Three Lubitsch Musicals

I've seen three of five Ernst Lubitsch musicals starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald with Monte Carlo (1930) and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) yet to screen. I may have to give those two a pass. Two of the films so far have been charming (and one not so charming), but none of them have been particularly great and I don't know how much more of MacDonald's singing I can take. Not screening is Rouben Mamoulian's brilliant Love Me Tonight (1932), also starring Chevalier and MacDonald, in which a tune sung by Maurice/Chevalier, a tailor in a working class neighborhood in Paris, is carried from one character to another like the Olympic torch until it reaches Princess Jeanette/MacDonald's fairy tale castle.

The Love Parade (1929) is the not so charming one. Count Alfred Renard/Chevalier marries Queen Louise of Sylvania/MacDonald only to find that he doesn't much like living in his wife's shadow. To teach her a lesson, he throws a hissy fit and threatens not to attend the opening of the country's opera, which would cause a scandal. He embarasses her by showing up late, and then reduces her to tears by staring at one of the dancers through a pair of binoculars. According to the film, for them to have a happy marriage, Louise would have to submit completely to Alfred and hand over any say in matters of state, which she doesn't much excel at anyway. In one scene, her advisers are telling her to borrow money from America when Alfred barges in and explains how everything in the budget can be payed for by exploiting natural resources, having mastered macro economics in a matter of days. The hero is a jerk, it's not funny and the songs stink.

One Hour With You (1932) was Lubitsch's fourth film with Chevalier and MacDonald, and his second time filming Lothar Schmidt's play "Only a Dream," so it's hardly surprising his heart wasn't in it. (It's telling that Lubitsch shares the same title credit with his assistant, George Cukor, suggesting that the latter directed some scenes.) The screenplay by Sam Raphelson is no more inventive that it absolutely needs to be: Dr. Andre Bertier/Chevalier and his wife Colette/MacDonald are happily married (which, in the world of the film, simply means they still enjoy screwing after three years of marriage) until the latter's best friend, Mitzi/Genevieve Tobin, returns from Lauzanne and tries to seduce the former. It's indicative of the shallowness of the script that Andre is only tempted to sleep with Mitzi, who looks perpetually drunk, because she's a willing woman. The film's most eccentric stylistic traits--the strecthes of rhyming dialogue leading into the musical numbers and Andre's assides to the camera--no doubt come from Schmidt's play, and aren't matched Lubitsch's sounds and images, which are strictly functional. Parts of the film are tinted, with blue corresponding to moonlight and yellow representing interior lights; daytime scenes aren't tinted, even when the characters are inside. This is enjoyable enough, I suppose, but not especially memorable.

The last film in the cycle, The Merry Widow (1934) is a pleasant enough diversion. The film opens in the imaginary country of Marshovia where Count Danilo/Chevalier has beded the entire female populace except the widow Sonia/MacDonald, who refuses even to lift her black veil. Deciding she's had enough of Marshovia, Sonia splits for Paris. The richest woman in Marshovia, Sonia pays fifty-two percent of the country's taxes. Fearing that an economic crisis would lead to a revolution, King Achmet/George Barbier sends Danilo to Paris to seduce her. But before checking in with the embassy to get the details of his mission, Danilo heads to a cabaret where he's far from a stranger and meets Sonia who tells him her name is Fifi. The plot piles on the standard romantic comedy crisises, although Lubitsch seems more interested in sustaining individual sequences than advancing the plot. (Two particular highlights are King Achmet discovering his wife, Dolores/Una Merkel, in bed with Danilo, and Danilo and "Fifi"'s first meeting in the cabaret.) Made the same year as Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcée starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, it's the only Chevalier-MacDonald film in which the stars are required to do any dancing. There's one striking sequence in which Lubitsch contrasts the solitary waltzing of the two leads with an embassy ball packed with twirling dancers. At 99 minutes, it does go on a bit too long, but it's enjoyable nonetheless.

