Hope Springs: CALL Discussion Group

Hope Springs Writer Vanessa Taylor

Director David Frankel

Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones), an Omaha accountant, and Kay (Meryl Streep) have drifted into a monotonous, alienating routine both in their 31-year marriage and in their lives. Kay coerces Arnold into taking a week-long couples counsel with Dr Bernard Feld (Steve Carell), author of You Can Have the Marriage You Want. The retreat is in a quaint, antique seaside town called Hope Springs.  Slowly and painfully the couple begin to rediscover each other and themselves, but continually lapse. Just at the point that Kay despairs and resolves to leave him, Arnold manages to break through his layers of suppression and come to her. Through the end credits, as Kay wished the couple renew their vows, presided over by Dr Feld. They have recovered the original intimacy of their marriage.

   Questions to consider:

1. Is the film about Sex for Seniors or does the sex signify something broader? Like what?
2. How do Arnold’s and Kay’s work scenes relate to those themes?
3. What is the thematic point in Kay making Arnold only one egg and one strip of bacon for breakfast? What's the thematic point of what seems to be an error: In the second breakfast a second egg materializes on the plate, after only one was in the pan. The best laid metaphors....
4. Consider the implication of the title, an obvious shortening of the proverbial “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” The full context may be relevant:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest:

The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man 

     Or maybe it’s not. Who in Hollywood reads 18th Century satire these days. 
        5.What functions are served by Kay’s scene with the woman bartender? Think outside the plot. 
        6.What’s the effect of the film’s opening on Kay rather than on Arnold?
        7.For their anniversary Kay says the couple bought each other a new cable subscription. “So many channels,” she says. What does that signify? And what of their daughter’s gift, a pair of elegant, clear candlesticks? How do gifts form a separate but related theme?
         8.What are the implications of the film watched within the film? Arnold watches The Caine Mutiny (1954) on TV. Both watch the young marrieds comedy Mad About You (1992) on TV and the French The Dinner Game (1998) at a cinema. The latter is a French comedy about an arrogant group of French executives who compete to bring the dumbest person they can find as guest. Steve Carrel played the prime schnook in the US remake. Are those Prada shoes in the elegant shop window when Kay rushes out of the cinema? How do these points connect? 
         9.What’s the point of Arnold’s closed eyes?
        10.Ah, yes. The golf thing. Why do we never see Arnold play golf, just read about it and “watch” it on TV? Why is he named Arnold? What metaphors lurk in the golf quotations, e.g.: 

1. “Hit it Bubba long.”
2. “If you’re one of those people who are looking for more distance....”

When Kay is about to live out her fantasy at the French film, Arnold says “Christ, it’s your ball game.” Any connection?

     11.When Kay decides to leave Arnold the prominent sign in her dress store reads “Modern Fit.” How does that relate to anything else in the film? E.g., to the the waitress’s, bookseller’s and maitre d’s knowing references to the couple’s marital difficulties?

     12. Are there any subtleties/complexities in the choice of songs? They seem rather obvious choices: Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” Annie Lennox’s “Why” and Lenny Kravitz’s “This Ain’t Over till It’s Over.” 

     13. Like scriptwriter Vanessa Taylor, David Frankel is best known for his TV work (Band of Brothers, Sex and the City, Entourage). But he also directed The Devil Wears Prada and The Big Year (a satire about men viciously competing in a bird-spotting competition). What echoes in the new film?

     14. What effect does the casting of comic actor Steve Carell as the counselor have on our experience of the film?

     15. Jeff Bridges turned down the role of Arnold so it was offered to Jones. Setting aside any issues of acting skills, how would the film have differed because of the two stars’ different personae (i.e., their image and the meanings/associations accumulated over their respective careers)? 

      16. What is the larger significance of the following quotes:

1. He is everything. But I'm... I'm really lonely. And to be with someone, when you're not really with him can... it's... I think I might be less lonely  -- alone.
2. You marry who you marry. You are what you are. Change is hard.
3. I’m getting limburger. You don’t have to eat it. 
4. Are you sure you’re ready to commit?
5. You’re the one who stopped.

       17. What does Kay’s wardrobe tell us? The counselor’s? Arnold’s?

       18. The town of Hope Springs may not really exist, unless it’s in Connecticut. You may have to settle for Niagara-on-the-Lake for that desirable twee. Does its antique self-conscious “charm” work as a metaphor?

        19.Not that it really matters, but how would you classify this film? How does it differ from both conventional domestic dramas and from romantic comedy? Here’s a hint. Classic comedy ends with a marriage; classic tragedy starts with marriage. 

Amour

As you may (or not) have inferred from its title, Michael Haneke’s film is about Amour. That’s not the L’amour that Chevalier serenaded mercilessly or that we hotly looked to the French cinemah to provide our becensored souls in the 50s and 60s. Those films celebrated beautiful free lovers like Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (And God Created Woman, A Man and a Woman). Here those fine actors are Anne and Georges Laurent, octogenarians in full  crumble.

The pre-title prologue shows Anne dead, decaying, but sensitively laid out, in a fine black dress, with an Ophelia scattering of white flowers, all snipped from their stems. To preserve her from embarrassing scrutiny for as long as possible and perhaps from embalming, Georges has locked and sealed her bedroom. Having begun with the end, the film then shows how it came to be.

The film proper opens with a crowd gathering for a concert. We spot the principals in the middle, comfortable to be out, chatting animatedly. As that crowd is welcomed to the entertainment so are we, but as the audience in the film faces us the question is who is watching whom? The film reflects us. As the couple is our mirror we see them through a mirror in the intermission bar. Now, we used to go to French films to see love stories we could never live. Here Haneke gives us the love story we may well live out -- if we’re lucky enough to last long enough for that suffering and even more lucky to have such a loving mate. So this isn’t the l’amour of young love but the profound and more realistic amour of the old. The casting of such romantic icons in the central roles enforces that distinction.

Unlike the syrupy scores of l’amour films, too, here there is no soundtrack music to key or to amplify our emotions. The few bars of music  we hear -- usually doleful strings -- are rooted within the scene -- the concert, the visiting pianist, the CDs. This film feels less like a film than an admission into a real relationship. Because its focus is on the couple’s interior lives the film -- once in -- doesn’t leave their flat.

