Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Blue Angel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Der blaue Engel

    Josef von Sternberg (1930)

    It takes a little while to get going but, once it does, The Blue Angel is gripping and terrible – the story of how a pompous high-school teacher in a provincial town in Weimar Germany descends to vagrancy, through his infatuation with a cabaret artiste, Lola Lola.  Professor Immanuel Rath first visits the ‘The Blue Angel’, the local club where Lola is headlining, in the hope of catching out some of his pupils – whom he’s already taken to task for circulating photographs of Lola in class.   Some of these gymnasium boys look to be in their late twenties and their high jinks are consequently strained:  the film finds its feet once it’s moved beyond almost farcical comic business into the uninterruptedly serious stuff.  (The schoolboys’ pranks include making a two-letter adjustment to the professor’s name to ‘Unrath’, which the subtitles translate as ‘turd’.  The Heinrich Mann novel on which the film is based is called Professor Unrat:  according to the online ‘NameLab’, ‘unrat’ is the ‘nickname for an unfortunate person, from Middle High German unrat  ‘need’, ‘disaster’ [sic].’)  Josef von Sternberg’s attitude towards Rath is coolly disapproving.   The staid professor is ridiculous and somewhat gross from the start.  He’s a clumsy pedant, both physically and socially awkward, blowing his nose with ludicrous formality and repellently loudly.  He’s sadly childish too.  Rath is dismayed to discover that his caged bird has stopped singing because it’s stopped living and speechless when his landlady disposes of the bird, dropping it into the stove without a trace of emotion or regret.    Because Rath is a far from admirable figure before his loss of authority, his humilation is grotesque rather than tragic but it’s still very upsetting.

    Emil Jannings was a leading stage and silent film actor, and in 1929 the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor.  When the talkies arrived, according to Wikipedia, his thick German accent got in the way of a Hollywood career.  Back in Germany in the 1930s, he starred in a number of pictures designed to promote Nazism.   (Jannings accompanies the Nazi high command to the mortiferous film premiere in Inglourious Basterds.  In reality, he died in 1950.)   Even if he’d never won an Oscar or made another film after The Blue Angel, Jannings’ performance as Professor Rath would have assured him a place in cinema history.  His style is decidedly theatrical but his characterisation has real depth.  When Lola is joshingly flattering him, Rath’s self-satisfied bashfulness is surprising and rather shocking.   When the action moves forward from 1924 to 1929 and we see what the professor has become, after five years of marriage (and, one assumes, cuckoldry), as part of the travelling show in which Lola remains a tawdry leading light, Jannings’ portrait becomes exceptionally powerful.  The presence of a clown in the company in the 1924 scenes seems to foreshadow the professor’s eventual fate (the clown has disappeared from the scene in 1929 – usurped by Rath).  When Emil Jannings sits at the dressing-room mirror putting on his clown’s wig and make-up, it feels like the prototype of countless what-have-I-become scenes in the same setting in subsequent movies.  At Lola and Rath’s wedding breakfast, Kiepert, the magician who leads the troupe, performs a trick of producing eggs from Rath’s nose.   Lola clucks seductively and Rath crows in proud reply.   When Rath is required to go through this routine again – on the troupe’s climactic return for a show at ‘The Blue Angel’ and in front of a local audience which have packed the place to see his ‘special guest appearance’ – Jannings’ desperately abject, almost demented reprise of the crowing is a sound that’s hard to get out of your head.

    Marlene Dietrich was approaching thirty when she made The Blue Angel, her first sound film.  Because Dietrich’s Lola, especially her singing of ‘Falling in Love Again’, is (truly) iconic, just quite how great a performance this is comes as a startling revelation.  And because we think of Dietrich’s speaking voice – in English – as an exaggerated, heavily accented drawl, one of the most striking aspects of her portrait is Lola’s matter-of-factness.  In her native language, Dietrich speaks naturally, untheatrically.  This quality – the fact that Lola isn’t self-consciously a femme fatale – has the effect of making her all the more sensually powerful.  Her physical freedom – shamelessness – is there not just in overpowering contrast to Rath’s own inhibition.  Josef von Sternberg manages to capture it in smaller but no less telling ways – as Lola makes a little movement that reveals an extra inch or two of flesh unknowingly or, at least, insouciantly.  Yet what’s also so good about Dietrich’s acting is that she doesn’t make Lola simply heartless.  There are moments when she’s intrigued, almost concerned by Rath’s blandishments:  when he proposes marriage, it’s all too much for her and she bursts into unstoppable (and unforgettable) laughter.  Then she comes to her self-interested senses and accepts him.

    The magician Kiepert is expertly played by Kurt Gerron, his scolding, shabby wife by Rosa Valetti, the clown by Reinhold Bernt and the strongman Mazeppa (whose seduction of Lola triggers Rath’s final breakdown) by Hans Albers.  (By an unspeakable irony, the Jewish Gerron died in the Nazi death camps, and in Theresienstadt ran a cabaret to entertain the inmates.)  It’s hardly surprising that Bob Fosse drew on The Blue Angel but I hadn’t realised how specifically some of the onstage compositions and details in Cabaret echo the earlier film – more than one of the dancers at the Kit Kat Klub has the exact physical form of a Blue Angel progenitor.  Although von Sternberg had returned from Hollywood to make The Blue Angel (his second sound feature), the chiaroscuro of Günther Rittau’s photography, with its deep, alarming shadows, seems fully characteristic of German expressionist cinema of the 1920s.   The details of the design make for some memorable images – like the figures that emerge from the school clock when it strikes the hour, sinister in their inviolable order.  At the end, you feel you’ve seen a film which is not just about physical longing but also about loneliness, and about how the horror of loneliness can be realised when it’s combined with longing.  You’re also left wondering whether what he felt for Lola fired Rath’s existence in a way that was life-enhancing as well as destructive.  It brings to mind the lines in Larkin’s ‘Deceptions’:

    ‘… What can be said,

    Except that suffering is exact, but where

    Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?’

