"House of Sand and Fog" - Vadim Perelman (2003)

House of Sand and Fog (2003), the much-praised feature film debut of Vadim Perelman, was based on the acclaimed 1999 novel of the same name by Andre Dubus III that was nominated for the US National Book Award. The story concerns an irreconcilable struggle over the ownership of a California beach house. Although highly melodramatic, the film actually does encompass a rather nuanced and sympathetic view of the two competing groups and avoids obvious bias in the conflict: throughout the film the focalization and sympathetic perspective is almost equally divided between the two competing sides. Since the two sides comprise an upper-class Iranian family and a lower-class American, such narrative balance, along with exceptionally good acting, builds up an expectation as the plot develops of interesting and dramatic social interactions. Unfortunately this promised profundity is never realized. Nevertheless, what is interesting about the film is that it raises issues concerning our sense of justice, which go beyond the traditional simplistic Hollywood moral tale.

At the outset of the film, Kathy Nicolo, the protagonist of one of the “lower-class American” narrative thread, is awakened with the news that the house in which she is living (and in which she grew up) has just been repossessed by the county for nonpayment of a $500 property tax. She is being immediately evicted. Kathy, we gradually learn, works as a cleaner and has been living a disorganized life since her husband left her eight months earlier. The sympathetic deputy sheriff present during the repossession, Lester Burdon, advises Kathy to consult a public defender and offers his support.

The other narrative thread concerns a once-wealthy Iranian family of high standing that has fled the oppressive circumstances in their home country and is struggling to make do in California. The father of the family, Massoud Behrani, was a colonel in the Shah’s army, but now in California he works in two menial jobs – at convenience store and as a civil ditch digger. When he learns that a beach house (Kathy’s) is about to go on public auction, he sees his chance to make a real-estate profit and improve his family’s fortunes.

As the events of this house repossession move forward, the viewer struggles to understand the backstories of the two threads, which would provide crucial information underlying the motivations of the key characters. This material is presumably covered more thoroughly in the novel (which I haven’t read), but it is only fleetingly and scantily alluded to in the film. Figuring out what lies behind these two thread is a challenge that perhaps keeps the viewer’s attention to small details, but it would definitely be helpful to know more about these characters:

• Kathy is disorganized and disheveled. She neglects opening her mail, and there are suggestions that she may have had alcoholic or drug dependencies (this is apparently more explicit in the novel). What happened with her? Why did her husband abandon her?
• Lester, a married man, becomes Kathy’s friend and eventually her lover. We understand that his marriage has gone cold, but we don’t really know much about his character. What drives him?
• It would be particularly useful to shed light on Massoud’s psychological background. His wife at one point accuses him of having made decisions back in Iran that necessitated their flight from the country and the ruination of their life. Is there something in his history that haunts him? I would like to know more.

What we do know is that Kathy is essentially a weak personality who cannot get her life together. She doesn’t understand the basic rules of the game of life, and she apparently frequently goes off the rails and falls into a funk. She is the type of person who needs protection in this cruel world: a truly just society should not take advantage of characters like Kathy. Massoud, on the other hand is the opposite type of personality. He is a strong, vigorous individual who is used to the rule-driven society of the military culture. He is rigorously honest and plays exactly by the rules, taking his lumps when he’s down, but cashing in when he’s ahead. At the public auction he acquires Kathy’s house for a song at approximately a quarter of its market worth, and he anticipates that he can resell the house and thereby lift his family out of poverty and fund his teenage son’s college education.

So relatively early on in the story an interesting conflict has been established between two basically implacable foes. Kathy has lost possession of her house due to a minor oversight, and anyone can see that a clear injustice has been perpetrated against her. We’re on her side: she should have her house restored to her. Even Massoud with his own financial concerns can see the inherent injustice that has happened to Kathy. On the other hand, Massoud has been playing carefully by the rules – the same even-handed rules that supposedly govern everybody in the universally admired “rule of law” society that operates in America. So we are on Massoud’s side, too. Anyway, Massoud is evidently not going to forego his chance to save his family in this dog-eat-dog competitive society in order to “reward” someone like Kathy whose lack of diligence and sloth is directly responsible for her misfortune.

All of these ruminations would probably be even more interesting if we could be privy to some of the thinking, perhaps via internal monologues, on the part of Massoud and get inside his character. But this we cannot do, as the film presents him as an opaque and stubbornly closed personality. Massoud rules his family like a military platoon and provides no explanations for his decisions (it seems that his wife doesn’t even know that he is employed at menial jobs: he leaves for work each day in a business suit and makes himself out to be an executive for Boeing).

This is the interesting narrative road, the two competing forms of justice, that was not taken by Perelman and his team. What we could have had in the film was the struggle in Massoud’s mind between his intuitive sense of justice (according to which Kathy’s case would be viewed sympathetically) and his rule-driven sense of justice that would weigh more favorably on his own side. It would have been interesting to see this social and judicial evaluation undertaken by a newcomer to the United States who might be expected, at least on reflection, to see the American system with the external eye of a more detach and objective observer.

At the same time there is another interesting angle here: the sense of justice that might be considered from the perspective of Kathy’s lover, Lester. He is, after all, a man who works within the law-enforcement system, and yet, as an insider, he knows that the rules sometimes need to be bent in order to achieve “true” justice (i.e. following our intuitive sense of what is right) in certain circumstances, such as Kathy’s, where the rules were improperly applied or twisted against her in the first place. In addition there is the conflict in Lester’s own personal life between the conventional rules of marital fidelity and his personal realization that Kathy is his true soul-mate and the person with whom he has more natural affinities. Again it is a conflict between one’s intuitive and subjective sense of justice (which, of course, can sometimes be clouded by emotion) and the rigid application of externally defined rules that cannot work out perfectly in all contexts.

Still another interesting perspective to highlight might have been the position of Massoud’s wife, Nadi. Not knowing anything about the financial circumstances or conflict, Nadi treats Kathy (when she suffers an injury at the beach house), who is a stranger to her, with characteristic Persian graciousness and compassion, a culturally ingrained behaviour characteristic of Iranian society. Her role, as another and contrasting outside of observer of American society, might have been given more examination.

So there were four significant characters to follow: Massoud, Lester, Nadi, and Kathy – with Kathy being perhaps the least interesting one to “get inside of”, because the injustice done to her is so obvious. We don’t have to wonder much about her mental state, because we readily understand it. But of the four, the film spends a great amount of screen time, maybe too much, on Kathy and not enough on the other three. This was probably due to the presence of the very beautiful and talented actress Jennifer Connelly, as Kathy. Connelly does well, but it might conceivably have been better for the film narrative to have someone less attractive in the role. The performances of all four of these characters, by the way, are excellent. Besides Connelly, Ben Kingsley gave an energetic rendering of Massoud’s character, and Ron Eldard, for the most part, was effective as a measured and reflective Lester. The role of Nadi, which I feel would have liked to see given more weight in the plot, was sensitively played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, a distinguished Iranian actress who, like the character she played, was forced to flee the Iranian social violence in 1979 and start a new life overseas.

But even without our full immersion into Massoud’s, and Lester’‘s moral struggles, we still have a potentially interesting plot situation. The viewer is made to feel some sympathy for all sides, and yet all sides are uncompromising and inexorably headed for a conflict that will be disastrous to at least one of them. How will this all be resolved?

