My Joy

                         Viktor Nemets and Olga Shuvalova                     

Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy, released in 2010, is an inscrutable portrait of Russia as a paranoid wasteland. From its first shot, that of a cement mixer being used to help conceal a corpse, the mood of the film is that of unrelenting despair. The film could be dismissed as a Russophobic screed, but it is so teeming with vital storytelling that I was enthralled from start to finish. The film is ostensibly a road film, initially following Georgy (Viktor Nemets), a young trucker as he attempts to make a delivery in Western Russia. The film, however, is extremely discursive. It hurtles through time and space illustrating a host of fragmentary tales. When Georgy is joined temporarily by an old drifter, we view the reminiscences of his attempt to return home after World War 2 and come to learn why he is living a peripatetic life. After the drifter goes off on his own, Georgy is waylaid by three hooligans who assault him. The attack leaves Georgy mute and mad and he spends the rest of the film wandering aimlessly through a pitiless landscape.

The characters who populate My Joy are a murderer's row of ruffians, criminals, teenage prostitutes (an especially scary Olga Shuvalova), and sinister representatives of the government. Every government official in the film, from Soviet intelligence officers during the Great Patriotic war era to road traffic patrolmen in present day Russia, are portrayed as corrupt figures eager to prey on whoever falls into their clutches. Repeated requests to see one's papers become the film's harbingers of doom. If My Joy has a flaw, it is that its narrative is so scattered that it is hard to follow. Despite this caveat, I found the film to be an unflinching triumph.

Los Golfos

                          

Carlos Saura's Los Golfos (aka The Delinquents) is a corrosive and impressively assured first feature. Produced by Pere Portabella, the film debuted at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Its portrait of disaffected youth living in the seamy underbelly of Madrid did not meet the approval of Franco's censors. After extensive cuts, a truncated version had a cursory release in Spain in 1962. The uncut print has only recently been reassembled and is available on a handsome looking disc put out by Radiance Films.

The film centers on a group of six young urban miscreants who participate in petty crime to survive, sometimes with the help of their moll, Visi. The hooligans rob blind ladies, pilfer fruit, assault cab drivers, loot garages, and more. No mentors or father figures exist to steer the youth towards virtue, an unspoken legacy of the Spanish Civil War. Much of the film functions as a documentary about the more sordid side of Madrid. However, Saura never flattens the characterizations into a neorealist lump. Each of the six youths is given a vibrant and distinct personality. One of the youths, Juan, shows promise as a matador, so the others pledge to steal enough money in order to jump start his career. They succeed, though at a terrible cost, and the film concludes not with Juan's triumph, but with the most depressing and despairing bull fight ever captured on film; as opposed to all those jolly ones.

Saura combines bracing neorealism with the nihilistic despair of Buñuel's Los Olvidados. The images of slum life, like women gleaning what they can from the town dump, are worthy of that master. Saura's juxtapositions are continually inventive and provocative. Fado and flamenco are contrasted with a Latin dance band out of the 1930s or a hip jazz club where the necking clubgoers are digging Gerry Mulligan. Regardless of their diversions, this is a portrait of a lost generation.

Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet

Despite enjoying the director's previous work, I found Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme to be overblown, gaseous, and empty. It doesn't matter to me that the ping pong prodigy played by Timothée Chalamet is unlikeable, but I found the character to be fatally uninteresting. Chalamet has proven he can play a Jewish hustler with his impersonation of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, but Marty lacks the charisma and chutzpah of a Dylan or a Sidney Falco or Sammy Glick. I think that Safdie and his co-writer Ronald Bronstein wanted to capture the Jewish magical realism found in works like Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, but the results are neither magical nor realistic. Safdie shoots the material with lots of close-ups, trying to give this period film immediacy. In this he partially succeeds, but at the cost of giving his film a realistic framework. The use of circa 1980 pop songs indicates he wanted to conjure something more timeless and mythic, but the character of Marty is not interesting or heroic enough to support the stuff of legend.

Safdie continues to be interesting in his handling of his players. I especially enjoyed the efforts of Odessa A'zion, Abel Ferrara, Penn Jillette, and Pico Iyer. However, a number of talented performers are stuck in cliched roles or ones that barely register, such as Fran Drescher, Kevin O'Leary, and Sandra Bernhard. Gwyneth Paltrow is promisingly cast as a Grace Kelly type figure, but has little to do except act bemused by Marty. I did enjoy the Tennessee Williams take-off, but too much of Marty Supreme, like the Moses the dog subplot, is overly convoluted and arbitrary. Marty's actions are rarely consistent with his character. While Marty Supreme has some interesting moments sprinkled throughout its two and a half hours, overall I found it to be a disappointment. 

Backrooms

Whatever their artistic merits, the commercial success of Kane Parsons' Backrooms and Curry Barker's Obsession is a truly heartening sign of life for the American film industry. Before the summer onslaught of sequels, retreads, and video game adaptations, it was very pleasing to film buff Biff that two original films from newcomers are runaway box office successes. After viewing Backrooms, I was particularly chuffed that such an abstract and avant leaning film has been embraced by the US public, particularly by those 35 and under. It is A24's biggest hit to date, already outgrossing Marty Supreme. Backrooms has a plot, but its chief attribute, which commences once Chiwetel Ejiofor discovers a portal to a parallel world in the basement of his furniture store, is Parsons' camera prowling the negative space of a world redolent of corporate offices and strip malls. This conveys a sense of dread that lingers despite the narrative seeming like a distended Twilight Zone episode. 

