Category: 1973

The Mother and the Whore (1973)

Jean Eustache | 3hr 40min

In the Les Deux Magots café where intellectuals and artists of Paris gather, Alexandre tries a little too hard to blend in with the crowd. He speaks eloquently of the May 68 protests, classic filmmakers, and the state of modern relationships, yet he never quite drops the tone of cynical self-importance, barely masking the lack of substance in his political philosophising. When invited to dance at a club, he justifies his refusal with two excuses – “It bores me, and I have no money” – though it is plain to see the self-consciousness which underlies his haughty indifference. As long as he is in control of his environment, then he can maintain the hypocritical pretence that compartmentalises his misogyny, sexuality, and desperate desire to be taken seriously – an effort which is severely threatened by the meeting of his two girlfriends.

Sigmund Freud’s infamous Madonna-whore complex is baked right into the title of The Mother and the Whore, calling out the male psychological desire to pursue both love and sex, but never with the same woman. To Alexandre, Marie is the reliable caretaker who he shares a small, shabby apartment with, spitefully tolerating his affairs. Meanwhile, Veronika is the promiscuous paramour whose no-strings-attached attitude fools him into thinking she lacks any greater depth than what she presents on the surface. Where both women overlap is in Alexandre’s flattening of their identities, believing they only exist to serve his conflicting desires for stability and excitement while rendering their emotional needs inconsequential.

“You don’t love me. You love Marie. You live and sleep with her, you wash with her, you shit with her. You love a woman and fuck another.”

Alexandre frequents Les Deus Magots café, trying to blend in with its intellectual clientele yet clearly lacking the substance to hold a thoughtful conversation that isn’t hinged on his ego.

The extent to which the director based this character study on his own youth is clearly defined by Jean Eustache himself, who openly named the real-life people that these women were based off. Though he admitted more freely to his weaknesses than Alexandre, he nevertheless shared similar passions and anxieties, drifting around the edges of the French New Wave during its peak with featurettes and documentaries before falling victim to creative block. The concept for The Mother and the Whore struck him very suddenly in 1972, at which point there was no holding back his immense ambition for his first feature film, using its nearly four-hour runtime to apply an intensive focus to the lives of three young adults and their juvenile struggles in love.

Like Truffaut before him, Eustache shoots on location through the streets of Paris, often with a handheld camera that underscores the film’s raw naturalism.
Grim, shabby minimalism in Alexandre’s apartment, which also happens to be the same apartment where Eustache lived – the autobiographical connection is strong.
City lights bounce off the Seine, forming a muted backdrop to this conversation between Alexandre and Veronika on a park bench at night.

Production for Eustache’s epic drama lands firmly outside the span of time that the French New Wave covers, yet it still couldn’t be more aligned with the movement’s subversive ideals. Shot in the streets and cafés of Paris on grainy black-and-white film stock, Eustache achieves a gritty, urban naturalism in his compositions and handheld camerawork, and even lets the noise of passing cars occasionally drown out his characters’ conversations. City lights bouncing off the Seine become a muted backdrop to Alexandre and Veronika’s meeting on a bench, and their threadbare apartments are completely empty of shelves, bed frames, and decorations, leaving clutter to gather on the floors instead. Eustache’s long takes prove to be crucial in appreciating the minimalist beauty here, as well as the dedicated performances of his actors, whether it is Bernadette Lafont crying to the entirety of Edith Piaf’s song ‘Les Amants de Paris’ or Françoise Lebrun commanding a powerful close-up in Veronika’s climactic eight-minute monologue.

The entirety of Edith Piaf’s song ‘Les Amants de Paris’ plays through this static shot as we sit with Marie in her misery, drawing a deep melancholy from the mundanity.
Françoise Lebrun commands an eight-minute close-up with a shattering monologue, shedding her carefree image to lament the emptiness of her sexual pursuits.

Ultimately though, Jean-Pierre Léaud’s thorny portrayal of our two-faced hero marks the greatest acting accomplishment in The Mother and the Whore, with his casting nodding to Eustache’s colossal influences Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. As insufferably verbose as he may be, it is telling that the only thing he listens to other than his own voice is his vinyl collection of French classics and British rock, offering those artists a respect that he never affords anyone else. When Veronika notices his fondness for music and sings a poignant love ballad in a rare moment of vulnerability, it is comical just how jarringly he changes the topic by turning on his favourite radio station, landing right in the middle of a segment railing against the laziness of modern society.

Eustache uses close-ups masterfully to forge a connection with his actors, giving Jean-Pierre Léaud the platform to deliver one of his best performances.

Smugness evidently goes hand-in-hand with insecurity for Alexandre, and it isn’t hard to see how his loquacious brand of intellectual pretence would later go on to shape the characters of Woody Allen and Richard Linklater films, especially considering the gaping chasm that lies between his narcissistic ego and feeble masculinity. It is much easier for him to blame women at large for his romantic struggles than to turn a critical eye inwards, as he shallowly longs for an era with old-fashioned values while remaining ignorant to the fact that he still would have been just as undesirable back then.

“I wish I had known the days when girls, in the streets of our cities, on our country roads, swooned over soldiers. The prestige of the uniform. These days they swoon over sports cars. These days, young businessmen, young executives, professionals, have replaced the military. I’m not sure we’re better off.”

Eustache’s screenplay is introspective, using Alexandre as a surrogate to put all his anxieties and shortcomings on display – and then tear them apart.
Eustache’s camera especially loves this brief shift to a high-end establishment in Paris, relishing its fine décor and lighting.

The cognitive dissonance needed for a radical leftist like Alexandre to make such a conservative statement is staggering, though clearly his politics are as fickle as his choice in women. Neither Marie nor Veronika have entirely figured out who they are yet either, but at least within The Mother and the Whore they develop a self-awareness that their common boyfriend never quite finds the courage to face. When the three of them enter a polyamorous relationship, Marie and Veronica are united in a mutual understanding that leaves Alexandre deeply discomforted, helplessly watching his psychological division between love and sex slowly erode. As it turns out, these women are far more complicated than the neat boxes he has designed for them. With Marie’s façade of stability fading, she not only finds the freedom to explore her sexuality, but also unleashes a pent-up rage she had previously contained. Similarly, Veronika’s claim that she is only after sex from men completely disappears when she reveals her jealousy towards Marie and tearfully laments the emptiness of her carnal pursuits.

