Fabric fantasies narrate ruinous love in Senso

The first sequence of Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954) unravels like a long bolt of silk let loose from the vertiginous upper balconies of Venice’s Teatro La Fenice. A performance of Verdi’s Il trvovatore is underway, the aria climaxing with a near-riot breaking out amongst the Fenice’s patrons. It’s 1866, the Italians are getting restless, the Austrian occupation in its twilight. The War of Liberation is eminent. Nonetheless a romance ignites between the Italian Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) and the Austrian Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger). You’ll note that their first exchanges are made with the opera being performed literally in the background of their two-shot, and it’s no accident. Visconti, scion of wealthy aristocrats with centuries of rule behind them, conflicted Communist, by then already a pretty major name in theatre and opera as well as cinema, unshakable in his vision and not to be rushed or compromised, uses this first sequence to lay the groundwork for what will be an absolute, go-for-broke, multilingual melodrama. So get ready.

The 1882 source novella by Camillo Boito, also entitled Senso, has Livia young, vain and inexperienced, but Visconti’s interpretation very smartly opts to make her older and more complex than Franz, with more to lose, and the brilliantly cast Valli, who was in fact four years older than Granger, actually seems over the course of the picture to look increasingly wrung dry by l’amour fou. Her naked shoulders, loose, waist-length hair and kittenish gaze in the early post-coital scene brim with fortifying eroticism, while the final scenes find her face strained and body seemingly unable to stay erect. Valli was still fresh from The Third Man (49), as was Granger from Strangers on a Train (50), so Senso was indeed something of a star-studded affair. Granger is even seductive at points, though the Italian version’s isn’t his voice, which makes an enormous difference. (Criterion’s new edition features the English version too, titled The Wanton Countess—with dialogue by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles!—as a supplementary feature.)

Yet, with all due respect to the story and performances, the most dynamic aspect of Senso however would arguably be its décors. Desire is the undoing of Livia, but it’s money that poisons Franz—but how could he not succumb to avarice when surrounded by such boundless luxury? Fabulous fabrics are endlessly flowing across the screen like a current of punch-drunk longing made tactile: veils, capes, bedclothes, night gowns, curtains, skirts that could provide shelter to entire families of very short people. The sets, the clothes, the furniture, the battlefields, the extras, those perfect patterns of grime on the doors of the Austrian officer’s dormitory: Visconti’s urge toward grandeur spared no expense. In fact, production ran three times longer than scheduled, went through three cinematographers (the first, Aldo Graziati, died), and finally bankrupted Lux Films. But watch how the look of everything in the film it what tells the story, from the morbid elegance and rich colours of Venice, to the final scenes in Verona, which looks like a sooty smudge, barren, used up, shadowy and blackened as an abandoned fireplace. It strikes me as apt that this story, which could be regarded as something of an adult, corrupted version of Romeo and Juliet, draws to its close in the very city where Shakespeare’s beloved teenage tragedy took place. More apt still that Visconti’s assistant director was none other Franco Zeffirelli (and if Granger’s memoir, excerpted in Criterion’s package, is to be trusted, Zeffirelli was also Visconti’s lover at the time), who would go on to helm the cinema’s most celebrated version of Romeo and Juliet (68). But then everything about Senso, maybe even the film’s failure to find international success, seems to conform to the dictates of destiny.

The wild frontier: El Norte on DVD

Near the beginning of El Norte (1983), a rural Guatemalan family sits around a table over which Josefina (Stella Quan) extols her practiced impressions of American life. “Even the poorest people have toilets,” she explains. “You flush it, and everything disappears.” As Guatemala is consumed by civil war, this vision of a utopia, a modern, ordered world where no one ever need look at their own shit, a world evoked most beguilingly in the images of vast antiseptic kitchens pictured in a well-thumbed Latin American edition of Good Housekeeping, plants within Josefina’s godchildren Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) and Enrique (David Villapando) the seed of a promised land, a place so longed for it blinds its pilgrims to the enormity of its shadow side.

