Poor Things (2023)

Rounding up my favourite films of 2023 with one of my favourites that I haven’t already written about, which only got a preview screening here in Melbourne towards the end of the year (and is due back in cinemas for a full run sometime in the new year I believe). Perhaps I have overrated it in the excitement of seeing a preview, perhaps it is a bit more middlebrow and less challenging than Lanthimos’s previous works, as I’ve seen some critics argue. Clearly it has its adherents and its detractors, like Past Lives. But in that cinema, that first time I saw it, it seemed pretty exciting. I shall have to return for a more sober appreciation next year.

I mean, if you’ve seen The Favourite or The Lobster or any of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films (or the works written by Tony McNamara, including the TV show The Great), you sort of know what general tone you’re going to get, and that can be summed up as “weird”. In the sense that this film is boldly-coloured, luridly non-naturalistic, glamorous and disgusting in almost equal measures, it is no surprise perhaps but the way it’s pulled off feels really sensuously done. It is also somewhat at odds with a lot of the content: there’s quite a bit of sex in this, which feels perfunctory at times, though often funny. Comedy suffuses this film, though it’s not precisely that either. I suppose it’s a Bildungsroman about the growing consciousness of a young woman, who as the film opens is mysteriously throwing herself off London’s Tower Bridge, but after she is resurrected by Willem Dafoe’s mad Scottish scientist figure with the transplanted brain of her unborn infant (Ramy Youssef plays the scientist’s assistant, and his literal ‘WTF’ moment when learning this is also beautifully delivered), she starts to discover the perils and beauties of living.

Emma Stone is going to win awards (I certainly hope she does, if this is not all too weird for most voting juries), and justifiably so, for what is a brilliant and very physical performance (there’s a dance scene that is filled with such joy in movement that it could be an acting workshop). However, the true star, for some physicality but also just for his line deliveries, is Mark Ruffalo, something I wouldn’t necessarily have said of any of his recent film work. There is of course a serious point about the way women are treated by men through history (this has a sort of fin de siècle setting, or just before, which perhaps justifies one piece of dialogue early on, though it’s still an uncomfortable laugh now), but also digs into the moral judgements on sex work and women’s pleasure, amongst other topics, as Bella continues to educate herself throughout the film. But despite the running time, you’re rarely far from a moment of true wonder and delight, or a big laugh, at any point in this film. Perhaps I’m dazzled now; I’ll watch it again, but this is fantastic in every sense.

CREDITS
Director Yorgos Lanthimos Γιώργος Λάνθιμος; Writer Tony McNamara (based on the novel Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer by Alasdair Gray); Cinematographer Robbie Ryan; Starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef رامي يوسف, Hanna Schygulla; Length 141 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Saturday 9 December 2023.

Criterion Sunday 411: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

Not really sure where to start with this one, but of course it must be understood that it’s a TV series, not a movie; it’s not designed to be watched as a single unit, and indeed I watched it in five sittings over the past week and a half. That said, it feels like a full expression of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s vision, with the carnivalesque, the nasty and bitter, the rank misogyny of desperate men, and the endless forbearance of easily discarded women.

Its setting is late-20s Berlin, and though the rise of the Nazi Party is somewhere in the background and is rarely far from the viewer’s mind (not least because the entire enterprise is sort of a state of the diseased nation piece in allegorical miniature), it’s rarely explicitly mentioned in the film. The set design drips with brown sepia tones, mostly being set in a series of slummy apartments and a bar where recently-released criminal Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) consorts with odious types like Gottfried John’s Reinhold and Frank Buchrieser’s Meck. For the first half he avers the criminal life, trying on a series of ‘respectable’ professions like selling shoelaces or hawking newspapers (albeit the Völkischer Beobachtung, the Nazi paper), until eventually he is ground down enough by fate to find himself pulled back into the work of the criminals he’s surrounded by—that much is hardly a surprise. He remains, however absurdly it may seem, attractive to women and a number of them (the actors all familiar from Fassbinder’s other films) move through his life, as we learn of the reason he was in prison in the first place, and the repeated insistence on his crime (the murder of an earlier girlfriend), makes it clear that he is not only no saint, but also that part of this world is a toxic misogyny that is normalised as part of the operation of society. That doesn’t exactly make it easy to watch, though, however much it may be clear this is Fassbinder’s point (and presumably of Döblin, the original author).

Visually, though, it’s quite something. Aside from the set design, there are many bravura pieces of filmmaking, long takes choreographing actors entering and exiting the frame almost balletically, or shots through cages and tracking around subterranean settings. It sweeps you up in this bitter, nasty world very easily and pulls you through what amounts to almost 15 hours of a descent into madness, made literal in the final epilogue episode, as all the incipient drama in Franz’s life become a whirling mess of hallucinatory drama soundtracked by fragments of music from across the canon (from Leonard Cohen and Kraftwerk to snatches of opera). It’s certainly an achievement of sorts, however little it feels like something I’d want to revisit in a hurry, and it’s worth the time.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Rainer Werner Fassbinder (based on the novel by Alfred Döblin); Cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger; Starring Günter Lamprecht, Gottfried John, Franz Buchrieser, Barbara Sukowa, Hanna Schygulla, Brigitte Mira; Length 902 minutes (in 14 episodes). Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Thursday 4 March [episodes 1-2], Friday 5 March [episodes 3-6] and Thursday 11 March [episodes 7-9], and at a friend’s home (YouTube streaming), Friday 12 March [episodes 10-12] and Sunday 14 March 2021 [episodes 13-14].

