For the first half hour of Letter Never Sent, the most pressing dramas that arises on our four adventurers’ journey into the wilderness are their romantic tensions and jealousies. Tanya’s affection for Andrei particularly irritates the insecure Sergei, resulting in a physical altercation that leaves Andrei picking himself up out of a swamp, and further complicating their already challenging quest for diamonds in the secluded mountains and forests of central Siberia.
Perhaps the only level-headed member of this party is their guide, Konstantin. Unlike the others, he is not a geologist, yet he has traversed this region many times before. It is clear from the letter he is writing to his wife that their juvenile antics are of little interest to him, and instead his heart and mind linger elsewhere.
“Remembered sitting in the hallway with you. I saw love and anxiety in your eyes. But again and again some overpowering voice keeps carrying me off. I’m even glad not to have sent this letter. Now during every stop near every campfire I’ll write to you about our itinerant life in the taiga.”
Each character is beautifully established in the opening scenes, as Kalatozov creates intimate arrangements from their faces.
Konstantin knows better than anyone how unpredictable the natural world can be, though even he isn’t prepared for the overwhelming turn of events which shrinks these emotions into minor trivialities. This rugged environment does not exist to profit humans, but is indifferent to their aspirations and suffering, tenderising vulnerable minds with its unfathomable, primordial chaos before swallowing them whole.
Where Mikhail Kalatozov once dedicated his handheld camerawork and canted angles to the soul-destroying grief of war in The Cranes Are Flying, here his aesthetic revels in a maddening struggle for survival, bowing down before ravaging elemental forces. We can feel every breath and shiver through his ultra wide-angle lens, pressing intimately against actors’ faces while stretching out daunting landscapes behind their weary expressions. His shift in location away from the urban centres of Russia only further demonstrates the versatility of his high-contrast photography as well, studying the evocative textures of rippling water, fresh fallen snow, and charred forests with equal parts wonder and terror.
Textured ripples in the water – a Tarkovsky trademark here that precedes his first film by two years.Low angles as well point up at overcast skies, forming these gorgeous, minimalist compositions.Griffith, Dreyer, Bergman – Kalatozov joins that list of directors who perfected and innovated the art of the close-up.
Even before these explorers begin dropping though, Kalatozov is already wearing away at their sanity, sinking his majestic orchestral score into a crashing, dissonant cacophony of strings, woodwinds, and percussion. “We are straining ourselves to wrench out the mystery from the bowels of the earth,” Konstantin continues to write in his letter, his voiceover playing beneath a frenetic montage of the party trekking across mountains and fruitlessly hacking at the earth, while the faint, double-exposed imprint of a fire rages over the top. The foreshadowing should not go unnoted here. As if sparked by this raging delirium, the forest itself catches alight shortly after, tragically dooming Sergei to perish beneath a fallen tree.
Foreshadowing in the double exposure effect of a raging fire.
“Nature has turned herself against us,” Konstantin’s voiceover poignantly reflects, though truthfully it was never on their side. Black smoke and haze rises into the air, and Kalatozov uncharacteristically uses a telephoto lens to cut out the survivors’ silhouettes against a grey sky, creating the impression of a two-dimensional image as they vainly call for help into a radio. The smog is far too thick for even a passing search helicopter to pick them out, and so they soon find themselves isolated once again, with nothing but their wits and stamina to outlast whatever the land should throw at them next.
A rare instance of Kalatozov using a telephoto lens, pressing his actors’ silhouettes against a dark, smoky sky to create a two-dimensional effect.
The cleansing rain that falls in the wake of this devastation helps to douse the remaining embers and quench the adventurers’ thirst, though it is little more than temporary relief as they trudge through the spindly, black trees of the forest’s ashy remains. Weakened to the point of total exhaustion, Andrei’s dazed expression floats by in close-up as he is carried on a makeshift gurney, and we too take his immediate point-of-view as he gazes up at the trees in a trance. Realising the burden that he is inflicting on his companions, he decides to disappear into the misty swamp one night and, much to Tanya’s horror, becomes the second to perish.
Letter Never Sent covers a huge range of natural environments, revealing central Siberia’s vast scope of danger.Kalatozov specifically styled these mounds for this shot – painstaking attention to detail, even when shooting in nature.
As the party’s numbers dwindle throughout Letter Never Sent, Kalatozov reveals a robust formal structure, not so concerned with narrative convention than his characters’ psychological disintegration. That each should meet their end in a totally different environment only further reveals the vast scope of the peril which encompasses them, particularly when winter falls and Tanya succumbs to the cold. As Konstantin carries her through the snow, Kalatozov recalls Andrei’s floating close-ups and point-of-view shots, though this time taking her perspective with a blurred lens that fades into a deep, empty darkness.
Horizontal close-ups and disorientated point-of-view shots formally connect these two devastatingdeaths.A lonely trudge through snowy wastelands, accompanied by a sparse quiver of strings.
By the time Konstantin is left as the party’s sole survivor, the score has settled into a sparse, lonely quiver of strings, accompanied by that constant voiceover. Unlike his companions, he was never motivated by the promise of riches – he has something far more valuable waiting for him back home, driving him to persevere against all odds.
“Vera! My darling Vera! My life doesn’t belong to me. I must deliver the map to people. I can’t die. I can’t. I must live. Too much has been lost. Too much has been found.”
Floating on a makeshift raft down an icy river, hallucinations of industrial ports, cranes, and boats entice Konstantin in haunting long dissolves, while a warm vision of Vera gently calls him back to the harsh reality he must face to survive. This is just as much a psychological struggle as it is a physical one, and only those who are prepared to fight both battles may live long enough to find salvation on the other end.
Breathtaking vistas in central Siberia as Konstantin floats down icy rapids. Hallucinations of industrial ports, cranes, and boats entice Konstantin in haunting long dissolves, evoking Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.This is as much a psychological struggle as it is a physical one, manifesting visions of Konstantin’s wife as he is on the verge of giving up.
For Konstantin, it takes reaching the brink of death for that lifeline to finally arrive, and the deep focus image of a rescue worker descending from a helicopter above his unconscious face in the foreground is all the sweeter for it. Suddenly, our weary explorer’s eyes flutter open, and Kalatozov ends his film the way it began. Flying through the air in a reverse tracking shot, all we can do is admire the terrible beauty of this desolate, untamed land, and the chilling insignificance of those who dare to challenge it.
Salvation arrives in this incredible shot, foregrounding Konstantin’s unconscious face while his rescuer descends from a helicopter in the background.Bookended helicopter tracking shots, flying out from the personal to the epic.
Letter Never Sent is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Flora and Miles may only be children, but by the time Miss Giddens meets them in the opening of The Innocents, they have already suffered more than most their age. Besides being orphaned as infants, their uncle and legal guardian prefers to keep an emotional distance, letting hired help carry the heavy load of parenting instead. The recent deaths of his valet Peter Quint and their previous governess Mary Jessel have no doubt also left them traumatised, and so it is little wonder why Miss Giddens is so concerned for their welfare when she is hired as the latter’s replacement.
