Papillon

I tend to watch a lot of French films, so I guess it’s fitting that I should take up two Hollywood mainstreamers in a row with a marginal connection to France – Papillon here and The Day of the Jackal next. (Coincidentally, these two films share another characteristic which is quite the opposite of the Hollywood norm - there is no love interest in either.) Or maybe not. Nobody is going to confuse Franklin J. Schaffner with Truffaut, Godard, or Varda. Still, even though Papillon has got to be one of the sloppiest major studio releases ever made, it has enormous power, power that is heightened and intensified by the fact that Henri Charriere really did escape from Devil’s Island and lived to tell the tale. It’s a good thing that Schaffner had enormous facility with this kind of picture because the mistakes in the movie border on the incredible – liquids, both blood and water, quite visibly splash on the camera lens and completely destroy all suspension of disbelief. The guillotine scene is unintentionally hilarious, with continuity and editing goofs that make you wonder if the crew was stoned both during filming and in post production; and the penultimate scene in which Papillon dives into the ocean and we can clearly see the diver supporting the float beneath him – so readily discernible that he or she could almost be a part of the story – these are all truly debauched and unworthy. (There are, in fact, more mistakes, easily Googled. I don’t have the heart to go through everything. One involves the great actor Anthony Zerbe in the role of the leader of the leper colony.)

Whatever; here I want to talk about one small stretch of this long movie, and that’s the closing credits, which compromise not quite a full two minutes. This sequence almost makes me think that Schaffner actually planned a lot of the errors in order to have them work in concert with the credits at the end as a kind of reflexitivity. As Papillon floats in the ocean on his makeshift raft after his daring jump from the cliffs, a narrator heretofore absent is mailed in from the universe to inform us that he escaped, lived the rest of his life in freedom, and outlived the notorious French penal colony. It isn’t clear to me what the advantage is of having a narrator bash in as an uninvited guest like this, and putting the message in text on the screen would have been just as intrusive and distracting. Perhaps Schaffner felt the point was too difficult to get across with more scenes in a “show, don’t tell” kind of way. Perhaps more scenes would have made a long movie even longer, and thus a little less commercially viable. Whatever the case, I think the consistent breaking off of the suspension of disbelief, whether intentional or not, sets up the images that accompany the credits in the end in a new and different way because watching the end credits becomes a necessary part of understanding the movie. I’ve often wondered what percentage of an audience actually sits and watches the final credits without popping the disc out or leaving the theater. It must be very low, and that’s because a definitive conclusion to the film has usually already been shown on the screen. Nobody cares who the gaffer or the third assistant director is. But here, as we watch the images of the abandoned prison – empty buildings eroded by time and covered in unsupervised vegetation – the enormity of the task that Papillon undertook, his quest for freedom, grows larger and larger in our minds. How many of us could match his zeal? The number is probably smaller than the number of us who sit through the closing credits.

This is a film full of action and violence, which necessarily makes for graphic scenes. But Schaffner also has an eye for the type of more understated, nuanced scene that a lesser director wouldn’t think of lining up. For example, in a scene showing the yard of the notorious prison the camera starts on a small lizard sitting atop the blazing hot roof of the building. A scene depicting a butterfly hunt pays significant attention to the fluttering insects trying to avoid the nets. In a scene in which the prisoners first arrive on the island a hog is shown happily rolling in the mud in the bottom left of the screen. And so on. But the final scenes that I want to draw attention to here are devoid of people and animals and only show the various parts of the decrepit prison as backdrop for the names of everyone involved in the making of the film while haunting music by Schaffner’s habitual composer, Jerry Goldsmith, builds to crescendo. The end effect upon us is, of course, contemplation of the nature of time. Time, we are being told by these pictures and the music in accompaniment, destroys everything. Sometimes the force of a human will – Papillon’s in this case – can combat it, or stall it off, but in the end the result is always a victory for time. And let’s not forget the cross breeding of the film and the meta-film, which is, overall, one of the most interesting features of Papillon.

Notes on a Scandal

            On this blog we generally try, with any given film, not to attempt to unravel more than maybe one half of one percent of the issues and questions that the film may raise.  This restriction sometimes hurts, especially with a picture like Notes on a Scandal that could probably support a 150 page essay on its own.  This motion picture is so meticulously planned, so well storyboarded, and so unusually rich both visually and verbally that it’s painful to pick and choose.  (Of course, it’s also incoherent and preposterous in places.  So be it.)  Here I’d like to rope off two different scenes that feature the same exact surprising revelation about a character.  One comes quite early on in the picture, the other much later.  Let’s get some background.

            Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett is well cast in the role, especially in the way her habitually loose, floppy clothes hang off her tall, lanky body; “Bash” to her husband) is new to teaching, beginning her first year in the art department at St. George’s School.  In her thirties, she’s begun a scandalous forbidden affair with her fifteen year old student Connolly (Andrew Simpson).  In the early scene I’d like to glance at here a much older, psychotic, delusional veteran teacher named Barbara Covett (Judi Dench does what she can with the hopeless role) finds out about the affair; in the later scene her much older husband Richard (the great actor Bill Nighy in a sensational performance) finds out. 

            Barbara is a lonely, bitter, misanthropic woman.  Her diary musings, given to us in great supply throughout the movie via voiceover narration, show her to be vain, condescending, manipulative, hateful, sneering, and a predator.  (We learn at the very end that a teacher, now gone, with whom she had a friendship – Jennifer Dodd – actually hit her with a restraining order.)  She is immediately taken with Sheba and watches her closely from a distance, making endless comments in her diary.  (In fact one of her diary entries opens the film – she remarks that her diary is the only thing to whom she trusts her secrets!)

            Barbara sees Sheba as “the wispy novice” who is “artfully disheveled” and that “they flock to her, even limp little Brian” (Brian being a meek, shy teacher who will play a key role later).  Of Richard, he’s a “crumbling patriarch”.  Their Down’s Syndrome child is a “court jester”.  When the family does some (admittedly trippy) dancing after dinner, this is “Bourgeoisie Bohemia.”  Yet, her sarcasm and rapier hate also betray an understanding of people born of deep and long experience – at coffee, when a fellow teacher remarks to Sheba and Barbara, “I’ve got an announcement,” Barbara says “You’re leaving St. George’s” and when the teacher says no, she then offers “Oh, then you’re pregnant,” which is correct.  She’s obviously seen the scene many times before.

            Barbara and Sheba first meet when the younger teacher is unable to stop a fight that breaks out in class between Connolly and Davis; Barbara rushes in to help.  She remarks that the boys are “little towers of testosterone”.  The incident gives her an opportunity to establish a beachhead with Sheba, a foundation for a friendship whose motives, we suspect, are not entirely sane or healthy. 

            Here’s how she finds out about Sheba and young Connolly- Sheba doesn’t show up for the school Christmas concert, so Barbara goes searching for her.  Seeing the lights on (it’s evening) in the art room, she proceeds to investigate. Of course she finds her – through a window she’s able to clearly see Sheba and Connolly having sex inside.  (In fact, the sighting is way too easy, which is a flaw in the film.  Anyone could have happened by and spotted the wrongdoing.)

            By this point we’ve gotten the feeling that Barbara is tough as nails and that very little in going to surprise or shock her, which makes the end of this scene remarkable.  The faces of the two women are caught in expressions that achieve what I’m tempted to call a kind of cinematic miracle.  Dench, Blanchett, director Richard Eyre and cinematographer Chris Menges all team up to create something extraordinarily powerful.  As Connolly sneaks away, Sheba has a kind of joyous naughty girl expression on her face that is worth twenty pages of dialogue.  Similarly, as Connolly comes out of the building and walks off, Barbara looks after him with a stare of incredulity that is absolutely priceless.  Right here – in just this one clip of film – the movie justifies itself as a piece of cinematic art many times over. 

            After cutting to Barbara, shell shocked, alone, in her apartment later that same night Eyre cuts quickly to Sheba in a supermarket parking lot with her mentally disabled boy, moving their groceries from the shopping cart to their vehicle.  Barbara calls her.  The comparison of the shots of the two women on the phone with each other is instructive – the older, alone, in her tidy apartment, holding the cordless phone in her hand exactly as well she might have done with a cordless rotary phone fifty years ago, the younger, with her child, balancing the cell phone on her shoulder, multi tasking. 

            Caught red handed, Sheba can do nothing but agree to a meeting.

            Eyre’s style here is very classically oriented – straight cuts, plenty of shot-reverse shot technique, commentative music (a score with no percussion by Phillip Glass that sets the mood).  As Barbara questions Sheba about the affair Sheba opens up in a way that she will not when, later, her husband finds out about the dalliance in a much more explosive scene.  (Keep in mind that Barbara has her own ulterior motives, selfish and personal, that I’m not getting into here with any depth –she manipulates the situation to her advantage, to suit her own purposes.  Sheba explains that Connolly came to her seeking help with his drawing (as it turns out almost everything of importance that Connolly tells Sheba turns out to be a calculating lie) and that one thing led to another.  She says it was “innocent”.  (Interestingly enough, later, when she is trying to explain it all to her husband, she claims the reverse.)  She sends him away but he “refused to accept it” and kept coming back. 