Everything in the film defines the nobility of the old couple’s love. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) puts up with her husband Geoff’s (William Shimell) infidelities. But they’re well matched -- though more basely than her parents are. “How much will the nurse cost?” Geoff asks Georges. Eva babbles on about real estate investments to Anne’s anguish. 

The visit by Anne’s prize student Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud) shows that Anne used to be -- as she describes Georges -- capable of seeming like a monster but very gentle and generous. After Alexandre plays the bagatelle Anne requested, she dances a bagatelle in her new wheelchair, briefly reanimated by her student’s visit. Such is the restorative power -- and ultimate futility -- of culture, especially the high culture of the characters’ music, art, reading, conversation. Rare for Haneke, this film is devoid of the mass media, with the exception of a brief newspaper citation of another mercurial relationship, that between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Obama. The insensitive nurse who painfully brushes Anne’s hair and tries to force the mirror on her contrasts to Georges' respect for Anne and his refusal to expose and humiliate her, a care quite beyond their daughter.

The more explicit disintegration is Anne’s. First she has a brief blackout. When the operation fails she is paralyzed on her right side. That leaves only her wedding ring hand still functioning, an emblem of how her marriage sustains her. When she loses her speech George shifts from exercising her stiff leg to exercising her voice, prodding her to sing when she cannot talk. There is a dramatic decline from her flowing Schubert to her faltering nursery song. After her first hospitalization she makes George promise not to hospitalize her again. His early return from a friend’s (bathetic) funeral interrupts her apparent suicide attempt; he finds her out of the chair, fallen beneath the window. She then tries to die by refusing to accept food and water.

At that point we become aware of George’s implicit disintegration. We have watched him serving her lovingly -- and without resentment -- as he shares her indignities of aging. He carries her, feeds her, raises her panties before their slow shuffle out of the bathroom, changes her soaked bedclothes, learns to diaper her. As he tells Eva, things will continue as they are, worsening, until it stops. Until he stops it.

He snaps when Anne spits the water back at him. By reflex he slaps her, is appalled, and apologizes. Here Haneke cuts in a montage of a tapestry and paintings, closeups of the art on their walls. As the full-screen images omit the frames, the images are of life not art. They are all landscapes, predominantly dark, bleak, with cloudy skies. If the sequence provides a contemplative relief from the shock of his slap, the images also express Georges’ apprehension of life’s bleakness and mortality. In them coalesce the emotions and helplessness that now turn Georges to fulfill Anne’s unspoken but demonstrated wish to be euthanized. 

Georges tells Anne two stories. The first is his boyhood memory of being moved to tears by an old French film about lovers who have the courage to renounce each other because of their disparity in class. That contrasts to Georges‘ more heroic sacrifice in serving his love to the end -- and then some. Georges remembers being as emotional in retelling the story as he was watching the film. In the second story -- which seems to trigger his smothering of Anne -- he recalls his suffering at a summer camp, from which his mother couldn’t free him before he came down with diphtheria. Then he frees Anne from her torture, despite her reflexive struggle to stay alive. When he smothers her Georges is at once his most monstrous and his most generous and loving. At least, that’s my reading.

In two scenes Georges confronts a pigeon in their flat. Unlike the prominent drawing of a bird on a shelf, this pigeon represents an invasive, discomfiting nature. In the first incident Georges closes the doors but opens the window so he can flush the bird out. In the second -- after he has killed Anne -- he closes that window as well as the doors, then traps the bird in a blanket. The last we see is him caressing the trapped bird. We then see him writing that he released it. We don’t see if he admits he euthanized Anne.  

We don’t see him release the bird. We don’t see him kill it. In a Haneke film nothing important is neatly tied up. As the opening concert audience was in effect watching us watch them, the pigeon’s fate may be reading us by how we read it.

Here’s my projection. Why would he close the window if he intended to release the bird?  If he does smother the bird after caressing it, he would only be repeating how he killed Anne. Why kill the bird? Well, why should this paltry creature persist alive when his beloved Anne is gone? And however certain he may be that his euthanasia served Anne’s most profound desire and need, he may well still harbour some sense of guilt. The lover has killed. Killing the bird -- the way he killed Anne -- may be his redefinition of himself, an expression of -- however palliated -- guilt. Claiming he released the bird may show he is in denial. After all, we’re talking about layers of awareness here, not the simple motivations and certainties of romantic fiction. In the next scene he denies Anne is dead when he imagines hearing then seeing her doing the dishes and then taking him out for a walk, reminding him to don his overcoat. This hallucination was set up in his earlier vision of her playing the piano, when he was playing the CD. In the affection, the smothering, the denial, the pigeon scene replays his last help to Anne.

Haneke doesn’t tell us what finally happens to Georges but he has set up clues. In his fantasy or madness Georges goes with Anne for one last walk. In effect he reunites with her, presumably by drowning, as his nightmare of finding himself ankle deep in water and being smothered portended. It’s Paris so he dies in Seine. That’s amour, as in real not cinema love. Georges serves Anne selflessly as long as he can, then he helps her out. Unable to carry on without her he has the faith to rejoin her. 

The film is framed by intrusions into the lovers’ flat. Before the couple’s story begins the firemen and police break into their sanctuary. After the couple’s story ends the physical damage has been repaired and daughter Eva takes over. At last she has her real estate investment. She sits in her father’s chair, boxed by the doorways as if in her own casket. She is poignantly alone, still not fathoming the love the apartment has lost. Earlier she recalled as a child hearing her parents making love and feeling secure that they would always be together. What we have been watching -- and which she could never understand -- is her parents’ more profound love-making as they deal with the vicissitudes of time and loss. They had the real love; she’s left with the unreal estate. This film is about that particular amour, not the romanticized generality. 

Perhaps the chilly, frustrated Eva casts a different light on our loving couple. Her scenes with her parents show remarkably little comfort, love, connection. Anne dreads her and Geoff’s visit and is later pained by Eva’s blathering presence.  Nor is there any engagement -- or even a snapshot -- of their grandchildren. Perhaps the couple’s intense love came at the cost of their isolation. They were so close they effectively excluded their daughter. They have a warmer relationship with student Alexandre than with daughter Eva. She has inherited her parents’ music but not their love. Now when she feels the duty to be close she doesn’t know how. 

Closing on Huppert raises another question. How does this film relate to Haneke's The PianoTeacher (2001)? There Huppert played a sado-masochistic piano teacher still living at home with her domineering mother. That’s for another day.

