Well, *we* enjoyed it.

I HAD intended to see Soderbergh’s HAYWIRE after enjoying the trailer, but as you can see, it took me a while.

I liked the premise of a film based around a female action star who can really do most of the stuff the script shows her doing — it seemed that HAYWIRE was the movie that would do for kicking people in the face what THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE did for soulless sexual encounters. And that, surely, can’t be bad?

Gina Carano, Soderbergh’s discovery — “a natural beauty who beats people to a pulp in a cage” — is worth it. She can act, and indeed in the conversation scenes she seems wondrously natural, her face moving about in a way that the faces of trained thespians, with their screen technique and Botox, rarely do. When you see her in interviews, she seems heftier and more voluble — Soderbergh has slimmed down her look and her mannerisms with careful filming and direction. In the more emotional scenes, he tends to use photogenics in place of histrionics, finding killer looks that express the character’s inner state.

Confirming this as an old-fashioned bit of star-grooming, Carano has very stylish costumes by Shoshana Rubin.

The rest of the cast is fine, with Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum holding their own in the punching and smashing departments, Michael Douglas a bit miscast as a trustworthy man, and Ewan MacGregor trying hard as always. Antonio Banderas is very amusing, starting the movie with a big beard and then putting it aside for the finale, really for no discernible reason.

Lem Dobbs, who scripted KAFKA and THE LIMEY, wrote this one too. It follows the cool, Melvillean aesthetic of the latter film, with a few moments of sentiment which are more underplayed than they were in the Stamp vehicle. Soderbergh said after KAFKA that he felt he wasn’t good at cold material, which is odd to me, since his OCEAN’S films seem basically slick and heartless. But then, I only like the first one of those, and that not so much. And then again, I liked KAFKA much better than SEX LIES AND VIDEOTAPE, so maybe I’m weird.

Mexico is always a bit sepia-toned in Soderbergh films (see TRAFFIC), contrary to reality.

Dobbs (before taking his name from Bogart in SIERRA MADRE, he started his movie career as Lem Kitaj, acting for Michael Powell in THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW — he’s the best thing in it) provides a very simple betrayal-revenge structure which masquerades behind a cloak of sophistication, with flashbacks, lists of names, rapidly shuffled international locations and plenty of mumbled obfuscation. As with THE LIMEY, whose classic moment is a long-held exterior with sounds of mayhem raging indoors (undoubtedly influenced by the climax of THE PUBLIC ENEMY) the movie gets some of its best effects by keeping dramatic events offscreen — but nevertheless makes spectacular use of Carano’s particular talents. Nobody is likely to top the best of Jackie Chan’s fights, but HAYWIRE’s hotel havoc will live for as long as people enjoy seeing Michael Fassbender getting his neck crushed between a set of powerful thighs, and that, my friends, will be a very long time.

Now for CONTAGION and then maybe MAGIC MIKE.

The Sunday Intertitle: Exodus, the dress rehearsal

THE CITY WITHOUT JEWS (DIE STADT OHNE JUDEN, 1924) is a creepy historical oddity — rather overrated for its so-called “expressionism,” but it’s one of very few Austrian films influenced by German expressionism at all, apparently. What IS striking about it is its plot, which deals with a mythical city, Utopia, which decides to get rid of all its Jews. Just ship them off somewhere, you understand. Somewhere nice, probably.

“We are being kicked out like dogs,” laments one distinguished-looking chap (there are a lot of obvious steretyped Jewish characters, but also some who depart from the cartoon format) — the line recalls Kafka, and also reminds me of Welles’ objection that The Trial was a pre-Holocaust fantasia, bits of which needed to be adjusted out of sensitivity to later 20th Century events. Which I think may be a misreading of Kafka, but BOY does it apply to H.K. Breslauer’s film.

