New York Film Festival 2014

As many of you know, I'm attending and covering the 52 New York Film Festival this year. I'll be posting some reviews over at Sound on Sight, as well as here and a few other places. Expect the reviews to start before the weekend. Other than the big flicks everyone's been talking about (Gone Girl, Birdman, Inherent Vice, Foxcatcher), there are myriad movies for which I'm excited, including, but not llimited to, La Sapienza, Maps to the Stars, Pasolini, Jauja, and some restored classics like The Color of Pomegranates and Jamaica Inn. Just today I saw two great films of vastly different styles and durations (66-minute Korean deadpan comedy and 3-hour German period piece, both of which will get write-ups soon). I'll also be conducting some interviews for other sites, including Indiewire, so tune in for llnks. Same Greg time, same Greg channel.

Early Shorts by John Waters

Hag in a Black Leather Jacket
1964
17 minutes

Roman Candles
1966
40 minutes

Eat Your Makeup
1968
45 minutes

John Waters, the filthiest filmmaker alive, has finally accrued enough respect to nab a prestigious career retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The event takes a long, hard look at the muck and mire that Waters has heaved upon insatiable viewers for fifty years, with most of his films screening in 35mm or 16mm (the exception being Polyester, sadly, which is perhaps Waters' most well-rounded and accessible flick). All of Waters' films deserve a gander, especially if you've never been exposed to the unflinching auteur's singular brand of moral degradation and depravity, but for those who want to dig a little deeper and see the seeds that sowed the John Waters style, his early shorts are required viewing.

Shot on the cheap at Waters' house with the aid of his friends, including a young Divine (not yet adorned with his iconic look), these early shorts are rough. If you go into the shorts expecting to see long lost masterpieces, you'll likely leave agitated. So don't do that. They work best when viewed less as legitimate, cogent films and more as the seeds that would blossom into Waters' style. Roman Candles is especially difficult viewing. It's 40 minutes of three separate, unassimilated films playing at once, in three squares (the screen is split into four squares, though the bottom left corner is inexplicable left blank). Waters splices together arbitrary shots of his friends and family doing things like watching TV and smoking, and one strange, fleeting moment in which Divine, wearing a wig, hides behind some shrubs. Someone also apparently shoots up heroin. You can see the tracery hints of Waters' voyeuristic style and disregard for aesthetic beauty here, though the most interesting bit is how banal everyone's life seems. We're used to characters saying and doing outrageous, disgusting things in Waters' films, and here, heroin user notwithstanding, nothing really happens.

It's actually a little shocking how innocuous it all is. Of course Waters' affinity for the licentious is present, as well as rampant drug use, sexual violence, and all manner of incoherent abrasion that only exists to shock viewers, but Waters maintains an almost jovial tone throughout. Starting with Polyester, Waters started to make capital-F Films instead of the shoestring-budget, fuck-off experiments of the early '70s: these films had perceivable plots, and sort of followed a three-act structure (sort of), and almost made sense to those not yet initiated into Dreamland. He continued to lace every film with his usual subversive wit, but his films were becoming less mean, less abrasive. The last, and most accomplished of his shorts, Eat Your Makeup, has a similar affability. It's likable in the way high school home movies are likable, and you have to admire the effort that went into it. Save for a deranged fantasy in which a young man (Divine) envisions himself as Jackie Kennedy at the moment of her husband's assassination, Eat Your Makeup doesn't try to ostracize its viewers because it was intended to be seen only by Waters and his friends. As Divine says in I Am Divine, (streaming on Netflix), Waters and co. didn't anticipate anyone ever seeing these shorts. They made them to occupy themselves, to stay out of trouble, and to express themselves in a world that didn't understand them. Like personal essays or visual diaries, these shorts capture the embryonic rebelliousness of John Waters and Divine.

