The Passenger

Earlier this month the death of Clare Peploe was announced in the news. I knew her name because of her association with two Italian filmmakers, one great (Michelangelo Antonioni), the other not (Bernardo Bertolucci). She was romantically involved with them both (she married Bertolucci in 1978), which would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that, post-Peploe, Antonioni’s work fell off a cliff and Bertolucci’s went from bad (1900) to worse (La Luna). 

In Carlo Ponti’s Guardian obituary, John Francis Lane wrote: “Under an agreement with MGM, Ponti produced three English-speaking films by Michelangelo Antonioni, two of which are among the director's best works, Blow Up (1966) and The Passenger (1975). The third film, Zabriskie Point (1970), shot in the US, was not well received but has since acquired a cult following.” Lane was being far too kind to both Ponti and Antonioni. Zabriskie Point was the second instalment in Antonioni’s three-picture deal with MGM. It was a confused mess in 1970 when it was released and time has certainly been unkind to Antonioni’s infatuation with 60s youth culture. 

Clare Peploe is credited with co-writing Zabriskie Point, along with Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Fred Gardner, and Sam Shepard. Clare’s brother, Mark Peploe, Antonioni and Peter Wollen are credited with the script of The Passenger, Antonioni’s last film for MGM. Zabriskie Point was an artistic and commercial disaster. The Passenger was, in one sense, even worse than Zabriskie Point in that it could easily be mistaken for a thriller. Genre is where artists go when they die. 

Evidently, Antonioni’s collaborators on The Passenger noticed that two of his best films – L’Avventura and Blow-Up – contained an unresolved central mystery: Anna’s disappearance in the former and a possible murder in the latter. So in The Passenger the protagonist, David Locke, a journalist who is in North Africa to make contact with a rebel leader, discovers that a man named Robertson in the next room has died of a preexisting heart problem and, for no apparent reason (job frustration? The Saharan heat?), Locke takes Robertson’s passport, switches their photos, takes Robertson’s appointment book and leaves the hotel. Locke/Robertson informs the confused management that Locke is the dead man. 

Sporting a (fake) moustache, after a brief visit to his – Locke’s – home in London to retrieve some documents from a locked box (when no one else is there), he follows Robertson’s itinerary to Munich and an airport locker containing a weapons invoice. Two of his “contacts” are there, but he doesn’t notice them. They follow Locke to a Bavarian church and approach him after a wedding ceremony to get the papers from him and pay him the first instalment. Robertson, it turns out, was a gun runner. His next meeting is in Barcelona, but they warn him that government agents of the African state could be on to him. 

Next stop, Barcelona. Locke takes in some of the sights, including a cable car ride in which he leans out of the window and flaps his arms like he’s flying (looks like James Cameron borrowed the idea for Titanic). Meanwhile one of the rebel contacts is captured and beaten up. And Locke’s wife discovers that the dead man isn’t him. Thereafter, in a real and incalculably sad way, The Passenger becomes a – highly uncommon – chase movie. Locke sees a friend, Martin, on a Barcelona street and, trying to hide from him, he runs into a woman – the same woman he made eye contact with in London. She is an architecture student engaged in studying Antoni Gaudi’s work. We are shown more of Gaudi’s strange playground architecture. The Girl (she is otherwise unidentified) tells Locke the story of Gaudí’s sad death. With Martin hot on his trail, Locke decides to leave Barcelona. The Girl accompanies him to a sleepy village hotel where, it turns out, Locke has an appointment. The penultimate seven-and-a-half minute single shot, involving a camera, gyroscopes and a crane, was as mysteriously pulled off as Locke’s death. All the relevant personages are there – the African government agents, Locke’s wife Rachel (who fails to identify her husband), and the Girl (who says she knew him – whoever “he” was). As others noted at the time, Antonioni was fond of wordless, ambiguous endings. This one disappoints only because everything that came before it doesn’t deserve it. If only the rest of the film had been as meticulously and seamlessly planned, staged, and shot. (1)

One of the only advantages the film has is Antonioni’s unerring eye for a fetching shot. Luciano Tovoli, the film’s DP, got a lot of praise, but he failed to mention that he was only acting as Antonioni’s third eye. 

Antonioni never communicated well with his actors, especially male actors. Look at Marcello Mastroianni’s undistinguished performance in La Notte (opposite Jeanne Moreau’s smoldering performance). Jack Nicholson does what he can with an impossibly-written role, but he looks and sounds completely out of place. Nicholson worked very hard to salvage The Passenger and re-release it. His commentary on the DVD is invaluable and highly reverential of Antonioni. (2)

As for his actresses, Antonioni had an obvious weakness for pronounced jawlines: Monica Vitti, Vanessa Redgrave, and now Jenny Runacre, who plays Locke’s wife Rachel. Maria Schneider seems disengaged throughout the enterprise and her thickly-accented English isn’t helped by the ponderous pretentiousness of the dialogue. It is at times thuddingly banal. But look out for an extremely rare – albeit weak – attempt at humor. In the Bavarian church, when Locke counts the money in the envelope he exclaims, “Jesus Christ!” Remembering where he is, he adds, “Sorry!” 

