NIGHTMARE ALLEY - #1078

Illegal acts of human cruelty.

That’s the reason the local sheriff gives when he shuts the carnival sideshow down. He’s specifically acting on a tip that the carnival has a “geek,” a human who will bite the head off a live chicken or eat whatever filth is tossed his way. But the cop might as well be talking about everyone in the troupe, and all the things they do to each other. And wait until hear hears about what happens when that kind of energy is sent out into the real world. 

Nightmare Alley is a story of double-crosses fueled by petty jealousy, and the price of ambition when funded by emotional pain. Tyrone Power stars in this freaky noir as Stanton Carlisle, a hustler who picks up tricks for the sideshow mentalist Zeena (Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic partner Pete Krumbein (Ian Keith). After an accident involving moonshine and some potential jail time threatened by that same local sheriff, Stan reveals who he is to everyone in ways both intentional and unintended. He ends up being forced into a marriage with Molly (Coleen Gray), the carnival ingenue, but not before they have both learned Zeena and Pete’s system. It’s enough to break out of the rural confidence racket and go legit in big city nightclubs doing the blindfold act, where Molly tips Stan off using a verbal code so he can make the audience think he’s reading their minds.

I love the names in this movie. Stanton Carlisle just sounds like the name of a crook trying to be fancy. And then there’s Krumbein. Anyone else hear Nelson Muntz getting upset that Marge Simpson called him a “Crumbum”? And we haven’t even met Lilith yet, the psychoanalyst played by Helen Walker that inspires Stan to expand his racket to more personal cons involving seances and spiritualism. What his encounter with the confident professional ultimately shows him is that everyone is on the take. Shakedown artists work in fancy offices, too. And Liliths have a reputation for a reason.

Released in 1947, Nightmare Alley held a strange reputation for a while. Edmund Goulding’s film was one of those lost classics that one could read about in books but never find on video shelves. It was infamous for its bleak outlook, especially its shocking ending. Amongst film noir scholars, it was considered particularly weird, the rare noir that wasn’t all bullets and concrete, but just as cynical in the way it trades on mental games and “the other side.” When I finally saw Nightmare Alley, it was via a bootleg at my local arty video store. They had a copy someone had taped off of AMC. Same story with Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole [review]. True cult favorites left to languish even as their status amongst cineastes grew.

Even watching it via a faded and low-resolution tape, the genius of Nightmare Alley was not lost on me. Tyrone Power grafts steely determinism onto a fragile ego, inventing an incredible noir anti-hero, a fast thinker whose brain also had whatever the mental equivalent to a glass jaw might be. One hit, and he shatters. The actor is electric onscreen, possibly never better. Perhaps a veteran actor like Power understood too well the veil between performance and reality, how Stan was much better at reading other people’s cards rather than his own.

Cards are important in Nightmare Alley. Not just the ones that Stan and Molly use in their act, where diners write down the questions that open them to Stan’s fleecing, but tarot carts. Zeena does two readings in the movie, and each predicts the downfall of a man in her life. Being a noir, neither should be a spoiler, but I’ll let you guess. Just yesterday I watched Blondell as a side player to Barbara Stanwyck in Archie Mayo’s pre-code marriage drama Illicit, and despite there being fifteen years between the two movies, she was probably even more vibrant in this one than in the earlier role. Blondell makes Zeena a formidable woman, remorseful for her past sins, but unafraid of challenging Stan when he wrongs her. She steals the show from both the other actresses, who don’t quite have the chops she does. Then again, maybe Goulding and writer Jules Furthman are doing it on purpose, reducing the women that Stan ostensibly betrays Zeena for, by making Molly a nervous sap and Lilith calculated and unemotional. (Side note: Criterion includes tarot cards representing the main characters in their new edition, which also boasts a transfer that isn’t just light years ahead of the bootleg I rented once upon a time but also the Fox DVD from the ’00s.)

I make no secret of Nightmare Alley’s influence on my Archer Coe book series. There are nods to it in various names used in the comics, just as there is a major tip of the hat to Orson Welles. When wanting to find a way to do a private detective comic that wasn’t your standard riff on Chandler, Cain, or Hammett, it came to mind to make the character a stage hypnotist instead, someone whom people in trouble might ask into their lives and share their intimate secrets with in order to get help. Of course, the big difference is that Archer Coe is a former bad man trying to make good, and Stanton Carlisle is just plain bad. 