In Eat Your Makeup Waters displays little to under understanding of, or perhaps just total apathy towards rhythm and editing. The short is like a fever dream in its short attention span and surreal imagery. It's also gaudy as fuck, and that's fine; this is Waters at his most parodic, and the messy visuals, the soft, sketchy, squalid hues and the barely discernible static of pop-songs and voice-overs lifted from various films all coalesce into a fascinating prophesy of what would soon become the John Waters style. There's a horror house in which the horrors are all represented by hoary everyday middle-America life: folks watching TV, eating dinner, sitting on couches, curling their hair. The horror, Waters implies, is that they may become like their parents and accept a boring suburbanite life. Waters pokes fun at the counter culture while indulging in the counter culture's penchant for drugs and political insolence. Waters claims that he and his friends weren't hippies--they ate meat and white sugar--but they smoked a ton of dope, and used smack, and huffed whatever they could get their hands on. This free-flowing reservoir of drugs is satirized in the form of a vending machine in the middle of the woods, festooned with the word DOPE in big white letters, and an assortment of goodies (pot, heroin, something that might have been Quaaludes) inside.

There are some great physical comedy and pun bits, too (the Scare-O-Chair is great, though it goes on too long). But the real stand-out moment is the Kennedy assassination, which was shot just two years after the real assassination. (Apparently people didn't appreciate Waters' homage.) It's memorable not only for its complete eschewing of social graces, but because it's the first real glimpse of Divine's adventitious energy. Defying the leptosomatic norm of female models, Divine (the man) embraced his girth, and Divine (the persona) flaunted her size on screen. (In I Am Divine Waters makes a clear distinction between Divine and his character, so I am as well.) She would later play a gaggle of trashy women, many of whom displayed a fierce mean streak, but in Eat Your Makeup Divine is all smiles and cordial hand-waving. He's a dreamer.

Waters has gone to great lengths to keep his early shorts off the internet, and they'll likely never see official distribution, since the expenses to cover the copyrights of the multitudinous sounds and clips he uses would cost an exorbitant amount of money, so the only way you can see the shorts is in a digitized, DVD-quality version. Waters ripped the films onto discs to preserve them (8mm has a tendency to corrode over time). Catch them while you can--they're free, and they're filthy.

Early Shorts by John Waters plays at the Film Center Amphitheater September 11 at 5pm. Tickets are handed out an hour before the screening. 

Early Shorts by John Waters get three hits of a big fat joint and one 'lude out of five

The Conformist

The Conformist

1970

111 minutes

Written and Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda, Enzo Tarascio, Gastone Moschin

For Bernardo Bertolucci, intimacy is artifice. Love, lust, longing--Bertolucci's characters don't possess these traits as much as they use them, like weapons, to get something, or achieve some sort of goal. Using careful composition and architecture, Bertolucci not only captures fleeting moments of intimacy, but he extrapolates the dark undercurrents of these moments. He's delicate in his depictions of emotional desolation, using a soft and kind touch to render dubious endeavors empathetic. To put it in a way Pauline Kael might appreciate, Bertolucci fucks his viewers gently.

The story of The Conformist, which is currently held over through the weekend at Film Forum, is told in a series of flashbacks. Bertolucci signals to viewers that we're in for a feverishly dreamy film by basking our main character in violent red in the very first shot while the credits roll. It's an attention grabber, with Georges Delerue's melancholic score slowly swelling and the classicist font appearing before us; already Bertolucci is pleating layers and setting up future mysteries. It's the 1930s. We meet Marcello Clerici (a serenely commanding Jean-Louis Trintignant), a 34-year Italian man with a privileged background and endless contempt for himself. His world,we quickly ascertain, is one of shadows and dust, feigned loyalties and betrayals. He carries unspoken guilt, and visits a priest to confess to a life of sins. Upon hearing of Clerici's sins (murder apparently being less important than a brief gay affair), the priest berates Clerici for not confessing sooner. But Clerici doesn't care. He's clearly not religious and seeks no comfort nor forgiveness from God: what he desperately wants is for society to accept and forgive him. Though Clerici's morals are as opaque as stained glass, his motivation is lucid: he tells the priest he wants to live a normal life. 

Ostracized as a young boy because his morphine-addicted mother and asylum-confined father were wealthy, Clerici was ridiculed and bullied by other kids. The one person who ostensibly wanted to be his friend, the affable chauffeur, was actually just trying to have sex with the young Clerici. The grown-up Clerici thinks lowly of his wife, whom he calls mediocre and stupid, and displays little loyalty for his friends. It's clear that he uses people to make himself feel better, though to little avail. After years of isolation and loneliness, Clerici decides to join Mussolini's secret police, who assign Clerici to murder his former professor, an exiled anti-fascist whom Clerici greatly admires. Clerici doesn't believe in fascism; in fact, his pseudo-progressive beliefs align more with those of his staunchly anti-fascist professor than his comrades. But his professor has been exiled, fascists govern Italy completely, and Clerici wants to conform, so he agrees. 

