The Talkies: A Future That Can't Work
Bowman, James
'THE TALKIES by James Bowman A Future That Can't Work S ummer, as anyone who has ever sampled a blockbuster (or even a mere block-cracker) can testify, has become the season for post-modernist...
...All this because I place a somewhat lower valuation than she is inclined to do upon mere cinematic innovation...
...In this case we could probably figure out for ourselves the subtext of Rosine's solicitude for Magali, but the parallel example of Isabelle helps to make the film's point about the distance to be traveled between spring and autumn in a woman's life, between the predatory Rosine and the lonely Magali, each of whom finds something to complete her in the other...
...Besides, the culture of the cineaste has always been inclined to overvalue mere technical accomplishment...
...Even appalling rubbish like South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is casually anarchic but has no particular axe to grind beyond a reflexive commitment to what its authors foolishly suppose to be free speech —by which they mean the right to be gratuitously obscene and offensive in public...
...This point is also nicely shaded by the younger Miss Romand's memorable performances in two of Rohmer's greatest films, Claire's Knee (1969) and Le Beau Manage (1982...
...60 September 1999 • The American Spectator ters that our dream-selves continually skirt will vanish when we open our eyes or not...
...The Movie of the Month is his latest film, Autumn Tale, the fourth and perhaps best of the series he calls "Tales of the Four Seasons...
...There's another hard thing to believe...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web-site — www.spectator.org...
...Like the worst and most troubling kinds of nightmares, the movie looks just enough like reality to leave us in doubt as to whether the disasThe right to watch smut is the only one we'll still possess...
...Doubtless seeking relaxation from the strenuousness of their labors in junior high school, the children of America spent over $ioo million for the thrill of being allowed to witness such imbecility in Wild Wild West...
...And for just a moment, before the moment passes, she is prepared to risk everything for a man she hardly knows...
...Not only would this get rid of the boyfriend and make Magali happy, she thinks, but "Then he would be taboo for me and I for him...
...Suddenly we realize that her solicitousness on behalf of an old friend's love life has really been a vicarious attempt to enliven her own, which has seemed up to this point to be completely untroubled...
...Instead, she is only prepared to claim, absurdly, that criticism of morally unmoored "inventiveness" amounts to "a prescription for the death of creativity and an attack on the American spirit...
...We think we know where it is going when Isabelle places a personal ad in Magali's name, since Magali herself has absolutely refused to do this, and then begins a tentative romance with Gerald (Alain Libolt), whom she met through the ad, again in Magali's name...
...It is possible that she is right about this, of course, but to myself I seem simply to be practicing a different form of criticism — one which, while paying tribute to the merely new and clever, places its highest values upon truth to life and moral and intellectual coherence...
...As in Pleasantville and other recent films set in the period, the 50's are maligned to those with no independent knowledge of the era as a means of suggesting that there can be no retreat from even those alleged "liberations" of the 1960's that seem in retrospect like liberations from common sense...
...Gradgrind may or may not have been representative of Victorian education, but it is certain that we have gone to the opposite extreme...
...Having decided that she doesn't much like the son after all, Rosine stays with him because she has so quickly formed a close bond with his mother...
...The vacuum inside their adorable little heads must be filled somehow, and, if parents don't mind whether what fills it is iron, death-dealing spiders the size of 747's or the things for which history supplies some documentation, it is unlikely that Hollywood will mind either...
...girls in dreams are more willing than girls in real life...
...Ol!,} James Bowman welcomes e-mail at WBowman@cs.corn...
...The educational JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...As shy of passing moral judgment as people in general are these days, film critics seem to think it no part of their job to mention such details in a spirit of censure, however obvious such a response might have seemed to most people only a few years ago...
...That is one reason why, I think, the late Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, received such respectful notices...
...In fact Gerald finds it fairly easy to transfer the interest he has built up in Isabelle to Magali, even though they are physical opposites...
...In fact it is the married Isabelle, far more than the unmarried Magali, who is desperate for masculine attention...
...Instead, the film is praised for its cleverness and the alleged uproariousness of its comedy while its offensiveness is either conceded as a qualifying defect or cited as a further recommendation...
...Canadians, minor celebrities, Bill Gates, Saddam Hussein, Christians, and the MPAA all come in for a pounding, and even the politically correct get the treatment in a small, relatively inoffensive way...
...But then this tale of autumn, of middle age, reminds us that if romance is still possible, it is not of that starry-eyed kind...
...It is Isabelle who can't seem to let go...
...Shall we raise the banner of liberation on behalf of prepubescent children cruelly denied the right to watch smut...
...0 ne can't help feeling that the sensibilities of such people have been blunted by too many simulated explosions...
