Flesh for Frankenstein (reprint)

 Here is my essay for the Criterion edition of the Paul Morrissey film, written in 1998.

Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein is one of the goriest film comedies ever made. Yet despite its schlocky sensationalism, it’s still a Paul Morrissey film. That means it has some passionately felt things to say about how we live—and mainly waste—our lives today. Specifically, it blames sexual liberty and individualistic freedom for destroying our personal and social fibre by turning people into commodities. As in his Blood for Dracula (1974) and Beethoven’sNephew (1985), Morrissey suggests that the moral failure exposed in his contemporary films—such as the Flesh trilogy (1968–72), MixedBlood (1984), and Spike of Bensonhurst (1988)—derives from historical romanticism. 

Morrissey deliberately lets his characters speak clichés for his satiric purpose. He lets them act inconsistently to suggest the vagaries of mortal whim. He goes way, way overboard, especially on the in-your-face gore in the rare 3-D version, because he considers both the horror genre and the 3-D fad to be ridiculous indulgences, romantic and commercial respectively. The film is absurd, but that’s calculated—and right in line with Morrissey’s familiar underlying moral spin. 

Morrissey’s key target here is sexual indulgence. The mad Baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier) is married to his sister, Katrin (Monique Van Vooren). With theirtwo children they live a demented sitcom family’s life; hubby rushes off to his lab and wife complains of neglect. With his trusty servant, Otto (Arno Juerging), the baron has constructed a heroic female and now plans to make her a male mate. For him he needs the brain of a lustful primitive “who wants to make love to anything.” Things go awry when the baron transplants the head of a would-be monk (Srdjan Zelenovic) instead of the lusty peasant (Joe Dallesandro), who becomes the baroness’ lover, while the baron is engaged in a barren act of reproduction in his laboratory. 

For Morrissey, the baron’s science represents a sexuality detached from human emotion. The incestuous couple, victims of their parents’ libertinism, show no love in their union. The baron shows no sexual interest in his sister/wife nor jealousy at her infidelities. In contrast, Dallesandro’s peasant suggests a sexuality that is free and natural. With his energy and dedication to his friend, this character is the most positive role that Morrissey gave Dallesandro. 

Yet pointing up the destructiveness of unbridled sexuality, the baroness is killed when she commands the zombie to satisfy her, while the baron and Otto literally forget the place of sexuality in life. Further, by framing the film with shots of the malevolent children, Morrissey suggests that man’s corruption has contaminated the future. 

Finally, there is that sensationalist 3-D—the projectiles show Morrissey’s tongue in cheek. Morrissey shoves man’s physicality at us when he juts his corpse’s feet out of the screen, with the various tumbling guts and spouting blood, and the climactic spearing out of the baron’s guts. Morrissey is satirizing film violence and the genre’s gore in these shots, because they clearly refer more to other films than to reality: “To know death, Otto, you have to. . .” is a pointed parody of Marlon Brando’s pretentious line from Last Tango in Paris. 

As Alfred Hitchcock often demonstrated, in rather different tones, comedy and horror, laughter and fear, are closely related experiences. In few films are they yoked as exuberantly as in Paul Morrissey’s Fleshfor Frankenstein.

Blood for Dracula (reprint)

Here is my essay on the Paul Morrissey film, that appeared in the Criterion edition in 1998.

Paul Morrissey’s two horror entertainments, Flesh forFrankenstein and Blood for Dracula, have become cult classics for their outrageousness and gross humor. But there is more to both films than meets the funnybone. 

They have much in common with Morrissey’s more characteristic films, the Flesh trilogy of 1968–72 and his New York street sagas, Mixed Blood (1974) and Spike of Bensonhurst (1988). The central figures fail to achieve a full self or life because they have too much freedom and power. Sensual self- indulgence seems the characters’ worst flaw and sexual exploitation the typical human relationship. Morrissey’s period pieces (including Beethoven’s Nephew, 1985) depict the historical roots of the amorality and commodification that Morrissey reflects in his contemporary dramas. So while these films are hearty comedies, they confirm Morrissey’s passionate critique of modern permissiveness. 

A shortage of Romanian virgins drives the vampire Count Dracula (Udo Kier) and his faithful servant Anton (Arno Juerging) to Italy. There an aristocratic family is pleased to provide a bride from among their daughters. But the count chokes on their nonvirginal blood. The family handyman, Mario (Joe Dallesandro) rapes the 14-year-old daughter, ostensibly to save her from the vampire. After the climactic carnage, this peasant commands the estate. 

Morrissey obviously has a lark with the vampire film conventions. He seems to be both in and outside the genre, utilizing and satirizing it at the same time. So no explanation is given for why the Italian peasant Mario speaks New York colloquial; a modern character is simply forced onto the period. His Marxist clichés also satirize the political pretensions of the European art cinema. In contrast to Anton’s selfless service to the count, Mario’s seduction of three of his master’s four daughters replaces the higher values of legend with the vices of social reality. 

In the same spirit of being both in- and outside the genre, Morrissey casts two established film directors in significant roles. The master of Italian neorealism, Vittorio De Sica, plays the Marchese di Fiori, and Roman Polanski, a specialist of psychological horror, plays the peasant who bests Anton in a tavern game. This star casting invites a comparison between the impotent, vain aristocrats and the potent, pragmatic peasants. 

The marchese also relates to the count as a romantic striving to sustain traditional values against a corrupt modernity. The count assumes more dignity and pathos from this comparison. Indeed, he becomes a genuinely moving figure when he’s tricked into taking nonvirgin blood. His toilet agonies are laughable, but we are touched when we remember that they are the death throes of a dashing figure who cannot survive in a world without purity. In this corrupt world, sex means death to the romantic hero. 

