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LOVE TRIANGLE: IT’S A DATE (1940)

February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

August 2, 2016

“Film for film, William A. Seiter may have given more pleasure to more people than any other director of the classical Hollywood era.” – Dave Kehr, Film Comment

William A. Seiter made companionable films, ones populated with sly comic actors given room to work. He started directing silent short comedies in 1915 and ended working on the television sitcom The Gale Storm Show in 1960. In between he was a sensitive shaper of star personas, from the Dadaist antics of Wheeler and Woolsey through the stubborn independence of Ginger Rogers. Less known today are the four 1940s musical comedies he made with star Deanna “Winnipeg’s Sweetheart” Durbin, a cute Canadian teen with a legit soprano singing voice who became a sensation, and was the highest paid actress in Hollywood by 1947 (she retired the following year at age 26). Warner Archive released the first of these, It’s A Date (1940), on DVD last month, and it’s a divertingly funny love triangle, pitting mother (Kay Francis) and daughter (Durbin) against each other for a plum acting role as well as the love of Walter Pidgeon. The set-up is a frame for Seiter and cast to hang gags on, and the deep bench of character players includes Eugene Pallette, Samuel S. Hinds, and S.Z. Sakall.

By the time Seiter joined the Deanna Durbin team, Universal had already hit upon a successful formula. Producer Joe Pasternak would select tales of problem-solving pluck that would provide excuses for Durbin to sing operatic solos. It’s a Date is no different, though it makes some concessions to her advancing age (she started in features at 14, and was now 19), by introducing the possibility of love and marriage in the person of the much older Walter Pidgeon, though he eventually falls for Kay Francis to keep Durbin’s squeaky clean image intact.

The screenplay, by Norman Krasna, has a tidy structure in which famed stage diva Georgia Drake (Francis) slowly cedes center stage to her irrepressible daughter Pamela. The fulcrum point is the casting of the new play by Carl Ober (S.Z. Sakall) to be directed by Sidney Simpson (Samuel S. Hinds). The theatrical duo initially offers the role to Georgia, but do an about face after seeing Pamela perform the lead part in a dress rehearsal. Pamela, without knowing her mother has already accepted the part, readily agrees to take it on as her first big break. She sails to see Georgia in Honolulu, and meets the prankster John Arlen (Walter Pidgeon) on board. Seeing her rehearse her lines of the romantic tragedy, he believes she is depressed, and tries to pull her out of it with some ingenious flirtation.

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Once Pamela learns that she is replacing her mother in the play, she vows to quit the part without Georgia finding out. She is so disillusioned by the whole business she plans on marrying John and ditching stage life forever. But of course things don’t work out that way. John falls for Georgia, Georgia is intrigued but would rather not steal her daughter’s boyfriend, and Pamela goes to elaborate lengths to hide the secret about the role she is desperately trying to quit. It makes for effective farce, and the whole cast is game to keep the machinery moving. Seiter uses rhyming shots to keep the comparison between mother and daughter going. At an opening night party Pamela decides to make a grand entrance by waltzing in and laughing heartily, unbeknownst to her, Georgia is making a similar entrance across the room, and in a couture gown to boot (Francis is impeccably dressed throughout). Pamela is always getting upstaged, that is until Carl Ober sees her manic energy on display and decides she is perfect for his play. And Durbin is an effective motormouth, chewing off pages of dialogue with bright-eyed energy. I could do without her soprano solos, which are sung in extreme close-ups which grind the story to a halt, but it is one of those boxes a Durbin film had to tick.

Hinds and Sakall act less like theatrical impresarios than indulgent uncles buying their precocious niece the prettiest toy in the store. Sakall is bubbly, Hinds is cool, but both coo at Durbin with undisguised adoration. The other man she entrances is John Arlen, a traveling playboy who falls for her idiosyncratic charms. He first sees her through a porthole, rehearsing her lines out the to balcony in the ocean. But he thinks the sad lines she is stating are real, so concocts a scheme to cheer her up. He pretends to be a stowaway, which immediately fires up Pamela’s imagination, and soon she is bribing the staff to bring him food and engineering plans to sneak him offshore (he’ll wear her clothes). This whole ship sequence is a series of gags with little impact on the plot, but it gives Seiter, Durbin and Pidgeon a lot to play with. Each character has an imbalance of information that makes them seem the fool. On the ship it’s Arlen, but once off of it Pamela goes in the dark, as the adult flirtation between him and Georgia flies above her head.

All the clanking machinery comes together at a Governor’s Ball in Honolulu (the honking Eugene Pallette is the good-natured governor), in which Hinds and Sakall tumble in to break the casting news to Georgia, while John is going to propose to her. Pamela, meanwhile, is convinced John is going to propose to her. The stentorian Pidgeon is convincing as a ladies man flustered for the first time. He sweats through his proposal with suavity while Durbin belts out “Musetta’s Street Song” from La Boheme. It’s well-orchestrated chaos overseen by Seiter and the Durbin star machine. Like most Seiter productions, it’s a warm, winning diversion in which the cast is having a ball and invites you in on the joke.

SUMMER OF ROHMER: THE ROMANCE OF ASTREA AND CELADON (2007)

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July 26, 2016

I am ending my Summer of Rohmer series with a film set in the spring. Yes, it is a shocking betrayal of the series’ seasonal brand, but I was eager to revisit The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007), and extend my stay in Rohmer’s world. Over the last six weeks I have traveled to a variety of France’s hottest vacation spots for romantic anxiety, from a Saint-Tropez country house in La Collectionneuse (1967) to Dinard, the beachside town in A Summer’s Tale (1997). The Romance of Astrea and Celadon transported me to the valley of the Sioule in Auvergne, a bucolic green landscape for star-crossed lovers in 5th-century Gaul to suffer in. For his final feature (he passed away in 2010), Rohmer adapted Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astree (ca. 1607 – 1627), a 5,000 page hit at the royal courts. Rohmer focused on the spine of the digressive novel – the romance between the shepherd Celadon and the shepherdess Astrea, and the miscommunication, madness, and masquerades that delay their union. Though set millennia in the past, the film works over familiar Rohmerian ground, as it ponders the nature of love and fidelity, while trying to square the contradictory impulses of each.

Astrea (Stéphanie Crayencour) and Celadon (Andy Gillet) are secretly sworn lovers, their passion closely guarded from their feuding parents. Celadon pretends to flirt with local girls to protect their cover, but one afternoon he goes too far, allowing one of these faux-paramours to kiss him. Astrea happened to be walking by, and immediately ejects him from her life, forbidding him to ever enter her line of sight again. Celadon, a sensitive poet-type with model cheekbones, takes this to heart, and attempts to drown himself in the river. But three upper-class nymphs spy his soggy body, and nurse him back to health in their castle. Galathée (Véronique Reymond) wants to seduce this shepherd, but all he cares about his living his life in solitude away from Astrea, to fulfill her wish. The nymph Léonide (Cécile Cassel) sympathizes with the poor lover, and tries to convince him to return to Astrea, who believes him to be dead. A stubborn literalist, Celadon cannot adjust to the new reality. His fidelity instructs him to honor their love, he has to obey her request and remain sequestered. But such actions drive both Astrea and Celadon to melancholy tears. Only the intervention of a kindly druid and timely cross-dressing can bring Celadon within Astrea’s sight, reigniting their passions.

