Poor Things

  In Poor Things the titles are wraiths of letters, floating, emaciated, fading away, like the beings that preceded and are then drawn out of the corpses under the doctor Godwin Baxter’s knife and training. The letters suggest an ever-fading life and substance, the tension between man’s skeleton through arrogant aspiration back to its reversion into bone. This theme recurs in the film’s intermittent black-and-white evocations of Victoriana which cast the film both in our current times of colour and our stripped past. 

The end-credits are too small to read. In context, they are the sign of the maker, the creator, at once stretching the limit of his art but falling short of fully realizing it. We aspire to spirit but lapse back into being things. The skeleton persists. The bone outlasts the spirit, however remade/reborn. Whatever richness of being we intend we revert to poor things. Thus Dr Baxter is both the practitioner and the victim of patriarchal perversion. 

Hence to the mutants that derive from Dr Baxter’s craft and genius. Weird animals, like a four-footed goose and a pig-headed chicken, scuttle through the scenes, as if too normal to warrant a close-up. His steam-engine carriage pretends to be drawn by a fake horse-head, as if the industrial revolution were but an inflection of the idea that man stays beast.

Similarly hybrid is the genre-basis of the plot. A female Candide strides through the story of Frankenstein’s bride against the urban landscape of a retrospective futurist Verne (the air balloons, that vehicle, etc). 

The innocent afoot is Bella. Baxter created her when he took the body of a maritally oppressed suicide and implanted the brain of rhe baby from her womb. She bears his surname because he made her, in a non-sexual paternity. That's an echo of Mary Shelley's scientist, bent  upon -- and bent -- creating life without woman, creating life "by this hand." That phrase echoes through his lab, in masturbatory hubris. We watch the current Bella creature blossom syllable by syllable from impulsive inarticulate into the new, independent feminist. Given physical being by the mad scientist, she on her own discovers and asserts her humanity and rights.

Her “I must go punch that baby” anticipates her turning from instinctual impulsiveness to effective social order.

The doctor’s seamed and resewed face evokes Dr Frankenstein’s monster, whom Shelley imagined ("conceived"?) and Hollywood multiplied. The Victorian context is reaffirmed by the latent William in Dr. Godwin’s name. Like this Baxter, William Godwin was himself apparently not comfortable with conventional heterosexuality, as Kara Hagedorn has demonstrated. 

The legitimate freedom of nonbinary sex is also exemplified by Bella’s lesbian affair. That begins in the brothel that also introduced her to the conflict and exchange of power in human sexuality. Those mutant animals and machines universalize this liberty of the nonbinary. 

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s new feature is so rich, complex, probing and untrammelled that one reluctantly hazards any reading upon a single viewing. So I’ll wait, this current venture my wraith, a presence but not fully bodied. 

Fallen Leaves

  In Aki Kaurismaki’s new film, men coming out of a rep cinema say the Jim Jarmush film  The Dead Don't Die reminds them of Diary of a Country Priest and Bande a Part, respectively. Fair enough. Our film has its own apparently lifeless heroes in staggering tsearch of rebirth. Their heartening tale is conveyed through Bresson’s skeletal aesthetic and Godard’s  (albeit way lower key) outsiders. 

Anyway, Fallen Leaves reminds me of Ozu — a subdued minimalist almost static anatomy of a season as an emblem of the current human condition. As the title— and the closing song, with Autumn in for Fallen — suggests, we’re in a chilly, bleak, tired world, sapped of colour and energy. But the heart beats on, especially those of our dulled central couple whose solitudes ache for their intuited connection.

The course of their true love is hobbled by Holappa’s weakness — drink — and his accidents, whether losing her number or walking into a train. Meanwhile Anya  patiently survives on her own. When she loses her shelf-stacking job for pinching a past-date pastry, she takes a drudge job in a pub. That ends when her boss is busted for drug dealing. Thence to a sheetmetal factory — the industry in which Holappa has his union card. He struggles on his own, with neither union support — until she recovers him at the hospital, retrieving him from a coma.

Anya’s second job is dramatically masculine, sweaty factory work. It involves her in some heavy digging and some heavier carting. This balances — and saves from cliche — her larger woman’s project, saving her man from his destructive weaknesses. 

When she adopts a dog she demonstrates her generous impulse to care for the desperate, to add a relationship to her solitude. Having inherited her small flat from her godmother, Anya is a step up the social ladder from her working friends — and a ladder above her lover.