Two Sirk Melodramas

Douglas Sirk's Sleep, My Love (1948) is one of those movies in which everybody thinks the woman is hysterical, but it turns out that there really are people plotting against her. Here, Alison Courtland/Claudette Colbert is being terrorized by a psychiatrist with horn-rimmed glasses that no one else has seen. One is reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), but where that film had a clear intent, I'm not sure what the purpose of Sirk's film is. Was he trying to warn viewers against trusting their spouses? It's skillfully made without being exceptional on any level.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), in contrast, has a very simple purpose. Not unlike Clint Eastwood's recent Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) about Japanese soldiers fighting in World War II, it wants us to empathize with a single German soldier and his girlfriend. Given their ideological agenda, these films--and Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2004)--can't deal with the rise of facism, only its decline. Sirk's film begins and ends on the Russian Front in 1944 with the Germans in retreat and taking heavy losses. While on leave from the front, Ernst Graeber/John Gavin falls in love with and marries a nice girl, Elizabeth Kruse/Liselotte Pulver, whose father (never seen) is in a concentration camp. Despite being a bit sentimental, this works far better as storytelling than either Eastwood or Hischbeigel's films, and Sirk's widescreen compositions are often stunning, especially in the opening and closing scenes which are set mainly outdoors and in the countryside. However, as much as one appreciates the film's non-stereotypical treatment of the Germans, one regrets the way it shies away from the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Films by Ernst Lubitsch and Douglas Sirk

Friday was the first day of Cinémathèque Busan's nearly month-long program of films by Ernst Lubitsch and Douglas Sirk, two German directors who made it big in Hollywood but otherwise have little in common. I've seen six films so far, some brilliant, all of interest, and among those yet to screen, I can recommend Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), and Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959). The quality of the prints varies dramatically, and three Sirk films (all pre-1954) are being screened on 16mm.

The first film I saw, Sirk's inexplicably titled Shockproof (1949), is a deterministic melodrama about a female ex-con falling back into her old habits. Its social agenda and overall structure recall Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), but there are some striking differences between the two. Here, the heroine, Jenny Marsh/Patricia Knight, didn't actually commit the crime she went to prison for but took the rap in order to protect her boyfriend, Harry Wesson/John Baragrey, a professional gambler. Rather than being driven to crime by economic desperation, her biggest problem is having lousy friends. She's only out of jail a few days when she and Harry are picked up in a bookie joint in violation of her parole. But rather than sending her back to prison, Jenny's eccentric parole officer, Griff Marat/Cornel Wilde, forbids her to see Harry and gets her a job looking after his own blind mother so he can keep an eye on her. In other words, like Mark/Sean Connery in Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), he tries to make an honest woman of her. Soon she's even cooking dinner for him like a "normal, decent" housewife. The script by Helen Deutsch and Samuel Fuller has plenty of twists, and Sirk's elegant mise en scéne helps to elevate the material, but the happy ending is so unconvincing that I can only hope it was imposed unwillingly on the filmmakers by the studio.

Made just before the implementation of the Hays Code, Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933) is as striking for its frank attitude about sex as it is dated in its sexual politics. On a train bound from Marseilles to Paris, Gilda/Miriam Hopkins, a successful commercial artist, meets Tom/Fredric March, an unsuccessful painter, and his flatmate George/Gary Cooper, an unproduced playwright, and soon after falls in love with both. Rather than break-up the boys' friendship, Gilda makes a gentlemen's agreement with them--"No sex"--and resigns herself to become "a mother of the arts," helping them to improve their craft and achieve fame. "My career doesn't matter," she announces at the outset. This is certainly enjoyable, but I wouldn't call it one of Lubitsch's best (for one thing, Tom and George are interchangable Jules and Jim types); its over-inflated reputation as a classic has more to do with the prestige of the Noel Coward play it's based on than its merit as a film.

Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956) has a three act structure with a turning point--which is basically just another act break. Notwithstanding the credit sequence, the first part of the movie is set in New York and Miami, and establishes Mitch Wayne/Rock Hudson's goal of marrying Lucy Moore/Lauren Bacall. Kyle Hadley/Robert Stack, a bazillionaire playboy and Mitch's childhood friend, functions as an antagonist who tries to lure Lucy away. The second part of the film begins with Lucy arriving in Texas after marrying Kyle in an offscreen ceremony. The turning point is Kyle's discovery that he's sterile which drives him to drink. The last part of the film is a perfunctory courtroom sequence in which Marylee Hadley/Dorothy Malone, Kyle's sister who's loved Mitch since childhood, tries to have him framed for Kyle's murder. She breaks down on the witness stand and tells the truth, which is totally inconsistant with her character. The film ends with Mitch and Lucy kissing as they get in the car to leave the Hadley estate forever.

The film divides these characters into symmetrical sets of Decent (Lucy and Mitch) and Indecent (Kyle and Marylee), associating decency with pragmatism. While Mitch gets around in a black company car, Kyle and Marylee are both associated with brightly painted convertibles. When Mitch meets Lucy in the film's second sequence, she's working in the advertising department at the Hadley Oil Company in Manhattan. Mitch is in town with Kyle, who flew in on a whim on his private plane. Mitch invites her to lunch, and when they arrive at the restaurant, Kyle is in the company of two floozies. As they're leaving, he attempts to give Mitch the slip and drives Lucy to the airport. Mitch magically gets there ahead of them, but Lucy isn't that sort of girl, anyway. In Miami, Kyle presents her with a lavish hotel room with a closet full of fur coats. But when he shows up for their date that evening, he finds that she's gone. "Lucy, are you decent?" he asks walking into the bedroom. "I guess she was." Earlier, the very fact that she favors Kyle raises doubts in Mitch's mind about her decency. "Are you looking for laughs or are you soul searching?" Kyle is only sympathetic in his desire to have a family. After he marries Lucy, he becomes temporarily decent and stops drinking. Marylee, who shows no desire to have a family, isn't sympathetic at all. Describing Mitch to one of the floozies, Kyle says, "He's eccentric. He's poor," but the movie suggests the opposite: Lucy and Mitch are normal, and Kyle and Marylee (who does less soul searching than anyone) are rich weirdos.

Adapted from William Faulkner's "Pylon" (which I haven't read), and set in Depression-era New Orleans, Sirk's The Tarnished Angels (1958) is about a straight-laced journalist, Burke Devlin/Hudson who's drawn to a family of flying daredevils that live like gypsies: hot shot pilot, Roger Schumann/Stack, his wife LaVerne/Malone, the mechanic, Jiggs/Jack Carson, and Roger and LaVerne's illiterate son, Jack/Chris Olsen. Burke's interest in them is never strictly professional and continues well after he's fired from the paper. When Roger's plane is damaged in an accident, the only person who can get him another one in time for the next day's race is a local businessman, Matt Ord/Robert Middleton, and Roger asks LaVerne to pay him a visit to persuade him, which she agrees to. For all the differences in period, milieu and tone, the emotional dynamic here is much the same as it was in Written on the Wind: Burke is in love with Roger's wife, but here LaVerne is neither a saint like Lucy Moore nor a whore like Marylee Hadley. Photographed in black-and-white and 'Scope with dramatic, high contrast lighting, the film is particularly striking for its mise en scène. Notice how Sirk moves his actors around the set rather than having them stand still while delivering lines at one another. It's at once Sirk's most compelling film and his most stylish.

Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) is set almost entirely inside a gift shop in Budapest where every business relationship doubles as a personal one. (I suspect we never see the boss' wife because their relationship is strictly personal.) The two main narrative threads involve Alfred Kralik/Jimmy Stewart's relationship with the boss, Hugo Matuschek/Frank Morgen, and a new employee, Klara Novak/Margaret Sullavan, which run parallel to one another. Mr. Kralik--the characters always address each other by their last names--is the store's oldest employee and he's often invited to Mr. Matuschek's home for dinner with Mrs. Matuscheck. But when Mr. Matuschek begins to suspect that Mr. Kralik's having an affair with his wife, Mr. Kralik finds himself suddenly out of work. (Mr. Matuschek hires a private detective whose manner is entirely businesslike.) Earlier in the film, Kralik gets off on the wrong foot with Ms. Novak, each unaware that they've been corresponding anonymously through the mail for several months and plan to marry. They agree to meet at a café, but Mr. Kralik, who's just lost his job, doesn't tell her he's the one who wrote her the letters. Thinking she's been stood up, Ms. Novak falls ill at the same time Mr. Matuschek attempts suicide, and Mr. Kralik pays a visit to each. Anxieties about the Depression hang over the characters. The film contrasts Mr. Kralik, who stands up to Mr. Matuschek on business matters, with Mr. Pirovitch/Felix Bressart, who has a family to feed and runs away any time Mr. Matuschek asks his employees for their opinion. There's a moving scene, after Mr. Kralik is fired, in which Mr. Pirovitch cautiously asks Mr. Matuschek to reconsider. Written by Lubitsch's usual screenwriter, Sam Raphelson, it's typical of their best work for the way it brings out depths of feeling in seemingly light hearted material.