Another thing Antonioni doesn’t handle well is politics. He may have believed it was safe to deal with something as arcane as an African insurgency, but he includes a quite gratuitous piece of film in which a political prisoner is executed by firing squad, with the prisoner’s body twitching violently at the impact of each bullet. We are shown the film on a Moviola screen, on which Locke’s friend Martin is editing it. Apparently (and this is confirmed by IMDB), the execution wasn’t staged but is an actual event. How Antonioni expected us to react to the filmed execution is impossible to tell, but it reminds me of something Orwell wrote: “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.” 

Finally, Antonioni’s downfall may have been attended by nothing more than poor writers of English. The English dramatist Edward Bond wrote the dialogue for Blow-Up. While it isn’t scintillating, it is functional. Nobody talks nonsense or unnaturally, like they do in Zabriskie Point and The Passenger. Efforts had been made to entice Fellini and Bergman, among others, away from their native countries and languages and make English language films. When Antonioni left Italy to fulfil the terms of his MGM contract, his peers must have seen it as the enormous risk – to his art – that it eventually proved to be. He wasn’t just leaving his native country and native language behind – he was forsaking his ethos, his frame of reference, his whole artistic world. He had made films outside Italy before: I Vinti had segments filmed in France and in England. Antonioni should've seen it as a warning. Only the Italian episode worked (even if Antonioni was forced to re-shoot some of its scenes). 

In 1968, Vernon Young seemed to foretell Antonioni’s fate: "Antonioni’s L’Avventura is unbroken witness to the catastrophe that ineluctably overcomes the man who is cut off – from his family, from his fellows, from himself."(3)

(1) A fascinating article devoted exclusively to the hotel room shot can be found here. 

(2) The version I watched was the expanded 126 minute version.

(3) “Our Local Idioms,” On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972)

The Shout (1978)

“’My story is true,’ he said, ‘every word of it. Or, when I say that my story is “true”, I mean at least that I am telling it in a new way. It is always the same story, but I sometimes vary the climax and even recast the characters. Variation keeps it fresh and therefore true.’” 

One of the accomplishments of modernism was the erosion of the good guy/bad guy dichotomy in novels, theater and films. By now, no one objects to the sympathetic portrayal of killers. There have been just as many works that present to us the Madman as Hero and the suggestion that the wrong people are populating lunatic asylums. 

The Robert Graves story “The Shout” was written in 1924, during Graves’s long convalescence from the war. He experienced what was then known simply as shellshock (an overtaxing of the adrenal gland) and was so badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme that he was pronounced dead. His obituary even appeared in the London Times. Along with his fellow war survivor, Siegfried Sassoon, Graves was familiar with the institutions that treated war veterans and their various mental conditions. One such institution is depicted in “The Shout” – a quite genteel English asylum in which the inmates are hard to distinguish from their doctors. 

Charles Crossley is one of the patients, whom, the lead doctor explains, suffers from "delusions”. The story’s narrator, a new member of the hospital staff, is delegated to be scorekeeper of a cricket match. Crossley is in the scoring booth with him and he tells him the story of Richard and Rachel. In the story-within-a-story, Charles tells Richard that he has the power to kill with a shout: 

It is a magic shout that I learned from the chief devil of the Northern Territory. I took eighteen years to perfect it, and yet I have used it, in all, no more than five times… My shout is not a matter of tone or vibration but something not to be explained. It is a shout of pure evil, and there is no fixed place for it on the scale. It may take any note. It is pure terror, and if it were not for a certain intention of mine, which I need not tell you, I would refuse to shout for you. 

Being careful to shout in a remote place, Richard and Charles go out on the sand dunes and are quite alone when Richard instructs Charles to shout on his signal. Without Charles seeing him do it, Richard has put candle wax in his ears. We get no description of the sound itself, just the odd appearance of Charles’s face and Richard fainting. 

A contest of dominance over Rachel ensues between Charles and Richard, and when Richard loses, he practices some magic of his own and smashes a stone he found in the dunes that he believes is Charles’s soul. The action of the story returns to the cricket match where a violent storm has appeared. During the ensuing deluge, Crossley becomes agitated. The chief doctor tries to calm him but Crossley threatens to shout him dead. Just then a lightning bolt strikes the scorer’s booth, killing Crossley and the doctor. The story concludes with the narrator informing us that he is boarding in the house of Richard and Rachel, who know of Crossley only as a clever conjurer. 

The story runs to only twenty pages and seems a little thin to have been made into a feature-length film. It opens at the end of the story, with Rachel (Susannah York) hurriedly arriving at the hospital and uncovering three dead bodies: the chief doctor (Robert Stephens) , Crossley (Alan Bates), and – presumedly – another patient. The same scene takes place at the end of the film, with Rachel concentrating her attention on the body of Crossley. John Hurt plays Richard, and the narrator, identified as Robert Graves, is played by Tim Curry. The major difference between the story and the film is that in the story Crossley’s tale is pure lunatic invention. The married couple, Richard and Rachel, who figure prominently in Crossley’s tale, barely know who he is. The filmmaker, Jerzy Skolimowski, chose to make Crossley’s story “true”, which leads to some confusion. In the film Crossley is captured by police for the murder of his “children.” In the story he is arrested for the murder of a couple in Australia. After he shouts one of the policemen down, Crossley is taken away in the back of a police car – presumably to the asylum. When the film opens, Crossley is driving a motorcycle and sidecar past Richard and Rachel’s car. Rachel drops Richard at the hospital right before we meet “Robert Graves.” A scene early in the film suggests some infidelity from Richard. And why is Rachel tenderly doting on Crossley’s dead body in the final shot? 

