Want to touch on two beautiful films by European directors.  The first is Bertolucci’s “The Conformist.”  It is a wonderful 1970 film set in Fascist Italy of the 1930s, much of it filmed at EUR in Rome, using surviving Mussolini era architecture.

The movie is a political drama, about the rise of fascism in Italy, and the fact that many of those who joined the movement where people looking for a way to “belong.”   We see this through the personal trauma of the protagonist, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who did not want to be “different” and sought comfort in a mass political movement.   The film combines political philosophy and lyricism.  The cinematography is the best ever.   In one scene, in a shadowed room in Paris, Clerici is explaining Plato’s “prisoners in a cave” analogy:  people are like ancients chained  in a cave, only able to see shadows on the cave wall.  They, like modern man,  know nothing about the real causes of the shadows.   Men can be misled by images: of flags, marches, and massive architecture.  Fascism was not really about ideology but the human condition.

Also interesting to me was Clerici’s historical perspective, made to a colleague, that the fascists were looking for, and found, the perfect counter revolution to both the democrats and proletarians.   At the end, there is the eerie, beautifully filmed scene of the assassination of an Italian political exile living in France, filmed in the Alps, with shadowy figures coming out of the misty woods to conduct the Caesar style assassination, with numerous Brutus like characters stabbing the dissident.   The past, as Faulkner said, is not really past.   The film also used Clerici to show what happened to the fascists in Italy at war’s end, filtering away when things were falling apart, like rats, blending back into society.  Overall, “The Conformist” was useful in depicting another version of fascism: less extreme perhaps than the Nazis, more stylish and intellectual, but equally dangerous and destructive

The second film is “Blue,” is by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, from his Three Colors set.  Filmed in 1993, “Blue” is a slow paced, internal, beautiful French film, centered around the main character, Julie (Juliet Binoche), who loses her family in a car accident and reacts by cutting off her emotions, her feelings, and her past.  She tries to isolate herself, selling the house and moving into a downtown apartment with no nameplate, avoiding connections and old friends, and living  anonymously.  Julie is invisible and totally free (“Blue” stands for liberty), living on coffee and swimming, merely existing.   The film has a great texture, an organic feel:  her running her knuckles along a stone wall in Paris, a French country estate with rustic courtyard and stone fireplace, the deep blue water at evening in the olympic pool of the health club, the natural colors of Parisian rooftops, parks, and street markets.  There is the magical background score, a new symphony for European integration, the music following her finger as she traces the score on the sheet.  The music was composed by her late husband prior to the accident.  Music she had stored away, not wanting to be reminded.

In the end, Julie discovers she cannot cut off from others as she had tried.  She can not just exist without others, without love, compassion, and suffering that accompanies them.  Otherwise, there is no meaning in life.   Music, too, has to be alive, not suppressed.  Finally, she brings her late husband’s symphony out of storage to the awaiting musical world, realizing people have to connect, let go, not shut off, reach out to others.  They have to confront loss, not choose denial.  It is about connection.  Music connects, too, as we see.

Wintering in Las Cruces, I saw a re-run of Tom Ford’s wonderful 2011 film, “A Single Man.”  Colin Firth is superb as a middle-aged gay man grieving over the loss of his partner of sixteen years.  The film is about friendship and meaning in life, and it is about loss and death.  The story takes place on one day.  Colin’s character, George Falconer, is a British college professor in Los Angeles in 1962, who awakes distraught and drained, re-living his grief over the death of his partner who recently died in an accident.   George calmly decides to commit suicide and makes all the preparations, and, without revealing his intentions, tells his literature class that death is what the future holds for us, what we are all waiting for, what we are all about, all facing at one time or another.  “It” comes to us all.   During the course of the day, however, he meets a new lover, a student, and rediscovers how to “feel.”   At the end of the film, in the middle of the night, George awakens with a moment of clarity, discovering that everything is in order and life is as it is meant to be, not always easy, but ordered after all.  He destroys his suicide note and locks his gun away.  He steps out the back door, and is startled by an owl that takes flight, its silver wings spread before him.  He smiles and walks back to bed, but suffers a heart attack at that moment.  As he is lying on the floor in his pajamas, dying, the vision or spirit of his lost partner arrives over him and kisses him, and the movie ends with George’s calm acceptance and the words “it came.”  This is a comforting view of death, that it is what we are all  preparing for and not to be feared.  It will, of course, come.  In addition to being about death and the natural order of things, the movie is also about mourning and recovery, the recovery of balance on George’s part.