Ejofor plays Clark, a frustrated architect living in a mythical city in 1990 who manages a pathetic furniture store for his daily bread. He has recently undergone a painful divorce and attends therapy session with his doc, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). After Clark discovers the portal, he enlists two collegiate videographers to document what he has discovered. Unsurprisingly, the duo become the film's sacrificial lambs for a monster lurks in the maze of this mysterious kingdom. Mary Kline becomes concerned about Clark and stumbles upon the portal. Flashbacks of her childhood, when she was a prisoner in the house of her mad mother, illuminate her struggle to metaphorically and literally walk through windows. A single survivor is left at film's end. A high tech firm has been monitoring the parallel world and is able to make an extraction. A company pooh-bah (deftly played by Mark Duplass) debriefs the survivor, functioning much like Simon Oakland's character in Psycho. As in Psycho, the explanation given mystifies rather than clarifies.

The visual landscape of Backrooms is a picture of suburban desolation and anomie. Indeed, the suburban strip malls of America in 2026 are even more empty after the rise of internet retailers. As the musical group Priests put it:

                           I was jogging to a strip mall

                           I felt nothing at all

                          Nothing I can recall

                          Besides Dollar Tree, Sears and Thai Bistro

Even before we enter the film's Interzone, the portrait of 1990 America is depressing. The colors of the costumes and decor are subdued and ugly. The film is a symphony in taupe and off white. Even when a color like blue is used it is a subdued blue rather than a vivid one. This fits the emotional tenor of the film. Clark and Mary both live a lonely existence, each haunted by the demons of the past. Ejiofor and Reinsve limn their characters' stress and isolation superbly. I was somewhat distracted by Reinsve's Norwegian accent, but that is a very minor complaint.  

Master Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik have extrapolated Backrooms from Parsons' YouTube series of the same name. However, the idea for this project did not just emerge full blown like an Athena from the cheesypastaverse. There are antecedents. Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 horror novel House of Leaves has a similar premise. While Parsons' characters travel horizontally into an alternative multiverse, Danielewski's descend vertically into darkness. With its labyrinthine tracking shots, Backrooms reminded me of Michael Snow's Wavelength and Kubrick's The Shining. Indeed, the labyrinth is the one of the central motifs in Kubrick's oeuvre. Regardless, I feel Backrooms can stand on its own. I don't think it is a great film, but it is a startling debut. 

Downstairs

Virginia Bruce, Paul Lukas, and John Gilbert form a triangle in Downstairs

Monta Bell's Downstairs is a fitfully entertaining 1932 drama released by MGM. Leading man John Gilbert has penned the screenplay in the silent era and then dusted it off in the hopes of reviving his flagging career. Gilbert plays the part of an unscrupulous chauffeur newly hired by a German Baron (Reginald Owen). Gilbert arrives on the wedding day of two members of the Baron's staff, Paul Lukas' butler and Virginia Bruce's parlor maid, and promptly establishes himself as a total cad by hitting on the bride. Bruce initially is able to resist Gilbert's advances, but comes to realize that he floats her boat more than the upright Lukas. Gilbert's chauffeur is such a total rotter that while he is making time with Bruce (soon to be the fourth Mrs. Gilbert), he is also coming onto the households' aged cook. The cook's appeal to him lies not in her feminine charms, but in the bankroll secreted in her stockings. Amidst these shifting and shifty alliances, the Baroness (Olga Baclanova) has a lover on the side. A situation the chauffeur exploits for blackmail.

Downstairs is an weird film that wizzes by at 77 minutes utilizing odd juxtapositions and iris dissolves. It is handsomely appointed with cinematography by Harold Rosson and art direction by the ubiquitous Cedric Gibbons. However, Monta Bell's direction never finds a consistent tone. The film veers from comedy to near tragedy without ever finding its footing. What makes the film palatable is its superior cast. Owen and Baclanova are one of the most hilariously mismatched couples in the history of cinema. Bruce and Gilbert generate a scent of eros. Bodil Rosing, best known as the maid in Sunrise, is affecting as the cook. Best of all is Paul Lukas who makes the stock role of the cuckolded husband believable. Downstairs also features Hedda Hopper as a former employer/lover of Gilbert's, Otto Hoffman, Lucian Littlefield,  and an uncredited Karen Morley in the final scene.

On a personal note, I can attest that the notion that the chauffeur was the great god Pan of the 1920s and 30s was not pure fancy. My wife and I were gifted a box of linens by my mother. They had lain in a closet in my parents' house since the death of my mother's aunt a decade earlier. When I opened the box I spied a selection of monogrammed hand towels. They bore an initial I did not recognize. Apparently, my great aunt had had a first husband who was not mentioned in my presence. When I queried mom about it: "Oh, yes", she replied, "she ran off with her chauffeur."