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon had a long gestation. Originally it was to be developed by Pierre Zucca, a filmmaker who Rohmer admired and advocated for. As Noel Herpe and Antoine de Baecque write in Eric Rohmer: A Biography, Zucca also planned his feature around the central romance, but was ready to include some of the novel’s more fantastical elements, like a “Fountain of Love that allows Astrea to see her heart’s desire again”, and a “rather mad final sequence in which Celadon contemplates the body of the sleeping Astrea, which is transformed into a fabulous landscape while Celadon himself visibly shrinks.” Zucca could not find financing for the project despite Rohmer’s vocal support. Zucca would pass away from cancer in 1995. Rohmer thought about mounting the adaptation as early as 1999, when he did some location scouting, but nothing came of it until 2007.

Rohmer did not have the same vision as Zucca, eliminating the more fantastical elements and focusing solely on the central couple. He was after a pared down lucidity, into which nature, and accidents, would intervene. For the first time he shot with two cameras (both Super 16mm) , which were operated by DP Diane Baratier and Francoise Etchegaray). Shooting with two cameras saved time, which was of the essence because Rohmer was suffering from scoliosis, which hindered his mobility. As with his previous adaptations like The Marquise of O or Perceval, Rohmer was slavishly faithful to the text, and when asked what he added to the Astrea and Celadon if the text was verbatim, he responded:

Nature! In this novel, landscapes are mentioned but not described. The sense of nature that appeared toward the eighteenth century, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, did not yet exist; one doesn’t feel nature really living. Thus what cinema contributes is elements like wind (I was lucky to have wind) that are not at all in the novel.

This response is strikingly similar to what D.W. Griffith lamented to Ezra Goodman in 1944: “What the modern movie lacks is beauty – the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” That beauty is almost the subject of The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, the gusts whipping the actresses intricately braided hair and letting Celadon’s lanky locks flutter over his face. The further Rohmer went back in time the more radical his aesthetic, as in the flagrantly artificial theatricality of Perceval and the presentational period piece of Astrea and Celadon. Rohmer recorded mostly direct sound (except for his precious birdsong that was added in mixing), and so wanted a location in which 21st century sounds would not be audible. This eliminated the Haute-Loire (which was slagged in the opening crawl for being “disfigured by urbanization” – for which they sued him and lost), choosing the unspoiled area around the Sioule river instead, a remarkably pristine stretch of hilly forests and glades.

The lead performers have a challenging task of navigating d’Urfé’s demanding, archaic text while wearing period dress (draping cloth and lots of exposed nipple). Stéphanie Crayencour is a diaphanous blonde who Rohmer chose because “he liked the way she held her head and her generous bosom.” Andy Gillet looked carved out of stone or a Calvin Klein ad, with his high, razor sharp cheekbones and wide-set eyes. They float lightly over d’Urfé’s dialogue, seeking music in the language, both performing in a lyrical, light footed style. They remain in disharmony until the final act’s glorious plot contrivance – in which Celadon dresses as a woman and arrives at a guest for the blessing of a new temple. As “Alexia”, he begins an intimate friendship with Astrea, until their closeness sparks into kisses. To Astrea she is giving herself over to a same sex attraction, while Celadon is indulging his love while technically honoring her request. She is not seeing “Celadon”, so he is not in her sight. But the masquerade cannot last forever, and when Astrea turns and prays that “Alexia” is really Celadon, he drops the mask. Love and fidelity again come into alignment, and they embrace in a new, tear-stained awareness of the other’s truth. It is an ending of ecstatic revelation, one only rivaled by The Green Ray in Rohmer’s work. And in a career forever concerned with exposing the feminine in his personality, to end with a scene of cross-dressing, of entering into the female domain and learning its secrets, is a lovely wish-fulfillment fantasy for one of cinema’s great directors of women.

For those who have traveled with me on this Rohmer Summer Vacation, I thank you.

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon is available on a watchable DVD from Koch Lorber, and on the crazy expensive Region B Blu-ray Rohmer box set from Potemkine. For the previous five entries in the Summer of Rohmer, click below:

La Collectionneuse (1967)

Claire’s Knee (1970)

Pauline at the Beach (1983)

The Green Ray (1986)

A Summer’s Tale (1997)

SUMMER OF ROHMER: A SUMMER’S TALE (1996)

February 27, 2020July 21, 2025 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

July 19, 2016

My summer of Rohmer enters its fifth week by docking at the rocky Breton seaside town of Dinard, the location of A Summer’s Tale (1996). Like all of Eric Rohmer’s summer vacation films, it is about hesitation and uncertainty, the holidays a transient borderland before the return to adulthood, when decisions have to be made. A Summer’s Tale involves a moody engineering student and hopeful musician named Gaspard who is romantically entangled with three women on the beach. He is entranced by the idea of love but is rather afraid of the physical reality, and masters the art of the indeterminate reply, a master of escape. One of Rohmer’s few male protagonists (the film often feels like a throwback to the masculine bull sessions of the Moral Tales), Gaspard is reported to be a highly autobiographical character who runs through a composite of events from the director’s life. Rohmer doesn’t look back with nostalgia, but with a lucid gimlet eye, his Gaspard one of high ideals and evasive, indecisive actions. A Summer’s Tale is streaming on Netflix, and is available on DVD from Big World Pictures.

A Summer’s Tale is the third of Eric Rohmer’s “Tales of the Four Seasons” series, following A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Winter (1992). Rohmer readily admitted its autobiographical qualities to Cahiers du Cinema at the time of its release: “Of all the films I’ve made, I think this is the most personal vehicle. Everything that is in this film is true. They are either things that I experienced in my youth or things that I noticed.” It was shot in Dinard, which was close to Parame, where he had married his wife Therese in 1957. For his stand-in he chose Melvil Poupaud, a rail-thin, gawkily handsome 24-year-old who had been making films for Raul Ruiz since he was a child (i.e. the delirious City of Pirates, 1983). Poupaud was to play Gaspard, a boy stuck between his school (engineering) and his love (music). He scoots of to Dinard on a slender thread of affection for a girl named Lena (Aurelia Nolin), who made vague promises to get there during the summer. Before her arrival, Gaspard strikes up a friendship with Margot (Amanda Langlet, Pauline at the Beach), an anthropology student who is working at the local creperie. Her boyfriend is halfway around the world, so she takes an interest in this melancholy narcissist. Assuming Lena has ditched him, Gaspard reluctantly bows to the attentions of Solene (Gwenaelle Simon), a flirtatious collector of men looking for a summer fling.

The majority of the film is taken up by the conversations between Margot and Gaspard, walking down the beach, around the rocky paths, and through the nearby forests. He claims to be a romantic, impulsively running to Dinard on the off chance he runs into Lena there. But then when Solene presents herself, these ideals disappear, and he begins to see the light in Solene’s eyes…. Margot is intrigued by his passion and disappointed by his predictability. She is clearly attracted to Gaspard, but continually pulls back from any romantic entanglement. She recognizes that he is something of a barnacle, happy to latch on to any passing vessel. The nautical metaphor is apt, because throughout the film Gaspard composes a catchy little sea shanty about a “corsair’s daughter” traveling the world. Rohmer wrote the lilting melody, which is threaded throughout the film and changes its meaning in context. We first hear it whistled over the credits, and on Gaspard’s guitar as he is working out the arrangement in his room. He is inspired to complete it after Margot takes him to hear stories from a local sailor about their folk songs. This is a boy serious about his art, wanting to channel his passions into song. Later we learn that he is composing it for Lena, but when he is alone with Solene he plays it for her as part of his tentative seduction routine. The song is as changeable as he is, and is thus drained of meaning.