The other great part of the film is that is it stylish, as would be expected from designer, now director, Tom Ford.  The movie has a wonderful cool and intellectual mood created by the reserved, stoic Colin Firth character, and by southern California of 1962.  For the protagonist’s home, Ford used a mid-century modern John Lautner house, with its Japanese-influenced redwood wooden panels and mixture of garden and glass.  In the background is talk of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on television and radio, but this is not important, barely thought of by the intellectual protagonist.  What is important are his relationships with people, animals, and ideas.  We get glimpses of his sensibilities.  He tells his class that fear is what causes anti-Semitism and other paranoia.  He takes a moment to smell the fur of a neighbor’s fox terrier,  saying that reminded him of his youth in England, the smell of buttered toast.

Substance and style combine in “A Single Man.”  I admire the handling of the subject matter, and I long for the wonderful 1948 Lautner house, reminding me of Wright, Neutra, Schindler, Koenig, the Eameses and Greenes, etc.  I will have to make another trip to L.A.

“The Quiller Memorandum,” filmed in 1966, is part of a unique genre of British spy movies of that era, realistic and gritty, set in London and Germany, with understated violence and unremarkable agents.  The protagonists are anti-heroes–spies like Alec Leamas in “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” Harry Palmer in “The Ipcress File,” and Quiller in “The Quiller Memorandum.”  They are bureaucrats who follow their own, somewhat irreverent, instincts, and who surprisingly to both sides, succeed in their missions.  Their enemies are East Germans, Russians, or neo-Nazis.  Their bosses are not much better than their enemies.  Our anti-hero spies are cynical about the world which forces them to play by the bad guys’ rules.

These movies are generally gray, nostalgic, and slow paced.  The Quiller Memorandum is typical, opening with a dark, empty suburban Berlin street at night, with a lit phone booth at the end.  Harold Pinter did the screenplay.  In other scenes, however, the Berlin weather is cool and clear, with blue skies, a typical Central European late summer.  People are wearing suits,  or perhaps light sweaters.   These movies are about the Cold War and modern Germany, but they also involve unrealized, potential love, in this case, Quiller, the British agent (George Segal), and Inge, a German school teacher and perhaps neo-Nazi (Senta Berger).

The plot is simple.  Quiller is a special agent, sent in by British intelligence to find the base of a neo-Nazi ring operating in Berlin.  Two British agents have been killed in this effort.   Quiller operates independently, coordinating loosely with the British intelligence station in Berlin.  He has but one lead to go on, a newspaper clipping about a neo-Nazi recently convicted in Berlin.  Using  this lead, and himself as bait, Quiller sets out contacting the co-workers of the convicted Nazi.   Inge is one of these, a teacher from the same school who admits to having neo-Nazi contacts but also negative feelings about Hilter’s Germany.  Quiller plays a naive American journalist, asking questions for a story he is doing, lying about his lack of German language ability, playing ignorant, and testing German nationalism  (boasting about American boxers and the fact that Joe Lewis beat Max Schmelling)  to observe reactions.  A romance starts to develop with Inge, and she eventually leads him to the headquarters of the neo-Nazis.  But, it is never certain whose side she is on.  In the end, he wraps up the case, arresting the ring, and, in the final scene, goes back to her school to say goodbye.  She asks if he got them all, and he replies that yes, we got them all, then adds, looking at her, “well, perhaps not all.”  As he leaves, he asks if she ever met a man named Jones (his predecessor who was killed).   As he walks away from the school, Inge is gathering her students in lines, clapping her hands in the old German way, to instill discipline.  We are left with a bit of ambiguity about her role.  You feel she was one of them, but may have cared for and protected him.

