Rosemary's Baby (1968)

After viewing films from all over his career, I've come to the conclusion that, as interesting and engaging as his movies usually are, Roman Polanski is just flat-out inconsistent. Not only throughout his filmography but within each of the stories he chooses to place on the screen. There is a boisterousness to his actor's dialogue and a quick-turn happenstance to his pacing always present, which either pushes the material to greater, stylistic heights or forces it down into the bowels of contrivance.

Rosemary's Baby shares these qualities, but does it succeed or fail in their execution? The answer is that it rolls into a bit of both. The film is seen as one of the pinnacle classics of horror cinema, and to a point, I can totally understand why. Above all, it is a completely unique horror experience as far as the top-billed in the genre go. The film follows Rosemary, a yuppie looking to have a child with her husband, as they move into a strange apartment. The neighbors take a peculiar interest in Rosemary, supporting her desire for children and offering their bedside care to her. However, as her baby develops she finds herself subject to increasingly destructive treatment from those that supposedly look after her.

It's a premise that could easily be thrown into a tacky "look how weird and fucked up this is" aesthetic, but supernatural evil and grotesque shock take a far backseat to clinical mystery. Rosemary's slow unfolding of a plot against her and the child she's expecting seems like an after-thought to the social observations on manners and passive aggressive expectation in the film. Polanski creates his brand of tension by suffocating characters with guilt and repression, Rosemary taking the brunt of expectation as the mother-to-be.

The sinister forces at work are very pedestrian and slice-of-life, like the herbal drink that Rosemary's neighbor gives to her throughout her pregnancy. The drink seems to cause her great pain, makes her pale and sickly, and eventually she starts to suspect something is wrong. Everyone tells her to ride it out, ignoring her plight and calling her crazy for thinking otherwise. This "harm through hospitality" makes the disturbance in the film much more effective. It's an interesting critique of social politeness at all costs, showing the lengths some people will go to in order to maintain the status quo.

The elements of witchcraft and satanism are downplayed to the point of subconscious needling, nagging at your senses and only occasionally throwing it all in your face. There are only a handful of dream sequences that outwardly depict the anxieties of Rosemary, one being a hallucination induced by her being drugged. This particular nightmare sequence is the cream core of the film, as Rosemary is implicitly raped by her husband and first makes the realization that something is amiss with the neighbors in her apartment.

The sequence features intense chanting and brooding strings that hover over shadowy naked old people (including her neighbors) and Rosemary tied down to a satin bed. It's one of those unforgettable film moments where there is a full-bodied humor and grotesque subversion in equal portion. The nightmare could have been made in an aggressive, gross-out fashion, but Polanski keeps in all the awkward nuances. The image of the old people standing around her bed, watching and waiting, is burned in your mind, not because it got scared into you, but because you genuinely didn't know what the fuck to think of it.

Mia Farrow's portrayal of Rosemary unfortunately has remnants of the old acting school elocution. I could see a genuine performance wanting to crawl out of her, but she remains fastened to the overly proper mannerisms and dialogue articulation found in Hollywood films of the '40s, '50s and early '60s. The time context becomes less of an adequate excuse considering that the movie was released in 1968, from a filmmaker known for stylistically alternative acting direction, and the counterculture film movement being in full swing. However, Ruth Gordon as the nosy, overbearing neighbor Minnie, was pitch perfect. It's clear she's supposed to be a caricature of a New York Jew, but she plays it with a nice tussle between ostentatious clown, dry villain and stern nurse.

Like with many of Polanski's films, Rosemary's Baby goes on for slightly too long (even though the ending is well done), attempting to throw a few extra twists in for good measure. An example is the portion where Rosemary seeks consolation in her first OBGYN, after being subjected to malpractice from another doctor that's in collaboration with the apartment neighbors. She finds out that this first doctor is ALSO under the sway of the neighbors, thwarting her plans to escape their clutches. It's a section that is far-fetched and unnecessary, it doesn't give any new context to what's going on in the story, it doesn't heighten the tension or provide a stylistic eccentricity worth watching. It's just extra fat. I couldn't help but feel that if the film was 20 minutes shorter,  it could have been more succinct and powerful. The tension could still be built adequately but there would be no room for flat twists that just turn into posturing.

So, on the positive side, Rosemary's Baby is a good-looking horror film that doesn't play by any of the rules setup in the genre. I've always wished more horror movies explored the slow, passive aggressive crawl of disturbance over shock and slash thrills, but the truth is the former is much harder to pull off than the latter. On the negative side, Polanski's penchant for dragging out his narratives and Farrow's fluffy, somewhat artificial performance hold the film back from any true greatness in my mind. It's a film that is absolutely worth watching, but one that needs to be taken with grain of salt.