According to Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe’s Eric Rohmer: A Biography, Poupaud borrowed some of Rohmer’s mannerisms for his performance, “rubbing his hands or biting his lips as a sign of indecisiveness”. Poupaud was not a fan of Rohmer’s previous films, finding them to be “a bit boring”, but he was fascinated by the man. “As soon as I met him I realized he’d put a lot of himself into this character. Everything I say, everything he has to say, all the long monologues about the way he doesn’t feel like he’s part of a community, and all these ideas I really think they came from Rohmer himself. The first time we met he didn’t talk very much, he was very shy, very intense, his blue eyes—he would look at you like a beast almost, he was very wild.”

They would shoot on the street in public, and hope no one would look into the camera. To keep people from noticing there was a crew shooting, they hid high-frequency microphones in the actor’s clothes (dispensing with a boom) and “Rohmer, made unrecognizable by his dark glasses and kerchief on his head, moved away from the filming team and waited for the crowd’s curiosity to dissipate. Then he inconspicuously lifted his kerchief, which meant, in his coded language, “Action!”. It was a guerilla kind of filmmaking that was also highly planned. Poupaud recalled that “Eric had calculated the schedule of the tides, the statistics for the sun, he had scouted sites a year in advance…” This kind of precisely organized chaos is what makes a Rohmer film. Actors befriend and talk for hours with Rohmer before shooting, but once on the set he never speaks about the characters and prefers to capture scenes in one take. Poupaud describes this approach as “everything was already in place, everything was already framed, he was just waiting for reality to come into the field.”

Rohmer is preparing the ground for reality, hoping to capture the memories of his hesitations and uncertainties as a young man, revived in the form of Poupaud. The film would not work however, without the mischievous, enigmatic performance of Amanda Langlet, who had last worked with Rohmer nearly thirteen years earlier in Pauline at the Beach (1983), and now 29 years old. Just like on Pauline, she is a wise observer, taking in the delusions of her friends and family. Her face is constantly reacting to Poupaud’s philosophical meanderings, and with a twinkling of an eye, or a downturn of the lip, can extinguish their brief flirtation. A Summer’s Tale ends with bittersweet non-closure as Gaspard sails away from his emotions and girlfriends, leaving Margot on the deck as the only adult ashore.

The previous entries in my Summer of Rohmer:

La Collectionneuse (1967)

Claire’s Knee (1970)

Pauline at the Beach (1983)

The Green Ray (1986)

SUMMER OF ROHMER: THE GREEN RAY (1986)

February 27, 2020July 21, 2025 robertemmetsweeney3 Comments

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

July 12, 2016

My Summer of Rohmer has been held over for its fourth smash week! For the uninitiated, I have been writing about the summer-set films of Eric Rohmer, allowing my vacation-less self to live vicariously through his characters. I have already traveled to Saint-Tropez for La Collectionneuse (1967), the French Alps for Claire’s Knee (1970), and Normandy for Pauline at the Beach (1983). Today I join one of Rohmer’s most peripatetic souls, Delphine (played by Marie Rivière), through Cherbourg, the Alps, and Biarritz in The Green Ray (1986). Delphine has recently separated from her long-distance boyfriend, leaving her alone and without direction for her summer vacation. A melancholy romantic, she is fiercely protective of her independence, and forever seeking the man who is worthy to end it. She spends her holiday bouncing from resort town to resort town, staying long enough until her loneliness overwhelms her and she is forced to move on. She begins to see portents all around, creating meaning by turning the world into a Tarot card to be read. Rohmer finds the beauty in her intense ascetic solitude, and grants her an ending of offhand sublimity.

It has been absurdly difficult to see The Green Ray in the United States since its theatrical release, where it was re-titled Summer and topped Andrew Sarris’ top ten list. The Fox Lorber DVD is out-of-print and pricey, and there are no streaming options (though VHS versions can be had cheaply). I viewed it on a UK Region 2 DVD, part of Arrow’s eight-film Eric Rohmer Collection, and it is also available on Blu-ray from the French label Potemkine, although only as part of a massively expensive box set (and it is locked for Region B – so you must have an all-region player to view). However you can get your hands on it, it’s worth it.

Rohmer first conceived of The Green Ray after seeing the following classified ad: “I am beautiful. I am from Biarritz. I should please, and men pay no attention to me, why?”. He combined this with his childhood memories of reading Jules Verne’s The Green Ray, a romance of the Scottish highlands in which a young girl avoids romance until she can see the titular ray, a flash of light that occurs after the sun sets, and which, per Verne, “has the virtue of making him who has seen it impossible to be deceived in matters of sentiment; at its apparition all deceit and falsehood are done away, and he who has been fortunate enough once to behold it is enabled to see closely into his own heart and read the thoughts of others.” The film takes the lonely yearning of the classified ad and the mystical romance of the Verne novel and combines it into the character of Delphine, created together by Rohmer and actress Marie Rivière.

Rohmer and Rivière held endless conversations about the character, with the director recording the actress’ thoughts on everything from her relationships to her vegetarianism, all of which were incorporated into the script. In the newly translated Eric Rohmer, A Biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe, Rivière recalls Rohmer saying that, “I’m reproached for writing sentences that are too long. But in life, people talk a long time without stopping. And I’m going to demonstrate that. No one will see the difference between a text I’ve written and an improvised text.” In order to create an atmosphere conducive to such improvisation, Rohmer opted for a completely female crew, from the sound engineer to the camera operator. He hired the 23-year-old Sophie Maintigneux to be the cinematographer, “giving her a small Aaton 16mm camera fitted with an old-fashioned zoom lens. Although he sometimes discreetly asked Sophie to use this zoom lens…in general he let her set the frame the way she wanted.” Francois Etchegaray was the production supervisor, who had already helped Rohmer on Full Moon in Paris. Rohmer would tell Marie Claire magazine that “It isn’t that I like girls so much that I feel the girl that resides in every man. I feel it in me.”

It was an austere, cheap 16mm production, shot in chronological order. Etchegaray was frequently annoyed by Rohmer’s miserliness, but toughed it out, arranging housing with friends and family at each of the locations and casting locals wherever possible. After it was shot, it sat in the can for two years while Rohmer decided what to do with this strange object. Eventually it was cut into presentable form by his longtime editor Cecile Decugis and her assistant Lisa Heredia. He decided on the unusual route of giving it to the cable television channel Canal+. They would debut it on television before its theatrical premiere. From the Canal+ advance and the one paid by Orion Classics in the United States, the film was almost entirely paid for before it’s opening. It’s theatrical life was not harmed by debuting on television, either, as it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and attracted more than 460,000 viewers in France. Baecque and Herpe claim it was “certainly one of the most profitable films in the history of French cinema.”

