The Face Knife

Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 begins with a shot of colorfully-dressed five person theatre troupe facing away from the camera with their asses in the air and their heads tucked under their shoulders. These quite limber actors right themselves and begin stretching their bodies as if they were prepping for some sadistic Tae-Bo-esque workout. It’s a very funny scene and it prepares the audience mentally for the upending of cinema conventions about to ensue, not to mention the pre-occupation with the body and the forces that have power over it that is one of the sub-texts of the film. Unfortunately, at this point the film does not pause for a corresponding calisthenics intermission, as it sure would behoove the audience to make sure that their bodies are warmed-up so as to endure with as little soreness or fidgeting as possible the grueling, 8 episode, 12+ hour marathon (split over two days) that awaits. Particularly the first two episodes. For those I could have used a full-body massage as an overture.

Out 1 is one of the most famous films maudit of all time - the head curator of the Museum of the Moving Image here in Astoria, New York, said that this weekend (Dec. 9-10) was only the sixth public screening of the film, and there was only one print in existence*. Naturally, I had been greatly anticipating checking this one off my list. Of course, I was also hoping for much more than a big ?ol notch in my New Wave belt. I was hoping for some revelatory experience, a moment of transcendence, the out of body experience that the best movies can give us. Out 1, like most movies, failed to live up to that promise. Perhaps it was just a function of my expectations (or a function of my chair), but I would have to number Out 1, to use a supercilious expression of the sharply drawn douchebag from this film, ?minor Rivette. ?

In a way, all of Rivette?s films are ?minor,? and in the same way, Out 1 contains all of Rivette yet exceeds none of it. It is a small, centerless film blown out of all proportion, an experiment in theatrical staging, a clash of acting methods, a study in free-floating paranoia and a series of interlocking games and puzzles where the purpose is not to ?win.? An attempt to sum up or ?solve? Out 1 would similarly miss the point, and I?m not going to attempt it, particularly because there are several other of Rivette?s films that interest me more and I would rather be defeated by (Duelle, Le pont du nord and the incredibly opaque and Kabuki-esque Noroit, of the ones I?ve seen. Even the similarly flawed L?Amour Fou has some indelible moments).

I’m going to try to make a few small notes about the film and what interests me in it. In the notes MoMI distributed at the showing (from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s out-of-print Rivette collection) is a quite dense Rivette interview I haven’t yet properly digested - although, unfortunately that alimentation may not prove possible as he refers to several films I have not seen and don’t think I’ll get the chance to any time soon. Besides, I’m probably only writing this piece for the aforementioned public belt-notching. N.B. You may not want to read below if you plan on attending one of the upcoming screenings or if you’re already disgusted with the way I’m treating this film. And this piece will end arbitrarily, kind of like the film.

I’m having a hard time starting this sentence without using the words “plot”, “structure”, “organized” or “story”, all of which would be misleading for reasons mentioned above, so I will say that the film is centered around a few separate groups and individual characters**.
(1)The aforementioned upside-down theatre group, led by red-head Lili, (Michele Moretti) is rehearsing a humorously noisy version of Aeschylus’s “Seven Against Thebes.”
(2) Another theatre group, planning a version of Aeschylus’s “Prometheus,” using rehearsal methods that could double as CIA torture techniques. This group is led by Thomas (Michael Lonsdale), who proves to be intimately involved with nearly every other character in the film.
(3) Colin (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a (faux) deaf-mute who plays the harmonica and receives bizarre messages which he deduces to reveal the existence of a secret society. He’s pretty greasy looking.
(4) Frederique, (Juliet Berto) a marginal street kid who likes to pickpocket, swindle, etc.
(5) Pauline/Emilie, (Bulle Ogier) owner of hippie hang-out. One of several characters with multiple names.
(6) There are two other “characters” in this film who are prime movers of the story as such but who never actually appear (to my knowledge - it may be possible that Pierre appears in one of the first two episodes, unremarked upon, as one of Colin’s “victims” - this is a completely unfounded theory, but I like it). As I am becoming a seasoned moviegoer and I am well aware of some of the stock though nonetheless moving pleasures of the form, I thought that Pierre-this or Igor-that would lead up to a Harry Lime or Ringo Kid-esque appearance in the 7th or 8th episode, but alas, they remain unearthly powers. At least Juan in Paris Belongs To Us has the decency to be definitively dead, if still the topic of every fucking conversation.