“Should I let the man’s soul be lost forever, or should I stake my own to save it?”

The change of routine and setting is freeing. Nightmare Alley doesn’t fall back on typical noir tricks. There is no gunplay or bag of money (though there is an envelope). The traditional hand of fate in most noir is now tied to mysticism, karma, and according to Molly, Stan is also tempting the hand of God. The charlatan’s problem is he wants to be a denier, but deep down he’s a believer. The hubris that will bring on the Godsmack is in trying to kid himself and Molly that there’s something good in his thieving, that he’s helping the people he harms. We know he knows it’s a trick, but he also knows the consequences of messing around with people’s memories of their lost loved ones, and like the criminal who pulls the heist even after one of the crew falls off, he chooses to ignore it.

Reassessing that in noir terms and examining how Lilith dresses him down in the final act, Stan is your typical genre screw-up but ultimately victim of memory. In this case, the memories he exploits causes the past he’s tried to disregard to catch up with him. The tuxedoed high society performer is exposed as a carnie in a wife beater. Maybe if he had taken the time to get an answer to some of his earlier questions regarding how a man could drop so low, Stan would have been wiser. It’s that damn hubris again. It was never going to happen to him. 

One final sidenote, in addition to the fine package Criterion has put together with the old show poster design, interviews, and porting over Fox’s critical commentary, they also commissioned a new essay from the incomparable Kim Morgan. It’s no coincidence that Kim is also the co-writer of the upcoming remake of Nightmare Alley with director Guillermo Del Toro. Just take a look at the cast – Bradley Cooper as Stanton, Cate Blanchett as Lilith, Toni Collette as Zeena – and this new version has a chance to be something. Look for Nightmare Alley later this year!

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

BEFORE SUNSET - #858

Confession: I didn’t see Before Sunset during its theatrical run, it was a couple of years before I finally gave in and checked it out. I had dismissed the notion of a sequel to Before Sunrise [review], being in my early 30s and still full of strange and precious ideals about story, I had rejected the idea that the magic could be recaptured or that we needed to know if Jesse and Celine ever saw each other again. It wasn’t until the graphic designer working on my graphic novel with Joëlle Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, gave me a DVD copy and insisted that I give it a try that I finally did. And was pleasantly surprised.

I mention this in part because how Jesse (still played by Ethan Hawke) answers the questions about the book he wrote fictionalizing the events of Before Sunrise sounds a lot like how I answer questions about my books. Specifically, the “did they or didn’t they” ending being a litmus test for how romantic you are. I give the same answer about the ending of 12 Reasons Why I Love Her.

Clarification: I am re-watching each movie of the Before Trilogy and writing about it afterwards. Thus, when I wrote my Before Sunrise review, I had not yet watched Before Sunset, and so when I wrote that each moment of that movie was every moment of the series, I had no idea that Jesse says the same thing, also in the scene discussing his book, in this entry. What can I say, we share a wavelength.

And the Affair to Remember [review] comparison? Fitting that the reunion of Jesse and Celine echoes the “did you or didn’t you” of the final scenes of the Leo McCarey film, though with a much lighter touch...before moving on. In Affair it was the end; in Sunset, the start.

Before Sunset is the very definition of a middle part of a trilogy. It’s a bit darker, a bit more serious. It feels incomplete, acting as the connection between the kick-off and the finale. And like most second parts, many fans are going to argue that it’s the best. For all the reasons cited.

Richard Linklater gets this. He’s not setting out to make a crowd-pleasing affirmation of Before Sunrise’s goopier potentialities. Before Sunset has a level of sincerity about what it means to be in one’s 30s that underlines how sincere its predecessor was about capturing the airiness of being in your early 20s. They’ve had a whole life to live, to fail, to lose or hang onto their romantic notions. Amusingly, Jesse is more hopeful now, and Celine (Julie Delpy) is a politically driven realist. Where their paths diverged somehow caused him to increase his belief, and for her to tamp her romance down. Then again, he is also in an unhappy marriage, so maybe by being so grounded he can appreciate feelings that are less so. I mean, there is a definite irony to her being jaded by romance, when he suffered the true disappointment; yet, her failure to carry through has arrested her emotional development. She is not sure she can ever again feel the way she did during their Viennese dalliance.

