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Reviews
The Wings of the Dove (1997)
The Wings of the Dove is unpleasant and downbeat, a brooding adaptation of the Henry James classic American novel.
The Wings of the Dove is a downbeat brooding adaptation of the Henry James classic American novel of, as usual with Henry James, Americans abroad. The film, as the novel by the same name and almost all of James's novels, is about money and status and the power they confer on the individual.
Beautifully filmed, the scenes of Venice steal the show and are the film's real attraction. Helena Bonham Carter is good as Kate Croy, the schemer who persuades her lover, Merton Densher, played by Linus Roache, to marry a wealthy American woman who is dying, but overall, the film is lackluster, especially when compared with the much richer and more vibrant film by Jane Campion, The Portrait of a Lady (1996).
Henry James deals with subtle nuances of meaning and thought, but this is not why the film fails to satisfy. James's novels have been successfully filmed before, most notably by Jane Campion. In addition, the very Jamesian book by Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, was adapted into a wonderful film (The Age of Innocence, 1993) by Martin Scorsese. If the novelistic ambiguities of Henry James are not to blame for the film's failure, what is?
Perhaps the actors do not fully embody James's characters as portrayed in the novel. Linus Roache, for example, is slightly wooden in his portrayal of the radical social activist. Is he idealistic, a champion of the downtrodden, or merely a shallow opportunist who becomes a victimizer?
!!!!! SPOILER !!!!!
Alison Elliott plays an interesting Millie Theale, the American millionaire who loved both Carter and Roache, and her presence is felt long after she quits the mortal scene. Strangely enough, the one rather long nude scene with the beautiful Ms. Carter fails to be erotic. Instead, there is a morbid air of the tomb that surrounds the couple's frantic lovemaking.
The deep, black darkness of the love-making scene suggests that the soul of the dead Millie watches over them. After all, Millie was the bond that held them all together when she was alive. Her death will dissolve the bond of love and greed that unites Carter and Roache. Ultimately, the love scene fails because of the unpleasant associations with Millie and becomes simply depressing.
In a way, the film emphasizes the point, so well made in James Joyce's wonderful story from Dubliners, "The Dead," that the dead hold power over the living. The way the film builds up to this climax is its greatest triumph. (John Huston's adaptation of the James Joyce short story was his last film (The Dead [1987]), and a worthy addition to that director's list of masterworks.)
Fallen (1998)
The viewer should be forewarned that meaning, theme, logic, and film aesthetics are at a premium in this disappointing film.
Where to begin? The plot of this film demands, no, requires, a willing suspension of disbelief. It appears that angels are very real entities-and so are fallen angels. The title of the film thus betrays its content. The very silly premise of the film is that fallen angles are out to get God in a big way. And what more diabolical way to reap vengeance on Him than to just generally screw up, play mind games with, and, yes, to wantonly kill these creatures made in His image?
If we are to believe this humorless film, Beelzebub, and others of his ilk, are behind all of the serial killings plaguing today's society. But evil is fallible. Because these demons are still somehow "spiritual" beings, they must inhabit a human (or animal) "host." Once a demon enters its host, the host does the demon's bidding with the total loyalty and obedience of a robot. But the relationship is anything but beneficial to the host. One of the favorite games of the demons is to see how many serial killings they can chalk up before their human host is shot, gassed, hypodermically syringed, or electrocuted into non-existence. When their human host gives up the ghost, they just peacefully waft away on the breeze to land on some other poor unsuspecting human (or animal).
!!!!!SPOILER!!!!!
Denzel Washington stars as John Hobbes, a Philadelphia homicide detective who has somehow ticked off Azazel, the head fallen angel. In fact, getting Hobbes becomes, for no apparent reason, the demon's special project. Apparently, life in Demonsville is real dull. Anyway, Hobbes becomes the pet whipping boy of Azazel, who generally makes a pest of himself. In rapid succession, Azazel has Hobbes suspended from the police force, suspected of murder, and finally hounded by the police-an outlaw hopelessly on the run.
All of this mumbo-jumbo is fueled by the daughter of a homicide detective who was likewise harassed 30 years earlier and ended up a suicide. The daughter, Gretta Milano (Embeth Davidtz), is a professor of religion, no less. Ms. Milano is, no doubt, too serious about her work and needs to lighten up a little. She ultimately succumbs to Hobbes charms and befriends Washington and his young nephew (now orphaned by the brother's murder) who are on the run at this point in the film. (Shades of Hitchcock's The Wrong Man.)
