Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)

Is Pickpocket Bresson's most famous film? It's Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, of course, only Bresson gives himself the additional challenge of dealing with petty thievery instead of (as was in Dostoevsky) a double murder (it's as if Bresson disdained the larger-than-life drama inherent in killing, and instead decided to focus on the minutae of common larceny). Paul Schrader talks about how its portrait of a man outside of society influenced Taxi Driver, filmmakers (including Scorsese) talk about the erotic and visual thrill the pickpocketing sequences give them, how watches and wallets and pens are passed around like so many prized fetishes, how fingers touch, lightly slide over, and slip into pockets, coats, handbags.

The first theft for me is the most telling: Michel at the horserace, behind the woman, hand poised above the handbag. Bresson cuts to a head-on shot of the two figures as they watch the race (depicted, in typical Bressonian fashion, entirely on the soundtrack). Michel's eyes, always hooded, droop an extra millimeter here: you can see how absorbed he is at what he's doing.

This isn't sex, or at least it isn't interactive sex: it's onanism, self-absorbed violation of a man or woman without the man or woman's awareness that he's being so intimately molested. It's a game people play, and yes, it is actually possible to ejaculate just from the friction created by textile alone. Whether the person you're doing it to is aware or not you're not quite sure, and that's the one thing that felt so freakishly right about it all, that paradoxically frank stare Michel gets from his victims sometimes: it's as if they're sizing him up, and in that millisecond of contact, seeing his soulful eyes and handsomely ascetic face, giving him consent to proceed. Is Pickpocket also Bresson's most most openly erotic film? Could be.

Looking at the DVD's extras, I found a fascinating documentary by a filmmaker who, confusing a vaguely familiar man she's met for an old childhood friend, discovers she's looking at Pierre Laymarie, who played Jacques in the film. She goes on to hunt down the rest of the cast, discovering Marika Green, who played Jeanne as the 16 year old virgin that she really was (and at 60 years old looking remarkably fit and lovely). Martin LaSalle, who played Michel, was unrecognizable (he was bald and bearded) except for the intense heavy-lidded eyes. Unlike most of Bresson's 'models' (as he called them sometimes) and like Anne Wiazemsky and Dominique Sanda, Green and LaSalle went on to have long careers (LaSalle, I'm surprised to learn, was in among many films Missing, Under Fire, Alamo Bay, and even an episode of Crime Story--like his character, he slips in and out of films I've seen without my noticing; he's even finished a film this year).

Green proudly shows a small painting LaSalle's given her in 1996, with the words written "with great love" or something like that. One wonders--that final image, of the two pressed together through prison bars, how intense was it that the memory of it should inspire so vivid an expression of affection after so many years? Michel, after years of alienation, finally discovers simple human contact--ironically when he's physically isolated, in prison. It's about as moving an image of love as any I can think of; one remembers the singularly intense sexual thrill Michel had (and Bresson so memorably evoked to us) of picking pockets, however, and wonders how long the relationship will last.

Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

From Forum with No Name:

Sitting down to a three hour-plus Japanese film with a ten and six year old is actually not impossible, particularly when said film is directed by Akira Kurosawa.

They loved it, of course. They loved the introduction of Kambei (Takashi Shimura) shaving his head in preparation for his daring rescue of the child (this may have been the point where they really got hooked, I think); they loved the antics of Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune, their hands-down favorite); they even loved Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) and his relative cluelessness.

They loved it that through maps, a quick reconaissance tour, and careful organization of shots (cut together so that the movement from one location to another or vice versa is always consistent) they come to know the layout of the entire village--the field of conflict, in effect. They loved it that the action sequences are clear and coherent (my six-year-old walked out of The Descent because, as he put it "they keep cutting and shaking the camera, and I'm getting dizzy"). They love it that Kurosawa as much as was possible didn't cheat--one bandit (as I pointed out) was really struck in the chest by an arrow (shot by an expert archer into a wooden plank the actor wore under his armor (Kurosawa wouldn't go so far as to actually kill his actors, I had to explain)); Kyuzo really swings his sword with masterful skill (a skill all the more impressive since (I pointed out to their amazement) before this film the actor, Seiji Miyaguchi, had never picked up a sword in his life).

It was a pleasure watching two kids experiencing the pleasure of watching a master filmmaker at his best. They laughed when he wanted them to laugh, oohed when he wanted them to ooh, sat sombre when he wanted to show them something sombre. When the movie was finished, they shook their heads; they couldn't believe they just saw a three-hour Japanese film.

Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1931)

 
Did Charles Laughton direct Island of Lost Souls? The film shares so many images and feelings with Laughton's Night of the Hunter you wonder: if he didn't actually have a hand in it, Laughton must have learned a lot from the director, Erle C. Kenton.

H.G. Wells is on record as disliking this version; I'm not sure he's altogether correct to be so unhappy. The Frankenstein theme is still there, clear as ever. A suggestion of bestiality was inserted, between the Panther woman and the hero (renamed Edward Parker), but the eroticism of their scenes together add to the horror, not detract from it, and bring the theme of "the animal in us" home in a way Wells never dreamed of (Does he object because it's too successful? But Wells is supposed to be a liberal on such matters...). The animals are less varied and less distinctive, but Kenton is smart enough to relegate them to the shadows, where they're most effective. The period of spiralling doom and the sense of despair it inspires has been drastically shortened, but Moreau has been given a far more horrific (and ironic) end. Overall, I think the film does not embarrass its source material.

Laughton is magnificent here. It's not so much the fanaticism of Moreau that's so shocking as his playful languor--at times he seems like a big fat cat, toying with his prey, and poses accordingly. His interest in the Panther woman's growing interest in Parker has a voyeuristic edge to it; he seems to have been thinking up of all kinds of perverse scenarios for his creations, as much for his own pleasure as for the scientific interest (Did he have similar plans for Parker's beautiful blonde fiance? I wouldn't be surprised).

Kenton's direction is superb, doubts notwithstanding. He shoots without music most of the time, and the silence is often unnerving (music, even classic horror-film music, would have dissipated the tension). A veteran silent filmmaker, Kenton uses faces, lighting, shadows with great expressiveness (one might even say 'great Expressionism'). Bars are an important motif, Kenton's way of suggesting the restraints animals and humans alike continually apply to their unconscious feelings, to be released at both our peril.

The method of vivisection ignores what we've learned of genetic compatibility and tissue rejection, issues addressed by the later remakes (the dull Burt Lancaster version, the loony Frankenheimer/Brando/Kilmer version). But there's an old-fashioned horror to the idea of cutting up the parts of different animals and stitching them together that the more genetically enlightened versions lack. Not the most faithful version of Wells' classic, perhaps, but I do think it's the most powerful.

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The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (Philip Kaufman, 1972)

I remember a friend asserting that if it wasn't for Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Philip Kaufman would have been acclaimed for the revisionism in his Western, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, about the James Brothers and their ill-fated Minnesota bank heist attempt. Having seen the film, I'n not sure the two can actualy be so easily compared--Altman's film has a dreamy glow about it, while Kaufman's is grimmer, more hard-edged; if anything, Kaufman's film seems closer to Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch in its story of a gang of outlaws on their last legs.

But Kaufman does share Altman's tendency to dawdle over little details and interesting side characters, like the bank manager constantly scheming to get people to deposit in his bank; the equally eccentric bank employee who feels morally superior to his boss; the crazed old man looking for his dead son; and the Pinkerton detective who feels confident of being able to catch the Jameses. Kaufman spends an inordinate amount of time on a baseball game complete with gloveless players, sticklike bat, well-armed audience and all--inordinate if you happen to think the game does little to advance the plot (it doesn't), but not so if you think it advances your feel of the time and place (which it does, beautifully and more successfully (albeit with less spectacular slapstick) than Altman does with his football game in MASH).

The film isn't so much about the raid, ultimately, as it is a study of contrast, between Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson, unusually subdued and good) and Jesse James (Robert Duvall). Younger excites more sympathy with his more poetic, forward-looking view on life, his childlike interest in machines and his (mostly suggested) sympathy for caged convicts. Duvall's James is a thug, a religious hypocrite, and a psychopath; I wonder if Duvall's played a more repulsive character in his career. What's interesting is how Kaufman has both men overreach with this raid, their past actions (one man's senseless murder, the other's seemingly innocuous repair of a steam calliope) catching up with them. Both their careers essentially end with this failed heist (or at least James' career with the gang--he goes on to rob a few more banks); Kaufman, though, shows more sympathy for the less fortunate Younger--despite being paraded around in the cage he earlier regarded with such unspoken dread, Kaufman has him express the last word on the marvels and hilarities he has witnessed around him.