            But here’s the rub – she tells Barbara that it began to feel like their secret, and secrets are seductive.  While she knew it was all wrong, she says she began to feel “entitled”.  It asked her, Why shouldn’t you be bad?  You’ve earned the right (by being a good wife, loving mother, etc.) – why shouldn’t you transgress a little?  And so the bad girl impulse that we glimpsed on her face a little earlier comes around full circle.  

            And yet later, when she has the opportunity to explain the affair to her husband, all she can do is stammer that she doesn’t know why she did it.  We can have a field day with this, of course, and all the circumstances are not identical.  For example, Barbara found out about the affair entirely on her own, by being a peeping Tom, whereas Richard finds out because Connolly’s mother bursts into the house and throws Sheba a beating (in turn, she has found out about the affair through the grapevine – Barbara planted the rumor with the whiney, wimpy Brian a few days before and waited for it to spread).

            This film, as I say, is very rich and abnormally well planned.  Very careful attention has to be paid in order to catch numerous slices of important dialogue and critical visual information.  Too, a lot of the supporting players are very strong – I have to conclude that Eyre is very strong with actors.  Phil Davis, Michael Maloney, Stephen Kennedy and Derbhle Crotty are all superb.  Bill Nighy absolutely steals the picture.  (Watch the scene in which Barbara is trying to get Sheba to come to the vet with her while Sheba’s family is waiting for her in the car, to go to Ben’s play!)  I guess what stimulates me to include it here is the different ways Sheba reacts to Barbara’s and to Richard’s learning of her taboo affair.  As an overall example of the various departments of the cinema it ain’t too bad, either.

Last Tango In Paris

           For the span of about fifteen minutes – from the start of the opening credit sequence until Paul and Jeanne make love against the window and then leave the apartment they will spend a great deal of the movie in together – this film is cinematic glory at its greatest.  The possibilities for the motion picture as a full blown art form are exploited to spectacular advantage in almost every way possible before the flick, unfortunately, starts a gradual slide into cliché, sensationalism, and melodramatic slop, as well as a real slowdown in the sheer virtuosity of the filmmaking. But what a start!!

            The part of the film I highlight here is bookended by two very distinct modes of the saxophonist Gato Barbieri.  His main theme is a mid tempo, moody ballad with all the characteristics of Barbieri’s Latin-fusion period, including the trademark Latin percussion, shakers, and rattles, but as Paul and Jeanne exit the apartment and go forth into Paris there explodes onto the soundtrack some wild Ornette Coleman type free jazz on the piano (Barbieri was playing with Coleman soulmate Don Cherry around this time) - the perfect accompaniment for the half macho, half joyful timbre of the scene. 

            The painter Francis Bacon once said “Even in love, the barriers of the skin cannot be broken down.”  The point behind the master stroke of using two Bacon portraits, a male and a female, to display the credits against is that it can impart a half aesthetic/half intellectual message or one that is fully aesthetic only, depending on the sensibilities of the moviegoer.  It also speaks to Bertolucci’s immersion in culture – remember, this is the early 1970s.  I wonder if Bertolucci means for the male/female in Bacon’s paintings to correspond directly somehow to the two principal characters, or in merely a more general sense?  And seeing the name Jean-Pierre Leaud in the credits – what more can a cinephile ask for? 

            Fade in: we see Paul standing under the elevated train tracks.  The camera twists in from behind him, on the right, as he clutches his head in his hands and screams “Fucking God!” into the noise of the passing train above.  He’s a striking man in a long, almost orange colored coat; while his face dominates the screen for a second we see Jeanne, an equally striking looking individual, in soft focus, walking rapidly behind him, catching up on him.  His face wears confused, pathetic, hopeless, helpless, sad expressions.  As she catches up to him and passes on by, walking quickly, she stops to stare at him for a brief instant.  She is flamboyant beyond flamboyant – a funky black hat, long white coat, high black boots.  (The scene is in some respects owned by the costume designer Gitt Magrini.)  As she passes him Bertolucci makes sure to include in the shot, on the far left, a very conservative couple in black overcoats walking side by side – a total contrast and comparison to Brando and Schneider, a juxtaposition of the mundane and the spectacular.  And when she jumps over the broom of the street sweeper in her path we have our real first introduction to the spell cast by of one of the greatest female presences in the history of motion pictures.

