Star & Shadow

The End   Joshua Oppenheimer  (USA; 1924)  Tilda Swinton, Signe Byrge Sorensen.

Viewed at Losing the Plot 7 June 2025-06-09

ok by me in America

everything fine in America

Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The End’ falls into a group of films that one way or another   depict ‘typical American life’.  Two films that come readily to mind are: Sam Woods’ ‘Our Town (1940), Lars von Trier’s ‘Dogville’ (2004).

These two movies are located in small American towns and examine socio- moral underbelly of their respective communities.  ‘Our Town’ deploys the Thornton Wilder script to present a setting of wondrous harmony where the people dwell in neat tidy houses, on neat tidy streets, living in a manner in which they are good, kind and helpful towards each other.  When a bad and cruel thing does happen, it turns out to have been just a nightmare, from which the dreamer awakens, and is able to continue her life in the actual dream world of small town USA.  Von Trier’s movie, feels like retort to ‘Our Town’. Von Trier dispenses with sets representing neat frame houses in favour of chalked out areas marking out the streets places and homes of his small town.  The machinations of the script involve the female protagonist Grace fleeing to the town, claiming to be escaping a vengeful criminal gang that’s after her.  The citizens are initially helpful and agree to give Grace the refuge she seeks.  But as Grace’s vulnerability increases, the plot thickens, the mask slips the knives come out: the true nature of the townsfolk is revealed.   They are two faced, violent exploitative and amoral, out for themselves whatever the cost to others. Von Trier ends his movie with a violent spasm of revenge in which Grace settles her scores with the town, with everyone deservedly annihilated and only the dog spared.

Both ‘Our Town’ and ‘Dogville’ are productions in which the communities exist within hermetically sealed spaces.  The scripts are both about the moral dynamics of living within the American dream which is also the characteristic feature of Oppenheimer’s ‘The End’.

The action take place at some point in the future after an environmental catastrophe. The setting is the prepared bolt hole of the McKays, an upper middle class American family.  Bolt hole suggests a rough and ready survivalist structure. But the McKay’s residence looks like any expensively furnished well proportioned large upper West Side apartment, replete with art works, mainly paintings, and period furniture.  It is a comfortable  re-assuring statement of entitlement and wealth.

Shortly after opening shots of the master bedroom and the location of the apartment as existing inside some sort of salt mine, the movie reveals itself as a sort of musical or perhaps operetta.  Cutting to the main living area, son McKay is building a finely detailed model of a pre-catastrophe townscape.  Unexpectedly he breaks into song,  soon mother McKay joins in, making the number a duet.  The banality of lyrics and tune made me wonder if I could see out the film’s two hours plus advertised length.

Along with the family McKay, there are some other bodies: mum’s best friend and dad’s friend, a woman fugitive plus a butler and a doctor. The latter two’s presence is never explained; you have to presume that a wealthy upper middle class family such as the McKay’s don’t go anywhere without a butler and a personal physician.  As scene follows scene each with its own model of normality and musical number, each with its own costumes and haircuts: it’s clear that ‘The End’ is a parody.  Even after the climate catastrophe the American dream goes on.

There are up’s and down’s a death a birth but the McKays simply live in an endless Lerner and Low musical with a song to mark every moment of life’s rich tapestry  Post catastrophe everything’s fine.  Everything normal.  Life’s a beach. There’s water in the taps (enough for the swimming pool) no rationing – endless food for the table, clothing medicines tobacco, whatever one needs, it’s on stream.  The cup of plenty runneth over for these people.  Post catastrophe?  It’s just like our way of life today. We ride on the hog’s back, enjoying the unending wealth of the privileged Western World.  We have everything.   Like the McKay’s most of us don’t know where our food comes from – we eat; we don’t know where our water comes from – we wash and drink;  we don’t know where our power comes from – we run our computers and appliances.  We consume without understanding either where the stuff comes from or what it costs.   I sit here tapping the keyboard of my computer with no idea how it works how it’s made or the cost of the earth’s finite resources expressed in its manufacture.  The McKay’s are just like us – The McKay household in their putative post catastrophe scenario: we in our current planet-wide climate crisis situation. 

But there is something lacking in Oppenheimer’s two hour parody.   His characters are good representations of their upper middle class privileged types; mother neurotic and controlling, father calm directing, son insecure the black fugitive assimilated, they cruise through the songs and the drama, but are untouched.  Oppenheimer’s script doesn’t go anywhere, it stays within the comfort of the parody. It shies off any sort of moral reckoning. Oppenheimer seems to have reached a level of self satisfaction with his script.  There are two the final shots of ‘The End’.  First, mother McKay and new mother McKay, stare out of their apartment at the salt mine in which their retreat is lodged; second, we see an image of what looks like it might be bacteria (or something?) squiggling across the frame.  Representing ‘life’?  Then cut to credits.  ‘The End’s’ sign off feels incomplete amorphous and smug.

Oppenheimer lacks an ultimate cinematic vision for ‘The End’.  He’s content to rock along in the comfort zone, parodying the contemporary spectacle of ‘life that goes on as usual’ which is characteristic of the West’s current sleep walk into the fire and water trial of global warming.  Without a cinematic moral questioning from within the hermetically sealed unit, Oppenheimer’s film amounts to little more than a shaggy dog story for the initiated.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  

The Spy in Black     Michael Powell, script: Emeric Pressburger (UK; 1939)  Conrad Veidt, Valerie Hobson

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 1^st June 2025; ticket: £7

another good German

Powell’s ‘Spy in Black’ for most of its duration is an exercise in intensities: cinematic intensities and relational intensities.  At the core of the intensity is the transgressive nature of what we are viewing and in a sense its normalisation in the very act of film making.

In ‘The Spy in Black’ (Spy) there are significant echoes of Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ which he made some 20 years later.  Both films are built around rogue anti-heroes, quasi sympathetic protagonists whose actions violate society’s moral code, but whose characters do not conform to the expected negative cinematic stereotypes. Both films have German lead actors.

In ‘Spy’ the unwritten code that Powell breaks is that of representing in a positive light the German Officer, Hardt, a secret agent trying to carry out a master plan to destroy the British fleet in Scarp Flow during the First World War. (Day of the Jackal another example of strong transgressive protagonist) Hardt is depicted as a career naval officer, committed to serving his country. The film opens with a sequence in Kiel where action against the British fleet is being planned.  In a restaurant used by German military personnel, the conversation and good natured bonhomie of the enemy officers is depicted no differently from that which might have been used to portray Royal Navel officers in a British pub.  The German officers are humorous sardonic and honourable men discussing the war in a professional way consistent with their duty to advance their nation’s cause.  Given the general demonisation of Germans both during and after WWl  (and in 1939 war with Germany was expected imminently) to be a German was equated with being ‘other’. The positive aspects of Hardt’s character as drawn by Powell represents an inspired piece of reverse protagonist creativity.  The disassociation between character attributes and character role builds into the script a dynamic of inner tension that is left for the audience to resolve. 

