Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

  The film’s opening theme immediately declares its subject: (Cue song:) “Tradition!” The fiddler on the roof is the emblem of man trying to pull off a tune, a bit of harmony and joy, in the precarious balancing act that is life — the teeter between tradition and proper changing with the times. But the antithesis is not just between the old and the new. It’s between principle and humanity, between religious dictate and mentschlichkeit. 

Of course Tevye’s drama is his increasing compromise with Jewish tradition as his three daughters choose increasingly anti-traditional marriages. Tzeitel spurns his arranged marriage to the much older widowed butcher, preferring the penniless tailor Mottel she loves. Hodel breaks Tevye’s heart by falling for the radical activist Perchik and then following him to Siberia. They will never meet again. 

In each case Tevye contrives to talk himself out of his initially principled position. “On the other hand…” he muses, before finally accepting his daughters’ choice when he sees the love in their eyes. 

Not so acceptable his third daughter’s choice, when Chava marries the Russian Christian Fyedka. Marrying outside the faith lies beyond Tevye’s range of acceptance. Mercifully, he musters a distant blessing as they separately depart for America. 

Though the film’s popularity and voice seem dominated by its address to the traditions of Judaism, the Russian culture also looms significant. The romances and shtetl life play against the shadows of Russian oppression. Tzeitel’s wedding is broken up by a fiery pogrom. Ultimately the Russian army evicts the entire Jewish community from their village. If the homey Jews have their Tradition of social and religious culture to maintain, the Russians have theirs — albeit based upon antisemitic violence. 

Indeed, as Tevye has his private debates over what’s expected of him, so have the Russian constable and Fyedka. The constable wants to spare his friend the pogrom, but the best he can do — given his Tradition and official responsibilities — is to warn Tevye about what’s coming and then early to send his marauders on to another family.  Fyedka is at first sight moved to stop his pals’ harassing Chava. Their marriage is an equal violation of both their respective Traditions. 

The two dance scenes address this collision between cultures. When Tevye dances drunkenly with Lazar Wolf in the tavern, the intrusive attention by some young Russian men is ominous. The tension eases when Tevye dances with one of them and the bipartisan revelry ensues. In contrast, the Cossacks break up the wedding dance. Beneath the tension and violence, however, the two cultures have a commonality imaged in the men’s kazatsky dances in both scenes. The matching lines of dancing, crouching men point to the humanity that the opposing cultures share and violate.  

As the Russian traditions move some focus away from the Jewish, the script also edges away from religion. Tevye’s conversations with God are just another soliloquy, like his debates with himself, where he’s expressing himself without expectation of result or effect. Tevye’s Bibilical allusions are a mishmash of offkey references — he confuses Abraham with Moses — and homey misattributions: “As the good book says, when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.”

Similarly, the aged rabbi — proffered as the community’s source of faith and wisdom — is a bumbling comic figure whose utterances have no religious heft whatsoever: “Sit down.”  As for the Messiah, “We'll have to wait for him someplace else. Meanwhile, let's start packing.” His wisdom is rather practical than Biblical, as in his blessing for the Tsar: “May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!”     

So Tevye has it ultimately wrong: “Traditions, traditions. Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as... as... as a fiddler on the roof!” It’s the enslavement to traditions, at the cost of humanitarian concerns, like love and compassion, that unbalances the life. The film demonstrates the need — for the Russians as well as the Jews — to overcome dangerous traditions. Of course, escaping the patriarchal tradition is especially important for the women here, who must fight their father and his ways to fulfil themselves. In this text tradition provides the danger not the security. 

Promising Young Woman

  Here’s a director to watch. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s feature film debut is a richly detailed exercise in woman’s empowerment. (By the way, she’s excellent as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown, though too far from rotweiler to be simply accurate.)

        The title points two ways. Cassie was a promising med student, top of the class, when she dropped out. Implicitly, she is living out a promise to avenge the videotaped gang-rape that drove her friend to suicide. That is, Cassie has shifted her dedication from addressing physical disease to the moral affliction of sexist violence. She’s trying to cure the body social politic. Her name evokes the Greek seer Cassandra whose visions were not believed.  

Aptly, Cassie comes to her climactic date, a pre-wedding stag party in the woods, in the guise of a call-girl’s nurse uniform. She even intends a surgery — carving the lost friend’s name into the rapist groom’s chest. The doctor’s stellar career could justify such revenge. The film ends on her complete attack upon male privilege.

Fennell carefully calibrates her scenes. When Cassie strides away from her first turnaround “date” we think we see blood on her clothes. But that would befit a male avenger. Cassie’s not killing the guys that she plays falldown drunk to trick into trying to take advantage of her. It’s catsup from her breakfast burger.  She only wants to expose them. 

Cassie addresses both genders’ role in our pervasive sexism. The men she tempts into thinking they can exploit her helplessness. “I’m a nice guy!” one bleats, frightened of her surprising strength that has shown him to be worse. 

We don’t know if the experience does chasten and enlighten the men, but here’s a sad clue. Pickup Paul recognizes her as the psychopath other guys have been warning about. Even having been exposed, the victimizers blame the victim.

So too the women, whom Cassie exposes for their more respectable assumptions. The Med School dean has crashed the patriarchal ceiling — by assuming the  males’ bias. As the man is innocent until proven guilty, the complaining woman must be either lying or asking for it. Cassie pierces the dean’s shell by hiding away the dean’s daughter and making the rape threat directly personal. With the superior Madison Cassie sets a similar trap. Having gotten her drunk Cassie pays a handsome man to take her friend to a hotel room where she will awaken wondering if she has been taken advantage of. Cassie gives both women the experience of helplessness they wouldn’t believe in Cassie’s friend. 

Cassie’s romantic encounter with Ryan promises an escape from her self-restrictive mission (however noble). Unconventionally, he drinks the coffee she spat into.Their dance in the pharmacy seems to turn the film into madcap RomCom. Most touching are the scenes where the lovers lie on a bed, clothed, chatting warmly. This idyll is disrupted when Cassie sees Ryan in the videotape of her friend’s rape. This sinks him to the level of smug sexist abuser, like the lawyer, like the macho privilege fully revealed at the stag.    

Cassie’s parents suggest a domestic version of the society’s strained artifice. They sit side  by side at the breakfast table, bracing each other without communicating, apparently arrayed against her. Their living room seems a display of expense without taste, frozen in the ‘50s with its plastic-covered upholstery and pseudo-art. The mother seems more disturbed than Cassie. This may be explained when her father says he too misses the lost friend and is so relieved “to have [Cassie] back,” thanks to the brief effect of Ryan. 

One shot sets Cassie against a wall blank except for what looks like a cake icing pattern on the wall. Like the antithetical drunken party scenes this backdrop suggests the false comfort and civility of our predatory dating scene. The moment typifies director Fennell’s full command of her medium.
 

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]"