Old Yorker

  • Undertow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Contracorriente

    Javier Fuentes-León (2009)

    A film with a start that draws you in and an ending that makes a strong impression can help you overlook a lot of intervening weakness.  The Peruvian movie Undertow ­– which naturally brings to mind Brokeback Mountain and, to a lesser extent, Ghost – is eventually affecting but a good deal of the story is based on implausibility.   Worse, the writer-director Javier Fuentes-León, in order to keep the drama alive, resorts to ignoring the essential character of the geographical setting and the local people whose lives he presents – and whose particularity seems the main point of making the picture.   Undertow is set in a coastal village and its protagonist Miguel is a fisherman there.  A popular and prominent member of the community, he’s married to Mariela, who’s expecting their first child.   After church service on a Sunday morning, the couple regularly host a lunch attended by the priest, their friends and neighbours.  When his cousin Carlos dies, it’s Miguel whom the family asks to ‘offer’ his body to the sea.    The one dissonant element in the village is Santiago, an artist-photographer, whom we first see taking pictures at Carlos’s funeral.   In the bar afterwards, Carlos’s brother refuses Santiago’s offer of drinks.  It’s clear the local men don’t like him not just because he’s an intruder on public-private grief but also because they think he’s gay (not the word they use).   Miguel is less hostile than the others.  A few minutes later, he wanders off to a secluded area of the beach, where he meets Santiago.  They are lovers but the tensions in their relationship are increasing because Santiago wants Miguel to come out.  Miguel insists that he’s not gay – it’s just that he want to be with Santiago.  Mariela doesn’t know Santiago but, when he sees her at the local store, he insists on buying a gift for her – a decorative candle.  He buys it as a means of having something of himself in Miguel’s home.

    Santiago disappears.  The anguished Miguel goes to his beachfront dwelling, where there’s no sign of the man himself but where his artwork is stored, most prominently a portrait of Miguel, from the neck upwards, in an attitude of prayer.   Miguel anxiously obliterates his own face with red paint.   It transpires that Santiago has drowned – we learn that from his post-mortem appearances to Miguel, invisible to everyone else:  these meetings allow the two men to (appear to) have further sexual experiences together.  One day a local girl and the man she’s with enter Santiago’s empty cabin.  The couple are looking for somewhere to have sex in private.  The girl discovers another picture – of the naked body of a man, recognisably Miguel.   The girl, whose advances Miguel had earlier resisted and who’s miffed with him, starts spreading gossip about the picture and what it implies about Miguel and Santiago.  The rumour-mill is working overtime by the time a distressed Mariela gives birth to a baby boy.   Soon after, Miguel admits to his horrified wife the affair with Santiago but assures her that he’s gone now, that it’s all over.

    The couple try to rebuild their marriage.  In one of his posthumous manifestations, Santiago – in spite of his earlier contempt for the local ritual of burial at sea – asks Miguel to find his body so that he can rest in peace, and Miguel goes deep diving in search of it.  When he finds Santiago’s body, however, he decides against bringing it to the surface – and loses it after the corpse floats off from where he tries to secure it.   Some time later, Miguel’s fellow fishermen, out in their boat, discover the corpse.  They bring it to land and try to arrange for its disposal without Miguel’s knowledge.  The same young woman who started the gossip about his relationship with Santiago now tells Miguel, not maliciously but because she thinks he should know, what’s happened.   As he stands watching the sea and sky one night with his baby son, Miguel sees lighted on the beach Santiago’s candle, which Mariela angrily threw onto the beach when she found out about the affair, meaning it to wash out to the ocean.   (She’s clearly not seen many movies.)  This triggers Miguel’s admission to his wife that he still loves Santiago.  Mariela leaves the village with the baby, on the same day that Miguel, after persuading Santiago’s mother, who has arrived with her daughter to collect her son’s body, to let him offer it to the sea. In the climactic funeral, while most of the villagers watch suspiciously from a distance, a few join the cortege led by Miguel.  He goes out on the water and discharges the body to its submarine resting place.