Unfortunately, with the viewer’s sense of suspense built up by this relentless buildup of tension, the narrative quixotically heads south and loses its way. Instead of moving towards some kind of resolution to the conflict, it seems that utter hopelessness takes over as a superficial plot remedy and defeats them all. Without warning, Kathy attempts suicide, twice. And at the end of the film, after Lester’s mysteriously belligerent intervention leads to the accidental death of Massoud’s son, Massoud poisons his wife and then commits suicide, himself. Thus everything turns out to be a manufactured tragedy of monumental proportions, without anything even close to proper motivations or seeding. Why? There is no real resolution -- just submission, defeat, and death. It is enormously sad, but the issues have been abandoned. House of Sand and Fog is an interesting film, but it could have been better.
★★½

"The Song of Sparrows" - Majid Majidi (2008)

With a string of contemplative, existentialist dramas about modern life, Majid Majidi has established himself as one of the foremost filmmakers anywhere. Although his films are set in contemporary Iran, and for that reason attract a certain amount of socio-political attention, the works reflect universal themes that could apply in any setting. His latest film, The Song of Sparrows (Avaze Gonjeshk-ha, 2008) continues this pattern, following on from Father (Pedar, 1996), Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye-Aseman, 1997), The Color of Paradise” (Rang-e Khoda, 1999), Baran (2001), and The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon ,2005).

In most of Majidi’s films, the protagonist, always a male, struggles through a life-changing experience that ostensibly ends in a crushing defeat. But at the conclusions of these films, the effect of the struggle has (usually) elevated the protagonist to a higher level of understanding about the world and about human relations. This is not a theoretical understanding, but something else – an intuitive sensitivity to interactive experience that goes beyond the verbal. And this is what connects Majidi’s films to Sufism and other extramundane spiritual practices.

This is not to suggest that Majidi’s characters are particularly philosophical. They are typically drawn from the working classes and have, for the most part, not had a higher education. In this connection, though, one must make note of the fact that the popular culture of Iran permeating all social levels is generally more reflective about destiny and spiritual matters than those of Western societies.

The story concerns the experiences of Karim, a middle-aged family man who lives in a village outside of Tehran, where he is initially seen working at his job on an ostrich farm. After a momentary oversight causes him to lose his job at the farm, Karim’s struggles to earn a living by other means take him to another world altogether – the hectic and confusing opportunities of the Tehran metropolis. There he finds himself faced with the conflicting moral dilemmas of modern life. Although this basic story theme has been presented countless times, the organic development of the story, with its compelling visual metaphors, has a slow, understated build-up that make it effective.

The narrative of The Song of Sparrows is filled with many little incidents and episodes, but it traces through roughly four main sections.

1. Karim at the Ostrich Farm (22 minutes).
The film opens with striking pictures of ostriches and then shows us Karim’s energetic attendance to their feeding and to collecting their huge eggs. His work is interrupted with news that Haniyeh, his teenage daughter back in the village, has lost her hearing aid in the local irrigation reservoir. He rushes back to retrieve this irreplaceably expensive item, but when recovered it turns out to be broken. Back at the ostrich ranch, Karim is momentarily distracted by the way some of his work crew are mishandling the birds, which gives one of the ostriches the opportunity to escape from its pen and head out over the barren landscape. Karim’s strenuous efforts to find the bird come to naught, and when the boss returns, Karim learns that he has been sacked. This section has served to introduce Karim and his family (a wife and three children) and its relatively modest circumstances; it ends with the disruptive event of Karim’s loss of employment. At this point three disastrous losses have occurred for Karim: the loss of his daughter’s hearing aid, the loss of the ostrich, and the loss of his job. How is the unskilled Karim going to feed his family and replace his daughter’s expensive hearing aid?

2. Karim Goes to the City (22 minutes) . Undaunted by the crisis, Karim rides his motorbike to the crowded streets of Tehran to see if the hearing aid can be repaired. After learning from a doctor that he will somehow have to buy a prohibitively expensive new one, he returns to mount his motorbike and is, just at that moment, mistakenly taken by a hurried businessman to be a private taxi operator. These private taxis are technically illegal in Iran, but they are tolerated, because this is the only practical way to move the vast urban population about the crowded streets of the city. Soon Karim realizes that he can make some money this way, and he begins pursuing this line of work in earnest. The businessmen that he subsequently picks up are all rushing about in the congested Tehran rat race, often making deals with their mobile phones as they ride on the back of his bike. Karim also discovers from overhearing the mobile phone conversations that these businessmen are often pretending to be what they are not – one of them even assures his listener insistently, “I’m in Mashhad” (another city several hundred miles east of Tehran).

Karim also observes that what is considered junk in Tehran would have some value back in his village. He picks up a tossed-out TV aerial and takes it back home to enhance his own TV reception. Soon he starts taking home other items to see if he can repair them and add to his homestead. While Karim is busy entering the hurly-burly world of capitalism, hoping to enrich himself, he learns that his son, Hussein (who is maybe 11-years-old) is similarly busy with his own dreams of enrichment. He and his boyfriends have somehow come up with the inane idea that they can become millionaires if they can grow and sell thousands of goldfish in the village water reservoir. So they are all working diligently to do what seems impossible: clean all the mud out of the reservoir so that it can be fit for their goldfish farm. To Karim this is crazy, and he scolds his son for wasting his time. At this point in the story Karim’s fortunes are on the upswing, and he is hopeful. He has decided to make his living as a motorbike taxi driver and junk repair man, and he tells his wife that he can make more money this way than by getting an ordinary unskilled worker’s job. He gives his friend, Ramezan, an offering to place at the shrine in Mashhad in the hopes that his life will continue to improve.

3. Karim’s Work in the City (25 minutes).
Having already stumbled into the job of a cycle taxi driver and junk repairman, Karim stumbles into another lucrative operation: that of a goods porter in the city. But Karim’s acquisitiveness is growing, too, and this swings the narrative arc in a downward direction. He uses a fake ID card to join a group of hired cyclists transporting refrigerators. But when his bike stalls during the mission, he loses sight of the group ahead of him and gets lost. He now succumbs to the temptation to sell his cargo refrigerator on the black market and pocket the money for himself. But the chance sighting of some ostriches on a truck somehow strikes a chord with his conscience, and he ultimately returns the refrigerator box to the original warehouse. Nevertheless Karim’s increasing obsession with commercial gain is still dominating his outlook, as is evidenced by his subsequent reluctance to pay a young girl on the road selling smoking aspand (an Iranian custom dating from Zoroastrian times to ward of the “evil eye”) anything more than the minimum amount.

Later while riding on a Tehran motorway, Karim happens to see Haniyeh and Hussein selling flowers, and he loses his temper at their actions that, from his selfish perspective, are making him lose face. In a rage, he abusively smacks poor Haniyeh, and when he returns home and learns that the flower-selling was undertaken to support Hussein’s absurd fish-farming schemes, completely blows his top. But when he storms over to the water reservoir with destructive intent, he is shocked to see that the boys have actually completed their arduous task and have cleaned up the reservoir enough for fish to live in it. Though mollified somewhat, he is still obsessed with his own junk-repair operations, which have now filled the front area of his house. While climbing over a mountain of it to arrange some of the items, he falls and breaks his leg.

4. A Change of Heart. (26 minutes).
With Karim now disabled, he can only watch passively while his wife and children earnestly set about making ends meet by working as farm labourers. After the dog-eat-dog world of competitive commerce in Tehran, his eyes are newly opened to the cooperative and communal style of life in his village. He is touched and starts to see things differently. On a trip to the doctor in Tehran, he is accompanied by the village boys seeking to buy goldfish for their foolish fish-farm scheme. When the boys lose all their fish in an accident and are devastated, Karim smiles benignly at their tragedy and sees the beauty of life in a larger context. At the end of the film he sees a sparrow trapped in his room, and he opens the door to set it free. When his friend Ramezan reports that the wayward ostrich from the ostrich farm has returned, Karim reflects on how he has changed since that original loss, and he lapses into a dream or meditation in which the ostriches appear as splendiferous creatures of God.