On top of all that, there seems to be another sinister influence taking hold of Bly Manor which is not so easy for her to pin down. The children’s behaviours are atypical, if not downright disturbed, especially with Flora being oddly drawn to the lake where Jessel supposedly drowned herself. Miles on the other hand acts strangely grownup for his age, unsettling Miss Giddens with inappropriately intimate gestures and hiding the dead body of one of his beloved pet pigeons beneath his pillow. Even more chilling though are the two ethereal figures flitting in and out of view, not only convincing Miss Giddens that Bly Manor is haunted by the spirits of Quint and Jessel, but that they are also possessing the children. These ghosts were lovers when they were alive, she learns from the housekeeper Mrs Grose, and now it seems that taking human vessels is the only way they can remain together.
Lacey bed curtains framing Miss Giddens and Flora, easing into the girl’s unsettling behaviours.Martin Stephens delivers an impressively creepy performance at the age of 11, his mannerisms suggesting an older, more sophisticated man living in his mind.Glimpses of spirits manifesting around the manor, convincing Miss Giddens of ethereal forces possessing the children.
Still, the doubt which Jack Clayton infuses in this supernatural mystery is hard to shake, especially given that much of it surrounds Miss Giddens herself. Beyond Deborah Kerr’s nervous infatuation when she meets the children’s uncle in the opening scene, she also carries a general uneasiness around any hint of carnal desire, hinting at a sexual repression stemming from her own conservative youth. If she is to preserve Flora and Miles’ innocence, then she must first release them from the spirits which seek to corrupt it, exposing their true nature once and for all.
Hints of sexual repression in this initial meeting between Miss Giddens and the children’s uncle, subtly expressed in Deborah Kerr’s delicate performance.Remarkable blocking and framing made possible by the deep focus lens, set design, and camera angle, looming the two creepy children over Miss Giddens further down the stairway.
That Kerr also plays Miss Giddens with such warmth and sensitivity though only obscures our judgement of her weaknesses. She does not project the image of some deluded, Victorian relic, but rather a woman whose maternal instincts grant her empathetic insight into the lives of children and the dangers of their environment. From the moment she enters Bly Manor, she is at odds with its menacing atmosphere, blinded by the light in its picturesque gardens and absorbed into the darkness of its Gothic hallways. The sets that Clayton constructs here are remarkably detailed, filling out backgrounds with paintings, statues, and patterned wallpaper, and elsewhere framing characters within gaping archways.
A marvellous feat of Gothic production design, filling the frame with Victorian clutter that divides the characters.An incredible array of set pieces all throughout the manor, one standout being the statue garden that surrounds characters with grotesque, stone figures.Picturesque flowers gardens and beautifully reflective ponds, offering up these eerie compositions even in broad daylight.The gazebo becomes another prime location for the spirits to visit, and Clayton puts its pillars to excellent use in this framing.
Just as astounding though is also his rendering of this space through delicately subjective camerawork, quietly revealing its grim, ominous nature. Despite making excellent use of the CinemaScope format, Clayton’s cinematographer Freddie Francis chose to selectively hand-paint the edge of his lenses, slightly narrowing the wide frame and creating a claustrophobic vignette effect. The impact is understated but powerful, suggesting a pervasive darkness that closes in on Miss Giddens’ very presence. The clarity that Clayton offers us in his deep focus photography of two shots is also deceptive in its apparent objectivity, in one composition positioning her nervous expression behind Flora who curiously studies a spider devouring a butterfly. Alternately, her anxious expressions are frequently foregrounded in intimate close-ups, subtly warping her face through wide-angle lenses.
Freddie Francis hand-painted the edge of his lenses to create a vignette effect, letting the darkness creep in.Exceptional use of deep focus lenses worthy of comparison to Orson Welles or William Wyler, particular in these two shots which separate Kerr from her fellow actors.
These are piercing images worthy of comparison to Orson Welles or William Wyler, and with Clayton’s surreal long dissolves, candle-lit interiors, and creeping camera movements in the mix as well, The Innocents effectively develops its own unsettling visual character. By the time Jessel and Quint fully reveal themselves to Miss Giddens, the psychological horror has already set in – though how much of this is merely the disintegration of a tortured mind remains agonisingly ambiguous. The governess is ready to save the children no matter the cost, and so after sending Flora to her uncle’s place in London with Mrs Grose, she is finally ready to directly address these ghostly disturbances with Miles one-on-one.
Long dissolves slip us between scenes and into Miss Giddens’ haunted dreams.Dark corridors lit only by the blazing candlelight from Miss Giddens’ candelabra as she moves with the creeping camera.
As the orphaned boy wanders through the greenhouse to the sound of trickling water and chirping crickets, Miss Giddens pursues him with an intensive line of questioning. “Sometimes I heard things,” he nervously confesses. “And when did you first see and hear of such things?” she pushes, only to be met with an unsatisfying reversal.
“Why, I made them up.”
Their faces grow clammy with sweat through this interrogation, and the glass panes of the greenhouse gradually fog up – though not enough to obscure the manifestation of Quint’s creepy, malicious grin pressing in from the outside. As if possessed by his wickedness, Miles launches into a brutally honest outburst, and drastically shifts away from his typically cool, sophisticated demeanour.
“You don’t fool me. I know why you keep on and on. It’s because you’re afraid, you’re afraid you might be mad. So you keep on and on. Trying to make me admit something that isn’t true. Trying to frighten me the way you frighten Flora. But I’m not Flora, I’m no baby. You think you can run to my uncle with a lot of lies. But he won’t believe you, not when I tell him what you are. A damned hussy! A damned dirty minded hag! You never fooled us. We always knew.”
Perspiration forms on Kerr’s face in the greenhouse as Miles’ vitriol spills forth.Deeply terrifying imagery – Quint’s grinning face slowly comes into view over Miles’ shoulder, obscured only by the fogged up greenhouse windows.
Miles and Quint maliciously cackle in unison at the terror on Miss Giddens’ face, and even after the young boy has seemingly managed to regain his senses, the malevolent spirit does not let go so easily. Gazing down from a high angle in the statue garden, Clayton’s camera suddenly adopts a new perspective for the first time in The Innocents – that of Quint himself, his hand raised in the foreground as if casting a spell over Miles. We might almost assume this to be confirmation of Miss Giddens’ supernatural suspicions were it not for Clayton’s reiteration of this same shot a few seconds later, revealing little more than a stone statue where Quint once stood. From this dizzying height, we helplessly watch as Miles falls to the ground dead, though who or what is truly responsible for his demise remains woefully unclear.