Though, even as she points out, Jesse has arrested himself. He has chosen to stay in that moment, regardless of how much his life charges on. The impetus for their reunion in Before Sunset is that he has written a novel about their one night together, and the book tour has brought him to Paris. This adds a fun metatextual layer to the movie. They are fictional characters that, at least for a brief period of the movie, are grappling with fictional versions of themselves. More importantly, though, it brings up the question of perception: his version of events vs. hers.

Or, perhaps more precisely, it questions the quality of a particular witness or narrator: how does their retelling of Before Sunrise change based on what they prefer to hide or celebrate. Of course, those alterations are based on what they feel and what they wish to suppress or keep secret--a tactic that spills over into how they represent their current life. Both begin with a desire to present their best face, forgetting that they are with the only person who is really capable of unmasking their pretenses. And they only have a couple of hours to get the job done. He has to leave for the airport at 7:30.

Fitting into the collegiate preoccupations both Jesse and Celine had in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset uses their ill-fated first reunion as a way to ponder questions of faith, the “what if” scenarios suggesting a different path for the wannabe lovers. Sure, they would have been different if they had seen it through, but not necessarily for the better. Is it possible that they needed to shed their youthful ideology in order to really be together? Would they have lasted if they had run with that first blush of emotion and not gathered the life experience that would give them the tools and tenacity to commit? Probably not. And thus, it is befitting that Before Sunset fails to end with a grand declaration, fading out instead on a quiet recommitment to love.

In terms of style and approach, not much has changed here, though it’s clear that budget and nearly a decade of work under their belts has improved all skills. The camerawork is cleaner, the look of the film more polished--but that could be an uptick in technology giving all indie filmmakers a leg up. Lee Daniel shot both movies, as he has many Linklater efforts, including Dazed and Confused [review 1, 2] and Boyhood [review], so I imagine the two had quite a rapport by this outing. Daniel also has a lot of documentary credits on his resume, which suggests certain skills he certainly could apply here.

Luckily, this progression helps rather than hurts. If the first film has the scruffiness of youth, this has the sheen of success, the characters showing off at a time when they can and when making sure everyone knows you’ve accomplished something matters. It can’t be the same every time...and as we’ll see, it won’t be.

SCANNERS - #712

Back in high school and on through college, I worked a story called Lords of Order, first writing it as a graphic novel and then a screenplay. Intended as the opening of a trilogy (and predicting the three brothers structure of my eventual prose novels), the story was a gritty fantasy about teenagers with psychic powers being preyed upon by an evil corporation that may have had a hand in their creation. It was a John Hughes version of the X-Men, in its way, but now I see it was also quite a bit like an adolescent version of Scanners.

Released in 1981, Scanners was David Cronenberg’s fourth movie, and essential in his emergence as a prominent auteur. Scanners set the groundwork for both Videodrome [review] and The Dead Zone in terms of approach and theme. It’s effective for what it is, a B movie with a firm grasp of its own schlock, highlighted by impressive practical effects. One of the film’s earliest bits of gore, when a man’s head explodes, has found new life on the internet as an animated gif. Its bloody climax, however, may be the most effective, if not easily the grossest. If you want to talk about the psychic travails of puberty, I am pretty sure anyone who had any kind of acne problem can relate to the squirting pustules growing on Michael Ironside and Steven Lack’s faces.

The two men lead the film, both playing the titular “scanners,” the name Cronenberg gives to people with extraordinary mental powers. Their main ability is telepathy via direct linkage of their nervous system with another’s. Once connected, they can read minds and also influence the other person’s actions--but at great physical expense for themselves and their victim. They also seem to be able to inspire spontaneous combustion in a manner that is never explained, and hack into computers in a manner that shouldn’t have been.

