The Monk and the Gun

  The moral of this charming fable is loud and clear: Our bellicose international politic has lost all sense of humanity, responsibility, sense, justice. Man’s ostensible progress has proved a disaster. Thus America, the democracy that leads the free world, is defined as “the land of Lincoln and JFK” — and by implication Robert K and MLK and all the other myriad martyrs to even domestic and playground gunshot.

Yet the film is also rich in subtleties. Its quiet narrative frame is Nature. Our young hero monk walks across a field of blowing grain in the first scene. In the last he walks away through an even richer field of flowers. There he leaves a dark lane in the field behind him. But that lane closes over as the flowers bend back. Nature survives man’s passage. It even erases his mark.

In the subplot a little girl’s lack of an eraser gets her a teacher’s scolding and torn papers, as she tries to emend an error with her hanky. The election officer gifts her an eraser but it’s returned because the girl sees the government has more need to correct their mistakes than she has. Out of the mouths of babes….

The child has also lost her playmates and friends because of her father’s choice of politician in the looming initial election. The effect of the “modern democracy” is to fragment the formerly harmonious society, down even to the level of family. The wife is torn between her mother’s politics and her husband’s.

Of course the film’s key “eraser” is the rifle, which the plot amplifies into AK-47s. The plot’s focus on rifles and their escalation sets us up for a conventional Hollywood shoot-em-up. But here the Ugly American is just a Meh American, commissioned to find and buy a rare antique rifle. 

When we expect the Lama wants his guns to shoot up the invading election system we expose our Hollywood mindset. No, this Lama comes to bury gunfire not to praise it. By the plot’s ironic twist, the American falls into step. Bhutan earns the happy ending in its new post-monarchical beginning — preferring peace and harmony over mortal ambition. 

The Unknown Woman

  This unflinching film about sex trafficking is as far from the sentimental nostalgia of the director’s Cinema Paradiso as you could imagine. 

“Hitchcockian thriller,” quoth NYT on the dvd jacket. Sure enough, it has The Master’s obsessive spiralling staircase, the jangling shrill violins and post-Frenzy sexual violence. The graphic sex has to be in that flashes of flashback format or it would be paralyzing.

Irena is a Ukrainian cleaner and maid in Rome. She’s, trying to keep tab on the affluent young couple that has adopted one of the nine babies she has been forced to bear (in 12 years of sexual exploitation). 

The film traces the horror and range of exploitation of women even in cell-phone contemporary Europe. At the mild end, to get the job she has to pay a percentage to the apartment manager who lands her work. That percentage rises to half to ward off his molestation (aka “I love you”).

Irena’s perils surpass any Paulines. To secure that job she has to paralyze the woman she has befriended to replace. The pimp she thought she despatched (and robbed) resurfaces more sadistic than ever, with murderous consequences. Even as she tries to toughen up her young charge Irena herself is propelled into unmotherly brutality. She’s violently mugged by two Santa Clauses! 

Yet Tornatore manages a happy ending. Irena comes out of prison to meet the girl she tended, thinking her her daughter. The girl is beautiful — but in a taut, non-binary way. Instead of the curves the pimps would peddle she’s all muscle and sinew, a warrior, her nursemaid’s protege prepared for the harsh world that almost destroyed Irena.

Coup de chance

  Coup de chance is clearly an 89-year-old’s movie. If you’re going to have a stroke, let it be “of luck.” Filmed entirely in France — and in French — it’s the slandered genius’s possibly final assertion of his art and soul against the calumny he unjustly endures in America. 

As well, the spectacularly autumnal forest in the dramatic conclusion evoke the golden age of the survivor. This is prefigured in the lovers’ first meeting, accidental (fated?) in the street. There they quote some high school Prévert: ”Dead leaves picked up be the shovelful. [You see, I have not forgotten.] So are memories and regrets.” The lovers take the chance to deal with their regrets.

So too the film’s summary wisdom. Heroine Fanny reads from her murdered Alain’s novel the philosophy by which he lured his high school goddess into an affair: “She has come to the conclusion that life was a random event and that the odds of her existing were one in 400 quadrillion. Hence everyone’s life was a miracle, everybody alive had hit the jackpot. It was important not to squander this miracle and she was prepared to take full responsibility for her choices. Still, it terrified her how big a part luck played in it all. And how much it helped to be lucky. But not to dwell on it.”