There are several significant symbolic themes in the The Song of Sparrows. Ostriches have long been images of iconic importance in Eastern Africa and the Middle East, going back to ancient Egyptian times [1]. Their enormous size as the largest birds and their fierce appearance have undoubtedly been the inspiration of mythical images of winged monsters and deities. The huge size of ostrich eggs connotes the power of renewal and rebirth at springtime and has its own iconic significance. Throughout the film, when Karim sees ostriches or their eggs, he seems to be reminded of something transcendent beyond his own immediate circumstances. These moments of reflection occasioned by ostrich sightings occur in all four acts, notably when he is spurred to return the refrigerator to the warehouse in Act 3. In all these cases, the ostrich seems to suggest the fearful and stirring power of life, but also the power of death.

Sparrows, by contrast, are at the opposite end of the bird spectrum – small and assumed to be individually insignificant. But sparrows also reflect the ever-teeming wonder and vitality of nature. After the village boys have cleaned out the water reservoir, some sparrows have come to nest there. When Karim releases the sparrow from his room at the end, it reflects his renewed sensitivity to the small, daily rhythms of life. If ostriches suggest individuality, sparrows suggest community.

Another symbolic reference is associated with Karim’s observation of his son’s and companions’ foolish obsession with making a fortune from a goldfish farm. This is a symbolic microcosm of God looking down at his (and our) own foibles. Karim’s mad quest to make money and forget about the important things of life was, from the celestial perspective, just as trivial as the boys’ schemes. After his accident in the last part of the film, Karim begins to view the boys’ activities with a benign tolerance. He sees their narrow-minded struggles to become “millionaires” with a loving and caring benevolence, just as we might hope God might see our own error-filled ways.

Majid Majidi is sometimes classed with his countrymen, Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi as a neorealist filmmaker. Although they all tend to concentrate focalization on a single main character, there are significant differences in terms of their respective visual narrative styles. Kiarostami tends to have long and static camera takes, that keep the viewer relatively uninvolved with the action. Even when Kiarostami’s camera is relatively in close, it seems to occupy an emotionally neutral position. Thus his mise-en-scene has an overall distancing effect on the viewer. Majidi, in contrast, features a fluid, dynamic visual style that keeps the viewer involved as if it were an unseen participant in the action. His style entails carefully crafted action cuts and well-motivated point-of-view shots throughout – a remarkable achievement in view of the natural, often urban, settings and the use of a mostly unprofessional cast. Panahi occupies something of a middle position between Kiarostami and Majidi, with relatively long camera takes, but very adroitly performed camera movements that maintain more of a narrative involvement and are ultimately less-distancing than Kiarostami’s cinematography. As a consequence of Majidi’s well-motivated cinematography and fluid editing, the viewer of his films has a much greater emotional involvement with the narrative flow. In addition, while Kiarostami’s principal characters are frequently somewhat cut off from (and hence more reflective about) their social contexts, Majidi’s characters are more immersed in their social environments. But even with this contextual immersion in Majidi’s films, there are always moments when the principal character has an epiphany, a flash of awareness, and this experience is intuitively shared by the viewer. Incidentally, this is the first Majidi film (in my recollection) that does not end with a shot overlooking water.

Although Majidi occasionally employs actors with professional experience, only the lead actor in The Song of Sparrows had professional acting experience, and that was Mohammad Amir Naji (aka Reza Naji), who was an earlier non-professional discovery of Majidi’s and had appeared in Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye-Aseman, 1997), Baran (2001), and The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon, 2005). In all of those earlier performances, Naji, although only a supporting actor, was a magnetic and compelling presence who added crucial energy to the narrative. In The Song of Sparrows, Naji is thrust to centre stage, as Karim, and he occupies an extraordinary amount of screen time. For his efforts on this occasion, Naji won the “Silver Bear” at the Berlin Film Festival, and “Best Performance by an Actor” at the 2008 Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Despite this recognition and my great appreciation for his earlier performances, I found Naji’s performance in The Song of Sparrows to represent the one serious weakness of the film.

Naji’s performance here is so over-the-top and strained that it borders on music hall theatrics. There is too much grimacing and melodramatic posturing, and it runs against the naturalistic setting that has been painstakingly established with the film and its other performers. In addition Naji’s face has been cosmetically altered with a considerably elongated nose, a different jaw line, and a strange set of teeth. This gives him an almost clownish appearance and suggests that some of the scenes are played for laughs. Although such effects can lighten the tone, they also keep the viewer from sympathising with Karim’s situation and moral struggles. The net effect is that Naji’s performance plays against the strengths of Majidi’s film and diminishes its effectiveness, thereby keeping the film from reaching the level of Majidi’s best work.

In The Song of Sparrows the otherworldly references in the film are enhanced by the occasional and nonintrusive background music of Hossein Alizadeh, a preeminent Iranian tar musician and composer of music for classical instruments. This gives a melancholic feeling to the story, and at the end, a sense of calm and resignation at the infinite complexity of existence. Does this suggest passivity and fatalism, that one should always be resigned to one’s humble circumstances? Let us hope not. One can’t help but admire the never-say-die fortitude and belief-in-himself of Karim, as he is viewed in the earlier stages of the film. Although something of a rube from the countryside, Karim is industrious and energetic, always looking for new opportunities. What we should take from this story is not a recommendation for passivity, but the conviction that Karim's indomitable energy can only be enriched by a broader appreciation of the cooperative harmony of nature and humanity. Overall, though, The Song of Sparrows is another impressive installment in Majidi’s continuing existential exploration of the higher and more spiritual levels of human experience.
★★★

Notes:

1. “Ostrich Eggs and Peacock Feathers: Sacred Objects as Cultural Exchange between Christianity and Islam”, by Nile Green, Al-Masaq, Volume 18, Issue 1 March 2006, pp. 27 - 66.

"The Rules of the Game" - Jean Renoir (1939)

Arguably the greatest film ever made, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu, 1939) seems at first appearances to be conventional, and yet it stands in a class of its own. One possible measure of its greatness would be to canvass all critics who have actually seen the film and ask them if they would rate it among the top five films ever made. I don’t think any other film would achieve as high a percentage of all-time top-five ratings as Renoir’s classic. And yet many appreciative critics struggle to articulate convincingly just what makes it such an outstanding work.

The story of the film concerns a weekend gathering of wealthy French socialites at a country estate. The focus is on various romantic flirtations and infidelities, involving servants and gentry alike, and as such and with its allusions to Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, it has all the external trappings of a light comedy of manners. Somehow, though, Renoir managed to mold this seemingly conventional material into a multi-layered and profound commentary on the nature of love, society, and the human condition. In the background, of course, was the generally shared feeling of impending catastrophe and social breakdown that would accompany another devastating world war. Perhaps it was not surprising in this connection that the ominous and gloomy light that the film cast on French society was not lost on its initial audience, who greeted the film with jeers and boos at its first screening. Within a year the French Vichy government had banned the film, and during the war the original film negative was destroyed, and the original director’s cut was permanently lost. The version of The Rules of the Game that exists today is the result of a painstaking reconstruction from some existing, cut-down production prints some twenty years later, and it is not precisely what Renoir originally released. Even so, when we see the film now, its lasting virtues shine through and transcend the war – and it is just as relevant today as it was in 1939.