Kedma

Kedma (2002)  Directed by Amos Gitai

“Kedma” is the name of the ship bringing Shoa survivors to Israel in May, 1948, a week before Israel became a state. We can take this film to be the antidote to that other Jewish refugee ship and film, Exodus (1960). Unlike Otto Preminger’s film of the Leon Uris novel, however, Gitai’s film expressly denies us any heroes and takes a far more flinty approach to the subject. Not for Gitai the simplistic Zionist cliches of Uris and Preminger. There is no stirring musical theme here, just long periods of unaccompanied action and a doleful string score that doesn’t distinguish between the violence, romance , hope and absurdity behind it.

For Kedma is not really about 1948. It uses that setting to dramatize the irresolvable conflict in Israel that if anything has increased today. It’s a retrospective prophecy, explaining what’s going on there now by purporting to reveal its roots.

The opening scene suggests that Israel allows no personal retreat from the community’s situation. An ostensibly personal moment turns out to be most public. The first shot is a woman’s back as she prepares to drop her cotton slip and join her lover Yanush (Andrei Kashkar) in bed. When he shortly leaves her we see this intimacy has occurred not in private but in a crowded below-deck on the refugee ship. In the camera’s slow track through the surprising crowd the personal story dissolves into the national.

The film shifts from the romantic promise of that first shot into the absurdities and shock of war. The refugees -- hungry, tired, all their possessions in a bag or suitcase -- disembark into a shooting match between a hapless British military unit determined to keep Jewish refugees out of their mandate and a small, armed unit of Israelis trying to help them in. 

Often a character we’ve just met and learned about is abruptly killed. An especially telling one is the Russian cantor, who speaks Yiddish but no Hebrew, who is too young to have a beard, and who itches to get a gun to start killing for his homeland. In him Gitai may have anticipated the current activism of the Haredim, despite their eschewal of military service. 

Unlike Uris/Preminger, Gitai includes the Arab case and perspective. First  a group of women bewail the loss of their olive trees. The new immigrants’ first clash with Arabs ends in a delicate standoff, as the Jewish leader stops the young cantor from throwing a rock at the Arabs who are themselves refugees from the Jews. The Arab woman leader urges her followers to “let them pass.” But then a gunfight between displaced Arabs and the internationally displaced Jews erupts, shockingly brutal.

The film’s first scene has no dialogue. The film has very little. What dialogue we get is often a demonstration of non-communication, the ostensible community shivered by its division into Polish, Arabic, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and even the odd military English. In this generally sparse screenplay, the reticence sets off the explosion in two core speeches. The first is an Arab’s railing at the Jews. He begins angry at their seizure of his donkey to  cart off their dead ends. He works up to an ardent vision that whatever the Jews will do to the Arabs they will remain on their lost land a constant, indomitable, irreconcilable doom, “like a wall.” That doesn’t promise an easy negotiation of a two-state solution.  

The second speech trumps even that. Having wept in joy at being in his promised land, Yanush is driven mad by the battles, their tolls, and the crushing of his hopes. He rages like an Old Testament prophet against what the Jews have been made by all their persecutors and the folly of their messianic lore. (For a transcript of his speech check the film’s entry on www.uk.imdb.com). 
     The two speeches taken together present the poles that appear to preclude any peace today, even as they prove the necessity for some conciliation. Their passion, terror and candour quite outstrip any other film treatment of the situation and expose the triviality of Exodus and any other other one-sided approach -- whether from the Left or the Right. 

In the last shot the surviving refugees and Israelis, including the broken prophet Yanush, disappear into the winding road -- they actually do go round the bend -- into the desert, whose surprising hints of fertility tacitly attest to the garden that the Israelis would develop and to which the Arabs would cling.

 

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011)

written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass

Sharon (Susan Sarandon) is a widow with two alienated, indeed antagonistic, sons. Jeff (Jason Segal) is a 30-year-old pothead who hasn’t had a relationship since high school. He stays in his mother’s basement retreat waiting for some sign that will bring him his destiny. Pat (Ed Helms) wears a paint-store logo but we don’t see him at work. When he buys a Porsche Boxter on credit he infuriates his wife Linda (Judy Greer) and drives her to think of leaving him for a more sensitive nebbish, Steve (Steve Zissis). At work Sharon is flattered by texts from “a secret admirer” who turns out to be her friendly colleague Carol (Rae Dawn Chong).

Each member of that family starts out angry because all dream of living a big life. That’s the domestic version of US exceptionalism. The mother is mad that her fantasies have been frustrated, especially her hopes for her sons. Pat is angry that his wife doesn’t understand how the Porsche will restore excitement to their lives. His detachment infuriates her. Jeff is frustrated that he isn’t getting his expected supernatural direction (He draws his religious faith from the film Signs). 

Eventually all three characters learn that their lives don’t have to be big. What rather counts is the small human connection. A massive traffic jam enables them to advance where it counts. The mother finds an unexpected intimacy, nonsexual, with the woman.They “get” each other; who needs more? Pat realizes and admits that he wants to be in love with his wife again, i.e., to recover the modest destiny that he abandoned for the delusions embodied in that Porsche. Jeff’s faith in signs led him to perform an act of heroism (he saves a father and his two little daughters from drowning). But he finds that even that “big” event is not as important as his small role in helping his brother and mother find their satisfaction. In the TV report of his heroism we don’t see him named or shown. He leaves the report to go repair the window shutter that his mother has been begging him to fix. That’s the glue that binds.

Now, we tend to think that Canada/Canadians live the small lives and the US/Americans get the big lives. Certainly that’s one effect of America’s historic tendency to mythologize itself. But along comes this American film, with major actors (Helms, Sarandon), that privileges the small life, the intimate connection, over the grandiose. The film also counters our sense, especially encouraged by the current political theatre, that America has lost its ability and willingness for self-criticism, self-analysis. (As it happens, the theatre review in the current New Yorker stresses a similar theme in the revival of Death of a Salesman.)

The film also eschews the pat ending in favour of an abiding sense of process, of incompleteness. Hence the title. A comma-free “Jeff lives at home” would be a complete sentence, period, finis. But “Jeff, who lives at home” dangles unfinished. It has no predicate so it’s a fragment, not a sentence. That reflects the characters’ initial fragmentary nature, in their relationships and in their lives. Jeff is also the subject with particular regard to how he “lives” at home. At first he seems to be in suspended animation. But as he engages with his brother’s troubles Jeff comes alive, he functions, he acts on his “sign” and becomes a hero. But his more fulfilling destiny is to live, really live, not in the headlines or the cosmos but at home, with his nearest and dearest. Thus valorizing the domestic, the modest, seems much more Canadian than American. But it’s hard to speak of “the American.” There are so many different “Americans,” some indeed downright Canadian.   