Clayton plays a trick of perspective here as he divorces us from Miss Giddens’ point-of-view, first taking this high angle as we look over the ghost’s shoulder……and then cutting back to the exact same angle two shots later, only to find a statue in its place.Sexual repression bursting forth, or the ghost passing into her? Miss Giddens’ kiss on Miles’ dead lips remains an unsettling enigma.
Has Miss Giddens been justified in her concern, trying to save these children from unholy evils? Are these merely ghosts of past traumas, manifesting as paranoid delusions? Does the kiss she plants on Miles’ cold lips come from her, or one of the spirits entering her body? Clayton offers few answers as this governess clasps her hands together in prayer, mirroring the image from the opening credits and sinking her into an unforgiving darkness. In their place, The Innocents simply haunts us with a stifled, neurotic madness, blurring the lines between sinful corruption and the efforts of those who obsessively seek to conquer it.
The final shot echoing the first, encompassing Miss Giddens in darkness as she helplessly prays.
The Innocents is not currently streaming in Australia.
When dessert finally arrives at the wedding reception of Yoshiko and Koichi Nishi, it would surely seem as if someone is pulling a cruel prank on the father of the bride, Iwabuchi. The day has already been tainted by the arrest of the senior businessman’s assistant Wada in full view of the guests and reporters, and now as the cake is wheeled out to reveal an elaborate design modelled after the Public Development Corporation headquarters, a single rose sitting in a top-floor window draws hushed whispers. It is no secret that this is where Assistant Chief Furuya jumped from some years earlier, bringing a standstill to the investigation that implicated Iwabuchi and several other executives. Meanwhile, suspicions that his colleagues pressured him into taking his own life are only ever uttered behind closed doors, with absolute confidence that no one is eavesdropping.
Only by methodically peeling back the layers of conspiracies guarding the upper-class plutocrats can the truth be revealed, though this is not a job for the police, courts, or even the media. True to his fondness for Shakespeare, Akira Kurosawa places this colossal objective on the shoulders of a single man seeking retribution for his deceased father, and thus reveals The Bad Sleep Well to be a contemporary, noir-tinted adaptation of Hamlet starring Toshiro Mifune as the vengeful son. Posing as Iwabuchi’s secretary, Koichi Nishi stands alone against the corrupt corporate culture of mid-century Japan, working from the shadows as he blackmails, intimidates, and investigates his way to the top.
Astounding depth of field in Kurosawa’s compositions, stretching the entire span of the dining hall where Nishi is celebrating his wedding to Iwabucha’s daughter Yoshiko. Kurosawa knows how to build tension without even cutting.Roses and crosses in that top floor window become something of a visual motif in The Bad Sleep Well, calling up the past to propel Nishi forward in his vengeful mission.
Even by Kurosawa’s standards, The Bad Sleep Well’s plot is remarkably dense, sprawling across a vast ensemble of characters who bring personal stakes to each gear in the narrative vehicle. The wedding itself is a tremendous setup, introducing the relevant parties through a Greek chorus of journalists offering backstory and commentary, while remarkably steering clear of convoluted exposition. In his meticulous arrangement of these nameless reporters among the masses of wedding guests, Kurosawa’s extraordinary eye for blocking bodies across the full horizontal length of his widescreen canvas is immediately revealed, developing a sharp aesthetic that carries through virtually every frame of the film with astounding consistency.
A tremendous use of blocking to draw our eye to the small details of Kurosawa’s scenery, but he also isn’t afraid to reframe his camera without cutting.
The shapes and lines that form in Kurosawa’s crowded staging here effectively draw our eyes to the subjects of his focus, highlighting even the smallest details within his ensemble such as Nishi’s quiet surveillance of his guests, and the suspicious reactions of executives when the cake makes its damning appearance. “Best one act I’ve ever seen,” a reporter wryly acclaims at this grand twist, and if this were a short film he wouldn’t be wrong – yet the witty response from his colleague might as well be Kurosawa impishly promising to follow up with an even more magnificent pay-off.
“One act? This is just the prelude.”
A superb arrangement of facial profiles to cap off the first act, staggered at four different layers in the frame.
Indeed, The Bad Sleep Well is only just getting started, as from here Kurosawa effortlessly shifts between multiple narrative threads and carefully weaves them into Nishi ‘s single-minded endeavour to take down his father’s killers. After Wada is released from police custody and rescued from a suicide attempt atop a live volcano by Nishi, he quickly becomes one of our protagonist’s greatest resources, faking his own death and psychologically tormenting contract officer Shirai by appearing as a ghost. Unfortunately, Nishi is not so quick to save company accountant Miura from his superiors, who demonstrate their chilling efficiency through a single, written message – “I know you will see this through to the bitter end.” It might as well be a bullet from a sniper’s rifle, one reporter comments, as it isn’t long afterwards that Miura willingly runs in front of a truck.
The volcano is a tremendously bleak set piece, shrinking Wada against its rocky terrain and leading him right to the edge of the crater.You have to feel sorry for Shirai – the most paranoid and tormented of the lot, driven mad by the mind games being played on him by both sides. Kurosawa plays out the manifestation of Wada’s ‘ghost’ with ethereal horror, even though we know exactly what is going on.
With Venetian blinds imposing severe backdrops inside corporate offices and Masaru Sato’s band of brass and percussion rhythmically carrying through a dark, jazzy ambience, Kurosawa’s admiration of Hollywood film noirs bleeds through his nihilistic take on Hamlet, positioning Nishi himself as a morally questionable antihero. This is a man who didn’t even realise how much his father loved him until after receiving a huge inheritance in his will, and yet has nevertheless taken it on himself to sacrifice innocence bystanders, marry a woman he doesn’t truly love, and implement cruel methods of torture to avenge his murder. “It’s not easy hating evil. You have to stoke your own fury until you become evil yourself,” he ponders in a shot that sinks his profile in darkness, flanking him with Wada and his friend Itakura in the background like two conflicting sides of his conscience. Even when Itakura is furiously chastising Wada in another tightly framed composition, Mifune continues to dominate the shot from the foreground like a hardboiled Humphrey Bogart detective, coolly smoking a cigarette and radiating a bitter stoicism.
Nishi’s darkened, foregrounded profile flanked by Itakura and Wada behind him, like two conflicting sides of his conscience.Tightly framed compositions maintain a visual relationship between each character – the boss, the underling, the bully.
By this point, keen-eyed viewers will have picked up on a visual device that reliably teases out the complex character dynamics in Kurosawa’s blocking, and subtly underscores Nishi’s position as a covertly powerful player in this game. In many of The Bad Sleep Well’s most crucial scenes, Kurosawa prominently features three individuals in triangulated compositions, with each point being defined by its relative position and movement around the others. When Shirai becomes Nishi’s newest target in his scheme for instance, Kurosawa’s camera holds on a long take of his panicked discovery of stolen money planted in his briefcase, and follows him edgily through the office as his supervisor Muriyama grows more suspicious of his behaviour. Of course though, this scene would not be complete without Mifune’s confident, unobtrusive presence in the background, sitting lower in the shot as he quietly observes the disturbance. He does not say a single word, and yet this painstakingly geometric approach to composing the frame ensures that he is always at the front of our minds, crediting him as the man responsible for Shirai’s guilt-ridden, psychological breakdown.
