A Little Night Music (1977)

I frequently complain about today's Hollywood musicals and frequently say how much better they were a long time ago. But... I am not sure the 1970s was the time when they were better. Harold Prince's 1977 version of Sondheim's A Little Night Music is rather flat. In the first place, it stars Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Rigg, neither of whom can sing, and in the second place the whole thing is filmed without miuch energy. I suppose this makes sense for the deflated egos of a majority of the characters but even the upbeat songs feel slow as captured by Prince's languid camera and the milky lighting that is such a hallmark of the 1970s. The costumes are gorgeous, but the film really could have been livened up by more interesting production design. Len Cariou feels as though he is on his game, and he and Laurence Guittard and Lesley-Anne Down – all three of whom are in good voice – seem to know that they're in a comedy, but... well maybe it's Prince that is trying to make something other than a comedy. The comic scenes just don't really work here. 

Or perhaps it's Taylor's fault. She plays the whole film in much the same way – it's a rather sad and desperate performance. It's even very moving when she gets to "Send in the Clowns", despite her inability to sing the song. But she doesn't lean in to the character's schemes or her silliness, and if she calls for clowns she never lets us laugh at her. She asks only for pity.

I want to say something about the theatrical frame that Prince gives to the whole thing. We begin in a nineteenth-century Austrian theatre, and the story is introduced to us onstage before we move in and find ourselves in the real world. We end onstage as well, and the actors take bows as the credits roll. This is a fine device, and Ingmar Bergman himself (A Little Night Music is based on a film of his) had used it just two years earlier for his film of The Magic Flute. But Prince does nothing at all with this theatrical frame. We never return to it in the course of the movie. The characters never talk directly to us; the falseness of it all never breaks through. In Bergman's Flute, for example, we spend a short intermission with the actors, who smoke silently or play checkers or flirt. It's a stunning little section in that film. In A Little Night Music we get nothing like this, and there is no point at all to the frame except perhaps to remind us that the entire thing might have been better onstage.

I read on Wikipedia that reviews of this film were mostly negative and that critics made a lot of hay about Elizabeth Taylor's apparently wildly fluctuating weight from scene to scene. I saw none of this. She looked great throughout the film. These critics perhaps proved one of the central theses of A Little Night Music: that men are pigs, and that an older man easily thinks himself entitled to a younger woman while simultaneously imagining that an older woman is entitled to nothing. How dare they.

The Magic Flute (1975)

Trollflöjten is a simultaneously weird and breathtaking Magic Flute. It feels totally un-Bergman, but there are also some gorgeous moments, particularly the quiet scenes off-stage between acts one and two. The costumes are also very cool, and the art direction is lovely.

The Ninth Circle (Deveti Krug) (1960)

Wow. Wow. Wow.

So, The Ninth Circle was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar the same year (1961) as Pontecorvo's Kapò, Roberto Gavaldón's brilliant Macario, and Clouzot's La Vérité (also brilliant), and they gave the damn Oscar to Bergman's boring The Virgin Spring. In any case, The Ninth Circle is very, very well made, and it is surely – with Kapò – one of the first films made about the camps. So much of the film is a love story (under Nazi duress) that I was expecting something else entirely from this film by the end – I, incorrectly, as it turns out – assumed the ninth circle was a reference to Dante's final circle of the inferno and signified the betrayals of Judas, Lucifer, and Cain.

But Deveti Krug shifts boldly in subject matter in the middle of the third act, and the ninth circle of the title turns out to be a literal section of the camp and not a literary reference to treachery. (Incidentally, Peter Weiss's The Investigation uses the circles of the Inferno as a formal way of tracking through the camps and the Nuremberg trials, and in the play we move further and further inside the camps.)

Because the movie shifted so drastically, I really wasn't prepared for the punch France Štiglic's movie delivered, and I ended up truly stunned by The Ninth Circle. Boris Dvornik, who plays the male lead, is outstanding in this.

Two from Ingmar Bergman

The Virgin Spring is a gorgeous little film. It's early Bergman (1960), and it is in the Criterion Collection, so it is available in a sparkling print. I don't think I have much to say about the movie itself. though. The plot is a very straightforward narrative of violence, loss, revenge, and religion based on a medieval tale from the thirteenth century.

It has an infamous rape scene, but the film's violence is presented in a painful, anguished way. This is not done through sound information (the way Stephen Prince suggests that pain is best communicated on film), in fact the film has hardly any sound in it at all. Instead, the camera seems to feel with the characters, and the violence itself is almost always obstructed from view in some way.

The narrative on which the film is based is inherently religious, yet Bergman manages to make a film that – despite the obvious existence of god – questions the god's choices. Birgitta Valberg and Max Von Sydow as the young girl's parents are really quite excellent.

Bergman is a bleak filmmaker – not totally joyless, but definitely bleak. And his film from 1976, Face to Face (Ansikte mot Ansikte) is no exception to this. But Face to Face boasts an unbelievably amazing performance from Liv Ullman. Unlike The Virgin Spring, which is easy to get ahold of, it's pretty hard to find a copy of Face to Face. I've been trying for years. But now I'm at Dartmouth and they have everything, so I watched it two weeks ago.

