42: Alice in the Cities (1974, Wim Wenders)

Owned version: The Criterion Blu-ray released in 2016 as part of the Road Trilogy box set.

Acquired: Assumedly November or December of 2016, during one of Barnes & Noble's half-off sales.

Seen before?: No.

I feel like a lot of what Alice in the Cities is doing can be explained by the use of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln on a television in a motel in which disaffected journalist Philip (Rudiger Vogler) is staying. Philip is traveling across America taking Polaroids for an ill-defined writing assignment. Televisions figure prominently in Wim Wenders' empathetic portrait of dislocation and ennui - televised images blare in hotels and motels and airports, displaying silent images of film stars and cheerful men shilling albums of Italian music and "ads for the status quo," as Philip grumbles - but nowhere does the motif seem more instructive as to Philip's journey than a brief glimpse of Henry Fonda portraying that most noble and deified of Americans. Young Mr. Lincoln is an excellent, stirring work of art that wears well the trappings of a mythopoeic construction of America the Beautiful, home to great men and great ambitions. It can be slotted neatly, if one cared to, into a certain nationalistic vision, a burnished vision of historical greatness. The film, of course, is not as simple as all that - Geoffrey O'Brien sums it up with, "Ford accepts triumphalism as a necessary evil - accepts the need for a Great Man and a monument to affirm his greatness - but his movie is not quite that monument. It is more a lament for what the world might almost have been, if there had been no need for a Lincoln to save it" - which is of course also The Point. It knowingly offers up an America that was never there, that cannot be found because to do so is to constrict one's vision.

Similarly, Philip's article is failing because he cannot find the America's he's looking for, simply because this America also does not exist - the America he hopes to find has no bearing on the country itself but is instead an outcropping of his own mind. When he exclaims about his camera, "It just never shows what you saw!" what he's really decrying is his inability to extricate the reality of his surroundings from his own lived experience within those surroundings. He can't get outside himself and really see. In this manner, it matters not what country he finds himself in - his alienation stems from within, not without. What he's searching for is himself. What he finds is a little girl.

Alice, the little girl, has problems of her own. She's traveling with a mother, Lisa, who loves her but cannot prioritize the girl's needs over her own and is fraying to bits because of it. Philip runs into the two of them at LaGuardia Airport after a pilot's strike in Germany strands them in the US for a couple days longer. Whereas Philip's existential malaise manifests as sloth, Lisa's turns into a desire for escape, and soon Philip finds himself with a new travel companion. What could (and often does in other hands) devolve into a pathos-sodden tale about a lost man who finds himself when forced to be a father figure to an adorable moppet instead blooms into something more flinty and sharp-angled, where the emotion seeps naturally out of the characterizations. A good deal of that has to do with the fact that Alice is anything but an adorable moppet. Yella Rottlander takes this assignment and runs with it, pushing forth a impressively modulated, sullen and spiky turn that nonetheless allows space for the sorts of small joys you'd expect from a kid who is still, after all, a kid (e.g. the scene with the photo booth, which also serves as a handy encapsulation of the changing relationship dynamics between Philip and Alice). Alice is, in no small manner, one of the most realistic children I can recall seeing on film - Wenders threads the needle perfectly in exactly how obnoxious to make her without tilting into Dutch territory - and Rottlander strikes nary a false note. (Interesting to see this so soon after Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, another film that recognizes that kids can be irritating without being monsters.)

Alice is a kid in a tough situation who's just old enough to know how she's being screwed and practiced at finding ways to evince frustration at not being able to do anything about it, and Philip is man without purpose or direction. In the course of Alice in the Cities, they don't solve each other's problems or change each other's lives - they merely drift together for a while, both at different stations in life yet somehow sharing a common outlook. (There's a beautiful shot where Alice is reflected multiple times in a developing Polaroid of Philip - a metaphoric depiction of a number of paths ahead of her into the future, one of which leads to becoming Philip.) Wenders's philosophical stance here can be neatly summed up in the sequence where Philip and Alice comb the city of Wuppertal looking for the residence of Alice's grandmother - a man who grew up here but recognizes nothing, having not been home in over a decade ("These old buildings are all being torn down"), and a young girl looking for a house she can't remember in a place she doesn't know, their twin levels of alienation dovetailing in ways that make them ideal travel partners. And if the film were them and only them, that would be enough.