Mario’s professed Marxism may seem persuasive, but it’s revealed as but another form of oppression. In front of his hammer and sickle insignia, Mario brutalizes his women. When he supplants di Fiori and dispatches Dracula, Mario represents not the triumph of the people but the replacement of one tyranny with another, less dignified. On another level, Dallesandro’s succession of De Sica represents the ascent of Morrissey’s New York neorealism over De Sica’s. 

Blood for Dracula is not a film for the squeamish. It has obvious appeal for the lover of Grand Guignol—but it equally addresses the thoughtful.

Love Trilogy: Reborn (2019)

  Yaron Shani’s Love Trilogy culminates in the bleakly optimistic Reborn (2019). 

Like the surprise revelation of radical flashback in the first film, Stripped (2018; see analysis on this site), the entire Reborn occurs within the period covered by the first two films.  

The second film, Chained (2019; ditto), focused on Avigail’s marriage, which ended in her husband’s double murder and suicide. The third film reaches back to trace the beginning of her love affair with Yael. This woman initially helps her to get pregnant, overcomes her own traumatic childhood to adopt a baby girl, and becomes Avigail’s lover. 

Avigail’s relationship with her teen daughter similarly rewrites the family tone from the earlier view. Here they are warmly intimate as the daughter frees Avigail from her burdensome, inhibiting long braids. However tragic the Chained shadow casts upon Reborn, the film celebrates love in the women’s community.  

Where Chained centered on the violent cop husband, Reborn establishes his victim wife’s superior sensitivity. This heightens the overall sense of tragic loss even as the film closes the trilogy upbeat — until we remember.

In Stripped the motive energy was the younger male Ziv, the music student turned rapist soldier. Here his victim Alice is revisited, as she has recovered from her assault and is reading from her new novel. 

In Reborn the two new men represent opposite concepts of manhood. The positive is the new husband who slides into the bath where his wife has just given birth to their son. (Like the rest of this trilogy but perhaps most obviously, this scene is presented with non-professional actors, with no script and is the product of a single take.) This man is loving, supportive, eager to join in his wife’s immersion.

But the implicitly central maleness in Reborn is the dying, comatose father. Insentient, unresponsive, he still drains the energy, confidence and harmony of his two daughters, Yael and Na’ama. Both women were traumatized by their mother's abandonment and their father's treatment. The clear implication is that he sexually abused the adopted Na’ama, leading to her troubled life as a prostitute and her clashes with Yael. After the two violent male heroes of the first two films, the lingering power of the vegetable father further indicts the male sense of love as dominance.    

The final image summarizes the trilogy’s faith in the generous community of women. The novelist has joined an organization that visits brothels to offer the women free and anonymous medical tests and treatment. That is, they non-judgmentally remediate their abuse by men. This action countermands Na’ama’s comment at novelist Alice’s reading, where she observes the writer presents women as they are defined by their men.

In the film's and the trilogy's last shot the novelist (who has been raped by the young man she trusted) hugs the weeping prostitute (abused by her father) and speaks for both and for all women: “You are not alone.”   

 

Love Trilogy: Stripped (2018)

  Yaron Shani’s Love Trilogy began with Stripped (2018), which very subtly introduced the violence and macho psychodrama later amplified in Chained (2019), previously discussed here. 

The central theme inheres in Alice’s assignment to her Cont Ed collage portraiture class: “Make yourself out of parts that aren’t you.”  Both the artist/writer/teacher/filmmaker Alice and the aspiring classical guitarist Ziv uncover uncharacteristic dimensions in themselves through their experiences, especially with each other. 

In the early sections of the film I was troubled by the apparently asynchronous conversation scenes. The dialogue and even music did not quite fit the characters’ movement of lips and fingers. This may have been a technical problem in the print.

Or not. This might be exposed as a narrative strategy at the very end, when the sounds of Alice’s school drawing class continue over the end credits. The image and the sound are more pronouncedly disjunctive than in the earlier conversations. 

More significantly, the narrative pivots on a radical shift in time. A present drama is revealed to have occurred much earlier — and most tellingly. If we do make ourselves up out of parts that aren’t us, it’s because time changes us, for better or worse, as our experiences require. Experience uncovers — or creates — our hidden elements. This is the film’s primary psychological theme.

That also gives the film a political dimension. It pointedly addresses the psychological cost of Israel’s perpetual self-defence, in the national draft that forms the vital army and in the citizenry that depends on it. This is the focus of the young guitarist’s “maturing” into a muscular, possibly overly assertive soldier. Initially he's apparently too shy to accept a girl's overtures. His family name is Zukerman, Sugarman. Such a sweet boy. But he changes -- to the detriment of all concerned.

Alice’s three — dramatically unmatched — dogs represent the life energies that can be harmonized, apparently domesticated, but their savage animal nature persists. Pent up, they growl danger. So, too, shy Ziv ripens into the hardened wiry warrior. This is the human — and social — nature that is stripped of its initial sensitivity. 

The teenage boys’ sexual initiation scene is an exercise of pathetic bravado, in the face of death, that the army will replay on a more serious level. In Alice we see the antithetic movement, into vulnerability, psychological disintegration and the labour of recovery.The titles of her two novels -- before and after the dramatic events of the plot -- record her movement from Rattling the Cage to Open Doors. Similarly, in the two exercises she assigns her class she moves from composing a presentation of one’s self to exploring another person. 