Jerzy Skolimowski, a Polish filmmaker of the same generation as Roman Polanski, has had an uneventful career. His best and most personal work was made in Poland prior to his expulsion. His best-known and best-remembered film in the West was the quietly heartbreaking Moonlighting, about a group of Poles working in England when Jaruzelski’s martial law is imposed. Skolimowski chose to turn Graves’s story of a delusional mental patient into a kind of New Age horror movie, similar to The Wicker Man. It makes no attempt to explain or justify the magical elements, the evil shout, a stolen shoe buckle and the stones that are supposedly souls. Graves, who was no stranger to magic, simply made them Crossley’s ravings. Skolimowski tried to leave us guessing – which will not do. 

Otherwise the film is occasionally breathtaking to watch. Mike Molloy, the Aussie cinematographer who also shot the excellent The Hit, creates striking images with locations in North Devon. Two of the original members of the rock band Genesis, Anthony Banks and Michael Rutherford, created an unusual soundtrack for the film. The staging of the shout itself, on the dunes of North Devon, is brilliant. 

That leaves the superb cast, headed by Alan Bates and John Hurt. Bates exudes genuine power in every scene he is in, while Hurt struggles valiantly to keep his wits about him. Susannah York, who was a darling of 60s British film, supplies the film with her nude presence in many scenes, including a few in which she is manipulated – indirectly – by Bates. I recall reading how a very old Robert Graves sat beside her at the film’s premiere. How it must have tickled dotty old Graves to be sitting next to her during those nude scenes.

A Summer's Tale

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) was a gift to filmgoers that so very few ever appreciated. Once he achieved financial independence with the foundation of Les Films du Losange, his own (and Barbet Schroeder’s) production company in 1962, he was free to make whatever film he pleased, with no consideration for “audience appeal” or “entertainment values.” It helped, of course, that his films had enough esthetic appeal to attract critical attention. And he won plenty of festival awards over the span of a very long career. These encouraged enough people to seek out his work, but, as indicated, not so many. Only one of his films, My Night at Maud’s, broke through the $1M ceiling at the box office. A Summer’s Tale (Un conte d’été, 1996) Rohmer’s twenty-first feature film, made just $318,739. 

He has an affinity with summer and with summer’s prime destination, the beach. La Collectionneuse (1967), the 3rd of his Six Moral Tales and his first film in color, was set in St. Tropez in the south of France. My Night at Maud’s ends on an island (Belle Ile en mer, “beautiful island on the sea” no less) off the Bretagne coast. Pauline at the Beach was filmed in Jullouville, just up the coast from Mont St. Michel. A Summer’s Tale is set not far from there, in Saint-Malo and Dinard. As I wrote more than a decade ago, “[Rohmer’s] foremost quality is an intellectualized sensuality, where the one invariably nullifies the other.” The seaside is the best place for a filmmaker to elicit sensuality in his characters, creating a sexy pretext in which to juxtapose quasi-philosophical discussions. It may perhaps have to do with his characters seeing one another nearly naked, or else it’s the heat and the relaxed pace of vacationers. 

Philosophy is taken far more seriously by the French, and Rohmer’s characters take pride in their ability to talk about their emotional lives. It is also the source of most of the humor, since the people in his films invariably talk a better game than they’re capable of living up to. It gives them an air of mastery over perfectly inexplicable behavior. 

Take Gaspard, for instance, the male lead character in A Summer’s Tale, played by Melvil Poupaud. He arrives in Saint-Malo with a backpack and guitar and moves into a room to which he has a key (it belongs to a friend). He doesn’t speak a word until nearly eight minutes of the film have expired. He says them to Margot, a waitress at a local créperie (played by Amanda Langlet, who was such a disarming presence thirteen years earlier in Pauline at the Beach). Gaspard and Margot meet by chance one day on the beach and they start a conversation. Her attraction to him isn’t returned, but as we quickly learn, Gaspard isn’t subject to any strong emotions. She invites him to a dance club, but he dances alone until finally sitting down to watch everyone else enjoy themselves. He has a clumsy way of crossing his arms and raising his fingers to his face, like he’s going to bite his nails. 

After expressing her interest in him, during one of many long walks around the coast, Gaspard informs Margot that he’s waiting for his girlfriend, Lena, to join him. Meanwhile, Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), a local beauty, has a go at Gaspard. Like a ton of bricks. Gaspard succumbs, while still awaiting Lena. Not exactly a love quadrangle (Gaspard has a Math degree), but an interesting quandary for a youth as callow as Gaspard. Just as he finds that he must choose one of these women (he repeatedly mentions taking one of them to Ouessant, a somewhat distant and – presumably – magical island), a friend sends him miraculous deliverance in the form of an 8-track recorder at an affordable price, and Gaspard, who insists that his music must come first, gratefully departs to purchase it. Margot sees him off at the ferry. On the soundtrack, Gaspard sings a sea shanty he has written, apparently, for just such an occasion. The action of the film lasts only three weeks, July 17 (today's date) to August 6. 

Rohmer didn’t discover his “style” as early as one might think. He made his first short film in 1950 and his first feature film in 1959. He is best known for the last four of his Six Moral Tales, La Collectionneuse, My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, and Love in the Afternoon. Practically all of his films since then have been thematically and visually similar. A Summer’s Tale has no surprises. Even for a seasoned cinephile, Rohmer’s films are difficult because they rely so much on faces and voices. The beach locations are eye-grabbing, but they serve only as a scenic backdrop. 