If your concentration slips for a moment, especially near the beginning (I had the unfortunate displeasure of sharing the theater with an old Italian man who bellowed throughout the first ten minutes and yelled at everyone who asked him to STFU), the elliptical narrative can be hard to follow. There are times, especially near the end, when Bertolucci slips into dream logic (the outrageous coincidence of Clerici running into his would-be rapist decades later, the man apparently surviving being shot in the face), and it's important to remember the memory-laden framing device. For realists and those who aren't enthralled by formalism, it might be easy to dismiss the film as a simple exercise in stylistic masturbation--it's stunningly beautiful, with nary a shot lacking in precision or grace. Bertolucci has always been more a master of mise en scene than montage (the latter is where Antonioni trumps him), but that hardly matters here, especially when he packs so much emotional information into each shot. I'm especially keen on the tracking shots that sway left and right, giving us slightly different glimpses of the same room, the same characters. 

But few filmmakers this side of Nagisa Oshima manage to make love and lust so disquieting. (Bertolucci's best films are, of course, far more human, and humane, than Oshima's, which rejoice in unpleasantness.) As an arousing aesthete, he's pushed envelopes that moviegoers didn't even know existed. He suffuses each and every moment of his films with an ineffable sense of love and loneliness; his characters are damaged people usurping cultural normalities, whether knowingly or inadvertently, and fighting against suppression. Whereas fellow Italian master Antonioni used stark modernism and rigid aesthetics as awls to dig at the malaise of modernity, often jettisoning actual human characters in favor of existentialist imagery (think of the vast monolithic buildings of Rome, the stoic stills of man-made objects, the stiff, slick hair of Marcello Mastrioni), Bertolucci's films feel alive, even as his characters are slowly dying on the inside. For my money, The Conformist is every bit as Sisyphean and desperate as La Notte, and uses color as well as Red Desert, though it's much more accessible than Antonioni's work.

In the most immediately striking scene, Bertolucci and director of photography Vittorio Delerue use high-contrast lighting to convey unspoken sorrow and insinuate the dimming of Clerici's soul; it's like a sort of visual prelude to Gordon Willis' work on The Godfather. Clerici reunites with his former professor, Quadri (Enzo Tarascio, who always seems to know more than he lets on), who mentions how bright and promising Clerici was, though the student was "always too serious." They're in Quadri's office, a typical stuffy intellectual domicile with various books wreathing the room and a big desk in the middle of the floor. There are bright windows looming on both sides of the frame. Clerici asks Quadri if he remembers how he, Quadri, used to veil the windows in the classroom to keep out the light; Clerici moves to the left side of the frame and shuts the blinds, so now light only pours in a thick gauzy stream from the right side, shrouding half the room in light, half in darkness. Quadri remembers, and they reminisce about Clerici's aborted thesis, about shadows and morality. Here Bertolucci cuts between shots with deft timing, creating a rhythmic sequence of medium-close ups that sprout like buds from the gorgeous master shot of the half-darkened room, the camera slowly moving down while tilting up, so that when Clerici moves to the foreground he appears to be the one in charge now. 

Bertolucci weaves moments of intimacy throughout, using sex as a means of understanding his characters. Clerici seems far away when he touches his wife Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), but genuinely committed when he touches Quadri's young wife Anna (Dominique Sanda); Anna tries to seduce Giulia while Clerici tries to seduce Anna, and everyone, of course, ends up alone. Or dead. The idea of attraction is corrosive in Bertolucci's world; think of the ill-fated affair in Last Tango in Paris (his most notorious film, and the progenitor of Kael's finest, most hyperbolic film review), which functions more as a self-flagellating experiment for the two lovers than actual intimacy. In The Conformist, a subtler, more delicate affair than Tango, Bertolucci shows how intimacy and love are superseded by acceptance. Some filmmakers use fascism as a lens through which we can view the preservation of the human spirit in spite of tragedy. It's become a trop of World War II movies. Not with Bertolucci. He depicts a society abraded by injustice and pervaded by hatred, but he uses the horrors to show the intrinsic need to be loved by the nameless masses instead of the genuine few. 

