Port of Shadows (1938)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Port of Shadows (1938) – M. Carné

Director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert are known for their films made during and just before WWII in a style known as “poetic realism”.  Along with Le Jour Se Lève (Daybreak, 1939), Le Quai Des Brumes (Port of Shadows) is typically seen as a part of a doom-laden zeitgeist that infected France before the Nazis invaded.  Les Visiteurs du Soir (The Devil’s Envoys, 1942) and Les Enfants Du Paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945, their masterpiece) were made during the Occupation.  And then the zeitgeist for poetic realism was over.  But Port of Shadows and Daybreak, both starring tough guy Jean Gabin, capture the mood, with their doomed love – or love between doomed people – depicted with poetic words and poetic images.  Here, Gabin plays a soldier (also Jean) who has deserted the army and we first see him coolly hitchhiking to Le Havre, a port city on the English Channel.  Seeking refuge, he follows a friendly drunk to an isolated shack where other loners congregate under the welcoming roof of “Panama” (Édouard Delmont).  There he meets Nelly (Michèle Morgan) who is hiding from her (possibly evil) guardian, Zabel (Michel Simon), and a trio of gangsters led by Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) who are also after Zabel (who has something to do with a missing man).  It is love at first sight for Jean and Nelly, but we know that Jean seeks to escape France on a ship bound for Venezuela.  Moreover, he has accepted civilian clothes from a painter who leaves them as he swims out to commit suicide, a bad omen if ever there were one.  When he defends Nelly by slapping Lucien (an embarrassment more than anything else), we see the gears of the plot start to grind inexorably toward Jean’s doom.  He knows it and Nelly knows it but still they love each other and still he gets on board the ship to depart.  But a temporary separation instilled with hope is not to be.  Such is the plot but it is really the dialogue (Prévert), the stylized soundstage production design (Alexandre Trauner), the gauzy foggy cinematography (Eugen Schüfftan), and the noir hero acting (Gabin) that seal the deal (all went on to great things).  The melancholy beauty of it all cannot help but bewitch you. 

No Country for Old Men (2007)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

No Country for Old Men (2007) – J. Coen & E. Coen

I first saw this in the theatre when it was released in 2007 (when I was soon to be 40).  It is set in Texas in 1980 (when I was turning 13).  Watching it again in 2019 (when I am currently 51), its larger theme, about changes in society/the world making it more difficult for “old men” to keep up/stay engaged, struck me a bit harder.  Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, the old sheriff who comes to feel that the world (of crime) has moved into a new era (new terrain/country) with the scourge of drug-related violence hitting West Texas hard.  He’s ready to retire.  This is not what I remembered about the film.  Instead, I remembered it as a thriller, with Josh Brolin’s scrappy welder, Llewelyn Moss, stumbling onto a drug deal gone wrong, escaping with $2 million dollars in cash, and being pursued by relentless psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (played scarily by Javier Bardem in a really bad haircut).  After all, the tête-à-tête between Brolin and Bardem takes up most of the movie, as we see their agentic/instrumental moves in detail (e.g., buying tentpoles and taping them together with coat hangers in order to retrieve the bag of money from the air vent in the motel).  The scenes with Jones and his wife or with his old friend (Barry Corbin) seem almost like “asides”, standing apart from the narrative.  Are they really the key to writer Cormac McCarthy’s themes (and the Coens’ screenplay which draws directly from his book)? Certainly, these scenes link us to the title of the book/movie and the sense that the world has become damaged and worse – or simply a “young man’s” game.  However, I’m not sure the air of melancholy induced here and in some of the amazing cinematography by Roger Deakins (at night, particularly) manages to overcome the ultra-violence onscreen (there is a lot of blood and death); I wish it did.  I’m also not quite sure the point that chance rules our lives (certainly a cornerstone of Anton Chigurh’s philosophy and a key factor in most of the major plot turns) is debated well enough.  After all, chance may provide both opportunities and obstacles for us but the way we respond to chance events seems to dictate how they play out.  Or not.  Moss couldn’t escape the inexorableness of his fate once things cascaded.  Perhaps the only solution is to step out of the melee altogether, as Ed Tom Bell chooses to do when he retires – but this may be a luxury for “old men” (and women) and comes only when the time is right (i.e., not at 51).  Until then, we will still have to contend with and attempt to control the “random” changes in our lives and the world, even if it worsens.     

