"Salma and the Apple" - Habibollah Bahmani (2011)

Salma and the Apple (Sib o Salma, 2011), a recent film by Iranian director Habibollah Bahmani, not only has the look and feel of a moral tale – its subject matter is self-consciously concerned with moral tales. In this respect it is like many Iranian films that are set in mundane circumstances but have a near universal scope.  The story relates how the moral convictions of a young seminarian affect those he encounters on a holiday visit to his home village.  Along the way, a question keeps coming to mind: what is truly important in life?

The screenplay for the film was written by Nasser Hashemzadeh, who I believe was one of the scriptwriters for Majid Majidi’s The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon, 2005), and it unfolds like a series of mythic parables that are interlinked to a common theme.  At the very beginning of the film, prior to the title credits, there is a hallucinatory scene of a young man meditating or praying in a pastoral setting.  The camera work here, featuring multiple dissolves of shots circulating and panning around a central point, will be repeated at critical points later in the story. There is then a cut to a young woman in a parked car along a highway roadside who had apparently dozed off while driving and has just awakened from a dream. The two figures in this opening sequence will be the focus of this film, the story of which proceeds to pass through four phases or “acts”.

1.  Introducing Sadeq
The first act introduces Sadeq (played by Hadi Dibaji), a young man who has returned for a visit to his provincial home after having been away studying at a seminary for several years. His parents are happy to see him, and his mother urges him while he is home to use the opportunity to go visit his aunt in a nearby town and ask for the hand of her daughter, Narges, in marriage (apparently marriage to her would also come with title to a small piece of land). She supplies him with a “suitor’s bundle” – a bag of small ceremonial presents to give as part of the marriage proposal ritual. 

As Sadeq proceeds with this mission, we see that his humble and benign demeanor seems to have a benevolent effect on all those that he meets.  When he takes an inter-city taxi trip, the driver turns out to be a former acquaintance, Hamed, who is agitated to see Sadeq with a suitor’s bundle.  It turns out that Hamed had hoped to marry Narges, himself, and seeing that Sadeq is seeking the betrothal of the woman he loves, he stops his car and punches out his passenger.  But Sadeq’s passive response displays boundless benevolence.  At the first opportunity, he sneaks away from the taxi, leaving his suitor’s bundle and a note to Hamed telling him to offer the presents to Narges and marry her – and have the accompanying land, too.  Such is Sadeq’s selfless way.

Continuing on the road, Sadeq encounters a shepherd, and they exchange some cryptic pleasantries. Encounters with this same shepherd will occur at other points, and these brief scenes seem to offer symbolic shifts introducing the next act of the story.

2.  The Apple
Sadeq stops by an orchard to perform his ablutions and say his prayers. When an apple drops from a nearby tree, he picks it up and takes a bite out of it.  But then he feels remorse – this apple tree clearly must belong to someone, and Sadeq feels that he should  have asked for permission to eat the apple.

He finds a gardener nearby and asks him for retroactive permission to eat his apple.  The gardener is intrigued by the young man’s moral rectitude and wants to engage him in further discussion.  Soon seeing, however, that he cannot get very far with Sadeq in such a discussion, he points out that the true permission that the young man seeks must come from the landlord, Seyed Jalal, and he tells young man where to find him.

When Sadeq finds Jalal, he is quickly given the permission he seems to seek, but then he is informed that Jalal is not the real landlord, either. The actual landlord had recently died, leaving his young daughter, Salma, who has recently arrived from the city to tidy up family affairs, as the true landlord.

3.  Sadeq meets Salma
At the house Sadeq is doing his ablutions again when he sees Salma (Sogol Qalatian) from a distance, and his head begins to spin, as evoked by another encircling dissolve-laden camera shot.  Later Sadeq talks to Salma, hoping that she will be the one to give him permission for having eaten the apple. Salma, though, is not so quick to grant him what he wants.  She is a university graduate in philosophy and is incredulous that she has encountered such a naive young man, finally asking him, “do you live in present time?”  She is impatient with such foolishness, but, like the gardener earlier, also charmed by Sadeq’s innocence.  She finally tells him that she will give him the retroactive permission he seeks on the condition that he start reciting from the Quran.  Immediately Sadeq goes to the garden and commences his recitations.

Sadeq assumes that he will have to recite the whole Quran, so this will take awhile. He stays the night, and there are further discussions. At dinner Sadeq mentions that he had come to the area to marry his niece (not having the occasion to mention that he had abandoned that mission to Hamed). Upon hearing this, Salma petulantly leaves the dining room. 

The next morning, Salma  criticises the Sadeq for always looking down and avoiding her gaze, and she tells him to go back to the place where he had left his “suitor’s bundle”.

4.  The Parting
So Sadeq is on the road again.  He runs into Hamed, who expresses guilt for having been so selfish earlier, returns Sadeq’s suitor’s bundle to him, and then urges him to go ahead and marry Narges.  Once again Sadeq’s benign, passive innocence has had the effect of summoning up the virtuous instincts of those he encounters. 

