Me and You

Bertolucci’s Me and You traces the hero Lorenzo’s (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) change from his first appearance to the last. In the first we see only his mass of snaky black hair until he briefly raises his pimpled, bitter, angry face. He’s at a session with a psychiatrist, considering what’s “normal” when he apparently abandoned a friend who needed his help. In the freeze frame that closes the film Lorenzo is smiling, exuberant, and his skin seems to have started clearing up. 

In between the 14-year-old has connected to his addict half-sister Olivia (Tea Falco) and helped her go cold turkey. He makes her promise to stay off drugs. She makes him promise to stop hiding from life. Though she buys some hash after making that promise, she doesn’t use it. In any case it’s not her earlier heroin. Like epic heroes Olivia and Lorenzo both journey through the  basement underworld, surviving that hell to emerge renewed and empowered

Perhaps the year’s least appealing film hero, Lorenzo is an absolute loner. He has the worst skin and loneliest mien in his school. The students know to ignore him; one corrects the girl who invites him to do a joint. He rushes out of class against the students’ current. He tells his mother he’s going on the school skiing trip but instead holes up in his parents’ basement storage locker. When his manic half sister joins him there they move from antagonism to understanding and mutual support.

They had no contact since she threw a stone at his mother, for stealing the girl’s father. Their father is remote from both, buying her off with drug money and him with a snowboard. The two troubled youth reflect the anomie, corruption and lack of principle and opportunity in modern Italy. They’re not just from a broken home but in a broken country. Where Lorenzo buries himself in his unfortunate appearance Olivia began a career of photographing herself in staged situations (Cindy Sherman sans prosthetics) till drugs hardened her and she froze out the feelings and confidence she needed for art.

In his first film in 10 years the 73-year-old Bertolucci brings astonishing clarity and understanding to the plight of a contemporary adolescent. The boy’s misadventures and the freeze frame end invite comparison to Truffaut’s memoir, The 400 Blows. Despite the seamier story and uglier hero Bertolucci still manages a more hopeful ending. Lorenzo has a close, loving relationship with his dying grandmother, who craves to hear his stories and is unperturbed to wake in the middle of the night to find him swiping her sleeping pills for Olivia. That scene coheres with the aging Bertolucci’s embrace of his troubled lad. 

Bertolucci teases us with echoes of his earlier work. The opaque glass over the mother’s phone call recalls a similar shot in Last Tango in Paris. Lorenzo’s speculation about incest with his mother and our expectation of incest with his half sister evoke Luna and The Dreamers respectively. But Bertolucci doesn’t go there. Instead he stays focused on a tormented isolated boy who doesn’t know what normal is -- other than it’s not him.  

The pet shop scene shows Lorenzo identifying with the chameleon and shape shifting twig insects, with the hard-shelled scurrying armadillo, and finally buying an ant colony in which he can detached watch a society at work. That for this outsider would be “normal.” As Olivia accidentally smashes the ant colony she breaks him out of his removed observer’s stance and urges him to engage with the world.

For his basement solitude Lorenzo stocks up on music and semi-junk food. He will live on nutella sandwiches and coke, with a nod to pear juice. As he lies in bed listening to hardrock on his earphones his body heaves in ecstatic throes, a loner trying to figure out what to do with his energy, in a parody of solitary orgasm. Olivia advances him to their waltz to David Bowie’s Italian song.

The title -- Me and You -- echoes through the film. Lorenzo’s mother says it on the phone to his father, summarizing their exclusion from his confidence. Olivia uses it to express their connection. Perhaps Bertolucci uses it to share with us his memory or sense of the “normal” adolescent agonies. Like the film the title is an old master’s embrace of the afflicted.  
     [June/14: What I didn't k ow when I wrote this was that Bertolucci had been confined to a wheelchair after surgery for the last 10 years. That makes this film's sense of restriction all the more personal and deeply felt.]

The Pin

  Naomi Jaye’s The Pin (Die Shpilke) is the first Yiddish feature made in Quebec. It could have been made anywhere -- which proves that Quebec cinema has at last outgrown its regional concerns -- but it had to be in Yiddish. For the old European language of the Jews is threatened with disappearance as the last generation of immigrant Jews dies off and as the new Israel rejects it for Hebrew. As the film is about memory and responsibility its very themes are fleshed out in its language.

The Shomer (David Fox) stays overnight with a corpse before its burial. This particular corpse turns out to be the woman this Shomer met, loved and makeshift married when they were in hiding from the Nazis in WW II. We see his younger self, Jacob (Grisha Pasternak), meet and fall in love with the beautiful Leah (Milda Gecaite) decades earlier.

