Old Yorker

  • Eyes of Laura Mars

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Irving Kershner (1978)

    After a morning in the ophthalmology clinic, I decided to spend the afternoon watching Eyes of Laura Mars on television – better than doing these things the other way round.  I’d seen Irving Kershner’s thriller, in which a serial killer stabs his victims through the eyes, once before (decades ago).  I don’t think it’s only because I remembered the murderer’s identity that I found the film feeble as a whodunit.  It was worth a return visit for other reasons, though.

    Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a high-profile New York fashion photographer.  Her provocative, kinky images – typically of young women undressed and posed as victims of violence – are increasingly notorious, and reviled by feminists.  (The work of Helmut Newton was the real-life inspiration for Laura’s work and Newton actually provided photographs used in the film.)   A collection of her work, ‘Eyes of Mars’, is being published and publicised as the killings of women close or known to Laura begin.  John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), the detective leading the investigation into these crimes, shocks Laura when he shows her police photos of other recent murder victims, whose attitudes in death echo her own images.  Laura also experiences veridical visions of her friends’ and associates’ murders, though not of who is committing them.  Faye Dunaway’s trademarks – her mask-like beauty and high-strung, breathy neuroticism – serve her well, if repetitiously.  The bits of her performance I liked best were the fashion shoots, where Laura is in charge:  it’s unusual to see Dunaway in zippy control of a situation.  Her playing of Laura’s terrified reactions to her visions, which never amount to more than a spooky device, is less interesting.

    There’s a distinct shortage of suspects.  The culprit surely can’t be the weak character of Laura’s feckless ex-husband Michael (Raúl Juliá):  though Laura, for a while at least, seems unsure if she still ‘has feelings’ for Michael, it’s hard to believe she ever did.  It can’t be her scuzzy, ex-con driver Tommy (Brad Dourif), whose conspicuously furtive behaviour has to be a red herring.  It can’t be Laura’s agent, Donald Phelps (René Auberjonois), who’s openly gay and therefore (this is the 1970s) a figure of fun – until he joins the list of victims.   (Donald’s in drag at the time and we seem meant to think the killer takes him for a woman although René Auberjonois is as obviously en travesti as Dick Emery, doing ooh-you-are-awful Mandy, was walking away from camera.)  The killer must be John Neville.  Laura first meets him at an exhibition of her work, which Neville dismisses – to Laura, apparently unaware of who she is – as ‘sad’.  In Laura’s extra-sensory perception of the second murder, an Alsatian dog barks at the approaching killer on a staircase.  She and Neville visit the site of the crime after the fact; the Alsatian kicks up exactly the same fuss at seeing the detective.  Laura ignores this.  She and Neville fall in love and have an affair.

    The cop has to be the killer because the film, with a screenplay by John Carpenter and David Zelag Goodman, is all about Laura and John Neville is the wanted man in her life.    Besides, Tommy Lee Jones’s performance is the only one in the film, apart from Dunaway’s, worth attention.  With his irregular good looks and ability to be at once sinister and soulful, Jones makes John Neville intriguing and sense (almost) of the split personality that’s finally revealed to explain (1) his crimes and (2) how he’s got into a relationship with Laura.  The film’s themes are seeing and not seeing:  second sight, love-is-blindness, the gouging of the victims’ eyes, voyeurism.  If Laura Mars’s camera is voyeuristic so is that of Irvin Kershner and his cinematographer, Victor J Kemper.  If the people who look at Laura’s photographs are peeping Toms, so are the film’s viewers.  Making the audience aware of, and uncomfortable with, this complicity is a neat idea but somewhat diluted by the killer’s personality.  It’s as if only someone as crazed by childhood trauma and mental illness as John Neville turns out to be could seriously take exception to the eroticisation and/or glorification of violence reflected in Laura’s images.

    New York City has a mostly bleak and grungy look here – a world away from the cityscapes of nearly contemporary films as different as Taxi Driver and Saturday Night Fever.  There’s an exciting, well-edited chase sequence – on foot – through the streets.  (Michael Kahn cut the picture, shortly after his first collaboration with Steven Spielberg, on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)  The film was produced by (among others) Jon Peters, immediately after A Star Is Born.   With that abomination still in my head from the previous week’s viewing, it was good to hear Barbra Streisand make an enjoyably impassioned job of singing the power-ballad theme song – ‘Prisoner’ by Karen Lawrence and John DeSautels – over the opening and closing credits of Eyes of Laura Mars.