Both groups of theatre folk are in a constant state of transition- nothing is ever finished or settled upon. The rehearsal scenes of Out 1 are not as satisfying as those in Rivette’s previous filmL’Amour Fou, which uses a similar schemata. In L’Amour Fou the text of the source play (Racine’s Andromache) becomes doubled or tripled or quadrupled in meaning while the words stay exactly the same, through repetition (to the point that the audience themselves is rehearsed for the scene) who is delivering the lines and where they are delivering them. I prefer that type of “play” with the text to what Rivette does in Out 1, where both troupes more or less jettison their texts right away (The Thebes group plans to have a character appear onstage who never appears in the play (sort of the opposite of Out 1’s Pierre), and the Prometheus group actually starts with multiple texts in multiple languages (but by the end of the film Thomas is saying that Prometheus is entirely missing from the play)) and approach the problem of interpretation from a much more abstract and even mythical angles.

The two troupes have entirely different philosophies, however, but it’s easy to differentiate between them, even though they both center around the movement and position of the body. The Thebes group approaches Aeschylus through autonomous actors moving against each other with dynamic forces. They are also taking a disturbing though humorous choral approach to the play, using un-musical screeching as counterpoint to the action. When one of the actresses tells the music director that she cannot perform a difficult musical run without taking a breath, the music director tells her not to worry because everyone else will be making noise. The group in this case functions to maintain the individual. When one of the actors wins the lottery and announces that he will share the windfall with the group, the collectivism of this sentiment is too much to take - one of the other actors runs off with the money, selfishly, thereby maintaining the individual boundaries. Lili, it is revealed, has a sideline of providing fake “papers” to people of nebulous origin - and while the slant of her business was unclear to me, it is possible to read the service she provides as being aligned with the individual against the state - providing free passage and open borders in defiance of the restrictions placed on travel and residency.

In contrast, Thomas’s group is all about the submission of the body to the collective. You can picture his acting workshops by imagining the 60s bohemian version of the “trust-fall” at corporate retreats. The notorious first appearance of this Promethean group consists of a 45 minute scene of the actors rolling in the primordial muck, babbling, biting each other and constructing and destroying a red idol made out of a dress-maker’s dummy. Another rehearsal scene involves a young woman laying absolutely still and expressionless on the stage while the other members of the troupe do things like slam a chair next to her face.

Thomas, himself, though, is inviolate. One of the most interesting scenes of rehearsal involves Thomas as a wounded Prometheus, where the sometimes-used subtitle of the film “Noli Me Tangere” in invoked (though in French “ne [me] touchez pas”) where the actors coming in supplication to Prometheus are barred from touching him. Thomas seems to be allowed to paw anyone he wants to at any time, and indeed, his function as a connector in the film is primarily erotic (he has past or present relationships with 4 of the women in the film, and even convinces two of them to engage in a menage a trois with him). Apparently, in the four hour Spectre version of the film Thomas is even more important, but even in this version I think he is one of the more sharply drawn characters, a hierophantic troll who nonetheless radiates a powerful magnetism on those in his orbit.

The actions of Thomas, as an eventually revealed member of the Thirteen, gives an inkling as to what “The Companions of Duty” are about. I’m not going to delve to deeply into Conspiracy Theory theory here, as I’m bored with that and trust my readers are familiar with the Eco or Pynchon or whom have you’s versions, but the corollary to the (very reductive and almost banal idea) that “everything is connected and nothing is connected” there’s the more practical question of Power and the threat of power. Secret forces can exert power by whisking you away in the night, or maneuvering behind the scenes to prevent your expose from being published or merely the idea that these things could happen cause those not a member of elite to give up power, whether it is power over their bodies and how they can use them or power over what is permissible or not permissible to think or imagine. The struggle against the people making use of these forces is anti-Fascism.

