“Un Flic” - Jean-Pierre Melville (1972)

There are various arguments concerning the precise specifications and boundaries of film noir, but few can deny that the supreme virtuoso of the genre was French director Jean-Pierre Melville.  He took this form of cinematic expression and refined it to almost surreal levels of artistic and dramatic abstraction. His last film, Un Flic (aka A Cop and Dirty Money), which was made the year before his untimely death in 1973, is so lost in moody and impressionistic images that its narrative absurdities seem not to matter.

As discussed in my review of Melville’s Le Doulos (1962), the main characters in a film noir are usually disillusioned outsiders and lawbreakers who want to forget the past and have little hope for the future.  They are often caught in some kind of gloomy, urban maze from which there seems to be no escape.  So normally you don’t expect a film noir protagonist to be a high ranking policeman, unless it is someone who has booked a ticket to the dark side.  But in Un Flic, the presumed protagonist is such a cop (that’s what “flic”means in French), and this lead role is played by French superstar and Melville favorite, Alain Delon.  Although he ostensibly upholds the law, he does so with a degree of cynicism appropriate for this noirish landscape, and he has a personal involvement with criminals of similar disenchantment.

In fact that sense of disenchantment, not uncommon to a film noir, is taken to an extreme degree in this film, and it is perhaps its distinguishing feature.  All of the characters seem so alienated, that there is almost nothing for them to say.  Indeed dialogue in the film is kept to a minimum, and much of the time communication is through the exchange of glances.  This pervasive sense of alienation is signaled by an opening title (and later repeated by Delon to a colleague in the story) quoting 18th century French criminologist Francois-Eugene Vidocq to the effect that as far as police are concerned the people they encounter only arouse two feelings, puzzlement and derision.

The principal characters are the policeman (Delon) and the collection of people around a smooth nightclub owner and thief (played by Richard Crenna):

• Commissaire Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon) is something like a combination detective and inspector of a local Parisian precinct.
• Simon (Richard Crenna) owns and operates “The Cotton Club”, a Parisian nightclub. He is also the leader of a sophisticated criminal gang.
• Cathy (Catherine Deneuve) is Simon’s gal, but she also has an affair with Coleman.
• Paul Weber (Riccardo Cucciolla ) is a middle-aged banker who has lost his job and has joined Simon’s gang.
• Louis Costa (Michael Conrad, known for his later role in US TV series Hill Street Blues) is another member of Simon’s gang.
• Marc Albouis (André Pousse) is also a member of Simon’s gang.
• Gaby (Valérie Wilson) is a transvestite with connections to the criminal underworld, but is trying to clear her record by serving as a police informer.

Actually, one could say that the two adversaries, Coleman and Simon, are on equal footing and are equally protagonists, although on opposite sides of the law.  The narrative focalization of the film is almost exclusively on these two.  There is a significant contrast between the characters played by Delon and Crenna, though, which seems to be related to their innate dramatic personas:

• Delon, though refined and handsome, projects narcissism: he is self-absorbed and opaque.  He gets his way by coldly beating and torturing his captives, and he appears to be unaffected by death and the pain suffered by others.
• Crenna, in contrast, projects thought and reflection. He seems more aware and sensitive to the people around him. The viewer can mentally emphathiize, though not sympathize, with his character, Simon. Even though the film title refers to the cop, the actual story tends to follow Simon’s efforts to pull off his heists, and so that character becomes the primary protagonist.

The story goes through four stages, or acts, but an identifiable narrative goal, which is Simon’s big heist, is not really established until the second act.

1.  Establishing the Scene.
In the beginning there is a long (11-minute) sequence detailing Simon’s gang robbing a somewhat remote bank situated right next to the ocean.  It is late in the day, the weather is heavily stormy, and there is almost no dialogue as three of the men, clad in trench coats and fedoras, successively enter the bank, with Costa waiting outside in the car.  The heavy rain and wind, clouded in mist and fog, casts a pall over everything – perhaps even more pervasively than the darkness typical of a film noir. As we struggle to make out who’s doing what in the mist, there is so much attention to incidental detail that it seems as if the “camera” (i.e. the “silent narrative witness”) gets distracted: while the camera is fixed on Costa in the car outside, the gang members inside evidently make their move.  When we cut back inside to the bank, the robbers have already drawn their guns and are demanding the money.  Things go awry when a teller sets off an alarm, grabs a gun, and shoots Albouis, before getting gunned down himself.  Simon and the others get away in their car with the money, eventually burying it somewhere in the countryside.  Then they drive back to Paris and deposit the seriously wounded Albouis at a medical clinic.

Meanwhile Coleman is shown attending to the seedy crime scene in his district.  A beautiful girl has been murdered at one location, and a pedophile has been robbed by his client at another. Coleman shows no empathy for anyone, and he readily punches detainees in order to get them to talk.  He also arranges a meeting on the street with his informer, Gaby, who tells him that a heroin shipment, carried by a drug mule known as “Suitcase Matthew”, will soon be made on the Paris-to-Lisbon train.

At this point of the story, two spheres of interaction have been established: that of Simon and that of Coleman.  And we know that Simon and his gang have, temporarily at least, gotten away with their robbery.  Coleman will probably be their adversary.  But the major narrative quest is yet to be determined.

2.  The Plot Thickens
In the next section, things become much more complicated, to the near bewilderment of the viewer.  It turns out that Simon owns a flashy nightclub and that Coleman is his good friend and often frequents the nightclub.  Not only that, but Simon’s woman, Cathy, is having an affair with Coleman on the sly.  Yet it seems, on the surface at least, that Coleman is unaware of Simon’s criminal activities.

Simon is now worried that a police dragnet of the Parisian clinics will uncover Albouis and get him to squeal, so, in another intricate scheme, he arranges for his men and Cathy to masquerade as medics and to go the clinic to kill Albouis.  Cathy dispatches Albouis with a lethal injection and reveals that she is clearly a trusted member of the gang.  The viewer has to wonder at this point: either Coleman must be aware of Simon’s criminal perfidy or his affair with Cathy must be pretty superficial.

Simon now plots a much bigger caper: he intends to rob the drug haul carried by Suitcase Matthew on the Paris-Lisbon train as it nears the Portuguese border.  Somehow the money from the previous bank robbery is associated with this heist.  Simon is supremely confident that his plan is foolproof and tells the other gang members:

“and when the goods are ours, the very men we robbed will buy them back.  No complaints lodged, no detectives on our heels.”