This is a well-meaning movie, but a confused and timid one, and history overtook it cruelly. The satirical point is that life in the de-Jewed Utopia is so dull, with no worthwhile arts, music, theatre or cafes, only beer halls selling sausages, that the gentiles lament their mistake and conspire to bring the Jews back, which they contrive to do by getting the leading anti-semitic politician drunk — causing the set to rock back and forth like a ship at sea, the film’s first expressionist effect — and then committing him to a Caligari-esque insane asylum (again recalling Welles:  ”In a people’s world the incurable racist has no rights. He must be deprived of influence in a people’s government. He must be segregated as he himself would segregate the colored and Semitic peoples—as we now segregate the leprous and the insane.” [Welles' remarks about segregating the insane are now dated in turn, but we know what he means: treat the racist like the insane were treated]).

This is where the film gets expressionistic, but also where it cops out, in a very Caligariesque way, revealing the story as the anti-semite’s fantasy. This doesn’t quite reverse the film’s terms the way the madman’s dream ending of CALIGARI betrays Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz’s subversive vision, but it does muddy the waters and adds further frivolity to the mix. It didn’t succeed in making the film harmless: screenings were still disrupted by Nazis throwing stink bombs. The film was financially successful, though, despite the author of the original novel disassociating himself from it on account of the ending.

Author Hugo Bettauer was shot dead by Otto Rothstock, a former Nazi party member, who was convicted but then released after only 18 months — an early clue to the way things were headed.

The movie’s switcheroo from a caricatured but somewhat realist narrative, into an overtly expressionistic fantasy, would seem to support Siegfried Kracauer’s portray of expressionism as an escapist approach which diverted the masses from thinking about what was actually going on around them — a means of avoiding political engagement. Which is a disturbing thought, because I always say that  EXPRESSIONISM WON — nearly all cinema is expressionist now, since all cinema attempts to portray the world from a subjective perspective. Certainly any film which uses music to channel the viewer’s emotions is “guilty” of a mild kind of expressionism…

In a final twist of the historical knife, Breslauer’s dream ending has been lost, and is attached to the surviving film only as a series of stills. Perhaps Bettauer’s shade can derive some satisfaction from that.

The Oz Trial

Before the law, there stands a guard.

A man comes from the country, begging admittance to the law.

But the guard cannot admit him. May he hope to enter at a later time? “That is possible,” says the guard.

The man tries to peer through the entrance. He’d been taught that the law was to be accessible to every man. “Do not attempt to enter without my permission”, says the guard. “I am very powerful. Yet I am the least of all the guards. From hall to hall, door after door, each guard is more powerful than the last.”

By the guard’s permission, the man sits by the side of the door, and there he waits. For years, he waits. Everything he has, he gives away in the hope of bribing the guard, who never fails to say to him “I take what you give me only so that you will not feel that you left something undone.”

Keeping his watch during the long years, the man has come to know even the fleas on the guard’s fur collar. Growing childish in old age, he begs the fleas to persuade the guard to change his mind and allow him to enter. His sight has dimmed, but in the darkness he perceives a radiance streaming immortally from the door of the law.

And now, before he dies, all he’s experienced condenses into one question, a question he’s never asked. He beckons the guard. Says the guard, “You are insatiable! What is it now?” Says the man, “Every man strives to attain the law. How is it then that in all these years, no one else has ever come here, seeking admittance?”

His hearing has failed, so the guard yells into his ear. “Nobody else but you could ever have obtained admittance. No one else could enter this door! This door was intended only for you! And now, I’m going to close it.”

This tale is told during the story called “The Trial”. It’s been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream… a nightmare.

Possibly my slightly strange combining of story and image here was suggested by AFTER HOURS, in which both THE TRIAL and THE WIZARD OF OZ are explicitly referenced, suggesting that screenwriter Joseph Minion (and whatever became of him?) should perhaps use as his pseudonym the catchy “L. Frank Kafka.”

(I’m not yet back online, but I had this post ready to go. See you soon!)