But what really makes Alice stick is the observational notes Wenders throws in regarding the world and people around them. The two of them may be shutting out the world, but the world is not alienated from them, and there are times when, say, Philip is telling Alice a story and a tram roars by in the background, or when Philip is trying to sleep in a hotel room and NYC street noise roars in from an open window, that remind us that the world does not begin and end with these two travelers. There is, instead, a whole bustling world, one of bus passengers and greasy-spoon waitresses, sympathetic policemen and flustered ticket-counter agents, ex-girlfriends and frustrated copy editors, and every one of these people, whether glimpsed in passing or given passages of dialogue and interaction with our leads, is given enough of a suggestion of a rich inner life by Wenders than any of them could spin off into their own film. Where Philip is closed off, Wenders is generous and curious, and he understands that life goes on around you no matter what you think of it. My favorite sequence in Alice is directly after Philip, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, spies Lisa leaving their hotel and realizes that she isn't coming back for Alice; as he trudges over to her, mulling how to break this news - or even whether he should do so - Alice is using the binocular scopes to follow a bird in flight. Unaware of the shift her life is about to take, lost in her joy, trailing a bird. Life goes on.

40: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese)

Version owned: The 2004 Warner DVD release as included in the Martin Scorsese Collection box set (the same one I pulled After Hours from).

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

The child is telling a joke, his mother the only audience. It's a joke he's heard and is trying to remember, but the details aren't coming out quite right. He gets to a point, realizes he forgot something, runs back to fill in the detail. A pause, a stammer, a restatement, a change. Eventually, he arrives at a punchline, but by then the joke is obliterated, blasted out of recognizable shape by the heedless energy of the teller. His mother, his exasperated mother, evinces no response other than a grim relief that the fumbling attempt at a joke is over... so of course the child thinks she doesn't get it and heads forth to run through it again, expecting that this time she'll laugh. The mother's face crumbles into a burgeoning sob.

This joke - something about a gorilla and some testicles, if I remember correctly - is so important to Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Firstly, the joke stands as a representation of realism and this film's curious relationship to it. The telling of the joke is a perfect encapsulation of Tommy, the pre-teen son of Ellen Burstyn's Alice - it's youthful loquaciousness as a verbal steamroller, awkward and oblivious and pointedly vulgar. Tommy is allowed to be unsympathetic and obnoxious to a degree that doesn't often find purchase in Hollywood, where children are often shown as precocious and/or wise beyond their years, and doing so makes him feel uncannily like an actual kid reacting to stressful circumstances. This general truth to character and circumstance revealed in small ways finds its way into every corner of the film - in the embarrassed hesitance of the first meeting between the widowed Burstyn and lounge rat Harvey Keitel, in the pastoral calm of Kris Kristofferson's ranch, in the nervous, frayed desperation of Burstyn at the end of a job hunt and the ever-weakening pronouncements about the bar's lack of a piano by the bar owner whom she's begging for a singing job. There's a thread here where Scorsese, ever the cinematic omnivore, is more or less using the structures of American melodrama to tip his cap towards Italian neo-realism, and the concentration on the economically downtrodden is part and parcel there.

Except that every little touch of realism comes with something to undermine it, to blow it up into something grand and brash. Harvey Keitel turns out to be a room-smashing monster; Kristofferson's ranch has grass rendered in eye-scorching Technicolor green; Burstyn's last stand is accompanied by a swooping fast-track zoom as she hobbles into the darkened bar. Too with the joke - the truth of the scene is a kid being a kid and telling a story while disregarding whether anyone wants to hear it, but the telling is allowed to wend so long that the realism breaks and the duration becomes its own meta-joke. This is appropriate for a sober ground-level drama frayed to bits by the fact that all its characters operate out on the far edge of their emotions. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a woman's-picture in the same way Mean Streets is a crime picture - it has the shape of the thing, but the violent, nervous rhythms juiced into it by its young, excitable director give it an electricity all its own, melodrama tiptoeing just up to the raw edge of miserablism before letting off the gas and sliding back towards less painful outcomes.