The first shot of the film is a forest, centered on a large tree with exposed roots. They’re an emblem for the whole narrative, which will reveal the roots of the old man’s present isolation. Leah married; Jacob probably didn't. At least he lives a solitary life now, free to spend his nights at the mortuary. An old tree with exposed roots suggests a past that wont stay buried. Young Jacob crawls out from under the roots, badly wounded, and finds refuge in an old barn. When he passes out he is tended to by the beautiful Leah, whom he will eventually meet and come to trust and love. In a climactic dream later he will emerge from another burial and try to unearth her too. 

The couple’s developing love is very touching, especially as it grows out of their life or death terror. Like a new Adam and Eve -- in a situation antithetic to Eden -- they live off apples that miraculously appear in the trunk of a tree. They appear without fertility. like the manna from heaven. This mystery casts a fable-like tone over the whole story.

The couple survive their initial mutual suspicion, their hunger, thirst, and the danger of passing soldiers. Having sworn fidelity they split over a threatening visit from a young Russian boy who is searching for his five-year-old sister. Leah talks him into lowering his pistol, but Jacob attacks him from behind and -- against her protests -- kills the lad. Jacob urges her to flee with him but she insists on staying behind to bury the boy. He’s an enemy threat but he’s human. The couple were planning to leap onto a train to the border together. But after this split, Leah makes it to the train but Jacob doesn’t. They don’t meet until she’s dead. That scene defines the difference between the life-giving Leah and the embittered Jacob.

That difference emerged earlier in perhaps the film’s central episode. Jacob tells her the story his mother used to tell him. It involves a prince about to marry a beautiful woman from whose heart three crows say they will steal her perfect happiness. To protect her the prince orders all the crows slaughtered, but one escapes to visit the wedding. When the crow alights on the woman’s heart the prince draws his saber and kills the crow -- mortally piercing his beloved as well. For there can be no perfect happiness. Leah changes the story. When the bride pats the crow it turns into a dove, for you can’t steal happiness. This foreshadows the disruption of the couple’s Eden.

Leah asks Jacob to promise that when she dies he will prick her with a pin before she’s buried. She fears being buried alive. The coincidence of her body appearing on his shift as Shomer enables him at last to meet his responsibility to her, to keep his promise. As her body lies there and he remembers their meeting and love she comes alive for him. But the pricked palm only proves she’s dead. The old man can leave her now, his promise kept after a lifetime tragically apart.  

But for a while Leah has come back to life for him. And so has Yiddish for us. 

Broken

Rufus Norris’s Broken is like the early Ken Loach social dramas ramped up to the breaking point. Where British social realism centered on the working class, Broken examines three families in an upper middle class close. The characters live in spacious, well-appointed houses in a quiet North London neighborhood. 
     So class is not an issue here. Nor is economics. Nor even is race, as the classroom easily accommodates some black children and an aerial view shows a black kid practicing his dance moves in the school parking lot -- that even the sensitive teacher Mike Kiernan (Cilliam Murphy) is too self-observed to notice. Instead of those familiar problems, here the issue is -- as you may or may not have inferred from the title -- breakage.

The people are broken. Bob Oswald (Rory Kinnear, unrecognizable) is explosively violent, especially in defense of his equally fragile/brutish three daughters. Teacher Mike  can teach courage but can’t marshall his own to commit to his love Kasia (Zena Marjanovic) until it’s too late. The most literally broken character is Rick (Robert Emms), who suffered brain damage from a childhood drowning and here moves from being beaten by Oswald into killing his own helplessly well-meaning parents. His mother’s welcome home cake may not be broken but it has collapsed. 

The families are broken. Solicitor Archie (Tim Roth) lost his wife to an accountant (!) and struggles to raise his daughter Skunk (Eloise Lawrence) and son Jed (Bill Milner). Oswald’s wife died, leaving him to do the ironing and to express his paternal manhood by beating up any alleged threats to his girls. Though united in love and caring, even Rick’s parents quarrel loudly over how best to handle him.            When Kasia loses patience with her fiance Mike she turns to Archie, but her switch from nanny to possible stepmother rouses Skunk to feeling abandoned even by her father: “Because she'll leave us the way she left Mike. Like Mum left us. Like everyone does.” Oswald loses one daughter, Archie almost loses his, and the Buckleys lose their son in the most dramatic form of family destruction. 

At the root of the breakage lies a barely repressed violence. Oswald explodes twice, savagely beating first Rick, then Mike -- in his way of being a good father. But down the spectrum of violence Rick’s mother (Clare Burt) tries to physically keep Rick from his room, leading to her death. Even the civilized Archie almost loses control in the police station, out of his concern for his missing diabetic daughter. He has to be restrained by his son. The gentle teacher Mike smashes a chair when he owes his freedom to his lost girl’s lover. 

