Streaming on Apple TV - Excellent crime adaptations - PRESUMED INNOCENT, BAD MONKEY, LADY IN THE LAKE

Adaptations are flowing thick and fast from Apple TV. For producers and editors commissioning stuff for TV's voracious appetite, there’s always some safety in knowing that the source material comes with a stamp of quality. Famous authors too. Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen and Laura Lippmann. I haven’t read any of the latter but the adaptation of her 2022 book Lady in the Lake is the best thing I’ve seen of its kind all year. The series showrunner and director is Alma Ha’rel 

It’s Baltimore 1966 with a dip back to the late forties. Two minorities are the primary focus – the Jewish community of suburban Pikesville and the black community. The former is disturbed by the abduction of ten year old Tessie Durst and the subsequent hunt for her killer. Particularly disturbed is Maddie (Natalie Portman), a middle-aged woman who, we learn was once the girlfriend of the father of the murdered child. The relationship was frowned upon and went nowhere and Maddie  Morgenstern married Milton Schwartz, a much less interesting and far more orthodox man. Tessie’s disappearance triggers enormous changes in Maddie – she departs abruptly from home, her son is permanently antagonistic and she embarks on an attempt first to do a little insurance fraud and then to get into newspaper reporting. Along the way she starts fucking a black cop.

 

Across town Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram) is trying to eke out a living as window mannequin at Hecht’s department store and as barmaid hostess at a black nightclub run by Shell Gordon, the black rackets king of Baltimore and a man to be feared. Cleo has an ambition to get into politics via a job on the staff of prominent local Congresswoman  Myrtle Summer and is also trying to keep her son out of harm’s way as he embarks on a life of petty crime as a numbers collector. The collision of the two societies, separated mostly by a cynical police force and an even more cynical newspaper reporter makes for great drama. The ending must be as bleak as any in recent times.

 

Presumed Innocent is based on a book by Scott Turow, a Chicago lawyer, written in 1987  and filmed by Alan J Pakula back in 1990. I remember that Scott Murray drew my attention to the book and for quite some time I was a devotee of Turow’s very precise, slow boil legal/political/crime stories that peered into the politics and corruption of the fictional Kindle County, a part of the larger area dubbed I think the Tri-Cities. But we know it was really Turow’s Chicago. In a Balzacian fashion, characters bobbed up across the series of books from Presumed Innocent in 1987 to Reversible Errors in 2002. Cant say I’ve read any since. 

 

The new series (showrunner is the amazingly prolific David E Kelley), a long eight parts, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Prosecutor Rusty Sabich, brings the story into the present. Back in 1987 there were no mobile phones and little CCTV to move the story along in the way that the new series does. It was complicated back then and the update piles on the clues that suggest at every step that we should have a sneaking feeling that Rusty may well have murdered his mistress. As far as I could see it doesn’t layout any clues as to who we finally learn did do it so the twist is a bit mediocre.

 

Bad Monkey benefits from taking its time. Carl Hiaasen is a great humourist, a great satirist but above all a writer with an implacable ability to open up the rotten can of worms that is Florida’s politics and law enforcement. The one previous attempt at making a movie of his books (at least his so-called ‘Adult Fiction”) was the stupendously mediocre Striptease way back in 1996. The TV series  (showrunner Bill Lawrence) tries to capture Hiaasen’s jocularity first via Vince Vaughan’s one man running standup dialogue as Andrew Yancy, a cop who has been tossed off the force then reinstated as a food inspector. It adds to it by possibly outright pillaging or by attempting to copy Hiaasen’s prose via a commentary track where a minor character far too frequently seeks to add a little humour by pointing out what is otherwise mostly the bleeding obvious. Still it does get Hiaasen’s focus – Florida corruption, pathetic police force, the sheer indolence of so many of the inhabitants and the tendency for many to take whatever criminal possibility is on offer. That gets a bravo. More Hiaasen please. 

 

In fact more adaptations of all three writers.  Done as well as they were done here would be just the ticket in between seasons of Slow Horses.