 

Raging Bull (1980)

I'm like the donkey with the lamest leg, the largest plough and the harshest farmer when it comes to the chronology in which I should have seen Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. Scorsese was one of the first directors (along with Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher) that I embraced as a paragon of artful cinema, back in my heady (or just uneventful) days of late high school. I got a huge rush from seeing Taxi Driver and Mean Streets around that time, my burgeoning curiosity for movies intersecting kindly with all of the stark violence, urban unrest and vibrant culture on display. After a while I was on to exploring other things, and Scorsese took a very intermittent role within my moviedom. I saw Gangs of New York junior year in high school, Goodfellas, Casio, and Bringing Out the Dead splashed into my view during a brief stint in college, saw The Departed in theaters a year later, The Aviator came three or so years later, then I finally rounded things off with a viewing of Shutter Island, a full year after it was released.

Raging Bull always seemed to elude my interest. I knew it was considered one of the director's masterpieces - a slogan hacked and coughed and fucked to death by every critic, film student and movie fan in the world. It was one of those things where I was simultaneously curious about the film's true quality, but also extremely put off by the impenetrable armor that so many people had placed upon it. So I dallied, I delayed, I forgot, I remembered and then forgot again. After enough time passed, effectively spreading me away from the film's reputation (in my mind's eye, anyway), I finally beckoned Netflix to send it to me.

Cast in an iron mold of gorgeous black and white cinematography, Raging Bull tells the story (based on actual events) of Jake LaMotta, a maverick boxer barreling down the middleweight regional circuit, undefeated and unchallenged. The man even stands toe to toe with boxing giant, Sugar Ray Robinson, and decimates him on more than one occasion. The film tracks La Motta's sharp rise to near-stardom, then his hard, slow tumble back into obscurity.

When you get down to brass tacks, Raging Bull is fundamentally structured like a million other cautionary biopics of stalwarts that buckle in the face of greatness. The film follows mid-early career LaMotta from his roots in a dysfunctional Bronx apartment where he's managed by his brother Joey, to a heated romance with neighborhood girl, Vicki, rising prestige in the ring, marriage, house, kids, etc, etc. It's not until Jake decides to take a dive in order to garner favor from his neighborhood sponsors that things turn sour, both in the ring and in his personal life.

LaMotta is portrayed by Robert De Niro, who injects a shit-storm of impotent rage and paranoia into a man never quite satisfied with his station in life or the intentions of those around him. It's a performance that helped to cement the legendary reputation (and his subsequent typecasting) of the actor. As far as how it actually plays off within the context of the film?  Honestly, there wasn't anything special about De Niro as young to early-middle age LaMotta. Not that De Niro is bad, but it's an identical performance from him, seen many times, both before and after Raging Bull. It's the same mumble-mouth wiseguy cadences and desperate moans that are well-worn in his little corner of pop culture.

When I finally landed upon the "classic" scene of him accusing his brother of cheating with Jake's wife, Jake uttering the gold-plated words, "I heard things" and "you fuck my wife?", it was a let-down of neutral proportions. The scene did it's job in shifting the drama along, but it wasn't nearly as interesting or iconic as all the parodies and stupid fan impressions would have you believe.

I'll give it to De Niro that he does do a fine job as elder Jake LaMotta - fat, washed up, life falling apart - but still desperately dry-humping the limelight, this time in the form of a lizard-haired stand-up comedian. The sense of transformation is truly palpable in the later scenes of the film, particularly where he performs at a shitty dive bar, heckled, scraping the bottom, but retaining a kind of smirking pride for the irony of his life. Of course, even this section of the film is dogged by typical beats of a biopic, particularly when LaMotta's wife drives up to Jake at his club and tells him she's leaving for good with the kids. In the prior scene with Vickie, the couple appears to be at peace in their idyllic Miami home, after an eruption of violence and anger years before, but then suddenly she's leaving him within two subsequent sequences? It feels like a lazy shoehorn, even with the undercurrent of lingering dysfunction.

The romance between LaMotta and Vickie is actually the best framed thing in the movie, at least, for the first section of it. The long, understated shots of the couple getting down to business for the first time and Jake's dominating, self-inflicted tease of her body before a fight are great stones in the river,slowing things to satisfying intimacy, if even for just a little bit.

The two things that struck me as definitively awesome were the boxing sequences and the film's music score. As the camera tracks down to the ring, a shrill set of strings wince off a melancholy that never saps up the film. Instead, it resonates with a graceful sadness. The music sometimes even cascades with the mish-mash of trick photography (not to mention the stellar sound design) that Scorsese employs for Raging Bull's boxing matches. Mixing in slow-motion, fast-motion, bulb-bursts and heavy smoke machines, the fights take on an ethereal quality, detached from the film, floating above it. These sequences are made all the sharper by De Niro's fight choreography, which punctuates and flows quite nicely to the film's dream aesthetic.