The Conformist gets cinque cuore spezzato out of cinque 

The Strange Color of My Ire

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
102 minutes
Written and directed by Helene Cattel and Bruno Forzani
Starring Klaus Tange

At the Stanley Film Festival, an annual horror fest that takes place in the creepy, creaky, byzantine hotel in which Stephen King conjured the concept for The Shining (and where the God-awful mini-series adaptation of said book was filmed), I made the irrevocable decision to skip the closing night party, where there surely would have been gaggles of pretty people in snazzy outfits drinking free champagne and smoking weed (this is Colorado, after all), and instead went to the late-night screening of The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears. Before I decided to see the movie I'd emailed my editor, who shall remain nameless, and asked if I'd like the movie. He said, "It's violent, surreal, and stylishly incoherent. You'll love it." I'd already been told by more than one critic that it was an unholy mess, a clusterfuck of stylistic indulgences pantomiming gialli tropes in lieu of actually saying anything original. Anything that polarizing had to be worth a watch. I was ineffably excited.

Before Strange Color, I saw a 35mm screening of the great cult flick Who Can Kill a Child?, which played sans subtitles (I don't speak Spanish), and I interviewed Elijah Wood, but he ended our interview early to go to the bar; he didn't invite me. (The next morning I shared a 3-hour van ride to the airport with Mr. Wood; when he saw a herd of rams crossing the street he pressed his face to the glass and bellowed euphorically, having never seen a ram before, let alone a whole herd. If he hadn't blown me off the night before I'd have found his childlike awe endearing, but he had, so I didn't.)

I had 20 minutes to get to the film on time, so I ran a mile, in wingtips and a denim jacket, to the theater where Strange Color was playing. I arrived heaving and agitated, my shirt suffused with a day's worth of sweat and my feet riddled with oozing blisters, with five minutes to spare. It took me maybe four of those minutes to find the front door, which wasn't on the front of the building. I got in just as the festival's logo adorned the screen. The room was rife with pretty young things ready to neck in the warm glow of slasher horror. I settled into my seat, alone, beads of sweat rolling down my face, ready for whatever.

I was really into it for the first 20 or so minutes. I was promised David Lynch does Dario Argento (that'd actually be a cute rom-com), and the opening of the film almost fulfills that promise. We meet Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange, who apparently only has one facial expression) and the strange apartment building he lives in. Dan has a wife, but she's missing. Maybe Dan killed her,or maybe the people from inside the walls came and abducted her, or maybe she never existed at all. It doesn't really matter. Ascertaining this much plot is a mental workout, actually: writers-directors Helene Cattel and Bruno Forzani (whose debut film, Amer, similarly siphoned gialli style, but with a knowing wink and grin) have no interest in setting up a story, or characters; it's all about the gorgeous look and feel of the film, all about style, the cinematic equivalent to a Stepford Wife. There's a great shot of a record slowly rotating, the red-and-white spiral slowly drawing you towards its center, the camera acting like the mind's eye as the spinning vinyl hypnotizes the viewer, lulling you into a tranquil state of ease.

Dan eventually meets a scary old woman, one of his neighbors, who lurks in a shroud of darkness, her face sheathed, her hands desiccated skinny things. She knows something; scary old women always know something. It's a creepy scene, predicated on how we know as little as Dan does, and Cattel-Forzani keep the tension tight by slowly encroaching, teasing us with glimpses of stuff that might have deeper significance. This constant teasing is what drew me in; My mind reeled and racked, trying to extrapolate the pervasive symbolism and apply meaning to the multitudinous cuts and split-screen shots and the bacchanalia of vivid colors. But none of it means anything. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is an exercise in redundant style, as subtle as a sludgehammer and as empty as the space between stars.