Then Sadeq runs into Jalal, who informs him that Salma has gone looking for him and has vanished into the woods.  Sadeq joins the search for her and while wandering in the fields has an incandescent, hallucinatory vision of encountering Salma by the apple tree in the orchard.  In the vision they sit down facing each other, and he looks her in the eye this time.  They are finally connected.  But then she suddenly vanishes, and he wakes up from his dream.

Sadeq goes back to the house, where he finds Salma safe and sound.  She tells him that she is planning to write a book on dreams (suggesting, as foreshadowed at the start of the film, that she has dreamed of him, too).  Then she asks him, “what was the verse you were repeating from the Quran last night?”  His rueful answer is simply, “is God not enough for His servant?”  Then he departs for good.

So the brief encounter between Salma and Sadeq ends without them really determining what is the essence of haram and halal.  Perhaps they are only left with vague feelings of unspecified guilt.  Certainly we, ourselves, may be left with questions concerning what it all means. 

In this connection, it is worthwhile to bring up two mythical stories from ancient religious teachings that may be evoked or suggested by this story:

• The story of Adam and Eve (Hawwā’) eating the apple in the Garden of Eden
• The story of Joseph (Yusuf) and Zuleika (Zulaikha)

The story of Adam and Eve is told in both Christian and Islamic versions, but there are some differences.  In the Christian story, Adam and Eve are told by God not to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Tempted by a serpent (thought to be Satan), though, Eve does eat the fruit and offers it to Adam. In the Quranic version of the story, Hawwā’ (Eve) does not tempt Adam to eat the fruit – they both simply shared the fruit together. Also neither the Bible nor the Quran explicitly mentions that the forbidden fruit was an apple. The idea of it being an apple is a Western tradition that may have been associated with translations of the Bible into Latin and confusions over the similarity of the Latin words for ‘apple’ (mālum) and ‘evil’ (mălum). Nevertheless, perhaps due to various cultural interminglings over time, it is my understanding that past Persian poets have explicitly referred to the forbidden fruit of this story as an apple, and so the idea of the “forbidden fruit” being an apple is familiar to many Iranians. Perhaps, then, the idea of the apple symbolically representing worldly temptation is an underlying motif in Salma and the Apple. 

The story of Yusuf and Zulaikha, meanwhile, may be more directly relevant to the Salma and the Apple narrative, and indeed Salma makes an explicit reference to the story during a conversation with Sadeq.  In that ancient story Joseph, son of Jacob, is dropped by his jealous brothers into a deep pit in the desert.  Passing traders find the boy and sell him to the Egyptian nobleman, Potiphar.  Potiphar’s wife, Zuleika, is soon overcome with lustful passion for the handsome Joseph, and she attempts to seduce him by various means. But Joseph, mindful of not committing the sin of adultery, resists her efforts. In the ancient Jewish version of the story, Zuleika is depicted at length as a relentless sexual predator, while the Quranic version offers only a relatively terse description of their interaction. Nevertheless, in all three Jewish, Christian, and Islamic holy texts, Zuleika is cast as an evil seductress bent on corrupting the handsome young man. However, later Persian Sufi poets Hafez, Rumi, and Jami cast her in an entirely different light, focussing on her self-effacing surrender to eternal love. From this latter perspective, Zuleika’s commitment to completely selfless love is akin to divine union with the mysterious Almighty.

So is Salma comparable to Zuleika in the ancient tale?  Certainly she has the lordly role here of the overseeing mistress (of the farm), and she may be also somewhat captivated by the innocent charm of Sadeq. But she never expresses any lustful desires for the young man, just a fascination [1].  All we are left with is vague inquisitiveness. And indeed that is the character of the entire film. We have an extended mood piece before us that has been enhanced by fine acting performances, evocative music (by Sattar Orkay), and occasionally dreamlike camera work.  But at the end a satisfying closure is not reached.

In the end Sadeq’s response to his own question, “Is God not enough for His servant?”, is to withdraw from life and return to the seminary.  By doing this he avoids corrupting himself, but he also misses an opportunity to find sublime enlightenment. The Persian Sufi poets had it right – the way to spiritual fulfilment is through loving engagement with another soulmate. The potential infinite rewards for taking this path outweigh the risks.  In fact even the brief encounter between Salma and Sadeq – that momentary engagement – accomplished something important and of permanence. For she was changed by him, and he was changed by her.
★★★

Notes:

1. The film presentation steers clear of any sensuous suggestiveness, and, for example, none of the nine or so women shown in the film show even a single strand of head hair.

“For a Few Dollars More” - Sergio Leone (1965)

Sergio Leone, who very early in his career served as a production assistant to Vittorio de Sica for Bicycle Thieves (1948), started off directing low-budget “sword and sandal” (aka peplum) epics in the late 1950s for the Italian film industry. But in 1964 he switched genres with his A Fistful of Dollars, which was set in the American Old West.  The extraordinary success of that film launched the ensuing craze of the “Spaghetti Western”, of which Leone was the acknowledged master.  Leone went on to make two sequels to A Fistful of Dollars – For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) – and together they are referred to as the “Dollars Trilogy” or the “Man With No Name Trilogy”.  All three films were very successful, but I believe the second production, For a Few Dollars More, is the best of the three. A Fistful of Dollars was more or less a direct copy of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) but recast into a Western setting, and while it was entertaining, it was inferior to Yojimbo.  The two subsequent “Dollars” films offered intensifications and exaggerations of Leone’s stylized dramatic techniques, but by the time we get to the third one, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, things have become somewhat overcooked and reached the level of slapstick.  For me, it’s the middle one in the series, For a Few Dollars More, that stands tallest.