Indeed Broken is a reflection of a broken nation, a shattered culture. There are no community norms any more, no accepted guidance for the children, no community even among the families enjoying the closeness of their close. Their father jailed, the girls throw a wild party. The characters may as well be hard scrabble screamers in the council flats. Perhaps the film’s central metaphor is the automobile junkyard, where impersonal giant jaws shuffle the wrecks from place to place. There Skunk finds refuge in an abandoned van.

Skunk provides the film’s one optimistic note and it’s enough to balance all the despair. Like the lawyer’s daughter Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, Skunk comes of age learning decency from her dad in an indecent, violent, dishonest world. Instead of Scout’s white-suited father, Skunk has a boyfriend in white denim armour, who warms to her, introduces her to worldlier ways but tries to protect her from the disappointment of his helpless departure. He’s an orphan too, having lost his whole family in a fire, but he manages to grow up with decency and care. 

Skunk has learned her father’s decency but proves more effectual. She gives the isolated Rick friendship and -- in her asylum visit -- a candour that discomfits his parents but opens him up. In his madness his affection almost proves fatal to her: “Don't be scared. I just want your goodness. I just want your goodness.” As things work out, her diabetic fit gives Oswald an unexpected shot at redemption.

Skunk’s diabetes makes her seem broken, too, but that becomes her emblem of strength. She has the courage to monitor her sugar level and give herself insulin shots. She is aware of her vulnerability:

Skunk: What would you do if I died, Dad?

Archie: I can't even answer that question.

Skunk: Would you cry?

Archie: Uh-huh. I wouldn’t be able to stop.

But to her danger Skunk responds with the film’s most exuberant sense of life. She records her blood levels in different brightly coloured inks, finding even in that dreary chore the chance for joy. Her subconscious teems with flights of joy and running. She visualizes the adult future her father dreamt when she was born. She likes him to recount that dream as if that ensures her future. Her revival closes this tense, bleak drama on a ray of hope. In her last vision she chooses life, however grim her reality, over a fantasy of heaven.  

If I Were You

I was so impressed by If I Were You at the Palm Springs Film Festival that I expected to hear a lot more about it. Alas, it disappeared into the esteemed Lorber DVD ranks, where to our relief and delight it can still be found. It deserves a large-screen rep.

Writer/director Joan Carr-Wiggin wrote a brilliant screenplay and directed a richly nuanced cast to bring it to  impeccable life. 

      The plot is an inventive symphony of triangles. Madelyn (Marcia Gay Harden) spots her lying husband Paul (Joseph Kell) out with his bimbo mistress Lucy (Leonor Watling). After witnessing their quarrel Madelyn follows the apparently suicidal Lucy to her flat. Though herself heartbroken she consoles the girl and settles into a friendship in which -- at Lucy’s suggestion -- each will count on the other to direct them through their present crisis. The girl has lost her lover and the woman seems to have lost her husband, but Lucy doesn’t realize Madelyn is her Paul’s wife. 
     As Lucy doesn’t know who Madelyn is, neither does Madelyn’s demented mother. Nor, for that matter, does Paul, who is jealous and indignant when he takes her mysterious calls from Lucy to be from Madelyn’s imagined lover. Nor does Madelyn yet realize who Madelyn is. That discovery will come when the business woman and homemaker steps out of her habitual roles and plays -- Queen Lear. 

The two women’s situation sets up a steady stream of bristling ironies, especially as the women develop a growing intimacy: 

“Enough about me.”

“It’s a small world.”

“You’re nothing like Paul’s wife. Your husband must love you so much.” 

“You’re so much like me.”

“I’m nothing like you.”

“I’ve been multi-orgasmic since I was eight.” 

“How nice for you.”

And of course when Madelyn wants to discuss their marriage Paul retreats: “I’m just going to catch the end of the game.” That he does. 

Other brilliant set-pieces include the tipsy Madelyn erupting at a focus group, an absurd King Lear audition, and another aggrieved wife’s confrontation of Paul when she thinks her husband has been having an affair with Madelyn.  The climactic Lear performance makes you want to see the whole play. 

The rom-com element takes a sharp turn when Madelyn slips into a new relationship with Derek (Aidan Quinn), whose father died in the same home and at the same time as Madelyn’s mother. It begins in the nursing home waiting room in the shadow of death: “When was our last first kiss and did we even know it was our last?” Their relationship blossoms over ice cream in a wintry cemetery. In him she finds an understanding, joy and devotion long gone form her marriage. 

