Those summer nights...

Anyone who’s lived in a cold climate knows there are certain rites that seem only to transpire during the summer, and the briefer the summer, the more urgently those rites are conjured. In anticipation of summer, Criterion has released two films on blu-ray that brilliantly examine the sort of bacchanalian follies that accompany the coming season.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was Ingmar Bergman’s first international hit, reuniting Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand, the nimble, charismatic stars of Bergman’s A Lesson in Love (1954), which like Smiles, is a romantic comedy, a genre Bergman rarely worked in (in the cinema at least) despite his obvious facility. Set in 1901, thus taking just enough historical distance to emphasize how little the nature of romantic entanglements alters with shifts in social mores, the film is indeed very funny. It’s also, more characteristically for Bergman, sexy, poignant, and painful. Smiles on a Summer Night is funny precisely because it’s painful.

Fredrik Egerman (Björnstrand) is an attorney sliding into middle age, attempting to soften the blow by marrying a woman less than half his age. He treasures her more than he desires her. He has photographs taken of her that he admires with the pride of ownership. Or paternity. Fredrik also has a son, roughly the same age as his new bride, who studies theology, broods almost professionally, is agonizingly self-absorbed, and tries to seduce the maid (Harriet Andersson) with lectures on virtue.

Desirée Armfeldt (Dahlbeck) is an actress. Closer in age to Fredrik (Dahlbeck was only 25, but possessed a preternatural, very sensual maturity), she was once his mistress. These days she has a thing going with a married, mustachioed, clownishly egomaniacal military officer, but it seems to have run its course. (One of my favourite lines is spoken in venomous deadpan by the officer’s jealous, deeply tormented wife: “Men are horrible, vain and conceited. And they have hair all over their bodies.”) An unexpected reunion with Fredrik inspires Desirée to hatch a plan that will correct the current flawed romantic geometries. It all goes down in her wealthy mother’s country mansion. Fredrik and his wife and son, the officer and his wife, not to mention their lusty servants, are all invited. The plan involves wine infused with mother’s milk and stallion sperm, a duel, chambers custom designed for facilitating extramarital sex, and at least one attempted suicide. The suicide, incidentally, is a comic highlight.

The characters in Smiles are archetypes of a sort, types that especially recall Chekhov. Like Chekhov, Bergman fills out these types with loving details and idiosyncratic comic exaggerations that his superb cast executes with nuance and efficiency. The result is a film at once delightful and quietly knowing, about age, gender roles, heartache, and the tumult so often left in true passion’s wake.

Fat Girl (2001), perhaps the most perfect work from writer/director/provocateur Catherine Breillat, concerns the sexual initiations experienced by two sisters during summer holiday. The elder, more attractive sister, 15-year-old Elena (Roxanne Mesquida), meets an Italian law student. One night, in a disquieting, transfixing, all-too-recognizable bravura early sequence, he uses his powers of negotiation to shamelessly guilt-trip Elena into anal sex (anal, he promises, doesn’t count). The sisters share a bedroom in the family’s summer cottage, thus the younger, overweight sister, 13-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), witnesses the entire transaction. She becomes an absorbing mirror.

Breillat’s camera seems always to be moving, but slowly, not prowling but studying, never intrusive, yet never strictly observational either. Fat Girl, which follows the events of this fateful summer to their abrupt and arresting conclusion, is built upon relatively few episodes, a model of concision, yet every sequence breathes: nothing is rushed. Breillat’s work repeatedly examines female sexual persona in a way that feels almost compulsively subversive, pushing equally against erotic sentimentality, male fantasies and feminist conventions with formal rigour, intellectual confidence and almost always, somehow, a sense of play. There are too many risks being taken in Fat Girl, too much spontaneity and exploration, for it to feel schematic. And I don’t know that Breillat’s ever found anyone who’s embodied her sensibility more acutely than Reboux, who was discovered by Breillat in a McDonald’s. Pretending that two posts in a swimming pool are her fiancé and lover, lifting her nightgown to examine her barely formed breasts and whisper to herself “putain,” letting her sister ostensibly comfort her by shoving a giant toast into her mouth, Reboux gives one of the most remarkable, unaffected and devastating performances of the last decade.

Done with mirrors: The Magician on DVD

In the carriage we find a troupe of traveling showmen: a mute mesmerist in a corny fake beard, a beautiful woman in drag, and a bespectacled, hunched-over crone who claims to be a 200 year-old witch. Call them mystics, entertainers, or businessmen like anyone else, they’re still fugitives the lot, wanted on charges of fraud and blasphemy, which makes you wonder just what it is their audiences were expecting. It’s the middle of the 19th century and all over Europe are towns not big enough for both science and the spirit.


