108.2Abstract (summary)
Merhige's revival of Murnau updates the film's original satire. Unlike the late Choco, the vampire shoe still fits. The filmmakers' world is characterized as decadent, unscrupulous, perched to violate even the last semblance of innocence (e.g., Greta ungarbed). The industry is so compromised that even in that pre-Method period the characters take in stride the star's spontaneous snacking on a live bat. The current industry provides precisely the target that Nosferatu addressed at its point in German history. Murnau's themes of sexual anxiety, social corruption, and the nightmarish projection of the outsider remain pertinent - so, too, this Murnau's pretence to be a scientist "engaged in the creation of memory," not an artist. That way lies President Reagan's prophetic confusion between his screen and his real life.
Of course, de Sade's stories are powerful and dangerous. Not for Kaufman the naive liberalism that a freedom - even of expression - is an unmixed blessing. In this film, de Sade's novel Justine prompts Simone to run away with the passionate architect employed by her cruel husband (A Good Thing). But de Sade's precious Madeleine is murdered by an inmate aroused by the story he has been orally passing on. However, that inmate is no innocent turned by bad literature. He is the public executioner (in the pre-credit sequence de Sade watches the man guillotine a beautiful young aristocrat). So de Sade's literature is no more dangerous - or controllable - than other forms of revolution or politics. Similar strokes on behalf of different folks. "How easily, dear reader," our de Sade purrs in the preamble, "one changes from predator to prey." The madman's visions are as likely to lead to a disruptive justice (e.g., the liberation of Simone) as to injustice (e.g., the murder of Madeleine). In the destruction of the humane priest Coulmier, the real villain is the censorious and hypocritical Dr Royer-Collard, not de Sade. Here de Sade is the noble storyteller and the government's censor is the Sadist.
Bibiane's redemption begins when she develops an interest in her victim. When she visits the funeral home she meets Karsen's son, Evian (Jean-Nicholas Verreault), summoned from his frogman job to attend to his father's death. At first she is reluctant to offer him comfort, having to brave the oaths of the son and Annstein's fellow fish-workers that vengeance will be visited upon the unknown killer. But soon the two fall in love. He concludes she must be an angel, because her presence prevents him from embarking on a fatal airplane flight. By film's end, she has confessed to her role in Annstein's death; her lover forgives her, and together they pour the dead man's ashes into the sea, fulfilling his desire to be buried with his wife, who drowned when Evian was only three. In this "very pretty story," "To make love we turn hate around." Through the fish-eye lens of accidents and coincidences Bibiane recovers focus and passion in a life that had dissolved into drift.
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In Shadow of the Vampire, John Malkovich portrays cinematic pioneer F. W. Murnau, who created the bone-chilling Nosferatu in 1922. And how can his vampire film go wrong when he has a real vampire for a leading man? Any director is accustomed to back-biting among practitioners of the lively arts - so why make a fuss about neck-biting?
MAURICE YACOWAR is on sabbatical from The University of Calgary, where he will teach Film Studies in the fall. For the discussion of O Brother, Where Art Thou? the author gratefully acknowledges the contribution of his colleague, Dr Bart Beaty.
Hollywood's jaw-dropping special effects don't seem very special any more. While blockbusters flog their increasingly boring high-tech pizzazz, some major films are mercifully returning to the stark delight of simply telling a story, not only as a strategy but as a theme. Ironically, the current fashion for self-referentiality brings us full circle back to the primitive pleasures of story telling. Three current successes, Shadow of the Vampire, Quills and Canada's own Maelstrom - with perhaps a Coen appetizer and side-dishes of Chocolat and the meatier Hannibal - provide intriguing cases in point.
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BEFORE we consider how Story Rules, one reservation. Stories may be timeless, but they can still prove obsolete. Lasse Hallstrom's hugely popular Chocolat is set in 1957, and that's where it belongs. A free spirit (Juliette Binoche) blows into a provincial French town and liberates it from its own deadly dull tranquillity. Her aphrodisiacal chocolates both symbolize and unleash the life of pleasure. They reunite one family, revive another, healthily separate a third, and provoke three romances (not counting the dogs). True, there is a faint counterpoise to the film's libertinism: both the wind-spirit heroine and the Irish gypsy (Johnny Depp) settle down at the end - that is, they are liberated from their liberty. But overall, the film's driving value is the principle of pleasure.