Getting to these outcomes, of course, is never easy - a lot of detours and dashed dreams have to occur before these people find their way to where they are. And there it's back to the joke again - it's a perfect microcosm of this film's idea of life as a long wait for an expected destination only to realize that destination isn't on the horizon and life is moving on whether you want it to or not, so now's the time to act. Burstyn spends the film pulling up stakes and running whenever things get sour, towards an imagined future of singing success in Northern California; the hard-fought satisfaction and wisdom of the ending comes when she doesn't run from another series of letdowns. The film finds its truth in the small gestures because the big ones are always revealed to be folly, emotional blowups that solve nothing because after the blowup you still have to exist. There's a beautiful scene near the end of the film between Burstyn and Diane Ladd where the former pours her heart out to the latter in the bathroom of the diner where they both work, and it's moving and fulfilling and helps Burstyn make her ultimate choice about where she's going to go with her life... and in the middle of it Scorsese cuts to Vera, the hapless young waitress who works with the two absent women, trying to manage a lunchtime rush all by her beleaguered self. Life goes on.

37: After the Rehersal (1984, Ingmar Bergman)

Owned version: The Blu-ray released by Criterion as part of the massive Ingmar Bergman's Cinema box set they released this past November.

Acquired: Christmas gift from my mother, though it didn't arrive until late January due to the overwhelming interest in the set.

Seen before?: No.

"Many directors' paths are lined with the corpses of actors. Have you ever tried to count your victims?"

Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehersal does not open with a title card. It instead opens with the above image, a shot that drifts over the length of a dressed stage to find its protagonist, director Henrik Vogler, with his head down on a desk. Is he dozing or just collecting his thoughts? No matter - at any rate, he slows stirs himself into upright, conscious life. Soon Anna, the lead actress in the production of Strindberg's A Dream Play Vogler is currently rehearsing, will arrive on set, claiming to be searching for a lost bracelet. Vogler assumes this to be an excuse, that's she's actually looking to talk to him - and he's proven right in quick order. Their two-handed verbal and emotional sparring, with a midfilm break for another back-and-forth between Vogler and older actress Rakel, comprise the body of After the Rehearsal. Just as Autumn Sonata was built out of the sparring between Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, and as Persona was built from the tension between Ullmann  and Bibi Andersson, and as Scenes from a Marriage was crafted from the arguments between Ullmann and Erland Josephson... who plays Vogler in After the Rehearsal.

So this is familiar ground for Bergman - indeed, why should we expect anything less from a late-career work from a master with such an identifiable stamp? The value here is in how Bergman embraces the familiar - indeed, weaves it into the fabric of the work. Anna, played with beautifully by Lena Olin, is the latest muse for Vogler, but her connections run deeper than a simple working relationship - one of Vogler's previous muses, Rakel, was in fact her mother, and the role she plays in A Dream Play was one that her mother had previously played for Vogler. This is, in fact, the fifth time Vogler has directed A Dream Play, and there is much discussion not only of Rakel but of another actress, Maria, who had also performed the role previously. Both these actresses, it's revealed, are deceased. Further, it's not just the material that has been reused - the set dressing is also a hand-me-down, with the centrally-placed couch in particular cited as being a holdover from a production of Hedda Gabler. Ghosts and echoes abound this production, and that's even before a literal ghost drifts in for a chat.

