Daily Archives: Sunday, July 10, 2016

  • Two Mules for Sister Sara

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Don Siegel (1970)

    A Western comedy-drama – and tiresome in both its comic and dramatic aspects, but a tribute too to Shirley MacLaine’s charm and variety.  When a mercenary called Hogan (Clint Eastwood) first claps eyes on Sara she’s nearly naked and being threatened with gang rape by bandits.  Considering how many good-hearted tarts MacLaine had played by 1970, you’d be forgiven for assuming Sara is another – and for being as surprised as Hogan is when, after he’s shot her attackers dead, Sara puts her clothes back on, and is wearing a nun’s habit.  Yet MacLaine’s characterisation is so strong that when, late on in the film, Sister Sara is revealed to be a whore after all, you miss the woman of God – even though you don’t miss Don Siegel’s tired attempts to get laughs out of a nun’s saying arse and swigging whisky and giving Clint Eastwood a right hook when Hogan riles Sara.  And within a few minutes of casting off her habit, Shirley MacLaine has made the floozie Sara differently vivid from the nun.

    A quarter-century after this movie, Clint Eastwood directed The Bridges of Madison County, in which he starred with Meryl Streep.  Their chemistry was surprisingly effective – enough to make you think Eastwood might naturally be a more agreeable performer opposite a woman who could do enough acting for the pair of them.  Shirley MacLaine too has histrionic resource to spare but her pairing with Eastwood doesn’t work so well:  whereas the Streep character in Madison County is essentially the lead, Sara and Hogan need to be more equal partners, and Eastwood’s wooden playing and thin, weedy (Sally’s adjectives) voice drain the film of energy.  When Hogan takes an injun arrow in the shoulder and instructs Sara how to remove it, MacLaine’s plucky anxiety makes the operation involving but you don’t feel for Hogan:  with Eastwood in the role, it’s no different from a cartoon character with an arrow through them.  The post-recorded sound serves to emphasise his unvarying line readings although, judging from the audience reaction in NFT3, there are people who think Clint Eastwood is a great deadpan wit.  The same people seemed to enjoy Hogan’s dismissive chauvinism too.  This is an important element of the ‘relationship’ between him and Sara, in Albert Maltz’s script.  According to the BFI programme note, Elizabeth Taylor wanted to play Sara.  The studio (Universal) was right to go for MacLaine instead.  At least we’re used to seeing her on the receiving end of male tyrants of different kinds so the balance of power here makes some sense.  The idea of Elizabeth Taylor being talked down to by Clint Eastwood is insane.

    Sara is working with a group of Mexican revolutionaries – the juaristas ­– during the Franco-Mexican war of the 1860s.  The film was shot in the Morelos state of Mexico and the landscape is spectacular – so too is some of the architecture, especially a vast ruin of a church up in the mountains.  The opening credits introduce us to the various dangerous wildlife of the locale – a snake, a scorpion, a mountain lion.   There’s not much imagination in the way these creatures are shown but they’re strong images even so.   The same goes for the faces of the Mexican peasants (and how these are presented to Gabriel Figueroa’s camera).   Sara’s mule – the burro – trots along amusingly, as does Ennio Morricone’s enjoyable score.   But Two Mules for Sister Sara has a pretty dull story to tell and the climactic battle – when Hogan and Sara help the juaristas to get inside a French garrison and the place is set on fire and body after body plunges from on high – goes on way too long.

    24 June 2012

  • Two in the Wave

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Deux de la Vague

    Emmanuel Laurent (2010)

    Never leave the cinema until the film is over, closing titles included.  At the very end of this mostly disappointing documentary about the careers and relationship of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Emmanuel Laurent gives us a couple of minutes of pure gold – Jean-Pierre Léaud’s screen test for Les quatre cents coups.   It’s not the only highlight – there are excerpts from Godard and Truffaut films of course – but it’s perhaps the only unexpected one.   The birth of the New Wave and the eventual falling out of its two leading lights are a true story with a built-in dramatic arc – you might think it’s hard to go wrong with it.  Laurent appears to have assumed that too.   He has an unimaginative framing device:  a young woman (played knowingly, archly by Isild Le Besco) is looking through an album of press cuttings, from which Laurent’s story (narrated by Antoine de Baecque) takes off.   Laurent doesn’t organise the material in a way that creates any kind of momentum.  He then – like so many non-documentary film-makers who eschew dramatic convention until the eleventh hour – changes his mind suddenly for the sake of a big finish.  The growing hostility between Godard and Truffaut allows him to do this.

    One of the irritating things about Two in the Wave is that Laurent treats ‘the New Wave’ as if its manifesto were written on tablets of stone – as if Godard and Truffaut, because they began making films according to a consciously adopted set of principles, lost credibility as soon as they started to move away from their starting point.  (Of course the pair’s own perceptions of how far they’d moved caused the rift between them but I assume each of them believed only the other to be guilty of bad faith.)   There are moments when Laurent seems to be attributing this oversimplification to the ‘media’ in France during the 1960s; the trouble is, he himself fails to present any more nuanced an account.  He rather suggests it was downhill all the way after Les quatre cents coups and A bout de souffle.   There’s a strong focus on Jean-Pierre Léaud in the closing stages.  We see him in a sequence of roles, at various ages.  He’s undoubtedly an iconic figure in the history of the New Wave but the effect of this montage is rather saddening.  It seems to intend to show Léaud’s versatility and star longevity but is no more than a reminder that, while he’s a good enough actor, the adult Léaud is much reduced from the screen presence he was in his teens – and a very different type.  An incipient tough as the adolescent Antoine Doinel, Léaud grew into a figure that sometimes looks like a caricature of a delicate, high-strung romantic sensibility.  And grew is probably not the right word anyway:  Léaud never seems fully grown up yet he retains little of his teenage charisma.  (That’s largely why the screen test at the end lifts your spirits so much.)   It’s ironic that Laurent presents Léaud, who worked with Godard as well as Truffaut, as an element of the New Wave that endured.  Because Léaud never advanced beyond his first appearance as Antoine Doinel, he comes across more as an embodiment of arrested development.

    The tensions between the two protagonists – and our own feelings about their work that we bring to watching Two in the Wave – naturally keep the film interesting in spite of the weak direction.  Seeing them shoulder to shoulder during the events of 1968 is fascinating:  the footage may have been selected to emphasise this but it’s plain to see that Truffaut is galvanised by the controversy of Andre Malraux’s attempts to remove Henri Langlois from his post at the Cinémathèque Française, Godard by the May ’68 student demonstrations.  (Truffaut stands beside him on a platform but his face suggests they’re miles apart.)  As personalities on screen, Truffaut has considerable personal charm and Godard – repellently chilly and sure of himself – has none.  Yet I sympathise with what he wrote to Truffaut in response to what the latter (or Ferrand, the director whom Truffaut plays) says in Day for Night:  ‘Movies go along like trains in the night … people like you and me are happy only in our work … ‘  Godard rightly insisted to Truffaut that what kind of train matters terribly.  He has more interesting things to say than Truffaut too – for example, when he distinguishes cinema from arts which aren’t (can’t and don’t try to be) lifelike.  I’m not sure, though – especially after watching this – that I want to see the political doctrinaire’s post-1970 cinema any more than I like the later work of the indiscriminate cinéphile.

    25 February 2011

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