“If people understood, once and for all, that fucking is shit. That the only thing that’s beautiful is to fuck because you’re so in love you want to a conceive a child who looks like you, or else it’s something sordid. We should fuck only if we’re in love.”

Alexandre gets exactly what he wants – both the mother and the whore – and yet it is at this point that he also unravels, helplessly watching his psychological division between love and sex slowly erode.

Alexandre is lucky to have two girls who love him and like each other, Veronika declares, but still happiness eludes him. After all, if he were to accept this state of affairs then he must also relinquish control of a dynamic that preserves his simplistic world view and protects his ego. Perhaps this is why Veronika’s unplanned pregnancy spurs such a rapid, uncharacteristic change of heart, sending him impulsively running back to her apartment to propose, and hopefully reduce this complicated love triangle to a traditional two-way relationship.

Predictably, his regret is almost instantaneous. For as long as his arrogance keeps him from addressing his own inhibitions, he will never find fulfilment in romantic intimacy, especially when it is contained within an institution as rigidly traditional as marriage. As Alexandre sinks to the floor in the final seconds of The Mother and the Whore, he has no lengthy monologue or deflection to steal back control. Eustache simply concludes this film of endless verbal debate with bleak, dampened silence, cynically anticipating the birth of a dysfunctional family, and its fathering by an infantile egoist who cannot understand the fundamental virtue of selflessness.

A foolish snap decision that would be framed in any other film as a romantic gesture, and an ambiguous resignation to the bathroom floor as he realises what he has done. Eustache’s ending is both dryly funny and totally hopeless.

The Mother and the Whore is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Amarcord (1973)

Federico Fellini | 2hr 7min

Spring arrives in the Italian village of Borgo San Giuliano with white, fluffy poplar seeds floating on the breeze, bearing a striking resemblance to the snow that has just melted away. In summer, school student Titta relishes the warm weather on a family day trip to the countryside, with his Uncle Teo being granted short-term leave from the psychiatric hospital where he resides. Autumn later brings cooler temperatures, and sees the vast majority of the population sail out on boats to witness the passage of the ocean liner SS Rex, while winter’s frozen grip on the small town heralds sickness and tragedy in Titta’s family.

The year that passes over the course of Amarcord is not bound by plot convention, and yet each vignette has its formal place in the eccentric portrait of 1930s Italy that Federico Fellini sentimentally models after his own childhood. Unlike the wandering odyssey of Satyricon or the pseudo-documentary of Roma, Amarcord never falters in its lively, easy-going pacing, loosely building its episodic formal progression around the seasonal changes and communal traditions of these villagers’ mundane lives.

Spring arrives with white, fluffy poplar seeds on the breeze – an annual occurrence that each year enraptures the small town of Borgo San Giuliano.
Summer brings warmer, brighter days, as Titta visits the countryside with his family and Uncle Teo for an amusing escapade.
The SS Rex passes by the town in Autumn, met by locals eager to witness this feat of maritime engineering.
Winter settles over the village, the snowflakes bearing notable resemblance to Spring’s white poplar seeds.

Perhaps then we must look even further back to I Vitelloni for the closest comparison in Fellini’s filmography, similarly trapping young men within cyclical routines that connect them to a larger community and hamper their dreams of escape. Like his 1953 hangout film, the camerawork here is dynamic, gliding and panning in breezy tracking shots that gently soak in the remarkable scenery. Even then though, the difference between Fellini’s early neorealist-adjacent style and the vibrant surrealism of Amarcord is gaping, as if his own nostalgic reflections have grown more playfully distorted with age. Characters here slip into dreams with careless abandon, dwelling on fables that infuse Borgo San Giuliano with its own spectacular mythology, and distant fantasies that may only ever live in their minds.

This town’s distinctive character comes together in scenes of communal celebration and tradition, the camera gliding breezily through the detailed mise-en-scène.
The town of Titta’s adolescence also possesses its own unique mythology, manifesting with surreal wonder in the dreams and memories of its people.

Little do these people know, they themselves will one day become legends to be wistfully recalled by a grown Titta in years to come as well, colouring in the vibrant ensemble of his life with effervescent idiosyncrasies as they rotate in and out of Amarcord’s narrative. Much like Saraghina from 8 ½, the town’s beach-dwelling prostitute Volpina becomes a subject of fantasy for Titta during his adolescent sexual awakening. Local hairdresser Gradisca is conversely a far more untouchable beauty, frequently drawing stares in her shapely red dresses and hiding a loneliness that delicately parallels Titta’s own discontent. The Grand Hotel where she is rumoured to have slept with a prince also plays host to a tall tale propagated by food vendor Biscein that comically details his wild night with 28 foreign concubines, while the long-suffering town lawyer perseveres through the heckling of neighbours to relay this village’s culture and folklore directly to the audience.

Minor characters cycle in and out of Fellini’s vignettes, fulfilling familiar archetypes wherever they are needed – the town prostitute, the untouchable beauty, the friendly lawyer.

The absolute persistence of ‘Mr. Lawyer’ in offering a scholarly perspective on Borgo San Giuliano is amusingly at odds with its pragmatic, free-spirited people, and it is telling that he is the one of the few to regularly break the fourth wall. “Theirs is an exuberant, generous, loyal, and tenacious nature,” he kindly elucidates, describing their proud heritage that runs “Roman and Celtic blood in their veins.” His appearances are intermittent, yet his self-aware monologues work powerfully to divorce Amarcord from the naturalism it occasionally leans towards, sweeping us into the subjective realm of memory where Fellini is at his strongest as a filmmaker.

