It’s Complicated

I haven’t read any Alberto Moravia but I love Bertolucci’s film of THE CONFORMIST — I notice I placed it in my top ten. Damiano Damiani was obviously a fan too, basing two of his films on works by the writer. First was LA NOIA/THE EMPTY CANVAS (1963). A VERY COMPLICATED GIRL (1969), “freely adapted” from Moravia’s The March Back, stars Catherine Spaak, Jean Sorel and Florinda Bolkan and is… very interesting.

Sorel’s character, also called Alberto, falls for Spaak’s, a pop art painter — the film is very mod in style, obviously updating its source in a way LA NOIA didn’t feel any need for. It has aspects of a giallo, mingling mod and murder, but isn’t really a mystery and doesn’t have a big enough body count to quite fit.

It must have been quite amazing to have been following the cinema from 67 to 70, the way censorship in the west was swept back so rapidly. Catherine Spaak was someone who rode that wave courageously — when she made her Hollywood debut in HOTEL (1967), nudity in commercial cinema was barely a thing. Here she’s full-frontal, and THE LIBERTINE (1968) she tries out a panoply of kinks. According to your viewpoint, this transition must have seemed like either a glorious liberation or the end of civilisation as we know it.

The most surprising scene comes when Spaak’s character tells Sorel’s that she was sexually abused by a relative. This is played not as a tragedy or crime or confession, but as an attempted seduction. Sorel accepts it that way with apparent enthusiasm. What was most striking to me is that the exact same thing happens in THE CONFORMIST. Stefania Sandrelli tells the late Jean-Louis Trintignant about being raped by her uncle as they travel by train (through the miracle of rear projection) on their honeymoon, and he role-plays the part of the uncle as she describes it. In AVCG Spaak’s story is about her stepmother, Bolkan, and it comes to assume a greater importance in the plot as Sorel seemingly loses his mind, but it’s otherwise very close — makes me think Moravia must have experienced something of the kind. It had not occurred to me (call me naive) that this was a thing — lovers sharing abuse stories as part of their fantasy life.

Balkan begins her transgressive, psychotronic career just as she means to go on, playing not only a bisexual child abuser but one who models the glue-on bikini. Sorel is… interesting. He’s the husband in BELLE DE JOUR, a strangely passive doll-man, here with the addition of designer stubble/very short beard that gives him an Action Man quality. Rather than suggesting depths of neurosis like Trintignant, he suggests undiscovered shallows. He’s more like Stephen Forsyth’s protag “I am a psychopath” of HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON. With a clever, intense actor like Trintignant even a terrible character becomes somehow compelling, even sympathetic. Sorel’s just causes increasing dismay as his actions and life spiral out of control. We had thought Spaak’s character, and certainly Bolkan’s were the problematic ones. But Sorel is the one leading us off a cliff.

The relationship starts kida dark but soon is almost in Moors murders territory. Had it continued along this dark path, the movie would be a unique giallo and better known. Instead it choses multiple strange pathways, and is generically undefinable, entirely its own thing. With a delirious pop score by Fabio Fabor, and production design by Damiani himself along with regular collaborator Umberto Turco.

Pretty compelling, weird stuff.

Listing (badly)

To be clear — the following is not my list of screenings for the coming semester. It’s my submission for the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll.

