Fixed Bayonets!

A war film reduced to its brute essence, Fixed Bayonets! possesses an almost transcendental rigour and self-discipline. It could just as easily be the work of a punch-drunk Dreyer as cinema’s resident tabloid poet, Samuel Fuller. Set on a snowy mountaintop during the Korean war, the film takes place on a bleached white canvas of snow, a thin painted backdrop adding to the overwhelming sense of artifice. It’s the perfect playground for a budget epic, and Fuller makes the most of it, alternating between lithe long takes and staccato montages in order to evoke the simultaneous terror and tedium of war. Save for the opening and closing blasts of music, the only sounds we hear are the sick crunch-crunch of feet on snow and the stereophonic call of the Korean trumpets. The periodic bursts of shell explosions and gunfire come as a relief from the hideous silence that pervades this unnatural place. Life is such a distant concern here that we might as well be watching two platoons of ghosts fighting over ownership of a cloud.

The stark setting of Fixed Bayonets! drains away all the other trappings of a typical Fuller war film—social commentary, anti-war agitation, autobiographical tangents—leaving only a series of irreducible moral challenges, like bodies uncovered in an empty swamp. The drama plays out in the soul of one Corporal Denno, a man who freezes up and cannot fire when confronted by enemy soldiers. As the leadership of the squad gets picked off one by one, Denno comes closer and closer to command and the inevitable confrontation with his own inability to take ownership of this bloodshed. Fascinatingly, Fuller underlines the man’s bravery where other filmmakers would cop-out and brand him a coward. The corporal may not want to take a life, but he’ll put his own on the line to save a wounded officer from the midst of a minefield. Compare that hair-raising sequence to the penultimate killing scene, when Denno, safely hidden in the bush, shoots an enemy at point-blank range. The Korean man’s body drops into the snow, like a puppet with its strings cut, and the rest of the squad rushes out to applaud Denno’s courage. Confusion flickers across his face. So this is bravery?

To Rome With Love

Woody Allen does not want to die. I assume this is not a surprising fact. Yet there is evidence that this perfectly reasonable desire—not to be crushed by the hobnailed boots of time, that is—is increasingly the primary driver behind Allen’s unflagging productivity. Playing an unhappily retired opera impresario in To Rome With Love, Allen lays out this premise in even blunter terms: retirement equals death. Absurd as it may be to live one’s life by such a principle, this fear is nonetheless the most persuasive argument yet to be made for late-career Allen. Who could begrudge the man his mediocrity if that’s really the only thing keeping the grim reaper at bay? And thus, we are gifted with the suspect pleasures of another one of Woody’s high-tourist pieces, a postcard of Rome with a few one-liners hastily scribbled on the back.

Inviting irrelevance while staving off death, the director’s relentless work ethic has led him on a hopscotch tour of Europe in recent years, as if he were a hunted man on the lamb from his own mortality. One imagines Allen hurriedly checking out of hotels, checking over his shoulder, always just one step ahead of the scythe nipping at his heels. How else to explain the clunky filmmaking of To Rome With Love? No doubt he was already planning his next escape before the last scene was even filmed. Presumably, we can look forward to many more years of Allen’s European adventures, moving from 2014’s artful murder-mystery Venice is Sinking to 2023’s mildly senile sex-farce Latke Love for Latvia (starring some young ingénue who is probably currently still in a training bra, plus a grateful Jude Law).

Two things should be noted here: a) I certainly don’t begrudge Allen’s efforts to stay alive, and b) none of this makes me any happier to slog through tiresome affairs like To Rome With Love. Last year’s Midnight in Paris was not without its own flaws, but it at least was centred by an affecting performance from Owen Wilson. In his latest batch of frothy Eurotrash stew, Allen clumsily mixes together four separate stories set in the Eternal City into one bland, lumpy mess. Stale one-liners and embarrassing sitcom plots abound—in one cringe-worthy example, a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) goes to the wrong hotel room, unleashing a chain of events that ultimately sees her impersonating a man’s wife and partaking of a private tour of the Vatican (a few moments of reflection is likely all you need to conjure up all of the expected jokes Allen draws from this scenario).

