Some Singing, More Rain

Film: Monsoon Wedding
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

One of the more fascinating cultural experiences I’ve had in the past several years is attending a Hindu wedding. I don’t know how traditional it was—it may very well have been Westernized in some ways, and the reception was very Western in a lot of ways. As for the ceremony itself, I don’t remember a lot. This isn’t because I wasn’t paying attention, but almost because I couldn’t. The bride, my older daughter’s first grade teacher, recommended to us that we bring a deck of cards for the actual ceremony. We weren’t seated close (not being family), and it was quiet and extremely long. I remember we were served ice cream in the middle.

Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding offers in some ways a very similar experience. In one important way, this film is badly misnamed—we never see the actual wedding. We get the build up to the wedding, we get the family insanity that goes around the wedding, we get infidelity, family secrets, random almost-couplings, fights, tears, a lot of singing, and what looks like one hell of a great reception, but no wedding.

This is a film with almost too many plots to get into, so I’ll stick with a couple of the major ones. Young Aditi Verma (Vasundhara Das) has been promised in marriage to Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas), a man she has never met. This is problematic, since she is currently involved in an affair with a married television personality named Vikram (Sameer Arya). Now the whole family is gathering in Delhi for the big event, and tempers, past insults and crimes, and a few current crimes surface. Along the way we discover that Aditi’s father Lalit (Naseeruddin Shah) is having cash problems because of the wedding. There’s additional turmoil in the family better left unspoiled here. And the wedding planner, P.K. Dubey (Vijay Raaz) has fallen madly in love with the Vermas’ servant, Alice (Tilotama Shome), and is thus unable to concentrate.

Nair doesn’t show us the wedding, because ultimately, the wedding is unimportant. It’s everything else that truly is important here. This film isn’t about the value of an arranged marriage over the sort of relationship Aditi had with Vikram. It’s not about the power of marriage or the importance of marriage. Rather, this film is about family, about love and about the strength and power of tradition even in the face of an ever-changing world.

For me, there are three real emotional centers to this film. First is Lalit Verma. While it is his daughter who is being married, the film is much more about him than it is Aditi. For him, as well as for his wife Pimmi (Lillete Dubey), this marriage means not so much gaining a son as truly losing a daughter. Hemant lives in Houston, which means that after the wedding, Aditi will leave Delhi, leave India, and live on the other side of the planet. For Lalit, this wedding is both everything and a loss of everything—money included, but mainly his daughter. His resistance through much of the film is there to cover this deeper fear of losing his little girl.

Second is the relationship between Dubey and Alice. Their romance is unarranged and happens naturally in the course of the film. It is sweet, almost naïve, and ultimately charming. When Alice, alone in the course of her duties, tries on the wedding jewelry, Dubey’s men accuse her of stealing. It’s only Dubey, who is watching her with the eyes of a man newly and wholly infatuated, who understands the truth of her game of dress up.

Finally, there is Ria (Shefali Shetty), the daughter of Lalit’s deceased brother, essentially adopted into the household. Without giving too much away, Ria guards a dark family secret that eventually comes boiling out the night before the wedding. Her role is a thankless one in the family—she’s a sort of spinster cousin—but she is in many ways the emotional core of the entire clan. Her scene with Lalit at the end of the film as well as the one that follows it, are the two moments in Monsoon Wedding that turn a well-made movie into cinema.

What surprised me here was a general lack of humor. I expected this to be very much a Hindi-language version of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and it is anything but. There is some humor here, but the humor is there simply to temper the drama. While the film ends on a massive uplift, overall, this is not the laughfest you might expect.

But it is good. It is very, very good. It is beautifully filmed and nicely paced, and despite the massive cast, it does not become confusing or difficult to follow. I’ve checked this film out from the library before and simply never got around to it. Now I wonder why.

Why to watch Monsoon Wedding: A slice of real life that cuts deeper than its surface topic.
Why not to watch: Family dramas have a way of being more painful than others.

