[ AS ALWAYS, SPOILERS ABOUND ]

Ingmar Bergman sure loves him a Summer theme! Where To Joy and Summer Interlude depict tragedy, Summer with Monika (1953) gives us folly. Folly of youth, perhaps, but I think Monika’s folly transcends her age: it’s in her character, not her stage of life. For Harry, yes, it’s a stage: he grows up in the end. But Monika, she’s just stuck where she is.

A brief summary. Young couple (Harry and Monika, both around 18) consorts freely and gaily until, you guessed it, Nature hits the buzzer and a child floats up from the primordial soup. Monika, who would rather be a “Dream Girl” (the name of her favorite American movie, one that simply bores Harry) neglects to bond with the child, shrugs off the shackles of family life, and flies away, leaving Harry to raise the child. Of course, that’s where the movie ends, but surely not the story. She’ll be back! I guarantee it! She’ll hop in and out of Harry and the child’s life at her whim for years…. Maybe I’m identifying too closely with some of these films, but DAMN.

Of course, the point of the film is to highlight the Edenic happiness Harry and Monika experience when they escape from the peonage of Civilization and make their way by boat to the summer paradise of an island off the coast of Sweden. There’s a wonderful, long montage sequence of their expedition out through a labyrinth of artificial waterways confined and bounded by a seemingly infinite tangle of bridges and structures; it all gives way to gorgeous vistas of open water and the natural splendor of the island they land on. The relief is palpable when you get to the island, and these children frolic without a single care or worry. Incredible. At this stage of my life, I can’t imagine feeling this way. You’d simply have to be rich, and I guess they are rich: rich with Nature. Summer is the easy season, after all, and they take full advantage. When they return to the city, we are given another lengthy and effective sequence of nature giving way to oppressive (and majestic) urban architecture. Tarkovsky does a similar thing in Solaris (1972)—on roads instead of water—and I can’t help but wonder whether he was quoting this film.

We are treated to some lovely black and white nudity (hers, of course), and we don’t have to feel like voyeurs because it’s Harry who’s looking at her, you see. We’re just seeing what Harry sees. If his loving eyeballs weren’t present on the scene taking in all her feminine glories along with us, then those same exact shots of Monika’s naked body would be “pornography.” Isn’t it amazing, the power of a little narrative context? Of course, this was 1953, when that was still possible. I think what these early films showcasing human sensual experience couldn’t have anticipated was home video. These fleeting glimpses of youthful bodies within the embrace of a complex story and fleshed out characters are perfectly “tasteful,” but home video is able to strip all that context away at the whim of whatever “preevert” happens to be in control of the remote. He can just pause it there, and Monika is transformed into nothing more than an image to summon ejaculation. Indeed, now with digital video, that preevert can take it to the next level and simply extract the “highlights” for online distribution to others who may not even know what film the images come from! Thus, “tasteful,” non-pornographic film imagery is no longer possible, and Summer with Monika itself may be seen as a kind of Filmic Eden to which return is forbidden now that we have eaten of the fruit of Knowledge of Digital Video.

I don’t know if Bergman has any politics, per se, but you could certainly view this film as an anti-Capitalist screed, the way the young fools are ridiculously exploited, mistreated, and dehumanized by their bosses and co-workers, all of whom collaborate to constantly crack the economic whips and keep each other in line. The bleak world created by this system is on full display in the grim montage of industrial cityscape that opens the film. Contrast that with the section in Paradise: we spend a full third of the runtime hanging out in the loveliest summer landscapes and seashores, wallowing nude and disporting playfully in every pose and posture available to the human form… only to be compelled by pregnancy and poverty to return to the mean confinement of the market-driven world, where Harry not only has to devote the bulk of his time and energy to filling up some rich asshole’s treasure trunk, but also has to invest his remaining personal resources in night classes if he wishes to sustain any hope of advancing his economic condition beyond meek subsistence. You can’t blame Monika for wanting to escape all that, I guess! On the other hand… you can.

I have to take note of a moment in which Monika breaks the fourth wall. It’s not even that common nowadays, but back then, it must have been a real shocker! (Certainly was to me.) She’s partying hard with her fella (not Harry), and leans back plucking tobacco off her tongue… then, whammo, turns her gaze suddenly into the camera, the lighting shifts dramatically (you can see Bergman’s theater background here), her eyes darken and her expression hollows out, her smug hedonism softens into a moment of self-awareness, an acknowledgement of the emptiness of her desires, the futility of her “ambitions,” such as they are, to infinite pleasure and escapism…. It’s her Confession, I think. She confesses to us, the audience, because she can’t even confess it to herself. Without a camera to look into, where would she look? A mirror? Ha! A mirror only shows beauty, not truth, everyone knows that! You need an audience for truth, and you yourself can’t be that audience. But that’s probably a discussion for another movie….

Speaking of mirrors, one is employed to great effect in the final shot, demonstrating precisely the point I just made. Harry, holding the baby for whom he’s now solely responsible, peers into a mirror and sees a montage of memories (because Bergman knows that consciousness collapses time) of Monika cavorting naked in their Eden, looking as fresh and sexy as a young woman can, and he smiles wistfully and wanders off into the cold night; regardless of the hell Monika has put him through, he can’t help but romanticize their relationship. Which is to say, he sees beauty, not truth. Is that what love is? Well, this IS where the credits roll… so I guess fucking so!