To be continued...

Paranoid Park

I've seen Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (2007) twice and liked it better the second time, but I still can't embrace it completely. The non-linear narrative has its perks, but the first-person narration seems to me a step backwards in relation to Elephant (2003). And while it makes interesting use of Nina Rota's score for Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965), often the music in the film simply feels like overkill. In the context of American independent cinema, it towers over something like Jason Reitman's Juno (also 2007)--a far less interesting and accomplished film about teenagers--but really that's not saying a whole lot.

Adapted from a youth novel by Blake Nelson (which I haven't read), the story of Paranoid Park is recounted in flashback. The narrative is framed as a written confession authored by the movie's teenage protagonist, Alex, portions of which we hear in voice-over. Effectively, this framing device normalizes the movie's scrambled chronology as a reflection of Alex's thought processes as he writes his confession. In contrast, Elephant has no such framing device to justify its non-linear narrative, which obsessively replays the events leading up to a school shooting from several different perspectives as if the film itself--not the characters or Van Sant--were attempting to master the past by going over it again and again. That said, narrative can never completely exhaust form. Seeing Paranoid Park the second time, I noticed how the film replays certain shots, not to clarify their meaning but to aid the viewer in constructing a timeline of events. Similarly, the documentary footage of skateboarders performing tricks, shot on 16mm, and the film's appropriation of Rota's music both refuse narrative rationalizations.

Writing about the film in an earlier post, I complained that the Rota music appropriated by the film wasn't sufficiently tied to Alex's subjectivity. And while Van Sant and his sound designer, Leslie Shatz, do employ sound subjectively at times during the film (for instance, Alex's argument with himself), I don't think that's their intent here. For one thing, the first time we hear Rota's music in the film is over the first shot, an establishing shot of a bridge behind the opening credits, before we're introduced to Alex. Rather, one might think of Rota's music as a leitmotif that refuses obvious associations. Although this particular motif reaches a climax of sorts with an especially romantic piece from Amarcord (1973) that drowns out the audio of Alex's girlfriend, Jennifer, yelling at him, this motif isn't strictly associated with her character and could continue, theoretically, ad infinitum. Conversely, when Van Sant does employ music subjectively--particularly, a piece by Beethoven at one dramatic moment--the effect is overbearing.


At the end of last year, the consensus among American reviewers (notably, Roger Ebert and A.O Scott) was that, all in all, 2007 was a pretty good year for the movies in general and American cinema in particular. And I'd have to agree; although the critics' prizes mainly went to the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, my own half-dozen favorites were Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, Adam Shankman's Hairspray, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There., Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding, and James Gray's We Own the Night. However, with the exception of Haynes', all the films listed above are more remarkable for their content than their style.

Two notable, mainly unheralded exceptions are Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, in which both directors refined and expanded their signature styles. Thematically, both filmmakers are on familiar ground even if, coincedentally, each is depicting a culture other than their own. However, in both films, the familiar content is enriched by the director's individual style. (Another coincedence is that, while Anderson's film appropriates music by Ravi Shankar from several films by Satyajit Ray, the star of Wong's film is Shankar's daughter, Nora Jones, whose own music appears on the soundtrack.)

