How to put an Audience to Sleep

...On Screen HOW TO PUT AN AUDIENCE TO SLEEP BY ROBERT ASAHINA M any thrillers depend for their effect on persuading audiences that even paranoids have real enemies Whether they are quasidocumentanes (All the President's Men) or science fiction (In vasion of the Body Snatch-ers), soap operas (The Stepford Wives) or occult fantasies (Rosemary's Baby), such films try to generate suspense by playing on the fear that somebody somewhere is out to get you The most difficult problem these movies face is making the threat to the protagonist convincing, and a good number fail precisely on this count A ludicrous tale like Coma, for example, makes it nearly impossible to suspend disbelief Dr Susan Wheeler, a young resident at a major municipal hospital in Boston, becomes suspicious when one of her friends inexplicably lapses into a coma after what should have been a routine operation She subsequently learns that an unusually laige number of people are not recovering consciousness after minor surgery As she digs for an answer, her suspicions of loul play inciease as she encounteis, tirst, administiative inertia, and then oulnght hostility Following an attempt on her lile...

...Wheeler makes the nightmarish discovery that a widespread conspiracy of physicians has been inducing comas in healthy patients and delivering the still functioning bodies to a government-sponsored life-support facility, the Jefferson Institute There the vital parts are systematically removed and auctioned to hospitals seeking fresh organs for transplant Although Genevieve Bujold tries hard in the role of Wheeler, the clumsy script by Michael Cnchton (who also directed), based on Robm Cook's best-selling novel, never provides enough dimension for her mounting terror to be believable I suspect that Cnchton and Cook were simply not up to constructing a plausible thriller around a woman Time after time, Wheeler is calmly patted on the head and patronizingly told to "take a few days off," perhaps in a misguided attempt to expose the male chauvinism lying beneath the thin veneer of medical "professionalism " But the female whose justified fears are dismissed as hysteria has long been a stock ligure in suspense films, and tar trom showing how libeiatcd their heroine is bv bucking her superiors, the moue makers meiely icveal how much thev are bound by the tired conventions of this genre Moreover, Coma is punctuated with a multitude of plot holes that leave Wheeler looking stupid After discovering the conspiracy at the Jefferson Institute, why does she go back there—alone7 Why doesn't she go to the police, instead of to the very same hospital administrators who had rebuffed her earlier7 There are some puzzling technical questions, too For instance, when Wheeler returns to the life-support unit in the Institute, why doesn't she have to wear the goggles she had on during her first visit to protect her eyes from the dangerous ultraviolet light7 That last stands out because the script otherwise spends so much time elaborating medical procedures Naturally, we must be given some details for the plot to be comprehensible Yet there ought to be a better way of handling the exposition than by having Wheeler bluntly ask the boys in the pathology lab how they would go about putting a patient into a coma Their answers, plus several other awkward speeches, tell us everything we ever wanted to know about anesthesiology—and more Since Cook is a physician turned novelist and Cnchton is a physician turned novelist turned director, this excess of medical minutiae is scarcely surprising What is surprising is their inability, or unwillingness, to tap the audience's genuine fear of hospitals and doctors Coma could have brought out the paranoid in all of us, instead, with undisputable anesthetic skill, it puts us all to sleep Iatrophobia, though, has not escaped the attention of Ingmar Berman, whose latest work comes complete with a mad doctor and is enough to make you sick The basic problem is that The Serpent's Egg is actually two movies Horizontally, so to speak, it is a thriller In Berlin, an unemplo\ed foreign trapeze artist, \bel Rosen-beig, comes home one day and finds the dead body ot his brother, who has evidently killed himself \s the police question Rosenberg, lie discovers that there have been several strange deaths in the neighborhood, all apparent suicides Soon an old acquaintance mysteriously appears, Dr Hans Vergerus, and upon learning of Abel's plight offers him a home and a job at a hospital The hero gradually learns that his patron has been experimenting on human subjects, including his brother, and that his room is outfitted with two-way mirrors, hidden cameras, and a variety of other devices used to manipulate the behavior of its occupants Vertically, however, Bergman's story is, scene by scene, a parable about human despair and futility The time is 1923, specifically, the week of Adolf Hitler's abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich Cigarettes are selling