FILM SHORT: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP - #173

The NW Film Center is showing The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp this weekend, a rare treat that Portland-based folks will want to check out.

While I hope to do a full review of the film one day (I doubt I'll be making it out to see it myself, alas), the Portland Mercury asked me to do a capsule review this week, and I share it here because I think these short bursts (50-100 words) require a certain talent and style unto themselves. You can read a slightly edited version in the paper this week, or on their website.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP Though buoyant entertainment through and through, this 1943 Powell & Pressburger movie smuggles a sturdy “war is hell” message in its titular hero’s walrus mustache. The Technicolor adaptation of David Low’s comic strips tracks a British career soldier through three wars. Fueled by the filmmakers’ usual visual panache and a tremendous performance from Roger Livesey, Colonel Blimp shows how youthful ideals can be overtaken by the obsolescence of age, leading to a bittersweet finish that pays honest tribute to the brave men who answer when duty calls. JAMIE S. RICH NW Film Center

PRIVATE LIVES OF ALEXANDER KORDA: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF DON JUAN - ECLIPSE SERIES 16

"What is romantic about spending your life telling women they are everything they are not?"

The jocular tone of Alexander Korda's 1934 film The Private Life of Don Juan is evident from the get-go, as is its sexual undercurrents. Or should I say overcurrents? The movie opens on a fountain spraying high into the air as a minstrel sings the ballad of the titular lover, the unseen Don Juan, desired by wives, hated by husbands. Women all across Seville are forlorn because their love lives have dwindled since the famous ladies man departed, only to have their spirits lifted as a mysterious figure, appearing to us only as a shadow, arrives beneath their despondent balconies to toss them a flower. Could it be that Don Juan has returned to woo them anew? Passion erupts, just like that fountain, rising up and going...well, nowhere.

The Private Life of Don Juan isn't so much a romantic comedy as it is a comedy of romance. Korda and writers Frederick Lonsdale and Lajos Biro (a regular on Korda movies, but who also wrote von Sternberg's The Last Command [review]), working from a play by Henri Bataille, aren't interested in the legend of Don Juan, except to skewer and deflate it. Screen legend Douglas Fairbanks, here in a rare talkie and also starring in his final feature, leads the film as the heroic lover. He has snuck back home under a veil of secrecy, hoping to avoid being jailed for debts that his angry wife, Doña Dolores (Benita Hume), has purchased in order to lord them over his head. Don Juan has seen better days. He is older and tired, maybe a little like the aging actor who plays him, not as ready to perform as in the old days, and also finding that he is being replaced. The man handing out flowers wasn't Don Juan, though now the whole town thinks it was. It's a new casanova looking to follow in the Don's footsteps.

Opportunity strikes when Don Juan leaves his wife waiting yet again, choosing instead to woo the pretty dancer Antonita (Merle Oberon). While he makes love to her, his doppelganger is straining his back to climb a balcony in another part of town. When the fake Don Juan is run through with an angry husband's sword, the real deal sees a way to sneak off, avoiding handcuffs by playing dead until he can save up enough to buy his way out of jail. Only, once Don Juan has gone, a new industry springs up around his memory. A scandalous, exaggerated biography becomes a best seller, and an opportunistic playwright crafts a stage production celebrating his alleged exploits. Fearing his legacy has gotten beyond his control, Don Juan returns to Seville to announce he is alive.

And here is where the true sting comes. No one will believe this middle-aged man is the real Don Juan. Antonita remembers him as younger, with a different mouth and blue eyes. The theatre audience laughs at the legendary lothario when he interrupts the play. There is no way for the man to live up to the mythology that exists around him. The truth is not important. When the play's author asks the audience which they'd prefer, a Don Juan who is just a man or the one who is a heroic phantom, they choose the phantom.

It's a fairly prescient depiction of the downfalls of fame. Old Hollywood and its stars had a particular knack for creating actors to fit a predetermined image. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was known for his stunt work and his suave persona, and he must have more than once been in a situation where the truth couldn't live up to the publicity. One has to respect his lack of ego for poking fun at himself here. He's still very charming on screen, smiling and laughing, even as the Don Juan act falters. In the film's final scene, his usual lines are turned down, the woman he says them to has already heard them. Don Juan has no defense. That gambit is all he has. It's a revelation both mirthful and mournful. The old soul is accepting his new position. The myth is learning to be fine with being just a man.