That cemetery image of rebirth confirms the function of the amateur theatre group’s production, where a troupe of well-meaning incompetents are saved by Lucy’s dippy Fool and Madelyn’s heartfelt Lear -- and the play saves them. The play harnesses Madelyn’s emotions and carries her through her heartbreak when Lucy turns against her and wins Paul away. Of course, Lucy understands Lear because she too has been maddened by losing everything she thought she had. Like Lear, Madelyn -- but also Lucy, Paul and Derek -- have grown to understand themselves better as a result of their adversity.  For Lucy and  Madelyn, the play has illuminated their selves and their lives, by giving them a detached yet engaging perspective on their personal dilemmas. Initially they helped themselves by taking the other’s advice, which each developed by pretending to be the other. Then they sank/recovered themselves in their Shakespeare roles. A Lear speech carries Madelyn through her mother’s funeral. Taking on a serious role gives Lucy the confidence to leave not just her bimbo life and callow ambition but her illusions about Paul. Both women get a new self-respect from the stage.

Wisely, Carr-Wiggin doesn’t leave Madelyn with either Paul or Derek. Given Paul’s familiar worry about his and his imagined rival’s penis size, the Derrick is the more satisfying victor. At least for us.  

The Family: CALL Discussion Notes

Giovanni Manzoni (Robert DeNiro), wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and kids Belle (Dianna Agron) and Warren (John D’Leo) are a family cubed. They are (i) a standard-issue American family, with two kids, a van and a dog; (2) from the Mafia, the larger Family, on whom they have snitched; and consequently (3) now identified as the Blake family. That’s how, after some 10 years in the Witness Protection Program, they are moved to a small town in Normandy, France, under the watchful eye of their handler Robert Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones). The jailed capos have put a $20 million bounty on “Fred Blake” -- in US money, yet! 
     At their new school Warren cultivates his business expertise, while Belle seduces her math tutor. But the Manzonis/Blakes just can’t leave their short fuses and reflex violence behind them. All four mete out their own justice. While Fred writes his memoir, to the FBI’s chagrin, Warren’s innocent short story in the school paper finds its way to the capo’s cell in America. That leads to the climactic shoot-out, where the gangsters kill the town cops, firemen and rose-growing neighbour, until the family offs the Family. The Blakes drive off into the darkness for their next attempt to disappear.

Here are some questions to consider:

1. To some extent the central characters function not so much as actors as personae. That is, they are exercising an image or associations collected over their respective career’s worth of films. Our response to them is affected by our memories of their earlier roles. E.g., Michelle Pfeiffer began as a sexpot but in Married to the Mob she played a Mafia widow courted by her dead gangster husband’s boss and by an FBI agent. DeNiro began as a comic actor with Brian de Palma but made his career in the violent Martin Scorsese films, especially Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, as well as The Godfather II, The Deer Hunter, The Untouchables, climaxing in the Fokkers franchise. Tommy Lee Jones has long played men of gruff manners and stoic authority, usually on the right side of the law.
2. Director Luc Besson made his name as a stylish director of French crime thrillers, such as Subway, La femme nikita and Leon: The Professional. He has done some US work, including The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, The Fifth Element, and Madonna’s “Love Profusion” video.  How does this film cohere with that career? Consider both theme and style.
3. The film could be classified as an American in Europe story, which ranges from Henry James (e.g., Daisy Miller) down to the Chevy Chase Griswold family holiday trips. How does this film work between or at either of those poles?
4. How does this representation of Americans abroad reflect upon currrent America?
5. What is the point/effect of the lengthy reference to Goodfellas here? There De Niro plays an established gangster who mentors the hero, Henry Hill who betrays him. Goodfellas is narrated by a reminiscing Hill, as Fred writes his memoir here.
6. Why is the Goodfellas screening originally planned to be Some Came Running, Vincent Minelli’s film of James Jones’s novel about a writer (Frank Sinatra) coming out of the army and returning to his home town?
7. How are the French characterized? Consider the process by which we learn about them (e.g., what traits first, what last)?
8. What’s the point of confusing calvados and camomile?
9. Why in this day and age does Fred use a Brother typewriter?
10. Why is there a clip of Dallas on the TV (in French)?
11. What’s the function of the priest? Of Maggie’s religion?
12. What’s unusual about the brother/sister relationship here?
13. Compare the mystery of the first (back view of t-shirted gangster at dinner) and the last (car drives into darkness) shots.
14. What’s the point of the complicated route by which Warren’s story gets to the capo?
15. How does the film draw on The Sopranos (e.g., the barbecue scene, the family, the treatment of the snitch)? More broadly, how is this a film about film?
16. Given that each Blake member acts in response to mistreatment or abuse, how does this film reflect the explanation of the origin of the Mafia given in The Godfather?
17. Given how successful the Blakes are when they are true to themselves -- e.g., Fred gossiping about gangsters instead of getting into intellectual analyses of some film, not to mention getting clean water -- might this film be about staying true to one's identity, however off-kilter or media-ated?  