The scene of Shirai discovering the stolen money in his briefcase is a masterclass in blocking, particularly showcasing Kurosawa’s use of triangulated arrangements.
Still, the cunning manipulations and exorbitant privilege of Japan’s wealthy elite are not to be underestimated either. As Nishi hides out with his small crew in the dark, dank ruins of a bombed out factory, Iwabuchi operates from a well-resourced office with countless disposable minions working beneath him, ready to get their hands dirty. Like Nishi, he too proves that he is willing to manipulate and even drug his daughter Yoshiko to save himself, drawing a dead heat between them in terms of sheer determination.
More triangulated structures from here down, in this case using the formation of the reporters’ heads to centre the entire scene around Iwabuchi who has unlimited resources at his disposal.Kurosawa locates Nishi’s base of operations in this bombed out factory, far beneath the corrupt corporation they are fighting from the shadows.Kurosawa using the full horizontal length and depth of the frame here to create an astounding composition, using the scarred scenery to reveal the lingering impact of World War II.
Even once all parties have finally caught up to each other and the finish line has come into view in the final act of The Bad Sleep Well, the competition between Nishi and Iwabuchi remains neck-and-neck. Within the Public Development Corporations’ bank books is the undeniable proof of Furuya’s assassination – all it comes down to is whether Nishi or Iwabuchi will win the race to their respective targets, infusing the climax with an uneasy suspense that Kurosawa finally resolves with a brutal, cynical gut punch. We are not even given the closure of witnessing the train collision which flattens Nishi’s car, set up by Iwabucha’s lackeys as a drink driving accident. Instead, Kurosawa simply leaves us to observe the lifeless wreckage of its aftermath, with the only survivors who know the truth being those too powerless to do anything about it.
Like his father, Nishi’s murder chillingly takes place offscreen, with his smashed up car being the only remnant of his death.
That Nishi should suffer the same fate as his father at the hands of the same men makes for a poetically devastating end to this saga, though within Kurosawa’s cutthroat world of corporate collusion, the ruling class’s total subjugation of the underdog is merely the way society works. At Iwabuchi’s press conference, the reporters who opened the film return to bookend it as well, reflecting upon Nishi’s life with a wary acceptance of the Vice President’s cover story in much the same way they once spoke of Furuya’s tragic suicide. Perhaps they are conscious of the corruption that runs deep in Japan’s bureaucracy to some extent, and yet its bloodied foundations remain shrouded in myth right to the end, resting upon the obedience, sacrifices, and bloodshed of disposable civilians.
One of Kurosawa’s most cynical, devastating endings, bringing back the reporters into the final scene as Nishi joins his father on Public Development Corporation’s list of casualties.
The Bad Sleep Well is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD and Blu-ray are available to purchase on Amazon.
Beneath the open, outstretched arms of the giant Christ statue that flies over Rome in the opening minutes of La Dolce Vita, every sin he preached against two thousand years ago is being committed by its self-indulgent citizens. Aristocrats shamelessly fornicate in drunken orgies, greedy journalists overstep boundaries to fill their own pockets, and children’s lives are chillingly taken by those most trusted to protect them. Still, at least these people are willing to pause for a moment to wave at the sacred spectacle blessing the crowds with his abundant grace – or is it judgement he is casting down, condemning them to the miserable hellscape that they have built at the global capital of Catholicism?
Just because gossip reporter Marcello Rubini laments this underworld of fetishised religion and vacuous principles doesn’t mean he is absolved from indulging in the hedonistic lifestyle that feeds it. Though he follows the movements of the flying statue in his news helicopter, apparently not even that is impressive enough to keep his eyes from drifting to the rooftop of sunbathing woman calling out to him. “What’s going on with that statue? Where are you taking it?” they yell, only to be drowned out by the whirring blades. With Marcello quickly abandoning any hope of chatting them up beneath the noise, it would seem the disconnection is mutual, as he flies away to his destination and on with his life.
A bastardised icon of Christ flies over modern-day Rome, blessing its citizens – or is he casting judgement down on the sinners below?
This is the plague of loneliness which has infected Federico Fellini’s depiction of Rome in La Dolce Vita, distilled into pure allegory. The most basic communication between lovers, friends, and strangers is hopelessly lost in the noise of superficial distractions, stifling the few genuine attempts to find some deeper sense of purpose within an empty life. Like parasites sapping the lifeblood of humans, Rome’s media and celebrity culture are partially responsible for this spiritual epidemic, with Marcello’s photographer friend Paparazzo even being named after the Italian slang for mosquito, and in turn giving birth to the term ‘paparazzi.’
Up to now, Fellini had explored similar moral tragedies within the fables of La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, though for the first time the poverty-stricken woes of the working class are not where his focus lies. Instead, he aims both disdain and conditional sympathy towards the upper end of society where there is a complete vacuum of personal responsibility, while only occasionally noting their impact on the suffering of those below. In true Christian style as well, seven is the all-important number which guides Fellini’s episodic structure, breaking this landscape of false idols into a series of parables that take Marcello ever deeper into Rome’s moral corruption – not unlike Dante’s physical descent into the circles of Hell.
The other key characteristic carried over from Fellini’s previous films as well is his location shooting within Rome itself, building on neorealist tradition while departing wildly from his mentors’ sensitive examinations of post-war poverty. For the first time he is shooting in widescreen CinemaScope, which itself is a fitting choice for this film of eclectic environments and bustling crowds, though his lush depth of field and meticulous blocking across the full horizontal length of the frame lifts La Dolce Vita to even greater stylistic heights that not even Fellini had touched before. At the many decadent parties Marcello attends, the camera frequently sits close to the ground as it observes inebriated guests mill around the bright, modern interiors, while one such gathering inside a Baroque castle treats its imposing history as little more than a consumable luxury. At the same time though, La Dolce Vita isn’t some conservative, high-minded condemnation of modern festivities. Like Fellini, Marcello is both lured in and repelled by its seductive glamour, the paradox of which incites a Catholic guilt that lingers from his childhood.
Fellini effortlessly transitions to a widescreen format, using its full horizontal scope to block his actors in luxurious arrangements, and a rich depth of field to layer his opulent compositions.
Beyond the ornate walls of Marcello’s parties, Fellini guides us through busy streets and neighbourhoods crowded with glossy black convertibles, reflecting the lights of Rome’s raucous nightlife. Only the wealthy can afford to live here, right by the majestic historical monuments that become little more than status signifiers, while the poor are kept out of sight on the city’s rundown outskirts. Though not all settings here were filmed in the real locations, such as the studio sets recreating the interior of St Peter’s Basilica and the Via Veneto, the artifice isn’t readily available from the sheer detail of the mise-en-scène.