A surreal expose on the pleasures of '70s Italian slasher flicks should be fun. Gialli are violent and steeped in style, but they're fun. Argento and Bava turn bodily mutilation into poetic entertainment, the marriage of sound and vision searing into your memory. Think of the opening to Suspiria, or the image of Boris Karloff's sallow undead face beaming in the darkness in Black Sabbath. These are creepy moments, but they're entertaining. Argento and Bava reward viewers, especially Bava, who treats his viewers like close friends. It's like, "Hey, thanks for watching my movie. He's a shot of Boris Karloff riding a horse into a thicket of woods. Enjoy!" Now think of David Lynch's best films, which use surrealism to plunge viewers into singular dreamscapes: they tease us as well, give us myriad sights and sounds to contemplate. The severed ear, the mysterious box, the Mystery Man, those rabbits sitting in a typical filial living room, watching television. Even if you can't surmise what they mean, they leave you with a feeling that something important is percolating below the surface. You don't feel cheated or manipulated, Lynch treats his viewers with respect. But, above all, Lynch never lets his penchant for terror usurp his gift for humor. His movies, dark and dour as they may be, are often funny as hell.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears isn't fun, or funny, or profound. If it wants its viewers to enjoy its company, it does a pretty shitty job. It's like that non-friend who tries to amuse you by insulting you, or punching you, or poisoning your drink and tying you up in his creepy dungeon basement. I felt like Cattel and Forzani were actively trying to encourage me to kill myself to escape the bombardment of stupidity and varicolored excesses they threw at me. The film is a demagogic harangue without any actual ideas. It's hard to remain engaged with a film that so quickly reveals itself to be empty and continually assaults you with verdigris flashes that sting the eyes long after they've numbed your mind. The munificent display of erect nipples and straight razors and hyperactive jump cuts left an acetic taste in my mouth. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for erect nipples and straight razors. But after the fifth time I was forced to watch the same goddamn razor stroke the same goddamn nipple I was seeing red.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears gets one-and-a-half erect nipples out of five

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

"Where are we?"

"Someplace good."

(Edit: This film isn't that someplace.)

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

119 minutes

Written and directed by Ned Benson

Starring Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, William Hurt, Bill Hader, Viola Davis, Isabelle Huppert, the Astor Place subway station

Ned Benson began writing what would eventually become the ambitious, sprawling screenplay for The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby when he was 27. When Benson first put pen to paper, his vision concerned the corroding life of a young man whose wife tries to commit suicide after their young son dies. It was told from the man’s point of view (of course), and the wife was essentially diluted into a MacGuffin. Jessica Chastain eventually took a peek at the screenplay, informed Benson that his film needed to somehow incorporate the view of a woman (apparently a revelatory moment for the young Benson), and the writer-director began to write a second screenplay that retold events from the woman’s point of view. Nine years later he had a 223-page screenplay and an astonishing cast of renowned actors to flesh out his story of love lost. He collated the two views, showing the same story from his and her perspectives, and told them in two separate halves. Unfortunately, in those nine years Benson never acquired the ability to write decent dialog, and his film suffers gravely.

We meet Eleanor (Jessica Chastain, brilliant even when she’s all but choking on fetid writing) and her husband Connor Ludlow (James McAvoy) as they flee a fancy restaurant, unable to pay the bill. They run and laugh and kiss in the grass, a flotilla of fire flies buzzing around them. They’re a beautiful young couple and their life seems perfect. (I do wonder, though, if we’d care about them at all if they weren’t such incredibly attractive individuals.) In the next scene Eleanor jumps off of a bridge.

Watching The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them is an innately unsatisfying experience because it’s not a standalone part of a trilogy, as advertised: hewn and spliced against Chastain’s wishes (she’s a co-producer and clearly this project meant a lot to her), Them is the bastard child of Benson and uber-producer Harvey Weinstein. They flensed almost an hour off of the original film and conflated the two perspectives. Supposedly Benson hopes the shortened amalgam will provoke interest in Eleanor Rigby, and people will pay to see the 3-hour version, which retains his original two-point perspective vision. As is, Them is a mess, pervaded by unbearably stilted dialog and a disorienting tendency to meld points of view into single scenes. Eleanor and Connor are inconsistent characters because we’re getting the two perspectives at the same time instead of in two separate halves. Sometimes Eleanor is tragic and we empathize with her, other times she’s a bitch because Connor sees her as such. But without a discernible marker telling us which view we’re getting, she seems like a schizoid person instead. Same goes for Connor: sometimes we feel his pain, other times we wanna knock his lights out. (At least I did.) It’s maddening. The ambition of the original elliptical narrative is lost, and Them resembles a hastily-constructed student film more than a decade-long undertaking.

