Tristana

‘Tristana’ kicks off with two brilliant scenes.

In the first, a football match between deaf mutes erupts into argument after a blatant foul – all in the most demonstrative sign language. It shouldn’t be funny and it’s certainly not politically correct. But it’s definitely the former and the hell with the latter.

In the second, the predatory Don Lope (Fernando Rey) strolls across a piazza, tweaking his moustache in suggestive manner. Hailing a young woman (who’s probably old enough to be his granddaughter), he asks where she’s going. “To find a sweetheart,” she gaily replies. “You’ve found him,” Don Lope leers. She protests that he’s too old for her. “I’m not too old,” Don Lope assures her; “the devil’s been dead longer than I’ve been alive.”

Fantastic stuff. Oh, that the rest of the film had played out in like manner.

‘Tristana’ is the only “blip” in the string of masterpieces that define the last two decades of Buñuel’s career – from ‘Viridiana’ to his swansong ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’.

An adaptation of a novel by Benito Perez Galdos, the story sees the young and innocent Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) delivered into Don Lope’s care following the death of her parents. The old lecher soon corrupts her. Spurning him, Tristana takes up with debonair artist Horacio (Franco Nero). Two years later, the increasingly lachrymose Don Lope jumps at the chance to have her back when a serious illness and the amputation of her leg pre-empt a parting of the ways between her and Horacio. But the Tristana who resumes residence in the Don’s household, lost limb notwithstanding, is more beautiful and infinitely less passive than the one who left. The stations are reversed.

And that’s basically it.

In the hands of Douglas Sirk it could have been unintentionally hilarious. In the hands of Pedro Almodovar, intentionally so. As a Buñuel film, however, it’s curiously anaemic. Re-uniting the director with Deneuve three years after ‘Belle de Jour’, none of the erotic frisson and barrier-pushing intimations of perversity are present. Although Deneuve was never better than when playing ice queens, she seems awkward as Tristana. Franco Nero – never better than as Django – just seems out of place. Thanks be for the presence of Fernando Rey: magnificent, mischievous and bristling with amoral cool in virtually every film he appeared in (and certainly those he made with Buñuel), he’s the only hint of life in ‘Tristana’.

What truly disappoints, given Buñuel’s aversion to critics foisting ‘meanings’ onto his work, is how thuddingly obvious the Freudian imagery is. Aside from a last-minute sequence of ingeniously orchestrated images guaranteed to instigate ongoing debate as to their narrative implication, it’s all so ordinary. And Buñuel was never a film-maker to whom the ordinary was suited.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

There’s an intriguing documentary on the Optimum Releasing ‘Luis Buñuel Collection’ box set edition of ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ which posits that the sequences of the main cast walking along an apparently endless road in the middle of nowhere is a metaphor for their collective death, and that the set pieces in between are indicative of an internal or emotional journey from denial to inevitable acceptance.

On one hand: yeah, maybe.

The devolution of the latter half of the film into a series of awakenings from increasingly bizarre situations of social embarrassment which turn out to be bad dreams does seem to bear out a reading of the film in which concrete reality does not exist and the bourgeoisie are subject to the breakdown (i.e. the death) of their own empty value systems – their ‘discreet charm’ masks infidelities, hypocrisies and vices sexual, alcoholic and narcotic*.

On the other hand: nah, maybe not.

Buñuel wasn’t just a surrealist, but a purist. His films are what they are. He wasn’t impressed with the critical necessity to foist meanings or interpretations on his imagery, and he always refused to ‘explain’ his work. There’s a wonderful story that he reacted with a mixture of horror and despair when an actor announced that they had finally understood their character’s psychology. Indeed, Buñuel gave little direction to his actors. His titles can’t always be taken at face value, either. ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ was assigned to the finished screenplay, pretty much randomly, after Buñuel and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière couldn’t agree on anything else.

His films are what they are. And what ‘TDCOTB’ is, is a black comedy about a group of friends who want to enjoy a meal together. They are frustrated by, variously, a misunderstanding over the date, a corpse laid to rest in the back room of a restaurant, an infantry battalion on manoeuvres, a political argument that ends in a shooting, a café that’s run out of refreshments, incarceration at the hands of an overzealous policemen on a night when the holding cells are haunted by the ghost of a brutal officer (a brilliant pastiche of the horror genre which Buñuel blithely deems “the night of the bloody sergeant”), and – in perhaps the only example in cinema of a play-within-a-dream-within-a-film – the revelation that the table they are seated at is laid with set dressings instead of salad dressings and they’re actually the ill-prepared and stagefright-struck cast in a theatrical production!