Jim Jarmusch fans will likely recognize the funeral scene in The Private Life of Don Juan from Broken Flowers, the indie director's own film about the twilight of a ladies man. It's the movie that Bill Murray's character, also named Don, is watching early in the film, as he realizes how alone he really is. Jarmusch has picked this section for a reason. Korda's scene has a lot of emotional subtext. Here is the man, believed dead, standing amongst a legion of black-clad women who have come to mourn his passing--and he knows not a one of them. These aren't his actual lovers, these are women who believed in the fantasy, who are crying over something they never had. In reality, for all his conquests, Don Juan is alone. Sure, he is amused to be cut loose, but then frustrated that he can't reclaim his identity. Don Juan has to shed everything to learn what's truly important. He has to understand his biggest fib is not his practiced rap, but everything he pretended to be. People believe the lies because there was no other truth.

The Private Life of Don Juan has a heavy meaning, but it's not a heavy movie. Far from it. It's the lightest of the Alexander Korda pictures in the Eclipse set. The episodic script moves quickly from one scenario to the next, a series of quick comic bursts, some of them schticky, some of them sensual, sometimes both. The culmination is probably when the exiled Don tries to show a barmaid (Binnie Barnes) that he can be everything his biography claims him to be, but it takes a couple of tries to deliver the "hot lava." Korda is having fun peeling back the curtains to peek into the bedroom, to show the construct behind the myth. Just as Flora Robson stole The Rise of Catherine the Great [review] in her showy supporting role as the Empress, The Private Life of Don Juan is taken over by Melville Cooper, playing Leporello, the long-suffering organizer of Don Juan's life. He's the one who makes sure Don Juan eats the right food to stay in shape, and who organizes his social engagements. Cooper is like the 1930s equivalent of F. Murray Abraham, blustery and forceful and very funny. The biggest laugh comes midway through the film when he cuts one of Don's hostesses to the quick, saying his favorite meal is a gabby old woman's tongue. And not while it's still in her mouth.

What really makes The Private Life of Don Juan work, though, is that Korda doesn't sacrifice that glib tone in order to make his point. Don Juan settles down and expresses his lesson learned, but he delivers his epiphany with the same blithe manner as he has said everything leading up to it. It's a new seduction, you see, one that is about allowing himself to be seduced as much as he is doing the seducing. He's falling in love with life in a whole new way.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 11/23

My reviews of non-Criterion movies for November.

IN THEATRES...

* Anna Karenina, in which Joe Wright goes as crazy as his heroine and throws cinema under the train. But in a good way!

* Killing Them Softly, the reteaming of Brad Pitt and his The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford director takes on and dismantles the crime genre the same way they did the Western.

* A Liar's Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman sounded like a good idea. In 3D, animated, built with audio recordings by the late comedian. Too bad it sucks.

* Life of Pi. The 3D or the tiger? Definitely worth seeing in the theater to see Ang Lee's beautiful adoption of the extra dimension, but expect to be underwhelmed by the story.

* Lincoln. Day-Lewis. Spielberg. 'nuff said.

* Silver Linings Playbook, in which David O'Russell asks, "How is Bradley Cooper not himself?" You may need a tissue for this one. Either from crying or...er, um...Jennifer Lawrence. (Yeah, I went for that joke.)

* Skyfall, Sam Mendes joins the Bond franchise, makes it legitimately good.

* Smashed, an underdeveloped but well-meaning tale of addiction with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul.

Also, if you live near Portland, you should stop by Cinema 21 for their three-film, weeklong Bogart celebration "You'll Take It and Like It." I wrote about it for the Mercury.

ON BD/DVD...

* D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln, a 1930 biopic in which the grandfather of cinema and the father of John Huston make the 16th President seem like a real dud.

* Comic Book Confidential: 20th Anniversary Edition, an entertaining snapshot of the comics scene in the 1980s.