McAvoy has the uneasy task of projecting sorrow and confusion at the same time using the awful writing Benson has handed him. He does an pretty good job (“Pretty good” basically applies to everything he does, though), but he doesn’t fair nearly as well as the prodigiously talented Chastain. She manages to make the flat title character into a living, breathing, crying person, POV-shifts notwithstanding. The legendary Isabelle Huppert, possibly the best living Actress this side of the Seine (her turn in The Piano Teacher is one of the all-time great performances, as scary as it is sad; she does more with a single stoic stare than most actresses can do in an entire film), plays Eleanor’s mother. She isn’t given much to work with, and Benson and co. seem content to let Huppert’s mere presence do the work. It almost works.

The whole cast is sterling, really: Williams Hurt, settling into AARP-age gracefully, plays Eleanor’s father, and he handles his inane dialog incredibly well (particular a story about almost losing his daughter in the ocean). His inability to look at his daughter when talking to her about the death of her son is heartbreaking. Bill Hader is Connor’s best friend and gets by simply because he exudes charisma, and the usually-reliable Ciaran Hinds does what he can as Connor’s father (more of a cipher than an actual father). But Viola Davis, always a pleasure to watch, gets the worst bit of writing to chew on: her diatribe on child-rearing would flunk a freshmen creative writing class, and she looks like she’s in pain trying to add any emotion to such shitty philosophizing.

Benson’s also an inconsistent formalist: the camerawork is sometimes good (particularly in Benson’s control of shallow- and deep-focus), but sometimes oddly blunt and unsubtle, and the frequent information dumping is more annoying than clever. (We only find out that Connor and Eleanor are married after Connor gets hit by a taxi—sadly, he lives—and the delayed relaying of information adds nothing to the story.) Son Lux’s score is lovely, for what it’s worth, but used sparsely. All of which would be forgivable if Benson got someone to re-write his writing, but he didn’t. Seriously, an MFA student from NYU could have rewritten this for a few hundred bucks and an implicit swell of ego. I’m sure many would be willing. The only thing that keeps the film tolerable is the collective effort of the actors, each one of whom brings his or her A-game. Otherwise this would have been an insufferable experience.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them gets two-and-a-half Harvey Weinstein bastardizations out of five

David Chase Is Fucking With You

"Don't stop..."

After seven years of unending argument regarding the ultimate fate of Tony Soprano, David Chase has finally given us a definite answer. And his answer, essentially, was a big "Fuck you."

Here is a man who would not take it anymore, all your ballyhooing over the ambiguous ending to the greatest drama cable television has yet produced. The myriad think-pieces arguing whether Tony Soprano gets whacked in that diner have done little to bolster appreciation for the show, or for television as an art in general. Arguing over whether Tony is alive or dead is as silly as arguing whether Schrodinger's cat is alive or dead. (It's both, obviously.) It misses the point, and it does a grave disservice to a show that spurred a tremendous upheaval in the nature of prime time television. The most notable example of a terribly misguided reading of the show's ending is that infamous anonymous blog that vivisects the final scene, shot by shot, cut by cut, using a keen understanding of formalism but little appreciation for the nebulous nature of art. Since then loyalties have only become more fervid: Tony Lives and Tony Dies is the highbrow equivalent to Team Jacob and Team Edward.

Few shows have become as deeply embedded into the pop-culture subconscious as The Sopranos. From the first time the opening credits rolled on television sets across the country in 1999, and we saw Tony cruising through the smoke stack-laden highways of North Jersey, and we heard the sultry sound of Alabama 3's "Woke Up This Morning" ("Chosen One Remix") pumping like a shot of espresso in our collective veins, we knew we were watching something different. Everything in the pilot means something: the fleeting shot of the grave yard and gradually-increasing space between the houses Tony passes in the opening credits (signifying the death of the old guard and the changes engendered and experienced by the younger generations); the opening shot of Tony peering through the legs of a statue of a naked woman in his therapist's office (signifying how Tony, alpha though he may be, is still powerless against the triumvirate of women in his life: his therapist, his wife, and his querulous, conniving mother); the religious symbolism (Tony being fed into the CT Scan machine, like Jesus entering the cave, as Tony's wife tells him he's going to hell.  The Sopranos is rife with imagery and metaphor, but, as Chase has stated numerous times, the writers never wanted to spoon-feed viewers.  