How are these lines important?

1. “Like Al Capone said, asking polite with a gun in your hand is better than asking polite with nothing.”
2. “The most important question a man has to answer is this. How much is a man’s life worth?”
3. Warren: “We’re playing in the minor leagues now.”
4. “We’re not in Brooklyn any more.”
5. “Try to fit in, won’t you Fred?”
6. Warren: “Can I rely on you when the time comes?”
7. Maggie: “Desire sneaks up on you.”
8. “You’re the best dad anyone could ever ask for.”
9. Le maire: “I’ve nothing against foreigners.”
10. Maggie: “Drop the Italian Stallion act, won’t you?”
11. Belle: “Love was the only thing that could have taken me out of my crazy life.”
12. Maggie: “Things went badly at the film society?”
13. Tommy Lee Jones’s last “F---."

A Streetcar Named Blue Jasmine: Reading Woody’s Williams

In Blue Jasmine Woody Allen’s echoes of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, are so frequent, central and apparent that they warrant special attention. The effect recalls the process T.S. Eliot described in “Tradition and the Modern Talent” -- and recently resurrected as “inter-textuality.” Every new work of art can draw meaning from its relationship to all other world art throughout history and can in turn inflect both what came before it and what may follow. But Allen’s use of Williams goes beyond that. The allusions are so structural that his film takes almost every step in the context of the earlier work. His meaning per force lies in how he specifically adheres to or --  even more significantly -- divagates from the earlier text, either the stage version or Elia Kazan’s Brando/Leigh film.

     Of course Allen does not acknowledge the Williams source. He doesn’t have to. The play and film are so well known the text is part of our cultural atmosphere. More importantly, Allen is not adapting the play. He only evokes it from time to time. His film can be read entirely independent of Williams. One can have a full experience of Blue Jasmine without having ever heard of Streetcar. But the film will be richer if one has and reconsiders it. In any case, to name the play as a source would invite the viewer to judge how closely the film adheres to it, which of course Allen doesn’t have to do at all. (Allen says he didn’t even see his star Cate Blanchett’s pre-casting Broadway performance as Blanche.)

In Williams, the pathetically faux-glamorous Blanche du Bois interrupts her sister Stella’s happy marriage to the brutish Stanley Kowalski. Allen’s Jasmine also pretends to a false lost glamour, from her assumed name to her last emblem of wealth, her pile of Vuitton baggage. Jasmine’s flashbacks and her talking to herself parallel Blanche’s mental crumbling. Indeed Jasmine has already had the shock therapy that lies in Blanche’s future when she’s carried off at play end. 

Where Williams’s women are sisters, effectively contrasting Stella’s constructive pragmatism to Blanche’s doomed romanticism, Allen’s are not quite sisters, both having been adopted. Ginger says Jasmine had the better genes, but Ginger outstrips her humanity and character. Jasmine’s betrayal of Ginger -- first financially, then domestically, in her unfair abuse of Ginger’s devoted men -- undercuts her anger at her women friends‘ betrayals by their affairs with her husband Hal.   

Clearly, every similarity opens into more telling differences. Jasmine has already wrecked her sister’s marriage to Augie and now shivers her relationship with Chili. That’s like Blanche warning Stella against “hanging back with the brutes.” Augie exposes Jasmine’s past to her fiance Dwight, as Kowalski tells Mitch about Blanche. Ginger’s attraction to the “sweet” (but secretly married) Al contrasts to Stella’s fidelity to Kowalski.

More significantly, Blanche’s animating delusion involves her clinging to her family’s lost glory, Belle Reve, the beautiful dream of the family’s old plantation. Though she has lost the land and the status it provided she believes Stella has debased herself by settling for the Polish laborer. She has no respect for their “fireworks,” Kowalski’s passionate engagement with Stella. To Blanche “Stella” could be a cold remote star but to Stanley she is an earthy sensual woman. Because of Blanche’s romantic fantasies her homosexual husband killed himself and she was fired from her teaching job for seducing a student.  

As she attempts to seduce Mitch into marriage Blanche strives to hide her age and her past. She sets up Chinese lanterns to keep her in the flattering shadows. Jeanette picked the name Jasmine, after the flower that blossoms at night. Indeed as hostess she did blossom in her glittering soirees. But Allen shows her primarily in the harsh light of day. Cate Blanchett is utterly selfless when she appears bloated from crying and haggard and sweaty from her exertions. She spends much of the film in the rending exposure Vivien Leigh suffers once, from Mitch’s harsh use of the “naked light bulb” she has struggled to avert. And in the dark night of her suffering Jasmine doesn’t blossom but wilts. In contrast to the star Stella and the flower Jasmine, Ginger is rooted, fertile, healthy. Ginger is so real and rooted Allen gives her a specific San Francisco address, in contrast to Jasmine's generality, the lost Hamptons and the desired Marin County.