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Had it been released in the '50s, this film would have been a clarion call to a freer, less conformist life. It would have been as salutary as its kindred wake-up call, Never on Sunday (Jules Dassin, 1960). But in 2001 the movie is a cliche, no longer a response to its time. Now it's redundant - a clarion call to smugness - because our current lives are not especially known for abstemiousness. Thus defending pleasure against monstrous moralists is an unthinking ritual, as dangerous as the churchly reflexes it condemns. Is unexamined licence worth licensing? The film gilds the sickly lily. Maybe that's why North America has been lapping it up and the Academy iced it with Oscar nominations.
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Far healthier is the historical reflection in the Coen Brothers' shaggy dog comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Though the Coens have suggested the film is a version of Homer's Odyssey - which they claim never to have read - that's a red herring. Rather, the Coens have just made the film that would have been made by the hero of Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1941). In that lower-case odyssey Joel MacRae played a famous director of comic fluff who resolves to make a serious, realistic, important film, titled O Brother, Where Art Thou? To experience that "real" world he hits the dirt road with a dime in his pocket. But after he is charged with murder, the cinematographer finds himself labouring on a chain gang. And it is only when the convicts join a black church congregation for a cartoon movie that he discovers the joy and relief that empty comedies - such as his - provide for the suffering. His earlier froth is justified - in a comic film of serious vision.
When the Coens allude to The Odyssey (the Cyclops, the Sirens, the credits), they point to the pompousness of Sullivan's initial ambition. In homage, they adopt Sturges' mix of sombre and slapstick. As the Coens' plot draws on Sullivan's life experience (the chain gang, the cinema, class privilege, the deep sleaze of the 1930s South, etc.) it demonstrates how a film drawn from harsh life experience can still provide the satisfactions of comedy. The Coens are adapting a classic Odyssey, alright, but it's the classic Sturges, not Homer. To answer the title, it is in the sharing of popular entertainments that we find our brotherhood, our community.
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IN another specific film homage, E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire is a behind-the-scenes story of the filming of F.W. Murnau's 1922 classic, Nosferatu: Ein Symphonie des Grauens. Merhige's twist is that the unknown Max Schreck, who played Murnau's Count Orlok, is a real vampire, who systematically works through the supporting cast and crew before sinking his teeth into leading lady Greta Schroder (Catherine McCormack). To enable Greta to perform with the terrifying Schreck (Willem Dafoe), Murnau (John Malkovich) has her pumped full of morphine. And in drinking her blood Schreck becomes sufficiently drugged that Murnau is able to complete his film - and to plot the vampire's demise. (Never mind that in real life Schreck and his "victims" went on to make other films. Why let the facts impede a good myth?)
The names invite speculation. The weird and mysterious principle is named Schreck - German for "fear." Murnau named his vampire Orlok to avoid copyright suits from Bram Stoker's estate, who secured "Count Dracula" between the fangs of copyright. "Orlok" recalls the stranger from Porlock who supposedly interrupted Coleridge's vision of "Kubla Khan." That name also rings too good to be true except allegorically: Coleridge's outpouring was locked shut at the point his poem ends, no real stranger necessary.
Merhige's footage seamlessly interweaves with Murnau's. The result is a witty thriller that is both an homage to the master and a critique of the art. The film's central paradox is that film (like other forms of storytelling) bestows an immortality on its subjects. The tale outlives the teller and the topic too. But the immortalizing art also sucks out life, as the idiosyncratic individual experience is transformed into the general. The story profits at the cost of inconvenient reality.
Film is particularly life-sucking because it separates the image from the actor's body. As Ms Schroder puts it, "A theatrical audience gives me life. This thing [the camera] merely takes it from me." Merhige makes Murnau as much a vampire as his Schreck. He is both frightening and pathetic in his compulsive thirst for image making. He is made immortal by the revitalizing power of his work. Like the vampire, the filmmaker thrives in the dark, as the house lights end his vision.
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Merhige's revival of Murnau updates the film's original satire. Unlike the late Choco, the vampire shoe still fits. The filmmakers' world is characterized as decadent, unscrupulous, perched to violate even the last semblance of innocence (e.g., Greta ungarbed). The industry is so compromised that even in that pre-Method period the characters take in stride the star's spontaneous snacking on a live bat. The current industry provides precisely the target that Nosferatu addressed at its point in German history. Murnau's themes of sexual anxiety, social corruption, and the nightmarish projection of the outsider remain pertinent - so, too, this Murnau's pretence to be a scientist "engaged in the creation of memory," not an artist. That way lies President Reagan's prophetic confusion between his screen and his real life.
