Are you here for an affair?

I know, romantic, right?

The title of the post is, of course, that great line Buck Henry wrote for himself to deliver in The Graduate.  And of course, Benjamin IS there for an affair.

Mademoiselle Chambon (2009), on the other hand, demonstrates that when one is out to make a romantic film, it is all-or-nothing.  Dithering one's way in and out of a relationship may be realistic, but it is hardly diverting or enlightening.  Noel Coward's lovers in Brief Encounter may have been English and talkative diffident and shy, but they were clearly and demonstratively and knowingly in a relationship, conflicted as they may have been and uncertain as to how they should proceed.  The lovers in Chambon don't seem to be able to figure out what they're doing at all.

It is possible to make films, even great films, driven by things other than classical dramatic narrative structure.  There are character portraits, explorations of environments or communities.  But you can't set a story on the knife edge of a binary choice--will-they-or-won't-they?--and leave it there for 100 minutes and engage an audience.  Or at least you'd have to be a greater artist than writer-director Stephane Brize.

At least Lean and Coward knew how to sustain the tension.  The affair remained unconsummated, although they did go to an apartment which Billy Wilder transmogrified into The Apartment.  In Chambon, the lovers go to bed but it is the audience that his put to sleep.  The encounter answers no questions, reveals no information, accomplishes nothing.

There is literally one interesting cinematic moment in Chambon, and you've seen it in other films, although actress Aure Autike as the wife in the middle, executes it perfectly.  We are at a little garden party, Mlle Chambon has been invited to play her violin, and she plays a piece of particular significance to her and her lover, Jean.  Jean, who has been established as a rather uncultured and inarticulate character (another problem with the film) is absolutely gobsmacked.  His jaw goes slack and his eyes go all gooey like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel.  But the way the wife sees it and makes the connection is quite wonderful, silent-film-style storytelling, and represents the one interesting moment that is not a pale shadow of Brief Encounter.

As a film buff, I can't help feeling your time would be better spent renting or buying the Criterion edition of Brief Encounter, rather than bothering with Mlle Chambon or even continuing to read this blog.  Go!  Now!

Journalism vs. Narrative

Heroes for Sale (1933) is more important to American history today than to cinema history. It began filming just before FDR's inauguration and concluded at the end of the first month. It is packed with ideas and controversies of the day, including morphine addiction, class, automation, capital vs. labor, communism and the Bonus Army, in the ripped-from-the-headlines mode of Warner Bros under production chief Darryl Zanuck.

The hero, played by D.W. Griffith repertory company member Richard Barthelmess, in one of his few successful performances in a leading role in a talking picture. As is often surprising for silent film stars, his manner and style are a bit stagy, but his sincerity wins over anything. Still, one has to accept a father who abandons his adopted son in order to tramp around the country being a fugitive/philanthropist. Makes sense from the studio that brought you the harrowing I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang.

Makes sense for a script co-written by sometime con man, journalist and adventure Wilson Mizner. Direction is by William Wellman, so you can count on speed--so much speed that a lot of story tropes are dropped before they're done in order to pick up a new thread--rain, and male camaraderie. The hero and the man who wronged him meet in a muddy shelter under a bridge (which resembles a foxhole), and acknowledge that, as former comrades-in-arms, they must reconcile, even though it does them no good, since the sheriff is ready to run them out of town anyway.

As for the Communist who turns into an oppressive exploiter--is that a comment about Communists, about capitalism, or is he just a convenient story catalyst?

Spy-spy love

The title reads, "Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious" (1946) and so he is. Perhaps most notably for his numerous kinks and obsessions which remained obscure to his original audiences, but which leap out in plain sight to us today. I'm not just talking about the old chestnut about the chilly blonde being sexier than the Marilyn Monroe type--Hitchcock 'fessed up to that one himself. Nor the fear of authority, which is central to the suspense genre as a whole. (Pro-authority action flicks, like the Bond movies, have to have a streak of silliness to keep themselves from being proto-fascist, like for instance, anything by the neo-Brown Shirt John Milius.)

