In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011)

Perhaps if this film had not been written and directed by the beautiful Angelina Jolie it would be recognized as one of the great war films. Its distinctive focus is the victimization of women in war. An end title tells us 50,000 women were raped in the Bosnian war. In the title’s variation on the Promised Land, the phrase ‘milk and honey’ is supplanted by ‘blood and honey.’ That is, murder replaces sustenance, rape love, betrayal trust, and humanity is supplanted by the murderous machinery of war.

One soldier tells Danijel that his pregnant wife must be delivering a son because a little daughter would drive him mad with doting. In the context his madness would have a different source: her doom to become another victim of a soldier’s rape.

The larger theme is the pervasiveness of division. The first shot is an aerial view of the landscape, A slash of river divides the Serbs and Bosnians. The people get along well enough to enjoy a dance together, where the Bosnian Moslem Ajla charmingly connects with the Serb soldier Danijel. Their promising romance is interrupted when a bomb shatters the club.

When they next meet Ajla is a prisoner and Danijel the camp commander. That power gap inhibits both their attraction, until her humiliation drives them together. The tender eroticism of their first lovemaking derives from the refuge each finds in the other, she from the other Serb soldiers’ brutality and he from the callousness of his job, personified by his father the general. Even Danijel’s protection fails when he is transferred to Sarajevo. 

They are reunited when she, having escaped the first camp, falls in with the Bosnian underground and agrees to let herself be captured to enable her comrades to get at Danijel, now more murderous than his father. Their lovemaking turns wild from Danijel’s doubting her. 

The division of that promising romantic couple gives way to the division within each character. Danijel is torn between his love for her and his father’s hatred of the Bosnians, for what they have done to the Serbs. Ajla overcomes her emotions for Danijel to avenge the Serbs’ murder of her infant nephew. So neither a passionate love nor a driven character’s mission can survive the division by war. Arguably Ajila is most victimized by the war not by her imprisonment, humiliation and rape, but when she is turned against her true lover. There her most positive aspect is poisoned.

In her first scene Ajla is painting a self-portrait, in relatively naturalistic style. At the end we see her final self-portrait, a more expressionistic one in which she seems to have imposed her own splotchy image on the portrait Danijel’s father ordered her to make of him, before he ordered her rape by another brute soldier. In this painting Ajla tries to expunge the general and her lover. Her ultimate portrait is what Danijel makes when his bullet to her head leaves an abstract red brushstroke against the canvas of the white wall. Bereft of all his resolve and mission he surrenders to the UN peacekeepers as a war criminal. In another form of self-portraiture Each character discovers him/herself from the tests of the war. 

In their night visit to the art gallery Ajla teaches Danijel that in art the most important part is the empty spaces, where the artist decides to do nothing. The war is the something the parties should not be doing. The war discovers the vacancy in both warring parties and the war’s emptying of all the people’s hearts, whether the respective ethnic communities or the central lovers, both together and alone.
     The film should not be judged as a documentary record of this war. As a fiction its thematic sweep covers a larger issue: every war’s undermining of nature, humanity, and the positive sustenance of our feminine nature.   

Rosewater

Rosewater is the film Argo should have been but wasn’t. It tells its story without hype or melodramatic fakery. Without the lies Jon Stewart won’t reap Ben Affleck’s box office. But he made by far the better movie. He respected the truth more than the cliches of the blockbuster.

Stewart has a great, moving story. The saga of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari’s 118-day imprisonment records the largely psychological torture he suffered and his personal responses to it. In solitary confinement he summons up the company of his dead father, whom the Shah had imprisoned and — physically — tortured for being a Communist, and his dead rebel older sister Maryam, who’d introduced him to the marvels of Leonard Cohen and the joys of culture and life. As Stewart shoots the film Iran itself — at least, as played by stand-in Amman, Jordan — is infused with a magic realism that reflects the absent powers and spirits in the cityscape. The imaginary life in the city is like that in the cell -- the country is a jail.

To set the political tone, the film opens on an Iranian poem abut a loving world endangered by the new threat to light. The title records the change in the connotation of rosewater, from the piety and warmth the child Maziar associated with it to the sinister insecure “specialist” who wafts it when he interrogates him. Rosewater has shifted from a humanist piety to serve a dehumanizing tyrant. That distills the tragedy of Iran.