The film also celebrates the fecundity of fiction. Story breeds story, film breeds film, genre breeds genre - and actors breed mythic personae. In film an actor draws upon his earlier performances, as his persona accrues layers and inflections of meaning. Though Malkovich immerses himself entirely into his Murnau, his casting mobilizes our memories of his earlier portrayals of the sinister and amoral (e.g., Les liaisons dangereuses, Heart of Darkness) and especially the theatre-in-the-brain metaphysical acrobatics of Being John Malkovich. The casting of Udo Kier as Murnau's doomed (here) producer, Albin Grau, draws affectionately on Kier's career in schlock horror films, capped by his Baron Frankenstein and Count Dracula in the two classics Paul Morrissey made in 1973 for Andy Warhol, Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. Here the erstwhile Dracula is the vampire's victim. This casting is a playful riff on the actor's immortality on film. As the tale survives the teller, the persona not only survives but feeds on and grows from each accumulating role.
Though clearly a horror film, Shadow of the Vampire also exercises a different genre: the behind-the-scenes drama. These are fictional versions of the "Making of..." informercials. Films about filmmaking are stories about storytelling, but made more fascinating by the magic of the machinery. Early silent comedy abounds with films about film-making. Early sound musicals exploited the backstage romance, cashing in on the pleasures of the stage musical but exercising the filmic advantage of unstageable Busby Berkeley compositions. The stage or film-set setting was simple, cheap, and provided the chic cheek of exposing the magic without dispelling its awe.
Perhaps this formal self-consciousness derived from the medium's sense of its own newness. Because filmmakers and their audiences were so intrigued by their new powers - first in silent movies and then in talkies - they delighted in exposing them. One finds the same luxuriant indulgence in Shakespeare's (after Lyly's and Nashe's) obsession with the idea of theatre, plays, performance, when the English theatre was first finding its feet - and exploring the wings. As early plays were at least in part about being actors performing - e.g., Will Somers playing Summer's Last Will and Testament - films about films are intriguing stories about films telling stories.
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THE Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance ethic of the Hollywood stage-musical film is extended a tad in Philip Kaufman's Quills. Kaufman exhumes no less prickly a scribe than the historical Marquis de Sade as an example of the compulsive writer. This de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) is not defined by his patented - well, he gave us the word - sadism, but by the fervid need to write out his fantasies. Here he personifies the psychological need for narrative expression.
Confined to the Charenton asylum, de Sade uses the young laundress Madeleine (Kate Winslet, clearly trading up from the sinking DiCaprio) to smuggle out his latest novel, Justine. Shocked by the novel's content, the Emperor Napoleon assigns a draconian overseer to Charenton, Dr Royer-Collard (Michael Caine). The doctor puts a stop to the Marquis' inmate plays after de Sade stages a bawdy depiction of Royer-Collard's marriage to the teenage Simone (Amelia Warner). Deprived of paper, de Sade writes on his bedsheets and has Madeleine smuggle them out for publication. Plucked of his quills, he writes with chicken bones and glass splinters. Increasingly isolated from outside contact, he relays a story through several inmates to his Madeleine. His cell stripped bare, de Sade writes with his blood on his clothing. Naked in a dungeon, he writes on the wall with his excrement. Even being tortured and mutilated (historically untrue) doesn't silence him. After his tongue has been torn out, de Sade still comes up with a killer punchline: when his friendly Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) offers spiritual relief, de Sade swallows his crucifix and chokes to death. This guy has to tell a story.