The Sopranos has something to say about everything. A day rarely passes during which I don't make a reference to the show, to the unwavering apathy of my friends. It's permeated my life because it raises questions instead of offering answers. The show's central themes concern morality and personal identity: does doing something bad make you a bad person? Can a person change? Do we ever really know who we are? Many of the show's finest moments, the ones that linger in your mind long after the credits have faded, are ambivalent to some degree: the Russian Paulie swears he shot; Tony stepping out of the Bing into the blinding stream of light as an Ennio Morricone song plays; Christopher fixing the tree that keeps falling down, the camera resting on the tree as we wait to see if it's gonna fall again (we never see it); the long dream sequences of which Chase and co. grew increasingly fond; and, of course, those goddamn ducks. Other moments are great because they pose questions regarding a character's motivations and morals: that heavy silence followed by Dr. Melfi's shattering, single-syllable resolution--"No."-- at the end of "Employee of the Month"; the burned-down horse stable and Tony's response in "Whoever Did This"; Tony refusing to kill Vito, his top earner, in the first half of season 6; Tony coming to terms with killing his best friend, with his mother hating him, with his father being a bastard, with his son being a loser, with the ruination of the lives of those he loves.

But these moments pale in comparison to the ending of "Made in America," perhaps the finest finale in television history. (I would say it's THE best finale, but adding "perhaps" makes me sound more reasonable.) It's been discussed more than any other finale, surpassing St. Elsewhere's and Newhart's rug-pullers, and Seinfeld's (artfully) non-resolution in which, of course, nothing happens. Only Twin Peaks' final episode approaches the devastating sense of not knowing conjured by Chase. of  By now everyone knows the score: only the second episode directed by Chase (the other being the very first episode), "Made in America" ends with a disquieting serene scene of Tony and his family sitting in a diner, listening to Journey, while a man in a Member's Only jacket watches them ominously. Chase establishes his visual vocabulary and points of view quickly and deftly cuts back and forth between Tony, Tony's POV, and a omnipotent, possibly benevolent third view. He establishes a rhythm, a sequence of events, and a certain tone. It's masterful directing. Go watch it now, because I can't do it justice. 

Then, after five long minutes of nothing happening, the screen goes black, the sound cut dead, just as we should get back to Tony's POV. The final words heard are "Don't stop." 

The common argument is that Tony has been killed by the man in the Member's Only jacket because earlier in the season Bobby told Tony that, at any time, without notice, without sound, they could be killed. They wouldn't see or hear it coming. Just sudden blackness. The conversation is repeated in the second-to-last episode, in which Bobby dies (though he definitely sees it coming, albeit too late). 

According to strict film theory, then yeah, Tony's dead. Member's Only Jacket, in the diner, with the pistol. But such a clear-cut resolution defies everything that made The Sopranos so great. 

Of course Tony dies. Maybe he dies in that diner, maybe he gets shot in the back of the head Godfather-style (the Michael Corleone restaurant shooting is Tony's favorite movie scene). Maybe he dies in a car accident, as he nearly does several times throughout the show. Maybe he has a heart attack, or gets whacked five years down the road. Maybe he goes to jail and gets shanked, or dies alone and old in a retirement community. Maybe he gets lung cancer like Johnny Sack. It doesn't matter: in the finale half-season, my choice for finest season of cable television, Chase goes to great lengths to show us the irony of the mob life. People die all the time, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. If the vicissitudes of fate decide to intervene against your behalf, you're fucked. But you don't know when it's gonna happen. Johnny Sack is given at least three erroneous diagnoses in jail, ultimate dying in his hospital bed, shriveled, pale, confused, and pathetic. After being outed as gay by Tony's daughter's boyfriend, Vito manages to elude death by running away to New England. But, stupidly, he comes home to ask Tony for forgiveness and gets killed in a gruesome, disgusting manner by the invidious Phil Leotardo. (Tony confesses to Dr. Melfi that he doesn't care what Vito does in his personal life as long as he keeps earning, one of the more enlightened moments of Tony's very slow progression as a human.) Big Pussy rats out his family and gets gunned down by his closest friends. He asks for a bullet between the eyes but instead gets 3 clips to the stomach. 

What does knowing whether Tony lived or died add to The Sopranos? How does it make the show better? It doesn't. People need closure because it makes them comfortable, but The Sopranos went out of its way to deny closure and make viewers uncomfortable. By cutting us off from Tony Soprano's world, David Chase made us feel exactly what Tony feels: that sense of not knowing what's gonna happen, when it's gonna end. 

"Made in America" gets five Fuck-Yous out of five

That Man From Rio

"What an adventure!"