Amid the cold barren settings the backgrounds bristle with film posters. Cinema provides a rich escape denied these characters’ real lives. Holappa waits outside the cinema in futile hope of meeting Anya again. A ring of cigarette butts tells her he had been there.  

The last shot echoes Chaplin (the auteur not Anya’s dog). The lovers walk into the sunset of a cold, heartless world. The factory scenes recall the dehumanizing sterility of Modern Times. And in the spirit of The Great Dictator the outside news world boils down to Russia's horrible barbaric  attack upon innocent Ukraine. Not a saving barber in sight.

Six months later the soundtrack would have added the October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s response. No resurgent spring there either. We're into the winter of discontent. 

        But Kaurismaki's small, touching lives go on, in a carefully controlled simplicity. Elegance can also be stark.

Cary's Introduction in Notorious

I’m fascinated by Cary Grant’s introduction in Notorious, which delays our view of his face far longer than we expect in such a romantic star vehicle.

Like Psycho, the film opens on a particular date and time. An April afternoon in Miami in 1946. The very specific implies a very universal. America is at war but this time and place are in domestic, balmy America. 

The first shot is a closeup of a reporter’s flash camera, panning along a line of reporters to one peering in on a courtroom. The journalists make the film about the reporting of the war, the civilian response to it, more than the war itself. There’s also a self-referentiality to Hitchcock’s camera starting on a newsman’s. So, too, his cameo, walking away from a bar with a drink — a replay of the playgirl Alicia’s (Ingrid Bergman) reform and her lover’s dangerous skepticism about it.

Inside the courtroom, a German American is sentenced to 20 years for treason. As his daughter Alicia cuts through those reporters’ intrusive questions she’s beautiful, firm, inexpressive. 

But she cuts loose in the next scene, cavorting at a party. She seems untouched by her father’s verdict. Exhilarated, she is sensual in her bare arms, her blouse a rebuttal to prisoner stripes. In her drunken hilarity the Nazi’s daughter seems to be the film’s central protagonist and mystery. The titular notorious?

But the party scene is commanded by the central rear view of a still, dark haired man. He clearly catches the heroine’s eye, as he denies ours. Alicia flirts with him, offers him a drink, but he is implacable. Of course, he turns out to be Cary Grant. Hitchcock introduced his male lead from behind, anonymous, the still center of the party, of the heroine’s flippant attention and of our questioning engagement. 

And of the film. This character, invitingly named Devlin, becomes its central mystery. He proves to be the true “notorious” for his precarious hovering between the devoted and the devilish. This romantic/political drama is an anatomy of Devlin, not Alicia. Having initially seemed the titular “notorious” of the party life, she is cleared by a conversation recording of any suspicion that she might share her father’s Nazi party life. 

The film exposes Devlin’s questionable pragmatism. He embodies the notorious inhumanity that can shadow even the right side in the eternal battle between good and evil. The good guys can do bad things. Especially when they can claim they have to. 

This Devlin is in the details. His apparent stability proves deceptive. His image does a 360-degree spin from Alicia’s perspective on her hungover morning after. We continue to get rear-view headshots of him, leaving his character and mood in question.

The lovers in various settings are set in a hard-edged clear foreground against soft-focus social backdrops. They are clear in a foggy world. When she is drugged by her Nazi husband Sebastian, Alicia turns foggy, provoking Devlin’s doubts of her reform and character.

The continuing rear-head shots of Devlin leave him enigmatic and ambivalent. To wrest control of the steering wheel he knocks her out with a punch we don’t see but disturbingly hear. As their love affair proceeds she is the aggressor, open, expressive. He receives her ardor coolly, impassive. His cold mien confirms the rear-head concealing of his emotion.  Indeed, the film's famous 360-degree camera spin around the lovers' passionate kiss is the antithetic rebuttal to the first flat shot of his back.

Devlin’s first suggestion of love for Alicia is his silence when his secret service bosses reveal their plan. Alicia is to seduce Sebastian, the Nazi collaborator who already loves her, win his trust and intimacy, then report on him. 