The Nativity Story (Catherine Hardwicke, 2006)

The Nativity Story (Catherine Hardwicke, 2006)

Excerpt:

Catherine Hardwicke's "The Nativity Story" (2006) sad to say, feels like a stillborn effort; you want to poke at it with a stick or the tip of your shoe, but the thing just lies there on the big screen, limp and rather lifeless, with a strong soporific effect (I had to stand at the back of the theater to stay awake, myself).

It's not a bad movie or at least not an actively evil one, as Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was. It doesn't take the lunatic writings of Anne Catherine Emmerich (or possibly Clemens Brentano, who may have added to or heavily rewritten her) and turn them into an ostensibly pious picture that's really an excuse for beautifully photographed torture porn and vicious anti-Semitism (I hope no one out there still harbors doubts--Gibson pretty much revealed his heart's true sentiments in that famously suppressed police report. "In vino veritas," if you like).

Apocalypto (Mel Gibson, 2006)

Brownface

Part of my problem with Apocalypto isn't just the violence; it's that Gibson has too simpleminded a take on violence. Scorsese had incredible violence in Raging Bull (more intense and vivid, I submit, than anything in Gibson's picture--remember Jake's nose being smashed?); what was fascinating about that film was that the violence was just the tip of the iceberg--you sensed that LaMotta's awful masochism was just a symptom of some profound inner malaise (same with Gibson, only Gibson seems incapable of stepping far enough away from his problems to actually do anything interesting with them; they just pour out of him, like an endless, artless turd).

Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006)

It's ambitious, a hell of a lot more ambitious than any animated movie I've seen this year (and I think I've seen more than anyone should be asked to see ), but I appreciate the fact that it's not just about finding love and acceptance within one's family or community (well, partly about that) but about the survival of an entire species. I wouldn't say it actually hits the mark, but it does come closer than any recent English-language animated film I can think of towards the sweep and scale of Miyazaki's late films (Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997) comes to mind).

And there's a grandeur to Miller's filmmaking that's startling, if you're used to the kind of icebound animation found in the Ice Age movies, or the Discovery-Channel look of March of the Penguins--here, every glacier and mountain is intricately realized, from snow-drowned foot to rocky crest, every ice storm vividly evoked (there's this  shot of icy vapor rushing over a ridge that's amazing, like a jet stream the size of the Amazon). Nightmarishly high ice pinnacles, vertiginously deep chasms, endless subzero desolation--it's an intriguing mix of the real and the hyperreal.

Better yet, the penguins might look cuddly at first sight, but there's little cuteness to their personalities--they can be every bit as hidebound with tradition or xenophobically racist or thrilled by sexual attraction as we are; one penguin's languorous waddle practically challenges the more hotblooded among us to tackle her and wrestle her down to the frozen floor.

The predators are unapologetically presented: malevolent seagulls, ferocious leopard seals, monstrous killer whales--this is not the benign nature seen in kiddie cartoons; if no one actually dies, you get the impression that it wasn't for lack of serious trying. One particularly hideous hunter (usually depicted as cute and obedient in almost any other nature flick) stares at the desperately fleeing penguin: you look into his terrifyingly lifeless black eyes (positioned above row upon row of great gnashing teeth) and you see--a reflection. Suddenly you feel you have an insight into their point of view, realize that their desire to eat the wobbly bags of tasty blubber is as desperate if not more so. If the birds manage to escape it's one more opportunity at survival lost, and a long, lonely time being hungry until the next opportunity pads along...

There are considerable flaws--the film is an unholy fusion of 'cutesy kiddie animation' and 'dark parable on ecological disaster,' and the stitches show. Frankly I can do without the former, but as Miller learned in Babe: Pig in the City (1998) (which was a commercial if not (in my opinion, at least) artistic disaster) one cannot have a consistent artistic vision and boxoffice success in the same production.

I like it; I like the risks it takes, the way it's willing to stretch credulity to make a point, even a  bizarrely absurd one--the neck ornament hanging round a penguin's neck, for example, which later becomes as onerous and strangling as any symbolic albatross; or the surreal feel of sitting in a zoo habitat (Is that the horizon or a cleverly painted facsimile?)--isn't it ironic that what's meant to comfort an animal might only serve to confuse him? Or the way the mysterious Others finally present themselves, as ghostly images lurking behind thick glass. The finale might be a tad optimistic, but given what comes before it's not overwhelmingly, fatally so, I think. The film seriously shakes up one's idea of what an American animated film should look like, feel like, be about.