Kowalski shatters Blanche's romantic fantasy not just by disillusioning Mitch but by raping her. At the end Stella has to force herself into not believing Blanche’s true report, in order to continue with her Stanley. In Allen’s repeated phrase, that is the culture of “looking the other way.” In contrast to Williams, Kazan’s film gave Stella the at least temporary resolve to believe Blanche and to leave Kowalski. He made the change to satisfy the censor’s demand a rapist not go unpunished. But the change also served Kazan’s faith in the informer. He made a point of facing the uncomfortable truth, as he problematically demonstrated when he testified before HUAC and as he dramatized in Panic in the Streets, A Face in the Crowd, The Harder They Fall, and On the Waterfront. Allen leaves Jasmine suspended, utterly alone, no last hope in sight, having exhausted even the clinical treatment awaiting Blanche. Perhaps the shadow of Blanche implies Jasmine's bleak future, shuffling among traveling salesmen or their contemporary equivalent.

Jasmine’s lost glory is the wealth and status she enjoyed as a result of husband Hal’s ponzi scheme.Though not as old and defeated as Blanche, she’s in the same crisis: struggling to survive her fallen fortunes and shattered self-esteem. Allen replaces the lost ideals of Williams’s tattered Old South with today’s white collar high stake banking fraud. He traces America’s decline from even the ambivalence of the slave-based plantation to the shimmering venality of corrupt Wall Street. 

While the Polish laborer Kowalski splits into Augie and Chili, respectively Ginger’s husband and fiance, as the male centre Stanley gives way to Hal. American energy has declined from Kowalski to this Hal, from the primitive life force Marlon Brando projected to Alec Baldwin’s venal slick. The smooth businessman seems antithetical to the brutish laborer but Hal proves as venal, savage, lustful and callous as Kowalski. 
     Instead of rape Jasmine is finally humiliated -- not by Hal’s career of affairs with her friends -- but by his abandonment for an au pair. That sexual violation drives her over the edge. Where Blanche tells Stella, Jasmine betrays Hal to the FBI. Even at the end Jasmine feels guilt -- not for having abetted Hal’s fraud but -- for turning him in. Her own act of conscientious citizenship was vengeful, not moral, and she regretted it for its cost to her. Lacking Kowalski’s animal resolve Hal kills himself, yet another index to the decay Allen traces in American energy and integrity.  Hal’s arrest in the street pales beside Kazan’s cut in the film from the rape to a hose washing garbage off the street (after a neighbor recalled the police turning the firehose on a rampant Kowalski).

      These larger contrasts established, smaller scenes accrue new meaning. Jasmine’s self-unaware, adult conversation with her two young nephews is an innocent replay of Blanche’s scene with the newspaper boy. In both she indulges her own adult needs insensitive to her much younger listener and unaware of her impropriety. The card game gives way to the lads’ noisy TV boxing match, both testing Blanches/Jasmine’s nerves.The street noise that torments Blanche becomes the rowdiness of Ginger’s children. Jasmine’s haunting by “Blue Moon,” the song that attended her meeting Hal, softens Blanche’s haunting by the fairground tune she associates with her husband’s suicide -- and foreshadows Hal’s. Allen’s atmosphere contrasts to Williams’s. The play opens on the squalid tenement, but in the film Kazan introduces Blanche emerging in a cloud of steam from the New Orleans train station. Allen’s first shot is of the cool high plane, in which Jasmine babbles to the helpless stranger beside her.

Like Blanche, Jasmine struggles to suppress her embarrassing memories and her guilt. She especially has to deny -- especially to herself -- her complicity in Hal’s fraud. Despite all the soap bubbles she is exposed in the bathing scene. Jasmine is in the tub when Hal brings her an expensive bracelet to reward her for “doing your duty” -- drawing Augie’s windfall $200,000 investment into his scheme. The gift makes her forget her initial hope Hal will make Ginger some money. If Blanche has always depended on the kindness of strangers, Jasmine depends on the (mutual?) exploitation of friends. Jasmine ruined her sister’s last hope of financial improvement and consequently her marriage, in return for another ornament. As if this exchange were not sufficiently revealing, Jasmine’s vanity and greed are emphasized by our memory of Blanche’s long baths, albeit offstage, which irked Kowalski  but which she needed to ease her exploded nerves. Blanche’s pathetic weakness undercuts Jasmine’s greedy comfort. 