Beyond the Clouds

Peter Weller and Chiara Caselli

Michelangelo Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds, released in late 1995, is a film about interlocking sexual entanglements set in four different European locales. The picture was based on a book of short stories Antonioni published in 1983 entitled That Bowling Alley on the Tiber. In 1985, Antonioni suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed till the end of his days. He was only able to make Beyond the Clouds with the assistance of Wim Wenders, though their relationship was somewhat contentious. Wenders added binding episodes and narration featuring John Malkovich as a traveling director musing on love and life. Antonioni was able to jettison some of the scenes featuring Malkovich, but not all of them. Similarly, sequences featuring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau were shot by Wenders, but only a single scene remains. The scene offers a self-reflexive take on artistry invoking Cézanne. The question raised is whether an artist repeats himself. Wenders, the auteur, admits that it is inevitable.

The other element that smacks more of Wenders than Antonioni is the soundtrack, the presence of U2 being the tell. It didn't work for me, especially the instrumental Van Morrison numbers used as love motifs. They are too sentimental for an Antonioni picture, even an autumnal one, and I count myself a Van Morrison fan. Wenders was able to prevail upon Antonioni to trim some of the sex scenes, particularly one of Peter Weller going down on Chiara Caselli. Even so, some observers, like Michael Atkinson of the Village Voice, found the amount of young female flesh on display to be gratuitous. It does seem like every female actress under forty gets totally nekkid in this flick. I am a little more tolerant of this than Mr. Atkinson. Seniors should be indulged their erotic reveries since some of them can only dream rather than do.

Vincent Perez and Irène Jacob

What is best about Beyond the Clouds and most distinctively Antonionian is its mise-en-scène. The film is otherworldly gorgeous. Lovers tease each other as they walk down ancient streets and foggy corridors pitched on the edge of oblivion. The eternal recurrence of romance, its ebb and flow, is evoked through water imagery. Parting and its sweet ache are memorably evoked. What is most uneven about the film is the acting. It is as if the players hit their marks and then could do what they want. Malkovich is fine and Irène Jacob is sublime. Jean Reno is wasted as are Mastroianni and Moreau. Peter Weller and Chiara Caselli show great charm. Kim Rossi Stuart and Inés Sastre are as charmless and at sea as Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in Zabriskie Point. Sophie Marceau looks great, but her performance is deplorable. I broke out laughing when her character claimed to have stabbed her father twelve times. I was not convinced. Similarly, Fanny Ardant muffs her drunk scene. Lovers of Mr. Antonioni's work should see Beyond the Clouds, others may be baffled.

Resurrection

         

Bi Gan's Resurrection demonstrates that the mechanism of cinema still has a pulse. I find that my previous remarks on Bi Gan still hold, but that Resurrection represents a wholehearted dive into the unconscious realms of surrealism. Some have accused the film of oneiric onanism, but I find the film contains pointed insights into both film and Chinese history. Titles trumpet the film's theme at the onset. The world is split into two, Yin and Yang, those who eschew dreams to live eternally and those rebels who live to dream; monikered here "the Deliriants". The film's one constant is the Deliriant figure embodied by Chinese boy bander Jackson Yee in a remarkable performance. The Deliriant's travails are shown in five discrete episodes. Each episode represents both a period in the history of cinema and modern China. The cinematic style used in each episode mimics that of the period. Thus, the opening section, set in the 1920s, is silent and filmed like the magic lantern visions of Méliès. The following episode, set during China's conflict with Japan, is shot using the conventions of expressionistic noir. And so on.

In each episode, the Deliriant lives on the fringes of society, a criminal, mongrel or monster. Throughout, there is a consistent aura of paranoia. The Deliriant is always ensnared or trapped by some aspect of society. In this respect, Resurrection stands as a veiled rebuke to Chinese authoritarianism. Bi Gan eschews the lengthy tracking shots of Long Day's Journey into Night enhancing the sense of the Deliriant's entrapment. That is until the last segment set on the eve of Y2K. In this section, the Deliriant is a young gang banger whose girl is under the control of a mobster. The camera follows the young lovers as they seek escape through the labyrinthian streets of the city. Only when they commandeer a barge and head out to sea, a recurring symbol of freedom in the film, do they seem at liberty.

Resurrection is chock full of film allusions. Now this can be a boon or a curse. The Bride has a host of references, not only Mary Shelley, but Bonnie and Clyde and Bartleby the Scrivener. Unfortunately, these allusion add little to the film. They merely serve to prop up a flimsy dramatic framework. Squeal, with its allusions to Barry Lyndon, is an example of a picture in which the film references add to its complexity and resonance. I feel much the same about Resurrection. The shout outs to Day of Wrath, The Lady From Shanghai, and Kiss Me Deadly add to the mood of mistrust and treachery. The China portrayed in Resurrection is the hall of mirrors of the modern totalitarian surveillance state.

Those seeking an overarching narrative in Resurrection are grasping at straws. The film is a set of variations on a theme. It is a movie designed to excite the mind's eye, as the continued use of the motif of the iris attests to. The episodes, as Tom Verlaine once put it, alternately dissolve and reveal. Actually Verlaine called it Dissolve/Reveal, a more cinematic version of the psychedelic pivot where the fire of everyday existence melts into the pool of the collective unconscious. The circularity of Resurrection's form, beginning and ending in a movie theater reflects the film's presentation of eternal recurrence. Same as it ever was through modern Chinese history. Deliriants of all stripes will find much to assay and treasure in this film.

