273. Days of Heaven

Song - Fields of Gold (Sting)

Movie: Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

Never has farm equipment been depicted so lovingly. Malick lingers on key mechanical parts and drops Ennio Morricone's score just to listen to the sound of wheat harvesting machines doing their work. They create perfectly cultivated wheat fields, stretching as far as the eye can see. In gorgeuos shots we see trains crossing these landscapes; they transport wanderers from all over the US looking for work, housing and a sense of community. They find it during harvest season in the Texas Panhandle where they bale, frolick, dance, pray and eat and drink in unison, before moving on to some other corner of the country. All of it looks so perfectly beautiful that you can easily imagine seeing your time here as the days of heaven. But when perfection is in one's grasps, the yearning to obtain it intensifies. Some need money, some need love, but all will go far to get it. 

 

Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) need money. They have spent all their lives going places and would like now to settle down somewhere and to own and be something. The (unnamed) farmer (Sam Shepard) who owns the wheat fields is rich, but also terminally ill and seemingly not someone for whom social interactions come naturally. When he falls for Abby, believing that she is Bill's sister, the 'siblings' decide to continue their ruse, hoping they will inherit the farm once its owner dies. As he keeps not dying, and is also kind and handsome, that leads to a sitation that is ripe for tragically hopeless romanticism, but for a long while it's left entirely up to Malick's directorial flourishes to conjure that. 

The actors, in particular Adams - I don't remember seeing her before, but she is spectacular - approach the situation with blunt realism. Their close-ups are fascinating, communicating both their emotional turmoil, but also their acceptance that having made up their bed, they gotta lie in it. I like too that among his many conflicted feelings, Gere at times also projects a sense of contenment that feels only to some extent self-deceptive, accepting that the arrangement he made has its flaws, but also has actually led to him living an easy life in luxury. At the same time, the farmer may not be the most worldly figure, but he is not entirely naive either. Shepard makes clear that he is making an active choice to believe that there is nothing shady going on between Gere and Adams. The question is not when he will 'find out', but when he will stop accepting it. This clear-eyed approach is only further emphasised by the performance of Linda Manz, who plays Bill's (actual) younger sister and also narrates the film with a directness that doesn't allow any delusions. As a result this becomes a story about four essentially decent, rational-minded, highly specific people who have to find ways to constantly (re)negotiate their thoughts about an absurdly impossible reality of their own making.  

It's cool to see that Malick's big bravura sequence here was obviously the main inspiration for the stunning hellfire in Killers of The Flower Moon. It's not surprising that Scorsese would have had Days of Heaven on his mind when making a movie about an arranged marriage in which a party awaits the promised death of their partner, while accidentally (maybe) falling in love with them. The film becomes even more interesting and perverted though when you consider who is in the position of Gere, Adams and Shepard, and how its hellish imagery and atmosphere (its other main reference point is Rosemary's Baby) contrasts Days of Heaven. 

A film that fares less in my mind after seeing Days of Heaven is Malick's own The Tree of Life. I liked that at the time, with some major reservations. The idea that our surroindings shape our feelings and actions is interesting and wonderfully depicted in Days of Heaven. The Tree of Life goes many steps further into some sort of unappealing mystic ecospiritualism that argues that nature, history and the built environment have an inescapable soul that defines our identities. As a result Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are essentially playing Fatherhood and Motherhood, rather than actual individual people. I should perhaps revisit it. If you can make Days of Heaven, you deserve the benefit of the doubt for the rest of your life. 

272. Fruit of Paradise

Song - In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (Iron Butterfly)

Movie: Fruit of Paradise - Ovoce stromu rajskych jime (Vera Chytilova, 1970)

Vera Chytilova plays it fair, immediately letting you know what you are in for with an almost 10-minute prologue about the Fall of The Garden of Eden, It tells the familiar story, but entirely with abstract close-ups of barely recognisable plants and flowers, and faded out desaturated images of a naked man and woman moving around. The quick hard cuts make it even harder to distinguish what's actually on screen, while the score consists of agressively progressive rock melodies, chirping birds, quaking frogs, choir singing and banging drums. When the snake appears that combination of incongruent sounds somehow gets unified into a single noise that seems to be coming out of a radio cassette that is being played backwards while breaking down. When the movie proper finally starts, you think you can settle down, but soon you realise that you will pine for the comprehensibilty of that opening montage. 

The story tells of a woman named Eva who is supposedly married to Josef with whom she lives in what could either be a spa, a mental institution or a hippie commune. Soon Eva gets obsessed by the devlishly mysterious Robert, hoping that he will either love or kill her, with the possibility that killing her may in fact be the greatest expression of his love for her. All of this mostly serves to give Chytilova the opportunity to be genuinely experimental, which demands a lot of her actors, in particular of Jitka Novakova. She plays Eva, and is asked to perform a lot of recognisably human activities in a way that no other human has ever done them. Meanwhile, Chytolova's aesthetic choices serve mostly to find out how connecting certain images to certain sounds would feel, and even scenes that seem to build to some sort of idea are abruptly cut off before you are allowed to get the sense that there is a larger point to them. You can't exactly say that it doesn't work - every scene gets at something that you have never experienced in a film, and never even expected to.

Every scene also at some point starts feeling like a complete waste of time, and I can't say that I plan to revisit this film anytime soon. But (and it is a big but) Fruit of Paradise let to the Czechoslovak government banning Chytiolva from filmmaking, which brings me to Never Look Away, a German film that got great reviews and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2019. In my view it is one of the most misguided and hypocritical movies of recent times. It's not a straight biography, but the life story it depicts closely resembles that of the painter Gerhard Richter, who struggled with his art first in Nazi Germany and then in Communist East Germany. In the opening scene, the film shows the famous Nazi exhibition of degenerate art, with a Nazi guide criticizing Malevich. Once the war is over it rails against the social realist art of the DDR, exemplified by an art professor scolding Picasso. These are the right targets for scorn, but the ethos and artistic sensibility of the film is ultimately much closer to Nazi-approved art and social realism than to Malevich and Picasso. Never Look Away is a state-funded epic prestige picture that's completely beholden to confirming its state's most mainstream ideas about politics, art, and the relationship between the two, doing this through a story, filled with 'teachable moments' at right places that make sure that the audience will always get the exact message it seeks to convey. Whatever else you may think of Fruit of Paradise, it is purposefully alienating and an honest expression of its contempt of, and rebellion against, social realism. 

271. Summertime

Song - I Want To Know What Love Is (Foreigner)

Movie: Summertime (David Lean, 1955)

There is the famous joke about the man who prays every night to God to let him win the lottery only for God to eventually tell him to buy a lottery ticket. We don't know much about the man, but the joke suggests that he may well be the "son and heir of a a shyness that is criminally vulgar." That's definitely the case for Jane Hudson (Katharine Hepburn), who in Summertime is told: "You are like a hungry child who is given ravioli to eat. 'No', you say, 'I want beefsteak.' My dear girl, you are hungry. Eat the ravioli!". What Jane and the unidentified lottery guy have in common is that their efforts are merely performative and won't have any effect on what they ostensibly seek to achieve. Jane will tell everyone she listens that she's come all the way from Akron, Ohio to Venice to look for the miracle that's been missing in her life, only to run away scared shitless once the miracle (as you may have guessed, the ravioli is indeed a metaphor) stands in front of her. 

In the piece on Shoot the Piano Player, I mentioned that the world conspiring to give you what you want, without you needing to do anything about it, is a shy person's wish fulfilmment fantasy. But there is indeed a more vulgar (as an aside, I Want To Know What Love Is being so high in Radio 2's Top 2000, while How Soon Is Now, or anything else by The Smiths, is entirely missing, is a discussion for another time) shyness that is less about the fear of expressing what you want, than about the fear of actually getting what you want, or think are supposed to want. As Hepburn shows here, it leads to a lot of running in place, whose main function is to create the illusion of activity so you can be able to tell yourself (and the people around you) that you are attempting to change things, while otherwise making sure that everything stays exactly the same. Summertime is ruthless in dissecting Jane's actions, while presenting itself as a gently pleasant romantic comedy-drama/Venice travelogue. It's a masterpiece

The film apparently helped tourism to Venice skyrocket, which makes sense as it presents the city in the most beautiful way possible, in a way that gives viewers the impression that they are slowly discovering its greatness. When Lean gets to a piazza, building, or side street, he often takes a bit of time, to reveal the true breadth of its beauty. Most of the time this happens through some quite elegant camera moves, but especially striking is the opening scene, which lets Venice showcase itself gradually through the window of a train moving towards it. As a result, Venice feels even more magical than Jane ever thought it would be, with Piazza San Marco as an especially romantic highlight. It turns out that you can actually just sit there and wait for a potential love interest to make eye contact and fall for you. In a way the film works as the inverse of the most famous scene in 500 Days of Summer. Yeah, it can be sad when reality turns out worse than your expectations, but there is far more potential for tragic blundering when reality actually exceeds your expectations. No better example of that than the ending of this film.   

270. Bride of Frankenstein

Song - I Was Made For Lovin' You (Kiss)

Movie: Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)

Oh no, Man has now control of the processes of nature! This notion is what's meant to frighten audiences here, much more than anything the monster (or his supposed Bride) does. The monster, played by Boris Karloff (already legendary enough to only be credited as 'Karloff') looks beastly and unnatural, but shouldn't cause any nightmares. And though he kills a significant number of people, none of the murders are presented in a grisly or suspenseful way. But beware of discussions about what happens when we create life out of death. Those are accompanied by dark shadows, canted angles and conspirational frowns. The question of whether humans are superceding God is not be taken lightlty, and though the film doesn't pretend there is potential for real-life Frankensteins to do harm, it is keenly aware of how amazing many recent scientific and technological developments are, and how unthinkable they were not that long ago. It's no coincidence that the mysterious scientists possess what they call an 'electronic device' that allows you to call up and speak with people in a faraway place, or that the creation sequence essentially consists of a series of quick cuts to electrical switchboards in various shapes and forms, bulbs lighting up. and electrical currents going in random directions, all in the service of the scientists' aim to use the energy of a thunderstorm for their own nefarious means.

The most spectactular scene in the film becomes even more interesting in the context of these thematic concerns. When Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) tells Frankenstein (Colin Clive) of his efforts to replicate his work, he brings out a set of glass jars, in which he has cultivated miniscule human beings, including a king, a queen, a bishop and a mermaid, all of them portrayed by real normal-sized people (one of them being Josephine McKim, an Olympic swimmer who won gold in 1928). Again, at no point does the film suggest that in the future we may have lab-grown human beings, but wbat it highlights about the present is enough to give you some uncomfortable goosebumps; we, humans, are now capable of manipulating reality to such an extent that we can show you minauture human beings that look just as realistic as Clive and Thesiger, and seamlessly embody the same space as them. It's worth reminding how astonishing that is/was, especially when you consider that some 1935 audiences could remember a time when it was inconceivable that they'd ever sit in a cinema watching man-made moving images. 

While the glass jar scene is merely the most obvious example of human manipulation of reality, the whole film is a testament to that. Every single shadow, weather phenomenon, tree or barren landscaape is artificially developed in a studio to create the desired effect, not to mention that it explicitly sets itself up in a prologue as a tale concocted by Mary Shelley to amuse/frighten her husband Percy and Lord Byron.  So, you may now ask, if the film itself is a manifestation of the horrors it evokes, does it give comfort to audiences in any other way? The answer is no. For all our progress, we still can't manipulate human feelings. And so Bride of Frankenstein tells an incredibly bleak story of a monster who knows he is a monster, wants to become good, or at least accepted by society, and fails, partly because despite his best efforts (he even learns a basic form of language!), he still can't control his murderous urges, and even if he were able to, there is nothing he can do to not be rejected by everyone who sees him, including his supposed Bride. The entire film is essentially about the effort to create a mate (in the process, the scientists commit many immoral acts, often presented with a macabre sense of humor) for the monster, only for the Bride to be repulsed by him at first sight. 

269. Shoot the Piano Player

Song - Laat Me/Vivre (Alderliefste, Ramses Shaffy & Liesbeth List)

Movie: Shoot the Piano Player - Tirez sur le pianiste  (Francois Truffaut, 1960)

You don't need to read anything about the making of Shoot the Piano Player to sense that it's made on the fly. Similarly to films like Chungking Express and Beat the Devil, it is almost entirely driven by talent and instinct, consistently making bold aesthetic and narrative choices that feel spontaneous and sometimes contradictory, yet always make sense. Truffaut's first priority in each and every scene is to make the interesting or surprising choice, fully confident that he can make it work within the greater context. It leads to an exhiliratingly fun film that also manages to connect wholly separate periods and styles of filmmaking. If that isn't enough, it also works as a great character study.  

In a flashback we learn that the unassuming Charlie Koller (Charles Aznavour), who plays piano in a local bar and mostly keeps to himself, is actually Edouard Saroyan, a potentially major talent who used to play in serious concert halls for serious audiences before his career was cut short by tragedy. The built-up to that tragedy plays like a melodrama from the early days of film, filled with exaggerated acts of romanticism and despair, expressed through outsized emotions and poetic, gravely serious dialogue. You wouldn't expect lines like "When you are lost in the night, you can't stop tbe shadows from closing in" to appear in a playfully ironic 90's crime-comedy. And yet, that's what Shoot the Piano Player often evokes when it returns to the present day. Here we find Charlie and his new girl Lena (Marie Dubois) on the run from a few gangsters seeking to find Charlie's brother Chico, a guy who should know by now that he is too aloof to get involved in complicated criminal plots. This time though his adversaries aren't much more sophisticated. Their schemes keep failling apart when they get too invested in their meaningless banter to pay attention to what's going on around them.

The lighthearted comic touch in the 'present day' should be at odds with the theatrically tragic mood of Edouard's story, but Truffaut's writing and Charles Aznavour's performance help link the two. Whether he is Edouard or Charlie, Aznavour suffers from shyness, which shapes at all times his relationship witb the world around him. Shoot the Piano Player contains a close-up of Edouard's finger ringing the bell of his future impressario. It's a shot thas has very often been copied, and used to illustrate the French New Wave. I didn't know it comes from here, but it is indeed the key shot of the film. As it comes during the most freewheeling, experimental sequence, it is easy to miss that Edouard never actually rings the bell. The door only opens because the imoressario's previous client - a woman violinist who we then follow all the way out of the building as we hear Edouard's piano music on the soundtrack - has opened it to leave. The world conspiring to give you what you want, without you needing to do anything about it actively is a wish fulfillment fantasy for a shy person, but is not a recipe for long-lasting happiness.