Disdainful of their human weapon, the American government is prostituting Alicia and expecting Devlin to arrange it. Devlin appears as inexpressive with the schemers as he was with her — though he does firmly bristle at one derogation of her character. He then coldly engages her in the ambivalent scheme. Because she loves him she will submit to — even marry —the Nazi she spurned

At heart this is the classic Love vs Duty story. Hitchcock’s twist is that both his heroes dramatically put their duty ahead of their love. Antony and Cleopatra would never do that. Our lovers’ choice neaBon Voyage and Adventure Malgache.rly proves fatal. What saves the day — both for Alicia and for the allies — is Devlin reversing the cliche. He puts his love for Alicia ahead of his duty to the program. Not only does he save Alicia but he gets her dirt on the Nazis’ Macguffin source.  

        Hitchcock was long concerned with the intrusion of world politics into personal or domestic relationships, from his 1930s thrillers --  TMWKTM, 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Lady Vanishes -- into his wartime Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat, and the centrally focused Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache. The theme dominated his Torn Curtain and Topaz.

As Hitchcock prefers the human over the political, Devlin’s devotion provides the happy ending for everyone — except Sebastian. As the drama opened on the back of Devlin’s head — the enigmatic positive — it closes on the back of the pathetic Sebastian’s. Devlin has whipped Sebastian’s wife off to her life-saving hospital, leaving him to face his mortally suspicious comrades. Sebastian mounts the stairs to the cabal’s plot. As with Devlin earlier, we can’t see Sebastian’s face but we can infer his feelings. To his notorious comradesl he is now the notorious traitor, his face lost to us as his trust is to them. 

Hitchcock's "Misteaks"

  Hitchcock’s “Misteaks”

The following is an expanded version of a paper I delivered (via Zoom) at Hitchcon ’23, a delightful convention of Hitchcock scholars and fans at Dobbs Ferry, NY.

Here is my modest proposal: Whenever we think Hitchcock has made a grievous error he probably has not. Rather, we have not yet figured out what he’s doing. It’s worth our effort.

Remember the initial complaint about Vertigo? He failed at the whodunit by revealing the solution in the middle. Such a loser! But really. Didn’t that rather mean it’s not a whodunit? 

It’s a whydodaydodat? Why are men so susceptible to destructive romanticism? How does even such a hardheaded Scottie so profoundly lose his bearings when he falls in love — with an illusion yet, a known fabrication? To the point that he risks and loses all trying to recreate — that illusion! He is compelled to recreate the fantasy he fell for. Isn’t that what “falling” in love means, a reminder of our solitary instability, encapsulated in the opening montage of alluring lips and spiralling plunge.

Or on a smaller scale: How does Scottie escape from that initial trough-hang? Did Hitchcock goof in his non-reveal? 

No. We’re not told how the hero escaped because it doesn’t matter. Not to the plot. Not to the themes. With such compelling dramas we have to remind ourselves that these characters are not real people. They are fabrications composed strictly of the details that serve the director’s purpose. They have no characteristics or experience other than what we are given. They have no life before, beyond or after — except what we grant them on every replay.

That’s not enough? Try this, then: the opening chase scene has a sufficiently oneiric tone to suggest we’re seeing not how the event occurred but how it haunts Scottie’s dreams. 

Still not enough? When Scottie ventures up the kitchen step-stool he drops — into Midge’s arms. Maybe that’s implicitly a clarifying replay: Scottie fell and some stronger Fireman Midge caught him. 

But really: Does it matter how he came down? If we had to know then Hitch would’ve told us. He didn’t — so we don’t.

Even Psycho fans are irked by the slick psychiatrist’s closing explanation. But the film’s structure clearly detaches Hitchcock from it. The shrink hangs the blame on Norman’s mother: “a clinging, demanding woman.” After killing her and her lover Norman assumed her personality. “He was never only Norman. But he was often all Mother.” And Norman was a mean Mother. Whenever he felt attracted to a woman “Mother killed the girl.” But Mother blames Norman, pleading innocence: “Why, she wouldn’t even hurt a fly.” Ironically, in his mother’s voice Norman confesses to his guilt — but the shrink blames Mom. 

The last shot— Marion’s car rising from the swamp — is a parallel resurrection of the dead, as if supporting Mom’s responsibility. But the guilt is all Norman’s, however flawed his mother may have been — or not. Contrary to the shrink, the guilt is solely Norman’s  which is confirmed by the film’s narrative frame.