These early scenes establish the peculiar tone of this extraordinary movie, which so flamboyantly rejected the then-dominant docudrama formula. Bookended with stark images of work, punctuated with moments that more closely resemble a horror movie, told entirely from the perspective of Rosa and Enrique, with no buffering middle-class outsider protagonist, El Norte is an epic chronicle of migration conveyed in three parts aligned to the three very different nations traversed, a tale with one foot in myth and the other in a still all-too-recognizable sociopolitical morass. Enrique bids his father farewell amidst a spectral thicket of maize. Rosa is courted by a local boy through the window of her parents’ home. Everything indoors warms in the glow of candles and kerosene, yet when Enrique, woken by spasms of gunfire, rushes from his bed into the darkness of a ruined hacienda, the eerie day-for-night photography cloaks all in ashen blues. Taking cues from both the Popul Vuh and the magical realist canon, a number of nature-derived symbols imbue the proceedings with enigmatic pathos. The uncanny resides alongside the real without pronounced differentiation or unneeded fuss. As the setting moves northward however, the real will gradually crowd out the uncanny, until the mystification, suffering and harsh electric light of the real is nearly all that remains.

El Norte is unusual in that its precarious earnestness is compellingly offset by its unannounced bursts of brutality, its mischievous, very Mexican humour, its subtle incestuous overtones, its almost pathological insistence on authenticity with regards to location, language and personae, and its unwillingness to redundantly polemicize on the injustices meted upon Rosa and Enrique as they abandon their devastated village to journey through Mexico and into the US to seek safety and work. As nurtured by director Gregory Nava, his co-scenarist Anne Thomas, and his astonishingly inventive cinematographer James Glennon; as embodied by the Mexican and American landscapes, the valiant cast and the experiences imprinted on their gallery of atypically cinematic faces; as contained and shaped by the limited budget and ideological rigour; El Norte assumes an oneiric, organic, striking and at times pleasingly oddball form.

Several scenes, some laughable in their melodrama, feel as modeled after telenovelas as the literary sources to which Nava pays homage. Yet the sincerity of Gutiérrez and Villapando, both very young and unseasoned at the time of filming, is disarming and rife with a flurry of emotions. Villapando’s silent film star saucer eyes convey such a distinctive naïveté, even when he learns to lie in English or, hilariously, talks a blue streak in Spanish in an attempt to sound like a Mexican. Rosa and Enrique are not so much incorruptible as they are perpetually stupefied, and their determination to move northwards—even when crawling through narrow, corroded drainpipes infested with rats—is fed by a pure, youthful faith in destiny.

‘In the Service of Shadows,’ the hour-long documentary on Criterion’s two-disc standard and blu-ray editions of El Norte, tells the story of the movie’s creation, which proves to be nearly as fraught with danger and buoyed by relentless resourcefulness as the movie itself. The indigenous extras who didn’t know what a movie was and subsequently were offended that they should wear costumes; the hostile Chapanecos driving the skeleton crew out of town; the Mexican military who held exposed film reels for ransom, eventually paid by Nava’s father, who smuggled $30,000 into the country in his cowboy boots—the fascinating stories connected to El Norte’s production are too numerous to recount here.

Another standout supplement is Nava’s student film ‘The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva’ (72), which dramatizes the final days of a poet displaced in the midst of civil war. It is graced by Nava’s attention to architectural detail and the likely influence of photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. It’s an essentially meditative film, low on drama, rich with locale and haunting imagery and strange moments such the one where Rodriguez Silva comes upon his first corpse, circling it before carefully placing his hand upon its back as though to sense how much life might still linger within. From the little about Nava’s career I could glean, it seems like, despite a long-time affiliation with J-Lo, the guy was never able to fulfill the promise of these early works. Perhaps the conditions of American independent filmmaking at the time, however difficult, brought out the best in him. Or perhaps it was the simple fact that, like the dazzlingly talented Charles Burnett, Nava’s special interest in America’s marginalized failed to attract opportunities.