Azazel and the other demons have one pretty nifty trick that makes them all but invincible-they can hop from one host to another with all the happy facility of fleas. Merely touching someone on the shoulder, or shaking hands, allows the demon to exchange hosts faster than Donald Trump or Jay Leno can change automobiles. Why, it's like a fun game of tag-You're it! Only the first prize for the luckless host is a kick in the seat of the pants.
Well, if there are demons (fallen angels to be exact), then does the film make the corollary statement that God exists? Note quite. The only serious religious questions raised in the film are answered in the negative. Hobbes, for example, has lost his faith, or what little he had, through years as a big city police officer. He has come to no great revelation about earth, life, death, God, or any other teleological question. Nor is there any great epiphany for Hobbes at the end of the film.
The film, directed by Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, 1996), seems to say that all of the villains and the nameless evil lurking out there, just beyond our peripheral vision, are caused by the machinations and conscious purpose of the demon brigade. This happy thought releases us-who, let it be understood, are created in God's image and have freedom of choice-from any blame for the miserable state of human affairs. This idea sounds suspiciously like the theme of Millennium, that most downbeat of all Fox television shows (now, sadly off the tube). Why does it always seem to be Winter in any television show or film concerned with serious evil? Perhaps they are all filmed in Canada where it is always winter.
Gabbeh (1996)
This is a visually stunning film.
This visually stunning film tells the story of an old couple's gabbeh-a finely crafted Persian carpet. One day when they go to a nearby spring to wash the carpet, an attractive young woman appears suddenly and mysteriously-she is the apotheosis of the people whose tale is told in the carpet's woof and warp.
The film is a surrealistic folk tale. As she helps the old woman wash the carpet, the young woman (the spirit of the carpet) begins the tale of her life, which becomes the film's story. The film's charm lies in the magical use of color and water to tell a story. Young girls are everywhere in native dresses that complement the picturesque scenery with as many dabs of color as a French impressionist painting. The filmmaker here is an artist, adept at sunsets, drifting cotton-white clouds on a pristine blue canvas. Pastels, ultramarines, burnt siennas, ochres-there is a sensuous joy in the very colors of the earth and sky.
The world of the film is a kaleidoscope of color. Exotic birds appear from nowhere like bursts of sunset. Young women dress in native Iranian costumes of reds, golds, blues, and greens. And through it all, the sounds of flowing water, like little bells or delicate wind chimes, is given a palpable presence.
The Persian carpet, no longer mute, beguiles the viewer with its simple, haunting tale of people and places at once so ancient and new. The wolf-like howls of a young woman's lover merge with the sound of the water as it rills and flows over stones, pebbles, and sand. The water is itself a comment on the people whose lives are lived within its boundaries. The magical and surrealistic elements of the peasant girl's story weave themselves into a fairy-tale. What enchantment there is in a young woman's quest for love and continuity. The very air is rich with the colors, sights, and sounds-the spices and incense of the Near East.
La cité des enfants perdus (1995)
The City of Lost Children is a wonderful, spell-binding film about the fantasy world of children.
The City of Lost Children is a film about a child's fantasy. Like a fairy tale about a beautiful princess threatened by a witch or an ogre, it's also about a child's dream that becomes a nightmare. Krank (Daniel Emilfork), an evil genius, sends his henchmen out to capture children and bring them back to his laboratory. He does this because he desires to steal their dreams. He hooks the children up to a strange contraption, a cross between a barber's chair and an electric chair, topped off with the very first electric hair curlers.
With this high-tech machine, he is able to capture the children's dreams. Then Krank hooks himself up to the same instrument and downloads the children's dreams. Krank does this because he, himself, has never been able to dream. What this means metaphorically is that Krank has no soul; what it means psychologically is that he is probably mad. His primary goal in life, then, is to be able to dream, and he has no scruples as to how he achieves his ends. He will do whatever must be done to achieve his goal. Krank is evil because, like a consummately selfish person, he panders to his perverted desires. In fact, he is in many ways a narcissist.
What happens to the children whose dreams have been stolen is not clear, but it is certainly unpleasant. Children are brought to his secret laboratory out on the ocean and there they just disappear. In effect, they become prisoners, guinea pigs to be used in nefarious ways by the evil Krank.