  

The Clock (2010)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Clock (2010) -- C. Marclay

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film, synchronised on screen to the exact time in the location where it is playing, is a monumental feat of editing (both visual and sound) and just plain gobsmacking.  It only tours museums so I was lucky enough to catch it at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image here in Melbourne today from 12:52 PM to 2:01 PM. In 2014, I had the chance to see 1:25 PM to 2:31 PM in Minneapolis; oddly, I did not recall any overlap until just before 2 PM when people started talking about it being too early in the day to drink.  Perhaps this is because the sheer number of clips, some familiar but many not and ALL of them out of context, might mean that you can’t remember having seen it in The Clock in particular.  Of course, I should have remembered Hitchcock’s bomb going off at 1:45 PM in Sabotage but I certainly knew that the 3:10 to Yuma was coming when its first clip appeared.  In fact, I was surprised that the first Yuma clip came so early – and also realised this time that there was at least one clip showing the child on the bus in Sabotage well before the explosion – so there must be a special treat for viewers in for the long haul who can see Marclay’s slow wind-up to some of the punchlines.  And there are indeed many punchlines – not just those favourite scenes that mention time – but an incredible array of visual and sound jokes produced by the editing and juxtaposition of scenes.  When someone dials the telephone, you know that another clip will show someone else in another place (but not another time?) answering the phone and then there will be phone after phone after phone.  Then a montage of train scenes or people in bed and the endless interspersing of people looking at their watches (or Big Ben).  The sound design is only partly diegetic – instead, the music and effects from a previous clip often carry over into the next one and some music is retained over several clips to set a mood (Shaft anyone?).  On Thursday nights, the museum shows the entire film (all night long) and last week someone tweeted about it in intervals – it seemed an extraordinarily impactful experience.  I’m tempted  -- but even after only one hour in the dark thinking about time, I saw the world outside in a different way (although this proved to be only fleeting – I need to get back inside!).  Highly recommended.

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY's THE CLOCK from hlgfilms on Vimeo.

The Florida Project (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Florida Project (2017) – S. Baker

Director Sean Baker caught my attention with 2015’s Tangerine, a story of down-but-not-out transsexual prostitutes in Hollywood shot entirely on iPhones.  His latest film shifts locations to Orlando, Florida, but retains the emphasis on those doing it hard at the bottom. More poignantly, his focus is on very young children who retain a wonderful joie-de-vivre despite their situation.  Specifically, these kids live at a motel (“Magical Kingdom”) that is managed by long-suffering but good-natured Bobby (Willem Dafoe, the only recognisable cast member, in a perfect performance).  He looks after his long-term tenants, particularly Halley (Bria Vinaite), a young unemployed single mum, who loves her six-year-old daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) but wouldn’t win any parenting awards.  Moonee and her friends are free range, running wild across parking lots between shops and busy roads, making mischief but having fun.  Things are not so easy-going for Halley but she tries to have fun; however, her rebellious anger (who gives a f attitude), seemingly (but not overtly) attributable to her lack of money and opportunity, causes problems for her. Baker shows us just one “magical” summer (from the kids’ perspective) but we know it can only lead to a dead end.  It’s wistful, slice-of-life stuff – but there’s an unavoidable tension here, particularly for parents.  Baker doesn’t judge his characters, he just shows us how bleak things are, in the shadow of a real fantasy world only moments away but impossible to reach. The kids just don’t know this yet.

Saraband (2003)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Saraband (2003) – I. Bergman

Ingmar Bergman’s last feature, shot on digital video for Swedish TV, is a return to the couple of Scenes from a Marriage (1973), played again by Liv Ullmann (now 65) and Erland Josephson (now 80), whose characters had earlier divorced (after his affair) but remained attached.  Well, thirty years later, after no contact for decades, Marianne (Ullmann) decides to visit Johan (Josephson) at his country retreat (paid for with a fortune inherited from a rich aunt). Marianne introduces this journey by speaking directly to the camera and giving us a rundown of what has happened to both of them in the intervening years – but it is hard not to look at Ullmann (and then Josephson) and think about aging and the effects it has on the body and soul.  (David Lynch worked this same magic with his most recent series of Twin Peaks).  Of course, viewers watching the films in the new blu-ray boxset in the order intended will have just watched the 1973 film/series and will be sensitive to any variations in Marianne and Johan’s behaviour.  If anything, his insensitivity and cruelty has intensified, but it is still hard to get a read on her.  She maintains her centered confidence (scored at the end of 1973) but is her attendance to others and advice to them part of a continued avoidance of self-scrutiny? At any rate, much less devotion is paid to Marianne than to Johan in this film (given that Johan is a Bergman surrogate but also here perhaps a surrogate for Bergman’s own father?).  In actuality, however, the plot of Saraband (broken into ten duets between players) focuses more on Johan’s granddaughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius) and her relationship with her parents, Johan’s son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and her deceased mother, Anna.  In the two years since Anna’s death, Henrik has retreated from his work as a musician scholar to take an (unhealthy) interest in training Karin to become a cellist.  The real crime here is that he has also treated her as a wife surrogate (reinforced by a couple of startling moments).  His weakness and inability to cope are not tolerated by Johan nor Marianne who both seek to free Karin from his grasp.  But ultimately it is her decision to make.  On the surface, then, Saraband seemed similar to other Bergman chamber dramas, but with the initial expectation of “return/retread”, I was prepared to be underwhelmed.  However, he had not lost his punch and the tensions in the relationships here – and their frankness – reverberated with me the next day.  Bergman’s experience may not be our own but his self-analysis and skill at dramatization combine for some powerful theatre (I mean TV). His final statement echoes his earlier emphasis on the sins of the father and subsequent liberation from them, a story of his life.