I'm interested in deeper twists, such as his fear of women, his belief that he is unworthy of him, his obsession with work, until personal identity is subsumed into the work. These ideas inform Notorious (1946), a film I find endlessly fascinating. It is one of the most adult films of its era, and for that reason I have avoided using it in my high school Film Studies class. No, nobody takes their clothes off or curses or uses drugs. But the concerns of the characters are adult concerns--love, sexual fidelity, duty, self-denial in service to that duty. It is an incredibly sexy movie--if you know how to read films of the 1940's. Between censorship and the culturally enforced reticence of the time, matters were not stated, but they were very clear to their audiences. (In fact, audiences came to understand that fade-outs after a kissing scene meant that sex followed, that the Production Code office began to bar all such fade-outs because they were too suggestive. Let me clarify--fading to black was too dirty for American audiences.)

If you watch Notorious carefully, you see that Cary Grant's character has fallen in love with the Bergman character almost as soon as she has fallen. But as soon as he learns that he must push her into another man's bed for the sake of the nation, he allows her to see him as cold, indifferent, detached. Apologetic, to be sure, because everyone recognizes there is something inherently indecent about the entire mission. But Grant acts as though he were not personally affected. And of course, we learn at the end that he is completely torn up.

As is Claude Rains's character, who is the most tragic of all. He gave his love wholeheartedly and sincerely and he is the one most truly betrayed, not Bergman and certainly not Grant. But Hitchcock and screenwriter Ben Hecht cut off sympathy in two ways. One is easy--he's a Nazi who wants to make a bomb; the other is subtler: his pathetic cry for help at the end, for Grant to shelter him from the wrath of his Nazi associates. We know that Grant, put in the same position, would accept his fate uncomplainingly, just as he accepted the necessity to pimp the woman he loves for his country.

And this is where this quintessential Hitchcock film makes tangential contact with the director we will be addressing next in Film Studies: Howard Hawks. For Hawks, duty and loyalty come first. Not honor, in the Asian or Germanic sense, like defending a family or a country. It's more like honoring one's own promises, one's own commitments. Maybe even if you don't quite believe in them anymore. As Sam Spade says in The Maltese Falcon (both novel and film) "When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it." There is beautiful stoicism in Notorious that we don't find in the neurotic Vertigo, The Birds or Marnie in which Hitchcock let his neuroses have full rein. Because it is only when Grant's character wonder what kind of man he could be to do what he is doing, that he is really and truly a man.

Why are you telling me this?

Give the makers of The Soloist (2009) credit: they did not crank out another piece of phony "Life can be good" uplift. They adhered to the ethic of the journalist played by Robert Downey, Jr. and engaged in honest journalism. Which would have made a documentary far more valuable than this well-meaning slog through a string of non-events.

There is no reason to belabor this. The film is not without merit. It is true that Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx give excellent performances that would be very impressive in any acting laboratory. And the expressionistic techniques used to give a sense of what the inside of a schizophrenic's head is like are very effective--overlapping voices and swirling, distorted images. But the film would not be much different if it had ended at the half-hour mark than it is at the end of an hour and three-quarters. There is no narrative drive, no push forward. The characters don't seem to know or care where they're going, so why should I? In short, the film fails to address the question that every story must address, "Why are you telling me this?"

The only continuing significance of this film is that its failure (which was exacerbated by a reported $70 million negative cost--probably due to a long development process) along with that of State of Play, occasioned talk that the audience for mid-budgeted studio-produced serious adult films had disappeared, and that this market segment was best left to independent producers.

First, people in the industry should be aware that the audience knows or cares not if a film is produced with studio or independent backing. It is impossible to detect these days. They should also know that the audience for poorly made or dull films has always been fairly sparse, and the best path to financial success would be to have better scripts written and to film them.

Next year there will probably a mid-budget film for adults which is a smashing success and everyone will run through the streets to hail the discovery that grown-ups like movies, too. Amnesia is a film executive's (and journalist's) perpetual malady.