There are eight principal characters whose interlocking romantic liaisons command the viewer’s attention:

• Robert de la Chesnaye, the owner of La Coliniere country estate
• Christine de la Chesnaye, the wife of Robert
• Genevieve de Marras, the mistress of Robert
• Lisette, the personal maid of Christine
• Edouard Schumacher, the estate gamekeeper and husband of Lisette
• Andre Jurieux, a heroic aviator
• Octave, a childhood friend of Christine
• Marceau, a poacher

The lustful associations are complex. Robert is romantically involved with his mistress, Genevieve, and his wife, Christine, who in turn is the object of the amorous intentions of Robert, Andrew, and Octave. Lisette is desired by Marceau, Octave, and her husband, Schumacher. In addition, Andre is loved by a less important character, Christine’s niece, Jackie. All of these various liaisons and flirtations go on in parallel over the course of a weekend gathering at La Coliniere. Because of the concurrent nature of the evolving relationships and the fact that the focalization is spread out over so many characters, the plot structure is fluid, with no real clear-cut boundaries. Nevertheless, one could schematically partition it into the following sections:

1. The Hero Arrives (21 minutes). Andre Jurieux is seen heroically landing his plane in Paris after a solo, transatlantic flight in record time. When interviewed by a breathless radio reporter at the scene, though, Andre petulantly expresses disappointment that his unnamed beloved (Christine) is not present to greet him. His friend Octave is there, though, and he scolds Andre for not playing the proper role of a national hero. The scene switches to the Parisian residence of the de la Chesnayes, where other characters are introduced. In a phone conversation, Robert tells Genevieve that he wishes to break off their illicit affair in order to achieve honesty in his marriage. Octave, an old friend of both Andre and Christine, seeks to cool Andre’s unrequited ardor and convert it into “friendship” by having the hero invited to a weekend hunting party at La Coliniere, the de la Chesnaye country estate.
2. The Chateau at La Coliniere (23 minutes). As various guests arrive, the estate gamekeeper, Schumacher, is instructed by Robert to reduce the rabbit population on the grounds without using fences. Making his subsequent rounds on the estate, Schumacher catches in the act a local poacher, Marceau. But Marceau’s rabbit-trapping skills appeal to Robert, who hires him to work in the chateau. As soon as Marceau arrives at the main house for work, though, he begins boldly flirting with Schumacher’s wife, Lisette.
3. The Hunt (for Animal Prey) (12 minutes). In a stark scene the wealthy guests, including women, are equipped with rifles and array themselves in blinds on the grounds, while the servant beaters drive “game” fowl into the air so that they can be shot. The guests blast away with their guns at anything that moves, with Robert shooting mostly at rabbits (not considered “game” by the hunters) in order to help rid his estate of the pest. This entire scene, which highlights the nonsensical slaughter of sentient beings for "sport", is a metaphor for the unreflective way we let our lives be governed by conventional rules that compromise our humanity. Later on in the film when one of the main characters is tragically killed, Marceau remarks, “He didn’t suffer. He dropped like an animal in the hunt.” At the close of the hunt, Robert meets Genevieve in a remote location and politely terminates their liaison. But Christine happens to spy their farewell embrace through viewing glasses and now first learns of her husband’s affair, which she thinks is still aflame.
4. Human Prey at the Chateau (28 minutes). After the hunt, the guests socialize and put on their own costumed music-hall entertainment, while at the same time there are parallel trysts and flirtatious encounters (all ill-fated) involving (a) Christine and one of the guests, St. Aubin, jealously watched by Andre, (b) Robert and Genevieve, and (c) Lisette and Marceau, jealously stalked by Schumacher. Things only get worse, as misunderstandings, angry confrontations, and Schumacher’s jealous attempts to gun down Marceau bring the entire party to pandemonium. This justly-acclaimed sequence is a masterful, almost delirious, display of deep-focus mise-en-scène – the pinnacle of Renoir’s career.
5. The Unraveling (23 minutes). With order seemingly restored and Schumacher and Marceau dismissed from service, Christine and Octave retire to a greenhouse to talk things over. Their philosophical discussion about human nature and love is both a reflective commentary and an intimation of deeper affection. But a final, tragic misunderstanding puts a rueful end to their hopes and to the story, as well.

Certainly The Rules of the Game is more than an upstairs-downstairs comedy of manners. But many critics see the film primarily as a castigation of the outmoded European upper-class values and social irresponsibility in the face of impending war. To me the film has grander and more profound themes that relate to the fundamentals of social interaction. In fact on repeated viewings, one finds new elements and nuances on which to reflect.

Social class and the rules. On the general subject of social class, there are interesting phenomena on display that relate more generally to how society operates. For people of any stripe, there are the “rules of the game”, the norms and policies that specify proper behaviour. But the game rules apply differently, depending on social class. For the upper-class people, the rules can easily be bent according to circumstances and convenience. For example Robert, Genevieve, and St. Aubin, who all belong to the privileged class, are quite willing to engage in illicit affairs. For them such pecadillos are merely minor transgressions that can be overlooked in the larger scheme of things. But for the lower classes, the rules set up serious behavioral boundaries. For example, Schumacher knows that his boss, Robert, wants to rid the estate of rabbits, but he still cannot tolerate the poacher Marceau’s rule violation. But for Robert, Marceau’s rabbit poaching seems downright beneficial, and the usual prohibition against poaching can be set aside in his case. Similarly, among the upper-class set at La Coliniere, individual social outliers are tolerated if they sport the wealth and/or proper manner appropriate to the set. Thus, both Robert, who has Jewish ancestry, and one of the guests who is conspicuously homosexual, are accepted as belonging to the upper class in-group, something not so easily attainable at the lower social rungs.

It is interesting that Andre, Christine, and Octave all stand somewhat outside the circle of upperclass society.

• Andre is a temporary member by virtue of his role as the national hero. But heros are expected to stand outside ordinary social contexts and represent idealized virtues. This is why they can gain universal acclaim, but the demands of this role are almost impossible to meet in practice for very long.
• Christine is the aristocrat imported from Austria, an outsider who struggles to adjust to the customs of the French gentry.
• Octave (played by Renoir, himself) is simply the tolerated friend of the aristocrats – the would-be artist who sees it all from the outside and can only express frustration at his inability to reconcile everyone’s (including his own) romantic dreams with reality.

Among the lower classes there are gradations, too. Schumacher, who tends to the grounds outside the main house, stands at a lower social position than the servants in the house, who work more closely with the gentry. Marceau, the poacher, is outside and below this social scheme altogether. Accordingly Schumacher follows the rules rigidly, while Marceau has no moral inhibitions whatsoever (he has nothing to lose), which unequally tilts their amorous face-off over Lisette from the outset. As for Lisette, she clings to her social status as Christine’s personal maid more fervently than she does to any other personal relationship.

Communication and Context. On a deeper level The Rules of the Game examines the ever-growing difficulty associated with the overlapping rules of social behaviour. Highlighted here is the fact that every human exchange necessarily has its own specific interactive context, and these contexts cannot be universally shared. Nor can these contexts be neatly isolated. Life was so much simpler in the past when social classes were more isolated and there was less intermingling of contexts. As the guests and servants intermingle in The Rules of the Game, they must continually shift gears and play according to the different rules. Everything would work nicely if there were a universal set of rules that could apply everywhere, but Renoir is reminding us that such a dream is impossible. Robert de la Chesnaye implicitly has that unattainable dream, though – he has devoted his life to collecting mechanical devices in which automated dolls act according to mechanical instructions. If only all of life could be mechanized according to some such set of rules, everything would work out perfectly and without awkward mistakes, just as Robert’s mechanical figures do when they are operated. In such an orderly, mechanically-driven world, Robert wouldn’t find himself in the position of necessarily having to disappoint someone (either Genevieve or Christine) – there would be a provable solution to every social problem. But of course it didn’t work that way in 1939, and in today’s ever more intermingled society, the situation gets only worse. (If his character role were to be translated to today’s setting, Robert would probably be obsessed with automated computer technology.) Robert’s interest in mechanical toys reflects his underlying “Objectivist” stance (see the discussion of Objectivism in my review of Michael Moore’s SiCKO). The reductionist world-view of the Objectivist is widely held in modern society, but it usually doesn’t work very well in connection with human interactions. In human social situations, context cannot be abstracted away as it often can in the physical sciences – there are too many details and too much complexity that cannot be covered by the rules of interaction. But today we often pretend that we can do the impossible: live according to simple social rules. To carry on this pretense, we inevitably have to lie (we even sometimes wind up fooling ourselves). When in the film the idealistic romantic, Christine, complains (after learning about her husband’s infidelity) that for three years her life had been based on lies, Octave points out to her that today everyone lies, including the government, the pharmaceuticals, and the media, so it should be OK for simple people like themselves to do it, too. We must ultimately acknowledge that social rules of a mechanical nature can only offer skeletal guidelines for behaviour. Rather than invariably seeing deviations from these rules as violations, these rules and their enforcement must sometimes be moderated by higher-level values of love and tolerance.

