Diabolique

It may surprise the casual reader to learn of my laudatory remarks for a remake that, like so many second attempts, has not met with the same critical approval as its original.  Now the original, despite its primitive effects, is certainly a fine film; what it lacks, however, is an awareness of its sleaziness and how essential this element remains for its ambience.  The ambience of the first Diaboliques (the 's' omitted in the American release and the remake) borders on the supernatural, which is undoubtedly effective, although much of this can be imputed to the grainy quality of what we happen to be watching.  The scenes are always poorly lit; the shadows always seem to be acquiring more territory.  Those who really love older films will detect a prejudice that I have never been able to conceal: for films, unlike for books, the quality of what of you’re taking in hinges greatly on advances in technology.  That is not to say that older films are inherently inferior (howls of indignation are already surging from every movie critic over the age of forty), but the very joy that we derive from film, especially in the theater, is forgetting we are moviegoers because we have become bystanders.  We are among the conflicted crowds lining the stations of Christ’s passion; among the cohorts of Mozart’s performance for the emperor; customers in the same bar that Ali and Emmi begin their sad waltz through life.  Our enjoyment should not be impeded by a crackling, uncolored screen, makeshift props, or the artificial sound editing that so plagued early cinema that everyone sounded like everyone else or some grotesque cartoon (or, at worst, like both).  I have readied myself for my cinematic excommunication and turn happily to this entertaining film.

The venue for our mystery is a small private school for boys somewhat outside of Pittsburgh.  Despite its modest size and the fact that it is run by a scumbag named Guy Baran (Chazz Palminteri), the establishment seems to be prospering, as can be assumed from its large swimming pool, Guy’s wardrobe, and the menu selections at the teachers’ table.  Two of these scholars are of particular interest: Guy’s wife Mia (the breathtaking Isabelle Adjani), who imparts history and her native French to her starry-eyed boarders, and Nicole Horner (Sharon Stone) who splits her time between algebra and Guy’s office hours.  As can be expected, truths gradually surface that do not cast our dear principal in a pleasing light: the school is not actually making any money, he couldn’t actually care any less about his wife (a sure sign of insanity), and Mia’s actually the owner, the financier, and the one on whom everything and everyone depend.  Nicole’s prurience is matched only by Mia’s naïveté and hypochondria, which doesn’t prevent women like that – in the movies or real life – from becoming confidantes.  Nor, I should add, from hatching a scheme that will lead, usually only in the movies, to a ridiculous series of twists involving Guy, that swimming pool, and some heart pills prescribed to Mia.  Yes, she’s a hypochondriac.  But she also may drop dead at any moment from a bad heart, and I will stop the insinuations right about there.

Some may think that two women plotting to kill a faithless cad a glamorous venture into feminist noir, but I will have to disappoint them (and since I’m a heretic, it shouldn’t matter).  What the original Diaboliques did so frightfully well was convince the viewer that what he was watching could very well be a ghost story; admitting this point hardly gives anything away.  Yet the essence of both the original and remake is the unabashed immorality on the part of all involved (including, in the remake, law enforcement officials), a staple of the noir genre.  The genre of endless compacts and endless betrayals, a realm whose inhabitants can only act and think at various levels of deceit, is the true incarnation of Darwinian principles taken to their extreme.  Diabolique has no pretension to great art, which is exactly what allows it to transcend the trash that its genre usually produces and move, with great alacrity, into self-parody.  The ending is both ridiculous and a parody of all ridiculous endings; the characters so infused with malice that they become both devils and mocking actors in a sinister play about thirsty lusts; the policewoman (a dazed Kathy Bates) both jaded and ingenuous.  For all its shortcomings, the film is fearlessly stylish and the acting (especially the despicable turn by Palminteri) incorporates every bad thing about bad people that reminds us yet again of the incorrigible banality of evil.  Since few remakes can hope to improve upon their forerunners, the contents, the details, and, most importantly, the texture must be altered to work on very different terms.  A timid form of blasphemy, that.

Borges, "Rubaíyát"

A work ("Rubaiyat" or "Quatrains") by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Change again my voice to meter Perse,     
To recall that time is the diverse          
Thread of avid dreams, those which we are    
For the secret Dreamer to disperse.         

Twin again the fire and ashen light,     
Flesh and dust and fleeting river's flight,     
Image of your life as well as mine,
It escapes both slow and fast this night. 

Pledge again this monument's hard cast,         
Which erects its pride in wind-like blasts,        
To the inconceivable light's glare,          
Centuries are ticks to Him who lasts. 

Warn again the gilded nightingale
Singing once atop the night's black vale;  
May stars hold in greed its resonance, 
And not lavish treasures in its trail.

Make again the moon your verse and pen,  
Write anew that bluish garden bend       
Dawn prefers.  Your garden and its moon 
Will in vain have sought you in the end.

Tender eves beneath this moon are fools,
Humble specimens of filth-strewn pools,
In whose watery mirrors you'll espy 
Endless images of endless pools.  

May the Persian moon make us distrust      
Golds of empty dusks, recurring lusts; 
And tomorrow is today, but you
Are others, the dead, whose face is dust.