Peer Pressure

Film: All That Heaven Allows
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There are moments when old films become unintentionally hilarious. In All That Heaven Allows, that moment comes at almost the exact middle of the film. In the scene, Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is riding in the car of the younger Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). The two are talking of their impending marriage, and of breaking the news to Cary’s two children. Cary is naturally worried about what her kids will say, and Ron tells her that it won’t be a problem as long as she is brave. It’s a lesson he taught his friend Mick in the war—that sometimes you simply have to be a man. And Cary responds by saying, “And you want me to be a man.” Knowing that Rock Hudson, despite his frequent romantic leads was gay made this brief scene hugely comic for me. I’ll admit that it broke the mood despite my best intentions not to let it do so.

All That Heaven Allows is a piece of 1950s romantic melodrama in which the villain isn’t a sneering industrialist or top-hatted creep, but all of us. We’re the bad guys in this film—you and me, and that person sitting over there.

Cary Scott is a relatively young widow with two children. We don’t learn why she is a widow, nor do we learn how long she has been one. Her son Ned (William Reynolds) is at college, but comes home on the weekends. Her daughter Kay (Gloria Talbott) does social work and speaks in a way that, had it been ten years later, would sound like the beginnings of radical 60s-isms, quoting Freud and railing against the roles of women in society. When the kids aren’t home, Cary has a moderately active social life that consists of cocktail parties and club lunches with the other women in town. In the evenings, she is sometimes squired around by Harvey (Conrad Nagel), who has a mild and passing romantic interest in her.

But then Cary notices Ron Kirby, who is tending the trees in her yard. He’s young, he’s attractive, he’s well built, and he’s got a deep manly voice. Cary is naturally interested in her, and while she’s older, she’s still quite attractive, so the feeling is mutual. Ron and Cary become something of an item, but quietly, since this is essentially dating the help, and the well-to-do in this quaint little town simply don’t do things like that.

Eventually, though, the two fall madly and passionately in love with each other, an event that is spurred for Cary by her meeting Ron’s friends Alida (Virginia Gray) and Mick (Charles Drake). It’s here that Cary learns of Ron’s philosophy of being his own man and being happy in his own way, and not really caring much for the opinions of those people he doesn’t care about.

Ah, but this is the problem. Counseled by her friend Sara (Agnes Moorehead), Cary brings Ron to a social gathering, where their relationship suddenly becomes the talk of the town. Everyone, it seems, is small-minded and petty, and can’t get over the fact that a wealthy widow like Cary would have anything to do with a tree farmer and gardener like Ron Kirby. There are snide accusations and the sort of cruelty-masked-by-surface-pleasantries that only the best bred of us can manage with a straight face. This cause célèbre is led by the town gossip and evil wench Mona Plash (Jacqueline DeWit).

But the problems aren’t limited to the neighbors and upper crust of society. Ned reacts badly to his mother’s romance with Ron, thinking that she has disgraced his father’s memory, and adamant that she cannot sell the house that has been in the family for generations. Kay tries slightly harder to understand, but is destroyed emotionally when she overhears others in town talking about her mother and accusing her of having an affair with Ron before her husband died.

The path this movie takes is a pretty obvious one, and while the ending has a few bumps in it for our star-crossed pair, it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. There’s a particular choice we want our loving couple to make, and it’s a fairly good bet that we’ll get there eventually, even if the road gets a bit rocky.

All That Heaven Allows is a tough film to judge simply because it is so damnably predictable. It’s difficult coming at it from this perspective to know if it is simply predictable on its face or if this is because so many other films have traveled the same exact path after it. The whole point of the film is idea of social oppression, of caving in and marching with the beat of the rest of society, of the comfort in being a part of the group weighed against happiness. In short, it’s romantic melodrama at its most romantic and melodrama-y.

The saving grace of the film is Jane Wyman. Wyman’s face in this film tells the entire story—one can read whether a scene is happy, sad, tragic, or fraught with social peril simply by looking at how she reacts to the situation. Her face is empathetic and easily readable, and her performance benefits from this tremendously. Rock Hudson’s job here is to be large, manly, and to have a deep voice, three things that he was naturally talented at. Everyone else’s job is to be selfish and small-minded.