Love and Brotherhood. Interestingly, many of the characters do indeed come together at various times in the story and share a kind of mutual, humanistic bonding that transcends the specific social game-playing in which they are momentarily involved. This humanistic bonding suggests something more universal and crosses the boundaries of class. The following is a list of the “brotherly” or “sisterly” interactions that take place in this manner during the film:

• Robert ↔ Andre
• Robert ↔ Octave
• Robert ↔ Marceau
• Marceau ↔ Schumacher
• Marceau ↔ Octave
• Octave ↔ Andre
• Octave ↔ Christine
• Christine ↔ Genevieve
• Christine ↔ Lisette

In each case the two interlocutors share a certain amount of candor and honesty, during which time they let their guards down and are relatively comfortable with each other as equals. Robert attempts to achieve such an encounter with Genevieve, but she will have none of it; Genevieve longs for something higher and even more universal.

What Genevieve would like (but knows she cannot realistically get) is something that Andre, Christine, and even Octave, all passionately desire: romantic love. Romantic love is universal, infinite, ego-dissolving, and in its ideal it transcends all contexts and boundaries. To be a lover is to live a dream, to play an idealized role in a dreamscape that is almost impossible to sustain for long. In the last analysis, neither Andre nor Octave can fulfill the extreme demands of romantic love, and they succumb to concerns for the social rules that govern their ordinary lives. This is the lament that Renoir plays out for us in The Rules of the Game.

Renoir’s achievement. Renoir managed to do justice to all these issues under discussion by cinematicly painting them in richer, more subtle shades than one sees in most films. The resulting effect is dazzling. The cinematography is extraordinary, with multiple, meaningful actions taking place in depth, using deep-focus photography. In the rapturous Act 4 ("Human Prey at the Chateau”), there is a breathtaking sequence of multiple 30-to-45-second shots in which many of the characters come in and out of the picture, seemingly at random, to interact in complex ways. In this sequence, the multiple romantic threads crisscross in the chateau corridors, and yet they appear more or less naturally, with a minimum of editorial cuts. Throughout these shots, Renoir maintains fluid camera movements and temporary compositions that maintain a visual balance, matched only perhaps by Mizoguchi. At the same time, the actors remain in-character and sustain their distinct personas. All of the acting is physically and visually expansive, yet effective, with memorable performances from veterans of his past works, including Julien Carette (as Marceau), Gaston Modot (as Schumacher), and Marcel Dalio (as Robert de la Chesnaye). Nora Gregor played the role of the semi-outsider, Christine, who in the story is said to have arrived years earlier from Austria, which matched her real-life circumstances -- she was, herself, a recent refugee actress who had fled Austria as a result of the Nazi Germany depredations.

It is reported that Renoir had completed less than half the shooting script when filming began, so that he must have made up a good part of the shooting scenario in a relatively extemporaneous fashion. It is hard to believe that such carefully blocked-out shots, with such fully-fleshed-out and nuanced acting, could have been accomplished in a supposedly impromptu fashion. You really must watch carefully this section of The Rules of the Game to appreciate just why the film is held in such high esteem and why it has had such a mesmerizing effect on directors that followed. For one example (there are several) of this virtuosity keep an eye out for the 43-second shot scanning the audience during the costumed performance in the darkened little theater that features Andre jealously watching St. Aubin and Christine, while Schumacher jealously searches for Lisette and Marceau. Alain Resnais said that he was stunned when he first saw the film. Robert Altman said that the film taught him the “rules of the game” of filmmaking, and indeed it led him to emulate Renoir’s multi-character, multi-layered narrative style in his own films.

The Rules of the Game was Renoir’s career high point, coming directly after two other outstanding films of his that were stylistically and thematically somewhat different: La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Bête Humaine (1938). Soon the world war would overwhelm Europe, and Renoir would flee to the United States, remote from his built-up ensemble of artistic collaborators. Through the various vicissitudes that would follow in his travels, however, he would always retain his unique inclusive perspective on the human condition.
★★★★

“SiCKO” - Michael Moore (2007)

Michael Moore’s documentary film SiCKO (2007) raises such fundamental and interlocking issues about modern society and culture that it is difficult to know where to start the discussion. With documentary films, of course, there are always two basic threads that one can usually consider separately: (a) the external issue under discussion and (b) the nature of the documentary expression undertaken by the filmmaker. But with Moore’s film, everything is connected and overlapping.

The subject matter of SiCKO, the external issue under discussion, is the American healthcare system and what can be done to address the fundamental concerns that have been raised by its critics. Certainly this is a subject that stands at the top of peoples’ concerns worldwide: the quality of healthcare, which is fundamental to basic quality of life. Of course there are some people who stubbornly insist that the American medical system is the best and most efficient in the world, but most people today recognize that there are deep flaws with the way medical care is delivered in the United States. There are many different measures that testify to this, but consider just these two:

• According to the UN’s World Health Organization report in 2000, the United States ranked 37th in overall world healthcare (France ranked 1st overall).
• According to the CIA’s World FactBook, the US ranks 49th in life expectancy (France ranks 8th).

One of the basic problems with the US system is that it, alone among leading developed nations, does not provide its citizens with universal guaranteed healthcare, leaving about fifty million people without any health insurance at all. One could spend weeks, even years, examining the specifics of this vast, complicated, and important subject, and a two-hour movie is not going to do that. In fact SiCKO doesn’t introduce much information that most people don’t already know, but it does go on to raise an even larger issue – and in this connection it rhetorically asks a disturbing question: what kind of society does America have that it can treat its own fellow citizens as objects that have a price, i.e. virtually as “pieces of meat”?

Let us put the disturbing nature of that question aside for the moment and consider the other main topic of discussion here, which is the nature of the documentary film expression employed by Michael Moore. I am always amazed by the animosity and contempt that so many people seem to feel for Moore. Right-wing and politically conservative people, of course, are inevitably offended by his positions, and they might be expected to dismiss his films. But there are also many political independents, even a great many people on the political left, who dismiss Moore as a liar, a “sleaze bag”, a slovenly showman, someone who is out to distort the truth and manipulate the audience. Why do they hate him so much? For one thing, they seem to despise him for appearing personally in his films and confronting some of his subjects on camera with troubling questions, which Moore’s critics often consider to be self-serving. But there is a deeper American cultural theme that underlies this animosity towards Moore, and it has its connections with the history of documentary films.