The city where the action takes place, the eponymous "city of lost children," is an anonymous metropolis, a lost city, that is visually like a German expressionistic painting. The city reminds me of Robert Wiene's wonderful silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). The city's obscurity and shadowy seediness also remind me of the Depression-era German city in M (1931), Fritz Lang's chilling film about a serial child murderer, and there are echoes of Lang's film in this one. The "lost" city may also refer to the microcosmic world that Krank has created in his "city in the sea," to use the words of Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem: "Death has reared himself a throne / In a strange city lying alone / Far down within the dim West / Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best / Have gone to their eternal rest. / . . . / And when, amid no earthly moans, / Down, down, that town shall settle hence, / Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, / Shall do it reverence."
To add to this odd, expressionistic aspect of the film, all of the children in the film appear to be orphans. We never see any of the children's parents, their mothers or fathers. In fact, the children appear to live in world of orphans and evil adults. Yet, at the beginning of the film, we do see a poster in a scene reminiscent of M, which expresses concern over the disappearance of many of the city's children. Yet, unlike M, we see no crowds of maddened city dwellers marching en mass to do violence to Krank and his henchmen. No, Krank is too smart to be found out by common folk, even the city dwellers of this anonymous and bleak urban sump.
I thoroughly enjoyed this film by directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, even with its implied temptations, perversions, and illicit desires. It's as if Tim Burton (director of such dark comedies as Beetle Juice [1988] and Edward Scissorhands [1990] and producer of The Nightmare Before Christmas [1993]) combined elements of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, the Star Trek television series, and Alex Proyas's brooding science-fiction adventure, Dark City (1998) to create this visually haunting and mesmerizing film.
L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961)
Last Year is a symphony
Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is an allegory about the process of time and memory, a kind of Proustian quest. Like a literary classic, the film gets better at each new viewing. Resnais's ambitious film is like a great symphony that resonates within one's soul. Last Year is, above all, harmonious, with contrapuntal lyrics as measured as a metronome. Unlike other difficult films, namely Robert Altman's great fugue, Images (1972) and David Lynch's disjointed and spastic Mulholland Drive (2001), both of which promise much and give little, Last Year fulfills its promise with an almost hypnotic, lyrical beauty.
Last Year is, in some ways closer artistically to James Joyce's Ulysses than any other film, including Joseph Strick's underrated and much maligned film of Joyce's novel (1967).
Taxi Driver (1976)
The film's claim to greatness is fatally marred.
Director Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) is a famous, if somewhat infamous, film. On the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest films of all time, Taxi Driver is listed at number 47, above The Third Man (1949), number 57; The Silence Of The Lambs (1991), number 65; and even Scorsese's much better film Goodfellas (1990), number 94. Leonard Maltin (in Leonard Maltin's 2002 Movie and Video Guide) gives the film a less than perfect review. Maltin writes, `To some, Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader's perception of hell-as a crazed taxi driver's vision of N. Y. C.-was brilliant. To us, this gory, cold-blooded story of sick man's lurid descent into violence is ugly and unredeeming' (p. 1362).
Is Taxi Driver a great film or a very bad one? The film concerns Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an ex-Marine, and his problems in reintegrating himself into a post-Vietnam American society. Travis suffers periodically from severe migraines that may be a result of his war experiences (or his neuroses, fears, or perverse imagination-we never find out). His migraines operate on a symbolic level as well. Since Travis is in great physical condition, his sickness must be emotional or spiritual. In fact, the film implies that Travis's sickness is twofold: barely suppressed rage plus a profound despair-that sickness unto death. (And what is the source of his despair? That too, we never learn.)
We know Travis is socially challenged; we know this because Travis takes Betsy, the girl whom he idolizes (Sybill Shepherd), to a porno film on their very first date. She is supposedly a high-class, sensitive young woman whom he desperately wants to impress. Has he no common sense? Was he raised by monkeys?
It is as if there is something important lacking in him-something vital and alive that has become numbed by the war (which he never discusses or speaks about-a forbidden topic). Oh, yes, he will admit he was in the Marines, but he goes no further. He can connect with no one. He is a product of a dysfunctional society-a new antihero, a rebel without a cause, but without the charisma of the Great Dean.
The problem with the film is simply that Travis doesn't care who is the recipient of his deadly anger, his repressed violence and savagery. It's all the same to him-a presidential candidate or some low-life gangster. (Some film reviewers apparently miss or overlook the fact that Travis first means to kill Senator Charles Palantine [Leonard Harris], the politician whom Betsy works for. Only after being thwarted in this unmotivated attempt, does he decide to whack the mobsters who menace Iris Steensma (Jodie Foster), the pint-size prostitute.)