The movie has a cool elegance, set in beautiful locations, a pre-war bathhouse, the 1936 Olympic Stadium, and Europa Center downtown.   I miss the style of the era:  the red classic Porsche Quiller drives, his medium gray suit and hopsack sports coat, white button down oxford shirts with narrow tie, and  polished brogues.  What I really like about Quiller, however, is his method, his American, almost Columbo-like, clever openness.  He banters and naively raises what others don’t talk about.   Who can he talk to about neo-Nazis.  He is smiling and polite, but there is an edge to Quiller as well, a seriousness.  He is a bit too intense, his questions a bit too direct.  He is also like a boxer, fearless.  Like Somerset Maugham’s Asheden, the World War I British agent, Quiller relies on his intelligence and instincts rather than technology, weapons, and tradecraft.  He is hanging out there alone.

Sitting at home in Helena, watching Terrence Malik’s “The Thin Red Line.”  It is a beautiful, lyrical film baed on James Jones’ novel about the World War II battle of Guadalcanal.  There are lots of blues and greens, like Fuji film, and beautiful cinematography, starting with the opening scene with Melanesian children swimming in the blue Pacific, white clouds above, Melanesian songs in the background. We see a tropical paradise, with colorful birds, blue and green, and red and yellow parrots, tall palms, and light shining down through Banyan trees.  The main character, a U.S. Marine named Witt, is swimming with the natives, interacting with their gentle culture.  There is a wonderful voice-over throughout the movie, Witt’s voice, very philosophical, asking about the human soul, and what created us, and about the spark that is within each of us:  ‘Who are you that makes all these many forms?”

There are three great scenes, the opening with the idyllic native world of Melanesia, the Solomon Islands, filmed on location.  Then, the battle scenes showing Japanese soldiers with camouflaged helmets and backpacks filled with branches and leaves, brownish uniforms, leggings, aiming air cooled machine guns, waiting for the American Marines in the fog, the Americans advancing, bullets whizzing (“whoosh”) out of the fog, single shots, close but how close.  You hear them passing very close.  Then the U.S. attack through an abandoned native village, overrunning the Japanese.   Hans Zimmer’s music, his deep chords, mixes with the voice-over as the two sides are killing each other in the frenzy of hand-to-hand combat, no quarter given: “This great evil, where does it come from? How did it steal into the world? What seed did it grow from? Who’s doing this?  Who’s killing us?”

And then, the penultimate scene, where Witt and his platoon are scouting along a river, and a Japanese reinforced battalion is coming, and Witt sees this and leads the Japanese off into tall green grass, where he is surrounded by a close circle of fifty Japanese troops, all aiming their rifles at him.  He is being taunted by a bitter Japanese sergeant, urging Witt to try to shoot it out, the Japanese rifles and uniforms the best I’ve seen in any movie, very realistic.  And then Witt, resigned, raises his rifle, and is shot, and the light streams from above, from the tree tops, like a beam, streaming down on this last moment of Witt’s awareness.  And then, suddenly, Witt is swimming again with the Melanesian children.  He has crossed over into a better world.  Witt always said to himself that this was somehow possible.

Then there is a scene with George Clooney playing the new Captain after the battle, reviewing the men in ranks, offering platitudes, using military jargon with the veteran survivors:  “I’m the father and Top Sergeant (Sean Penn role) is the mother…” and some other b.s.   It never stops, Malik seems to be saying, officers leading men to take impossible hills.  This is the theme of “Gallipoli” and other great anti-war movies.   One of the survivors in this movie, a brave officer loved by his men, Captain Stavros, is replaced at the end for refusing to take an objective which would only waste his men’s lives.  The Colonel (Nick Nolte) relieving him tells Stavros that he is too soft hearted.