Note that all three “Dollars” films display something of a casual, even cynical, attitude towards the American Western genre to which they belong. The surreal level of violence and the mounting body count in these films are not suitable for all tastes, even if the “bad guys” get what they deserve. Indeed, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was highly critical of the almost adolescent depiction of violence in the film [1].  In order to enter into the fantasy world of all three films (and For a Few Dollars More in particular), one must suspend one’s normal sensibilities about killing and true-to-life realism, as if one were watching a sci-fi or horror film.

For a Few Dollars More tells the story of two professional bounty hunters who compete to collect the reward for the capture or killing of a notorious outlaw.  One of the bounty hunters is “The Man With No Name”, again played by Clint Eastwood, who was the principal character in A Fistful of Dollars.  In that respect For a Few Dollars More is a sequel, but there is otherwise no narrative connection in this film to the earlier film.

Aside from Eastwood and Van Cleef, most of the rest of the cast comprised Italian actors, which didn’t matter too much, since all the dialogue was dubbed.  The most significant characters in the film are

• Manco (Clint Eastwood) – a bounty hunter and known to the screen public as “The Man With No Name”.
• Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) – the “Man in Black” – a bounty hunter who was once a respected military commander from “the Carolinas.”
• El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) – his name in Spanish means “The Indian”, and he is the ultimate bad guy.
• Juan Wild, the Hunchback (Klaus Kinski) – a minor member of Indio's Gang.  Kinski would later achieve fame in some Werner Herzog films, such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

We expect that our narrative interest will focus on Manco, the presumed hero, but it turns out that the other bounty hunter (the “Man in Black”, played by Lee Van Cleef) is equally interesting, if not more so.  It is the interaction between these two ruthless and suspicious bounty hunters that fascinates.  The contrasting personalities of the two bounty hunters is notable:

Manco
This is not his name, but merely a soubriquet which means “the one-handed man”, since Manco does almost everything with his left hand.  He keeps his right hand shielded by his serape so that at first one wonders as if he is paralyzed on the right side. But when he draws and shoots his gun, he uses his right hand to deadly effect. Manco is intuitive and a perceiver, who delays action until the last second, at which point he becomes lethal.

Mortimer
Mortimer is about twenty years older than Manco and is a thinker.  In fact, though Manco is the presumed hero, it turns out that Mortimer is smarter, more thoughtful, better equipped with weapons, and a better shot.  He seems to be superior to Manco in every way. 

Neither man is very trustful, but it seems that Mortimer is more trusting of Manco than Manco is of Mortimer.

Another key aspect of the film is Leone’s cinematography and overall mise-en-scene. The settings look realistic enough for some Mexican border villages, but the exteriors were shot in Almeria, Spain, and the interiors in the Cinecitta studios in Rome. Leone uses picturesque long shots to set the scene, and then varies the pace by building up the tension as one of the many tense confrontations takes place between mutually hostile characters.  Leone draws out the tension in each of these scenes by showing  tight close-ups of the contestants and the onlookers.  We are expecting extreme violence in these scenes, but we have to wait as the tension mounts on each occasion.  Since these confrontations are key to the film, I will label them as C1, C2, . . . in the following.

The overall narrative goes through four basic acts that tell the tale.

1.  Introducing the Principals
In the first act, we see Mortimer hunt down and kill a wanted man so that he can collect the $1,000 reward.  This is confrontation C1. The man Mortimer kills looks inhuman, more like a rabid animal, and this  presumably serves as Leone’s “gentle” introduction to the bloodshed that will follow (roughly 30 people will be killed in this story).  Mortimer is supercool and displays his deadly marksmanship. 

In the following scene, Manco comes into a small town and finds his bounty target in a saloon. Again there is a slow buildup before Manco dispatches the wanted man and his three henchman with a few quick shots in confrontation C2.  For this he gets a $2,000 reward.

Up to this point we have been presented with two ruthless killers, and these are supposed to be the “good” guys. So their target, the third principal, has to be much worse than these guys for our sympathies to be in the right place. And Leone meets those requirements by depicting “El Indio” as an utterly sadistic psychopath who delights in the suffering he inflicts on others.  Indio is initially shown being sprung from prison by his outlaw gang, and in the process, he cruelly kills his cell-mate (C3), who had earlier given him the secret of where all the money was stored at the famous El Paso bank.  Once out of prison, Indio captures another bounty hunter (not Manco or Mortimer) who had sent Indio to prison, and he then has this man’s wife and infant child exterminated in front of him.  Then Indio finishes him off, too, by conducting what is apparently his killing ritual: a mock duel (C4), whereby he starts his musical pocket watch playing a brief tune, the ending of which will signal the time for annihilating his victim.  Leone builds up the tension during this sequence by showing 18 successive extreme close-ups of various participants and onlookers during the period that the pocket-watch music is playing.