I must admit it was an effort on my part to take an interest in these young people – not so much because of the difference in age (Rohmer was older than me – 76 – when he made A Summer’s Tale), but the focus of attention almost entirely on the moment, the sensations, the mood, the contact with others one’s own age. Rohmer said he based his script on memories of his time as a young film student. He admitted that he is uncomfortable in the company of people over 40, but I think his interest in young people is due to their nascent qualities – traits of which they are barely even aware. You could call it simply naïveté, if that word didn’t feel so out of date. Older men and women are too cautious, perhaps, for a Rohmer film. 

A commendable quality in Rohmer’s films is his choice of actors (or nonactors). The three women actors in A Summer's Tale, Amanda Langlet, Gwenaëlle Simon, and Aurelia Nolin, are far more interesting – more watchable – than Melvil Poupaud, one of the most callow of Rohmer’s leading men. But this was probably intentional. When Gaspard manages to evade the consequences of his triple dealing, even when it is Margot who sees him off, it can’t have come as much of a surprise to Solène or Lena. 

One of Cesare Pavese’s earliest novels was called The Beach (La Spiaggia), about a group of male friends and an attractive woman one of them introduces to the group at a summer retreat. Stanley Edgar Hyman called it “the comic ghost of a tragic love story.” Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale catches the fleeting insouciance of the season, and is memorable without being consequential.

Él

Luis Buñuel’s made thirty-two films in three different countries in two hemispheres over the span of a career that lasted 48 years, from 1929 to 1977. Some of them are great, some of them are good, and several are simply bad. His best were his first two flagrantly surrealist films made in France, An Andalusian Dog and L’Âge d’Or, a one-off documentary that was promptly banned in his native Spain called Las Hurdes, the fearless Mexican film Los Olvidados, his triumphant return to Spain (and top form), Viridiana, the Mexican short Simon of the Desert, and his very last film in France, That Obscure Object of Desire. 

Some critics don’t seem satisfied with so much fine work to celebrate. Now that even his most obscure films are available, they hold up his lesser, flawed films, like Nazarin, The Exterminating Angel, Tristana, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie as masterpieces as well. They even find something to praise in films that Buñuel admitted were failures, like Él (1953), which has lately achieved a cult status. In his exquisite memoir, My Last Breath, Buñuel characterized Él (He) as a dramatized case study: 

It’s simply the portrait of a paranoiac, who, like a poet, is born, not made. Afterwards, he increasingly perceives reality according to his obsession, until everything in his life revolves around it. Suppose, for instance, that a woman plays a short phrase on the piano and her paranoid husband is immediately convinced that it's a signal to her lover who's waiting somewhere outside, in the street. . . .(1) 

This is a good premise for a study of pathology, but how does a viewer who doesn’t suffer from Señor Galván de Montemayor’s fixations respond to Buñuel’s exploration of them? They are wrong, I think, to believe that Buñuel intended us to laugh – there isn’t a trace of humor in the film. To Buñuel, the man’s case is a source of interest for an outsider like him, for whom the manias resulting from the final stages of a Christian ethos, spurred by a rapacious capitalism in which property is sovereign, are a source of interest in themselves. 

The film opens with the repellent Roman Catholic ritual of foot washing in which a priest on Holy Thursday washes the feet of a subordinate (in this case an altar boy) as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Buñuel adds to our discomfort by closing in with Gabriel Figeroa’s camera for a closeup of the priest kissing the boy’s foot. The man filling the basin with water is Francisco, who, judging from his participation in the ritual, is church laity and a pillar of society. He watches the priest kissing another’s boy’s foot, then abstractedly looks down the row of feet in the congregation until he sees the stylish shoes worn by Gloria, an attractive young woman. When she notices Francisco’s gaze, she becomes alarmed. 

The service ended, she leaves the church, but when she reaches the holy water font, Francisco is there holding a handful of water into which to dip her fingers. She turns away from him and by the time he reaches the street her car has driven away. Francisco returns to the church every day in hopes of seeing her again, and when he finally does and he tells her of his obsession, she tells him she is engaged to another man. 

Following her from the church, Francisco discovers that Gloria’s fiancé is an old friend of his named Raúl. Francisco invites the two of them to his house (an Alphonse Mucha art deco nightmare) where his gives an impassioned speech about love over dinner that conquers Gloria. Strolling together in the garden, Gloria kisses Francisco. 

The film jumps forward a little, and then jumps back as Gloria tells Raúl, whom she had thrown over to marry Francisco, what a nightmare her marriage to him became, right from their wedding night. Honeymooning in Guanajuato (an exquisite old city in the mountains), Francisco is suspicious of every man they encounter. He discovers an old acquaintance is staying right next door to their hotel room. He takes a hatpin to the adjoining door and rams it through the keyhole.

Francisco's suspicions and accusations become increasingly violent as the film proceeds to its inevitable conclusion with him becoming completely unhinged and sequestered in a monastery. It would’ve been too much to ask of Buñuel to make Francisco the least bit pathetic, when none of Buñuel’s characters inspires our sympathy. Every one of them seems at least half-crazed, and most of them are doomed. Buñuel takes a very dim view of human beings, so why should Francisco and Gloria be any different? The only benefit his characters derive from his dramas is experience – but it is of the most unedifying kind. 