The boys’ sex scene contrasts to the scenes of women’s counselling and supportive companionship. Alice is initially drawn to include Ziv for her documentary on new combat soldiers because he is so atypical, apparently too sensitive, too feminine, for that reduction.  Ziv proves himself with a vengeance.

Love Trilogy: Chained

  Yaron Shani’s Love Trilogy: Chained examines the paradox of Israeli male force on both the personal and political levels. However left implicit, the political extrapolation from an Israeli domestic film is compelling. 

        The 16-year veteran cop Rashi Malka is a forceful but feeling agent of justice. He faces increasing pressure both at work and in his two-year marriage to Avigail, with her 13-year-old daughter Yasmine. In both the issues derive from his strong will and assertive principles.

In the opening scene the man Malka arrests for beating his son claims to have a broken hand. “We’ll put a cast on it,” Malka promises. But as his brusque discipline of Yasmine increasingly alienates Avigail, Malka breaks his own hand. In this domestic procedural Malka dwindles into his opponent. He becomes the Other he prosecuted earlier. 

Malka falls under investigation when his invasive examination of boys for possible drug possession leads to an unfair charge of sexual assault. Malka is here quite just. He was acting on a lead, that boys were selling drugs in the park. As he is not in the youth division Malka may lack the protocol but he acts on principle. He deals firmly but properly with the boys’ suspicious resistance. He’s innocent of the particular charge but his persistence has left him vulnerable to the accusation. Under that pressure, he fails the lie detector charge.  

Malka suffers a parallel excess in his family life. He and Avigail are struggling to have a baby. But their relationship is undermined by his rough disciplining of her daughter. The report of a rapist in the neighbourhood helps to justify Malka's concern. But at home as at work, Malka's principles are sound but his action possibly excessive, as when he forcibly hauls Yasmine away from her friends. 

        The aggressiveness that served his policing undermines his family life. That is, his principled strength becomes a weakness. His forcefulness only makes him vulnerable. That’s the paradox in the English title: the strong cop, not the the weak arrested man, is the one who’s “chained.” To that point, the cop hero is named Malka, yiddish for "queen." His name denotes his potential feminine power.

In the central scene of macho posturing Malka drinks with two younger buddy cops. All three are large, powerful men flaunting sexual prowess and liberty. The meeting is supposed to provide relief from his office persecution. Instead it establishes Malka’s radical vulnerability. Here he learns that Avigail has just had an abortion (contrary to her claim that their insemination attempt failed) and that she’s planning to leave him. Malka discovers his greatest vulnerability in the scene that initially flaunts masculine strength.

        Malka's story ends tragically because he is unable to modulate his male force. With Avigail he retreats to childish petulance, spurning her sexual initiative, blocking the exit with a tantrum, in short, turning passive aggressive. His "I'm nothing without you" proves quite true but that dependency is her burden, not a gift. The same assertive ploys also fail with the police investigating team. Malka's tragic end is the extremity of masculine attack, the ultimate end for a man who can deploy nothing but force. 

Across our various cultures there are ample revelations of the weakness inherent in male power: the need for emotional understanding and expression, an openness to others’ will and needs, the development of a less aggressive sensitivity. This theme assumes broader relevance in a society that across its entire 72-year existence (and historically before) has had to be constantly vigilant against mortal enemies. The toughness and resolve that defensiveness requires may have its tragic cost if it fails at temperance. 

        Malka's first name is Rashi, an allusion to one of the sagest rabbis in Judaism. Though the justice of his actions in both plot-lines define his virtue, he fails to live up to the tempered wisdom of his first name and the feminine control of the second. If the tragic ending seems surprising, the idea of family violence was introduced in the opening scene and emphasized in the story of the father who dives to his death after his children.  

        In Israel another dimension emerges from the class distinctions in the characters. Malka, his family and colleagues are all clearly Mizrachi, working class, helpless before the system that oppresses them. The police investigators and the arrested boys are Ashkenazi, the power class. When one boy threatens to sic his father after Malka the hero's persecution is set. As soon as he is charged Malka knows the fix is in. He can't afford a lawyer to defend him.  

        The original Hebrew title evokes "The apple of his eye." In that context the drama warns against the excessive defence of what one most prizes. It can lead to a fatal blindness.

    Postscript

        Chained (2019) is the middle film in Shani's Love Trilogy. Regrettably, I haven't seen the other two films. [CORRECTION: I now have and have analyzed them elsewhere on this site:  Stripped (2018) and the finale, Reborn (2019). 

        And from Wikipedia; "Yaron Shani works with a cast of non-actors, who work without a script, improvising the scenes on-camera. The film is shot in single takes, without rehearsals.^[1][3] The lead actor, Eran Naim, is a former police officer, and played a main role in the film Ajami as well.^[3]"

Irresistible (2020)

It’s a two-word title. With a shift in colour writer-director Jon Stewart isolates the “resist” in “irresistible.” If the larger word suggests resignation the inner one calls for action, for reform. If the body seems a political satire the film concludes with a mule's kick.

The epilogue identifies both the narrative’s central target — the huge amount of money both spent on election campaigns and open to misappropriation and abuse — and a call for a radical transformation of America’s electoral system. It’s broken, every which way, as off-screen Stewart’s brief interview with a federal official affirms. 

The film’s opening sets the national context: Donald Trump’s 2016 surprise defeat of Hilary Clinton. The plot sends Democrat organizer Gary Zimmer to a small Wisconsin town to use a mayoralty race to launch a local hero in the party’s cause. Both parties pour huge bucks and tech resources into the minor election, afraid to lose a potential toehold.