Unlike Anderson and Wong, however, Van Sant doesn't have a distinctive style of his own. His early features--Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), My Own Private Idaho (1990), and presumably Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), which I haven't seen--are distinguished by their focus on marginal characters and Northwestern setting, but they're more off-beat than singular. I can barely recall his first two Hollywood features, To Die For (1995) and Good Will Hunting (1997), they're so impersonal, and I haven't seen Psycho (1998) or Finding Forrester (2000). After making Gerry (2002), Van Sant started citing Béla Tarr as an influence on his work, and while I wouldn't hesitate to call Elephant or Last Days (2005) a masterpiece, neither one is as singular as Tarr's Damnation (1988), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and The Man From London (2007). By imposing rigorous stylistic constraints on himself, Tarr has arrived at a style as distinctive as Bresson's or Ozu's. Paradoxically, in moving away from Tarr's influence, Paranoid Park is even more impersonal.

Still, one must concede that Van Sant's style does enrich some rather thin material. Its subtle repeatitions and musical leitmotifs repay multiple viewings. And even if Van Sant isn't as great a filmmaker as Tarr, at least we won't have to wait seven years for his next film.

Taiwanese New Wave Film Festival

For their Taiwanese New Wave Film Festival (which is still going on), the Cinématheque Busan was extremely liberal about what qualifies as a Taiwanese New Wave film. In addition to six films by Hou Hsiao-hsien and three by Edward Yang, they're also screening the first three features by Ang Lee, two recent works by Tsai Ming-liang and three documentaries made in the past few years. What made the line-up esspecially exciting for me is that, of the six films being shown with English subtitles, five have never been distributed in North America.

Hou's A Summer at Grandpa's (1984) has a two-part structure that recalls some of Yasujiro Ozu's films in the way it alternates comedy and drama. The first half is delightful. While their mother recovers from an illness in a Taipei hospital, a boy and his younger sister spend the summer at their grandfather's house in the country. The boy quickly befriends a group of local boys when he trades a toy car to one in exchange for a turtle. Soon after, the boys turn up at the grandfather's house, each one holding a turtle to barter with. However, unlike say Floating Weeds (1959), the film has a loose, episodic narrative, so the second half doesn't feel like a progression of the first but merely an accumulation of bummers: the mother's condition steadily worsens, the kids' uncle is disowned by the grandfather when he gets a woman pregnant, the sister looks to a retarded woman in the village as a surrogate mother. The Sunday afternoon screening Heather and I attended was full of little kids, which would be unthinkable in North America, where subtitled films--even ones as accessible as Indigènes (2005), Offside (2006) and Persepolis (2007)--are automatically distributed as art films regardless of their content.

Yang's Taipei Story (1985) begins and ends with the heroine, Ah-chin, in an empty white room representing the promise of a fresh start. In the opening scene, she's apartment hunting with her boyfriend, Lung, after getting a promotion. When the company she works for gets bought up by a conglomerate and her boss, Mrs. Mei, leaves to work elsewhere, Ah-chin is told by her new employer that, "Your job doesn't exist under our system." The film's final scene shows her in an office Mrs. Mei plans to use in starting up a new company, but by then it's become apparent (I think even to Ah-chin) that there's no escape. She moves in with Lung to get away from her father only to find that Lung is becoming more and more like him. The couple talks of moving to Los Angeles, but the film makes it clear that it would be the same for them there (for one thing, it's full of Taiwanese). I'd love to see it again since I suspect it would benefit from a second viewing, but the chances of that happening any time soon are fairly slim.

Yang's third feature, The Terrorizers (1986), is more playful. It has one of those plots where the characters initially have no connection to one another, but step by step are drawn closer together. The virtuoso opening sequence, which establishes all the major characters, may be the most audacious stretch of film that Yang ever directed. From the first establishing shot of a police car speeding through a Taipei neighborhood just after sunrise, Yang cuts to a couple in bed. The man, a photographer, awakes to find that his girlfriend's been up all night reading, then steps out on to the balcony where he hears police sirens. After a second shot of the police car, Yang cuts to a second couple. This time the woman is an author who's been up all night struggling with revisions of her latest novel. Finally the police car arrives at a gambling den where the photographer snaps a picture of a woman fleeing the scene with a broken leg. As this description perhaps hints, the connections Yang draws between his characters aren't exclusively literal, but also thematic (the two women who stayed up all night) and purely formal, creating rhymes through repeated actions, lines of dialogue and compositions. There's a lot more to say about the film, but I don't want to spoil any thing for those who haven't seen it.

