Old Yorker

  • Sunset Boulevard

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Billy Wilder (1950)

    Its reputation as a classic isn’t hard to understand.  For a start, it has a great title.  Sunset Boulevard, as well as being an actual Los Angeles location, is a name resonant in itself and metaphorically perfect for the film, whose two main characters are a former star of silent movies, inhabiting the long twilight of her career, and a struggling screenwriter, drawn into her world with, for him, fatal consequences.  Billy Wilder and his co-writers, Charles Brackett and D M Marshman Jr, use a narrative device of startling effrontery (and which, in 1950, may have been unprecedented in a Hollywood movie).  The story is told by the deceased screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden); he introduces himself as a corpse floating in a swimming pool, in the grounds of the mansion belonging to the once-famous Norma Desmond.  Most important, Sunset Boulevard is the prototype of movies that skewer the cold heart of the Dream Factory, a place where illusions long outlive hope.

    The show business has-been desperate for a comeback, the writer as a particularly disposable part of the movie-making enterprise – these are familiar screen figures now.  The enduring power of Wilder’s film is thanks in large part to his excavational casting:  the people playing film-industry relics in Sunset Boulevard are the real thing, performers and artists actually forgotten or ill-used by Hollywood.   During the 1920s, Gloria Swanson made about thirty films; between Music in the Air (1934) and Sunset Boulevard, she made one (Father Takes a Wife (1941)). Norma Desmond’s butler, later revealed to be the first of her ex-husbands and the once-famous film director Max von Mayerling, is played by Eric von Stroheim, whose artistic losing battles with Hollywood studios were notorious.  (When Norma watches herself on screen, with Max working the projector, Billy Wilder illustrates her Hollywood heyday with a clip from Queen Kelly (1929), starring Swanson and directed by von Stroheim – he was fired from the production before the controversial film was completed.)  The trio of neighbours who visit the mansion to play bridge with Norma – ‘the waxworks’ as Joe Gillis calls them – are Anna Q Nilsson, H B Warner and Buster Keaton.  The fact that Keaton is (now, at any rate) the only recognisable face among them is eloquent.

    Sunset Boulevard doesn’t aim to be likeable and succeeds in that aim, but its cynical cleverness is impressive.  Joe Gillis first enters the grounds of Norma’s palazzo on Sunset Boulevard by chance, as he tries to give the slip to two men trying to repossess his car.   She may have disappeared from public view but Joe recognises Norma immediately:  ‘You used to be in silent pictures – you used to be big’ – his remark elicits her famous reply, ‘I am big – it’s the pictures that got small’.  When she learns he’s a scenarist, she shows him the script she’s written for her comeback movie, in which she intends to play the title role of Salome.  Joe realises the script is hopeless but agrees to work on it.  He moves into the mansion at Norma’s insistence and soon becomes, in more ways than one, a kept man there.  Sunset Boulevard, shot by John F Seitz and with an art direction team headed by Hans Dreier, has an unmistakable look.  The baroque details and bizarre rituals of Norma’s home – especially the monkey funeral – remain remarkable, more than fifty years on.  It’s a fine irony, given the film’s theme, that its reputation has endured so strongly.

    Yet that theme is narrow.  Billy Wilder elaborates it ingeniously but it’s not enough on its own and the storyline used to substantiate it is much less extraordinary than the movie’s assault on Hollywood.  Norma Desmond’s belief in her imperishable stardom is deluded but she’s less blind about age withering her as a woman and, as such, she’s more conventionally pitiable.  When Joe first escapes her clutches, Norma attempts suicide; he returns but she’s increasingly anxious about his relationship with the young script reader Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson).  While Joe’s prostitution chez Norma, of himself as well as of his art, is daringly unusual, his involvement with Betty isn’t.  The scenes between William Holden and Nancy Olson are nicely played – and, for the viewer as well as Joe, a relieving contrast to the supercharged ordeal of life with Norma.   Although she was born and raised in Hollywood, Betty is refreshingly sane and sanguine about the movie business, as illustrated in a nighttime sequence in which she and Joe walk together through deserted backlots.  The experience evokes for Betty memories that are pleasant without being crazily starstruck.  Even so, her part of the story has the feel of filler.