As the one member of the cast who eventually engages in an armed struggle against the forces of evil (though, perhaps she does so as the result of a pun - “Les Compagnon de Devoir
(the Companions of Duty)” for “Les Compagnon de D?vorer” (the Companions of Devouring))- Juliet Berto gives an embryonic version of her immensely entertaining performance in Celine and Julie Go Boating, but that’s exactly what is - an embryonic version of that performance. The physical cues that make up the later character are all but absent here. The failure of her character to play any game properly be it chess or (and incidentally, if I see another movie where a metaphor about playing chess with yourself is thrown up onscreen, I just want it to be a joke about ‘polishing the bishop,’ knowwhatmsayin’?) blackmail or conspiracy is the result of the actress’s failure to create a convincing character - and thus she simply has to die.

Jean-Pierre Leaud fares a little better, as he is responsible for the one transcendent cinematic moment of the film, where he chants verse from Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” while a handheld camera is in his face, walking down a street. His Colin is a marginal figure, refusing to work, instead haunting the cafes running penny-ante scams (more or less annoying people - for cash!).

It has been mooted that the failure of the groups and ideas of Out 1 to cohere are a metaphor for the death of the 60s following May ‘68, but the political content of this film is much less overt than it is in other Rivette’s (and even, for example, in Paris nous appartient and Le Pont du nord, where it is still more alluded to than actually made manifest). All the tuckered-out, jam-loving hippies in the world aren’t enough to make that point, and the French cinema would have to wait a few more years for a film that shares some of the same cast as Out 1, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, for an autopsy of that generation. As you will have to wait for my essay on that film. It’s been in progress for quite some time. Wait for it.

Related and Elsewhere:
Aaron Hillis at The Reeler
Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door
At Critical Culture, links to all 8 episodes of Out 1 (no subtitles, apparently)
Reverse Shot
Screengrab

If anyone else posts a review to a blog, I’d love to read it.

*There will be another screening March 3-4. Tickets are available via the link above. I believe there may be a showing in the offing in LA, as well
**and if I had half a brain, it would have occurred to be PRIOR TO THE FOURTH FUCKING EPISODE to make a flow chart of these relationships. Maybe that will be what March is for. Maybe.

Paris may not belong to us, but Paris* owns your ass (even when she’s in the midst of a crane-assisted makeover), and it’s this alienation between human beings and the things they create that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things… explores. The modern city creates unnatural “needs” for its inhabitants because of class structure, the distribution of wealth, urban planning, and the omnipresence of advertising.

Our inverted relationships to our environment and the commodities we produce may be a piece of our death, but they’ve never looked so good as photographed by Raoul Coutard in Two or Three Things…. It’s like Rodchenko photographing a world where Jack Kirby was an instructor at the Bauhaus. Eye-popping color like something out of a Tashlin comedy (another genre where objects sometimes do not behave quite as expected or desired) made me salivate over the prospect of owning this in the sure-to-be-forthcoming deluxe DVD edition, to be played on that widescreen HDTV I’ve been hurting for for so long.

It may sound like I am, but I’m not enjoying my symptoms.

Being something of a feminist, I squirm in my seat when Godard resorts to metaphors of prostitution (embodied always in HOT, foreign born Parisiennes) to illustrate the soul-killing effects of the cycle of work, but the matter-of-fact way in which the encounters take place in this film are drained of titillation and approach black comedy around their irregular margins.

But all the flashy Pop commodities in the world, from spicy dresses to toy machine guns to candy-apple red automobiles can’t point to a way out. The film is littered with posters for air travel to destinations where liberation struggles are going on (you know, I’ll have to watch it again to make sure that that is the case), and maybe that’s the only way out of the struggle. Or you can just sit at a table and stare into a coffee cup.