At the Sydney Film Festival (Part 3) – Janice Tong's Short Take on ALL SHALL BE WELL (從今以後, Ray Yeung, Hong Kong/China (2024)

 

Lin-lin Wu, Patra Au, All Shall Be Well

 

All Shall Be Well is a beautifully made small film from Hong Kong that at its heart looks at the idea of what makes a modern family. From its first frames – an early morning routine of two familiar lovers in their 60s, their silent movements, habitual, tender, every day. There’s no need for dialogue or any introduction to these two characters. 

 

It’s impossible not to be captivated by the understated performances of Patra Au as Auntie Angie and her life companion, Pat (Lin-Lin Wu). The two women are clearly still in love with each other, so many poignant moments of them sitting next to each other at their dresser, preparing their breakfast (this was the loveliest – like a well-rehearsed pas de deux), or walking down the street to the market together. Theirs was a companionable life that has been bedded down like the course of a winding river. No doubt they had weathered storms in earlier times, although family members now seem to be supportive. I’m sure that ‘coming out’ in Hong Kong for their generation would have been extremely difficult.

 

When Pat dies all of a sudden, and as she didn’t leave a will, Angie’s world is literally torn to shreds. The much needed time for grieving your other half recedes to the background as the infighting begins. What kind of funeral should be performed? According to whose wishes, now that Pat is no longer alive to speak for herself? Where should she be buried? What happens to the apartment that was Pat and Angie’s co-residence? What was their relationship in the eyes of their family, or the law? 

Patra Au

Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing is that Angie was constantly referred to as ‘her good friend’ or ‘they were like sisters’, as the family insists on keeping their relationship hidden, like a dirty family secret, when dealing with the authorities or lawyers or the Buddhist priest. More than that, they began to deny their relationship had ever existed. And in the end, the family, being blood relatives, gets the final say. The loophole for same sex couples in Hong Kong does not recognise this type of relationship if one has passed on without a will. 

 

The Cantonese title of the film, 從今以後, is a well-known turn of phrase, a Chinese idiom that translates literally as ‘from now on’, but it’s meaning is really about ‘starting again’ once we’ve come to a realisation of some past mistake or action that needs to be corrected. Perhaps the English title All Shall Be Well may be read as its adjoining couplet; that from now on, (having realised our mistakes) we’re able to amend our wrongs, that all shall be well. If you get this phrase next time in a fortune cookie, read into it this profound message.

 

We were lucky to have the director, Ray Yeung, present at the screening, where he talked about the impetus that drove him to make the film and some of his filmic choices. Although the film won the Best Queer Film at the Berlin Volksbühne, he said it was extremely difficult to source funding to make the film, "I was told that no one wants to see two lesbians over 60 in a relationship", especially because in Hong Kong, “old gay couples are a minority within a minority”.

 

For me personally, there's pure joy in hearing my mother tongue, Cantonese, spoken on the big screen (it has been a while for me with new Hong Kong films), the nature of the spoken language has many colloquialisms that only native speakers would be able to pick up on its nuances. Especially nostalgic moments were from some of the early scenes where the family and children all got together to play games: red light, green light; and marble checkers – I still have my set from Hong Kong, brought over to Australia all those years ago. A lovely reminder of my old home town.

 

All Shall Be Well has carved out a small oasis for itself in this fast-paced city – the film is slow and poignant, filled with moments of pause and meditation, as though it's asking the city to also take time out in order to reflect on this story. The pared-back colour palette and generally monotonal treatment in the film adds to its consideredness: of loss, grief and rejection. With this film, Ray Yeung has raised an important question for our millennia: who has the right to speak for, and make decisions for the one who is no longer there? 

 

The 71st Sydney Film Festival screened from 5 to 16 June 2024.

Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop analyses truth and fiction in TRANSATLANTIC (Anna Winger, Daniel Hendler, Germany/France, 2023)

 

 

 

Despairing of his country’s muted indifference to the war in Europe, 32-year-old Varian Fry left the USA in 1940 for Marseille with $3000 strapped to his leg. There, he led a volunteer team to assist more than 2000 refugees escape from Vichy France. 

The refugees included artists and intellectuals many of whom walked across the Pyrenees to Spain, or left by boat with forged documents to safe ports, en route the USA.

The refugees included film director Max Ophüls; writers Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler and Walter Benjamin; artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba Breton; musicians Pablo Casals and Wanda Landowska; Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof; and the philosopher and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. 

