Les distractions

Claude Brasseur and Jean-Paul Belmondo

Jacques Dupont's Les distractions, released in the States as Trapped By Fear, is a slightly above average noir that is more interesting for its acting than its direction. Jean-Paul Belmondo stars in this 1960 flick as Paul Frapier, a feckless reporter who seems more interested in chasing the ladies than in chasing down stories. Claude Brasseur plays Laurent, a former army buddy of Paul who once saved his life in Algeria. We first glimpse Laurent racing a stolen car through Paris pursued by the police. An accident ensues and a cop dies, so Laurent is forced to flee. A chance meeting with Paul leads to Paul helping shelter Laurent and attempt to smuggle him to Spain. However, Laurent is forced to go on the run. He is even reduced to eating pig slop at one point. This is contrasted with Paul making time with pretty much every female in the cast. The police reunite the pair in the requisite tragic ending.

The part of Paul is made to order for Belmondo who is magnetic and adept in the role. The character is just rebellious enough to fit him to a tee: "Fuck the police," Paul exclaims at one point. Brasseur is equally effective, regarding his fate with mournful eyes. Alexandra Stewart is well cast, for once, as a fashion model. Belmondo is able to loosen up the usually stiff actress. Their scenes together have genuine chemistry. Sylvia Koscina and Eva Damien also make the most of their roles as Paul's more casual acquaintances. Dupont's background was in documentary work and his direction here is fairly unfussy. A sequence which shifts from a trained monkey to a caged bird, highlighting Laurent's sense of entrapment, is one of the film's few visual flourishes. The film works best when Dupont has a good location to prowl around, like the Spanish bar in an antique shop that Belmondo takes Stewart to.

Richard Cornu's score is sadly insipid, detracting from the gritty tone of the film. Dupont's handling of the film's denouement is likewise wan. Jean Bassan's source novel provides a crackerjack finale reminiscent of High Sierra, but in Dupont's hands the sequence fizzles rather than pops. Still, anyone seeking to see Belmondo in his prime could do worse than Les distractions.

      

The Naked Island

Nobuko Otowa

Kaneto Shindo's The Naked Island, released in 1960, is a mesmerizing masterpiece. Largely shorn of dialogue, the picture focuses on a farming family of four eking out a living on a small denuded Japanese island. The family mostly raises yams and potatoes on a terraced hill. Because of the lack of rain and foliage on their isle, the unnamed couple have to row to the mainland several times each spring and summer day to fetch water. They then have to tote the buckets of water up a torturously steep hill to douse their plants. The first third of the film establishes the daily rhythm and challenges of the couple's meagre existence. The kids pitch in except when the eldest gets to travel to school and slack off. The perseverance of the family is stirring in a Sisyphean way: their life is a hard and repetitive struggle, but, at least like Camus' Sisyphus, they are able to derive a smidgin of joy as they toil.

The first third of the film ends with a resounding slap of reality that reminds us that, though the film is set in the modern era, the couple lives just as their forebears have for centuries; with much the same values and attitudes. The remainder of the film documents a trying year in the life of the family. Changes of seasons bring new and different chores along with rituals and celebrations. It is these bonding rituals that help the family heal after tragedy strikes. Because of its lack of dialogue, characterization, and plot, a film like The Naked Island needs to be technically assured to be even tolerable. The film is technically superb in every detail. Kiyomi Kuroda's cinematography presents a natural landscape that is both sumptuous and daunting. Shindo mostly shoots his two main players from a low angle, emphasizing the toll taken by their everyday struggles. Opening and closing aerial reorients the viewer. We realize that the totality of the family's world is but a dot in a vast world.

Nobuko Otowa and Taiji Tonoyama, who play the couple, carry the film on their shoulders. It is obvious that they are really doing their own stunts and this gives their performances a stunning verisimilitude. You see and feel their struggle. As Sheila O'Malley has sagely noted, acting is doing and The Naked Island is a prime example of committed performances in which gesture merges with behavior. Apparently the hardships experienced by Ms. Otowa did not embitter her towards Mr. Shindo for she became his third and final wife in 1978. I also must shower superlatives on the score by the great Hikaru Hayashi who composed over thirty operas and over a hundred film scores. It is evocative without ever bogging down into sentimentality, much like The Naked Island as a whole.