    It’s clear from an early stage that Javier Fuentes-León is prepared to sacrifice believability for easy, immediate impact.   Miguel’s and Santiago’s sexual encounters around the beach, although they’re not to human view displayed, still seem risky.  When Miguel first finds out about the gift to Mariela, it’s surprising that he sets off to see Santiago in anger, has sex with him, then remembers to grumble afterwards.  Undertow depends crucially on the intolerance of homosexuality in Miguel’s community but the writer-director gives little sense of the world-shattering impact of the events on the people involved.  Miguel’s shame when his secret is discovered isn’t specific enough – Fuentes-León doesn’t get across what this must be like for a man who’s not only religious and proud of his manhood but who’s particularly respected by his friends and neighbours.    The trauma for a wife, in the final stages of a pregnancy, of rumours that her husband’s not only been unfaithful to her but is, unthinkably, gay would be great enough even if Undertow‘s setting was urban.  You’re reminded of this most forcibly in the well-acted exchange between Santiago’s mother and Miguel, as he begs her to let him offer Santiago’s body to the sea.  The mother – whom Santiago has to thank for his ‘sensibility’ as an artist and who, it’s implied, encouraged his career – tells Miguel she was so shocked at finding out from her son that he was in a relationship with another man that she decided never to mention the subject to Santiago again.  This is from a relatively sophisticated, middle-class woman.  Her reaction to homosexuality is stronger than that of anyone, other than Mariela, in the tight-knit, religiously conservative, working-class world in which Miguel lives.

    The nude painting the girl first discovers in Santiago’s cabin is one of many, all practically on public view to anyone who goes in there – but not, it seems, to Miguel himself.  He can continue to claim truthfully, when pressed, that he never posed naked for Santiago but the latter had told Miguel he didn’t need him to pose – ‘I already know every inch of your body’.  If Miguel is nervous enough to hide his identity on the facial portrait, why doesn’t he take a few minutes to see if there’s any more incriminating evidence lying around?   The local priest, although he’s fond of Miguel and Mariela, is a predictably strict disciplinarian.  During the phase of sex-after-death with Santiago, the priest finds Miguel sleeping naked on the beach with an empty bottle by his side, and reprimands him for his irresponsible drunkenness – ‘People could have seen you’.  Why don’t we see anything of the priest’s reaction to the scandal that breaks shortly afterwards?    I suspect Fuentes-León leaves questions like these unanswered for two reasons, neither of them good.  First, there’s the magical realism element of the story.  As I understand it, this genre of writing and film-making involves blending fantastic elements into an otherwise credible situation in order to access a deeper understanding of reality.  Here, the magical realist dimension seems to be used lazily – as if the presence of intentionally unrealistic aspects was in itself sufficient to excuse any lack of credibility anywhere in the movie.  Second, there’s the gay sermonising side of Undertow.

    One of the best bits of dialogue in the film is:

    Miguel:   Your trouble is, you think everyone’s like you.

    Santiago:  No, my trouble is that I think they’re like you.

    Here, Javier Fuentes-León shows an awareness that some people think all gay men think all straight men are really gay – Santiago’s rejoinder wittily confirms that prejudice.  But this exchange also serves to underline how little Fuentes-León explains the circumstances of Miguel’s and Santiago’s liaison.   Brokeback Mountain prompted questions about how gay the main character Ennis del Mar was.   Was he a homosexual, a repressed one except for his relationship with Jack Twist?  Or was he in love with Jack but otherwise heterosexual?   There are obvious implications in Ang Lee’s movie, although both men marry, that Jack is more gay than Ennis.   Some detractors see this ambiguity as frustrating, even evasive, although I think it gives the film enriching uncertainty.  The fact is that, in the isolation of Brokeback Mountain, with only each other for company, Ennis and Jack develop an affinity, feel the need for sexual intercourse and have it with each other.  This experience is indelible, all the more so because it’s frozen in time and irreconcilable with the lives they return to, where homosexuality is socially impossible.  How Miguel and Santiago got together in the first place, while Miguel was living his usual life, is harder to credit – not least because Santiago’s sexuality is hardly concealed and Miguel could therefore spot him and beware.  Even if you accept that a single, unforeseeable sexual episode occurred, it’s difficult to imagine how the relationship progressed.  Miguel is no intellectual but, as one of the lads and a good Catholic and, one assumes, sharing the homophobia of both groups, he must have asked himself questions about his feelings for Santiago.