She tries to hide Alain’s lottery ticket gift from husband Jean but it starts his suspicion.

In emphasizing the importance of hair-breadth chance Allen’s Paris film specifically evokes his London film Match Point (2005). The latter opened with a tennis ball suspended in mid-bounce over a net. It could fall either way. This time it falls over, to score a point. Life and lady luck are like that. At the end the killer throws a stolen wedding ring from a bridge to the Thames. It hits a rail, bounces up and then — down to the ground. Unknowingly, the killer’s intention has been thwarted. 

But no. Another murderous burglar finds that ring, which ultimately frees the real killer from suspicion. In Allen's later French forest an innocent hunter commits the fatal accident that the villain had planned for his own excuse. Fate, justice — it’s all chance, all luck. That makes life neither comedy nor tragedy but “a farce; a black farce.”

The new film also echoes the earlier one’s romantic triangle, with variations. Fanny works for an art auction house and is married to a very successful but only “practically legal” investment counsellor, Jean. That harmony is disrupted when she meets and falls for the writer who adored her in high school. 

In Match Point Emily Morton’s heroine Chloe marries Tom, a tennis pro promoted into her father’s elite business. That marriage is threatened by Scarlett Johannson’s struggling American actress, Nola (‘alone’ in reverse). Nola loses her engagement to Chloe’s brother Matthew but falls into an affair with and pregnancy by Tom. In the Paris film the opening shot follows a blond ponytail down the street. She evokes Johannson but turns out to be Fanny. Plus ca change…. This time the killer doesn’t get away with it. But neither husband is an innocent victim. 

That’s not the only cultural allusion in a film that ripples with pertinent French culture. The heroine’s maiden name is Moreau — and she has a Jeanne Moreau mouth to match. Several names evoke French culture: Fanny, Camille, Jean, Sorel, Blanc, etc. In particular the auteur shadow of Claude Chabrol drops across the wealthy upper class family shivered by betrayal and murder.

The hot lovers fear turning into Mallarme’s “swan frozen in ice.” Alain buys Fanny The Secret Garden, a fantasy novel about a child’s redemption. The title puts a cultural frame against all the floral wallpaper — pale leaves behind Jean’s office desk, lively branches behind Alain’s bed — and the autumnal forest where at least poetic justice finally descends. In his refuge from America Allen luxuriates in his adopted French culture.

The auction house in passing provides an even more dramatic allusion: Caravaggio’s painting of the boy David flaunting Goliath’s harvested head. Goliath is famously painted as the adult Caravaggio, and David after his own youthful mien. Like that painting, here Allen is the old man hanging on the arm of his past.   

One last touch. The charming but evil Jean exults in his colossal model train set. This opulent doodad grows out of some boyhood trauma. It reveals him still rooted in its insecurities and desperate for a power beyond even morality. While it shows off his wealth it reveals his insecurity.

        Like the Caravaggio connection from the past artist to the present, this train also evokes Mia Farrow’s slandering of Allen, which crumbled on the implausibility of his alleged assault on their daughter in their attic and evidence that Mia was coaching their young daughter in her testimony. The story included the problematic presence of a model train set. The detail seemed to root the allegation in a song by a Farrow friend. So Jean's lavish train set implicitly recalls why Allen is shooting in France — 32 years after that false rumour, still poisoning the air.  Allen in effect blows up the lingering allegation against him.  While Allen is largely silent in his own defence — leaving the field to Farrow — the train scene here is a dramatic but tacit reaffirmation of the aging artist’s innocence.

Under the Skin -- Take One (initial review, 2013)

 From darkness comes vision. The pre-title sequence is an abstraction of galactic travel, with a total eclipse culminating in an eye. The narrative details the similar intersection of aliens and earthlings.

The aliens have taken the shape of male motorcyclists, but make one of their team a woman (Scarlett Johansson) as bait to seduce human males for the harvest of their skins. One reading of the title is that under the skin people can prove as different as (i) humans and aliens, or (ii) the innocents the heroine seduces and the vicious logger who tries to rape her and destroys her (and as a logger, plunders the natural world in which she seeks refuge). People on this globe live as if on different planets.