The film feels terribly rushed, especially in the introductory scenes, as if Buñuel’s hurried shooting schedule had affected the narrative. It’s stock footage up until Francisco’s maniacal jealousy begins to show itself. The acting is merely competent. Arturo de Córdova was briefly in Hollywood, even playing Casanova (which is ironic in itself – Francisco’s jealousy is clearly the result of sexual inadequacy). He plays Francisco as straight as possible under the circumstances, but Buñuel’s direction must’ve been confusing. Buñuel admitted that Él was a miscalculation: 

In general, it wasn’t very well received. In Mexico, El was nothing short of disastrous. Oscar Dancigers [the film’s producer] stormed out of the screening room while the audience was convulsed with laughter. I went into the theatre just at the moment when (shades of San Sebastian) the man slides a long needle through a keyhole to blind the spy he thinks is lurking behind the door. Oscar was right; they were laughing. The film played for a couple of weeks, but only thanks to the prestige of Arturo de Cordova, who played the lead. 

I didn’t find anything funny about the film, and I have to wonder what his Mexican audience was laughing at. There is not even a trace of the sardonic or ironic. There are only increasingly strained examples of paranoia. Because Francisco is so respected by society and by the head of the local church (everyone, it seems, takes his side in confrontations), there is a political aspect to the film, but it doesn’t have the bite that it does in Viridiana or even in the flawed Nazarin. And there isn’t a flicker of the eroticism Buñuel liked to throw in at the oddest moments. 

So, if you remove the comedic aspect of the story, what's left? As Buñuel wrote, “My only consolation came from Jacques Lacan, who saw the film at a special screening for psychiatrists at the Cinémathèque in Paris and praised certain of its psychological truths.” 

(1) My Last Breath (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

Portnoy's Praise

Philip Roth’s third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969, was the ultimate renunciation and celebration of his Jewishness. While the explicit – and utterly burlesque – depictions of masturbation made the novel an instant bestseller, it’s preoccupation with the negative psychological effects of growing up Jewish in America provoked the ire of many prominent Jewish critics.(1) In Roth’s Guardian obituary, Eric Homberger spells it out:

From his earliest work, Roth’s Jewish readers were uneasy with his ironic view of Jewish life. Roth delighted in every nuance and absurdity of Jewish life in the US, but his defiantly secular sensibility was without piety or reverence. When asked about his religious beliefs in 2006, Roth told the radio interviewer Terry Gross that he had “no taste for delusion” nor any need for spiritual consolation. The Jewish community saw Roth as a wisenheimer – a sharp-tongued young man who had turned his back upon the religion of his fathers. . . . Heavyweight critics agreed. Robert Alter saw an element of “uncontrolled rage” against women and Jewish parents in Roth’s early books. Irving Howe argued that Roth lacked Tolstoyan amplitude because his books came out of a “thin personal culture”. Alfred Kazin wrote that Roth seemingly had escaped from his Jewishness altogether. (2)

While Portnoy’s Complaint is a consistently scathing assignment of blame by its self-centered narrator on his parents in Newark, New Jersey, Roth insisted that his own parents bore no resemblance to Portnoy’s and that his upbringing had been a largely happy experience. In fact, when Roth’s satire relaxes and he tries to show us the fleeting happy moments of Portnoy’s family life, the novel springs momentarily to life. After his lengthy portrayal of his father’s life of drudgery, he tries to tell us some of what inspired his love for his parents: 

But what he had to offer I didn’t want—and what I wanted he didn’t have to offer. Yet how unusual is that? Why must it continue to cause such pain? At this late date! Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred … or the love? Because I haven’t even begun to mention everything I remember with pleasure—I mean with a rapturous, biting sense of loss! All those memories that seem somehow to be bound up with the weather and the time of day, and that flash into mind with such poignancy, that momentarily I am not down in the subway, or at my office, or at dinner with a pretty girl, but back in my childhood, with them. Memories of practically nothing—and yet they seem moments of history as crucial to my being as the moment of my conception; I might be remembering his sperm nosing into her ovum, so piercing is my gratitude—yes, my gratitude!—so sweeping and unqualified is my love. Yes, me, with sweeping and unqualified love! I am standing in the kitchen (standing maybe for the first time in my life), my mother points, “Look outside, baby,” and I look; she says, “See? how purple? a real fall sky.” The first line of poetry I ever hear! And I remember it! A real fall sky … It is an iron-cold January day, dusk—oh, these memories of dusk are going to kill me yet, of chicken fat on rye bread to tide me over to dinner, and the moon already outside the kitchen window—I have just come in with hot red cheeks and a dollar I have earned shoveling snow: “You know what you’re going to have for dinner,” my mother coos so lovingly to me, “for being such a hard-working boy? Your favorite winter meal. Lamb stew.” It is night: after a Sunday in New York City, at Radio City and Chinatown, we are driving home across the George Washington Bridge—the Holland Tunnel is the direct route between Pell Street and Jersey City, but I beg for the bridge, and because my mother says it’s “educational,” my father drives some ten miles out of his way to get us home. Up front my sister counts aloud the number of supports upon which the marvelous educational cables rest, while in the back I fall asleep with my face against my mother’s black sealskin coat. At Lakewood, where we go one winter for a weekend vacation with my parents’ Sunday night Gin Rummy Club, I sleep in one twin bed with my father, and my mother and Hannah curl up together in the other. At dawn my father awakens me and like convicts escaping, we noiselessly dress and slip out of the room. “Come,” he whispers, motioning for me to don my earmuffs and coat, “I want to show you something. Did you know I was a waiter in Lakewood when I was sixteen you know I was a waiter in Lakewood when I was sixteen years old?” Outside the hotel he points across to the beautiful silent woods. “How’s that?” he says. We walk together—“at a brisk pace”—around a silver lake. “Take good deep breaths. Take in the piney air all the way. This is the best air in the world, good winter piney air.” Good winter piney air—another poet for a parent! I couldn’t be more thrilled if I were Wordsworth’s kid! … In summer he remains in the city while the three of us go off to live in a furnished room at the seashore for a month. He will join us for the last two weeks, when he gets his vacation … there are times, however, when Jersey City is so thick with humidity, so alive with the mosquitoes that come dive-bombing in from the marshes, that at the end of his day’s work he drives sixty-five miles, taking the old Cheesequake Highway—the Cheesequake! My God! the stuff you uncover here!—drives sixty-five miles to spend the night with us in our breezy room at Bradley Beach. 