The film deflates some common myths about that enemy country. The young airhead infatuated with Ahmadinejad is no famished street urchin brainwashed with chocolates but an educated Brit. Stewart’s strongest point is to distinguish between the Iranian people and their government. The government may be evil — ironically, itself the Great Satan character it projects on America — but the people are warm, spirited, hungry for freedom and for connection to the outside world. The point is concentrated in Maziar’s comic interview on Stewart’s TV show, where he points to a similarity between Iran and America. This of  course convinces Rosewater that Maziar must be a traitor and a spy.

When Maziar inveigles Rosewater with tales of his international massage experiences he exposes not just the Iranian puritan’s hypocrisy but his projection upon the Other — in this case the profane West — his own suppressed desires and shame. The jailor is more frightened than the prisoner — his power belies his vulnerability. 

     Yet Maziar and Stewart remain confident in the future. In the final scene the Iranian security force demolishes the subversive army of satellite dishes. But behind a door a furtive wide-eyed boy with a cell-phone camera bears witness. As the frightened savagery continues another generation of freedom fighter rises from the shadows. Hope springs eternal.

The Dance of Reality

In his first film in 23 years 86-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky produces a spectacular surrealist meditation on the nature of humanity. His examination of character operates on two levels. As his father transforms from macho autocrat to sensitivity and vulnerability, Jodorowsky’s subject is how to be a proper human. But as that story is played against the background of Chilean politics the same lesson applies to the body politic: how can a government be properly humane. 

Here Jodorowsky’s father looks like the dictator Ortiz — tall, thin, strutting, strong cheekbones, affecting the same moustache — against whom he plots, first a revolt then assassination. At the crucial moment he can’t shoot him because his hands are suddenly crippled, a metaphor for the fact he unawares admires and emulates the autocracy his politics opposes. His hands lock because he can’t kill the outer embodiment of his self; he has to kill it within. His wife frees him by making him fire at the images of Stalin, Ortiz and himself, that is, purging himself of his autocratic insensitive past self.

The father’s crippling connects him to the community of mine-damaged cripples whom he earlier disparaged, refused to let his son help and even attacked. His — first psychological, then physical — crippling is imaged in their missing limbs. All are reduced by their ruinous, uncaring society. The society that pragmatically rejects the broken, the disadvantaged, reflects in the father’s rejection of his son’s sensitivity — that dread homosexuality — and his cruel tests to toughen him. In contrast to the father’s skeletal sternness, the mother has an operatic extravagance both in emotion — she sings all her lines as arias — and in her mothering bosom. She strips down exuberantly to cure her son’s fear of the darkness with a frolic. 

His mother heals his father by urinating on him, a brazen parody of baptism and washing away his sins. Earlier the father blew out the radio by pissing on it during Ortiz's public address. The wife’s beneficent piss corrects the destructive macho posturing of his.
     There are other parodies of Christianity in the film. The mother thinks her son is the reincarnation of her father and rejects him when he loses his long blond hair. The father passes through a series of tests and tortures on the road to redemption, resisting the temptation to betray his ideals. At the end the hawking dwarf outside the family’s clothing store turns water into wine — reducing Christ’s miracle to a parlour trick. When most in need the father is rejected by the film’s one priest, a callous unchristian sort. The ranting theosophist may seem a salutary alternative to the various churches of greed and power — until he shows his own cruelty in forcing the young hero to fight his dead friend’s twin brother in a bar. No religion is valid if it countenances human cruelty. That’s why Jodorowsky’s “reality” is not fixed, hard and cold, but a “dance,” inviting openness, spontaneity, partnering and joy.

Jodorowsky pere is Jewish — and constantly insulted as such — but shows no sign of faith or observance. His conversion from cruel tyrant to sensitivity and forgiveness evokes the change from the Old Testament God to the New. That applies equally to the concept of what kind of person and what kind of government one should be. 

     Obviously this is a very personal film. Jodorowsky himself plays his adult self and his son Brontis plays Alejandro’s father. Its true signature is the brilliant invention in imagery, music and event.