[ AS ALWAYS, SPOILERS, IT’S ALL MY FAULT ]

My two favorite moments in Godard’s Contempt (1963):

1) Brigitte Bardot peering back over her shoulder at her husband and delivering to him—from her terrifying eyes—the first forays of her eponymous reassessment of his character. It’s possible I’ve never seen a more beautiful woman rendered on film than Bardot in THIS film, but beyond that fact—in this particular scene, her eyes exceed the constraints of physics, somehow, and I feel that she’s being inhabited by a god. This film, after all, is about the vengeance of the gods on pusillanimous “modern” people who “cope” rather than thrive, who spurn righteous bohemian art-making to churn instead a profitable, but meretricious, trade from their talents, who snuffle for favors from higher cocks in the Capitalist pecking order instead of defending their own integrity against vile, demeaning personal encroachments. You want to lose your lunch watching Palance slobber all over Bardot in this film, and to witness Michel Piccoli acquiesce like a shrugging serf to the producer’s seigneurial appropriation of his WIFE makes you want to find your lunch again so you can burn it to ashes and disperse them in a cloud over the flawless Mediterranean Sea where a significant chunk of the film is set. The gods are in this film, presented in their statues, but shining forth stern force from their eyes in first a blue and then a red glow—which is to say, these are LIVING GODS, not dead, but incandescent, present and extremely relevant to the doings of mortal men and women—all-seeing eyes of fierce judgment from the ancient world. THESE are the eyes Bardot borrows for her reappraisal of her husband’s virtue, or lack thereof… and VIRTUE is certainly the word for the thing he lacks. That’s why he has to dress up like Dean Martin—he has no inherent masculinity and must assume it (or at least, its appearance) from a role model, indeed a fictional one, in order to convince any interlocutor that he possesses those traits himself.

2) Jack Palance’s explosion of childlike delight when he sees a naked mermaid winnowing through the waves in the dailies from the Odyssey adaptation he is producing. He hams his entire role to the hilarious max, but particularly in this scene. He is so stimulated by the mermaid that he throws a tantrum, kicking reels of film out of an assistant’s hands, demanding that the rest of the film measure up to the mermaid’s lascivious promise. Fritz Lang (playing himself) was selected to direct this film not because of his legendary cinematic résumé, but because he is German, and as Palance reminds us, “Everyone knows it was a German who discovered Troy.” You have to wonder what kind of nonsense Godard must’ve run up against in the fabled Satanic Mills of Hollywood to give us such a character! Every scene Palance was in was just steak for him to chew and chew and chew, I loved it!

The music swells into magnificence at the drop of a hat, often drowning out the words; even if I understood French, I doubt I’d make out the dialogue without the subtitles. I’ve seen him do this in some of the other films (Weekend suggests itself). Then at other moments, the music swirls precipitately down the drain. The music is gorgeous, orchestral, moving, sentimental; yet it’s also arbitrary, fickle, self-serving. Is Godard, the “master,” merely playing games with us, the audience? Well, duh.

The movie ends with “Silencio!” Which of course brings Mulholland Drive to mind (ending with the same word) and… holy shit, this film runs all through that one, doesn’t it? Let’s see: in MD, the dark-haired beauty named Camilla (although she has amnesia and doesn’t actually know her name) gets out of the shower, puts on a blond wig, and examines herself in the mirror; in Contempt, the blond beauty named Camille gets out of the bath, dons a black wig, and examines herself in the mirror. (Am I remembering MD well enough? Been awhile since my last immersion. At least I now have an excuse to watch it again!) And both films examine the movie-making process from a… jaded perspective, shall we say. You know, there’s a weird scene in which they’re watching a lip-synced song and dance routine in a sparsely attended theater… and in MD you have the lady singing the Roy Orbison song in Spanish, which turns out to be lip-synced! Yeah, Lynch was all UP in Contempt’s folds and crevices, sans doute, yo. Definitely going to need to arrange a screening at some point; I’ll need to rewatch this one, too. And the sad thing is, I’ve seen it at least twice before, barely grokked it until this time…. For some reason, I’m ready for Godard these days. At least, 60’s Godard. I have no idea what he got up to later on.

Okay, if this were a film essay, it would be pathetic, but fortunately, it’s just an uneducated viewer’s response, and nothing more is required of me, so I’m going to give up NOW, since my tea is ready and bedtime’s just around the corner, and I’m definitely ready for it.

I should say, I’m hoping to figure out how to set up a “Films” section on this site. It seems pretty stupid to be using up my blog with all these film bits; the point of this site is to promote my writing, not blather on about the movies I’m watching… I’m only doing that because there seems to be an itch I need to scratch. So maybe I can scratch it in a Film section and leave this blog alone, if Textpattern will just cooperate; I’m not sanguine about that, however…. Another “however,” however, will direct us toward the wisdom that Time is Infinite. Etc.

Took in Jacques Demy’s debut film Lola (1961) t’other night, mostly with grimacing disaffection, although I enjoyed the local color of Nantes, the baroque architecture, the dazzling washes of light, Anouk Aimée’s eyes, equally dazzling… She’s one of my favorite Fellini gals, as a matter of fact, and frankly much better served by him. He groks her beauty as Jacques Demy apparently can’t… I felt like Demy was cramming her into this script, and it didn’t sit well. (Not that her vitality or raw sex appeal were in any way unwelcome in my particular living room.) Must be said, however, the film’s ahead of its time: her suitor is an incel 40 years before incels were even a thing! And I won’t judge Demy too harshly based on this evident juvenilia. (Pretty sure this guy was Agnes Varda’s husband, and she’s on another level, I’ve seen two so far—mindblowing—I’ll be spacing her films out like I’m doing with Bergman and Fellini. And Godard. I feel like I should have watched all these people in my youth, what was wrong with me? Actually, I watched plenty back then, just didn’t fucking get it. Thank you, Criterion Collection, for bringing it all back home….)

But Lola’s not the movie I was going to write about; just giving it a mention. I actually started on Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales last night, and I gotta say, it’s a fascinating journey so far through the minds of randy PUAs (Pick-Up Artists) before that was even a thing! Granted, I’ve only seen the first three as of yet, but I strongly suspect the last three won’t disappoint in this regard…. There’s a kind of analytic fervor to both the scriptwriting and the filmic technique, a desire to impose a rational, deterministic scheme on probabilistic events; even as the world throws its curveballs, the key to preserving “morality” (and thus, comfy bourgeois self-entitlement) is to get down to BUSINESS and keep your eye on the ball! You MUST create and preserve Order at all costs. If temptation distracts you briefly, don’t beat yourself up, just toss that hot temptress back into the ditch she crawled out of, and get yourself back to the BUSINESS of transforming life from an organic Process to a mechanical System. Something along those lines, but I’ll revise it as necessary. Will the last three prove me wrong? Honestly, I fucking hope so. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving these films.)

1. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1961) is only 20 minutes, and it’s hilarious. The protag develops a crush on a woman he passes every day in the street and works up his courage to approach her, lucks out with a sincere improvisation in which he flexes all of his PUA skills and manages to persuade her to let him ask her out next time he sees her. Of course, after that, he never sees her—he takes to haunting the streets at the dinner hour, fingers crossed they’ll cross paths… and being hungry, he ends up snacking on pastries from the corner boulangerie. This becomes his daily routine. Scene after scene of him standing in the street stuffing cookies and sticky gateaux in his mouth while longing for sexual consummation—just cracks me the fuck up! Frustrated by his failure with the original girl, he lays the mack down on the counter girl at the bakery, and she reluctantly agrees to go out with him after much hemming and hawing…. but then the original girl shows up, after all—she had broken her foot—and he simply ghosts the bakery girl, figuring that was the “moral” thing to do, since she wasn’t really the one he’d wanted to begin with. You’ve gotta stick with The Plan.

2. Suzanne’s Career (1963), as a title, neatly sums up the business of being a woman in a marketplace of love. You interview for the position of girlfriend, and if you measure up to the arbitrary standards of the hiring manager, he onboards and integrates you into the corporate culture of his gonads; over time, whether or not you’re a “good fit” for those gonads becomes evident, and you either stay on to advance further in the organization, or you’re shown the door to make your way through the cruel world eventually into the offices of some other business that happens to be hiring, rinse and repeat. Suzanne exemplifies the humility of the applicant, while Guillaume represents the whimsical, self-regarding narcissism of the hiring manager, and Bertrand observes and participates in their antics with a measure of scorn for what he sees, especially in Suzanne’s self-abnegation, but he comes around by the end when he discovers that not only has Suzanne survived this process intact, but succeeded in establishing a steady, stable relationship for herself with a pretty decent fella, while his own love life is pretty much the same shitty mess it’s always been. His big epiphany amounts to: Wow, I thought she was worthless, but turns out she knows this game better than me.

3. My Night at Maud’s (1969) gives us Jean-Louis, soi-disant “Catholic Engineer.” He studies mathematics and probabilities and appears to base his life decisions on Pascal’s Wager, which posits that the chance of God’s existence, however small, warrants betting the farm and believing every word of the Dogma, since the reward (if it’s true) is infinite. Kinda like the lottery, gotta play to win! Heeeey… you never know! It could happen to YOU! You gonna let that cigarillo-chomping mouthbreather ahead of you in line at the corner shop have a legitimate, statistically supported shot at the Dream, but not yourself? Fuck no, buy the ticket, yo, just keep it on the DL from your homies, they won’t let you forget what a hypocrite sounds like… Where was I? Mais oui, Mssr. Catholique, via chance encounter, spends the night with a splendidly sexy divorcée (Maud), but thinks pure thoughts and longs for the blonde he hasn’t even properly met yet (he caught sight of her in profile at Mass last Sunday morning and then pursued her sweet bicycling posterior in his car until la Justice of snarled traffic intervened to derail his righteous quest to become her new bicycle seat), and indeed manages to preserve his vaunted chastity in the face of, yes, stiff temptation. Oh, the trials and tribulations of l’homme moral! Fully revved by the unconsummated night at Maud’s, he PUAs the girl of his rêves in the street (again, on the basis of Pascal’s Wager) and manages to spend the night at her place, too! (In both instances, his excuse is the weather: a snowstorm, a.k.a. probabilistic event.) Again, an entirely chaste evening, but this time he’s in it to win it—and win it he does! I mean, er, win her he does. Her! Sires a child on the new possession and five years later runs into Maud at the beach, spazzes a bit at the recollection of his sublimated sizzle for this fallen hussy, this temptress of worldly delights whom he so manfully resisted at his weakest moment, but thoroughly enjoys the spiritual cat fight that erupts betwixt her and la femme-trophée as they pad past each other in the sand.