The troupe offers a lift to a fellow thespian found starving in a wood, an alcoholic seemingly on his deathbed. His name is Spiegel, the Swedish word for mirror, so when Vogler (Max Von Sydow) hovers over him closely, smelling the despair on the man’s breath, there’s much to imply that he might as well be looking at himself, or what he’ll become just a few more miles down the road.


The troupe arrives in Stockholm, where they’re to perform for a small, elite audience, among them the chief of police and the royal medical advisor (Gunnar Björnstrand), a righteous rationalist determined to prove irrefutably that their magic show is a sham. Though his more intimate struggles would be dramatized numerous times over the coarse of his long career, The Magician (1958), newly available from Criterion, is probably Ingmar Bergman’s most unabashedly autobiographical film about his professional life, pitting artists and critics against each another to see who can out-humiliate who. Björnstrand’s debunker was based on the critic Harry Schein, who Bergman felt persecuted by. Schein was the husband of actress Ingrid Thulin, and this knowledge injects a delicious audacity into a scene where Björnstrand simultaneously iterates his distaste for the troupe’s hocus-pocus and confesses his attraction to Thulin, who plays Von Sydow’s wife. Björnstrand has a line here that’s terribly on-the-nose yet somehow more potent for it, as though he himself were mesmerized and felt compelled to utter some naked truth: “You represent what I despise most of all: the inexplicable.”


The Magician was made during a transitional point in Bergman’s career: between The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring; between anxiety about death and anxiety about godlessness; between collaborations with cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist; between staging his films as, to some degree, extensions of his theatre practice, and transforming his aesthetic into something more wholly cinematic, driven as much by the characters’ internal states as their external dramas. It’s never been an especially beloved installment in Bergman’s oeuvre, and critics fret every now and then about whether it successfully adopts one genre or another, since some sections are comic, while the climax borrows conventions from horror. I can’t get too worked up about regarding any Bergman film’s genre status, but I find it tremendously interesting to see how The Magician so casually dismantles the obligatory narrative conventions used in every genre. It starts out focused on the troupe and implies that Von Sydow’s the hero. Yet we gradually become more invested in Thulin, who’s character and performance are more sympathetic and dynamic. (Von Sydow, usually so very good in Bergman, is a little hammy here, his character’s silence prompting him to overact with his face and hands. This overcompensation for silence would be memorably corrected some years later by another Vogler: Liv Ullmann in Bergman’s Persona [66].) Regardless, a third of the way into the film we abandon these characters and their adversaries both and pass an extensive digression with two younger, minor characters hungry to bring excitement to their lives: the troupe’s coachman and a servant girl, played by a very sexy yet subtly sad Bibi Andersson, who each drink from an ostensible love potion and await the results with a certain desperation. It’s as though Bergman conceived The Magician not as a propulsive drama or even a character study, but rather a sort of ensemble-driven essay on precarious ambitions under constant threat of having the rug pulled out from under.


We gradually come to the troupe’s performance, thoroughly pulled apart and laughed at, as promised, and to a series of deaths or seeming deaths, one being that of a man we already thought dead, another being a man we can’t quite believe is dead, and still another being a death already foretold by the crone, who may be the film’s one genuine mystic. These deaths set the stage for a carefully devised haunting meant to shake up Björnstrand. It’s a wonderful display of trickery, much of it dependent on mirrors, shadow and imagination, none of it ultimately capable of persuading Björnstrand that he was wrong in his initial assertions. Not that it matters. The troupe comes and goes and want only to amuse us, and perhaps move us, for the short duration of their stopover. As Bergman himself writes in his memoir Images: My Life in Film, which is excerpted in the booklet that accompanies Criterion’s disc, “I had often felt that I was involved in a continuous, rather joyous prostitution. My job was to beguile the audience.”

"Life takes its own turns..." A conversation with Dolph Lundgren about crossovers, comebacks, and that killer instinct

I met Dolph Lundgren on the roof of Toronto’s Thompson Hotel, which features a swimming pool, bar, and bevy of women wearing bikinis and heels. Lundgren was undistracted and quite honestly just wonderful to talk to, warm, humble, funny, and utterly candid about his life both on and off screen, as both a father and a son. Fully cognizant of his peculiar career as star and occasional director of countless low-budget actioners, he’s good humoured yet remains genuinely ambitious. He has plans to make a period drama in his native Sweden, and hopes that his memorable role in Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables will help him re-enter the mainstream.

Universal Soldier

One thing that became clear in our conversation was the depth of Lundgren’s affection for Stallone, an expression of long-term friendship that much more endearing when you consider that Lundgren put Stallone in intensive care for several days during the making of Rocky IV. This was back in the mid-1980s, when the multilingual black belt had abandoned a life in sciences—he was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to get his PhD in chemical engineering at MIT—to get into the movies. He was dating Grace Jones and debuted alongside her in A View to a Kill before landing the part of Rocky’s Russian nemesis Ivan Drago. But thanks to the ballooning video market a niche was opening up, one tailor-made for the likes of he and Jean Claude Van Damme, with whom he co-starred in Universal Soldier. Lundgren has never been out of work since, but he hasn’t had a theatrical release in 15 years. Until now.