That Man From Rio

1964

110 minutes

Directed by Philippe de Broca and Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Written by Philippe de Broca 

Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Francoise Dorleac, Jean Servais, Adolfo Celi

The immaculate manliness of Jean-Paul Belmondo is one of French cinema's greatest delights. With his shirt unbuttoned far below the GQ-approved second button, and the gradual accumulation of dirt and blood stylishly staining his slim white pants, he walks, talks, and seduces with swagger and masculine grace. He's a Francophile's Bogart, but with better taste in loafers.

He also takes a punch like a champ and runs marathons in formal attire in That Man From Rio, a light-hearted send-up of early spy flicks. If the movie were to be remade today (please, no), Tom Cruise would have to play Belmondo's character. No one else can do that much running.

Writer/co-director Philippe de Broca harness Belmondo's scruffy sex appeal and uses it to mock the typical manly Hollywood hero. Belmondo plays Adrien, a French soldier on leave who gets swept up into a plotless adventure of esponage, foreign intrigue, monetary greed, and thrilling sexism. Adrien is a sort of reimagination of his ill-fated character from Breathless: he's seductive and caddish in equal measure, and possesses MacGyver-like ingenuity, but Belmondo plays the part with an indiscernible grin and wink, his knowingly straight-faced turn more akin to Sterling Archer than James Bond. However, Belmondo and de broca play it so straight-faced the ridiculousness, intended as spoof, comes off like another '60s adventure flick, albeit one that's exceptionally well-made. They never quite take it far enough. 

The plot is inconsequential, of course: A priceless statuette is stolen from a musuem by a less-than-sneaky crook; soon thereafter Adrien's "friend" Agnes (Francoise Dorleac) and her mentor Professor Norbert Catalan (Jean Servais) are both kidnapped by the same less-than-sneaky crook, now accompanied by an equally uncouth partner. A detective with an apparent lack of culture briefly investigates the matter, but is quickly forgotten when Adrien jumps on a motorcycle (the first, and least absurd of the many vehicles he comandeers during the film) and chases Agnes to Brazil.

De Broca dexterously combines New Wave formalism--well-placed jump cuts, keen sound editing--with Golden Era adventure nonsense. The stunts are often spectacular (I'm not sure if Belmondo did his own stunts, but it certainly appears that he did, at least some of them). Belmondo has sharp comedic timing, as when he's giving a farcical story about how he kidnapped the Professor, only to see the crooks snag Agnes off the street, and he abruptly says, without missing a beat, "Oh shit! They're kidnapping Agnes!" Then he jumps out the window and chases them.

Dorleac fairs less well. Though she radiates charisma and does an admirable job with the skimpy material she's given, her role essential requires her to look hot (which she does well) and be stupid (which she also does well). The whole film is steeped in testosterone, though it's certanily aware of its own macho bull-headedness. The misogyny comes early and easily, as Adrien tells his buddy Lebel that he'll knock Agnes around if she's been messin' with any other men; Belmondo (or, as I like to say, Bel-Man-do) keeps up the manly facade throughout the rest of the film. He handles the increasingly silly situations deftly and calmly, while always looking just disheveled enough to be sexy (he's a stylish fucker for sure). Agnes, however, is essentially useless, seemingly competent at only two things: loving men and being rescued by men. And she even manages to fuck up the latter. Adrien's not a bad guy, and he's astonishingly thrifty, like a French progenitor of Indiana Jones' casual kind of hero, but I don't understand why he goes to so much trouble to save Agnes. I get that it's supposed to be farical James Bond (Adolfo Celi would go one to appear as a key villain in Thunderball), but the farce isn't so convincing. It's never ridiculous enough to be satire. More often it's just sexist enough to be banal, what I call Casual Sexism, the kind that society just accepts as quotidian, which makes it even more uncomfortable. 

"A woman should wait for you at home," Adrien muses to a young boy who briefly becomes his sidekick (think of a less annoying Short Round, and better-dressed). "She should play the piano, or the harp. Agnes can't even boil an egg, and I'm traveling across the world to save her." If the pervasive sexism is supposed to be satirical, and I have a hunch it is, it's not wholly effective. Though it's still more effective than anything the Emmys have attempted thus far.

That Man From Rio gets three-and-a-half shirtless Jean-Paul Belmondos out of five.