Where we expect a sex scene we usually get something metaphysical. The naked bodies operate stripped of any physical background. The first time, the woman found by the roadside is being slowly stripped — we expect by the motorcyclist who will rape her. But it's the naked Scarlett (unnamed in the film, Laura in the novel), plundering the body for her woman's outfit. Having donned a woman's skin and face she now dons the clothing. When she leads men to their doom they follow her into the dark pool she strides across. Led by their erections they literally go in over their heads and are trapped as in aspic, while she treads the surface. Eventually the men implode leaving their emptied skins to be harvested, presumably for the next UFO of aliens. 

The setting is Glasgow in 2014, when Scottish independence is coming to a vote and where the representative society are famously binge-drinking young women and lecherous brutish lads. Those are contrary attempts to find the comfort of a community, an identity. With their incomprehensible dialect, the Glaswegians seem more alien than Scarlett. They help us to identify with her. 

In one of the film's many twists, though, the laddish brutality is represented only in the intersection lout who taunts the heroine and the group that attack her van. Her victims are rather charming innocents. They are not the aggressive drunks on whom we expect extraterrestrial justice to be wreaked. Indeed in most cases Scarlett has to be the aggressor not just in the initial engagement but in the sexual invitation. 

The alien Scarlett also works as a human allegory. Initially she functions without any moral compass. So she kills the Czech visitor who tried to save the drowning father. She feels no compunction about abandoning the crying baby. And again, the men she kills are nice guys, not lechers. 

When she picks up the misshapen solitary, the heartless alien discovers human feelings. Though she leads him to his appointed doom she changes her mind and releases him. What prompts her change is her sight of herself in a mirror, where she sees how alien to herself she looks. Then she can feel for him. The freed victim wanders home naked, where her colleague finishes him off. But Scarlett has discovered human emotion, especially the feeling of being alienated and vulnerable. The other aliens, sensing she is AWOL, hunt for her.

This new sensibility is so foreign it discombobulates her. Human emotions are as strange and unmanageable to her as the black forest cake she chokes on. She has no human appetites, so can't eat even dessert. She ends up confused and alone in the rain, on a bus, helpless and cold, until a man offers her help, warmth, comfort, a meal of fried egg and beans that -- understandably -- she doesn't touch, and an equally alien cultural experience in the gibberish TV clown. 

When the generous, unselfish man leaves her in her room, with a heater, she for the first time discovers and enjoys the beauty of her body. Under the skin she is the alien but her experience with the misshapen man has opened her to the warmth of the helpful stranger. Not just acting but now feeling human, she welcomes his kisses and sexual approach. But their intercourse is thwarted by her lack of vagina. She looks for it with a lamp, uncomprehending. She can't let him in. Her humanity is skin-deep.

Under the skin she remains the alien, as the rapist logger discovers when he claws her skin off with her pants. As she has discovered human warmth and feeling, though, it's apt that the logger destroys her in a gas-lit fire on the snow. In the last shot, low angle up through the falling snowflakes, her smoke seems to be rising toward a white-framed portal (unless that's a flaw in the Cineplex screen). 

For all it's sci-fi trappings, then, this is a very human and immediate story about the vulnerability of the emotional, the inhumanity of the selfish and destructive, and — in human and alien alike — our quest for completion, to connect with someone both on and underneath the skin

Under the Skin -- Take 2: Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin was better received by critics than by audiences upon its 2013 release. Perhaps audiences were surprised when a promisingly sexy thriller turned into sci fi, without having the en route mysteries explained.

I any case, Under the Skin gains considerable interest from Glazer’s next film, the extremely successful 2023 Zone of Interest. The illumination is mutual. 

Both films open with an eerie, barely musical sound track and ambiguous abstract imagery. The effect is disturbing and suggestive of an other-worldly context, an abnormality.

Both films follow an outsider’s experience of an alien world. Here it’s the heroine’s exploration of Earth. She seduces men to harvest their internals. Somehow the severely disfigured victim escapes. When she encounters a non-predatory man she deepens her vulnerability. Drawn into sexual intimacy she is shocked to discover herself unable to admit her lover. She is ultimately destroyed by a frustrated rapist.

    In the later film it’s the Nazi commandant and his family who are coldly detached from normal human feelings and responsibility, as they try to marginalize their concentration camp.

     Indeed both films center on exposing the central woman as an inhuman. One is an alien whether from outer space. She proves a first draft of that completely selfish and heartless Zone of the Nazi functionary’s Interest.