So Simon and Coleman are now both working at cross purposes to intercept a big drug shipment  undertaken by a shadowy third party about which the viewer never learns much.  But at least the principal narrative quest has finally been established.

3.  The Robbery on the Train
The robbery on the train is totally outlandish, and once more there is very little dialogue over more than 20 minutes of screen time. The Paris-Lisbon train stops at the Bordeaux station, where Suitcase Matthew books a sleeping car apartment and is given his drug shipment.  Then the train departs to the south, while Simon, Weber, and Costa fly in a helicopter above over the train as it moves at speed.  Simon is dropped down by a rope from the helicopter onto the top of a train car and manages to work his way inside.  Again there are long, intricate sequences that suggest detailed planning, and yet the entire operation seems to be so dependent on fortunate circumstance that one cannot believe any level-headed thief would attempt such an operation.  The improbability of the scene showing Simon picking a lock with a horseshoe magnet is particularly absurd.  But this extreme slowing down of the action under tense circumstances a la Rafifi (1955) adds to the melodramatic pitch.

Anyway, Simon’s team pulls off the heist and makes it back to Paris. Coleman, acting on Gaby’s information, had planned to intercept the drug shipment, but finds Suitcase Matthew empty-handed at the next train stop. Angry with his failure, Coleman accuses Gaby of giving him misinformation and slaps “her” in the face.

4.  Closing the Circle
Coleman eventually learns about Albouis, links him to Costa, and has Costa arrested.  After interrogating and presumably torturing Costa, Coleman links everything to Simon.  Simon makes plans to get away with the stolen heroin and phones Cathy to come pick him up in her car.  But that phone call has been tapped by the police and overheard by Coleman.  He arrives when Cathy does, and guns his friend down on the street.

Since the story of Un Flic seems to be categorically unrealistic in many respects, we have to accept the film as almost something like a jazz riff – an impressionistic sequence of colored tones that evoke an overall mood, rather than a story that makes sense.  The mood is ice-cold and lacking in human passion – just tinted by Delon’s ambiguous grey stares.  Perhaps a symbolic evocation of this sense of pale indifference and unreality are the images of blonde hair in the film, all of which have associated interactions with Coleman.  In fact all of these blonde figures stand out in Coleman’s dim grey world like bizarre traffic lights of artificiality and deception.  These are signals of a key film noir aspect: the problem of finding someone to trust in a tangled world of deception.

• Early on, Coleman contemplates the open-eyed visage of a beautiful dead woman who seems to be staring absently into space.  He looks into her eyes for a moment and then turns away.
• Suitcase Matthew has a beefy physique and physical manner that suggests the social milieu from which the criminal element commonly emerges. But this contrasts markedly with his bright blonde hair that looks as if it has been artificially colored.  This is bizarre, because as a drug mule, he is supposed to be someone who blends in with the crowd.
• Cathy, played by Catherine Deneuve in her usual style of aloofness, is utterly cold-blooded. She kills Albouis without a trace of emotion, and when she watches her lover Simon dying on the street, she seems only mildly contemplative.
• The transvestite Gaby also has vividly blonde hair and is a deceiver on many levels. Yet although she snitches on the criminals she knows and pretends to be female (the viewer is deceived, too, because her true gender does not become evident until late in the piece), she is the only one who seems to have genuine human feelings. Adding further to this deception, at the viewing level, is the fact that this role of a male cross-dresser is played by actress Valérie Wilson. (Of course, having Delon’s presence in the film has its own suggestive connotations of deception, too. Given Delon’s admitted past same-sex experiences and connections with gangsters, the savage scorn he projects towards gays and gangsters in the film is a further deception on the part of Melville.)

One has to wonder about what Coleman knows along the way and what are his final motives. If he is intimate with Cathy, could he be so unaware of Simon’s and her criminal activities?  When Costa indicates that he would never rat on his pals, Coleman expresses utter confidence that he will do just that. So torture seems to be the route that Coleman takes to get the needed information. And when Paul Weber was about to be arrested, Coleman was indifferent about preventing his suicide.

When Cathy shows up in the car at the end to pick up Simon, one might surmise that she is there to set up Simon for the fall, but I don’t think so. Consider Coleman’s response when his colleague suggested to him that he had pulled the trigger too early on what turned out to be an unarmed Simon: “I wasn’t sure if he would commit suicide”. Yeah right. So he killed the man in order to prevent him from killing himself? We don’t buy that.  No, it seems to me that Coleman guns down Simon out of jealous anger that Cathy had made her final choice in favor of Simon and not him. Final evidence of Coleman’s depraved narcissism.

In fact there is no real warmth of humanity to any of the characters in this film, so it is difficult for the viewer to identify with or feel empathy for any of them.  Simon is a ruthless killer.  So, too, are Coleman and Cathy.  It is as if Melville has presented us with just those same two very limited options of how we might feel towards his characters: indifference or derision.
★★★

“Curse of the Golden Flower” - Zhang Yimou (2006)

Loyalty, Filial Piety, Ritual, Righteousness

These are the four virtues of Confucianism, which have been a guiding moral compass for traditional Chinese society but which have also been cynically exploited by extractive social elements in that society, too.  All four virtues express the advocacy of restraint and the submission of individual aspirations before a common plan. The ramifications of this notion are an underlying theme of Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, which was both a big-budget [1] historical epic (with the usual violence and histrionics) and an artistic success.

     

Zhang Yimou’s early films centering around the struggles individuals trying to make their way in difficult social circumstances established him as one of the world’s foremost film artists.  His film narratives were not just about the struggle to find fulfilment in China – they movingly explored the existentialist depths of human longing and resonated on a universal plane.  But then having moved to the top of his profession, Zhang seemed interested in widening his expressive repertoire by venturing into the escapist Chinese wuxia martial-arts genre (Hero, 2002; House of Flying Daggers, 2004). Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) was his third venture in this cinematic style, but to me it represented another shift in direction.  On this occasion Zhang recovered his artistic bearings and managed to produce another powerful statement about the human condition that was worthy of his earlier masterpieces. 

Although it is masterful, this film is a dark, disturbing work – about as bleak as you can go, and Zhang’s artful cinematic expressiveness is employed at full throttle to convey a sense of gloom and despair.  Indeed it is worth comparing this film to its cartoon-like wuxia predecessors in Zhang’s work, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, because the themes and visual stylistics are so sharply in contrast. One thing that all three films share, though, is a complicated set of interlocking relationships involving multiple deceptions as to who one is.  In all three films, the principal characters and the viewer, too, are often deceived about the true identities and past histories of several key people.  Along the way, there is always the question, in the minds of us viewers, as to just when these secrets are uncovered in the minds of the main characters. Because of these complications, I will go over some of the details of the narrative.