Distinctive fight sequences can't save a movie of this caliber, however. Raging Bull has always been billed as a dramatic juggernaut, and a lot of the drama feels like Oscar-blowjob. Mountainous tantrums, tearful breakdowns, a lukewarm brother relationship (that should have been explored further), marginally important supporting female roles and a moral arch that was tired long before this film was made. Sounds like Academy fodder if I've ever seen any. Scorsese injects enough of his trademark non-sequitur moments and the fight photography is absolutely worth watching, but ultimately Raging Bull is tepid. An alright film, with a handful of good ideas scattered throughout.

Drive (2011)

After hearing so many people suck the dick of Drive for about year, I finally decided to hunker down and watch it. The main thing that put me off for so long was the inclusion of Ryan Gosling, an actor who's fame and fan adoration still eludes my sense of sanity. All he has to do is be in a movie, standing around looking tough or sad, and suddenly he is god's floral embellished gift to earth. Situations like this crop up every once in a while in pop culture which really make me wonder about the populace, and, if I'm an unwitting monster or alien or in a bad coma dream that I can't wake up from. I don't know how else to fathom so many people  genuinely loving mediocre presence. Or worse, fooling themselves into loving it, because there he is right now and he looks cool and he's serious and that jacket he wears makes the movie.

On the other hand, Drive is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who made Bronson (an interesting biopic that starred Tom Hardy), and it includes actors of mild respectability like Bryan Cranston, Ron Pearlman and Albert Brooks. However, the second red flag (after Gosla-thon) shot up as I learned the synopsis. The story of a nameless, brooding stunt driver falling for his neighbor and getting tangled up in a local mob deal, is definitively simplistic. It's a premise where the dialogue, the characters and the pacing need to be incredibly strong in order to pull off something truly memorable. The trouble with a lot of these hyper-genre movies that call transparent attention to the types of films they are referencing, is that they often only echo the shallowest aspects of those previous films. It's as if the idea of making a good movie is thrown out in favor of people can getting their nostalgia on.

It's not to say Drive is overtly one of these hyper-genre films, it is less so than movies like Machete, Hobo with a Shot Gun, Faster, The Expendables, Not Another Teen Movie, Epic Movie, etc, but there is a specter of hard-lit, gratuitous '80s violence running throughout. Not to mention the sleazy neon synths of the pop songs that drop in now and again.

I'll admit that the beginning of Drive has hints of promise in it. Gosling isn't talking much (what he does best), his moonlight getaway is set up amidst a flashy montage and punctuated synth bass notes, the world is encased in a dreamy green-white cinematography. But even then, I could spot holes that would be torn wider and wider as the film progressed. Save for a few specific scenes, the movie is edited like any other big budget Hollywood film, with all the unnecessary jump cuts, spoon-fed character/location references and awkward leaps in time that you can chew on.

After a while, Drive starts folding in on itself, one plotline and turn-of-dialogue at a time. Whether it's the short-lived ring of the cautionary words that Albert Brooks' homicidal mob boss, Bernie Rose, gives to Gosling (mob involvement = lifetime of danger), or the anti-climatic twist/swift resolution of the driver taking revenge over a rigged pawnshop robbery, it's easy to tell that any possible narrative establishment or long-form tension has been sucked away. The "smile our way into love" interaction between Gosling and Carrie Mulligan's Irene is another example of this, the two characters literally smiling sheepishly at each other - when they meet, when the driver plays with Irene's kid, when they see each other in the hall, when Irene's husband comes home - all the way into a hyperbolic make-out scene that absolutely was supposed to be super cool and stylish, but comes off overblown and irrelevant, because who really gives a shit about this cardboard cutout of a relationship?

The movie also has a major non-sequitur that seems to hint at either extra footage being cut or the ritualistic force-fuck of an attempted cool-kid moment that was completely unnecessary. The driver retrieves a human face mold from the set he works on, implying that he is to wear it in some functional situation where he does not want to be recognized. Right? Wrong. He dons the mask in front of an Italian restaurant owned by one of the mob bosses where no one sees him, and, instead of going and pulling some trick to reach the boss, the driver waits for him to come out, then follows him faraway to his lonely demise. So, the only explanation for this man-mask is that the director wanted to drum up the idiosyncratic-scene quotient.