Much like in the earlier Parisian effort, the characters of this film are drawn into fantasy worlds far richer and more exotic than their own lives—a setup that effectively approximates the dislocation of the tourist experience. However, the resulting epiphanies are darker than the film’s glossy sheen would suggest. Leopoldo, the Italian white-collar worker played by Roberto Benigni, is granted a glimpse of celebrity living when his mundane existence becomes fodder for pundits and paparazzi. Yet when this notoriety ends as suddenly as it began, he yearns for his former fame (life is bad for everyone, so it’s better to at least be famous, the man’s ex-chauffeur explains). Allen’s Jerry almost destroys his daughter’s marriage for the sake of his opera dreams, only to salvage everything with the weirdly implausible fact that he doesn’t understand “imbecile” means the same in English as Italian (the joke is so corny it becomes funny again by virtue of sheer audacity). Jack, an architecture student played by Jesse Eisenberg, is all too willing to toss his girlfriend aside for a fling, only to find he is the one who has been discarded when the object of his affections chucks him overboard with only a moment’s notice. The happiest couple, by all appearances, is the young pair who save their marriage by cheating on each other.

It’s actually rather perverse that such grimness should be bracketed by a cheery tourism brochure, but this pessimism is the film’s sharpest feature, and a welcome relief from the overstrained comedy. The glamour of Rome masks the fact that this is a place of ruins, the graveyard of an empire. But this dark thought is fleeting—as are all dark thoughts in this light place—and its face is never fully revealed from beneath its cowl. Then, moments later, there is a knock on the door. The hotel air conditioning harmonizes with a singer in the piazza below. A faint odour of something like ashes drifts in from the hall. And when the maid finally enters the room, Allen has already leapt out the window, clutching the pages of a script treatment in his teeth as he repels down the walls of the Excelsior with tied-together bed sheets.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Auteur theory, at its most simplistic, can sometimes resemble little more than a checklist of directorial fetishes. In that regard, Russ Meyer—with his buxom uber-vixens and emasculated half-men—could easily stand as one of our greatest artistic lechers. As it is, he must settle for mucking about in the grimy back alleys behind the pantheon with his pin-up girls and beat-up cars. But give the man his due: he knew trash like no one else, and delivered it with a passion far beyond the cold cynicism of your typical exploitation movie. Indeed, a film like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is almost uncomfortably personal at times, to the point of turning one man’s sexual hangups into a universal law akin to gravity (or the lack thereof, in the case of certain anatomical areas).

Skipping merrily along from one feverish image to the next, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! follows the violent misadventures of three hot-rodding go-go dancers who kill and kidnap their way to a desolate ranch populated by a wealthy, woman-hating crippled pervert and his two sons. The dialogue is a kind of oversexed poetry, filled with innuendo, pseudo-Beatnik slang, and surrealist one-liners (anti-heroine Varla is memorably described as being “like a velvet glove cast in iron”). Meyer spends much of the film at the feet of his three goddesses, shooting them, Welles-style, against a blank desert sky (the combination of outsized personalities and spatial disorientation occasionally creates the impression you’re watching 50-foot-tall Amazonians stomping feeble male midgets). Yet for all the film’s fondness for these ladies, violent Varla still can’t escape retribution for her crimes, although tellingly it’s another woman that finally fells the giantess. The cause of death, by all appearances, is blunt force trauma with a sex object.

We Have a Pope

The first mistake of Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope may have been its decision to turn the College of Cardinals into something more akin to a seminary summer camp. How successful can a satire be when populated by such an innocuous bunch of clowns? A gaggle of grey-haired sorority sisters, the Cardinals caper about with a giggly, carefree air (it’s a wonder we don’t see them braiding each other’s hair while reading out Cosmo quizzes, although perhaps that’s too flippant for Moretti’s mildly impudent worldview). Dreamy and dumbstruck, they lean on the balustrade and stare up at the shuttered windows of their absent leader, mooning away like a group of teenage girls with pictures of Justin Bieber on their bedroom ceilings. And where is the pope? He’s hiding from the burden of his duties, roaming the Roman streets as he ponders what his psychiatrist could have meant when she told him he had a “parental deficit.” (Hint: look in the mirror, padre.)