Out of the tub, where Blanche is trying to recover a lost dignity, Jasmine is bent upon recovering a life of stolen glamour. She functions as an ornament for the dentist and hopes to for the wouldbe politician, Dwight. She aspires to be an object of shallow beauty, a useless bloom like the jasmine. She studies computer science so she could become an interior designer, as if a room were the only interior she needed to design. Dragging her Vuitton, flying first class, finding another rich man to adorn, Jasmine is concerned with the surface of her life while inside she disintegrates. In Dwight she finds one last hope for reviving her lost shallows, like Blanche’s desperate play for stolid Mitch (“Sometimes -- there’s God -- so quickly”).

  Allen is rather less concerned with romantic fantasy, the tension between the ideal and the flesh, than Williams. Allen rather focuses on social criticism. Jasmine’s disillusioned Dwight is less troubled by her role in Hal’s fraud than by her lying to him. The politician would live with fraud if only he knew about it. Dentist Flicker wants her beauty in the office but also in an adulterous affair. While Allen’s film is rich in his central characters‘ psychology -- and Jasmine is as intriguing an enigma as Blanche -- his target is rather the amoral political/economic climate of current America. Post meltdown, the wealthy transgressors have escaped punishment, their exploitative system continues unchanged but for their myriad ruined victims   -- “Some people can’t put things behind so easily.”  
      Finally, Jasmine like Blanche might be read as a projection of the author. Blanche embodies the  vulnerable, fragile dreamer for whom the coarse, realistic world allows no refuge, a plight with which Williams -- especially after his sister Rose's suffering -- could easily identify. Perhaps there is some Woody in Jasmine. He no longer plays the neurotic, ever questioning, ever insecure nebbish himself. But when he turned to the tragic mode, as in Interiors, he usually worked through the feminine aspect. Perhaps the 78-year-old Allen, at the top of his game, puts into Jasmine his own questions about the solidity of his achievement, the integrity of his self-examination and how honestly he has lived his life on and off screen. Like Streetcar, this is a deeply felt film whether we read it as anatomizing a society or a soul.  

Ishtar (1987)

Naive American civilians and a hypocritical, amoral CIA blunder into the Middle East tinder box with its web of Shiite and tribal wars and a roiling opposition to the entrenched Arab despots -- some supported by the US. Other foreign powers, e.g., Turkey, Russia, fall all over themselves trying to get an edge in influence. An ancient map shows borders that could launch the next/last world war.

No, that’s not the latest Oliver Stone. Or CNN. It’s Elaine May’s 1987 comedy Ishtar. The film’s production rumours so soured the press that despite early audience approval it was numbered among the worst films ever made. That’s how far ahead of its time Ishtar was. Though she continued to write, even collaborating with Ethan Coen and Woody Allen on a recent Broadway omnibus, May hasn’t directed another movie since. Now that the DVD release won positive reviews in the New York Times and on IMDB, I’m glad to see the film is finally getting its due. 

In this film May combined the form of the Crosby-Hope Road movies with the spirit of Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap. Dustin Hoffman (Chuck) and Warren Beatty (Lyle) respectively play the Hope and Crosby song and dance men, but with two twists. First, May plays Beatty against his reputation as legendary stickman and denies him Crosby’s romantic edge over the delusional Hope character. Here Beatty is shy among women and incompetent:

    “Yeah, but you gotta have the looks, Chuck. I mean, you walk into a place like that and girls just     want ya, ya know, ya got that kinda face. Kinda mean lookin' but with character. And the way you walk, you can only do that with a small body! Did ya ever hear of a big sports car? I mean, if I'd look like you....”

That, remember, is Warren Beatty envying Dustin Hoffman. Lyle doesn’t recognize a woman when he wrestles with her. Even when he holds her breasts. Astonishingly, the critics failed to pick up Elaine May’s tongue in chic.

Secondly, the men are terrible composers and singers. (But Beatty and Hoffman are brilliant in performing mediocrity.) This is where it draws from Spinal Tap. Like that group Chuck and Lyle have a musical ambition entirely incommensurate with their talent and sensitivity. Here’s the composition Chuck sings to a couple celebrating their 53rd anniversary (which, by the way, he had a year to compose):  

“I'm leaving -- some love in my Will. I'm leaving -- some love in my Will. My life is nearly over, and time goes by so fast. So I'm going to give you a present, to thank you for the past.”

Then Chuck wonders why the people threw food at him.

The bathetic lyrics by May and Paul Williams emblematize the shallow sentimentality and naivety of American culture. A doo-wop trio sing “I’m quitting high school cuz you don’t like me.” In another lyric, romance dissolves into pop culture nostalgia:

“I see her standing in the backyard of my mind, she cracks her knuckles and the scab that's on her knee won't go away. I see the woman waiting in her eyes and I can see the love but I can't see the Brooklyn Dodgers in LA.”

