A Girl and a Gun

A Film Unlike Most Others

Last year, the New York Times ran a Sunday piece by Terrence Raferty proclaiming Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu, 1939) as possibly the greatest movie ever.  Except as statements of personal preference or enthusiasm (Truffaut thought Rules "the film of films"), such statements are in fact meaningless, like saying Rembrandt's "Polish Rider" is "greater" than Velazquez's "Pablo de Vallodolid." There is no imaginable system of measurement or verification of claims.  But short lists have a little more validity, and in my book any list (beginning at about five, certainly ten) would have to include Rules.  For some months now, it has been out on a spiffy DVD by (natch) Criterion, which is chock-a-block with fascinating interviews with Renoir himself, collaborators behind and in front of the camera, and other people with something intelligent and interesting to say.

Here's a brief intro: André is an aviator who lands at Orly airport one night amidst a clamoring throng after having set a one-man US-to-Paris speed record.  But to the radio reporter who shoves a microphone under his nose, he expresses his deep  disappointment that the woman for whom he undertook this dangerous feat is not there to meet him.  Although he does not mention it, she is Christine, married to the Marquis de la Chesnaye, who has had a (Platonic) relationship with André for some weeks; all those in the la Chesnaye social circle understand this and of course smirk at the idea that there was nothing erotic in this friendship.  Octave, a sort of middle class ne'er do well who is friendly with both André and Christine, tries to smooth things over and gets the Marquis actually to invite André to a shooting party in the la Chesnaye country chateau along with a gaggle of other close friends (including the Marquis's own mistress, whom he renounces, half-heartedly).  All this is put before us in approximately the time it took me to write it.  And now the film really begins.

Renoir takes us through the social whirl at the chateau, endless flirtations and adulterous dalliances, mostly played for comedy, in a series of all-but-perfect scenes.  The first night the guests are there, he stations his unmoving camera (in deep focus, to give everything equal importance) at the end of an upstairs hallway and stages a ballet of the guests in and around one another and in and out of one another's rooms.  It's funny, but it tells us also about this little group as a microcosm of the 1939 France Renoir is working in.  He never lets us get far from the brittle, artificial society he hated so much--in one of the interviews, he repeatedly and angrily refers to it as "rotten"--and he shows only how adherence to the rules (duplicity, deceitfulness, infidelity, insincerity) glues it all shakily together.  Renoir also found the perfect metaphor for his society in the Marquis's passion for collecting eighteenth-century mechanical toys.  Their complexity and emptiness leave little else to say.

Lest this seem merely an exercise in dishing the rich--and Renoir was an unreconstructed man of the left--we also see a mirror image of this society downstairs, among the large group of servants which manage the la Chesnaye's mansion.  A few servants snootily observe that they have heard the Marquis had "a relative named Rosenthal" (double entendre: the Marquis is played by Marcel Dalio, who played the Jewish WWI prisoner Rosenthal in Renoir's La Grand Illusion [1937]) but they are quieted by the chef, who informs them that la Chesnaye is one of the few employers in his experience who understood that you poured the white wine over the boiled potatoes while they were still hot to produce perfect potato salad.  A poacher on the estate is hired by the Marquis to put him on the right track, shining shoes in the chateau; soon, he is poaching on the gamekeeper's wife.

The centerpiece of this (and I have only skimmed the surface) is the shooting expedition itself, where decorous bonhomie and manners turn into a blood fest and bickering over which slaughtered bird and rabbit belongs to whom.  It is an unforgettable reminder that this society of supposed innocent philandering can so quickly descend into carnage and brutality. 

The game holds together as long as people agree to play by the rules.  But, inevitably, they start to express shards of real feeling, to tell pieces of the truth, to say what they really want and really hate, and when that happens, events spin entirely out of control and end in horrible tragedy.  The Marquis tries, not without sympathy and regret, to restore order by sweeping reality under a rug, but the game is up.  As one of the guests, a retired General, says approvingly but ruefully of la Chesnaye, "The race is dying out." In a few short weeks after the film's summer 1939 release, that prediction began to come true.  The Parisian audiences hated the film, and after a few performances, the government banned it as too gloomy, possibly even defeatist. 

