Film review

  • José

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Li Cheng (2018)

    Twentyish José (Enrique Salanic) lives with his single-parent mother (Ana Cecilia Motos) in a small apartment in Guatemala City.   Li Cheng’s film begins with a description of an apparently typical day for them.  Mom (as she’s called in the cast list) wakes her son shortly before setting out to sell homemade sandwiches on the street.  She and other local women who make a meagre living in this way ply their trade wherever they can; the authorities regularly move them on.  José’s job is also in fast food, in an unusually literal sense.  He runs about outside the eatery where he works, trying to attract passing drivers to stop and buy.  He waits cars and trucks rather than tables.  After work, José stands on a street elsewhere in town.  Another young man approaches.  They acknowledge each other then have sex in a dark, poky room.  The routine is repeated next day except that José meets with another young man.  They go to the same room but the sex is different – not so mechanical.  Afterwards, José and Luis (Manolo Herrera) doze peacefully together.  The following day, they meet up again.

    At the front of the bus that José catches to work, a Christian preacher declaims – a sort of spiritual tour guide.  He tells his fellow passengers, inter alia, that God loves a sinner.  José doesn’t look too sure about that but he knows he’s a sinner.  He isn’t breaking the law:  according to Wikipedia, ‘Consensual, non-commercial, private same-sex sexual activity has been legal in Guatemala since 1871’.   Even so, the country remains (as well as economically poor) socially conservative and strongly religious, with evangelical Christianity on the rise.  José‘s director Li Cheng was born in China but emigrated to the US at the age of fourteen (he’s now in his mid-thirties).  His background qualifies Cheng to give a double external perspective on Guatemalan life and he sets the scene very effectively.  In one sequence, José and Luis stand in a crowded street at night watching a religious procession pass by.  The look in Luis’s eyes indicates that, for him as much as for the man behind the camera, he’s observing the rituals of an alien culture.

    Luis gives a similar impression in church with his mother Luciana (Evelyn Celinda Bautista Torres):  he joins her in the happy-clapping but looks to be going through the motions.  In bed together, José and Luis gently examine each other’s body, including scars.  José explains that his was self-inflicted; Luis that his brothers attacked him when they caught him with another man in their village.  Luis, a building worker, is currently on a job in Guatemala City.  Cheng doesn’t suggest that homophobia is less of an issue here than in the sticks;  it’s just that in a bigger place gay sex can go more easily unnoticed.  José’s mother, like Luis’s, is staunchly religious.  One weekend, she sees her son getting on a motorcycle and riding off with his new male friend.  The bike breaks down temporarily, which delays José’s return until late that evening.  When he gets home, his mother is curtly angry but Cheng has revealed her true state of mind before her son is back.  She prays aloud for his safe return – she may well feel he’s in greater danger because (she suspects) he’s out doing wrong.  In the days that follow, she repeatedly urges José to pray for God’s forgiveness and guidance.

    The naturally reserved José says little about his own religious beliefs but there’s no doubting the strength of his devotion to his mother and awareness of the distress his sexuality will cause her.   José, which Cheng wrote with his producing partner George F Roberson, is both a vivid portrait of present-day gay lives in a particular environment and part of a longer tradition transcending specific time and place:  the film dramatises a mother-son relationship that’s mutually loving but, from the son’s point of view, emotionally oppressive.  José is tied to Mom’s apron strings, his romance with Luis strangled by them.  Both men are in love as never before but their predicament is expressed by the restricted setting of their lovemaking.  (They rent the room for an hour at a time: on one occasion, a voice from the other side of the door announces time’s up and José calls back that they’ll pay for an extra hour.)  Luis wants to get out of Guatemala altogether.  When José says he can’t leave his mother, Luis stops seeing him and disappears.