A Special Day

Perhaps the central metaphor in Francesca Comencini’s A Special Day is the synchronized behaviour to which capitalism forces even the individualists. The film traces the meeting of pretty 19-year-old Gina, whose aspirations to be an actress have led to this job as a congressman’s “escort,” and Marco, a loser who’s excited about his future on this first day of his job as chauffeur. Both are economic outsiders, living on the fringe of Rome, but both aspire to get to the hub.

As they idle away the day together, waiting for the congressman to be free, Gina’s first idea is to visit a synchronized swimming competition. Her expensive dress and stiletto heels may set her apart from the plebeians in the audience, but her difference and the others'  attention give her a panic attack. She senses the danger of so distinguishing herself.  Later she synchronizes a school of fish by running her finger up and down their glass cage. But her power is illusory, as we see when in her wild independence she gets a fish tattoo behind her ear and when she brusquely services the congressman. She's his fish. That brusqueness dispels our sense of her idealism. For all her worldliness and free spirit, she’s still trapped in the system that exploits even  — especially — the beautiful. 

Even the heroes’ mothers are trapped. Gina’s mother obviously makes great sacrifices to dream of her daughter’s stardom. She must understand the sordid reality behind her daughter’s urgent shower at the end. Marco’s mother gives the priest free mending and sewing services in hopes he will advance her nebbish son. 

The mothers will persist in their illusions because that’s what mothers do. But our heroes may awaken as a result of this day. The film opens with Rome awakening, first with the street sounds -- mainly dogs -- behind the dark credit backgrounds, then with the dawn. It ends at night, with Marco yet again messing up his career hopes by quitting his job and Gina idly absorbed in the fantasy world of her TV. She's watching some political demonstration but on the fantasy medium. Whether they form a romantic union or not, neither one seems likely to fulfill themselves in this world. As we cling to the possibility of a romantic ending we prove as delusional as them. Marco proudly blows his rare job opportunity but Gina — by blowing not her job — arguably fares even worse, in self-respect.

All three Comencini directors enjoy youth and beauty and centre their stories on that attraction.  But they know the real world doesn’t fairly respect even those thus gifted. That bleak insight proves the neorealist streak underpinning the romantic fantasy.

Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler targets something larger than TV sensationalism — the psychopathology of corporate America. It owes less to Network than to Death of a Salesman, which showed America abandoning character for empty personality.

Of course the film satirizes TV news in several respects. “If it bleeds it leads” encapsulates the ethics of the medium. So, too, does the proportion of its content: a few minutes on the serious issues, with the bulk squandered on local mayhem. The medium prefers to titillate rather than to educate. “It looks so real on TV,” hero Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) muses on the LA local station’s news set, where fantasies are sold as reality. The news team specifically sells the nightmare of urban crime, to engage its viewers in fear.

To succeed as a TV news photographer Bloom graduates from recording a scene to creating the disaster. First he rearranges the family snaps on a bullet-riddled fridge. Later he moves the traffic accident corpse into a more photogenic position. He monkeys with a rival nightcrawler’s van, causing his death. Ultimately he stages an arrest and shoot-out that imperils the police and kills his employee Ricky. But nothing phases Lou.

And that’s the point. Lou is a classic psychopath. He has no family background or life. As he later admits, his problem is not just an unwillingness to communicate with people but a dislike for them. He shows no feeling for any of the victims he sees, even as his intern dies. Lou’s only motivation is his own advancement, his only emotion ambition.

His remarkable glibness shows the self-help education he proudly got online — itself an emblem of insularity. When he tries to get a job with the junk dealer to whom he’s selling stolen goods, Lou carefully distinguishes himself from the slacker youth of his day. He promises diligence, hard work, even offers to work free as an intern. Still selling himself as he exits, he salutes the man’s refusal to hire a thief.  

The more we hear Lou the more he embodies the modern businessman. Failing to get an intern job he sets himself up as a company owner and hires a homeless young Rick — as his intern. Lou drills Rick with management slogans. Instead of conversation he talks like a manual. “Why you pursue something is as important as what you pursue.”  He seduces the desperate news editor Nina (Rene Russo) with the vapid: “A friend is a gift you give yourself.” Underneath that fake sentimentality, however, he is blackmailing her into sex. She is older, more experienced, worldlier, more powerful, but he forces her to his will. 