Michael Haneke's Fun and Games

Michael Haneke’s Fun and Games

When I wrote my study of Hitchcock’s British films some 35 years ago I had to go to London (UK) and Washington (DC) and book private screenings at the British Film Institute and the Library of Congress. If I were to write it today I could stay at home. Having the films at hand for multiple viewings might prevent all those embarrassing mistakes. I say ‘might.’

The burgeoning DVD resource has created a virtual museum of both serious and fatuous film. So when the Austrian director Michael Haneke debuts in America with Funny Games (2008), starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, his DVDs enable us to read this apparently commercial thriller in the context of a significant career. In fact, the film is a shot by shot remake of his 1997 film of the same name. His ten feature films to date reveal Haneke’s recurring themes and strategies. I will not deal with the screenplay he wrote for director Paulus Manker, The Moor’s Head (1996), his dialogue credit for Manker’s Schmutz (1985), his contribution to the anthology, Lumiere (1996) and The Rebellion, Haneke’s 1993 adaptation of a Joseph Roth novel, because these works are not available on DVD – yet. Even the British Museum doesn’t have everything.

Overall Haneke combines Hitchcock’s sense of the savagery within our civilization with Brecht’s detachment devices (aka Verfremdungseffekt). A Haneke film has certain stylistic trademarks. He tends to episodic narratives, with -- to encourage contemplation -- lengthy shots and blackouts. His films abound with cultural signs, especially the devolution from classical music to the brutish mass media. His characters act out of visceral impulse rather than logic or clear motive. The fact that he usually names his central couple George and Anna – even in his script for The Moor’s Head -- suggests he is more interested in generic characters and relationships than in individual psychology. His most characteristic theme is the alienation and brutalization that feeds and grows out of our increasingly violent entertainments. He usually involves games that like the characters’ fictional diversions prove malicious. As his landscape turns increasingly political, the dangers tend to come from the outside world and the menace points to a psychopathology in Western society. Yet Haneke always leaves a final sense of uncertainty, some mystery unresolved, an enigma still in the air. He denies us the comfort of thinking we understand.

***

Beginning modestly, Haneke described the focus of his first three films as “the progressive emotional glaciation of Austria.” His first feature, The Seventh Continent (1989), was based on a news story. A successful materialistic couple, engineer George (Dieter Berner) and his optician wife Anna (Birgit Doll) systematically destroy all their possessions, then kill their young daughter Eva and themselves. As they cut up their clothing and flush down their savings the prolonged destruction recalls the climactic explosion in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). The parents’ resolve wavers only twice: when they consider sparing their child, and when Anna’s “Nein!” is too late to save the aquarium. The media have numbed these characters’ emotional lives, from the wake-up clock radio to the Australian tourist billboard that provides the film’s title and the characters’ cover to prepare their suicide. Having axed one TV set, Georg and Anna keep another they can die watching. The snowy screen catches their ultimate void.

Remarkably, the first shot in Haneke’s first feature encapsulates his canon. It is a rear view of George and Anna as they sit in a car wash, apart, darkened, unmoved and unmoving, while their collective shell is harshly buffeted – for cleansing. Each of the three acts – set a year apart -- has a car wash and a voice-over letter to George’s parents, two of which are Anna’s cheery reports of their successes and the last George’s suicide note. The rough cleansing foreshadows their purge of possessions and themselves. Moreover, they sit there watching the wash as if it were a film. We seem to be in the back seat watching them and watching with them. Characters who live as if they were in a film become a Haneke trademark. We have no explanation for the characters’ decision, only fugitive clues. Perhaps for all their success and however exhilarating their life/ride may seem they could no longer obey the “Do Not Brake” sign outside the car wash. 

In Benny’s Video (1992) the teenage Benny (Arno Frisch) is obsessed with violent videos. He shows his tape of a pig’s slaughter to a girl whom he then kills with his stolen stun gun. After his parents see the tape of the girl’s murder, the father protects his business image by dicing and disposing of the corpse while the mother takes Benny to Egypt. There they videotape their experiences and numbly watch the incomprehensible Egyptian TV. Their lives are wholly mediated. We even see the parents’ ultimate arrest on the apartment’s security screens. His video obsession has left Benny with no conscience, no emotion, an outsider bemused to wonder what he’ll do next, whether it’s abusing his best friend’s trust, killing a new friend, or betraying his parents for protecting him. He could be watching himself in a film. His mother’s weeping recalls the conscience and feeling lost in Benny’s world of desensitizing media. Some religious references at the end -- a cathedral on Egyptian TV, the boys choir’s holy recital, some organ music – recall a defunct remediation.   

Haneke opens 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) with the report of a 19-year-old student shooting three people dead in a Vienna bank then killing himself. In the ensuing 71 vignettes we guess who will kill whom. The incident brings together a homeless Romanian boy scavenging through Vienna, a couple who take him up instead of the girl they have planned to adopt, another couple with a sick baby and a tense marriage, a cashier who impersonally treats her old father as a client, and youths variously engaged in games -- a puzzle, computers, ping pong. Especially the adoption story demonstrates Haneke’s refusal to sentimentalize. He weaves in TV news clips about wars in Somalia, Haiti, Ulster, Anatolia, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia. The TV reports the bank shooting but doesn’t name the victims, preferring to expand upon Michael Jackson’s denial of child molestation charges. As the star ends the film Haneke moves from the family stories to social disintegration. Even the video shot to help the ping pong player is used cruelly. He is locked into mechanical repetition like the violent media around him. 

***

An outside destruction of a family drives Haneke’s two versions of Funny Games (1997, 2007).While there are subtle inflections in the tone, casting and context, both films share the plot exactly. The lakeside vacation home of an affluent couple, Georg (Ulrich Muhe in the original; Tim Roth in the remake) and Anna (Susanne Lothar; Naomi Watts), is invaded by two young strangers, Paul (Arno Frisch; Michael Pitt) and Peter (Frank Giering; Brady Corbet). Ostensibly coming from a neighbour’s to borrow eggs, they take over. They kill the family dog, cripple the husband, then play a series of sadistic games before murdering the family. They then proceed across the lake to their next complacent victims, who are even more affluent and house-proud. 