Documentary films are supposed to expose the “truth” about some subject. Inspired by the demonstrated success of Western empirical science, a good documentary film is supposed to lay bare the objective facts of a situation, so that a judicious and unprejudiced viewer can see objective reality and arrive at the truth. This is in direct contrast with propaganda films, a label that Moore's rabid critics attach to his films, which display a willingness to distort the facts in an effort to persuade the viewer on some point. In ever-more-strenuous efforts to get at the underlying truth of a subject, documentary filmmakers have always continually striven to efface the subjectivity of their own point of view by attempting to expose “the truth” in ever-more objective detail. An idealistic extreme of these efforts has been cinema vérité. I commented about cinema vérité in connection with my review of Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1999):

The notions of cinema vérité, which actually go back to the work of Dziga Vertov and his Russian colleagues in the 1920s, became popular in France during the 1960s. The goal was to capture objective reality, “the truth”, with the camera. When the popularity of cinema vérité spread to the US, it became known as “direct cinema”, but there was an often-overlooked difference. The American filmmakers adopted a “fly-on-the-wall” approach: they wanted to make the camera so inconspicuous, so “invisible”, that the subjects being filmed were not consciously aware of its presence. The camera was to be an objective record of reality. But of course this is a fiction: the camera always has its presence and its point of view in any filmmaking activity. The French cinema vérité documentarians tended to acknowledge explicitly this presence of the observer, and they incorporated their own observations into their recordings.

The fundamental distinction between French cinema vérité and American direct cinema relates to a fundamental philosophical divide separating two ways of looking at the world, which I call “Objectivism” and “Interactionism”.

• Objectivism is the naive objective reality stance, which most of us adopt most of the time in our everyday activities. The objective world is assumed to be scientifically knowable and reducible to elementary entities that operate according to laws that can, in principle, be discovered by an “objective” observer. This objective world is “out there” – independent of any observer. To know about this world, one’s act of scientific observation must avoid any interference with that which is being inspected. Isaac Newton’s Laws of Physics are representative examples of Objectivism’s achievements.
   
• Interactionism (which could also be called the “the Phenomenological”) recognizes that the observer invariably and essentially has an effect on whatever may be observed (as attested to by physicist Werner Heisenberg with his Principle of Uncertainty). For Interactionism, every human activity invariably involves an embodied interaction with something else (even, as Heisenberg noted, when interacting with a scientific instrument). In this respect, rather than Cartesian dualism and Newtonian analysis, one should associate Interactionism with Buddhism, Sufism, and the work of Merleau-Ponty. From the Interactionist perspective, Objectivism is only an abstract ideal that has pragmatic application in many domains, but not all. But real experience, which is inescapably interactive, can only be approximated by Objectivism -- and only approximated accurately some of the time, such as when observing more remote physical objects, like the stars. In other spheres of activity, where account of human interaction cannot be minimized, such as the sphere of human social activity, Objectivist approximations are particularly weak and inaccurate.

“Direct Cinema”, which has dominated the American imagination when it comes to documentary filmmaking (even though it is only one style and not even the most common practice), exemplifies Objectivism, or claims to, anyway. Note that in fact, direct cinema documentary filmmakers have shooting ratios as high as 100 to 1, which means that out of all that “fly on the wall” material that has been collected, only a small amount of footage is actually used. This means that the film editor has been highly selective in terms of what makes the final cut, and this selectivity almost invariably reflects a personal point of view. In contrast with Objectivist-influenced American direct cinema documentarians, outstanding European documentary filmmakers, such as Werner Herzog and Louis Malle, have been Interactionists. They recognize that every documentary film presentation necessarily involves interactions on the part of the filmmaker with his subject material, and they explicitly acknowledge that interaction by supplying their own personal commentary. Michael Moore belongs to the same camp and is an Interactionist, too, but he is operating in a popular society that clings stubbornly to the belief that Objectivism is the only option.

So in SiCKO Moore gives the viewer his personal narrative describing his investigation into a sick social patient, which in this case is the whole of American society. You may well not agree with his point of view, but this is his journey and his telling. This makes his film not a scientific investigation (in fact there is not much material here about the US healthcare system that you don’t already know, anyway), but a personal story, and so it makes the film that much more compelling (and correspondingly infuriating to his opponents).

Moore’s story has a well-coordinated argument that is structured almost like a medical diagnosis, with an increasing sense of irony as the film progresses:

• The unwanted symptoms are first examined (Section 1).
• Next the recent history of how things got this way are covered (Section 2).
• Then successive examples of successful “treatments” given to other “patients” (countries) are presented (Sections 3-6).
• The final diagnosis is an exercise left for the viewer. But Moore reminds his audience at the end that America has always opportunistically borrowed good ideas from abroad and adopted them without prejudice. It is time, he says, for America to do that again.

Supplementing the main sections are also some brief entr'acte pieces that are used for maintaining the mood and tempo of Moore’s presentation.

1. The Difficulty of Getting Medical Coverage (30 minutes). The first section of the film documents an extended series of outrageous personal tales describing ordinary people who have been denied medical insurance and therefore have not been able to obtain critical medical treatment that they could not afford. Of course one could complain that these are only selected cases taken from a large society, but the cases appear to reflect not just individual mistakes, but systematic policies that are unjustly applied on a wide scale. There are several types of problems described:

• Many people cannot obtain health insurance, even if they have the money to pay for it. The insurance companies reject applicants if they are too thin, too fat, or otherwise considered to be risky investments.
• Insurance companies deny claims and cancel policies if they can find some unreported pre-existing condition, even when it is as trivial as a past yeast infection.
• Insurance companies will not provide doctor-recommended and potentially life-saving treatment to a patient if it can be classified as “experimental” (and therefore not part of the standard practice).

This section also documents doctors and case workers in the industry who are explicitly rewarded and paid bonuses for rejecting patient claims. The goal of the insurance companies, and their allies, the health maintenance organizations (HMOs), is to deny treatment as much as possible in order to maximize profits.

Many of the cases presented portray people who died because they were denied treatment that could have saved their lives. This section has an emotive impact. The viewer meets these people; they speak to the camera; and then many of them die. Although critics might complain that these selected cases are grossly unrepresentative of US healthcare, one has to ask how even one of these tragic cases has to come to pass.

2. Recent US Healthcare History (12 minutes).

• This historical background begins about forty years ago when archived US Presidential recordings reveal that Richard Nixon was attracted to supporting the idea of establishing HMOs, because these new organisations would try to reduce medical treatments as much as possible in order to secure higher profits.
• The commentary then recounts Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated efforts to reform the US healthcare back in the early 1990s.
• It is argued that the reasons behind Hillary’s speicific failure and always behind the political difficulties of American healthcare reform are the entrenched interests of the insurance companies, the HMOs, and the pharmaceutical corporations. All of these organisations are enormous economic enterprises that can use their economic clout to influence the government by effectively making campaign contributions (i.e. offering bribes) to government officials. This has resulted in a convenient partnership – while each of the CEOs of the big healthcare organisations gets salaries and payouts amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, US senators are also all getting hundreds of thousand of dollars per year in campaign contributions.
• A particularly egregious example (presented with a photoshopped image to dramatize the point) is that of Billy Tauzin, a former US Congressman who left Congress and went on to become the CEO (with a $2 million salary) of the principal drug lobby, PhRMA.

3. Canada (10 minutes). The scene shifts to Canada, which does indeed supply universal healthcare to its citizens. Although US conservatives issue dire warnings about lengthy patient waiting lists in Canada that would presumably make their system undesirable, Moore suggests that there are some Americans who would definitely prefer the Canadian system over their own. He documents an American woman who tries circuitous schemes to get medical coverage in Canada that is not available to her in the USA. He also reports that even the Canadian Conservative Party is staunchly committed to the Canadian universal healthcare coverage.

