La Notte

Monica Vitti

I recently revisited Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte for the first time in about four decades and felt that, as a piece of film craft, it has held up rather well. I've always been of two minds about Antonioni. He was obviously a cinematic master, able to express anomie through a mise en scene that displays man adrift in a modern maze of his own making. The opening segment of La Notte which pictures Milan as a grid of modernist architecture is the foremost example of this, a cold and gleaming evocation of alienation circa 1961.   

Antonioni's lack of warmth and humor has always bugged me, though. His characters often seem like ciphers, existing only to put across philosophical concepts. The party at a large estate that takes up most of the runtime of The Night is a good example of this. The central married couple of the film, played by Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, flirt with potential lovers, but the party, though extravagant, is listless and enervating. As one character puts it, "Nothing ever happens." Society ends up applauding a horse's ass. The reaction against Antonioni's pretensions was best summed up by the title of Pauline Kael's famous essay, The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties in which she also dissed La Dolce Vita and Last Year at Marienbad. 

Characterization is lacking in Antonioni's work. Mastroianni is playing a famous writer, but has little to say except meaningless epigrams like "D'Annunzio's turtle died of colic after eating flowers." His character is supposed to be a hollow man, but Mastroianni is too soulful a performer to be convincing. This is the same conundrum as when he played Camus' Meursault in Visconti's L'Étranger. There is a similar vacuity to Moreau's character, who like Mastroianni is able to project at least a spark of personality with her eyes. The couple reconcile at the end by rutting in the mire: Antonioni's version of a happy ending. 

No one in the film registers as a flesh and blood human in the film. Bernhard Wicki's performance as a dying friend at the start of the picture is so ridiculously overwrought that one appreciates Moreau and Mastroianni's restraint in comparison. The nymphomaniac who attempts to seduce Mastroianni in the hospital seems to emanate from another picture, perhaps the cartoonish pulp of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor.  

What I have come to appreciate as I get more decrepit is the formal beauty of La Notte. Gianni Di Venanzo's high contrast, black and white cinematography sings. Life may be relatively meaningless for Antonioni, but it has a visual and erotic charge. The characters in the film do not seem specific because they are functioning within variations on a theme: duet for husband and lover, duet for wife and lover, a duet of love until death for wife and husband. It may be discordant, but as La Notte unspools, I hear music.          

The Happy Ending

Jean Simmons

Richard Brooks' The Happy Ending is a feminist melodrama that I found to be a good deal more interesting than most critics did in 1969. Brooks was an unyieldingly macho director, but after the popular success of The Professionals and In Cold Blood, he penned The Happy Ending as a change of pace and an opportunity to provide a good meaty role for his missus, Jean Simmons. The film's tone is satiric, influenced by The Graduate and Two for the Road. Unfortunately, a light touch is needed and Brooks tends to bludgeon his audience with his message. I laughed when I read a thumbnail description of the film: "An affluent Denver woman (Simmons) gets drunk, pops pills and walks out on her lawyer husband (John Forsythe) of 16 years." However, the satire of the film is so mean spirited and grim that there are few genuine laughs in the movie. 

The 1953 courtship of Simmons' and Forsythe's characters is displayed in a musical montage sequence that opens the film, underpinned by Michel Legrand's score. We hear the film's theme song, "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life", for the first of many times. Mary (Simmons) and Fred (Forsythe) are on the cusp of an anniversary shindig, when Mary bolts for an impromptu getaway to the Bahamas. She is deeply dissatisfied with her life. Her husband has cut off her financial independence after one too many alcoholic incidents and a suicide attempt. Mary now eschews alcohol, but is dependent on pills and her life feels listless and empty. On the plane to Nassau, she meets an old college friend Flo (Shirley Jones) who reaches out to Mary in her time of need. Flo, a self-described "well-educated trollop", has flitted from married man to married man, the latest of whom is a wealthy businessman well played by Lloyd Bridges. Ms. Jones, who won an Oscar under Brooks' direction for Elmer Gantry, provides much needed warmth to the film. Partridge Family fans will be shocked by her nude scene, though Brooks made some cuts to change the film's ratings from M to R. Nanette Fabray is effective as Fred and Mary's loyal maid, though I could have done without the scene where she holds a phone in her crotch.

While in Nassau, Mary flirts with a gigolo played by a badly cast Bobby Darin. Robert Darin, as he was billed here, gives it a good try, but looks too sickly to be a stud. He does nail the (overexplained) desperation of the character. The movie reviews Fred and Mary's marital life in flashback as the picture progresses. Simmons performance is such a study in self abnegation that she was awarded an Oscar nomination. Not only do we get to see her get busted for a DUI, with a very feeble puke scene, but she also gets her stomach pumped for her troubles. To Brooks' credit, he does not end the picture with a contrite Mary going back hat in hand to her hubby. Mary opts for a life of her own, deserting not only Fred, but a teenage daughter who seems extraneous to the flick. Simmons offers a very good performance of a rarity in a Hollywood film, then or now, a three dimensional middle aged woman. However, the film sank commercially and so did Simmons' career. Forsythe gives a typically inert and somnambulant performance. He is not quite wooden, but does seem etched in stone. This is not fatal to the film, Fred's life with Mary is meant to be dull, but it doesn't help either. Fred is supposed to be a glad-hander who is described to be "the life of every party" by one character. If Forsythe is the life of any party, it must be a sadly moribund one.