Ghost Nursing

Shirley Yim consults a seer in Ghost Nursing

Wilson Tong's Ghost Nursing is the best exploitation film I've seen in some time. The folks at Vinegar Syndrome have issued a splendid looking Blu-ray of this 1982 supernatural horror flick. Shirley Yim stars as Jackie, a working gal who we witness fleeing Hong Kong and some large gambling debts for Thailand in the first reel. There she shares a crash pad with a cousin who cajoles her into selling her wares at a local dive. After being brutalized by a wealthy client, Jackie visits a local seer to gain insight into how she can change her run of bad luck. The seer gifts her a misshapen "child" to nourish who will, in turn, protect Jackie. Things start out promisingly for Jackie, she wins the attention of a hunky and kind suitor, but she does not completely fulfill her part of the bargain and harsh consequences result. 

Ghost Nursing resembles a graphic novel or comic book, as we used to call them, in the best possible way. Visually lurid with bold primary colors, the Vinegar Syndrome disc does justice to the palette of the film. The camera set-ups are outstanding, especially for a film made for such a low budget. The exploitive bits of the film are somewhat undercut by the seamy treatment Jackie experiences. The film editing jumps rapidly through scenes, particularly during the film's gonzo final third. This disguises the brilliantly schlocky practical effects and causes the viewer to get swept up in Ghost Nursing's WTF rush.

Hell's Highway

Tom Brown and Richard Dix

Rowland Brown's Hell's Highway is a vital and nervy B feature from Radio Pictures. This David O. Selznick production beat I Was a Fugitive on the Chain Gang to the punch in the prison exposé sweepstakes of 1932 by opening two months before the more remembered Warner Brothers feature. Hell's Highway stars Richard Dix as an inveterate bank robber facing a lifetime behind bars. He languishes in a shambolic prison camp presided over by a cruel commandant (perpetual baddie C. Henry Gordon). The conditions are medieval in their cruelty as the shackled prisoners break rocks in the hot sun in a penal system built on graft and greed. All the prisoners' wear targets on their backs in a picture that is extremely grungy and deglamorized for a Hollywood flick. Dix's character yearns to break free, but when his kid brother (Tom Brown) joins him in stir, his perspective changes. If you've seen one prison picture you might think you've seen them all, however Hell's Highway wizzes by in 65 minutes of feverish intensity that includes two prison breaks, murder, adultery, intimations of homosexuality, institutional racism, blackmail, torture, and arson.

The film's editing is swift and ironic. A prisoner's drawings spring to animated life. Popular tunes, mostly sung by the black prisoners, serve as aural transitions for this procession of carnage. Sultry blues concerning adultery (Frankie and Johnny) and dope (Willie the Weeper) create an aura of doom. Brown captures the gloomy delirium of the prisoners' plight in sweaty close-ups. The only note of hope in the picture is embodied by Whiteside (Stanley Fields, omnipresent in 1930s Hollywood), a reformer heralding the change coming with the New Deal. William K. Everson has noted how Gordon's character prefigures Hume Cronyn's fascistic prison warden in Brute Force. Similarly, Charles Middleton's mystic convict presages John Steinbeck's defrocked preacher, Jim Casy, in 1939's The Grapes of Wrath. The picture originally had Dix die after being pursued by hound dogs in a swamp, but reshoots directed by John Cromwell give us a slightly less tragic ending. Brown is credited with over twenty screenplays, but his credits as a director are few owing to his alcoholism, communism, and irascibility. Alexander Korda famously fired him on the set of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Nevertheless, on Hell's Highway he creates memorable vignettes with over twenty memorable supporting performers. Dix, who I find oafish in most of his other pictures, is at his brawny best under Brown's direction. 

The Adventures of Hajji Baba

                     

Don Weis' The Adventures of Hajji Baba is a wide screen Technicolor hoot. When I compare it to such tired, socially responsible crap from 1954 as The Country Girl, I further appreciate Weis' buoyancy and colorful flair. The film is exotic schlock, a formula producer Walter Wanger had followed for 1942's Arabian Nights. The Adventures of Hajji Baba, likewise, did boffo biz. Why? The film has a shopworn plot, little characterization, but boasts more flesh on the screen than any other American film of the 1950s. Fifteen minutes had to be shorn from the American cut before it could be shown in the UK. After Weis establishes the film's milieu in one shot, color coordinated slave girls behind bars, he shows Hajji Baba (John Derek) plying one of his trades, which include Don Juan, barber, masseuse, and swordsman, by giving Claude Akins an oily rubdown. I hope Derek got hazard pay. Weis is able to instantly conjure the camaraderie of a community, notwithstanding the fact that he has a cast of very unlikely Arabs, such as the blue eyed Derek.

Establishing a milieu: the first shot of The Adventure of Hajji Baba

Hajji is tasked with protecting a willful princess (Elaine Stewart, as stiff as knotty pine) during a bewildering number of fracases. They both get tied up and tortured numerous times. Hajji makes time with every featured femme in the flick. Despite this and the countless harems we see, the women in this picture all have spunk and agency. In fact, one of the gals Hajji locks lips with is the leader of a rebellious Amazon gang played by flame haired Amanda Blake; soon to be Miss Kitty on television's Gunsmoke. This flick conveys the cheap thrills of pulp and peplum within an eye popping comic book framework. John Derek, villainized as Bo Derek's Svengali, is not bad. I prefer him to Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter. Weis started out promisingly with such trifles as The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, I Love Melvin, and this picture. By the 1960s, he was hopelessly out of step: Billie and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini are among the worst pictures of any era. Weis' bread and butter became television work: glimpses of a jaunty survivor can be found in episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Remington Steele.