Rohmer wanted the intimacy of a home movie, and got a tremblingly open-nerved performance from Rivière as a result. Incorporating her own improvisations with Rohmer’ written texts, Rivière’s Delphine is annoyingly sympathetic, a vulnerable introvert and judgmental scold. So intent on protecting the domain of her self, she can lash out at others simply wanting to entertain her. Any incursion into her space is a violation to Delphine, whether well-meaning or no. And Rivière can throw a fine tantrum with her long-levered limbs. But then she is given moments of privileged silence. There are three pivotal sequences of solitude at her vacation stops, where she walks off on her own and contemplates her loneliness. Rivière’s face can be a mask when with others, but here it cracks, she is so utterly alone against the vastness of nature. To invest this solitude with meaning, she begins to read signs. Throughout her journey she stumbles upon the color green, whether on street signs or the playing cards that mysteriously turn up at her feet. Though she denies a belief in the supernatural during an earlier conversation with friends, as the vacation drags on she begins to grasp for such belief as coincidences pile up around her and a group of scholars discuss Verne’s The Green Ray in Biarritz.

A fugue (composed by Jean-Louis Valero) intermittently plays on the soundtrack, a rare use of non-diegetic sound by Rohmer, as Delphine seeks the ray, and impulsively flirts with a cabinetmaker (Vincent Gauthier) at the Biarritz train station. Everything starts to glow with meaning as she travels with him to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, at which a gift shop is named Le Rayon Vert, and the sun begins to set over the horizon. He asks Delphine to stay with her a few days. She delays a response until after the sunset, waiting to see the ray, for the truth, and for some rest in the arms of another.

I previously wrote about The Green Ray in 2010. Check it out here if you can’t get enough.

SUMMER OF ROHMER: PAULINE AT THE BEACH (1983)

February 27, 2020July 21, 2025 robertemmetsweeney3 Comments

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

July 5, 2016

Welcome to the third week of my Summer of Rohmer, in which I fill the void of my own vacation-less summer by vicariously joining the beach holidays of Eric Rohmer’s neurotic, attractive, and hyper-articulate characters. I started the series by visiting a Saint-Tropez cottage in La Collectionneuse, followed with a scenic French Alps home in Claire’s Knee, while today I scurried off to a Normandy beach house in Pauline at the Beach. We have leapt from Rohmer’s cycle of “Moral Tales” to his “Comedies and Proverbs”, as well as his shift to female protagonists (which began with his previous film A Good Marriage (1982)).

Pauline at the Beach (1983) is set during the waning weeks of summer, with Marion (Arielle Dombasle) bringing her 15-year-old niece Pauline (Amanda Langlet) to spend a few parent-less weeks before they both have to return to work and school. There is a pressure to find friends and have a fling before the holiday runs out. The waifish blonde Marion is immediately pursued by two men, the dewy-eyed romantic Pierre (Pascal Greggory) and the older, pragmatic womanizer Henri (Feodor Atkine). Rohmer frames the film around Pauline’s observations. She is a quiet, almost background presence throughout, silently weighing Marion’s actions as she falls for Henri and keeps Pierre on her string. Rohmer leads off his Comedies and Proverbs films with a quote, and here it is one from Chretien de Troyes: “He who speaks too much does himself harm.” Marion, Pierre, and Henri talk incessantly about the nature of love, but show no knowledge of how to embody it. Instead they remain irrevocably wrapped up inside themselves. I produced the DVD and Blu-ray of Pauline at the Beach for Kino Lorber (complete with an Eric Rohmer interview and a fine booklet essay by Michelle Orange), so consider that a full disclosure of my biases.

The French summer holiday is unfathomably long to this American, who snags week-long respites if he can afford it. In Pauline at the Beach, Pauline has been vacationing for months, and wants to use the Normandy trip as a final unwinding before a return to responsibility. This is Marion’s only holiday, having spent the rest of the summer preparing her next fashion line. So there is already an inset anxiety – the fun is about to end. Pauline had spent the previous two months with her parents, and is free for the first time. Marion has started peeking at swatches for her fashion design job, which looms at the end of their stay. So the seductions and crushes seem to happen on fast forward – Marion immediately falls into bed with the mercenary Henri, and Pierre declares his undying love to her (they had a brief fling a few summers back). All the while Pauline stays silent, unwilling to take part in their philosophical parlor games, in which they intellectualize their respective thoughts on love, a Plato’s Symposium if held by untrammeled narcissists.

They all have different manners of self-regard. Henri believes himself to be a “nomad” who “can’t stand a woman who makes me think of her as furniture.” This is a flattering way for him to justify his serial womanizing, enabling their freedom instead of justifying his pursuit of pleasure. Marion, recently divorced, is not interested in freedom. She wants love to manifest physically (“I’ve never burned with love except in dreams”), and transport her beyond herself. It is a storybook vision. Pierre says that “passion that flames too quickly burns out too fast.” He is trying to position himself for Marion’s sake, as he knows she has never “burned” for him. He is playing a longer game, “for a deep and lasting love”, one that unfolds over time. His is the most grounded version, but he is too jealous and petty for him to realize his noble goals. He is always focusing on his own pain, his own feeling of being slighted, to have time to cultivate his higher emotions. Pauline only chimes in with, “I don’t agree with any of you, except maybe Pierre…You must know people to love them.”

Rohmer might have tweaked her phrase to say that he had to know people before they could act in his movies. He had first worked with Arielle Dombasle and Pascal Greggory in his 1979 stage production of Kleist’s Catherine de Heilbronn, which suffered withering reviews. The actors, however, were thrilled with the experience, and were eager to work in Rohmer’s collaborative, intensely rehearsed style once again. The story’s origins went back to some of his plays in the ’1950s, but it didn’t begin to take true shape until the late ’70s for a group of scenes he titled Loup, y es-tu? (Wolf, Are you There?). The totality came together on a train ride filled with loud soldiers. Rohmer is quoted in Eric Rohmer: A Biography: “under those conditions, I couldn’t read, it was impossible to read, but at the same time, ultimately, it’s easier to write. So I concentrated; I had a notebook and I began writing very fast without listening to what was being said around me and I really had the idea of the continuity of the film.” He kept tinkering with it up until the start of shooting on A Good Marriage.

In terms of casting the biggest question mark was Pauline. He found a photo of Amanda Langlet in the French Production Society’s file of child actors, and after a brief telephone call with her cast her on the spot. Fifteen years old, Rohmer treated her like any other member of the cast, consulting “her regarding the psychological details of her character”, recording her thoughts on a tape recorder. According biographers Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe, who listened to the tapes, “it is hard to distinguish directed improvisation from desultory conversation”, as Langlet blurred into the character of Pauline. Through all of this collaborative work Langlet gives a wonderfully subdued performance, a watcher and thinker not yet ready to take center stage in her own life.

Once again Nestor Almendros was the director of cinematography, though he had begun to get tired of Rohmer’s thrifty ways. Head camera operator Virgine Thevenet told de Baecque and Herpe: “In the United States, Nestor had become a star. Back in France, it drove him nuts to find Eric still quibbling about paying for his coffee.” The reigning visual influence on this film was Matisse, specifically his painting Romanian Blouse. The red, white, and blue color scheme would be adopted, and counter to their usual insistence on not altering locations, they would repaint hallways to keep the motif intact. Rohmer hung a reproduction in Langlet’s room, and Rohmer was delighted to find that she shrugged her shoulders in a manner similar to the painting in a restaurant scene with Greggory.