Zhang adapted his script from Cao Yu’s 1934 play, Thunderstorm, which concerned moral degradation in contemporary Chinese society.  Zhang moved what was a contemporary story way back in the year 928 of the Later Tang Dynasty [2] around the imperial court of a Chinese emperor (although the story is entirely fictitious). The principal characters are

• Emperor Ping (played by Chow Yun-Fat)
• Empress Phoenix (Gong Li)
• Crown Prince Wan, the oldest son of Emperor Ping (Ye Liu)
• Prince Jai, the 2nd oldest son of Emperor Ping (Jay Chou)
• Prince Yu , the youngest son of Emperor Ping (Junjie Qin)
• Imperial Physician Jiang (Dahong Ni)
• Mrs. Jiang, the mother Jiang Chan (Jin Chen)
• Jiang Chan, the Jiang’s daughter (Man Li)

The plot does not have a clearly identifiable structure, but I will divide it into four main stages or “acts”.  Stage 1 concerns the introduction of the principal characters and is dominated by Emperor Ping.  It also establishes that something is clearly wrong with Empress Phoenix. Stage 2 covers more complicated relationships that are evolving in reaction to Ping, who is largely out of the picture in this section.  Stage 3 returns to the imperial court and personal confrontations between the principal characters.  Stage 4 depicts the climactic showdown between Ping and those who oppose him.  Because there are so many deceptions going on in the story, I identify some of them with a “D” at various points along the way.

1.  Emperor Ping and His Court
Initial images show the imperial palace run by thousands of attendants operating in massive mechanized synchronization, with no accommodation for individuality.  At the same time an imperial army led by Prince Jai returns to the capital after a three-year campaign.  When Emperor Ping greets  Jai’s return, it is evident that Ping is still a formidable swordsman and that there may be some future conflict between Jai and Ping.

However, a more prominent conflict is quickly revealed.  Crown Prince Wan has for three years been having a secret affair (D1) with Empress Phoenix, who is not his birth mother.  Also, Phoenix is suffering from some strange illness, which turns out to be due to Ping’s secret order (D2) that imperial physician Jiang add poison to Phoenix’s regular dosages of medicine to cure her alleged anemia.  Administered over two months, this poisonous fungus will destroy the empress’s mental faculties.  In order to protect his own position, Jiang wishes to use his daughter, Chan, who is one of Phoenix’s servants, as a spy; and for similar reasons he encourages her to have a secret affair (D3) with Crown Prince Wan.

When Ping calls the royal family together, we get a picture of his doctrinaire rule.  He sternly reprimands them for not properly aligning themselves with the Heavens (i.e. not following his rules).  Seeing that Phoenix is reluctant to take her two-hourly medical dosages, he insists that she must follow heavenly ordained orders: “medicine is governed by dosage, just as life is governed by natural law,” he reminds her.  In fact he sees it as his duty to maintain law and order within his own family in order to set an example for the whole country.  This follows Chinese tradition, according to which an emperor’s commands are to be rigidly followed according to Confucian tradition, provided that the emperor is recognized to have Heaven’s mandate to rule.  Sitting at the top of the hierarchy, the emperor must embody and enforce the Confucian rule-based system for all to follow.

So the narrative goal of Phoenix is how she can survive in this oppressive situation.

2.  The Jiang Family Intrigue
Phoenix interrupts a tryst between Wan and Chan, and learns about their affair.  From a clandestine meeting with physician Jiang’s wife, she also learns about the poison being administered to her.  But after this meeting, Mrs. Jiang is captured by palace guards and brought before Ping, who recognizes that she is his former lover of 25 years before.  We learn from Mrs. Jiang that back then Ping had been an army officer who had conspired with the King of Liang to take over the throne and marry his daughter, Phoenix. Ping had ruthlessly then ordered the destruction of his lover’s family, but unbeknownst to Ping (D4), she had escaped and married the royal physician.   Given the fact that Crown Prince Wan was not mothered by Phoenix, we suspect that Mrs. Jiang is his birth mother (D5). This would mean that the Wan-Chan relationship is incestuous. In any case, to get rid of the Jiang family messiness, Ping assigns the imperial physician to become the governor of Suzhou and to depart with his family immediately.

So far Phoenix has been seen as powerless, but now it is revealed that she has secret plans afoot to stage a rebellion (D6).  She informs Jai that she wants to force Ping to abdicate the title to Jai, and not the crown prince, Wan.  Jai, citing his devotion to the Confucian value of filial piety says that he cannot act against his father.  But seeing his mother being slowly poisoned by Ping,  he changes his mind; he decides to forgo the Confucian dictum and act according to his compassionate feelings for his mother.

Meanwhile Wan rushes off on horseback to chase after his lover, Chan, who is now on the road with her family to Suzhou.  He meets the family at a roadside inn and learns from Chan that Phoenix has been conspiring with the state army in some way, so he races back to the capital to see if he can put a stop to it.  When Chan’s mother, worried about incest, cryptically tells her to forget about Wan, Chan also rushes back towards the palace.  At this point some mysterious black-clad ninja-like warriors (moshuh nanren?) descend on the Jiang quarters and methodically start killing everyone.  It is clear that Ping’s intention is to exterminate the Jiang clan; only Mrs. Jiang manages to escape, and she also races back to the capital.

3.  Confrontations and Revelations

Back at the palace, the fearful Wan confronts Phoenix about her plans for rebellion.  When his apprehensions are confirmed, Wan angrily stabs himself, but not mortally.  Ping goes to his son’s bedside seeking to gain his confidence and informs him that he has always known about Wan’s affair with the empress.  That evening at a royal banquet honoring Jai’s appointment to lead the palace guards, Chan and her mother, who have been captured by guards, are brought before Ping.  With all the contestants finally in front of each other, angry revelations are made.  Wan and Chan are informed of their incestuous relationship.  Ping tells Chan and Mrs. Yang that they know too much and must be exterminated.  Chan runs away, but the black ninja-like warriors quickly and silently kill both Chan and Mrs. Jiang.

4. The Armed Rebellion
Now the most dramatic and disturbing events of the story take place.  With most of the secrets revealed, the armed rebellion is launched, and Prince Jai’s force of ten thousand soldiers attempts to storm the palace.  Inside the palace and to the surprise of all, Prince Yu suddenly kills Wan and attempts to seize royal power for himself with a small armed force.  But Ping’s ninja-like warriors quickly kill Yu’s men, and then Ping takes off his cloth belt and laboriously and sadistically beats his own son to death with it. 