    We seem meant to think at the end of Undertow that Miguel, admitting to Mariela that he still loves Santiago and losing his wife and child through his honesty, has done the right thing.  But what exactly has he admitted – that he loved this man, now dead, enough to have sex with him, or that he’s homosexual?   Fuentes-León, although he blurs the two things, moves closer to the idea that Miguel comes out as gay.   We see Miguel, his baby son on his knee, watching a telenovela.  Mariela comes in, sees this and switches channels to a football match.  This is a good enough joke but what’s it supposed to mean?  Socially, Miguel is as much a man as the other fishermen:  why should his propensity for sex with a man mean that – deep down – he conforms to other gay stereotypes?   When he and Mariela are trying to repair their life together, a scene of their having sex again works well:  there are no words but they both look to be thinking, ‘This shows we can still do it – but what does that amount to?’  The final funeral procession and the fact that Miguel seems to admit that he’s gay raise more unanswered questions.  Is the handsome young fisherman who helps Miguel to carry Santiago’s body down the beach showing compassion or that he might be gay too?    How will Miguel resume his life in the village (there’s no suggestion that he’s moving on elsewhere)?  Santiago’s funeral is undeniably touching, even though the carrying of his body (and someone lending a hand to Miguel) is weighted to suggest the Via Dolorosa rather than a beach in Peru; and the neat rhyming of Miguel’s opening and closing ‘offerings’ to the sea detracts from its emotional power.  (The conclusion of Undertow isn’t in the same league, in this respect, as Ennis del Mar with the two shirts hanging in his trailer at the end of Brokeback Mountain.)

    The deep flaws in the direction and writing inevitably limit what the actors can do but the three principals, all well cast physically, are still very fine.  Cristian Mercado as Miguel, although he’s at his most emotionally vibrant at moments such as learning the news that his unborn child will be a boy, gives a likeable, deeply-felt performance.  The most eloquent misery in Undertow is supplied by Tatiana Astengo’s Mariela when she learns the truth of her husband’s gay relationship.  Manolo Cardona doesn’t sentimentalise the character of Santiago – he never loses a sense of aloof antagonism towards all the locals except Miguel.  Details of Selma Mutal’s score occasionally reminded me of the music for Brokeback Mountain, although it has none of the wrenching weight of Gustavo Santaolalla’s theme.   A double meaning may be present in the film’s original title (Contracorriente):  its English translation is certainly effective, suggesting as it does both the current that pulls Santiago to his death and a sense of running against the tide.

    9 August 2010

  • Under the Clock

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincente Minnelli (1945)

    BFI advertised it as Under the Clock and that’s what the opening titles say but the film’s called simply The Clock in Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies.  If you look for ‘Under the Clock’ on Wikipedia, you see that ‘Under the Clock (Pod Zegarem in Polish) was a Nazi torture centre in Lublin, Poland during World War II’.  Although the film’s IMDB entry is Under the Clock (with a note that The Clock was the original title), the information on Wikipedia makes you wonder if ‘Pod Zegarem’ was the reason for ‘under’ being dropped from the name of a movie that tells a very different World War II story.  Vincente Minnelli describes the whirlwind romance between Joe Allen, an American soldier on a forty-eight-hour leave in New York City, and Alice Maybery, who works as a secretary there.  They almost literally bump into each other at Pennsylvania Station on the morning of Joe’s arrival – Alice breaks the heel of her shoe stumbling over his kitbag.  By four o’clock the following afternoon, they’re married.  Joe’s train departs from Penn Station the next morning.  He’s heading back to camp in Maryland then expects to be posted overseas.  Under the Clock was released just after VE Day so more than two months before VJ Day – at a time, in other words, when American wives and girlfriends still didn’t know whether the men they loved would be coming back.