Indio’s musical pocket watch ritual will be repeated, and we eventually learn via brief flashbacks that it is associated with an earlier time when he was obsessively in love with Colonel Mortimer’s sister. When he had encountered her with her lover who was giving her the pocket watch as a gift, he killed the man and raped her. But in the middle of his treacherous act, the mortified woman killed herself. Whenever Indio recalls those horrible moments, he drifts into a marijuana-laced haze of madness.

2.  Manco and Mortimer Meet Up
When Indio, Manco, and Mortimer variously learn that the well-guarded El Paso bank has the most money in the region, maybe one million dollars, they all head there.  Indio goes with the intention of robbing the bank, while the two bounty hunters, knowing Indio’s insatiable appetite, separately go to El Paso hoping to get the $10,000 bounty on Indio’s head. There are two confrontations in this act, but unlike the first four confrontations, they do no result in bloodshed. In the first one, C5, Mortimer intentionally insults one of Indio’s men, the hunchback Juan Wild, but despite sinister glares, nothing comes of it. In the next confrontation, C6, Manco discovers that there is another bounty hunter, Mortimer, who is after his quarry, and he tries to force him out of town. This results in a life-threatening display of marksmanship between the two, as they shoot off each other’s hats.  In the end, they decide that it makes more sense to team up and work together against Indio’s gang of 14 gun-toting desperados.

3.  The El Paso Bank Robbery
Manco reluctantly accepts Mortimer’s proposal that he join Indio’s gang and work from the inside.  This he manages to do, and he is sent off with three other gang members to rob a bank in a nearby town.  Once safely out of town, though, Manco kills the other three gang members in another deadly confrontation (C7).  When he returns to El Paso, he and Mortimer keep an eye on the bank in hopes of thwarting Indio’s intended robbery.  However, Indio’s lightning strike is too well-planned, and Indio and his men make off with the bank’s safe.

Mortimer now tells Manco to rejoin Indio’s gang and convince them all to head north. Manco joins them, but hoping to get all the stolen money for himself, he tries to double-cross Mortimer by convincing the gang to head south.  Indio has his own ideas, though, and decides that the gang should head east, to the small town of Aqua Caliente.

4.  Agua Caliente
When the gang arrives in the small town, the crafty Mortimer is there too: knowing how evil minds work, he had anticipated everything.  Bearing no grudges, Mortimer then helps Manco get through another confrontation (C8) with sinister townsfolk from Agua Caliente by displaying his uncanny marksmanship.  Then he has a deadly confrontation with the hunchback Wild in the local tavern (C9).

Through mutual greed, further double-crossings, and Indio’s relentless treachery, the rest of the gang is bumped off, one by one.  Eventually it comes down to the final confrontation (C10), again with the pocket watch, between Mortimer and Indio.  Mortimer gets his revenge, and when asked by Manco before departing if he wants his share of the money and bounties, he says, “maybe next time.”

It is difficult to specify exactly what are the elements that make For a Few Dollars More effective.  Perhaps it is its strange blend of fantasy, iconic images, and in-your-face engagement. Certainly realism is not the focus.  The marksmanship of Manco and Mortimer is impossibly accurate – they never miss, while their opponents almost always do.  In addition there is a ridiculous scene in which Manco and Mortimer are caught trying to escape from the gang with the stolen loot and are subsequently severely beaten up. This extended thrashing is so brutal that it would kill any normal person.  And yet Manco and Mortimer soon recover and barely have scratches on their faces to show for it.

No, what makes the film is the emotional intensity that is generated by the music and the pacing. Strangely, the musical score by Ennio Morricone is an integral and thematic part to the narrative. Morricone was a former classmate of Leone, and Leone would usually have the musical score for his films composed prior to shooting.  Then he would have the music played on the set (remember, the film was dubbed) while the film was shot. This may have served as an emotional guide for Leone’s direction and for the acting, too. In addition, the editorial shifts between long shots and sequences of extreme close-ups tend to put the viewer very much inside the action.  The overall effect is expressionistic immersion, and despite the lack of literal realism, it can promote a kind of emotional realism.  After all, that’s what cinema is about.

A final word concerns the role of Colonel Mortimer, played by Lee Van Cleef. We expect that Clint Eastwood’s character, Manco, will be the primary protagonist, but it is Van Cleef’s character that eventually dominates. He is smarter, more skilled, more measured, and more stylish than the rough-hewn, cheroot-smoking Manco. And there are interesting details about his style that one picks up as the film progresses.  He wears his gun in a cross-draw position, which would be a slower draw in a duel that requires lightning speed.  But in two lethal duels he faces in the film, he just happens to be equipped with a gun at his hip when he needs it.  Watch for that when you see the film.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Bosley Crowther, “For a Few Dollars More”, The New York Times, 4 July 1967.

