Movie Journal: June 2015

those long, dreary, still evenings when even the dogs are too bored to bark and even the clocks seem weary of ticking.
Anton Chekov, "Excellent People" (1886)

Dreyer has lived long enough to know that you live only once and that all decisions are paid in full to eternity.
Andrew Sarris, 1964

Nuri Bilge Ceylan reminds me very much of austere Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer;  both directors emphasize intelligent conversation.  Ceylan's film Winter Sleep (2014) is more visually sumptuous, in color and widescreen, but people spend time talking to each other, just as in Dreyer's films.  Ceylan has quite successfully adapted two Chekov stories ("Excellent People" and "The Wife") to Anatolia, where social life and the economy are not so different from Russia in Chekov's time.  The ubiquitous snow is beautiful but drives people indoors, where they talk to each other and try to find meaning in their lives.

Another director who uses snow effectively is Yoshitaro Nomura, in Zero Focus (1961), where a woman who has been married for two weeks goes to northern Japan to try to find her missing husband.  Nomura shoots the snowy landscapes in widescreen black-and-white on a relatively low budget, with a confusing plot and flashbacks within flashbacks highlighting the role of women in U.S.-occupied postwar Japan.  When I first came to New York there was a movie theatre on 55th Street that showed exclusively Japanese films, but the Japanese film industry has changed considerably and few films make it now to America; even the great films of Ozu and Mizoguchi are seldom shown, though we can thank Turner Classic Movies and Film Forum for making them occasionally available.

Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) comes at the end of the postwar film noir cycle, when memories of the war were being replaced by fear of communism.  Private detective Mike Hammer is adrift, trying to find a secret that the government doesn't want him to find: "the great whatsit."  The fists of a private detective are no match for the atomic power controlled by the government and individuals are left floating in the ocean, as civilization is destroyed by the opening of Pandora's box.

Tomorrow is Another Day (1951), directed by Felix Feist, represents a brief period of redemption in the middle of the noir cycle.  The first part of the film, when an ex-con hooks up with a blonde taxi dancer and they kill the cop who is keeping her, is a powerful view of what it means to be an outsider in a world that is starting to prosper.  The second part, where they find a job on the run, get turned in by a kid who reads about them in a pulp magazine, and then are exonerated because the cop they killed was a crook and an embarrassment to the force, is more on the sappy side; their escape from town by hiding in a truckload of new cars being delivered to a dealer, however, is impressive in its irony.

Jean Renoir's La Bete Humaine (1938), with its mixture of populism and fatalism, is a fair rendering of Zola's novel, with powerful images of running a train and trying to overcome the effects of parental alcoholism, mixing murder and violence with sexuality, as women are caught in the middle.  Fritz Lang did a remake in 1954, as Human Desire (Lang:  "have you ever seen any other kind of desire?") with considerably less populism and considerably more fatalism.