 

Another factor that helps make The Adventures of Hajji Baba spritely entertainment is its vigorous score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Tiomkin was coming off the huge success of his score for High Noon and its attendant single, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin. Some thought Frankie Laine's hit version of the ballad saved that film commercially. Consequentially, a single was derived from the main theme of ...Hajji Baba featuring Nat King Cole on vocals with Nelson Riddle arranging. It was never more than a B side, but Cole's mellifluous voice pops up every five minutes of the film burbling "...Hajji Baba." It is bananas, but fits snugly within a film that is already cuckoo for cocoa puffs. Tiomkin's orchestral score is exciting and exotic without depending on Orientalist tropes.

 

L'Amour et les Forets

Virginie Efira and Melvil Poupaud

Valérie Donzelli's L'Amour et les Forêts (Love and the Forests) is a not quite good film with many elements that I enjoyed. The flick was released in the US in 2024 under the anodyne title Just the Two of Us. Ms. Donzelli and Audrey Diwan adapted the script from Éric Reinhardt's novel. The film chronicles an abusive marriage from the point of view of the mistreated wife, Blanche (Virginie Efira). The story is told in flashback as Blanche recounts the arc of her marriage to Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud) to her divorce lawyer. Blanche and Grégoire enjoy a whirlwind romance though Blanche's twin sister, Rose (Ms. Efira doing double duty), is not sold on the lug. After the happy couple settle down and produce two children, Grégoire reveals his needy and controlling nature. Starved for true affection, Blanche takes a lover which sends hubby over the edge. Grégoire morphs into a furniture smashing monster who spies on his wife and drives her to a suicide attempt. A stay in a mental hospital helps bring Blanche to her senses and she leaves the facility determined to leave her husband. More (mild) terror awaits, of course. 

I liked some of Ms. Donzelli's directorial strategies. We first see Blanche against a fragmented background and scraps of memories, usually concerning happy times with her lover, intersperse her reverie. This seems an apt way to covey that Blanche is trying to piece together the shards of her broken life. However, some techniques don't work. I usually like it when a director color codes a film, but the choice to use red for eros and blue for fear seems too facile to me. The film lacks humor or irony. The only touch that gave me a mordant chuckle was that Blanche and Grégoire secret shared love word is verite. I think the initial rendezvous between Blanche and her lover is bungled. He breaks the ice with her by teaching her archery, surely a prime opportunity to register the thwack of cupid's dart. However, the scene is neither elegant nor erotic. Certainly, as this former archery counselor can attest, no one on the set knew how to properly notch and release an arrow.

For a psychological thriller, L'Amour et les Forêts lacks psychological insight. We learn nothing of Grégoire's background or family. He is a relative cipher and that makes the film a little too formulaic. Now this flaw may stem from the source novel, but it flattens the film's texture. I also felt the Tartuffe reference was too on the nose in trumpeting the theme: two faces have I. Nevertheless, the level of acting in the film is outstanding. Ms. Efira, a major star in Europe but under appreciated stateside, is particularly adept at projecting her character's plight through her soulful eyes. I thought Mr. Poupaud's performance was good at expressing his character's surface charm and desperation, but it lacked volcanic energy during the numerous frenzied rages. The supporting players are uniformly superb, especially Dominique Reymond as Blanche's lawyer, Marie Rivière, and Virginie Ledoyen.

Book Review: Hitchcock & Herrmann by Steven C. Smith

Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann mug for a publicity shot

Steven C. Smith's Hitchcock and Herrmann is a well written and researched survey of the collaboration between the two maestros that lasted from 1955 (The Trouble with Harry) to 1964 (Marnie). The relationship foundered when Hitchcock rejected Hermann's proposed score for Torn Curtain, but it is amazing that the collaboration between these two needy and anxious geniuses lasted as long as it did. Mr. Smith's reliance on first person interviews, not all his own, prevents the book from suffering from the phantasms of some of the volumes about Hitchcock. Smith's main bailiwick is music, he is the author of esteemed biographies of both Herrmann and Max Steiner, so the tome should have been titled Herrmann and Hitchcock. However it is titled, the book is welcome because there is an oceanic amount of scholarship on Hitchcock, but only a trickle about Herrmann. Instead of rehashing his biography about Herrmann, Smith enlists a bevy of music lovers, ranging from conductor/composer William Stromberg to New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, to analyze and assess Hermann's scores. The book is learned, but not in an ostentatious way. You do not need a background in music theory to appreciate the book.

That said, I wish it had a discography. Herrmann produced an amazing array of music and guidance is needed. Besides the scores for his Hitchcock films, I recommend the scores to Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Devil and Daniel Webster (which shows off his debt to Charles Ives), Jane Eyre, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Day the Earth Stood Still, On Dangerous Ground, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Cape Fear, Jason and the Argonauts, The Bride Wore Black, Sisters, Taxi Driver, and, my personal favorite, Fahrenheit 451. Some of these are hard to track down, but all are worth listening to on their own. Smith touches on the full breadth of Herrmann's career, from music for radio and television shows to classical cantatas, so I am sure there is much more to explore.

