Evil Does Not Exist

Od course i paid admission hoping there’s a guaranty.  (There isn’t.)

Evil does not exist. Nature exists. Mankind exists. What evil there is — or isn’t — lies strictly among those elements. 

But nature is nature. Outside the moral arena. The deer are timid, avoid humanity, but can be prompted to harsh reactions that may seem evil but — they’re natural. They are self-preserving reflexes not calculated actions. Even at its bloodiest nature remains innocent in its primitive stirrings. “Red in tooth and claw,” nature remains innocent of evil.

Not so humanity  — “man” as non-gendered. Man has moral awareness, moral responsibility, so there lurks and springs the evil. Evil does not exist — except in mankind. If there is any evil it is in man, not nature. 

That’s the point of the opening and closing scenes. They open with a lengthy meditative view up through tree-veined skies, exalted by the score. The first ends abruptly with little Hanna staring up at the skies. The end closes with her dead. As her handyman father, Takumi, bears off her corpse they disappear into the dark forest. They have returned to nature, dust to dust, leaf to leaf. 

        They achieve a greater non-materiality than the skeleton of the gut-shot fawn.

Not so the city slick. The former talent agent is now touting the corrupt company’s greedy plan to spoil the region and the village by developing a sophisticated camping site on the hill above them. The sewage like the water (and like modern corporate urban man) will inevitably run downhill. The moral antithesis to gravity.

At the meeting the company’s two PR touts fail to win the villagers trust. Instead, the two are genuinely moved to pressure their boss to remake the project. Sent back with a hollow pretence to compromise, they decide to convert to the village life. 

The woman is the likelier to succeed because she has a more realistic sense of herself. She survives her violent encounter with the greenery — a sliced palm, like another culture’s stigmata.

Not so the man, who is still seeking a role he can play in life. The marginal actor converted to talent agent. Now one happy stab at log-chopping persuades him to take an even more dramatic life change. 

But his instincts betray him. The climactic scene is harsh and elliptical. His and Takumi’s search for Hanna seems to have reached a happy conclusion. But then Hanna walks toward the majestic stag. Takumi hangs back, trusting to the deer’s natural gentleness. The city slicker panics and rushes to “save” her. That panics the deer, who fatally gores Hanna. 

Takumi, trying to restrain the hapless transplant, wrestles him to the ground, leaving him possibly dead. But he’s too late to save Hanna so he carries  her off, dissolving into the field. The city guy struggles back to life. 

        But then he stumbles and falls, even now unable to merge himself into nature. Dead or alive he hasn’t the self or sensitivity to be the “at one with nature” he deluded himself he could become. The loner in the human world remains isolated in the field. What life he may still muster is doomed by his guilt about Hanna. 

Arthur Newman (2012)

  This is director Dante Ariola’s dark psychological plumbing of the screwball comedy. You know, like Bringing Up Baby aka What’s Up Doc? Uptight white male hero meets freewheeling femme whacko and it’s love … at the end of the disastrous trail.

Here the laughs are light. This is a sombre examination of identities, how we find them, why we need them, how we’re both bound to them yet compelled to flee them. How we can/can’t recover one.

Wallace Avery starts with a shattered identity. He was a very promising amateur golfer but fell apart on the pro circuit. His golf identity eroded his function first as a husband and more hurtfully as a father. Now he’s a Fed Ex functionary with a one-way committed girlfriend. Cut off from his son, he created a room for him, a shrine the kid has never seen. The connection defines the distance between them.

When he can’t live up to his role as golfer, dad, lover, businessman, what does a guy do? Make himself a Newman (pause halfway thru). Arthur J., to be precise. Wallace fakes his death — by drowning, aptly, for a drama about immersions as self — and drives off to a casually promised job as a Terre Haute private golf course pro.

He’s barely on the road when he encounters Mike — a woman really named Charlotte, but you know how shifty identity can be. Clearly Arthur/Wallace and Mike/Charlotte have something in common and will hotly hit the sack before you can say QED.

Mike is introduced vandalizing her lover’s wife’s car, on some kind of bad trip. Gently concerned, Arthur takes her to the hospital and attends to her there. As they gradually adjust to each other their relationship continues but stiffly, with many jabs and no caresses. Turns out she’s fleeing an identity too. With a psychotic mother and a psychotic twin sister (the true “Mike”) , Charlotte is rootless, unfocused, driven, self-destructive.