    Gloria Swanson’s performance epitomises both the irresistible grip and the limitations of the film.   She is iconic in the role of Norma Desmond and Wilder may have encouraged her to play it in the manner of a silent-movie star but I wish, whenever I watch Sunset Boulevard, that I could be more confident Swanson was capable of different.  The grotesque facial expressions, madly glinting eyes and talon-like fingers make for great stills; but Swanson’s stylised melodramatic poses and gestures lack variety, and so do her line readings.  Although Norma, as the very senior partner in a sexual liaison, is more self-aware and vulnerable than Norma the narcissist-fantasist, Swanson doesn’t show many different facets in the two aspects of the character – although she is more human in the occasional more casual, less pressured bits of conversation between Norma and Joe.  Whether it’s intentional or not, Swanson’s style of acting seems primitive and shallow beside William Holden’s understated, expressive naturalism.  Holden brilliantly captures Joe Gillis’s charm, weakness and self-loathing.  The cast includes, as well as examples of those left on the trash heap of movie history, more durable Hollywood authorities in the form of Cecil B DeMille and Hedda Hopper – as themselves.  The participation of these two in Sunset Boulevard, an often ferocious biting of the hand that fed Billy Wilder, is richly ambiguous.

    16 May 2017

  • Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma

    Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975)

    Pasolini’s final, infamous film translates the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage from early eighteenth-century France to a more specific place and time:  the Republic of Salò in 1944-45 – the second and last year of the life of this rump fascist state in northern Italy.   Four libertine pillars of society – an aristocrat, a churchman, a lawyer and a politician – kidnap nine young men and nine young women, and transport them to a palazzo in the countryside.  The film’s first section describes the selection of these victims, who include the abductors’ female children – the Duke, the Magistrate and the President having agreed to marry each other’s daughters to facilitate matters.  The libertines recruit three other groups of four to assist in their project.  Their collaborators include middle-aged (and well-heeled) female prostitutes; teenage boys, dressed in fascist military uniform, who act as guards; and a quartet of ‘studs’, young soldiers chosen for the job because they’re particularly well endowed.  Once the household is in place, the ‘masters’ begin to subject their victims to sadistic exploitation of many kinds, sometimes stimulated by the stories that the prostitutes, in turn, tell the company.

    While the historical setting is specific, Pasolini’s cultural references are wide-ranging.  The film’s opening credits include a bibliography of French writings on de Sade by, among others, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir and Pierre Klossowski.  Pasolini’s screenplay (written with Sergio Citti) incorporates excerpts from Barthes and Klossowski; the characters quote explicitly from Nietzsche and Proust, among others.  One of the prostitutes, rather than storytelling, supplies a piano accompaniment, often Chopin, to her colleagues’ tales.  The formal structure of Salò nods to Dante rather than its Sadean source.  The palazzo’s décor includes Bauhaus furniture, religious statuary and modern art on the walls.  At one point, we hear a radio broadcasting a reading from Ezra Pound’s Cantos.  While Nietzsche and Pound might seem to reinforce the fascist flavouring, this clearly doesn’t apply to the cultural selection as a whole.  In the case of a Fernand Léger painting, Pasolini, as Gilbert Adair noted in Monthly Film Bulletin (September 1979), ‘subverts a work of art that was itself once scandalous before becoming respectable museum fodder’:  the Léger is the background to a sequence in which a naked girl is forced to eat the Duke’s warm faeces.  The framing of the images and the measured camera movement give the abusive horrors on the screen a tableau effect, situating the film among the various other works of art that it references.

    Salò connotes different understandings of ‘fascism’.  The lack of distinction between the dictatorship of the four libertines and that of the film’s auteur is the most potent and unsettling aspect. The young people are selected on grounds of physical suitability both by their kidnappers and by Pasolini.  One of the boys escapes and is shot dead en route to the country house; one of the girls has her throat cut soon after arrival there.  The remaining sixteen are in the house and the movie for the duration.  The cast weren’t required to eat actual excrement but they are repeatedly exposed and exploited.  Some of them get the opportunity to react individually to particular assaults or other crises for their characters.  These are brief episodes, however; as a group, they are often undifferentiated and meekly submissive.   This is interpretable as an illustration of what fascism does to people – one sequence, which sees a succession of victims betray others in order to save their own skin, certainly comes across as that.   But two kinds of mastery are at work here.