Similarly Mark as protagonist of ‘Peeping Tom’ is a creation comprising a similar dissociative relationship between character and actions.  With his accent Mark (played by Karl Boehm) establishes himself as a German. in other words he, like Hardy is ‘other’.  It must have been important to Powell for Mark to be identified, marked out as German. We have a biography for Mark because this is key part of the script.  As Mark was born and raised in England his German accent can only be an artifice that was necessarily decided upon by Powell.  Powell obviously wanted Mark to be taken by the audience as a German.  The question is why?  At one level perhaps he might have felt the audience would find the film more acceptable if the serial killer was equated with a demonised nation; or perhaps it was Powell’s way of codifying Mark’s otherness; or perhaps Powell projected onto German identity a quasi romantic twisted vision – a vision of ‘being pre-doomed’ with which in some part of his character Powell himself also identified.

From the first opening sequence of ‘Peeping Tom’, shot mostly from Mark’s point of view as he murders his first victim, a prostitute,  we understand we are in the presence of a cold killer.  But Mark,  as a killer, is belied by the character he presents in his daily life.  Mark’s a loner but he’s also kind considerate and can be seen as lacking self confidence.  The audience understand that he’s schizo, driven to kill by the arousal of an obsessive drive, scripted with some of the same dissociative characteristics as Hardt.  Mark’s representation gives ‘Peeping Tom’ a spring loaded tensility that drives the narrative for the audience.

Central to the scripts of both ‘Peeping Tom’ and ‘Spy’ are forbidden relationships, relationships between a German man and classic English rose type women.  Neither of the women, Helen in ‘Peeping Tom’ and Tiel in ‘Spy’ are victims, they are simply mesmerised by the dark attraction of the ‘other’.  Interestingly both women are in positions of superiority to the men: Helen’s the daughter of Mark’s landlady, Tiel is Hardt’s superior officer. In the plot twist Tiel’s revealed as a double agent.  She is working for the British not the Germans. But whatever hat she is wearing, her attributes always suggest a quintessential Britishness.

The red room and the black room. The heightened erotics of ‘Peeping Tom’ take place in Mark’s ‘ photography darkroom, a room saturated in red that invokes blood death and sex.  The erotics of Spy take place in the noir chiaroscuro interior of the ‘safe house’.  Being a 1930’s film explicit depiction is restrained but the kiss between Tiel and Hardt and the development of the scene leading up to it are marked by an intensity that presages “Peeping Tom’.  Rooms for torture, rooms for forbidden relationships.

Virginal sweet English rose women abound in British movies:  in effect they are angels. They evince certain types of attributes:  women whose role is act as counterweight to the male protagonist’s often destructive instincts (and actions) in their unabashed femininity they draw attention to the voice and presence of the vulnerable, acting as a consciousness representing the dispossessed, caring for the male and nursing them; all the archetypal stereotypical female roles.  And they appear   frequently in Powell and Pressburger’s films: I know where I’m Going, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, A Matter of Life and Death.   But buried in the scripts and acting out of both ‘Spy’ and ‘Peeping Tom’ is the idea of violation, an impulse to effect a desecration of a lynchpin of the British film industry.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk   

 

 

 

 Tokyo Story Jasujiro Ozu (Jp; 1953)  Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18 May 25; ticket: £7

the unsaid

In Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’ one event underlies the shape and design of his script.  It’s never mentioned it is never summoned it never makes an appearance.   It is submerged beneath the surface of scenario’s domesticity: Japan’s Pacific war. The shadow of death that it castes appears in a couple of scenes but there is never any direct mention or even allusion to the war waged by Japan from 1931 to 1945 which ended in complete capitulation. 

Their defeat was a defining temporal event, scarring the Japanese psyche, a defining moment which marked out time as being divided between two epochs: pre and post defeat; pre and post the radical wash through of Western/ American socio cultural influences into traditional life styles.

 

And what do Ozu’s people see?

There are no point of view shots in Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’.  But in specific scenes his characters look out at the world.  As tourists his main characters, Ma and Pa visiting their children in Tokyo, gaze out at Japan’s capital city. This is a city that in 1945, some 8 years before their visit, had been razed to the ground by a huge fire storm following US incendiary bombing.   After the fire there was nothing left of Tokyo, a city in the main constructed from wood was burnt to a cinder. As Ma and Pa gaze out either from the tour bus or from some vantage point what do they see? 

There is one thing we know that they see: the ‘empty centre’ of Tokyo.  This is the imperial palace and its extensive gardens which are located at the centre of the city.  We get a brief glimpse from the tourist bus of this ‘empty centre’ which is remarked by the old couple. And of course what they see is that it is unchanged: the empty centre remains the empty centre.  Almost alone it survived the devastation.

Looking at the empty centre it’s as if nothing has happened. 

During their one trip out on foot to explore Tokyo, Ma and Pa look out on the city.  But this city even though reconstruction had taken place at break neck speed must have still evidenced something of the conflagration that destroyed it.  But Ma and Pa appear to see nothing disturbing or untoward in the presenting vista.  Their response to seeing the city is that nothing’s changed since they last visited Tokyo.   

As if time has stood still.

Why can’t they see what they’re looking at?

There’s a schizo perception at the core of Ozu’s movie: nothing looks like it has changed but everything has changed.

Shot from the angle of the fixed camera, each scene comprises more or less a single take.  Ozu’s scenario is constructed upon quasi traditional ‘Noh’ classical precepts.  The scenario is continuous taking place through a particular unified window of time, chronicling the visit and return of elderly parents to their children in Tokyo. The action is delivered as a series of continuous shots without reactive intercutting.  There are no cuts no close up’s each scene locked into Ozu’s unhurried temporal rhythm.   Without shot manipulation, time has an integrity in ‘Tokyo Story’ that embeds itself structurally into a scenario whose particular theme is the subjective perception of the signs of time and change.  Schizo time.

Those who have too much time and those who have too little ‘time’.