        In a supporting theme the unconnected couple witness a diabetic man die at  bus station. Wallace tries to revive him. Mike steals his identification, so he dies as an Unknown. Our central couple take a siginificant step towards humanity when they look up the man's widow and deliver the news. More personally, this extremely odd couple stumble into a mode of relationship that will finally get them into bed. Ok, to intimacy. 

But it’s only through their respective shields. Their sex happens only when they role play. They follow strangers, study them, then enter their homes, assume their unwitting hosts’ clothes and identities and finally make the beast with two backs. Well, as they’re playing others it’s maybe four.They’re themselves only when they’re others so when they’re just themselves they can’t get it together.

Until the end. Even there the uniting is a separation. Both return to their abandoned identities because… well that’s who they are. It’s not like in the movies, where you can just play someone else when you feel like it.

Baby Reindeer

You could call Baby Reindeer the Meet Cute Romance on steroids. Or a new chapter in Psychopathology in Everyday Life. I’ll settle for a triple-threat introduction to genius. Richard Gadd wrote this series, directed it and stars as the failed standup comedian who discovers himself through a Wacko Other, the humongous Martha. That’s about as impressive a triple-threat intro as Orson’s Charlie.

In the beginning. The haggard Donny is a bartender who buys a needy woman a drink. He is then alternately tickled and tormented by her stalking him. What keeps him from firmly and finally shucking her is his own guilt/shame/insecurity that derives from his having been drugged and raped by a screenwriter who’d encouraged his hopes to crack the biz.

The stalker’s intrusion into Donny’s life and mind torpedo his romance with the lovely and generous trans, Terri. It also queers his relationship with his ex, Keeley, and her mother, who has let Donny live in her house until Martha’s violence turns threratening. 

The last scene finds Donny alone and miserable in a bar, sans Visa. He killed his standup career by spending his gig on a humiliating confession. That makes him a brief celebrity. But he has nothing and no-one. The handsome young barkeep pays for Donny’s drink.

Now, there is an ambiguous ending for you. Will Donny revive his sanity, hopes and remnants of self-respect by invading the bartender’s life as Martha did his? Will the stalked turn stalker? 

Or is this revelation the necessary step for Donny finally to understand his nemesis Martha and to embrace her, perhaps even romantically, as radically kindred? After all, it was his first intercourse with Martha that finally freed him to make love to Terri. There’s guilt in them that hills but also maybe hope for a prospector?

When he/we learn what her sobriquet Baby Reindeer means we see she is as damaged by a loveless childhood as he was. This couple lives second generation trauma. Martha’s parents always fought. Donny’s vulgar bullying brute of a father was only hiding from his own childhood abuse by a priest. Father and son finally embrace over their respective rapes. Emerging from those traumas, neither the round lawyer Martha nor the skeletal comedian Donny have an easy path to self-knoweldge and self-acceptance. But they’re mad enough to try.

This dense, tense, shocking melodrama ultimately addresses an unexpected corner of our own humanity. It’s remarkable. And in both Jessica Gunning and Richard Gadd gives us two amazing new stars. 

The Juniper Tree (2003)

  To my regret, I lost touch with the work of Quebec actor/director Micheline Lanctot after her wonderful Handyman (1980) and Sonatine (1984). Happily, a dvd sale just produced The Juniper Tree, which she wrote, edited and directed. She also provided the music. It’s a wonderful reunion.

Lanctot’s familiar theme of two sensitive souls meeting across obstacles of class and culture here gets an operatic rendition. The film opens with a poetic reverie — both in word and in abstract imagery — about the savagery of archetypal motherhood. It closes on an operatic summation. In between we get two very dramatic stories about families fractured by passions and loss. 

Lanctot intercuts a two-hand melodrama with an opulent fairytale production of a typically grim Grimm fairy tale. In the titular tale a stepmother beheads her rejected stepson and is eventually killed by the singing bird that has revived the boy’s spirit. A macabre story of fatal passions finds a happy miracle.