Pauline at the Beach was poorly received by French critics, with Le Figaro calling it “a strong contender for the prize for the most ridiculous film of 1983″, reserving the most damning insults for the “illiterate” dialogue and Arielle Dombasle’s performance. Perhaps the schematic nature of the dialogue plays better in translation, but Dombasle is a delight, a frothy, lightly comic performance around which the men circle and Pauline observes with bemused interest. The film was a still a financial success at home and abroad, and stands as one of Rohmer’s purely pleasurable works, from the location (the sad loveliness of an emptied out beach town) to the outfits (I don’t have the language for fashion, but my wife exclaimed any time Arielle Dombasle appeared in a new ensemble), to the romantic nettle woven by their pretty words. Marion, Henri, and Pierre cannot live up to those words, but Pauline, with her reflective, penetrating stare, offers the possibility of authenticity, and an enduring love.

SUMMER OF ROHMER: CLAIRE’S KNEE (1970)

February 27, 2020December 11, 2023 robertemmetsweeney4 Comments

June 28, 2016

My Summer of Rohmer continues with Claire’s Knee (1970), the fifth of the director’s Six Moral Tales. It is a story of fidelity and an experiment in desire, in which a betrothed vacationer enters into a flirtation with two teenage girls. As with La Collectionneuse (which I wrote about last week), it takes place within the span of a summer holiday, this time on Lake Annecy in Haute-Savoie. Instead of enjoying the transcendent view of the Alps, Rohmer’s characters debate the nature of love, whether it is an act of will or something more…elusive. Summer is once again used as a crucible to test one’s belief. La Collectionneuse depicts the curdling of male desire outside of Saint-Tropez, while the male protagonist of Claire’s Knee is trying to trigger his lust in an attempt to overcome it.

The man is Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy) a rakish diplomat living in Sweden who returns to Haute-Savoie in order to sell his family’s vacation home. While there he runs into Aurora (Aurora Cornu), a writer and provocateur who challenges Jérôme to pursue a flirtation with the reflective teenage girl next door, Laura (Beatrice Romand), who harbors a crush on him. This adventure will help Aurora invent an ending for her unfinished novel, and kill the remaining time left on her holiday. Jérôme accepts Aurora’s invitation, to help out a friend , indulge his baser instincts, and to test the strength of his love for his fiancee Lucinde. His puppy-love flirtation with Laura, which they both quickly tire of, further cements his love for his betrothed, but then he spies Laura’s half-sister Claire, a waifish beauty with a distractingly sculptural knee. Jérôme pours his remaining energies into touching that joint, for if he can channel his unwieldy desire into that one chaste locale, it will re-confirm his feelings for Lucinde. With Lucinde he does not have the same power over his will, his emotions emanate from something beyond. Lucinde “is everything. You can’t add to everything.”

Like all of the Moral Tales, Claire’s Knee originated as story Rohmer had written years earlier, one from the ’40s entitled, “Who is Like God?”. It started with the de Sade epigram, “It is not pleasure that makes people happy, but desire and the obstacles that are put in the way of realizing that desire.” The basic set-up was already present, of a thirty-something about to marry who dallies with two teenagers near his vacation home. In the final version of the story, also titled “Claire’s Knee” (1949), the man, Jérôme, spies the girls playing tennis, and hides their balls to lure them to his home. This is a more predatory scenario than that in the film, and Rohmer has Aurora present this earlier version as an idea for a novel she was never able to complete. So in the film Jérôme agrees to playact the character from her book, adding to the blurring of reality and fiction that Rohmer was so skillful at with his performers.

Aurora Cornu, a Romanian writer, essentially played herself. According to Eric Rohmer, A Biography (Columbia University Press) Rohmer, “had known this woman of letters for many years and liked her frankness and anti-conformism. Together, they spent whole afternoons reorganizing the world on the second floor of the Cafe de Flore or visiting Parisian churches.” In the film Rohmer has her recreate their lively discussions with Jean-Claude Brialy, whom Rohmer liked for his dandified looks. He only gave him one instruction before shooting: “to let his beard grow.” Laurence de Monaghan, who played Claire at the age of 16, was spotted coming out of the Royal Saint-Germain hotel, a non-professional actor who had the ethereal look Rohmer was seeking.

The most striking performances in the film come from the youngsters, especially Beatrice Romand as Laura and Fabrice Luchini as her motormouthed friend Vincent. Romand looks like a sly sylph under a mop of curls, and is one of those rare actors who can convey the act of thinking without saying a word. Her face is a seismograph of reactions to Jérôme’s flirtations, at once ecstatic, disbelieving, and suspicious. It turns out the latter is correct, and midway through the movie she pivots her attentions from the debonair Jérôme to the gawky, overactive Vincent, embodied in a thoroughly charming performance by Luchini. His body has not quite balanced out yet, so he speaks as fast as possible to distract from his awkwardness. He impressed Rohmer by reciting Nietzsche to him the first time they met, and “made the whole Claire’s Knee group laugh until they cried by imitating Rohmer or by developing one of the far-fetched theories that were his specialty – to the point that Rohmer let him improvise his own text in front of the camera.”

Following the success of La Collectionneuse and My Night at Maud’s, Rohmer was granted his largest budget to date, thanks to an investment from Bert Schneider (of BBS Productions), who had just produced Easy Rider. Though it filmed in a rapid six weeks, Rohmer had a full crew for the first time, complete with set photographer and camera dolly. He had so much time to prepare that, according to co-producer Barbet Schroeder, “the maddest case of anticipation was for the sequence in which Jean-Claude Brialy leans down to pick a rose. A year earlier, Rohmer had planted the rose at the spot where it was supposed to bloom, calculating the date when it would open, which was written down in the work plan…Everything happened as planned!”

Once again Nestor Almendros was the director of photography, opting for a cooler mountainous palette than the hothouse of La Collectionneuse. Still utilizing the 1.33:1 frame, the film unspools in a series of calm centered two-shots, as Jérôme determinedly goes about his seductive business. For Jérôme his love for Lucinde has been sanctified as something beyond desire while for Claire and Laura he is a rather clumsy, if handsome, intruder upon their still developing amorous adventures, which often spill outside the frame. Jérôme and Aurora hold the center, with Laura and Claire going beyond. They have their own affairs to get in order and desires to slake.

SUMMER OF ROHMER: LA COLLECTIONNEUSE (1967)

February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 robertemmetsweeney5 Comments

June 21, 2016

Summer has officially arrived, along with the mounting pressure to enjoy it before it passes. The filmmaker who most deeply investigated the contradictions of the sweaty months is Eric Rohmer, whose summer films contain placid surfaces rippled by violent speech. His characters are surrounded by beauty and inevitably beset by anxieties of how their time there is being wasted, ticking away. Since I have no summer getaway planned, I have chosen instead to get away with Rohmer, by viewing his summer-set films, and writing about them throughout the season. My guide will be the door stopping Eric Rohmer: A Biography (Columbia University Press), by Antoine Baecque and Noël Herpe (newly translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal). First up is La Collectionneuse (1967), part of his series of Six Moral Tales, a chronicle of a poisoned vacation near Saint-Tropez. Two men attempt to subsume themselves in nature, but instead resort to their true selves when a young woman joins the house, whereupon they descend to macho posing and bickering.