Known as “the American Schindler”, Varian Fry received the only official recognition of his work in 1967, five months before his death. André Malraux, then Minister of Cultural Affairs awarded Fry the croix de Chevalier of the French Legion d’Honneur. Malraux had visited Fry in Marseille in 1941, but had refused his offer to escape from France, instead entrusting Fry with the reels of his Spanish Civil War film L’espoir (1940). 

Varian Fry, Marseilles, 1941

The television series Transatlantic was ‘inspired’ by Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio, a weighty novel that ‘fictionalizes’ the work of Varian Fry and his collaborators. In its closing titles, Transatlantic claims to be a “a work of fiction inspired by real people and real events”.

Factual history and historical fiction are really at issue here.

A lot happened during Fry’s fourteen months in Marseille and both Orringer and the television series creators Anna Winger and Daniel Hendler have a lot to choose from. Or maybe…just make-it-up…sorry, I mean create ‘historical fiction’.

Orringer, for instance, creates a major and entirely fictional character for her novel – Elliot Shiffman Grant. He is the second most important character after Fry, and also Fry’s past lover. Grant joins him in Marseille to renew their closeted relationship and provide the novel with its central emotional arc, even if none of it is actually true. 

Varian Fry, 1967

Winger and Hendler dispense with Grant entirely in their television series and, instead, use a Thomas Lovegrove as Fry’s gay lover. But he, too, is entirely invented for romantic interest. 

Fry’s son has confirmed to The New York Times that his father was gay, but the Orringer and the television series creators have gifted Fry lovers who never existed. 

In the novel, Orringer gives Hannah Arendt only a few pages. She comes to see Fry looking for help to escape Vichy France. He immediately tells her he will try to obtain visas to the US for her and her husband. In the television series, Arendt is a slightly more substantial character, but is forcefully told by Fry on several occasions he cannot provide her with a visa. Quite confusing.

In Transatlantic, the escape route over the Pyrenees is compromised by British Intelligence who want British POWs taken to Spain. Fry’s lover, the fictional Thomas Lovegrove, turns out to be working for the British. In the novel, the route is never compromised, nor are there any British POWs, nor British Intelligence operatives and certainly no Thomas Lovegrove. 

Alexander Fehling as Max Ernst, Johdi May as Peggy Guggenheim

Other sources do claim Fry worked for British Intelligence and did help British pilots escape, suggesting it was a source of income to keep his refugee operation afloat.  It was, after all, a murky war, where casualties include the truth.

The novel also details the Flight Portfolio project - drawings from the surrealist artists seeking Fry’s help to escape. The drawings were to be smuggled to New York for a sale designed to raise funds for more escapees. But the Vichy police confiscated the drawings in a raid. 

In fact, there was no such Flight Portfolio project until 30 years later. In 1971, four years after Fry’s death, the International Rescue Committee published a portfolio of lithographs, limited to 250, under the title FLIGHT. Fry, who started the project in New York in 1964, found it difficult to assemble the work. In The Rescuer (2012), Dara Horn notes that a reluctant Marc Chagall finally contributed, but refused to sign his work. Max Ernst refused numerous requests from Fry, only ‘capitulating’ when Fry travelled to France to beg him. André Breton just flatly refused. 

If these claims from Dara Horn are true, this reluctance to engage years later with the refugee cause and with the man who could legitimately claim to have saved their lives is very puzzling. Something is missing here.

Fictionalization, however, allows Orringer to take the idea of a ‘Flight Portfolio’ from 1971 and re-plant it to Marseille in 1941. It’s such a good idea for a book title, after all.

Historical fiction is still fiction.

One real character from the time, who didn’t make it into either the novel or the television series, was a volunteer Varian Fry called a ‘moral adventurer’ – the ex-pat American Charles Fernley Fawcett: a wrestler, Foreign Legionnaire, social butterfly, trumpet player, songwriter, composer, artist, B-film actor (more than 50 credits), and for Varian Fry in Marseille, a doorman-receptionist. Fawcett wore his ambulance corps uniform as he managed the queues of refugees lining up for interviews with Fry. 

Cory Michael Smith as Varian Fry

Fawcett engaged in six bigamous marriages in a three-month period during the war, marrying Jewish women from Nazi internment camps so they could leave on American visas. At one point, two “Mrs. Fawcetts” turned up in Lisbon at the same time. 