Nino Rota’s endless variations of the film’s main theme capture this whimsy with carnivalesque panache as well, and are absolutely crucial to the sensitive evolution of each scene. The motif swoons on strings as the camera romantically glides through a frozen tableau of soldiers, forms the jazzy underscore to Titta and his friends’ waltz with imaginary women in the foggy darkness, and even passes diegetically to a musician playing his flute in a barbershop. Its joviality is resilient, never quite losing its optimism even as it fades out with the village lights dimming at night, and ultimately becoming a pure expression of the town’s own flamboyant character.

A dream frozen in time – the camera gently drifts through the Grand Hotel with mystical intrigue.
A dense fog settles over the town, while Titta and his friends waltz with imaginary women, deep in a trance.

It is quite remarkable as well that every street, building, and monument of Borgo San Giuliano is entirely constructed on studio sets, allowing Fellini a level of control over his handsomely offbeat mise-en-scène that captures a specific era in an isolated region of Italy. At the same time, the scale of Amarcord’s production is enormous, transforming this village into an entire world – which of course it is to an adolescent Titta. The cultural and historical detail woven into the architecture is particularly rich, though Fellini also chooses opportune moments to subtly let authenticity slide for a more wistful evocation of his hometown of Rimini instead, cutting out sharp shadows and silhouettes in his low-key lighting. Even the Victory Monument which stands in its square is recreated with impressionistic elegance, baring the backside of a woman that draws the lustful gaze of visitors, while the small addition of angel wings elevates this voluptuous figure to a level of divinity that exists only in Fellini’s memory.

One of Amarcord’s strongest compositions arrives at the Victory Monument, baring the backside of an angel who draws the lustful gaze of visitors venturing out into the rain.

In those moments of surrealism where this narrative departs from reality altogether, Amarcord moreover reveals a pointed, satirical edge aimed towards the nationalistic tyranny bearing down on Italy’s younger generations. When Mussolini comes to town, the red-and-white papier-mâché model of his face that is raised in a formal procession is laughably cartoonish, and even begins speaking when Titta’s lovestruck classmate Ciccio imagines it marrying him to his crush, Aldina. Suddenly, this military ceremony transforms into a wedding before our eyes, and the fascist pageantry is defanged as red, green, and white confetti is joyously tossed over the underage newlyweds.

Fellini delivers one excellent set piece after another, mocking the obsessive, fascist pageantry of the era with a giant papier-mâché face of Mussolini who springs to life and weds a pair of young school students.

Fellini continues to send up the stern teachers at Titta’s school and the church’s ineffective Catholic priests with mischievous glee as well, and yet he is also delicately aware of the malice which lurks within these institutions. There is no comedy to be found in the local authority’s torture of Titta’s father for making vaguely anti-fascist remarks, nor in their chilling speeches of “glowing ideals from ancient times.”

With baggage like this attached to otherwise cheerful memories, maybe it is best for them to remain in the past, Fellini contemplates, though not without sparing a sad thought for those like Gradisca who were carried away by the cultural norms of the era. She may have been the subject of many fantasies in her eye-catching red, black, and white outfits, but she is still a woman with her own hopes and insecurities, revealed in fleeting glimpses behind her veil of cool, feminine confidence. Perhaps then the loneliness which brings her to tears one night in front of a crowd is also what spurs her to marry a fascist officer in the final scene of Amarcord, even as her own fate beyond the inevitable fall of Italy’s totalitarian regime is left sorrowfully ambiguous.

The camera pans across this low-lying landscape just outside town, where Gradisca marries a fascist officer and resigns herself to an uncertain future. Titta’s absence is only barely noted – this too is a turning point for him to carve out a new future away from the only home he has ever known.

She is evidently not the only one leaving Borgo San Giuliano with dreams of brighter futures either. As the camera slowly pans with the remaining wedding guests across the countryside, their distant shouts offhandedly mention Titta’s departure with little elaboration. Given the recent passing of his mother from an infectious illness though, it isn’t hard for us to surmise the reason. The winter months have wreaked devastation on his family, and their funereal grief has been absorbed into yet another communal ritual carried out with depressingly rote perseverance.

Still, time continues to traipse forward, seeing spring’s puffballs replace the glacial winter snow and old memories give birth to new beginnings. Escaping the routines that govern this community need not arrive as a grand epiphany, but may even be as subtle as a silent, unremarkable departure, leaving one’s name to be fondly recalled by those who have stayed behind.

The loss of Titta’s mother also marks his loss of innocence – a rite of passage which, unlike all those other small ventures throughout the year, is carried out with depressing perseverance.

After all, within Fellini’s portrait of evaporated childhood, memory moves in both directions. Distance across time and space may erode our physical connection with old friends, yet those relationships are revived in the mercurial oceans of nostalgia. Just as the past wistfully lingers in the present, the present sways the past, constantly remoulding it into new forms that reveal previously hidden truths. Only through Amarcord’s reality-warping hindsight can Fellini recognise the absurd norms of his youth with the nuance they deserve, from the oppressive evils and mournful insecurities of his neighbours, to the sweet, boundless joys that have faded with the encroachment of adulthood.

Amarcord is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, and Amazon Video, and can be purchased on Amazon.

Mean Streets (1973)

Martin Scorsese | 1hr 52min

When low-level mafioso Charlie Cappa tentatively reaches for the flames of candles and gas stoves in Mean Streets, he does not do so lightly. There is a reverent trepidation written across his face, but also a mindful curiosity seeking to glimpse the fiery wrath of God. The act borders on self-punishment, becoming a reminder of the damnation that awaits him should he fail to atone for his sins.

“The pain of hell. The burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite. Now, you don’t fuck around with the infinite. There’s no way you do that. The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand, the kind you can feel in your heart. Your soul, the spiritual side. And you know, the worst of the two is the spiritual.”

The vast Roman Catholic cathedral is not to be seen again after the film’s opening minutes – this place is not meant for low-level gangsters like Charlie.