So the pope rejects his role and the film its better instincts; an idea that surely sounded promising on the page takes on the form of its doddering, gutless subjects. What comedy there is to be found here suffers from the disjointed tone and lousy timing—too slow for farce, too quick for deadpan—which leaves the gags to fizzle out in the musty, tomb-like atmosphere cultivated by Moretti. Mostly, the film limps by with mild irreverence its only sustaining crutch. The director seems altogether too pleased with his boldness in showing the powerful inner circle of the Catholic church playing volleyball and whining about espresso (easy on the froth, by the way). Rather than tackle the fraught subject of Catholicism in the 21st century head-on, Moretti opts for the mushy middle-road. He inadvertently pays respect to the rituals of the church even as his blithe depiction of the institution argues that all of this is of little consequence. The film achieves its greatest subversion in its own irrelevance.

Bernie

With its serene perversity, Richard Linklater’s Bernie could easily be taken for the modern-day equivalent of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. Admittedly, the comedy of Chaplin’s film is several shades blacker—save for that flash of righteous moralizing near the end—but both films balance an almost naïve sweetness with a pitiless glimpse into the void. Bernie’s final mincing jailhouse walk even evokes the famous closing shot of Chaplin’s film, where his bluebeard killer totters forth like the Tramp. But beyond such surprising synchronicities, there is also the sense that both of these killers are the true lovers of their victims, their violence not a contradiction of that love but an extension of it. Mrs. Nugent, the blackhearted widow who is the first and only victim of Bernie Tiede, offers no shortage of motives to an eager killer, from her controlling ways to her casual cruelties. Surely only someone who cared so deeply for the old woman could kill her for the simple fact she chews her food too much.

But Linklater’s film is also a tricky beast of its own breed, and its portrait of small-town life is no less pointed for its fond familiarity with the setting. The citizens of Catharge, Texas—the location of the real-life crime that inspired the film—appear as a kind of gossiper’s chorus, providing colour commentary on the murder trial and rising to Bernie’s defence. Real people speaking scripted lines, they create a disjunction between fact and fiction more disturbing than any of the film’s dark comedy (the appearance of Jack Black and Bernie Tiede himself together during the credits even provoked gasps from several audience members). Of course, the film is all about disjunction: the truth is that Bernie killed someone, but the truth is also that he is a good man. How do you reconcile that? It’s a strange morality that damns a woman for not going to church yet forgives a man for stuffing her corpse in a freezer, but Linklater approaches these contradictions without judgement or disdain. His depiction of small-town life is as openhearted and brutal as Bernie himself—faithful love, and four shots in the back.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a supposedly smart film, about the usual smart things: the origins of life, the nature of faith, magical black goo. Why then is it filled with so many stupid people? On a creepy alien planet, when a man is greeted by a cobra-shaped creature popping out of the aforementioned magical black goo—versatile stuff, this—he reacts as if finding a kitten on his doorstep. (Not to spoil anything but try to act surprised when kitty shows her claws.) Such is the film’s cartoonish rendering of its characters, most of who willfully fling themselves into the jaws of death while spouting lively banter like, “I’m a geologist, I like rocks.” As a species, we have travelled through space and walked across the face of the sky, but it seems we haven’t figured out a way to avoid reducing ourselves to a craven parade of dimwits and dullards just to hold together a weak sci-fi plot.

 Ridley Scott’s return to the world of Alien gilds itself with enough grandiose, quasi-mystical nonsense to give itself at least a faint glow of intelligence, if none of the actual substance. The film’s tantalizing exploration of the origins of human life gives way to a series of uninspired horror-movie jolts, held together by the mutilated traces of some sort of story. Every incident occurs in a vague, disjointed haze, devoid of the context necessary to give the skeletal traces of narrative some impact. You can’t have plot twists without a plot, yet Scott vainly contorts the air in an effort to get a reaction out of his audience. All that remains is a self-annihilating vision of creation, which makes one suspect Scott himself is a little ambivalent towards this monster of his own making. The most striking feature of this morass is the film’s chain of flawed creators, each engineering its own equally flawed, ever more unstable progeny—an effective metaphor for the diminishing returns of this long moribund series, if nothing else. Hollow and self-regarding, Prometheus finally signifies nothing grander than its own failings.

Satantango

1. At three hours, a film aspires to a certain grandeur, something along the lines of Michelango’s The Last Judgement. At four, it’s the whole Sistine Chapel. At seven, it might as well be all of Rome. And Satantango would be the city in ruins, abandoned to rain and rust, populated only by dour ghosts with no one left to haunt.

