Comment ca va?

Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean_Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's Comment ça va? (How's It Going?) is one of several Marxist Structuralist film essays that emerged from the Godard multiverse in the mid 1970s to little acclaim and attention. It crudely intermixes film, video and text, has amateurish camera work, and indifferent acting. Nevertheless, I was engaged with the film's philosophical struggles throughout. There is more to chew on here than in twenty typical features. I am generally not thrilled with Godard's Marxist platitudes, but he proved to be prescient on the great technological change of our era. We now live in an age in which the image has gained primacy over text. This has had an incalculable effect on human psychology and it was the primary theme of the latter half of Godard's career up to his final feature, The Image Book.

The two main characters in the film work for an unnamed paper, presumably Libération, a Leftist daily founded by Serge July and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973. As the decade unfolded, the paper moved to the center-left and it in this context that the idealogical conflicts of the film should be viewed. The dueling editors are played by Michel Marot, in real life a distinguished architect, and Ms. Miéville, here dubbed intriguingly "Odette". Odette and the unnamed character played by Mr. Marot are collaborating on a documentary on the newspaper biz. The film is a meta comment on itself, bien sur. The pair squabble with Odette taking the high road, i.e. the doctrinaire Marxist way, as Marot prevaricates. "Objectivity is a crime," she barks at him and he eventually sees her that she is right to adhere to resistance as the only just response to the world. Odette is filmed from the back or with her face in shadow, all we see are Miéville's blonde tresses. You cannot gaze directly into the face of truth or, in this case, Godard's final muse.

The primary duo is contrasted with a young proletarian couple, in a movie filled with dialectics, played by Christian Fenovillat and Catherine Floriet. He works as a machinist while she tends to domestic chores. There is no idealogical discussion between the two, they seem perfectly happy to canoodle on their couch oblivious to the television behind them spewing Lies Writ Large. Here I have to advise readers that I think Wikipedia's page on this film misreads the plot. It conflates Odette's character with Ms. Floriet's character. Ms. Floriet is a brunette, as you can see below, while Ms. Miéville is a blonde. It is a murky and tangled movie, but I think the fact that Wikimedia misreads a film about media disinformation is perfect irony. Now more than ever, one cannot believe what one reads and sees.

Catherine Floriet

Comme ça va? is structured like a B noir, opening and closing with Marot's deadpan narration. Now I am going to disclose the ending of the film because if you've read this far about Structuralism, French politricks, and whatnot, you can take it. Odette and Marot's film is rejected by the "Central Committee" of the paper in a fashion that, like much of the film, resembles Struggle sessions during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. After this rejection, Odette leaves the paper and disappears from Marot's life. Now if this was a true noir Odette would have been shown getting iced by the party, but I'm not sure Godard was that prescient about the Party or had enough of a budget. Comment ça va is even more relevant in an era in which my country is befuddled by the fog of war. The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam: no more reporters on the ground with combat troops and we are seeing or not seeing the results.

Dark Water

       

Hideo Nakata's Dark Water is an effective horror film with a palpable sense of unease. This 2002 flick is slow paced, all the better to encase the audience in its gunky atmosphere. The film centers around a woman going through a contentious divorce named Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki). She is battling over the custody of her six year old daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno) with a husband who is willing to fight dirty, including bringing up Yoshimi's past mental health issues. Under enormous stress, she must find a job and a new place to live. She finds a promising job in publishing, but her new digs are another matter. She and her daughter find themselves in a dilapidated and putrid apartment building in a flat that has water seeping from the ceiling. If that is not enough, mother and daughter soon both glimpse what seems to be a supernatural presence who may be leading them astray.

Dark Water conveys its atmospheric dread with a dour look. Even when the characters are outside their creepy domicile, the weather is overcast or raining. The film has a stomach churning palette, primarily grays and sickly greens. The few uses of primary colors, a yellow slicker and a red child's purse, are linked with the supernatural. Mr. Nakata, primarily known in this country for Ringu, elicits chillingly effective performances from his two leads. If Dark Water has a flaw it is that its scenario is overly reliant on tropes from its antecedents, namely Don't Look Now and The Shining. 