Of course, de Sade's stories are powerful and dangerous. Not for Kaufman the naive liberalism that a freedom - even of expression - is an unmixed blessing. In this film, de Sade's novel Justine prompts Simone to run away with the passionate architect employed by her cruel husband (A Good Thing). But de Sade's precious Madeleine is murdered by an inmate aroused by the story he has been orally passing on. However, that inmate is no innocent turned by bad literature. He is the public executioner (in the pre-credit sequence de Sade watches the man guillotine a beautiful young aristocrat). So de Sade's literature is no more dangerous - or controllable - than other forms of revolution or politics. Similar strokes on behalf of different folks. "How easily, dear reader," our de Sade purrs in the preamble, "one changes from predator to prey." The madman's visions are as likely to lead to a disruptive justice (e.g., the liberation of Simone) as to injustice (e.g., the murder of Madeleine). In the destruction of the humane priest Coulmier, the real villain is the censorious and hypocritical Dr Royer-Collard, not de Sade. Here de Sade is the noble storyteller and the government's censor is the Sadist.
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AND so to the year's best Canadian feature - at least according to the voting audience at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Genie Awards jury (who awarded it top honours for the categories of director, screenplay, lead actress, and cinematographer) and, last and most certainly least, your obedient reviewer.
Who can't love a film that's narrated by an indomitable fish? This prehistoric pisces uses his last breaths to tell "a very pretty story," that begins with a graphic abortion and the cremation of the fetus. Then, like a whirlpool, it spins its human characters until the lines between earth and water, between life and the conscious and the subconscious are dissolved in the bracing joy of surrealism.
Denis Villeneuve's Maelstrom is a simple parable. Bibiane Champagne (Marie-Josee Croze), a beautiful businesswoman, finds redemption after a series of odd accidents and coincidences. She is young, spirited, independent, the perfect subject for a cover story on future entrepreneurs in Avenir magazine. But there are chinks in her armour, beginning with her traumatic abortion. Though at 25 she's running three women's clothing stores, she remains in the shadow of her famous business-whiz mother. When Bibiane suffers a financial setback, her brother hijacks her stores, and her bubbly life begins to go flat. All of her apparent success proves to be at dangerously loose ends. Driving home from a drunken bash, she hits a 53-year-old fish-plant worker, Annstein Karsen (Klimbo), who staggers back to his flat only to die.
Though Bibiane escapes the accident scene without being apprehended, she begins to suffer a series of fishy ramifications from her secret crime. For one thing, her favourite Chinese seafood dish is suddenly too tough - because the man she killed was the one who used to select the squid at the market. Poetic justice moves in mysterious ways. And all the [Not Transcribed] car-washes in town cannot cleanse her car of its fishy smell (and it's not one of those '50s models, you know, with fins). Finally, at her lowest point, she risks her life to drive it off the docks. But she gets a second chance at life, indicated by a title, a loop in the narrative, and her clambering, soaked, back up to the dock.
Bibiane's redemption begins when she develops an interest in her victim. When she visits the funeral home she meets Karsen's son, Evian (Jean-Nicholas Verreault), summoned from his frogman job to attend to his father's death. At first she is reluctant to offer him comfort, having to brave the oaths of the son and Annstein's fellow fish-workers that vengeance will be visited upon the unknown killer. But soon the two fall in love. He concludes she must be an angel, because her presence prevents him from embarking on a fatal airplane flight. By film's end, she has confessed to her role in Annstein's death; her lover forgives her, and together they pour the dead man's ashes into the sea, fulfilling his desire to be buried with his wife, who drowned when Evian was only three. In this "very pretty story," "To make love we turn hate around." Through the fish-eye lens of accidents and coincidences Bibiane recovers focus and passion in a life that had dissolved into drift.
The film seems like a ballad, with its simplicity, irony, and the framing quotation of "Good morning, starshine." Villeneuve gives the drama an unearthly, synthetic feel by bathing the action in blue and green tints. But his most outrageous - i.e., interesting - device is to have the whole story narrated by a large, grisly fish (the voice of Pierre Lebeau), who periodically reappears in a slaughterhouse basement to have his head chopped off again and to tell the film's story. Our fish is not as adept as Scherezade at keeping his head, but to tell his story he keeps reviving. He is far more self-aware and worldly than the tracly woman who narrates her mother's saga in Chocolat. The fish tale brings the teller back to life.
The ancient fish establishes the storytelling urge as primeval. The storyteller is as basic a form of life and consciousness as a fish. The storyteller is indomitable, persisting with his tale even beyond his last gasp. He's like some Ancient Marinated. Even if the fish is ultimately silenced - just before he explains our destiny to us - his story persists. "All human actions are manifestations against death," as one character quotes the Norwegian writer Bjorn Magnussen (who, of course, killed himself).