His exclusion from the novel and from Transatlantic only testifies to the wealth of real - and imaginary - characters available. 

Leaving aside the surrealist artists’ party (nude in the novel, clothed in the television series), ‘fictionalization’ can produce some imaginative moments.

In the television series, surrealist artists André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba Breton and Max Ernst loiter around a swimming pool improvising poetry:

“Hug the dull. Prickly thorns are below.

In his slippers, a snail has lost his armor,

But he has found a mailbox.

The rain falls upside down.

It is blown by the currents, like ribbons.

The gray-black clouds are reflected on the skin of the sardines.

Swindled under the influence of their lumber pains!”

 

In Orringer’s book, when André Breton is escaping Marseille by boat, Breton says to Fry:

“There is no purer embodiment of surrealism than the departure from land onto a borderless plane of water. One sails over the bodies of millions of creatures, many of them unknown to man – even over mountains uncharted, mountains higher than the highest peaks in Tibet – entirely without consciousness, without the slightest knowledge of their existence. One might, for example, while sitting in the ship’s dining room and eating iced pineapple, sail over a great underwater current propelling a fleet of leviathans and their children, thousands of tons of oily flesh moving invisibly and inaudibly along that unbound underwater river like giant corpuscles through the bloodstream of the world.”

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (30) Straub and Huillet : “Landscapes of Resistance”

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub 

Jean-Marie Straub (1933-2022) and Danièle Huillet (1936-2006) are relatively rare examples of international filmmakers in the sense that they have embedded their filmmaking in texts and locations reflecting political and cultural history whether in Germany, France or Italy. On their films together Straub (pron. Strorb) is credited as director while sharing production, post-production and writing credits with Huillet although, as further suggested, this functional ‘division of labour’ obscures the truly collaborative nature of their creative relationship.

Straub was born in France in Alsace-Lorraine. At the age of seven he experienced the banning of the right to continue to publicly speak French when the border province was occupied by Germany in 1940; over the centuries control has alternated between France and Germany and the culture is mixed.  His interest in cinema appears to have had its first active expression in his taking part in demonstrations against the unenterprising film programming of Metz cinemas. Straub made his first films in West Germany where he had moved in 1959 with Danièle Huillet to escape being conscripted into the French army for the Algerian War, and from 1969 they lived and worked in Italy.

The bulk of their work has been in German with their sources often also German, the philosophical and technical aspects having roots in German Marxism and in the aesthetic theories of Brecht although Straub admitted to only later reading his writings. His early experiences in filmmaking were during the period of the French New Wave in Paris where he met Danièle Huillet in 1954. They married in 1959 and remained inseparable for the 52 years until Danièle’s death. Her interest in cinema, especially in ethnographic film, pre-dated the meeting with Straub when both were preparing to enrol, unsuccessfully, in the French film school, IDHEC. Prior to moving to Munich Straub worked as an assistant to Abel Gance, Renoir, Rivette, Astruc, and Bresson, the latter's work a major formative influence.

The sexist assumption that Straub was the principal author of the films with Huillet in a supportive ‘behind the scenes’ role persisted until a 1982 interview published in ‘Frauen und Film’ in which “Huillet removed all doubt that the works of Straub/Huillet are truly collaborative - and always have been” (Barton Byg 12). Byg states that the single area in which Huillet did leave more of the decisions to Straub is the aspect of filmmaking that has been reified into directorial “signature”:    the set-up and framing of the shots, with areas such as script and mise en scene (staging) more equally collaborative while sound, editing, and scene design together with certain producer’s functions, were more likely to have been in Huillet’s charge.

Byg further points out that “Straub/Huillet question the notion of authorship by multiplying the form of their works, subverting the question of “originality.”  “From the very beginning a principal aspect of their aesthetic has been to subvert the primacy of the visual in cinema by having the text, sound, duration, and editing clash with, rather than support, the image” (12). At the same time they did not dismiss the implication of individual work within film tradition, consistently referring to the importance of figures of the classical cinema,”especially because it is endangered.”

Although “their approach is a modernist one of reduction and simplification of form” (ibid 20), Straub-Huillet, over more than three decades, repeatedly expressed their wish to maintain a connection to film tradition and references to the great artists of classical cinema abound in their work. Jean Gremillon’s experiments with sound other than as merely an accompaniment to the image, was a formative influence on Straub. He more than once cited Jean Renoir as the source of a definition of “the filmic - a tiny dialectic between between film, theatre and life” - also varying it by replacing “film” with “encounter with place” (ibid 20). Renoir’s description of the actor’s relation to the text and his early use of live sound also parallels that of Straub/Huillet (23,24).

To come across the films of Straub and Huillet without foreknowledge is to discover “a rigorous program that's all work and no play,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum warns but then hastens to add that “every one of their films offers an arena of play as well as work, and opportunities for sensual enjoyment as well as analytical reflection.” Writing in 1988, Rosenbaum draws a distinction between the marginality separating Straub/Huillet’s films from the more widely circulated “art films” of Godard, Ruiz, Kluge et al. Their films frequently present greater challenges for the viewer simply because they insist on the reality principle - preserving and enlivening the integrity of the original text in terms of meticulous choice of actual places/settings or landscapes where intensely rehearsed performances by the actors, with total commitment to live sound recorded at source for the final release soundtrack, as more important than the pleasure principle.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's further description of them and their films is well placed : “Utopian Marxists with a taste and passion for nature, antiquity, direct sound, and obscure, mainly neglected texts, they remain materialist thorns in the sides of those critics and programmers who believe that films are meant to be consumed rather than grappled with.” (123-9).  Other than what resides in the chosen text to be reshaped, Straub - Huillet rejected the narrative conventions prevailing in illusionistic film narrative. Their acceptance of photography as a baseline clearly distinguishes their films from the avant garde and “reveals the error of critics’ “tying them to the way structuralist/materialist filmmakers call attention to the material facts of film” (Byg 22).

Rosenbaum further distinguishes “the conflicts, textures, pleasures, and meanings [that] are created in the encounter of one or more pre-existing texts (verbal and musical) with concrete places/settings or landscapes. In each film the complex balance of the encounter is distinctly different.” The texts range from fiction (by Brecht, Heinrich Böll, Marguerite Duras, Kafka and Cesare Pavese) to poetry (by Saint John of the Cross, and Stéphane Mallarmé); from plays by Ferdinand Bruckner and Pierre Corneille to letters (by Friedrich Engels and Arnold Schoenberg); and from political statements (by Franco Fortini and Mahmoud Hussein) to musical pieces (by Bach and Schoenberg). The locations have included urban and rural landscapes in Egypt, France, Germany  and Italy, as well as shots in New York and St Louis to supplement the mainly German footage of Amerika / Class Relations, their 1984 Kafka adaptation. (123-4)

Nicht versöhnt /Not Reconciled 

Based on Heinrich Boll's novel 'Billiards at Half Past Nine', Nicht versöhnt /Not Reconciled (1965) a narrative about three generations in the life of a German middle class family involving eight members over 50 years (c1910-60) told mostly in flashbacks, is “quite simply exploded” in the film, the whole novel abstracted into 12 tableaux in a chain of elliptical moments in 53 minutes, past and present co-existing on the same level. Straub describes it as “a lacunary film” - the whole body is composed of cells with gaps between. “Time is flattened out, generations are meaningfully confused – all in order to make, not a film about the advent of the Nazis, but historically one that shows that Nazisim already existed politically before 1933 and continues still.” (Roud  Dictionary ed. and entry on Straub-Huillet 967). The Bressonian influence is clearly evident in the mise-en-scène of Not Reconciled. There is virtually no acting or interaction between the characters who dispassionately deliver monologues in scenes that are completely given over to them leaving little space for description of the location or for suggesting the character's state of mind. Straub stated that the intent was “to eliminate, as much as possible, any historical aura in both costume and sets, thus giving the images a kind of atonal character” so that they merge into a continuum of past and present.

Thereafter politics is an implicit presence but “taken up by the post 1968 left as models of anti-realist, political filmmaking” (Nowell-Smith, ‘Making Waves’ 214). Except in rare cases such as Fortini/Cani (1976), his (sic) films (sic) were political only to the extent that they “revolutionised representation” in breaking every convention that Hollywood had established. “His (sic) Brecht-inspired critique of representation and his radical politics had a lasting impact on the Young German film, especially on Alexander Kluge and the early Rainer Werner Fassbinder” (Kaes 616).