La Collectionneuse originated in a short story that Rohmer wrote in 1949 entitled, “Chantal, ou l’épreuve” (Chantal, or the test), and was the third of his “Moral Tales” to be filmed (after The Bakery Girl of Monceauand Suzanne’s Career, both 1963), though it was the fourth in Rohmer’s intended order. He had to delay My Night at Maud’s for funding issues, so the cheaper Collectionneuse, which takes place almost entirely at one location, went first. The story was about two dandies who stay in a villa with a young woman of dubious reputation who had “an angelic face, a dazzling complexion, and the manners of a middle-school student.” Rohmer adapted the basic scenario for Collectionneuse, and brought along friends to make it on a shoestring. Having recently come off making a string of educational films for French schools, Rohmer was especially interested in documentary experiments, which, he wrote,

“A welcome development is emerging in the domain of informative film that resembles less and less a picture album accompanied by a sonorous and hollow commentary. …The means used are very direct, drawing mainly on the speech of the interview, on debate, on conversation, all of which are means, despite what people have said, that are highly cinematic and modern. Thus alongside the fiction film, a domain that is infinitely vaster than that of classic documentary is being constituted.”

He would carry over some of these lessons to Collectionneuse, on which he would record “remarks made by his actors, who had been asked to speak freely about their passions and love affairs.” Rohmer bent the fiction to fit the reality of his performers, who were mostly non-professionals.

Adrien (Patrick Bauchau, A View to a Kill) is an art collector in the process of raising funds to start his own gallery. Needing a break from the stress, he accepts a friend’s offer to stay at his vacation house outside of Saint-Tropez. Also there is Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle), a mercurial sculptor with time to kill, and Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a young woman who is playing the field, heading out with a new man almost every night. Adrien undertook “to really do nothing”, Daniel was his partner in embracing the void, while Haydée went about her nighttime searches for love. Daniel and Adrien have reached a state of decadence and rot, ready to concede the end of the ’60s dream. They wear ratty nightgowns while Haydée is grasping for the future. Daniel and Adrian treat their life as a game, and Haydée as a pawn, a diversion from their boring adult lives, not realizing that she has already surpassed them.

Bauchau was a friend of Rohmer’s producer Barbet Schroeder, and had been a co-producer on the French New Wave omnibus films Paris Seen By…, which Rohmer organized. He is a lithe, leonine performer, a man aware of his own beauty who can easily convey Adrien’s perplexity when Haydée does not swoon over him. She becomes a curiosity and a puzzle to Adrien’s narcissistic mind. Daniel Pommereulle was an artist friend of Bauchau who was essentially playing himself. He was also a sculptor of strange objects on a break, but instead of going on vacation he made a film. He is of a similar slim body type as Bauchau, but less commanding. He recedes where Bauchau pushes forward.

Haydée was cast after Rohmer met her at a party at his his pal Paul Gégauff’s house. She was working in real estate, and had never acted before. Her inexperience is appropriate for the role, as both actor and character are thrust into a strange situation without much prior experience. Haydée is presented first in the prologue as a visual element, the image of an ingenue with Louise Brooks hair and kewpie doll features. Rohmer breaks her down in a series of close-ups of torso/knees/feet, an objectified image that the film will undermine as she toys with the juvenile games played by Adrien and Daniel. Rohmer would run the three actors through multiple rehearsals before shooting a frame, where they would “invent the text they were going to perform”. The rehearsals were an artistic choice as well as an economic necessity. Not willing to waste a frame of film, Rohmer rarely shot more than one take. His DP Nestor Almendros recalled in his autobiography, A Man With a Camera, that, “We were able to keep the ratio of footage taken to film length at only 1.5:1. A record! We used only 15,000 feet of negative…in the laboratories they thought they were the rushes of a short.”

This was Almendros’ first feature film, and it displays a sumptuously beautiful use of natural light, most of which was due to budget constraints. You can see the gradients in the summer sunlight and textures in the shadows. This use of natural light was both an aesthetic choice and a budgetary necessity. They didn’t have big arc lamps , so usually used whatever light was at hand, pushing the limits of the 35mm film stock. For all its rivers of dialogue, La Collectionneuse is a remarkably tactile feature, of terry cloth robes against the skin, rocks under your feet, a shaft of light entering the room. Like most of Rohmer’s work La Collectionneuse has a piercing lucidity, conveying an understanding of background birdsong as well as the labyrinthine self-delusions of aging artist-lotharios.

LOVE IS IN THE AIR: ROME ADVENTURE (1962)

February 27, 2020July 21, 2025 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

June 14, 2016

I marked the arrival of summer by watching one of Delmer Daves’ grandly romantic teen melodramas, Rome Adventure (1962). It is earnestly sweet travelogue about a 21-year-old ex-librarian who seeks her independence in Italy and falls for blonde bombshell Troy Donahue. Like the other films Daves made with Donahue (A Summer Place, Parrish, Susan Slade), Rome Adventure is disarmingly frank about the desires of its randy young characters. Instead it revels in the unstable beauty of these kids and their still-forming moralities. Rome Adventure pairs teen idol Donahue with the plucky, world-weary Suzanne Pleshette, an immensely likable personality to follow for the two-hours of the film’s Roman tour. Much of the film’s pleasures derive from simply walking around Rome with two-good looking kids while admiring Charles Lawton’s Technicolor cinematography. Since I won’t be making any European vacations myself this summer, Rome Adventure will have to do.

Delmer Daves suffered a heart attack in 1958, and was instructed by his doctors to avoid physically taxing shoots like the Westerns he had become known for (3:10 to Yuma, The Hanging Tree). So he abruptly switched gears to melodrama, which necessitates less running around. This sunk his stock with critics, who have never come around to these films, but kept his commercial success rolling. In both his Westerns and his melodramas, he had an unerring eye for locations, able to build up detailed social milieus for his inevitably forthright and sincere characters. For Rome Adventure, Delmer Daves dusted off Irving Fineman’s 1932 novel Lovers Must Learn for his adapted screenplay, lending some of the film an anachronistic quality – like the transatlantic steamship that takes Prudence Bell (Pleshette) from New England to Italy. It’s appropriate for a girl with an old-fashioned name like Prudence, though she does her damndest to undercut it.

Prudence opens the movie by quitting her job. She is working as a librarian at a hoity-toity New England college, and the spinster professors disapprove of a novel she personally lent to a student: Lovers Must Learn, by Irving Fineman (!). So she read the book the movie she is appearing on is based on – and will go on to act it out. Before they can fire her she quits, calling it “my independence day.” Just like that she jumps aboard a ship to Rome by herself, hoping to experience the kind of passion she only had read in literature. She will go on to test herself in a variety of romantic entanglements to see what works for her temperament. The movie is focalized through her perspective, so the film’s gaze is pointed outward from her and towards the men in her life, wondering which one will really ring her bells.