The vast cathedral where he seeks counsel from priests radiates a grand opulence that is scarce to be found elsewhere in Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough gangster film. In the hierarchy of the Italian American mob, these characters are about as distant from the high-ranking Dons and Consiglieres of The Godfather as they are from the icons of Christ and the Madonna that decorate the church’s stained-glass windows. Instead, Charlie can often be found frequenting the underground, Mafia-owned bars of New York City, submerged in a hell that burns blazing red lights through every corner. The visual impact is daunting, though Scorsese is clearly at home here with his handheld camera effortlessly floating through its dingy interiors. It is no wonder Charlie needs to intermittently feel the fiery heat of hell to remind himself of the present danger, given how ordinary it has become in his everyday life.

Keitel holding his hand close to open flames is an inspired motif that runs throughout Mean Streets, forming the basis of his Christian faith and fearful desire for redemption.

For a large portion of Mean Streets, this limbo-like banality is a punishment in itself. Charlie has his own dreams of making something more out of his secret relationship with Teresa, an epileptic woman shunned for her condition, as well as starting a nightclub where he can support those he cares about. In the meantime, his time is spent carrying out odd jobs, and pulling his reckless friend Johnny Boy out of trouble. There is little plot to be found in this hangout film, but while it lacks the narrative momentum of greater gangster films such as Goodfellas, its inertness also refuses to move Charlie any closer to his dreams. If anything, the fragile grip he has on keeping his life together brings a far greater threat of them slipping even further away.

A young Robert de Niro making a loud entrance – Johnny Boy is volatile, reckless, and a complete idiot, blowing up a mailbox the moment in his very first scene.

After all, it is Charlie’s neck on the line should Johnny Boy’s reckless misadventures and gambling debts put him on the wrong side of any dangerous men. Charlie’s brotherly shouldering of this responsibility is more than just a reluctant duty. It is his form of spiritual atonement, proving to himself that he has some capacity for goodness despite being consumed by a life of crime. If he can protect what he believes is a paragon of childlike innocence in Johnny Boy, then he can fulfil the directive offered in the film’s opening minutes.

“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”

The Johnny Boy that we see though is a far more unscrupulous figure than Charlie would like to think. Robert de Niro’s performance here couldn’t be more distant from his intensive take on Vito Corleone a year later, as he violently blows up a mailbox in his very first appearance and proceeds to walk through every scene with an aloof, upbeat swagger. Innocent may not be quite the right word to describe him, but rather stupidly naïve, like a sociopath who lacks the brains to recognise the consequences of his wild behaviour. Believing that there is some capacity for goodness or reason in Johnny Boy’s immature mind is Charlie’s fatal flaw, and it is through his internal struggle that Harvey Keitel delivers a magnificently nuanced performance that outdoes even de Niro’s.

Though often compared to Goodfellas, this narrative does not have the same forward momentum, instead sitting in the uncomfortable, day-to-day routines of these characters.

The New Hollywood movement is truly alive in these morally grey characters, but it reverberates with just as much purpose through Scorsese’s location shooting on New York’s gritty streets, rundown apartment buildings, and grimy bars. The visual similarities to The French Connection are striking, following in the footsteps of William Friedkin’s crime film while developing a distinct style that audiences would identify as Scorsese’s unique voice within a few years’ time. Those scenes spent driving through the city at night with neon signs, shabby storefronts, and lights bouncing off wet roads presage the brilliant visuals of 1976’s Taxi Driver, while the heavy jump cuts, triple-edits, and montages draw a direct line from the French New Wave through to his later career.

One of the great New York films, basking in the modern architecture of its iconic skyscape.
This shot could easily be from Taxi Driver with the bright neon lighting, wet pavement, and of course the creative placement of the camera on the roof of a taxi.
Scorsese’s famous triple jump cut, borrowed from Agnes Varda and later returning in The Departed. It is used to especially brilliant effect here as Keitel lays back down in the intro, and we launch into ‘Be My Baby’ by the Ronettes.
We are witnessing the birth of Scorsese the master filmmaker here with the tracking shots in Mean Streets, hanging on the back of Keitel’s head as he dances through the bar.

Scorsese’s camera becomes even more creative in one reverse-POV tracking shot that hangs on Keitel’s sweaty face as he drunkenly wanders through a party, downing spirits while the world seems to sway around him. He is the disorientated centre of this shot, much like he is for the film at large, bearing multiple burdens that pile on his conscience as the wildly energetic scatting of ‘Rubber Biscuit’ plays in the background. The broader doowop soundtrack it is part of marks another innovation as well, with Mean Streets being one of the first films next to American Graffiti to use existing pop songs rather than original scores, and forging an even closer connection to the contemporary American culture that envelops and isolates Charlie.

A brilliant, frenetic tracking shot literally attached to Keitel’s sweaty face, disappearing into a fever dream set to the disorientating scatting of ‘Rubber Biscuit.’

It is a struggle for anyone in an environment so steeped in secular modernity to maintain any sort of connection to their spiritual roots, and so while Scorsese formally cuts away to those festivities celebrating the Feast of San Gennaro in the streets of Little Italy, he simultaneously frames the mafia as a mutated outgrowth of such deep-rooted traditions. Roman Catholicism does not embody pure moral virtue to these men, but rather encourages them to accept sin as a fact of life, leaving penitence as the only path to salvation.

Scenes of Catholic icons and Italian traditions out in the open, acting as formal reminders of the culture these gangsters have distorted and exploited.
Blazing red lights flood the underground bars where Charlie hangs out, trapping him in the pits of hell.

In Charlie’s case, this relationship becomes one of unhealthy dependence, driving him into mortal peril in the hope of spiritual redemption. Blind to the fact that Johnny Boy’s soul is unsalvageable, he remains loyal through his friend’s lies and transgressions, right until their last moments together. After almost two hours of spending time with these characters, Scorsese ramps the tension up in the final act as Johnny Boy gets close to paying off his gambling debts, only to pull out his gun and foolishly threaten a loan shark. It appears to be a stroke of good luck that Charlie defuses the situation without casualties, and safety even seems to be within reach as the two men drive out of town to lay low for a while, and yet our sense of security is completely shattered when a car that has been tailing them starts shooting.