If the plot seems outlandish, wait. It’s a funhouse version of the 2017 special election for Georgia's 6th congressional district, where the two parties and supporting groups blew over $55 million — without the happy ending here.

The local tragedy and several jokes reflect the current national situation. Certainly the town’s crumbling from the loss of its main industry speaks for the nation of small (and large) towns under duress. Both Zimmer and GOP spinner Faith blatantly confess the falsity of the spin-room. In an echo of the Trump lying streak, when Faith bald-faced claims to be from that small town Zimmer caves: “She said it. Now it’s true.” CNN and Fox News both come in for satiric slams. 

But the main drive is the exposure of the system. As Zimmer meets the small town the characters are played as the rubes and hicks we’ve come to expect from the urban pundits. But here the country mice turn the tables on the city mouse. 

When the joke turns out to be on Zimmer it’s also on us. Spoiler alert: they’ve been playing him, exploiting the political system to con big buck donations to save their town. Justice happens but only through a surprise deception and the locals’ exploitation of the Washington (and hence our) dismissive prejudices and false assumption of superiority.  

Why, the two roughnecks even know the diff between a simile and a metaphor! Is no prejudice sacred?

As we expect of Stewart, he inclines away from the Trump party and administration. But he also hasn’t lost his larger understanding that the problem goes beyond the parties, to the system’s abdication of American values and fairness. As Stewart views the nation’s paralysis, waste and dysfunction he utters this plague upon both their houses. 

The Midwife

In Martin Provost’s The Midwife, the title could be plural. While Claire is the actual midwife, having delivered a generation of newborns into the world, her antithetical Beatrice also serves as a kind of midwife when she brings Claire into new life. The rootless amoral wastrel Beatrice breathes new energy, spirit and joie de vivre into the abstemious midwife, pulling her out of her womb of natal duty. 

Beatrice is aided by Paule, the long-distance trucker whose garden abuts Claire’s. When he leads her to a spectacular high panoramic view he repeats the midwife’s instructions at birth: “Breathe. Take a deep breath.” Paule confirms Beatrice’s urge to accumulate as much pleasure as she can as she succumbs to the cancer in her brain.

Another rebirth occurs at the professional level. The clinic is closing for want of funds.  Claire’s colleagues are happily joining an ultra-modern, high-tech and profitable new super-clinic. Claire’s early reluctance to join them is confirmed when her visit discovers that the new tech will make her experience and values obsolescent. 

She rejects that rebirth — a conversion to the technical — and instead renews her faith in the human values of her profession. She will teach her old ways rather than abandon herself to the new. That reaffirmation of herself is itself a rebirth, if rather a renewal than a conversion.

Claire’s son Simon parallels her movement. Not faring well in his plan to become a surgeon, he decides to become a midwife himself. Or as the new world has it: birth technician. This as his own fiancee is pregnant.  

Dramatically, Claire’s last delivery in the old institute is an emergency operation on a young woman whom she delivered 28 years ago — whose life she saved by providing her own blood. “Lucky we had the same rhesus,” she adds modestly, feeling she was only doing her job.

Beatrice hardly seems a likely agent for Claire’s salvation. Beatrice was Claire’s father’s mistress. They spent enjoyable time together until Beatrice’s abrupt departure drove the father to kill himself. Unaware of that event, Beatrice returns hoping to see him one last time before she dies, to make amends. Deprived of that opportunity, she manages to break down Claire’s understandable antagonism and work out a kind of salvation for both.

The drama runs two parallel plot lines: Beatrice’s death and Claire’s renewed interest in life and the pursuit of pleasure. As both heroines leave their respective pasts the last shot seems their metaphoric standin: Paule notes that the old rowboat that was collecting water is now sinking completely away. The water closes serenely over its ruin, closing over it like a lost memory. 

   

 

A Rainy Day in New York

As usual, the new Woody Allen film — his 48th feature in 51 years! — is a disturbing departure from the last few. What disturbs is its newness. We’re disappointed when our expectations are denied. So an adjustment is necessary if we are to take it on its own, proper terms.  

The plot is familiar: when a small town hick comes to New York, her relationship with a city guy is challenged by the Big City. It’s Neil Simon country but Allen infuses it with an uncommon density of personal inflection. That goes beyond “What’s sexy about short-term memory loss?” And “Time flies….Unfortunately, it flies coach…. It’s not always a comfortable trip.”

Specifically the film responds to the time and circumstance of its making. When Mia Farrow’s long-dismissed allegations of Allen’s alleged abuse of her daughter resurfaced, Amazon broke their agreement to fund and distribute the film. As a result, the film is available in Europe but not in North America. So here: “The world is full of tragic little deal-breakers.” And “There are no newspapers that are not tabloids.” Not since Manhattan has Allen delivered such an encomium to New York City: “You are here or you are nowhere. You cannot achieve another level of anxiety, hostility or paranoia anywhere else.” Instead of the usual star-studded Allen cast, here Jude Law is the film’s one big star.        

As his name suggests, Gatsby Welles is a cultural construct. “Gatsby” signifies the illusion of old wealth and social stature.  “Welles” connotes a maverick individuality. The hero’s wealthy family propel him into the arts, the responsibilities of high society, the mixed blessings of the privileged. But at that privilege he bristles.

This Gatsby took classical piano but yearns to play romantic ballads in a bar. He doesn’t have to be able to sing well to enjoy singing a classic ballad. Instead of college studies he prefers high stakes gambling (at which he succeeds uncommonly, like Woody the filmmaker). Ultimately Gatsby breaks out of his romantic rut, unlike brother Hunter, doomed to marry a woman with an emasculating laugh.   