In the opening scenes several characters weakly blame the parent for their own weakness. In the hotel tryst Marion’s dead mother inhibits the lovers’ intimacy. “We can have dinner. At my house,” Marion muses, “with my mother’s picture on the mantle.” “And after the steak?” Sam suggests, “Turn mother’s picture to the wall?” In his cameo Hitchcock — like Mom’s photo — turns his back away from her imminent sin. 

For his part, Sam won’t be marryin’ Marion because he’s paying off his dead father’s debts and his own ex-wife’s alimony. The great thing about family here is that it provides excuses for one’s own weaknesses. And even evil.

The real estate office scene shows other characters hiding behind parental domination, like the Patricia Hitchcock character. Her mother’s doctor eased her wedding night — with paralyzing tranquilizers. Now her mother has just phoned to see if husband Teddy has phoned. Parents intrude—as their kids let them. 

We infer a future replay when the swaggering Texan Cassidy buys off his sweet little daughter’s unhappiness with a $40,000 (cash) house. (This is a really old movie.) In this narrative frame, the character evades responsibility by claiming parental influence. The weak submit to the domineering — even if they have to invent one. 

When the shrink blames Mom he denies Norman’s responsibility for conceiving his mother’s possession of him. Here the Phoenix setting assumes extra meaning. Sure, it’s an aptly torrid desert state. But the phoenix is also one of the film’s bird references — like Norman’s stuffing of birds, Marion the unstuffed Crane, etc. Indeed our opening camera movement is that of a bird approaching and alighting upon an apparently random window sill. The phoenix is a hermaphroditic bird — combining both male and female sexes — that is reborn from its own ashes. That’s a neat emblem of Norman’s excuse: his mother exists anew inside him. But the phoenix is just a myth. A useful excuse, but mythical, unreal. If the psychiatrist’s explanation seems pat and implausible, it’s supposed to be.  He adopts Norm’s loony excuse.

Of course, Hitchcock has confessed to at least one mistake, to Truffaut. On Stage Fright he apologizes for having presented the villain’s lie as a flashback. As it was played it seemed as real as the plot. As if it really happened. Reviewers objected to having been thus misled. Was that Hitchcock’s mistake? Or his audience’s, for not yet having twigged to a narrative that exercises the conditional tense. 

In fact, that twist in narrative propels the film’s central point — the fluid interweaving of theatre and life. That is, we constantly shift between modes of being and modes of performing. This film’s brilliance lies in how a simple whodunit so richly explores that theme.

Again the life-theatre confusion provides the narrative frame. The film opens on a theatre’s “Safety Curtain.” But when it rises it reveals not a theatre stage but a bustling London street scene. That’s an irrational fluid movement between film, theatre and the “real” life that all art pretends to portray. 

That safety curtain closes the plot when it falls down — mercifully off-camera —to slice killer Jonathan (Richard Todd) in half. That frisson the Hitchcock of Frenzy might not have spared us. So much for the “safety” of that curtain — and by extension the stage’s ostensible detachment from our reality, the separation of performance from being. Furthering the illusion of safety, the cops can’t penetrate the “safety glass” on Jonathan’s car window — but bullets do.

In the first scene Eve (Jane Wyman) is driving Jonathan in urgent getaway. This conventional noir image is the film’s “real life” — the basic film level of performance. But the scene’s falseness registers partly in the car’s briefly blank back window but mainly in Eve seeming to drive out at us. This film rhetoric undermines the supposedly “real” drive. 

So is what then “happens” here. Jonathan tells Eve — and shows us — that Charlotte killed her husband and has come to him for aid. That’s the lie played as event. As if the whole “event” were not already a string of fictions

In the parallel scene at the end, Eve and Jonathan are hiding in another vehicle — a classic prop carriage — when he is exposed and decides to kill her. These framing scenes are precisely reversed parallels. Jonathan produces his false tale as Eve drives them through the putative street reality in a car. The truth emerges when they cower backstage in a theatre carriage. Truth arrives through artifice. 

In sum, we find our life truths through our stories, whether on the page, stage or celluloid. Conversely, to get through life we consistently draw on our fictional, composed lives. This film portrays the complete interweaving of Performance and Being. We act what we are; we are what we act. Living is a layering of performances. The romance between Wyman’s Eve and Ordinary Smith (Michael Wilding) grows entirely through a variety of scenes of false pretences.