Ozu’s script comprises in the main the ordinary interactions that fill out day to day  life: comings and goings, domesticity and food, the routines of ritual interchanges.  Through the mediated experience of Ma and Pa we understand that it is not just Tokyo that has an empty centre: following the defeat, the core expressive gestures of Japanese culture have also become emptied.  The traditional tokens of respect for parents, the bowing the kneeling the bringing together of hands before one’s face, are now become form without meaning.  They are simply gestures that sign an outer  compliance to traditional values, gestures which in the new situation have ceased to make a claim upon the hierarchy of deference to parents.  The children

hurried and scurried by the new reality simply want divest themselves of care and responsibility for Ma and Pa. Their key response is to pack them off out of the way to a spa: it would have been better for them not have come.  Finally Ma and Pa understand this, get the message and leave.  The outer forms signifying respect and honour which is their due in the traditional value system, simply flatter to deceive.  The new reality is that the young have not got time to minister to the old.

‘Tokyo Story’ employing generational dimensions, comprises a narrative shaped around an event that never happened: a war.  The younger generation overtaken by the press of American cultural influence, clinging to traditional outward forms, are overtaken by an invasive work ethos unable to see what has happened or pay attention to what is happening, as if nothing had changed.  The older generation, unable to confront the actuality of the war, are trapped in the ethos of change in life that it has caused.  At the heart of this society Ozu perceives a schizo seed.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

  

The Marriage of Maria Braun   Rainer Werner Fassbinder  (FDR; 1979) Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Lowitsch, Ivan Desny

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 24 April 2025; ticket £7

the constant companion

In the opening shot of Fassbinder’s ‘Marriage of Maria Braun’ we see Maria and Hermann’s wedding ceremony presided over by a Nazi functionary with a stock portrait of Adolf Hitler looming over the proceedings. It’s the middle of an air raid; a bomb explodes, the room shakes, plaster crumbles, the picture of Hitler crashes to the ground out of sight.

In the final sequence Maria, re-united with Hermann, dies in an explosion at her home after she ignites the gas she has left on in her kitchen.  She has just heard she and Hermann are the joint beneficiaries in the will of her boss.

Fassbinder’s movie begins and ends on an explosive note.

In ‘The Marriage of Maria Braun’ Fassbinder creates Hermann the mystery man: Maria’s husband.  A husband who for the most part is absent, yet in his absence remains present in the life of his wife.  As scripted Hermann and Maria are a war time couple who’ve known each other for only a couple of weeks prior to being wed. Immediately after the marriage Hermann is ordered to the front line and disappears.  Despite the short duration of the liaison Hermann occupies the space at the centre of Maria’s identity.   Whenever asked she says that she is Hermann’s wife, she waits for his return so that she can take her rightful place as his wife. 

Maria’s caste iron commitment to the return of her Hermann appears in antithesis to the confident self sufficiency she expresses, as her career (in parallel with the economic recovery of the FDR) flourishes and she ends up managing a large successful business enterprise.  Of course people can incorporate contradictory psychological needs into their lives; but perhaps the existence of  contradictory/oppositional drives has the capacity to provoke in the individual a self destructive schizo reaction.

Who is Hermann Braun?  He’s a wonderful Fassbinder construct. Hermann comes and goes fades in fades out of the action, but is always there in Maria’s mind always a central reference point in the scenario.  When Fassbinder allows him to appear, we are only allowed brief glimpses.  He returns from the war, takes the rap and does time for Maria’s killing of Bill, he’s visited in prison and on release takes off to Canada to make his own life.  And of course he’s there for the finale.   Absent – yes, but when he’s actually in a scene, in Maria’s apartment, in prison, in the final sequence set in Maria’s dream home, he is a very solid presence.  In physicality in style of dress in his few words.  He’s a man of steel.  Hermann’s dialogue is focused, he sees what needs to be said and done.  Not just for Maria but for the audience Hermann becomes more and more present, really there on the screen.    

Fassbinder’s film making is informed by his work in theatre – theatre inspired by  Brecht.   What he understands is how to realise theatrical ideas in two-dimensional movie space.   He achieves this through his sensibility of shot framing and lighting that always contains the potential for movement. In the course of the film there’s never a feeling of stasis but of kinetic development and which is given further dynamic by the script.  

The nature of Fassbinder’s script works to establish the characters in a way that owes much to Brecht.   His persona are built on the premise that they take up certain ‘positions’ vis a vis their lives; we understand them through the particular attitudes they evince in relation to the world about them and themselves.  Maria is of course exemplary in this respect, and the film’s intentionality takes its cue from her.  Maria’s career, whether she is a whore or a CEO, is defined by her statements about her marriage, her boundary setting in other relationships, and her desire to make money to provide for her husband.  Likewise Karl’s relationship with Maria is defined by his position in relation to her and the deal he does when he visits Hermann in prison.   The audience establish a cognitive bond with the characters rather than an emotional nexus.  This is the opposite of Hollywood style and means that Fassbinder cannot resort to the emotional manipulations typical of this Cinema.   It’s all in the mind and Fassbinder leaves it to the audience to figure it out.  And as a complex (and very well edited) movie, ‘Marriage’ sustains its power to engross its audience even though its relational demands differ from most movie experiences.

So who is Hermann Braun?  In the first sequence of ‘Marriage’ Hitler appears then disappears, followed by Herman who appears then disappears.  Both vanish without trace.  Which is no coincidence as in Fassbinder’s film Hermann plays the role of the phantom Führer who haunts this post war Germany.  Hitler is not just an image he’s a reality who won’t – no can’t –  go away.  He is absent from Germany but omnipresent,  the secret incubus of the FDR (West Germany).  Maria’s role exemplifies the history of post war FDR through the ‘40’s and ‘50’s.  Firstly as whores for the victors, as despised Nazis who had to pay with their very bodies for what they had done.  Then when the victors fell out, the FDR is co-opted into the West’s great expansionist  enterprise, now walking in lockstep with capitalism’s  corporate ethos individualistic values and ideology of acquisitive greed.  The phantom Führer has his get out of gaol card; he’s released from prison and finally returns not so much in the form of Hermann, but as myth ready to guide Germany to her never to be forgotten destiny.   

As the film progresses Fassbinder sends us radio messages from the FDR front line. The re-armament, the increasing international influence the heroic sporting victories and finally at end of the final credits strange negative ghost-like images of post war FDR chancellors: Adenhauer, Erhard, Kiesinger, Schmid. Of course the constant companion, Hitler, is absent.

Fassbinder began ‘Marriage’ with a perception. Hitler was not dead.  Despite collective amnesia, he lived on in the psyches of the people. His image may have vanished from the State Registrary Offices, he might no longer give the Nazi salute from podiums or be fawned by Leni: but he was still present.  And it was ridiculous to imagine otherwise: as if some magician could wave a magic wand to give the command: Forget Him. As if the victorious West could issue an imperative command to the German People: He is gone, he never existed.  Banished vanished Hitler lived on and lives on, he cannot go away. In the years  after WWll Fassbinder witnessed the resurrection of German industries: steel: Krupp; automobiles: VW, Mercedes; chemical industry   Beyer, Agfa, Hoechst, BASF (except Beyer all now changed company name).  All these companies were deeply implicated in the Third Reich and its slave labour programmes; all massively rewarded by the Third Reich, now in the  embers of the post war years,  all massively rewarded in the can-do neo-liberal economic climate where they all become world forces.   Fassbinder perceived something of the Hitler Spirit at work.