The first men she meets are a mousy student named Albert Stillwell (Hampton Fancher, who would go on to write the Blade Runner screenplay) and Roberto (Rossano Brazzi), an older slick tongued Roman who continually tries and fails to win Prudence’s heart. Albert is her parents’ choice, a safe milquetoast type whose only topic of conversation is the Etruscans. Naturally Prudence gravitates towards the more dangerous Roberto, who at least offers the possibility of new experiences. Both men try to lead her around town, but once Prudence sets her sights on the baby-blue eyes of Don Porter (Donahue), no other man stands a chance. Daves said that Donahue “looks like Young America wants to look”, and he was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood in the early ’60s. This blonde-haired blue-eyed lunk was handsome but still retained some of his baby fat, giving him the unbeatable combination of beautiful and non-threatening.

What makes these films so pleasurable, though, are the characters that surround the main company, the little worlds that Daves is able to build. At her Rome home Prudence has the pensione owners and employees, a gaggle of sweet old Italian ladies who cluck over her every move. The most fascinating character is Daisy (Constance Ford), the owner of the “American Bookshop” where Prudence works. Daisy is a true independent spirit, a model, one would think, for what Prudence is trying to do in Rome. Daisy lives alone with her big English Sheepdog Mcguinness – having left her schoolteacher gig behind to follow her dreams of the romantic life in Italy. Introduced in yellow pajamas, thick glasses, and smoking a cigarette in an elegant holder, she is the vision of a self-made eccentric. Constance Ford is hilariously funny in the part, playing Daisy as a woman with no filter. I wish she was more of a central character, as the tidbits we do learn about her are so tantalizing. She mentions that she makes yearly vacations to Ischia on which she inevitably meets and loses a man in the same weekend. I would have loved to have seen a spinoff movie (directed by Rohmer, ideally), that followed Daisy on one of these amorous trips, to see more of what makes her tick.

But alas, the movie returns to Prudence and Don as they make their way across Italy, traveling to Lake Maggiore, where they stay in a tiny chalet by the water. Prudence is reluctant to sleep with Don, worried it would break the spell that they are weaving. Things start to unravel when Don’s ex-girlfriend Lyda (Angie Dickinson) returns to the scene. Something of a man-devourer, Lyda had dumped Don out of boredom, but has come back to toy with him some more. Gorgeous and imperious, she is the one thing more beautiful that Don. Dickinson is devilishly good in the part, chewing up the scenery just as she gnaws at Don’s ego.

The film ends on a disappointingly paternalistic note, one that undermines Prudence’s so-called “Independence Day”. Roberto, who early on promises to offer her a sexual education, later offers a narrow definition of a woman’s role – that of companion who is there to tame a man’s baser instincts. Essentially, to be a babysitter. Throughout the entire film Prudence has been the driving force of the plot, making her own romantic decisions, and then in the penultimate sequence Roberto swoops down like a mansplainer-ex-machina to throw the movie off balance. Prudence and Don are destined to be together, but it was a misstep to have their union decided not by Prudence, but by the kindly old Italian lech who lives around the corner. But this does not eliminate the multifarious pleasures of Rome Adventure, a relaxed, charming travelogue that I would have been happy to tag along on for many hours more.

MARTIAL ARTIST: XU HAOFENG’S THE FINAL MASTER (2015)

February 27, 2020March 11, 2022 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

June 7, 2016

Xu Haofeng is a student of martial arts, a chronicler of its lore and history. He graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1997, but instead of entering the movie business, he spent over a decade tracking down old kung fu masters and writing wuxia novels. His most famous publication is The Bygone Kung Fu World (Shiqu de Wulin, 2006), a book about Li Zhongxuan , a practitioner of xingyiquan, one of the Wudang styles of Chinese martial arts (Wong Kar-wai admired the book, which led him to hire Xu to co-write The Grandmaster). When Xu found him, Li had been working as a receptionist for a household appliance store in downtown Beijing for decades. Xu is obsessed with preserving the minutae of kung fu history. He told China Daily that, “A real kung fu battle lasts only seconds. And the results of a competition between top practitioners are decided even before opponents begin combat.” This reveals itself in his directorial debut The Sword Identity (2011), an elliptical and idiosyncratic martial arts film in which fights end in the blink of an eye. Xu’s latest feature, The Final Master, was released into U.S. theaters this past weekend, and is yet another intensely ritualized take on the kung fu film.

Based on one of Xu’s novellas, The Final Master takes place in 1930s Tianjin, a heavily Westernized port city. The Qing dynasty had been ceding territory, or “concessions”, within the city to European countries since the 19th century in order to encourage trade, hence all the English language advertising seen slapped all over town. Chen Shi (Liao Fan) makes a vow to his master to pass on the lessons of the Wing Chun fighting style to future generations. Exiled from Canton, he attempts to set up an academy in Tianjin. The only way to open a school in the city, however, is to beat the eight great martial arts houses in battle. Wanting to blend into society, he makes a business arrangement with an acid tongued barmaid with a Rudolph Valentino crush (Song Jia) to be his wife, as a strange single drfiter would cause undue attention. He also learns that an outsider would never be accepted into the Tianjin martial arts community, so he drafts the cocky local Geng Liangchen (Song Yang), to train as an apprentice. The rules keep shifting under Chen Shi’s feet, however, as local politics and the poisonous influence of dojo boss Madame Zou (a delightfully evil Wenli Jiang) and the increasing power of the military begins to undermine the old martial arts traditions. Whether or not Chen Shi gets to open his academy, he will face down all eight dojos, regardless of the cost.

As in The Sword Identity, the fights are staged with unfamiliar quickness (The Final Master won for Best Action Choreography at the 2015 Golden Horse Awards). Xu believes this to be a more realistic way of depicting how martial arts were actually fought, a matter of one quick thrust or parry before defeat. Liao Fan trained for two months to pull off the style Xu prefers – which forbids the use of stuntmen. Fighters are doomed by their choice of weapon, stance, or target before the bouts have even begun. These are not adrenaline pumping sequences, but cerebral and cunning. It is disorienting to watch these after decades of ever-more elaborate stunts and wire-work, making these “realist” fights seem abstract, suggestions of fights, templates of them, rather than the real thing. It gives Xu’s films a rather ritualistic dreamlike quality, of men going through pre-determined motions. In the climactic battle, held in a stone alleyway, waves of fighters ebb and flow with disturbing orderliness, they bow in defeat and depart as if completing a stage acts. For Xu these are the only moments that matter – the clash of broad Northern swords with Chen Shi’s smaller, quicker Southern blades. His narratives float, while his fights are freighted with the weight of the world. The Sword Identity and The Final Master have near-identical plots, about beating martial arts schools so out-of-town masters can open an academy (I haven’t seen his second feature, 2011′s Judge Archer, because it has never been released, even in China) . But this basic set-up fractures into pieces as the moves go along, with none of the normal plot payoffs one would expect of such a linear narrative line. Instead there are proliferating subplots and a miasma of obscure motivations. Xu never allows you to see inside his characters’ heads. You have to read them from the way they move.

Near the beginning Chen Shi has just entered Tianjin and is having dinner at a Western restaurant. He is told no one has ever eaten more than five loaves of their bread at one sitting. So, to match the number of martial arts houses he has to beat, he starts eating eight loaves of bread before stalling in gluten overload. Everything in Xu’s films is a test of some sort or another that has to be met, though resolutions are foggy and happy endings are non-existent. The fighters in Xu Haofeng’s films abide by Tom Sizemore’s line in Heat, “the action is the juice.” The action is their principles put into motion, their spiritual beliefs made physical.

