By Yasmina Tawil
Throughout his heyday in the ‘60s, French filmmaker, gag-writer, and clown Pierre Étaix added to a tradition of meticulous, melancholic screen comedy that began with silent masters like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. The video that follows pays tribute to his unique and oft-overlooked contribution to the medium.
By Yasmina Tawil
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Epistle to the Hebrews
Tender Mercies looks like nothing on paper. The script by Horton Foote is spare and direct, and the dialogue seems to sit damply on the page: How long have I been here? Two days. How far is it to the nearest town? Four miles. Conversations are short, stripped of any color or imagery, and scenes are brief and focused. The film itself, released in March 1983, initially comes across that way, too. Director Bruce Beresford steadfastly refuses to do anything showy, turning the Texas desert of the storys setting into an empty, desolate place devoid of anything attractive. Playing out in elliptical bursts, the film starts quietly and stays that way throughout, ambling through its story of a washed-up country singer, Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), who finds himself broke and hungover at a tiny motel run by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) and begins working at the property to pay off his debt before sticking around and becoming a part of her life.
Any given scene in the film doesnt look like much, and it probably wouldnt feel like much viewed out of context. Yet theres a fragile beauty in the way the film adds up to be so much more than the sum of its dusty parts, and the work as a whole is a powerful, earnest, lovely film about redemption, forgiveness, andin a manner more honest than almost any other American film of the modern erafaith. Tender Mercies belongs to that rare class of film that directly addresses religious faith not as a talking point or as a weapon to be used on the audience, but as a genuine component of the lives of its characters, without attempting to ignite that faith in the viewer or resorting to the extremes of piety or bitterness to make its spiritual point. It is, in every manner and method, honest, and its examinations of the small acts that define love and compassion are among the most insightful ever put to film.
Its not surprising, though, that it looks so ordinary. Film can be an amazing medium for so many things, but its often terrible at exploring the micrometers of nuance that make up a change of heart. Its a medium of action, and belief is invisible. A film can communicate the aftermath of conversion, or convey relationships through conversations and acts, but the silent work of contemplation and kindling is harder to show. One of the reasons so many faith-based films feel so cheap and thin is that they ignore thisor worse, think that talking about belief is the same as showing it. They wind up delivering hollow homilies. Theyre also designed to do the very thing Tender Mercies never once attempts: proselytize.
By Yasmina Tawil
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
— Epistle to the Hebrews
Tender Mercies looks like nothing on paper. The script by Horton Foote is spare and direct, and the dialogue seems to sit damply on the page: “How long have I been here?” “Two days.” “How far is it to the nearest town?” “Four miles.” Conversations are short, stripped of any color or imagery, and scenes are brief and focused. The film itself, released in March 1983, initially comes across that way, too. Director Bruce Beresford steadfastly refuses to do anything showy, turning the Texas desert of the story’s setting into an empty, desolate place devoid of anything attractive. Playing out in elliptical bursts, the film starts quietly and stays that way throughout, ambling through its story of a washed-up country singer, Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), who finds himself broke and hungover at a tiny motel run by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) and begins working at the property to pay off his debt before sticking around and becoming a part of her life.
Any given scene in the film doesn’t look like much, and it probably wouldn’t feel like much viewed out of context. Yet there’s a fragile beauty in the way the film adds up to be so much more than the sum of its dusty parts, and the work as a whole is a powerful, earnest, lovely film about redemption, forgiveness, and—in a manner more honest than almost any other American film of the modern era—faith. Tender Mercies belongs to that rare class of film that directly addresses religious faith not as a talking point or as a weapon to be used on the audience, but as a genuine component of the lives of its characters, without attempting to ignite that faith in the viewer or resorting to the extremes of piety or bitterness to make its spiritual point. It is, in every manner and method, honest, and its examinations of the small acts that define love and compassion are among the most insightful ever put to film.
It’s not surprising, though, that it looks so ordinary. Film can be an amazing medium for so many things, but it’s often terrible at exploring the micrometers of nuance that make up a change of heart. It’s a medium of action, and belief is invisible. A film can communicate the aftermath of conversion, or convey relationships through conversations and acts, but the silent work of contemplation and kindling is harder to show. One of the reasons so many “faith-based” films feel so cheap and thin is that they ignore this—or worse, think that talking about belief is the same as showing it. They wind up delivering hollow homilies. They’re also designed to do the very thing Tender Mercies never once attempts: proselytize.