But there's something else, another angle that I think makes the idea of old, repetitive material into something productive. Early on, Vogler chastizes himself in voiceover for "...this parody of conviction that's gone sour and crumbled," speaking to a weariness with something well-trod; when he follows this up with, "Why justify myself to this young person who doesn't care what I say?" there's a sense that he's struggling to find his place in the modern way of things. Making Vogler a theater director invites a temptation to read this as autobiography of sorts for Bergman, a temptation the material certainly encourages when, say, Vogler tells Anna, "I make sure the audience loves you," and the film cuts to an over-shoulder shot from Anna's point of view, placing us in Anna's shoes as The Director Himself talks directly to us. But it's more than that - there's a feeling that this is all foregone, that these arguments are not new, that the carpet on the stage has a path worn into it that is currently being followed because that's the way Vogler (and by extension Bergman) wants it. Olin follows in the path of her mother because Vogler demands it; even when she protests about her ability to tackle this demanding role, he responds with, "You can only be that bad if you're talented." Rakel shows up because Vogler incarnates her as a way to expunge lingering issues regarding her and her daughter, and when he says, "Not a day goes by that I don't think of you," is he working out his guilt for having let the elder woman irreparably down or justifying why he's sucked himself into her daughter's orbit? When Anna throws a wrench into the narrative Vogler has dedicated himself to playing out, he responds by charging ahead anyway and narrates in full a fantastic love affair for the two, directing it down the cruelest possible path that results in maximum misery for both parties no matter how Anna tries to get ahead of or redirect this narrative. There's a telling moment during this long sequence where the two are strolling around the stage as Vogler spins his preferred future - at one point, Bergman lets them walk off frame and then zooms down to the stage floor, highlighting the swatches of gaffer's tape that serve as marks to be hit during the play. That's quite the hand-tip there.

If Vogler is then controlling the narrative, as a director is wont to do, sending it along a certain line that satisfies him, it's instructive that we come back to the first shot. Vogler is at his desk in repose. Maybe he's thinking, maybe he's slipped into a cat nap. The film that follows is inexorably tethered to his perspective - he's the only one who we hear on voiceover, he talks to Rakel even though she's dead (with Anna out of focus in the background), and when the story doesn't go to his liking he starts telling a different one. With all the back-and-forth about sadness and aging and death ("I breathe decay. You think I don't know that?"), combined with the pointedness of making the central production A Dream Play and the openly-fantastic interlude with Rakel, I suspect what we have here is not a case of a director breaking down the psyche of a young actress but a director breaking down the psyche of an old director. This is, on at least one level, a feature-length argument Bergman is having inside his own head, and if the chamber up there leaks out some echoes onto the stage where his characters are standing, so be it. Everything around him has gone silent save for the voices in his head yelling at one another; when Vogler muses right before the blackout, "What worried me most in that moment was that I couldn't hear the church bells," it suggests that even God has gone silent. Bergman might know something of that.

32: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)

Owned version: The DVD released by Anchor Bay in 2002, as part of the Herzog/Kinski box set.

Acquired: 2005 presumably, from my then-local Borders.

Seen before?: Twice - once in 1996 (or thereabouts) from a VHS I'd bought used from a Blockbuster, and once from this DVD on March 7th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, and man did I write some dopey garbage back then. I was almost 30 already, you think I'd have learned some shit.)

The camera drifts from on high, through the clouds, until settling within view of a jungle mountain. On the mountain is a long line of tiny people, burdened and trudging like marching ants, fording their way over a thin road of mud and rock. Some are natives, kept in chains and made to bear the various possessions of the others, the conquerors who have enslaved them. Around this procession is naught but trees and mist and muck, dwarfing them and making the polished metal and fine clothing worn by the conquistadors seem foolish and incongruous. Already, it seems, Nature is doing its best to swallow these people whole.

Aguirre, one of the greatest - if not the greatest - work from one of our greatest - if not the greatest - living filmmakers, is a long and difficult journey towards an inevitable destination, as the hubris of Man finds no purchase within the implacable loamy soil of Nature. This is a theme that of course Herzog would return to again and again, but it was never so clear-eyed and pitiless and it was here. Man is represented by the Spanish conquistadors in general, with their absurd dreams of finding a legendary city of gold and complete unawareness of how to deal with the landscape, and Klaus Kinski's Aguirre in particular, a dagger-eyed ice-cold sadist straining at the power hierarchy he sees within his grasp yet never able to reconcile his own implacability with the far more implacable indifference of the country through which he storms. Noblemen become tinpot dictators, priests become inquisitors ("The Church was always on the side of the strong"), and a raft in the middle of the Amazon becomes a besieged island nation before then becoming a sinking sepulchre rapidly being reclaimed by the jungle in the form of mice, butterflies and what seems a thousand chittering monkeys. Aguirre, driven round the bed by his impossible ambition and the endless hostility of the immediate world around him, dreaming of sailing to and conquering Trinidad, stares unsteadily at a monkey he's managed to grasp before tossing it aside and croaking, "Who's with me?" Herzog then cuts to the Sun, beaming bright and dispassionate forever upon him.