Although Heather and I both had trouble following the plot of Hou's City of Sadness (1989), it's worth noting that the screening we attended drew a larger crowd than any of the Hollywood films in the Cinèmatheque's recent Fritz Lang retrospective, and it was one of Hou's biggest hits in Taiwan. In part that's because he's found a subject that resonates with a wide audience: the years between 1945, when Taiwan was returned to China after a half century of Japanese colonial rule, and 1949, when the Nationalist government retreated to Taipei following the revolution on the mainland. It focusses mainly on two brothers living in different towns--one a loud and burly man (Kao Jai) who's on familiar terms with the local gangsters; the other a timid deaf mute (Tony Leung) who hangs out with intellectuals--and the actors playing them (as well as Li Tien-lu as their crotchety father) give the most vivid and memorable performances I've seen in any of Hou's films. It's also a good deal funnier than anything he's made since. In one important scene, Leung does an exaggerated double take to show surprise. Filmed mainly in long and medium shot with a rich ambient soundtrack, it's more about atmosphere than plot, and although it runs for over two and a half hours, I wasn't bored for a moment.

This weekend we plan to see Tsai's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) and Kuo Chen-ti and Chen Wu-ssu's Viva Tonal: The Dance Age (2004). I saw Tsai's film a few years ago on DVD but, more than most filmmakers, his work needs to be seen on a large screen. I know practically nothing about the latter except that it's a documentary about Taiwanese dance culture in the 1930s. It sounds like a fascinating subject, but whether it yields a fascinating documentary is another matter altogether. I thought about waiting until I'd seen them before posting this, but since neither is technically a Taiwanese New Wave film, I'd rather write about them seperately.

The Daughters of Kim's Pharmacy

Sunday night, after watching the men's final of the French Open, I was flipping through the channels when I came across an old Korean film on EBS, the educational channel.

The film was shot in black-and-white and 'Scope, and the dialogue was post-synced. I placed it somewhere between the mid-1950s and late 60s, although I didn't know enough about Korean cinema to say for certain. It crossed my mind that it might've been made as recently as the mid-70s.

I'm even less certain of the period in which it was set. Many of the characters wear traditional Korean clothing, but one man (I think he's a sailor) wears overalls in every scene in which he appears. Others even wear western-style suits. At the earliest I would guess the late nineteenth century when Korea first established trade relations with the U.S., and at the latest the mid-twentieth towards the end of Japanese colonial rule.

I didn't get any of plot which involves a large cast of characters with no apparent single protagonist. I did catch the occassional "Abeoji" (Father), and in one scene, an old woman accompanying a reluctant younger woman through the woods at night says "Ka ja" (Let's go) no fewer than a dozen times.

The film's director is evidently a metteur-en-scène. Favoring long shots over close-ups, s/he does an impressive of moving his/her actors around the set. That said, one can't simply follow the images and expect to understand what's happening. The few visual clues we do get aren't of much help. In one shot we see some one--their face isn't visible in the frame--putting on a pair of men's pants in the foreground while a small boy sleeps behind him.

Another obstacle to understanding the plot is the condition of the film itself. In an early scene we see a young woman and man walking through the forest. A jump cut later they're both on the ground, but I wouldn't rush to any conclusions: they're both still fully dressed.

The style initially seems realistic, but as the story takes on supernatural elements, the director begins to introduce tilted angles, and the acting ranges wildly from naturalistic to theatrical.

Every so often the film's title would flash on screen: 김약국의 달들 (Kimyakgukeui Daldeul). The English title, according to IMDb, is The Daughters of Kim's Pharmacy (1963), and the director is Hyun Mok Yoo. If you know where I can find a subtitled DVD in Busan, I'd much appreciate it.