What ‘TDCOTB’ is, also, is funny as hell. The dead restaurateur scene, which plays like a ‘Monty Python’ sketch, sets the tone early on: the humour is po-faced, absurdist and steeped in the macabre. Buñuel nails his usual targets – politicians, the middle classes, the church – with unerring accuracy, subverts audience expectations (or confirms them if you’re an aficionado of the director) with playful panache, and delivers a supremely entertaining bit of cinema in the process.

And those enigmatic scenes of the main cast walking along an apparently endless road in the middle of nowhere? I like to think it’s about some elegantly dressed people walking along a road. It’s kind of like the hat blowing through the woods in ‘Miller’s Crossing’: it’s utterly memorable and cooler than cool … and it’s no more or less than a hat blowing through the woods.




*Fernando Rey’s character, a foreign ambassador, uses the diplomatic bag to smuggle drugs and worries that “the Marseilles gang” might be onto him – a beautifully sneaky nod to his iconic role in ‘The French Connection’ the previous year.

French Connection II

I’m going to say something controversial:

William Friedkin directed ‘The French Connection’ and John Frankenheimer ‘French Connection II’ – it should have been the other way round.

Frankenheimer was at his best helming films where attention to detail was the key: the raison d’être for narrative and mise-en-scene. Please, before you haul me up against a wall, give me the kind of hiding that makes ‘The Sweeney’ look like the girl scouts and accuse me of picking my feet in Poughkeepsie – all of which I probably deserve for my two sins of (a) suggesting Friedkin shouldn’t have directed ‘The French Connection’ and (b) being a pretentious twat by using raison d’être and mise-en-scene in the same sentence – allow me to explain. Just give me one paragraph. That’s all I ask.

Okay. John Frankenheimer did his best work when close observation of a milieu and precise attention to detail were the watchwords of plot, narrative and aesthetic. Consider ‘The Train’, which I have described elsewhere in these pages as “a battle of wits between the two men, a game of forward thinking and low cunning, not unlike a chess match but with the French railway system as the board and a steam loco and a couple of dozen waggons for pieces. Frankenheimer's …talent for incorporating technical minutiae into the narrative - indeed, using it as the cornerstone of scenes of suspense - is pure genius.” Or ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, an exercise in documenting the logistics of a conspiracy – its planning and execution. Or atmosphere and routine of prison life in ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’. The procedural aspects of ‘The French Connection’ – surveillance, evidence, tailing suspects, putting the case together – would have seen Frankenheimer in his element. Friedkin, on the other hand, was renowned as a director who put his actors through the mill. Imagine his take on the cold turkey sequence which forms the centrepiece of ‘French Connection II’. Imagine the cultural clash element of the film shot through with Friedkin’s trademark sense of belligerence.

As it was, though, Friedkin directed the first film and made a classic. Frankenheimer helmed the second and, to be fair, came bloody close – the problem with ‘French Connection II’ is something no director could arguably have surmounted anyway.

The problem is the ending of the first film. Not only has Doyle shot a fellow cop, not only does the last frame of the film suggest he’s crossed the line between grimly determined policework and certifiably obsessional behaviour, but a closing credits title card informs us that Doyle and Russo were transferred out of narcotics and reassigned.

And yet the opening scene of the sequel has Doyle (Gene Hackman) happily – well, no, not happily: the man’s a total fucking grouch – arrive in Marseilles, on secondment to the local cops and hellbent on taking Charnier (Fernando Rey) down. Charnier, improbably living in the same house (after narrowly escaping a sting that sees the rest of his collaborators arrested, you’d think he’d have gone to ground), is still looking to corner the American market: in an undeveloped subplot, he’s seen making a deal with a corrupt US army officer.

Without Russo to provide double-act bantering possibilities, Doyle’s conversational imperative becomes a one-note exercise in how to offend his hosts (on national differences: “I’d rather be a lamp-post in New York than the President of France”; on the local cuisine: “What did you do, cremate it? Where’s the mayo?”). Meanwhile, the Marseilles PD prove more effective in putting a tail on Doyle than actually locating Charnier.