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Sally Field and Lewis Pullman

Olivia Newman's adaptation of Remarkably Bright Creatures is pleasant fare. Any adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt's bestselling novel would suffer from the contrivances and cutesy anthropomorphism of that magically realistic work, but Newman's restraint and the efforts of a well chosen and talented cast made for palatable viewing even for this hardened cynic. Set in the present day Pacific Northwest, the film and novel tells of two damaged loners who bond over an aging octopus in a small aquarium. The octopus (voiced mellifluously by Alfred Molina) is named Marcellus and provides occasional narration, somewhat dismissive of his human captors, that gives the film a welcome sardonic note. Tova (Sally Field) is an elderly widow in a small coastal town work who works nights at the aquarium where Marcellus becomes her sounding board. After Tova injures her ankle, she tutors her replacement, Cameron (Lewis Pullman), a drifter at loose ends after the dissolution of his band. Both Tova and Cameron have trauma lingering from their past which, with the help of each other and Marcellus, they work through.

If you detect a bit of snideness to this description, that would be accurate. The reveals of the mysteries of Tova and Cameron's past trauma are extremely pat and predictable. However, the scenery is pleasant, the CGI sterling, and Newman's brisk pacing never lets us focus too closely on the many improbabilities of the plot. Remarkably Bright Creatures' supporting cast makes the film a good hang. In what could have been token roles, romantic foils for the two leads, Sofia Black-D'Elia and Colm Meaney both display great charm and skill. It is certainly nice to see Mr. Meaney, who has played a host of villains and boors in a long career,  shine in an appealing role. The fact that his character is a Deadhead portrayed for once without cliché is an added bonus even to someone like me who has never cottoned to Jerry Garcia and company. Tova's female friends, who are self-dubbed the "Knit-Wits" and include Joan Chen and Beth Grant. are an amusing flibbertigibbet Greek chorus. Their standout is Kathy Baker, at the end of a career that has not matched her talent, who gets to tell Tova to snap out of her funk in the film's best monologue.  

The presence of Sally Field often elicits a diabetic reaction from critics and sophisticated audiences. First, the legacies of Gidget and The Flying Nun had to be overcome. Even when she won two Oscars, Field's plain Jane sincerity ("You like me, you like me") brought more ridicule than respect. In the long run though, I believe she has given as many great screen performances as Meryl Streep. It is a testament to Ms. Fields' talent and Ms. Newman's touch that Tova never seems ridiculous even when addressing an octopus. Ms. Newman also brings out heretofore unexploited aspects of Lewis Pullman's capabilities. His warmth and ingratiating awkwardness here bode well for his future.              

Squeal

Algars Vilims and Kevin Janssens

Aik Karapetian's Squeal, currently streaming on Tubi, is the most interesting and impressive film I've seen since Sam Raimi's Send Help. Squeal received no theatrical release in the US and has generated little critical scrutiny. The reasons for this are obvious. While only superficially a horror film, a foreigner is chained up inside a pig barn a la Hostel, there is enough porcine viscera on display to seemingly disqualify the picture from serious attention. Also what kind of publicity can a film directed by an Armenian set in Latvia and populated by its denizens receive. However, Squeal is a deceivingly complex allegory, chock full with allusions, that seems to me one of the best films released in 2021.    

Belgian actor Kevin Janssens plays Samuel, a visitor to Latvia who we first encounter driving that country's back roads searching for his long lost father. He accidentally strikes a pig in the road, who will prove to be his guide on this hero's journey, and then he encounters a dour local woman named Kirke (Laura Silina). She beckons him to seek shelter at the pig farm she runs with her aged father (a splendidly sulphureous Aigars Vilims). She feeds Samuel and plies him with homemade vodka and when he awakes the next morning, he finds that he is an enchained prisoner living in a pigsty. After a few obligatory beatings, Kirke and her father are able to convince Samuel to help out by performing the most odious chores on the farm. Kirke, who has learned some English from her dead mother, is able to converse with Samuel and they tentatively bond. However, Samuel is coveted by two neighboring elders while their grotesque charge (a stunning Normunds Griestins), Jancuks, wants to take Kirke for his own. Complications ensue until Samuel, briefly, gains his freedom with the help of the magically realistic pig; a pattern that repeats.

Laura Silina

I don't want to dwell too much on the plot because, despite its fabulistic nature, Squeal has a few surprises in store that I don't want to divulge. One way to interpret the film is as a political allegory like Animal Farm. Though both works posit pigs as the lumpen proletariat, Squeal is not about the Russian Revolution. Instead it functions as an allegory about resistance to and assimilation of immigrants in modern day Europe. Samuel is initially derided and vilified as a "foreigner" by the locals. However, because of his physical prowess, Samuel earns the respect of the rural folk. By film's end he has been assimilated into the community, marrying and impregnating Kirke. The film never descends into mere allegory because of the multi-dimensionality of the characters and performances. All the leads are superb. Mr. Janssens, who is chained and naked for the first third of the film, gives one of the best physical performances I've seen in some time. His combination of brawniness and vulnerability reminded me of Viggo Mortensen's performances in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. The film avoids a fairy tale ending as Samuel spies the magical pig who has aided him leaving the farm for a life of freedom. He wonders if he is better off enjoying the tyranny of domesticity or the liberty of the rootless. It illustrates the binary posited by the great writer Dave Hickey: is he a pirate or a farmer?