Spiritual vacancy

The fantasy is hardly new, but there’s a novelty to its veneer that holds a certain initial thrill. The hero, a murdered cop raised from the grave, exists beyond death. The villain, too, is invincible. There’s the suggestion they could fight for all eternity, like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, with no limit to the cartoony extremes of meaningless violence they can exact on each other. The women are uniformly astonishing objects, every one untouched by age, imperfection, gravity. Even the rookie cop wears a uniform revealing luscious cleavage. There’s a climactic four-way showdown in some part of town called “the projects,” yet not a single person seems to live there. So we have a world without poverty, pain or unattractive women. Or death. Or even, it would seem, colour, beyond red. Yet there’s no limit to the diversity of weaponry, so rest assured we get plenty of noise. Yes, it’s beautiful in its limited way. But is that enough?

I suppose The Spirit, written and directed by Frank Miller, inspired by Will Eisner’s comic, shot on the same digital backlot that produced the stylistically akin Sin City, represents the future, or maybe just the sluggish-to-catch-on present, of movies. But I dearly hope it’s not the only future, this hermetically sealed world that eschews what some of us love about movies: actual places, sunlight, spontaneity, interaction, evocations of sensual experience. The titular super hero (Gabriel Macht) is a ghost of sorts. Fittingly, he inhabits a city where everything’s the vaguest suggestion of something that might have once breathed. It’s a twist on the texture of film noir, but this twist squeezes out all of noir’s pathos and sweat.

“My city needs me,” the Spirit soliloquizes. “She is my love. She is my life.” There’s no mistaking this for anything but unabashed melodrama, and that’s fine—there’s plenty of room in the movies these days for alternatives to the standard of supposed naturalism. But characters speak exclusively in shopworn hard-boiled patter, expository monologues, or declamatory statements that extinguish subtext. There are flourishes of visual expressionism: an automaton created by evil genetic scientist the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) commits ritual seppuku, and the background’s consumed with the blood-red rays of the Japanese flag; characters swim in waters so murky they could be drifting through gaseous portals in space. But all the eye candy, from the misty skies of fluttering snow to Eva Mendes’ immaculate ass, begins to wear as the story proves itself bereft of feeling. The characters are stereotypes. Their stories get very boring.

There’s not much point in talking performances here, though Jackson seems to have a good time. And I am kind of fascinated by the Octopus’ emphatic dislike of eggs, which seems counterintuitive given that, besides being a beloved breakfast staple, eggs are a symbol of rebirth, and Octopus is singularly obsessed with immortality. And they’re luminescent white, one of few colours Miller permits. They’re also as thin and fragile as Miller’s story, which threatens to grow into a franchise where hero and villain just keep beating the, er, living shit out of each other in the presence of fawning babes, against a backdrop of absolutely nothing.

Bawl in the family: Rocco and his Brothers

There is pulsing through Rocco and his Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli), Luchino Visconti’s celebrated 1960 epic drama, a towering force as wild, forbidding and fearsome as it is transfixing. That force is called family.

Based on the novel by Giovanni Testori, this story of five brothers and their newly widowed mother transplanted to Milan from the rural Italian South, at nearly 3 hours, moves, explodes and engages with tremendous energy. The film’s vitality emerges from the accumulation of several talents working harmoniously at the peak of their powers. Giuseppe Rotunno’s restless, roaming camerawork, especially in the protracted close-ups or spectacular exteriors, such as the massive street brawl or the cathedral-set lovers’ break-up; Mario Serandrei’s masterful editing, with sharp transitions that catch you off guard before hurling you into some new, unexpected scene, sweeping confidently across the tale’s broad chronology; Nino Rota’s jazzy, often detached but never glib music that makes menace weirdly seductive; the international cast of actors, deeply committed and nimble enough to shift convincingly from tender nuance to grand opera in a hastened breath: everyone involved contributes something substantial to the film’s overall power. But I think what truly makes all these elements gel, a unifying vision that we should probably attribute to Visconti, is an acute, mythical understanding of the fathomless potency of blood ties in determining the fate of the characters.