  Gatsby’s girlfriend Ashleigh comes from a wealthy Tucson banking family. A journalism student at Yardley College, she takes him to New York to interview the famously serious film director Roland Pollard. “You’re too original to have mass appeal,” the awed Ashleigh assures him. Gatsby’s old schoolmate dismisses his work with “Never a decent toilet joke.” When Ashleigh quotes Pollard’s line “Love and death are two sides of the same coin” she doesn’t understand it, but has evoked an early (funny) Allen title. 

The R.P. director’s nominal echo of Roman Polanski sets up Ashleigh’s NYC adventure. While in real life Farrow persists in her discounted allegations against Allen, she publicly defends Polanski against the sex charges to which he pled guilty. Here Pollard, his writer Ted Davidoff and actor Francisco Vega personify the predatory film industry that feeds off the star-struck, helpless naifs. Pollard uses his artistic suffering, Davidoff his unfaithful wife and Vega his star power to seduce the relatively innocent Ashleigh. Only the early return of Vega’s girlfriend preserves Ashleigh’s relative chastity. Implicitly Allen places Farrow’s persistent allegations in the larger context that undermines her.   

Seeing Ashleigh on TV with Vega, the heartbroken Gatsby hires a hooker to represent his fiancee at his mother’s classy dinner As Gatsby describes his mother’s literary circle: “It's rich housewives who have the leisure to pursue esoteric culture. The out of work, discussing the out of print.“ After his mother sees through the ploy and sends the woman home she tells Gatsby that she had herself been a hooker. Indeed that’s how she met his father. Indeed she used her savings to set up his eventually successful business. This candour opens Gatsby’s relationship with his mother: “She’s a lot more than I gave her credit for.” With that knowledge he can accept himself as well as her and he can follow his desire to stay in New York and live the life he prefers. There is not such a gaping gap between the respectable and the pragmatic after all. There is non shame in honesty.

The film ripples with allusions. Its sentimental core starts with the opening song: “I got lucky in the rain.”  The singer sadly needs a song, then “You came along,” the love of his life. Relationships begin and end in the rain here, climactically over “Misty,” because the rain signifies the melancholy chill from which we seek love for shelter. “What I really need,” Gatsby avers, “is a Berlin ballad.” In the converse call to social realism, Gatsby is supposed to see the Weegee exhibition at MOMA, but he abandons that to follow his new interest, Chan, the grown-up kid sister of his old flame Amy, into the older histories in the Met. 

This relationship begins with the Benedick-Beatrice sparring on a student film set, where they meet and have to act a passionate kiss. Eventually their life will follow that art. They meet on that film set, have that museum date then meet again under the Central Park clock reliving a favourite romantic film. Rooted in an old culture, Chan’s home is full of Old Master paintings and antiques. She reads Gatsby as an exotic searching for a romantic dream from a vanished age. That becomes her. But she's an active creative spirit.  Gatsby's move from Amy through Ashleigh to Amy's younger sister evokes Allen's from his relationship to Mia to her neglected step-daughter.

Chan wins out over Ashleigh because she knows Allen’s familiar dependency upon art for a meaning and consolation otherwise rarely available: “Real life is fine for people who can’t do any better.” That’s a film-romance re-write of Gatsby’s mother’s career.

Unfortunately, to cleanse themselves of the old Allen “scandal” Timothee Chalamet and Rebecca Hall announced they were donating their salaries to charity. They make themselves victims of the slander and misrepresentation Allen has suffered and survived for so many years. This is a film they should be proud of having served. 

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

Even such a lightweight airy number by Woody Allen achieves a heft ordinary auteurs would strain to achieve.

In this delightful comedy Allen exercises his love for 1940s crowd pleasers. The film mixes screwball comedy and gumshoe thriller.  The script hits a Billy Wilder pace. The music, settings and stock characters recall Howard Hawks at his best. 

Allen’s performance as the insurance investigator is arguably his clearest homage to Bob Hope. “She graduated from Vassar and I went to driving school. “ A woman has a body that won’t quit: “Quit? It won't take five minutes off for a coffee break.” Does he want to see the siren’s strawberry birthmark on her thigh? “Sure, when can I take the full tour?” And of course: “I may be a scummy vermin but I'm an honest scummy vermin.”

Lengthening the tradition — the Allen and Helen Hunt characters are a modern Beatrice and Benedick as they wallow in an articulate antagonism that could only belie their essential love. In the fireworks kissing scene Allen exuberantly explodes the perennial cliche.  

The film may lack the obvious philosophic underpinning of Allen’s later work but it’s cut from the same cloth. 

As in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Alice, his New York Stories episode and the later Magic in the Moonlight, etc., Allen uses variations on magic to shift his characters into another mode of experience. Here hypnosis is ambivalent in its purposes. In the stage act it moves CW and Sally Ann into their antithetical relationship, love supplanting their antagonism. But as every opening brings vulnerability, the two also serve the jewel thief hypnotist’s criminal purposes.  

Hypnotism here serves as magic and art work for Allen elsewhere. It provides an escape from the “scummy…grungy” existence Allen always envisions the human condition to be, hungry for any possible escape or respite. The curse turns out to be a blessing.

  Indeed this idea may animate all of Allen’s compulsive returns to the music and film genres of the past. We’re cursed with mortality. What healthier insouciance than to ensure the immortality of the genres by which we used to connect?  

A Trip to Greece

A Trip to Greece is the sixth European-trip movie  Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan have made (with director Michael Winterbottom) in 10 years. That sets up the obvious parallel with Odysseus’s 10-year return home from the Trojan Wars. 