Haneke even keeps the original soundtrack which over the opening credits flies off the Handel down to John Zorn’s punk. In the opening scene the parents play at identifying operas. In the high-angle shot culture/civilization slices through the benign green Nature it controls. But in the clean-cut gentlemen with their sadistic games a radical savagery poses as civilized.

As the film details the middle of three home invasions, it is itself one of a type. The Attacked Home genre would include Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971), Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), the remade The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955; Michael Cimino, 1990) and Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1961; Martin Scorsese, 1991), along with such down-market kin as Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968), The Crazies (Romero, 1973), and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977). Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) offers a reversal, as the innocents are terrorized when they enter the savages’ territory. 

By genre convention a Haneke close-up renders the most mundane domestic detail sinister. But he denies us the usual happy ending. His point is not a family’s trial and hard-won success but the modern taste for violence and its brutalizing effect, which allow no salutary conclusion. 

In both Funny Games a rhetorical fissure declares the audience complicitous in the torture, both physical and psychological, that characterizes the genre. As Anna searches for the family’s murdered dog, Paul winks to the camera (i.e., us). He later asks us about his bet on when the family will be dead. After the intruders teasingly depart, a lengthy shot of Anna turned from the TV could be a still; absent the killers, the film seems suspended. When Georg says he has been tortured enough Paul says “We’re not up to feature film length yet,” then asks the audience: “Is that enough? But you want a real ending with plausible plot development, don’t you?” “We want to offer the audience something and show what we can do, right?” 

After Anna grabs the shotgun and kills Peter, Paul takes the TV remote control and after a still shot of his hand on the button, rewinds the tape of his life, returning to the point where he now prevents Anna’s taking the gun. Later Peter glances at us before he keeps Anna from the knife on the boat. We have anticipated its bloody application since its emphatic drop earlier. Peter describes a film about the intersection of fiction and reality. In the last shot, in his next victims’ hallway, Paul smiles at us, to that Zorn metal shriek. 

The remake replaces Paul’s wink with a fugitive smirk and drops his reference to the film’s feature length. But it keeps the other examples. In the rewind scene, where the original shows the white-line sign of a video rewind, the remake updates to DVD.

Amid this self-referentiality Paul and Peter call each other after the sadistic cartoon characters Tom and Jerry and the apathetic contemporary update, Beavis and Butthead. Against this fictionality, however, Haneke stresses the reality especially of Georg’s pain, crippled and tortured, and Anna’s ultimate numbness.  

Given these devices, the film is less about a violent invasion than about films about violent invasion – and our appetite for them. Anna’s out of frame forced strip teases the viewer’s anticipation. When Georg is forced to say “Get undressed, my darling” he too is invisibly violated. We are again disappointed when son Georgie can’t shoot Paul, when Anna’s shooting Peter is rescinded, and when Georgie’s and his father’s killing and Georg’s knife torture are off camera. Here the killers break their promise “to show us what [they] can do.” Blink and you miss Anna’s drowning. In the discussion after the Cannes premiere Haneke declared that “Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn’t need the film. Anyone who stays, does.” This film condemns the audience it attracts. As it piles on the terror we abhor but crave, its horror is anti-horror.

The original film’s casting drew on Haneke’s personal vocabulary of actors. Georg is played by the actor who in Benny’s Video covered up for his son’s murder, only to be betrayed by him to the police. As Arno Frisch plays both roles, Benny seems to have grown into Paul. As the blank snowy TV screen that ends Haneke’s first feature, The Seventh Continent, opens the action in his second, Benny’s Video, the family casting makes Funny Games an extension of the latter. This time the family is destroyed by outsiders, anticipating the shift to societal tensions in Code Unknown and Cache.

For the US remake Haneke turned to more public personae. Both Watts and Roth are primarily known for milder narratives but they have also appeared in horror remakes. In another class tension these mainstream stars are assailed by Pitt and Corbet, who have worked with such Independents as Gregg Araki and Gus Van Sant. Watts’s star presence certainly heats up the forced strip. The short Roth makes Georg more immediately the emasculated American male. In a parallel cultural shift Haneke changed the family dog from German Shepherd to Golden Retriever and Frisch’s dark Paul to Michael Pitt’s Beach Boy All-American glow. 

***

In 1997 Haneke also made a two-hour TV film of Kafka’s The Castle with parallels to Funny Games. As K and his barmaid fiancee Frieda, Haneke cast the actors who played Georg and Anna, with the Peter actor as Jeremiah, the land surveyor’s incompetent assistant who exploits Freda’s sexual anxiety. The blonde Anna and Peter are dark-haired for the Prague nightmare. As a reminder that we are watching a fiction, the voice-over narrator parallels Haneke’s fissures, like the actor’s address to the camera and the rewind. As K is an innocent caught up in a series of perplexing, destructive games, with strained manners and menacing claims of insult, the adaptation confirms the Kafkaesque tone in Funny Games. 

Coherent with the Kafka fragment, Haneke turned to the enigmas around the empowered and the defeated in Code Unknown (2001), “Incomplete tales of several journeys,” where he also resumes the urban nexus of Chronology. A Paris street tussle connects a principled black Moslem teacher (Ona Lu Yenke), a begging Romanian grandmother who is deported, and the central story. There Anne (Juliette Binoche) is starring in a film remake of The Collector and a staging of Twelfth Night, but their respective horror and nervous hilarity pale beside the tensions in her real life. She has difficulty connecting to her photojournalist lover Georges (Thierry Neuvic). His feckless younger brother abandons their father, who in response slaughters his cow herd. In the metro an Arab flirts with Anne, then rails at her and spits on her face. 

The film is framed by a deaf child acting out an emotion for classmates to identify, but we hear their guesses only at the first. We are left to struggle with their unknown code. As the deaf children’s drum band pounds out a visceral rhythm across the closing montage, we wonder how the grandmother was driven away from her new post, why Anne has locked out Georges, and ultimately what awaits a city of such alienation and conflict. Along the film’s wide range of “performance” only the deaf children seem bonded to and by their expression.