He arrives after we have already eaten, but his own dinner waits while he unpeels the soggy city clothes in which he has been making the rounds of his debit all day, and changes into his swimsuit. I carry his towel for him as he clops down the street to the beach in his unlaced shoes. I am dressed in clean short pants and a spotless polo shirt, the salt is showered off me, and my hair—still my little boy’s pre-steel wool hair, soft and combable—is beautifully parted and slicked down. There is a weathered iron rail that runs the length of the boardwalk, and I seat myself upon it; below me, in his shoes, my father crosses the empty beach. I watch him neatly set down his towel near the shore. He places his watch in on down his towel near the shore. He places his watch in one shoe, his eyeglasses in the other, and then he is ready to make his entrance into the sea. To this day I go into the water as he advised: plunge the wrists in first, then splash the underarms, then a handful to the temples and the back of the neck … ah, but slowly, always slowly. This way you get to refresh yourself, while avoiding a shock to the system. Refreshed, unshocked, he turns to face me, comically waves farewell up to where he thinks I’m standing, and drops backward to float with his arms outstretched. Oh he floats so still—he works, he works so hard, and for whom if not for me?—and then at last, after turning on his belly and making with a few choppy strokes that carry him nowhere, he comes wading back to shore, his streaming compact torso glowing from the last pure spikes of light driving in, over my shoulder, out of stifling inland New Jersey, from which I am being spared. 

And there are more memories like this one, Doctor. A lot more. This is my mother and father I’m talking about. 

... 

But don’t get me wrong (as though that were possible): during a winter snowstorm what is more thrilling, while stamping off the slush on the back landing at lunchtime, than to hear “Aunt Jenny” coming over the kitchen radio, and to smell cream of tomato soup heating up on the stove? What beats freshly laundered and ironed pajamas any season of the year, and a bedroom fragrant with furniture polish? How would I like my underwear all gray and jumbled up in my drawer, as Smolka’s always is? I wouldn’t. How would I like socks without toes and nobody to bring me hot lemonade and honey when my throat is sore? 

It is in passages like these that Roth comes close to a balanced appraisal of his Jewish background. They stand out in the narrative with sudden, unexpected beauty like the halos Renaissance painters placed around the heads of saints. What could be more human than a 33-year-old man missing a loving gesture from his mother? 

(1) What no one seems to have noticed is the novel’s incredible hostility to gentiles – to typical middle class white American life – and its special satirical attention to shiksas, emancipated gentile while women.

(2) Philip Roth Obituary. 

The Swedish 'Ordet'

Get rid of the miracles, and the whole world will fall at the feet of Jesus Christ. Rousseau 

Not until this past week have I had a chance to watch the film Ordet. Not Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, that he waited until 1955 to make, that has inspired some critics to write about in words so reverential that you’d think the film was the record of an actual miracle and not the bald and quite ridiculous representation of one. Chris Fujiwara stated categorically “that Ordet is a great film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person will deny.” Fujiwara, I learn, has written books – BOOKS – about Otto Preminger and Jacques Tourneur. An auteurist is someone who goes around kissing every frog he can find on the outside chance that just one of them is an enchanted prince. 

But I’d rather not dwell on Dreyer’s ponderous version, because there is another Ordet, made in 1943 in Sweden by Gustaf Molander, who is best known for having brought Ingrid Bergman to the attention of David O. Selznick in his 1936 film Intermezzo and for directing Woman Without a Face, from one of Ingmar Bergman’s earliest scripts. Molander’s Ordet opened in Stockholm the day after Christmas in 1943. Nine days later, Kaj Munk, who wrote the original play, was murdered by the Gestapo in Denmark. His body was found in a ditch the next day. As I wrote eleven years ago, “In itself, this [Molander’s making a film adaptation of Munk’s play] was a rather daring act in a nation (Sweden) that, to save itself from the fate of Denmark, was officially neutral throughout World War II.” Carl Dreyer reportedly wanted to make his own film of Ordet, but had to wait at least a decade after Molander’s film due to copyright restrictions. 

Molander’s film has a great deal going for it – not the least being originality. But, compared with Dreyer’s version, it has much less going for it in terms of style – the manner in which the story unfolds is less formal, but also less mannered. By the time Dreyer made his last two films, Ordet and Gertrud, his ideas about film had so ossified that it’s a stretch to call them motion pictures. Dreyer’s actors seem like opera singers, who have to plant themselves so that their diaphragms can function. The lighting of his interior scenes is as unnatural as that of a portrait gallery. 