Rocky IV

JB: You have an enigmatic role in The Expendables, playing this guy who’s drowning in drugs and sadism and turning on his friends. Gunner seems like a villain but proves to be something more complicated.

Dolph Lundgren: One reason I wanted to do the film—other than Stallone asking me, which is something you don’t think about twice—was the fact that Gunner is such an interesting guy. I was surprised he was so complex. In fact in the original script there was more drugs and Gunner was totally nuts. I’ve done bad guys before, but someone like Gunner is appealing because, being a kind of bridge between the bad guys and good guys, he offers something very specific to play, instead of coming on set and just trying to look tough.

The Expendables

JB: You’ve occupied the director’s chair several times now. Are there things you’re still able to learn from watching someone like Stallone work in that capacity?

DL: Anyone making an $80-million dollar picture with all these people, locations and big set-pieces in it at his age—there are only so many people in the world who can pull that off. So as long as I can be there next to him I’m checking out everything he does.

JB: While the action scenes are fairly cutty, there’s actually a lot of camera movement within many individual shots, which is unusual these days.

DL: That’s a good point. Stallone originally had a younger DP before hiring Jeffrey Kimball. Jeffrey’s an old-timer, he lights very old school, and wanted to shoot the character stuff as simply as possible. Even in the action, as you said, he likes to show more of what’s happening. Of course people are used to quick cutting, so you’ve got to give them some of that, otherwise they get bored. It can be funny nowadays to watch older action movies where you see a guy running and running and here comes the explosion… and still he’s running and it seems to go on forever. The funny part is that’s only 15 years ago. [Laughs] Things change.

with Grace Jones

JB: You possess a very particular kind of celebrity, one that doesn’t often promise much in the way of theatrical release yet attracts hordes of passionate fans. You even have a drink named after you! It’s a kind of celebrity that didn’t really exist before the 1980s—when you started out—and the development of this enormous specialty market for action thrillers on home video. Has this aspect of your career surprised you?

DL: I never knew what to expect from my career. When I was training for Rocky IV, I’d just done this Bond movie with Grace Jones, who was my girlfriend at the time. I remember Grace saying to me, “Forget the Bond movie. You’re going up against Rocky. This is going to be with you forever. This is huge.” I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but then your life takes it’s own turns. I became kind of famous, but I ended up doing a lot of smaller movies, some big ones, but a lot of small ones that went direct to video. I hadn’t expected that, but I never expected to direct either. You’re probably right about that difference in celebrity, because now that I’m back on the big screen, I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s like Mickey Rourke’s comeback, but you can’t help but feel there’s something similar going on when you’ve been around for so long and you get that groundswell where everybody kind of knows of you but you need to be in that big movie for people to rediscover what you’re all about. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Now when I do these premieres I’m sure there’ll be people whispering to themselves, “Shit, he’s still alive!” [Laughs]

Johnny Mnemonic

JB: Are you actively looking for projects that fall outside the genres you’re known for?

DL: Always. What it is John Lennon said? “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Things seem to run away from you sometimes, but then you arrive at these turning points in your career. I do feel like maybe this is one of those times when all these hours I’ve put in to making these weird movies all over the world might add up to something. For instance, I’d like to direct this period piece in Sweden. If I can pull it off it would be a transition from action to drama. Not an easy transition but there are those who’ve done it, like Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner or Clint Eastwood. I’m not in their league but I’m trying to do something similar.

The Shooter

JB: Have you tried to work in Sweden?

DL: I’ve been offered things but they’ve been very stereotypical. I figured if I was going to run around with a gun and shoot people I’d do it in Hollywood. But two years ago I did an episode of this summer radio show where you sit down and talk about your life and play music for 90 minutes. I talked about my dad and my childhood, because all the Swedes just saw me as this big, dumb blonde guy who lives in Hollywood and loves violence and doesn’t give a shit about Sweden. That went over pretty big, and then last year they approached me to host the Eurovision Song Contest. I had to do some singing and dancing, and it was quite well received. So I hope I might be a position now to do something different because they’ve glimpsed another side of me.

Masters of the Universe

JB: Did you watch a lot of Swedish cinema growing up? I confess that virtually the only Swedish films I know from the period of your youth are probably all Bergman.

DL: Sure, we all did. Bergman included, of course. It was very artsy in those days, but all of that’s in me somewhere. I still love Fanny and Alexander.

JB: Last year your home in Spain was broken into. I understand they tied up your wife, which must have been terrifying. Is it true they fled after seeing a photo of you and realized they were robbing Dolph Lundgren’s house?