The other aspect of this intriguing film that I want to touch on are its allusions to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, another tale of an outsider and his troubling assimilation into European society. Both films employ an ironic and omniscient narrator. The musical theme played during two key scenes between Kirke and Samuel is one of the two love themes employed in Barry Lyndon: the Irish folk tune "Women of Ireland". The scene where Kirke serves Samuel a meal mirrors the one in which Redmond Barry is seduced by a comely German woman. The twist in Squeal is that the meal is a honey trap. A later scene between Kirke and Samuel also offers a variation on the scene in which Barry attempts to locate a piece of cloth in the bodice of his kissing cousin. Furthermore, a scene in which Samuel rescues Kirke's father after he is shot during a fracas calls to mind Barry rescuing his injured commanding officer in the Kubrick film. I feel that the allusions are neither obscure nor gratuitous, but add to the texture of a magnificent film that unspools in a scant 85 minutes. 

Hell Harbor

Lupe Vélez

Henry King's Hell Harbor is a raucous melodrama that belies King's later reputation as a staid and stodgy yarn spinner. The 1930 film is a vehicle for Lupe Vélez and was one of the last gasps of Inspiration Pictures which had been formed by King, Charles H Duell, and Richard Barthelmess in 1921 to make Tol'able David.  Vélez plays Anita Morgan who has lived all her life in a small port city on an unnamed Caribbean island yearning for something bigger and more exciting. Her father (Gibson Gowland), a descendent of the pirate Henry Morgan, is a brute who wants to barter her off to an unscrupulous and repellent moneylender (Jean Hersholt). Anita's deus ex machina is an American sea captain played by the forgettable and forgotten John Holland.

As you can tell from the cursory description, the plot of Hell Harbor is no great shakes. It was cobbled together by at least three screenwriters from the novel Out of the Night by Rida Johnson Young. Young wrote over thirty plays and musicals and is best known for writing the book and lyrics to Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta; not my jam, really. However, with the exception of Mr. Holland, the cast of Hell Harbor is continually interesting. Where else can you see the two male leads of Greed reunited and as venal as ever. Before she became a punchline in films like Mexican Spitfire, Vélez was an appealing and beguiling leading lady. She provides much needed spunk and and charm to this flick. Goofy comic relief is provided by two dependable veterans: Harry Allen and Al St. John. King's direction sometimes seems crude and haphazard, but there are moments of sublime lyricism, too. Rondo Hatton appears as a bouncer.

The Cabin in the Cotton

Richard Barthelmess and Bette Davis           

Michael Curtiz's The Cabin in the Cotton is one of the more under rated American films of 1932. This Warners/First National flick is one of many pictures about rural Americana released after the salad days of Griffith and Ince, but before the fateful Variety headline Hix Nix Stix Pix. The Cabin in the Cotton is set amidst the cotton fields of the American South and is based on a 1931 novel by Harry Harrison Knoll. The adaptation was by Paul Green, a then noted, now forgotten playwright who won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Abraham's Bosom. Green, who was leftist enough to collaborate with Kurt Weill and sleep with Lotte Lenya, amplifies the portrait of class warfare present in the novel. The film has a frankness about class issues that would be remarkable even if the film was released to today.

When the film commences, the main character, Marvin Blake (Richard Barthelmess), is the teenaged son of tenant farmers working the cotton fields owned by Lane Norwood (Berton Churchill). Marvin is trying to better himself by going to school when his plans are upended by his father's sudden death. Norwood agrees to pay for Marvin's continued schooling, if he will work for Norwood after he gets his degree. Marvin ends up running Norwood's general store and keeping the books for him. However, Norwood has an ulterior motive for his kindness to Marvin. His tenant farmers, who resent Norwood for the usurious loans he has saddled them with, have been pilfering cotton and other goods from Norwood and he wants Marvin to rat on them. In turn, the tenant farmers want Marvin to use his smarts to sell their ill-gotten cotton. Marvin's plight is mirrored by the love triangle he finds himself in. The other two points being Betty (Dorothy Jordan), the earnest daughter of a tenant farmer, and Madge (Bette Davis), the saucy daughter of Norwood. After the tumult of melodramatic events, including a lynching and a fire, a kindly district attorney and Marvin are able to negotiate a truce between the farmers and the landowners.

The Cabin in the Cotton is strictly a backlot film. Painted backdrops and rear projection documentary footage are utilized to give the illusion of the outdoors. That is just as well, because Curtiz has always struck me as a director who is not really interested in portraying nature for its own sake. He is more at home in portraying the tangle of human relationships (most successfully in Casablanca) and The Cabin in the Cotton's scenario gives him ample opportunity to etch ambiguous motivations. Berton Churchill's Norwood is your typical Churchill performance, that of a bloviating and selfish fat cat. Yet, not all of the landowners are portrayed in the same light. Likewise, not all of the tenant farmers in the film are paragons of virtue. Some are as venal as Norwood and the efforts of such legendary stock players as Russell Simpson and Henry B. Walthall make them come to life. Curtiz's signature motif in the film are close-ups of hands, pushing and pulling, grabbing and entreating as a symbol of emotional manipulation. Another of Curtiz's coups in the film is the memorable staging of two dance sequences. The farmers' dance is to old time fiddle music as they do the Virginia Reel to Turkey in the Straw and The Girl I Left Behind Me. Norwood, after prodding by Madge, hires a black (or "yella" as one hick describes them) band from Memphis who play that new fangled jazz music. At one point, the band is instructed to play a "peckerwood wiggle", which mocks the poor folks.

