Oedipus in Malibu

What do Ada Ushpiz’s Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt  and Terence Malick’s Knight of Cups, have in common. It would seem nothing. The former is a documentary about one of the greatest and most controversial thinkers of the 20^th Century and the latter is a fiction about an alienated Hollywood screenwriter, Rick, played by Christian Bale. First of all these two unlikely bed fellows both have trouble coming to a timely end and both deal with thinkers. The Ushpiz film, a tiresome attempt to unify a plethora of disjointed material around no theme in particular, repeats the leitmotif of Hannah Arendt thinking with a cigarette in her hand (Arendt was apparently a giant in smoking as well as philosophy, a fact that is also underscored in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt in which Barbara Sukowa playing Arendt is constantly puffing away).  Rick, like Arendt, is frequently looking out meditatively during the Malick film, but the comparison ends there since what goes on in Rick's head, in contrast to Arendt's well thought out pronunciamentos, can only be called stinking thinking. Do all screen writers walk around Malibu engaging in interior monologues which can be neatly translated into voice overs? Are all seeking to be awakened from an existential sleep and do all of them intermittently find themselves waking up in the middle of conversations that sound like lousy adaptations of Oedipus, Cain and Abel and Macbeth?  Do they all look like they have seen Fellini’s  8 ½ and Stanley Kubrick’s Eye’s Wide Shut one too many times and do all their girl friends and especially the one played by Cate Blanchett (Nancy) also look out vacantly as Monica Vitti did in L’avventura after her friend disappeared? Do all Hollywood screenwriters  wander around the lots of film studios when they’re not attending fashion shoots populated by half naked models? Undoubtedly there are lots of people who have been adversely molded by the unreality of the film industry, but surely not even the most jaded script writer thinks thoughts like the ones that Malick puts into his main character’s head. "I dreamt that we were caught in a huge tall wave that engulfed the city," is an example.Yes it's understood that the movie is about a brooding filmic sensibility who, when he isn’t staring out at the sea, is wandering amongst rock formations in the desert and who on more than one occasion finds himself staring at a craggy road. But get out! Even by Hollywood standards, this is errant nonsense of the highest order.

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."

L’avventura at Film Forum

A newly restored print of L’avventura is playing at Film Forum and there are problems with it. To begin with, you can barely read the subtitles. But "let’s go to the video tape" as Warner Wolf used to say and revisit some of the themes of this seminal work. In a key sequence at the beginning of the film Anna (Lea Massari), the girl who iconically disappears, tells Sandro, her lover, “When someone is there facing you, that’s all you get.” She’s in despair when they are apart for a month at a time, but she prefers separation’s imaginative possibilities. It’s the territory of Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer and Sartre’s La Nausee with a touch of Bovaryism thrown in. But then Antonioni turns off the current. There’s nothing like an unexplained disappearance to pull the rug out from under mankind. In fact, the Ur disappearing act is the absence of God. Here we have the Southern hemispheric version of Bergman’s The Silence. As Sandro (Gabrielle Ferzetti), Claudia (Monica Vitti) and the others on their boat search the island, Antonioni begins his exploration of distance and scale. The theme of painting runs through the movie. There’s an early cut between Anna and Sandro and a group of American tourists discussing painting, then in a later scene where Claudia is being stalked by men in a piazza she runs into a paint store and asks for a can of blue and there’s the wonderful scene where Sandro intentionally lets his pendant knock over the ink well of a young artist attempting to capture the ornate arch of a church. Antonioni famously said to Rothko, “your paintings are like my films. They are about nothing...with precision,’ The early scene with the figures crawling across the rock strewn island and then the classic urban scenes culminating in the de Chirico like image of Claudia running frantically down the hotel hallway in search of Sandro, who has fallen into the arms of an American prostitute named Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo), are all the visualization of the notion of closing the gap, the exists between men and more specifically between man and the enormity of things. It’s not love or even really lust, but some primal fear that brings the figures in Antonioni’s landscape together. When Sandro is caught in flagrante by Claudia, Gloria asks for “un piccolo ricordo,” a small souvenir or memory. Sandro throws some money between her legs as he chases Claudia to the film’s famous climactic or anti-climactic scene. But the lovely words linger with you. Yes, Gloria is a whore, but even she wants to be remembered.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

L’Avventura is a mystery about a missing woman, but the supernumeries in what could have been a police procedural, in other hands, move to center stage under Antonioni’s direction. Similarly Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011 and whose title can’t help but reference another fairytale, Serge Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, starts off with caravan of two cars and a jeep with a rotating light, carrying amongst others, a prosecutor, a police commissar and a doctor, who are attempting to locate a corpse in the darkness. The caravan takes on an emblematic significance as it cruises through the breathtaking landscape of winding roads and fields of grass whose beauty and barren immensity are the occasion for window-like set pieces that would qualify as melodrama if they didn’t so perfectly earn the emotion they create. A hogtied corpse is eventually located by a wonderful pair of characters called simply the "diggers." Cemal, the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) sits next to one of the accused men who have been brought along to lead the police to the crime scene. Chekhov was a doctor (he once said “medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress") and Cemal is the Chekhov of the movie, offering not only an autopsy of victim, but a diagnosis of the spiritual illness of his colleagues. For instance, throughout the movie Nusret, the prosecutor (Taner Birsel) repeats the same story to Cemal, about a woman who forecasted her own death.  The seeming non-sequitur begins to make sense as we begin to see that the prosecutor aided by his bonding with Cemal, reveals he is talking about his own wife who killed herself, after giving birth to their child, as an act of vengeance for her husband’s infidelity. The prosecutor’s face is disfigured with dark blotches and then in the autopsy sequence as blood shoots up creating blotches on Cemal’s face, a metaphoric blood-tie between the two men is affirmed. During the course of the night and early morning the caravan stops in a town where they are entertained by the local mukhtar, who has an angelic daughter. The daughter transfixes the miserable party while her father makes a pitch for a state of the art morgue. Most of the young people in the town have left and they need their parents’ bodies preserved until they can fly back from places like Germany. Waiting for Godot is the English title of Beckett’s play, but in the French, in which it was originally written, the title was En attendant Godot or “while waiting for Godot.” Like Godot, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is about the life that goes on and the questions that are asked while men and women wait for the answers to both the great and small questions of human existence. Do not miss this masterpiece.

What to Bring on the Ark

Biblical level catastrophes have been making headlines with increasing frequency. So here is a list of essentials to take with you on the Ark:

Don’t go anywhere without the DVD set of Antonioni’s trilogy, L’Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse  (the stock exchange sequence in La Notte with Alain Delon is as essential as K rations). Life as we know it could not continue without Bergman. How could we understand personality without Persona, endure the absence of god without The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Lights, comprehend marriage without Scenes from a Marriage (Paul Mazursky would never have been able to make An Unmarried Woman without it), or appreciate life in general without Fanny and Alexander, which has nothing to do with the Romanovs, and has still less to do with Franklin J. Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra? Tolstoy told Chekhov that his plays were almost as bad as Shakespeare’s, but we need to make sure there is room for War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Three Sisters, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, along with Lear to deal with problems of aging, The Tempest and The Winter’sTale to reinforce the notion that nothing is over until it’s over, and yes, Cymbelline to remind us that beauty can exist without perfection. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is great to have in any storm, along with The Wasteland  (a poem that is starting to have practical applications in our polluted world). Make room for Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, along with two chickens, two turtles, two lambs, two snakes etc.