DL: They didn’t really flee. They were there, stealing stuff. They were probably Eastern Europeans because they spoke bad Spanish. My wife and eldest daughter were there—my little one was asleep—and my daughter says to them, “If my dad were here you’d be in trouble!” Right at that moment they saw the picture of me and said, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re big fans of his movies.” [Laughs] My daughter asked them how they could be doing this if they like my movies and one of the robbers said, “Well, I suppose you can have a few things back.” The whole thing was like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Bizarre. Anyway, I was filming The Expendables at the time and couldn’t leave the set, so I really went nuts. I called some people I know in Bulgaria and asked them to go find these guys and have a word with them. Of course nothing came of that. The good thing is that my kids now know there are bad people in the world. I have a good security system and armed guards now, so I hope it never happens again. I suppose there was a slight advantage to being famous in that situation, but then I started to think these guys might come back and try to grab one of my kids or something. That’s why I beefed up the security. You never know with these people.

in the karate pants

JB: You’ve devoted a large part of your life to martial arts. Have you found yourself in situations outside of the movies where you’ve had to use those skills?

DL: Very few times. I rarely get in a fight because I’m quite big, so most people don’t want to mess with me. But when you do martial arts you’re not typically an aggressive person. You learn to brush things off. I think the only times I’ve had to use those skills outside of movies was when I worked as a doorman in Sweden or Sidney or someplace when I was 25. I’ve fought a lot of people in a dojo, but that’s completely different.

JB: Was a part of your original motivation to learn martial arts to defend yourself?

DL: I think part of the motivation was that my dad was physically abusive. It was very tough, you know, him beating up on my mom and me. Dealing with that is very difficult for a child. It makes you feel inadequate, so you look for something to help you feel confident. I played ice hockey for a while, did some boxing, but it was only when I took up karate that I felt stronger, like I could defend myself, and I found some of that inner harmony you get from studying martial arts. Of course, I also become a good fighter. Something kicks in and you get that killer instinct. That’s something that happens when a person’s been hurt when they’re very young. I think all great fighters have something like that in them, some kind of scar. You need a little bit of an evil part to your character to be able to knock somebody out. It all happens very quickly. You don’t even know what you’re doing until it’s over.

A review of The Expendables will be posted this Friday.

The novel as autopsy: Alexander Ahndoril's The Director dissects Ingmar Bergman circa 1961

Ingmar Bergman with cinematographer Sven Nykvist

Speaking of Ingmar Bergman... Swedish author Alexander Ahndoril’s The Director (Portobello Books, $15.95) concerns Bergman and the apparently tumultuous creation of his 1962 film Winter Light. The Director is a novel, though it is a meticulously researched one that reads very much like an impressionistic biography, leaving the frontiers of what constitutes fact and fiction ambiguous for all but those few in the know and still alive to testify. It was written and published in Sweden while Bergman, who died in 2007, was still alive and was initially given the legendary filmmaker’s approval before he changed his mind and publicly condemned it. Regardless, the Swedes made it a bestseller.

Joyce Carol Oates, who last year published a decidedly unflattering collection of novellas about episodes in the lives of Poe, Twain, Henry James and Hemingway, wrote that Ahndoril’s book “arrests our attention like an autopsy performed on a living man.” It’s a very astute observation, even if I’m not sure many readers, especially non-Bergmaniacs, are likely to feel all that arrested by this poetic and image-laden yet deeply ponderous tale of an artist still grappling with his crippling need for a stubborn father’s approval. The Director is indeed morbid, narrow, a little cruel, and as sequestered from the larger, messier world as a pathologist’s quarters. I love that the English translation was performed by someone named Sarah Death.

A scene from Winter Light

Bergman was often very articulate about the enigmatic images that would obsess him until they finally yielded a complete idea for a film. In keeping with this, The Director begins with a vision, caught within a glass jar, that carries inside of it the germ of Winter Light: “A man of his own age walks toward him, quivers and al at once is twenty paces closer. He seems to be dressed as a priest.” Bergman’s father was a priest, and this film—a major turning point in Bergman’s work, largely putting to rest the filmmaker’s interest in dealing directly with religious faith—was conceived as a hypothesis as to how Bergman would have felt by this point in his life—he was in his early 40s—had he followed his father into the clergy. His father never considered the cinema a suitable career for Ingmar and much of the novel finds its protagonist childishly preoccupied with earning his father’s praise, even while the old man falls ill and is hospitalized.