One of the techniques I love in this film is the insistence on showing one person in a conversation without cutting back and forth for reactions. We hear the interlocutor off-screen while mercilessly revealing every smallest gesture and micro-expression of the camera’s subject. Each character receives this treatment in turn; there’s no favoritism. The choice of who to present in a given conversation seems to depend on who’s most likely to be squirming. It requires the actor to truly inhabit the character, to vocalize lines, but also to listen to lines, to demonstrate comprehension and thought-formulation in the muscles of the face, often for several minutes at a time. Just one false move would ruin the take. Something of a tightrope, and I would call it bravura filmmaking.

[ 7-22-22 ]

4. La collectionneuse (1967) is the first of these Moral Tales that I simply found distasteful. None of the characters have any charisma or appeal. The previous films give us characters who, regardless of how unpleasant their behavior may seem, at least appear to harbor within themselves SOME modicum of conscientiousness towards others. Whereas, in this film, I feel like I’m watching sociopaths.

If I’m being generous, the film’s ostensible purpose seems to be to demonstrate the tyranny of solipsism in male-female relations. Our hero Adrien simply cannot imagine that Haydée—who looks maybe 19 and not even glancingly interested in him—is not spending every minute of her time scheming to acquire him for her “collection,” which is defined as the set of all men whom she has taken to bed. Although he clearly wishes to count himself among them, he doesn’t want to have been successfully “collected”; rather, he wants to be the one who “collects” HER. (And then discards, sans doute.)

Of course, his reasoning that she is a collector of men relies solely on the observation that she is sexually liberated and unabashedly active in that lifestyle. It also depends on his reluctant (but ineluctable) attraction to her, which places him in an undeniably submissive posture, a power hierarchy he cannot tolerate. He, after all, has to be on top! He has created a mythology around himself that he is infinitely desirable to women, thus positioned above them in a sexual caste system visible only to him, and so he must be the monarch of his relationships: this is the natural order, and anything else would be an insult to pride and self-respect. Indeed, pride, we must infer, is the basis of morality, for he constantly refers to “morality” as the justification for his endless barrage of cruel, demeaning tactics against this poor girl, when it is clear he simply wants the upper hand and resents her bitterly for her refusal to submit to his domination. It seems to be the habit of the characters in these Moral Tales to fetishize morality as the guiding principle of behaviors that are actually arbitrary and even animalistic—anything BUT moral. Adrien, in the voice-over narration, is relentless in justifying his actions as consequences of adherence to a code of moral conduct, when we can see clearly that he is just horny. (Sort of like how Don Rickles pretends he’s defending the morality of election integrity, when really he just wants that sweet, sweet immunity from criminal prosecution afforded to anyone who sits behind the Magic Desk in the White House. Funny how that is.)

Pretty dismal film, all over. This one’s in color and has that drab, jaundiced palette you often see in 60s films. It is well filmed, anyway, and I did enjoy the languorous narrative tone—envied the vacation vibes… maybe I’ll take one of those, someday? As for the choice to use color film, maybe Rohmer wanted to show how tanned and perfect the bodies were? Frankly, I think I would’ve tolerated the horrid characters much better if the film had been in black and white. There would’ve been a more innocent beauty to their bodies (the shape and sheen) that would have redeemed, somewhat, the ugliness of their souls. Instead, they look like they’re posing for a perfume ad in EVERY scene. Hard to take them seriously….

Yeah, so… the first strikeout in this series. Can’t win ’em all!

[7-23-22] Back here the next day to wonder why I reacted so strongly against this particular film. Somehow, I saw the humor in the first three, whereas this one felt like a grim slog through lives of nitwits. Objectively, now… was it? Or did I have some personal, emotional response that caused me to unfairly malign this piece of art? I’ll have to reserve judgment, methinks, until I’ve completed the Moral Tales…. There’re only two films left in the series, I’ll certainly get to them pretty soon, but they’re both in color, like this one, which makes me nervous…. In any case, let’s see how those play out, and if it seems necessary, I could revisit this one at some later moment… you know… in tranquility.

[7-26-22]

5. I’m happy to say Claire’s Knee (1970) seduced me back into the wicked embrace of les contes moraux. I think perhaps La collectionneuse suffered from excessive vapidity in the characters. They were such empty husks of human beings, there was no way to engage their adventures with any degree of empathy; mostly what you felt was contempt. In Claire’s Knee, it must be said, Claire and her boyfriend Gilles do fit in that mold and could easily have been transplanted over to La collectionneuse without even noticing the change of scenery; if the movie had been about them, it would have been dreadful indeed! Fortunately, their roles in this film are almost incidental. The main three characters are Jerome, Laura, and Aurora (a name that, amusingly, seems to induce epilepsy in French tongues), and they are all delightful (and charmingly scandalous) in their own ways. Which is such a relief—I was rather apprehensive after that last one!

What we’re looking at here is a loose modernization of that prototypical French roman scandaleux Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Believe it or not, I read that novel back in college (not for a class or anything… but that would’ve been cool!), and I even managed to summon up most of the author’s name just now before resorting to Google to give me “Pierre,” which I never would have gotten. And of course, there’s a great 80s film adaptation… a couple of them come to think of it. Stephen Frears did Dangerous Liaisons, and Milos Forman did Valmont. Holy shit, I’m on a roll! I’m going to look those up to save potential embarrassment, however…. Vindicated. I seem to recall the Frears was better than the Forman, but face it, I was a teenager when I saw these movies, so it’s plausible I was full of shit. Probably not going to test that theory out anytime soon, though… Preferable to continue in ignorance of my adolescent shittiness.

The point being we have a couple of diabolical schemers collaborating to lave their corruption in the refreshing spray of girlish innocence. Aurora is a writer looking for material and has taken the ethically dubious step of creating mischief in the real world so that she can observe and record the ensuing mayhem in her novels, becoming like as unto a Goddess in our sublunar realm. In this case, she encourages her old friend Jerome, with whom she has been unexpectedly reunited during a July holiday, to seduce Laura, the lively, burgeoning 16-year old daughter of her host. Aurora is cheerfully evil, smiling blandly through every obscene suggestion she makes as if it were perfectly reasonable for a man (such as Jerome) planning to be married inside of 6 weeks to pursue carnal pleasures with a minor. He goes along with it because he is so laid back and easy-going, but mainly, we suspect, because the ripe young fruit being set before him is so enticing.

His pursuit of Laura fizzles due to her intelligence and self-awareness—her perspicacity in seeing through his act. She comes to understand that her attraction to him stems not from sexual heat, but rather from filial affection; she had confused her desire for a father figure (her own father being deceased) for lust. A practical man, perceiving he won’t succeed with her, Jerome’s lechery immediately transfers to Claire, Laura’s stepsister, in the form of an erotic obsession with her knee, which he longs to touch after seeing it pressed against a ladder. Intriguingly, Laura is present and witnesses his witness of the holy knee, but we are not given access to her impression of the scene. Did she perceive the dirty layers of his perversion in that moment? Or did her innocence protect her from understanding?

He even describes all of this to Aurora, who suggests baldly that the only cure for his predicament is to touch the knee. And he manages to arrange a situation in which the act can be performed: isolate Claire, mangle her emotions until she breaks down into tears, and then “comfort” her by massaging the knee. The caress of the knee is the victory of analysis over innocence. She accepts his caress at face value despite its clear disingenuous intent, which subtly defiles her in his eyes and removes her from the category of innocence, thus sating his appetite for corruption and resolving his desire for her. He is now free to return to his fiancée with a clear conscience.

I will say, although I’ve disparaged her relentlessly here, I actually came to admire Claire in the end for defying Jerome’s nasty bit of emotional sabatoge. He incites her tears by maligning her boyfriend’s fidelity. The final scene of the film depicts her and Gilles (the boyfriend) in conversation (with ever-nasty Aurora eavesdropping from her balcony!), the gist of which conveys both his innocence of the charge and her acceptance of his explanations. We sense that they are not in danger of breaking up over this injustice, and that is something of a relief.

[7-27-22]

6. Love in the Afternoon (1972), or shall we call it by its French title L’amour, l’après-midi to distinguish it from the Billy Wilder film of the same name? I saw someone online call it Chloé in the Afternoon, which is intriguing, but I don’t know where they got that from…. Whatever it’s called, I LOVED it right up till the end when it walked off a cliff. What the fuck.

I’m sure I’d be disputed by anyone who heard me say it—which my site’s visitor statistics (or lack thereof) reassure me won’t ever happen—but I got some serious Eyes Wide Shut vibes from this film, right from the start. One of the first shots gives us Frédéric’s wife Hélène performing ablutions in da buff, full length from behind (interesting contrast with one of the final shots of Chloé in da buff, full length from behind… both women are gorgeous, but I’ve just gotta give it to Chloé); a nearly identical shot of Nicole Kidman opens Eyes Wide Shut. Like Tom Cruise, Frédéric spends his days at work bored out of his mind because the modern world is a fucking soulless machine within which humans must struggle on a daily basis to survive as organic, loving, principled, ecstatic creatures of infinite spiritual dimension. Frédéric must abandon his wife and children every single day in order to “make a living” and maintain a respectable “bourgeoise lifestyle.” Meanwhile, his wife, also working, must abandon her children to a nanny, a stranger in the household whose only function is to be the mother to her children that she’s not allowed to be. The modern family is thus demonstrated to be a monstrous deformation of what human beings actually need and desire. Any wonder that these people are so fucking unhappy? Ha ha!

I think this last moral tale is the first to feature a married protagonist. He spends the movie falling in love with Chloé, and it’s a wonderful relationship. I really enjoyed experiencing their development as friends. He is put off by her, at first, and there is quite a bit of friction in their chemistry, but you feel, underneath it, the genuine mutual esteem. Each of these people sincerely cares for the other. And it’s not as if he doesn’t love his wife; he does, I believe him, but he also protests a bit too much. Probably because he feels guilty about his ever-expanding affection for Chloé, spending all that time with her in the afternoons (which otherwise, he avers early in one of the numerous voice-over narrations, are so dreadfully dull and oppressive), and feeling so natural with her, so comfortable and relaxed.