In the main plot a maddened mother drowns her two young sons and is saved from a motor suicide by a highway patrolman. But he is as riven as she is. He’s a reformed commune hippy who has found stability and purpose as a cop. But that career choice cost him his hippy wife and access to their two young sons. He deals with the maddened strange mother en route to visiting his sons to explain why he’s gone. The brief encounter compels him to transcend his professional legality. This is itself an ending of fairytale extremity. 

Leads Sylvie Drapeau and Frederick de Grandpre are unfortunately unknown to me, as I have drifted from Quebec cinema. But they are both excellent. 

Wonderful to see the artist Lanctot at her sustained peak.

The Monk and the Gun

  The moral of this charming fable is loud and clear: Our bellicose international politic has lost all sense of humanity, responsibility, sense, justice. Man’s ostensible progress has proved a disaster. Thus America, the democracy that leads the free world, is defined as “the land of Lincoln and JFK” — and by implication Robert K and MLK and all the other myriad martyrs to even domestic and playground gunshot.

Yet the film is also rich in subtleties. Its quiet narrative frame is Nature. Our young hero monk walks across a field of blowing grain in the first scene. In the last he walks away through an even richer field of flowers. There he leaves a dark lane in the field behind him. But that lane closes over as the flowers bend back. Nature survives man’s passage. It even erases his mark.

In the subplot a little girl’s lack of an eraser gets her a teacher’s scolding and torn papers, as she tries to emend an error with her hanky. The election officer gifts her an eraser but it’s returned because the girl sees the government has more need to correct their mistakes than she has. Out of the mouths of babes….

The child has also lost her playmates and friends because of her father’s choice of politician in the looming initial election. The effect of the “modern democracy” is to fragment the formerly harmonious society, down even to the level of family. The wife is torn between her mother’s politics and her husband’s.

Of course the film’s key “eraser” is the rifle, which the plot amplifies into AK-47s. The plot’s focus on rifles and their escalation sets us up for a conventional Hollywood shoot-em-up. But here the Ugly American is just a Meh American, commissioned to find and buy a rare antique rifle. 

When we expect the Lama wants his guns to shoot up the invading election system we expose our Hollywood mindset. No, this Lama comes to bury gunfire not to praise it. By the plot’s ironic twist, the American falls into step. Bhutan earns the happy ending in its new post-monarchical beginning — preferring peace and harmony over mortal ambition. 

The Unknown Woman

  This unflinching film about sex trafficking is as far from the sentimental nostalgia of the director’s Cinema Paradiso as you could imagine. 

“Hitchcockian thriller,” quoth NYT on the dvd jacket. Sure enough, it has The Master’s obsessive spiralling staircase, the jangling shrill violins and post-Frenzy sexual violence. The graphic sex has to be in that flashes of flashback format or it would be paralyzing.

Irena is a Ukrainian cleaner and maid in Rome. She’s, trying to keep tab on the affluent young couple that has adopted one of the nine babies she has been forced to bear (in 12 years of sexual exploitation). 

The film traces the horror and range of exploitation of women even in cell-phone contemporary Europe. At the mild end, to get the job she has to pay a percentage to the apartment manager who lands her work. That percentage rises to half to ward off his molestation (aka “I love you”).

Irena’s perils surpass any Paulines. To secure that job she has to paralyze the woman she has befriended to replace. The pimp she thought she despatched (and robbed) resurfaces more sadistic than ever, with murderous consequences. Even as she tries to toughen up her young charge Irena herself is propelled into unmotherly brutality. She’s violently mugged by two Santa Clauses! 

Yet Tornatore manages a happy ending. Irena comes out of prison to meet the girl she tended, thinking her her daughter. The girl is beautiful — but in a taut, non-binary way. Instead of the curves the pimps would peddle she’s all muscle and sinew, a warrior, her nursemaid’s protege prepared for the harsh world that almost destroyed Irena.

Coup de chance

  Coup de chance is clearly an 89-year-old’s movie. If you’re going to have a stroke, let it be “of luck.” Filmed entirely in France — and in French — it’s the slandered genius’s possibly final assertion of his art and soul against the calumny he unjustly endures in America. 