    Few of the hostages – or the guards or the studs, for that matter – were trained actors.  (According to IMDB, few went on to other film work after Salò).  This shows – and to strongly expressive effect.  These youngsters, whose innocent appearance is poignant (when the word ‘deflower’ appears on a subtitle it really registers), are simply doing as they’re told.  Although, unlike the victims in the story, they could have chosen not to take part, the overriding impression is of kids obeying the instructions not of the Duke, the Bishop et al but of Pier Paolo Pasolini.  The helpless naturalness of the victims, who are often naked, contrasts with the portraits of the abusers and the prostitutes, most of whom are incarnated by experienced actors (albeit not huge names).  The abusers too have plenty of physically and emotionally tough scenes to play but their vivid, one-dimensional theatricality seems protective.  And in presenting these older men and women as images of vice and corruption, Pasolini concentrates predominantly on their faces.  (Aldo Valletti’s severe squint is a very literal indicator of deviance but he is, as the President, especially compelling in this respect.)

    The exercise – abuse – of directorial power is troubling but Salò is interesting as a piece of sexual self-expression on  Pasolini’s part, which it’s hard to see as inadvertent.  Although he humiliates the actors here, his filmography and autobiography amount to substantial evidence of a complex infatuation with youthful, especially male, beauty.   This may be wrong (I’m not going to watch the film again to check) but I have the sense that an increasing amount of the sexual activity in Salò is homosexual – as if this is what the eye behind the camera is inexorably drawn towards.  After the gruesome climactic torture and killing of most of the victims, Pasolini ends on a confounding, ambiguous diminuendo.  The atrocities completed, two of the young guards dance together to Ennio Morricone’s insinuating score, which accompanied the film’s opening titles and now returns to the soundtrack as a record on a gramophone in the palazzo.   One of the boys asks his partner his girlfriend’s name.  The other boy replies ‘Marguerite’ but there’s no interruption to the pair’s gentle waltz.

    The emergence of the director’s sexual identity resonates with the audience’s inevitable implication in the film:  even though the sex acts are often appalling, responses to them are bound to reflect something of a viewer’s own sexual nature.  (You react to the coprophagia and the torture too – though it’s hard to think that most reactions to these won’t be simpler – horrified disgust and disgusted horror, respectively.)  Pasolini’s impulses as a political animal have a more limiting influence on Salò.  By the mid-1970s, film audiences not only thought of Nazi Germany as the epitome of systematic brutality but were also getting used to a Nazi propensity for kinky sex games (The Damned, The Night Porter).  That legacy casts a long shadow on the screen, certainly across the Republic of Salò:  the abusers behave the way you’ve come to expect fascists of the era to behave.  While he’s too honest to deny a personal sexual investment in the story he’s telling, Pasolini is at pains to put distance between himself and the abhorrent political regime that supplies that story’s context.   As a result, he also gives the audience a bit of moral breathing space.  This is certainly welcome while you’re watching Salò but it feels circumventive.  It encourages you to feel that what’s happening in the film is not the inherent consequence of uncontrolled human ‘freedom’ but the reflection of a particular brand of political pathology.

    Salò has a superficially well-defined structure:  the ‘Ante-Inferno’, describing the selection of victims, introduces three infernal ‘Circles’, corresponding to the main themes of the stories told by the prostitutes – the ‘Circle of Manias’, then the ‘Circle of Shit’, then the ‘Circle of Blood’.  The narrative doesn’t build, though, and goes slack in the ‘Circle of Blood’ part until the shocking lethal finale.  It must be said too that, while the tale-tellers succeed in arousing their immediate audience, this may not happen for the cinema audience.  The women go on for so long, and with such a stylised and unvarying delivery, that you keep hoping for a change of raconteuse and of subject – even though you know it’s bound to be even worse than what’s gone before.

    In this country, it wasn’t until 2000 that the BBFC passed the film uncut for theatrical screening and video distribution.  Salò is undeniably pornographic.  Whether it’s pornographic in the sense of tending to deprave its audience, as well as tending to arouse sexually, is less clear cut – because so much of the picture is alienating.  If I’d just read the screenplay, I’d probably have been very impressed.  Having watched the film, I’m inclined to agree with what Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times in 1977:

    ‘Salò is, I think, a perfect example of the kind of material that, theoretically, anyway, can be acceptable on paper but becomes so repugnant when visualized on the screen that it further dehumanizes the human spirit, which is supposed to be the artist’s concern.’

    I’m pleased to have seen Salò at last – but in a ‘Well now, that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over’ way.

    14 May 2017

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