Alexander Ahndoril

The most impressive bits of writing here find Ahndoril, in a concise, very Bergmanesque style, allowing fantasy, dream and memory to slip into objective reality, with ghosts from the past entering and strange discoveries being made, such as a missive from Bergman’s troubled mind that’s somehow been inscribed onto the sole of an artificial foot. The more captivating fully-fledged scenes in The Director however concern the film’s production, even if Ahndoril emphasizes the tension between Bergman and certain actors and crewmembers who considered the project too dreary. When interviewed, Bergman’s collaborators have resoundingly testified to the general cheerfulness on Bergman’s sets, though such generalizations no doubt fail to supply the whole picture, and in any case liberties must be granted when a writer’s intentions are made explicit. The larger question here is to what purpose all of this slippage between fact and fiction has been crafted.

The triumph of Death: The Seventh Seal on DVD

Clouds clothe the dawn, a terrified chorus trembles unseen, an eagle hangs so black and still as to seem stenciled out of the sky, a disembodied voice reads from the Revelation of John, horses wade ankle-deep in the sea. Death (Bengt Ekerot) appears on these rocky shores before the knight Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), newly returned from the Crusades to a plague-ravaged Scandinavia. When the reaper raises his cloak he might as well be ripping open a black hole, but the gaunt, blue-eyed, deceptively young Antonius does not succumb so easily. He challenges Death to a round of chess. He’s seen paintings and heard ballads and knows he’s met a willing adversary. He doesn’t expect to win but merely buy time, hoping to use his reprieve to perform one meaningful act. If in the meantime he could also glean some evidence of God’s existence he wouldn’t complain.

Did such a chillingly seductive embodiment of death appear before Ingmar Bergman before he departed from this world on his beloved island of Fårö nearly two years ago at the age of 89? Did he bargain, propose a game to play, or merely smile knowing that he’d staged all this before? It’s worth evoking the establishing moments of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) as a reminder that there is here a thoughtful, personal, richly detailed and diversely populated movie, and not just still images so oppressively iconic as to discourage actual engagement. Its impact on international film culture was paradigm shifting, but it’s also an entertainment, an apocalyptic road movie as witty, bawdy and playful as it is gloomy. (“A skull is more interesting than a naked woman,” a painter quips. Bergman was shrewd enough that over the course of his career he often gave us both.) It’s a parable of doubt and regeneration, set in a slyly modern Middle Ages; a nimbly acted, gorgeously staged and photographed tale of disillusioned yet resilient figures—the knight and his squire, a company of traveling players, a cuckolded smith and his juicy wife—traversing a world wracked with violence wrought by the twin terrors of metastasizing civilization and religious piety. (Need we say more about its relevance to our world today?)

I first saw The Seventh Seal half a lifetime ago, thanks, however improbably, to the programmers at faith-based Vision TV, who aired it a few times when I was in my teens. I’m pretty sure it changed my life. Truthfully, I’ve never felt compelled to herald it my favourite Bergman—in just a few years the director’s succeeding, more mysterious, erotic, neurotic and naturalistically photographed films would render certain farcical aspects of Seal pretty corny—but those images, moments, atmospheres, and lingering questions remain singular to me. I’ve never doubted the depth of the film’s impression on my psyche. Or its conduciveness to replay. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it on screens big and small, but it’s every time been an immersive, even haunting pleasure.

Criterion’s new special edition, available both in Standard and Blue-ray, complete with well chosen special features and a new, digitally enhanced transfer so sumptuous that even on my piece-of-shit 30-year-old TV I marvel at the difference, offers another excellent excuse to revisit the film. It ages very well. When I see it now I appreciate different details: the fleeting flirtation between Von Sydow and the arrestingly lovely Bibi Andersson at the start of that scene where Antonius and the squire share fresh strawberries and milk with the players; the series of individual portraits Bergman creates as his characters watch the moaning flagellants parade into a square, preaching fire and brimstone to an already fearful village; or the serenity in the face of Gunnel Lindblom when she finally meets Death after a last breakfast and speaks her one line in the entire film: “It is finished.”

The highlight of Criterion’s new package, also available as a separate disc, is Bergman Island (06), Marie Nyreröd’s documentary portrait of Bergman made just a few years before his death. Shot primarily on Fårö, where, following his wife Ingrid’s death, Bergman had lived alone for years, sometimes speaking to no one for days at a time, Nyrerod’s interviews yield unprecedented candour from the filmmaker on topics such as his predilection for love affairs with actresses and his neglectful fathering. Bergman also speaks eloquently about topics as familiar as his parents, his thanatophobia, and his sense that his best work was done in the theatre. The film overall is very moving, its subject in good spirits. There’s startling 16mm footage from the shoots for Seventh Seal and Persona, and a pretty funny little story about getting invited to a pool party by Barbara Streisand. (He declined, and promptly picked up and moved back home after a brief time in Los Angeles.) But what sticks with me most after seeing it is the image of Bergman’s aged hands, narrow, a little shaky, but still so alive as he speaks, and reconsiders.