Upon the arrival of the Parondi family in the spectral, snow-covered Northern city, clashing loyalties are already wreaking havoc: a few words construed as disrespect launch an instant shouting match and mutual antipathy between the Parondis and the future in-laws of the eldest Parondi son Vincenzo (Spiros Forcás). Soon after, the charming, thuggish Simone (Renato Salvatore) takes up boxing, womanizing and petty theft seemingly all at once. After a stint in the military, Simone’s younger brother Rocco (Alain Delon) follows him into the ring and, in an act that will later spell disaster, takes up a quiet romance with a smart, beguiling prostitute named Nadia (the superlative –and sumptuously leggy– Annie Girardot) who was Simone’s girl of two years previous. As stray caustic elements spin into increasingly closer proximity, Rocco and his Brothers builds to its climax on waves of violence and toxic moral perdition, culminating at a scene of unbridled emotion, a well-calibrated frenzy of weeping and hollering that feels less like the indulgences of some fine actors than like an impotent purging, an attempt to redeem unforgivable crimes through the ecstasy of sheer, manic volume. It’s like something out of Wild Kingdom. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

Though Visconti was once heralded among the masters of cinema, in the 30 since his death his name has fell from the place it once held near the top of the heap. It seems safe to presume that a revival of Rocco and his Brothers will likely find a new audience with limited knowledge of its director’s career and reputation, which I’d argue is a blessing. To come to this film without prior knowledge of Visconti’s role as an affluent Marxist or founder of neo-realism is to come to it freed of a burden that can only hamper a more fluid, fresh reading of the film.

Case in point: after my own riveted viewing of Rocco and his Brothers I prepared for this piece by reading Bosley Crowther’s 1961 New York Times review. He writes: “there is in this strong and surging drama of an Italian peasant family's shattering fate in the face of the brutalizing forces of unfamiliar modern city life a kind of emotional fullness and revelation that one finds in the great tragedies of the Greeks.” By tracing a Leftist tradition from Steinbeck to Visconti, Crowther renders the Parondi clan as being above all victims of a modern capitalist-industrial urbanism –which strikes me as a hell of a stretch. Perhaps it’s my own baggage –my father is also of poor, un-educated, Mediterranean, hot-blooded and rather oppressively loud folk– but the root of the Parondis tragedy seems to reside all too clearly in cultural traditions that predate Crowther’s point of reference. The city and its corrupting elements play a crucial role, but nothing in the film strikes me as being more flamboyantly destructive than its titular fraternity of pathologically misogynists, lorded over, somewhat ironically, by a matriarch that will not suffer any threats to the singular sovereignty she inhabits in her family. In plain terms, these guys are serious mamma’s boys, and mamma is one formidable figure.

Unsurprisingly, the theme of the family as agent of disaster isn’t especially popular in movies, but when it arises in the hands of artists who know the territory, it can make for masterpieces. Rocco and his Brothers reminded me of the Godfather trilogy, with Rocco himself bearing a striking resemblance to Michael Corleone, the family’s saviour who becomes corrupted by the very poisons he tries to exorcize from his family. In that film, the judgment of the father replaces the clinging grasp of Visconti’s mother, but either way, these films thrill us with stories that come with a clear warning: beware the elders that close off the forging of your own paths in the name of family pride, because once ensnared, every time you try to get out, they pull you back in.

The forgotten ones: the gradual emergence of Buñuel's Mexican films on DVD

It’s long frustrated me that Luis Buñuel, one of history’s greatest filmmakers, is often considered so solely on the basis of his spectacularly scandalous early shorts Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (30) and late-career European co-productions like Belle de jour (67) and the Oscar-wining The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (72). The vast bulk of Buñuel’s filmography is actually comprised of films made in Mexico between these periods, but, due to a number of issues –distribution, rights, the absence of international stars, the stylistic range and of the material, and, one suspects, a dismissive attitude toward the Mexican film industry– most of these films have failed to reach their rightful audience.