Even Drive's depiction of violence is nothing to guffaw at, despite the "blown-away" reaction that I've heard from so many people. The few moments of ultra-gore, like the shotgun blast to the head and the kitchen knife to the throat, are satisfying to watch for the virtue of their technical execution, but not for punctuation on the context of the story. These moments of violence come off as useless fantasy rather than weighted action, which actually hollows out the film more than it lifts it up. On top of everything, each sequence of blood and guts is edited awkwardly, pulling between a curtailed dignity (by not showing it for long) and a "money shot" moment, where you see everything, all at once.

Ultimately, the only thing I came away feeling satisfied and endeared by with Drive, was Cliff Martinez's awesome film score. His use of swirling ambient chords pushes the movie into an ephemeral space that it doesn't necessarily deserve. It's a cloak of gorgeous affection that would have served a well-crafted drama or romance, but here it just conjures up the phantoms of emotion and nothing else. It is, however, a nice relief from the contrived lyrics of the chosen pop songs, like College's "A Real Hero", which is set to the melodramatic backwash of the driver being a sensitive cool-dad to Irene's son. As the girl on the track sings "a hero, a real human being", I just about want to hang myself in the closet.

So Drive is inconsistent and nothing at all special. It can't seem to decide between wanting to be cult cool or straight-up serious, something that foils its impact throughout. Gosling certainly doesn't save the film. All his puppy dog stares and monotone dialogue show exactly what he can do as an actor. I'm sure it was a style choice on the part of Winding Refn, but the truth is, that's not a thrown performance for Gosling, that IS how he acts. Also, it's a tough guy movie where all two of the women characters are irrelevant and always outside the world of heavy things, of violent things and of crime things. Anyway you slice it, aside from the great original score, the film is a monster of style that slowly devours all substance. Of course, this particular monster thinks that if he devours enough, he'll find meaning beneath all the meat.

Jubilee (1978)

A lot of movies have been made about punk rock and most of them are terrible. The main reason for this is because punk - ever since its rise in the mid to late '70s - has been perhaps the most bastardized sub-culture on the face of the planet. Just look around today to see what I mean. Punk has infiltrated every orifice of pop culture, from baby clothes to fashion lines to faux-attitude t-shirts to a common acceptance of piercing and tattoos (metal helped with that as well) to a wonky sea-saw of derivative music (emo, screamo, grunge, pop punk, Oi!, Celtic punk, hardcore, etc, etc). Consequently, finding a meaningful connection and an accurate depiction of what punk originally encompassed is like looking for a very tiny needle in a gargantuan, burning haystack.

Most punk movies try to simultaneously glorify and reproach the wild-crust lifestyle of those who inhabit the culture. They flaunt the music, the clothes, the snarling attitude - but these films never usually penetrate beyond surface level grime or melodramatic caution. They're stuck in a limbo of cool, the culture is merely an eccentricity to sell to an audience that has a similar ignorance about punk. It's a blind leading the blind situation, and the cliff is usually not far away.  

Jubilee, however, struts about in a very different fashion. Presiding throughout the film is a deep embrace of know-it-all anarchy - a volatile, funny and effortlessly wise abandon that puts you in a strangely satisfying place. In some ways you could imagine Jubilee as an extravagant musical turned inside out. There are no breaks into song, but there are raw, impromptu musical performances. There is no grandiose story arch or moral backbone, but there is a surreal, disjointed adventure. There is no contrived cast of never-grew-up high school thesps, but the film is made up of very vivid, hilarious and obnoxious characters.

The film isn't so much a narrative as it is an insightful poem on the state of England in the late '70s. Unfurling in abstract stanzas, it jumps between Queen Elizabeth I, who wishes to observe the future of England, and a group of wayward "future" punks that live in a run-down, vandalized loft that always seems to be doused in a sea of orange, yellow and green. Connecting them is a supernatural entity (a god-man with black eyes and a leotard) that spouts off fragments of a cryptic eulogy for a Britain that already seems to have endured an apocalypse - namely, World War II.

The most striking aspect of Jubilee is the depiction of the post-war industrial landscape of England. Director Derek Jarman didn't have to dress up elaborate sets or fly off to some far-flung location in order to capture the post-civilization vibe he was looking for. He was living it everyday in the England of the '70s. Every where the camera travels there seems to be a pile of old factories, rusted fences, decrepit brick houses, abandoned storefronts and shabby loft spaces. It's surreal to look at the state of the country - it looks more like the ghettos of Blade Runner than an actual place within our time span.