  Playing fictionalized versions of themselves, the two British stars deliver their own version of the archetypal epic. They land somewhere between Homer and Joyce. 

Perhaps the film’s key motif is the photography scene in the old amphitheatre.  Bantering as ever, they swap the classic masks of comedy and tragedy. Steve briefly resumes his affair with the beautiful young photographer 

The film ends on that fork. On the comedy side, Rob enjoys an idyllic reunion with his wife, Sally, freed from both their parental duties and their separation. 

To Steve falls the tragic: his father dies so he has to fly home early. He takes melancholy refuge in the home he left his ex-wife.  Their hug reminds him of his loss.  

This double vision of life makes this perhaps the most touching of the series. We get the familiar elements of the travelogue: the spectacular scenery, the mouth-watering national foods, the pretty women viewed — perhaps regrettably as usual — through the cocky banter of men still boys. 

The two men’s competitive teasing is amusing as ever, but now there are more jokes about their aging. There’s an intensity in their ostensibly playful race. Now Steve even has Bergmanic dreams, as if his real-life success as a more serious actor has brought a psychic vulnerability. 

A dark shadow threatens the film’s comic element early. Our heroes drop an acquaintance off at a massive refugee camp, secured with concrete walls and barbed wire. The  two buddies speculate about its horrors. But we don’t go in. They drive away, staving off the intrusion of the tragic side of life — for a while. 

Both men have a knack for impersonating famous actors. They compete at it, amusingly and even brilliantly. A whole conversation can be conducted in these guises. All the while they’re impersonating others, though, we know they are impersonating themselves. The outside scenes remind us this is a scripted drama and for all their personal infusions they are acting roles. 

Indeed the men’’s compulsive role-playing may betray their essential insubstantiality. They seem able to engage with each other — and with others — only by playing at being others. Even when Rob embraces Sally his emotion is filtered through play. As the jokes about their driving encapsulate, both men need to be in control. And that means staving off seriousness, openness, suppressing their emotional lives as long as possible. 

Perhaps that’s the point of their comic role-playing here. The masks of Greek tragedy are the faces we live. We may enjoy some comedy but the presiding, profound vision is the tragic. The real tragedy may not be death but the failure to live connected to our deepest self.  

 

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

The marvellous thing about Woody Allen is how variously he can replay the same central core of themes and values for fresh pleasure — and how much serious thought can freight his comedy. 

In terms of themes and issues Woody makes the same movie over and over again. That’s what directors do, as Jean Renoir observed: The director makes one movie across his lifetime. But each replay is fresh, different, rewarding, a pleasure to enjoy and to contemplate. 

      As a case in point, here’s a joke in Magic in the Moonlight (2014). Stanley playfully rejects the charge he doesn't believe in the unseen world: “On the contrary, I always thought the unseen world was a good place to open a restaurant…. The spirits have to eat somewhere.” 

  Go back 40(!) years to Love and Death (1975), where a pattern of food/eating jokes undercuts the characters’ airy philosophizing with a bathetic, hardheaded reminder of the most basic human appetite: food. Boris returns to the philosophizing Sonia from the dead to describe death — It’s worse than the chicken at Tresky’s restaurant. 

The main theme of Moonlight is that hardy Allen perennial: “Depressing as the facts of existence are, they are the facts. There is no metaphysical world. What you see out there is what you get. I think Mr. Nietzsche has disposed of the God matter rather convincingly.”

The question is how we will deal with the fact that “Happiness is not the natural human condition.” As Allen continually dramatizes, life is so miserable we need illusions to get through it. 

Stanley’s long, intense conversation with Aunt Vanessa is a brilliant dance in dialogue. (I doubt there’s a livelier scene of such focused and ironic dialogue in any other 2014 film). Vanessa seems to support Stanley’s ever-weakening assertions even as she leads the stuffy skeptic to acknowledge his irrational desire for Sophie. Her minimal verbalism is a parallel to the sleight of hand by which the the magician manoeuvers his audience into an alternative perception. As Stanley discovers he loves the woman he just exposed as a fraud, Vanessa concludes, “the world may or may not be without purpose, but it's not totally without some kind of magic.“ 

Stanley is a magician who fakes a supernatural power. He also takes pride in exposing pretenders to engagement with a higher reality. But he is converted from absolute rationalism — twice. First he’s conned by his magician friend and the fake seer Sophie. But even after that Stanley discovers that fakery and reasserts his doubt, he still/again falls in love and accepts its irrationality. So much for his original conviction: “When the heart rules the head, disaster follows.” In his films (and life) Allen advances the saving grace of irrational love in an unsympathetic universe. Sophie shows the same refusal to be sensiblen when she dumps her millionaire fiance to marry the surly magician.

The film’s central focus on man’s reason — and its necessary limits — makes this a counterpoint to The Irrational Man. Both heroes are lumbered with learning, especially Nietzsche. Where the earlier film focused on the issue of moral responsibility, this one takes a breezier attitude towards finding through love the consolations available in our brief, doomed lives. The film is an unmitigated pleasure for the mind as for the jokes. 

One more point. The 1928 setting allows for a rich recreation of the glamour, beauty, romanticism of the period, in the characters’ rich lives and in the soundtrack. Allen's rare return to wide-screen shooting amplifies the opulence. But here’s the point: the horrors of the Depression and WW II are looming in the wings.

To Rome, With Love (2012)

The Eternal City gets a different kind of travelogue treatment here: a visit by a spectrum of Woody Allen representations. This is Rome seen through the prism of its creator. Allen's appearance was his first in six years, five films, his first since Scoop. As the dedication in the title suggests, it's a very personal dedication to the famous city.