for four billion marks a pack and customers line up outside bakeries at four in the mormng, hoping to buy bread But Bergman is not content to merely note that the country is suffering an acute economic and political crisis He takes us on a grand tour of the seamy underside of the city, including a whorehouse and a sleazy cabaret—frequented by dwarfs, drag queens and assorted freaks and outsiders—where Rosenberg's sister-in-law Manuela is a dancer and a part-time prostitute Yet none of these is as alien a figure as David Carradme's Abel Like his father, Carradine is almost an archetypal American character actor whose lopmg, bow-legged gait is better suited to the range than to the asphalt jungle (not to mention the high wire) This forces Bergman to contrive a rather far-fetched explanation of Abel's presence in Berlin He is the American son of Jews who emigrated from Riga to Philadelphia, and is stranded in Berlin because his circus act was grounded while his brother was recovering from a wrist injury The Serpent's Egg also was shot in Germany with mostly German actors, making Carradine as foreign to the production as Abel is supposed to be to his environment And Bergman does not help matters by teaming him with Liv Ull-man, who plays Manuela—perhaps her most embarrassing role ever She even has to sing the by-now obligatory cabaret number—in a green wig, no less'—to symbolize German decadence in the '20s Casting troubles are compounded by technical lapses Because The Serpent's Egg is very poorly edited, its net effect is confusion The photography—by Sven Nykvist, Bergman's long-time and justly renowned collaborator—is disappointing as well Apart from the strikingly lighted scene where Abel discovers his brother's body, done through a doorway at middle distance, Nykvist seems to have fallen into the esthetic fallacy of matching dreary subject matter with dreary cinematography A few selfconsciously arty touches—such as a huge closeup of Abel's hands, shot from waist level, as he reads his brother's suicide note—are barely recognizable as the work of either Nykvist or Bergman But worst of all is Bergman's total failure to integrate his suspense thriller with his moral tale The latter is particularly fuzzy At one point, Vergerus ponderously explains the metaphor of the title "Man is a malformation, a perversity of nature We must exterminate what is inferior It's like a serpent's egg Through the membrane you can discern the already perfect reptile " The director thus purports to give an account of how Nazi Germany arose from that serpent's egg, hatched by mad scientists playing God with human subjects And his idea of tragic irony is to have one of the characters comment, with relief, on Hitler's Putsch "It was a grand farce Hitler and his gang underrated the strength of German democracy " T he French have had somewhat more experience than the Swedes in combining suspense with moral/ psychological insights, one recalls the novels of Simenon and the movies of Henri-Georges Clouzot and Rene Clement Mado, directed and written by Claude Sautet (whose best-known films are Cesar et Rosalie and Vincent, Francois, Paul, et les Autres), is the most recent sophisticated Gallic thriller Regrettably, it does not live up to the standards of its distinguished predecessors Mado's eponymous heroine is a young woman (Ottavia Piccolo) who gradually becomes the object of the obsessive desire of a middle-aged business man, Simon Leotard (Michel Piccoh) While he is pursuing her, he suffers a financial and personal setback when his partner, wiped out by debts from speculation, kills himself Leotard vows to take revenge on the man who caused his friend's downfall, and enlists Mado's aid in his complex plan As he approaches his goal of vengeance, though, Mado grows more distant His eventual triumph over his enemy is short-lived, and in the process he loses both his honor and his mistress I should note that the plot is easier summarized than seen The film's distributor helpfully provided critics a synopsis Without it, I would have been lost amid the twist and turns of Leotard's complicated financial and personal schemes, not to mention the swarm of characters cluttering the screen In addition, Sautet is no more successful than Bergman in presenting two movies in one—the first being a revenge thriller, the second yet another variation on the theme of Pierre Louys' La Femme et le Pantm Sautet has tried to bridge the gap between them with some heavy-handed symbolism—such as the muddy road in which Leotard's car is bogged down at the conclusion—but Mado cannot overcome a bad case of what might be called genenc ambiguity The bright spot here is the veteran Piccoh's solid performance as Leotard Piccolo, by contrast, completely lacks the poisonous allure necessary to bring a respectable businessman to his downfall, in fact, she resembles a Continental version of Linda Blair Still, her physical and dramatic shortcomings are really insignificant Even with a better actress, Mado would remain a mess...