We watch Lou grow from petty, violent thief into a corporation: his pretentious news photography company. From his Rick interview on we watch Lou act and sound like a company. His unscrupulous and even criminal conduct ultimately leaves him boss of the two-van company with which his rival had earlier tempted him. But Lou owns this company and has recruited three other bright young interns to exploit. Now when he comes to a fork in the road he can take both dark routes.
     The film seems most current hard upon the US election. There the wealthy companies and PACs essentially bought the election that would give the rich more tax breaks, deregulate the economy, repeal health care and further widen the gap between the small group of Haves and the huge mass of Have-nots — who voted themselves down the river. Bloom embodies the Republicans’ corporate religion and total lack of empathy for the disadvantaged. If Lou Bloom seems to evoke the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, his more compelling echo is of the callous child-killing team of Leopold and Loeb, bereft of emotion and empathy.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

Not having seen many Swedish comedies since the demise of that madcap Ingmar Bergman, I was delighted by this biting black comedy. But like Bergman, I suspect director Felix Herngren — and source novelist Jonas Jonasson — is using hero Allan Karlssen as an embodiment of the Swedish national soul. 

The key clue may be Allan’s involuntary (and sloppy) sterilization, which left him reduced and in pain but grateful for his removal from the temptations and tribulations of romance. At film’s end he envies the dithering eternal student Benny for being able to make the romantic connection Allan was denied. The neutered Karlssen embodies Sweden’s pretence to neutrality. 

When the 100-year-old man escapes his old folks’ home for an open-ended adventure he personifies the freedom of the unattached, the unrestrained. The old man stumbles through all sorts of dangers and disasters, blissfully unawares. By taking off with a suitcase stuffed with money he triggers a bikers’ gang chase and a number of deaths and disasters. Totally without guile himself, he hooks up with another solitary man, then another, and blithely blunders through to a happy ending. 

The flashbacks to his earlier life replay that drama — an innocent unaware of all the disasters he is causing. His passion for exploding things clearly alludes to the Swedish genius Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite. The child Allan delights in blowing things up. His first targets, of increasing significance, culminate in the explosion of the merchant who underpaid Allan’s widow mother for her Faberge egg. For that he’s sent to an asylum and sterilized by a social biologist who imagines Allan’s resemblance to the statistical Negro. Allan’s last adventure begins when he blows up the fox who killed his pet cat.

Allan’s life is defined by his passion for explosions. When he fights in the Spanish civil war he has none of the revolutionary ardor of his doomed friend Escobar. Allan just wants to blow things up, which is a suspect form of neutrality, destruction without a principle. His last bridge explosion ingratiates him with Franco who thinks Allan saved his life — when he in fact imperilled it. Allan drinks and parties with Franco and later Truman and Stalin with the neutral’s lack of political engagement. But not without dangerous effect.

For neutrality can be as explosive, as destructive, as taking an impassioned position can be. Allan’s innocence proves dangerous when he helps Oppenheimer invent the atomic bomb and lets himself be swept off to Russia. His mature years are spent as a double agent — another dangerous, self-deceiving form of neutrality — as he passes information between Russia and the West, fatuous stuff which favours and imperils neither side but nonetheless leads to many political assassinations. If Allan is too dumb — he quit school at 9 — to have political awareness and moral awareness, he has an instinct for self-service. That makes this neutral exceedingly dangerous for everyone, however blessed his own accidental success may make him seem.

The violent macho biker who eventually joins Allan’s entourage qualifies by losing his memory. That’s his form of neutering. It enables him to live with Allan, whom he had planned to kill, but also renders him incapable of responsible thought or action. For the lion will lie down with the lamb -- and, more to the point, rise unfed -- only if the lion forgets his nature. He won't be converted by the lamb's example of virtue.
     In contrast to Allan’s ignorance, the polymath Benny is neutered and neutralized by his excess of education, his inability to commit to any one discipline. He is an "almost" anything. At least Benny outgrows his neutrality by venturing into a relationship with Gunilla (and her 40-year-old elephant Sonja). Ultimately Allan’s greatest gift is encouraging Benny not to stay neutralized like he is.