In his cameo appearance Hitchcock does a double take on Jane Wyman just as her character has shucked her extreme but ineffective maid disguise and returned to her initial character’s, selecting among roles within her role. He catches her between discordant images of her assumed “self.” Hitch’s appearance reminds us that the film — like life — is all performance, a layering of being.  The creator briefly steps into his fiction, just as his heroine has changed her image back to her —fictional —self. And of course — the various plain Janes that wouldbe actress Eve plays evaporate beside the sizzling white marble persona of Marlene Dietrich.

But my primary focus here is on Hitchcock’s scenes of brazen falseness, which tempt us to assume The Master has grown careless, sloppy, in admitting an obviously fake shot. For example, The Lady Vanishes opens on an obviously miniature setting. This isn’t just to save money. Rather, it’s a play with form, a register of pretending. It’s a visual equivalent to “Once upon a time…,” the traditional start of a folk tale like this. Of course, what “Once upon a time” really means is “Never” but also “Always.” It’s how Fiction trumps History.

The film shifts from this initial pastoral romance into hard political reality in the climactic gunfight with the Nazis. That movement of the film as a whole is also reflected in the two comic Brits byplay The foppish cricket-nerds turn into warriors — and prove a crack shot to boot. 

So, too, in Torn Curtain, where a shallow self-obsessed couple risk many East German lives to advance the hero’s personal ambition—however noble the MacGuffin. Their opening and closing shots define the couple as isolated, insulated, indulging their own warmth and seclusion amidst the Cold War. The palpably plastic garden where Paul Newman confesses to and recruits Julie Andrews by its unreality admits the actors’ reigning personae: Hud is leading Mary Poppins up the garden path. Given his earliest roots in German Expressionism, it’s hardly surprising that Hitchcock indulges in such calibrated artifice that we may by reflex misread as carelessness.

Now, for an apparent example of emotional incongruity, let’s pause over the stunning shot in Topaz, where the revolutionary’s murder of his beloved is presented as a high angle shot down upon a billowing blossom. Why such beauty for a murder? In this sordid espionage drama the operatic intensity of this shot sticks out like — a healthy thumb. The beauty seems inappropriate. However — the murder itself assumes a beauty when we consider the context. In killing his beloved the revolutionary leader is saving her from the unimaginable atrocities the beautiful “traitor” would suffer if tossed to their troops. From her servants’ fate we have had an idea of what she might endure had her lover not delivered her so … beautifully. His apparent callousness is amplified when the European political traitors get away with their treachery nonplussed. 

And so finally — Marnie! Its blatant expressionism begins with the whole-screen red suffusion when the colour reminds Marnie of her suppressed bloody childhood trauma. Despite this clear license, reviewers proudly saw through Hitchcock’s “clumsy” use of back projection. “He didn’t fool me,” is the tacit gloat. As if he couldn’t had he wanted to.

Two versions are especially blatant. In one Marnie rides her Forio in ecstatic escape from her constricted reality. She loses that refuge when she rides into a stone wall — like the stone reality that arrests most fancy —and most attempts to forget past guilt. The other is the obviously false painted backdrop of the shipyard behind Marnie’s mother’s house. That falseness clearly expresses the ghostly past that haunts Marnie until — forced by her wild game hunter hubby — she confronts it and escapes its hold.

Again, the ostensible mistake points to the core of the film. Marnie has lived a rootless, ruthless life because she has buried her memory of killing the sailor who had been fighting off her mother. The mother’s repression of that memory leaves her with one crippled leg to stand on — and evermore to repel Marnie’s affection. 

Marnie’s corrupt compulsions derive from her dissociation from her past. The obviously false backdrops emblematize a present life (foreground) detached from its past (background). In the image as in the psychology the past is a ghostly removal from the present — that nonetheless grips. Indeed it paralyzes, Marnie as much as her mother. Hitch’s apparent mistake is a rhetorical strategy. Remember — he cut his teeth on Caligari.

Indeed Hitchcock introduces this theme in the opening credits. They are presented as if a book, with changing pages. Normally in this trope a page is turned to reveal the new page beneath. Here credits are revealed when new pages are piled onto the old. Each new layer buries the last one. It sets up Marnie’s futile burial of her past. 

The antithesis, preserving the past, appears in Mark’s first wife’s pre-Colombian art collection— doubly resonant as it is all that Mark still has of hers. It is destroyed by the storm that also shatters Marnie’s cool front. In that primitive spirit, too, Mark applies the jungle hunter’s determination to train the wild creature to trust him. Here — and in the rape scene — Connery’s Mark draws on his association with the expedient license of his James Bond.