Sergio Leone

Films of Sergio Leone:

• For a Few Dollars More - Sergio Leone (1965)
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Sergio Leone (1966)
• Once Upon a Time in the West - Sergio Leone (1968) 
• Once Upon a Time in America - Sergio Leone (1984) 

“Shoot the Piano Player” - François Truffaut (1960)

François  Truffaut’s first feature film, the semi-autobiographical The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959), was a big hit for the former film critic and auteur-theory advocate. But his second feature, Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianiste, 1960) did not meet the elevated expectations of the public or the critics, even though it stands today as one of the iconic French “New Wave” (La Nouvelle Vague) works.  Crafted as a mixture of comedy, romance, and film noir, the film was considered by many to be an artificial pastiche of homages and in-jokes that just didn’t add up to a coherent artwork.  Others, however, loved the film, sometimes without being able to explain why.  I am one of those who hold the film in high esteem, despite some evident flaws, and I will try to argue a case for it.

Truffaut later admitted that he was consciously trying to chart a new artistic direction with Shoot the Piano Player, in an attempt to avoid potential autobiographical typecasting arising from The 400 Blows. By making a film of an expanded narrative based on American crime writer David Goodis’s novel Down There (1956), he apparently wanted  to move away from the personal context and display his sympathies for the American films noir of the 1940s and 50s – and also perhaps demonstrate a full panoply (or at least try out a number) of cinematic techniques along the way.  Nevertheless, I feel that Shoot the Piano Player still lies in the personal psychological space of Truffaut.  Evidence for this can be seen in the fact that Truffaut modified the personality of the protagonist away from the confident and authoritative one fashioned by Goodis in the novel to a more introverted personality like Truffaut’s own.  Thus despite the stark contrasts in external trappings between these two early films, Shoot the Piano Player is still very much of a personal and existential journey like that of The 400 Blows.

To me, the main theme of Shoot the Piano Player concerns how a man enters into and establishes the most significant personal relationship in his life – the one with that woman with whom he seeks the deepest connection. This is explored here by presenting events that cast light on the internal mental landscape of the main character, Edouard Saroyan (aka Charles Kohler).  This role was played by the famous French singer and songwriter Charles Aznavour, although he doesn’t sing in this film. It is interesting, by the way, that the main character’s name indicates that he is an Armenian, which is also Aznavour’s own ethnicity (his real name is Shahnour Varinag Aznavourian) [1].

One of the striking aspects of the film is its rapid narrative movement.  The version of the film that I saw recently was only 81 minutes in length, but a lot of narrative ground is covered over that relatively short stretch.  In particular there are five narrative threads of interest, each of which represents a different “world” (sphere) of concern for, and reflects a different aspect of, the main character, Charles.  For the purposes of clarity, I identify these threads as follows:

CF: Charlie’s world at the piano bar where he works and lives nearby.
CB: Charlie’s world with his two older brothers.
CW: Charlie’s world with his wife Therese
CL: Charlie’s world with Léna
CT: Charlie’s world with the two criminal thugs, Momo and Ernest

These various narrative threads are presented in ten unequally-lengthed sections .

1.  Prologue (CB)
At the outset we see a man, who we will later learn is Charlie’s brother Chico Saroyan, running through dark city streets in a desperate effort to escape some pursuers.  In his frenzy, he crashes into a lamp post and falls down.  A passerby helps him to his feet.  The two strangers now cordially engage in a discussion of what will be the film’s principal theme: what is it about women that make men love them.   The passerby explains his love for his wife and why it grew gradually over time.  Then he disappears into the night and from the rest of the story.

2.  At Charlie’s Piano Bar (CB, CF)

Chico finds the piano bar where his brother Charlie works, and he runs in to hide from his pursuers. Charlie is a tight-lipped piano player who entertains the dancing customers with his playing.  Although Charlie hasn’t seen his brother in four years, he is familiar with his usually criminal activities and doesn’t want to have anything to do with him.  When two thugs pursuing Chico show up, however, Charlie reluctantly does help Chico escape out the back door.  In this section we are introduced to Charlie’s introspections in voiceover, and on this occasion he reflects on his ambivalent feelings for his dumb and troublesome but upbeat brother.

This section, by the way, also features a bizarre singing performance of a witless and boring song, “Framboise”. The reasons for why Truffaut included it in the film escape me. It is apparently supposed to be funny, but it takes up a full two minutes of this 81-minute film and is merely a distraction.  Later on in the film there will be another disruptive, time-wasting song that takes up a further minute-and-a-half of screen time for no reason.  Anyway, this section does show, at least, life at the piano bar, and we are introduced to the proprietor, Plyne.

3.  Charlie with Léna 1 (CL)

At the piano bar Charlie is informed by Plyne that the pretty waitress Léna (Marie Dubois) likes him. Plyne confesses to Charlie that he moons after Léna, himself, but that he doesn’t have enough class for her.  Charlie is interested, too, and walks Léna home, but his shy, introverted nature holds him back from making any romantic moves on her, and the opportunity is lost.  During the walk home, Léna sees the two thugs (Ernest and Momo) in her hand mirror, and she and Charlie manage to run around the corner and escape their pursuers.

4.  Charlie at his flat (CF)

Back at his apartment, we see that Charlie lives with his younger brother, Fido (played by Richard Kanayan, also an Armenian), who is a young schoolboy. Charlie tucks the boy into his bed for the night, and then welcomes into his own bed his voluptuous neighbor, Clarisse, a hooker who frequents the piano bar for her clients.  From this scene it is evident that Charlie is not so shy and inexperienced as he might have at first appeared.