As a footnote, we can look at the current situation in Palestine.   The Israelis have turned Gaza into an extermination camp and are subjecting the West Bank to a daily Kristallnacht.  It’s to be noted that besides the USA, the one country that is least critical, that is unfailingly in its support of Israel’s war on the Palestinians, is Germany.  It’s anti-Semitic legislation has been re-interpreted to suppress anti-Zionism. A country that might have learnt to understand something from its own Holocaust, now acquiesces in the spectacle of another country adopting its genocidal past of mass murder.  As Fassbinder knew: Hitler is a phantom who lives on in many guises.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Return      Uberto Pasolini (It, Fr, Gce, Uk;  2024)  Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 22 April 2025;  Ticket: £13.25

all face no space

Uberto Pasolini’s movie ‘The Return’ is dominated by ‘faciality’. The film comprises:  face face face face then more face, all framed of course in big close up.   The face that is the principle object of Pasolini’s camera is that of  Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, the king of Ithica who is returning at last from the Trojan War.  Fiennes’ face heavily sculpted by the make-up department resonates with the affect of ‘redemptive suffering’, or something like that, which cues the dominant thema of Pasolini’s script: the idea of the returning war vet – of which more later.

The issue with the Fiennes’ face is its invariance. Its used by Pasolini as a sort of touchstone of his movie, his visual leitmotif which is returned to again and again. But  the effect is that this close-up that is supposed to say something like ‘redemptive suffering’, at each repetition says less and less until finally completely devalued it says nothing. It has become a parody of itself. 

Fiennes’ big face shot is characteristic of ‘The Return’ which is dominated by use of the close-up.  In similar respect to the ‘Odysseus’ affect,  Juliette Binoche’s ‘Penelope’ gets the same sort of treatment: repeated default big close shot of her face expressing something like the eternal stoicism of women.   Telemachus (Odysseus’ son) and Penelope’s suitors are filmed for the most part up close, with the editing cutting from face to face to maintain the flow of dialogue.

‘The Return’ is a film which has at its core the confrontation between the Odysseus’  and his family and the antagonists, the suitors.  In respect of understanding oppositional relations, they need to be located in space, space we can see.  It is space that is implicitly involved in the creation of dramatic tension. Tension is expressed in body language, in proximities and distances, in the containing environment that is the carapace of action and re-action.  Tension needs  space.  In abandoning space or reducing it to subsidiary element, Pasolini effects the deintensification of the dramatic play-out of his movie. Tension is not created by intercutting from one face to another whether it be angry aggressive mocking sneering; without spacio-temporal referent faces become vacuous signifiers of manipulation not action.   

Of course in order for dynamics of any given space to be understood in a movie, it has to be viewed on a big screen, ideally one that fills the viewers field of vision.  But a lot of films made today have the look of products made to be viewed on a phone or a home TV monitor.  Space and the concomitant action contained therein simply don’t register small scale.  On small screen, critical elements of the interactive detail of action simply become background; the eye scans the image which takes about five seconds (perhaps even less on a small device) quickly exhausting all the information that it can gather from the shot. The eye then wants a change of shot.  The human face as image on a small screen has an immediate impact.  Although the image is absorbed just as quickly, because reading faces is one of the things we do regularly, each face is read as a message with a particular emotional or perhaps occasionally cognitive meaning. Small scale projection: faces are easy for to read; wide shots may simply fail to register.   

The reality is that ‘The Return’ like many contemporary movies has not been made for its comparatively brief short first theatrical release.  It’s produced for the long run: to be available on-line on demand, filling out TV schedules and as a sort of time filler material on smart phones.

That’s entertainment.

‘The Return’ is a retelling of Odysseus’ return to Ithica.   In answer to the many ways in which the story might have been adapted Pasolini’s script opts to reduce the story to a one dimensional idea of the traumatised vet.  Odysseus in ‘The Return’ represents the returning soldier, broken burnt out by war, like a US vet coming back from Vietnam or Iraq.  Pasolini renders Homer’s multifaceted myth in one emotional key  indelibly stamping it with imprimatur of Fiennes’ face.   

As a director Uberto Pasolini (unlike his namesake Pier Paolo who also directed films based on Greek myth) doesn’t look like he knows what he is doing with his movie.  This might have to do with the fact that he was beholden to a potpourri of financial backers, each supplying a commissioning editor with their own interests to champion. 

There’s no vision no singular perception shaping of ‘The Return’.  Pasolini only offers us ‘a face’.    Odysseus’s home is depicted as a monumental Wagnerian Castle, but if this is the vision why not give the film a Wagnerian feel?   Pasolini’s attention to costume and prop detail is minimal as if its enough to dress up his  male actors in loin cloths and old blankets, and his women in one or another type of wrap-about. There is no imprint of a stylistic sensibility in the scenario, simply a satisfaction with the scripted thema of the returning vet.  The actors playing up as the suitors never look anything other than hirelings from the world of soap opera, unable to to move on from the look of ‘the Sword-and-Sandals’ epics churned out by Cinecitta in the 1950’s and 60’s.  But in the case of these movies the cod inauthenticity of the productions (such as Hercules, 1958, starring Steve Reeves) was part of their attraction and charm.  In  ‘The Return’ the disjunction between the acting, the contemporary nature of the dialogue simply creates a disassociation between the theme and the means Pasolini uses to realise his theme. 

The returning vet is an issue that has been well covered by Hollywood and other Cinemas, but if this idea was to dominate ‘The Return’ Pasolini perhaps should have set his film in the present times where it might have made a claim for some sort of authenticity, rather than looking as it does a mismatched hotchpotch of disparate elements.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

The Bad Seed     Mervyn Leroy   (USA; 1956) Nancy Kelly; Patty McCormack

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 6^th April 2025; ticket: £7

to have and to have not

‘The Bad Seed’ is a title that did the venerable journey through various expressive modes.  It started life as a novel by William Marsh, was developed into to Broadway play, then made it to Hollywood as a feature film, and finally adapted for TV remakes  a couple of times  In all its first three forms ‘The Bad Seed’ was a huge success. A best selling novel, a long running Broadway show, and a successful high grossing movie, finishing in the top 20 US box office for ‘56.