    2 February 2018

  • The Silence

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tystnaden

    Ingmar Bergman (1963)

    The Silence, scheduled to screen in NFT2, was moved to NFT1, the biggest BFI theatre.   If that wasn’t a huge surprise in itself, the news that this was a location swap with a Singin’ in the Rain screening was.  It’s good anyway to know the Ingmar Bergman retrospective is getting decent audiences.  I hadn’t seen The Silence before and wouldn’t rush to see it again but it certainly holds a position of great interest in the Bergman canon.  Released in Sweden in September 1963, the film followed very hot on the heels of Winter Light  (which had opened in February of the same year) and forms the last part of the ‘Silence of God’ trilogy.  In this instance, however, God doesn’t feature as either an alarming presence (as in Through a Glass Darkly) or a dismaying absence (as in Winter Light).  Silence in this case is chiefly the result of people not speaking each other’s language, literally and metaphorically.  The visual style of The Silence is also very different from that of its two immediate predecessors.  Both in that respect and in its human silence aspect, this film seems, rather, to look forward to Persona.  Bergman himself is learning a new cinematic language.

    Train journeys, into and out of the town in which the rest of the film takes place, begin and end The Silence.   Two sisters break their homeward journey, presumably to Sweden, in Timoka, a fictional location in what appears to be a Central European country[1].  Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), accompanied by Anna’s son Johan (twelve-year-old Jörgen Lindström, who went on to play the boy at the start and close of Persona), book into a local hotel.  Ester, the older of the two women, is seriously ill (or, at least, running a high fever) and never goes outside.  While there’s mutual affection between Ester and Johan, Anna is coldly antipathetic towards her elder sister.  Ester is a professional translator.  Anna appears just to want to have a good time and to resent Ester’s illness, though it doesn’t prevent Anna’s going out on her own.   She goes to a cinema, then a bar, and, once back in their hotel room, gives Ester an account of an invented sexual encounter with the barman she met (Birger Malmsten).  When, later, a sexual encounter with him does take place, in another room in the hotel, Ester knocks on the door, sobbing to be let in.  After admitting her sister, Anna gets back into bed with the barman, turning on all the lights so that Ester has a clear view.  The following morning, Anna announces that she and Johan will be leaving shortly.  The news triggers a sharp decline in Ester’s condition.  While Anna and Johan are at breakfast, Ester suffers some kind of physical crisis and is terrified that she is about to die.  An elderly hotel porter (Håkan Jahnberg) tries ineffectually to help and calm her.  Earlier in the film, Ester told Johan that she had learned a few words of the local language.  When the boy returns to the hotel room to bid her goodbye, Ester gives him a note, which he doesn’t look at until he’s in the train with his mother.   The note reads ‘To Johan – words in a foreign language’.

    The Silence was sexually explicit to an unusual degree – unusual for Bergman at the time and for early 1960s art cinema more generally.  (It was also a notable box-office success in Sweden:  the two things may or may not be connected.)  The film is even more sexually implicit with a current of unrequited incestuous desire running through it.  Johan washes his mother’s back while she takes a bath; Anna asked him to do this but then has to tell him enough.   While Anna is out, Ester strokes Johan’s face and hair but he pulls away.  Ester desperately needs to get into the room where Anna is having sex.  There’s a hint, in mention of the sisters’ late father, that Ester may also have (had) an Electra complex.  The ominous alien environment of Timoka is realised not only in the foreign language theme but also in repeated references to the intense heat of the town, which the Northern European visitors can hardly tolerate, and in a tank rolling down a street in darkness.  This is one of the film’s strongest images, though Sven Nykvist’s chiaroscuro lighting gives the whole piece a fascinating instability.

    Yet the brew is almost too rich:  mostly empty hotel corridors; a troupe of (Spanish-speaking) dwarf entertainers staying at the hotel; the knife-edge between hysterical laughter and weeping; the apprehension of death and resulting panic.  The soundtrack includes a single prolonged, discomforting note, along with J S Bach.  The protagonists represent a dichotomy between the cerebral (Ester) and the sensual (Anna).  Perhaps God isn’t absent at all but sarcastically represented by the elderly porter, with his ticking pocketwatch and magic tricks that fail to entertain.  There are so many Bergman tropes (or Bergmanesque touches) that The Silence, in long retrospect, sometimes has the quality of self-parody.  The narrative is a series of charged images that lack the mysterious coherence of those in Persona. The result feels, again in long retrospect, like a draft for the later film.  The acting, almost needless to say, is very good.  There are passages in which, even though the details of the tensions between the sisters remain opaque, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom seem to be expressing the very soul of conflict.  Ester’s help-I-can’t-breathe-I-think-I’m-dying monologue, powerfully delivered by Thulin, is all the more remarkable thanks to the upside-down image of her  face that fills the screen at this point.

    30 January 2018

    [1]  There actually is a river Timok, which flows mainly through Serbia and into western Bulgaria.

Posts navigation