The '68 Comeback Special: 24 Hours In The Life of a Woman

And so I find myself, once again, without subtitles. Up language creek without higher than a C in introductory French. Thanks for nothing Alina Christie! But I kid my one-time French Teacher who married into her job and spoke slightly worse French and far worse English than me. At times like these I wish I'd been a better student. But then I'd probably also be bitter that I wasn't traveling more. I do my traveling in John M. Stahl, Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minelli films, to places of the mind more than anywhere on a map. I've probably seen every inch of Rome, Paris and London in the films but never put a foot in either of them. Would I walk around picking out the spots where Sami Frey and Anna Karina sprinted like lost cats between cars or would they feel just as imposing and indifferent as Philadelphia and New York still do to me? Maybe that's why I like expressionistic atmospherics over social realism these days, why I've come to love studio bound films with the same, if not greater, passion I used to reserve for naturalistic films with anthropological interest in people, landscapes and towns. I treasure Winter's Bone, Ballast, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia & Tony Manero but maybe it's that a glut of great films with an objective eye and ethnographic senses of place aren't a guarantee in a given year anymore. 2013 gifted me masterpieces of the form like A Hijacking, Almayer's Folly, The Bling Ring, In The Fog, A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, Stray Dogs & Stranger By The Lake but those films also build slightly on the abject, entrancing minimalism of Liverpool, Birdsong & A Screaming Man. It hints at a film culture in flux, beholden to no one tide or ideology and it's goddamn thrilling. At the end of every year I tend to gorge myself on all the new releases I missed while keeping a balanced diet of premieres and older works. So during this time a film with an inch-thick atmosphere and a menacing color scheme, like Leave Her To Heaven, Taza Son of Cochise or Some Came Running, seem like manna from movie heaven. I bring all this up because I get the impression that Dominique Delouche was trying to marry a modern, bleak honesty with an old fashioned dishonesty and found himself a little too early and a little too late. 

24 Hours In The Life Of A Woman, Delouche's entry in the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, a film-by-film examination of which David Cairns and I are getting perilously close to finishing, is what you might call an oppressive atmosphere piece. It's based on an oft-filmed novel by Stefan Zweig and focuses on the saddest millionaire in Monte Carlo. Danielle Darrieux, by 1968 an old hand at playing casualties of l'amour fou, is a newly widowed aristocrat who meets a young gambler and is instantly, against both civilized custom and her better judgment, drawn toward a dour but handsome gambler played by Robert Hoffmann. They share a whirlwind erotic companionship from which she hopes she can walk away from with a newfound lust for life. Fate, as usual, has sadder plans. Hoffman's interesting to stare at but he leaves very little impression next to Darrieux, who handily carries the whole film. Without words, faces are just about everything here, as if watching a silent film and Darrieux proved to me anyway that she could have held her own next to Madame's Garbo and Helm. She has a queer sort of wounded dignity, totally unlike anyone else in the world, and that was just square one. Delouche kind of hamstrings her a bit because he's after something different than the typical tearjerkers at which she excelled. She could go to 11 but he cuts her off at 4 the whole film. His aim was something both seductive and depressing, which is hard to get right when he plainly has nothing like a happy or interesting enough ending in mind.

24 Hours is an experiment in atmospherics which wouldn't have mainstream champions until the 70s. What he wants to do is wed the florid emotional banquets of France, Italy and Old Hollywood in the 1950s with a much more modern idea of how to end a film. It wasn't that those films ended happily too often, it was that they had a way to slide the ending in without you quite realizing how badly you'd been fucked up. The term 'rollercoaster' might have lost all meaning but it was once a perfect descriptor. Sirk, Stahl and Jean Renoir didn't always leave 'em laughing, but the ups and downs and the way they took their bows made it all better in your soul. Think about Anna Magnani talking to the narrator in The Golden Coach. She's alone but Renoir wouldn't dare let us know that. It would have spoiled the fun and broken the spell. Delouche was riding an altogether different wave. Unfortunately it ran right over him while RW Fassbinder and Stanley Kubrick cut right through it like some of Bruce Brown's lithe young surfers. Like Aleksandr Zarkhi, who was across the croisette with another very dark adaptation, Anna Karenina, he failed to take off as a runaway international success because of his radical stylistic subversion. It wasn't necessarily that both films were too morbid, it's that the world wasn't prepared for it yet, having not let despair wash over them. 1968 and the canceling of Cannes was a big part of that. World cinema took a step away from an idealized studio production and embraced scrappiness and defeat. Not that I'm complaining mind you, as some of the best films of all time came out of this shift. Entire careers were built on it. If Coppola and his audience hadn't listened to the wind blowing in this direction, maybe he'd never have felt the need to follow up Finian's Rainbow with The Godfather, which is the platonic ideal that Delouche and Zarkhi were groping towards. They never again got a chance to prove to audiences beyond their home turf that they'd been ahead of the curve. Polarizing also-rans like Barry Lyndon and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant hit at the right time and get the credit with the austerity crowd, though I prefer both of the films from '68.

Delouche engineers a number of stylistic gambits that feel less like flights of fancy and more like flights into the 1970s. An erotic daydream on a purgatorial marriage bed, a ghostly watch ticking away the seconds of our woman's life, funereal marches through insanely appointed hotel lobbies, entire concert halls filled with the somnambulant rich. Walter Wottitz, who lensed the last few Jean-Pierre Melville films, helps turn the film's set, a posh casino, into a hotel of the damned filled with wealthy corpses, all the better for Darrieux to stand apart from in her purple and gold gowns and nearly irrepressible inner light. Peter Medak's spiffing The Ruling Class, featuring dear departed Peter O'Toole's funniest performance, makes the same gestures, though with nothing like the subtlety. Verve and vitality stifled by expectations. Delouche doesn't turn the supporting cast into skeletons coated in dust and cobwebs, but probably just because he didn't think of it. In the end Darrieux walks away from passion, not because it's what's asked or expected of her, but because she knows it'll extinguish anyway with a reliably unreliable cad like Hoffmann. Shudder-inducing stuff. And you understand all of it without a single word. Like so much else regarding the '68 Cannes Film Festival, you can hide the truth for only so long before it comes out. After a film like this, I'm glad I've got others to take comfort in because something like this can really get you down. 

The '68 Comback Special: Anna Karenina or The Living Dead Of The Moscow Aristocracy

David Cairns is quite simply one of the finest and most entertaining film writers there is. I've never met him in person (an ocean tragically separates us. Betcha can't guess which one!) but I consider him a friend all the same and lucky to have encountered his many talents and his graciousness as a human being. I've spent many trainrides scanning the back issues of his remarkable blog, Shadowplay. Our love of the odd, the uncanny and the specific (not to mention the British) in film connects us. He's also a dynamite filmmaker, but you must surely have known that! Last week he kicked off a joint project we're undertaking - an alternating investigation of the films due to play at the ill-fated 1968 Cannes Film Festival. His first piece features not just an incredibly incisive written commentary, but a rich video essay he made with the help of Timo Langer. Next week he'll pick up the gauntlet I throw down here and on we'll go until we've left our brand on every film meant to sweep audiences off their feet that year. The story of the festival has more or less usurped the historical importance of any work scheduled, which is a sad thing indeed. We're aiming to shed a little more light (I've already done a little) on these landmark works and maybe pick some winners just for fun. This next film and I have something of a history...

Orson would have fit nicely into the film, come to think of it...

In my sophomore year at Emerson College in Boston, I lived a solitary life in a grungy apartment in Lechmere, or as its known locally, that part of town where nobody goes. My days were pretty routine: go to class, eat, go to the Boston Public Library and rent ten DVDs from their basement - naturally they put the foreign films where sunlight couldn't touch them or the creeps who wanted them. I discovered not one but two films that played the 1968 Cannes Film Festival while I was a regular there. The first was Miklós Jancsó's The Red & The White, a film that I recognized right away as a masterpiece. It perplexed me that something that dripped with greatness in the way this did could possibly be left off most canonical lists I'd encountered, but also entirely off my film school curriculum. Maybe the loss at the festival had kept it off that many more radars? Likely as not it wouldn't have made much of a difference. After all, when's the last time anyone talked about Chronicles of the Years of Fire or The Hireling? The other competition entry I found was Alexsandr Zarkhi's Anna Karenina, which kicked my brain's ass. 

I'd picked it up because I'd recognized Tatyana Samoylova on the DVD box. I still had a mad crush on the feisty revolutionary bride from Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying and figured this would be as good a showcase as any for her. I quickly lost myself in the plot, thinking the movie was just a little too kind to the Tolstoy and subsequently had no cinematic fire in its guts. And the way they'd dressed and presented Samoylova just seemed so...wrong. Her expressions seemed to be a series of lies.  Anyone who's seen The Cranes Are Flying knows what truth looks like when it burns across someone's determined face. It was a joyless watch, and in my state (hungry, cold, miserable, living with only insects in a filthy apartment no one ever visited) was too much for me to handle. A second viewing explained that that was indeed the point. The most successful adaptations of Karenina have to accept this up front and find a way through it or find a way around it. Joe Wright's version might be my favourite, not because it's revolutionary in the telling, but because he and Tom Stoppard made its heroes actors and boorish theatre patrons for the audience/aristocracy (audienstocracy? I'll work on that) to gawk at. The story has been told so many times that you've got to supercharge your grammar. Zarkhi's choice - to go right up to the edge of horror and pull back at the last moment - is a good one but it doesn't let an audience breathe or find anything resembling hope within the already very sad story. 

Zarkhi frames everyone who isn't one of our four or five leads as if they were the living dead. Across the Croisette, Dominique Delouche was trying much the same thing with his version of 24 Hours In the Life of a Woman but his mode is different. If Delouche was in the realm of Carnival of Souls or the later Daughters of Darkness then Anna Karenina is clearly at a ball thrown by Hammer Studios. The make-up sits nicely between vampire and zombie and wasn't the ghastly pallor of the filthy rich practically the British studio's greatest weapon after Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing? Rodion Shchedrin's music is so overpowering it seems like some of James Bernard's more insistent brass. What's fascinating is that it also anticipates the direction the studio would take. The colour scheme and montage that would fit comfortably in Demons of the Mind or Hands of the Ripper. Everything here spells fright and cruelty, from red-and-blue-tinted erotic nightmares, dances that turn into churning maelstroms and people failed by man and beast with disastrous consequences. And certainly the ending is about as subtle as anything in Rasputin, The Mad Monk, but we can't entirely blame our director for that, rampaging music and psychological lighting notwithstanding. 

But of course the horror we're meant to notice is that of the stifling life Anna is doomed to if she doesn't flee. Zarkhi overplays his hand a touch here. Anyone who didn't know how it ends will have guessed by the time Anna boards the coach to Oblonsky's house. Everyone around her is dead. The production design, make-up and mise-en-scene make it perfectly clear where she's headed. Zarkhi essentially treats her near-death disease as her entry into purgatory and from then on she looks as though she's just missed the train to hell. Complimenting or criticising this movie is a little tricky because it clearly accomplishes its goals, but in so doing have made a sort of horrific living wax museum drama. Zarkhi had been making films for forty years when he made Karenina and his hand is steady, to say the least. The cinematography is showy but engrossing. Between the constant woozy motion around drawing rooms, theatres and gardens and the fact that the film appears to be flickering as if through a candle-powered projector, it looks and acts like almost no other film. It's sort of Barry Lyndon but capable of running at speeds up to Ken Russell. There are some truly unforgettable images and scenes here like the single breath-taking shot where a character decides to take his own life. What makes that more miraculous is that it's followed closely by the film's most lighthearted moment: Kitty and Levin struggling with their ring fingers, which looks too perfect to have been planned. Those graceful acceptances of human behavior made this deliberately heavy film seem worth its terrors.