I don’t want to give a lot away here, because the film does follow a pretty obvious path, but there are some things done very nicely. The section of the film before the end concerning Cary with her children at Christmas is still very effective and powerful, as it highlights the relationship Cary has with her children, and their own particular selfishness. This scene elevates the entire film, and as with much of the rest, it is Wyman who does the elevating.

Why to watch All That Heaven Allows: The lessons of society still need teaching now and again.
Why not to watch: Sometimes, that teaching can be heavy-handed and trite.

No Fourth Wall

Film: 2 ou 3 Choses que je Sais D’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her)
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I think I’m starting to finally get a hold on Jean-Luc Godard. Two years ago, I’d heard of Godard but had never seen one of his films. Now, I’ve seen a good half dozen, and I feel like each one I see gives me a little more insight into what Godard was doing with his films. I haven’t liked them all by a long shot, but I think I respect the vision and the determination to do something really different with film. 2 ou 3 Choses que je Sais D’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) is one of the strangest Godard films I’ve seen (and that’s saying something), and quite surprisingly one of my favorites.

This film comes right in the heart of an incredible spate of productivity in Godard’s filmmaking. In the late 1960s, it seems like Godard was putting out 2-4 films every year. 2 ou 3 Choses que je Sais D’elle is the culmination of earlier experiments in his work. There are a lot of similarities here to films like Masculin-Feminin in the large titles that pop up at times, albeit here without the jarring soundtrack.

Like many of his films, Godard spends this one playing with the idea of film and filmmaking. Here, this comes in the form of essentially destroying the fourth wall. Frequently, characters in the film speak directly into the camera, saying pieces of apparent nonsense that have little or no relevance to anything on the screen. He prepares us for this in the opening few minutes by describing his main actress, Marina Vlady, and then reciting almost the exact same description of her character in the film, Juliette Jeanson.

The plot turns on an idea we’ve seen her before. In fact, this is the third time in the last year or so that I’ve seen this identical basic storyline. Juliette and her husband live in a modest apartment, but can’t quite afford .the payments on it. So she turns to prostitution as a way to make ends meet and allow them to stay in their ultra-modern but essentially cramped and pedestrian apartment. It’s got a lot in common in that respect with Jeanne Dielmann and the housewife-turned-prostitute idea with Belle de Jour. But for a variety of reasons, I like this one a lot better.

It would be wrong to suggest that this film isn’t very strange in a lot of ways. It feels less like there is a narrative here and more like there is simply a series of events that happen in front of us. We watch Juliette go through her day, dropping off the kids at a day care for hookers, fending off the man who wants to act as her pimp, and servicing clients before returning home to her husband and children. Anything to make ends meet, evidently.

That, though, is exactly the thrust of Godard’s film. This film is intensely anti-American and anti-consumer. Juliette does what she does not because the family needs the money to survive per se, but because they need to money to live the lifestyle they wish to emulate. For them to live in the style to which they have become accustomed, the additional income is necessary.

And that’s really the interesting thing about the film. Godard appears to be making a statement about the nature of the consumer model we’ve had for so long. We mortgage our future for a little ease or the joy of a couple of moments of perceived freedom, but what is actually happening is that we experience less and less true freedom. In many senses, Juliette is selling herself for a promised dream of a modern world and a better life, and she’s actually getting almost nothing in return, are at least nothing that means anything.

Godard’s voiceover narration is extremely strange. He whispers everything, almost as if he is afraid of being overheard. Again, this is oddly compelling in its own way. Godard has discovered a secret, and is sharing it with us, letting us in on what he has to say—about consumerism, Vietnam, the hollowness of the American cultural export, and more.

