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!

Squinting with your eyes open

Obviously, everything's going to be completely all right.

I don't have many observations to record about the chilly, dark spy picture Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011).  It seems to be less of a film, and more of a simulation of the experience of being a spy.  Nothing is stated outright, nothing is explained, no one is identified, no one reveals their thinking.  If anyone has feelings, you won't hear about it.

Even better, screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have dispensed with those two popular crutches of the modern spy film.  First, the voice-over of the protagonist, explaining the arcane non-verbal transactions going on.  You know the thing, "Sturgess gave me a glance that could only mean one thing" blah, blah, blah.  Second, the big explanation at the end, "You see, Collins, I knew as soon as I saw Verdoux wearing the ring, that Operation Fuzzball was going to be scrubbed, because..."  Clearly, the writers and director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) decided to have respect for the audience and challenge them to lean forward and come to the film, instead of being overwhelmed by it, as in a Bond or Bourne film.

The story is often referred to as "complex", but it's not so much complex as it is sub-contextual. Here is a very visual film -- the soundtrack by itself would tell you almost nothing-- the very opposite of a standard spy film, which is all explaining and a couple of gunshots at the end.  But the story is relatively straightforward if you understand two things.  In LeCarre spy stories, there is no there there.  It's never about a secret that has to be stolen or protected.  It's about the process of security -- who works for whom, who is who really who they say, who can be trusted and who will betray.  What they are protecting is immaterial and never discussed.  Questions of loyalty are about the security force that claims your allegiance -- MI6, CIA, KGB, not the countries who have created and harbor these forces. And loyalty to the very idea of security and the discipline security requires.  And the time sequence shifts, but that is clearly laid out in the form of Smiley dictating a memorandum, so confusion as to time only lasts seconds at most--if you are paying attention.

The characters communicate in literal and dramatic code.  Information is conveyed by a look, a shrug, a cock of the head, or of the eyebrow.  But the film is not slow.  Information arrives rapidly and in profusion, once you understand how to interpret it.  It is quiet, but densely packed.

My favorite shot--a recurring sequence of a packet of papers rising, by itself, in a sort of document-dumbwaiter, acknowledging that information is the real protagonist, that data is more important than people in this universe, deserving of its very own private elevator.

The film has a wonderful visual uniformity, oddly reminiscent of Welles's The Trial.  It was interesting to learn that that uniformity was achieved in a similar way as it was in Welles's film.  Nearly all of The Trial was shot in a single abandoned railway station in Paris.  Nearly all of Tinker Tailor was shot in an abandoned military base in England.  This provided a number of structures with a wide variety of purposes and spaces, but a single gloomy aesthetic that supports the tone of the film perfectly.

That's really all I can say.  The film has been too brilliantly dissected and explicated by David Bordwell, and if you are a serious student of film, you have to read "Tinker Tailor:  A Guide for the Perplexed."

My own parting advice-- don't watch this for relaxation, but for stimulation.  Put away the wine and brew some coffee.  The film is worth a little lost sleep.

Writers blocks

The central figures of The Answer Man (2008) and World's Greatest Dad (2009) and A Single Man (2009) are all writers who must shed their terrible secrets in order to find freedom and peace. All feature astounding central performances and all are the creation of novice or near-novice writer directors. Together they represent a spectrum of mood from romantic comedy to black comedy t0 sombre drama, each pointing to a more hopeful future. It was striking to have encountered them all within the same week.

Each protagonist's secret is quite different. Jeff Daniels's Arlen Faber once felt a connection to God (he wrote a book of answers to big questions called "Me and God") that he no longer feels, no matter how many different spiritual disciplines he chases after. Robin Williams's Lance Clayton, who yearns to be respected as a writer, only finds that respect by concocting a sensitive journal he attributes to his loutish dead son. (Incidentally, both of these books have genuinely helped other people more than they have helped their own authors.) Williams's grief is merged with and almost subsumed in gayhis new pride and self-respect as a published author, albeit a secret one. And Colin Firth's George Falconer secret is that he is in mourning, that his dead "roommate" was in fact the love of his life, a fact which, in 1962, must be concealed. And the fact of that concealment has nearly become the central fact of George's life; perhaps if only George could openly mourn, he could be simply healed. But that route is cut off for him.

[World's Greatest Dad also has a wonderful corollary theme--how the living distort the memory of the dead according to the needs of the living. Lance refuses to do that, and one of the best scenes in any film released this year involves Robin Williams bursting out in tears at the sight of a rack of disgusting porn magazines, then to be comforted by the peculiar looking newstand manager. I literally--not virtually, literally--fell out of my chair.]