There is no shot like this in the film, but I do like the poster.

On the whole, most of the supporting players in the film offer effective performances. Teresa Wright, in a horrid wig, signals the greatest generation's disapproval of the baby boomers as Mary's mother. Dick Shawn is well cast as a slick advertising exec who is a pal of Fred's. He and Lloyd Bridges serve as mouthpieces for Brooks to decry the hollow materialism of the US in 1969. Tina Louise has a better part than usual. Brooks does place her cleavage under Forsythe's nose in one regrettable shot, but also gives her a good monologue decrying the beauty industry. However, Brooks undermines this speech with its setting: a poker game in a health club locker room with the bored housewives slugging Scotch. In the background, an overweight woman struggles to put on her undergarments. Ugly in more ways than one. There is more than a hint of misogyny in this sequence and another one in the health club where Simmons and a bevy of zaftig females torture themselves on exercise machines while patriotic music blares. Not satire, just bad taste. I also thought the Denver setting was overly anonymous.

I am not a fan of Michel Legrand who I feel was not a gifted melodist. However, the theme song, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, is one of his more lasting achievements. It certainly was an Adult Contemporary hit in the day and has had a longer shelf life than its host film. Legrand sneaks a version of his previous hit movie theme, "Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair, into a cocktail lounge scene. The attempt to write a calypso number to evoke the Bahamas, is dreadful and embarrassing. The late Erin Moran, Joanie on Happy Days, appears briefly as the younger version of the daughter.

I wrote that I found more redeeming qualities in the film than critics at the time. Life magazine's Richard Schickel branded the film a "melodramatic travesty" and Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, described it as an exercise in "fatuousness". I do think the film's criticism of the beauty industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and social apathy have gained more currency with time. Also the picture's preoccupation with mass media and its effect on the brains of the American consumer looms larger post-internet. Mary watches a panned and scanned Casablanca looking for the happy Hollywood ending. There are constant interjections of audio and vocal snatches from television: violence, Nixon's inauguration, commercials. Brooks and longtime collaborator, cinematographer Conrad Hall include all means of advertising in their wide-screen frame, especially billboards. Richard Brody thinks the look of the film was informed by Antonioni, but I lean more towards the sway of Godard, particularly Pierrot le Fou. I don't think The Happy Ending is a good film, but it is not the disaster it was reputed to be at the time of its release.

Freaky Tales

 

Pedro Pascal

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Freaky Tales shows flashes of personality, but, ultimately, is too derivative for its own good. The film, in part, was inspired by the song "Freaky Tales" on the album Born to Mack by Oakland Hip-Hop icon Too Short. Set in 1987, the film unfolds in four interconnected chapters, all set in Oakland and Berkeley. An aspiring rap duo gets to perform with Too Short while punks in love battle Nazi skinheads at punk venue 924 Gilman street. A loan shark (Pedro Pascal) has one last job while the skinheads make the mistake of crossing Golden State Warrior star Sleepy Floyd. I was living in San Francisco in 1987, so I did feel a pang of nostalgia watching this paean to the neglected East Bay. I even got to see punk luminaries Flipper, and many lesser lights, at Gilman street during this era.

The locations are well used and the songs selected by Raphael Saadiq, whose discography I commend to all, are expertly chosen even when they are not by East Bay artists. The acting is all over the place. A lot of the younger performers are amateurish. Ben Mendelsohn, an actor I usually like and who has collaborated before with the directing duo, offers a one note snarl of a performance. Perhaps the fault lies in his character, a corrupt police detective who is so evil that he has spawned the lead skinhead (Mom, per usual, is absent from the flick). There are too many societal ills lumped in his character to make him believable. Pedro Pascal, an actor whose work I have never really cottoned to, is the most soulful thing in the film.

The picture is an obvious labor of love, stars and East Bay icons like Tom Hanks, Tim Armstrong, Too Short, and Marshawn Lynch all make cameos, so I salute the directing duo for trying something heartfelt instead of succumbing to Captain Marvel 2. However, the structure, playfulness with time, and use of a diner as an important setting are all too reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. I've enjoyed films that drank from this well (like Things to Do in Denver When Your Dead), but Freaky Tales crosses my personal Mendoza line because it has little to add to the Tarantino template except for its setting. As with Quentin, having the heroes smite evil doers seems more like wish fulfillment than catharsis.