There is no sensible reason for any living person to visit this place. And surely one might rightly wonder what good could come of dedicating seven hours of life to this particularly austere branch of Hungarian art cinema. Normally, I frown at such talk as hopelessly philistine and sort of impolite (leave me to my five-minute tracking shots of muddy cows and stick to your own damn heathen amusements), but I’ll entertain doubts when being asked to commit the equivalent of one whole working day to someone’s artistic vision.

Once a film grows to these proportions, however, it becomes difficult to even consider its merits. Not necessarily because these things don’t matter anymore—they do, and I’ll yammer on about them right away, I promise—but because it has turned into an immovable object. Commit yourself to Satantango, and you’re no longer asking if the experience is worth it. For better or worse, it’s done. You’ve gone through it and come out the other side. What does it matter if the film was good or bad? There’s only one question that matters here: Am I the same person after watching it?

But first, what is “it”?

2. Much as one can’t capture a whole city by describing a street corner, Bela Tarr’s sprawling seven-hour epic can hardly be summarized through a discussion of mere plot. Not to say that there isn’t a plot—there’s plot in spades, reams of it, stuffed into corners and spilling out of drawers, plot on the floor, plot in the cupboard, everywhere and anywhere. There’s betrayal and greed, sex and violence, joy and despair. Beyond that, there are strange digressions and weird, ecstatic visions. Dreams are described. Much alcohol is consumed. The centrepiece of the film is a drunken dance party where the normally miserable peasants stomp and sing and walk around with cheese rolls balanced on their foreheads before passing out and becoming swallowed up in spider webs, like relics in a museum basement.

As a story, the film is almost simplistic. Although there’s no real central character, much of what happens revolves around Irimias, a charismatic man of questionable morals who comes to a failed farming commune with the intention of settling old scores and bilking his comrades out of their paychecks. A sorrowful lot trapped in a cold, damp Hungarian hell, the former communards are especially vulnerable to any promise of a better tomorrow (Futaki, the strongest personality in the whole bunch, has no bigger hope than to soak his feet in hot water every day). The fact that a mentally disturbed child has killed herself only makes the villagers all the more vulnerable to Irimias’ righteous shaming of the entire community. Even as Tarr engages in elliptical storytelling, sometimes doubling back to retell earlier events from different perspectives, the story itself remains engrossing and clear in its allegorical purposes.

But why describe the plot? Is that what the film is about? Why not describe the animals? You could just as easily summarize the film as a herd of cattle in the rain, a pig in the mud, a cat tortured and killed, an owl on a balcony. Or why not describe the rain, the ever-present rain, which is basically the lead character, at least judging by the amount of screen time afforded it? Or perhaps you could describe the landscape, which speaks as eloquently as the finest storyteller? There is so much in this film beyond its characters and story; the humans and their little troubles matter, but no more than any other element of the film. Sure, the sexual dalliance between Futaki and Mrs. Schmidt near the beginning of the film is a significant incident, but Tarr spends much of his time focused on the kitchen table and the chair, while life happens somewhere just off screen. We hear the pair scheming and musing on their crushing, confining lives, but so what? The chair has its problems, too.

3. Like any hefty epic, this film carries with it the inherent gravity of artistic intention. In other words, if you’re making a deliberate artistic statement, then you must be deadly serious, right? This is the same pernicious attitude that assumes Herman Melville could somehow write things like “Queequeg was George Washington, cannibalistically developed” without smirking or that an often reserved filmmaker like Yasujiro Ozu would never stoop so low as to make jokes about children shitting their pants in a farting contest (Good Morning, check it out).

Yet for all its grey misery and rain-soaked squalor, Satantango is funny, and sometimes even brutally, ridiculously hilarious. Aside from the fact that one of the key structuring images is a pig wallowing in the mud and filth, the film is littered with verbal gags and droll non sequiturs (one member of this miserabilist chorus dreams of a better future: “I’ll be a watchman in a chocolate factory. Or a porter in a girls’ dormitory”). Yes, the film is also deeply serious, but this is the challenge Tarr has taken on for himself, and perhaps his greatest achievement here. He has molded a tragedy out of a group of comic misfits, losing none of the humour as he reaches for pathos. It is a King Lear in which the Fool plays every part.