5.  Ride with the Thugs (CT, CL)

The next day Fido goes off to school, and when Charlie goes out, he is confronted by the two thugs who force him into their car at gunpoint and shortly thereafter do the same thing to Léna, who was also walking nearby.  The thugs, who are still after Chico for some past debts they think are owed them, want Charlie and Léna to lead them to him – and they found out where they live by bribing the bar proprietor Plyne. This is an odd scene, because what starts out as sinister soon degenerates into jocular wisecracks between the four people riding around in the car.  Again there is a conversation about women – this time it concerns the thugs’ attitudes about women and why they cannot resist their charms.  By happenstance, though, the car is stopped at a police checkpoint, and Charlie and Léna escape while the police are questioning the two thugs.

6.  Charlie’s Past (CL, CW)

Charlie again walks Léna home, and this time she invites him up to her apartment.  It is now revealed to the viewer what Léna has known all along: that Charlie was once a famous concert pianist named Edouard Saroyan.  She wants to know why he is now using a different name and performing in a dive like the piano bar where she works.  The film then goes into a 17-minute flashback covering Charlie’s account of his past.

The Flashback:

Charlie/Edouard was married to a comely young woman, Therese, and struggling to come up in the world as a pianist. By chance, it seems, he meets a concert impresario who hires him to perform, and soon Edouard is famous. But later Edouard learns that his big break was brought about by Therese’s self-sacrificing submission to the impresario’s lustful demands, in an effort to advance her husband’s career. The resulting shame and Edouard’s jealous reactions led to Therese’s suicide, which utterly shattered Edouard’s life. Blaming himself for her death, he abandoned his promising career, disappeared from view, and changed his name to Charlie Kohler.

7.  Charlie with Léna 2 (CL)
The next section is really a continuation of the previous one, but since it is the highpoint of the film, it deserves its own status.  By this point in the story it is clear that Charlie has three miseries weighing on him: 

• his traumatic memories and guilt associated with his lost love, Therese
• his problems with the two thugs pursuing him (and Chico)
• his crummy life at the piano bar.

But Léna has fallen in love with him and is intent on solving all three problems.  There is now a visually lyrical scene showing her embracing and kissing him.  In her bed, she does all the talking, saying sweet romantic things to him while she caresses him.  This scene makes up for all of Truffaut’s (and cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s) other experimental misfires, and it features my most memorable images of the film.  Léna is determined that her love will revive the old Edouard Saroyan and restore him – to a happy union with her.

The next two sections of the film (8 and 9) are run in parallel, with intercutting scenes.

8.  Fido and the Thugs (CT)
The thugs now kidnap Fido from Charlie’s apartment and force him into their car.  They are still trying to find someone to lead them to Chico.  Again, these scenes with the two thugs show them engaging in small talk and telling jokes, making them appear human, even if they are desperately reckless.

9.  Léna and Charlie at the Piano Bar (CL, CF)

Léna takes Charlie back to the piano bar so that they can both resign their jobs.  But she is bitter about Plyne’s selfish betrayal to the thugs, so she mercilessly taunts Plyne.  Charlie sees that Léna’s taunts are too rough on the simple-minded and still moonstruck Plyne, but he says nothing, thinking to himself, “it’s none of your business. . . . nothing is.”  But Léna keeps at it. Pllyne, who says he worships women as angels, can't believe that Léna could act this way. Finally he goes lethally berserk and attacks Charlie in a blind rage. In the ensuing fight, Charllie accidentally kills Plyne, and barely survives, himself.  Now Charlie has another problem: the police will charge him with murder. 

But Léna whisks Charlie away from the investigating police and drives Charlie up into the mountains where his two brothers, Chico and Richard live.  At the same time, the thugs and their hostage Fido are also headed for the same place.

10.  Charlie at the Saroyan house (CL, CT, CB)
The climactic scene takes place at the snowbound Saroyan residence, where Léna, Charlie, his three brothers (Chico, Richard, and Fido), and the two thugs (Momo and Ernest) all converge.  Léna, fueled by her burning love for Charlie/Edouard, has solved all the problems up to this point, and she appears to have solved things here, too.  But not quite.  You’ll have to see the film to learn what happens in the end.

Truffaut and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who was a favorite of both Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) tried a number of film techniques in Shoot the Piano Player, and not all of them worked. But enough of them did work to result in an outstanding film that simultaneously conveys tension, vulnerability, and melancholy. All the characters, including Plyne and the two thugs, are human and almost innocent despite their violent recklessness.  This reflected a perhaps resigned, almost fatalistic, view of humanity – that each of us is just a captive of his or her own circumstances and no more or less deserving or guilty than anyone else.

For various reasons Truffaut chose to shoot in Cinemascope, and the wide-screen compositions actually contribute to a kind of expressionistic circumscription that adds to the mood. Truffaut used several mirror shots (i.e. images shown that include mirror reflections [2]) to good effect – some of them highly unrealistic but evocative nonetheless.  One example was when Léna espied the two thugs in her hand mirror when she was walking with Charlie.