Startling intimacies, drifting narratives: Garrel x 2

An actress accosts her filmmaker husband for casting another actress in a role clearly modeled after her. A woman sits perched on a toilet in a pocket washroom while her boyfriend crouches just outside the door, kissing her, which prompts the release of her urine heard tinkling merrily on the porcelain. A couple discuss whether or not one is able to paint the portrait of the other, their very proximity being an obstruction to their ability to truly see one another. A smiling elderly woman explains to a young mother that she’ll always be welcomed here while both clutch a child’s denim jacket, the confused child standing just a few feet away, staring at a man who timidly alludes to his new role as surrogate father. A woman waits on a subway platform while she watches another woman, who we by now see as a sort of double for her, enter a train from the other side and be carried away in the opposite direction from where the woman is heading.

These images, which I’ve plucked more or less randomly from my recent crash course in the cinema of the prolific but under-seen French filmmaker Philippe Garrel, appear onscreen with a minimum of context, if not downright cryptically. Each hovers in its own space, pieces of a mosaic. You get the impression, even after watching only two Garrel movies, that maybe every scene in every Garrel movie hovers in a similar way, the mosaic to which they belong being not any single picture but the whole body of work which, peculiar, at times unabashedly courting pretentiousness, strikes me as genuinely singular.

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (J’entends plus la guitare, 1991) and Emergency Kisses (Les Baisers de secours, 89), the movies collected in Zeitgeist’s new Philippe Garrel X 2 two-disc set, generate an atmosphere I can honestly say I’ve never seen in movies before, or at least not pursued with such rigour and for such sustained durations. Garrel has a way of placing the camera before one or two figures—usually gorgeous, forthright women and unassuming, often far weaker, sometimes homely men—and letting them build a vivid hum of intimacy that defies filmic artifice. There’s something of Ingmar Bergman in this, and Robert Bresson too, but Garrel’s lyrical naturalism has none of the carefully honed dramaturgy or overt urge toward transcendence of either. (Garrel cited Jean-Luc Godard as his cinematic idol way back in the 1960s, but it seems to me the Godard movies which feel closest to Garrel’s are the lesser-known, playfully self-referential ones, like 1980’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), which come long after the canonical 60s works.) Garrel’s stories have no beginning and no end. The relationship between these characters and the people playing or directing them often seems flamboyantly blurred. If they had dramatic arcs these stories would resemble Woody Allen movies or Chekhov plays, all these sophisticated couples negotiating their love affairs and philosophizing about the wayward nature of their lives, frequently stupefied by the presence of their offspring.

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar begins with two couples on holiday, no longer young—or at least no longer innocent—bohemians who seem set on a course of perpetual ambivalence. The movie is dedicated to Nico, the statuesque German-born model and deep-voiced chanteuse most famous for her collaboration with the Velvet Underground on their eponymous debut. Nico lived with Garrel for several years and appeared in a number of his films. Marianne (Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege) is clearly based on Nico, heroin habit included. Marianne and Gerard (Benoît Régent), Garrel’s stand-in, drift together and apart, at times compelled toward stability, at times finding it unbearable and thwarting it however they can, usually through the accumulation of other lovers, their undulating trajectories moving in time to Faton Cahen’s eloquent score.

It was while going into production on Emergency Kisses that Garrel learned of Nico’s death and decided to make a film about their relationship. Yet Emergency Kisses is in fact a far more overwhelmingly self-reflexive work, with Garrel himself playing Mathieu, the filmmaker husband of the disgruntled actress Jeanne, played by Brigitte Sy, who was Garrel’s wife at the time. Garrel and Sy’s son, the now well-known actor Louis Garrel, plays Mathieu and Jeanne’s son. Garrel’s father Maurice plays Mathieu’s father. Garrel’s ex-girlfriend Anémone plays Minouchette, the actress Mathieu chooses to play Jeanne… You get the (meta-)picture, which of course reads like a wildly elaborate form of group therapy but does indeed cohere into something that reaches marvelous heights of emotional richness—though there’s something presumably unintentionally comical about Garrel’s onscreen presence, his enormous mushroom-mound of frizzy graying hair and his little voice. Mathieu and Jeanne, like Marianne and Gerard, do their dance of partnership and paternity, of uncertainty, self-interest, self-loathing and love, and love, as is explicitly stated by the characters, is what makes the stories of their lives. And these stories make for surprisingly absorbing and sensitive filmmaking, culminating in a bravura finale that, after so much talk, engulfs the last moments with a poetry that’s wordless, visually inspired, metaphorically pointed and quite moving.

Remake/Remodel: Last House on the Left, Assault on Precinct 13

There are remakes and there are remakes. Remakes, renovations, revisits, re-imaginings. The terms mystify. Some sequels are actually remakes. Some remakes simply regurgitate foreign language hits into English. Some remakes, like Psycho (1998) or Funny Games (07) are close to Xeroxes, yet are often most interesting for revealing all those things in movies that can’t be Xeroxed. There are movies, such as Solaris (02), that we call remakes but are actually going back to the literary sources rather than the earlier movie. There are movies, such as Cat People (82), that we call remakes yet share very little with the earlier movie aside from its title. Some remakes aren’t initially presented as remakes at all, but are. These can be extremely interesting.