*or, you know, New York, as the case may be.

One of the most unfair things about this world is that other people seldom act the way we want them to, and that can make life just plain difficult. If they could only see what you see, grasp the facts of the situations the way you can, surely - surely - a positive outcome for all could be reached. But most of the time, other people just don’t seem to get it. Are they all just fucking jerks, or is something else going on?

Gradually, it seems, the American independent filmmaker is emerging from a solipsistic cocoon and making movies that deal honestly with what I like to call “the problem of other people.” That problem is essentially that a part of everyone who is not you will remain forever inaccessible and in reserve, no matter how hard you try to break down the barriers. An inability to work around this fact results in neuroses, which often have debilitating, but quite possibly entertaining for the rest of us, symptoms.

I myself happen to take it for granted that you, dear reader, are an autonomous individual capable of some, to be sure, spectacularly wrong-headed opinions but ones that are probably based on the available facts as you see them. I’m willing to give you that doubt, not because I am particularly magnanimous but because all evidence seems to indicate that there is, not, in fact, a cosmic conspiracy to frustrate my ambitions, with various government officials, family members and even, at times, “inanimate” objects acting in concert.

The (giant) Squid and the Whale engage in a deep sea combat that until very, very recently (after the production of this film) had not been witnessed by human beings. Yet it was more or less taken for granted by biologists and animal death match enthusiasts that this combat did take place, although we couldn’t really see it. Despite our best cogito-ing, phenomenological bracketing and what not, a bulletproof proof of the autonomy of the “other” is not forthcoming. Heck, half the time the so-called experts even have trouble proving that they themselves exist, much the less the rest of us.

What to do, what to do? Well, one way to tackle the problem is to interpret the actions of all and sundry as accidental or on-purposeful attempts to make your life difficult. And indeed, in addition to praising his favorite texts as “very dense and interesting,” Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) is inclined to plead for his family members to “stop being difficult,” whenever he doesn’t get his way.

Another way to tackle the problem is to retreat so far inside yourself that you become incredibly alienated. The younger brother acts how I would imagine a shell-shocked Danny Torrance from The Shining would, chugging beers and marking his territory at school in squirm inducing ways.

At one point, the older brother, when confronted with his limitations, says to his mom that he “doesn’t see himself that way,” and indeed, being alienated from other people also leads to self-alienation.

Noah Baumbach is unflinching in detailing how that sometimes relationships, be it with a family member or potential love interest can be based largely on projection. In this year’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July deals with similar themes but seems to posit a solution that everyone has similar doubts and insecurities, and therefore it is not necessary to be afraid of intimacy. Baumbach’s film shows that this solution is, while appealing, ultimately facile, and that other people are really capable of inflicting terrible damage on you, without you ever being able to explain why, except with empty words like “difficult.”

To be continued in a review of Talk to Her(2002).

continued, sort of, from Boudu Saved From Drowning

Robert Bresson’s Mouchette famously ends with the drowning death of the title urchin, after a long night during which she was raped and her mother died. The next morning, a succession of characters offer Mouchette charity, in the form of clothes, in the form of food, but she spurns them all before rolling down the embankment and into the water. On the face of it, it certainly seems like Mouchette was in a helpless situation and couldn’t be “saved,” despite any help that could be offered her. The fact that the help in question is offered in the spirit of pity rather than empathy doesn’t make a difference.

In what little reading I’ve done about Bresson, the idea of him being a Jansenist filmmaker is quite prominent. Most “modern” Catholicism and Christianity stress “works” as the key to the kingdom of Heaven, so grappling with the Jansenist ideas of original sin and predestination can be alienating. The idea that human effort matters little in determining one’s place in eternity is antithetical to the more or less liberal, secular values of the Western World.

Even the most fervent believers in “free will” cannot deny that there are three circumstances of a person’s life that are completely out of one’s control: where you were born, when you were born, and to whom you were born. These are, for lack of a better word, Fate, and Mouchette’s Fate seems inescapable when it comes to all three.