In this vision Sweden has pretended to be neutral but bears a heavy responsibility for the violence and destruction to which she has been party — however “innocently.” The ostensibly neutral end up serving those who exploit them. Neutrality is thus not a moral advantage but an abdication of responsibility.
                                          ***

     Now comes a tangent. Indeed this film proves prophetic. Sweden's latest blunder in its pretence to innocence and neutrality is her premature recognition of the state of Palestine. Pretending neutrality in the Middle East war,  she in fact takes a very dangerous position. By recognizing the Palestinian state Sweden is encouraging the Palestinians to not make peace with Israel. In contrast, Spain's early recognition of the Palestinian state was made contingent upon their negotiations with Israel.
     Sweden is also ignoring the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States. The new “Palestine” lacks the first three of the four criteria for statehood. It doesn’t have a permanent population, because millions of its citizens insist on their right of return to swamp Israel, which would end that legitimate state's Jewish identity. It doesn’t have a defined territory because the Palestinians have refused to negotiate borders for peace with Israel, as per the terms ending the 1967 war.  Palestine lacks a government because the terrorist Hamas runs Gaza and Abbas is in the tenth year of his four-year term in the West Bank. Even after the disasters of the Gaza war an election is expected to prefer Hamas in both areas. The new Hamas-Al Fatah unity government fractures daily. In recognizing the state of Palestine Sweden is pre-empting a peaceful treaty with Israel and recognizing a terrorist state. Also a racist one, as even the “moderate” Abbas has promised there will not be a single Jew in the new Palestine. In the inflamed Middle East Sweden’s “neutrality” is as blissfully ignorant, irresponsible and destructive as Allan Karlssen is — without his silver-haired charm and his defence, senility.

Birdman: CALL Discussion Notes

Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton) played the superhero The Birdman 20 years ago but has turned down the fourth instalment. To advance his art he adapts, directs and acts in the Broadway drama, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The production is troubled by a lead actor’s incapacitating accident, his replacement Mike’s (Edward Norton) Method unruliness, Riggan’s troubled relationship with his daughter Sam (Emma Stone), his bittersweet exchanges with his ex-wife, and the Times critic’s threat to kill the show with an opening night savaging. Riggan also manages to lock himself out of the theatre during a preview, which leads to a massive video sensation of his walking through Times Square and the theatre in his briefs to get to his last scene.

Questions to consider:

1. Why is the first shot a fireball streaking though the heavens? To what later scenes does it connect?
2. How does Inarritu play with his stars’ personae, e.g., Keaton’s six-year period between starring roles in a film and his having played Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) twice for Tim Burton, Edward Norton’s reputation as a difficult actor, etc. 
3. Why is the film set in a superhero culture? Norton played Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk and Emma Stone was in The Amazing Spider-Man. A tv clip refers to Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man films. A Spidey weaves through a marching band, along with some less familiar monsters.
4. Why cast eternal boy Zach Galifianakis as the Broadway producer?
5. Why does Riggan’s self-lockout follow upon his spotting Sam being close with Mike?
6. What is the thematic point of Inarritu’s very long takes, pretending to a single-take film? Might they relate to any of these themes: the continuity between life and art, between truth and fiction? control vs chaos? the ego vs the uncontrollable world? the unexpected virtue of style? Rigging the action?
7. How does the Birdman voice express Riggan?
8. For what might the Birdman be a metaphor? 
9. What’s the point of the ex-superhero actor having superhuman powers? We first see him levitating and at the end we’re led to believe he’s flying. He’s also a dab hand at telekinesis. So?
10. What does the film’s presentation of theatre say about life? Vice versa?
11. Why can Mike get an erection on stage but not in life? Same woman, incidentally.
12. How does this film relate to Mexican director Inarritu’s earlier features, Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel? e.g., He usually gave us a non-linear plot. 
13. Why the subtitle (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)? Why is it the title of the Times review? Who has what ignorance and what’s its virtue? Might it relate to our prosaic sense of ‘realism’? 
14. Consider the four female leads: Riggan’s daughter Sam, costar Leslie (Naomi Watts), sexy girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and devoted ex-wife Sylvia (Amy Ryan).
15. Why that particular Raymond Carver short story for the play? What is the film talking about by “love”? There’s a story that Carver’s editor so reworked his original manuscript that Carver never quite recovered his confidence and self-respect after that experience. 
16. Why is Mike reading Borges’ Labyrinths on the tanning bed, a seminal text in Magic Realism? The Times review heralds Riggan’s work as a new realism. Is the film?
17. Why is Thomas named Riggan? Why is Mike Shiner when that’s what Riggan gives him?
18. What’s the significance of the Truth or Dare game? Why does Mike in the game stick only to the Truth? What on stage? Riggan?
19. Why does Sam retreat to the dangerous rooftop? How does that relate to the ending?
20. After Riggan blows his nose what are the implications of his new beak?
21. What’s the point of the title credits style, words assembling through scattered letters?
22. What’s the significance of Riggan’s prized Carver cocktail napkin and Mike’s stealing it for his Times interview? 
23. How does Sam’s view of her father’s relevance change?
24. How does the allusion to Phantom of the Opera open out in this context?