The print used by Criterion is not the one shown in 1939, parts of which were irretrievably lost during the war.  But post-war restorers found enough outtakes to patch together a version Renoir himself announced as very close to his original, if not precisely the same.  Surely the spirit is here, not to mention the astonishingly fluid camerawork, a story (by Renoir) so tight and witty and profoundly sad as still to make me marvel after twelve or fifteen viewings.  I can't close without saying a word about the cast.  Dalio, in what I believe was his only lead role, was flawless, as was Nora Gregor as his wife and Mila Parély as his mistress.  Special mention for Renoir favorites Gaston Modot as the gamekeeper and Julien Carette as the poacher, and for Pierre Magnier as that Greek chorus of a General.  But the picture belongs first of all to Renoir, as director and writer, yes, but also as actor.  His Octave is one of the miracles of modern cinema.  Octave is genial, irritable, worldly, practical, self-deluding, an oaf, a shrewd arranger.  He gives a speech toward the end in which his illusions all collapse and he sees himself as a failure; you'll never forget it.  Then he really fails.  I'm not sure what the word "genius" really means, but if it means what most people seem to think, Renoir was one.  Nobody who cares for film, art, or life should miss this gorgeous creation.

Hardy Perennial (1908-2005)

John Mills has always been there in my film-watching experience.  That began in earnest in the late 1940s when television came to southern California and the local stations filled air time with old movies, many of them British because rights were so cheap.  Mills seemed to be in them all, and seemed to be able to do anything in the bargain.  I remember in particular The Young Mr. Pitt (1942), Great Expectations (1946), and Scott of the Antarctic (1948), along with a considerable collection of British officers in WWII films.  My own personal favorite was his rich comic turn in The Wrong Box (1966).  He was a dedicated pro who never seemed to give less than his best in whatever the vehicle. 

In Like Flynn

A month or two ago, we had some spirited exchanges on outstanding actors and actresses.  One of the problems with such discussions, of course, is that there are nearly as many criteria for quality performances as there are performers.  I thought it might be interesting to look at one actor who did one narrow thing well, but so well that he may deserve a special little niche in a corner of the pantheon. 

Errol Flynn was born in Australia in 1909 and never seems to have been cut out for a model citizen.  He was constantly in trouble, first for petty criminal infractions, later in hot water with irate husbands who had the quaint notion that their wives' sexual favors belonged exclusively to them.  It was only his devastating good looks that got him a shot at real work, in the movies, and it is one of the more peculiar ironies of his career that his first role of almost sixty in film and television was as Fletcher Christian in a "Bounty" film of the early sound era.  As it happens, Flynn's mother was a direct descendant of one of the Bounty's crew.  By 1935, fortune smiled and put him together with director Michael Curtiz, who cast him in Captain Blood and the next year in The Charge of the Light Brigade.  These parts suggested a modest competence for the action hero type, which didn't require a great deal of acting talent, but Flynn looked good handling a saber and in a cavalry uniform.

Then, however, came immortality of a kind: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).  Curtiz's Technicolor extravaganza had it all: legendary hero, colorful scenery, dastardly villains (Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone), a ravishing heroine (Olivia de Havilland), wonderful pacing, a tight plot of great dialogue, and a boatload of terrific character actors in lesser roles (Alan Hale, Eugene Pallette, Una O'Connor, Patric Knowles, and many more).  But most of all it had Flynn, who carried off the part with such panache, natural flair, confidence, good humor, athleticism, and control that it didn't seem like he was born to play Robin Hood, it seemed as though he was born Robin Hood.  It's one of the screen's great parts--shallow? yes, but perfectly conceived and realized within its depth, such as it was--and I'll bet you've watched it far more times than you'd like to admit largely because of Flynn.  I'll never get enough of it.

It was two more years before Curtiz found an equally juicy role for Flynn: Captain Geoffrey Thorpe in The Sea Hawk.  This was an Armada-era good English vs. bad Spaniard sea-going epic with Flora Robson doing as fine a Queen Elizabeth as Judi Dench ever imagined, more good villains (Rains again, and Henry Daniell), solid minor heavies (Jack LaRue, Gilbert Roland), Hale and Donald Crisp among Flynn's faithful, and a great story.  Once more, Flynn is, however, the picture: bold, charming, dashing, vulnerable but up to the task.  It's hard to think of a genre picture--unless it's Robin Hood--where a single player lifted it to the level of a tiny but unmistakable work of art. 

It was pretty much downhill after that.  Flynn made a lot of pictures, including many westerns (in which he was never convincing as an American--his only success in that respect came as Captain Nelson in Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma, which came out in 1945, a lousy picture with nice direction, photography, and a respectable if not memorable job by Flynn).  Flynn continued his "wicked, wicked ways," the title of his posthumous autobiography, drank more heavily than ever, went through three statutory rape trials (the title of this post entered the language with explicit reference to his success, if that is the word for it, with women), a nasty tax dispute with the Australian government (he reportedly said, "I'll forget it all if they will"), and never looked very comfortable, even in roles reasonably well tailored for him, like the spy in Kim (1950).  The tale gets more sordid with each passing year, and I stop here to keep from soiling the memory of two performances unlikely, in their type, ever to be outdone.  He died in 1959. 