Lack plays Cameron Vale, a scanner who is taken into custody by a nefarious corporation and its lead scientist, Dr. Ruth (The Prisoner’s Patrick McGoohan). The company is trying to cultivate scanners for espionage and other unsavory purposes, but they find themselves at odds with a rogue scanner, Darryl Revok (Ironside). Revok is looking to unite all known scanners, and killing the ones who refuse. Ruth and his cronies dispatch Vale to find the bad man, though the more he looks, the more Vale realizes not everything is on the up and up.

Cronenberg’s script is scrappy, but also threadbare. There is actually very little to the plot, and many scenes slam together without much connective tissue. Vale’s investigative skills seem to rely more on psychic predictions than real detection, and the gunmen who follow him around are never adequately accounted for. Scanners feels as if Cronenberg either didn’t have the budget to shoot more story, or simply didn’t care about why or how he’d get to the scenes of exploding heads and cars. The truth may be somewhere in the middle, as reportedly the filmmaker was rushed into production before there was a complete script with instructions to finish in time to qualify for a tax break.

Fans of blood-and-guts horror probably don’t care, however, and one could probably make some pretty good critical hay out of the political implications of weaponized genetics, particularly as science continues to learn more and more about how we are put together. For me, Scanners could have used with a bit more character work. The choice to make Vale a blank slate means we never quite grasp his motivation. Likewise, Revok is never permitted to preen in his villainy. Surely there was some Thanos-like justification for his mission Cronenberg could have injected here, but much like my bad adolescent writing, the only real driver seems to be possessing the power itself. Which isn’t really all that relatable and exciting for us normal folk out here in the audience. Though, maybe now I can resurrect that old script and fix it based on the lessons I gleaned from Scanners.

But probably not.

IN A LONELY PLACE - #810

Note: The screengrabs here are from an earlier DVD release and not the Criterion Blu-ray being reviewed.

Oh, the sick mind of a writer. And nothing so perverse as believing your particular brand of sickness is special.

I’ve been fascinated by In a Lonely Place for some years now. Film noir at its best, In a Lonely Place is a cynical, hard-bitten favorite. So much so, I wrote about in my most recent (currently abandoned) novel, as there are similar themes to be had in both. Here, let me cut and paste the pertinent section from the rough draft, which explains some of what the movie is about: 

When I was done with Leandro, I drove over to a revival theatre in Santa Monica where they were showing an old Humphrey Bogart movie. In a Lonely Place, 1950, directed by cinema himself, Nicholas Ray--a dark-side-of-Hollywood picture. While I was waiting for it to start, eating a box of Jordan almonds, I wondered what I would do next. Leo drew the line at giving me Adam’s address. He said that didn’t pop up right away, he’d have to go farther into the system, and that would leave fingerprints. I would have to find Adam some other way. Last I heard of him, after Brianne left him and we moved here and the divorce, he was still in Oregon working for that computer company. I didn’t suppose it would be too hard to find out if he was still there.

The movie was amazing. Bogie plays Dixon Steele, a washed-up screenwriter with rage issues. One night he takes a coat-check girl back to his apartment to talk about a book he’s supposed to adapt, and after she leaves his place, she never makes it home. The police chief decides Bogie did it, that he was really living out one of the lurid scenarios he writes for the pictures. Enough people keep telling that story that other folks start to believe it, including the one person who shouldn’t, the actress who provided his alibi and whom he then fell in love with. There is enough pressure that before they know it, they really are in an old Hollywood potboiler. There’s no way out of it then, and Bogie ends up back where he started. The lonely place--where murders are committed, stories are imagined, and the broken-hearted reside. “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”

Leaving the theatre, I noticed a poster advertising an upcoming retrospective of the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Images of Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Pierre Léaud. Temptresses, gangsters, and teenagers. I’d have to come back for that.

Movies come up a lot in my book. And detective fiction. Rest assured, I’ll be taking a pretty heavy pair of scissors to the above. I can see tons of things I’d cut right now, get it down to the bones. Much like Dix eventually savages the book he’s meant to turn into a faithful screen version. The way the coat-check girl (Martha Stewart) describes the imagined romance novel, I can’t help but think of Leave Her ToHeaven, and maybe that’s the kind of sharpness Dix brings to his script. We can only guess. All we know of the unseen screenplay is what the onscreen author tells us.