As well, the spectacularly autumnal forest in the dramatic conclusion evoke the golden age of the survivor. This is prefigured in the lovers’ first meeting, accidental (fated?) in the street. There they quote some high school Prévert: ”Dead leaves picked up be the shovelful. [You see, I have not forgotten.] So are memories and regrets.” The lovers take the chance to deal with their regrets.

So too the film’s summary wisdom. Heroine Fanny reads from her murdered Alain’s novel the philosophy by which he lured his high school goddess into an affair: “She has come to the conclusion that life was a random event and that the odds of her existing were one in 400 quadrillion. Hence everyone’s life was a miracle, everybody alive had hit the jackpot. It was important not to squander this miracle and she was prepared to take full responsibility for her choices. Still, it terrified her how big a part luck played in it all. And how much it helped to be lucky. But not to dwell on it.”

She tries to hide Alain’s lottery ticket gift from husband Jean but it starts his suspicion.

In emphasizing the importance of hair-breadth chance Allen’s Paris film specifically evokes his London film Match Point (2005). The latter opened with a tennis ball suspended in mid-bounce over a net. It could fall either way. This time it falls over, to score a point. Life and lady luck are like that. At the end the killer throws a stolen wedding ring from a bridge to the Thames. It hits a rail, bounces up and then — down to the ground. Unknowingly, the killer’s intention has been thwarted. 

But no. Another murderous burglar finds that ring, which ultimately frees the real killer from suspicion. In Allen's later French forest an innocent hunter commits the fatal accident that the villain had planned for his own excuse. Fate, justice — it’s all chance, all luck. That makes life neither comedy nor tragedy but “a farce; a black farce.”

The new film also echoes the earlier one’s romantic triangle, with variations. Fanny works for an art auction house and is married to a very successful but only “practically legal” investment counsellor, Jean. That harmony is disrupted when she meets and falls for the writer who adored her in high school. 

In Match Point Emily Morton’s heroine Chloe marries Tom, a tennis pro promoted into her father’s elite business. That marriage is threatened by Scarlett Johannson’s struggling American actress, Nola (‘alone’ in reverse). Nola loses her engagement to Chloe’s brother Matthew but falls into an affair with and pregnancy by Tom. In the Paris film the opening shot follows a blond ponytail down the street. She evokes Johannson but turns out to be Fanny. Plus ca change…. This time the killer doesn’t get away with it. But neither husband is an innocent victim. 

That’s not the only cultural allusion in a film that ripples with pertinent French culture. The heroine’s maiden name is Moreau — and she has a Jeanne Moreau mouth to match. Several names evoke French culture: Fanny, Camille, Jean, Sorel, Blanc, etc. In particular the auteur shadow of Claude Chabrol drops across the wealthy upper class family shivered by betrayal and murder. Of course, a few films ago Allen would have played Alain.

The hot lovers fear turning into Mallarme’s “swan frozen in ice.” Alain buys Fanny The Secret Garden, a fantasy novel about a child’s redemption. The title puts a cultural frame against all the floral wallpaper — pale leaves behind Jean’s office desk, lively branches behind Alain’s bed — and the autumnal forest where at least poetic justice finally descends. In his refuge from America Allen luxuriates in his adopted French culture. 

The auction house in passing provides an even more dramatic allusion: Caravaggio’s painting of the boy David flaunting Goliath’s harvested head. Goliath is famously painted as the adult Caravaggio, and David after his own youthful mien. Like that painting, here Allen is the old man hanging on the arm of his past.   

One last touch. The charming but evil Jean exults in his colossal model train set. This opulent doodad grows out of some boyhood trauma. It reveals him still rooted in its insecurities and desperate for a power beyond even morality. While it shows off his wealth it reveals his insecurity.

        Like the Caravaggio connection from the past artist to the present, this train also evokes Mia Farrow’s slandering of Allen, which crumbled on the implausibility of his alleged assault on their daughter in their attic and evidence that Mia was coaching their young daughter in her testimony. The story included the problematic presence of a model train set. The detail seemed to root the allegation in a song by a Farrow friend. So Jean's lavish train set implicitly recalls why Allen is shooting in France — 32 years after that false rumour, still poisoning the air.  Allen in effect blows up the lingering allegation against him.  While Allen is largely silent in his own defence — leaving the field to Farrow — the train scene here is a dramatic but tacit reaffirmation of the aging artist’s innocence.