Do I know what it all means? Probably not. But this film does make me feel like I’m starting to get a handle on what Godard was trying to do not just with this film, but with film, which makes me feel like this whole crazy journey has some sort of point after all. I found this one fascinating. I’m not sure if that has resulted in my getting a better handle on Godard, or if my better understanding of his work causes me to like this film. Regardless, that’s the case here. This is an interesting watch, and its surface shallowness and aimlessness masks a surprising depth.

Why to watch 2 ou 3 Choses que je Sais D’elle: For a story you can see coming, it’s still pretty engaging.
Why not to watch: Disjointed, non-existent narrative.

Me and Howard Hughes

Film: The Aviator
Format: DVDs from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Twenty years ago, the actor most frequent thought of in combination with Martin Scorsese was Robert Di Niro. These days, Leonardo DiCaprio would be just as accurate an answer. DiCaprio has made at least four major films with Scorsese, each one garnering a ton of critical acclaim. Similarly, Scorsese seems to have mellowed in some ways. While The Departed seemed like a trip back to his roots, he has branched out in terms of theme and subject in his films. A good example of this is his biopic of Howard Hughes, The Aviator.

While the film begins with Hughes’s mother bathing him and telling him about the dangers of cholera and typhoid, most of the film concerns the man’s life from the late 1920s through the middle and end of the 1940s. In short, these are the years of Hughes’s greatest productivity, innovation, and notoriety, and the beginnings of his eventual decline into paranoia, OCD, and compulsive behavior.

Hughes (DiCaprio) inherits Hughes Tool Co., netting him a massive fortune, which he uses to finance his own entry into the motion picture industry. His first movie, Hell’s Angels, took three years and close to $4 million to produce, and lost money despite being a hit. During this time, he hires Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly, who reminds us every now and then that he can be an excellent dramatic actor) to run Hughes Tool, and Dietrich eventually acts as Hughes’s go-to for virtually everything in his life.

Much of the film concerns the many loves of Howard Hughes, including (but hardly limited to) Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), and a 15-year-old high school student named Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner). But despite all of the women, the first and only true love of Howard Hughes was flight. During the course of the film, Hughes sets an airspeed record and pushes the limits of aviation in a number of ways.

But this isn’t what made Hughes interesting. What did was his crippling mental and emotional problems. We get small hints of these early on, but they become progressively more pronounced and severe as the film continues. Hughes was a germophobe, and this is portrayed in painstaking and poignant detail in the film—washing his hands until they bleed, standing in a public restroom until someone else opens the door for fear of touching the handle. Hughes’s OCD and cleanliness tendencies threaten to cripple him completely. What we see in the film is not the kooky nuttiness that we might think such problems might cause. We don’t see the “Oh, I’m a bit OCD” behavior that most of us exhibit a little of—fixing our CD collection when one is out of order. At one point, Hughes spends nearly three months in a projection room, stripped naked, urinating in empty milk bottles. He effectively quarantines himself for fear of illness.

What’s also fascinating is the enemies he makes and battles through the course of the film. Most notable is Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), Chairman of Pan Am and rival of Hughes’s own TWA. Trippe, along with Maine Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), attempt to wrest a monopoly on international flight for Pan Am, and see Hughes’s innovations in aeronautics as a major roadblock. They play on his crippling fears to attempt to cow him into submission and force him to sell off TWA to avoid embarrassing investigations into his—quite frankly bizarre, even by wealthy eccentric standards—personal life. What’s shocking here (and this is closely based on the history) is that despite his enormous wealth, Hughes came out of his battles against Pan Am and the Senate looking much like the wronged everyman in battle with titanic corporate and government forces arrayed against him.

In short, The Aviator is a portrait of a brilliant, tenacious, and deeply flawed human being. It’s a masterful performance by DiCaprio, who is able to capture both facets of this man, both the incredible genius and charisma as well as the legendary mental and emotional instability. As Hughes, DiCaprio frequently repeats sentences over and over, unable to let the particular phrase go. DiCaprio is assisted greatly here by his entire supporting cast, notable Blanchett, who won a well-deserved Oscar for her portrayal of Hepburn.