The uniformed consensus on Buñuel’s Mexican films usually insists that, often produced quickly, often melodramas, and sometimes employing Buñuel more as a gun for hire than canonized auteur, they’re compromised works ill-representative of the director’s mischievous disposition and Surrealist roots. Such assumptions ring false for several reasons, not the least being that melodrama is in fact a genre highly conducive to exercising Surrealist philosophy. The period has its lesser titles to be sure, but it’s nonetheless a body of work characterized by invention, provocation, sensuality and economy.

The good news is that in recent months these films have started cropping up on DVD shelves, including two very different titles paired together by Lionsgate in a set imaginatively titled Luis Buñuel 2-Disc Collector’s Edition.

Gran Casino (47), his first Mexican film, admittedly comes closest to being “Luis light”: frivolous, generic, with few traces of anything especially “Buñuelian.” Yet it’s entertaining and far from without interest, concerning a couple of likeable charros who venture to Tampico to find lucrative work in the oil fields. They find more than they bargained for after befriending an Argentine oilman who represents the last holdout in a region otherwise monopolized by a German-owned company using any means necessary to eliminate competition.

The film lucidly evokes its rowdy, anarchic setting, dominated by elitist corruption and riggers eager to relinquish their earnings in the local casino with its luscious female entertainers. The plot features murder, masquerade and plenty of music, and while Buñuel’s contributions are largely workmanlike, he does enhance the proceedings with his distinctive attention to objects –a face reflected in an ice bucket, a stick dragged suggestively through crude oil in the midst of an otherwise tepid love scene– as well as to Mercedes Barba’s impressive thighs jiggling beneath a curtain of sheer fabric in her initial dance number.

More deeply satisfying, The Young One (60), an English-language, US/Mexico co-production, is an unfaithful, utterly inspired adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s story ‘Travelin Man,’ a chamber piece set on an island off the Carolina coast, a fecund locale that serves as a confluence of contentious attitudes toward race, sexuality and identification. It begins with black clarinetist Traver (Bernie Hamilton) arriving alone and desperate in a small boat. Cries of rape jarringly explode over the soundtrack just before we’re treated to an exhilarating series of jump cuts that flashback to the events that brought Traver to his current state. This is followed by the introduction of Miller (Zachary Scott) the island’s white gamekeeper, seen killing a rabbit, who, like Traver’s boat, will enjoy the distinction of actually being shot up twice before the film’s through.

Death and transformation abound in The Young One: animals are hunted and consumed, an old man expires, and the pubescent Evalyn (the remarkably unguarded Key Meersman), at least in the eyes of Miller, her guardian, goes from being a girl to a woman. Amidst these transitional states, the story’s central irony is writ large: while the charismatic Traver must run from lynch-hungry whites happy to assume he’s guilty of a rape he probably didn’t commit, a forced sexual relationship erupts between the middle-aged Miller and the disarmingly innocent Evalyn.

All the signifiers of socially conscientious middlebrow pap are in place –one can imagine the material resting cozily in the hands of say, Stanley Kramer. But Buñuel, who developed the script with Hugo Butler, creates something far more complicated and full of juice. The Young One implicates the viewer fully into the process of Evalyn’s loss of sexual innocence, playfully juxtaposing the trappings of her ostensible newfound adulthood with her girlish manners, as in her final scene that finds her hopping childishly along a boardwalk in oversized heels.
Likewise, the film constantly draws overt parallels between the two men, even while exposing the grotesque aspects of Miller. And in the memorable last scenes, it is in fact Miller who undergoes the greatest, strangest changes. The whole process is conveyed through elegant, fluid camerawork by Gabriel Figueroa and Buñuel’s compelling habit of lingering on images of people at work, of food and, of course, of Evalyn’s legs, which he neither grossly fetishizes nor denies their immaculate beauty.

Lionsgate’s release is in some ways rather clumsy –the two discs are mislabeled, the songs have no subtitles– but the transfers look great, the audio commentaries accompanying both films have their distinct merits, and above all they got the material back on the market in a very affordable package.