    Good actors show us what the people they’re playing are feeling.  Star actors make the experience of the characters they’re incarnating feel definitive.  When the characters played by such actors are in a situation experienced by many, those in the audience to whom the situation is familiar may feel that the intensity of their own experience is properly reflected on the screen.  You can certainly believe this is what happened to people watching Judy Garland as Alice and Robert Walker as Joe in Under the Clock.  The movie is based on an unpublished story by Paul Gallico and his wife Pauline; the story was bought by Arthur Freed as a potential vehicle for Garland and adapted for the screen by Robert Nathan and Joseph Scrank.   Joe and Alice are both sincere, innocent characters – he’s a country boy from Mapleton, Indiana, although Alice’s background is less clear she too is a relative newcomer in the big city – but with Garland and Walker in these roles there’s an extra dimension.  She’s in her first non-singing role, he had made a specialty of playing young soldiers – but they both suggest an underlying complexity.  Of course this derives partly from the knowledge that their off-screen lives were not charmingly uncomplicated.  But because there’s so much more to Garland and Walker than meets the eye there’s no danger of our seeing Joe and Alice as little or ‘ordinary’ people.  This is what takes Under the Clock to a different level.

    It’s refreshing to see Judy Garland, in her early scenes with Robert Walker, as the quieter, more reticent character.  Her passionate quality emerges more gradually than it often does and just about redeems potentially the cheesiest sequence in Under the Clock.   After their high-speed civil marriage, Joe and Alice see a bride and groom, and their guests, departing after a church wedding.   They go into the empty church and quietly read the wedding service to each other.  When shooting began on Under the Clock, the director was Fred Zinnemann.   Garland didn’t get on with him and asked Zinnemann to be removed and replaced with Vincente Minnelli, with whom she’d just enjoyed a great success in Meet Me in St Louis.   Zinnemann is one of my favourite directors but Arthur Freed was right to accede to his star’s demands here.   Minnelli’s visual flair and romanticism are essential to the film’s success.  He ensures there’s a third major character in the story – New York City.  Although the film features some actual footage of the streets, it was mostly shot on the MGM lot.  Most remarkable is the reconstruction of Penn Station (by William Ferrari and Cedric Gibbsons) with its bustling crowds.  Minnelli handles the populous city sequences with as sure a touch as he does the intimate romantic scenes between Garland and Walker.

    There’s a persistent ambivalence in this characterisation of New York.   You get this from the moment that Robert Walker first comes up an escalator at Penn Station to meet the streets outside:  tall and slim himself, he’s overwhelmed by the skyscrapers.  Walker blends excitement and apprehension about New York expertly and the swarming complication of the place repeatedly threatens to thwart the lovers – when they’re separated on the subway, when they battle the repeated bureaucractic obstacles to getting married immediately.  But there are delightful urban details too.   When Alice and Joe are finally married at City Hall, the office is closing for the day and cleaners – who look like proper cleaners but are ably acted – are beginning their work.  On their first evening together, Alice and Joe miss her last bus home and hail what he thinks is a cab but turns out to be a milk float.  When the milkman Al Henry gets a black eye and a sore head from a flailing drunk (Keenan Wynn is almost too convincing in the latter role), Joe and Alice end up doing the milk round themselves; there’s a lovely shot of ranks of milk floats lined up in the dark.   In return, Al takes them back to his home, where his wife makes them breakfast.   The domestic rhythms of this scene are effortless and funny; the Henrys are beautifully played by the real-life husband and wife team of James and Lucile Gleason.   There are very few bits that don’t work.  Ruth Brady is rather dreary as Alice’s flatmate Helen, who warns her against romancing with a soldier, but the scene is saved by its closing line.  Alice’s boyfriend Bill (Marshall Thompson, best known for Daktari on television twenty years later) hasn’t said a word throughout Helen’s chattering.  As she and he prepare to leave the apartment and Alice in peace, the silent Bill cheerily booms ‘Goodbye!’

    13 April 2012

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