4. England (19 minutes). England is another country offering universal healthcare coverage to its citizens. Moore shows that England even offers (or has up to now) free coverage to tourists who injure themselves while doing foolish things during their visits to the country. This section also includes enlightening remarks from venerable British politician Tony Benn about the England’s sixty-plus-year experience of universal healthcare. To give up such a programme in England now, Benn says, would be as unthinkable as taking back the right of women to vote: universal healthcare is now an essential part of British civilization.

Entr’acte. This interlude covers the sad tale of a female HMO worker whose young daughter dies during an emergency illness, because the HMO would not authorize life-saving treatment at the nearest hospital.

5. France (15 minutes). France, number one on the WHO tables, is of course the best when it comes to healthcare. More examples of the superior French system are provided, and this is further attested to by some American expatriates living in France who swear by the French approach.

Entr’acte. Magnifying the contrast between the social inclusiveness of France and England and the divisive, profit-driven US system, this section shows how Los Angeles hospitals take indigent patients needing treatment and dump them off as if they were refuse at skid row shelters for the homeless.

6. Cuba, the Ultimate Irony (12 minutes). Taking note of the US Military’s claims that prisoners held in Guantanamo military facilities get comprehensive medical care, Moore decides to see if the US government is willing to offer the same kind of treatment to some real American heroes who have been neglected. These are three volunteer 9/11 rescue workers who are still suffering from debilitating conditions incurred as a result of their efforts, but who cannot obtain medical coverage, because they were acting as volunteers and not employees. Why is it that so-called “terrorists” get better medical care from the government than volunteer patriots? This entire section, of course, is a stunt, but Moore sets it up to dramatize the inequities of the American system. His “boat people” voyage, with his ill passengers in tow, doesn’t make it onto the Guantanamo Bay military base, but the whole trip was basically a ruse for him to convey his patients not to the base, but to Cuba proper. That impoverished country, as we should know, just happens to have universal health care, and, as a consequence, a higher life-expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the US. His patients all get the treatment in Cuba that is not affordable to them in the US.

Moore’s thesis, of course, is not just that the US healthcare system is ill, but that entire US society is unwell. In France, England, Canada, and Cuba, they live in a world of “we”, not “me”. From a larger perspective this social/political problem is intimately associated with the rigidly Objectivist underpinnings of US popular culture that tries to comprehensively apply the idea that just about everything is property that can be rightfully exploited by its individual owner. A prime example of this reductionist mentality is the crippling insistence on the part of the US to impose worldwide “intellectual property” laws – the notion that an idea, an item of thought, can be a piece of property that is owned by an individual. In accordance with this line of thinking, US corporations have engaged in biopiracy by attempting to secure “intellectual property” ownership in foreign countries over essential food chains and traditional medicines, such as in India in connection with aubergines and basmati rice. I will cut short further discussion on the limitations of the notion of “intellectual property” here and simply refer the reader to the commentary in my review of Brett Gaylor’s RiP: A Remix Manifesto (2009). The main point to be drawn in this connection is that America's over-application of Objectivist-inspired “property thinking” has diminished its capacity to deliver healthcare properly. Pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, and health insurance companies are only interested in profitable returns on their investments, not on tending to the health needs of the citizenry. The real solution to this problem is to use an Interactionist-inspired approach, and that is just what Canada, England, France, and Cuba have done.

Traditional conservative commentators, however, try to cast this healthcare debate into the old and simplistic notion of Capitalism versus Socialism, but this is not the signal dichotomy for the issue at hand and only confuses the debate. For one thing, two of the major communist countries, China and Viet Nam, do not now offer universal healthcare for their citizens. Their own ruthless adoption of Objectivist principles has led them to partially abandon the community-oriented welfare of their citizenry. In fact the places were universal healthcare is primarily offered today are in European countries that are primarily capitalist. And the capitalist-socialist divide is further muddied by the practices of some so-called bastions of capitalism. For example the WTO purports to champion capitalism, but engages in practices that actually restrict free trade by pressing for the propagation of “intellectual property”, laws. So, too, the “privatized” (but property-obsessed) HMOs largely restrict free trade and the freedom of consumer choice of their customer-members.

In fact capitalism is not essentially Objectivist, and it can comfortably accommodate an inclusionist, Interactionist mode of operation, as is evidenced by France, England, and other European countries. (Note that Moore also had a considerable amount of film footage about Norway, but he didn't include it in the final edit, because it was redundant to his argument.) In those progressive European countries, there is a recognition that people are not pieces of property for which only a return on investment is expected. A point that Moore didn’t emphasize in SiCKO but that is germane to his thesis is that the reason why the Guantanamo Bay “detainees” were given proper medical care was that they were/are considered valuable pieces of “property”, not because they naturally deserve such treatment (as they should) by right of simply being human beings.

The bottom line on SiCKO, then, is that Michael Moore has told his tale and made his case very effectively. With the evidence of this film, he now has to be recognized, if he hadn't been already, as a filmmaker of the top rank. Although his appearance and verbal style is folksy, it is clear that his film has been meticulously crafted. I understand that he had over five hundred hours of film to edit – a shooting ratio of more than 250 to 1, which would exceed that of most of the direct cinema productions. He and his staff have diligently mined archival footage to support his argument, and they must have put in an enormous amount of hours putting it all together so that the exposition is brisk, clear, and hard-hitting.

Interestingly, Michael Moore’s work has been compared with that of direct cinema maestro documentarian Frederick Wiseman, because both have presented unflattering portraits of American institutions. But Wiseman is one of those sly selectors of recorded information who has managed to keep himself inconspicuous and still cunningly convey his own point of view. As much as I admire Wiseman’s work, I think Moore’s upfront approach is probably more straightforward (provided that accommodation is made for Moore’s heavy sense of irony).

Finally, in view of the evident excellence of this work and its likely positive social impact, I guess I must at last forgive Michael Moore for his wreckless public support of Ralph Nader in the critical 2000 US Presidential election. We all make mistakes, and Moore has confessed that he made the wrong move, big time, on that occasion. Since then, with Bowling for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 911 (2004), and SiCKO, Moore has emerged as an increasingly profound social commentator. In the end we could say that with Michael Moore's unshakable belief in, and prescriptions for, his unwell country's ability to make a recovery, he’s just what the doctor ordered.
★★★★

“The Lady Vanishes” - Alfred Hitchcock (1938)

Alfred Hitchcock’s last film made in Britain before his shift to America, The Lady Vanishes (1938), is widely viewed as one of his all-time best films. I wouldn’t put it in the category of some of his classics, but it was probably his best comedy (or, if you will, “comedy-drama”). One should also not underestimate the importance that railroad trains had during the days before widespread air travel, and The Lady Vanishes is one of the prominent films of that period, along with von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Express (1932) and Renoir’s La Bête Humaine (1938), that incorporated the metaphorical significance of trains into its narrative. The film also belongs to the well-established genre of the socially mismatched man and woman who are thrown together by adventurous circumstances and fall in love along the way, as exemplified by Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). Nevertheless, there are some weaknesses to The Lady Vanishes that keep it below the top rank. Significant among the deficiencies are the implausible and unmotivated events that popup out of nowhere and propel the action forward.

The story, which is essentially a spy thriller, is set in a fictional and obscure Eastern European country, Bandrika, which is evidently involved in the Machiavellian political machinations going on in Europe prior to World War II. At the outset a collection European tourists has been temporarily stranded because an avalanche has blocked the railroad. When the tracks are cleared the next day, they all board the train for home (England, for most of those of interest). Once they are on their way, though, one of the travelers, a commonplace, middle-aged woman, disappears. Unraveling the reasons for this disappearance and providing assistance occupies the rest of the film. There are roughly four “acts” to the film narrative, and, interestingly, I find the second act to be the most compelling section. After that the film becomes a stock crime thriller of rather unimaginative proportions.