Ultimately, the film, despite its great power and marvelous acting, is a cold-blooded work of art. As in the Beatles's Eleanor Rigby, Scorsese walks from the grave, the death-in-life of an urban cesspool, and no one is saved. There is no hope, no vision, and no teleology that results from all of the frenetic activity. There is no appeal to basic humanity or to religious or moral or ethical values or beliefs. Perhaps the film's claim to greatness is fatally marred. That the flaw is in humanity itself is no great consolation.
American Beauty (1999)
American Beauty is a kind of Lolita for the new millennium.
American Beauty is a kind of Lolita for the new millennium, an imaginative look at contemporary American society. In director Sam Mendes's reappraisal of American mores, that American suburban scene is killingly dull-an oppressive miasma looms depleting the atmosphere of oxygen and covering those captive in its oppressive clouds with a deep layer of pain and angst. What American Beauty chronicles is a collective failure, both of energy and of spirit in American society. What has become defunct in our me-first, dot-com society is our capacity for wonder and our ability to conduct valid human interaction. What we now have, instead, is a tremendous vacuum and a collective longing that must be filled at any price.
The film has the New-Age flavor of people seeking desperately for meaning in their lives and for spiritual sustenance. American Beauty depicts middle-aged suburbanites Lester and Carolyn Burnhams' misguided attempts to exorcise this longing through extra-marital sexual liaisons. These desperate attempts to recapture love and security are obviously doomed from the start. Lester (Kevin Spacey) becomes infatuated with his daughter's beautiful friend, Angela, and Carolyn (Annette Bening) initiates an affair with fellow real estate agent Buddy Kane. These parallel quests to recapture what they have lost-Lester in pursuing the specious passion of youth, and Carolyn by imbibing the Lethe of her career and new love interest-create the dramatic tension of the film.
Lester is a walking dead man. This is not a spoiler; we learn this fact in the first few minutes of the film. The film comprises, then, a kind of retrospective of the dead, a look at what went wrong in Lester's life and marriage-and why. The film does not provide any useful answers for the audience, however, who, we assume, may very well be suffering in some degree the same problems that plagued Lester prior to his death. Any implied solutions are easily negated by the fact that Lester has little time to savor his new-found wisdom, for he is snuffed out, a victim of a cruel twist of fate. And this is not exactly a fair return for one's troubles. Given these considerations, it is difficult for me to believe that Lester especially wanted to die, after finally having solved his angst and his spiritual and sexual frustrations.
Carolyn is not as aware as Lester that there is a deep emptiness in their lives. But she too seeks some value some thing in which to believe, and this becomes here career which soon subsumes all of her other passions and interests (except, perhaps her gardening). In an earlier decade she would have been a political radical, as Eric Hoffer terms it, a "true believer." She approaches her work as a real estate agent as if were a religion that will save her from the emptiness she feels in her life. One morning we see her compulsively cleaning a throughly dirty house she wishes to show later that day. She is almost frenzied in her effort, almost losing control at one point, until she cries her mantra, "Successful people project an aura of success." But mere capitalism, however decadent, is not to blame here.
American males (and I am not exempting myself in this accusation) appear to be plagued by a fetish about certain female institutions: cheerleaders (because they remind us of our lost youth, Bruce Springstein's "Glory Days"), and young girls (the Lolita syndrome) for the same reason. Both are subconscious attempts to recapture our lost youth, a time when sex was a mysterious "potentiality" and sexuality still a potent, mythical force in our lives. If we wish to verify the truth of the Lolita syndrome, we only have to remind ourselves of the debacle on Long Island a half dozen years ago. The press sensationalized Amy Fisher (Joe Buttafuko's 16-year-old lover) as the "Long Island Lolita." She has recently been granted parole and is writing a book about her experiences. Perhaps we shall be seeing this book made into a picture by Hollywood?
In American Beauty, the rose is an ambiguous symbol at best. The more one reflects on the symbol, the more it resonates with meaning upon meaning. Traditionally, in literature, the rose has been a symbol of perfection. In T. S. Eliot we have the rose garden as the ultimate symbol for man's vision of perfection, the ultimate epiphany, and farther back we have Dante's vision of God as a multifoliate rose, a beatific vision of paradise. In the film, we have the rose as sexual metaphor, and not a very subtle one at that. The "American Beauty" is a type of rose, of course, the very type that Carolyn cultivates, and the "American Beauty" is also the daughter's friend, the object of Lester's lust and his misplaced romantic idealism.
Deconstructing Harry (1997)
A beautifully crafted and entertaining film.