Johnny Boy’s wound in the neck seems fatal, though his fate is left decidedly ambiguous. Whether or not he survives, Charlie’s misguided path to redemption has effectively been redirected as he collapses to his knees in a position of prayer. With the gunshot in his hand drawing direct allusions to Christ’s suffering, and a burst fire hydrant dousing him in a baptismal fountain of water, Scorsese’s theological symbolism effectively canonises Charlie as a saint among gangsters. Still, the tragedy he has suffered from seeking atonement in a godless inferno is devastating. In Mean Streets, there is no saving those demons that have fallen from grace into the pits of hell. For as long as he is trapped in his own personal purgatory, Charlie must look towards the heavens to be redeemed from his own mortal sins.

An ambiguous yet deeply spiritual ending, spraying a baptismal fountain of water over Charlie as he collapses to his knees – a saint among gangsters.

Mean Streets is currently streaming on Paramount Plus, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV and Amazon Video.

Scenes From a Marriage (1973)

Ingmar Bergman | 6 episodes (41 – 52min) or 2hr 47min (theatrical cut)

True to its title, Scenes From a Marriage never sways from its tight focus on six isolated episodes of Johan and Marianne’s married life, using each to piece together a collage of a fragmenting relationship across ten years. The couple often speaks of other people who are important to them, including their unseen children and extramarital lovers, yet the only characters who ever take up a substantial amount of screen time are those who act as counterpoints to them. In one scene we watch Marianne’s mother reflect on how disconnected she felt from her late husband, while at a dinner party two married friends, Katarina and Peter, pour out a verbal stream of visceral disgust at each other. 

“I find you utterly repulsive. In a physical sense, I mean. I could buy a lay from anyone just to wash you out of my genitals.” 

At first, Johan and Marianne might seem like the most ideal couple of them all, and their friends even acknowledge this when considering the awkward situation that has arisen from their unbarred scorn. “It will do their souls good to catch a glimpse of the depths of hell,” they joke, but perhaps that glimpse was more of a stimulus than they realise.

An awkward dinner party with friends Peter and Katarina foreshadows the vicious conflict to come between Johan and Marianne.
Bergman plays with the distance between his actors all throughout Scenes From a Marriage, emphasising their disconnection in these perfectly staged wide shots.
And then bringing them together in these tightly framed, intimate close-ups.

When we first meet Johan and Marianne, they are pushing the false image of their unwavering love in a magazine interview, speaking about the ten years they have been wed. Conversation unfolds organically in Ingmar Bergman’s dialogue, painting a portrait of Marianne as a woman who is no stranger to separation. Not only has she ended a marriage once before, but she continues to see clients undergo the same experience in her profession as a divorce lawyer. Perhaps it is because she is so familiar with others’ problems, or maybe she just possesses a deep-rooted desire for stability, but clearly she has considered the subject from every angle save for a personal one. In this interview, the illusion of her marital contentment is only ever broken in the journalist’s uncomfortable interruptions, as she constantly arranges them into poses for the camera which expose the artifice behind it all.

Bergman sets his film in motion with a naturalistic conversation between Johan, Marianne, and a journalist interviewing them on their marriage, intermittently breaking up the flow with her requests to pose for the camera.

Ingmar Bergman’s writing is some of the strongest it has ever been here, dispensing with his usual traces of surrealism for a realism that confronts the awkward complexities of his characters head-on. In doing so, he is also creating his most forthright examination yet of bitter conflicts that divide once-passionate lovers, in slight contrast to almost every other film of his over the past decades which have lingered such interrogations on the edges of other more faith-based questions.

Also quite unusual for Bergman is his move to a television format, simultaneously serving the extended, episodic structure of his story, yet unfortunately compromising on his usually impeccable visual style. Even with his regular cinematographer Sven Nykvist at hand, the tiny budget that the network gave them does not allow for the sort of lush production design of Cries and Whispers.

Despite being largely contained within small, minimalist sets though, Scenes from a Marriage is anything but stage-bound, as Bergman lifts it into a cinematic realm through his reliably sharp blocking bodies of faces. By cutting between wide shots and close-ups, he paints out the flow of isolation and connection between Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. Doorframes often confine them in oppressive compositions, but both actors especially excel in tightly framed shots of their faces partially concealing each other, or otherwise slightly turning away from the camera in displays of restraint.

Some very solid framing through doorways in wide shots, closing the domestic space in around them.
It is just as much about how Bergman frames his actors in close-ups as it as about their expressions, at times partially concealing their faces through profile shots, and in this key scene, flipping them upside-down.

When emotional extremes run high at the climax of Marianne and Johan’s breakdown, the two collapse on the floor and begin to make love. As they finish, Bergman frames their faces resting against each other from an upside-down angle, literally turning this intimate expression of love on its head in the midst of a bitter feud. That she almost immediately tells Johan afterwards that all she felt was “lukewarm affection,” Bergman once again damages any hope that they might reconcile. Instead, it appears as if they are doomed to fluctuate between passion, civility, and loathing for eternity.

A classic Bergman composition with the parallel heads on the bed, illustrating the unity and division between lovers.
Ullmann’s head partially obscures Josephson’s face in this shot, fusing them together while impeding on his physical presence.

When Bergman’s camera pulls back from close-ups, these intimate interactions effectively turn into tennis matches, staging his actors symmetrically on either side of a bed, table, or couch as they trade barbs across the court. When Marianne begins to consider how their separation might be judged by her parents and friends, Johan impatiently shuts her down, demanding that this separation remains solely about their own personal issues, though even he cannot stand by his own rules.

One thing the couple can agree on at least is that Katarina and Peter’s troubles come from not speaking the same emotional language, and Johan and Marianne are eventually forced to admit that they are guilty of this too. Despite being highly intellectual individuals, they are self-described “emotional illiterates” who don’t understand a thing about their own souls. There is certainly some therapeutic growth here in recognising this, as Marianne reads aloud self-reflections from her diary on how she has hidden her true self to please others, but when Bergman shifts his camera to Johan, the only reaction we find is his sleeping face. When he awakes, he is apologetic and Marianne offers forgiveness, but the distance between the two has only widened.