‘The Bad Seed’ as a realised idea certainly struck a chord with its audience.  It may   be partially accounted for by a fascination with the disjunction between the well brought up pretty little eight year old girl (Rhoda) and the cold blooded murders she commits.  But perhaps to some extent its appeal to the audience was partially embedded in its setting.  ‘The Bad Seed’ takes place in ‘The Suburbs’, in a generic representation of the real estate developments that were becoming the preferred homes of millions of Americans.  Increasingly wealthy in an increasingly confident USA this expansion of the suburban way of life represented a psychic deterritorialisation as people turned their backs on their ethnic roots and embraced a new form of identity founded upon the burgeoning individualist consumer culture – represented most completely by the automobile – the mechanical bride.

 

Interestingly there are significant alterations to ‘Bad Seed’s movie plot that make it distinctly different from both the original novel by William Marsh and the Broadway play which stayed true to Marsh’s work.  The Production Code Association (PCA), basically Hollywood’s movie censor, was hostile to any movie adaptation of ‘The Bad Seed’.  So when Warner purchased the rights the PCA insisted on one major change. Both novel and play conclude with the mother (Christine) dying (committing suicide after poisoning her murderous little girl) and the Rhoda surviving the poisoning, and able presumably to continue her merry dance of death.  Mervyn Leroy’s film treatment reversed this outcome: now Rhoda’s mother lives (somewhat improbably) after her suicide attempt and Rhoda who survives the poisoning is subsequently killed off in a final coda, struck down by a falling tree in the middle of a huge thunder storm.

So ‘poetic justice’ a la PCA sort of triumphs (the bizarre post end credit sequence in which Christine after addressing the audience, bends Rhoda over her knee and smacks her bottom, may or may not have been Leroy’s gesture of contrition, as if murder deserved at least a formal smacking) though not in a very convincing manner.  The bolted on changes to the original story line look what they are: formulaic genuflection to the requirement of movieland propriety.  Actually the ending with its primal earth shaking lightening and cracking thunder works to re-inforce a feeling that grows ever more insistently in the course of the film that what is at work in the scenario is the force of evil.  Within the suburbs evil lurks.   This makes Rhoda in some respects a precursor of Regen (The Exorcist) and to some extent the films of David Lynch.  John Carpenter was certainly influenced by the film and novel.

The fundamental changes that the PCA insisted on (They were probably responsible for removing from the script earlier examples of Rhoda’s crimes that come up in both book and play but not the film: killing her pet dog and her babysitter. In the movie she is suspected of killing an old lady by pushing her off the fire escape. For a child to kill

her pet dog was simply off the Hollywood map; to kill an old woman, just about ok.)  actually make the film a more resonant critique of the forces at work in America in the 1950’s.

Both book and the play revolve around the problem suggested by the title: “The Bad Seed’.  At issue is whether Rhoda’s murderous psychopathy has been inherited. In book and play it’s revealed that Christine was an adopted child, and that her biological mother had been a serial killer who was sentenced to death by frying in the ‘chair’.  In play and book the central issue revolves about Christine’s fears that Rhoda has inherited a bad gene from her grandmother (a recessive gene that determined her bad nature!).  Christine undergoes nervous collapse at the thought that she has passed on bad seed to her daughter.  But the movie is different, the inheritance issue never gains persuasive dramatic traction.  The script treats the issue with diffidence. It’s never revealed (did I somehow miss it?) that Christine’s mum was a serial killer.   In Leroy’s scenario Christine breaks down at the thought that her mother was wicked, but beyond her own insistence it is never convincing that she has strong reason to blame inheritance for Rhoda’s character.  A kind of vacuum envelops the issue of bad seed.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

But if nature is not responsible for Rhoda’s behaviour then it must be the environment, and Rhoda’s environment comprises the new kind life styles that are evolving in suburban America.  The suburbs are the source of psychic instabilities whether they be intro or extra – verted.  Could it be that ‘Evil’ ‘Psychopathy’ call it what you will, oozes out of the ‘burbs’, like dark blood from an infected wound?  With the pressure they exert on people to conform to the all American ideal, with their materialistic ethos and spoilt children the suburbs are incubators of the bad seed.  In its comfortable setting in the concerns of the characters, these elements are all present in ‘The Bad Seed’ which of course has a significant Hollywood precursor in ‘Mildred Pierce’.  Like ‘The Bad Seed’ ‘Mildred Pierce’ is dominated by a twisted mother daughter axis, set in the midst of American plenty.   Rhoda feels like a younger model of the precocious spoilt Veda, Mildred Pierce’s daughter.   Both ‘Pierce’ and ‘Bad Seed’ are unusually for the movie business female dominated scenarios, less concerned with action more focused on state of mind, the states of mind that were coming to define American life. 

I think Leroy’s direction is self absenting.  Like fellow Warner director, Michael Curtis (also director of Mildred Pierce) Leroy is experienced enough to know when to engage in Cinematic manipulations and when to let the script speak for itself with seemingly minimal direction.  Coming from the stage, the script is adroitly fashioned to represent the key characters and ideas.  It doesn’t necessarily need big production heightened camera work or deft splicing.  Leroy is happy to stay a lot of the time in long or medium shot, enabling the viewer to see the interactions and relations, and the camera movement when it happens, works with effect.  ‘The Bad Seed’ has a stagey feel, but what we are seeing is theatre; and in contemporary life it is theatre that has come to provide the role model for many of our relationships.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  

 

 

Monsieur Verdoux    Charlie Chaplin (USA; 1947)  Charlie Chaplin; Martha Raye; Maryilyn Nash

Viewed: dvd

no more Mr Nice Guy

In movies the dead speak.  And of course besides M Verdoux and his victims there is some one else who dies in this film. 

As Chaplin’s opening shot tracks through a cemetery past the gravestone of Monsieur Verdoux, the eponymous subject (based on serial killer Henri Landru) provides in voice over a short justificatory explanation of his journey to the grave. The Voice relates how he’d been a bank teller for 30 years before being summarily dismissed. With a family to suppor (comprising as we later find out, a disabled wife and young son) he had resorted to a series of business transactions involving the liquidation of wealthy women.  Monsieur Verdoux explains that for him this was ‘a business’, but a business in which one needed some luck – which unfortunately he didn’t have.

The use of the word ‘liquidation’!  It has a double meaning: one of converting assets into cash;  the second, a vernacular euphemism, meaning to kill without compunction.   Using the word in this manner sets up the philosophical consideration offered up to the audience by Verdoux during his trial for murder at the end of the movie.  Delivered with Chaplinesque panache it’s his ironic rapier thrust into the heart of contempary hypocrisy where he points out that the Capitalist system produces vast industries for the production of armaments and weapons with the consequential need to foster wars of mass destruction and the slaughter of millions. In contrast Verdoux points out that he is being tried and condemned for the death of a few people. Verdoux concludes that he is a mere amateur by comparison.   The point made is not to justify his actions, but to place them in the context of a moral counterbalance.  Just a thought.