The characters’ need to move back into the past is also imaged in their frequent movement toward the back of the scene. Hence Hitchcock’s frequent images of dramatic depth.  At Strutt’s dangerous arrival at the party the camera slowly descends through the vast front hall before stopping on his close-up. This plunge fits Strutt as he threatens to expose Marnie’s recent criminality.

The film’s opening shot — a closeup of Marnie’s yellow/gold/guilty purse — pulls back to reveal a railway station in dull browns and greys. Marnie walks away along a thin dull red line into the rear of the shot. In scenes of her momentary successes her fore- and her back-grounds cohere. But only temporarily. She remains fragile — fractured by the split between her past and her present, which is so dramatically figured in the fake backdrops. 

Walking into the background is a visual correlative to returning to the past. The characters go back spatially as well as temporally. Marnie and Mark walk down a long corridor at the Rutland stable. After her suicide attempt Mark rushes up and out of several shipboard corridors. Perhaps the film’s most famous scene is the long-shot that frames Marnie’s Strutt theft on the right side of the screen and the (mercifully deaf) cleaning woman on the left. This one scene is presented as two separate depths. And of course Hitchcock knows we’re now siding with the thief.

As usual Hitchcock’s cameo also serves his theme — here the depth-background conundrum. Hitchcock enters a hotel hallway on the left side, sees Marnie walking away behind — with her new, ill-gotten baggage from shopping— then he turns to look at us. As if to say: “Did you get this?” He appears as the pivot between her walking back/away and our presence. The entire film pivots on the depth of the psyche and how its shaping events can only with danger be buried. The obviously fake backdrops embody that split.

Hitchcock knew what he was doing. Especially when we think he didn’t. His “misteaks” are really ours. He’s still ahead of us. QED.

You Hurt My Feelings

  Not often that a title so denies the thrust of a film. In this film’s therapy-speak, accusing someone of hurting your feelings evades the reality: You choose to feel hurt. Partners in a successful relationship will assume responsibility for their own responses instead of blaming the other. 

That’s the point of all the family tensions here. The compulsion to be candid is embodied in Beth’s title of her memoir: I Had to Tell It. She felt the compulsion to reveal her parents’ cruel lack of respect of her. “Shit for brains” was one of her daddy’s sobriquets for her. Her candid memoir enabled her escape from the diminution it made her feel. 

In her creative writing class Beth is properly over-enthusiastic about her students’ attempts. But she’s surprised and hurt that none have read or even heard of her book. They dutifully promise to correct that, but any insult is hers to take not what they gave.

Her response to her own son is diametrically opposed to her father’s but equally problematic. In over-praising his potential and accomplishments she undermines his self-acceptance as much as her father did hers. 

Beth’s key “betrayal” now is her husband Don’s praise of her new book, a novel. When she overhears his admission that he doesn’t like the book she feels he has been lying to her. 

But the husband’s defence is solid. He wanted to support her even if the work was not to his taste. The second agent’s sale of the book justifies Don’s support. But Beth is immediately tested again when the blurb on her cover is trumped by a better blurb on the book beside hers. Who says what doesn’t matter as much as how the subject chooses to respond.  

When the couple jocularly recall their false appreciation of each other’s gifts they are reminded that a close relationship may often depend upon such small tactful fibs. So, too, instead of declaring how ugly his facial surgery has left him Beth assures him he will look good when it heals. 

The film closes on a perfect shot. The couple is together in bed again, starting to read their respective copies of their son’s first play. We don’t know how good/bad it will be or how supportive/candid they will be in response. But now they know the balance that’s required and the understanding on both sides.    

In a minor replay of the theme, when Beth’s sister’s boyfriend is fired from his play he resolves to retire from acting. Instead he apparently auditioned for another and enjoys  success. Again, the firing isn’t as significant as how he chooses to respond to it. As the bard put it, Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

Don’s counselling sessions work the same theme. Though he feels he is losing his skill and memory, the point again is that the responsibility to work lies with the client not the therapist. The longterm client who can’t afford him anymore attests to Don’s efficacy.

When the mutually hateful couple demand their $33,000 refund they indignantly reject his advice they separate. Their shared rejection of him saves their marriage when his patiently hearing them didn’t. What he says or doesn’t say is not as important as what they work out. 