The Wet Parade

Dorothy Jordan, Robert Young, and Walter Huston

Victor Fleming's The Wet Parade is a mediocre melodrama based on a then recent novel by Upton Sinclair. This 1932 MGM production cannot escape the limitations of its source material, a dashed off anti-alcohol screed that was one of over a hundred books Sinclair produced. Sinclair was the son of an alcoholic salesman and he obviously had an axe to grind. The novel and film both picture two families, one southern and one northern, who are brought to ruin by demon rum. First we meet the southern Chilcote family in 1916, presided over by pixilated paterfamilias Lewis Stone. Stone has a son, Rog (Neil Hamilton), who is following his besotted example and a disapproving daughter named Maggie May (Dorothy Jordan). Stone makes a half-hearted attempt to stay sober, but ends up dead face down in a pig pen; about as low as one can go in an MGM production.

Rog moves on to New York City where he moves into a tatty SRO hotel managed by Kip Tarleton (Robert Young). Kip is saddled with a drunken Dad played by Walter Huston. Huston's orotund and grandiose performance as a drunkard still stuck in the Gay 90s is the main reason to see the picture. Maggie May shows up in town, primarily to pair off with fellow teetotaler Kip. Kip's father's decline continues unabated by prohibition. In fact, the film makes plain how pernicious the effects of bathtub gin and the like were in those days. When Huston's hootch is destroyed by his wife (Clara Blandick), he becomes enraged and beats her to death. That's right, Auntie Em is clubbed to death. Huston is sentenced to life in prison and disappears from the picture. Kip sells his hotel and becomes a prohibition agent for the Treasury Department. His partner is Jimmy Durante, whose schtick seems out of place here but whose presence belies what an over stuffed production this is. The picture really climaxes with Blandick's murder at the 75 minute mark, but there are still 43 minutes to go. 

Rog is soon going to hell on a sled with the help of a party girl played by a peroxided Myrna Loy. Rog drinks too much cheap rotgut and is blinded, putting him on the road to redemption. In the novel, Kip is rubbed out by gangster, but, in the film, it is Durante's character who makes the ultimate sacrifice. The film is a tad bit more equivocal about Prohibition than Sinclair was. While alcohol is shown to be pernicious in the film, the unexpected effects of Prohibition are made so plain that even Kip is doubting its efficacy by film's end. MGM uses medleys of patriotic songs to paper over the political divide. 1932 was an election year with Franklin Delano Roosevelt upending Herbert Hoover in November. Though the Crash had been the central issue, Prohibition also had its impact. The Democrats ran as the Wet party.

The best scene in The Wet Parade has Walter Huston delivering a stemwinder stump speech for Woodrow Wilson in 1916. The film cross cuts to a contemporaneous Republican response 

which is a carbon copy presented for ironic effect. Huston gives one of the best performances of a drunk I've ever seen. Neil Hamilton is less convincing in his sodden moments, but is good at projecting his character's diffidence. Robert Young's sincerity jibes with his character in one of his finest performances. Dorothy Jordan barely registers, but that is probably because her character is a complete pill. Ms. Jordan appeared in over twenty films between 1929 and 1933 then retreated from the screen after marrying Merian C. Cooper. After a long hiatus, Jordan appeared in three of Cooper's productions for John Ford: The Sun Shines Bright, The Searchers, and The Wings of Eagles.

The Wet Parade suffers from the deficiencies of its source novel. The handling of class and race issues is particularly clumsy. Even Victor Fleming's biographer derides the project as "a barely viewable film made out of an unreadable book." 🎁 However, I think Fleming redeems the irredeemable somewhat with his boisterous handling of crown scenes: the salons, saloons, speakeasies, and political pow-wows of the film. Sometimes MGM's luxe production values pay off: I loved briefly spying a recreation of the St Regis Hotel's Old King Cole Bar. On the whole, though, The Wet Parade is recommended only to the hardiest of old time film buffs.

🎁 Michael Sragow, Victor Fleming, page 176.