Dix is a sinister storyteller, one who doesn’t shy away from the more gruesome details of a plot. Naturally, when the police, including an old buddy from his army days who’s now turned detective (Frank Lovejoy, The Hitch-Hiker [review]), show the wordsmith the murder scene photos and outline their own timeline for how Dix killed the girl, he starts to puzzle through the potential suspects and motives himself. He even relays his own version to that buddy and his wife (Jeff Donnell, The Sweet Smell ofSuccess). As he spins the yarn, directing them at to act it out at the same time, Ray and director of photography Burnett Guffey (The Strange One [review]) isolate the light on Bogart’s face, making it look the way it does when a kid telling ghost stories at camp holds a flashlight under his chin. The irony is Dix can’t imagine himself doing it, despite every one else thinking he probably did. Or, to clarify, he can’t imagine himself doing this particular murder. He never wavers in his belief he didn’t, not even when he cruelly jokes with his agent that maybe he did. There’s truth in that wicked humor, and little that Dix is capable of some pretty nasty business. He has violent spells that give everyone pause. The same light lands on him when the moods take over, a visual cue to let us know that we are heading into darkness. It’s almost supernatural--even if now we recognize him as a man with anger management problems, perhaps even some PTSD from his combat service, and the classic patterns of an abuser. He erupts, attacks, and then is sorry, making amends through grand gestures and promises to never do it again. Dix is a hard man to like, and yet we do anyway, because he’s still Humphrey Bogart. Playing on the actor’s star power, Ray messes with our perceptions. We have a feeling Bogart is the good guy, because he most often is, and so we put our faith where no one else can.

In essence, we are the lover that the actress who falls for Dix can’t be, because we put aside our doubts and put our faith in the supposed inevitability of a Hollywood happy ending. The noir twist here is how the stories about the writer, rather than the ones he crafts himself, take their toll on Laurel (played by Nicholas Ray’s real-life (and estranged) wife Gloria Grahame (The Big Heat, Sudden Fear [review]). Laurel lets her imagination get the better of her; she can’t separate the violence she’s witnessed from the violence Dix is accused of perpetrating. It’s a shame when you let a thing like a dead body get in the way of a good love story, but then again, as Dix explains, “A good love scene should be about something else besides love...Anyone can look at us and tell we’re in love.” This little bit of poetry is delivered during the scene where the film really turns. He’s making her breakfast, and Laurel is groggy, having taken sleeping pills to (unsuccessfully) block out her nightmares about Dix beating another man. Where earlier in the film she saves him with her alibi and pulls him out of his slump by taking care of him, now he’s her caretaker, right down to the domestic chores--though the results aren’t quite the same. There is a wonderful metaphor embedded in this scene: Dix is trying to prepare Laurel’s breakfast grapefruit, but he is having a hard time because he has straightened out the curve in the grapefruit knife, thinking the bend is not supposed to be there. All the better for stabbing things with...?

Bogart and Grahame are a natural screen pairing. They are attractive and confident, and they both have a bit of a speech impediment. She is aloof, and then a rock, and then a bundle of nerves that grows more tangled even as she unravels. (Dix will never straight her out!) Fascinatingly enough, Laurel’s not opportunistic. The failed actress never pushes the more successful scribe for a part in his new movie. This makes Laurel less the femme fatale and more the stable good girl. Dix has no nemesis but the one buried inside him.

Nicholas Ray manages to both have his tongue in his cheek when dealing with this Hollywood nonsense and be perfectly serious when relaying the rest of his tale. In a Lonely Place goes to some deep recesses and sifts around in the muck, yet it also maintains the aura of illusion. The scenes around Dix and Laurel’s apartment complex are played with an almost sitcom-like airiness. It’s classic Hollywood at its finest, and also a subversive, self-reflexive tribute to the system that spawned it. Joining the pair is a cast of eccentric characters and Hollywood types: a nebbish agent, a one-time matinee idol turned drunk, a controlling masseuse, a raven-haired actress on the prowl, the producer that’s also the son-in-law of a studio chief and whom no one respects. All that’s missing is a studio fixer. Even the coat-check girl is a type, she’s the wide-eyed movie fan who can’t believe she’s rubbing elbows with celebrities. In a Lonely Place is a cautionary tale: motion pictures are a deadly business.