  The framing song is the familiar old hit parade topper, Volare. That defines the perspective as an American of Woody Allen’s age — who would remember that song from the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the rare foreign language song to become an American pop hit 

Allen’s character serves a double function. As Jerry, tourist Hayley’s father, he deploys his familiar nebbish persona, nervous on the plane, suspicious of Hayley’s new fiancee, an Italian leftist. He’s also a failed music director. His long-suffering wife cares enough to define the reviewer’s “imbecile” as “ahead of your time.” 

But like Allen, Jerry has a good eye for talent. With more bravery than most: his Pagliacci brilliantly performs entirely inside a working shower. As the conventional opera unfolds exuberantly around him, he performs in his shower box, washing and lathering as he sings, superbly. That lunatic staging choice is an actual necessity. His tenor can only sing well in the shower. This image resonates further: in an apparently conventional staging something personal operates in a private box within, weird but vital. Like the Allen element in any story he tells. It may seem odd but it’s necessary.  

An alternative Allen surrogate opens the film. The Rome traffic director functions like a director: “My job, as you can see, is to see that the traffic move. I stand up here, and I see everything. All people. I see life. In this city, all is a story….There are many stories, next time you come.” On behalf of director Allen he introduces the characters and concludes the story.

Robert Benigni plays another Allen, a modest little man thrust into the ordeal of celebrity. TV makes him a sudden star — for being so ordinary. He enjoys promotion, public attention, the service of beautiful women, but he’s finally relieved when the spotlight moves on and he can return to his modest family. One might take this as an ironic reversal of the scandal/attention that drove Allen from the US to this cycle of European films. 

A similar personal reflection may lie in the story of two newlywed provincials whose move to Rome is complicated by their separate adulteries. Those unconventional sexual experiences have the salutary effect of enabling them to see past the surface allure of Rome. They return to the simpler lives, especially enriched by their respective sexual experiences. Their illicit adventures deepened their relationship.

The other plot has two Allen surrogates. Alex Baldwin is the mature man who returns to the Rome of his student days and through Jessie Eisenberg relives a doomed old romance. The interplay of past and present is a familiar Allen device, especially apt in the Eternal City which unchanged has survived centuries of human waves. The woman the mature man warns the younger not to fall in love with is precisely the kind of enchanting, bright but disastrously neurotic beauty Allen was prone to fall for (as he recounts in his current memoir). As another signature, the “Ozymandias melancholia” is revived from Stardust Memories.

Perhaps lacking the moral intensity of Allen’s best films, this is still a delight, engaging, rich, amusing, and as this reading proposes — subtly personal.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

After the panorama of failed dreams in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, here Woody Allen empowers his hero to escape his limited life through fantasy. 

Successful Hollywood hack Gil discovers an alternative life when his fiancee’s (shudder) Republican parents bring them to Paris. His imaginative experiences lead him to abandon his unsatisfying life, including his engagement, and to settle into his dream city, Paris. Presiding over his new romance is Cole Porter’s urbane “Let’s Do It.”

In the pre-title sequence a Dixieland song-long montage of the glorious sights of the city sets the stage. Over the credits Gil extolls the romance of Paris to his unsympathetic Inez, especially his desire to have lived there in The Golden Age, the 1920s. The hero of Gil’s novel runs a nostalgia store. That suggests his fascination with the past, which will mature into his decision to go live with it.

This film is an act of alchemy. Pedant Paul dismisses Gil’s romanticism as a pathology: “Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking, the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in. iI's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” 

But Allen makes Gil right and Paul wrong. About Rodin’s wife, as well as about the perception of an idealizing reality beyond the material. Hemingway’s lessons include the insight that Inez has been having an affair with Paul.

Gil’s 1920s romance, Adriana, rather than appreciating her contemporary glories, yearns for her lost Golden Age, the Belle Epoque. When both are transported there, Gauguin and his mates harken back to their Golden Age, the Renaissance. Even the Golden Agers yearn for a lost Golden Age. 

  Adriana decides to stay there. But Gil returns to his proper time, emboldened to deal with his reality. His lost heroes can still inform him as he navigates their world in his/our time.

Ironically, interior scenes in Gil’s current life are often shot in a golden glow themselves, in the characters’ hotel room as well as in the later visit to King Louis’s home at Versailles. That is, our time could well be the Golden Age for a future one. However harsh or drab our world, others may well find it their own preferable refuge — and so could we, as Gil ends. 

  What causes Paris’s alchemical miracle, bringing contemporary Paris to such life for Gil, is the arts. In his midnight meanderings Gil meets the artists and writers who have given him his romantic vision of the city. For Allen the artistic life, the freed imagination, provides an energy unavailable in uncompromising normalcy. As Gertrude Stein finds this theme in Gil’s novel — “The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” —  she evokes so many of Allen’s movies from Annie Hall on. 

Gil’s discovery of himself in Adriana’s memoir recalls Allen brilliant story of Madame Bovary stepping into a hapless professor’s life. Still, Gil misses out on the described consummation when she stays with Gauguin. 

Inez dismisses Gil’s love for Paris as “a fantasy.” But the past Gil perceives there is real. In the Parisienne Gabrielle, herself a nostalgia dealer at the flea market level, Gil finds his true soulmate, in name as in nature. She may not be Adriana but — she’s real and she’s there. Inez wasn’t.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Woody Allen’s theme here opens with a telling ellipsis in the opening statement. In the quote from King Lear, “Life is a tale…full of sound and fury signifying nothing,” Allen omits the phrase after ‘tale’: “told by an idiot.” The line  with that omission is repeated at the end.   