1. Introduction of the Characters (24 minutes). The film takes its time introducing a collection of characters who will figure in the ensuing events. These include

• Three wealthy young ladies on a holiday. Only one of them turns out be important for the later events: Iris (played by Margaret Lockwood), who is returning home to England to marry her wealthy and socially-approved fiancé.
• Gilbert (played by Michael Redgrave), a brash young music anthropologist, who is pursuing field studies concerning local dance customs of the region.
• Miss Froy (played by Dame May Witty), an innocent old governess returning to England after five years.
• Caldicott and Charters, two stuffy, upper-class English tourists with a consuming interest in a cricket test match going on in England at that time.
• A barrister, Mr. Toddhunter, and his mistress, who are trying to avoid attracting attention to their adulterous affair.

For most of this act, the action is imperturbably scattered and inconsequential. Gilbert doesn’t even appear in the first eighteen minutes, and it isn’t until 21 minutes into the film that Gilbert meets Iris, the first circumstances of which are, naturally, far from romantic. At the very end of this act, 24 minutes in, an evening balladeer is mysteriously strangled, and the tone has suddenly shifted from idle chit-chat to more omenous things. (The presumed idea that the balladeer’s melody contained a secret message to be memorized for conveyance back to the home front is reminiscent of a similar ploy in von Sternberg’s 1931 outing, Dishonored.)

2. Iris Alone (31 minutes). Before the train departs, Iris is hit in the head by a falling brick that was apparently intended for Miss Froy. This is the first occurrence of a recurring pattern in the film: the audience is often ahead of the characters in terms of awareness of threats. As the train departs, Iris, still dazed by the knock on the head, joins Miss Froy’s compartment, and they chat. When she later awakes from a brief snooze, she discovers that Miss Froy is gone, and everyone around her denies ever having seen the old lady. Of course we saw Miss Froy, but the others deny her existence and argue that Iris’s accident has led her to hallucinate the old lady’s presence. With paranoia mounting by the minute, Iris becomes increasingly distraught by the evident conspiracy around her to deny the truth, and she finally enlists the sympathetic, but politely skeptical, Gilbert to her cause. The dramatic buildup in this act is superb, as Iris’s concerns for her friend is confidently dismissed and “explained” by an onboard psychiatrist, Dr. Hartz (played by Paul Lukas), as merely a temporary neuropathology. But at 55 minutes into the film, Gilbert finally notices a discarded tea package that confirms Iris’s story is true, and he rallies to her cause.

3. Iris & Gilbert Seek Miss Froy (20 minutes). Gilbert and Iris now actively look for clues about Miss Froy and discover that an Italian magician on the train is part of the plot. Eventually it is revealed to the viewer (but away from the focalization of Gilbert and Iris) that Dr. Hartz is an evildoer and in charge of the conspiracy. A few minutes leader Hartz reveals his malevolence to Gilbert and Iris after having given them a drink that will poison of heavily sedate them. But wait, Hartz’s scheme is mysteriously sabotaged by one of his own charges, a woman disguised as a nun, who failed to put the sedating drug into the drinks. Iris and Gilbert find and revive Miss. Froy, who is actually a British spy and who had been wrapped in bandages as Hartz’s patient, as the train arrives at local the station.

4. The 2nd Train Trip (18 minutes). Dr. Hartz realizes that his plans have gone awry, but he is still in charge at the local train station and directs the carriages containing the British passengers to be uncoupled and attached to a train that will take them to an isolated area inside Bandrika. When the train stops, the British passengers are trapped inside their carriage, as soldiers prepare to take them prisoner. While Miss Froy escapes on foot out a back window, a fierce gunfight breaks out between the passengers and the soldiers. Meanwhile Gilbert and Caldicott manage to restart the train themselves and drive their comrades back across the border into “free” territory.

At the end of the film back in London, Iris abandons her betrothed and accepts Gilbert’s marriage proposal, and then they both happily learn that Miss Froy, too, managed to make her way safely back to England and report to the Foreign Office. Love triumphs in the end, and evil foreign plots have once again been stymied.

Francois Truffaut said that he so much admired The Lady Vanishes that he sometimes saw it twice in a week and that he knew the film by heart. To me the film is an amusing piece of fluff but falls short of Hitchcock’s best efforts. All in all, the film is something of a paean to the British cultural identity in the face of the gathering international political storm clouds of the late Thirties. This may appeal to Anglo-American patriotism, but it reduces some of the performances to more transparent schematizations. For example, the barrister, Mr. Toddhunter, has no real significance to the story other than to portray the kind of “appeaser” that was held in much contempt by the warhawks of those days.

To be sure, there are some delightful elements in the film to be savored. One example is associated with Hitchcock’s adroit mechanisms of visually alerting the viewer to something that is not yet evident to his players. When Iris first chats with Miss Froy on the train, the old lady uses her finger to mark out the spelling of her name, “Froy”, on the dusty windowpane next to them. Later, after everyone denies the existence of Miss Froy, Iris and Gilbert sit down by the same window. The viewer clearly sees the name “Froy” still marked on the window, while Iris and Gilbert blithely converse for a couple of minutes, oblivious to the telltale evidence demonstrating the real existence of the old lady. It is a delicious moment of suspense as the viewer waits impatiently during the conversation for what can only be inevitable: for Iris to glance at the window and recognize the significance of the marking.

The acting and characterizations in The Lady Vanishes are relatively uneven. Margaret Lockwood, as Iris, has the allure and spark to sustain interest in her persistent efforts to find and assist her friend, Miss Froy. Indeed the energetic performance of this beautiful brunette (this was before Hitchcock’s later obsession with washed-out, stereotyped blondes) manages to sustain the narrative throughout. But Michael Redgrave, who was a prominent stage actor and making his first major film appearance, is much too cavalier and self-conscious to be believable. The whole thing seems to be just a lark for him, as he smirks his way from one scene to another. The result is that the chemistry between Iris and Gilbert is pretty artificial and nothing like the Gable-Colbert combination in It Happened One Night. Many of the other characters are also relatively wooden or hammy, but the duo of Caldicott and Charters (played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) rise above such banalities and almost make the film their own. Their brilliantly humorous and spot-on portrayals of two idle and useless English gentlemen (very much in the P. G. Wodehouse tradition) is hilarious and irresistibly whimsical. I couldn’t get enough of them, and, tellingly, I preferred their screen presence to everyone else's, including those of the two leads.

But while Wayne and Radford almost make the film wonderful, the many implausible elements in the plot are just too noticeable and unmotivated to be ignored. Here are some of them:

• The motivational background concerning Miss Froy’s spying activities is never provided. What is it that she knows and intends to convey to the British Foreign Office that is so important? We never learn that.
• The member of Dr. Hartz’s gang of conspirators dressed up as a nun, who saves Iris and Gilbert, is a shameless and inexcusable example of a deus ex machina. She just pops up out of nowhere – no foreshadowing, no motivation, nothing – and betrays Hartz for no apparent reason.
• When Hartz, allegedly a doctor, examines Iris and Gilbert at the time they are feigning drugged unconsciousness, he doesn’t merely glance in their direction. He actually raises the closed eyelid of Gilbert to check if he is insensate. It is unbelievable that he would not see at such a close range that Gilbert is merely pretending.
• After getting knocked out in the fistfight in the baggage car, how does the villainous magician recover so quickly and why does he later show no acknowledgment of what happened?
• How do Gilbert and Caldicott manage to drive the train back across the national border?

Overall, The Lady Vanishes is a lightweight, escapist caper, but nothing so sublime as Hitchcock’s wonderfully told The 39 Steps (1935).
★★★