While each individual’s fate is often tragic, or at least pitiable, the grand sweep of history on display here is clearly fodder for comedy. History is not written by the losers or winners, but the ignorant and the deranged—people too removed from reality to actually play a part in the pageant they describe. In the police office, two clerks go over a report authored by Irimias, who offers sneering indictments of his acolytes, all of whom are portrayed as pathetic, stupid and somewhat unhygienic. Rewriting the harsh descriptions, the two clerks provided a bemused commentary of their own as they revise the record, reducing everything into the doughy, formless language of bureaucracy.

Whatever truth is to be found about these people is left up to the village historian, the doctor. Locked up in his house with his books and his alcoholism, the doctor sits all day at his window, recording the comings and goings of the townspeople in his notebook. In a final, crucial joke, he is sent to the hospital for 13 days to recover from a desperate midnight ramble, but when he returns, he is unaware that the village is now deserted. He returns to his chair, writing in his notebook that everyone is apparently too afraid to leave their homes. The death of the community becomes the end of history, and the doctor’s response is simple and almost logical—he shutters his own window.

4. In the bar, a drunk man drones on in the background, recounting his encounter with Irimias endlessly, trapped in some sort of damaged feedback loop where he just keeps repeating the same words over and over until they break down and become sonic paste: gunpowder, grasshoppers, Steigerwald. For a film so attuned to empty spaces and silent pauses, Satantango is remarkably attentive to the vagaries of language (perhaps a lingering trace of the film’s literary origins, as a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai). The man in the bar, besotted with beer and verbs, serves as the film’s chief linguistic theorist, offering up a practical demonstration of the mass delusion that is the socially agreed upon meanings necessary for language to function. Or, as he explains to no one in particular, there’s a huge difference between plodding and plodding.

You don’t really begin to appreciate just what a fine joke this really is until about the eighth or ninth instance of someone silently, doggedly trudging through the rain and the mud. If this film were a doctoral thesis, it would be called “‘How’s my plodding?’: The psychological function of walking in late-20th century Hungarian agrarian cultures.” The natural place of these people is not at rest, secure in their homes. Nor is it striving towards a destination, confidently entering with the knowledge that you are expected inside. It’s in-between, exposed, whether as a drunk belching in the ditch as he shuffles forth lamely in search of fruity brandy or a group tramping through the storm, collars turned up against the rain as the refuse of the world congregates at their feet like tiny tribes worshipping stone-faced gods.

5. At one point, in his home, the doctor collapses, and I am seized with panic, and not just because something has suddenly, shockingly actually happened, a real dramatic incident on screen in front of us, good lord, it’s like Tarr has gone Hollywood on us, but I truly fear the doctor is dead, and I ask myself is this what life comes to, dead alone in a room, and my panic comes because I see myself in the doctor, he had his brandy and I’ve got my Tarr, we’re both holed up with our spirits, I need to get out of this room, the air is growing thin, I need to get out before they find my corpse, the light from the DVD menu screen flickering across my face like a candle at a vigil, oh god it’s me call the doctor I’m the doctor call the doctor let me out out out and oh wait, never mind, he’s just drunk, just drunk, false alarm, next chapter, please.

6. Abandoned between capitalism and communism, the villagers seem on the verge of sliding into some proto-industrial purgatory (one of the only jobs in sight is prostitution, and even that doesn’t pay anymore). Everyone reels about for a guiding principle to provide at least a meager sense of direction and purpose to life. Apparently too petulant and selfish to function as a collective, the group also lacks the ruthlessness necessary to be effective capitalists. It’s not for nothing that Irimias derides them all as slaves without a master.

The film’s final sequence is a potent vision of this desperate, rootless quality. In a monologue delivered in total blackness—this scene only screens in your mind’s eye, sorry—the doctor tells us of a dream he had once. Futaki is called forth by the sound of distant bells, but he discovers only a small church, the tower collapsed and no bells to be found anywhere. Standing amidst the wreckage of history, the villagers are similarly confused. The collective collapsed and the communist dream dead, the people live on, sleepwalkers awakened in strange environs, no longer certain what brought them to this place. They seek out jobs and live unfamiliar lives, holding all the while to the irrational belief that one day everything lost will be restored. Numb, sleep-drunk, they rub their eyes and stumble through the grey new world. Was anything ever real at all?

7. “Well, did you enjoy yourself?”
“All right.”
“Did you see the metro?”
“No.”
“What have you done, then?”
“I’ve aged.”
—Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro