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 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 wrote 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

It's easy to see why the film helped tourism to Venice skyrocket. 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, historic building, or side street, he'll only show a small part of it before slowly revealing 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! 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 the real source of the film's horror, and though ut 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.  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. 

268. Clerks

Song - Money For Nothing (Dire Straits)

Movie: Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994)

Towards the end, Dante (Brian O'Halloran) laments that he finds it really hard to change what's bothering him as he is "not the type of person who'll disrupt things just to shit comfortably." In a movie that almost entirely consists of entertaingly long-winded asides and digressions, that's one of the few lines of dialogue that expresses a concrete idea simply. I would have enjoyed Clerks a lot even without it, but it does add some depth to it, highlighting that Kevin Smith has actually been building towards something, with more thought and subtlety than he's let on. O'Halloran deserves some credit here too. He is obviously not some great actor, and hasn't done anything of note outside of Smith's orbit, but he does get Dante's vibe of half-arsed nonchalance exactly right. He hates his job as an inconvenience store clerk, and hates himself for feeling that way, resulting in many failed attempts to find the exact midpoint between having a professional demeanor and a cool indifference. 

Smith was still working in the store he shot Clerks in, an origin story that has helped him become successful enough to never have to worry about shitting comfortably, or about disrupting things. I hadn't seen Clerks before, but I was a fan of Chasing Amy and Dogma, and even found Jersey Girl quite charming. It's quite unfortunate that Smith has since become way too invested in essentially making fan fiction out of his own material, especially because it risks clouding his earlier work. His eagerness to be seen as the ultimate fanboy is at odds with his work on Clerks, which never feels like it's made by someone who has no reference points beyond geekdom. Aside from one scene that discusses Star Wars (and even then, the primary subject is not the movie itself, but an absurd hypothetical dilemma involving independent contractors), there are barely any nods to popular culture here. Most of the jokes, dialogues and situations in the film are just (well thought out) comic exaggerations that would be recognisable to anyone who's ever been either a clerk (or has had any other shitty side job) or a somewhat lost 22-year old. And the opening scene (that has a brilliant punch line just when you think it has ended) made me laugh a lot. 

Now to bring up the elephant in the room, yes, Kevin Smith is obviously not the director with the greatest visual sense in the world. It is here sometimes fairly obvious that he has no idea what to do with a camera beyond turning it on and pointing in the general direction of someone speaking, preferably without moving around too much. There is a hockey scene that contains so many close ups of roller skates and hockey sticks it's unclear whether it was filmed like that to achieve an artsy look, or whether it was intended as a parody of artsy depictions of sports. It doesn't work as either and its visual incoherence is mostly just baffling.  Having said that, Smith has found lots of ways to make his visual limitations work in his favor. Apart from using cuts for comic effect really well, he also knows how to get the most out of static shots, probably most notably in the scene where Dante and his ex reunite, allowing us to see them work through their feelings in great detail. Another good example (that sets up the one scene of the film that's a bit tasteless and needlessly humiliating) comes when an older customer asks to use the staff bathroom, and once approved keeps reappearing into the frame with perfect timing and increasingly outreagous requests. 

For my money though, the best shot of the film features Randal (Jeff Anderson), Dante's neighbouring video store clerk (who has much less trouble walking around with an air of cool indifference) ridiculing a client who is asking for film advice. They are filmed from inside the video store; through its windows we see Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) hang around on the block as they usually do. When the disappointed client leaves, we see a confrontation between her and the two layabouts. As tbe camera remaisn still inside the store, we see it all happening from behind and with the sound muffed. It's the best example of how the corner on which our two clerks work is shown from many different perspectives and viewpoints, creating a nice sense of the overall atmosphere of the place, turning the movie into a snapshot of street life.  

267. 25th Hour

Song - Overcome (Live)

Movie: 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

"This life came so close to never happening..." Few contemporaries, in any field, have done as much to highlight America's racial and social injustices as Spike Lee, but what makes him such a great filmmaker is his understanding that societal structures can't entirely account for human folly. Do the Right Thing! leaves no doubt about how race and class shape its Brooklyn neighborhood and create power hierarchies and tension, but, without ever losing that context, Lee depicsts Raheem's death and the ensuing destruction of Sal's pizzeria as the result of a series of choices made by humans acting out of love, anger, desire, chagrin, playfulness, irrationality, and a sense of community. Lee has criticised audiences for failing to understand why Mookie threw the trash can into Sal's pizzeria, and even if you set aside political considerations, it's easy to see why such an audience response might irk Lee. Cause he does the work, and never forgets to consider Sal's feelings about that faithful night. It all came so close to not happening, and you can sense why Sal may feel that it never should have happened. 

Too many contemporary filmmakers wanting to dip their toes in social criticism fail to give their individual characters the humanity Spike Lee provides, resulting in films that are angry about the system without showing how that system actually affects real recognisable people, making their characters merely artificial symbols of a struggle.  It wouldn't hurt either to put in an effort to see political/social adversaries as actual people with feelings, ideas and hopes worth exploring, which finally brings us to 25th Hour, a film that makes you care deeply about the inner lives and personal struggles of two douchebags (you can easily imagine Barry Pepper's character play a racist cop in another Spike Lee movie) and a cowardly privileged professor who would love to be able to fall in love with his student, without feeling guilt over it. 