By Yasmina Tawil
Mick Travis sits alone in his study, his back against a wall plastered with war photos, shooting a dart gun at images hung up on the opposite wall: a womans naked body pasted atop a line of police in riot gear, a sleeping family, Big Ben, the queen in her carriage. Though he never says as much, these are all symbols of institutions that wield power over him. The upper-crust boarding school where Mick is a student is another; in the next scene, his younger classmates are whipped into a subtly terrifying frenzy over an athletic victory. Back in the study, Mick and his friends Johnny and Wallace drain a bottle of vodka and take a blood oath to each other, before Mick utters his famous line: One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.
These four minutes of Lindsay Andersons 1968 film if. provide a concise, if intentionally provocative, summation of the British directors politics. Like so many other filmmakers who came to prominence in the 60s, Anderson thought in revolutionary terms. What set him apart was a wariness towards ideological regimes of all kindsand the masses who subscribe to themthat transcended the decades defining right vs. left, old guard vs. young avant-garde split. If you want a continuity of theme, I think this is one, Anderson wrote in a diary entry his lifelong friend, the writer Gavin Lambert, quoted in his book Mainly About Lindsay Anderson:
a mistrust of institutions and an anarchistic belief in the importance of the individual to make his or her decisions about liferather than simply accept tradition and the institutional philosophy.
Its a worldview Anderson developed most effectively in a trilogy of films starring Malcolm McDowell as the protean Mick Travisa character who changes so drastically and inexplicably from if.to O Lucky Man! (1973) to Britannia Hospital (1982), he might as well be a different person in each one. More than Micks personality, what connects these works is their evolving assessments of the state of Britain at three points on a 14-year timeline.
Their pointed social commentary has earned the films (and their director) a reputation for being very British and exceedingly of their time, but thats a superficial judgment. In our current age of economic strife and malignant populism, Andersons satire feels far less dated than the idealism of his 60s contemporaries. Watching the trilogy now, in the US, it couldnt be clearer that in pointing out the absurdity of one place and period, they captured a brand of political absurdity that couldnt be more contemporary.
Perhaps this is a strange thing to say about a movie that ends with a massacre, but if. is the most optimistic of the three films. Mick Travis, in his original incarnation, is the archetypal teenage rebel. In his first big-screen appearance, 24-year-old McDowell earned his Clockwork Orange role by tempering youthful anger with a magnetic grin and icy blue eyes so alert, they make everyone else in the frame look half-asleep.
As the ringleader of a trio of outcast Crusaders, Mick is targeted by a band of older boys known as Whips who constitute the schools lowest but cruelest layer of authority. Though the Crusaders do break rules, from drinking to taking a joyride on a stolen motorcycle, its their iconoclastic attitude that poses the greatest threat to the school and ultimately leads the Whips to exact corporal punishment on them. Its a humiliating enough experience that when they stumble upon some guns, Mick, Johnny (David Wood), Wallace (Richard Warwick), and Micks fiery love interest (Christine Noonan, playing a character known only as The Girl) decide to put his philosophy into action. if. culminates with a Founders Day fire that forces a parade of parents, administrators, clergy, and a visiting military official out of the school building and into the Crusaders crosshairs. Perched on the roof, these heavily armed individuals finally have an advantage over the sea of conformists on the ground.
By Yasmina Tawil
Mick Travis sits alone in his study, his back against a wall plastered with war photos, shooting a dart gun at images hung up on the opposite wall: a woman’s naked body pasted atop a line of police in riot gear, a sleeping family, Big Ben, the queen in her carriage. Though he never says as much, these are all symbols of institutions that wield power over him. The upper-crust boarding school where Mick is a student is another; in the next scene, his younger classmates are whipped into a subtly terrifying frenzy over an athletic victory. Back in the study, Mick and his friends Johnny and Wallace drain a bottle of vodka and take a blood oath to each other, before Mick utters his famous line: “One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.”
These four minutes of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film if…. provide a concise, if intentionally provocative, summation of the British director’s politics. Like so many other filmmakers who came to prominence in the ‘60s, Anderson thought in revolutionary terms. What set him apart was a wariness towards ideological regimes of all kinds—and the masses who subscribe to them—that transcended the decade’s defining right vs. left, old guard vs. young avant-garde split. “If you want a continuity of theme, I think this is one,” Anderson wrote in a diary entry his lifelong friend, the writer Gavin Lambert, quoted in his book Mainly About Lindsay Anderson:
“a mistrust of institutions and an anarchistic belief in the importance of the individual to make his or her decisions about life—rather than simply accept tradition and the institutional philosophy.”
It’s a worldview Anderson developed most effectively in a trilogy of films starring Malcolm McDowell as the protean Mick Travis—a character who changes so drastically and inexplicably from if…. to O Lucky Man! (1973) to Britannia Hospital (1982), he might as well be a different person in each one. More than Mick’s personality, what connects these works is their evolving assessments of the state of Britain at three points on a 14-year timeline.