In The Piano Teacher (2001) Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is a middle-aged classical piano teacher whose domineering mother (Annie Girardot) lives – of course -- in front of her TV. Erika fights with her mother and vents her frustrations on her students. She hectors them (“Are you sorry because you’re a pig?”) and ruins a fragile young pianist by putting broken glass shards in her right-hand coat pocket. Privately Erika visits porn film parlours, spies on lovers at a drive-in and cuts her inner loin before dinner. After disdaining Walter (Benoit Magimel), an engineering student passionate about his piano, she accepts his love in a violent lavatory encounter. As the engineer is studying “low voltage,” Erika repels Walter with her insistence upon sado-masochism, then is repelled when he obeys. In another variation on Funny Games Walter violently invades the women’s home. This is Haneke’s fullest treatment of the collision between culture and savagery. In a brief scene hulking hockey players drive two delicate young figure-skaters off the ice. But in her relationship with the hockey playing engineer the esteemed pianist proves the more brutal. As Erika warns Walter, “I have no feelings. Get that into your head.” Enraged, she can turn her violence only upon herself. 

Time of the Wolf (2003) advances the situation of Funny Games. After an apocalypse Anne Laurent (Isabelle Huppert) brings her family to their rural vacation home only to find it occupied by strangers, who kill the patriarch and steal their supplies. Anne, Eva (Anais Demoustier) and the fragile young Ben (Lucas Biscombe) scramble to survive. 

In Cache (2005) Haneke returns to the video focus of Benny’s Video. Some mysterious videos force cultural critic Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) to confront his guilt over betraying a childhood Arab friend. While his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) grows remote, their son seems complicitous in his father’s destruction. For a fuller discussion see my “Cache and the Public/Private Secret” (Queens Quarterly, Summer, 2006, pp. 225-233).

Remaking one’s own film as closely as Haneke did Funny Games is an extreme proof of Renoir’s observation that a director really makes only one, aggregate film. The emotionless and malicious game-players, killers and self-destroyers who harden before their TV sets in Haneke’s dream world confirm him a major and compelling auteur.

Bibliography

Michael Atkinson, “Family in peril,” Sight and Sound, April 2008, p. 23.

Catherine Wheatley, “Unkind rewind,” Ibid pp. 18-22.

Robin Wood, “Michael Haneke: Beyond Compromise,” CineAction, Issue 73/74, pp. 44-55.

A 7-DVD set The Films of Michael Haneke is available from Kino. Cache has been published by Columbia/Tristar and Time of the Wolf by Palm Pictures. Since I wrote this paper in 2008, of course, Haneke has again extended and distinguished himself with The White Ribbon and Amour. 

Fatih Akin & Post-nationalist Cinema

Fatih Akin and Post-nationalist Cinema

(One idea plumped up with three tangents)

(written 2008)

As he reflects his Turkish family background, the German-born director Fatih Akin may augur a shift in world cinema to a new internationalism. At 35 Akin typifies the generation for whom the operative community transcends national borders. His focus on German-Turkish relations is especially timely as Turkey pursues admission to the European Union. 

 In addition to issues around EU governance, the new internationalism in European film grows out of that mixed blessing of corporate globalization and the demographic shifts from immigration. The concept of A Cultural Nationalism Without Borders has both positive and negative implications. The clearly negative element is the challenge that anti-assimilationist Islam radicals pose to their host nations. This threat to national identities and values is exemplified by the firestorms suffered by Mark Steyn here, novelists Martin Amis and Ian McEwan in Britain, and the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Holland. This aspect is unlikely to be addressed by a cinema dedicated either to the mass box office or to the reflex judgments of the dangerously well-meaning Left. I will instead focus on the more positive, at least the less incendiary, effects of the new post-nationalism.

But first, Tangent #1:

This new internationalism rather jars us old pre-Boomer cinephiles. For film became our most serous art and pleasure by celebrating national cultures. True, to claim seriousness for the form we would usually focus on the coherence across the director’s canon: Hitchcock vs Lean, Ford vs. Hawks, Kurosawa vs Ozu, Godard vs Truffaut, Fellini vs. Antonioni, Bunuel vs. the world. Every nation bred its own auteurs. But we knew that for all their distinctive voices these artists advanced their respective national cultures. 

Indeed we embraced the medium’s new maturity because it made us feel we were citizens of the larger world. Even as it explored the most serious issues of life and poetry, ‘Cinemah’ opened us to divergent national cultures. If Calgary or Lethbridge did not have a Thalia (the arty rep house in the Greenwich pre-Global Village) they could still have a Film Society that imported 16 mm passports out of Here. All the more rewarding when they exercised the provincial provincial censors by flashing some breasts or letting an adulterer like Jeanne Moreau go unpunished. 

As Canadians we welcomed the advent of the two venerable Dons Owen and Shebib, Gilles Carle, Claude Jutra, Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, because they proved -- to us as much as to the international community --that Canadian film need not be just the tatty hem on the American crinoline. Now we had our own national identity -- or two. Soon ‘from sea to shining sea’ meant from Jack Darcus in Victoria to William MacGillivray in Halifax with Mireille Dansereau and Micheline Lanctot en route. 

Now, at least since The Red Violin (Francois Girard, 1998) Canadian cinema has turned outward to international narratives. This is distinct from those eager denials of our nationality like Porky’s, Porky’s Revenge, Animal House, Animal House Revenge, and so on ad nauseum, where we’d fly an American flag within the first two minutes in order to hide in that American crinoline. But now our leading auteurs – after Norman McLaren -- Michael Snow, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan -- have transcended nationality in their subjects as in their reputation. The ubiquitous Don McKellar wrote the screenplay for the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (2008).

Even the ostensibly parochial My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2008) rather finds the director bellying up to the bar of an international poetic genre, the Symphony of a City as launched by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) and most recently distinguished by Terrence Davies’ memoir of his Liverpool, Of Time and the City (2008). If Maddin is contemplating his navel here, it’s a global navel engagement. His subject is not so much Winnipeg as urbane urban mythopoeia. Like Marcel Dzama, Maddin is a Winnipeg artist who has parlayed small works of huge quirkiness into international stature. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, if Maddin is ‘from Winnipeg,’ the scope of his ambition and his incorporation of the entire rhetoric of film history make him immediately ‘far from Winnipeg,’ however close he appears to operate. When Maddin opened this film in New York City last June he was deployed in several other functions unrelated to Canadian film. Clearly his local resonates the universal. In the January Sight and Sound Maddin made three of the critics’ Best Five Films of 2008 lists and was heralded by Michael Brooke as the “Canadian straitjacket case” (which in context is praise indeed). Even without a beckoning EU our cinema now waxes international. End of tangent.