Adapted by novelist Ulla Isaksson from a 13th century ballad, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (60) is a bracing study in crime and punishment, revenge and repentance. Against Sweden’s larger paradigm shift from paganism to Christianity we see Karin’s transition from childhood to womanhood, a transition brutally interrupted by rape and murder. Soon after discarding her body stripped of valuables in the woods, Karin’s vagabond assailants take refuge in a nearby home. The home, it turns out, belongs to Karin’s family. The parents learn of their daughter’s fate and exact their wrath methodically and without mercy. It could almost be a horror movie.

Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (72), newly reissued to coincide with the theatrically released remake, is itself a remake of The Virgin Spring. Its source material is uncredited, but justly so: it serves as a skeleton for something genuinely fresh, distinctive and autonomous. Craven’s Mari is, like Karin, pretty, somewhat spoiled, and blooming into a woman. The cultural paradigm shift depicted here however is a sort of reversal of that of 13th century Sweden, with Mari’s womanly awakening coinciding with the sexual revolution and the movement away from Christian values to neo-pagan ones. Craven accounts for the shadow side of this revolution by injecting  elements of violence that vividly recall the Manson murders.

Only a dozen years passed between The Virgin Spring and Last House on the Left, but standards of acceptable content went through their own sort of paradigm shift. Mari appears during the opening credits through an opaquely dappled shower door. She’s clearly naked, but we can’t yet see her nakedness, as though Craven is granting her one final moment of innocence before extinguishing it in a flurry of corruption and butchery. Craven’s rapist/killers force their victims to pee in their pants. They denude and disembowel them, and we see about as much of it as the low-budget camera and effects work provides for. Yet curiously, while Last House on the Left is more shocking than The Virgin Spring in the explicitness of its violence, it never even comes close to reaching its predecessor’s level of soul-chilling brutality. Craven skips Bergman’s final sequence of repentance, opting instead for an abrupt ending, signaled simply by the completion of the killing. Something is missing here, and you don’t need to know The Virgin Spring to feel it. But this absence is itself indicative of something happening in the post-hippie, teen exploitation milieu Craven’s movie inhabits. It is a far sleazier, clumsier movie, and I’d argue there’s something to that. It speaks to its age.

Howard Hawks’ late western Rio Bravo (58) drifts across the screen with an hugely pleasurable lack of urgency. The siege drama unfolds in long breaths, with many arrivals and departures, a slow-building romantic subplot, a musical detour, some elegantly choreographed wordless sequences and a wealth of character development extending out from the more boldly captivating shoot-outs. John Wayne’s Sheriff John T. Chance has to fend off a troupe of well-equipped adversaries who want to free his prisoner, and he only has the truly marvelous Dean Martin’s Dude, a boozer attempting recovery, and Walter Brennan’s Stumpy, a cantankerous old cripple, for deputies. Yet Chance never seems too worried. He’s John Wayne, and this a movie about tough men who don’t apologize, men rendered vulnerable yet incapable of self-pity. The old cliché about courage under fire is embodied here with elegance and depth.

John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (76), which was remade a few years back and has recently been reissued in a special edition, is itself a remake. Its roots are not as obvious as Last House on the Left’s, but Carpenter’s sense of indebtedness is made clear from the outset, when the opening credits inform us the editor is someone named John T. Chance. The reconfiguring is more radical, with Rio Bravo's sleepy Texas town traded in for a Los Angeles ghetto, the band of outlaws replaced by what seems like an army of suicidally determined gang-bangers, and, most importantly, Hawk’s relaxed amble is forgone in favour of tautness and severity. Assault is a clipped, decidedly unfussy action movie, which also makes direct nods to Sam Fuller—the child killing—and Akira Kurosawa—the silent waves of baddies closing in—while cementing Carpenter’s particular directorial voice. It’s pretty terrific.

There are goofy, low-rent cop show aspects to Assault you’d never associate with a studio-backed, star-studded class-act like Rio Bravo: Carpenter’s ninja movie all-synth score, the Charlie’s Angels-like cutaways to a plastic speaker during a radio conversation, the sometimes corny lines, ie: “There are no heroes any more; only men who follow orders.” (That line, incidentally, comes from the speaker.) Yet collectively, these elements brim with modest charisma and quiet individuality, traits perfectly in keeping with Hawks’ men and women. And Carpenter’s insertion of a woman into the quartet of cornered, insufficiently armed protagonists who must hold their own against the urban ambush is inspired, simultaneously maintaining a tough-talking, Hawksian spin on heterosexual courtship and infusing their dialogue with an active, modern female presence. Overall, Assault will never be confused with the sort of classical majesty of Rio Bravo, but it’s exemplary of another era and another approach to genre filmmaking, a paragon for anyone trying to breath new life into an old idea.