The film also notably won Oscars for art direction and cinematography, and it deserved both. To achieve the look he was going for, Scorsese digitally recreated the film to look as if it had been filmed with the processes available at the time each scene was taking place. The color frequently looks off—and this is intentional, because it is intended to (for instance) duplicate the two-strip Technicolor process, which made greens look a bit bluish. It’s subtle, but it adds a fascinating element to an already fascinating film.

I’ll say this now—if I wasn’t a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio, I would be after watching this film, because it might be the best one of his career. If I wasn’t already a huge fan of Scorsese, this is the sort of film that would put him in my top five directors. I’ve complained recently about films that run too long for their subject, but The Aviator reminds me that no really great film is ever too long. This one has a running time of just under three hours, and it doesn’t feel like it. It could have run another hour, and I wouldn’t have noticed or complained.

Why to watch The Aviator: One of the best biopics ever made.
Why not to watch: Insanity can be very disturbing.

History is Not for the Timid

Film: Novocento (1900)
Format: DVDs from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There’s a reason I’ve gotten through most of the really long films in the first half of this quest. It’s mainly because really long films can be really hard to watch. Oh, there’s still plenty of films that clock in at close the three- and four-hour marks, but to my knowledge, Bertolucci’s Novocento (1900) is the last one on The List that runs more than five. It took me several days to get through the whole thing.

I also find that the longer the film, the shorter my synopsis. So here’s the quickie version of this film. Two boys are born on the same day at the same place in Italy. One, Alfredo Berlinghieri (played as a child by Paolo Pavesi and as an adult by Robert De Niro), is born to the ruling family of the estate. The other, Olmo Dalco (played first by Roberto Maccanti, then by Gerard Depardieu), is born to the family of peasants who work the land. The two grow up together and sometime rivals and sometime friends, but are separated several times. While Alfredo’s life is money and pleasure, Olmo’s life is work and socialism. We also get World War I, the rise of fascism, and the subsequent socialist revolution after the war. And this takes something more than 300 minutes to tell.

And that’s really all there is to this. It is a warts-and-all telling though, and for Bertolucci, this means mostly warts. The life of the Berlinghieri family is essentially the sorts of problems of the wealthy we have come to associate with the movies. Alfredo has a loveless marriage and deals with the rise of fascism by essentially ignoring it completely. Olmo, on the other hand, deals with intense poverty, oppression by the fascists, and the fact that the love of his life dies in childbirth. Meanwhile, the peasants on the Berlinghieri farm are forced to deal with Attila Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland), and abusive and terrible foreman who converts early to fascism and is cruel beyond measure.

It seems that over and over what this film is about is simple human brutality. Much of this comes from the character of Attila—he bludgeons a cat to death near the middle of the film to prove a point about dealing with communists, kills a child brutally, and murders a former landowner. But the brutality and vicious sexual practices aren’t limited to him, nor strictly to the fascists. In one fairly memorable scene, Olmo and Alfredo prepare to share a prostitute, but Alfredo insists that she drink first. This triggers the woman’s epilepsy, so we get a full-blown seizure during naked time. There’s a ton of nudity in the film as well, and virtually all of it is about as unerotic as possible, to the point where it is frankly unappealing.

What I don’t understand is the length of these endless epic films. I understand the point that Bertolucci is trying to make here, but it seems very much like he could have made this point without a number of these scenes. Is it important, for instance, that we see the young Olmo and Alfredo comparing their penises? Do we need the full length of the party scene in which Alfredo’s eventual wife pretends to be blind and then proceeds to tell everyone there that she really isn’t blind? I understand that a story of this scope requires a bit of length, but a good hour or more could be sliced out of this film without much loss in terms of character or story. A lot of what happens is merely Bertolucci piling up additional evidence for things that we as an audience already understand.

It’s an interesting choice to completely skip the wars, though, and that’s a choice I appreciated. Olmo goes off to war and returns home, and this takes just a few minutes of screen time. We don’t get an endless slog of battles and fight sequences and men running out of trenches and being gunned down. Similarly, we don’t see anything of World War II. Essentially, the story that is being told here is limited to the Berlinghieri estate and what happens there rather than in Italy as a whole.