The first film I ever saw directed by Kaneto Shindo was his 1964 horror masterpiece Onibaba which I viewed at the Roxie theater in San Francisco. This was in 1987 or so and, happily, the Roxie is still in business today. Kaneto Shindo lived till he was 100 and directed 48 films, most of which remain unseen in the USA. Of his other films, I've only seen 1968's Kuroneko, a good, if not outstanding, period horror film, but The Naked Island will spur me to seek out more of his oeuvre. 

                                   

It Rains in My Village

Eva Ras

Aleksandar Petrović's It Rains in My Village is a strangely compelling adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Demons (aka The Possessed) set in the now defunct nation of Yugoslavia. You don't need to be familiar with the (very long) novel to appreciate the Serbian director's 1968 effort since the film is very loose in its adaptation of what is my favorite book. Suffice to say, Petrovicć's thematic intentions align with that of the Russian master in that It Rains in My Village is a critique of revolutionary socialism. Tito and his regime were perceived as relatively benign in the West in 1968 due to Yugoslavia non-alignment with the Soviet bloc, but Petrović's film stands as a middle fingered salute to Tito and his minions. As in Demons, a nihilistic adherence to Party doctrine brings death and chaos to a rural village.

The backwardness of the village is immediately established in It Rains in My Village. A band arrives on bicycles to play at a wedding, but a female member of the band is sent packing in order to kowtow to local custom. The village is dirty and primitive. Most of the men seem under employed. Roaming pigs, ostensibly herded by the film's main character Trisa (Ivan Palüch), are the main traffic. There is a mute and crazed girl named Goca who functions as an unpaid sex worker for local laborers. Trisa hangs at the one lane bowling alley and pub where he is often the butt of Joska's (Mija Aleksić) teasings. Joska goads Trisa into marrying Goca with predictably tragic results.

At this point, the real villain arrives in the form of Reza (Annie Girardot), a sophisticated teacher with an urban background. She is also a painter and soon enlists the clueless Trisa as her model and boy toy. However, the audience knows she is a no goodnik when she disparages "religious mania" and addresses Trisa as "comrade". When a dashing pilot crash lands nearby, Trisa is soon displaced from Reza's boudoir. When Trisa is implicated in Goca's murder, Reza and Joska fan the fires of public opinion and the hive mind of a lynch mob takes over. Trisa is subjected to fiendish torture and death. The finale juxtaposes Trisa's traditional funeral with, in a nice satiric touch, a tractor ballet celebrating Tito's 100% support at the polls. The dead eyed stare of Reza at the village priest during the service rams home the message: big sister is watching.

Annie Girardot

Apart from divvying up the character of Nikolai Stavrogin between Trisa and Reza, the main difference between Demons and It Rains in My Village is the use of folk songs by Petrović. The wedding band, often joined by Joska, punctuates the action with songs that comment sardonically on what has transpired. A little levity goes a long way during this bleak, but brief (80 jam packed minutes) affair. Mija Aleksić was the most beloved Serbia entertainer of his generation, he eventually got his own postage stamp, and his musical digressions show why. He brings a very human face to a very evil character. The other leads are equally sublime. Palüch brings a solid presence to the simple minded shepherd. I remember Ms. Girardot for the deglamorized and put upon heroines she played in the 1970s and 80s, when Deneuve and Adjani got the glamour puss roles, so it was nice to see her so young and alluring. She gives her character just the right trace of a sneer. The role of Goca could have been a bad joke about female promiscuity, but the presence of Ms. Ras redeems the role. She makes her character a believable innocent. Because of her work with Dušan Makavejev, I've always found Ms. Ras to be the Serbian Shelley Duvall and that is, for me, high praise.

It Rains in My Village is the kind of near masterpiece that reassures me I have more to see before I shuffle off to Buffalo. Certainly I will be tracking down more films by Mr. Petrović. He didn't shy away from adapting classic novels as one of his later films was an adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, my favorite novel of the 20th century. The fact that he succeeded with the equally unfilmable Demons gives me hope.