The differences between the two films are striking. In Molander’s film when we first meet Johannes, he is a pastor in his father’s church. In Dreyer’s film he has already flipped his lid, has escaped his family’s confinement and wanders the oh-so picturesque grassy hills preaching to the wind. Molander opens his film, after a disembodied voice gives us a tour of a cloud-filled sky and verdant earth near a rocky coast, at a farm house where several voices call out for “Inger” – everyone from the old patriarch with the familiar face of Victor Sjöström, as Knut Borg, needing her help putting on his Sunday collar to her husband looking for his socks in the kitchen to her younger brother trying to comb his cowlicked hair. Inger has to quiet them all because Johannes (Rune Lindström), a student pastor – like Kaj Munk – is nervously preparing his sermon, so nervously that he gets hiccups. His wife, Kristina, gives him a spoonful of sugar. 

Two differing Sunday services, and their religious dogmas, are contrasted by Molander – the orthodox Lutheran and the “born again” sect. Predictably both sides are convinced of their own righteousness. Knut Borg’s (Sjöström) orthodox Lutheran family is brought into direct conflict with a “born again” family, headed by Petterson (Ludde Gentzel) when Knut’s youngest son and Petterson’s daughter fall in love. Knut’s eldest son (Holger Löwenadler) announces his doubts about God, gets drunk in a tavern and gets beaten up. Then, after giving his Sunday sermon, Johannes disappears. Apparently, it isn’t theology that troubles him (Dreyer blamed his mental breakdown on his reading too much Kierkegaard) but the nature of faith itself. While he sees and hears more than enough of religion in the world, faith is lacking. 

And in Molander’s telling, Kristina, Johannes’s wife, is run over by a car after she tries to bring him back home. In a bizarre scene that anticipates the film’s climax, at Kristina’s vigil, Johannes tells her corpse, “In Jesus’s name, stand up!” Johannes’s subsequent breakdown makes somewhat more sense. His wife is eliminated by Dreyer. The actor playing Johannes was the remarkable Rune Lindström, who also wrote the Molander film’s screenplay. (The most hair-raising moment in the film comes not at the end but when Johannes, who by then thinks he is Jesus, goes in to see Inger just after she has died. When he looks at her he – and we – hear her voice calling to him to help her!) 

The rest of the story is familiar to anyone who has seen the Dreyer film, but the way it is told in Molander’s film is much more naturalistic. For one thing, Molander’s Ordet is crowded with life, and his actors resemble real people rather than archetypes. And his film is alive with humorous touches. This was an important choice for Molander, since he avoids the horrible solemnity of Dreyer’s film, and he doesn’t set us up, as Dreyer does, for the supernatural scene in which Inger, who died in childbirth, is roused by Johannes, as if from sleep, from her coffin. The scene is staged in two rooms, a smaller room where the coffin sits and an outer room, filled with a few dozen people. Just as they are about to screw the coffin lid down, Johannes arrives. He closes the door so that he (and his little sister) are alone with the body. He repeats the same command that he used with Kristina’s corpse, “In the name of Jesus Christ, stand up!” First her nostrils flare, then her eyes open. (If I found her sitting up in the coffin a little too pat, it’s only because I’ve seen too many vampire movies.) 

If Munk’s play and Dreyer’s film demonstrate one thing definitively it is that surely the raising of Lazarus was the most vulgar of Jesus’s miracles. Dreyer’s film has had an odd effect on many critics who were otherwise level headed reporters for their periodicals. It makes them go all reverent and weak in the knees (and between the ears). When Roger Ebert, who is usually so sensible and down-to-earth, saw Ordet, he wrote things like “The camera movements have an almost godlike quality” and “The lighting, in black and white, is celestial”. He tells us that “I had started by viewing a film that initially bored me. It had found its way into my soul.” I won’t try to figure out what Ebert is talking about. I saw the same film he did and I didn’t think the stunt staged in the last scene made up for the protracted tedium of what led up to it. I wonder what Roger Ebert would’ve written about Gustaf Molander's film if he’d seen it before Dreyer stole all of his thunder. 

Every frame of Dreyer’s Ordet gives away his game, that is so solemnized and emphatic that we could be watching the life of a saint instead of the ordinary lives of farmers. Molander’s film is like a Breughel painting – like The Fall of Icarus. 

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood 

Its human position: how it takes place 

While someone else is eating or opening a 

window or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

(“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden) 

Molander was never a master, thank god. He was only an intelligent and conscientious filmmaker trying not to appeal to our faith but to move us.

Nemesis

What hath Roth got? – Saul Bellow (1)

That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve. 

For no good reason I came late to Philip Roth. In fact, I read my first of his thirty-one novels, The Human Stain, last October. I just finished reading my second Philip Roth novel, called Nemesis. I didn’t know until after I finished it that it was Roth’s last. It was published in October 2010 when he was 77. 