Elsewhere on Criterion’s disc of In a Lonely Place, the camera is turned on the filmmaker. The 1975 documentary I’m a Stranger Here Myself caught up with Nicholas Ray while he was working as a teacher, at the time he was shooting We Can’t Go Home Again [review]. The movie details Ray’s cinematic philosophy, shedding light on his approach to character, his championing of the outsider, and how he expects to communicate with the audience. John Houseman, Natalie Wood, Francois Truffaut, and others also chime in to talk about the filmmaker. Early in the doc’, Ray talks directly about In a Lonely Place, including how he came to the film’s knockout ending.

Among the other extras is a 1948 radio adaptation of Dorothy B. Hughes original novel for In a Lonely Place. (Hughes also wrote the source book of Ride the Pink Horse.) Performed for the Suspense series, it stars Robert Montgomery as Dixon Steele, a would-be novelist and serial strangler. Though a Los Angeles story, there are no Hollywood trappings, and the portrayal of Dix’s compulsive behavior is far less complex, despite being related from a first-person point of view. Is it possible Bogart’s dismissal of then novel he’s supposed to adapt in the movie version a meta joke about In a Lonely Place’s own source material.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

L'AVVENTURA (Blu-ray) - #98

For me, I think what is most compelling about Michelangelo Antonioni’s challenging 1960 drama L’Avventura is how it so effectively upends the mystery genre to serve the director’s own thematic purpose.

More than fifty years before Gone Girl, Antonioni crafted an oblique narrative about a young woman bored to death with her future husband and the state of love in general who in some manner orchestrates her own disappearance. Anna (Lea Massari) is a rich man’s daughter, engaged to Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and yet disconnected from her own privileged existence. She tells her father she has no intention of marrying the man, but then makes her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) wait outside while she has an afternoon quickie with him. The three of them then join other friends on an overnight boat trip to remote waters. While swimming, Anna lies about seeing a shark, presumably to see how everyone will react. She only confides this secret to Claudia. Thus, the other girl is understandably suspicious when Anna goes missing later that day. The travelers have docked at a desolate island. There is no one else on it with them, only an empty shack, and no other way off. Yet, when it’s time to go, Anna has disappeared without a trace. Someone thought maybe they heard another boat, but there is no real proof.

And so L’Avventura becomes a manhunt--at least, after a fashion. The police come to investigate, accusations are thrown, with the fiancé being the first suspect. Sandro and Claudia lead the charge--though separately whenever possible, Claudia does not trust him--and they remain the most dedicated, following whatever leads come up, pursuing a trail that may not be there. It’s along this search that they also derail their own efforts. Sandro kisses Claudia, she rebukes him...and yet, she is drawn to him. Eventually, their attraction takes over. The investigation becomes a romantic getaway. By the time the pair rejoin their other friends--who, bored and unaffected, have carried on with their perpetual holiday--they are behaving as a married couple, alternately bickering and being affectionate. Claudia hates herself just a little; Sandro, as ever, is nonplussed.

But ain’t that just like a man? At least in the way Antonioni depicts Italian society. The men are driven by lust, emerging in the streets as one predatory pack whenever a woman is left to walk unescorted. It happens first with the young American of questionable morals (Dorothy De Poliolo)--who herself claims to be lost and could be seen as a double for Anna--and then when Claudia decides to wait outside when Sandro goes into a shop where Anna had possibly been seen. It’s a reversal of the earlier scene, when Antonioni and cameraman Aldo Scavarda artfully framed Claudia through the crack in the curtains in the room where Sandro and Anna are having their tryst, the audience peering out at the girl peering in, as if perhaps she desires to be up there with them. She is isolated in both scenes, but in the later instance, she becomes the object of sexual craving rather than rebuked. And its Sandro who is now outside observing, witnessing the threat from inside a doorway. Of course, it’s significant that this is immediately after the two of them have made love; the wild animals sense the change.