* The Day He Arrives, an existential quandary, and arthouse take on Groundhog Day, from Korean director Hong Sangsoo.

* Film Noir Collection, Volume One: Olive Films bundles together four of its noir and not-so-noir titles for a pretty solid collection of 1950s B-movies.

* Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 and 2: Ultimate Edition. Or how I spent my Thanksgiving.

* John Cage: Journeys in Sound, an informative documentary about the avant-garde composer.

* Long Day's Journey Into Night, Sidney Lumet's masterful staging of the Eugene O'Neill drama, with Katharine Hepburn in the lead.

* Die Nibelungen, Fritz Lang's epic silent film adaptation of the classic Nordic poem. From 1925.

* People Like Us, a mainstream drama with surprising depth. Starring Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks.

* Ramrod, a dark western with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, the stars of Sullivan's Travels.

* We Can't Go Home Again & Don't Expect Too Much, the lost experimental film of Nicholas Ray paired with a documentary about its making.

PRIVATE LIVES OF ALEXANDER KORDA: THE RISE OF CATHERINE THE GREAT - ECLIPSE SERIES 16

The Private Life of Henry VIII [review] was a great success for Alexander Korda, and so it only made sense that he would continue in this vein as both a filmmaker and a producer. For his next historical feature, Korda handed the directorial reins to Paul Czinner, who had recently left Germany with his wife, the actress Elizabeth Bergner, to escape persecution from the rising Nazi powers. Czinner and Korda settled on Catherine the Great as a suitable starring vehicle for Bergner. Though Catherine had a long reign as Empress of Russia, one full of scandal and rumor, the pair decided to focus on her early life for The Rise of Catherine the Great, and her move from her home country of Germany to the court of St. Petersburg--a situation that Bergner could likely identify with.

At the start of the picture, the Empress Elisabeth (Flora Robson, the Basil Dearden-directed Saraband for Dead Lovers) is on the throne. Lacking both an Emperor and a direct heir, Elisabeth is trying to position her nephew, Grand Duke Peter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Little Caesar, The Prisoner of Zenda), to take over and carry on the bloodline. In classic fashion, the young monarch is not as interested in affairs of state as he is in affairs of the heart and also those of the body. Being a ladies man and a scoundrel, the idea of marrying a German princess he's never seen doesn't really appeal to the dandy. His mind changes, however, when he meets Catherine and she charms him with her naïveté and devotion.

Only, his mind is to change just as quickly on their wedding day when a valet (Gerald du Maurier) plants a doubt in his head: what if she is not as naïve as he originally believed? Feeling royally played, Peter approaches his new marriage as if it were a game. Can he carry on as he was and keep his wife in her place? He'll push her to see how clever she really is!

These early portions of The Rise of Catherine the Great are the best parts, with Peter acting the rake and Catherine trying to outmaneuver him, sometimes advised by Empress Elisabeth herself. Flora Robson pulls a coup on her castmates, completely dominating The Rise of Catherine the Great each and every time she appears on screen. (Hell, even Criterion chose to put her on the menu screen rather than the movie's titular star.) The actress reminds me of Helen Mirren, both in attitude and appearance. Hers is by far the most colorful role. She gets to shout and throw tantrums and even gives one of her ministers a black eye. Her showing "Little Catherine" the ropes has echoes of Choderlos de Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses. The innocent is being trained to disarm the cad. Peter is fueled more by pride and jealousy than he is desire, and Fairbanks handles the wounded ego angle with aplomb.

Unfortunately, The Rise of Catherine the Great nearly skids to a halt when Elisabeth eventually passes on. Peter rules Russia with the same shortcomings that make him such a bad husband, and he quickly fears Catherine's popularity and her keen instincts for fair rule. Or should I say her alleged instincts. The script, which was cobbled together by three writers, gives pretty thin examples of Catherine's decision-making skills, and for most of this part of the film, she appears far from great. The political machinations are a pale replacement for the more swarthy bedroom negotiations, and Catherine is shown as weak willed and easily bested, a wilting flower beholden to a rotten man. She is only convinced to make the right choice and seize power when his insults become too much to bear. Czinner wishes to paint Catherine as the mother of the country who will fight for her children, but that portrait doesn't fit in the frame, not when, for the bulk of the picture, she is too busy pining for her sweetheart to make the bold moves to get rid of him.