The kissing scene between Léna and Charlie featured a series of superimpositions and dissolves along with jump cuts of Léna in bed talking to Charlie.  For me these work very well to convey a sense of tenderly romantic delirium.

I have already mentioned the speed of the narrative presentation, and this has a cumulative effect over the course of the film.  There are many tracking shots, but they are not leisurely – everything is moving fast in this story.  The editing is good, too – I particularly liked the intercutting of conversation among the characters inside the car driven by the two thugs. 

Returning to the movie’s principal theme about love between a man and a woman, I would say this is about love from the wistful perspective of a man whose existential survival, on the psychological level, is at stake.  It captures this feeling of loneliness and hesitancy, and its effectiveness is due perhaps as much to the memorable performances of Charles Aznavour, as Charlie, and  Marie Dubois as Léna, as it is to Truffaut’s cinematic techniques. 

★★★★

Notes:

1. Some of my favorite people are Armenians, and I have always admired their style and culture.  Regrettably, though, Aznavour is a staunch advocate of heavy-duty intellectual property restrictions, which I believe and have argued are harmful to our general welfare.
2. I have discussed mirror shots before – see for example Torment (1944).

"The Fiances" - Ermanno Olmi (1963)

Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi has seen himself more as a craftsman than as an intellectual.  As such, he is different from the typically judgmental writer/author and more like (most of) us – he is a perceiver immersed in the complexity of the world surrounding him.  We generally don’t emphatically act in the clearly defined fashions of the actors that we usually see in films. Olmi evidently understands this, and what distinguishes him from and above most other filmmakers is his ability to tell his cinematic stories in a more naturalistic fashion – closer to the way we ourselves experience the world.  For this reason Olmi is often classified as a Italian Neorealist (and indeed Vittorio de Sica was one of his major influences), but there is a subtle difference.  The Neorealists tended to aim at capturing the “objective” life of ordinary people, as if they were documentarians.  But Olmi (who admittedly was originally a documentary filmmaker) has a way of presenting the world as it is existentially experienced by his characters.  This makes his films less objective, but more authentic.

The Fiances (I Fidanzati, 1963) was Olmi’s third film, following the marvelous Il Posto (1961), and it bears some similarities with its predecessor.  Both films follow the experiences of an ordinary young worker as he tries to adapt himself to a new job and social circumstances.  And both films have overtones concerning the dehumanizing aspects of work life that was becoming standard in modern postwar capitalism.  But The Fiances is not really so much concerned with sociopolitical commentary as it is with something more basic.

The story concerns the small joys and woes of a young Italian couple, the fiances, who have been engaged to be married for some time.  This was common in Italy for years after World War II because of the severe housing shortage that the war had created.  Even fifteen years after the war, there was a significant shortage of adequate housing, and so young couples often had to wait for some time before they could find a suitable apartment to move into and commence married life [1]. This long time of waiting could wear off the bloom of early romantic love.  For the couple in this story, further stress is placed on their relationship by the unhappy prospects of their being separated for some time due to work commitments.

Actually in some respects there doesn’t even seem to be much of a story at all in The Fiances.  That is truly a magical aspect of Olmi’s films in general.  They seem merely to feature only a random sequence of trivial incidents that don’t appear to have a meaningful connection to a coherent narrative.  And yet the cumulative experience of watching these incidents leads to something of an epiphany about life and love.  That is what happens here in The Fiances, and it testifies to Olmi’s extraordinary skill in weaving a meaningful tapestry out of these various scattered elements.

The narrative structure, such as it is, has roughly four sections to it that describe what happens to the two main characters, Giovanni (played by Carlo Cabrini) and Liliana (Anna Canzi).  The focalization of the film is almost entirely on Giovanni throughout.

1 The Departure

The film opens on a local dance hall in Milan where Giovanni and Liliana evidently habitually go for their social life.  The atmosphere of the dance hall is tacky and tasteless, as if all the people have been coming to this joint too many times, and it is now just a bad habit.  The live music that is played by the hired pianist and accordionist has a rather shabby organ-grinder feel to it, but this music persists in the mind of Giovanni and becomes the main musical theme of the film.

At the dance hall, it is evident that Giovanni and Liliana are out of sorts and barely speaking to each other.  This scene is interspersed with a number of flashbacks that provide the background for why the couple is at odds.  Giovanni has received a job-transfer offer that he cannot afford to refuse.  He is a blue-collar welder, and the job offer is a chance to get a pay raise and promotion by spending a year-and-a-half at a construction site in Sicily, several hundred miles to the south. As a proper young woman, Liliana cannot go with Giovanni to Sicily, so it means that they will be separated for a long time.  So naturally Liliana thinks that this will mean an end to their marriage engagement. As he is ready to depart, the quarrel is still not settled, and this section ends with Giovanni on a plane south to Sicily.

2 Arrival in Sicily

In this section the social isolation of Giovanni is clear.  He arrives in Sicily in the evening and checks into a hotel room where he will stay for a few days until he can find a more permanent residence.  Then he has a lonely dinner in the mostly empty hotel restaurant. Giovanni is a taciturn working-class person who listens more than he talks. At work at the construction site the next day, he observes a fellow worker is seriously injured and rushed away in an ambulance.  His foreman tells him that the local Sicilian workers don’t have an adequate work ethic: accustomed to the seasonal work of agricultural workers, they even fail to come to work on rainy days.