Jansenist thought posits that one thing can redeem the human soul: grace. Recall the end of Diary of a Country Priest: “all is grace.” I’m not sure that that would hold in Mouchette, because the world is a torturous place - a mudscape where the sound of metal scraping on metal shakes the night. You can almost smell the carbon monoxide given off by the trucks that pass Mouchette’s hovel.

In Catholic dogma, God can bestow his Grace on the supplicant through the Sacraments, the first of which, and the most important, because it removes the stigma of Original Sin, is Baptism. Is Mouchette’s drowning a baptism, or a denial of the possibility of Grace? Our urge to be charitable - born of pity - leads us to the first explanation, but maybe the answer is not so kind.

I like to think of myself as a charitable person. I’ve given change to the homeless, donated my blood (and refused the complimentary cookie), shopped at the Salvation Army for cool clothes and every Thanksgiving I have every intention of bringing in some canned goods for my office’s food drive. But even though I am by all evidence bursting with love for the unfortunate, if I ever see a tramp in mortal danger I’m going to mind my own business. Call me a hobophobe if you’d like, but if fiction is any indication, saving a tramp will totally fuck up your life.

Still, although my heart has been thus hardened, I can’t help feel pity for the poor and weak. But is “pity” a good reason to be charitable, or even the right reason? Is the “right” reason different if you’re (even nominally) a Christian or secular humanist?

The great part about the humanism of Renoir or Bresson is that it never champions asceticism - any moral or ethical message is always grounded in the inescapable facts of our corporal bodies and their needs and limitations. I think a lot of “spiritual” or “philosophical” artwork has the tendency to elide the realities of the body, though those realities are always present (and almost by definition, necessary) in the very highest art.

The body of Boudu is mostly whiskers and rags covering the great Michel Simon. Boudu has a companion, a dog, who runs away in the first scene. This is apparently the last straw, and Boudu throws himself in the Seine.

There’s a cliche that killing yourself by hanging is a unconscious wish to punish yourself for a crime and the metaphorical implications of, say, blowing your head off with a shotgun are pretty apparent. As far as tossing yourself in a body of water with the intention of not surfacing until you’re blue and bloated, my best guess is that it’s tantamount to a baptism, a desire to be close to God. Perhaps, though, it is an anti-baptism…

In any case, Boudu certainly thinks Paradise can be found on the riverbed and is justly peeved at the bourgeois bookseller, Lestingois, who pulls him from the Seine. I like Lestingois, and it’s harder to fault him as a benefactor than it is some other more supercilious would-be literary saints. When we are introduced to him, we are made immediately aware of his affair with his maid, and although he is in love with books and the literary life he doesn’t seem to be a snob. He’s aware of his faults and doesn’t seem to think he’s better than anyone else (except perhaps his wife). Thus it’s hard to see the effect that Boudu has on his life as any sort of ‘comeuppance,’ unless we see it as comeuppance for the ’sins’ of a class of people rather than any individuals within a class.

Boudu totally screws up the social order by failing to keep his bodily impulses constrained within the rules of a household. He spits everywhere, chases the maid and woman of the house around, and generally messes up the place. He’s the one-man version of the hobo wrecking crew/last supper in Viridiana.

Ultimately, instead of throwing Boudu out on his muttonchops, Lestingois attempts to “normalize” the odd relationships that develop between the 4 people living in the house, but Boudu will have none of it. He capsizes the whole enterprises and floats away, reclaiming some rags from a scarecrow upon his liberation.

Has charity, in this case, failed, and if so, who has it failed? Is Boudu’s intransigence a rebellion against those who (arguably, I would say) patronize him, or is it just that some people can’t be “saved”?

To be continued Monday in a review of Mouchette (1967)

Boudu Saved from Drowning is available on Region 1 DVD

Imagine a polyphonic ringtone, stomping on a human face - forever.