Another song simply alternates “Hello”, “Baby” and “Love you.” Here Lyle neatly encapsulates the genre’s cloying sweetness: “Hot fudge love, cherry-ripple kisses. Lip-smacking, back-slappin', perfectly delicious.” Yet as Chuck lauds another Lyle banality, “Shit man, when you're on you're on.”

This musical silliness shades into the film’s political theme when Shirra Assel (Isabelle Adjani, playing the Dorothy Lamour role of exotic temptress) warns the smitten Americans that “This is an ancient devious world, and you come from a young country. Promise me you will keep my secret without trying to understand it.” By film’s end the freedom fighter/terrorist has improbably grown misty-eyed over the clods. She flouts her cell to save their lives. In 1987, of course, the audience could still absolve a freedom fighter of terrorism.

Our American heroes are completely unable to handle the area’s politics, as the government, freedom fighters and CIA all resolve to kill them. For CIA director Jim Harrison (Charles Grodin), “No, if two Americans die it has to be unofficially.” Two other CIA agents reveal the area’s confusion of cultural signs:

-The KGB is here. I recognize two agents.

-The ones dressed as Texans?

-No. The ones dressed as Arabs. The ones dressed as Texans are Arab agents. I also recognize two guys from Turkish intelligence.

-Which ones? The ones in the Hawaiian shirts?

-No, the Bermuda shorts. The ones in the Hawaiian shirts are tourists.

That world is so dangerous that even a simple code -- say, “I want to buy a blind camel” -- can freeze into a burdensome reality. Drawing a “red line,” anyone? When Chuck and Lyle admire their blind camel’s stubbornness -- “Stupid-ass camel! He'd rather sit there and die!” -- they point to their own odd kind of heroism. Their completely unfounded musical ambition and confidence are a desperate attempt to suppress their real sense of their own failure. Chuck lived with his parents until he was 32. Both lose their wives (Tess Harper, Carol Kane). Chuck’s depression hits him both when he’s high -- on a high rise ledge -- and in the windswept desert. Lyle feebly consoles him:

“It takes a lot of nerve to have nothing at your age, don't you understand that? Most guys'd be ashamed, but you've got the guts to just say 'to hell with it'. You say that you'd rather have nothing than settle for less, understand?”

Stranded on the desert, among vultures, betrayed by all, they reach for spirit:  

Lyle:Chuck, this isn't really a good time to get depressed.

Chuck: You're right, I don't know what's wrong with me.

Lyle: Look at the upside: we're not livin' lives of quiet desperation. 

Beckett meets Spinal Tap when the blundering incompetents find a kind of heroism simply in carrying on, refusing to submit to their awareness of their failure.

They have their moments. The scene where Chuck is forced to to fake Berber lingo to auction off black market weaponry is a classic of Hope-ian bafflegab. He stumbles into effectiveness when he pulls a cry out of the very quality he needs to succeed here. Chuck stretches Chutzpah (yiddish for huge nerve) into Chutzpah-yi-yi! When an extemporized shriek carries such wit and weight you know the script is a work of masterful intelligence.

And why wouldn’t it be? It’s Elaine May, the genius of those sharp-eared satiric skits she did with Mike Nichols. She wrote and directed those shrewd satires, A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, and the brilliant Mikey and Nicky, where she outdid John Cassavetes on his own territory. Elaine May couldn’t make a dumb movie. She had already worked with Warren Beatty on the script of his Heaven Can Wait (1978) and would co-write Mike Nichols’ Clinton parable, Primary Colors (1998). But in its political satire Ishtar is closer -- indeed a companion piece -- to Nichols’  Charlie Wilson’s War (2007). The notorious Ishtar, far from being ineffectual, prepared for those later political satires and also, with its awful music and lyrics, the new genre of Cringe Comedy, like the Christopher Guest mockumentaries, the work of Ricky Gervais, and TV series like the transplanted The Office, Girls and Veep. 

Our (of course, anti-) heroes get a happy ending. They coerce the CIA into recording and promoting -- world wide -- a concert recording of their godawful music. Hard to believe? Remember, the CIA furtively funded the lefty British cultural periodical, Encounter, for its odd political purposes. And the losers survive.

The film closes on their most significant lyric: 

Telling the truth can be dangerous business;

Honest and popular don't go hand in hand.

If you admit that you play the accordion,

No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band.

But we can sing our hearts out.

And if we're lucky, then no neighbors complain.

Because life is the way we audition for God;

Let us pray that we all get the job.

Too bad that after Ishtar Elaine May didn’t. Again, she was that far ahead of her time.