It is an interesting story, and one worth some time. But it is in many ways less an actual story and more an investigation of these two men who grew up side-by-side but also miles apart from each other. But really, this is all there is here. It’s the story of two very different lives lived at the same place and in the same timeframe against an increasingly dangerous and inhospitable backdrop. And for that, Bertolucci could have saved us all a little time and cut this down to a manageable size.

There are shorter versions of this film available, incidentally. I can’t speak to the quality or what has been cut, but I imagine that some of the more brutal sequences are not in the final version of the film, in part because this brutality is the difference between the unrated version and one more palatable to most people.

I can’t say I disliked Novocento, but I can say that I was ready for it to be done around the conclusion of the first disc, and more than ready when there was still an hour left to go.

Why to watch Novocento: A 40-year portrait of Italy through two wars.
Why not to watch: Sometimes, that 40 years feels like real time.

Two-Legged Sharks

Film: The Bad and the Beautiful
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There’s a particular type of film that is told from the back end forward. It’s always an interesting writing decision and directorial decision to essentially let the audience know the basics of how the story is going to end, or at least the point that we’re going to come back to in an hour or so. The Bad and the Beautiful starts this way, and this is a film in which the thought of starting at the end actually makes good sense.

We’re introduced to a trio of people refusing to speak with a man named Jonathan Shields. One is Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), a successful film director. The second is Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), one of the most popular leading actresses in Hollywood. The third is James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), a highly-sought-after scriptwriter. None of them will take the man’s calls. All three are brought into the office of Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon), who asks the three to relent. The crew then talks about their history with James Shields, one of the most powerful men in the movie business.

Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) is the man of the hour here, a powerful man in the business, but in the eyes of these three, Shields is also the most hated man in the business. And we learn something about how each of these people really got their starts in the business, and how Jonathan Shields is inexorably tied up in both their success and in their own personal tragedies.

We learn about Fred Amiel first. When Shields’s father dies, the man was so hated that Jonathan had to hire extras for the man’s funeral. One of those is Fred Amiel, who works as an extra at times and also works behind the camera. The two end up becoming friends and starting their own company and go to work for Harry Pebbel, producing (Jonathan) and directing (Fred) poverty row pictures and cheapies, but getting something actually out of them and turning out interesting films. But then, at the moment of their big break, Jonathan gives Fred’s script to another director, cutting his friend out of his moment of glory.

Georgia began life as the alcoholic daughter of an alcoholic star. Slumming around Hollywood for bit parts and a little male companionship, Georgia is a wreck. But it’s Jonathan who saves her, and makes her into a star. That he does so by letting her think he has fallen in love with her and stringing her along to get the performance he needs from her before letting her go.

And then there’s Bartlow, who Shields brings out to Hollywood to write the script of the book he’s just written. Bartlow is plagued by a Southern belle of a wife (Gloria Grahame) who interferes with his work and spends all his money. To get the script he wants, he sends her off with one of his stars, who proceeds to get both him and the Southern belle killed in a plane crash. But Bartlow’s career is made.

And then we’re back to the start. Shields is looking to get a new start in the film business, and wants this group of people to work with him. Will they or won’t they? Will they continue to hate him for the lies and the deception, or will they decide that for as much as he did wrong, he also did right and helped make them who they are? It’s a decision that we understand at a greater depth at the end of the film, and the decision the three characters make says as much about them as it does about Jonathan Shields.

This is another case where I probably saw the movies in the wrong order—I should have watched this before I watched The Player, because there are some real similarities here, although without the whole murder/crime/cover-up/vengeance angle. But this is a film that is very much about the dark underbelly of the Hollywood system and the star system. And at the same time, this is a film that is simply about success and business. Apart from the glamour, this story wouldn’t be that different if it took place in the steel industry or advertising or book publishing. It’s a story of success by any means, failure on the grand scale, and people who are very good at what they do, but who are not always very good at being people.

