Pornosophy: Loving Sex?

Is loving sex all that it’s cracked up to be? Or is it the province of bad movies like Love Story (1970) or another sixties classic A Man and a Woman (1966). One of the nice things about a film like Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013) is that it shies away from loving sex. One of the film’s great scenes is an enormous argument that breaks out in an elegant hotel room which a couple has been treated to as a gift. Instead of passionate lovemaking the time away from the kids turns into a massive back and forth in which mutual recriminations almost end in a breakup. Another classic depiction of non-loving sex occurs in Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) when Claudia (Monica Vitti) discovers Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) in the arms of the American whore Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Polioli). It’s a scene of almost orgasmic disenchantment in which everything that is wrong with the universe is concentrated in one spectacularly revolting embrace. David Lean’s version of Noel Cowards’s Brief Encounter had love, but the encounter was too brief to turn into sex. And then there is the case of the second to the last film John Holmes ever made, The Rise of the Roman Empress (1987). At this point in his career, Holmes already knew he was HIV positive yet he proceeded to have unprotected sex with the Italian porn star and politician La Cicciolina. If there were an award given for malevolently intentioned unloving sex or “loving porking," this film could very well get it. These days loving sex is literally the talk of the town. It’s the only way for students to indulge their promiscuous desires in California under the new “Affirmative Consent” statute which is one of the biggest challenges to the pleasures of the hate fuck. Last Tango in Paris (1972) contained some sex scenes which epitomized the misery of the human condition and are the perfect antidote to the virus of sentimentalism which is on the verge of infecting both cinema and life. The monologue of the nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), in Bergman’s Persona (1966) is also an effective remedy for romantic daydreams, along with the old locker room adage, “tell ‘em you love ‘em and you lay ‘em."

Rachmaninoff, Pachelbel, Delerue

                                                                                        Johann Pachelbel

Pachelbel’s Canon in D was the sound track for Ordinary People and then there was The Last Metro, a movie that came out the same year and featured a score by Georges Delerue that was equally haunting, though neither of these movies was to outdo David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which featured the mother of all scores which pulled heartstrings, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 in C Minor. Ordinary People was about the breakup of a marriage after the death of a child and despite the themes of loss that the music conveys within the context of the movie, the composition is clearly baroque and in fact recalls Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The Last Metro was set during the occupation of France and deals with survival. Brief Encounter, which premiered 35 years earlier, in the final days of the war, was about a romance predicated on impossibility. Ordinary People and Brief Encounter are about despair and the music, though not Wagnerian, partakes of the Liebestod, that characterizes Tristan and Isolde. The Last Metro conveys a similar yearning, yet it soars resplendently reflecting romantic transcendence rather than agony. Ordinary People can probably be credited with a revival of interest in Pachelbel. And undoubtedly Rachmaninoff  and George Delerue found new audiences because of the soundtracks for Brief Encounter and The Last Metro. But was it pure coincidence or was there something in the zeitgeist that produced two of the most memorable film scores in the same year of film history?

Washington Journal II: Millais’ Ophelia

Ophelia by John Everet Millais (1851-2)

Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, op. 18 is indubitably moving. But is it great art? The strains of it accompany the ill-fated lovers in David Lean’s l945 film adaptation of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter, a powerfully moving work of emotion in its own right. The Pre-Raphaelite show at the National Gallery, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design 1848-1900 begs the same question. One of the most famous works of Pre-Raphaelite art, the painting of the drowning Ophelia by John Everet Millais, is a centerpiece of the exhibit. As you walk into the gallery in which it’s displayed, it hits you right between the eyes. You are struck by the apparition of sepulchered beauty. Millais in fact has gone where Shakespeare feared to tread, showing what in Shakespeare was only spoken by Queen Gertrude (Act IV, Scene VII) and ambiguously at that. Did Ophelia kill herself or was the drowning accidental? It’s a question Shakespeare scholars have troubled over  for centuries and which Millais doesn’t answer in the painting. But what is the difference between romanticism and estheticization? The Pre-Raphaelite movement which came into existence during the height of the Industrial Revolution was known for the propagation of the esthetic as a counterpoint to material values. Yet this romanticized Ophelia in all her sublime glory embellishes the bard’s words in way that ultimately lessens their imaginative effect.