Consider the following dialogue:

1. Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.
2. —I wish I had more self-respect.  — You’re an actress, honey.
3. Note on Riggan’s mirror: “A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.”
4. Shave off that pathetic goatee. Get some surgery. Sixty’s the new thirty, motherfucker.
5. People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky. depressing, philosophical bullshit.
6. The stage is the only place I know what I’m doing.
7. You’re a celebrity not an actor.
8. You confuse love with admiration.

Maps to the Stars

The framing star maps represent David Cronenberg’s two arenas of action here. The first, the map of Hollywood stars’ homes, points to the mundane glamorous world whose pretensions he approaches with acerbic satire. There are some great comic lines here. The stilted acting style, whether terse or flamboyant, suggests the artificiality of those characters’ lives. 

For their real drama lies beyond their awareness. That is represented by the last map, that of the heavenly stars. Where the streets are where the characters live — or used to — this map is where mankind functions. Even the powerful are but puppets of the gods. Here the satire gives way to the larger dimension of classical Greek tragedy, a powerful family doomed by a buried secret. Cronenberg visits a classical tragedy upon a silly Hollywood family. Small people can live big lives, even those small enough to think they’re living big lives. 

The two tones intertwine in the various characters’ quotation of a Paul Eluard poem. The libertines — who live in satire — yearn for liberty — freedom from the gods that control the tragic dimension. 

The family’s name, Weiss, is ironic because for all its power the family has very little wisdom. The married couple know their secret but have foolishly tried to hide it and its consequences. Dr Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) is famous for psychological texts that extoll the value of (of course) confronting secrets. His therapy method uses physical abuse to squeeze the last secrets out of his patients’ flesh. Wife Christina (Olivia Williams) manages their 13-year-old movie star son Benjie (Evan Bird), fresh out of drug rehab and contracting to star in the sequel to his hit comedy Bad Babysitter (which is not necessarily a reflection on his parents and their “chore whores”).  

The family’s key secret is that Christina and Stafford are siblings, separated in childhood, who unwittingly met abroad, fell in love, married, had two children and discovered they were enacting the most primal taboo. But their love was too great to part. The secondary secret is that four years ago Benjie’s older sister Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) drugged him (with “vitamin” pills) and then burned the house down. He was saved with only psychological scars, but she suffered burns to her body and face. The knowing Agatha and ignorant Benjie used to replay their parents’ marriage in a ceremony of reciprocal consecration. 

Released from the sanatorium, Agatha returns to Hollywood and gets a job as personal assistant to a fading star, Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore). A tragic heroine in her own right — and mind — Havana seeks to revive her career by playing her dead mother’s role in a remake of the ‘60s classic that made her mother a star. She first loses the part but gets it when the other actress loses her young son in a tragic accident. The gods move in mysterious ways their wonders to deform.

While the parents are haunted by their buried secret, Havana is haunted by taunting visits from her dead mother — even worse, as she was in her beautiful youth. Benjie is haunted first by the young girl whom he visited in the hospital and then by the actress’s dead son.The hauntings embody the chilling grip the past maintains on the present. When Agatha reappears she has the power of a disturbing ghost, provoking her brother’s confusion, their mother’s agony and their father’s futile attempt to assert his power, first with a big bribe then with a physical attack. At the end the whole family is destroyed, mother by fire and water, the kids by their parody wedding and the father by a death-in-life stupor — that probably wreaks havoc upon his much anticipated book tour.