In the final scene, the Marine survivors  are being relieved, leaving “the Canal,” boarding LSTs  to go to their transport ships home.  They are marching past a makeshift military cemetery where their comrades are buried, and we hear the voice-over  of a young Marine survivor:  “there’s only one thing a man can do, find something that’s his, and make an island for himself.  Who are you (our creator) that I have lived with, walked with?  Dark and Light, and strife and love, are these the workings of one mind?  A glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours.”   And, then we see a young battle weary Private on the transport ship home at the end, on the stern, watching the white wake mix with the blue ocean waves, and him telling others in his southern accent, “I’m determined now, I’ve been through thick and thin, and am ready to start living good.  It’s time for things to get better.   That’s what I want, and that’s what’s going to happen.”  Then we see a palm frond in the surf,  and hear Witt’s voice: “who are you that I lived with and walked with, a brother, a friend?”  Then we hear the Melanesians singing as the credits come on.

Turned off State Street in Santa Barbara and walked a few blocks up Haley Street to Taka Puna, men’s retro fashion boutique.  Being in this small store, which John Malkovich frequents, I am reminded of his film “The Dancer Upstairs.”  I am reminded of Javier Bardem in the starring role, playing Rijas, the police inspector, trying to track down the leader of the Shining Path insurgency, a man called Ezekiel based on the real terrorist, Guzman.  Based on a true story by Frank Shakespeare, the movie is a beautiful tone poem, set in Peru, shot in the “Altiplano” of Ecuador and Peru, and in Portugal and Madrid.  There are beautiful urban night scenes, with lights and lanterns strung along wonderful Latin Baroque streets, winding up the Lima hillside.  Glass cafes are lit up in the dark, amid the purple night, like French chintz bars shining on Latin Quarter streets.  Soft tones predominate, with Bardem wearing a light gray suit and light green tie, set against the reds and blues of the city.  The most beautiful scene came at the end, at Rijas’ daughter’s dance recital, dancing a Martha Graham piece, her red dress in the elegant mirrored room cascading multiple images.  Rijas makes it just in time, rushing in from his work, and standing in the back, by the door, catching the eyes of his daughter who is happy he made it, a slight smile is exchanged as the Nina Simone’s solo background music starts for the dance number.  The beginning is wonderful, too, in the high Andes, at night, three native Indians hunched together in the front seat of pickup, lights shining ahead on the road as they drive along, icy volcanic peaks visible outside in the moonlight, instrument lights of the dash creating a dim green interior, the occupants speaking Quechua, and Nina Simone’s voice coming over the radio, prefacing a song of hers.   As daylight arrives, you see green fields and high plateau outside and the colorful Indian dress of those in the truck, gray and white rough hewn, hemp sweaters an bowler hats.  The Andean flutes are now playing a rendition of “All Along the Watchtower.”  The film, as it develops, involves an “almost romance,” of Rivas and his daughter’s dance teacher, the unknown terrorist, the two lives intertwined in the backdrop of momentous events, like Hal Holbrooke and Goldie Hawn in “The Girl From Petrovka,” set in Brezhnev’s Russia with dissident intrigue and revolutionary theory woven in.  Both films are romances and narratives of our age, of insurgency.  Bardem’s charisma holds us, a soft policeman with soft but articulate accent, who wants to use the law in a more honest way, rather than being a corrupt lawyer or brutal cop.  He is soft on punishment.  He is not a hero, is just doing his job.  Rijas’ boss comments on Rijas’ Quechua background and concern over treatment of Indians, asking if he has strong feelings about the issue, or, sarcastically, if he is the Gary Cooper type who keeps things to himself.  Rijas answers that yes, he has feelings about the treatment of the native population, but maybe he is also the Gary Cooper type.  Rijas is a cop and also a Quechua, and a lawyer by training.  Laura Morante is superb as the ballerina terrorist and Rijas’ daughter’s dancing teacher.

