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The Pelican Brief (1993)
Hollywood cowardice
I had to give this picture a very low rating--a 2--in large part because it offers hard evidence of the sorry persistence of racism in Hollywood into the 1990s. Think about it: a beautiful,young leading lady; a handsome, young leading man; a thriller where they both share danger and a commitment to justice. There's a love angle, right? WRONG. The makers of this film could not bring themselves to have Julia Roberts' and Denzel Washington's characters cross the color line and kiss each other. Huh????? In any other movie where the leads were played by WHITE PEOPLE, there'd be at least a kiss--if not a lot more. Chalk up another victory for corporate cowardice. A disgrace.
L'Atalante (1934)
A Dream of True Love
There are days (many of them) when I think this is the best movie I've ever seen. It is a deceptively simple story, an old story--boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-and-girl-get-back-together--told in a pictorial language that is at once wholly natural and very, very strange.
E.M. Forster defined a story as two events separated by time; Vigo discovered a perfectly cinematic style of thinking about time and our movement through it that captures the sense of reverie at the edge of consciousness, the awareness of the drift and accretion of moments that become our lives--become us--and he made that sensibility the medium of his narrative. It is a style that foregrounds the the interstices and caesuras of the story, which paradoxically makes the events all the more telling.
But this all sounds as if L'Atalante were high metaphysics or painfully abstruse modern art. It's neither, of course; as so many have said here, it's simply beautiful--charming, erotic, light as a snatch of song heard in the open air, wonderfully, frankly sentimental yet shadowed by equally frank carnality and even danger. The mixture is intoxicating--and necessary. Of course Michel Simon's character is annoying and disturbing; so is Autolycus in "The Winter's Tale," and so are Trinculo and Stephano in "The Tempest." Vigo, like Shakespeare, knew that magic and romance need a bit of coarse earth to work their spells properly.
One reason L'Atalante escapes cinematic pedantry is Vigo's admirable attitude toward the characters in this tale: He respects them. Too many filmmakers (the Coen brothers come to mind) seem to treat the characters in their films as playthings to manipulate and make interesting pictures around. What happens to them is a function of genre, or of the director's interpretation of what genre might require, or of some other formula, rather than of the director's sense of life and of the lives lived in the internally coherent world of the film. This is more than a difference of style; it is a moral difference, as the young rebel Vigo surely knew. By honoring the true love his awkward young newlyweds are sure they've found, then lost, then rediscovered somehow altered, deepened, rendered more fragile and precious--Vigo strikes a lasting blow for the dignity and irreducibility of the individual human lover. THAT'S a revolution.
Black Narcissus (1947)
The Politics of "Black Narcissus"
I, too, loved this movie. There are images, moments in it that I will never forget--Sister Ruth, in her scarlet dress, gripped by a seething, lubricious madness, emerging onto the terrace where Sister Clodagh is ringing the bell; the Holy Man, staring into space as the drumming stops when the general's son dies; Jean Simmons dance of the single scarf--and on and on. The film earns the highest complement a work of art can receive--it is perfectly, beautifully coherent on its own terms, like the logic of a dream.
Yet, I could not help but be disturbed by the colonial and, yes, racial politics of the picture. Again and again, the people of the valley were described--contemptuously--as "children." The film endorses this point of view. The very basis of the story is that the fecund, irrational, libidinous "foreignness" of the place can drive Europeans insane.
Now, I do not want to adopt the fallacy of judging past eras and achievements with the moral standards of our day. But at the least, it seems clear that "Black Narcissus," for all its beauty and mystery, is also a striking document of the colonial mindset.
Ordet (1955)
A harrowing excursion into the miraculous.
Ordet is about faith. It may be the most breathtaking exploration of religious experience ever filmed.
The story is simple, like an old tale. Borgen is a farmer. His son Anders loves Pedersen the tailor's daughter. But Borgen and Pedersen profess different faiths; Pedersen adheres to an austere fundamentalist belief while Borgen believes in an earthier, less metaphysical Christianity. While cordial to each other, both fathers oppose their children's wish to marry.
Borgen has two other sons, a cheerful agnostic named Michel, and Johannes, who studied to be a parson and who now has gone insane pondering the imponderables of faith and doubt. Johannes wanders out in the middle of the night to preach to the wind, and he declares to anyone who will listen that he is the risen Christ.
Michel's wife Inger is the key figure in the drama. She is a radiant, simple, hard-working wife and mother. She honors old Borgen, her father-in-law, and he clearly adores her. Michel and Inger have a frankly carnal love for one another; she is pregnant with their third child. She has the most elemental kind of Christian faith, and trusts that her husband's essential goodness of heart will lead him back to the fold.
All these characters and forces come together in a terrible crisis when Inger goes into premature labor. I'll not divulge the climax, for you should have the same experience of wonder and gratitude I--and probably most moviegoers who've ever seen it--had as it ended.
Two important notes: All this Christianity stuff may turn you off, may make you think Ordet is some gloomy Scandinavian meditation. Banish that thought. While slow-moving, the movie is not boring. The pace is perfect for the subject, and as the crisis comes and the film relentlessly heads toward climax, you cannot take your eyes off it, and your heart pounds in fear and anticipation of what will happen next. Nor is the picture especially intellectual. It is, rather, beautiful, and its themes are articulated in the language of cinema, not the categories of Kierkegaard.
That language, finally, is Carl Dreyer's. His unmistakable film grammar--the hauntingly lit intereriors, the long pans from place to place in the same room, the slightly detached yet intense performances, the most purely photographed exteriors in cinema, echoing the Danish pictorial tradition of Hammershoi, Pedersen, and others who worked a modest magic with the windswept elements of Denmark's hard land--this fiercely personal vision is put to the service of something rare in the movie business (or any other business): love.