In the meantime Jai’s attack continues.  Although his forces are initially successful, it becomes clear that Ping had been forewarned by Wan and had prepared a huge imperial army that attacks and overwhelms Jai’s forces.  In one of cinema’s most devastating scenes of military slaughter, we see Jai’s army utterly annihilated. Jai is captured alive and taken before Ping, who informs him that his punishment will be to personally administer his mother’s daily poison until she becomes a vegetable.  Rather than submit to such a horror, Jai kills himself, while the sadistic Ping casually watches and munches on his food.  The film ends with Ping ordering the defiant and completely defeated Phoenix to take her medicine once more.

What are we to make of this quasi-Shakespearean tragedy, filled as it is with such carnage and grief?  Narratives always involve a (usually metaphorical) journey of some sort.  There are invariably various roadblocks, lost trails, and adversaries that must be overcome along the way in the effort to reach the desired destination.  In Zhang Yimou’s films the protagonist’s goals are rarely achieved, and it can be a success even to survive the difficult narrative journey.  With Curse of the Golden Flower, as in Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Shanghai Triad (1995), even survival is denied: all is lost, all hopes are crushed, and the protagonists are annihilated, but this time on a more epic scale.  At its essence this film is a horror story, and it carries the fascination that a good horror story can offer.  In examining the film’s virtues, there are two perspectives worth considering: it’s expression and its larger meaning. 

With respect to the film’s expressive qualities, this is truly a dark and disturbing masterpiece of expressionism.  Zhang Yimou pulls out all the stops to create an oppressive, threatening environment that renders the imperial palace an opulent prison.  The cinematography has its share of martial-arts “wire-foo” swordplay, but it is much more constrained on this occasion and fits much better into the story than such pyrotechnics did in Hero and House of Flying Daggers.  In the action scenes here there is the characteristic stop-and-go cinematic pacing that offers an impressionistic presentation of the action.  Such wildly varying temporality is the way one remembers one’s own experiences of intense actions, and Zhang effectively conveys those feelings here.

But those swordplay action scenes, skillfully presented though they may be, are not what create the truly expressionistic atmosphere of the film. It is the film’s larger scope and long shots involving thousands of people that create the relentless sense of confinement and doom.  Emperor Ping, masterfully played by Chow-Yun Fat, is the embodiment of calculating cruelty that sits at the very top of this overbearing system of coercion.  He is not a howling, fiendish animal, as might be portrayed in lesser horror films; his manner and demeanor is recognizable to us.  We recognize elements of his character in our own midst, and that makes his role even more unnerving to see, even more horrifying to contemplate. Ping is gradually seen to be merely the human face of a some mysterious dark force, which is also manifested by the contingent of ninja-like warriors who suddenly drop down from the sky out of nowhere and swiftly annihilate their victims.  These inhuman killers work silently and seem to represent some satanic force of nature that is beyond human comprehension.  In this sense, they are like ghosts or spiritual demons from whom there is no hope of escape.

The climactic battle scene in which Prince Jai’s army is destroyed is a signal example of this idea.  The giant moving metal wall that imprisons and confines Jai’s army is a figurative indicator of the claustrophobic sense created.  Jai’s army is symbolically crushed by this confinement and is quickly emasculated.  His men are unable to engage in the swordplay for which they are prepared and are instead quickly exterminated by a massive onslaught of arrows fired from over the confining wall.  As we watch this scene, we see human agency crushed by unfathomable, mechanical power.  After the bloody annihilation, thousands of diligent workers rapidly remove all the dead bodies and replant the chrysanthemums in the palace courtyard, leaving it exactly like it looked it before the battle.  No trace of resistance to the pervasive imperial domination is allowed to remain.

These expressionistic elements all contribute to the larger themes underlying Curse of the Golden Flower.  The foundation of the oppressive horror that pervades the environment is the notion of a vast mechanical system that is powered by ordinary humans, not demons.  From the earliest scenes of the film, one sees the imperial system mechanically operating by means of people forced to suppress their individual human traits and act in synchrony with those around them.  Their humanity has been lost and has been made part of an inhuman machine.  To support this suppression of humanity, the four Confucian virtues of “Loyalty, Filial Piety, Ritual, Righteousness” have been invoked in order to promote blind subservience to the authorities. Zhang’s depiction of this blind subservience to autocracy as something that fuels an unspeakable horror is diametrically opposed to his message in Hero, which advocated blind subservience to an all-powerful ruler for the sake of social order.  This sets right the imbalanced view that was projected by Hero.

On this account I would comment that of course we know that social disorder is a fundamental problem and that human social welfare has risen above primitive conditions by means of human institutions that curtail random violence and chaos.  However, these same institutions (such as for example the traditional Confucian social framework) can often be exploited by coercive elites in order to maintain their dominance and suppress human autonomy to an extreme degree.  In films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, this oppressive social confinement – a system that makes humans operate according to inhuman, mechanical rules – is in the background.  But here in Curse of the Golden Flower, this oppressive system is more explicitly represented. 

This is where the Jiang family plays a role in the story.  The imperial physician is not an evil man, but he has to play his part and contribute to the mechanized evil.  He knows that if he disobeys the emperor’s commands, he and his entire family will be exterminated.  So he and his innocent daughter consent to the system’s commands and participate in the slow poisoning of the empress.  Yet in the end, they “knew too much” and were all exterminated anyway.  Similarly, Crown Prince Wan also submits to the demands of the system and is unwilling to act against it.  His revelations of his mother’s plans to his father ensured that rebellion’s doom.

There were two figures, however, who defied this oppressive system, and interestingly, they were both women: Empress Phoenix and Mrs. Jiang.  These two heroines defied the unvanquishable oppression knowing that they would be destroyed, but they could not agree to suppress their own innate feelings of what is right.  At one point Empress Phoenix confides that she knows she will eventually be defeated and turned into a cretin, but she will not give up without a fight.  In the end Prince Jai was won over to this level of thinking, too.  He tells his father in the last scene that his rebellion was not for personal gain (that is, to become emperor), but to act in support of his mother.  He was acting according to the authentic feelings of his conscience and his heart. 

Gong Li has a difficult role in this film, since her options for action are so limited and she is mostly shown grimacing in pain. Nevertheless, she manages to represent the unquenchable spirit that has characterized some of Zhang’s best films.  In the end and crushed in every way, she doesn’t submit.  She still throws the medicine away in defiance.
★★★½

Notes:

1. At the time of its production, Curse of the Golden Flower had the largest production budget, $45 million, in Chinese film history.
2. This was a short-lived rule (924 - 936) that prevailed after the fall of the epic Tang Dynasty (618 to 907).

