150. Rosemary's Baby

Song - Mama (Genesis)

Movie: Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

- "You were on a horsey! Yeah, you are.. uhm?"

- "I am the Devil, and I am here to do the Devil's business."

- "Nah, it was dumber than that."

A reminder to not sell out your wife and kid in a Faustian bargain that will marginally improve your middling career. And if you really insist on doing it, check first if Faust isn't a low-rent grifter. What makes Rosemary's Baby so good is that both interpretations are equally plausible. Most of the dread comes from Polanski's filmmaking choices, which make ordinary objects, feelings and events feel alien and otherworldly, and Mia Farrow's great performance as a woman who slowly uncovers a conspiracy against her and her baby, but doesn't quite understand the why and the how behind it, causing her ever greater anxiety. In the previous sentence, I originally wrote 'causing her to lose her mind', but she does not. She correctly deduces what is going on and responds rationally to it. But the film works so well in part because it hides its rationality in plain sight. The conspiracy against Rosemary may well be the work of Satan, but nothing that actually happens in the film demands a supernatural explanation. 

For obvious reasons, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was on the back of my mind while watching Rosemary's Baby. Tarantino's film is heavily committed to blowing up every myth, icon and (self-)delusion it encounters, including all the grand narratives around Charles Manson and his followers. That ultimately leads to the exchange quoted on top of this post, one of my favorite bits of dialogue in any Tarantino film. It reduces the Manson cult to a bunch of harebrained shitheads, in the thrall of a fast talking carnival barker and the film never lets them become anything more than that. There are no great ideas behind their murders, nor are they some uniquely evil people working in the service of some uniquely evil causes whose grand mysteries need to be uncovered. They are just a bunch of dumbass Tarantino characters. This approach doesn't trivialise them or their misdeeds, but illuminates how easy it is to commit meaningless mindless violence and how hard it is to escape from it if you find yourself in the middle of it. 

I don't know how much Tarantino thought about Rosemary's Baby when making the film, but even if the Castevets are 'actual' conduits of Satan, their conspiracy against Rosemary would not have been possible without the help of her husband Guy (John Cassavetes), a harebrained shithead in the thrall of a fast talking carnival barker. His first line in the movie is a lie, telling the landlord that he is a doctor instead of an actor. When Rosemary jokingly calls him out, he lies again, telling that he is in 'Hamlet', when in fact he is mostly in Yamaha commercials. And upon returning from their first visit to the Castevets, Rosemary and Guy respond to them as most young just-married couples would after being invited to a dinner by their long-retired upstairs neighbours, gently laughing among themselves at how outmoded they are, while concluding that these are nice people who will obviously not become their friends. Guy knows this (Rosemary makes most of the assessments, he mostly agrees with her), but man, that Roman Castevet told such fascinating and interesting stories about his life, he must go back to him to hear more of that. By then, the film has shown us that Roman tells rather boringly about his life, giving the feeling that he is a bit of a fabulist who can't really get into much detail. But that is not needed to convince Guy that he was a Successful Man. And you can't expect Guy to not listen to a Successful Man, can you? 

I also don't know how much the Coens have thought about Rosemary's Baby during their career. They are far more obviously influenced by Polanski than Tarantino, especially in their approach to dreams and surrealism. But Guy Woodhouse also made me think of their trademark characters like William H. Macy in Fargo and Dan Hedaya in Blood Simple. He is a schmuck who is much dumber than he thinks he is, and loses control over a plot he is way over his head in. His panicked desperation when Rosemary lets him know she wants to change doctors is hilariously pathetic. Moreover, he is never presented with any proof that his scheme actually works. Polanski never shows any evidence that the 'magicians' are actually capable of magic or that Guy's career has meaningfully advanced. There are many reasons why your competitor can go suddenly blind. You believe it's the work of Satanists who want to help you, because you want to believe it. And yet despite his irrationality and stupidity - at every point in the film Rosemary proves to be far more intelligent than her husband - the conspiracy against his wife still succeeds. No need for Satan to find that frightening. 

149. Small Change

Song - Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

Movie: Small Change - L'argent de poche (Francois Truffaut, 1976)

I was not a fan of The White Ribbon, its endless portents of doom, and its austere portrayal of a rotten village with rotten children who will grow op to be nazi's. I don't like hopelessly bleak films, especially not when they present their bleak hopelessness as dogma that would be accepted by the rest of us if we just didn't look away. But, damn, oftentimes I found this film, whose approach is basically the polar opposite, almost equally offputting. This is one of the most aggressively positive films I've seen and as shamelessly patriotic as any gun-toting, flag-waving American Rambo wannabe. 

Small Change is not without its pleasures. It is an almost plotless film meanderingly looking at the lives of pre-teens, and their families and teachers in the town of Thiers. Most of them live around each other, or even in the same apartment block, and pretty much all characters in the film know each other. The best parts of the film occur when they meet at various public spaces throughout the city (the school yard, the cinema, the bars on the streets), allowing us to observe how this community interacts with each other. We see who talks to who, how people behave around friends, acquaintances and people they know in passing just because their kids go to the same school, how small talk helps form and sustain friendships, and how the talk of the town becomes the talk of the town. Truffaut does film this beautifully, and it is a happy coincidence that I saw The Rules of the Game shortly before seeing this film. Truffaut was a great admirer of Jean Renoir, and you can really see (I think) the influence of 'La Colliniere" in the way he establishes the relationships and connections between the various townspeople, and in the way he follows and hops around various characters as they make their way across town. 

Unlike Renoir, Truffaut absolutely loves his characters. Nothing wrong with that, but you often get the feeling that the film insists that we not only have to love these characters equally, but also that we have to love them in the same way that Truffaut does. This is a film in which good things happen to good people and oy vey if you even think that something bad could possibly happen to them, or if you believe that some discord could maybe improve the film. Every potential conflict is resolved as painlessly and swiftly as possible, nobody is really a bad student, nobody gets ever truly uncomfortable (or isn't shown to be when the occasion arrives), annoyed or angry, everybody is adjusted to the norms and values of the community and is happy to live in this quaint little town where everybody knows your name. 

Well, there is one exception: little Julien Leclou, who lives on the outskirts of town in a shanty with his mother and grandmother and who always arrives in school with bruises on his face. He sleeps in class, steals from the other kids and is generally uninterested in socialising with the other kids and in becoming part of the town community. At the end of the film it is (not so shockingly) revealed that he has been beaten by his guardians and is transferred into another family. Julien's portrayal, in combination with the unfailingly positive attitude of the rest of the film, is really the main reason I was rather irked by Small Change. It makes it not merely a film about good things happening to good people, but a film about good things happening to good people, because they live in a good society and as good people follow the good rules of that society. People who fall outside of that society, who don't have access to it, do not get to live a good life. The film presents it as if every social space and institution in the town is ideally designed for people to to lead fulfilled lives. If you live in this town and are not happy it is your fault. After all, how can you possibly be unhappy in Thiers, France, where even a toddler falling from the third floor can survive without a scratch? At least the American Rambo wannabes are exciting. 

148. Love Is Strange

Song - Ik Heb Je Lief (Paul de Leeuw)

Movie: Love Is Strange (Ira Sachs, 2014)

Ira Sachs may well be a poor man's Spike Lee. That is not in any way intended as an insult - no shame in being a somewhat worse filmmaker than Spike Lee, while sharing similar feelings and ideas about life, films and New York. The comparison is also not intended to be a definite statement. I have only seen two films by Sachs - this one and Little Men. My favorite thing about both is that they use their basic setups as a jumping board for a broader look at city life, digressing from the main plot to introduce characters and places we come to care about despite seeing them sometimes only for a single scene. The dude moving to Mexico-City here, for example, is given a deeper inner life and more specificity and wit than some films give to their main characters. This approach helps create a wonderfully vibrant picture of New York as a community where all kinds of various characters try to live good, decent and interesting lives and where the problems, challenges and desires of each of these characters are not independent from each other. They are all shaped by the political, social and economic realities of the city. 