Verdoux is a black comedy centred on Charlie’s superb playing of the killer. His play out of the clown murderer is immaculate: his precision in action – such as preparing the poison –  his balletic balance – his mobility of face  – allied to the soothing British charm of his voice are all compressed into the character, the clown intent on the business of marrying and killing rich women for the sake of their money. There are a couple of unconvincing scenes in which Chaplin in the style of Harpo Marx has resort to Sennet style slapstick routines in going after a potential women victim.  But in his controlled expression of comic purpose Chaplin has never been better.  And of course the blood money from his dark deeds has ‘an innocent purpose’: it’s used to maintain Verdoux’ disabled wife and son.  Verdoux, a selfless dark Harlequin. 

There are wonderful highlights – Verdoux counting the victims’ money –   Chaplin breaking through frame and full face addressing the audience as to the nature of his ‘work’ – the sequences with Martha Raye.  There were also strange holes in the scripting: in particular the death of his wife and son, announced precipitously by Verdoux raising the unanswered question as to whether they had died natural deaths or had he killed them, unable to bare the brutal reality of not being able the continue to care for them? This question is left hanging on Verdoux’ coat-tails.  And the bad luck?  This seemed to entail, not his getting caught but rather his decision to invest his ill gotten gains in stocks and shares before the  market crashed.

What is central to the emotional feel of Chaplin’s ‘Monsieur Verdoux’ is its complete lack of either sentimentality or regret, both in relation to the inner scripting of the film and to its outer metaplay of Chaplin’s own career trajectory.   There’s one apparent exception.  Verdoux has no doubts no stabs of conscious in relation to his ‘liquidations’ whether it be the wealthy women or the cop who gets wise to him.  They all have to die.  The apparent exception is ‘The Girl’, a waif whom Verdoux sets up as a victim, a lab rat in effect, to test out the efficacy of his poison.  He nearly carries through with her murder, but stops at the last moment when her story and her goodness touch his heart.  She is spared as Verdoux affected, obeys the dictates of  his conscience.   You might say: “Sentimental!’  But no Chaplin countervails this moment in a later scene where he meets up again with the waif, now come good, who tells him her fortunes have changed because she has married an arms manufacturer and business is booming!   They’re in the money!

So no sentimentality is the order of the day and this of course applies to Chaplin himself in making ‘Verdoux’.  The film in which he makes the decision once and for all to kill off his alter ego, ‘The Little Tramp’.  Without regret without compassion in cold blood.  His time is up.

Verdoux now exemplified the times, the man of the moment: as amoral as the arms manufacturers and like them, a good father and husband.   

Chaplin did not have to make of himself an unsentimental serial killer.  He chose to adopt a persona that was the complete opposite of ‘The Little Tramp’. After Verdoux there could be no way back to the innocence of a character who was now out of place in a world without innocence.  

 Verdoux is not caught.  He is discovered. He could have escaped but he choses to give himself up of his own free will to the police.  There’s no bathos nor pathos,  simply his calculated decision to chose certain death.

The scenes comprising Verdoux’s last moments are cool and completely lacking in emotion, not tragic, simply timely, and these moments equate with Chaplin’s own disposal of ‘The Little Tramp’.  It’s time for him to go and he’s dispatched with the same equanimity with which one might discard a pair of old worn and holed socks.  Verdoux initially refuses the rum he’s offered, then commenting he’s never tasted rum and might as well try it, picks up the glass and necks it.  He faces the priest, no last rites, simply responding with a contained dignity to the visitation.  Then the final shot: head held high without hesitation he walks past the camera, turns with his back to us and walks to the (unseen) guillotine.  And as he moves away from us towards the place of execution a guard either side of him, we see just the merest hint of that ‘walk’.   A walk towards the end.  For Veroux and ‘The Tramp’.

Black comedies about serial killers were choice filmic morsels of the post World War ll era. Besides ‘Verdoux’ there was also Robert Hamer’s ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ (1949) starring Alex Guinness.  It tells of a disowned son murdering his way to an inherited Baronetcy.  But it’s difficult to imagine any one wanting to make black comedies about the serial killers of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, men such as Ian Brady, Fred West and Peter Sutcliff.    For some people, in the age of the self-made image,  to be a serial killer has become a (self fulfilling?) career choice: killings perpetrated in order to become famous or rather infamous.  The era of increasing hostility by some men to the changed and increasing status of women in society appears to be linked to increasing murders of women, usually women in relationships, but many carried out simply as a function of ingrained sexual hostility.  Chaplin had his own axe to grind with money chasing women and with Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, but the film stands as dark metaphysical fable of ‘business’.  Likewise ‘Kind Hearts…’ works as satire on class prejudice.  But I think in our contemporary charged psychic atmosphere it is no longer possible to see these films as grounded in metaphorical or social concerns, as black comedies with unusual settings.  The form taken by the narratives of quasi justified serial killing, for many people will outweigh any parodic or satirical intent of the film maker.   The which makes the public exhibition of the titles problematic. Programmers will have to weigh up moral psychological social political as well as artistic considerations in deciding whether or not to screen these titles.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Nosferatu – a Symphony of Horror       F W Murnau  (Ger; 1922) Max Scheck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroder

Live tracked by S!nk

Star and Shadow Cinema 14 Mar 2025; ticket £12; £10

the with and the without

By today’s standards Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ lacks the literalist rendering of Robert Eggers’ recent 2024 re-make of the same title.  Eggers’ movie with its promiscuous use of CGI replaces narrative coherence with a series of spectacles: hallucinations, tomb openings and the final sexual parody, the energetic absurdist coupling of the monstrous Nosferatu and Ellen.  Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ piling one thing on top of another devalues any sense of climax (sic), or plot line as the film comes to resemble a series of spectacular adverts.  For which one might conclude that it’s in tune in with the attention demands of today’s audience.

Murnau in 1922 delivered a completely different type of ‘Nosferatu’ which takes the form of a dark quest.  It’s a journey of evil in which the tensions are built up slowly as Nosferatu’s journey reaches its end goal the seeking out and possession of Greta (Eggers’ Ellen).  Murnau’s structure incorporates lyrical watery sequences that leaven the blood fuelled intentions of the Vampire as his coffin is carried by river and sea towards its destination. 

Murnau’s 1922 picture had no synchronised sound track. No dialogue no stings no reinforcing mood music.  But the experience of the audience was of course not silent.  Separated from the picture, music was played in the cinema as the accompaniment to the projected film. 