The films have very different physical settings and very different visual approaches. Answer Man makes Philadelphia look as pretty and comfortable as the best parts of Boston. World's Greatest Dad takes place in a bleached and barren Washington State. And A Single Man takes place in tiny slices of Los Angeles carefully selected to project the idea of "1962." [Incidentally, a number of recent films such as (500) Days of Summer and Valentine's Day are making Los Angeles, especially the older downtown area, appear to be quite liveable.] But all manage to isolate the writer-protagonist (alright, in The Single Man he makes his living as a college professor, but he know he is really Christopher Isherwood who was a professor AND a writer).

Because all three writers are lacking in the relationship department, and for all the words they know, are unable to utter the ones that will relieve their loneliness. (That's a paraphrase from something, but I don't know what--let me know if you know.) Which perhaps explains why this very visual medium seems to be exploding with stories about writers (these three films are hardly the only examples--writers have been playing leading roles in movies from Sunset Boulevard to The Shining. Film shouldn't be very good at portraying people who, as writers do, live inside their head. I think the key is that for all of them the pain has overflowed past the point of words, and has achieved palpable visual expression. For Arlen Faber, the pain has clustered in his back, literally paralyzing him; he rids himself of both the physical and spiritual paralysis via the tender ministrations of Lauren Graham. My idea of a great plan, incidentally.

[Single Man has a particularly striking visual scheme, with very high grain film evoking an era 50 years in the past--specially obtained for this shoot--and frequent non-narrative interludes which fixate on eyes: not pairs of eyes, mind you, but single eyes. A gaze, so closely examined one cannot tell if it is fixed on an object or staring into emptiness. Or both. The eyes are not only George's--it seems the shots are not meant as character revelation, but seem to be about the act of looking. I can't say I've satisfactorily deciphered the shots upon a single viewing, but I'm surprised I have not found any discussion of these shots on line to help me out.]

Hitchcock didn't like pictures of people talking. But it turns out pictures of people looking, thinking and feeling are pretty cinematic.

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.

Cinema of secrets

Uncle Charlie has a secret. And soon his niece Charlie will have her own secret--that she knows Uncle Charlie's secret.

Alfred Hitchcock's films are riddled with concealment, doubt, shame and regret. The reason: everyone has a secret. Think of the quintessential Hitchcock scene. The protagonist is looking for evidence against the villain (think Rear Window, Psycho). They begin searching the room or house. Now the villain comes back unexpectedly, only the hero doesn't know it yet but we do. Now the hero has a secret--that he is looking for the villain's secrets. And all the time we, the helpless spectators are saying, "Hurry up! Get out of there! You'll get caught" naturally siding on the side of sneaking around and being suspicious, instead of honestly confronting someone.

It's strange that the suspense of Shadow of a Doubt (1943) works as well as it does. There are only a few minutes when we suspect young Charlie is in danger for her life. But the undefined menace of Uncle Charlie pervades the entire film, despite (or perhaps because of the blandness) of Joseph Cotten's manner. And at no time during the film do Charlie's parents or the community at large ever understand what truly took place.

The film has a strange resonance with An Education (2009) which I had the complete and absolute pleasure of seeing this weekend. I would like this blog to be as detached and analytic as I can make it, but in this case I really don't care. I really enjoyed this film in a way I haven't enjoyed a film in months.

The title reminds one of the old adage by humorist George Ade, "There are at least two kinds of education," a proposition which this film sets out to illustrate--and does so brilliantly. I don't want to explicate the plot or the moral or even the wonderful production design or the marvelous performances of Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard (a longtime favorite). All I can say is that director Lone Sherfig has placed and held everything in a marvelous sort of balance--playing fair with us but setting us up for heartbreak nonetheless.

Again, Topic A is secrets, only we don't know it for most of An Education. In both cases, young women, bored with their life and their surroundings experience the intervention of an older, more experienced, apparently more sophisticated man; one who likes them for who they are and wants to cultivate their intelligence and taste. What's the implied message here? Watch out for cultivated people--only trust loutish boyfriends? Not sure, but that normal adolescent desire for escape and for growth and yearning for that person who will help one become who one is supposed to become leads to terrible mistakes in judgment. Understandable, but terrible. Sadly, there is a sparkle to the bad side that the good side lacks. As Jean Kerr's daughter complained about playing Eve in a Garden of Eden play, the snake has all the lines.