So it's a tragedy, one built on vanity and imperiousness. But here's the thing: That cut is also objectively funny, a triumph of context and timing. Which leads into something I never really picked up on before, despite the general tone of most Herzog films - Aguirre is also a comedy, a bleak and mordant one that takes full advantage of the absurdity of the situation to find bitter laughs in a hopeless situation. Indeed, what jokes come are almost entirely rooted in irritation and/or exhaustion - there is, for instance, a great plant-and-payoff gag early on, for instance, involving Christian burial and ceremony that earns a shocked laugh when a frustrated Aguirre disposes of some troublesome unburied corpses by ordering a raft blown up. Later in the film, Aguirre's hand-picked Emperor gorges himself on fresh fruit as his underlings are forced to count grains of corn for sustenance, and the shot of the Emperor tearing through a mango is framed so that behind him, out of focus, we can see one man staring at him, unblinking, unmoving and scowling, as though trying to will his heart to explode right then and there, and the shot (and the actor) hold long enough that passes through ominous and earns a dark chuckle; another amusing bit sees Aguirre standing still and staring off into the distance, looking increasingly pained and annoyed as a native toots away on a pipe right near his ear. Even the famed decapitation sequence, a beautiful and grotesque burst of surrealism, is preceded by a one-liner. The distance between this and Nicolas Cage nattering on about iguanas on a coffee table is not so large after all.

Key to the peculiar effect of this film, both in its tragic and comedic dimensions, is the staggering performance from Kinski. And that was another revelation - because for years I'd remembered the mania, the frothing and crazed ranting. Except... that's not what this performance is at all. Kinski does of course have his moments of outsized lunacy (there's really no other way to deliver a line like, "The Earth I walk upon sees me and quakes!"), but it's a far chillier and more nuanced performance than I'd given it credit for all these years - there's even room for moments of tenderness in it, like the last scene with his daughter Flores, a mournful prelude to his mad soliloquy among the monkeys. Said soliloquy, crucially, is also in fact a fascinating underplay - all but the last line take place inside his head, so the hissing, spiraling insanity we hear bears little resemblance to the confused, staggering wretch on screen. This is crucial because while his madness is manifest early on, it's balanced by a control born of understanding of his place in the hierarchy, so that he comes of as ruthless and determined rather than flamboyantly mad. He stalks and smolders and swaggers, only exploding on occasions where his facade of unflappable megalomania is, by circumstances, flapped pretty fucking hard. My favorite instance of this comes after the wife of an enemy, knowing all too well Kinski's ill intentions towards her husband, exclaims at him, "God will punish you!" Kinski affects a haughty, mile-long stare and a faint grin, as if to say, "Neither you nor God can hurt me, I'm fuckin' Aguirre"... and then he turns and walks directly into a horse, leading to an eruption of arm-flailing and a peeved, "Get out of my way!" Aguirre, the man who thought himself the wrath of God, the man who dreamt of being the god-king over all the New World, is a tragic fool who can't even control a single animal.

Speaking of single animals: There's another scene with Flores, an earlier one where Aguirre finds a small sloth. This is a small and beautiful scene, with a genuinely happy Aguirre regaling his daughter about this little animal's unusual life: "He spends his whole life asleep. He's never really awake." Could that be the unspoken cosmic joke at the heart of it all? Are we all just the fevered dream an ever-slumbering rodent?

29: Age of Consent (1969, Michael Powell)

Owned version: The 2015 "45th Anniversary Series" DVD released by budget-disc kings Mill Creek Entertainment.

Acquired: June 25th, 2017 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

Or, This Deserted Island Wasn't Deserted Enough.