Criterion Sunday 204: Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978)

She’s an attractive woman, Hanna Schygulla is (as the title character), and that’s only one of the things she uses to get ahead in the post-World War II mess of West Germany. Maria’s dogged pursuit of her goals, flirting with other men before returning to her pre-War husband (who returns unexpectedly even after she’d given up on him), makes her a potent symbol of Germany in the period, and this film thus functions as something of an allegory. Certainly those closing scenes, soundtracked by the insistent voice of a football commentator narrating a successful German game, drives that home. It may not be Fassbinder’s most flashy film, not the one perhaps with the greatest cult credentials, but it’s a wonderfully resonant piece, I think, underpinned by a great central performance by Schygulla.

CREDITS
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Writers Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich; Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus; Starring Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny; Length 115 minutes. Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 18 March 2018 (and before that on VHS at home, Wellington, November 1997, and at university, Wellington, March 2000).

Passion (1982)

After the full stop that was Week End (1967) and the partial return of Tout va bien (1972), Godard sort of disappeared into a wilderness of televisual and video-based filmmaking. Upon his return to the cinema screen in 1980 with Sauve qui peut (la vie), he may have been once again using recognisable star actors, but the narrative structures were certainly far from mainstream. This second film of his return is within a filmmaking framework familiar from Le Mépris (1963), which film incidentally also starred Michel Piccoli and was shot by Raoul Coutard. However, the Godard of 20 years later has a quite different method of putting together narrative, making Passion a rather more challenging viewing experience.

This is, however, the experience of this later period of Godard’s filmmaking, as the links between scenes—not to mention between image track and soundtrack—become increasingly tenuous. You could view this as a breathtakingly brazen disregard for conventional narrative structures (the beginning, middle and end “but not necessarily in that order” approach of one of Godard’s famous dictums), or as an increasingly cranky and self-indulgent way of befuddling the audience, but I choose to take it as both. I cannot deny that actually watching the film is perplexing, but this isn’t the emperor’s new clothes: there is a method here that definitely yields some interesting results.

As with Le Mépris, once again there’s a fairly self-critical portrait of the artist, who here is the bespectacled Polish filmmaker Jerzy (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz). Like Godard (living and working in Switzerland by this time), Jerzy is in some sort of self-imposed exile, stranded outside his country as the first political convulsions are taking place that by the end of the decade would lead to the overthrow of Communism. He is making a film called Passion which seems anything but passionate from what we see—beautifully-shot and lit tableaux of unmoving figures which seem to restage Renaissance paintings and give plenty of opportunity for the baring of female flesh, which Jerzy rather imperiously co-ordinates when he’s bothering to work on the film at all. Unsurprisingly there are problems with the budget, and it’s never quite clear what the plot is (indeed, the question is put to him directly at one point, to which he amusingly reacts with disgust, rather suggesting that plot is beside the point for Godard/Jerzy).

The rest of the cast are largely enacting a scenario involving factory owner Michel (Piccoli) and his wife Hanna (Schygulla), as well as Isabelle (Huppert) as a factory worker who comes into conflict with Michel. The ideas Godard seems to be playing with involve the demands of a working life (shades of Tout va bien) and those of the heart. There are communication issues too, particularly between the non-Francophone characters (Jerzy and Hanna). It’s difficult, though, to draw out more expressive ideas on just one viewing—Godard’s films get increasingly elliptical and densely-layered and require more time to unpick. His soundtrack work still likes to fade in and out repeated snatches of music (here it’s most prominently Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem), but there’s also images with different sounds matched to it (voices that don’t emanate from the characters we’re viewing, for example). And then there’s some typically playful Godardian self-referentiality, as when Isabelle tries to clear out her father from a room only to be told by another character that the elderly actor playing her father wants to get more attention when he delivers his single line (for which Godard immediately cuts away).

It’s far from a terrible film (whatever the limitations of my rating system), and in fact Passion may be, as I’ve implied (I hope), one of the most suggestive and rich of his 1980s output. It’s definitely films such as this one that demand repeat viewings to fully absorb some of the textures and ideas. It’s too easy to write this off as just an incoherent jumble, but for the first-time viewer that’s quite likely what it will come across as. However, that viewer can at least be thankful that like most of Godard’s films it hovers under the 90 minute length, and perhaps the mystery will incline that imagined viewer (who may or may not be myself) to return to it someday.

Next Up: Godard did a few other films during the 1980s including a typically ornery adaptation of King Lear (1987). At the end of the decade, he made Nouvelle vague (1990) which in its name suggests a look back on his founding legacy. I do intend to watch and review this, but in the meantime I have his short German travelogue Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 1991).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard; Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Isabelle Huppert, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, Hanna Schygulla, Michel Piccoli; Length 86 minutes. Seen at the university library, Wellington, March 1999 (and more recently on DVD at home, London, Monday 30 September 2013).