...But this seems to be very much a minority view among film critics—for instance, the many who cried up the originality and ingenuity of the fantasy on offer in The Matrix a few months ago and found my objections to the picture in spite of these things incomprehensible...
...They may not quite have believed that such mechanical spiders actually existed in the 1870's, but it seems unlikely that they had any very clear alternative ideas about the period...
...This is because kids are the audience least likely to be troubled by the whimsically counterfactual, for example the presence in 187o's Utah of a giant, steam-powered, mechanical spider, manned by a fanatically evil cripple with the help of shapely maidens clad only in Victorian-style underwear, which spews machine gun bullets and death rays at its hapless victims...
...Like Gerald and Magali, we are briefly invited to share the hope that is so natural for beginning lovers and for lovers of romance — namely, that they represent a harmony of thought and feeling that bespeaks the melding of two souls...
...But what the film actually has to say boils down to banalities: Marriage involves trust...
...Is this a cause to raise our moral hackles...
...don't go to posh parties in a cab and a rented tux...
...It is an impressive example of the filmmaker's art: a scenario meant to invoke dream images without ever quite crossing the line into mere fantasy...
...THE TALKIES by James Bowman A Future That Can't Work S ummer, as anyone who has ever sampled a blockbuster (or even a mere block-cracker) can testify, has become the season for post-modernist fantasy to run riot...
...This incident also casts a light on the other strand of the plot, in which Magali's son's new girlfriend, Rosine (Alexia Portal), is also trying to matchmake on Magali's behalf...
...emphasis on facts attributed by Dickens to Mr...
...Can they ever have felt a thrill of the sort that Eric Rohmer, the Henry James of the cinema, regularly serves up in little, out-of-the-way art houses for those of us who are refugees frominnovation...
...Three months ago in this space (see "Moody Blues," TAS, June 1999) I argued that, contrary to popular belief, the children are not harmlessly occupied while stuffing themselves with popcorn and sweets in the presence of fantastical images like these...
...At the same time, she is not wrong, not at all wrong, when she says to Gerald by way of explanation for the pass she has made at him: "I want all men to love me —especially those I don't love...
...The film is said by its fans to be "satirical" but, like the TV-addled children to whom it is meant to appeal, its attention span is too short for itto be able to remember what it is trying to be satirical about...
...The mechanical spider in Wild Wild West is relatively benign compared to the mechanical man in The Iron Giant— a progressive, pop cultural messiah with a beatnik John the Baptist, come from the stars to teach pacifism to the simple but violent folk of benighted, Communist-hating, 1950's America...
...That's left for Isabelle's daughter, the young bride, for whom Magali represents a sort of memento mori...
...One such critic, Miss Virginia Postrel, the implausibly pretty young thing who edits Reason—while praising nonsense, so long as it is presented in the form of "play"— attacks me in the pages of her occasionally interesting magazine for failing to "understand" this originality and ingenuity in the movie...
...Not that such fantasies cannot be met, increasingly, in every season of the year, but they come into their element during school holidays when the industry is even more focused than usual on movies for children...
...True, such an overt political agenda is still relatively rare...
...The American Spectator • September 1999 61...
...It's outrageous, dude...
...Naturally, her own interest in Magali makes Rosine think that Etienne would be perfect for her...
...It might be construed as advocating censorship...
...Miss Postrel, it seems to me, can only argue that I do not understand The Matrix if she is prepared to make the case for such coherence in the film, but she does not do this...
...All useful things to know, no doubt, but I'm not sure it's worth $8 and 145 of one's remaining stock of minutes, even with the technical legerdemain and a considerable amount of undraped female pulchritude thrown in for free...
...We can see Gerald becoming more and more interested in Isabelle and can imagine what will happen when she breaks the news to him that she is married and really has been wooing on behalf of her friend, whom he has never met...
...I fell for her, not him," she tells her previous boyfriend, Etienne (Didier Sandre), her much older professeur de philo whom she is trying to get rid of...
...This story of two women, married Isabelle (Marie Riviere) and her divorced friend Magali (Beatrice Romand), whom she is trying to fix up with a man, is original and inventive in an altogether different sense...
...Then, teasingly: "I replaced you not with a boyfriend but with his mother...
...I doubt that even the authors of the film think that...
...But the only overarching theme is hatred for those who see something wrong with third-graders being initiated into sexual knowledge and encouraged to spout obscenities...
...But it doesn't happen as we expect...
...I'd love that...
...For one thing, the vacuum may be filled with more obviously harmful stuff...
...Is it possible that Miss Postrel is still so young that she considers mechanical spiders and levitating ninjas exciting when there are movies like this to be seen...
...Yet my impression of its critical reception has been that almost no one has mentioned the moral poverty of its point of view...
...licentious sex is dangerous...
Vol. 32 • September 1999 • No. 9