So ingrained is this mutual miscommunication that even when Johan’s affair with Paula first comes to light, Marianne expresses total disbelief that anything was ever wrong between them. Ullmann’s eyes widen in fear and anguish, but most of all it is confusion we read on her face as Bergman’s camera lingers in close-up, tracing those tiny micro-expressions that flicker and disappear within milliseconds. Only now does Johan reveal that he had been desperate to get out of this marriage for years, and when Marianne calls her friends to tell them the news, they too admit their knowledge of his cheating. Clearly the reality of this marriage was evident to everyone but those wrapped up in its raw emotions, incapable of turning their perceptive minds inwards.

Ullmann is a powerhouse in Scenes from a Marriage, even more than Josephson. It is also a very different performance from Persona with the heavy verbal acting, but the subtle facial expressions are still there.

More than just an interrogation of a relationship, Bergman dedicates his series to examining the institution of marriage itself, and how the limitations of this contract restrict their bonds rather than nourish it. No longer do Johan and Marianne feel comfortable being their natural selves as husband and wife, as these rigid roles are thrust upon them by a one-size-fits-all culture. Their identities have been warped beyond recognition, and Marianne even reflects on how little the two resemble their younger selves who got married all those years ago.

“When I think of who I used to be, that person is like a stranger. When we made love earlier, it was like sleeping with a stranger.”

When Marianne considers remarrying too, Johan cynically articulates that she will just move through the same cycles all over again, finding only disappointment. He should know as well – he has not found love with his mistress, but just another kind of loneliness worse than being alone. Paula has ultimately turned out to be little more than a distraction from the inadequacy he feels from having his identity so closely intertwined with Marianne’s, and even in that role she is failing.

Johan and Marianne find a strange unity outside the boundaries of marriage, the closest thing either will get to a resolution.

What are we to make then of the affair they conduct with each other so many years after finalising their divorce? Has the absence of a rigid contract freed them from their bitterness? There is evidently still a deep love there, as in Marianne’s sleep she is haunted by nightmares of losing her hands, and thus being unable to reach out to Johan for safety as she crosses a dangerous road. In this imagery though, she also implicitly blames herself for their separation. They might never recreate what they used to have, but there is some hope that they might forge something new outside the boundaries of marriage if they can somehow resolve the fact that they would be threatening their own current relationships. “We love each other in an earthly and imperfect way,” Johan reassures his ex-wife, putting to rest her concern that she has never felt true love.

When words can no longer do these lovers justice, all that is left for them is to sit in silence, whether it be out of contempt, understanding, or both. For all the acerbic quarrels that Scenes from a Marriage expresses so eloquently, it is through a pair of silent images that Bergman creates the most perfect representation of this relationship.

 On the verge of signing their divorce papers, Johan sits across a table from Marianne with his head in his hands, and she reaches a hand out to comfort him, only to pause and withdraw before he notices. Later in the same scene as they sit on either side of a couch, he reaches out to hold her hand, and they finally make contact. Within this formal mirroring, Bergman reveals the chasm which exists between these “emotional illiterates”, turning their marriage not into a battle of husband versus wife, but rather lovers versus the space between them.

Wide gaps between Johan and Marianne, often either driving them apart or filled in a simple act of openness.

Scenes From a Marriage is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.

Ludwig (1973)

Luchino Visconti | 3hr 58min

The final piece of Luchino Visconti’s thematic ‘German Trilogy’ speaks more directly to the nation’s true history than its largely fictitious predecessors, and in striving to chronicle such dense passages of monarchical politics, he also ends up with his longest film yet. Ludwig stands at an imposing four hours long, though quite astoundingly, its pacing never drags. The odd exception here is in those uninspired, documentary-like monologues delivered to the camera by various supporting players in King Ludwig II’s life, offering criticisms of his rule that would never otherwise be expressed freely in his royal court. This is a far stronger film when it is interrogating such dissent as an extension of its rigorous character study, targeting the strange mix of sexual insecurities, mental illnesses, and artistic obsessions which roil around in the Mad King’s troubled mind. Within the opulent palaces of 19th century Bavaria, he loses himself in the decadence of extreme wealth and fantastical dreams, and Visconti beautifully details it all in his exquisite, operatic staging.

With his angular eyebrows, sharp jawline, and bright blue eyes, Austrian actor Helmet Berger is a dashing fit for the role of the young King, who ascended to the throne at the age of 18. His sensitivity is revealed in his two great passions – the classical music of German composer Richard Wagner, who he seeks to relocate to Bavaria, and his charming cousin Empress Elisabeth of Austria, whose affection he pursues. The first half of Ludwig is dominated by these storylines, manifesting as a pair of romanticised ideals that can never quite compete with the realities and pressures of being King.

Some splendid framing of close-ups, pouring over Berger’s dashing features as a young King Ludwig II.

Inside the royal halls of his reign, Visconti surrounds him with the sort of elaborate period designs that carry centuries of historical weight, precisely carved to the traditions of an empire renowned for its ravishing architecture, textiles, and décor. Colourful walls and large frescos often form ornate backdrops to the historical drama, which is blocked through meticulous arrangements extending deep into his compositions. In his vibrant office of embroidered seating and scarlet wallpaper, oil paintings hang in golden frames above its royal occupants, while elsewhere giant candelabras reach all the way up to the ceiling in a cavernous corridor. Softening the intensity of these painstakingly curated interiors are large, leafy plants, infusing otherwise contrived designs with a lush greenery not unlike that which Visconti used to similar effect in Death in Venice. It also helps that he shot many scenes on location at many of Ludwig’s actual castles, making the most of their authentic halls and exteriors as the settings for his dramatised historical account.