Age of Consent centers around James Mason as a creatively frustrated painter who moves to a tiny island off the coast of Australia in search of solitude; instead, he finds a lively and pulchritudinous teenager played by a debuting Helen Mirren, and a lengthy tete-a-tete begins to develop. As the title implies, Mirren is suggested to be underage (though she seems to have no knowledge of her age, and the one character who repeatedly insists she's too youthful has good reason to keep her believing so); her side of the narrative, then, chiefly involves her own growing sense of autonomy. Indeed, the film uses a series of visual metaphors to suggest that both characters are prisoners in their own lives, from the opening credit sequence revealed to be a fishtank in which a watch is suspended as a form of advertisement to an early shot of Mason in bed with a woman shot through the headboard so as to suggest prison bars to the first meeting between Mason and Mirren - a negotiation on the price of fresh seafood caught by Mirren - arranged so that Mirren is trapped by the front door frame of Mason's beach hovel. So I guess it's ironic that the film ultimately gets imprisoned by the necessary compromises of its screenplay.

Consent, the last theatrical release of the legendary Michael Powell, had the potential to be a rough-hewn gem if it had stuck with the Mason/Mirren dynamic, if it had been possible to pare it down to a two-hander. Mason takes his natural unctuousness and tweaks it enough so that the smarm turns into a wince, the oblivious defense of a man intensely discomfited by the presence of others - he's the kind of guy you can totally see buggering off to some isolated paradise in hopes that the cessation of noise will stoke his waning muse. Mirren, meanwhile, is coded as Nature Girl, the wild animal instinct to Mason's artistic rationality; she's introduced literally emerging from under a dock as though the sea just spat her forth, and her wide-brimmed sunhat stays on even when she dives back into the ocean to escape detection by Mason's dog. (In this light, Mirren's legs and armpits going unshaven is a perfect and necessary touch.) As such, there's a base satisfaction in seeing these two find someone who can give them what they need - Mason gets a model, someone to put a spark of life back into his art, and Mirren gets an adult who will see her and treat her (to a degree) as a fellow adult. Powell's direction is unsurprisingly gorgeous - beyond the nuanced central performances, the editing is crisp and clever (and painful when necessary, e.g. the violent cut when a nude Mirren gets hit across the back with a switch) and the colors pop even on this disc's drab garbage transfer, with sparkling oceanic blues and lush overgrown greens providing contrast to the cool relaxing blacks (for shadowy exteriors) and browns (for interiors). There's even some lovely underwater photography, a fluid accoutrement that takes full advantage of the allowed access to the Great Barrier Reef (even if Mirren's big nude underwater swim is shot, due to necessary adherence to censorial codes, exactly like a nudist-camp movie). The surf-and-sand setting, the beautiful bohemian surroundings with the preponderance of natural color, makes the occasional splash of the artificial that much more impactful; while there's nothing on the level of the berserk use of the red dress in Black Narcissus, the discovery of Mirren's secret money stash - her ticket to a life off the island and thus true freedom! - by her drunken avaricious aunt is given an extra frisson by the pointed contrast of a hot pink handbag tossed on top of moss and rock, screaming the defilement of this secret place to the woods around it.

That drunken aunt, though, is indicative of the crippling problem with Age of Consent - namely that there's other people in it. Every time Powell has to drag in another character, the film loses its bearings; it's a delicate back-and-forth into which a goddamn Carry On film keeps poking its snout. There's the aunt, an unintelligible screech machine. There's the young man who runs the ferry between the island and the mainland, a lean himbo whose big scene is one where he unsuccessfully attempts to force himself on Mirren. (This scene, truth be told, isn't a complete botch - it's mostly about the young man's awkward nervousness, which is both an interesting way to defuse any potential ugliness and an interesting way to play with a completely different vague sort of ugliness.)  There's Mason's neighbor, a female chicken farmer whose sole character trait is that she really, really badly wants some dick. And there's Mason's friend/agent, a licentious mainlander who spends the majority of his screen time talking about banging beautiful women and steals a wad of cash from Mason so that the plot will have somewhere to go in its last half-hour. The last two get dovetailed in quick plot thread about the two of them meeting for dinner, culminating in a baffling and tasteless joke where the agent declares he's been raped. If it happens to Mirren, it's uncool, but when it happens to this jerkwad it's a larf. Yeah, sure, whatever.