But the scuzzy, broken-down landscape is populated with a wide assortment of characters, all very much alive and always looking for a bit of fun. The main group is made up of two pudgy girls in heavy pink eyeliner and colorful hair, Amyl Nitrate and Mad, two brothers with a bent for incest, a slut aptly named Crabs, a young guy, known as "the Kid", looking to make it big as a musician (played by a despondent Adam Ant) and a mute cross-dresser simply called "Chaos". They're all lead by Bod, a waifish upstart that stirs up the trouble (namely murder and dance orgies) that the group so desperately needs to cure their boredom. The actress who plays Bod, Jenny Runacre, also plays Queen Elizabeth I, adding a playful little spice of surrealism into the film's dynamic.

It's authentic acting all around, as most of the cast was actually engaged with the punk movement in some shape or form at the time. The girl who plays Amyl, mysteriously listed as "Jordan" on IMDB, particularly stands out with her precocious monologues on the woeful history of England, how art always begins as something that is alive and is then subsidized for the masses. She also reflects on art's inevitable destruction through a lack of dreams: "In those days, desires weren't allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them - films, books, pictures. They called it 'art'. But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art." There's also a particularly vivid scene in the film where Amyl performs in a theater, donning a viking outfit and lip-syncing to a dub-infused punk song. She attempts to make her movements look choreographed and even austere, but the masquerade is easily dismissed by her occasional grins and clumsy missteps. It's Jubilee in a nutshell - posturing uppity philosophy one moment, then shitting all over it the next.

This theater scene also introduces the most magnetic and bizarre character in the film, Borgia Ginz, played by a gleefully demented Jack Birkett. Swiveling his bug-eyes to and fro, baring his huge set of game show host teeth and cackling wildly like a lunatic, Ginz is the exaggerated media mogul that all the young punks who dream of recognition come to rely on. Ginz is perhaps the most perceptive of all the characters in Jubilee and becomes an embodiment of the film's primary tenants - self-destruction, chaos and manipulation.

"Without progress life would be unbearable. Progress has taken the place of Heaven...It's like pornography; better than the real thing," he says during one of his monologues, echoing the sentiment that such a volatile movement as punk was destined to burn out quickly, and all that's left is the fantasy of it. At another point Ginz exclaims, "This is the generation who grew up, and forgot to lead their lives", a very haunting statement that spells out the inevitable disillusionment that comes with an absence of responsibility.

That's the most powerful thing I took away from this inverted-glam, punk rock odyssey. Anarchy and indolence don't offer any answers - in fact, they never intended to. They are (or were), however, powerful tools of transportation, the end result just needs (or needed) to be made up of something else entirely. I think Jarman saw this with extreme clarity, knowing that one day, sooner rather than later, the party would be over. The punks would have to actually make good on their irreverent disassociation with society and shape England for the future. Unfortunately, the movement was dead before most people realized it - killed again and again by an implosive nature, mass commercialization and humorous dismissal from the general public.

But the archetype of punk persists and finds its way, albeit minutely, into our daily lives. Jubilee may sound the death-knell for a specific subculture and generation in the '70s, but punk encapsulates very timeless qualities of rebellion, rejection and strength. Long ago ceasing to be an ideology, punk has remained, foremost, a -feeling-. While it is certainly a word detached from its original significance, it is still valid when the right kind of mind is pushing it out of their lips and putting it into action.

Persona (1966)

Movies sometimes have a funny way of slipping profound context into your life, even if they echo their message from decades gone by. There is definitely a sense of happenstance to it, as the time in your life and the way you view a film vary greatly, but when the planets align just right and all the traffic lights are green, a revelatory experience waits to be unleashed in movies. It's the testament of great art in action - an audience the filmmakers never even dreamed about now enjoy their work on entirely new levels. These movies have become disembodied entities - always with the signatures of their creators - but now more of an ephemeral reincarnation, more of a personally refreshed experience.

I felt this way when I watched Ingmar Bergman's Persona for the second time in my life, just about a week ago. The film is primarily a disheartening free-fall into existential identity theft, but it carries with it many social observations on the cowardly, deceptive nature of how people interact with each other. Bergman highlights the moral dilemma of acting selfishly (and the act of never bothering to justify it), with the ultimate form of consequence - total theft of the self. Sure, a few of the technical stingers and awkward transitions don't quite hold up, but the hokey qualities of the film are vastly outweighed by a clear articulation of the pitfalls found in social complacency.

With brief, abstract bookends of flashing imagery (from spiders to old cartoons to dicks), Persona tells the story of an actress, Elisabet Volger, who chooses to be mute, and her small-minded but dedicated nurse, Sister Alma. Elisabet forces herself into silence after a stage performance, where she was unable to speak, making her feel humiliated and lost. Tasked with watching over her, Alma finds Elisbet's silence to be unnerving. Despite her reservations, Alma forges ahead and the two are sent to a seaside summer retreat for Elisabet's recuperation. Alma quickly learns that her paitent is not actually looking to recover, but to appropriate her personality as if she were studying for a role in a play or film.