Glossy black cars drive through busy streets, reflecting the lights of Rome’s raucous nightlife.Fellini is dedicated to designing the frame through Rome’s magnificent architecture, using this walkway to funnel through his shot and connect foreground, midground, and background.
When it comes to La Dolce Vita’s most memorable and iconic scene though, Fellini wisely chooses to use the real Trevi Fountain as the basis of Marcello’s fleeting romance with lively Swedish movie star, Sylvia Rank. Played by up-and-coming actress Anita Ekberg, Sylvia makes a sizeable impact in her relatively short time onscreen, becoming celebrity incarnate with her ditzy public persona, buxom beauty, and moody sensitivity. She may not live outside the superficial glamour of the entertainment industry, but her radiant passion is unlike anything Marcello has encountered before, and so over the course of one night the subject of his gossip column evolves into an icon of angelic veneration.
Anita Ekberg’s appearance is brief but impactful – a woman to be revered, but never touched by a man as tainted with sin as Marcello.
After wandering away from the party, he and Sylvia approach the Trevi Fountain. She is the first to dance in its waters before inviting him in, where he reaches his hands out to touch her face. Once there though, he simply can’t bring himself to cross that threshold of intimacy. Like the Roman gods carved from stone that stand above them, Sylvia has frozen, as if taking her place among their divine company. She may be revered and even desired, but never must something so sacred be grasped by mortals as spiritually corrupt as Marcello.
The Trevi fountain scene is recognised even by those who have not watched La Dolce Vita, as Marcello and Sylvia cross the barrier into a realm where cleansing water flows from divine gods.
Perhaps then wealthy socialite Maddalena might be a more attainable prospect for the cynical journalist, seeing as how her discontent with modern-day Rome mirrors his own. For a time, he tries to cover that up with shallow praises of it as “a jungle where one can hide well,” though her desire to set up a simpler life elsewhere slowly wears away at his false positivity. When they run into each other again at a party hosted in an aristocrat’s castle, he once again wanders off with a woman who has drawn his eye, yet one who this time curiously leaves him in an empty room.
From a nearby chamber, Maddalena speaks into a well, revealing a trick of acoustics that hauntingly carries her voice to where he is seated. It is through this ghostly separation that Fellini plays out what seems to be the most sincerely romantic dialogue of La Dolce Vita, as she confesses her love and proposes marriage. Marcello tentatively dances around his answer for a time before finally returning the sentiment with a heartfelt monologue, and yet it isn’t until he is met with total silence that he realises Maddalena has been quietly seduced away by a fellow partygoer. The tangible vision of potential romance that faded into a disembodied echo has now disappeared entirely, and thus Fellini breaks Marcello’s heart again with another reason to despair.
The most intimate conversation in La Dolce Vita unfolds in separate rooms, connecting Marcello and Maddalena through distant echoes before she is swept away into another affair.
How can Marcello blame Maddalena though when he too has fallen so many times to the same temptations, even as he has complained of wanting to excise them from his life? His moral offences are not victimless, as throughout the course of La Dolce Vita he continues to cheat on, neglect, and physically abuse his mentally troubled fiancée, Emma. He has a “hard, empty heart,” she claims, while he accuses her of smothering him with a sickening, maternal love. Even at their lowest though, just as it seems they have cut ties for good, there he is picking her back up from where he dumped her on the road. In a more conventional Hollywood film this act might be framed as persevering love, and yet Fellini pierces the glib idealism to expose their reunion as little more than a desperation for companionship, and a passive willingness to let its toxicity eat away at their self-respect.
Trapped in a cycle of fights and silent make-ups with no real resolution, Marcello and Emma’s relationship slowly suffocates. Fellini takes up many issues with the state of modern relationships, and key among them is a lack of self-respect perpetuating a passive toxicity.
Delving deeper into Marcello’s inability to maintain healthy relationships, Fellini introduces his womanising father. It is through his sins after all that we gain some insight into the self-destructive hedonism that he passed onto his child, and on an even larger scale, from older generations down to all of Rome. The discomfort that crosses actor Marcello Mastroianni’s face here exposes a new kind of insecurity we haven’t seen before, reluctant to expose a formative piece of his childhood which lacked a stable, loving paternal figure.
At the nightclub where Marcello meets his father, Fellini chaotically fills the frame with the glitzy spectacle of giant balloons tumbling from the ceiling, and draws their lustful eye towards burlesque dancers. It is during one clown’s sad trumpet solo though, incidentally reminiscent of Gelsomina’s from La Strada, that Marcello’s father grows disinterested and strikes up a chat with the woman next to him – his son’s ex-girlfriend, Fanny. His eagerness to cross that line and pursue his own impulsive desire not only speaks to his selfish, weak-willed character, but also offers some explanation for the vices ingrained in Marcello, who at the very least recognises them as such.
Fellini drops balloons from the ceiling in the nightclub where Marcello goes with his womanising father, finding entertainment in the form of burlesque dancers and one sad, lonely trumpeter.
Between the seven parables of La Dolce Vita, Fellini continues to trace the path that leads from small transgressions to a larger culture of cruel exploitation, most acutely capturing that evolution in the media frenzy that congregates around a fake sighting of the Madonna. Just outside the city, two children from a poor family lay claim to witnessing this miracle, while their parents spur them on. Marcello is among the more sceptical visitors – “Miracles are born out of silence, not in this confusion” – and yet he follows through on his report anyway, feeding the blind faith of believers to keep the news cycle moving along.
A small lie blows out into a media frenzy, and Fellini relishes his opportunity to crowd each frame with people, lights, scaffolding, vehicles – absolute excess in the name of finding spiritual enlightenment.
At the tree where the Madonna was sighted, sick people and their families pray for healing into the night, as if desperately trying to reclaim the Christian spirituality that Rome has lost. Fellini positions his camera at high angles above the crowd as rain begins to fall, short circuiting the flood lights and saturating spectators, yet still they all remain. Their devotion might almost be considered inspiring were it not for the mindless fanaticism that escalates when the children claim to witness the Madonna’s return. As they run from one spot to another, Fellini fills his frame with the crowd’s confused, disorderly movements, growing more frenzied until they begin violently tearing branches off the tree that she apparently touched.
Any objective observer can see the blatant irony of their desecration, breaking an apparently holy icon into lifeless parts so they might selfishly take a little bit of it home for themselves, though the scene’s final stinger doesn’t arrive until the following morning when the dust has settled. In the heat of the moment, a small, sick boy has been trampled to death, literally killed by Rome’s religious herd mentality and its corresponding media circus.
Religion mixes with mass media, and the consequences are devastating, stripping faith of its dignity and twisting it into a violent, grotesque competition.When the dust settles, the casualties are revealed – innocence literally killed by Rome’s religious herd mentality.