Perhaps the domestic theme’s clearest exercise is in sister Sarah’s interior design work. When she goes by her own taste her proposed lighting fixtures leave her apparently sophisticated client cold. But her desperate offer of a phallic grotesquerie works immediately. Here as in the psychological issues we can nurse our own abused feelings or try to understand the offending other’s.   

I don’t know writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s work. After this extraordinarily fresh, sensitive, witty intro I must watch for her more.     

Golda (2023)

  This may appear to be the standard political drama. All the women are secretaries. All the leaders, bosses, even the panel of judges whose investigation frames the narrative are men. 

But there is one exception — the eponymous hero, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. 

Between radiation treatments for her eventually fatal lukemia, the chain-smoking, conscience-driven woman negotiates Israel’s skin-of-the-teeth survival of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 

While the Jewish state’s survival drama predominates there is also a compelling faith in the power a woman can wield in high office. She may recoil from the threat of turning its attacker Egypt into an army of widows and orphans. But that effective possibility wins Israel’s fragile peace with Egypt 

Golda’s effectiveness counters her disclaimer: “I’m not a soldier. I’m a politician.”  Success in the latter requires at least the possibility of the former. For all her grit and sinew, she remains a character of sentiment, emotion, empathy — keynote requirements so often forgotten in leadership.

In contrast to Golda’s wisdom, with even her suppressed gut instincts validated over time, the nation’s vulnerability is as due to the masculine entity as its military successes are. In particular, the nation’s foremost military heroes are here demystified: Moshe Dayan and Arik  Sharon. Their vanity clouds their judgment. 

Unfortunately the film also rings true to Israel’s current predicament. Golda may coerce Egyptian President Sadat into recognizing the state of Israel. But to today’s arab world, especially to the genocidal Palestinian campaign with its global support, the target is “the Zionist entity.” Not even lip-service respect is paid any “Israel,” however legitimate and important an contributor to the world it has proved to be.

Finally, there is the issue of Jewface. Why wasn’t a Jewish actor cast as Golda? Is this an affront to the Jews?

As if casting Helen Mirren could possibly be considered an insult to her subject. Simply, Mirren is magnificent. Her physical transformation — not just the face but the body, the legs, the motion — is matched by the subtlest nuances in feeling, perception, posture, expression. There has not been a better performance this year.

I gather Mirren spent three hours each day at makeup. Sarah Silverman would have taken twelve. The persecution rests.

Arguably the most touching scene is the newsreel clip of the real Golda and Sadat chatting with easy warmth over their peace deal. As she jokes, they’re a grandmother and grandfather enjoying each other. They incarnate Golda’s most famous line: “We won’t have peace till the arabs decide they love their children more than they hate us.” The line is famous enough not to be articulated here. But it drives that newsreel warmth. 

As well, the Golda-Sadat harmony offers that illusory hope that the other arab nations might someday accept peaceful existence with the Jewish state. That, after all, has since 1948 been the crucial reason why the Palestinians have not accepted the statehood they have been offered. They want to replace the Jews not join them. And the world won’t rein them in. Today as in 1973, as in 1948, Israel cannot count on anyone but herself for defence.   

Private Life (2018)

  The last scene of Tamara Jenkins’ marvellous film is at once eloquent and taciturn.

Rachel and Richard — by now far less harmoniously matched than their names — sit in a diner. Their Edenic quest ends at Appleby’s. They’re waiting for — we know not whom. It could be another surrogate who has promised to bear a child for them but — as in their earlier experience — now welches out. Or it could be another candidate with an egg transplant. We don’t know which because we’re not told. 

And that’s because it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that this particular couple, despite all the disappointments and discouragements we have watched them brave, persist in their campaign to have a child. We’re not told whether their adoption plan worked out but we assume that either it didn’t or it wasn’t enough. 

Still, that apparently empty last scene is packed. The couple are continuing their fertility quest despite all the discouragements from their friends and from their own experiences. In their faces and deportment we read a tired hope and conviction, barely surviving their disappointments. 

In the one key action, Richard rises from his seat across from Rachel and moves to her side. That is, he remains committed to her desire despite his own weakened resolve for a child and despite their campaign’s cost to their marriage. They constantly argue. They haven’t had sex for a year. Their two surrogate children — massive mastiff dogs — seem marginal to their lives however fully they occupy the space and time. They are two large voids not fillers.