Persona is a film that slithers under the skin, right into the dark recesses of the subconscious. You can tell from the sheer animosity of Elisabet and Alma that Bergman desperately had a bone to pick with the hypocritical machinations of society. Elisabet is a kind of moral abyss, choosing to remove herself altogether from the masquerades that people put on daily. Liv Ullman plays the actress with an eerily satisfying glibness, her devilish smirks and glassy-eyed desperation speak volumes above Alma's incessant barrage of complaints, desires and admissions. Bibi Andersson casts Alma in numerous masks - politeness, compassion, devotion - but quickly devolves her into a toxic mass of deceit and resentment.

In my favorite scene of the film, Alma is compensating for Elisabet's lack of speaking, by telling the actress some of her deepest held secrets. As she reclines awkwardly in a chair, Alma discusses an infidelity she never acknowledged to her soon-to-be husband. She explains that she was at the beach with a friend, laying naked in the sun, when she noticed two teenage boys spying on them nearby. Alma describes all the intimate details of the encounter, how her friend beckons the boys over and they all engage in wild, frivolous sex. Alma admits to Elisabet that it was the most pleasure she had ever known, that she had never been truly satisfied by her fiancee.

Alma's admission of deceit is made all the more palpable by the heavy silence in the beach house - the hypnotic swish of the sea in the background driving it all straight to the gut. Her confession is a disturbing realization of human impulse and weakness. There is no entity there to chide her or wrap her back around to her morals, which gradually deteriorates her mental state. In a sense, this scene exemplifies the brutal dynamic of Persona. There's a presiding feeling in the film that nothing can be done to turn people into creatures of sincerity and truth, and so Bergman eagerly opens up the path to hell.

The way Bergman applies layers of light and shadow in such a simple space as a beach house is pretty astounding when you think about it. The brooding visual aesthetic expertly reflects the conflict between the two women, as well as Alma's gradual synthesis into Elisabet's repertoire. From the sun-bleached stones of the beach, to the dense darkness barely penetrated by lamps or sunlight within the house, the location is an abstract resemblance of each woman's state of mind.

There's a scene where Elisabet quietly emerges from a bright hallway into a dark room where Alma is sleeping, which is just so powerful to watch. Elisabet takes a moment to look over Alma, then moves on, but Alma wakes up and the two gaze at each other longingly. It's just one instance (aside from the blatant scenes of Elisabet necking Alma) that points to not only an emotional attraction, but a sexual attraction between the women. It's an interesting aspect considering the issues of women's liberation at the time, but I think the sexual energy points more to the vanity of Elisabet, she's more in love (and lust) with the idea of taking on the role of this damaged, struggling woman that looks after her.

Persona also plays with time and pacing, adding a hefty helping of disorientation to the film. It starts off as a fairly straight-forward narrative, but a little while after the two women reach the beach house, scenes begin to meld into each other and break off abruptly, as well as disintegrate into abstract transitions and rear-projection tricks. Bergman plays with the idea of fusing scenes with vastly different tones and lighting aesthetics - when Alma gets upset at Elisabet in the kitchen, runs off to her room, and then the actress later comforts her - to give off a bizarre progression of time. Then there are scenes, such as Alma's breaking point in the middle of film (before she tries to get Elisabet to cut her foot on the glass), which cut-off without warning. Such uneven pacing might have caused most films to fold in on themselves, but you can tell Bergman took his time in making sure the editing reflected the mood and message he was trying to convey.

I would say the doctor at the beginning of Persona sums the film up with such a severe articulation, indicative of Bergman's (usually) fantastic writing: "I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace...you can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham".

Those sharp, painfully honest words expose the social conundrum of living selfishly, while desiring to appear altruistic, successful, stable, smart, appreciated, etc. It's a ripped band-aid off the pretense that so many people employ in their routine lives - the idea that even honesty and proactive self-awareness have been relegated to convenient social masks. It's an observation that is perhaps slightly too cynical, but it comes from a genuine place all the same. With Persona, I don't think Bergman is asking, "why are you so selfish?". I think he's really asking, "why bother pretending?".   

La Collectionneuse (1967)

With La Collectionneuse, I've now seen five of Eric Rohmer's six moral tales, which include the likes of My Night at Maud's, Chloe in the Afternoon and Claire's Knee. I've been consistently impressed by the director's ability to rattle off insightful dialogue on a whim and to craft well-rounded male protagonists. In each of his moral tales, Rohmer cast's his leading men as scientists studying the essence of women. They attempt to dissect, circumvent, adore and classify the fairer sex in order to explain their hypothesis' on love, lust, romance and obsession.