“Le Crime de Monsieur Lange” - Jean Renoir (1936)

Jean Renoir’s great films of the late 1930s have such a rich social complexity to them that they are sometimes summed up as reflecting his overall “humanism” – although I’m not sure that term does full justice to what Renoir accomplished. Certainly his films encompass multiple layers of fraternal camaraderie, social expectations, and romantic love that involve a number of interacting characters; and these films often have a depth that goes beyond the conventional cinema fare. In fact the first time one sees one of these films, it is easy to miss just how adroit Renoir’s cinematic expression was in these works. Cinematically, Renoir is able to convey multiple subjective perspectives, sometimes all in the same frame of an extended moving-camera shot.  Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1936), was an early oeuvre in this series, and it also happens to be one of Renoir’s more controversial offerings.

In some ways Le Crime de Monsieur Lange was Renoir’s most overtly political film.  Renoir’s generally leftist sympathies are in clear view in this work, which was made during the ascendancy of France’s Popular Front, a coalition of leftist political groups, including the Communist Party, that won the 1936 general election.  Renoir, himself, was affiliated with the Popular Front, and in that same year he also made a documentary film, La Vie Est à Nous (Life Belongs to Us) that was funded by the Communist Party.  But what makes Le Crime de Monsieur Lange particularly controversial is not so much its leftist sympathies, but its apparent justification of a murder (“le crime”) that was presumably done for social well-being.  (This may evoke some thoughts in your mind concerning the American government’s drone-empowered assassinations of foreign villains, but I will leave that topic aside here.)

The story of the film, as you would expect with Renoir, is more than just a political narrative, and it includes several romantic relationships. It is framed as a story told in flashback: an account of the circumstances that led up to the murder.  One can think of the plot as comprising five main sections, but the three inner sections make up the bulk of the film.

1.  Framing the Story (6 minutes)
A car drops off a man and a woman (we later learn their names -- Amèdée Lange and Valentine Cardès) to a hotel near the French frontier, and they check in for the night.  Immediately the hotel owner’s son recognizes the male guest as a wanted criminal, and suggests to the other hotel workers and patrons in the lobby they turn him in to the police.  During the ensuing discussion, the female guest comes out to the lobby and says that she will tell their story to all of them and that they can then judge what action they may want to take.

2.  Batala’s Publishing House (37 minutes)

The first section of the film presents the social situation at a local building courtyard that includes a small publishing run by Paul Batala, a laundry run by Valentine, and a rooming house managed by a concierge (Marcel Levesque) and his wife. The principal characters introduced here are

• Batala (Jules Berry) runs the publishing house, which is trying to get out its first issue of a pulp detective magazine. It is soon evident that Batala is a dishonest and unreliable manipulator, swindler, and womanizer.
• Lange (René Lefèvre) works for the publishing house.  He dreams of being a successful writer, and his nights are spent writing stories about his fictional creation, “Arizona Jim”.
• Edith (Sylvia Bataille) works for the publishing house and is Batala’s (current) woman.
• Valentine (Florelle) runs the laundry in the same courtyard buildling.
• Estelle (Nadia Sibirskaïa) is a pretty young woman working at the laundry.
• Charles (Maurice Baquet), the son of the concierge, is a bicycle delivery man and in love with Estelle.

As is typical with Renoir, the romantic involvements are many.  Batala had a past relationship with Valentine, is currently involved with Edith, and eventually forces himself on Estelle and impregnates her.  Edith loves Batala and will do whatever he says.  Lange is interested in Edith and Estelle, and later in Valentine.  Valentine is interested in Lange.  Estelle loves Charles, but shies away from a physical relationship.  Depicting the evolution of these relationships occupies the bulk of this part of the film. 

This section closes when the hopelessly in debt swindler, Batala, learns that his creditors are taking legal action against him that may lead to his imprisonment.  So Batala heads out of town on the train.

3.  The Worker’s Cooperative (20 minutes)
News reports indicate that Batala has been killed in a train crash, and the company’s creditors swarm into the publishing house demanding payment. The company staff propose that a worker’s collective be formed to run the business, and the chief creditor, M. Meunier’s son, readily accepts the idea. Soon the rejuvenated company is flourishing by publishing Lange’s “Arizona Jim” comics, which become huge bestsellers at all the newsstands.  The “team spirit” of the collective leads to social harmony and effective, cooperative work. 

Everyone is happy now.  Lange and Valentine have become lovers, and so, too, are Charles and Estelle.  Arizona Jim is such a success that the collective gets a film contract, and they decide to throw a party to celebrate.



4.  Batala Returns (14 minutes)
As the party begins in a dining room in the courtyard, Lange goes upstairs and discovers the presumed-dead Batala dressed as a priest and rummaging around in the company office. To Lange’s horror, Batala announces that he has returned to take what is his.  He says he owns all the rights to the company, and he intends to take over again and dissolve the worker cooperative. This is the corrupt 1% restoring its privileged ownership over the 99%, and Lange sees the idealistic dreams of the collective dissolving before his very eyes.  After Batala goes out into the courtyard and starts coming on to Valentine, Lange  rushes out and shoots Batala with a gun.  M. Meunier’s son offers to whisk Valentine and Lange away from the murder scene and take them to the border in his car.

5.  Closing the Frame (2 minutes)

We return to the present, with Valentine now having concluded her story to the hotel staff and awaiting their verdict: will they turn them in or let them go?  The closing shots reveal what that decision is, with Valentine and Lange making their way on foot along a windswept beach and across the border to safety and an unknown future.

The most evidently controversial issue with Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is whether it endorses committing murder for the common good.  But in fact there are several interesting aspects of the film worth considering, both with respect to the cinematic elements and to the larger themes presented. With respect to the cinematography, Renoir’s emerging virtues are on display. This includes shooting in depth, featuring multiple, active personages coming in and out of frame within a single shot.  In this respect there are several moving camera shots that have drawn considerable attention from critics, most notably during the murder sequence.  During that approximately three-minute scene, there are several closely joined shots that make the entire sequence seem almost like a single shot.  Film scholars have been particularly interested in the shot of the actual shooting, which includes a 270-degree reverse pan shot  [1,2].  In that shot, the camera has Lange initially in frame; and then as Lange moves away to the right, it pans to the left, in the opposite direction of Lange’s movement.  This pan shot sweeps quickly around the empty courtyard, finally winding up on Lange again, who is now in front of Batala.  Why did Renoir choose such a bizarre camera movement at this critical movement?  Some critics have suggested that Renoir’s pan was intended to incorporate the social perspective of the collective (the sounds of the celebratory party can be heard on the soundtrack throughout this shot) so as to make the murder an act of “the people” and not just that of an individual [1,2].  I rather doubt this interpretation.  Renoir’s pan here is quite rapid (perhaps too rapid) and not the sort of deliberative and circumspective movement that would incorporate all that it surveys into its overall perspective.  It is true that the shot does distance the viewer from Lange at this decisive moment, thereby building up dramatic tension, but whether the shot truly incorporates a socially communal perspective is doubtful.

