The Mill and the Cross

Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, currently playing at Film Forum, is what would normally be called a tableau vivant—a painting brought to life. Actually it’s art history come to life, as Majewski not only wrote the haunting music for the film, but also co-authored the screenplay with the art historian Michael Francis Gibson. The subject of the film is Pieter Brueghel the Elder's 1564 painting The Road to Calvary, which today hangs next to The Tower of Babel in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, and in one sense the film simply presents the backstory of the painting. The depredations of the Spanish occupiers of Flanders, which included burying infidels alive and crucifying them, are the centerpiece of The Mill and the Cross. But there is also the human comedy, or carnival, manifested in the ubiquitous macabre depictions of both human sexuality and sadistic children’s play. Ironically, the most haunting moment is the final shot in which we see the Brueghel painting behind a rope in the museum as the camera pulls away from it in a long shot. All along we had been brought into the center of the artwork, and now the painting is consigned to being simply an object photographed at a distance in a famous art museum five centuries later. Even more jarring are the presences of Michael York, Charlotte Rampling and Rutger Hauer, who plays Brueghel. These aging cinematic icons break the silence that introduces the movie, but to what end this parade of acting royalty? Kirk Douglas played the tortured Van Gogh in Lust for Life, but Majewski’s subtlties are muddled by the display of star power.

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

Only the French can make a film shot of a child with a cigarette dangling out of the side of his or her mouth look romantic. Only the French can portray an older woman's infatuation with and exhibition of her naked body to a prepubescent boy not look like pedophilia. These are among the accomplishments of Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, the story of the pop singer and songwriter famous for hits like “Je t'aime ... moi non plus” and “Lemon Incest,” now playing at Film Forum. Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) was born Lucien Ginsburg to Russian Jewish immigrants, and the film dramatizes the evolution of his persona with the use of animations and a puppet alter ego that finds its seminal energy in the early period of the Second World War. Gainsbourg grew up during the Nazi occupation of Paris, wearing the yellow Star of David on his chest. The film’s use of animation and puppetry can be accounted for by the fact that the director, Joann Sfar, is a comic book artist who has never made a film. Still it's a French film at heart and only the culture that produced masterpieces like Breathless, Jules and Jim and Diary of a Country Priest could succeed in making the depiction of Gainsbourg's relationships with starlets like Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot as lacking in romance and sensuality as this failed piece of hagiography does. 

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

Sophie Fiennes’s Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, now playing at Film Forum, reveals Anselm Kiefer to be the Donald Trump of contemporary art. Through no fault of his own, the monumental structures Kiefer creates, in particular the asymmetrical towers the film portrays, have something in common with post-modern edifices like Thom Mayne’s building at the Cooper Union. Inadvertently, the movie is about the banality of artistic process even amidst the millenarian aims of art. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a German compound word that means coming to terms with the past, and Unheimliche is a word used by Heidegger to refer to a sense of the uncanny. Both words aptly describe a German artist who is a self-appointed repository for both historical memories and images of estrangement. The world Kiefer created near the French town of Barjac, and which he would eventually abandon, is an alternative universe, with worker bees busily demolishing and rebuilding a funny house of mirrors composed of sculptural monuments to tattered books, battle tanks, ships and nameless encampments in which both revolutionary figures and the victims of genocide occupy beds that look like graves. This is the subject of Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, but the movie is also a work of art in and of itself. Fiennes adopts Frederick Wiseman’s approach to documentary—there are no voiceovers, intros or explanations. Both the art and the artist speak for themselves. An Übermensch like Julian Schnabel is a minor annoyance in comparison to the massive ego that Fiennes portrays.

The Big Heat

The Big Heat, which was recently revived as part of the Fritz Lang series at Film Forum, is the prototypic film noir, almost an essay in the genre, using actors—Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin, Gloria Grahame—whose personas perfectly embody the Pulcinellas and Harlequins of this sour commedia dell’arte. The self-consciousness of the form, and the way in which it footnotes its own provenance and lays the path for posterity, with cops and villains out of central casting, is key to understanding the film’s conviction. Quentin Tarantino is a master of this cinematic music in the meta film noirs he creates in movies like Pulp Fiction, which by the way have no monopoly on either humor or grotesquery, as evidenced in Lang’s effort. A B-girl named Lucy Chapman (Deborah Green) is burned with cigarettes, tortured and murdered. Gloria Grahame’s character Debby Marsh has half of her face burned off and gets her vengeance by reciprocating the favor on her thug lover Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). But there is no shortage of one-liners, sometimes of an uproarious nature, amidst the bleak landscape. Walking into Glenn Ford’s hotel room, Grahame comments, “Say, I like this, early nothing,” and says that her scar-face is “not so bad…it’s only on one side” and that now she can look at the world “sideways.” Grahame actually acts as the soothsayer, the drunken Tiresias of the film, popping out with aphorisms while defying gravitas. Of course the greatest influence on Fritz Lang’s work in The Big Heat is Lang himself. You don’t have the shadows of M; in fact, the film, and in particular a timeless scene in a nightclub called The Retreat where mobsters hang out, is full of light. But it’s a glaring light, the cosmopolitan light of Metropolis, which is recalled in one character's soliloquy, set against an iconic cityscape of towering skyscrapers that juxtapose cozy images of corruption with the juggernaut of impersonality.