After such a reprehensible display of abhorrent human behaviour, there is only one person who Marcello can turn to for some restoration of hope, and whose own storyline is split up into three smaller parts across La Dolce Vita. Affluent intellectual Steiner is the man that Marcello wishes he could be with his balanced lifestyle, loving family, and sophisticated hobbies, and Fellini even sets him up as a spiritual guide of sorts who plays jazz and Bach on a church organ. His party of artists and philosophers is relatively subdued to the others featured in La Dolce Vita, inviting Marcello to thoughtfully ponder his two great passions of journalism and literature, and how he might follow in his host’s footsteps to find peace within himself. In rebuttal though, Steiner is quick to divulge his own discontent.
“A more miserable life is better, believe me, than an existence protected by a perfectly organised society.”
Steiner has achieved the dream of wealth, love, and success that Marcello deeply envies, with his splendid house party framed to pristine perfection.
Only when Steiner’s story is wrapped up in its third act do the terrible depths of his anguish come to light with a gut-wrenching twist. Outside his house, journalists gather to get the scoop on the man who allegedly killed his children before committing suicide, and swarm his unaware wife whose confusion turns to horrified realisation of what has happened. “Maybe he was afraid of himself, of us all,” Marcello tries to reason, grasping for answers that don’t entirely make sense in the wake of such immense tragedy. If a smart, self-assured man like Steiner couldn’t hold onto some thin thread of moral order in this universe though, then what hope is there for Marcello?
Fellini’s cinematography constantly highlights the astounding geometry of Roman architecture, here gazing up at a stairway to the heavens.News spreads out on the street of Steiner’s murder-suicide, delivering the final blow to Marcello’s hope in some cosmic moral order.
It isn’t quite clear how much time has passed between this scene and Fellini’s final episode, but the shift in Marcello’s disposition is notable, having abandoned both his passions of journalism and literature to sink deeper into the entertainment industry as a publicist. After he and some new friends break into one of their ex-husband’s beach house, the night quickly devolves into a bacchanalian orgy which sees Marcello cover a female companion in cushion feathers and ride her around the room, degrading her to the level of a beast. No longer do we see any inhibition or hesitation in his debauchery, but rather a listless resignation to his moral depravity that thoroughly blends in with the licentious crowd.
Marcello’s life devolves into a dehumanising orgy, void of dignity or belief in some greater purpose. These are the deepest pits of hell where humans become little more than animals.
In these closing moments, Fellini formally unites the end of Marcello’s spiritual journey in La Dolce Vita with its start and midpoint, and draws on two crucial symbols from both. As the sun rises the next morning after the party, Marcello and company loiter down to the beach where fishermen have hauled a bloated Leviathan from the water. “It insists on looking,” Marcello reflects as he stares into its dead, godless eyes, feeling them pierce his conscience. Where La Dolce Vita began with Christ flying over Rome, it now ends with Satan being dredged up from its depths, as Marcello finally reaches the innermost circle of Hell and faces the hideous disfiguration of his soul.
A bloated Leviathan dredged up from the ocean, piercing Marcello’s soul with the cold, dead eyes of Satan.
And yet even here at Marcello’s lowest point, still there is a divine presence by his side – a young girl he had previously encountered at a seaside restaurant, whose soft features he noted resemble those of an angel from an Umbrian church. In a key piece of foreshadowing, the cha-cha song ‘Patricia’ she innocently hummed along to while waitressing is perversely revisited in the closing moments as the soundtrack to Marcello’s orgy, hinting at her return and final attempt to reach him. From across a channel on the beach where he now stands with his friends and the dead sea monster, she waves and shouts at him, eventually getting his attention.
Ultimately though, Fellini chooses to end La Dolce Vita the same way he started it – with Marcello’s complete failure to connect with others, even as his Umbrian Angel tries to reach him over the noise of the waves. With a defeatist shrug, he returns to his decadent life, and consequently leaves behind the purest icon of divine grace that he has encountered yet. Through Fellini’s cynical subversion of theological iconography, the greatest religious epic put to film does not trace the paths of great men like Judah Ben-Hur or Moses, but a tortured soul’s weary descent to the depths of an amoral, existentialist hell.
The return of Marcello’s Umbrian Angel is a last grasp at salvation, but the distance is too great. Lips move, but the sound doesn’t quite reach across the channel, leaving this tortured soul to fade back into his existential hell.
La Dolce Vita is currently available to buy from Amazon.
Sin has taken on many forms in Ingmar Bergman’s films, from the creeping doubt of The Seventh Seal to the infidelity of Sawdust and Tinsel. The Virgin Spring marks the first time it manifests with such explicit violence though, deriving from bitter resentment and evolving into soul-crushing guilt. There is no undoing these physical actions the way one might deny an unclean thought, leaving this great shame to haunt every single character who manages to outlive the chaste, Christ-like Karin.
Tragically, it is her rape and murder which sets in motion everyone else’s reckoning with their own moral principles. After being sent off with her family’s servant Ingeri to deliver candles to a church about a day’s ride away, she is targeted by a trio of dubious herdsmen. One is simply a young boy, traumatically caught up in the devastating crime committed by his older companions. As witness to the incident, Ingeri is remorseful too, given that she had been jealously praying to Norse god Odin for Karin to be struck down. Even her mother and father bear heavy consciences, with Märeta confessing her own selfish desire to be the favoured parent, and the religious Töre being driven to commit a vicious act of vengeance upon discovering the identities of his daughter’s killers.
Christian and pagan faith is woven heavily into the iconography of The Virgin Spring, binding characters together by their strong convictions and guilty doubt.
It is no accident that Karin’s death lands on a Good Friday here. Much like The Seventh Seal, the setting of medieval Sweden brings connotations of Christianity and paganism fighting over the souls of common people, and Bergman’s symbolism is perfectly pointed in its references to both. The night before Karin and Ingeri’s departure, he sets the scene for a Last Supper in the family’s modest dining hall, framing them beneath the heavy weight a giant, gnarled trunk which stretches its way across the room.
Always one to pay attention to the significance of his religious symbolism, the Last Supper imagery here ties into the impending “crucifixion” of Karin.
Later, a bastardised version of that holy feast takes places when Karin sits down for a picnic with her soon-to-be attackers, turning them into Judas figures who will betray her trust. Bergman’s photography in this forest is sharp, and yet it is frequently obstructed by dense foliage and collapsed trees, turning the natural location into an unruly, godless environment. It is also the perfect habitat for the one-eyed, Odin-like hermit that Ingeri encounters on her journey, offering ominous answers to her prayers and eventually driving her away in terror.
Another Last Supper, though this one bastardised by the Judas figures planning to betray the Christ figure at the centre.These dead, slanted branches are constantly obstructing Bergman’s frames here, fragmenting shots into pieces that bring a poignant brokenness.