Church and state of uncertainty

If, like me, you’ve never seen John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, you may want to avoid learning too much about Doubt, the new film version adapted and directed by Shanley himself. Set strictly within the confines of a Bronx Catholic School in 1964, it’s a dramatic meditation on the dichotomy of ambiguity and faith, or as two characters put it, proof and certainty. There’s pleasure to be had in watching the events unfold blind, learning the facts to be debated only as they arise, piece by carefully doled-out piece.

Having said that, many of you will catch on to where this is heading from the outset, in a scene where each of the central players are present and the conflict, in its way, is spelled right out for us. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives a sermon on the theme of doubt and how it might bring us together rather than leave us in lonely despair. As Flynn gives examples of internal sources of unease, little things “no one knows” about us, Shanley cuts to individuals in the congregation, listening with rapt attention and recognition. It’s as though Flynn’s speaking directly to them, as though he’s somehow looked into their souls and diagnosed their unspoken suffering. But when Flynn offers his last example of secret turmoil—“No one knows I’ve done something wrong”—the camera rests firmly on Flynn himself. The moment is not exactly subtle, but it is elegant.

The evidence against Flynn, in a superbly amiable, layered performance from Hoffman, racks up swiftly. Flynn smiles a lot, and offers physical affection to his kids. He takes an unseemly amount of sugar in his tea, makes unseemly jokes with his fellow priests. He likes his nails kinda long. He keeps little flowers in his Bible. Most importantly, he singles out Donald Miller (Joseph Foster, perfect), the school’s only black student, and an alter boy, for special attention. He becomes, in the words of one character, Donald’s “protector.” When Sister James (Amy Adams) eventually sees something that suggests an “unhealthy” bond being forged between Flynn and Donald, she brings the issue to the attention of Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the fearsome, ultra-stern school principal half-jokingly referred to by Flynn as a dragon. Very quietly and methodically, a campaign’s undertaken to get rid of Father Flynn, preferably following a full confession.

Much has been made about Shanley’s tip-toeing around the truth with regards to what unfolds behind closed doors in Doubt, but in all honestly I think the truth’s pretty damned clear, though more time with Donald, who’s conspicuously absent for much of the movie, might have shifted our reading of the scenario either way. The exact actions Flynn is guilty of are not so important to the story as the disturbing polarities of entitlement and genuine compassion he exudes. Admittedly, my reading probably says as much about my regard for the priesthood as it does Shanley’s intended subtext.

Personally, I’m more than fine with ambiguity—hell, Rashomon’s one of my favourite movies—if it yields something resonant or provocative about the subject being considered, and Doubt is absolutely engaging in this sense, thick with portent, psychological struggle, dynamic characterizations, uncomfortable questions. Yet, if anything, Shanley’s directorial style isn’t ambiguous enough. His is a strained sort of classicism, with ostentatiously skewed angles in moments fraught with paranoia. (A chamber drama about spiritual unease and all-too earthly temptations that relies on tight shots of faces negotiating how much can or cannot be reveled: we are very much in Ingmar Bergman territory here, and there were moments while watching Doubt that I really missed the late master.) Shanley’s approach is an odd mix of conservatism and flamboyance, and feels neither here not here. Still, the dialogues really grab you, the silences chill you, the photography, courtesy of Roger Deakins, is crisp, contained and magnificent. And the actors are most often brilliantly nuanced, even if one in particular, for better of for worse, really stands out from the others.

Streep’s is a fussed-over performance, featuring the broadest accent and most severe facial mask of the ensemble, a pale pinched pout under red-rimmed eyes that peers out from under that black bonnet in a way that renders Aloysius a spinster sucking on some holy lemon that she proudly refuses to reject. Yet I don’t think Streep’s detractors are going to convince anyone who’s actually seen this movie that her performance is anything less than riveting, driving every scene right to its precipice of tension—you can call her affected, but every affectation is loaded with purpose, and nothing is wasted.

The sole moment where Streep genuinely falters would have to be the film’s final one, a brief, sudden emotional thaw pitched to function as the sort of transcendental release perfected by Robert Bresson in Pickpocket (1959), and emulated in numerous movies since, most notably, and most effectively, in American Gigolo (80) and L’Enfant (05). But I think Shanley should probably be the one to ultimately take the heat for this limpid finale. Where he could have left us with a devastating whisper and fade, with another disarming close-up, he’s opted for weepy collapse, rising music and crane shot. Instead of drawing us in he casts out of the emotion, giving us no room to feel anything on our own. He may argue that he’s simply giving the audience the sort of big closing uplift they need, but what can I say? I have my doubts.