And this was the case at the Star and Shadow screening where the impro musicians – S!nk – live tracked ‘Nosferatu’.

To view film with sound married to picture (which is the universal situation today) and viewing film where the sound is separated from the picture is a very different experience; without the synchronised sound the audience has a completely different relationship with the image.   More intuitive, more direct, opening up the viewer to another level of involvement with the material. 

With sound on film the primary engagement of the audience is usually with the dialogue.  Dialogue makes a cognitive demand: in order to follow the plot to assess the psychological motivations of the players, the thinking mind has to be engaged.  Of course some of the narrative and characterisations are achieved by the picture,  but if the dialogue is removed from a sound film (or if it is in a foreign language without subtitles) the action usually becomes incomprehensible and the viewer usually loses interest.  Together with the dialogue sound on the picture is also represented by the music track and the FX track.  These tracks tend to be manipulative.  There are stings (either musical or FX) which underline moot points in the action and moments of realisation or in horror films characterised by exploiting sudden high volume. The music tracks typically reinforce the intended emotional response or mood the director thinks appropriate to any given scene.  Sound on picture tends to be designed for manipulative affect – steering plot and plot rationale and reinforcing desired audience response.

Something different happens when the sound (usually musical accompaniment) is separated from the image. The audience moves into a very different state of mind, developing a distinctly different kind of relationship with the projected images. Without dialogue, the viewer’s consciousness locks directly onto the picture.  Viewing becomes a non-verbal experience that replicates something close to the way in which the child experiences the world.  Although accompanying music might have stings and mood re-enforcement, the primary effect of the music is to ease the psychic passage of the viewer into flow of the film.  As the film develops the music starts to weave a trance-like atmosphere, creating the conditions for the viewers to pass out of their everyday state of mind and to be absorbed into the picture.  To become  again, for these moments, as children, at one with what they are seeing.    A condition where there’s no separation between subject and object: the viewer is in the screen.  And this surely is the ‘Magic of Cinema’ a magic that we have by and large lost.

This ‘Magic’ was re-activated by the audience, re-claimed by S!nk’s live tracking of ‘Nosferatu’.  Of course not all ‘silent films’ are live tracked with the artistry finesse and sensitivity that S!nk bring to the task.  But when it happens, then we are privileged to be able to take a step back in time both objectively and subjectively.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

 

Johnny Guitar     Nickolas Ray  (USA; 1954)  Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge

the eye’s have it

Nick Ray’s ‘Johnny Guitar’ is an inverted Western, where many of the familiar tropes and expectations of the Hollywood genre are turned on their head.   It’s movie that induces into its chosen form a deep vein of psychic substance that is rare for Hollywood let alone cowboy pictures. 

The opening section comprises three sequences that indicate Ray’s movie is not going to honour the genre by following the familiar path: Johnny Guitar’s entry is heralded by explosions – the ripping apart of the mountains through which he is riding; a stagecoach hold up which he spectates; and a powerful overwhelming dust storm which blasts across the land.  Man made environmental destruction, extreme weather and indifference to stick-ups immediately suggests Ray’s Western has a alternate focus of attention.

This is confirmed quickly through the opening master scene that’s set in Vienna’s saloon where Ray’s script sets up his main protagonists as women.  In this era (and many others) women roles in Westerns are normally either non existent (except as extras) or more or less token petticoats whose role in the scenario to soften the exclusively male action.   Women are not players they’re pawns.

In ‘Johnny Guitar’ the women are the players: Vienna and Emma in ruthless stand off.  As in most scripts the two adversaries both hold different values which define and feed their animosity and provides the rationale for the play out of the plot. Vienna, with her Saloon built to profit from the new railroad, stands for the quickening forces of change, the increasing ease of migration, that are redefining power in the Western territories; Emma, a large rancher sees these changes as a threat to her interests, and determines to fight them – and of course Vienna.

So far so good. We have two women as the players in a theme that whilst having a socially and historically grounded script has the traditional oppositional structure. But Ray’s scenario, guided by his female leads, takes his Western deep into psycho-sexual areas that are almost entirely foreign to the genre. Westerns typically depict emotional relationships such as they are from the male character point of view. This is normally defined as a self sufficiency: the man does not need the woman.  The Cowboy is by definition the lonesome Cowboy (cf John Wayne). 

This suppression of emotion is subverted by Ray, feelings albeit conflicting feelings are poised like loaded springs at the core of the film, defining the characters and investing the action with a substrate of intensity which is both expressed and repressed giving edge to every line of dialogue every movement.  And it feels real.

Ray’s narrative play out is underscored by a matrix of cross referencing relationships. The aforementioned long key scene in Vienna’s saloon bar not only establishes the oppositional plot device centred on Emma and Vienna, it also opens up the two women’s contrasting sexualities. Emma’s self loathing shame at her physical attraction to a gangster which leads her to the twisted logic of wanting his death as the price of eliminating the warped internal conflict caused by her desire.  Emma’s eyes are hot with self anger.  Vienna’s eyes are cold.

Vienna’s sexuality has been used and abused.  Her eyes are cold because she is emotionally dead.  But Vienna has self awareness and at some level within herself; she’s unable to accept the end of love.  She has sent for her old flame Johnny Logan (Johnny Guitar) to give herself one final emotional test.  And in the key saloon section when all the shouting’s done, Emma’s gone, everyone’s left, Johnny and Vienna are alone.   

This is a long scene in which Vienna and Johnny are psychically folded into each other’s space. In their movement through Ray’s framing and dark low key lighting with its shadows and half seen faces, there builds up a erotic intensity between the two ex-lovers of desire acknowledged and desire denied that creates an unbearable tension between their two bodies, their two psyches trapped between acceptance and denial of feeling.  Vienna played by Joan Crawford, her face a mask of blood red lipstick and dark proscenium arched eyebrows, is the most vulnerable;  she has the most to lose as Johnny’s physicality presses upon her. But both of them reveal something at the core of their inner selves, the wounds and vulnerabilities the underlie the play out of their lives.   

Vienna’s embrace of the ritual elements of Ray’s script: the Pieta scene with the wounded gangster, the Blood Wedding and the calmness with which she sits on her horse, a noose about her neck waiting for Emma to hang her, are made all the more credible by the audience’s understanding of her inner toughness, as understood from the scene with Johnny.  Compared to living with her own inner turmoil, the externalities of life, however terrible, can be confronted with equanimity.