Barthelmess, who was a big silent star, was nearing the end of his career as a leading man. At 37, he is too old to play his character. He never had the greatest amount of range, but I think his closed in performance, an augury of his embittered take in Only Angels Have Wings, is appropriate for the role. His character is a study in vacillation and Barthelmess is able to convey this. Ms Jordan's character is so anodyne that she hardly registers at all. The opposite is true of Ms. Davis who gives an outstanding, indeed star making, performance. This is the film in which she delivered the immortal line, "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair."

Davis plays a fun loving minx without a trace of censoriousness. Her Madge is a gloriously natural creature, never ashamed to flirt, pet, or get turned on.

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.

Outcome

Keanu Reeves and Jonah Hill

Jonah Hill's Outcome is a toothless Hollywood satire destined for obscurity. Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a top flight Tinseltown star returning to his career after a five year hiatus brought on by various addictions. As part of his rehabilitation, Hawk is making amends to figures from his past who he has let down, ranging from his mother (a game Susan Lucci) to his first manager (Martin Scorsese). However, his comeback is threatened when Hawk is blackmailed by someone who has got a hold of a compromising video from his past. 

Mr. Hill, who wrote the screenplay along with Ezra Woods, also appears as Hawk's lawyer. Unfortunately, Jonah Hill the director indulges Jonah Hill the actor in a number of scenery chewing scenes that reek of self-indulgence. There is some smart repartee in the film. I did enjoy Ivy Wolk's wry asides and David Spade is well cast as a weasel. However, Hill has little visual imagination and most of the cast, especially Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer, are stranded in rote roles. Outcome is not funny enough to be an effective farce and not insightful enough for any dramatic payoff. The fact that Hawk can't remember the incident that he is being blackmailed about makes one wonder what the big deal is. If it was established early on that Hawk was enjoying sexual congress with a dog on the video or something of that nature, then his panic would be understandable. As it is, it is hard for the audience to maintain sympathy for a handsome and rich character who is not really under siege. Once the nature of the video is revealed, the somewhat less than shocking nature of it renders much of what has gone on before as superfluous. A description that would fit the entirety of Outcome to a tee.                                    

Little Trouble Girls

Jara Sofija Ostan

Urška Djukić's Little Trouble Girls is one of the most promising feature debuts of 2025. This compact Slovenian film tells the story of shy and sheltered Lucija and her sexual and psychological awakening during a summer choir retreat at a convent. A short scene of Lucija riding in a car with her mother displays her repressed background, as her mother expresses her disapproval of girls Lucija age, sixteen, wearing lipstick. Once at the convent retreat, Lucija falls under the spell of the choir's queen bee, the more mature and sophisticated Ana Maria (Mina Svajger). Ana Maria, who would qualify in the US as a mean girl, leads Lucija astray with sapphic come-ons and by urging Lucija to join her in ogling the construction workers toiling at the convent.

Lucija is, at first, intrigued by Ana Maria, but, ultimately, becomes justifiably repulsed by her manipulations. She makes the mistake of tattling on Ana Maria to her choir master (a suitably spineless Saša Tabaković). The conductor treats her not with understanding, but disdain. He reacts by humiliating Lucija in front of the choir, criticizing her, admittedly pinched and hesitant, singing. Lucija becomes persona non grata within her peer group. Director Djukić manages to elicit marvelously unaffected performances from her young cast. She crowds the frame in the interior sequences to suggest the dual nature of adolescent intimacy: both alluring and suffocating. She gives the film a palpable feel of sensuality, foregrounding the throb and heave of bodies. When Lucija masturbates in a bathroom stall, Djukić provides a close-up of her thorax, writhing with forbidden pleasure. When Lucija spies on a particularly hunky worker, Djurkić provides a point of view shot from her perspective of the man's muscular arm, shimmeringly beautifully in the sun. The outdoor sequences in the film, workers toiling at the construction site or bathing in a stream revel in the plein air beauty of natural light.

Jara Sofija Ostan and Mina Svajger: intimacy that is both alluring and suffocating

The role of music in the film also is a clue to the ambivalence with which Djurkić regards beauty, both sacred and profane. Nearly all of the choir's songs are paeans to the Almighty. They are beautiful, yet practiced and rote. True aural beauty is experienced only once in the film by Lucija when she happens upon a sextet of nuns singing in glory to God. The open hearted beauty of their singing reflects the nuns' inner devotion, something the members of the choir cannot approach. This sequence also sets up the extraordinary last shot of the film in which Lucija feeds upon grapes as Sonic Youth perform the gleefully blasphemous song that provides the film's title. Earlier, Ana Maria tells Lucija that they must eat sour grapes as expiation for their sins, but, by film's end, she has been revealed as a false prophet. Lucija, now outside of the web of her sinister peers, can enjoy the fruit and her solitude for their own sake. She may not adhere to the strictures of a holy order, but she has learned that the world is awash in sin. This is something Sonic Youth, no strangers to Catholic guilt, convey also. The key line in the song Little Trouble Girls is "...I'm really bad." Once an individual has accepted that man is born in sin, that knowledge is liberating whether one is seeking expiation or not.