Of course, she wants more; why would a beautiful young woman spend so much time with a man? It’s not like he’s gay, after all. He’s married, but that’s no impediment; this is France we’re talking about. She tells him straight up, she wants his baby. She’ll raise it on her own. How trés moderne! (I hope I’m getting these Frenchisms right! Once again, my visitor count preserves me from embarrassment…)

So… right on the verge of consummating this relationship we’ve been so deeply present with for the last 90 minutes, this dipshit chickens out, sneaks out the door leaving a stunningly naked Chloé waiting for him in her bed, and runs home to his wife, who seems uncomfortable and even distraught at his awkwardly timed arrival (the afternoon!); we are given to infer that she herself may be conducting an affair. The pair commences lovemaking as we look politely out the window—at the afternoon, I guess—and Fin. Jesus fucking Christ. I won’t deny, I really liked Hélène—she was cute and friendly, and had a very cozy bond with Frédéric—but I was actually rooting for Chloé. I had trouble with her at first because she’s rather neurotic and nervous, not very comfortable in her own skin, and preoccupied all the time with the ridiculous circumstances of her life… and there was so much disharmony between her and Frédéric in the beginning, I just felt tense whenever they were together… but over time, they seemed to fit better and their emotions started to flow in the same channels… you felt a real friendship happening. I was surprised and pleased by that; I hadn’t expected it, although I don’t know what I was expecting… I guess something sociopathic like the previous movies!

So when he left her hanging like that—and in such a humiliating position, stretched naked on the bed, offering herself to him, awaiting his love, even while he’s grabbing his coat and sneaking out—it was just so unbearable, such a betrayal… And what is wrong with me, one wonders, that Frédéric’s fidelity to his wife ends up feeling like a betrayal! In any case, this is a good spot to bring up Eyes Wide Shut again. Remember the ending of that? The couple reunites and reaffirms their marriage with that famous line, “Let’s fuck”? Same ending. Frédéric and Hélène reaffirming their marriage and running off to fuck. It’s the same movie, essentially! We get a glimpse of the wife’s psychodynamics, but mainly stick with the husband, whose own endless self-analysis and doubts about the integrity of his marriage lead to risky wandering and adventures, but he “rescues” himself from moral peril just in the nick of time…. Something like that, anyway. Ha ha! I’m too tired to work it out in any more detail than that. Anyone who’s read this far… well, I feel for ya.

Okay, that’s all six of Six contes moraux, and I rate the overall experience as highly enjoyable and thought-provoking, if at times infuriating. My favorites are a tie between My Night at Maud’s and Love in the Afternoon, even though that ending really fucking disappointed me. I can’t believe I wrote all this shit about them, too! I’ve been on a tear, for some reason, but I’m sure it won’t last. I would like to write about Fellini, though…. and I’ve got so many Bergmans to tackle yet; I had a great time writing about him, I’m sure there’s still fuel in the tank for the rest. And I’ve been loving all these French movies, just something about French people that turns me on. So we’ll see, maybe I’ve got a few more of these to go…. ;)

Apparently, my Contact page was labeled “Piss Off” in the site menu. Must’ve been some fookin’ Tralfamadorian trolls hacked my site! Ahem. Anyway, the menu is now friendlier, inviting you to “Get in touch.” I glanced in at my “Link Heap” page as well, and a foetid stench of dead links engulfed and / or suffocated me, and I had no choice but to retreat shamefacedly, a failure in every dimension of Internet Presence. Which is to say, I’m aware of the issue, and maybe someday I’ll do something about it, but I make no promises!

T’other night, I plunged head first into Bergman’s Summer Interlude (1951), included on the same disc as To Joy (1950). It’s tempting to call the films twins, they share so much in structure, theme, and imagery. All the same, Summer Interlude might be the prettier twin, you know, the talented one.

First of all, it’s just a beautiful film. We’ve lost so much these days by shooting everything in color. Color tricks you into thinking you’re seeing something “real.” So it’s a lie. Whereas, black and white captures reality and explicitly transforms it into a dream. It’s honest. You can’t look at a black and white movie and understand it as anything other than an artistic creation. Not so with color; one is lulled into passive acceptance of the “reality” of what is seen. Can we all agree it isn’t healthy to look at images on a screen and think of them as “real”? (Apparently, this is how we ended up with Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian; I rest my case, y’r Hon’r.)

You can literally SEE THE LIGHT in a black and white scene (it’s the “white” part). In a color scene, there is no light, per se, only an assortment of frequencies sliced out of the spectrum and artfully composed. You can see shadows, somewhat, but even those are usually muddied by a dense enmeshment of color. Black and white removes the distractions that color preserves, forces you you actually look at a composition and interpret what you see. We must also remember the brain’s propensity to fill in the gaps whenever information is missing: this processing power engages the attention and the imagination more intimately and powerfully. I’m making all this shit up as I go, of course, but it’s probably true.

Summer seems to be a predilection for Bergman. Indeed, the first movie in the collection is Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)! Wild Strawberries and To Joy both transpire in summer, and now… Summer Interlude. A season that lasts, I would guess, about 2 or 3 months in Sweden. Ha ha! Given Bergman’s proclivity, so far, for nostalgia, it makes sense he’d focus on Summer, it being, after all, the time of year most likely to beckon to the longing reflectivity of latter years. Also, an easier time to make a movie! Honestly, that’s probably it; and now I seem to recall that Bergman’s main gig was as the director of a theater, and he made his films in the off-season, so there’s your answer, Sherlock.