András Kovács observes that “acts are depicted as symbolic gestures rather than as real physical facts, and so events of the plot for the most part are told rather than shown.” - the act of one character shooting another with a pistol in Not Reconciled is “reduced to the signalling of a gesture.” This aspect of Straub's style assumes the form of a kind of distanced theatricality, a tendency that becomes stronger in some of Straub/Huillet’s subsequent films. On the other hand, Straub adopts a radically minimalist style in, for example, Moses and Aaron (1974) in which two characters and a chorus perform Schoenberg's opera outdoors in the ruins of an ancient arena (148).

The film of Not Reconciled is to be counted among the many cases in the Straub/Huillet oeuvre where a knowledge of the original, in this case Boll's novel, and repeated viewings are necessary in order to comprehend the film's narrative but not the film's theme. To Rosenbaum, “for all its complexity and difficulty as an integral narrative, Not Reconciledregisters more simply and conventionally than [the Straubs'] other works within its individual sequences, and perhaps the only one of [their] individual films to which the usual concept of 'mise en scène' can comfortably be applied.”

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

Straub-Huillet’s next film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), was a first project made after a long struggle for funding and thus Bach was their third realised film, composed of documents from Johann Sebastian’s life, musical performances in historic locations, and a few fictionalised scenes held together by a voice-over narration by his second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach. “It never presumes to tell us more about the characters’ motivations or personal lives than the historical evidence offered in the chronicle although some additional evidence was generated in the same tone” (Turim 330). Nothing survives that was known to have been written by Anna Magdalena except for an inscription in a bible. Most of the text is made up of phrases from her husband's letters and the necrology written by one of his sons. In all there are about twenty sources, plus the linking passages written by Straub and Huillet.

Leading Bach interpreter, harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, plays Bach in both senses. However the Chronicle is not just a biographical account but an intelligent revelling by Straub-Huillet in the “Bach experience.” New York film critic Armond White finds Straub expanding film’s potential in letting various techniques illustrate aspects of Bach’s life and work, witnessing Bach’s real-time execution of performances (as portrayed by Gustav Leonhardt). “Rejecting the sentimental conventions of  storytelling, Straub/Huillet find pleasure in the rigours of film form.”

The music, from solo harpsichord to orchestral, on the soundtrack is presented to represent the range of Bach’s work recorded ‘live’ in performance (q.v.), and presented chronologically in 25 pieces, all extracts from the original as composed from 1721-49. Roy Armes suggests “this leads one to ponder on the style of performance and the nature of the film itself” (214).

 “Much time and travel was dedicated to finding [25 different original locations] and performers who could use the original baroque instruments, a practice that was not at all common at the time […] The live recording of uninterrupted performances also goes against [film] industry practices.”(Byg 55).  

 Chronicle is, as Straub has said, “a love story. It is also a documentary on the actors and musicians of the film; also a film with social and political aspects; and finally, to use a phrase of Straub’s, it is a film-film [i.e. 'pure film'] and it is in this last aspect that it brings us back to the music of Bach. It is because the film is all of these things at once that it is such a major achievement of integration.” (Roud BFI p.65)

Othon

Othon (1969) - more an exemplar than  a paradigm on the spectrum of Straub-Huillet’s radical approaches to redefining cinematic narration - their first film in colour, is also the first of a number of their films set in the ancient world. It is based on a canonical text, Pierre Corneille’s 17th century play, a tragedy inspired by an episode of Roman history from 69 AD. It contains what can be taken as a revolutionary message around an ambitious nobleman’s search for power through love and political scheming. In 1962 while they were on holiday in Rome Straub was inspired to make a film on the site of the Circus Maximus, the remains of a massive ensemble of buildings looking across a valley. Six years later after completing Bach Straub suddenly had the idea of Othon “ feeling the need of a text, a language which would be as tight a texture as the music of Bach; and on the level of the spoken word, Cornielle did the same thing that Bach did for music” (Roud BFI 105).

Corneille’s play has a complex plot constructed around the struggle for the throne at the end of the reign of the ageing Emperor Galba, “the complications of the plot being its very essence.” All the characters are victims of the power game. Straub/Huillet felt that the power struggle and the relationship between the government and the governed had forceful 20th century parallels (ibid).  But Straub/Huillet had no interest in a theatrically conventional adaptation of the play.   

The video guide Understanding Straub and Huillet (see below) begins by asking the question: how and why does a film like Othon not look and feel like a conventional theatrical adaptation? The answer, it is suggested, lies in the underlying disconnect from generic film adaptation that feels like a documentary about actors performing an adaptation carved out of the diegesis (fictional world).  

Actors in period costume are ‘dropped’ into the present without any attempt being made to cover up the process of disconnection. The original diegesis is, in effect, superimposed on a modern filmed reality. This palimpsest is made up of 5 layers seemingly in competition: the original play (1) is condensed from 135 to 90 minutes at times running too fast for ‘reading,’ cadence in delivery of the lines given priority over enunciation (2), imposed on a pre-selected location on which the film is built (3), with the actors in Roman dress denoting the period (69 AD) (4). A variety of mainly non-French actors was carefully chosen and exhaustively rehearsed. An ‘explosive mix’ forming a distancing from the ‘“rocking horse rhythms” of the Alexandrine French (ibid 113) - a variety of accents spoken without dramatic expression before a backdrop of ancient remains, the sight and sounds of traffic of contemporary Rome in the valley and of water in a nearby fountain, all forming an aural tapestry. The burden of stage - bound theatricality from the classical past is dialectically dissolved by distancing techniques of Brechtian epic theatre directed at transforming a passive into a ‘thinking’ audience.

For Straub/Huillet, as Roud points out, “ language is an ‘object - something to be manipulated and handled as freely in the composition of the soundtrack as the visuals in the cutting room” (113). In contrast, their insistence on directly recorded sound as the final soundtrack, something live that can only be partially controlled, in preference to wholly determined studio sound recording and dubbing. For Straub/Huillet direct sound becomes another available option, the tension between ‘reality’ and artifice allowing actuality and chance to play a role (114).

This is all designed as part of the Straub’s and Huillet’s craft, as Tag Gallagher puts it, to paradoxically “finally make the texts themselves disappear, whereupon we have a movie, which is why the words have so much more substance.” As Sarah Jane Foster continues in her Cinematheque Annotation on Othon available online in ‘Senses of Cinema’ : “Othon doesn’t elevate the language of the play by creating artifice around it; the words become another material element in the filming process” [emphasis added] […] The flattened hierarchy of material and narrative lets us experience the film sensorially:  the timbre of each actor’s voice, the hum of background traffic, and the texture of the green trees and wine-red tunics are as important to the film as Cornielle.”

In defence of this approach to the text, novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras in 1971 implored audiences to put aside conventionally conditioned expectations and go and see Othon. “To call a work obscure is just as disastrous as to call it a masterpiece of clarity: the text becomes burdened with a prejudice that prevents the reader from relating to it directly. The work is imprisoned” (quoted Foster.” See entry on Duras in 6 (10).

History Lessons

Straub/Huillet’s following film, History Lessons (1972), is closely based on an unfinished novel by Bertolt Brecht ,’The Business  Deals of Mr Julius Caesar.’ Interviews with four contemporaries of Caesar’s - a banker, a soldier, a lawyer and a writer - place Caesar’s exploits in political perspective  exactly quoting Brecht’s dialogue while the filmmakers “make a radical (Brechtian) break with every rule of narrative film grammar” in paring away illusions. “This is arguably political cinema at its most advanced and provocative” (Tony Rayns ‘Time Out’).

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Tony McKibbin is the author a short guide on Where to Begin with the Straub/Huillet films. Click for link.  https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-jean-marie-straub-daniele-huillet. He suggests the best film to start (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach), and the best follow-up viewing (History Lessons and Too Early/Too Late).  

Available on YouTube is a 17 min. video guide Understanding Straub and Huillet in the Studio Ersatz series by an unidentified presenter making effective use of clips from their second feature film Othon made in the form of a palimpsest - an open ended multi-layered adaptation of a play to film.