Karin’s shattering death effectively splits The Virgin Spring in half, leaving its second part to open with the herdsmen unsuspectingly taking refuge at her family’s home. It isn’t long before they figure out their hosts’ connection to their victim, and with this realisation comes a fresh guilt bearing down on their minds. When one of them foolishly hands over Karin’s ruined dress, their identities become apparent to Märeta and Töre as well, and at this moment the brooding concern that has quietly sunk into Max von Sydow’s performance mutates into a furious conviction of what must be done.
As he goes about preparing the vindictive murder of his guests by way of pagan rituals, he finds an unlikely ally in Ingeri. Bergman’s imagery is striking as Töre wrestles a thin birch tree to the ground, setting him against a vast, desolate landscape that swallows him up in its grey austerity. Inside, she offers him a hot bath, where he uses the snapped branches to flagellate his nude body in a violent cleansing of the soul, before approaching the sleeping men. Even the idolatrous knife he carries bears the visage of a skull and bones, thrusted menacingly into the table as he waits for them to wake up.
Max von Sydow gives the best performance in this ensemble as the furious, grieving father Töre, mutating the character’s sense of faith and justice.
As The Virgin Spring builds its two acts to a pair of climactic struggles, the intimacy that comes with Bergman’s piercing close-ups uncomfortably turns on us. There are certainly moments shared between Karin and Töre early on which bask in their gentle affection, but even more impassioned are those tight frames of faces furiously pressed against each other in conflict. Whether it is the helplessness felt during Karin’s rape or Töre’s fierce killings, Bergman makes violence feel truly claustrophobic, even burning up a pair of combatants in one composition which stages them behind a hellish fire.
The Virgin Spring is Bergman’s most violent work to date, pressing faces up against each other in displays of brutal power and vengeful fury.
If Karin’s death represents the crucifixion of Christ though, then there is salvation to be found in the death of an innocent. Perhaps it is a holy miracle, or maybe just a quirk of nature, but the moment her grieving family lift her head from the place she was left to die, a spring of fresh water bursts forth from the earth. As Ingeri kneels to wash her dirty face and drink from the small fountain, a path to redemption for each of these sinners is uncovered in his profoundly spiritual imagery, expressing communal prayer through a beautifully blocked tableau. His screenplay is just as eloquent too, with Töre pouring out the sorrow, frustration, and devotion of a grieving father.
“You see it, God. You see it. The innocent child’s death, and my revenge. You allowed it. I don’t understand You. I don’t understand You. Yet, I still ask your forgiveness. I know no other way to live. I promise You, God, here on the dead body of my only child, I promise you that, to cleanse my sins, here I shall build a church. On this spot. Of mortar and stone – and with these, my hands.”
An exceedingly handsome tableau of prayer and salvation, manifesting through Bergman’s depth of field and intricate blocking.
The Virgin Spring may be a fable of Christ’s death and gift of salvation, but in Töre’s journey we also partially recognise the Book of Job. The test of faith which rips away that which he holds dearest, plunges him into deep despair, and raises him up again higher than before lays out a rich theological arc that Bergman meditates on with stirring grace. Questions of faith, virtue, and atonement may be nothing new for him, but their manifestation here through such visceral violence is punishing even by his standards, considering with uncomfortable introspection how these lofty ideals might survive our most corrupt, godless instincts.
The Virgin Spring is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and Kanopy, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
If the pulpy crime novel ‘Down There‘ had been translated to Hollywood’s silver screen a few years earlier, it may have looked like a standard film noir, composed of stark shadows and austere characters. Had it been adapted by Jean-Luc Godard, it might have deconstructed the genre with self-conscious humour, giving the middle finger to tradition so that it can play in the sandbox of avant-garde filmmaking. With François Truffaut at the helm, what we get instead is Shoot the Piano Player, sitting somewhere between sweet sincerity and lithe playfulness, and existing far from the realm of cinematic expressionism. Any remnants of noir that might linger in the pensive voiceover of a mysterious man with a troubled past are practically absent in the French auteur’s whimsical slapstick and graceful camera movements, which candidly float through the bustling bar where former concert pianist Charlie now plays honky-tonk tunes to Parisian patrons.
Compared to Truffaut’s autobiographical debut The 400 Blows released only a year earlier, Shoot the Piano Player is a livelier piece of cinema, experimenting with its form a little more freely. After a pair of gangsters kidnap Charlie and Léna, the bar waitress who he shares a budding romance with, they explain how their boss Plyne turned them in, and the film cuts to a black screen framing the bartender in three circles, greedily stroking wads of cash and happily divulging their personal information. Any time a scene begins to edge towards stagnation, Truffaut will happily throw in short, amusing cutaways like these that whisk us away elsewhere. Even as Shoot the Piano Player approaches its climax later, a gag is slipped in mid-conversation when a gangster declares “If I’m lying, may my mother keel over this instant!” The immediate cut to an elderly woman collapsing on the floor would have surely provided some inspiration to Monty Python’s comedic style years later, stepping smoothly away from the narrative to land a brief, effortless punchline.
Comedic cutaways used to great effect, innovating a style of cinematic comedy that would go on to inspire so many other filmmakers including Monty Python.
Just as Truffaut’s editing offers levity, so too does it prove to be integral in telling the heartfelt stories of Charlie’s past and present romances. From a distance, the confused shuffle of hands between him and Léna as they walk together down a street might seem like an awkward interaction, but through some insert shots there is rather a nervous intimacy imbued in his reaching out and her recoil, quietly exploring the boundaries of their young relationship.
Truffaut is a magnificent editor above all else, and recognises the potential of the medium in economically telling these love stories through cutaways without dialogue.
Being the tools of Charlie’s musical craft, his hands often receive this kind of visual emphasis from Truffaut’s camera, wringing out tunes from the bar piano. If we are not dwelling on his hands, then the internal piano hammers are isolated on their own, producing jaunty tunes seemingly of their own accord, or Truffaut will otherwise catch Charlie in creative frames and move the camera around him in a relaxed glide. This may not be his ideal life, but while his hands are sliding across keys he can comfortably disappear into his light-hearted music, becoming nothing more than the mysterious bar musician who brings joy to strangers.
“Who is Charlie Kolfer? All we know is he’s the piano man who’s raising his kid brother and who minds his own business. Your music brings in the locals every night, and the joint takes off.”
Very few close-ups on Charlie’s face as he creates music, choosing instead to identify him with his hands, his piano, and the effect he has on others.Inspired framing with the grand piano lid dominating the shot, consuming Charlie in his music.
The tragic tale of his past romance he runs from today is divulged through a flashback that dominates the middle section of the film, and which Truffaut dreamily slips into via long dissolves and multiple exposure shots of faces, neon signs, posters, and restaurants, as Léna’s voiceover echoes in the background. While there is usually a light spontaneity in Charlie’s present tense voiceovers that express his unfiltered thoughts, the shift to past tense in this flashback associates him more closely with the traditional noir protagonist, haunted by old mistakes and troubled relationships. Within this fatalistic reflection, truths begin to spill out around Charlie’s real name, Édouard, and his marriage with Thérèse, a woman who regretfully slept with an impresario to earn her husband his career as a concert pianist.