1. He Who Gets Slapped
   Year: 1924
   Director(s): Victor Sjostrom
   Comment: My favourite film. It’s not like anything else. Lon Chaney manipulates the audience’s emotions by making shapes with his body, within the shapes Sjostrom makes with his camera. A melodrama in which nothing is really credible but everything is incredibly compelling. The film that draws the line between the laugh of the clown and the snarl of the lion.
2. The General
   Year: 1926
   Director(s): Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
   Comment: Ten films is such a small number that maybe all the entries do need to be perfect. Formally speaking, this one is: every shot is an essential component. Keaton makes the camera’s observation part of the joke. Each shot says, in a perfect deadpan, “Here we are now. And now this is happening. And so…” Plus you have a cinematic icon as star, a magnificent comedian, an incredible daredevil, working on the biggest canvas he ever got.
3. Citizen Kane
   Year: 1941
   Director(s): Orson Welles
   Comment: What, I’m going to leave this off, so I can look more like a wild individualist? A brilliant cinematic mind jumps into the medium, determined to see what he can make it do. Tackle everything in a fresh way, from story to performance to camera to design, special effects, sound, editing. It may not actually invent anything but it packs in a ton of radical creativity and unconventionality. The filmmaker conveys his joy at all the tricks he comes up with, which makes the film supremely likeable to me, which it doesn’t get enough credit for.
4. A Matter of Life and Death
   Year: 1946
   Director(s): Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
   Comment: The Archers had to have a place on my list, and in truth it could be any of five or six films, but this one marries its experimentation to a story both real AND fantastical, enabling them to stretch themselves in every direction. I love their use of Technicolor and I have, I admit, a mysterious sentimental attraction to stories of WWII. And I have a deep sympathy for Powell’s rejection of realism: as he said, it doesn’t really exist in the cinema. It’s all an illusion. And we know it. Romantic, funny, epic, the film’s breadth of vision puts everything Britain’s made in the past 50 years to shame.
5. Eight and a Half
   Year: 1963
   Director(s): Federico Fellini
   Comment: There’s the sheer invention; the joy of looking through such a pair of magical eyes; Fellini’s roving camera; his carnivalesque world; Nino Rota’s galumphing score. I don’t know how many more times I can bear to see this one: the last time I was continually on the verge of tears over its beauty. And I don’t get that with other beautiful films. The love of cinema seems to speak directly to me, but to add an acerbic quality, Fellini is quite harsh on himself, via his stand-in Mastroianni.
6. The Knack… and How to Get It
   Year: 1965
   Director(s): Richard Lester
   Comment: The inventiveness and playfulness of the French New Wave is ported over to a grey London autumn and blended with native surrealism. Screenwriter Charles Wood explodes Ann Jellicoe’s play and, with director Lester, assembles a dazzling mosaic from the pieces. All the choices are surprising, and somehow coherent. And it’s all quite strange: John Barry’s jazz score and David Watkin’s beautiful photography combine with the oddball text to create a feeling that’s a bit mysterious, even while it’s mainly all just bursting with youthful exuberance.
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
   Year: 1968
   Director(s): Stanley Kubrick
   Comment: “If he could get rid of the human element, he could make the perfect film,” joked Malcolm McDowell. But here he almost does. By acting, arrogantly, as if nobody had ever made a really good science fiction film, Kubrick solves all the problems methodically but also pushes the genre into epic, mythic, spiritual terrain that even the best sf literature rarely touched upon. Stately, bold, astonishingly beautiful. The great rationalist suddenly blasts us off into a psychedelic experience which doesn’t yield fully to reason. It’s not even certain if the film is optimistic or despairing (yet colourful).
8. Playtime
   Year: 1968
   Director(s): Jacques Tati
   Comment: Having become a national or international institution, Tati blew his career to pieces with a colossal folly, a two-hour-plus widescreen film about the purgatory of modern urban life, eventually transformed into a playground by the human imagination. With his character of Hulot reduced to one figure among dozens, spread across a vast screen, and with anything resembling a conventional gag or slapstick ruthlessly expunged. Only comedy that astonishes, laughs you can’t explain, comic abstractions, are allowed here. Jokes about things looking like other things, sounding funny, taking too long, not being audible, not being understood. The scale is dazzling, insane. The world received it with a puzzled frown. If you’re on the right wavelength, you’ll instead be almost embarrassed at receiving such a lavish gift.
9. The Conformist
   Year: 1970
   Director(s): Bernardo Bertolucci
   Comment: Bertolucci had recently cowritten a spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West (another obvious contender for this list). Similarly, here we have a cruel and cynical tale delivered in a lush romantic style. Delerue’s music and Storaro’s photography create an astonishing sweep. The political intent gives the film a sense of passion, even though Bertolucci is quite harsh about his characters. In Trintignant, he has the perfect star for this style, giving a performance that’s elegant, sardonic, sometimes robotic, sometimes a little crazed. I think all my choices have something in common, a sense of filmmakers breaking through all the conventions, asking “Why can’t it be like this instead?”
10. My Neighbour Totorro
    Year: 1988
    Director(s): Hayao Miyazaki
    Comment: Miyazaki’s films add to the traditional dynamism of the anime form a welcome and surprising poetry. He pays attention to things cartoons usually ignore. A major setpiece here is two little girls waiting for a bus, one of them almost falling asleep. The filmmaker is in tune with childhood because his ambitions are usually simple but profound. Here, he wanted to show city kids what life in the country is like. His version of that is quite idiosyncratic, with the little dust bunny creatures, the cat-bus, and the titular nature spirit, a huge cat-owl thing, utterly benign but a little alarming and obviously very powerful. Very little is explained, which seems like a good lesson for children to absorb: there are mysteries.