In many of Roth’s novels his presence isn’t hard to find, down to a character, who is often the novel’s narrator, that bears a resemblance (even if only a moral one) to Roth. The hero in Nemesis has the unlikely name Bucky Cantor (no one calls him by his given name, Eugene), a short, extremely near-sighted twenty-three year old who made up for his height disadvantage and bad eyes by becoming a formidable athlete. Because his mother died in childbirth and his father was a criminal (“a very shady character”), he was raised by his grandparents in a nearly exclusively Jewish district of Newark, New Jersey called Weequahic. This town also features vitally in Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. That novel’s complainer, Alexander Portnoy, was a graduate – like Roth – of Weequahic High School in 1950. So it wasn’t surprising that Roth would go back there in what became his last novel. 

The story of Nemesis is told by Arnie Mesnikoff, but we don’t learn about him until the novel's third part, set in 1971. In the summer of 1944, the time in which most of the story is set, Philip Roth was 11 years old. Unlike Roth, Arnie was stricken with polio which left him wearing braces on his legs for the rest of his life. 

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Bucky’s Junior year at Panzer College, but when he tried to enlist with his two best friends at the college, he was classified 4F because of his poor eyesight. He never quite got over his sense of his own inadequacy as a man from that day, not even when he landed a job as the summer playground supervisor at Chancellor Avenue School, which was next to Weequahic High School, where he planned to apply for a job as phys ed teacher. 

Unlike flu viruses or Covid-19, polio always appeared in the hottest months of summer. And in that especially hot summer of 1944, there was an outbreak of polio in Newark. There had been polio outbreaks every year, in some parts of America, since 1916, and it was polio’s most famous victim, Franklin Roosevelt, who established the charity organization, The March of Dimes. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine wasn’t available until 1955. 

The novel’s scene stealers include Bucky attending the funeral for Alan Michaels, one of the boys in his charge on the summer playground. Already questioning the culpability of a God who would send polio to cripple and kill children, his resentment reaches a crescendo when they reach the cemetery:  

They all joined the rabbi in reciting the mourner's prayer, praising God's almightiness, praising extravagantly, unstintingly, the very God who allowed everything, including children, to be destroyed by death. . . But what might not have occurred to the Michaels family had not been lost on Mr. Cantor. To be sure, he himself hadn't dared to turn against God for taking his grandfather when the old man reached a timely age to die. But for killing Alan with polio at twelve? For the very existence of polio? How could there be forgiveness—let alone hallelujahs—in the face of such lunatic cruelty? It would have seemed far less of an affront to Mr. Cantor for the group gathered in mourning to declare themselves the celebrants of solar majesty, the children of an ever-constant solar deity, and, in the fervent way of our hemisphere's ancient heathen civilizations, to abandon themselves in a ritual sun dance around the dead boy's grave—better that, better to sanctify and placate the unrefracted rays of Great Father Sun than to submit to a supreme being for whatever atrocious crime it pleases Him to perpetrate. 

Also impossible to forget is Bucky’s “love interest,” Marcia Steinberg, a year younger than him and a first grade teacher at the Chancellor Avenue School. She had gone to a summer camp in the Poconos just before the polio outbreak in Weequahic. She was worried for Bucky, and she begged him to keep himself safe and come to work at her summer camp. He knows it’s his duty – perhaps the only one left to him – to stay where he is and not let the boys he supervises in the playground down by playing it safe and running away to the Poconos. Deep down, though, Bucky isn’t really cut out for such devoted self-sacrifice, and almost against his will he leaves Weequahic just as the epidemic is getting worse. Because of his guilt over this – as he sees it – act of desertion, and because there is an outbreak at the summer camp shortly after his arrival that afflicts him as well and that disfigures his athletic legs and one of his arms, Bucky renounces his engagement to Marcia. 

Twenty-seven years later, he tells his story to Arnie Mesnikoff, who was one of his boys at the Chancellor schoolyard. He tells him about the letter Marcia wrote to him with two words, “My man,” written in perfect cursive two hundred and eighteen times down the front of the page and halfway down the back. 

The letter was signed with just her initial, M, a tall, beautifully formed capital exhibiting a little flourish in the loop and the stem, followed by "(as in My Man)." 

But then he tells Arnie about his last meeting with Marcia at the hospital, about how she entreated him to marry her because she didn’t care what the polio had done to him, that she loved him no matter what. But Bucky refuses to subject her to a life married to a “cripple,” and sends her away. But what she tells him is the truth, that it wasn’t polio that twisted him: 

Bucky, you've always been this way. You could never put things at the right distance—never! You're always holding yourself accountable when you're not. Either it's terrible God who is accountable, or it's terrible Bucky Cantor who is accountable, when in fact, accountability belongs to neither. 

Bucky ends it with Marcia anyway. The nemesis in the book’s title isn’t God or polio, but Bucky’s ill-formed character. And he destroys two lives with it. As Arnie concludes: "He has to find a necessity for what happens. There is an epidemic and he needs a reason for it. He has to ask why. Why? Why? That it is pointless, contingent, preposterous, and tragic will not satisfy him. That it is a proliferating virus will not satisfy him. Instead he looks desperately for a deeper cause, this martyr, this maniac of the why, and finds the why either in God or in himself or, mystically, mysteriously, in their dreadful joining together as the sole destroyer." 

This sad, elegiac novel ends with a glorification – an apotheosis – of Bucky’s lost athletic beauty. He takes the boys onto an empty dirt field where the high school football team would practice and shows them his skill throwing a javelin. It is a beautiful, fleeting image from a lost summer, and all the more beautiful for being the last fictional moment in Philip Roth’s work. 

(1) Comment made to Dick Cavett.