THE MIRROR (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975).
Perhaps the best way to indicate the very unusual nature of The
Mirror is to say that it is both the most painstakingly structured
of Tarkovsky's films in visual terms and the least linear of his narratives.
Although the director claimed that the picture was not obscure or mysterious,
it is certainly demanding. The kind of receptivity required to understand
and appreciate the film, it would seem, is of a kind with the intense
inward drama that is depicted.
The film's narrator, for the most part cloaked in shadow when we see
him as an adult, recalls scenes from his childhood, including some involving
his mother as a young woman that he might only have been told about
or imagined. These pieces of the past, sensually vivid, blend in and
out of sequences from the present, in which the narrator is in his apartment--talking
on the phone to his mother, now an old woman; quarreling with his ex-wife;
and having dreams in which figures and symbols of the Russian past mix
with his own memories. A third layer involves historical footage and
other newsreel-type fragments evoking the overpowering force of the
world outside the narrator and his family, especially the terrible Second
World War, in which the elusive figure of the narrator's father plays
a part.
The Mirror presents a tragic dualism of past and present--
the past is identified with nature, beautiful yet strange and inhuman.
The film's shards of memory are lit with exquisite care. The wind, the
movement of water, the reflections of sunlight on objects, are precisely
orchestrated to create a feeling of the past as always "other,"
beckoning to us with its beauty but somehow beyond our reach. The sequences
in the present, on the other hand, combine oneiric imagery with a bleak
sense of guilt and loss. The narrator's true predicament, the center
around which the spell of memory swirls, only becomes evident when we
realize that he is dying. In the face of life's end, he finds that he
doesn't know how to redeem himself from the past.
The film employs the theme of deja vu to link the religious
impulse with the uncanny power of memory. The same actress (Margarita
Terekhova) plays the narrator's mother as a young woman and his ex-wife.
He has a young son as well, and the actor who plays him also plays the
narrator as a boy. Many other metaphorical images recur: the bird as
divine messenger, for instance, and the burning house (an iconic image
of world catastrophe that Tarkovsky was to use again in The
Sacrifice). There is also much symbolism that is specifically
Russian--it helps for the viewer to be acquainted with Pushkin, Dostoevsky,
and Chekhov, among other literary figures from Russia's past who play
a part in the film.
Music rarely occurs as background--only as a sort of announcement of
theme or spiritual realization. There are bits of Purcell and Pergolesi,
but mostly J.S. Bach from both of his Passions. Tarkovsky's mysticism
is nominally Christian, but not Orthodox.
Some would argue that no film should require more than one viewing to
be appreciated. But I think there are different kinds of films. I needed
to see The Mirror twice, not only to more fully grasp the movie's
formal qualities in a critical sense, but to open myself to the highly
emotional nature of the work. On death's door, Tarkovsky is saying,
the slightest bits of the past preserved in our minds take on the importance
of eternal verities. In The Mirror, we are invited to become
rapt with the miracle of our birth, and to see the inexorable force
of time both tragically and in the light of a transfiguring "beyond."
MINISTRY OF FEAR (Fritz Lang, 1944).
Ray Milland plays a man who has just been released from a mental hospital.
A fortune-teller at a village festival lets him win a cake, but it turns
out she thought he was someone else. The cake was meant to transport
information for a group of spies. They then set out to frame the hero
for murder and get their cake back, while he tries to convince the authorities
(and a German love interest) that he's not crazy.
The film is based on a Graham Greene book, but the special tone of the
novel has to do with the hero's guilt about assisting his wife in her
euthanasia, which is the reason he was put in an asylum. The film mentions
this, but doesn't make it an important element, so the idea of the hero's
mental instability, which would accentuate the feeling of paranoia,
doesn't come through. The plot, as you might surmise from my summary,
edges perilously close to the risible, and the love interest between
Milland and Marjorie Reynolds is insipid.
However, this is a Fritz Lang picture, so despite the weakness of the
screenplay, the film has style and atmosphere to compensate. A scene
on a train with a blind man is terrific. Another sequence involving
a séance has a weird feeling of menace reminiscent of Hitchcock.
