Zama, Moonrise, Othello, The Snowman

Zama

Lucrecia Martel's Zama strikes me as one of the best films of recent vintage. Coming nearly a decade after her last fiction feature, the superb The Headless Woman, Zama reestablishes Martel as one of our best current directors. An adaptation of Antonio Di Benedetto's novel, Zama portrays the plight of a Spanish magistrate stuck in a backwater province in late 17th Century Argentina. Zama longs to return to his family and some semblance of civilization, but is stuck, Catch 22 like, in an Edenic dead end. He frustratingly courts a Governor's wife and sires a son with a native woman, who treats him with contempt. Zama is so bored that he joins an expedition to ferret out a legendary outlaw. This ends badly for Zama.

Martel's lens gives Argentina a natural beauty that has a fierce, dangerous side. The affront to civilized Europeans that untamed Argentina offers is symbolized by the small brushes used by the Spanish gentlemen to vainly wipe their boots before going inside. Those interiors are ramshackle at best, crumbling and overgrown by the wild country surrounding them. Martel cuts off heads and limbs in shots to covey Zama's claustrophobia, motifs that are repeated. Zama is ultimately a critique of colonialism as an alienating mechanism that brutalizes all in its wake.

Claustrophobia is also central to Frank Borzage's Moonrise, from 1948, another masterpiece. I watched for the second time on a predictably crisp Criterion Blu-ray. I had seen it in the 80s at the San Francisco Art Institute on a double bill with the sublime A Man's Castle. The print at the Institute was nowhere near as sharp, but the impact was the same. Borzage hems in his protagonist on the Republic lot, tightly arraying the action around a man doomed by a family curse. The torment of the narrative and the film's expressionistic photography has led some to call it a noir, but I would classify it more as a rural film (or Hix Pix): a strain that started with Griffith and his cohorts and produced Henry King's Tol'able David, Ford's Judge Priest, Renoir's Swamp Water, Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter and many, many lesser efforts. The last vestiges of 19th Century American regionalism could be seen on television in the 60s, mostly on CBS: Gunsmoke, Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Andy Griffith. 

Surreal American Regionalism: Frank Borzage's Moonrise

This was Borzage's last effort for Republic Studios and he put everything he had into it before a ten year hiatus. The first third of the picture teems with expressionistic and, even, surrealistic, effects. Borzage slacks off the hysteria as his protagonist becomes ensnared by his foul, evil deed. Dane Clark, the lead, is the obvious flaw. A stoic type, Clark had a more urban flavor to him than the role called for; he resembles an inexpressive Richard Conte. Still, Borzage utilizes Clark's face as a mask hiding accumulated traumas. He has a bit more success with Gail Russell. using her hands the way Bresson would use Anne Wiazemsky's digits in Au Hasard Balthazar. The supporting cast has many wonderful performances: Rex Ingram, Lloyd Bridges, Henry Morgan, Allyn Joslyn and, briefly, Ethel Barrymore. Moonrise is a superb B movie from an underrated director.

Another previously seen B masterpiece with a protagonist claustrophobically entrapped by grilles, bars, curtains, handkerchiefs, ramparts, an arras or two and whatever other bric a brac that could be scrounged up is Orson Welles' Othello, the "American" cut from 1955 or so. Having just seen a three hour Oregon Shakespeare Festival version of the play, I was even more impressed with Welles' elisions. Welles venerated Shakespeare above all other artists, but knew that three hours in the cinema with this lugubrious tale would overly tax his audience's attention. He was also intent on making a short and cheap film. Welles slashed away a good deal of Desdemona's, Bianca's and, even Iago's lines to brilliant, streamlined effect. This is really the Orson Welles show and who can complain with that,

Micheal Mac Liammoir and Orson Welles in Othello

Othello can survive an indifferent Desdemona or a clumsy Roderigo, but, happily, Welles knew that Iago is the key role; Othello's secret sharer. Seeing him from the wings at sixteen in Dublin, Welles must have known Micheal Mac Liammoir would be an ideal Iago. Very medieval, primeval even with a trace of bitchy hauteur, Mac Liammoir epitomizes this black heart of malice and treachery. Like Borzage, Welles could evoke human tragedy with the humblest of tools, but Mac Liammoir was not one of those. Unfortunately, he was in very few feature films.

In the "they can't all be masterpieces" category is Tomas Alfredson's The Snowman, a failed thriller that is not quite as bad as its reputation. Alfredson's bleak sense of architecture is suited to this Nordic noir, but the story is off the rails. Val Kilmer has an affecting cameo, but little else is coherent or entertaining. What we have is a crime thriller that exists to bash the patriarchy, a la The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the proceedings don't even reach that low bar. (8/12/18)