    It goes almost without saying that the bedroom sequences are the heart of this film.  According to IMDb, none of the cast had acted professionally on screen before.  If that’s right, Li Cheng has done a great job directing them.  The love scenes between José and Luis are remarkably staged and played – frank yet discreet, natural and tender.  Mom is benighted and unwittingly destructive; Ana Cecilia Motos makes her a more disturbing and poignant figure by convincing us of her deep love for her only son (she also has married daughters but that’s not the same).  It’s a powerful irony that, by fighting for the domestic status quo, Mom will presumably ensure that José continues to live promiscuously.  He’ll go on needing forgiveness but he’ll still be with her, which is her priority.

    One scene I didn’t understand.  Working her latest sandwich pitch, Mom sees Luciana, tells her that Luis is leading José astray and reminds her of the teachings of their pastor.  Luciana is annoyed and moves away quickly.  She’s already well aware of her responsibility to direct her son towards redemption – presumably why Luis was with her in church.  The two women evidently know each other and this exchange implies they’re members of the same congregation.  How does that square with Luis’s account of his family life outside Guatemala City?   Besides, it’s not as if Mom’s words to Luciana have a direct effect in ending the affair.

    José misses Luis immediately and fails to make phone contact with him.  His efforts to try and find Luis take on a new urgency with the abrupt ending of the relationship between José’s work colleagues, Monica (Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez Gonzalez) and Carlos (Esteban Lopez Ramirez).  (She is keen for them to settle down; he just wants to have fun.  When Monica gets pregnant, Carlos promptly departs the scene.)  The last part of José consists almost entirely of the title character’s unavailing attempts to track Luis down, which eventually take him outside Guatemala City and, in the closing scene, to the ruins of a Mayan temple.  Throughout the film, Li Cheng and his DP Paolo Giron contrast the cramped conditions of José’s home, working and sex life with large spaces beyond the city – glimpsed from public transport or more fully enjoyed by José and Luis on their motorcycle outing to the country.  In the later scenes, these open spaces dominate.  Their physical scale now communicates a sense less of freedom than of the hopelessness of José’s quest.

    As Luis, Manolo Herrera is such an expressive presence that the viewer misses him too.  Enrique Salanic, with much more screen time, has a bigger challenge and meets it well.  There are times with José when you feel you’re watching a person in a documentary rather than a drama but Salanic is often striking.  He seems more feminine in the company of Luis and to have aged several years by the end of the story, despite its short timeframe.  José is a small-scale film; even at only eighty-five minutes, it feels stretched a little thin.  But it’s finely observed and thoroughly engaging.  It makes you want to see what Li Cheng does next.

    18 August 2020

  • Summer Interlude

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sommarlek

    Ingmar Bergman (1951)

    The relationship giving the film its title is sunny but shadowed too.  The particular quality of the Scandinavian summer – the awareness that daylong light is transient and will  turn to daylong darkness – naturally helps create the atmosphere.  Gunnar Fischer’s chiaroscuro black-and-white images of sea and sky sustain it.  The young lovers are Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson), an aspiring ballet dancer, and Henrik (Birger Malmsten), a college student.  Their romance takes place on an island on the Stockholm archipelago, where Marie visits her aunt and uncle for a summer break, and Henrik lives with his elderly aunt.  Although increasingly enraptured by each other’s company, the youngsters’ mood of sweetness and light is volatile.  Marie, knowing Henrik to be thin-skinned, enjoys teasing him.  She’s unnerved, late one evening, by the hooting of an owl.  In one of their conversations, Henrik admits to occasional, fearful imaginings of tipping over into a great darkness.  As autumn approaches, a few days before he’s due to return to college and Marie to the theatre in Stockholm, Henrik has a diving accident and dies from his injuries.