I always wanted to do a film festival of my favorite movies.  This is the first of a series of reviews of some of my favorites instead:

Watched once again “The Odessa File” with Jon Voight, a film set in Hamburg in 1963.    It has my favorite film opening, with Hamburg’s evening rush hour, already dark,  the balmy North German city seen from high above, amid heavy opening heroic chords of “Deutschland Uber Alles,” spires standing agains the indigo sky.  Two arteries of traffic can be seen below in the evening, two moving streams of car lights winding through the suburbs converging near the Alster, then diverging again.  You see tall, modern office buildings below, walls of lighted windows, white specks.  Then the camera is down at tire  level, showing the modest cars of the day, the DKWs, Opals, and Volkswagen Beetles, streaming by along with the numerous minibuses and Mercedes Benz taxis.

The camera switches to the action, to the St. Pauli/Rapperbahn district lit with Christmas lights.  Jon Voight (journalist Peter Muller) is behind the wheel of his dark green Mercedes negotiating the holiday shopping traffic, the camera focused on his face through the windshield, the Mercedes ornament on the hood, Voight’s driving gloves clasping  the ivory steering wheel, the reddish leather seats, the bright lights of stores flashing by.  Overhanging Christmas decorations are reflecting off his windshield,  flashing off the glass as he drives, the reflections changing as he moves along.  You see a modern red tram next to him slowing down, with a “winding down” sound, paralleling him next to the street as he slows for a red light.  Perry Como’s “Christmas Dream” is now playing, with a “pom, pom, pom” beat: “watch me now…”  “here I go,”… “all I need’s… a little snow,” … “to help me…”  “dream, my Christmas dream.”   Como’s smooth, light tenor voice is the background.

Voight is stopped at the red light, and the camera pans from his face to the sidewalk:  shoppers and children’ laughter, store windows with red and white plastic Santas inside, steam rising from a wurst stand, and pedestrians buying sausages.  Focus shifts to a carousel, with pipe, whistle, and organ sounds coming from its calliope.  Credits emerge on the screen.  We are seeing pedestrian shoppers scurrying across the street in front of the streetcar and Voight’s Mercedes at the crossing, waiting for the light.  The Germans are wearing scarves and wool hats and overcoats, some leather and some wool, some with fur collars, but not all coats are buttoned up.  They are hurrying before the light changes.  Perry Como’s singing stops, and you hear the calliope, interrupted suddenly by a more Germanic march, and a German boy’s choir singing “Christmas Dream” in German now, all voices in unison, cadence taking over, waiting for the light.

We are brought back to Voight and reality with the metallic “clang, clang” of the streetcar as it takes off.  We once again see Voight’s face as he accelerates and pushes the gear shift upward.  Reflections from the street are again bouncing off the car’s front windshield, letters appearing now, then sliding upward and off the glass as the car moves on.  Strings of  Christmas lights and decorations draped over the street, snowflake cut outs, bounce off the windshield as we once again watch Voight’s driving face.  The youth choir fades, and Como’s voice reemerges, singing his melodic solo again, but now in German, the words the youth choir was just using.  The magical clear photography and lively Christmas music takes me back to 1967 , and my own visits to Hamburg on the weekends.

The music stops, and credits disappear, and the movie starts.  We are now on downtown streets, Voight driving, as an announcement suddenly comes over the car radio, an update on President Kennedy’s condition, that doctors at Parkland Hospital have said that President Kennedy is dead.  Voight pulls over, as do other cars around him, and listens to the news.  He is like all Germans, who loved Kennedy, saddened.   The subsequent dialog between Voight’s character and his fiancee, Sigi, is inspiring, adding to the image of the younger “Good Germans.”  He is a “free lance,”  he tells Sigi with Voight’s soft  German accent, and he is proud of that, and he is open, like a German, about his ambition and his work, and he is idealisitc, and will not work for a larger (Komet) news magazine just for the money.  Sigi is the best German girl since Senta Berger’s Ilsa in “The Quiller Memorandum.”  The story moves on to Muller’s battles against neo-Nazis in the 1960s Germany, still not too distant from the war.  Sometimes  I just watch the beginning over and over.