***

In Fatih Akin’s films this change – this blurring of old borders -- proves the host culture’s richness. The theme of his 2007 film, The Edge of Heaven is the redemption, both personal and national, that derives from interweaving disparate cultures. The film presents three sets of alienated parent-child relationships which are resolved only after all six characters have moved to the other country and embraced that Other’s perspective. Though Turkey is characterized by civil unrest it is there that the characters find their peace and salvation. In a comic summary of this internationalist spirit, when the prostitute Yeter (Nursel Kose) is asked if she’ll “do French” she replies: “French, Italian, Greek, I’ll do it International for you.” I really should pay her for that line.

The central figure, Nejat (Baki Davrak), is a Turkish professor of German literature at a German university. That is, he personifies internationalist culture. His Goethe lecture presumes an order beneath loss and chaos: “Who wants to see a rose bloom in the depths of winter?” That winter echoes in the casual mention of death in the opening scene and in the titles that predict the two women’s deaths, both in absurd accidents. 

 Nejat initially disapproves when his widower father Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) takes that prostitute as his live-in girlfriend. Nejat softens when he learns Yeter is funding her daughter Ayten’s (Nurgul Yesilcay) university education. When the drunken Ali kills his prostitute, Nejat rejects his father and goes to Istanbul in search of her daughter. While Nejat takes over a German bookstore there, Ayten, who is a political activist, flees the Turkish police to Germany. There she is taken in by a German student, Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), with whom she has a lesbian affair. For that Ayten is resented by Lotte’s conservative mother Susanne, played by Hanna Schygulla. The rebel Ayten is arrested and sent back to a Turkish prison. Her lover Lotte campaigns to free her. After Lotte’s death her mother Susanne relents and takes on her daughter’s campaign to free Ayten. 

The two conflicted generations converge when Nejat, the unforgiving son in one family, meets Susanne, the newly forgiving mother in the other family, for dinner.  This leads him to forgive his father. In the last shot Nejat waits on the beach for his father’s unlikely return. Ali – who in despair has set fatal sail into the sunset -- will probably never know his son has forgiven him. Yet Nejat still redeems himself by this penitence. The instruction “repent” echoes through the film, from the Turks threatening the prostitute Yeter in Germany to the rebels’ internecine squabbles and at least the posture of penitence by which Ayten wins release from jail.

The tangle of impulse and coincidence points to the tragic effects of human division, whether personal or cultural. The need to understand and to embrace the Other is more clearly suggested in the film’s original German title, Auf der anderen Seite (On the other Side) than in the given translation, The Edge of Heaven.  

Amid these tragic divisions the rose that truly blooms in winter is Susanne – Lotte’s mother -- the character who most movingly transcends her prejudices.  In Hannah Schygulla Akin cast arguably the most compelling persona of post-war German film. Schygulla in her Fassbinder films, especially The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979-80), exemplified the responsible new Germany: brave, pragmatic, generous, loving, indomitable. Though we’re shocked to see this beauty as a bigoted frump, her character rises to recover those values. In this appearance the actress’s courage matches her character’s. Paradoxically, in the film’s most affirmative scene Susanne and Nejat, the conservative German mother and the liberal Turkish son, drink a toast to our most compelling unifier, Death.

Now, Tangent #2:

In a similar iconography Stephen Daldry in The Reader cast Bruno Ganz as the law professor who embodies Germany’s hard confrontation of the past. As Ganz is another icon of the new German film, his portrayal of Hitler in Downfall (2004) inflects his persona into the German who transcends the past by confronting history. Ganz’s law professor leads the new generation through the implications of the fact that “The law is narrow” – against the breadth that humanity and usually complex moral issues require. His candid humility contrasts to the shame that paralyzes the central couple. The Ralph Fiennes hero remains emotionally numbed by his sexual initiation by a beautiful older woman who he later learns had exploited young girls in the concentration camps to the same ends for which she exploited him. For her part the Kate Winslett heroine is a self-unaware cleanliness freak whose late literacy feeds only her taste for pulp romances and provides an elevation for her suicide. The boy’s – and our – discovery of her Nazi function rewrites everything we have thought about her, including her cleansing, her sexual generosity, her craving for narrative, and her self-destructive shame. The theme of literal literacy opens into moral illiteracy and reiterates the helplessness of high culture against savagery. 

End of Tangent 2. One left.

***

Akin introduced the internationalism of The Edge of Heaven more lightly in his first fiction feature, a heist film, Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos, 1998), where the gangster friends are a Turk, a Greek and a Serbian who tries to join an Albanian gang.  

Akin crossed other borders when he mixed genres in his more adventurous In July (2000), where a noir opening spins into a screwball romantic comedy that even includes whimsical animation. A young German physics teacher Daniel (Moritz Bleibtrau) hitches a ride with the violent Isa (Mahmet Kurtulus), a sinister Turk who has a corpse in the trunk of his car. As in The Edge of Heaven, the ensuing narrative explains how the hero got to the film’s ominous opening scene. By the end all our suspicions about that Turk are dispelled.

In a flea market Daniel attracts a girl, July (Christiane Paul). She persuades him to buy a Mayan sun-ring that will ensure he will meet the one girl destined to bring him eternal happiness. She hopes that will be her so she invites him to a rock concert, where – to my present purpose -- the band sings about “a love that crossed over every border.” But these sun-crossed lovers are thwarted when Daniel is instead attracted to a Turkish girl, Melek (Idil Uher), who also wears a sun image. After a chaste night together she leaves to meet her friend in Istanbul. When Daniel drives off after her, he picks up the hitchhiking July, who -- frustrated at losing him -- decided to go whichever direction her first ride would take her. As destiny would have it, he is that first ride.

In the subsequent series of accidents, disasters and random crimes, Daniel and July are repeatedly separated and reunited. As she introduces him to fighting, marijuana, the exhilarating joys of misadventure, she proves her initial sense that “He has something deep inside waiting to get out.” Like a politicized – and leopard-free -- Bringing Up Baby, the ultimate romantic union fulfills the screwball heroine’s intuition and ends the hero’s dullness. Prefiguring the end, Daniel pretends to marry July so the border guard (played by director Akin himself) will admit them into Romania. The fake union overcomes the barrier of the border. In his cameo the director personifies border crossing.