    The cut-short first love, which is the film’s centre, is an interlude too in terms of the structure of the piece – or, rather, a series of interludes.  The narrative begins thirteen years later; Marie’s recollections of her time with Henrik are extended flashbacks from the present-day framework of the story, which Ingmar Bergman wrote with Herbert Grevenius.  Marie is now a prima ballerina, rehearsing for a production of Swan Lake.  Admired as a dancer, she’s reputedly a cold fish in her offstage relationships – the latest, with journalist David Nyström (Alf Kjellin), is evidently fractious and failing.  In her dressing room, Marie takes delivery of a parcel and is stunned to find it contains Henrik’s diary of the summer they spent together.  Due to technical issues, the Swan Lake dress rehearsal is postponed from afternoon to evening.  This gives Marie the opportunity to take a ferry over to the island where she knew Henrik, and to remember their romance.

    Marie’s brief reunion at his house on the island with her uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist) is variously revealing.  It was he who had Henrik’s diary sent to her at the theatre:  Erland pocketed the diary when he caught sight of it in the hospital room where Henrik died, and has kept it through the intervening years.  We learn too that Erland took Marie away for the winter following Henrik’s death, supposedly to help her get over it.  He succeeded, in the sense that she returned ‘walled up’ against the anguish of losing Henrik.  It’s strongly implied that an affair with Erland, which Marie bitterly regrets, played its part in numbing her heart.  She recalls taunting Henrik with jokey threats that, if he didn’t swear undying loyalty to her, she’d become Erland’s mistress.  It was just at that moment the owl call spooked Marie.

    In his 1982 biography of Ingmar Bergman, Peter Cowie maintains that ‘Each of Bergman’s major films constitutes both a distillation of its predecessors and a great step forward into new realms of expression and technique … Prison was the first of these; Summer Interlude the second’.  The latter is certainly remarkable as both a self-sufficient drama and a foreshadowing of important Bergman themes and memorable motifs in the films that followed (tonally different though these often were).  The transient midsummer setting points towards Smiles of a Summer Night.  In one of their light-hearted moments, Marie and Henrik eat wild strawberries together; Mrs Calwagen (Mimi Pollak), Henrik’s cancer-ridden aunt, not only has the cadaver-to-be look of Professor Borg’s aged mother but even describes herself as a corpse.  On the eve of Henrik’s fatal accident, Mrs Calwagen plays chess with her priest (Gunnar Olsson).  It’s a very different pairing from the chess contestants in The Seventh Seal but the plump, pompous priest remarks that he ‘feels death beside me’.

    Marie increasingly shares that feeling, anticipated by her bumping into the priest on the ferry she takes to revisit the island.  Perhaps suppressing the memory of their last meeting, she says she hasn’t seen him since her confirmation in his church; the priest reminds her they did meet on other occasion.   Soon after arriving back on the island, Marie sees Mrs Calwagen walking ahead of her.  This is one of the film’s most complex and potent images.  It appears ‘the corpse’ is still alive, thirteen years on; her survival makes Henrik’s premature death seem all the more unfair.  Yet Bergman and Gunnar Fischer visualise the black-clad old woman as such a weird, inhuman figure that she might be a ghost or, at least, a figment of Marie’s imagination.  His spacious summer house, in which the presumably widowed Erland now lives alone, has a mausoleum vacancy.  The place has already been prepared for complete abandonment during the approaching winter.  The furniture is covered – shrouded.

    Returning to the theatre and to her dressing room after the dress rehearsal, Marie encounters the dance company’s ballet master (Stig Olin).  Helpless against the fate that has governed her life, Marie has likened herself to a ‘painted puppet on a string …if I cry, the paint runs’.  When we first see the ballet master, slouching against a wall of the dressing room, he himself has the limp, ungainly attitude of a disused marionette but that initial impression is deceptive.  He wears costume and make-up for the role of Doctor Coppélius, explaining that another dancer’s indisposition means he’s taking on this role, which he’s often played before, in a forthcoming performance of Coppélia.  This and his Svengali manner with Marie combine to suggest the ballet master is also a puppet-master – that is, the creator and would-be controller of a plaything[1].