In The Final Master the militarization of society is pushing out the old martial art codes. Chen Shi and his dogged, stubborn refusal to compromise is a bulwark to protect the legacy Wing Chun kung fu. Chen Shi rarely makes more than one movement in a fight, staying still as long as possible before flicking out his arms in an an effortless gesture that stuns his opponents (whom he never kills, only incapacitates). He wants his wisdom to be absorbed by the fighters he is vanquishing – each fight a lesson, each loss an education.

In 2009 China Daily described his novels: “Xu prefers to meticulously describe battle scenes and how people undertake strict training. He says he does so according to what he learned during his studies. Xu often strays from main plots, addressing other interesting topics, such as ink painting, calligraphy, antiques and food, to add more dimensions.” His films are extensions of these novels, with simple narratives that drift away into the ether while the action remains gem-like in its precision and clarity. These are rigorous, principled, and remarkably strange films, possessing a recalcitrant, obsessive personality not often seen in action movies of today.

INJUSTICE DEPARTMENT: HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT (1980)

February 27, 2020July 21, 2025 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

May 31, 2016

In June of 1967, Thomas Leonhard’s children disappeared. They vanished along with his ex-wife and her new husband. A year later Leonhard would learn that they were given new identities as part of the FBI’s Witness Protection Program. A cement mason in Buffalo, New York, Leonhard spent the next eight years in State and Federal courts trying to win the right to see his two kids. This remarkable story became the subject of Leslie Waller’s true crime novel Hide in Plain Sight, which James Caan would adapt for his directorial debut in 1980. Caan wanted the film to be a “cinema verite kind of thing”, so he shot the film on location in Buffalo, with most of the film unfurling as a low-key docudrama, sticking to the everyday details of Leonhard’s life. United Artists considered it too arty and a money loser, so it did not receive the full support of the studio, despite largely positive critical notices. It has been available on DVD from Warner Archive for a few years, but what led me to Hide in Plain Sight was the Buffalo News’ list of the top ten films shot in Western New York. Buffalo is my hometown, and it hasn’t had much luck on the silver screen, aside from Vincent Gallo’s idiosyncratic Buffalo ’66 and some turn-of-the-century Edison shorts (I am partial to A Trip Around the Pan-American Exposition (1901)). Locals have always been most proud of The Natural (and its use of Parkside Candy Shop), but for me, Hide in Plain Sight presents a more complete view of the city, from the bars to the factories to the zoo.

In the film Leonhard’s name is changed to “Thomas Hacklin Jr.”, and in Spencer Eastman’s screenplay his job is changed from a cement mason to a rubbery factory worker, for reasons unknown. Caan plays him with mumbling, under-his-breath casualness. Pauline Kael complained that Caan “can’t express anything but ‘huh’”, but Hacklin is a mild-mannered, keep-to-himself kind of guy who keeps his emotions buried down deep. It’s a nuanced, sensitive performance from Caan, which works well against the stellar cast he has assembled. Kenneth McMillan plays police detective Sam Marzetta with sympathies for Hacklin’s plight, but he’s too busy to do anything about it. Marzetta is a like a beached whale with deli cake crumbs perpetually stuck to his moustache. Then there is Hacklin’s pal Matty (Joe Grifasi), a hatchet-faced co-worker who offers Hacklin the pleasure of inane chatter. Hacklin spends most of the film in a haze, confused about his children’s disappearance and running up against an apathetic bureaucracy. It’s only when his new girlfriend Alisa (Jill Eickenberry) hooks him up with a competent lawyer (an intense Danny Aiello) that he begins to make some progress. The movie gives Hacklin more of a hero’s ending, including a fight scene where he thwacks a guy with a shovel (which, Leonhard said, he never did).

Leonhard was fine with the film and its factual liberties. He was just happy to get his story out, telling the New York Times that the important thing was “getting his story told, so it won’t happen to anyone else.” Not that he did it for free, since he was making $250 a week at the cement factory. He received $20,000 to give up the rights to his story, and one percent of the producers’ net receipts. He became a local celebrity, becoming “one of the biggest heroes in Buffalo since O.J. Simpson.” Caan does a fine job detailing the day-to-day life of Leonhard/Hacklin, starting the film with an impressive crane shot as workers leave the rubber factory, settling in on Hacklin and Matty as they make their way back home. All the markers of Buffalo life are here – there is an old sign for Iroquois Beer when Hacklin goes on a blind date. It was a local brew that traces its opening to 1842, but after a series of mergers and buyouts, the last Iroquois would be bottled in 1980, during the film’s shoot. Then there is the shot of a Bocce’s pizza box, which Hacklin’s ex-wife Ruthie (Barbara Rae) is bringing to her mobster boyfriend. Bocce’s was founded in 1946 and is still in operation today, continuing to feed the mobsters of tomorrow. There are also trips the the Buffalo Zoo, Delaware Park, and a dingy eatery called Gulliver’s on Allen St. This is where Hacklin first encounters Marzetta about the whereabouts of his family. Marzetta sits like a lumpy stone, ham sandwich in hand, refusing to answer questions to Caan’s insistent, desperate dad, Yankees cap firmly set on his head.

This was something of a passion project for Caan, and the way in which United Artists refused to support it soured him on directing – it would be the first and only feature that he directed. While promoting Michael Mann’s Thief in 1981, he vented his frustrations to the New York Times:

I spent two years of my life doing it, and some jerk at United Artists -who’s been fired, thank God – said, ‘This picture isn’t commercial.’ Well, it wasn’t. There were no sharks.Plus I had to listen to speeches like, ‘I’ve been watching rushes for 40 years, and you have to do so and so.’ I’d say, ‘everything’s changed in 40 years. Peanut butter’s changed in 40 years. What are you telling me?’ ‘I mean, the guy put music into my film when I wasn’t there. I said, ‘I don’t want music, I’m shooting a cinema verite kind of thing, so why the hell is the Fifth Symphony coming out of the candy store, all of a sudden?’ He won’t direct again, Mr. Caan says, because ‘everybody wants to do ‘Rocky Nine’ and ‘Airport 96′ and ‘Jaws Seven’ and you look and you listen, and what little idealism you have left slowly dwindles.’

Though the score was imposed, the film seems otherwise unscathed, and Caan imposes some unorthodox maneuvers. During a pivotal argument between Hacklin and his ex-wife, in which she admits to marrying her mobster boyfriend, Caan starts pulling back their increasingly heated exchange until the dialogue becomes inaudible, flooded by traffic sounds. This avoidance of drama, subordinating it background noise, fits the ethos of this whole film, meant to be not just a ripping yarn but a portrait of a Rust Belt city in the midst of decline. I was born the next year, and well-paying factory jobs like Hacklin’s had disappeared by the time I was of working age.

The movie, as real as Caan tried to make it, avoided the difficult truths of the case. Leonhard was reunited with his children, now teenagers, for a summer. But they decided to move back in with their mother in Reno. After nearly a decade of searching for them, they had grown up too much without their father by their side. With great equanimity, Leonhard said, “We still love each other, but I was new to them, I was a stranger, and we didn’t have that closeness of everyday things that parents normally have with their children, things like taking your son to a ballgame, or seeing him graduate from high school, or seeing your daughter’s first date, or watching her dress up for the prom.”