The first film was based on an actual case, Doyle and Russo prowling their home turf, knowing when something doesn’t add up, knowing when someone’s dirty. It’s immediate, edgy, gritty. The sequel – an entirely fictional work – squanders its first half on Doyle’s fish-out-of-water integration into a different city, a different country, a different culture. It’s only when Charnier’s men shanghai him and shoot him full of H that things get interesting.

The second half is one barnstorming set-piece after another: Doyle going cold turkey, the dry dock shoot-out, Doyle indulging in a little pyromania to flush out Charnier’s men, and a full-tilt exhausting chase scene (the car chase of the original here transmuting into something just as pounding but on foot) which climaxes in one of the most abrupt endings in mainstream film.

Ultimately though, I can only damn ‘French Connection II’ with faint praise: it’s a well-made and eminently watchable film that served no purpose in being made.

PERSONAL FAVES: The French Connection

I’ve been laid up with a nasty case of the man ’flu (is there any other kind? can the man ’flu by its own definition ever be anything other than all-out life threatening?) for the last couple of days. Activity-wise, the pleasures of the cinema, the pub and my favourite Italian restaurant are out of the picture, so I’ve mainly been watching DVDs and surfing the net.

It was during the latter activity that I came across the latest in Jeremy’s Images from my all-time favourite films series on Moon in the Gutter: ‘The French Connection’. Out came the DVD and 100 minutes of classic cinema ensued. Thanks, Jeremy.

The film’s genesis was a non-fiction book by Robin Moore which detailed the efforts of New York narcotics cops Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso to seize and nail the prime movers behind a shipment of heroine from France to the USA. They began by surveilling a known crim, the spectacularly named Pasquale Fuca, on little more than gut instinct. The trail led to French drug lord Jean Jehan, who was assisted in his innovative import scheme by TV celebrity Jacques Angelvin.

Ernest Tidyman, in adapting the book, took certain dramatic liberties, hence a fair bit of name changing: the cops are now Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), the neighbourhood hood is Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and the Marseilles mastermind, xenophobically nicknamed “Frog One” is Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) and the celeb in his pay is Devereaux (Frederic De Pasquale).

I’ve not read the book and I have only the most cursory knowledge of the real life case. I have, however, seen the film – the first of William Friedkin’s two bona fide masterpieces – more times than I can count and it was still as immediate and uncompromising and dynamic when I watched it yesterday as it was the first time I saw it – as it was, I imagine, when it first hit cinema screens in 1971.

I probably don’t need to rehash any of the plot. I probably don’t need to issue a spoiler warning when I talk about my favourite scene. I seriously doubt that a litany of classic moments is necessary (just check out the sequence of images on Moon in the Gutter – if they don’t make you immediately want to rewatch it, you might want to take a cardiogram just to check you’re not clinically dead). But screw it, for the record:

Doyle, dressed in a Santa suit, punching the hell out of a suspect. “Do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie? … You son of a bitch, you sat on the edge of the bed, you put your finger between your toes and you picked your feet.” Surely the greatest non-sequitur in the history of cinema.

Russo doing a B&E on Doyle’s apartment after Doyle’s last night’s pick-up leaves him restrained to the bed with his own cuffs.

Doyle and Russo shaking down a bar, cheerfully abusing the customers and punching out an informer just to protect his cover.

Doyle and Russo freezing their extremities off during a surveillance, scarfing junk food and chugging foul coffee while Charnier and an associate spin out a three-course meal at a luxurious restaurant.

Doyle almost coming to blows with the Federal Agent, Mulderig (Bill Hickman), who’s been seconded to the case. Mulderig has a low opinion of Doyle, holding him responsible for the death of a colleague in an earlier, botched operation. And where do they go at each other like men possessed? In front of the Chief, at the site of fatal traffic accident. Subtle!

Doyle tailing Charnier to the subway where the cunning European successfully evades him. Doyle hurls his trademark pork pie hat to the ground with such vehemence that the hatband bounces off.

Doyle taking an assassination attempt by Charnier’s hired gun very personally. Commandeered car / L-train / 80mph chase in downtown traffic. ’Nuff said. The best car chase in the movies. Ever. So says I and anyone who disagrees is welcome to accompany Doyle and Russo down the station and talk about it there.

Doyle haranguing a police mechanic when a suspected car is stripped to pieces. “I’m had everything off but the rocker panels,” the old-timer protests. “Aw, come on, Irv, what’s that?” Cut to: an air chisel slicing through the rockers. Guess where the stash is?