Not to be too alarmist, but - mobile phones, work of the devil, right? In addition to ruining more classic plot devices than any invention besides DNA testing*, this illusion of being constantly plugged into a communications grid - is this wise? I mean, what kind of person wants to be available all the time? Not the kind of person I want calling me, that’s for sure.

Mobile phones might wreck some suspense plots but as a trope they’ve been sorely underutilized in film fiction. Until that high school text-messaging sex comedy starring Hillary Duff that we’ve all been waiting for comes out, we’ve got to settle with Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang Ke’s The World.

The World is a narrative about the deforming effects the availability and control of technology have on the younger generation of Chinese**,told in the setting of an amusement park outside of Beijing that reproduces famous world-wide landmarks at reduced scale. You can see the skyline of New York (still complete with the Twin Towers about the height of two Yao Mings standing on each other’s shoulders),- The Eiffel Tower at 1/3 scale, and a miniature Taj Mahal.

While no Baudrillard has been (or will be) harmed in the making of this essay, I’d like to bring up his closest North American analogue, familiar to you all from his guest spot in Annie Hall, Marshall McLuhan. In McLuhan’s terms, a “media” is an ‘extension of man’ - anything that extends our senses or capabilities. In simplest terms, radio is an extension of our hearing, and automobiles (also a media according to McLuhan) extend our sense of touch/ability to act in the world. Media deform our perception of the world, like a lens. The procession of different media create different ruling narratives for each age. What happens, then, when a media is theoretically available but in practice unavailable to over a billion people? Have these people not had a pretty literal limb amputated?

The characters in The World, led by Tao (the charming Tao Zhao, the provincial pop star of Jia’s Unknown Pleasures) and her boyfriend Taisheng (Taisheng Chen) are constantly consulting their cellphones, riding in tiny cars or staring wistfully at airplanes flying overhead. The cellphone is used as an instrument of paternal control in romantic relationships. One character even considers buying a new Motorola with a GPS chip to keep track of his girlfriend, who keeps switching her phone off. Cellphones are a fifth column in your pocket, constantly betraying your actions either actively (storing your incriminating text messages for someone else to read) or passively (not being on). They’re the informers for the forces arrayed against Freedom.

Forces that also keep strict control over travel. An old friend gets a passport and arranges to travel to Ulan Bator, of all places, and Tao can barely comprehend it. One of the characters is tangentially involved in passport fraud, a crime that surely carries a severe (but unspoken) penalty. Even the Russian guest performers at the amusement park have their passports confiscated by their minder. Russia, now supposedly free, still exerts control over its citizens’ movement, and the only way out is through deceit and prostitution to the wealthy class.

Often, we see Tao riding a slow monorail - always alone or nearly so - a reminder of the other technologies that were supposed to liberate but have ended up merely moving us around in circles. Still, The World is a travel narrative, even if the characters never leave Beijing. There’s a destination you can reach from anywhere…

*and therefore exacerbating the already over-the-top narrative contortions of the contemporary thriller

**though, it seems to me in my non-expert way that ‘Chinese’ is a pretty poor blanket term to describe the different cultural, social and racial types that make up the 1+billion inhabitants of the PRC (not to mention Hong Kong or Taiwan)

The World opens July 1 at Cinema Village in NYC, and throughout the summer in other major cities. Check the Zeitgeist Films website for dates and locations

Luis Buñuel film in which Fernando Rey plays an aging lecher. Okay, that’s a feeble joke. Look for a “Which Buñuel film am I watching?” flowchart to completed sometime this summer.

Viridiana is a blasphemous film about the consolations and proper uses of religion.The titular character is a novice nun who returns to the world one last time before taking her vows in order to spend some time on the estate of her widower uncle Don Jaime (Rey), who has sponsored her entry into the convent. As with most of the characters played by Rey in the Buñuel canon, Don Jaime is very wealthy and inflamed with lust by any young woman, and as such he tries to tempt Viridiana to marry him and stay with him. The night before Viridiana is to return to the convent, Don Jaime asks the naif if she would do him a favor, which consists of wearing his dead wife’s wedding dress and shoes, which we had seen him caressing earlier. With the help of his maid and some drugs, Don Jaime prepares to ravish Viridiana only to find that he cannot go through with it. In deep shame, he kills himself, though Viridiana only finds this out as she is about to board the bus back to the convent.