If the script dumbs itself down to allow for these broad Komedy interludes, resulting in corny groaners like the agent seeing Mirren and declaring, "I've got a bird of me own," immediately leading to a cut where the chicken-farming neighbor is carving up a roasted bird, it ultimately self-destructs by trying to reconcile the incompatible relationship between the two. Here, then, is where its capitulation to a certain form of crowd-pleasing formula goes past tiresome into fatal - the more I think about the end, the more sour it seems. As Consent digs into the relationship between Mirren and Mason, it comes to an impasse - Mirren clearly has feelings for Mason, feelings which are not being reciprocated. He sees her as an adult, which is gratifying and fulfilling for her, but she comes to realize he only sees her this way because he sees her as a subject - just because he recognizes her womanhood doesn't mean he recognizes her autonomy, and in a scene like the one where Mason is struggling to paint a posing Mirren only to shake his head and mutter, "It's the dress. Take it off." without so much as looking at her... well, that evocative downcast glance by the newly-nude Mirren speaks volumes. She's merely traded one jailer for another and she knows it. So why then, given that this is about her struggle towards autonomy, does it end the way it does? I have to assume this is a function of needing to adhere to the source material - a novel by an artist renowned for his work with the nude female form - but there's still something desperate in the way it manufactures a facsimile of a happy ending, with Mason at the last minute understanding the emotional attachment Mirren has developed for him and deciding - whether out of emotional epiphany or panic at losing his muse, the film isn't clear - sure, fuck it, I do love you too. I try not to be the kind of person who reviews the film they wish they'd seen rather than the one they did, but picking at a perceived flaw necessarily assumes there's a version of this material that would have pleased me; therefore, I submit a stronger film would have Mason left abashed and alone as a chuffed Mirren swims back into the sea that birthed her. But Powell ain't Rohmer, and this ain't La Collectionneuse. So her nascent autonomy gets betrayed in favor of her being revealed as an eleventh-hour Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She was right when she tearfully said, "You only want me for the pictures," and it's to the film's ultimate detriment that it realizes this and frantically tries to wave it away anyway. A pantheon director deserves to go out on better than such a flat note.

16: Absolution (1978, Anthony Page)

Owned release: This is included in the Drive-In Movie Classics 12-disc, 50-movie pack released by Mill Creek in 2008. This is on Disc 4, Side A.

Acquired: Purchased from Amazon on June 3rd, 2009.

Seen before?: No.

This, of course, would be the unnamed film in my Abominable Dr. Phibes review, another example of a long-desired watchlist title that once I had in my grasp I was suddenly in no hurry to get to. Like many a film, this one caught my interest in my teen years when paging through whatever edition of Leonard Maltin's yearly movie bible I had on me at the time. While Phibes may have worked better for me had I seen it back then, I suspect I was correct in sitting on Absolution until I knew a thing or two.

If nothing else, I also hadn't yet seen Sleuth or The Wicker Man or Frenzy as a teenager, which means had I procured and watched a copy of this back then, I wouldn't have understood how this fits into the larger question of the work of writer Anthony Shaffer. Coming to this after those two is the right way to do it, this being a minor but mature work that trades in much of the same stock as those two exemplary antecedents. The common thread in Shaffer's original work reads to me as the dangers of certainty - how an assumed knowledge of What I Know to Be True can blind a person to the true shape of the narrative in which they exist. Richard Burton's rigid Father Goddard, like Andrew Wyke or Sergeant Howie, is a man of imperious authority and strong will who finds himself caught up in intellectual gamesmanship with an opponent he ruinously underestimates, in no small part due to his need to filter the world through the lens of his religion and the vows to it that he has devoted his life towards. The structure of his life and work have been as they were for so long that he cannot conceive, for instance, his pet student Stanfield chafing under the restrictions of parochial school and pranking him via the sacrament of confession. The fallout from this prank proves darker than either man could have anticipated, as both proceed from an understanding of how Father Goddard can and will act.