Of all of them, I suppose I have a certain level of sympathy for Amiel and Bartow. Amiel trusts Shields to help his own career as much as he will help Shields, and Shields sells him out at the first opportunity. Bartow treats Shields like a friend, and loses his wife because of it, because Shields wanted the script more than he wanted Bartow having to deal with his wife’s distractions. And yet, even there, my sympathy is tempered. Even more, I don’t have much sympathy for Shields himself. He’s ruthless in getting what he wants, vicious, arrogant, and heartless when it serves his purposes.

While there is certainly a plot here, this film serves more as a character study than a plotted story. But, it’s one hell of a character. Minnelli might be better known for musicals, but The Bad and the Beautiful shows that he wasn’t limited to them.

Why to watch The Bad and the Beautiful: Can Hollywood ever really be skewered enough?
Why not to watch: It’s really difficult to sympathize with assholes.

Fallen Idyll

Film: Un Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Few things in this world are sadder than an abandoned project. Jean Renoir’s short film Un Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country) is actually not really a short film, but a portion of a film he never completed. While this does tell a complete story, it tells it incompletely in many ways. It’s difficult to tell if the start of this film is the actual envisioned start, or if the ending here is the real ending Renoir wanted.

A family group heads to out to the country to spend a day. For the, the country is a huge change from their daily life in Paris. The country folk, on the other hand, are not too enamored of the Parisians, often wishing they would simply go away. But today is slightly different. The family consists of a Monsieur Dufour (Andre Gabriello), a businessman; his wife (Jane Marken); and their daughter, Henriette (Sylvia Bataille). Also along for the trip is an ancient, deaf grandmother (Gabrielle Fontan) and the promised husband of Henriette, Anatole (Paul Temps). Anatole, we are to learn very quickly, is something of a simp, and evidently quite a bit older than his betrothed.

Sitting along the river bank are two boaters named Henri (Georges D’Arnoux) and Rodolphe (Jacques B. Brunius), who immediately set their minds on the non-grandmotherly pair of women. Rodolphe, who sports mustaches so impressive that he wears a guard for them when he eats, initially has designs on Henriette, looking for a bit of fun and assuming that there will not be any consequences of such actions. They create a meeting for themselves and the women, and then, after the family has eaten, provide M. Dufour and Anatole with fishing poles, and offer to take the ladies out boating.

That’s really the whole film, although being alone with a strange man in the wild forests near a river bank certainly seems to make Henriette willing to (ahem) give of herself to Henri, for it is Henri and not Rodolphe that seems to catch her fancy. Rodolphe, initially rebuffed in his advances toward Henriette, determines to woo the older woman. While we learn of the success of Henri’s actions, we’re never really sure if Rodolphe sealed the deal, to use something like the common parlance. And that’s it. We’re given a five-minute or so epilogue that lets us know what happened to these characters after their eventful day in the French countryside, but overall, the very short running time sort of precludes a lot else from going on.

As a fragment of what should have been a larger work, this is quite interesting. There is a sort of lyrical beauty to many of the scenes that Renoir has created. The romantic angle is quite dated from a modern perspective, though—the women here are seen essentially as a quarry for the men to hunt. Actually, that’s probably not so dated from the perspectives of many a man. But it does seem to be the opposite of progressive in a lot of ways, which may well be either a function of the time in which it was made, or a function of the time Renoir was attempting to depict.

The look of the film is lush and the filming is languid and lovely, making this film something special to look at. It’s a terrible shame that the film was never completed. At twice this length, or perhaps a bit longer, Un Partie de Campagne has the potential to be something moving and beautiful. It approaches this in places, but still feels far too limited and too rushed for something that should be told at the pace that it wants to set—slow and tranquil, something eased into instead of rushed through.

For this, it’s a disappointment, although this is not the fault of the film itself. Renoir’s fragment still holds more power and more actual romance than films three times this length being made today, and for that, it is noteworthy.

Why to watch Un Partie de Campagne: Renoir brings lyrical beauty to film.
Why not to watch: It doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s half a movie.