Their pointed social commentary has earned the films (and their director) a reputation for being very British and exceedingly of their time, but that’s a superficial judgment. In our current age of economic strife and malignant populism, Anderson’s satire feels far less dated than the idealism of his ‘60s contemporaries. Watching the trilogy now, in the US, it couldn’t be clearer that in pointing out the absurdity of one place and period, they captured a brand of political absurdity that couldn’t be more contemporary.
Perhaps this is a strange thing to say about a movie that ends with a massacre, but if…. is the most optimistic of the three films. Mick Travis, in his original incarnation, is the archetypal teenage rebel. In his first big-screen appearance, 24-year-old McDowell earned his Clockwork Orange role by tempering youthful anger with a magnetic grin and icy blue eyes so alert, they make everyone else in the frame look half-asleep.
As the ringleader of a trio of outcast “Crusaders,” Mick is targeted by a band of older boys known as “Whips” who constitute the school’s lowest but cruelest layer of authority. Though the Crusaders do break rules, from drinking to taking a joyride on a stolen motorcycle, it’s their iconoclastic attitude that poses the greatest threat to the school and ultimately leads the Whips to exact corporal punishment on them. It’s a humiliating enough experience that when they stumble upon some guns, Mick, Johnny (David Wood), Wallace (Richard Warwick), and Mick’s fiery love interest (Christine Noonan, playing a character known only as “The Girl”) decide to put his philosophy into action. if…. culminates with a Founders’ Day fire that forces a parade of parents, administrators, clergy, and a visiting military official out of the school building and into the Crusaders’ crosshairs. Perched on the roof, these heavily armed individuals finally have an advantage over the sea of conformists on the ground.
By Yasmina Tawil
The most important parts of a film are the mysterious parts beyond the reach of reason and language. Stanley Kubrick
Coming-of-age films generally chronicle the moment where a sexual and emotional awakening is at hand, the point at which we transition from dreamy, fun-loving kids into neurotic, beleaguered adults. (Or maybe that was just me.) If we track a bit further back from that point, however before the characters careen all the way over the waterfall, when they can just begin to hear the distant roar aheadthere can be found a very different kind of attitude: fear of the unknown.
Peter Weirs masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock, takes us to the precipice of adulthood in the guise of a simple mystery story, by quite literally throwing some of its characters off a cliff (or at least behind one). The film opens with a long, static shot of the southern Australian desert, with small, gnarled trees and scrub brush in the foreground and a thick, hovering cloud of fog obscuring the horizon line. Gradually, the fog shifts and settles down over the trees, revealing the jutting expanse of distinctive, jagged cliffs that make up Hanging Rock, a monolithic mamelon slowly being exposed, as the ground below it becomes concealedone of many apt metaphors Weir has in his employ.
In fact, the idea of the monolithexplored in equally confounding ways by Stanley Kubrick in his 2001: A Space Odyssey, released some seven years before Weirs film in 1968duly serves as the films linchpin, without ever disclosing its purpose or intentions. The genius of the narrative, based closely on Joan Lindsays novel of the same name, is in this particular kind of murkiness: Picnic can be about practically anything you want to ascribe to it. Is it a meditation on the plaintive unknown of sexual awakening? A film about the limitations of human understanding? Does it concern the idea of our intellectual and spiritual frailty? All of the above and vastly more. In the end, we have a narrative steeped in the idea of mystery at its most elemental. To do this, the film takes a form that Kubrick himself would explore in The Shining some years later: It begins simply, as a kind of genre film, but gradually opens up to a more abstract consideration of the unknown.
By taking an elegant Victorian-era mysterythree girls and their Mathematics mistress from a fancy, turn-of-the-century boarding school go missing amongst the strange, obelisk-like stone protuberances and sharply cut pathways of the Rock, after a class picnic on Valentines Day in 1900and blowing up the conceit far past the point of solution, Weir has free reign to explore the obsessive conniptions we experience when presented with a true, unsolvable enigma.
By Yasmina Tawil
The most important parts of a film are the mysterious parts – beyond the reach of reason and language. —Stanley Kubrick
Coming-of-age films generally chronicle the moment where a sexual and emotional awakening is at hand, the point at which we transition from dreamy, fun-loving kids into neurotic, beleaguered adults. (Or maybe that was just me.) If we track a bit further back from that point, however— before the characters careen all the way over the waterfall, when they can just begin to hear the distant roar ahead—there can be found a very different kind of attitude: fear of the unknown.