Tangent #3:

The film’s genre switch from its thriller start to the comedy conclusion anticipates the frame on the Irish Danny Boyle’s current exercise in internationalism, Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle opens with a chase through the meanest streets of Mumbai and a torturous interrogation, but works around to close with a garish Bollywood song and dance spectacular. In that framework collide not just two genres but two worlds and two visions of life. It establishes perhaps the film’s radical point, the reciprocal relationship between the harshness of social reality and escapist entertainment, especially film and TV. Here as in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), the arts provide a refuge from life’s terrible miseries but that anodyne keeps us from addressing them. The illusional refuge perpetuates the misery. Boyle’s hero succeeds in part by his own integrity but more largely because the questions he’s asked happen to coincide with what he has suffered. He wins with the scars of his experience, as his beloved is purified by her scar. But his freakish success, which feeds the fantasy of the suffering nation, hardly justifies the system from which he has implausibly emerged. The film embodies that saw-off. End of tangents.

Though Akin’s In July is a much lighter film it anticipates the concerns of The Edge of Heaven. In both, the German heroes find their salvation in Turkey. The Turkish border officials are more generous and considerate than the Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian -- as the girl Ayten’s experience in a Turkish prison is a far cry from Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978). In the final resolution the dreaded Turk Isa was only trying to smuggle back into Turkey his dead Uncle Ahmed, who died while visiting his family in Hamburg but could not be buried there without his birth certificate. That is delivered by Isa’s girl friend, who turns out to be Daniel’s first dream-girl, Melek. The Turks not only prove amenable but they enable the German lovers, Daniel and July, to fulfill their destiny. 

In addition to refuting their suspicious stereotype, both films touch on the alienation Turkish immigrants experience in Germany. In Akin’s German films the deepest human relationships require we transcend national borders. The host German culture is liberated by its minority Turkish. So, too, in Solino (2002) an Italian family’s pizza business in Germany thrives until the brothers split in romantic rivalry. But they ultimately reunite over memories that outweigh their differences. As it happens, this morning’s Globe and Mail reports a poll that reveals the Turkish people think Germany is the only country that has a largely positive effect on the world. 

  As Akin rejects borders he has also switched between fiction and documentary. Head-On (Geigen die Wand, 2004) details the pragmatic union between two self-destructive German Turks, the rocker Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), who slashes her wrists to escape her traditional Muslim family. The 1980s rock score led to Akin’s feature documentary, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) where Akin collaborated with the German avant-rock musician Alexander Hacke to survey Turkish popular music. 

To a Turk born in Germany his nation and his culture are neither Turkish or German but both. A minority in one culture finds freedom and fulfillment beyond its borders. Any hard and fast border between them would be a destructive artifice. Given this commitment to super-national community it is not surprising that Akin has contributed to two international anthology films, Visions of Europe (2004) and the imminent New York I Love You (2009). Akin may augur a new generation of auteurs who choose to bestride the wider world -- and the narrowing law -- not like a colossus but as a bridge.

Stand Up Guys

+Stand Up Guys (dir. Fisher Stevens)

Like the recent fogey musical Quartet, Stand Up Guys gives some aged icons the chance to exercise their old skills and charm as performers exercising their old skills and charm, to snatch a bit more light from their dusk. What Guys lacks in opera it makes up for in grittier sentiments, a more general profane wit than Billy Connelly provided, and witty reflections on the existential American crime genre.

The opening sequence interweaves two destinies. Doc (Christopher Walken) paints his brilliant sunrises. His best friend Valentine (Al Pacino) is released from prison after serving 28 years without ratting out his boss. Doc takes Val to his modest apartment, then to a night of partying. Their old boss Claphands (Mark Margolis) has not forgiven Val for his son’s death on a job, so he compels Doc to kill Val before 10 a.m. or Claphands will kill them both. Unlike a similar setup in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976), here Val twigs to Doc’s assignment and the two pals move candidly toward the inevitable shoot-out. There’s rather more gunfire here than in Quartet.

The film’s main theme is the distinction between merely living and becoming fully alive. All three men have been in prisons, Val literally, Doc in his uneventful retirement and their partner Hirsch (Alan Arkin), whom the lads break out of his nursing home for one last romp. Off his oxygen tank, Hirsch races the stolen car because the adrenalin rush keeps him alive. When he’s left waiting, he dies. The unrealized or half life is the real prison.

Of course sex is central to the heroes’ vitality. Val pops a handful of Viagras to score at a brothel, run  by their old madame’s daughter. His priapic overload takes him to the emergency ward, where he meets Hirsch’s daughter, Nina (Julianna Margulies). Hirsch, who grew his prowess through a vacuum cleaner, is an even greater success at the same brothel. Despite his triumph, he feels guilt for betraying his long-dead wife. Doc abstains because he alone is a grandfather. Abandoned by his daughter, he anonymously enjoys his granddaughter, Alex (Addison Timlin), the waitress at his daily diner. Alex is impressed at Val’s hunger (three large meals within a few hours), an emblem of the doomed ex-con’s appetite for life. Like the madam, all three gangsters’ constructive care for their young women contrasts to Claphands’ mortal bitterness over his son.

These stand up guys are men of honour and integrity. They’re Old School (as the DJ notes) because they define themselves by what they do. As pros, they take pride in critiquing and improving their craft. They affirm their own codes. Doc is so Old School he doesn’t have a cell phone. Val and Hirsch don’t know about no-key cars but they retain their old driving skills. Their ethics require courtesy, politeness, justice, as Val demonstrates when he negotiates a dance with a young woman (a homage to A Scent of a Woman, 1992). All three men resolve to avenge the rape of the woman they find in the trunk of their stolen car. With a nod to New School feminism, they give Sylvia (Vanessa Ferlito) eight minutes with her trussed up rapists and a baseball bat before the drug squad pounces.  As Val later reports, they “gave the girl back her life.”

      When the film closes on the same sunrise painting it opened on, we infer our heroes have gone out in a blaze of glory. We don’t see them fall because they’re stand up guys. We don’t see them survive because their existentialism tells them how they live or die is more important than whether. If they do die, it’s a kind of rebirth, reflected in the scene where they break into a store to get natty new suits. Like the priest scene, the Flashy New Suit scene is a convention of the classic gangster film, but it always connotes the start of the gunsel’s career. Here it’s the end. Or is it rather the once resigned heroes’ return to new life?