The fish-frame has several other effects. It amplifies the enigma and drama of that ballad-simple plot. It makes the subject of the film not the story but its telling. That is to say, the film is less about Bibiane's experience than about the function of telling her story. One woman's redemption by a centred, unselfish love is less important than its retelling as exemplum. Stories keep us alive and spirited, so they affect immortality.
Finally, the fish tale reminds us of the mysteries of our life, the unfathomable potential of destiny, nature, and supernature. As the hero's father "only believed in what he could see," he lived a partial, unfulfilled existence. Frightened by his wife's drowning, he stayed on land. But his subconscious desires drove him to the fishery - and he named his son Evian! As the title may suggest, man and fish are equally subject to the fatal whirlpools of nature, destiny, chance, but man is distinguished by the consciousness that allows for choice and love and - present company excepted - storytelling. Hence the contrast between the lover-parent relationships. Amid the artifice of fashion, Bibiane is smothered by her legendary mother. But because Evian lives with the sea he transcends his frustrated father.
Villeneuve contrasts the jammed, denatured city to the open waters. Water shots punctuate the rhythm as much as the yappy fish does. In the dead man's sad apartment, one wall is papered with a sumptuous forest scene. In Bibiane's posher, more sterile space, one poster variably asserts that (i) "All the reactionaries are tigers on paper" and (ii) "All the revolutionaries are tigers on paper." Both apartments seem remote from the roots of life, but Karsen's expresses his deflected desire. The plastic metallic blue in the scenes of Bibiane's abortion and the cremation of her fetus are antithetical to the sea at which the lovers make their peace.
This is, of course, not the first film to have been narrated by fish. In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, one frame device presents Python-faced fish engaging in chit-chat as if they were accountants on a commuter train. But Villeneuve's fish is pure, undeniable fish, with no anthropomorphic pretence other than his abilities to think, speak, and tell his story - and to recognize a Grieg fugue when he's trapped by one.
Although this narrator is outside the plot-line of the film, fish permeate the plot. Karsen's world centres upon the selection and cleaning of fish. His colleagues console Evian by presenting him with a huge fish. Bibiane is caught in a traffic jam caused when a truckload of frozen fish spills onto the road and has to be shovelled away. Prefiguring her hit-and-run, she drives over a fish when she leaves. She dreams of a writhing eel, the one-eyed snake of the sea.
In addition, the narrator fish has a human double in the plot. Separately, both Bibiane and her lover in the depths of their confusion seek advice from an innocent bystander (Marc Gelinas). He is a pragmatic, lugubrious chap whose deep jowels and deeper voice align him with the fish narrator. In the Metro station the man advises Bibiane that it would be unnecessary and foolish to turn herself in for the accidental death: "If I were you I'd keep my mouth shut." Later, in a bar, when the miserably drunk Evian is torn between his love for Bibiane and his need to avenge his father, the bystander again insists: "There's no problem. Marry her and keep quiet." Contrary to the narrator's impulse, the fish-face within the story advises both lovers to suppress their story, to shut up and get on with their lives. But he serves the classic function by drawing out their stories and finding direction in them.
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DESPITE their black humour and often harsh imagery, all three of these films sustain a comic tone, with varying overlays of romantic whimsy. As anyone who has ever giggled at a "Boo!" realizes, comedy and horror are closely related, joined at the funnybone. Maybe it's related to whistling past the graveyard. In fact, the tone of these three films is personified by Anthony Hopkins in his revival of Hannibal Lecter in Ridley Scott's Hannibal. Hopkins plays the cannibal as an elegant, supremely intelligent man who can't stop talking - except to bite off more of his listener than he can chew. His enchanted FBI adversary, Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore), spends much of the film listening to audio tapes of Lecter. In their affair he penetrates her with his words. In the penultimate dinner, the extempore storyteller supreme spins a creation off the top of someone else's head! In his hunger for the finest pleasures of life, Hannibal the Cannibal is at once savage and supremely civilized - the living and killing ambivalence of the twentieth century. In his one person collapses the human spectrum: the cannibal and the gourmet, the pre- and the ultra-civilized. He is the human equivalent of Villeneuve's fish, indomitable, primitive, compulsively talking. Little wonder that Hannibal's exuberance for all the arts of living culminates in the joy of telling stories and - even better - living them.
Word count: 3706
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Summer 2001
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