Another interesting cinematic take with respect to this film is to compare its overall tone with Marcel Carne’s Le Jour se Léve (1939):

• Both films were scripted principally by Jacques Prevert. 
• Both films are told in flashback about a murder that has just been committed.
• In both films, the murdered man is an unprincipled and almost satanic shapeshifter stylishly played by Jules Berry.  The seemingly only way to thwart this treacherous threat is to kill him off.

Despite these similarities, the two films seem quite distinct to me.  Le Jour se Léve, the superior film, is a moody, existentialistic story about love. The viewer gets inside the head of the later film’s protagonist, François, and empathizes with his concerns and anxieties.  With respect to Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, however, the perspective is more socially inclusive, and although the viewer sees the Lange character sympathetically, the view is primarily from the outside.  Thus  Le Jour se Léve is more subjectively romantic and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is more objectively political. Given the fact that Prevert scripted both films, we can assume that this distinction between the films largely reflects the differences between Carne’s and Renoir’s cinematic visions and styles of visual storytelling.

In fact this is what makes Renoir so interesting.  His cinematic storytelling style often incorporates multiple perspectives and is consequently both romantic and political at the same time.  But these two perspectives are not just stuck together in an ad hoc fashion without coherence; instead, these two angles seem to fit together into a larger human landscape.  Most critics and film scholars have focused on the political side of things, but the romantic side of this film is at least as important.  Thus there are viewers (in fact, sometimes even a single viewer on different occasions) who have liked this film for quite different reasons.

Consider the difference between the men and the women in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.  The three principal women, Valentine, Sylvia, and Edith, are all totally supportive and loving.  They are selfless, committed, and loyal to the individual men that they love, even when they, themselves, are ignored or abused.   The men, however, are quite the opposite.  Batala is good-tempered, but is also a selfish opportunist and willing to exploit anyone else in order to promote his own comfort.  The courtyard house concierge seems foolishly harmless, but he consistently espouses racist views and dismisses Asians (whom he had earlier encountered in the French “Tonkin Campaign”), Indians, and Blacks as stupid and lazy.  Charles is tolerably naive but totally focused on his own welfare.  Lange wants to do the right thing, but lives in a dream world of cowboys who right wrongs with a six-gun.  This kind of “solution” won’t work in the real world, and we know that Lange’s murder is a profoundly wrong way to deal with the complex, interleaved corruptions of modern existence.  In fact there is a disconcerting escapism that permeates the world around Lange.  Lange is troubled when the news of Batala’s death comes over the radio, but Valentine puckers up to him and says, “what about me; am I alive?”  And when the undesired child of Estelle and Batala is stillborn, there is only a momentary frown expressed by those around her.  In fact shortly thereafter Lange decides to incorporate that incident into one of his comic book stories, and he projects what will happen to one of his characters in his imagined story –  “Estelle, led astray by the sordid hooded fascist had a certain amount of luck: the baby died!”

So what are we to take away from Le Crime de Monsieur Lange?  Certainly we can’t endorse Lange’s murderous act, even though we know that this simple-minded man wanted to remove a miscreant whom nobody would miss.  Was the worker’s collective also such a simple-minded dream that it could not really work in the real world? According to Renoir’s optimistic presentation here, it could work, and this is where his inclusive humanistic vision comes into play.  The collectivist idea could work on a larger scale, but only if the socially collectivist structure is supported by the willing, compassionate engagement that underlies the spirit of this movie.  The political solution will not work without the romantic spirits, and this romantic spirit is most movingly expressed by the women in Renoir’s film, not the men.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Reader, Keith, “The Circular Ruins? Frontiers, Exile and the Nation in Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange” (2000), French Studies, vol LIV, No. 3, pp. 287-297.
2. O’Shaughnessy, Martin, “Breaking the Circle: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and the Contemporary Illegibility of the Radical Text” (2011), South Central Review, 28:3, pp. 26-44.

“Brazil” - Terry Gilliam (1985)

Brazil was not a commercial success upon its theatrical release in 1985, but I hold it to be a monument in Expressionistic filmmaking and also one of the greatest films ever made.  Not only does the film cover universal issues of human aspirations and feeling, but it also shows us how these are being jeopardized within the ever-enclosing social frame of our modern world.  This concern about oppressive social control, of course, is not new. Indeed the issues that Brazil raises concerning how the misuse of information threatens the viability of our social enterprise go back to the 1949 publication of George Orwell’s novel 1984, a story which is Brazil’s thematic inspiration.  But in some ways, Brazil presents this threat as an even more comprehensive and disturbing problem than Orwell did.  I will return to this issue later.

From the opening scenes it is evident that the evocation of 1984 is woven into Brazil’s very aesthetic fabric.  Although Brazil’s story is said to take place “sometime in the 20th century”, the architecture, clothing fashions, and everyday technology all appear to be very much that of 1949.  But beyond those similarities, what takes place in the film appears to be an almost apocalyptic vision of the future seen through a 1949-dated Orwellian lens.  This quasi-futuristic (sometimes called “retro-futuristic”) vision is enhanced by what would have at that time (in 1949) been futuristic technological advances, such as  computer technology that is a bit more advanced than that of the otherwise early 1940's - 1950's style.

The narrative In this retro-future milieu concerns the fate of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a low-level employee of the government’s Ministry of Information.  By means of this ministry, the government maintains a pervasive level of surveillance on society and urges all citizenry to be suspicious and to report everything they see.  Throughout the film, one sees ominous wall posters and statue engravings with messages like  [1]:

• “Trust in Haste, Regret at Leisure”
• “Suspicions Breeds Confidence”
• “Be Safe: Be Suspicious”
• “Don’t Suspect a Friend, Report Him”
• “Help the Ministry of Information Help You”
• "Loose Talk Is Noose Talk"

Lowry works for a division within the ministry, the Department of Records, where all this gathered information is stored.  But there is also another division in the ministry, the Department of Information Retrieval, which is responsible for collecting and maintaining the “integrity” of the information. 

