Adult films (but not that kind)

The Beguiled 

US, 1971
Directed by Don Siegel

Wow!  Every craft and credit here is outstanding.  Is this where that “to Don” dedication at the beginning of Eastwood's Unforgiven comes from?  The Beguiled is kind of a genre picture, and you could even call it an exploitation picture of sorts.  But those humble designations, and Siegel’s workmanlike reputation, aren’t adequate to the utter artful confidence on display here.  This is a complete package: great location, design, powerful expressionistic direction and cinematography, really fine performances that render really well imagined characters.  Eastwood is modest, but he’s a real actor, even at this comparatively early, pre-auteur date.  Geraldine Page is positively Shakespearean, or elemental, humanizing a monster, or demonizing a human.  Elizabeth Hartman is a revelation, and this Pamelyn Ferden kid really does give one of history’s great kid performances.  

J. Collier, Clytemnestra

 

So far, so good—but there’s a complication.  The film is very frankly, very unblinkingly about sex, about the power and danger of sexual desire.  As such, the subject is not only central, but it is also briefly, vividly illustrated.  And so, accordingly, it would seem to be out of bounds to all sorts of parents and kids and conscientious moral conservatives.  Right.  Or, wait a minute.

Sex is a primal, even elemental subject.  It’s tough to the point of impossibility for a neophyte, even an initiate, to rationally, calmly, even safely make her way through.  But the frankness on display here is not only contemporary (70’s cinema), it’s also honest and instructive and even healthy.  The Beguiled touches upon gender clichés, then subverts or supplements them.  Myth and reality, archetype and particularity.  The wages of sin are certainly clearly paid.  But the emotional remainders, the emotional shards have removed us from the merely didactic and into the plain tragic.  And in the end, it's not remotely exploitative.  Don't see the film, then.  And know that what you're not seeing is true and real, communicated not only with great craft, but with great integrity.

Blow Out 
US, 1981
Directed by Brian De Palma

De Palma is kind of a jerk.  Who may aspire to decency.  Maybe he even gets there once in a while.  Then he makes Scarface.  That’s as much the story here as the ostensible or explicit plot.  The opening is De Palma all over, ostentatious/ obnoxious camera mobility/virtuosity in the service of objectifying titillation, that inevitably turns into violence toward women.  Wait.  Ha-ha—it’s not sex and murder after all, but just the attempted production of an exploitation film!  But the naked girl’s scream shows us how faked and ridiculous this kind of thing is, or maybe how heartless and inhuman.  It’s the ghost in the machine of film futurism: the sick might just have intimations of the striving.  Okay, sound guy—go out and get us a real scream for this picture.  

We get distracted from metatext (or pretense) for a while, following Mr. Travolta around on this quest.  (You look at this and remember that he could have and should have been an actual movie star during all those lost years.  He’s charismatic, attractive, adept, capable, in the right hands and the right circumstances, of being deeply sympathetic.  But it’s so much easier to be James Caan than Tom Hanks, isn’t it?)  This is a pretty crafty move, and it’s really quite well managed, quite well maintained for quite a stretch of time.  

That maintenance has a lot to do with the fact that this guy, these guys are some filmmakers!  The extended sequence in which Travolta/Jack goes out to record some random sounds and actually documents this assassination is pretty spectacular.  (Diopter!)  The impressive thing is that the sound collecting, the devotion to and affection for craft, is just as arresting as the conflict and jeopardy that follows.  It’s this versatility that allows them to actually do right by Antonioni (something of an empty formalist, something of a jerk himself), Antonioni’s own murder film, even his frosty world view.  (Blow Out very consciously and even very ostentatiously references, replicates and updates Antonioni's Blow Up [1966].  For the clearest expression of that cold vision, check out him, 1960, 1961, 1962.)

M.A., Vitti

It turns out the senator was with a floozy, and his handlers want to cover it up.  And this Jon Lithgow character is lurking around...  You can see the cruel contrivance a mile away, though the more cruel conclusion may come as a surprise, or even a shock.  It’s what’s wrong, and a bit of what’s redeemable about the picture.  This may be a trashy thriller, but they're making Art too.  And underneath all of that vaunting and vulgarity, there's also the feeling that comes as a consequence of craft.   

The sequence in which Travolta discovers that all of his recordings have been erased is pretty great, given that the excessive round and round of the camera actually enhances the meaning and feeling of the thing.  The murder of that first woman—one-upping Hitchcock’s concept of the wrong man—is a sure-handed move toward catharsis, not only cinematically impressive (stunning, actually), but also fearsome and pitiable.

De Palma's inspiration, for good and ill

On the other hand, that sequence is also just sadistic.  Such contradictions and inconsistencies continue.  Nancy Allen is not very effective.  (That would be the director's then-wife being objectified and endangered here.)  The Dennis Franz stuff is really unattractive, and worse, ineffective.  There’s a place for the Lower Depths, but this is plain unpleasantness, and that unconvincingly.  That's the back and forth of this movie—something admirable runs right into a more or less default jerkiness.  The climactic sting operation is very Harry Potter 5—forced and illogical and implausible, solely designed to push us into an inorganic, basically manipulated and manipulative climax.  But some climax!  Most movies, like most people, are only sort of successful.  But at the same time, or in this, they can still be sufficient, or more.  