Your further remarks

This was difficult! I will wake up screaming as it occurs to me the thing I forgot to put in. Even now I’m dismayed at what I felt compelled to knowingly exclude. No Chaplin, Marx Bros, pre-codes, horror films, musicals, westerns… is this even a list at all?

Drowning in a Sea of Bliss

ON SUCH A NIGHT might not qualify as a forgotten gem but its certainly a curio. Grant Richards (as “Nicky Last”) is going to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit but a flood gives him a second chance. His new wife, Karen Morley tries to rescue him with Alan Mowbray’s travelling magic show but they’re pursued by the real killer, Eduardo Ciannelli (as “Ice Richards”) and a fast-talking newspaperman (Roscoe Karns) and they all end up stranded by the flood in a southern mansion full of stereotypes of one kind or another (white-bearded colonel, superstitious black servants).

The verbose and ebullient Mowbray (as Professor Ricardo Montrose Candle) seems to be inhabited a role conceived for WC Fields — florid speech, including “comic” racism (“My suntanned friend”), elaborate endearments, legerdemaine, perhaps with Lupe Velez as the missus ( “My little cactus flower.”) Here, she’s played by Milly, much later in THE CONFORMIST as Trintignant’s mum. Such recasting would have moved this movie towards INTERNATIONAL HOUSE territory. Despite the thriller aspects — which show signs of promise early on — it’s halfway to such lunacy anyway. WC Fields in a disaster movie is an inspiring thought. You could get him to say the title: “Why, it’s a veritable towering inferno.” “My, my, my, this is quite the Poseidon adventure.”

And yes, E.A. Dupont directs. There’s a bit of unchained camera business going on, but it doesn’t rise to the spectacular. Still, it’s a peculiar and different film, an independent production now seemingly extant only in a ratty, fuzzy form. I’ll take what I can get: several of Dupont’s US films aren’t discoverable at all…

Oh, and Mowbray speaks of composing a song to be entitled “Drowning in a Sea of Bliss,” but since he never gets anywhere with it, I’m attempting a set of lyrics.

I’m drowning in a sea of bliss

Sinking down for your liquid kiss

It’s not that surprising

The water is rising

With the sound of a terrible hiss

A dum-dee dee dum…

ON SUCH A NIGHT stars Philo Vance; Pendola Molloy; Oscar Shapeley; Dr. Satan; Madre di Marcello Clerici; Granville Thorndyke; Dr. Lupus Crumm; Mrs. Leeson; Himmelstoss: Capt. Englehorn; Teeler Yacey; ‘Teddy Roosevelt’ Brewster; Uncle Cato; Black Mammy (uncredited); Little Joe Jackson; Yankee on Street (uncredited); and Fantastic Brown.