Terror's Advocate

            While your ancestors were eating acorns in the forest, mine were building palaces.

                                                                                                        Jacques Vergès*

You may initially be rather appalled at the controversial subject of this documentary, born to a Vietnamese mother and a father hailing from this region of France, the first place in the world to use the Euro, and you may end your viewing no more sympathetic to his causes.  Yet he couldn’t care less.  The agenda that makes Vergès get up in the morning is the freedom of anticolonialist fighters and political radicals who, in his estimation, have not been given a fair shake.  As an attorney of some of the more notorious political criminals in recent memory, his record continues unblemished.  “I have had clients, friends, who were sentenced to death.  Several dozen.  Not one of them was executed.” 

Vergès’s subsequent tears are hardly reptilian: he often believes in those people he chooses to defend even more strongly than they do in themselves (he even married one of them).  As a twin, a half-Asian, a converted Muslim, a former soldier, a staunch anticolonialist, and an intellectual all in one busy and enigmatic person, Vergès’s mission in life is to support the unsupportable and defend the indefensible.  The consequences of his actions are, however, well beyond what his vacillating ideals might imagine.

Although ostensibly a documentary, Terror’s Advocate is nothing like the biopics to which we have grown accustomed.  We meet people from Vergès’s past and present who praise him, often anecdotally, but cannot agree on who or what he is.  That his ethnicity, place of birth, and physical distance growing up away from Europe made him favor the politically disenfranchised is obvious.  His compassion, while present, ebbs and flows in limited quantities; to him, the essence is the principle of the matter.  The right to self-determination, a right that we are coming to understand as vital (albeit under the aphoristic caveat of giving someone a rope and letting him fashion his own particular knot), is what each person and nation state wants.  In this way, Vergès is hopelessly modern, in love with the concept of defending those whom others detest and provoking those upon whom society can do nothing but smile.  One of his alleged contributions to legal proceedings, for example, rejects the entire system as a sham and the terms used as relative to the oppressor and oppressed.  Upon the independence of this country on July 3, 1962, Verges founded a publication that inspired the last novel of a well-known American writer.  As his list of headline-making clients continues, Vergès becomes more steeped in the ways of the world, choosing his parties with an attenuated plan at hand.  Now especially involved in Middle Eastern and African affairs, he also becomes a moving target for the Israeli secret service.  And then, on the eve of expensive attempts to free this leader, he vanishes completely for eight years.

What he does in those years apart from write a book called Agenda (Simoen, Paris, 1978, although hardly mentioned online) is left open to debate.  Some of his acquaintances claim to have spotted him in Paris, and finally he admits that he did spend some time in his adopted hometown.  But he was also traveling to some of the farthest reaches of Asia, from which he finally returned in 1978, “thin, tanned, with a hardened expression,” as well as utterly penniless.  Has he been in touch with his wife and children?  A French journalist compares his Algerian wife, the Pasionaria of the FLN, to this member of the Résistance, who in no small irony is believed to have been murdered by Vergès’s most infamous client.  Surely, it is suggested, a woman of such strength would not tolerate such negligence.  So Vergès starts again, now mostly bereft of his political leanings, empathizing with the perpetrators of another violent attack in Paris itself.

And this is where, about halfway through, the film changes from biography to newsreel, and where we become painfully aware of the worldwide interconnections among revolutionary cells which have abandoned their political principles for power and gain.  Suddenly it is no longer about Jacques, but about the house he built.  The knowledge that a powerful French intellectual would succor their cause did not lead terrorists to do anything they wouldn’t have done alone, but it did tell them that, on one front at least, they were winning.  The world was scared of their crimes, scared for its children, scared for a future of random violence against civilians designed to show how effete and indifferent their governments really were.  Is that the goal of insurrectionists?  Wasn’t it once the last resort of oppressed peoples to rage against their overlords?  But violent, politically-driven nonconformity is as sellable and hollow as the material inequalities it despises.  Just don’t tell Jacques Vergès.

*Note: Jacques Vergès died on August 15, 2013, at the age of 88, in Paris. 

Baudelaire, "L'ennemi"

A work ("The enemy") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

My youth was but a darkling storm,         
Crossed here and there by brilliant suns;  
By rain and thunder ravaged, torn,          
My garden fruit, less red, undone.             

The autumn of my thoughts is here,             
With spades and rakes my shade will loom,    
To reconstruct this land of tears,              
Where water laps large holes like tombs.        

Who knows if flowers newly dreamt,  
Shall find upon this washed shore's bend
That mystic fare and sweet vim's chart?        

O pain, as time devours life, pain!                    
Dark Enemy that eats our heart!                   
On spilled blood fed, in strength it gains! 

Everything is Illuminated

My first viewing of this film a few years ago came about from a friend's recommendation that a work involving both Jewish culture and Russian language would be of abiding interest.  Which of course it is, but not in the way one might imagine.  As a heavily-invested outsider to these two remarkable communities, I could take what I pleased without any personal betrayal, a pithy explanation of why the most remarkable artistic experiences usually have little in common with our own lives.  I can admire the endless fields of bounty, the obsessive-compulsive protagonist in his ridiculous obsessions and compulsions, the sitcomish dinner table banter, and the general population's utter indifference to history because history, as they say, is made to be forgotten – not that we should at all honor such a proposal – and remain cheerfully impassive.  Yet there is something so remarkable about journeys like these in fiction and life that one cannot but take sides.  And from the very beginning we are rooting for Jonathan Foer (Elijah Wood).