While the script clearly goes wrong in sticking Catherine in the backseat for The Rise of Catherine the Great's final act, some blame must also be placed with Bergner. She's not much of an actress, and she also lacks any special screen presence. Just like Peter, the camera doesn't really love her, it's more okay with her. Even surrounded by Vincent Korda's impressive set designs and decked out in John Armstrong's costumes, Bergner can't quite marshal the charisma to make her character believable. A film about a woman coming into her own and taking control of an empire requires a much stronger personality to bring it to life.

But then that's the problem. As a whole, Paul Czinner's directorial style lacks the vitality of even Korda's, who himself wasn't exactly the most vivacious. The Rise of Catherine the Great also lacks the sheer force of a performer like Charles Laughton, or the more lusty aspects of the Henry VIII story. When the gossip and the whispers take over The Rise of Catherine the Great, one can't help but think all that cattiness is much ado about nothing at all. Maybe they were saving all the salacious details for a possible sequel? Too bad the Korda franchise was soon to go elsewhere.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI'S TRILOGY OF LIFE (Blu-Ray) - #631

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a notorious author and activist before he became a filmmaker. As a self-described homosexual Marxist Catholic, his viewpoint was, to say the least, unique and his chosen means of expression often abrasive. He began his cinema career as a screenwriter and became a protégé of Fellini--though the two had a falling out when Pasolini struck out on his own to make his 1961 debut, Accatone, the story of a pimp in the Italian slums.

After a decade of increasingly pessimistic movies, Pasolini decided to adopt a new outlook on life. Turning to classic literature, he chose to helm a Trilogy of Life: three films adapting famous books that themselves were a collection of short stories and fables. Working with material by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and tales from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, jumping from Italy to England and then to the Middle East, the filmmaker embraced the ribald and the sensual, turning these well-known parables into a celebration of mankind's pleasures, devotions, and freedoms. Politics and religion were mocked--sometimes lovingly, other times sharply--with Pasolini ultimately letting the human condition--and the human comedy--dictate a narrative free of all expected restrictions (and predictably censored for the same).

It's a surprisingly good fit for the director, even if his newfound blithe spirit was not to last. Shortly after completing the Trilogy of Life, Pasolini rejected the work, claiming that he had succumbed to a particularly thin, knee-jerk liberalism. His next, and sadly last, film turned out to be his most misanthropic and controversial yet. Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom is still one of the more discussed and disturbing pieces of cinema [you can read my review here], both reviled and revered in counterbalancing measures. It's kind of bizarre to consider how Pasolini jumped one to the other. If you saw Salo separately from The Trilogy of Life and had no idea who had made either, I doubt you'd guess it was the same man.

I keep a copy of Boccaccio's The Decameron next to my bed, where I can occasionally grab it and read one of the stories. (Also, to let the ladies know I am edumacated and/or a would-be pretentious intellectual.) The 14th-century tome is credited with having originated the art form of the novella (which is not just a short novel, but that's a discussion for another time). It's basically a collection of short stories, 100 in all, told by ten travelers to pass the time. They are alternately funny, philosophical, dirty, and magical. Despite the book's considerable age, it doesn't read like an antiquated relic. It's lively and bawdy and quite entertaining.

For his 1971 adaptation of the book, Pasolini quite understandably whittles the text down from 100 to about a dozen entries or so (including at least one that is told, rather than performed). His version of The Decameron (111 minutes) also jettisons the framing sequence, instead letting the stories flow naturally one into the other. A few characters connect from one to the next, sometimes stumbling into the neighboring scenario just to kickstart the next tale and send the narrative on its way. For the first half of the film, there is a recurring character of a con man and a thief (played by Pasolini regular Franco Citti; he's in all the films in this set and also in Mamma Roma); for the second half, there is a painter who is struggling to complete a fresco in a church. He is played by the director himself, and so no surprise that the painter's vision gives The Decameron its most fantastical images, including a living painting re-creating classic religious iconography. He also gets to utter the movie's last line, "Why complete a work when it's so beautiful just to dream it."