It’s a split that runs through all the couples in L’Avventura. Anna is not the only one who finds the male/female relationship wanting. (It’s telling that she is reading both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, a novel about adultery and the disappointment of marriage, alongside the Bible when she disappears; it’s one of God’s few appearances in the movie, faith is as absent as true love.) The wealthy older woman Patrizia (Esmeralda Ruspoli) tells her would-be paramour Raimondo (Lelio Luttazzi) that she was not made for love, and she rebuffs and belittles his advances. He, in turn, proves he can’t handle delicate things, dropping the antique crockery found on the island, a symbol of a lost civilization that the bored socialites argue over. Who owns it? How would you use it? Even knowing where it comes from makes you the object of ridicule. Why be smart or concerned about things long since dead?

Maybe this is why the woman who is made fun of for allegedly wanting to take the pot and put flowers in it is the one to truly transgress. Giulia (Dominique Blanchar) at first seems like the sweetest of the crew, but when Claudia rejoins her friends, she finds Giulia carrying on with a young painter. She is defiant about it, challenging others to judge her, even rubbing it in her husband’s face. The sweet has been made to run sour. There are no happy endings in love stories, only prison sentences. Which is why Anna gets out before she is locked in. Ironically, by doing so, she dooms her best friend to that same fate. Claudia and Sandro are bound together more by their shared concern over Anna’s vanishing then they are any true affection. The final images of L’Avventura show them unable to separate, subject to their roles (he the philanderer, she the long-suffering devotee), and filled with despair. By all evidence, there is nothing else out there for them because nothing is all that modern man truly has.

It’s been several years since I last saw L’Avventura. I wrote about it the last time, too, in connection with a showing of The Big Sleep to promote my comic book You Have Killed Me. It’s funny how much more obtuse the movie becomes with distance. (Perhaps I am remembering L’eclisse more?) Watching it again, I was struck by how much of a standard mystery the movie really is. Except for the missing woman, there are no strange goings on, no tricky editing or confounding digressions. Sandro and Claudia follow a pretty strict path, going from one clue to the next, the narrative adopting somewhat of an episodic structure. This makes it no less intriguing, though; on the contrary, the simplicity only heightens the tension, leaving wider spaces for the viewer to ruminate on Antonioni’s existential commentary, which he doles out sparingly. Each incident is almost like a prompt, a short philosophical riddle for the monastic cinephile to meditate on.

Monica Vitti proves a marvelous vessel for delivering these messages. She appears innocent and empathetic, truly curious and caring, defying her glamorous image, more like the blonde girl next door to Lea Massari’s more calculating woman of the world. It fits noir conventions, they are analogues to Rhonda Fleming and Jane Greer in Out Of The Past, though they are sadly stuck without a reliable Robert Mitchum. Gabriele Ferzetti makes for interesting casting. He appears too old for both of them and physically unremarkable. Not exactly handsome, you wouldn’t notice him without a spotlight. Not the way you would Marcello Mastroianni or Alain Delon, the stars of Antonioni’s next two movies, which form a thematic trilogy (and which I will be revisiting next).

This might be over rationalizing, but it’s possible that my seeing L’Avventura more clearly has as much to do with the new restoration as it does time. The 4K digital upgrade used for this new Blu-ray presents the film in a way that far surpasses any prior release (my screengrabs, for the record, are from Criterion’s 2001 DVD). The clarity with which one can now view the black-and-white landscapes of Antonioni’s movie is quite something. The desolation felt when stranded out at sea, or how small Vitti and Ferzetti appear in the final moments, is illustrated not just by the widescreen framing, but also the depth of detail that is now evident in high definition. That ocean goes on for miles, and the cliffs and balconies give way to a bottomless view. By contrast, the interiors are confining, whether the hull of a boat or a hotel room. Antonioni’s sad figures are at once trapped by their surroundings and humbled by just how insignificant they appear within them.

As an audience, we are left to feel the same way. I can’t imagine the added effect of seeing it in a theater, of the images writ large. The vastness of Antonioni’s vision would blanket the auditorium. L’Avventura is a haunting motion picture, teasing out answerless riddles while making us feel all the more lost for the fact that the lack of any solution is somehow a fault of who we are.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review. The stills shown are taken from the standard-definition DVD release and not the Blu-ray under discussion.

THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY: THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG - #716

In 2006, Joëlle Jones and I published a comic book called 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. As you can likely guess from the title, it was a romance told in twelve chapters. Some were anecdotes relayed as straightforward narratives, some were more abstract, and they were arranged in something other than chronological order with the hopes of building a less conventional and more encompassing image of a young relationship.

I don’t recall entirely how we came to use the umbrella image on the cover, whether I specifically suggested to Joëlle that we pay tribute to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or if she went that direction because she knew how much I love the  movie, but the results turned out rather fabulous.
So, in honor of that, I have decided to review this new release of Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical in a manner befitting the comic.

12 REASONS WHY I LOVE THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

(1) Catherine Deneuve with a bow in her hair.

(2) Colors. Geneviève’s yellow sweater. The red and green of the apartment where Guy lives with his aunt. Madeleine’s dark green raincoat. Geneviève’s pink date outfit. The scandalous red at the nightclub. The way the umbrella store looks like it was painted with macarons. Or how characters’ outfits often match their surroundings, in some cases exactly, Geneviève’s silky frock with the exact pattern of the wallpaper. Surely this movie had some influence on Sofia Coppola’s color choices in Marie Antoinette? [review]

(3) “Maybe happiness makes me sad.”

(4) The unreality of musical cinema married to very real subjects. The fact that every line of dialogue in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is sung already removes it from any semblance of Neorealism, and yet unlike the more wholesome or censor-restricted musicals of Hollywood, Jacques Demy uses the music to tell a timely, personal story about premarital relations and an accidental pregnancy. Really, the tragic undertones are more akin to opera. Sure, some Hollywood musicals touched on darker topics, but usually buried in symbolism and coded language. Demy has no such obstructions, despite his film looking more innocent than any of them.

(5) Michel Legrand’s melancholy, romantic motifs, particularly his main lovers’ theme, also has as much in common with classical music and opera as it does with Golden Age Hollywood and the days of the studio orchestras. His sweeping romanticism would be equally at home in a Warner Bros. love story or an MGM tearjerker.

(6) Farewells at train stations.

(7) Complicated characters. Geneviève is young and naïve, but also practical and opportunistic. Guy is an idealist made cynical by war and heartbreak. Roland’s own heartbreak causes him to approach love as a business transaction. Tough choices have to be made, all requiring more than two-dimensions. Demy’s cast are playing beyond their obvious types, even if the love triangle relies on familiar genre tropes.

(8) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is even better if you’ve seen Lola [review] and realize that Marc Michel is reprising his role a Roland and his monologue about his failed love affair was not just invented to give him backstory.

(9) Interior life vs. exterior. Most of the drama takes place indoors, but life carries on outside. A carnival is in full swing while Geneviève and her mother debate her choices, and the revelers are visible through the umbrella shop window, contrasting to the seriousness of what is happening inside. Likewise, the later snowstorm.

(10) Sex has consequences. Sometimes you get a baby, sometimes your hero goes and hires a prostitute and his sick aunt dies while he’s having his fun. Ooops.

(11) At the same time, lovers can make sensible choices and still be happy. Guy and Madeline make a good life for themselves, even if their romance wasn’t born of intense attraction (at least on his part). We possibly surmise that Geneviève and Roland are not as happy, but only because Geneviève carries the guilt of abandoning her lover while he was at war. For all we know, they were perfectly suited for each other. She always looked that sad, anyway. Which leads us to...

(12) Bitter reunions. Not even bittersweet. The ending both hurts and uplifts. First love, as it turns out, may not be the best love, and Guy makes a firm choice. No regrets.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a musical like no other. Demy’s style is pronounced, yet never insistent, blossoming here in a kind of controlled explosion. He pulls a deep sorrow out of this fundamentally romantic tale, toying with our emotions, invigorating us with the rush of love and then letting it slowly leaking out, nearly giving in to despair. It’s strangely wonderful in that it’s sad and true. But also just a wonder to watch and listen to.

Though 12 Reasons Why I Love Her is currently out of print, you can buy signed copies of it, and all of my available books, directly from my website.

This disc was provided by Criterion for purpose of review.