    10 December 2009

  • The Bling Ring

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sofia Coppola (2013)

    In late 2008 through to mid-2009 a series of burglaries took place in Los Angeles.  The homes burgled were in and around the Hollywood Hills and their owners were celebrities, including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.   The culprits, who became known as ‘the Bling Ring’, were a group of Californian teenagers.  According to the Wikipedia article on the crimes, the celebrities ‘were targeted due to their being considered fashion icons by members of the group’, whose ringleader Rachel Lee described their thefts as ‘going shopping’.  (It’s therefore no surprise that the burglarised were mostly women – perhaps Orlando Bloom and Brian Austin Green were included only because they shared their homes with Miranda Kerr and Megan Fox respectively.)  The Bling Ring is Sofia Coppola’s retelling of these events; the source for her screenplay is a Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales (a good surname in the circumstances) called ‘The Suspects Wore Louboutins’.  Sofia Coppola has been criticised for shallowness, for not going below the surface – but what probing is possible in telling this amazing tale of celebrity-consumer culture?   If Coppola had tried to explain the behaviour of all the kids in the story she would have risked weakening the film as a social comedy.   There is a brief explanation, by Marc, the one boy among the five thieves, of his motivation.  This is a strong bit in the film but partly because Marc is somewhat incongruous in the criminal company that he keeps.

    The ironies in the material extend well beyond what’s on the screen.  Members of the Bling Ring were up for interviews with Nancy Jo Sales – it was a great opportunity for self-promotion – but scandalised by what she then wrote in Vanity Fair.  Alexis Neiers, the prototype for the character played by Emma Watson in Coppola’s movie, was relatively relaxed about the portrait:  it had no reality since some of Watson’s clothes were, said Neiers, ones she wouldn’t be seen dead in.   A few hours after The Bling Ring was screened at Cannes this year, $1m of jewellery loaned to stars appearing on the red carpet during the Festival was stolen from a hotel room.  Sofia Coppola has changed the names of the originals and has no doubt done some shaping to sharpen the satirical edge of the dialogue but she needs only to describe what happened in order to create a movie that’s both funny and desolating.

    The selfish appetency in evidence on the screen is thoroughgoing – and that’s all there is; this must be what worries some critics.   The Bling Ring has so far taken around $20m worldwide (two and a half times its budget).  Do its detractors feel better or worse that box-office success must surely be thanks in no small part to American kids whose moral universe isn’t so different from that of Alexis Neiers and co (and who now presumably see the Bling Ring as part of the celebrity pantheon of which Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are merely longer-standing members)?    Perhaps critics are worried too that Coppola is artist enough to make you feel the attractive aspects of the thieves’ lives.  The Hollywood Hills look beautiful and almost magical at night.   (The Bling Ring is dedicated to the cinematographer Harris Savides, whose last movie this was before his untimely death in late 2012.)  What the gang do – getting high, drinking, driving, joining in to songs on the car radio – has been nostalgised in other films.  There are moments when you almost wonder if the youthful carelessness The Bling Ring describes might also in time become a suitable case for nostalgic treatment.

    The outrageousness of the thefts is moderated too by the impossibility of feeling sorry for the ‘victims’, given their ludicrous surplus of possessions and their crap home security.  I assume it must be true that the thieves were able to Google the celebs’ home addresses and found Paris Hilton’s house key under the doormat.   Although in one sense breathtaking, in another it’s entirely natural that the kids graduate from stealing a bag of the kind they know Hilton owns to stealing her actual bag.  Inside Lindsay Lohan’s home, Rebecca (the Rachel Lee character) applies Chanel as if it were holy water but the gang are not otherwise respectful of what they find in wardrobes or other reliquaries:  they grab what they can.  Their voracious consumerism has the quality of vindictive self-assertion – they’ve as much right to the things they steal as the things’ owners.  The Bling Ring’s capacity for moralising self-justification is amazing.  Even Marc, unconfident and relatively likeable, talks after his arrest about America’s ‘sick fascination with a kind of Bonnie and Clyde thing’.

    The four girls – Katie Chang, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga and Watson – are all great-looking.  On the evidence of this film, they can all act too – but it gives The Bling Ring an extra charge that they have the looks to succeed without being good actresses, to become celebrities of the Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan kind – famous for being famous.  (I keep mentioning these two because I’d never even heard of other burglarees such as Audrina Patridge and Rachel Bilson.)   The cast is just about impeccable.  Israel Broussard plays Marc sensitively and gets across well the boy’s relief at getting into a group and no longer being isolated.  Taissa Farmiga, who has a look of her sister Vera, is more fluid than Emma Watson, who pushes a fraction too hard but whose hard edge keeps the satire in focus.  Leslie Mann is brilliant as Watson’s home-schooling mother – a smiley, clueless motivator.  The girls may see themselves as relative have-nots but you wouldn’t guess it from their homes’ dimensions and decor.  The acreage of the rooms, in theory enviable, is actually alarming:  it comes to illustrate the empty space in the girls’ heads.  The interior decoration includes little yappy dogs.

    15 July 2013

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