Another Movie Roundup

Sunday Night Journal — November 9, 2008

In the past I’ve done a few posts in which I gave capsule reviews of the movies I’d seen since the last such post. I think the last one was almost a year ago, but I know I’ve posted about a number of specific movies since then—for instance, in the context of the long-running discussion of Brideshead Revisited (yes, the 1981 BBC version is a masterpiece.) The combination of Netflix and an empty nest has caused my wife and me to see more movies in the past couple of years than we had seen in the previous fifteen or more, and a lot of that viewing has been devoted to classics that I had either never seen at all or had seen once thirty-five or forty years ago. So I’m not going to try to mention everything I’ve seen—a lot of it is old X-Files episodes—but here are the most interesting ones.

Breathless. This is Godard’s most famous (I think) movie. I loved Bande à Part, probably without much real justification, and was really looking forward to this. What a letdown. I didn’t much care for it. It seemed a sort of exercise in pre-hippie bohemian posturing, and consequently rather sad.

8½ and La Dolce Vita. It’s official: I don’t much care for Fellini. I’ve seen Juliet of the Spirits, Intervista, and now the two that are widely considered masterpieces, and found them all more irritating than anything else, despite some excellent moments. I can’t entirely explain this. The apparently aimless talking—high-speed chattering, actually— and wandering around is not fundamentally different from some of Antonioni’s work, which I like very much. But Fellini’s people just annoy me, and I don’t find much imagery that touches me (often Antonioni’s saving grace), or the sense of mystery that some modernist films have. I came closer to liking La Dolce Vita than any of the others; I may see it again sometime.

Double Happiness and Catfish in Black Bean Sauce. These are connected only in that they are small independent films dealing with family problems produced by cultural collisions in the United States. Each is the sort of thing I would never have picked, but which sounds interesting to my wife. They’re both quite enjoyable in a low-key way. Double Happiness deals with the conflict between a young Chinese-American woman who wants to be an actress and her staid family. Catfish is about a Vietnamese brother and sister who were adopted as orphans by an African-American soldier at the end of the Vietnam war and are now as young adults having trouble figuring out exactly where they belong, especially after their mother appears. I think I liked the second of these a little better.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. These are the 1980s BBC productions of John Le Carré’s novels, starring Alec Guiness as George Smiley. I missed them when they were televised, and find now that they’re as good as people said at the time. If you have any taste at all for Le Carré’s work and espionage stories in general, you shouldn’t miss them. Everyone of course has his own mental image of fictional characters, but I find it hard to imagine a better Smiley than Guinness.

Cover Her Face. More BBC from the 1980s, one of several dramatizations of P. D. James mysteries starring Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh. It’s great if you like this sort of thing, which I very much do. I found myself thinking that it and others like it were the last representatives of something in England, though I’m not entirely sure what the something is. It might be worth more thought; all I can say right now is that I’ve seen similar BBC mysteries produced recently—for instance the Inspector Lynley series—and there is a moral courage in the earlier works, and in the society which they depict, which is not there in the more recent ones.

Diary of a Country Priest. This is a faithful 1950 version of one of my favorite novels, and thus I feel bad about saying that it didn’t really affect me, and that I have no real explanation for that fact. Perhaps it’s that so much of the novel is interior. It’s worth seeing; maybe my reaction is idiosyncratic.

Bleak House. And yet more BBC, but recent, 2005. The BBC still does this sort of thing beautifully. I read the novel decades ago and really didn’t remember it very well, so I can’t evaluate the film’s representation of the book. But taken on its own terms it’s great: stupendously good acting and general production which certainly convince you (or me, anyway) that this is really what Victorian England was like. And of course since it’s Dickens it’s a great story.

I did have one major complaint: the claustrophobic cinematography. For far too much of the time you see only one person, in a fairly tight close-up, often around or through some object like the back of a chair or a partially closed door. When two or more people are talking you usually see only one of them at any moment. It feels like you’re watching through a keyhole. It really bothered me for the first hour or so, to the point where I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep going. Eventually I was able to ignore it, but it’s a significant defect.

The Silence, the third in Bergman’s so-called “faith trilogy,” which also includes Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly. I’ve already written about Winter Light—see the last item in this journal, and one sentence on Through a Glass Darkly here, which I stand by, though it was written in the immediate aftermath of the experience. I only recently saw The Silence. I didn’t like it as well as the other two, but have found it lingering in my mind and am wondering if I’ll change my opinion later. The Silence is about two sisters who are headed for opposing disasters: one is sick, cold, cerebral, and isolated; the other is healthy, warm, sensual, and promiscuous. Both are completely miserable. Part of my problem with the film was that the eroticism involving the second sister was so powerful that it almost crowded out everything else. It’s pretty tame by today’s standards—R-Rated, we’d say in the U.S.—and undoubtedly my reaction is partly due to the fact that I find Bergman’s women more compelling than most Hollywood sex symbols. But it’s a good thing Bergman didn’t do pornography. Still, it’s intellectually coherent and often very beautiful. I don’t quite see why it belongs with the other two, although one could say that it describes pretty well a world in which faith is no longer the object of a struggle but has been long since completely extinguished, a world without even the memory of God. And a terrible world it is.

I may write at some length about these, though it might be difficult and tedious to organize my thoughts. For the moment I’ll say that although these films are generally taken to be (and I think were said by Bergman to be) a statement of his final break with Christianity, they are a very, very ambiguous statement. Perhaps he himself did not realize how ambiguous they are. Perhaps he did not realize how much of what he was discarding was only a false conception of God, the product of an overly rigorous upbringing as the son of a Lutheran clergyman. I think he saw something of what God really is, but it didn’t occur to him that such a thing could be real, and so thought he was an atheist when he rejected the false God. Through a Glass Darkly illustrates this perfectly—I mean, consider the title (1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face…”).

The Virgin Spring. Bergman again, and one of his best, a re-telling of a medieval legend. I should warn anyone who hasn’t seen it that the central incident is a violent crime, and although, as with the eroticism of The Silence, its depiction is very tame by contemporary standards, Bergman’s artistic skill makes it very powerful.

It was just a couple of days ago that my wife and I watched this one, and I really have as yet few words for it. I think every adult Catholic should see it—well, every adult Catholic capable of appreciating non-Hollywood movies. After it was over, I had this exchange with my wife, following a long silence in which I think each of us was trying to master his emotions:

He: It’s hard to believe that was the work of an atheist.

She: I don’t understand why he did it.

He: When you get to heaven you can ask him.

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