What's clever about this film is how Shaffer's screenplay and Anthony Page's direction work together to quietly lock the audience inside Father Goddard's perspective as well. This is true in terms of the story structure, relying as it does on certain elisions of action that are necessary for us to make the same assumptions that Father Goddard makes. But there's some formal quirks that accomplish this as well, ranging from the obvious to the subtle. In the former camp, you have a crucial tracking shot of Stanfield running through the woods after an argument with Blakey, a drifter he's befriended (played in his film debut by the great Billy Connolly); the shot, keeping up with Stanfield in full sprint and overlaid with shrieking Hermann-esque violins, represents an overflow of panic and guilt, an eruption of action in what has to that point been a staid affair, and there are two subsequent shots that mirror it at different turns of the plot in blunt visual representations of the transfer or shift of that panic and guilt. Also fairly obvious, especially in light of this being from the guy who wrote The Wicker Man, is the import of Blakey living in the woods - of course this rootless dude, with his old letterman jacket and long hair and long beard and easy grin, whose first introduction to the boys of this school is hollering, "All property is theft!" at them and whose espousal of the hedonistic lifestyle becomes increasingly appealing to the young Stanfield, would be a nature boy and thus diametrically aligned against the stern Catholicism of Father Goddard in favor of a do-what-thou-wilt paganism. Blakey even reveals that he once served as a carnival fortune teller, making whatever codswallop jumped into his head and selling it to the gullible. "As long as they left smilin', I didn't care what crap I told 'em," he chuckles into his whiskey, and of course. Father of lies, right?

That we're expecting this push-pull battle for Stanfield is certainly encouraged by the script - the first exchange of dialogue is between Blakey and Goddard, with the latter refusing the former's request for employment - so it's only in retrospect that it sinks in that Blakey never actually does anything sinister. Through the narrative, he's nothing more than a friendly, shaggy hippie whose worst crime is stealing some food from the school kitchen and being a rootless sort of fella who befriends a young man itching for an excuse to rebel. That's what I'm talking about when I mention subtler indications that we're spending the whole film more or less in Father Goddard's headspace. This is apparent when parts of the narrative that he would have no access to and know nothing about still bear the echo of his judgment. A notable example is the scene where Blakey is harassed by two cops - as he's being pummeled by two cops, there's a cut to a closeup of his head smacking into the ground, then as one of the cops grasps his head and begins to pull him up by his hair, Page cuts to Goddard's classroom where a student is reading the line, "An enemy has done this." This is true in the moment from Blakey's perspective, but if we assume Goddard's perspective it's a sneaky callback to an early scene where the students are performing Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience and we hear the line, "The enemy of one, the enemy of all is!" Blakey is, to Goddard, an enemy against all he is and represents, and is thus an enemy to all his charges, and his influence over his prize pupil Stanfield is an offense he cannot bear.

His attempts to solve the problem while still holding fast to the restrictions necessitated by his role within the Church (most importantly the impossibility of breaking the seal of confession) only cause more problems, and as things spiral out of control, the warm earthen browns and greens of the forest shift to dark and threatening shades of autumnal decay, with multiple bodies found buried in earth black as Goddard's cassock, and the shadows in the school grow deeper until they threaten to swallow every hall and every classroom. (The climactic confrontation is cast in so little light that it might as well be happening in space.) The back half of Absolution invites the sort of crazed ultraham that Burton became known for late in his career, but he instead keeps a firm hand, leaking out just enough hysteria in his choked, whispered prayers and widened eyes that the effect is as though he were bellowing anyway. The closer Goddard gets to what he sees as The Truth, the further he gets from seeing the end reveal coming and the closer he gets to derangement. The key shot, from where I stand, comes in a scene where Goddard is confronting Stanfield about having lied in confession. The two men are at opposite sides of the frame in the foreground and a large ornamental spear in the background hangs on the wall. The arrangement of the actors is such that the spear appears to emanate from Stanfield's eyes and bury its point in Goddard's skull. It's a loaded image, but it's also something of a dodge: Goddard lets Stanfield get inside his head, leading to ruin for all... but not in the way we are led to believe. At the end of The Wicker Man, Sergeant Howie pays for his headstrong obliviousness with his life. At the end of Absolution, Father Goddard is left to a worse fate.