Underneath all the glamour and Hollywood sunshine this is a Cronenberg horror movie. Each major character wrestles with personal demons beyond the call of normal neurosis. As the old maps used to say on their unexplored spaces — There be monsters here. 
     It’s a challenging film, as it interweaves two such incompatible genres, satire and classical tragedy, with some very unlikable characters, especially the Weiss males and the colonialist Havana. Unlike Benjie’s franchise, this film is one of a kind, that requires us to adjust to its quirks and disturbing inflections. It denies us our usual satisfactions — always a Cronenberg virtue.

The Romantic Englishwoman (1975)

Joseph Losey’s theme here is borders — the limits that we set in order to transgress them.

Borders are arbitrary, disputable. So in the railway car one man says they are in Germany, the other France. 
      Between them is Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) who has left her family and posh French estate in search of a cure at the waters of Baden Baden. But she limits her escape to wildness to an intemperate bet at roulette. She spots the handsome young gigolo Thomas (Helmut Berger) but responds with bemusement not lust. The latter is what her novelist husband Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine) imagines for her when on the phone she tells him she’s going for a lift (aka elevator). As she lives her life she also lives his more lurid — and cliche — fantasy.

Dashing young Thomas makes a career of crossing borders. He hijacks a hotel dinner cart to sup outside. His passport declares him “poet” — the wilder version of the husband novelist. Rootless and amoral, he delivers hot cars and cool cocaine to shady men and romantic delusions to wealthy spinsters. “The English women are the worst,” he says, “They want everything.” 
     That covers Elizabeth: she has the optimum home, cute son, handsome successful loving husband, but she also wants — she knows not what. There is still a fire in her marriage, as we see when she and Lewis make wild love on their lawn, interrupted by their neighbour’s headlights (another scene of transgressed borders). The title elides the border between English and Woman. 

The other border scriptwriter Tom Stoppard plays with here is that between fiction and life. That’s his familiar territory. He made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the brilliant modernist comedy that moved between the familiar life of Hamlet’s play and the off-stage life centered on his two bit-part friends. Our experience of Elizabeth’s life is paralleled by — or filtered through? — her husband’s attempt to draw a fiction out of his life. He’s writing a screenplay (this one?) about a woman who goes somewhere to find herself. To avoid the cliche he tries to turn that into a thriller.

Which is what he does to his wife’s life. Lewis likes to set up a life situation to see what will happen. After his phone chat with Elizabeth we see he’s having a drink with a scantily clad girl. She’s their au pair but Lewis ends his experiment by sending her off to bed. The girl finds herself in another man’s plot later when Thomas takes her to a movie, then distracts her from her duties — dangerously — with the pretence to help her English. The girl is fired but Thomas’s stay as Lewis’s putative secretary continues. The authors survive their characters.

Lewis has invited Thomas first to visit, then to stay, as a kind of experiment. He wants to see what will happen between Thomas and Elizabeth, to see if they have indeed cuckolded him as his aberrant fantasy tells him. As a writer he wants to watch what develops. As a husband he tries to exorcise — or exercise — his insecurity. He is determined to catch his wife at infidelity. He pushes them into the date at which Thomas is spotted by his nemesis, forcing his departure, the brief intimacy with Elizabeth that Lewis catches, and the lovers' escape to Italy (over another border) where they play out their — and Lewis’s — doomed fantasy. When Thomas calls Lewis to come take her home, Lewis is followed by the shady men whose cocaine Thomas has lost to the rain and he’s finished. He has crossed his last border. 

As a vagabond rapscallion Thomas identifies himself with a Fielding character, Tom Jones. Not his fault it’s the wrong Fielding. He read him in translation.
     The normalcy to which Lewis returns Elizabeth is the sadly escapist party they had planned and — as we did — forgotten. Our glimpse of that festivity is of a desperate, pathetic attempt to kick over the traces — cross the border — of our normal, contained life. That is a hardly promising vision of the life to which the lively wife, reined in, returns. It's yet another scene her novelist husband has arranged for them to “live.”