Pasolini's focus tends to be on stories with either a sexual or religious base, often both, as well as tales that are generally derailed by one person's greed or folly. While much of what we see borders on the blasphemous--a convent full of nuns taking advantage of a man they believe to be mentally deficient; the robbing of a Bishop's grave, etc.--Pasolini is only tweaking the nose of the church playfully. He is creating a connection between earthly and heavenly pleasures, suggesting that each exists in concert with the other. Hence, the penultimate story of the man who literally screws himself to death. He returns from the afterlife to reveal that sex is considered to be a virtue, not a sin, and his punishment will be for other wicked deeds. Granted, he is in Hell, so we don't really know how God and his minions feel about the matter, but the message here is, hey, regardless of the outcome, its worth it.

Pasolini's depiction of medieval living is neither romanticized nor prettied up. The buildings and clothes are shabby, the people are dirty. There are so many rotting teeth in The Decameron, my own mouth started to hurt after a while. Director of photography Tonino Delli Colli, who also collaborated with Raffaello Matarazzo and Louis Malle, shoots without much added light, preferring the natural look of sunlight and shadows--however musty some of those shadows might be. Likewise, Pasolini doesn't push his rather large cast--which is made up in large part of non-actors, in the Italian Neorealist tradition--toward big acting. He plays the comedy for what it is, but mostly let's the rest of the behavior just be. It makes for a surprisingly lithe anthology picture, one that sets the tone for its sibling films.

The set-up for 1972's The Canterbury Tales (111 mins.) more closely mirrors the frame of the Geoffrey Chaucer book: travelers on the road to Canterbury in medieval England agree to swap stories to pass the time--though who is telling the tale and where is never really addressed again. Instead, the thread that runs through the movie is that of Chaucer himself, another winking role for Pasolini, sitting at his desk and writing his book. He says little, instead mostly just looking up from his work to smile at a clever punchline or two.

Pasolini has chosen eight stories from the original text, once again favoring ribald anecdotes and morality plays that involve human greed and betrayal. The sections range from the humorous (a wife and her lover trick her husband into locking himself away while they make love, only for her previous lover to show up looking for action) to the more dire and serious (Franco Citti plays the devil come to Earth to observe human misery; three young boys plot against each other after finding treasure). Some of the sequences lack the punch or the narrative flow that made The Decameron more riveting. Laura Betti (1900 [review]) plays the Wife of Bath in a short vignette that comes to very little, and outside of some familiar settings, not much leads the viewer from one story to the next.

Still, The Canterbury Tales has two superior segments that alternately surprise, delight, and in the case of the second one, horrify. First is Ninetto Davoli, who played a swindled bumpkin in The Decameron, returning here as a shiftless teenager making merry and causing trouble in both work and play. The scenario is Pasolini's tribute to silent cinema, with Davoli doing an imitation of Chaplin's Tramp. The slapstick is funny and the homage loving, with the modern director juxtaposing the "innocence" of the early motion pictures with Chaucer's not-so-innocent characters. (Another Chaplin connection: the revered auteur's daughter Josephine plays the lovely girl May in the opening story.)

The second sequence is essentially the film's big finish. It features a materialistic clergyman being visited by a youthful angel who spirits him away to Hell to take a glimpse at what happens when men of God betray their vows. Pasolini builds a large outdoor set on an English wasteland, with naked demons painted head to toe in garish colors and grotesque scenes of torture and punishment. It's at once both disturbing and hilarious. The director's rudimentary special effects, depicting giant Satanic buttocks releasing wicked priests back into the sulfurous landscape, succeed on sheer audacity. It's hard to laugh when you feel so queasy!

As with The Decameron, perhaps the best element to recommend The Canterbury Tales is the art direction. Pasolini's unique take on ancient living, embracing all the stink and filth, is so vivid, he successfully erases all trace of modernity and creates an alternate world that is believable and intriguing. Even if the movie doesn't gel in terms of narrative, it still looks remarkable. It also seems had Pasolini chosen a better way to end the film, he might have turned what is a very good effort into something great. Sure, the trip to Hell is remarkable, but The Canterbury Tales lacks any final message. There is no summation a la the painted fresco, nor do we get something akin to the libertine's moral that we are privileged to receive at the end of The Decameron (or even the closed circle of The Arabian Nights). Instead, The Canterbury Tales just stops. Ironic for a film about a journey that it kind of doesn't end up anywhere.

Pasolini all but abandons the collected story structuring for 1974's The Arabian Nights (130 mins.), even going so far as to drop the frame from the original source material. Likewise, he steps comfortably away from any overriding religion, instead embracing a more freeform narrative line where man determines his own fate, with only happenstance and our own foolishness to get in the way.

If there is any throughline in The Arabian Nights, it's the clever slave Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini), who arranges for her own sale to the handsome young Nuredin (Franco Meril). When her "master" refuses to heed her advice, she is kidnapped and they are separated. Thanks to her wiliness, Zumurrud escapes again, and her flight from capture eventually lands her in a city in search of a king. Mistaking her for a man, and following an ancient tradition, the ruling powers put her on the throne. Meanwhile, a properly shamed Nuredin goes searching for his lost inamorata.

As in The Decameron, one aspect of the script tumbles into the next, with Zumurrud's enemies criss-crossing over plot lines and also getting their comeuppance. Pasolini shot the exteriors of the film in the Middle East, with the interior sex scenes taking place on an Italian soundstage--meaning he also foregoes local actors when away from Italy, presumably because actors willing to get nude for his camera would have been harder to find in Muslim countries (as they apparently were not in England; you ever wanted to see Doctor Who's Tom Baker getting' busy? Me neither!). Even so, The Arabian Nights appears even less like studio-based constructions than the preceding films. The legitimate sights serve the production well.

Midway through the picture, when Nuredin has been taken in by a trio of horny sisters who read to him from, one presumes, One Thousand and One Nights, Pasolini diverges from the path and dives down a rabbit hole into more stories. Ninetto Davoli returns as Aziz, who has lost all he has known in the world, including his love and manhood. He is found in the desert by Taj (Francesco Paolo Governale), and the wandering Prince listens as Aziz relates the circumstances by which he came to be so dejected. This leads to Taj forming a new plan to pursue love on his own, and as he puts his scheme into motion, he gathers the histories of those he recruits in aiding him. These stories end up being the most outrightly mystical of any of the tales in all three movies in the Trilogy of Life, suggesting the happy outcome that is soon to come is more fated than the participants realize.

Unfettered as it is from Catholic judgment and any governing morality, The Arabian Nights is the only film where indulgence in our most natural impulses is not punished. Sexuality morphs freely, basically creating an idealized world where all could act as they pleased, the only price that had to be paid was involvement. Aziz has bad things happen because he doesn't govern his own fate, and Nuredin loses Zumurrud when he does not heed her advice. Yet, those who embrace life are rewarded. Even Nuredin eventually. Perhaps this is what soured Pasolini so, he knew his vividly realized fantasy was not to be. There are couple of key scenes of brutal violence in The Arabian Nights, at least one of which (a castration) is shocking enough to be in Salo. One could argue that maybe Pasolini's disillusionment was quite possibly born from the fact that even in an invented world where everyone was free to frolic and love as they saw fit, such attacks were necessary, because otherwise we might take our free will for granted.

The Canterbury Tales also has an English dub that was overseen by Pasolini. Though I generally shy away from dubs, this one makes sense, as the film was shot in England and features plenty of British actors. The Cockney accents fit the material. Additionally, though they don't play within the movie, there is a supplement with the English inserts Pasolini created for the written elements, like letters and Chaucer's book, seen in the film.

Each disc has its own handful of extras, with the lead bonus on The Decameron, Patrick Rumple's 25-minute visual essay "On The Decameron" being essential viewing early on. I kind of wish that I had watched it before watching the movie, because it both lays the groundwork for how Pasolini built his career up to the point of taking on Trilogy of Life, but also gives some insight into how The Decameron is structured and points out Pasolini's influences from the world of cinema and painting, including the material he borrowed from Giotto, the painter whose work becomes the tableau vivant in the last portion of the film.

This vivacious detour by Pier Paolo Pasolini makes for an interesting, albeit tragically brief, third act in an accomplished film career. Trilogy of Life is an anthology of anthologies, three movies based on famous collections of stories from classic literature: Boccaccio's The Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and the more mystical The Arabian Nights. Over the three films, Pasolini dissects human desire and our capacity for error, examining sin, indulgence, and punishment, building toward a morality where all would be free to love as they choose. The tales collected are funny, sensual, and sometimes poignant, all composed stylishly. Sure, the message doesn't always gel, and some sequences are clunky, but overall, Trilogy of Life is exactly the enjoyable life-affirming experience Pasolini set out for it to be, regardless of his own eventual disappointment in its thematic qualities.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk. Images here were taken from promotional materials and were not taken from the Blu-Ray under review.

WEEKEND (Blu-Ray) - #635

"This isn't a novel, it's a film. A film is life."

Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard's incendiary 1967 farewell to motion pictures as he knew (and redefined) them, gives new meaning to the term "road rage." Most of the picture takes place on the highway as city dwellers head to the country for weekend getaways. Except, rather than heading toward some kind of bucolic idyll, what awaits them are traffic jams, accidents, and violence. In Godard's vision of the late 1960s, citizens have come to value their cars more than their lives, and they use the vehicles as weapons. They are status symbols that tell others who you are--the wealthy drive fancy roadsters, men who work drive trucks and tractors--and people vie for social positions the same way they vie for a parking spot.

The focus of Godard's episodic polemic is, ostensibly, the Durands, a bourgeois couple in a loveless marriage. At the start of the film, both husband and wife--Corinne and Roland, as played by Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne--are each plotting with their lovers, making plans to murder the other. Corinne has convinced Roland to chance not fixing his brakes in hopes he'll crash and burn; Roland is waiting for Corinne's father to die so he can bump her off after she's gotten her inheritance. Their trip that weekend is actually to go visit her old man, who is on death's door, with the hope of staying in his good graces and preventing anyone from tampering with his will.

How the Durand's view life and their place in the world is immediately evident as soon as they encounter a line of traffic backed up on a two-lane highway. Roland unrepentantly pulls into the second lane and starts pushing his way toward the front, indifferent to the honking horns and angry shouts from the people he and Corinne are knocking aside. This is what the moneyed class do: they insist on their privilege. Godard has set up one long metaphor for society on this roadside. As the Roland's travel the line, we see people from all different walks of life, young and old, working class and middle class. There are trucks full of animals, representing agriculture. We also see signs of industry. Ironically, a Shell gas truck is trapped in the middle of the jam. Along the way, some have been run off the road, crashing into trees. One woman is going the wrong way. Another couple has given up and started playing checkers. A man hauling his sailboat can only dream of the sea.

This long line of vehicles is probably Weekend's most famous sequence. Godard and his longtime director of photography, Raoul Coutard, have orchestrated the whole thing as one unbroken shot, the camera traveling alongside on its own unseen vehicle running through the ditch (be it a four-wheeled ride or some jury-rigged contraption on tracks, like what Coutard rides at the beginning of Contempt [review]). It's an impressive piece of choreography, and one of many ambitious shots that are peppered throughout Weekend. Some are more static than others, like the couple's fight with Jean-Pierre Leaud, which ping pongs between his car and the phone booth where he sings his side of the conversation (presumably to no response). Equally as impressive as the traffic jam set-up is a later scenario where a pianist sits in the middle of a town square explaining the enduring power of Mozart. As the impromptu concert progresses, townsfolk listen and go about their lives. Coutard slowly turns in circles, first one way and then the next, capturing the whole panorama. Tarantino would later lift this routine for the loquacious diner scene in Death Proof [review].

"Are you in a film or reality?"

"A film."

"In a film? You lie too much."

Weekend is less a movie about story and plot than it is a collection of experiments and exercises. Most of the episodes play as more refined versions of the similar political skits that Godard wove through his irregular Rolling Stones documentary Sympathy for the Devil/One Plus One, and though the final title card declares that this is the end of cinema, it's really the beginning of Godard MkII, paving the way for his later output, creating a manifesto that he still adheres to, as evinced by his best efforts from the last decade or so, such as Notre Musique [review] and the more recent Film Socialisme [review]. Its structure and ideas represent his dissatisfaction with traditional filmmaking and his cohorts from Cahiers du cinema's complacent approach to the same, which he considers akin to the political left's inability to put their radical words into practice. It is, in a sense, his claiming the "right of way," while also embracing the "way of might."

Both notions arise within Weekend's varied anecdotes. At one stop, a worker in a tractor collides with a trust-fund kid's sports car. Amusingly, this fatal fender-bender occurs while the older man sings the virtues of unity via "The Internationale." The young driver is killed, his girlfriend is angry, and she keeps insisting that because they are rich and fancy, they had the right of way. He points out that his efforts in the fields feed France. It must have been with a weary heart that Godard decided on including the cruel joke that punctuates the scene: the only common ground these two people share is their anti-Semitism.

"Might" is given lip service further into the story. After the Durand's have finally crashed their own car, they make passage by working on a garbage truck, an effective up-ending of cultural norms. As they gather up trash, the workers who have taken charge, one a black man and the other white (Omar Diop and Laszlo Szabo), share their belief that only a violent revolution is going to make a difference. The pacifism of the flower child movement is not going to cut it. As a symbol of their unity, the black man speaks for the white man, and vice versa, with Godard setting his frame on the face of the man being spoken for, not the one speaking, making their two voices one.

Weekend is basically a string of parables, an extreme take on The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales, or even Pilgrim's Progress: it's a journey that makes pit stops within more individual stories. Godard's script is a dismantling of consumerist culture and class politics, and civilization breaks down the farther the Durand's travel. In another ironic twist, they become less human the fewer automobiles there are running. Earlier, cars and other purchasable products and pop culture fantasies are shown to be more important than God--whom they have possibly met, though he's now a dangerous highwayman who has stepped straight from the Bible into an Alexandre Dumas novel--but once the Durand's lose their car, they are forced to barter with ideas. Give that they are short on ideas, they get stuck. It's a moment straight out of Beckett, with two vagabonds on the curb unable to conjure up any legitimate truth, brutalized for their own lack of purpose.

"The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome with more horror."

The question that Weekend poses is a difficult one: as the class system breaks down, are people really becoming less human or is it actually more human? In the final act, the Durand's are taken over by true radicals who have reverted to a kind of primitive tribalism, complete with animal sacrifice and chants. It's the revolution of apocalypse, with people becoming the goods that are now traded and consumed. Yet, the point is made that, in its most natural state, mankind may be savage, but he is honest; it's the imposition of society, of organizing as a system, that alters our nature. We trade savagery for barbarism.

In terms of aesthetic goals, so too does Godard chisel away the imposed structure of more than a half-century of cinema to grasp at something more unfettered, more pure--though arguably more formalist and reflexive at the same time. It's rougher, but more honest. Weekend is getting closer to uncompromised communication. Take your ideas and throw them against the screen, and see what sticks. One could spend a long time mapping it out and picking at the intellectual nuggets that Godard has sprinkled along the trail, but the true experience is more visceral. The audience is meant to just watch, to travel along with the camera, and let the mis-en-scene work its own magic. It tickles at the base of your brain whether you realize it or not. It's what makes Weekend so subversive. It's unnerving and exciting, and for as close as even Film Socialisme got to replicating the results, there is really no second time. Again, this is the start and the finish, both its own thing and the connector between the past and the future.

I'd only seen Weekend once before prior to this release. It was the New Yorker DVD release from 2005. It's been quite a while, but I remember even then there was disappointment that the transfer was middling, with soft colors and problematic resolution. No such issues will greet those watching the Criterion Blu-Ray. The new restoration, working with a massive 2K scan of the original film, is every bit as vibrant as Godard and Coutard intended it to be. Detail is rich, and colors really pop.

Criterion also rounds out the package with plenty of supplements, including archival interviews with the lead actors and French television footage from the set of the movie. There is also an illuminating new video essay by Kent Jones, and three articles in the booklet, including pieces of an interview with Godard conducted in 1969.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review. The above images are promotional stills and not screengrabs from the Blu-Ray under review.