Spike Lee's films identify the racist roots of many of these realities and love black Americans more than your average Hollywood production. Predictably, Spike Lee has been accused of reverse racism for these reasons. Those accusations are disingenuous for many reasons, including the fact that Spike Lee also presents white people with more empathy and love than your average Hollywood production. Similarly, Ira Sachs, (who is a middle-aged gay man), presents straight teens, with more understanding and care than most contemporary American directors. He understands that teens' discovery that they are hormonal beings and that love, sex and friendship are distinctly different things that produce distinctly different feelings can be incredibly confusing. Especially because they do not last forever. Friendships end, sometimes for dumb reasons that you can't quite understand. 

Sachs is not as good at portraying marital strife and does not really use Marisa Tomei to her full potential here. He does luckily use John Lithgow and Alfred Molina to their full potential. I did not know that Lithgow had received an Oscar nomination for playing a trans woman in The World According to Garp, but I've always known him as an actor who emphasises his softness and his vulnerability. I was a fan of 3rd Rock From The Sun, and much of what made that show work was Lithgow's performance as a man who feels vulnerable and uncomfortable in his body, but tries to hide it by pretending he is a confident pater familias. This may be a somewhat offensive attempt to explain why I am not surprised to see that he feels so at ease playing a gay man. In any case, Lithgow and Molina really manage to convey their love for each other and their long complicated history. Which makes the film's ending only more frustrating. It feels cheaply manipulative and inelegant to kill off Lithgow, despite the fact that his death had been set up. 

147. And God Created Woman

Song - She (Charles Aznavour)

Movie: And God Created Woman - Et Dieu... créa la femme (Roger Vadim, 1956)

The French will give you two teen idols, and two worldviews, for the price of one. Not only is Brigitte Bardot here sexier than Marilyn Monroe, she is also a rebel without a cause. That allows the film to be both tantalizingly provocative in the way it shoots Bardot, and adopt an old-fashioned moralising attitude towards her independent rebelliousness. It shows off her body and non-conformism, while tut-tutting her for showing off her body and non-conformism. Happily it is much more committed to the former than to the latter, making it an enjoyably cheesy film that is also a good example of how cultural movements take their time to fully develop. Some of the elements which would a few years later come to define the French New Wave are already visible here, especially in the final scene.    

That final scene is also the best in the film. Bardot's character Juliete Hardy has by then spent most of the film married to Michel Tardieu (Jean-Louis Trintignant, not bad, but you wouldn't think this is one of the great French actors), while being actually in love with his brother Antoine (who also loves her, but sees himself as a responsible adult who can't be with such a debauchee). Meanwhile the third brother also desires her, and so does the businessman investing in the shipyard of the three brothers and their mother (who thinks Juliete is "a slut" who will lead Michel astray, which of course she does). You can see how one could lose one's mind in such a situation, which is what Juliete does in the basement of a notorious bar where a band of immigrants is practicing their music. Juliet starts dancing, seemingly in a trance, with the camera circling around her, occasionally closing in on her anguished face, arms and legs while the basement slowly fills with all the men in her life looking at her in wonder. As this is happening, she keeps dancing and the camera keeps following her until a gun is fired. Nobody dies, but nothing is resolved either and the film ends on an ambiguous note.

It was interesting to see this film so shortly after writing about Atlantic City. Both are films by French directors, set in a seaside town on the cusp of a generational transformation thanks to investments in casinos and hotels. And both are about young women seeking to embrace that transformation, while being held back by people who would like to keep those changes at bay for as long as possible. While this is for the most part a lighthearted comedy and Atlantic City a serious, sometimes bleak, character-driven drama, the latter film ultimately ends on a more hopeful note. Yet, in reality And God Created Woman had a much bigger impact on its city's transformation, helping turn St. Tropez into a touristic hotspot, thereby contributing to the rise of mass tourism (which I would argue is one of the most important developments of the 20th Century, deeply connected to labor rights and wealth distribution). Beyond Brigitte Bardot, some of the most interesting sights in this film are the empty untouched beaches, a nice reminder that these are nothing more then sandy areas along a body of water before being social spaces.