Back in Action (Sort of)

After having been brought to grief by a broken leg (ouch in neon) with many complications and twelve days in hospital, I can manage an hour or two at the keyboard each now and again.  I won't be getting out to any theaters, not that there's much worth seeing, but I have a backlog of DVDs and nothing much to do but work the remote and have a good time.  My stat page tells me that, for reasons I cannot fathom, there have still be a lot of visitors to a AGAAG, and now I hope to give them a good reason to come.  There will be pieces on older films, Lord knows what else, and I'm hoping this will be as worth your time as I know it will be therapeutic for me.  Thanks for your patience.

A Great Hole

In the autumn of 1962, I was wandering rather aimlessly through Paris's thirteenth arrondissement, playing the flâneur before I even knew the word.  I found myself walking beneath a huge, blank wall of dark stone before I was aware that it was there; finally looking up and around, I saw that the wall ran on for a couple hundred yards or more, and at the end turned right for nearly the same distance.  I walked and walked until I finally saw a sign carved into the wall above a small walk-in gate: La Santé--the famous, forbidding, and completely intimidating prison.  Just standing there was frightening, and it was hard to imagine anyone going in that gate who could harbor any hopes of coming out again.  The place appeared impregnable, invulnerable, unbreachable.

In 1960, Jacques Becker completed Le Trou (The Hole), a film about an escape from La Santé based on an actual attempt which had been turned into a novel a few years earlier.  Becker had gotten his start as an assistant to Jean Renoir in the 1930s, working on La Vie est à nous (1936) and on La règle du jeu (1939) before getting his own pictures late in the war years and after.  He may be best known in this country for the two films available on DVD, Casque d'or (1952) and Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), a Jean Gabin vehicle and a beauty.  But it wasn't until now that I got hold of Le Trou.  You should too.

Most prison films are about escape, and Becker's is no exception.  But his handling of the material is exceptional.  He concentrates almost exclusively on process.  The five men sharing a cell start digging their hole almost from the film's beginning, and in very long takes we get a sense of how hard it is to break through the floor, and then for an exploratory team to find their way through the complex underground passages--where they must avoid patrols--to the outer wall.  It's as gripping a film as you can imagine, and the interplay among the men adds important connective tissue, an element absent from Robert Bresson's equally powerful film of the struggle of a single man to get out of a Nazi prison during the war (A Man Escaped [1956]).  None of the actors are well known, although a couple have long lists of credits.  One, played by Jean Keraudy--he's the "Roland" character--was a part of the original escape team, and this was his only movie.  There's a lot of other fascinating business about prison life, mostly communicating between cells, passing packages back and forth, anticipating the approach of guards. 

Becker had a marvelous sense of pacing and timing.  He lets things go on long enough that you feel yourself there, but boredom is a psychological impossibility.  He died in February 1960, two weeks after finishing the final cut and two weeks before Le Trou opened in Paris.  He was fifty-four and at the height of his powers. 

Hating Oldboy, Loving Oldboy

Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy had its South Korean release in 2003, won the Grand Prize at Cannes last year, and has now opened theatrically in the US.  I haven't begun to try surveying the critical response nationally--you can always go to the 117 reviews in several languages linked via the film's IMDb page--but I have picked out four that seem roughly representative.  Pro are David Edelstein at Slate Stephanie Zacharek at Salon.com.  Con, energetically so, are Manolah Dargis of the New York Times--registration required, but if you aren't registered you can get the flavor from my remarks in the immediately preceding post--and Armond White in the New York Press.

I saw the film for the second time this week, after a cooling-off period of six months, and nothing has quelled my own enthusiasm.  But almost as interesting is the polarization Oldboy has occasioned, the strenuous approval and savage denunciation it has brought out.  Why?  What is being argued about here?  And what, in my view, is being missed?

I see three issues.  First, there is the matter of substance versus surface.  Dargis thinks Park has produced just another Gap commercial, flash and fire with nothing beneath; White sees the stylistic talent but comes to the same conclusion: an eye-catching but empty vessel.  It's hard to understand how they reached that point.  Oldboy is a story of redemptive love--and the redemption is achieved, at phenomenal cost, but achieved nonetheless--and of the entrapping coils of vengeance, Park's announced subject for this film, its predecessor, and its successor.  Oldboy's protagonist, Oh Dae-Su (unforgettably played by Choi Min-Sik), has every reason to seek vengeance, but seems equally propelled by the need to find the "why?" for what was done to him.  As he says, though, when he learns the story behind the story, he can't give up the thirst for revenge, it's become a part of him.  Similarly, his tormentor, Yu Ji-Tae (and plaudits as well to Lee Woo-Jin), is driven by a maniacal insistence to avenge a wrong, and when he has done so, he asks himself what there is left to live for.  These interlocking stories are told through numerous cinematic devices: editing, split screen, film textures, time and consciousness shifts, digitization, whole new ways of staging traditional scenes (a fight is put on in a basement hallway, where Oh, wielding only a claw hammer, works his way from one end to the other through a ferocious band of Korean thugs; the camera tracks from the side, left to right, maintaining the same distance throughout rather than diving into the middle of the action); backflashes galore; and plenty more.  But for all the relish Park demonstrates in his ability to stage these pyrotechnics, I never had the sense he lost sight of his story and the deep implications it held for the way we look at ourselves and our fellow humans.  (There is more to be said about the way Park handles the redemption scene but it's impossible to discuss it without revealing an astounding plot revelation, a scruple which did not by the way inhibit White.)

Second, there is the matter of violence.  Perhaps people object to Park's lack of bashfulness about cinematic display because so much of it depicts violence--graphic even by the standards of reasonably jaded western audiences.  Today, Dargis reviewed Sin City, reputedly a massively violent film, and found it a yawner.  Something about Old Boy triggered her attack mode: could it be that Park was simply too effective in showing what we have learned to absorb and pass off as "movie business"?  Or was it that, amidst all the gore, Park still found ways to laugh--sardonically, ruefully, but laugh nonetheless?  I'd love to give some examples, but again, most come as surprises and I fell honor-bound to keep them that way.  One perhaps innocent revelation is Oh's beatific smile as he opens the elevator at the end of hallway littered with broken goons.

The subject of film violence is swampy territory, and I enter with caution.  But I am struck by the absence of one dimension in the rejections Oldboy's.  Anyone writing about notably violent American films from the late 1960s, like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969), could hardly be taken seriously if no mention was made of violence in American life at the same moment, upon which these and many other films were commenting, or at least using as background for resonance: the political assassinations, the civil rights violence and urban riots, the Vietnam war.  But people feel free to criticize Park for all the mayhem without mentioning the extensive violence that South Korean military dictatorships put the country through from 1961 to the late 1980s.  Park was born in 1963, and indeed when asked about violence in interviews has said that Koreans of his generation have experienced so much of it for so long, audiences have granted them the latitude to explore it frankly and realistically.  Valid point, it seems to me.  But then I believe violence is a legitimate topic for art--has been in western culture since The Iliad--and that we will never minimize this scourge without confronting it unflinchingly, exploring its undeniable fascination, honestly and repeatedly accepting its consequences.

Finally, both White and Dargis are not content to take apart the film; they also indulge in animadversions to its audiences, specifically the people who enjoy it.  These are "cinephiliacs," a word of which I have only become aware recently, and which--judging from their articles--refers to people without critical standards who cannot distinguish between art and rubbish, people who like pretty much anything and, to get back to the first point, like it even more if it's brightly packaged and novel.  (White: "Our jaded culture only cares about the schlock of the new."  I suppose that accounts for all the remakes, the apparently unkillable biopic, and on and on.) 

Try as I might, I don't know how they have this inside knowledge of the film's admirers.  It couldn't, could it, be that those who have expressed approving judgments, and therefore don't see Oldboy their way, must therefore suffer from some aesthetic pathology which has corrupted love of cinema into a form of madness?  A particularly unworthy guilt-by-association ploy that both writers use is to tar Park with the Quentin Tarantino brush.  Tarantino was head of the Cannes Jury last year; Oldboy won the Grand Prize (number two behind the Palme d'Or, which of course went to Farenheit 9/11); Tarantino has shown a certain taste for violence and cinematic splash, and if he likes something, it's got to be bad.  Q.E.D. 

When I'm at my best (hey, it happens now and then), I try to judge a film by what I see on the screen, and not who I imagine might be liking it or not liking it, then fantasizing what they must be like by the supposed distance of their conclusions from mine.  A daring statement of critical principles, I'm sure, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.