Many contemporary movies don’t contrive to be erotic. Films like ‘Anora’ don’t deal with emotions or feeling they just do endless scenes of fucking and humping, squealing and moaning: spectacle has taken over life so that all we see is ‘the fireworks’.  Ray’s ‘Johnny Guitar’ in connecting outer life with inner feeling is a film that not only  blows the traditional Westyern apart, it occupies a space that all to rare in Cinema.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

      

The Seed of the Sacred Fig           Mohammed Rasoulof  (Iran/Ger; 2024)  Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh

Is that a gun in your pocket

Mohammed Rasoulof’s film is a response to the oppression of women in Iran and the regime’s brutal reaction to civil protest against its core theocratically justified laws. However Rasoulof to some extent models the film satirically on the ‘Hollywood Western’ which genre like theocratic Iran, is often marked out by the non-existence of women, or at least their relegation to shadow status.   So ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig Tree’ is characterised by the theme of the ‘gun’  ‘cabin fever’ and the final ‘shoot out.’

‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ (Sacred Fig) is a film made in a spirit of complete defiance of the Iranian Islamic State.  Complete in that Rasoulof makes any film at all in that he has been banned by the Revolutionary Courts from film making (hence the film was shot in secret); complete in that his film is not an oblique or indirect attack on the regime. Both in subject matter and script ‘Sacred Fig’ comprises an uncompromising sustained frontal assault on both the values the Islamic State and the hypercritical bureaucratic apparatus that enforces and sustains them both through intimidation and the promiscuous use of the death sentence.

After ‘Sacred Fig’ is discovered by the authorities to have been produced and subsequently entered into Cannes Festival 2024, there’s no way back for Rasoulof.  He was sentenced to an eight year stretch, sentenced to being flogged, sentenced to the confiscation of all his property. He has managed to escape Iran and find refuge in Europe (using the sort of underground route that in ‘Hit the Road’ Panah Pahani made a film about).  Given the long reach of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard he will always be at risk of assassination by their agents.

This is the film of a brave man, prepared to die for his open hostility and opposition to the regime.  Likewise, unthinkably brave everyone involved in the film, in particular its key players Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki and cinematographer Pooyan Aghababael.  At risk from the vengeful state judiciary they have put life and limb on the line.  As far as is known most of the above are still in Iran.

‘Sacred Fig’ is in two parts which comprise a ravelling of the plot and an unravelling, an intensification and a climax.  In the opening pretitle sequence we see a series of shots: a close shot of bullets rattling down onto a table leading through to Iman (antogonist) driving to a remote shrine where he recites a prayer of thanksgiving.  This section introduces the change in Iman’s work situation from which point the script plays out the forces unleashed by widespread women’s protests consequent on the killing of Mahsa Amini whilst in police custody. 

Iman (sic) has been promoted and he now a judge/investigator for the Revolutionary Courts.  Part of his work will involve signing off the death penalty for ‘politicals’ hence his identity and work are kept secret.  Just in case, he is issued with a gun for self protection.  Cue the vectors of intensification as through their smart phones Iman’s two daughters Razvan and Sana watch the eruption of protest caused by Amini’s death.  These protests also cause a rapid increase in Iman’s workload as he is called on not to investigate incidents arising out of the protests, but rather to rubber stamp the increasing number of death sentences passed by the courts.

To go with his new corporate theocratic status Iman has been given a new spacious apartment in a block reserved for special servants.  Like any employee of a large company or indeed a monolithic dictatorship, those who do the dirty work get well looked after.  But Iman’s new dwelling, which he shares with Najmeh his devout wife   and his two daughters, becomes a strange incubator of all the contradictions and oppositions that riddle contemporary Iran.  As the pressure at work ramps up, the increasing issuance of death warrants starts to exert a toll on Iman, and then something disconcerting happens: HIS GUN DISAPPEARS.

This is Rasoulof’s strategic plot device.  It’s a sort of Hollywood antithesis.  As Raymond Chandler famously quipped when you want to ramp up the action in a movie, get a man with a gun to enter the room: everything changes.  Here the opposite occurs: suddenly a man is without a gun: everything changes.  From becoming a de facto symbol of male authority the gun becomes a defacto symbol of male weakness.  A strange equalisation is premised as Iman supported tacitly by his boss tries to find out what’s going on, which of his family (if any) has the gun. Although the apartment is searched high and low the gun is not found.

Events become more violent. One of Iman’s daughters Razvan, is with her friend who is seriously injured by police buckshot when they are out on the streets of Tehran.  Likewise Iman’s boss increasingly concerned by Iman’s inability to regain possession of his gun, organises a ‘discrete’ interrogation of the women by one of the department’s specialists. But despite this intimidation and being subjected to the tricks of the interrogation trade, the gun continues to elude the men.

The ravelling up section engenders a growing the feeling of claustrophobic paranoia characterising relations between the members of this small family. (a claustrophobic paranoia that perhaps replicates the underlying mood in Iran)  Hermetically sealed in the apartment with only a small uncurtained section of a window out of which to peer at an increasingly unpredictable world, they are trapped between the  violence of the male validation of ‘God’s Law’ and the women’s passive resistance.  The tension evolves out of this power disequilibrium: Iman’s ranting opposed by the tacit silence of the women whose communicative response is mainly mediated through their body language and their eyes.  Iman’s wife plays a pivotal schizo role in this situation.  Although pious and supportive of her husband, she’s torn between her sense of wifely duty and her instinctive desire not just to protect her daughters but to see that the violence they are all experiencing directed against women, can’t always be justified.

For his climactic end section Rasoulof transposes the action.  Iman removes his family from Tehran, drives them to a ruined abandoned city.  At this point the actors are set down in a mythic primal landscape and arriving here the gun ‘issue’ is stripped back to its essence without subterfuge.  It is the male pitted against the women.  Iman finally convinced that one or perhaps all of the women is lying to him and has the gun, drops the mask of polite circumspection and subterfuge, resorting to the unalloyed male capacity for violence.  He assaults his wife and daughters locking them up without food or water. By this stage we have seen that Sana the youngest daughter has the gun, and that perhaps the two girls have been complicit both in taking the gun and successful in their protestations of bemused but affected innocence. Perhaps even Najmeh at some point knew or realised the truth, but kept ‘mum’. 

As Iman’s violent rampage of frustration escalates, Sana escapes and frees her sister and mother.  Following a chase through the ruins, there is finally a ‘high noon’ moment, an absurdist replaying in mock tribute to all such movie tropes, where Sana and Iman (who has been given another gun by his boss) face off against each other with their guns:  the final gun fight.  Slowly approaching her, Iman in classic mode challenges Sana to shoot him. Her guns barks out its defiance but as Sana fires the ground beneath Iman’s feet collapses and he vanishes into the ruins down below. 

So at the last Rasoulof signs off with Marxist-type philisophical observation:

What begins as tragedy ends as farce.

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk