Film review

  • Gloria (1980)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Cassavetes (1980)

    Once I’d jotted down a few thoughts after seeing Gloria, I read the BFI programme note and what had seemed puzzling about the film made sense.  An excerpt from Tom Charity’s John Cassavetes: Lifeworks (2001), the note mentions Cassavetes wrote the piece ‘to sell, strictly to sell’ and with no desire to direct the movie.   Hollywood’s surprising insistence that he should do so proved impossible to resist, after the consecutive commercial failures of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1977).  Gloria, the story of a middle-aged gangster’s moll and a young boy, trying to get away from mobsters pursuing the child (who may or may not be in possession of crucial information), amounts to a piece unusual in the Cassavetes oeuvre.  It’s conventionally constructed and, in the end, conventionally sentimental.

    The tenth of the twelve features he directed, Gloria has a splendid opening titles sequence.  The credits are worked into vividly coloured paintings, with a strong Mexican flavour, by Romare Bearden.  These visuals, accompanied by Bill Conti’s surging, emotive score, culminate in a city skyline at night, which then dissolves into the real thing:  New York City.  The early scenes build up a disturbing energy.   Jeri Dawn (Julie Carmen), a young Hispanic woman, is on a bus, on her way home to the Bronx, after doing grocery shopping.  When the bus lurches, Jeri loses her balance and falls over with her cargo:  the other passengers shriek with alarm as if something much worse has occurred – and as people do when this kind of thing really does happen.  Jeri’s fine and quickly picks herself up but the moment soon feels like a harbinger of true horror.

    As Jeri enters her apartment building, she sees a sinister-looking man and fears the worst.  Her husband Jack (Buck Henry), an accountant for a New York mafia family, has turned FBI informant.  There’s now a contract out on him and his family.  When Gloria Swenson (Gena Rowlands), her friend and neighbour, arrives at their apartment, wanting to cadge some coffee, Jeri begs her to take care of the Dawns’ two children, teenager Joan (Jessica Castillo) and her six-year-old brother Phil (John Adames).  Gloria isn’t keen but, within a few screen minutes, Jeri, Jack, Joan and Jeri’s mother (Lupe Garnica) have all been murdered, and Gloria is protecting Phil in her own apartment – though neither of them is happy with the arrangement.

    Throughout Gloria, Cassavetes’ movement of the camera round his home city is dynamic.  (Fred Schuler was the DP.)  The sense of people on the run is animated simply and strongly:  there are plenty of sequences in which Gloria and Phil really do move at speed.  The action also consistently conveys the fractious heat of New York summer but this impressive packaging sharpens awareness of what a familiar storyline it surrounds.  When the desperate Jeri asks her to take care of the children, Gloria replies that she doesn’t like kids – ‘Especially your kids’, she adds with a caustic humour that clashes with the genuine panic and urgency built up in the early scenes.  This is the starting point of tough broad Gloria’s inevitable progress towards becoming like-a-mother to the orphaned child – a progress punctuated by repeated irritable exchanges between them, by serial separations and reunions which, though entertaining enough, are essentially mechanical.

    In the main roles, Gena Rowlands is so forcefully hard-bitten and John Adames so sheerly unusual that they elevate the material.  Rowlands is as affecting as she’s economical when Gloria, suppressing tears, leaves Phil in their hotel room and heads for her climactic confrontation with the mob boss who was once her lover (Basilio Franchina) and his henchmen.  Rowlands appeared in a total of nine Cassavetes films and starred in five of the last seven.  He wrote this part for his wife even though he didn’t expect to direct her in it.  Cassavetes may have felt Rowlands applied an authenticating Midas touch to the character – plenty of critics certainly felt that.  This viewer could never forget that Gloria (whose surname is the actual birth name of Gloria Swanson) was a movie type – I’d say a stereotype rather than an archetype.

    ‘She’s tough … but she sides with the little guy’, declared the theatrical release poster for Gloria in 1980.  While Rowlands received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her work, John Adames shared the Razzie for Worst Supporting Actor – tough for an eight-year-old, and unfair.  (Even if he was in distinguished company:  the co-recipient of the award was Laurence Olivier for his hilarious performance in The Jazz Singer.)  Adames isn’t a natural actor (he’s not performed on screen since), which makes him a surprising choice for a big role in a Cassavetes picture, but he’s a distinctive presence.  In spite of Gena Rowlands’ matter-of-factness, the double meanings in Gloria’s remarks about falling in love and sleeping with Phil have a cute and mildly queasy quality but eccentric John Adames has a winning intentness and determination.  ‘You’re the man’, Jack Dawn tells Phil as he entrusts his ledger (‘the Bible’) to his young son shortly before hitmen descend on the apartment.  Adames makes curious, complete sense of this label:  he’s a homunculus.

    Although physically convincing, the hoods are part of the formulaic side of Gloria.  The playing of them (by, among several others, Tom Noonan, J C Quinn and Sonny Landham) is one-dimensional – there’s no sign here of the hyper-naturalism of a typical Cassavetes ensemble.  This could be intentional – keeping the bad guys at a cartoonish level makes it easier to take Gloria’s firing as many bullets into them as she does.  Even so, the more interesting contributions come in cameos – John Pavelko as a grey-faced bank teller, a succession of cab drivers (Shanton Granger, Santos Morales, Walter Jukes, Janet Ruben, Jerry Jaffe).  Bill Conti’s score sustains the Hispanic aspect of the story by incorporating the famous melody from the second movement of the Rodrigo guitar concerto.  It gives the narrative a lift but also reminds us this is music we’ve heard before – just as we’ve seen before people-discovering-their-humanity movies like Gloria.

    2 August 2019

  • Vagabond

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sans toit ni loi

    Agnès Varda (1985)

    Although her later films were all documentaries, Agnès Varda spent a large part of her long career bringing works of fiction as well as non-fiction to the screen.  In Vagabond, one of her most celebrated movies, she brings quasi-documentary techniques to bear in creating a drama.  One winter’s morning (in the present day), in the Languedoc-Roussillon wine-growing region of southern France, an agricultural worker comes upon the frozen corpse of a young woman.  Varda then proceeds to tell the story of how Mona Bergeron (Sandrine Bonnaire) ended up dead in a ditch.  The narrative includes dramatisation of Mona’s last days and interviews with some of the people she encountered during them.  Several of these witnesses, speaking to camera, wonder what became of Mona or, knowing her fate, express regret that they didn’t do more to help her.

    That distinction makes clear that Vagabond isn’t a straightforward faux-documentary:  it implies that the unseen, unheard interviewer (if s/he exists at all) may not have consistently informed the people concerned that, where or how Mona died.  Yet the combination of documentary elements and dramatised flashback is beguiling and gives the impression that Varda is doing something very unusual.  She’s finding out what actually happened to – in effect, bringing back to life – a homeless person who fell through the cracks of the social order and who, in reality, would probably remain a mystery – if, that is, she wasn’t forgotten as if she’d never existed.

    The film is exasperating, though.  Varda’s complex approach, in spite of Sandrine Bonnaire’s strong presence and performance, yields few insights into Mona’s character or even information about her personal history.  If this were one of Varda’s real documentaries, I think her intense interest in people would make her push harder than Vagabond does to discover more.  Instead, it’s as if the surface ‘reality’ is being used as a reason for the limits of the film’s exploration – of Mona and even, with a couple of exceptions, the attitudes towards her of other members of society.

    Two episodes in particular reflect this.  Mona hitches a lift with Mme Landier (Macha Méril), an academic on her way back from a conference.  She buys food and drink for the journey for them both, and lets Mona sleep in the car while she’s in her motel room.   Mme Landier learns from their conversation that Mona’s real name is Simone, that she was properly educated and that she had a secretarial job in Paris before going on the road instead.  Asked why she dropped out, Mona says because she prefers drinking champagne in a car, as the two women are doing at that moment.  Mme Landier is evidently interested by Mona and unafraid to probe but there are no more questions from her.

    Later, Mona meets Assoun (Yahiaoui Assoun), an immigrant labourer.  With his boss’s agreement, she moves into the primitive accommodation Assoun shares with other labourers.  He also instructs her in his job of cutting vines.  He’s a lone Tunisian in a work force of Moroccans, all temporarily returned home to see their families.  Assoun is the one person in Vagabond whom Mona clearly likes but it’s obvious, and would be obvious to her, that, when he assures her she’ll still have a roof over her head when the Moroccans return, that’s not going to happen.  Her shocked anger with Assoun when he tells her she has to go because the other men won’t have her didn’t make sense to me.  Although the episode does raise the important question of how much Mona is still committed to an itinerant life, this isn’t pursued.  The tantalising nature of the Mme Landier and Assoun chapters are in contrast to the recurrence of some other characters in Vagabond, which in the context of the narrative as a whole, feels too shaped.

    Varda’s cast includes professional and previously non-professional actors.  It’s obvious which are which even though I recognised only Sandrine Bonnaire and, as an old woman’s discontented maid who romanticises Mona’s ‘freedom’, Yolande Moreau (the title character in Séraphine many years later).  I wasn’t sure how much this disjuncture of performing styles was intended.  It’s typical of Varda that she treats her protagonist with compassion but without sentimentality.  Mona isn’t easy to like and, says one of the interviewees, ‘helps the system that she rejects’.  But the viewer ends up feeling about her little more than the guilt professed by some of the characters in Vagabond – the same kind of guilt we’d have felt if the end of a young woman like this had been a brief news item rather than a formally ambitious 105-minute drama.   Perhaps Agnès Varda is aiming to make her audience feel guilty about not feeling guilty enough.  But Varda also engineers our limited sympathy:  she’s no more willing than Mona herself is to tell us more.

    20 July 2019

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