Deconstructing Harry is a beautifully crafted and entertaining film by Woody Allen, who wrote, directed, and starred in the film. Although the film may not be as innovative as Mighty Aphrodite, nor quite as charming, it is certainly one of Woody's best films. Deconstructing Harry does allow the pain and anguish-as well as the comedy and absurdity-of the guilt-ridden, self-absorbed, but basically good-guy Harry Block to bubble and percolate, and it often erupts to the surface in scenes of wincing pain or comic and dramatic sequences that are powerful and moving.
Because Harry Block (played by Woody Allen) is afraid of life, he lives vicariously through the books he writes. These books are all thinly veiled autobiography (a fact that enrages his family, friends, and acquaintances). Harry's ex-wife Joan (Kirstie Alley) in one early scene verbally runs Harry through for his exposure of their private lives in his latest novel. (Harry, like Kenneth Starr, reveals too much.)
Harry's fictional works have an order and logic that his real life lacks. Like the poet Wallace Steven's "jar in Tennessee," Harry uses his fiction as an ordering principle-or perhaps, like Robert Frost's definition of a poem as a "momentary stay against confusion," Harry's novels are an attempt to create a world in which he may live without fear. Harry's fictional world is essentially an attempt to make sense of a world without a faith in God or the comfort of religion, which sounds like (and is) one of Ingmar Bergman's major themes. (Woody's respect and admiration for the Swedish director has been well-documented in essays and interviews.)Harry's inability to sustain relationships and his need to confess the intimate details of his life and those around him are symptoms of his desperation. He seeks to use his art as a surgeon does a lancet. Through his art, he seeks to erect a foundation, a kind of stillpoint in a universe filled with awesome and terrifying change. He desperately seeks balance in a world of Heracleitean change, and, because he relies almost solely on physical gratification and sensual pleasures-as evinced by his many affairs-he is bound to be disappointed.
Harry is too much the controller, as when he tells his doting young girlfriend Fay (Elizabeth Shue), "Don't love me, I'll only hurt you." In fairness to Harry, it is certainly true that he is aware of his own shortcomings. He is, however, powerless to act, and this makes him a somewhat comical figure, like T. S. Eliot's Prufrock. And yet Harry is aware of this ridiculous aspect of his persona. He knows that a part of him is the buffoon, the clown, the fool. In fact, Harry takes full advantage of this side of his personality to make jokes that are often quite cogent and barbed. From Sleeper onward, many of Woody Allen's best jokes come from an awareness of the absurdities in the protagonist's life, combined with a comic self-deprecation.
Biruma no tategoto (1956)
The Burmese Harp is a poignant elegy to the failure of Japanese imperialism.
The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto) is a poignant elegy to the failure of Japanese imperialism in World War II and a plea for a more humanistic world. Because it is a Japanese film and portrays events from the perspective of a proud, yet defeated nation, the story it tells is doubly moving. Released in 1956, director Kon Ichikawa's film was made while Japan was still recovering from the effects of war and a full decade before the nation's economy improved on world markets and the international prestige of Japan's technology began its remarkable climb.
Born on November 20, 1915, Kon Ichikawa is considered one of Japan's leading directors. Ichikawa's first major film, A Girl of Dojo Temple (1946), was a puppet version of a Kabuki play. The American Occupation authorities confiscated the film because its script had not been submitted for their approval. Ichikawa's early films were often comedies or satires-a rarity in Japanese cinema-and earned him the appellation of the "Japanese Frank Capra." Ichikawa first achieved fame in the West with The Burmese Harp, which won the San Giorgio Prize in 1956 at the Venice International Film Festival.
The events depicted in The Burmese Harp are on the surface quite simple. The viewer becomes aware of the film's symbolic and allegorical nature only later on in the film. The story concerns a small band of Japanese soldiers who are fighting in a remote part of Burma, unaware that the unconditional surrender of Japan took place three days earlier.
One of the band, Private Mizushima (Shoji Yasui), plays a harp to wile away the time and to entertain his comrades. The ranking officer, Captain Inouye (Rentaro Mikuni), is a former musician, and his soldiers relish the music of the harp and the joy of singing together. But this love of music signifies more than just a temporary release from the stresses of men at war. The men's singing becomes a leitmotif throughout the film and a symbol for the community of spirit that binds them all together. Music functions in the film as a semi-religious, semi-mystical force that has the power to unify and to heal.