What’s Jenkins’ view of this indomitable resolve? Does it attest to their character or to their destructive obstinance? Who knows? We’re left to our own reading. To our own disposition. The film allows us to project our conclusion. It reads us by how we read it.  

Clearly Jenkins has a clear-eyed view of contemporary feminism — that is, not just the achievement of opportunity for women but its inevitable costs.

Rachel delayed pregnancy until her 40s because she was intent upon establishing her career as a writer. Now she pays the price for that delay — her own eggs having weakened and the couple’s options reduced. 

Rachel’s dilemma is replayed in Richard’s brother’s stepdaughter Sadie. Dropping out of her extended college career, she too wants to become a writer. But her offer to provide Rachel with an effective egg is defeated by her own weakness. When she’s admitted into a respected writers’ retreat she seems destined to repeat Rachel’s success/failure.

We rarely get such a trenchant film focused on a couple in decline. Even in their careers they are fading. Rachel has her new book appearing, but is outraged by its cover’s misrepresentation. She is helpless to protect that offspring too.

Richard has fallen from a successful off-Broadway theatre director to working in a pickle company.  That job, dealing with shrunken phallic emblems, coheres with his having only one testicle and the discovery his semen has no sperm. Fortunately, no-one calls him the shrunken Richard, “Dick.” But their swinging doctor is a Dordick. The couple’s decline coheres with Jenkins’ sense of the limitations of the success of feminism. However liberated, women remain in thrall to their biology.

After all, bearing children — whether, when, where, how, why — that is the most private of life. 

Cookie's Fortune (1999)

  In this undervalued 1999 comedy Robert Altman once again uses a social microcosm to anatomize contemporary America.  The Easter weekend setting in Holly Springs casts a Christian framework around the seedy Mississippi small town setting.  

That birth/death issue also drives the three central characters. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close)— blending Garbo and the Mason Line— is the classical Southern Belle pretending to purity. The director of community theatre tries to hide the fact that her Aunt Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) has committed suicide. Camille is so assured of her privilege that she runs roughshod over the police crime-scene tapes and assumes she will inherit her aunt’s estate. She even claims co-credit with Oscar Wilde for her production of Salome. Camille falls from inherited privilege to madness. Selecting that play -- however modified -- for an Easter church presentation reveals the white leader's compromised moral sense and authority. Her personal doom reflects the self-destruction and failure of the racist project.

As a result of Camille’s vain machinations, the suspicion of murder befalls Cookie’s closest friend and help, Willis Richland (Charles Dutton). Willis personifies the complexity and delusions of American white supremacism. We’re led to be suspicious of his every action, only to be disabused by his virtue. His night invasion of the mansion is to keep his promise to clean Cookie’s guns. If he steals a mickey of bourbon at night he replaces it the next day. His knowledge completes Cookie's crossword. 

Indeed Willis refutes the myth of America’s racial abyss. His white grandfather sired a huge keyboard of children and grandchildren, a spectrum of whites and blacks. Willis’s surname anticipates Camille’s bequest of her estate to the most legitimate heir, this black man. He was to that manor born.

As Willis refutes the cliche of the shiftless inferior black, Ned Beatty provides an affable humane alternative to the Rod Steiger redneck stereotype sheriff. Beatty’s Lester Boyle immediately knows Willis is innocent by his homespun wisdom. In fishing veritas.  

The third central character is the most ambiguous. Emma Duvall (Liv Taylor) is a vagabond with an instinctive bond with Willis and an equally compelling antagonism both to her supposed aunt Camille and to her putative mother Cora (Julianne Moore). That bloodline proves as fallacious as the assumptions of Willis’s essential difference.

Throughout, human instincts run athwart social expectations. Though Emma is an outlaw, of suspect character and security, her compulsive affair with rookie cop Jason (Chris O’Donnell)  provides a romantic energy and bracing spirit otherwise lacking after Cookie’s suicide. 

Indeed if Camille was counting on getting the fortune cookie she assumed her due, that fortune is as ersatz as Cookie’s fake necklace. The true fortune is the border-crossing relationships that dissolve the vicious faultlines we usually see in Mississippi dramas. On this Easter the humane America is reborn — not least because a child saw and reported the gun hidden among the Easter eggs.