I’m quite taken with Maj-Britt Nilsson, who plays Marta in To Joy and Marie in Summer Interlude. Her eyes are a touch too close together, which causes her eyebeams to intersect at an unusual angle, sharpening her smiles, but also her insults. Her body buzzes with easy, nimble energy… appropriate since her character is a ballerina! You feel no regrets at all watching her for 90 minutes in a row. There are moments when I don’t quite believe her, but I think that’s more Bergman’s fault than hers…. He’s still a little clumsy in his craft, isn’t he? By Wild Strawberries, he seems to have found his rhythm, but in this movie, he’s still a tiny bit unsure of himself, and I wouldn’t even say that if I hadn’t already seen Wild Strawberries (or, come to think of it, The Seventh Seal).

Off the top of my head, some of the major ways Summer Interlude recapitulates To Joy:

1. Structure: begin in the present, flashback to show us the doomed relationship, then return to the present for emotional mop-up.
2. Theme: grief.
3. We learn of the lover’s death before even meeting him or her: it’s just inevitable. To Joy dooms the girl, whereas Summer Interlude dooms the boy.
4. Why did the lovers die? Randomly. No fault of their own, nor of anybody else. God said, Fuck you, today’s the day.
5. Classical music! In To Joy, it’s the orchestra, which gets plenty of screen time, and in this one it’s the ballet: lovely, dramatically side-lit dancers with long shadows. Both of these movies celebrate the “Working Class” of the performing arts, the people in the trenches doing the hard work—whether sawing on the strings or pumping out the pliés! Grit and determination, we are given to understand, fuel the Arts just as much as they do the Trades.

I’m sure there’re more points, but I don’t feel like summoning them up…. If anything occurs to me, I’ll add it to the list!

Marie shuts her emotions down for 13 years after Henrik’s death. In her grief, she learns to “build a wall around herself” to prevent further harm. It’s represented visually by the theater makeup so thickly applied to her face. You can barely recognize her face behind it, it’s almost literally a wall. How is she able to tear it down? She acquires Henrik’s diary, after all these years, and it’s not the act of reading it that frees her from her self-made prison, but of giving it to someone else to read—her current lover who’s on the verge of leaving her due to her emotional freeze-out—so that he can understand why she has been so cagey with her affections. She’s literally given herself away, and now she’s free.

Nilsson does an amazing job portraying both a bubbly teenager and an “aging” 28-year old professional ballerina. Bergman has a real knack for filming women, I’m realizing…. He’s able to see past their beauty and bring out the richness of an inner life… which is a real trick when you’re filming such beautiful women!

In fact, on reflection, these early films tend to feature kind of flat, one-note male characters up against vitally portrayed females who crackle with a certain, shall we say, complexity. It isn’t until Wild Strawberries, really, that you get a male with significant depth and pathos. Maybe that was his breakthrough film? I haven’t seen enough to judge yet, I suppose!

That’s probably enough about that. I thought I had things to say about the “Uncle” character, and was going to talk about all the mirrors (Bergman loves him some mirrors, let me tell you!), but I don’t feel like it. Kinda wrote too much already, frankly, what the fuck am I doing? These were just going to be little summaries or reader responses…. If I change my mind later, I’ll come back and edit this post. So there.

Was it a year, two years ago? Via discounts, coupon codes, and sheer megalomania, I acquired the Criterion box sets of both Fellini and Bergman, and all I can say is “Je ne regrette rien,” or some such pretentious thing. (You can’t fake pretension, not when you’re speaking French in an American accent—that’s the genuine article—’specially iffin you don’t even know French in la première place.)

I binged on some of the Fellini a ways back, while Bergman bided his time; whereas more recently, I finally began the Bergman, and even the earliest, let’s-face-it hamfisted examples have been blowing me away. A brutal energy and honesty in Bergman, you might even call it uncomfortable, right from the beginning. This is going to be a ride! The box set contains something like 30 movies, arranged ingeniously NOT in strict chronological order, but rather in a sinuous motion through the developing artistry of Bergman over time in the medium of film. You get the bright stars of his masterpieces with the minor works sprinkled evenly between. Keeps you interested: you don’t have to wade through all the juvenilia before finally getting to the “good stuff.”

The one I watched last night (competent juvenilia) was called To Joy (1950), whereas the last one I watched a few weeks ago (masterpiece) was Wild Strawberries (1957), which melted me right into my cushions. We’ll see how that assessment holds up to my next viewing, of course, at which point maybe I’ll write about it… if I’m still writing about films by then. Kinda like keeping a dream diary, you’re enthusiastic for the first few entries, then it all just fades away, doesn’t it? In any case, I don’t feel prepared to react to that one, especially since it’s been a few weeks now, I don’t have fresh images, and I really want to watch it again.

For now, To Joy. Hmm, what could THAT title be referring to? You guessed it, Einstein: Beethoven. And lo, the film is filled with classical music, our protags being violinists in an orchestra, dramatically portrayed with various saucy angles and a surprisingly agile camera swooping around like some harpy haunting the concert hall, seeking out our lovely couple in their respective seats.

Right as the film starts, Stig learns that his wife Marta has been killed by an exploding kerosene stove. His head arcs down to the table where his weeping begins, dissolves into literal harp strings (from their orchestra), and we are delivered into the past to examine the journey of their relationship: from its inception through marriage and concluding in Marta’s death, survived by Stig and their children. What a strange feeling, to KNOW Marta’s fate in every scene, in which so many transmissions of sympathy and deep feeling pass between their animal spirits; to see Stig’s enjoyment of her vitality and generosity, having already seen his future grief.