Mamma Roma

Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, currently in revival at Film Forum, begins with Da Vinci’s Last Supper, ends with a reference to El Greco, in a desolate shot of burned-out ruins, and nods to Mantegna’s famous painting Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Actually, from the beginning, Pasolini’s second film establishes two of the director’s central obsessions—the low life of Rome’s pimps and prostitutes and Christianity, if not the passion of Christ himself, which puts the director in good company when you think of Augustine and Dante’s Divine Comedy, also mesmerizingly evoked in a tragic prison sequence. But the really great art historical reference is Anna Magnani (she, like the Madonna, will likely go down as one of the great subjects for all the artists—in this case filmmakers—who tried to embody her), who plays a majestic whore and lush who wants the best for her son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo). In the first scene she leads pigs into her pimp’s wedding while celebrating her freedom by swinging her then little boy in the air. It’s the bags under Magnani’s eyes—with their world weariness, their lust, their rapture and compassion—that leave such an indelible imprint. Guilietta Massina played a prostitute in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria with an almost Chaplinesque mixture of humor and pathos, and years later there was Sigmone Signoret’s Madame Rosa. But Magnani is the ultimate whore, strolling through Rome’s underworld in a series of literally death-defying soliloquies—only why did she have to shave her armpits?

Cluny Brown

“He’s creating a new and better world,” Andrew Carmel (Peter Lawford), the son of English Aristocrat Sir Henry Carmel (Reginald Owen), tells his father about Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer), the Czech professor who is symbolically seeking refuge on an English estate. It’s 1938, the eve of Hitler’s Anschluss, at the beginning of Ernst Lubitsch’s last film Cluny Brown (1946), currently in revival at Film Forum. “What for?” Sir Henry replies. The banter of English drawing room comedy is the palette from which Lubitsch is working, and the verbal play centers on class conflict in English society as a metaphor for the domination that threatens the world. In the English context alone it’s a seemingly beneficent condition epitomized by Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) herself, a plumber’s niece whose irrepressible personality defies the strictures of class. Domination in the extreme of course leads to the fascist attempt at hegemony that would lead to the Second World War. The constant verbal play of the film—“feeding squirrels to nuts,” doing “the wrong thing at the right time”—refer to resistance to the social order, and the humor is disconcerting, since the lightheartedness of the reversals will soon have implications that go far beyond the elegant parlors, stately gardens, horses and quaint English village life that constitute the movie’s settings. 

Breathless

“She dumped me or I dumped her, I don’t remember,” Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the feckless gangster in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless—currently in revival at Film Forum—tells his moll Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a would-be journalist who hawks the International Herald Tribune on Parisian Boulevards, when she asks about his former wife. The cadence evokes the famous first lines of Albert Camus The Stranger (L’Etranger, 1942), “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” The syntactic similarity is not coincidental. From the moment that Michel picks up his gun and shoots a policeman, with the film’s haunting jazz theme in the background, the similarity to Meursault’s senseless murder of an Arab  is established. The only difference is that the desolation of North Africa is replaced by the dusty streets of the American westerns to which both the filmmaker and his two protagonists are attracted. Breathless is one example of translation failing to convey the poetry and meaning of the original language. A bout de souffle is the French title of the film, and it means literally at the end of breath. There are some wonderful exchanges, both of language and telephone numbers, in the film. Danton 0100 is the police. Élysées 8984 is one that Michel is always trying to get, and there is a Belle Épine number. But the final exchange of the film, when Michel is literally breathing his last breath, underlines the poetry of Godard’s title. Michel is dying, still mugging in his death, having made the choice of nothingness over grief in an earlier scene that foreshadows his demise and hearkens to Camus’s themes. Michel says, “Makes me want to puke,” and when Patricia asks what it means, the police detective who has been chasing Michel translates it as, “You make him want to puke.” The expression on Jean Seberg’s face is one of the most unforgettable in the history of cinema, ranking with the horrified open mouth on the nurse in the famous Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) .