Dan Duryea turns up as one of the villains, and he's fun to watch. Lang
was always good with darkness and shadow, and he excelled at the crime
film. Here he was on the cusp of the "film noir" style that
he would keep improving on as the years went by. A great film it is
not, but an entertaining movie to occupy your time for an hour and a
half, with just enough suspense to get the blood racing a little--well,
that's not so bad.
THE EAGLE (Clarence Brown, 1925).
In 18th century Russia, the young Count Dubrovsky (Rudolph Valentino)
rescues a runaway carriage containing the beautiful Mascha (Vilma Banky).
This heroic act earns him the gratitude of the Empress, Catherine the
Great (Louise Dresser), but when the Czarina invites Dubrovsky to a
private audience, it turns out that she wants him to be her lover, and
he rejects her advances. This forces him to flee, and then he discovers
that his father has died in penury after being robbed of his estate
by the villainous landowner Troekouroff (James Marcus). Dubrovsky dons
a mask and becomes "The Black Eagle," a Robin Hood-type figure
who fights for the poor against the evil count. He poses as a French
tutor in order to enter Troekouroff's household and exact his revenge,
but it turns out that the lovely Mascha is the daughter he is supposed
to teach.
The story is loosely based on a Pushkin story--and I do mean loosely,
since the film has none of the story's grace or sense of character,
and it alters the tale beyond recognition, adding the ludicrous subplot
with Louise Dresser as Catherine the Great. To be fair, the film is
meant to be tongue-in-cheek, a lighthearted parody of the swashbuckler
genre. The production design is absolutely first-rate, with wonderful
sets by William Cameron Menzies, and the George Barnes photography is
fine. The always capable Brown uses the moving camera to good effect,
especially in the famous tracking shot down a long table covered with
dishes of food.
Nevertheless, I found myself yawning during The Eagle. Valentino
is more energetic than usual, but the story is so schematic that it
was difficult for me to sustain interest in what was happening on screen.
Even a parody of a swashbuckler needs some good action, and there isn't
much here outside of the opening sequence with Valentino on horseback.
The Zorro-type setup seems promising, but then the plot devolves into
the tired motif of a man pretending to be a tutor and falling in love
with his charge.
Perhaps on a different day, or on a bigger screen, I would like it more.
The gap between what pleased audiences in the silent era and what pleases
us now can often seem very wide. The Eagle was a slick Hollywood
production for its time, and I always try to make allowances, but I
also have to call it as I see it. Behind all the glitz, this film feels
very shallow.
THE COW (Darius Mehrjui, 1969).
In a remote poverty-stricken Iranian village, the peasant Hassan (Ezzatolah
Entezami) owns the town's only cow. He loves and cares for it as he
would his own child--it represents not only his livelihood but his dignity
and prestige. One day, when Hassan has gone for the day to purchase
supplies, his wife discovers that the cow has died--someone has cut
its throat, probably one of the "Bolouris," shadowy bandits
from another village who prey on the farmers.
Everyone knows that this event will devastate Hassan. Eslam (Ali Nassirian),
his friend and the village's most capable man, decides that they should
bury the cow and tell Hassan that it ran away. Everyone agrees, and
when Hassan returns and discovers that his cow is missing, the village
maintains this false story. Hassan refuses to believe it. First he acts
as if the cow is still there. Then his mind gradually detoriates until
he begins to think that he is the cow.
Mehrjui's second film was based on a play by his friend Gholam-Hossein
Saedi, an artist whose opposition to the Shah had gotten him thrown
into prison several times. For those not familiar with the Iranian situation
at that time, the film's political dimension may not be evident at first
glance, but its style and themes are effective in universal human terms.
The villagers' elaborate denial of what really happened is fascinating--springing
at first from what seems a cultural aversion to the experience of loss
and an exaggerated concern for the feelings of the victim, it takes
on a life of its own after the lie has been told. It then becomes imperative
to maintain the fiction at all costs, the alternative being great dishonor.
This compelling instance of the power of denial indicates, as the film
goes on, a deeper social reality--lying as a method of cultural cohesion
in the face of crisis, which in this case is the crisis of poverty.