3 Giovanni at Leisure
But there are non-working days, too, and Giovanni explores the local area.  He has some time on his own, but again, he is always alone and has no new friends.  He walks into a local church and sits alone piously at a pew in the back.  When a dog enters the church and disrupts a pastoral session for some children, the children all giggle, and Giovanni is amused too.  This is the first time that we see him smile, but he is still alone.

On the bus to the construction site, Giovanni overhears his fellow transfer workers dismissively gossip about the pathetically peasant attitudes of the local Sicilians. 

He later goes to a raucous local street festival which features women dressed in festival masks who are thereby permissibly able to dance with strangers on the crowded square.  Giovanni dances with one such woman, who offers him a kiss but won’t take off her mask.  The festive spirit leads to general drunkenness, and back at the hotel Giovanni even gets into some rowdy pranks with some of the other tenants.

During sections 2 and 3 of the story, Giovanni occasionally has flashback memories of his life in Milan – one associated with this parting argument with the inconsolable Liliana and another one when he danced at the dance hall with a sexy girl with whom he had apparently had a brief affair.  So he is trying to immerse himself in the new surroundings, and maybe drifting away from Liliana.

4 Memories
Giovanni moves out of the hotel he had been staying at and into a barren little hostel room that will be his more permanent accommodation for his time in Sicily. But memories of Liliana keep coming back. He remembers his affair with the sexy Milanese girl and how it had hurt Liliana. And he remembers Liliana’s quiet suffering in response and her quitet heartfelt reaffirmation of her love for him. Now he begins to remember her more fondly. They begin to exchange letters, and this begins the most beautiful part of the film that shines a meaningful light on everything that has come before.  The normally taciturn Giovanni opens up as the letters are read aloud in voiceover:

“Why haven’t you written?  I sent my postcard two weeks ago and still no answer from you. . . . My regards to everyone and a kiss for you.”

Liliana responds that she was afraid to open his letter, fearing that it would be a “good-bye” letter from him:

“I hesitated to write back. . I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.” . . .
“I had lost faith and hope as well.”

As they exchange more letters, we learn that a couple of months have now passed.  The growing tenderness is conveyed by showing Liliana on camera speaking her letters aloud.  She says she doesn’t go dancing anymore, because he is no longer there to dance with her.

“I tried to forget you, to erase you from my thoughts.  But now, thank goodness, everything has changed.”

For his part, Giovanni’s words for her become tender and soulful, as he expresses his ardour for her.  He goes out and swims happily in the ocean, and we know that he is thinking of her.

At the film’s end, it is Sunday and a storm is brewing outside.  Giovanni spontaneously rings up Liliana on the phone and speaks to her. She is alarmed and wonders what’s wrong, but he says he called just because he was thinking of her.  With ominous thunder sounding outside, he speaks tenderly to her for a few minutes, and then hangs up as a torrential downpour with heavy winds drowns the countryside at the close of the film.

The storm at the end of The Fiances is a brilliant touch on the part of Olmi and accentuates the strong emotional feelings at the close.  A number of critics have viewed this closing storm as an indication that the affair between Giovanni and Liliana is either threatened or doomed to die of ennui (for example, [2,3]).  I don’t think so.  To me the storm merely emphasizes their sense of being apart and their vulnerability to external forces.  It shows how powerless they are in the face of exigencides that arise out of the wild, natural world out there, but it does not diminish their longing for each other – it brings greater attention and urgency to it.

The acting on the part of Carlo Cabrini and  Anna Canzi is superb.  They were not professional film actors prior to The Fiances, although they did appear in a few films thereafter. They both effectively portray basically inarticulate working-class people, but they convey magnitudes in their facial expressions, especially Ms. Canzi.

Overall, I am still amazed at the way Olmi does it – the way he stitches together the various mundane depictions of his protagonists’ surroundings so that they convey a sense of melancholy and reflection. And then he turns things around so that loneliness brings awareness and longing for the departed soulmate. This is not just operating according to the realism mythology of going out and find ordinary "real" people and then photographing them. This involves carefully staged theatrics, handling of actors, image composition, and editing. For me, this is closer to the authentic reality of our conscious existence. By doing this he constructs a nuanced inner narrative that conveys his message. The film's narrative movement is epitomized by the musical soundtrack. The "organ-grinder" accordion music theme in the beginning seemed sleazy and cheap, but it gradually comes to symbolize all the times that Giovanni and Liliana were together at the dance hall. While in those earlier times they had gotten into the habit of taking each other for granted, they have later come to look back at those times as wonderful moments that they shared.  And so the accordion theme at the end becomes a beautiful aural motif for their now-recognized true love.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Paul F. Wendt , “Post World-War-II Housing Policies in Italy”, Land Economics, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May, 1962), pp. 113-133.
2.  Bill Gibron, “Past Perfect: Criterion Classics - I Fidanzati (1963)”, Popmatters, (19 December 2006). 
3. Kent Jones, “Rhapsody in the Rain”, The Criterion Collection, (23 June, 2003).