Face to Faceis about a psychiatrist who has her shit together. As her daughter is off at camp and her husband in New York for work, she goes to stay with her grandparents for a month while some work is being done on her house. This return home opens up all sorts of things for the woman and she confronts her long-repressed fears and anxieties.

This is a hard film. First of all, it is dated by its interest in psychiatry and repressed memories, but the film itself is also a true challenge. The main character is truly fucking sad, and there doesn't seem to be much of a way out of the misery that she feels blanketing her put-together life. So this is hard to watch. Honestly, though, I spent a good portion of the film with my jaw dropped, disbelieving that Liv Ullman was as good as she is. Ullman is extraordinary in Face to Face. She tears into the role and is unrelenting. We get every confused, difficult moment of this woman's existential anguish. It is a performance that is so exquisitely crafted and so specific, that the audience is left as confused as the character about what is really wrong with the woman.

The trouble with the film itself, though, is that it doesn't have much of a solution to this anxiety, and frankly doesn't have much of a reason for displaying it all to us in cinematic form. Face to Face is enjoyable only for Ullman's virtuosity. The film itself is unrelentingly miserable.

Bergmanesque

Everyone always said that The Seventh Seal, Bergman's 1957 meditation on death (and the film that made him a star) was a film about a man playing chess with Death. Um, okay, so Max Von Sydow does play chess with Death, but the film isn't about a dance with death or anything like that. Von Sydow isn't even the star of the film.

Instead, The Seventh Seal is a very cool and intriguing meditation on how each of us deals with death, how we run from it, the different ways we try to stave it off. It's also filled with all kinds of atheist meditations about the alleged afterlife and asks moral questions about saving lives and causing deaths and the ludicrousness of religious fervor in the face of death. It's an intriguing, beautifully shot film with a great ending and some lovely poetic moments. Gunnar Björnstrand, the film's star (he plays Von Sydow's squire) is wonderful: skeptical, practical and filled with hate, both for his master and most of the people around him, and yet truly compassionate and generous. It's a wonderful role and the actor is great.

Truth be told, the bits with Death and the chessboard were all kind of silly, almost laughable. I couldn't help chuckling at the first scene with Death on the beach. All I could think of was Woody Allen's Love and Death. Allen loves Bergman and his spoof of The Seventh Seal is an ingenious one. At any rate, I quite liked the film, mostly because it wasn't at all what I was expecting.

P.S. I'm currently reading some Charles Busch plays (The Lady in Question, Psycho Beach Party, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom). This shit is hilarious.

Cinema

Ingmar Bergman is officially THE MAN. I have seen several of his films: most notably Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata and I think they are great films. I love their temperature, especially, and I love Liv Ullman in them. I've also seen and admire Through a Glass Darkly and Wild Strawberries but let me tell you, I just finished Fanny and Alexander and I feel like I've been bowled over.

Fanny and Alexander is a stunning, shining work of genius that holds its cards close to its chest and is uncompromising and beautiful. Anyone who says they love movies absolutely must see this film.

The Golden Globe nominations came out this morning. I hate the Golden Globes for their absolute devotion to celebrity and their complete and utter unaccountability, but they do sort of set the mood Oscar-wise. It really is a shame that such a band of outsiders should decide so much in Hollywood. Eh. They showered their blessings today on Sideways, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Li'l Miss Scarlett Johanssen also got herself a boost today and so did, inexplicably, Kevin Kline. Whatever. Very good news for Cate the great, though, as she is looking more and more like an Oscar nominee lock for The Aviator. It's-about-motherfucking-time.

I didn't go to the cinema today. Instead, I cleaned like a madman. I moved all of the furniture and vacuumed everything. I replaced all of the light bulbs in the house, cleaned my bathroom, did the dishes, bought a print for the kitchen, replaced some of the fixtures in the bathroom and threw away a whole bunch of crap. I cannot believe how clean my floor is.

Besides, none of the films I want to see is playing near me and I just don't feel like driving to Hollywood today after driving to Santa Monica by way of Valencia last night. (The party was really fun, though. I love shit like that sometimes. I just talked with people about whatever nonsense came into my head. When I don't know anyone I can occasionally have a really nice time. No prospects, though there was this adorable Peruvian/Wisconsonian optometrist at the party who looked to be about 26 and came to the soirée direct from the audience at the Pasadena Symphony.) End flashback.

I watched about half of Fanny and Alexander: right up until the intermission, and then Eduardo came home so I shut off the TV. I like to give him the use of his own television when he's here. It feels odd to be watching a movie on his huge television while he's relegated to his room, especially since he uses the TV so much.

The print I hung in the kitchen is pretty cool. It is a framed photograph of a bunch of dusty old wine bottles. Dusty wine bottles say something interesting to me: they are like purposefully neglected little treasures. They know their own value and are simply waiting to be used. Or perhaps they are like academia: full of interesting information and always surrounded by more of the same but rarely called upon.

I bought a play today: Fat Pig by Neil LaBute. I don't like Neil LaBute, but I read scene one because of the title and kinda got hooked. Plus I had a 25% off coupon at Borders. I also felt like finishing a book. I have been reading Genet's Le Journal de Voleur for weeks and it is fabulous but rough going.