And then there’s that brilliantly, unforgettably cynical ending. As Charnier escapes (oh sorry: this is the plot spoilers bit, btw; so was the paragraph above, actually), leaving the rest of the conspirators, French and American, to take the rap, Doyle plunders about vengefully in a deserted factory. Russo joins him and almost gets shot for his pains. Then Doyle sees a figure in a doorway and empties his gun. It’s Mulderig: dead. Russo is shocked. Doyle barely registers what’s happened. “Frog One’s here and I’m going nail him,” he declares. He goes sprinting into another part of the factory. A single shot rings out. The screen goes black.

Damn near every frame of ‘The French Connection’ gives you a memorable image, a quotable line or some banter that zings (Hackman and Scheider play off each other effortlessly and with perfect timing); but it’s the ending I remember above all. It’s so chillingly ambiguous. Leaves just enough open.

Then, of course, they made a sequel. But that’s another story.

PERSONAL FAVES: That Obscure Object of Desire

Starting with the title, let’s ask: the object of whose desire, and how come she’s so obscure? Our, ahem, ‘hero’ and narrator Mathieu (the incomparable Fernando Rey) is the man who’s got it bad. The object (how flattering a term!) is dancer Conchita, and so skewed is Mathieu’s perspective that he sees her as two women. One, voluptuous and sensual (played by Angela Molina) inflames his passions; the other, elegant and cool to the point of icy (Carole Bouquet), continually denies him.

We’re in Luis Bunuel territory, all right.

The usual targets are lined up (Bunuel’s films often come across as the cinematic equivalent of a shooting range): the middle classes* (Mathieu is a wealthy businessman who utilises his contacts in the legal profession to get his way – or resorts to bribery if that fails); the church (Conchita’s supposedly God-fearing mother takes Mathieu up on a financial offer vis-à-vis her daughter); and the state (the battle of the sexes is played out against a backdrop of terrorist activity).

This is a film that could have been made this year and would have proved scathingly satirical and ridden to box office glory on a wave of controversy. Bunuel made it thirty-one years ago.

Mathieu narrates his saga of desire and frustration to his fellow passengers during a train journey. Present in his compartment – and sly personifications of these themes – are a lawyer (officialdom), a psychiatrist (apposite, given the nature of Mathieu’s obsession and the duality of his perception of Conchita), and a mother and daughter (symbolic of the family unit Mathieu is bastardising in buying off Conchita’s mother). The funniest scene in the film has the teenage daughter brusquely sent out into the corridor as Mathieu describes his night of non-consummation.

Presupposing Steve Martin’s hilarious almost-couplings with Kathleen Turner in ‘The Man With Two Brains’, Mathieu very nearly gets his way. Conchita, furious at her mother’s bargain with Mathieu, nonetheless agrees to live with him but begins treating him as little more than a sugar daddy, sponging off him while holding out against the necessity of intercourse for as long as possible.

Their first night sees him enter the bedroom with Conchita (Molina); she excuses herself to the bathroom and dons a nightgown, leaving it unbuttoned, her décolletage exposed. The Conchita who rejoins him (Bouquet) is dressed demurely and allows him the briefest of caresses before saying, “Not yet, I’m not in the mood now.”

Mathieu becomes forceful. Conchita acquiesces, but insists he extinguish the candles. “Don’t celebrate your victory too soon,” she warns as darkness embraces them. Grunting in shock, he stumbles out of bed and re-illuminates the candles. Beneath her nightdress, a silken arrangement of ribbons and bows; quite alluring, but preventative in its design. Or, to put it bluntly, if Ann Summers had designed a chastity belt, that’s what Mathieu finds himself doing battle with.

“I struggled with it for fifteen minutes,” he tells his fellow passengers sadly. “I was incensed … It was impossible to remove it.”

The final bitter joke of ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ is, of course, that Mathieu never gets his wicked little way. Bunuel’s subject is the concept of a woman for whom one’s passion is unrequited as having two sides: the yin and yang of erotic allure and physical unattainability. Casting two actresses in the same role is the perfect realisation. And in structuring an entire film around a besotted man being denied sex, Bunuel achieves cinema’s most absolute – and phenomenally witty – comment on sexual frustration.



*Not for nothing is one of his most famous works entitled ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise’.