Melody is equated with the life of the spirit and the joy of home and happier times. The discord of war is heightened by the presence of this music in the midst of palpable fears, where sudden death is not the most frightening, and a painful, lingering death from starvation or wounds is a very real possibility for each man. In a wonderful early scene, Mizushima and his comrades confront British troops as night falls. In the midst of a small celebration, the men learn that British troops are nearby and watching them. But the Japanese continue singing casually in an effort to gain time to ready themselves for battle. But the disguise is not really necessary, as the British themselves burst into song and the two nationalities blend in an instance of peace and harmony with renditions of "There's No Place Like Home."
The Burmese harp itself is a central symbol in the film that serves to define Mizushima and his quest. The harp is an element of stability in the lives of all of the men. But have the men have gained their separate peace?
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
The film is nothing more than a study in gross self-indulgence and pretension.
A fine cast of journeyman actors is wasted in this dismal swamp of innuendo and surrealistic melodrama. Also wasted are an interesting beginning and an intriguing premise. At the film's opening, we see an attempted murder foiled by an automobile accident. The intended victim, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), a dark, mysterious beauty, escapes death but suffers from amnesia. When she is befriended by Betty (Naomi Watts), a perky blond who has just arrived from the Midwest (Deep River, Ontario) to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood, the film rapidly develops into a quest for personal identity and truth. United by the noble bonds of friendship, the two women intrepidly stalk the surreal streets and sun-drenched beautiful places of a Beverly Hills that is rife with danger and suspense. Lynch's ability to create an atmosphere thick with the fear of potential violence works well in the first quarter of the film, but toward the middle, bored by all of this innuendo, we eventually say "who cares?" Questions are raised, but none are answered. This is like taxation without representation.
The film's promising elements-mysterious lives in the haunts of the rich and famous-slowly, methodically, and ponderously dissolve like so much grease down the tubes with the Draino. Mulholland Drive becomes merely fodder for Lynch, the Great Trickster, who, in failing to invest his film with a heart, soul, and (worst of all) a brain, perpetrates the greatest outrage against his audience. By its robust ineptitude, the film mocks not only itself, in a self-referential chic, but also the people who have actually paid good money to see it.
One scene, in particular, is instructive. At one point, giving way to insomnia, the two friends, Betty (the blond) and the Rita (the brunette), who are by now also lovers, hail a cab that deposits them in the seedy side of town. Here a thin, cold winds blow discarded candy wrappers and the yellowed pages from ancient dailies to and fro. The scene is Lynch's Little Magic Theatre (aka the Club Silencio). The theatre is a cheesy old movie house unimaginatively converted into a kind of night club. Most of its tiered seats are unoccupied, as the Blond and the Brunette sit down together and look anxiously at the stage. Almost immediately, a sad sack of a woman is physically helped on to the stage. Perhaps she has stage fright or has read the script. A sonorous, plaintive ballad, sung in Spanish, begins to emerge from within this dowdy woman with misapplied makeup.
Though she looks like a fugitive from a Tijuana Red Light District, or from someone's (the director's?) nightmare, the soulful ballad works its melodious way into every nook and crevice of the theatre. Betty and Rita, apparently transfigured by the lyrics and melody, begin to cry so fluidly that makeup and mascara run, and Betty soon looks like Tammy Baker at a funeral.
But are the women crying because the song is so soulful, so beautiful, or because they are stuck contractually in this dismal bog of cinematic bi-polarism? At one point, Betty's chair contracts a severe case of Saint Vitas Dance, and threatens to hop, skip, and shudder its way to the back ward of the local hospital. (Shades of the Exorcist?) But Rita is ready with moral support and is able to subdue the chair, which, ashamed of its histrionics, settles back into its former existence as an uncomfortable seat in a cheap theatre. Once the obsessed chair is exorcised, we remind ourselves that more horrors await us, just around the shadowy corner. Perhaps the Bag-Man-Who-Looks-Like-A-Buddhist-Demon will pounce, showing a cavernous jaw filled with bad teeth and halitosis. Caution: Spoiler
This cheerful scene in Lynch's Magic Little Theatre ends when the zombie-like ballad singer finally collapses on the stage and two men, ticket taker and diabolical Master of Ceremonies, haul her unceremoniously off the stage. Well, at least she doesn't get the bum's rush. Strange thing is, though, the song continues. Behold, the deft stroke of the Mountebank! The song was not sung by the plump, odd woman with the bad hair and makeup. Apparently, the song is coming from a loudspeaker-appearance versus reality, perhaps? Well, gee, but hasn't this been done before, and so much better, in, say, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966)-or scores of other more artful and accomplished films?