“It was like he’d cut me in two. As if my heart were one thing and my body another. It wasn’t Thérèse who went with him. Just her body, as if I wasn’t there.”
A dreamy transition into the past, layering several images in this multiple exposure shot as if hit by a wave of memory.A tragic long dissolve from Thérèse’s crumpled body to the article reporting her suicide – Truffaut’s editing is used just as much for drama as it is for comedy.
Édouard’s shock and momentary lapse in judgement initially pushes him to leave the room in cold rejection, though his remorseful return a few seconds later comes too late. A melancholy dissolve leads from Thérèse’s splayed body on the pavement below their apartment to the newspaper article of her death, and pieces of Charlie’s new identity thus begin to crystallise. The shame he carries with him is reflected in his new choice of profession, turning away from concert halls and relegating himself to obscurity in a small bar as both penance and escape.
The gangsters’ conflict with Charlie’s brothers takes up a good portion of the present-day storyline, though Truffaut often frames it as a distraction from his actual priorities, right up to the moment he is unavoidably caught up in their affairs and forced to retreat to his family’s hideout in the mountains with Léna. Back in Paris, the glare of streetlamps and headlights blearily refract through the windscreen as the camera drives outside the city’s boundaries, until a dissolve eases us into the bright, frosty landscapes of the French Alps, where the stage is set for a final shootout.
A drastic shift in lighting as we move from the dark streets of Paris to the white snow of the French Alps. Beautiful location shooting all round from Truffaut.
Here, dark pine trees frame and obscure characters set against the white snow, as the key players tentatively anticipate the impending conflict, and Truffaut’s editing dynamically accelerates towards the tragedy that punctuates its climax – the death of Léna, who was instructed by Charlie to wait outside the cabin at the most inopportune time. It appears that life moves in catastrophic cycles for this reclusive pianist, as for a second time he is forced to look down at his lover’s lifeless body crumpled hopelessly on the ground, destroyed by his own rash misjudgements.
Gorgeous cinematography in the Alps as we accelerate towards the climax, here silhouetting Léna in a distant frame between trees.Devastating narrative form in the repetition of Charlie’s lovers’ deaths, poetically cycling his life in fatalistic patterns.
When Shoot the Piano Player returns to the bar in its final minutes, it might seem that Charlie has simply returned to pay penance once again, covering his deep pain with cheerful melodies. And indeed, Truffaut does linger on his agile fingers dancing across the keys for a brief, few seconds, absorbing him into his own musical expression, but it is not for long, as the camera soon glides upwards to finish on a still close-up of his pained, wistful face. The tonal blend of comedy and tragedy which the film balances so skilfully in its narrative often makes it seem as if it could conclude on either note, and although there may indeed be a lightness that continues to flow from the pianist’s hands, Truffaut’s camera no longer engages in its falsely merry melodies, choosing instead to reach out with its final shot to the sensitive, sorrowful character hiding behind them.
No more running – a poignant final shot as Truffaut’s camera no longer floats around Charlie or engages in his music, but simply sits in this wistful close-up, letting loneliness seep from the empty right half of the frame.
Shoot the Piano Player is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
When young, affluent socialite Anna disappears on a boating holiday, little changes within her social circle. Her friend, Claudia, and lover, Sandro, wander the Sicilian coastline together, leisurely tracing any clues that might explain what happened, but this new gap that has opened up in their lives barely registers. The emptiness they feel has always been there; it is now just a little wider than before. They flirt and make love, trying to fill it in with something, anything. And yet everything they grasp at disintegrates in their fingers, leaving them nothing but a haunting, existential ennui through which they are paradoxically both isolated and unified.
In L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni’s characteristic use of architecture extends beyond the angular, modernist structures of the 1960s, as the breath-taking Aeolian Islands rise up into the scenery to permeate the landscape with rocky outcrops and cliffs. The metaphor of individuals as lonely islands in an expansive sea isn’t easily lost in the unambiguous dialogue, but its true power lies in the crisp, greyscale imagery. Harsh blacks and whites are almost non-existent, as Antonioni opts for low contrast photography which matches shades so closely that the permanently overcast sky virtually blends in with the sea.
An arresting greyscale palette in this harsh, coastal landscape.
When it comes to framing his affluent characters within these gorgeous compositions, his deep focus lens is the tool he returns to again and again, staggering bodies from the foreground to the background, turned in all different directions. For these men and women, merely the act of making eye contact requires mental effort. Instead, they are left to morosely wander through natural landforms and artificial structures, unable to find any connection to each other, let alone their lost friend.
Disconnection through blocking. Staggered across layers of the image, and not a hint of eye contact.
At one point on their meaningless quest for answers, Claudia and Sandro venture to a church where ropes stretch across its rooftop balcony. With Anna no longer between them, the two are left to consider how their relationship may evolve from this point on, and upon this sacred ground the prospect of marriage is raised. It is an off-hand comment, thrown out with little thought, and the contemplation that follows only cheapens the spiritual union by appealing to it as nothing but a cure for their chronic loneliness. During this deliberation, Claudia leans on one of the ropes, and accidentally tolls a church bell. In response, church bells from across the city start chiming in response, and suddenly a wide, honest smile stretches across her face. Though it is brief and arbitrary, she rejoices in this connection, this small moment of belonging to the larger world holding more significance for her than any other relationship she has encountered.
Like his Italian contemporaries, Antonioni firmly roots his style in the neorealism of the 1940s and 50s, shooting on location to ground his settings in a world he and his viewers are familiar with. The primary difference here is that Antonioni’s focus isn’t on the struggles of the downtrodden, or the heartbreaking impact of war and poverty. Rather the direct opposite, in fact, as Claudia, Sandro, and their friends lack any experience of earth-shattering events that might justify their constant state of discontent. For the Italian bourgeoisie who sit untouched above the rest of society, there is such a thin line between existence and non-existence that the disappearance of a friend barely registers. The only tangible truths out there are those huge, material constructions which tower over the city, like odes to the superfluity of human progress.
Antonioni always believed that social problems should remain secondary to cinema itself, which would certainly earn him criticisms today of “style over substance”, if that accusation actually meant anything. The vapidity of his characters should certainly not be mistaken for a flat artistic vision, as L’Avventura poignantly expresses a broad dissatisfaction with society, modernity, and above all, the fact that one even feels dissatisfied in the first place.
An immaculate melding of both natural and artificial landforms in the final shot – lonely souls lost in a harsh, modern world. An all-time great ending.
L’Avventura is currently available to stream on Kanopy, Mubi Australia, and The Criterion Channel.