Highly-curated production design all through King Ludwig II’s German palaces, here matching the embroidered chairs, patterned wallpaper, and flourish of roses within the vibrant red palette.
Visconti also makes extensive use of shooting in the real palaces, composing his shots with patterns and perspectives.
Visconti also makes superb use of classical paintings within his shots, using them as backdrops and arranging them around the image.

Ludwig certainly relishes this extravagant living, and yet he possesses a dreamer’s mind that is detached from reality, preferring to shape his surroundings into wondrous fairy tale images. Upon the grounds of Linderhof Palace, he whisks himself away into a fantastical, artificial grotto that he built with the intent of staging operas, and in a wooden room that seems to be built around a tree, he hosts orgies with his servants. In his ideal world, Wagner would have unlimited funding to keep on composing music, though such lofty aspirations of enriching the minds of the people is not easily realised with the artist’s philandering and profiteering, eventually forcing Ludwig to send his friend home. Likewise, his love for Elisabeth is stifled by the expectations placed on him as a King to instead marry her sister, Sophie, which itself is further complicated by his repressed homosexual desires.

The fantastical worlds of Ludwig’s dreams, brought to life through his own mad ambition.

Unsurprisingly, many of Ludwig’s handpicked companions are men who, despite his Catholic guilt, arouse a romantic desire in him. Against a deep purple sunrise, Volk the waiter strips down and goes swimming in the lake, while Ludwig surreptitiously watches from behind reeds obstructing Visconti’s voyeuristic shots. When the servant is thrown out, presumably due to the King’s own inner torment, he is simply replaced with another who continues to inspire a guilty lust. Later in life, his hiring of actor Josef Kainz to follow him around and recite poetry to the point of exhaustion manifests this sensitive longing as an eccentric, poisonous obsession, which only worsens with his degrading mental state.

A gorgeous purple sunrise accompanying Ludwig’s lustful voyeurism.

This deterioration is a physical one as well, and Visconti’s stylistic choice to roam his camera around scenes with zoom lenses pays off particularly well when we begin moving into close-ups of Berger’s now-grotesque face. With his black teeth, unruly hair, and red-rimmed eyes, it is clear that all self-care has disappeared from his routine, while his pale skin bears the mark of his reclusiveness from the outside world. Berger conducts himself with obstinate hostility in many of these later scenes, furiously ranting against the Bavarian government who dare to commit treason against their King, and simultaneously digging his own grave with his unhinged behaviour.

Huge transformation in Berger’s physical appearance – red-rimmed eyes, unruly hair, and blackened teeth.

From The Leopard to The Damned, Visconti’s storytelling has consistently sought to understand historical empires through the larger-than-life characters defining them, and yet even after four hours of studying Ludwig’s erratic reign, there still remains something compellingly mysterious about his legacy. As he is arrested and confined to a manor where he receives psychological treatment, his surroundings finally reflect the pitifully tragic state of Bavaria’s own monarchy. Opulent decadence is replaced by monochrome, minimalist décor, with only a few simple paintings and a cross adorning the stark, white walls of his bedroom. This “tyrant who knows no limits in order to indulge his fantasies” is stripped of even those, and denied the liberty to imagine anything but an escape from his desolate prison.

The lingering uncertainty of the deposed King’s memory is best summed up in Ludwig’s final freeze frame, his wet, lifeless face withholding any answers as to how he died. “I am an enigma. I want to be an enigma forever, for those outside my world and myself,” he tells his psychiatrist not long before his death, and through Visconti’s tenderly drawn characterisation of this lonely, troubled figure, he is perhaps, at the very least, granted his last wish.

Ludwig’s final prison is a stark, white prison, a punishment for his overindulgent, decadent living.
A freeze frame on Ludwig’s lifeless face – there are no answers to Ludwig’s enigmatic life or death.

Ludwig is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Nicolas Roeg | 1hr 50min

To live through the tragic death of your own child is a horrifying enough prospect on its own, but in the convergence of past, present, and future that emerges in architect John Baxter’s unwieldy, indistinct hallucinations, that grief becomes a sea of despair, pulling him down into its cold, all-consuming depths. The layers of subtext and symbolism that flow through Don’t Look Now may take multiple viewings to fully appreciate, but in Nicolas Roeg’s fluid editing which swirls between cryptic images of blood, churches, water, and grotesque representations of death, its feverish atmosphere takes hold, haunting us with the ghosts of events that have already taken place, and some that are still yet to happen.

The supernatural clairvoyance that plagues John’s mind may be considered a curse in this way, but as we witness in Heather, a blind psychic he meets in Venice, such mysterious gifts need not be so detrimental. Though she cannot see, the special vision she possesses allows her more insight into the world than anyone else, and the abundance of mirrors and reflective surfaces surrounding her frame her as such, becoming distorted yet enlightening filters of reality.

Mirrors all through Roeg’s mise-en-scène, reflecting and distorting reality like psychic visions.

Water consequently becomes an especially potent visual metaphor, particularly early on when an upside-down pond reflection of John and Laura’s young daughter, Christine, ominously portends her imminent drowning. She is not the last person in the film to die in such a gruesome manner either, as in a subplot concerning a loose serial killer in Venice we observe bodies being drawn up from the canals, rotted from the time spent submerged in their murky depths. If John’s own supernatural ability can be likened to these bodies of waters that contain splinters of answers, then it is important to recognise the necessity of coming at them from purely figurative angles, and avoid submerging oneself in the overwhelming, suffocating currents of literalism.

Roeg’s magnificent use of water as a strong visual metaphor.

It is the latter course of action which tragically defines John’s own arc, as in the wake of Christine’s death he decides to accept a commission in Venice to restore an ancient church, and ironically dig deeper into his own scepticism. Unable to accept the possibility of the supernatural, he takes all his visions at face value, living them as if they were immediately present rather than considering their underlying significance. All around Venice he continues to chase a small figure dressed in a red coat, identical to that which his daughter wore when she died, and warnings of his own impending fate continue to emerge all around him. This city of deep canals, misty alleys, and ancient architecture becomes its own mysterious force in John’s journey, constructed just as much through Roeg’s masterfully inventive editing as it is through the location’s own unique layout of disconnected islands.