Dropping the “idiot” has several implications. For one, it frees from that identification the offscreen narrator, the teller of this tale. It also shifts the idiocy from the teller to the characters. Each of the subplots exposes the folly, vanity, self-delusion, self-destruction, of the uniformly pathetic characters. All pursue follies, under the misguiding light of the title song: “When you wish upon a star” …. you wish will come true.

Across the cast — it doesn’t. The aging divorcee Helena believes holus bolus in the fraudulent fortune-teller, Cristal. Daughter Sally grows impatient with her failure husband Roy but misses the chance for an affair with her art gallery boss. When she has the chance to open her own gallery her mother denies her the promised loan on the fortune-teller’s advice.

Novelist Roy has abandoned his medical career then fails as a novelist. Then he steals the MS of the friend he thought was dead — but appears about to come out of his coma. The film ends before that tragedy plays out. But already the novelist has left wife Sally and courted a neighbour who throws over her fiancee for him, a catastrophe for both families. On his first night in her flat Roy wistfully watches his ex Sally undressing across the courtyard. 

Meanwhile Helena’s romance with an occult book dealer flounders when he fails to ask his dead wife for permission to marry Helena. At a second seance he asks and receives her blessing. That saves Helena from having to await her fulfilment in a future life. She has a growing conviction she was Joan of Arc in an earlier one. While her superstition may salvage her life it ruins Sally’s.

Sally’s father Alfie, having left Helena in hopes of a racy bachelor life, marries a hooker Charmaine in hopes of recovering his youth and having a son, his first having died young. Alfie is as successful as the other characters. His garish wife stops faking pleasure in their marriage, saps his fortune, betrays him with at least one younger man and in announcing her pregnancy can’t assure him the child is his. Her trainer/lover has just beaten Alfie up, so he may have to find another gym. This adds insult to injury. 

For all this canvas of idiocy Allen articulates a sympathy for his characters. As he has often — perhaps usually — reminded us, life is bleak, awful, doomed, and so we need illusions and fantasies to sustain us. The film’s title exemplifies the cliche delusions by which we drag ourselves forward in unsubstantiated hope. 

And if we can find relief from a fantasy, if illusions help us carry on, then more power to us. That puts this film especially in line with The Purple Rose of Cairo. 

The film has a curious tone. There are very few jokes. The characters’ heart-rending defeats make it a modern, post-Loman tragedy. But the film’s effect is almost comic for its unremitting parade of the characters’ folly. That harkens back to Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, where the two versions of the heroine’s story — one comic, one tragic —  are essentially the same. 

Finally — need I say it: this is a superb, richly detailed, masterfully realized film, another in Allen’s unbroken line of classic achievements.

Saboteur (1942)

Hitchcock’s opening image embodies the central theme of the film. A shadow of a mysterious male figure appears against a massive wall of white corrugated metal. That introduces the attack on the factory that triggers the plot. 

The image also anticipates a very dramatic scene later, when villain Fry shoots real bullets from behind the cinema screen, fulfilling the threat from the inner movie’s irate husband. Taken together these two shots embody the functional discontinuity between image and reality. 

Specifically at issue is the image of American democracy. The villains are wealthy American traitors undermining the nation’s 1942 defence against a foreign totalitarianism.  As Tobin explains, these exceptionally wealthy — and respectable! —people hunger for unmediated power. They would profit from the overthrow of democracy. Striking for a WW II thriller, there is no mention of Nazis. The threat to democracy is the US oligarchy.

They disdain of the sentimentality and idealism that hero Barry Kane (a more ideal, humane Citizen than Welles’s of 1941) represents. The elite that has prospered from democratic capitalism here abandons the outcast, the underprivileged.

The circus freaks are a broadening miniature of American society. Their instinctive responses to the troubled couple set the spectrum of humanitarianism. The mean dwarf Major bitterly argues for their betrayal. As the essential human, The Human Skeleton instinctively defends them: “The normal are abnormally hard-hearted.”  As the Siamese twins are of course divided on every issue, it falls to the bearded lady to intuit the couple’s emotional connection. She has the romantic instinct to save them. 

The film teems with instances of deceptive appearance. Twice the feuding Patricia and Barry are taken to be passionately in love, as others foresee their harmony. Patricia’s father is in the tradition of the extra sensitive, extra perceptive blind seer. Barry is struck by the difference between the real Patricia and her billboard image. Conversely, the very respectable Tobin and society matron Mrs Sutton prove to be the vile traitors, undermining America’s defence against her enemies. Setting the climax on the Statue of Liberty confirms the film’s political core. Here life and freedom literally hang by a thread. America has to defend its values against internal subverters as well as their foreign enemy.   

Especially chilling is Tobin’s cynical description of Kane: “He's noble and fine and pure... So he pays the penalty that the noble and the fine and the pure must pay in this world: he's misjudged by everyone.” 

Barry establishes an immediate connection with trucker Mac, an example of Tobin’s “moron millions” who lack his ambition for a “more profitable type of government.” For Mack having three meals a day is a sufficient dream. Like the freaks later, Mac helps Barry escape the forces of law and order that have been suborned by Tobin’s false image of citizenship and respectability. Dishearteningly, this debate over America’s soul is as current today as it was in 1942. That battle was won but the war persists.   

Still, despite that sombre theme this is a hugely enjoyable film. There are several delightful set pieces, especially Hitchcock’s venture into the Western chase scene, Barry’s scenes with the blindman and with the freaks, his extemporizing in the Sutton lair, the surreal cinema scene, his careful deployment of little Suzie and, of course, the climax on Lady Liberty.