            She rushes forward, hurrying on, jumps over the broom, and Bertolucci cuts to the street below where we see policemen – alert, accessible, and available, an ironic situation because it is the complete reverse of the circumstances  at the end of the film where there is not a cop to be found anywhere when Jeanne so desperately requires one.  There follow more close-ups of Paul’s perplexed face and both man and woman gaze upward at the apartment – she from right outside the building where it is located, he still underneath the train tracks.

            We’re wondering – who are these two?  What is their relationship to each other?  The questions are about to be both answered and prolonged.

            We get our first close up of Schneider as she contemplates the APARTMENT FOR RENT sign – what a superstar, maybe not Brando’s equal in acting ability but more than his equal in screen presence and charisma (she will repeat this situation with Jack Nicholson a few years later).  She hurries down the stairs to a café to phone her mother.  Two other people are in the restroom – an old woman brushing her dentures (the significance of which is…?) and Paul, brooding.  The only way he could have gotten there before her is to have gone straight down while she went up to the lobby of the building to read the APARTMENT FOR RENT sign.  In another moment he will be in a place just a shade before her once again – we can’t know it at the time, but while the camera stays on her in the phone booth, calling her mother, he gets the key to the apartment from the concierge and enters it.

           

            This phone call gives us our first little bit of exposition – Jeanne tells her mother that she is going to look at an apartment and then to the station to meet Tom, presumably her boyfriend or husband.  But the visual exposition is just as strong – she opens her coat, puts her hand on her hip, the camera lingers on her legs as she preens for it.  Bertolucci’s message is clear, and it’s not a feminist one – this is a woman primed to be fucked. 

            The concierge in the building pleads ignorance of the apartment for rent when Jeanne says, with great flourish, “I’m here for the apartment.”  The concierge says she knows nothing of the sign and complains that people come and go and she’s always the last to know.  She tells Jeanne to go look at the apartment herself if she so desires because she, the concierge, is (presciently) afraid of the rats.  She can’t find the key; Jeanne disgustedly turns to go; the concierge produces a duplicate with a cackle, making an insulting remark about Jeanne’s youth.  The concierge bursts into song, and a hand reaches out to place an empty bottle outside the door of an apartment.  The principal musical theme - a little too schmaltzy here - plays on the soundtrack.  Bertolucci throws in a neat little auteur move on the clank of the bottle, switching the focus from the concierge in the background to Jeanne in the foreground.  But the whole scene is an exercise in cinema – the camera starts back, off to the right, and slowly moves in on the window until the window is center shot.  This is reminiscent of the very first shot of the film that picked Brando up under the Metro tracks.

Jeanne ascends to the apartment in the elevator in a shot that’s lit in black and gray, in great contrast to the stark lambancy that the scenes have been framed in thus far. 

Once within the dark apartment she opens shades and the balcony doors and gets a fright to see Paul sitting by the fireplace.  She remarks that he must have come in behind her when she entered and left the door opened, but he says no, he was already there.  Almost instantly they’re talking about where the furniture should go.  He moves around; in a too obvious symbol, or metaphor, or whatever you want to call it, her reflection is shown in a cracked mirror.  This time the panning camera moves back, not in closer, as she asks him, in English “What are you doing?”  She – and we – are totally unable to make sense of this man’s dark, strange behavior.  Neither she nor we, the audience, know a thing about him as yet. 

In a shot photographed in a blue and white that clashes with everything else we’ve seen so far (as did the black and gray of the elevator shot), she goes to the bathroom and pees casually.  She returns; the camera backs up to show her black hat isolated on the floor; after she asks, “You still here?” he sweeps her up into his arms. 

As sex scenes often are in the movies, this once is a turn on, a turn off, and bewildering.  The brute animal force of it is electrifying, but there are too many questions – for example, they’ve passed each other twice already, once in the street under the train tracks and then again in the lavatory in the café.  They’re both unforgettable looking individuals – they don’t recognize each other in the apartment?  Perhaps they do but choose not to comment.  This would go a little way towards explaining the spontaneous combustion.

I can imagine what feminist critics might have to say about all this -especially the way her body jerks like a marionette after she rolls off him once they fall to the floor, and the clear shot of her pubic hair that accompanies this, to say nothing of Paul’s over the top priapic antics.  It’s not my purpose to defend or criticize this here. 

Oddly, though Paul never takes his coat off during any of the meeting, as they leave the building we see him, through the glass of the front door, putting it on.  What?!  When did he take it off? He wears an impish, almost mischievous, grin as they come out – not peccant in any way - while Jeanne seems shocked, dazed, confused.  He takes the sign APARTMENT FOR RENT down, crumples it up, throws it away – the lease is signed, the relationship has begun.