    While stressing the transience of a performing career in ballet, this culminating sinister figure also tells Marie her sole purpose in life is to be a dancer.  He seems to recommend, in other words, that she carry on immuring herself in the stage world where she’s lived for years.  This pivotal exchange has an unexpected outcome, though.  The ballet master’s speech is briefly interrupted by David’s arrival in the dressing room.  Marie introduces him, surprisingly after her earlier tetchy manner with David, as ‘the one person who’s kind to me in real life’.  As the ballet master takes his leave, he plants a kiss on Marie’s lips.  This is alarming but proves not to be the kiss of death on her readiness to escape psychic stasis.  Instead, she decides to show Henrik’s diary to David.

    As might be expected, Bergman realises the hectic theatre atmosphere vividly, through editing tempo and minor characters like the long-serving box-office man (Douglas Håge) and the elderly janitor (John Botvid).  He’s also at pains to emphasise the punishing slog of ballet:  Marie’s colleague, Kaj (Annalisa Ericson) moans about the aching feet she cools in a bowl of water.  (Kaj also has a fag in her mouth, which nicely dates the film.)   The stage make-up in Summer Interlude is more than a mask.  It’s almost a disfigurement – most obviously in the ballet master/Coppélius’s grotesque appearance, including a false nose.  In the film’s closing scene, Marie removes her ‘paint’.  What emerges doesn’t quite have the bloom of her teenage face but she does look much younger.

    The ageing effect of the heavy pancake and dark lines emphasising her eyebrows serves a simple practical purpose, as well as an expressive one.   It was a tall order for Maj-Britt Nilsson, in her mid-twenties at the time, to look convincing as the fifteen-year-old Marie.  (It’s not clear why Bergman made the character quite so young, rather than, say, college boy Henrik’s exact contemporary.)   Even without her theatre make-up, Marie, on her return to the island, looks older than the twenty-eight she’s meant to be.  By putting years on her, Bergman makes it easier for Nilsson to achieve the gulf in spiritual age between the teenage girl and the still young woman.  Maj-Britt Nilsson may not have been in the same acting league as the leading actresses of later Bergman films but she gives (as in To Joy) an impassioned and very engaging performance.

    Birger Malmsten partners Nilsson beautifully.  Although nearly thirty when the film was made, Malmsten is thoroughly believable as a boy on the cusp of manhood, thanks to his slim physique and to the emotional registers he gives Henrik, whose halting, tentative manner complements Marie’s vital aplomb.   He’s almost comically self-pitying when he laments no one really loves him except his dog, Gruffman; but Malmsten also creates a deeper, more authentic melancholy, as if Henrik, at some level, intuits the fate in store for him.  (Gruffman, for his part, has a hangdog air that’s very appealing.)  The playing throughout is just about impeccable.  Stig Olin’s ballet master is impressively unaccountable.  Renée Björling has only a small role as Erland’s wife but the sad, resigned look she gives her faithless husband is a memorable moment.  The well-fed complacency of Georg Funkquist’s Erland is repellent at first yet Bergman isn’t entirely devoid of sympathy for him.  Erland’s rueful nostalgia, albeit for a lecherous past, somewhat redeems him.  No character in Summer Interlude is dismissed easily.

    Erland’s decision to give Marie Henrik’s diary after many years is a necessary plot contrivance but there’s little else in this splendid film that comes across as contrived.  The resolution of the story and the protagonist’s situation is a fine balance of sorrow and consolation, as Marie is confirmed in the knowledge that she can’t recover the joyful intensity of her first love but discovers a new willingness to re-engage with life offstage.  As far as I know, a short animated sequence that comments humorously on Marie and Henrik’s feelings for each other is unique in Bergman’s cinema.  All in all, the film fully deserves its reputation as the first of his three great aestival pictures of the 1950s, paving the way for Summer with Monika and Smiles of a Summer Night.

    17 August 2020

    [1] It’s a little confusing that the film opens with a notice of the company’s current repertoire that announces dress rehearsals for Swan Lake and, rather than Coppélia, Petrushka.  There’s no further reference to Petrushka, whose title character is, of course, a puppet.