The Bicentennial/1976 stuff mostly signifies as spectacle, and as an impediment for Jack trying to get to the endangered Sally.  It’s a pretty successful impediment, setting us up for some parallel montage that’s as simple and as effective as D.W. Griffith’s.  And maybe it leads us to a bit of a reasonable semi-insight into the relationship between blithe surfaces and the darkness that really does so often lie beneath.  It certainly leads us to a terrible conclusion—he didn’t make it, and neither did she.  Here the pessimistic/nihilistic 70s thriller returns to the metatextual, Rear Window concepts about voyeurism and sadism and the real life consequences thereof.  Sally’s dying screams were terrible.  And now they’re cut into that objectifying sex film, such that the objectification, the nakedness and humiliation fall away.  One life lost, another ruined, and the world spinning heedlessly on.

Breaking In 

US, 1989
Written by John Sayles
Directed by Bill Forsyth

That 80s score obscures the fact for a little while, but this is a timeless little piece.  It’s defiantly small-scaled, quiet, even modest.  But there are powerful accumulations here, little lasers of perception and compassion, of interesting incident combined with real wisdom.  The size of the coveralls.  The friendly guard dog, and the soft-sold, less friendly second dog.  The card game and the nickname.  Everyone is tempted toward spectacle and high style, but isn’t this what writing and direction are for?  Text, character, performance, and the effective communication of important ideas.  If this is the case, since this is the case, the attentive, sensitive viewer will find this to be sure-handed to the point of virtuosity.  

Forsythe and Sayles are really well matched here; their dispositions and methods are wonderfully complementary.  Burt Reynolds got the press, and he’s very good.  (A lot of typecast actors could really shock us if they were to find such felicitous support.)  But Casey Seimaszko is the big revelation here.  He could have been an eccentric, but he finally registers as complex, mysterious, precious.  Look at his joyful, grateful response to the granting of the prostitute’s favours.  Apropos, this is exemplary naturalism.  You can’t really show it to the sensitive, but it is also beyond moral reproach.  They are not advocating or celebrating, nor are they holding their noses.  They are simply detailing these seemingly marginal lives until we understand how unmarginal they are, how substantial, central, sufficient. 

All that makes the movie sound a bit too calculated or good for you.  It’s also a nice capable caper picture.  The various jobs are really nicely detailed and built up.  There’s a Dortmunder feel, but less so.  Also, it’s an effective comedy, in an easy-going way.  Special commendation to Chaykin and Tobolowsky.  The ending is kind of stunning, part Chekhov, part de Maupassant.    

Nightwatching

UK/Poland, 2007
Written and Directed by Peter Greenaway

Trot out the adjectives, visually speaking.  This is an utterly gorgeous, luminous film.  Not just painterly, but really successfully and multiply painterly.  Frames, perpendiculars, exquisite balance giving way to different exquisite balances.  Props and costumes seem so apt, so familiar and lived in/with.  As per usual with Greenaway, these visual clarities come into conflict with narrative and thematic complexity.  It’s a compelling combination, and a valid one. 

On the other hand, as per usual with Greenaway, it’s all kind of unpleasant.  Make that very unpleasant.  Some of that unpleasantness is earned; the film intelligently and perceptively considers power and its abuses, and abusive power behaves badly.  In this the film goes beyond the level of platitude and self-serving—the specificity, of the thing, both historically and methodologically, is positively Brechtian.  And the picture, this detailing of the ways of political oppression, isn’t likely to be very pretty.  

Laughton, in the Kordas' version, 1936

On the other hand, on the side of our protagonist (Freeman is revelatory), there’s a Rabelasian component, an earthiness/bawdiness that seems at once really well-researched/historically plausible, and really humanly accurate.  After all, the muck of medieval subsistence is still not so terribly far in the past.  Unfortunately, this is also, on the side of the apparent good guy, the source of most of the aforementioned unpleasantness.  Rembrandt’s efforts come more or less to naught, the which conclusion—remember, the writer/director is telling this particular story for a reason—contains the message of themovie.  It’s a practically Buñuelian vision of human perfidy.  Is Buñuel so set on the futility of it all?  It’s more than that, really.  Misanthropy is one thing.  Vicious misanthropy might go a bit too far. 

Mind you, the conclusion, in which that foreign gentlemen steps out of the frame, enumerates the many facets of Rembrandt’s failure, and then concludes that he was right, has considerable, undiluted power.  Near the end of Henry V Prince Hal isn’t sure who won.  Are we ever?  At the very end of Henry V, not to soon after the historical battle, that stirring victory all falls apart.  Maybe not here.  It’s kind of thrilling, after being so very dispiriting.