La Collectionneuse follows this same path, sketching out the story of a handsome art dealer named Adrien. Tired of being consumed by his job and at odds with his girlfriend, he takes a vacation at his friend's villa on the Mediterranean Sea. Adrien plans on doing absolutely nothing while at the villa - he desires only to take in the beauty of the area, go for morning swims and to sleep undisturbed. When he learns from his friend Daniel that a young woman, Haydee, is coming to stay with them, his temporary peace is ended. It isn't long after that a series of events push Adrien to become increasingly enamored with the girl.

The French Riviera is beautiful in and of itself, so the film was predestined to be an idyllic visual distraction. Still, the slight yellow-white tinge of the cinematography gives La Collectionneuse a very nostalgic "home movies" feel, without the grit and grain of low-quality consumer cameras. It's the same oven-baked visual aesthetic that appears in Rohmer's equally gorgeous film, Claire's Knee, which is set in a similar coastal villa. The look of the film gives off a warmth that settles you in for an evening of lazily profound reflection.

Adrien and Haydee's interactions provide a well-conceived play on relationship dynamics. With Adrien, you get to hear all of his inner-thoughts, his plans and designs, his guesswork about Haydee's ultimate intentions. Haydee, on the other hand, is an enigma like the rest of the female characters in Rohmer's moral tales. I feel Rohmer avoids meta-insight for his women as a sort of artistic expression of their unknowable intrigue. The true insight of his films comes from the perception that you can't ever truly know someone, no matter how well or how long you've been acquainted with them.

Adrien finds his interest in Haydee almost deplorable. He doesn't want to be lured in by her loose, reckless lifestyle, yet, he finds himself inextricably drawn to her all the same. Throughout the first section of the film, Adrien actively berates Haydee for her actions, attempting to get her to react and pursue him. In one scene, Adrien just flat out asks Haydee what the point of slutting it up is, when no meaningful relationships can come of it. Haydee replies, almost bashfully, that she's searching for something, but she doesn't know what it is. She admits that she wants a deeper connection with a man, but that she feels she always screws something up before it reaches that point.

It's this kind of earnestness that makes Rohmer's films so satisfying to watch. You can tell the man has labored long and hard in his own life on the subjects of women and romance, and he is baring all of it - his mistakes and his triumphs - on screen for the world to see. Rohmer loves women, regardless of any inconsistent or contrary behavior they might fall back on. He realizes that when feeling uncertain or being dragged around by impulses (instead of actively riding around on them), the women in his life would act conversely in order to guard themselves from men with the same types of impulses.

Since forthrightness between the genders is gravely disproportionate (due in part to biology and sociological upbringing), constant disingenuous validation from men only reinforces upon "revolving door" women the desire to be selfish, to skirt accountability, to forgo decency. Haydee encapsulates this kind of woman perfectly. Rohmer casts her as a naive waif, sloshing blindly through a bog of insincere men, female liberation and self-doubt. She is both assured in her adventurous lifestyle and also deeply insecure about the type of man she desires to be with.

Adrien merely bumbles his way into Haydee's life - at times successfully obtaining her attention and other times scorning her inadvertently. All of his plans and predictions about her intentions are made irrelevant by the girl's killer combo of low-esteem and a whimsical nature. Not to mention that, technically, Adrien is volunteering infidelity against his far-flung girlfriend. This works as a sort of moral backbone of the film, exposing Adrien as inherently hypocritical and undercutting any good intentions he may have for Haydee.  

Rohmer also weaves general, but very perceptive observations on social acceptance into the film, using them as venn-diagrams for the behavior of young men and women. At one point, a man speaking to Daniel remarks that the Victorian era gave rise to the idea of people creating an image of "distance" around themselves. This superficial "distance" was manifest to create the intrigue and adoration that these people so desired from others. This resonated with me quite a bit, as especially today, people utilize this passive aggressive behavior in all facets of their social life, not just romantic. To me, it's a dishonest intrigue, very selfish in nature, that does not lend itself to healthy, fulfilling relationships. Since it comes from a deeply selfish and shallow desire to be loved but to not necessarily return it in kind, Rohmer emphasizes the idea that the more self-involved people are the less happy they become, but the surface gratification is nice all the same.

La Collectionneuse may be just a bit long-winded and a touch sloppy in it's technical execution, but it doesn't detract from the meaty love philosophy that resides within. Adrien and Haydee's on and off fluctuations provide a satisfying uncertainty, where confidence is undone by recklessness, naivety foiled by intelligence and everyone is at the mercy of everyone else. You know, like reality.

Prometheus (2012)

I'm pretty sour on most of what Hollywood has produced in the past decade, including what's being made these days. The sense of plot-plowing, lazy archetypes and the marketing double cheeseburger (ala The Deathly Hollows, Part 2) have completely choked any true meaning (which, in this case, is thrill and spectacle) out of blockbuster films. It's just about the transient gratification and the social hype - studios will always scramble for new ways to pander and squeeze every last dollar out of consumers.

Despite this, I still find bits of ingenuity, slivers of good storytelling, dashes of satisfying action, remnants of full-fledged character development and smatterings of well-choreographed special effects within the Hollywood spectrum. These are elements that come no where near the territory of "memorable" but they do present an intriguing potential all the same. With Ridley Scott's Prometheus, there are murmurs of promise, but the uneven pacing, inconsistent acting and an ultimate desire to impress a wide-ranging audience seals the film's fate as a gun that goes off into your toes instead of your face.

The film is a precursor to the Alien series, taking place well before the events of the 1979 classic, before the eventual evolution of the xenomorphs to their iconic movie-culture image. It revolves around the crew of an exploratory space vessel, Prometheus, and more specially, the lead scientist, Shaw. Set out to a distant planet, Shaw hopes to uncover the secrets of human existence by interacting with an alien civilization that she feels may have created humans in the first place. Naturally, when they arrive, things don't go as planned.

Perhaps the best and worst thing about Prometheus is the acting. Noomi Rapace fills in Shaw with an intriguing mix of idealism, ambitious curiosity and politeness. She is definitely the heart of the film, and Rapace, being a talented actress regardless, does her damnedest to provide a fleeting sense of weight to the film's overall context. Michael Fassbender as the android, David, also makes a strong performance. Fassbender plays David as a mincing enigma, at turns courtesy, heroic and devious, he plays a key role in setting the Weyland Corporation's agenda into action. Guy Pearce also stands out as Mr. Weyland, though his role is extremely brief.

But then you have this cadre of ham-handed support roles - almost like all the creative juice was spent on Shaw and David. Rapace shares the protagonist spot with Logan Marshall-Green, a dead ringer in looks for actor Tom Hardy, but not at all as talented as him. Marshall-Green plays Shaw's love interest and fellow scientist, Halloway, as a sort of...bro scientist? The glaring inconsistency is that he's supposedly sensitive to the trappings of science, yet he provides the cowboy bravado of the crew and berates David, a pure product of science, at every turn. Throw in a goes-nowhere villianess performance by Charlize Theron, a contradictory ship captain played by Idris Elba and an inane crew that is made up of cookie-cutter caricatures (two guys that have some weird bet with each other, the spiky crewman who wants no friends, the doughy crewman who only wants to be friends with the guy that wants no friends) and you can imagine why Prometheus feels very unbalanced.

However, even more inconsistent is the way the film is paced. The first 30 minutes of the movie has this very measured flow to it, leading from Shaw's expedition on Earth to a cryo-sleep sequence where David takes care of the ship, watches old movies and shoots hoops while riding a bike. It's a strong build-up with time for the characters to breath. Right after the crew's briefing with Weyland, the film begins to jolt forward in very strange intervals. There are weird turns where important information is tossed in, then resolved within a matter of minutes (such as Shaw's infertility). It feels like the plot and subplots have all been smooshed and funneled down to fit a tight run-time, acceptable for most audiences. By the time Prometheus careens down the hill to it's inevitable conclusion, you find yourself wondering, "did all of this serious business just happen in a matter of 20 minutes?"

Even with the rampant issues of the film, there's no denying that Prometheus is a great bundle of cinematography, set design, special effects and refreshingly intense horror sequences. The ship interior is a great mixture of white bulkheads, stylish digital interfaces and glowing orange-yellow lights, the crew's exploration suits have a satisfying mix of bulky armor plates, well-placed LEDs and streamlined diving suit underlays. (SPOILERZZZZZZZ) There is a gorgeous sequence where Shaw gets caught in a sort of metal sandstorm, with small sharp chunks of shrapnel cascading around her as she hangs on to the ship for dear life. Of course, the craziest sequence has to be where Shaw finds out she has been impregnated with a monstrous-DNA fetus and must use an advanced medical pod calibrated for men along with self-injected anesthetics to extract the thing before it kills her.

All in all, Prometheus is a half-cleaned up mess. It looks good and it sounds good, the acting is good...sometimes, the plot is paced well...sometimes, the characters are interesting...sometimes. I feel the lesson to be learned is that all the hype and viral marketing in the world won't save a film from it's financial obligations or its attempts to satisfy everyone at once. Prometheus is ultimately a good idea crushed down by the massive car pile up at the intersection of art and commerce.