Peter Weir’s masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock, takes us to the precipice of adulthood in the guise of a simple mystery story, by quite literally throwing some of its characters off a cliff (or at least behind one). The film opens with a long, static shot of the southern Australian desert, with small, gnarled trees and scrub brush in the foreground and a thick, hovering cloud of fog obscuring the horizon line. Gradually, the fog shifts and settles down over the trees, revealing the jutting expanse of distinctive, jagged cliffs that make up Hanging Rock, a monolithic mamelon slowly being exposed, as the ground below it becomes concealed—one of many apt metaphors Weir has in his employ.
In fact, the idea of the monolith—explored in equally confounding ways by Stanley Kubrick in his 2001: A Space Odyssey, released some seven years before Weir’s film in 1968—duly serves as the film’s linchpin, without ever disclosing its purpose or intentions. The genius of the narrative, based closely on Joan Lindsay’s novel of the same name, is in this particular kind of murkiness: Picnic can be about practically anything you want to ascribe to it. Is it a meditation on the plaintive unknown of sexual awakening? A film about the limitations of human understanding? Does it concern the idea of our intellectual and spiritual frailty? All of the above and vastly more. In the end, we have a narrative steeped in the idea of mystery at its most elemental. To do this, the film takes a form that Kubrick himself would explore in The Shining some years later: It begins simply, as a kind of genre film, but gradually opens up to a more abstract consideration of the unknown.
By taking an elegant Victorian-era mystery—three girls and their Mathematics mistress from a fancy, turn-of-the-century boarding school go missing amongst the strange, obelisk-like stone protuberances and sharply cut pathways of the Rock, after a class picnic on Valentine’s Day in 1900—and blowing up the conceit far past the point of solution, Weir has free reign to explore the obsessive conniptions we experience when presented with a true, unsolvable enigma.
By Yasmina Tawil
Two roads diverged in a (Holly)wood: after the scandalous release of Lolita in 1962, Stanley Kubrick and his producer, James B. Harris, each set out to make a Cold War thriller based on a best-selling novel.
Suffice it to say that history remembers Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)a movie that Harris helped to set up before blanching at his partner’s idea to turn it into a comedymore vividly than the foursquare nuclear-sub drama The Bedford Incident (1965). Splitting from Kubrick on the eve of the directors greatest popular success rendered the New York-born Harris as the proverbial footnote in a world-beating auteur narrative, a marginalization seemingly borne out by the fact that he only produced five features over the next forty years, three of which he also directed.
The most striking of these is Some Call It Loving (1973), a stylized erotic drama privately financed via a tax break scheme for $400,000. In a superbly written and researched essay included with the recent two-disc set from Etiquette Pictures, Kevin John Bozelka explains that Harris brought Some Call it Loving to Cannes in 1973, where it was critically admired (including by Pierre Rissient, who bought it for French distribution) and then destroyed by American reviewers later in the year. The films slow, stately style and baldly symbolic content were laughed off on contact: a rambling, contemporary fable that is merely pretentious, was the assessmentof The New York Times.
Pretentiousness is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but theres nothing mere about Harris adaptation of John Collier’s short story The Sleeping Beauty, about a man who purchases a mysteriously slumbering woman from a traveling carnival and brings her home to be his companion. On the contrary, Some Call it Loving is fully, aggressively pretentious, wearing both its fable-like aspirations and caustic cultural critique on its impeccably tailored sleeves. Its characters live in the contemporary equivalent of an enchanted castle on the edge of the city, deliberately cut off from everyday society. The elaborate role-playing games of Robert Troy (Zalman King) and his female companions Angelica (Veronica Anderson) and Scarlett (Carol White)which expand to include the expensively acquired and newly awakened Jennifer (Tsia Farrow)are legible as a form of aristocratic folly: call it the discreet charm of the bourgeoise.
Luis Buuels shadow falls over Some Call it Loving, particularly the scene in Viridiana (1961) where the angelic novice played by Silvia Pinal is drugged by a servant and served up to the unscrupulous Don Jaime (Fernando Rey); Bunuel luxuriates in the necrophilic aspects of the scenario even as his villain holds back from ravishing the unconscious virgin (a decision that plays as a pious hypocrites moment of grace). In Harris opening, Robert gazes uncertainly at Jennifers supine body and refuses to join the other carnival-goers in paying for a kiss; when he makes his offer of $20,000 to Jennifers handler, he shakes off the implication that hes buying her for sex. Like Don Jaime, hes powerfully attracted to the younger womans sleeping form, which also rhymes with the plight of Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and his botched motel-room rape of his sleeping charge in Lolitathe difference being in Kubricks film, its bad luck rather than a guilty conscience that keeps him from following through.