Viridiana inherits the estate, but she has to share it with Don Jaime’s out of wedlock son, Jorge, who is a typical modern smoothy who wants to bring electricity and modern farming methods to the estate.

Viridiana wants to use her wealth to help people, and starts a home for some begging invalids. This doesn’t turn out to well, as as soon as they are left unsupervised, they throw a raucus party culminating in a tableau vivant of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” and dancing to Handel’s Messiah, the only phonograph record Don Jaime had, which he used to play the organ along to.

As the beggars give in to their urges, one of them says of his cohorts “Let them sin…it’s good for the soul….then they can repent.” which to me is pretty much the summation of any functional version of Christianity. The rules-based ascetiscism Viridiana learned in the convent and tries to apply to real life is just not practical for human beings.

In the wonderful ending, (which, apparently Buñuel adapted from the censors’ suggestions) Jorge invites a chastened (but ready to become unchaste) Viridiana to play cards with him and maid, with whom he is already having an affair (unlike his father, who remained faithful to his dead wife, or so we are led to believe). A rock and roll record blares on the phonograph, with the chorus “Shake your cares away,” and Jorge explains the rules of the game to Viridiana, and that they play cards because the “nights are long and you have to fill them somehow.” The consolation of other people, of being the bride of the world rather than the bride of Christ, is the only option left to us, born sinners who would certainly not be able to deal with paradise even if it were given to us. It seems a little odd for me to use a film banned in Spain and other countries for blasphemy as an example of the kind of religion I find attractive, but I really see a kinship between the themes of this movie and the earthly spirituality of a Dostoevsky or Bresson, and I don’t think that Buñuel would necessarily think that that’s a bad thing.

Viridiana is currently unavailable on Region1 DVD

I still don’t know if I can forgive Todd Solondz for Happiness or Storytelling, but Palindromes is really an excellent film, his best by many miles. Stylistically and morally, Solondz has opened himself up, going beyond the closed universe of sitcom style set-ups and misanthropy that characterised his earlier work. Solondz will still never be accused of being a great stylist - can you think of a Solondz shot that doesn’t involve Philip Seymour Hoffman’s semen - but there are some great, lyrical moments in Palindromes, particularly the Night of the Hunter-inspired river escape.

Palindromes is a comedy about teen pregnancy and abortion, but it’s not a particularly topical movie, which is something I think confuses critics. They see these hot button topics (also pedophilia) and think the film is *about* these things - how could it not be - but, in the case of Palindromes (and again, I’m not going to defend Solondz’s earlier films - not a fan), they’re really metaphors for a larger message about how human beings stumble towards intimacy (not the sexual kind) with each other in a world that causes us to mistrust and hate our neighbors and ourselves. Solondz’s characters are constantly making the wrong choice, but for the right reason, and that’s what makes them ultimately lovable, their infinite fallibility. Just when you think they can’t make a worse choice, they do. In the past, Solondz seemed to dwell on this aspect of life, to mistake it for all life, all human experience, especially in the context of Suburbia, and his films often mocked the characters for their mistakes. They were cruel films, but Palindromes is uncommon in its sensitivity and gentleness, without being ever sentimental, a particularly difficult thing to do when children and childhood are part of the project. I’m tempted to revisit his earlier films, but my memories of them are too strong and too negative, so instead I’ll just look forward to his next project. Hopefully, it will be even more influence by the surrealism of Bunuel, because I think their respective humanisms have a lot in common. Both are interested in the malfunction of human desire and the way that one cannot change one’s innate drives without repression and horrible consequences*. A full-blown surreal Solondz film I think would be a revelation.

* in the vernacular, “you can’t unfry things. you can’t change who you are” (Strangers with Candy).