The architecture, blocking, and lighting of Venice makes for a powerful, ghostly setting.

In those few moments where the gravity of the present outweighs all else, Roeg delivers weighty, slow-motion sequences, dramatically underscoring John’s discovery of Christine’s body as well as Laura’s fainting in the restaurant. Outside these scenes though, he delivers a masterclass in montage and parallel editing, intercutting the couple’s love-making with their morning routine the day after, and then in the very final of the sequence of the film smashing together the fragments of foreshadowing we have seen throughout the film to form a complete puzzle. Roeg’s magnificently frightening reveal flows in graphic match cuts between symbols, premonitions, and shots whirling across church interiors, all the while bells clang chaotically in the background.

From Heather’s clarified perspective, these enigmatic icons can be contemplated from a distance, allowing their underlying implications to arise organically. For a man like John though, so wrapped up in his own grief and scepticism, the reckless pursuit of logic only delivers answers after he has plunged right to the gloomy depths of his mysterious visions. And as Roeg’s persistent foreshadowing drives home over and over through Don’t Look Now, there is no hope of surfacing again this far down.

Long dissolves, parallel editing, and montages creating some truly striking sequences where barriers of reality and time are broken down.

Don’t Look Now is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

The Exorcist (1973)

William Friedkin | 2hr 12min

Though it is the scarred, pale face of a possessed Regan MacNeil which has culturally persisted as the image most closely associated with The Exorcist, the film reveals its most central concern right there in its title – this is about Father Karras, a priest tasked with saving the soul of a 12-year-old girl, and his disturbing confrontation with his own lack of faith. He is not alone in his efforts, as late in the film he is joined by Father Merrin, an older priest whose past with the demon Pazuzu offers a bolstering of spiritual conviction, and the full-frontal revulsion with which the fiend provokes them is similarly contained mostly within that final act. Up until this unleashing of supernatural horror, William Friedkin builds a creeping slow-burn of a narrative, quietly drawing together Karras’ spiritual crisis and its formal counterpoint in Regan’s gradual possession.

One of the most terrifying movie monsters ever, played by a 13-year-old Linda Blair.

As Regan’s mother, Chris, walks through the suburban streets of Georgetown early on, The Exorcist’s famous tubular bells theme rings throughout, imbuing this seemingly benign location with a threatening eeriness. No longer do we have to venture into Gothic castles and creepy motels to find terrifying monsters, as the catalyst for Regan’s possession remains largely ambiguous. All we can gage is that this is an ancient spirit which humanity has wrestled with for millennia, as indicated by the opening scene set in an Iraqi archaeological dig site, and that it has invaded a corner of our modern society presumed to be a safe place for our children. The paranoia of 1970s America is well and truly alive in The Exorcist. 
  
As Regan’s mother, Chris, passes by the local church, we smoothly latch from her storyline onto the parallel plot thread of Father Karras, whose disconnection to his faith is mirrored in the physical distance between him and his elderly mother. As a devout Catholic woman, she is one of the few remaining links holding him to his religious belief, and the guilt he harbours over living too far to care for her properly is thereby associated closely with his own personal spiritual crisis. When she passes away, his shame and doubt only intensifies, further feeding his personal demons and thus putting him at an immediate disadvantage when he is enlisted to exorcise someone else’s.

Faith and endurance always on Friedkin’s mind.

When he finally arrives at the MacNeils’ house, these once-dainty, wallpapered bedrooms and corridors have been overtaken by the unholy force inhabiting Regan’s body. Rather than turning it into a red-hot, torturous hellscape, it instead manifests as an icy-cold wasteland, void of life or anything sacred. The demonic being which Karras is confronted with is intelligent and psychologically invasive, recognising and playing on his crisis of faith by deliberately failing his tests intended to determine whether Regan’s spiritual sickness is truly supernatural. Through vulgar acts of sex, violence, and blasphemy, it continues to force upon him questions of how this thing, whether it be paranormal or not, could exist in a world with a loving God.

Father Merrin arriving, backlit in the misty coldness emanating from Regan’s bedroom – a justifiably iconic shot.

As Karras’ strength dwindles, the arrival of Father Merrin heralds some little bit of hope. Silently anticipating the coming of its old foe, the demon’s eyes narrow, and we slowly dissolve from this extreme close-up to the street outside, where the elderly priest’s taxi pulls up. Chillingly silhouetted in the pale blue mist that has now spilled out from Regan’s bedroom and onto the footpath, Merrin finally enters this godless space.

It is an exhausting ten minutes that we spend watching the two face off – Pazuzu spewing green bile, cursing, levitating, flicking out its long, black tongue, all the while Merrin remains steadfast in his devotion, barely reacting to its provocations. No music is needed to emphasise this frightening battle of faith and corruption. Instead, it is simply underscored by Pazuzu’s rough, grating voice, Merrin’s prayers of conviction, and the violent rattling of furniture. Much of the repulsive imagery which The Exorcist is remembered for takes place here, but it is easy to forget how just about every other element of this scene, from its stark lighting to performances, is designed to wear its audience down into a state of hopelessness not unlike Karras’. 

Blue, expressionistic lighting all through Regan’s bedroom, creating haunting silhouettes such as these.

The restoration of faith for this lost believer eventually comes not in his victory over fear, but in his literal absorption of another’s sins and subsequent sacrifice, thus destroying this evil once and for all. Friedkin paints the allusion to Christ’s redemptive death in broad strokes, but after the brutally unapologetic confrontation we have witnessed, an equally unapologetic metaphor of absolution serves to bring about a perfect balance. It is in the patient narrative progression towards this shocking test of faith that Friedkin accomplishes something remarkable, bit by bit letting his demented, expressionistic imagery seep into the quiet suburbs of America, and thereby crafting not just a controversial cultural touchstone, but a masterwork of cinematic horror.

The Exorcist as available to stream on Netflix Australia, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.