The main douchebag is Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), a semi-professional crack dealer who got caught and is now spending his last 24 hours as a free man with his two best childhood friends, Wall Street trader Frank (Barry Pepper) and high school professor Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his dad (Brian Cox) and his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson).  Each of these people approach the day with a huge lump in their troath that they can't quite express, partly because it's hard to put into words such a monumental change that will forever alter their lives, partly becuase they all have their own individual hangups. Luckily, there is Terence Blanchard, whose score plays as if its composed by that lump in their throats, expressing their confused sadness and apprehension of the incomprehensible magnitude of the coming void in ther lives. The score adds an almost mythical dimension to the film, that's even further progressed by Lee setting it in the direct aftermath of 9/11 with Pepper's apartment even looking directly at the site where the Twin Towers used to be. 

If I would be forced to choose, I'd say that this is my favorite original film music, but 25th Hour also contains two scenes of similar greatness The first one comes early when after seeing 'Fuck You' scribbled on a bathroom mirror, Monty responds by disparaging just about every single meaningful ethnic and social group in New York, with each of them appearing in a montage that works as a love letter to the diversity and resilience of the city following the terrorist attacks. An additional nice Spike Lee touch is that he adds a small dash of surrealism to the scene by having Norton's reflection come off as much angrier than the actual Monty standing in more quiet resignation in front of the mirror, knowing that he can't really blame 'the Bensonhurst Italians with their pomaded hair" or the "uptown brothers who don't pass the ball, never play defense and take five steps on every lay-up" for all his troubles. Some of these people we'll see again in the film's ending scene, when his dad drives him to prison and tempts him with an alternate life. He could take the wrong turn, drive out of New York, all the way into the west where in some faraway desert town Monty could build a new life. It's a scene of great melodramatic magnificence that (admittedly featuring some absolutely godawful make-up work) culminates with the words that open this piece, so effective because they are equally devastating in the context of both the alternate reality imagined for Monty and his actual reality. They serve also as a wonderfull expresion of the feelings of anger, love and disappointment Cox has towards his son. And again the scene works as a love letter, in this case to the vastness and the possibility of America, making it only more tragic that out of all the choices Monty's had, he decided to be a mediocre crack dealer barely ever traversing beyond the familiarity of his neighborhood. 

It's notable though that it's mostly the others who dwell on what could have been. Norton regrets getting caught, and is pissed off about it, but he doesn't exactly regret his life choices. Though outwardly he presents himself as wanting to make amends, his final night of freedom is mostly about living the kind of life he did when all went well. He enjoys being able to get a private room with his friends and lover in a big nightclub where he can say cleverly sounding stupid things like "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends", and succesfully pretend that he understands the ethical misgivings of his friend who's in love with a student, while secretly judging him for being a weakling who can't act. What makes Lee great is that he is never (explicitly) judgemental about all this. He understands the allure of this life, and he sympathises with Monty's regret that he has to abandon it. The film looks at the situation from the closured view of Monty and his friends, and finds itself on their same confused emotional wavelength. Lee makes sure to film even the most meaningless, dumb or nonsenical act in a way that feels almost epical and eternal. In the process, the film also becomes a great dramatic depiction of the kind of friendship that was comically presented in The Big Lebowski, with Hofman's Jacob in the role of Donny.

266. Fatal Attraction

Song: Billie Jean (Michael Jackson)

Movie: Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987)

Well, that explains Jacob's Ladder! I saw that a long time ago and was surprised by how relentlessly terryfing it was. I felt it was out of character for Adrian Lyne, who seemed to mostly specialise in what you could call elevated sexploitation, not that there is anything wrong with that - I greatly enjoyed Unfaithful and 9 1/2 Weeks! Turns out Fatal Attraction is much more interested in being a thriller, in the most literal sense of the word, and one that would make a great case study in film classes on the use of negative and external spaces. At a certain point you get the sense that there is danger lurking behind every piece of furniture and every corner of the screen. You just admire how much Lyne enjoys playing around with the audience, making ordinary objects and spaces seem ominous by pointing the camera just a fraction too long at them. Often times nothing actually happens, but that misdirection only makes the film more effectivly stressful. You never know what's coming. 

I may have mentioned before here that I am not the biggest fan of Glenn Close, which doesn't even have that much to do with her acting choices. I think her natural disposition just makes every single character she plays more dour and pitiful by default. That makes her a rather perfect fit for this role, in which she plays a steely businesswoman who is barely able to hold together her professional demeanor in public. Her playful flirty confidence is a front for a lonely woman with fear of abandonment who is unable to make meaningful connections to people. It's quite fitting that while she works for the kind of Manhattan corporation that was the symbol of victory in the 1980's, she lives in an apartment in a questionable meat district. Lyne shoots this place as if he wants to reference every single experssionistic horror film he's seen, and fills it with burning fires, in case you don't get the metaphor that it is hell. There is nothing wrong with good pulp, and Fatal Atraction is really good pulp. 

Apparently many of the actors were disappointed by the decision to change the ending of the film. In the original ending Glenn Close, who spends most of the film stalking Michael Douglas and his family after a one-night stand, claiming she is carrying his child, would have commited suicide staged in such a way to succesfully frame Douglas as the killer. That ending was deemed too bleak by test audiences, so it was reshot, leading to a deliciously over the top climax that kills Glenn Close. Goes to show that sometimes the commercial choice is also the correct artistic one. Because it would be a betrayal of Close' performance to have her 'win'. The whole point of her character is that all her actions are essentially a powerless cry for meaningfullness, and a futile attempt to be the kind of woman she presents hersefl to be, and her peers expect her to be. From that perspective, the current ending is also far bleaker than the original one.