The official stance of Iran's government, moreover, was that the huge
gap between rich and poor did not exist, or should not be talked about
because it would damage the country's image--both options amounting
to the same thing, namely, denial of the problem. And in this it was
not at all unique, as anyone familiar with societies based on inequality
can observe.
The derangement of the film's main character--his descent into insanity
and degradation until he becomes a threat to the peace of the community--is
even more evocative. Hassan's identification with his cow, which prompts
his neighbors to eventually treat him like one, is a portrait in miniature
of the psychological consequences of oppression.
The visual style is stark, with a close and relentless focus on the
faces of the villagers against a barren rural landscape. The picture
was shot in high-contrast black-and-white with some especially effective
images during the night scenes, when the fear of attack by the Bolouris
heightens the panic and suspicion. There is nothing crude or amateurish
about Mehrjui's work here--this is a carefully crafted piece with devastating
emotional impact. Among many fine touches, Mehrjui's use of a little
window in Hassan's barn as a means to express tension between the man's
inner struggle and the pressure from the social world outside is a master
stroke.
The Shah's censors didn't know what to do with The Cow. It
was produced with government funding, but immediately banned once officials
saw the film. A year later it was released with an addition to the opening
credits saying that the events depicted happened fifty years earlier,
before the reign of the Pahlavis. But it wasn't allowed to be shown
abroad. A print was smuggled out of the country and won a prize at Venice.
The Cow is now considered the founding work of the new Iranian
cinema. This has become a familiar pattern--under the Ayatollahs, the
banning of important films, and their subsequent recognition on the
international stage, has continued.
PERFORMANCE
(Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970).
Chas (James Fox), a London gangster, angers a crime boss by killing
another hood for personal reasons. Forced to hide while he figures out
a way to flee the country, he stumbles into the mansion of a hermit-like
rock musician named Turner (Mick Jagger) who lives in decadent fashion
with two girlfriends (Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton), enjoying
a life of drug-enhanced hedonism. Chas is at first hostile to the ways
of his new landlord, but is gradually drawn in to Turner's strange lifestyle.
The film pioneered a radical style that came to prominence from the
late 60s to the mid 70s, and then quickly went out of fashion along
with the 60s "counterculture" movement. It uses a sort of
fragmentary editing, with very short quick cuts of images within a sequence,
often from different scenes or even times within the narrative. It's
meant to be experienced intuitively rather than rationally, and should
not be confused with the more mechanical rapid MTV-style cutting that
came to the fore in the 1990s. Here it's particulary striking in the
early sequences with James Fox in his gangster milieu, where the abrupt
editing evokes the brutal and irrational world of an East London crime
world.
If Cammell hadn't got Mick Jagger to appear in the movie, it's doubtful
that it would have been financed. It was actually shot in 1968, and
despite Jagger's presence, the producers were appalled at the result
and sat on the film for two years before releasing it. The vision and
overall sensibility was primarily Cammell's, with Roeg adding his solid
directing and cinematography chops. The picture may seem dated, as every
example of this style now does, but unlike many of the others, it does
not appear faddish or inept. It captures a cultural moment when the
music and drug subculture was experimenting with androgyny. Chas's tough-guy
masculinity is challenged by Turner's tacitly feminine self-assurance.
At the same time, Turner is tempted by the allure of danger which Chas
represents. All this is conveyed obliquely and through an increasingly
languid narrative rhythm, spiced with Cammell's terse throwaway dialogue,
which was reportedly enhanced by a good deal of improvisation.
It's become a cult film, of course, primarily because of Jagger, although
he has considerably less screen time than the more experienced and capable
Fox. Jagger sings one song ("Memo to Turner"), and this sequence
is the best in the film, although it makes little narrative sense. The
overall dramatic effect of the picture is rather murky. This would seem
to come with the territory, but I think lack of clarity is one of the
drawbacks of a drug-influenced style of thinking, which amounts to a
critique of an entire trend of the time and not just of this movie.
The climax resorts to the old notion of the doppelganger, which has
the advantage of shock value in this case--the psychological equivalence
of youth rebellion and gangsterism was not exactly what the countercultural
audience was looking for. Performance is a strange and compelling
hybrid, a flawed experiment that deserves to be seen once, if only as
a snapshot of an unusual cultural moment.
©2008 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