Bergman blocks the actors in provocative ways. He doesn’t just throw some actors on the screen and direct them to say their lines at each other; instead, he finds ways to position them against each other in space. You might call it Psychological Geometry. For example, in one scene, he places Stig to the left, Marta in the middle, and a mirror on the right, arranged so that Stig seems to be looking away from Marta, whereas the mirror image of Stig looks toward her, and meanwhile, her gaze is moving everywhere! Another scene on some rocks at the seashore: the actors shift into different orientations within the shot, depending on the development of feeling in the scene. Stig and Marta face each other—he leaning back, she leaning forward—but then he sits up and his head crosses to the other side of hers, so that now they’re looking in opposite directions—at odds with each other—but then they move again for a fervent locking of eyes and a rise in feeling… It’s all precisely staged and for my money, pretty effective!

The ocean, the seashore, the waves crashing in and rolling out, an emphasized image in this film: the perpetual cycle of wrath and retreat enacted both by Nature and by Melodrama. Incredible, indeed infuriating at times, how bipolar these people are! Screaming one second, ecstatically embracing the next. It’s hard to gauge who they actually are underneath it all. Keeping us audience members off-kilter in this manner is extremely effective at ensnaring our sympathy for the characters. We experience their love more strongly as it becomes more tempestuous and unbalanced. You yearn for them to come together, and then you’re cringing as one or the other throws unwonted bombs into their seemingly imminent serenity. I almost felt like an abused lover myself in this storm! Stig keeps flying into adolescent fury or miring in depression, but he’s always grounded back into cheerfulness by Marta’s steadiness… not before he’s hurt her in some careless fashion, of course. So you hate him for hurting her, but you love him even more for what appears to be his unfeigned feeling for her that always draws him back into her orbit.

And you understand also that this whole film is his flashback—she’s already dead before we even catch sight of her—so everything is subjective to him. The result being, she’s mostly angelic and faultless throughout, while he’s wracked with guilt over every little misstep that he’s made, every destructive decision, every selfish failure to see and love her as she has deserved. You sense he resents her for having this power over him, but he’s also grateful for being held securely and safely in that power. (And naturally devastated to lose it.)

Curious bit in the film that kind of threw me: Stig deems himself a loser and a mediocrity (especially after he fucks up his violin solo debut), and so he seeks solace and excitement in an extramarital affair. Openly—he doesn’t even hide it from his wife! That is some swingin’ bohemian clique these people are rockin’ in midcentury Sweden, eh? The girl he swoons for is a nymphet type, fully grown but coquettish and, hm, limber, shall we say? She is the wife of an elderly fella who loves to, in the modern parlance, get cucked; I’m not sure what they called it back then…. In any case, he’s the one who brings them together and luxuriates in the lather of their concupiscence. This film came out in 1950! Scandalous! (Admittedly, I’m kind of overselling it here; it’s nowhere explicit.)

Even though the film is a flashback from Stig’s perspective, I wasn’t sure what to make of a few breaks in that structure, when we hear the thoughts of other characters. Even the conductor of the orchestra has his say! I wonder if Bergman simply didn’t care about narratorial consistency, or were these bits meant to portray how Stig imagines other people view him and his relationship? This is something we do: imagine the reactions of others to our own actions. Being in a relationship is to be observed by others in the activity of that relationship; one observes the observers and experiences a vicarious thrill wondering what they think of it all.

After all, everyone is completely alone, their relations always mediated by social forces or physical distances or even interior monologues, which no matter how ardent and seemingly full of feeling, no matter how sincerely felt, are just self-serving propaganda, a stream of words designed to persuade ourselves that we are feeling what we believe to be appropriate in a given context. Building ourselves moment by moment through the living process, creating the person we present to the world and also to ourselves. What is underneath it? Who really built that person? With what consciousness, what design, did he or she do it? Did you make choices? Did you wish for what you got? Or for something else, something you never got? Did you feel helpless to make yourself in a shape of your choosing, or did someone else make you, and you merely accepted the “gift”? Who’s “responsible”? (We’re getting into Vivre sa vie territory, here! That one has really haunted me, I’ve got to get back to it soon!)

Just realized, A Ship to India (1947) has the exact same narrative structure as To Joy. It starts by revealing the fates of the main characters, then flashes back for the rest of the story before returning to the present for a final resolution of emotional elements… Intriguing! I wonder how often Bergman uses this particular structure… I’ll keep an eye out as I progress through the oeuvre. What it comes down to is the nonlinear exploration of consciousness. What is a consciousness? What form does it take in time and space? A person, a WHOLE person, doesn’t even exist in time, but rather folds time endlessly within himself as he grows and progresses through the naturally encoded stages of his organism. Wildly different parts of your life will butt up against each other within your consciousness, separated by years, yet simultaneous in YOU… you could be an old man peering across time into your own childhood, seeing it so clearly you weep…. and that’s exactly how Wild Strawberries works! Holy fuck.

That’s probably a good note to end on. Writing undeniably aids the understanding, doesn’t it? Wasn’t really the intention here, but I feel pretty good about the result…. Shit, I can’t do this much work for every movie I see, though, can I?… Ha ha! Whatever.