A highly neurotic Jewish-American writer of Ukrainian provenance, Jonathan is distinguished as much by his demeanor as his phobias.  As we inspect his thick black glass frames and gigantic eyes, we might think of all those unfortunates who sat beside us in classrooms past or we might simply think of a microscope.  Jonathan, you see, does not really participate in life as we live it.  He is invariably on the side, against a wall, around the corner, at the foot of a bed.  He is a scientist in discipline and vigilance, although he has not quite grasped his field of study.  The actions and words that construct our world avoid him, and when they coalesce into a material keepsake, he maniacally bags and tags this debris and adds it to a magnificent wall devoted to his family's history (his black suits bespeak perpetual grief).  Jonathan has always been himself – a childhood flashback suggests a shrinking ray – even if he is still unsure who precisely that might be.  Why has Jonathan always been Jonathan?  The explanation is never really given, which is just as well since most of us remain mysteries even unto ourselves.  What we can say is that he is a young man of artistic ambitions sensationally terrified of a normal life, which in this context means he is sensationally terrified of discovering that there may be nothing about him and his family to discover (to paraphrase another famous movie, nothing could be worse than being perfectly average).  As his grandmother passes away in the opening scenes, she bequeaths a picture of her husband and another woman, Augustine, and the place of its composition, Trachimbrod.  In good dramatic convention his ancestor expires after revealing the what, that Augustine helped her husband escape the Fascist blade, but not the how and why.  And Jonathan – purposeful and yet so purposeless Jonathan – has been handed an adventure.

The next scenes are so original and so refreshing that we don't really know what to do with them.  We meet Alex (a wonderful Eugene Hütz), an urbanized praying mantis of a youth from Odessa who works in tandem with his allegedly blind grandfather (Boris Lyoskin) in "Heritage Tours," a daytripper company specializing in wealthy and curious American Jews.  While "Jew" is not the family's preferred ethnic term for the children of Abraham, it is to the film's great credit that Alex never intimates the family enterprise is fraudulent.  That is to say, when an American seeks out an old shtetl, he will be driven to it, he will be waited for, and he will be granted a modicum of sympathy (Heritage tours guarantees at least the first two).  So when Jonathan commences his "rigid search," in Alex's phrasing, there have been many precedents and there will be many more as ancestor worship, the Internet, and the fall of Communism have all conspired to make seeking out such locales a relatively problem-free excursion.  The three pile into an old car with grandfather's small border collie, unknowingly named after probably the most famous of all African-American Jews, and a road movie is born. 

Are the ensuing peripatetics predictable?  I suppose they are, but they are predictable by virtue of our knowledge that we are watching a film, not living a life.  There is no sound way to foresee what Jonathan will learn about himself and others, nor a pigeonhole in which to place a film that so snugly fits in no particular category, not even comedy.  The countryside is egaddingly beautiful, the soundtrack appropriately bohemian in its melodies, and the parties involved very uninterested in one another's well-being, allowing selfish desires to surface that vaguely resemble conversation pieces, all through Alex's broad interpretation of English synonyms.  We don't really know where the road leads – even Trachimbrod does not seem to exist, for more than one reason – and amidst the raucous laughter and cultural head-butting, a few subtle moments might evade our purview.  One character, for example, translates a term of which he should have no knowledge at all; in another scene, Jonathan confesses something so plain and simple, and yet so shocking, that we remember he is not a cut-out but a real person cowering behind a façade of fussiness.  And the final reel, when Jonathan returns to an America that we only saw through his eyes to begin with, will puzzle the viewer who may not think much of transatlantic coincidence, or, for that matter, of fate itself.  

The irony of this great movie is that it belies its title, but not as slyly as it might think.  Perhaps a good chunk of fault can be imputed to the original novel, which I could not read because it is written not to be read but to be discussed.  Never mind that it is also written in Alex's fantastic brand of English that sounds so articulate filtered through a Russian accent that we have at times something akin to poetry (his admission that "many girls want to be carnal with me," Sammy Davis Jr.'s job as the "seeing eye bitch," the fact that the name "Alex" is "much more flaccid to utter" than his full name, and his wonderful use of the word "premium"). Yet the inherent problem with any apotheosis is the run-up.  While we can leap from the mundanely comical to a deep sense of the tragic, the staircase must manifest itself in slices, not as a sudden spiral to the heavens.  We know Jonathan wishes to understand how close he came to never existing; we also know that there is nothing more personal or tragic than familial bereavement.  These two components of our sense of decay will always generate pain, because most of us persist in our convictions that we are mortal.  A trip to where your grandfather barely avoided the scythe must evoke both fear and trembling, and with these emotions, some greater comprehension.  Of what exactly, however, will depend on the beholder.