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Stuart Liebman  “Not Reconciled”  review  Monthly Film Bulletin  March 1976                                                                     

Richard Roud entry on Jean-Marie Straub  in Cinema a Critical Dictionary  Ed. Roud  Vol 2  1980;                                                       

Straub  BFI Cinema One series  1971                                                                                                                                       

Tony Rayns  review “The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp”  MFB op cit.                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Tag Gallagher “The Greatest Filmmaker You've Never Heard Of”  Sight & Sound  Dec. 2009                                        

Maureen Turim  Essay on Straub and Huillet in New German Filmmakers  ed. Klaus Phillips 1984                              

Jonathan Rosenbaum “The Sound of German”   Essential Cinema 2004                                                                                              

Martin Walsh “Brecht and Straub/Huillet: The Frontiers of Language  Afterimage 7  Summer 1978                              

Barton Byg  Landscapes of Resistance  the German Films of Straub/Huillet  1995                                                         

Roy Armes The Ambiguous Image: narrative style in modern European film 1976  chapter on Straub

At the Sydney Film Festival and now The Current Cinema - Janice Tong's short take on KINDS OF KINDNESS (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/UK/USA, 2024)

 

Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘triptych fable’ as it is described in its press kit is all but a well funded (you can tell by the way it’s filmed and it’s mise en scène) farcical romp that lacks the kind of abstract ‘weirdness’ (another oft used word associated with the film) Lynchian cinephiles so love. It matters little that it’s broken out into 3 stories, the 2 hour 45 mins screening time was at best, unpleasant, but overall, on the far side of inducing tedious boredom.

 

Perhaps..  as the second film I watched on the same night, immediately following Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 3 hours 17 mins, About Dry Grasses meant I had little tolerance for anything less-than-brilliant held true. 

 

With Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos has moved away from his earlier masterpieces like Dogtooth (2009) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017. They offered us a kind of darkly tragic Euripidic-Sophoclean take on life. 

Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe

Instead, Lanthimos is following his Poor Things (2023) trajectory of installing us in a mind-numbing and meaningless simulacrum — a sort of dystopian Disneyland (as if the real thing is not frightening enough). Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe reunite here, three times, across three stories, each playing different characters, but are all simulacra of their previous selves – this was intended on the part of the director and his co-writer, Ehimis Filippou. Filippou and Lanthimos wanted the three stories and their characters to inhabit the same universe, but they are not woven as interconnecting narratives, in fact, the three stories are only linked by the initial that is common to all three titles: the R.M.F of The Death of R.M.F; R.M.F. is Flying and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. No, we don’t get to find out what R.M.F. stands for, but we do see these initials embroidered on a shirt of a man in the first story.

 

In The Death of R.M.F, Jesse Plemons, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival this year for this role, plays a middle aged corporate type, whose sole occupation in life is to keep his boss (Dafoe) happy…sure he is not all that obedient because he takes small liberties by acting against instructions (like wearing his own choice of clothes for the day) or lying about what he’s has or hasn’t done. But this wasn’t a problem until his position was ousted by a more obedient pawn (Stone). Whereas in R.M.F. is Flying, Plemons is a dedicated husband whose wife (Stone), a marine biologist who returns home from being lost at sea for many months. But he soon suspects that she is not who she says she is. Lastly, in R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich, Plemons is paired with Stone as a kind of bounty hunter in search of a particular person – a surviving twin who has the miraculous ability to heal. Folks, if you’re wanting to see the dance scene in the motel parking lot (b, you’ll have to wait until the last 10 mins of the film. Or, just YouTube it.

 

 

 

Perhaps a good way to describe the film is as an alt-fiction piece, where the whole world has become overrun by cults, and these three stories are just examples of power and the desire of people wanting to control other people (kind of like a magnified version of social media); the smacker is the other’s blind willingness to be controlled. Boy, the lengths in which a person would go to in order to submit to the other’s power is excruciatingly banal. Sadly, I cannot see this film as a play on anything psychological like the Stockholm Syndrome or attuned to a philosophical idea like that of ‘the bull is nothing without its matador’ (Cixous), it's ‘weirdness’ is really just plain sad and not satire…In the session I attended, there was a lot of laughter from the audience, and usually at unexpected moments in the film. I guess they were a mix of uncomfortable sniggers and genuine chortles of disbelief. I doubt if anyone laughed in the same way at a screening of Mulholland Drive.

 

All in all, I found this to be a difficult film to like even though it’s well made. 

 

The 71st Sydney Film Festival screened from 5 to16 June 2024.