Christopher Strong

Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong played recently at Film Forum as part of their current homage to l933 pre-Code films (running through March 7th). Christopher Strong is a little like Freud’s discovery of infantile sexuality. Its premise begins in a parlor game with English aristocrats speculating on the implausibility of fidelity. 1933 might have hearkened the end of Prohibition, but not in the movies and a film like Christopher Strong with its witty highly sexualized repartee was a swan song for explicit sexuality in American film (until l968 when the code was rescinded). Curiously the character of Christopher Strong (Colin Clive), a member of parliament is an exception in the world of British liaisons dangereuses that the film depicts and it's his indiscretion with the virginal aviatrix Lady Cynthia Darlington (Katherine Hepburn), whose first love had been flying, that sets the stage for this precursor to the far more chaste Brief Encounter (l948). “You wouldn’t have loved me if I wasn’t the kind of woman who takes this kind of thing seriously,” Hepburn exclaims at one point.  Of course, it’s significant that Christopher Strong presents an upper crust world that’s above morality, while the transgression of Brief Encounter is far more grave considering its characters grounding in solid middle class values.Dionysius may be the subject along with Icarus since (since someone’s going to pay the piper for all the literal and metaphorical high flying), but the sensuality really lies in the cinematography. If it weren’t for its anachronistic setting, you might mistake Christopher Strong for a grainy experimental film of the 60’s with its constant wipes, superimpositions and split screen shots. Hepburn’s slinky silver moth gown could easily have been part of the wardrobe for the Jack Smith classic, Flaming Creatures. There is only one question. Why is the film called Christopher Strong when the Colin Clive character really plays second fiddle to Hepburn’s Lady Darlington?

Brief Encounter

Joyce famously defined sentimentality as "unearned emotion." David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), the movie version of Noel Coward’s Still Life (1936), currently revived in all its black and white glory at Film Forum is an unearned emotion party. That which doesn’t exist is always a hands down favorite over the known and the predictable--in a sentence the theme of this grand old war horse. But from there on all bets are off. The story is told as an interior monologue, an imagined rendition to the one person in the world that our heroine could talk to, her stolid husband, Fred (Cyril Richmond), who does his Times crossword puzzle in his pinstripes and is looking for a seven letter word based on a line of Keats--which turns out to be “romance.” The movie begins where it ends as Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard) are interrupted by reality in the form of a chatty acquaintance. In the throes of impossible love or passion ( the Liebestod, that Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde suffer from), the world seems to recede which turns out to be a perfect segue way to the comic romantic subplot in which Stanley Holloway plays the randy stationmaster. We see only the garish lips of the woman talking like Billie Whitelaw’s mouth in the film version of Beckett’s Not I and incidentally the interiority recalls O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, just as the final sequence in which Laura almost throws herself in front of a train, Anna Karenina. When Laura exclaims that she rather be dead, Alec says “If you die, you’d forget me and I want to be remembered.” What begins to be apparent is that Lean earns his unearned emotion in this masterpiece, which is to say that genre art can rise to brilliance. Love Story is not a good example of this, but Brief Encounter, Romeo and Juliet and the Ring cycle all are (indeed Laura and Alec walk out of a cheesy romance called Flames of Passion). Our two forlorn lovers meet when Laura gets something in her eye and the iconography of subjectivity starts with this brilliant device which involves the distortion of vision, all to the background of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2. Laura’s husband refers to her as looking piqued and indeed she is suffering from an illness known as the romantic agony in which clocks appear everywhere, a train shooting through a station becomes a symbol for consummation that never occurs and a fedora lying on a foyer table connotes personhood.  But speaking of consummation, one wonders if there are any brief encounters left to be had in our disenchanted post-modernist universe. Today you hook up before there’s a chance to manufacture any of the feverish and resplendently unrealistic fantasies that characters like Laura and Alec suffer from and then you “sext."