Of course we know that information technology is immensely valuable in today’s society. But the problem with the modern and conventional, but naive, view of information is that it is all assumed to be objective and timeless.  In truth, however, the “information” that is collected is always associated with some physical interaction in the world, and this invariably has some context, which is never completely captured.  In fact as the computational artificial intelligence community discovered some time ago, this invariably-present interactive context is usually too vast to be collected and stored for each interaction.  So compromises must be made; some of the context must be ignored.  For the kinds of interaction examined by the physical sciences, this is less of a problem, because physics and chemistry attempt to derive physical laws that are more or less context-independent.  But for the interactions involving complex systems, particularly involving biological organisms such as ourselves, everything is connected to everything: the extended interactive context can only be ignored at our peril.  This is why sharing information indiscriminately and without regard to the original authentic context and the concerns of the original interaction participants can be misleading and harmful. But such pervasive and contextually ignorant information gathering and processing is exactly what is happening on in Brazil’s society, and it is also happening in our society, as well.  As a result, serious mistakes can happen.  One such mistake marks the opening event of the film.

Despite the inevitable weaknesses of aggregating a vast mountain of “objective” information, Brazil’s tightly controlled society obsessively works to do just that.  And to support this effort, the government seeks to keep track of everything that happens so that no terrorists can take advantage (yes, in Brazil, made long before 911, the government employs the specter of terrorism to justify their invasive policies in the same way that modern governments do).

In the face of this stultifying and mechanistic obsession with information collection, Brazil depicts a few key individuals who seek to preserve the intimacy and authenticity of their private interactions.  In fact if you think about it, this is what true love is all about: it is a unique, totally engaging and immersive encounter between two individuals that cannot be shared or objectified.  In Brazil’s grim world of universal information storage and retrieval, Sam Lowry dreams of the uncanny, irreducible magic of romantic love.  The story of the films looks at what happens to these dreams.

The narrative of Brazil goes through four stages:

1. Introduction and Setup
2. Finding Jill
3. Rescuing Jill from the Information Society
4. The Getaway

1. Introduction and Setup
At the outset, the film shows an office in the Ministry of Information’s Department of Records, where a dead fly falls into a printer, causing it to mechanically misprint a person’s name.  Instead of Mr. “Tuttle”, a debtor’s invoice winds up being assigned to Mr. “Buttle”.  Straightaway, armed policeman break into Buttle’s apartment and take him prisoner, and soon Buttle dies of a heart attack while being tortured under interrogation.  But this film is not about Buttle and his family; it’s about people on the periphery of this opening event.  Buttle’s arrest was witnessed by his upstairs neighbor Jill Layton, and Sam Lowry’s Depart of Records is involved in this mistake, as well.

In this opening section of the film, the viewer is introduced to Lowry’s life and acquaintances.  These include his old friend Jack Lint (Michael Palin), a superficially friendly social climber and confident extrovert who works in the Department of Information Retrieval and who is the social opposite of Lowry, the sensitive and perceiving introvert.  There is also an introduction to Lowry’s work environment in the Department of Records and to Lowry’s vain and wealthy mother, who is dedicated to rejuvenating herself via plastic surgery.  Lowry’s nights are filled with romantic dreams of him being a superhero soaring through the clouds and rescuing his imaginary beautiful maiden and true love from fantasy monsters.  

But in the midst of all the inertia and drudgery of Lowry’s bureaucracy-filled world, he happens onto one person who is entirely different from all this – a mysterious freelance repairman who shows up at his apartment and fixes mechanical infrastructure that has broken down.  This free soul turns out, in fact, to be Mr. Archibald Tuttle (Robert De Niro), the originally intended addressee of the government’s misdirected invoice.  He had quit working for the government’s Central Services and become a rogue free-lanacer, because he couldn’t stand all the bureaucratic paperwork.

Although Lowry is generally powerless in the outside world and powerless (without Tuttle’s help) to deal with the mechanical failures of his apartment’s heating system, he is an invaluably proficient operator at his office in the Department of Records, where his human touch is occasionally needed to solve simple problems that have not been accounted for in the government’s procedures.  On one such occasion while delivering a refund check to Buttle’s widow, he catches a glimpse of the neighbor, Jill Layton, and he recognizes her as the fantasy maiden of his own dreams.  She runs away before he can find her, but he does manage to learn her name.

So at this point in the film, we understand Lowry’s circumstances and his quest: to find Jill Layton. His adversary in this quest will not turn out to be a specific person, but will be the system itself.

2.  Finding Jill
At his office in the Department of Records, Sam learns that Jill Layton’s file is classified and held by the separate Department of Information Retrieval.  Evidently Jill is suspected of terrorist associations, and Sam realizes that she is in danger.  To get access to Jill’s records and help her, Sam will need to get a position in that separate, secretive division.  So he reluctantly seeks the aide of his socialite mother to see if her influence can secure him a job over there.

In the meantime Sam finds his apartment in a shambles due to pugnacious workers from Central Services who are peeved to learn that the outlaw repairman Tuttle had fixed his earlier heating problem.  Here again the system shows its ugly face.

Finally his mother’s influence lands Sam a job and a tiny office at the Department of Information Retrieval, where he ultimately learns that Jill’s personal file is held in a special room where torture-filled interrogations are conducted by Sam’s friend, Jack Lint.  Sam goes there and manages to talk Jack into giving her Jill’s file.  Sam’s goal is now to find Jill and save her from being taken by the authorities.

3.  Rescuing Jill
In the nick of time, Sam sees Jill at the front desk of the Ministry of Information and rescues her just before she can be arrested by the police.  Jill is suspicious of Sam’s government affiliation and runs away, but Sam persists and succeeds in mollifying her concerns.  Shortly thereafter while visiting a department store, however, an attack by unknown armed men causes mayhem and the police arrest Sam and Jill.  Sam is let off, but he is now ostracized by his new boss and his old friend Jack for aiding a “terrorist”.

When Sam returns to his apartment, he discovers that is has been taken over and wrecked by the antagonistic Central Servicemen.  The mysterious and oddly heroic Tuttle again shows up and settles the score.  Jill somehow shows up, too, and now she is showing signs of responding to Sam’s amorous longings. 

They retreat to his mother’s empty apartment, but before making love, Sam rushes out to perform a heroic act.  He will break into the Department of Information Retrieval and destroy Jill’s files, so that she will disappear from their surveillance system.  This he manages to do, and they then spend a night of heavenly bliss together.

But in the morning the romantic spell is emphatically crushed when the police crash into the apartment and arrest the two of them in bed.  Under arrest and put into solitary confinement, Sam is informed that Jill is dead.  He is taken to a tower torture chamber, where some unspeakable torture is about to be performed on him.

4.  The Getaway
Just before the torture session is about to commence, though, Tuttle and his allies miraculously break into the tower, killing Jack and rescuing Sam.  Sam and Tuttle run away, but not before blowing up the Ministry of Information building.  But things are becoming more and more surreal by the second.  In a chilling scene, Sam’s savior, Tuttle, is engulfed in windblown newspapers and disappears altogether.  Sam makes it back to his mother’s apartment, escapes another armed police attack, and eventually finds himself in a prefab home that is being carried on a truck driven out of town by Jill.  The two of them will escape together to a romantic sylvan paradise, far removed from the government’s oppressive control.  But this entire getaway turns out be just a dream.

In the narrative world of Brazil, the adversary blocking the attainment of the narrative goal is not an individual or a group, nor is it even an obstacle-laden or dangerous natural environment, such as a mountain to climb.  No, as I said earlier, the adversary here is a system that is based on a misconception of information.  The clever way this is depicted is what make the story, scripted by director Terry Gilliam, along with Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown (who also has a memorable bit part as “Harvey Lime”), so effective.

The cinematography and special effects in Brazil are remarkable even by today’s standards.  There are all sorts of eccentric but mood-inspiring moments, and they flow together into a smooth continuity, even affording such moments as Gilliam’s explicit homage to Segei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925).  The expressionistic presentation not only establishes an evocative mood but also carries semantic import.  Throughout the film there are constant visual reminders of the “mechanical” way that context-stripped information is transferred and crudely used in this society.  In fact many of the  mechanical operations depicted seem clumsy and subject to failures.  Whenever Sam takes an elevator, it seems to malfunction in some way.  This is the way of mindless, brute mechanics.  In terms of physical architecture, there are bulky heating and cooling ducts everywhere, symbolizing the blind connectedness of everything and everyone.  But this connectedness is purely mechanical and lacks the subtlety of truly situated interactions.  At one point Sam Lowry gets frustrated with the relentless transmission of pneumatic information tubes in his office, so he hooks the "input" and “output” tubes together so that they effectively (and symbolically) create a “short circuit”, which causes the entire pneumatic tube system to blow up.

This blind connectedness of information flow, without attention paid to the subtlety of interactions, has caused everyone in the society shown in this film to avoid responsibility.  To remove any shred of meaningful commitment and responsibility from government affairs, people are constantly required to sign fine-printed authorizations that remove perpetrators from further responsibility.  (This may remind you of the many occasions you are required to read a lengthy and virtually unreadable authorization statement on a Web page and then mouse-click your acceptance of it.) So everyone here is supposedly connected via information transfer, and yet everyone is actually disconnected from any meaningful interactions.  Thus in one scene when armed attackers enter a restaurant, most of the patrons pay no attention – because it is none of their business.  The misuse of information transfer in the society shown here has cheapened, if not eviscerated, true human connections.

A reminder of how our own current “information society” can so readily dismantle people’s lives via shoddy information misuse came to the fore recently in connection with news about Neda Soltani.  She was an Iranian university lecturer who in the wake of the disruptions associated with the corrupted presidential “election” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was mistaken for another woman, Neda Agha Soltan, who was shot dead on the streets of Tehran during a demonstration.  Journalists and bloggers found Ms. Soltani’s photograph and spread it around the Internet as a picture of the murdered girl who was considered a martyr.  This mistaken identity error (like “Buttle” and “Tuttle”) more or less wrecked Ms. Soltani’s life, and she was fortunate to escape Iran before the government secret police could get their hands on her.

With respect to this theme of information misuse in Brazil, there are two specific aspects of the story that I would like to mention: the matter of Tuttle and the matter of the film’s ending.  The Archibald Tuttle character has only a few brief appearances, and yet his persona is crucial to the story.  He is not someone who transfers misleading “information” around, instead he does things.   He is a man of action and interaction.  When he comes to Sam’s apartment, he knows exactly how to set things right, and then mysteriously and gracefully flies away off the apartment balcony, suspended by a high wire.   How does he know that Sam is a compatriot in this struggle?  In fact he is the embodiment of a spiritual savior, but he doesn’t operate on the plane of noble thoughts and ideas, but in the world of action.  At one point he says to Sam the same thing that appears as a big-lie shibboleth on government wall posters: “we’re all in this together”.  When the government says it, it means implicitly, “we know everything about you”.  But when Tuttle says it, he means something different – that he and Sam are meaningfully connected in an authentic engagement.  This is an engagement that cannot meaningfully be put down on paper, and Tuttle hates paperwork.  So it is memorably disturbing at the film’s end when Tuttle is overwhelmed by discarded newspapers and swept away. 

This brings me to the matter of Brazil’s ending.  When the film was to be released in the US, the American distributor, Universal, feeling that Gilliam’s ending was too bleak and would displease American audiences, demanded a re-edit so that it would have a happy ending.  But I believe that Gilliam’s original cut does have a happy ending – much better and happier than any superficial rescue scene.  What Brazil celebrates and what is highlighted by Gilliam’s ending, is our belief that dreams can be real, that wrongs can be righted, that love can be found and fulfilled.  At the end of the film, Sam’s spirit is unbroken.

It is this illusion of superficial information connectedness that is soul-destroying in Brazil, and Sam Lowry’s soul has not fallen to it. Where Sam’s mind lives is somewhere else – in the world of human aspirations and dreams.  And that is why the film’s title is what it is.  In fact Brazil is not mentioned in any way in the film, although the song (actually, Aquarela do Brasil, 1939) is featured on the soundtrack and hummed by Sam Lowry at the film’s finish.  Though perhaps relatively few viewers have actually been there, the word suggests in people’s minds a dreamy faraway place, where music, magic, and love can happen.  As the song says:

Brazil,
When stars were entertaining June,
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured someday soon...
We kissed and clung together

Then,
Tomorrow was another day
The morning found us miles away
With still a million things to say.

And now
When twilight dims the skies above
Recalling thrills of our love
There's one thing I'm certain of...
Return, I will,
To old Brazil. 

★★★★

 

Notes:

1. See http://www.faqs.org/faqs/movies/brazil-faq/