The milky way: Louis Malle's Black Moon

Black Moon (1975) opens with the initially serene image of a badger innocently snuffling its way across a quiet rural road… only to meet sudden death under the wheels of our heroine’s smart little orange Euro-hatchback. The badger’s shocking accidental demise is our entrée into this film’s distinctively violent world, violent in the literal sense—there’s some sort of war going on, apparently between the sexes, with early scenes involving young men executing a line-up of young women by firing squad, and young women tormenting and molesting some young men—and violent in the figurative sense, with its almost total absence of exposition, its dearth of intelligible dialogue (though there is a conspicuous quote from Macbeth), and its succession of bizarre images and encounters that never accumulate into anything so pedestrian as coherent causality. Black Moon proved to be something of a bête noir in Louis Malle’s formidable oeuvre, a fantastical, anti-allegorical, sumptuously photographed (by Ingmar Bergman’s long-time collaborator Sven Nykvist) work that greatly rewards those viewers inclined to shrug off things like narrative logic in favour of sustained fascination, beauty, and mystery. It’s now available on DVD and blu-ray from Criterion, who’ve made a special project of heralding Malle’s legacy.

Our protagonist, Lily (Cathryn Harrison), is an Alice-figure hovering somewhere between adolescence and womanhood, apparently oblivious to her nascent sex appeal. She finds herself at a country manor inhabited by a small, elderly woman (Therese Giehse) confined to a bed and two young, mute adults (Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey “superstar” Joe Dallesandro and Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart), each of whom seem to communicate primarily through telepathic touch, and a gang of rowdy naked kids who vanish at random. There are a great many non-human inhabitants of this house and its surroundings as well, including pigs, turkeys, a unicorn, a snake, a chorus of sheep, and flowers with feelings to hurt. Lily’s central action throughout is to look at things, most often astonishing or alarming things, and Malle and Nykvist manage again and again to render the images of her looking captivatingly. The most notable shift in Black Moon finds Lily gradually coming to understand that the old woman’s survival, and perhaps that of others she meets, is dependent on breast milk, and the film draws to its close with Lily resolving to offer her breast up to one in need.

Malle’s work frequently concerned sexual development in children, most obviously in films such as Murmur of the Heart (1971) and Pretty Baby (1978), and while its tempting to regard Black Moon as purely surrealist—especially given that one of the script’s co-authors is Joyce Buñuel, daughter-in-law of filmmaker and one-time card-carrying surrealist Luis Buñuel—there are a number of elements that prompt an interpretation in keeping with this over-arcing Mallesque theme. Many of Lily’s encounters impart a heightened awareness of gender, sensuality and the body as a site of numerous forms of erotic interest, hidden threat, and corporeal need. Not to mention the scenes where Lily reaches across a table for a giant-sized glass of fresh milk or the fairly straightforward symbolic possibilities generated from the aforementioned snake and unicorn. I don’t want to pigeonhole Black Moon so much as address some of its fecund multiple readings. It’s a delightfully perplexing film. It’s a bestiary. And it’s one of the most beguiling weirdo-discoveries on home video this year.

Liv Ullman at 70: a look back at Saraband

Liv Ullman turns 70 today. Her strangely angular, deeply sensual beauty; her tremendous presence even, perhaps especially, when silent; her worry, joy and wonder; her sometimes near-palpable warmth; her sometimes fearsome wrath: all of these qualities have kept me more or less spellbound since my teens, when I first saw her withhold words, incite confessions, and move ghostily toward that climactic merger of mind and spirit in Persona (1966) . 

She's truly one of the greatest of them all, and nearly as formidable a director as she is an actress. She's all the more admirable, too, for her ardent humanitarian work, though the greedy movielover in me would like nothing more than to see her return far more often to the screen, where she still radiates so much emotional texture, more so, in fact, with the force of familiarity. For this reason I figured I'd mark the occasion by posting my review of her final performance for her great collaborator and one-time husband, the late Ingmar Bergman. I wrote the piece before Bergman's death, not to mention that of cinematographer Sven Nykvist's, and have left references to the artists' former status among the living as is. 

Ullman's Norwegian, I realize, but since she's most familiar to us in Swedish, I'll opt to say på födelsedagen!

In the realm of art, the inextricable conspiracy between mortality and the photographic image is probably made most palpable and immediate in our relationship to seeing actors age in film. Watch a retrospective of any actor with a long, prolific career, and you soon notice that the way time makes its mark upon that actor causes the work to resonate more deeply. The almost spectral, larger-than-life presence becomes fused with the gradually dispersed pieces of evidence that reveal the all-too-human vulnerability to time’s passage. This betrayal of the myth of youth in the movies is one of the phenomena that make the medium uniquely powerful.

The mere illusion of time’s passage was one of the pivotal elements in our relationship to the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 television series Scenes From a Marriage. Over six episodes, Marianne (Liv Ullman) and Johan (Erland Josephson) endure the most tumultuous years of their relationship, finally winding up in, perhaps, their last embrace that literally seems to exist outside of time and the laws that govern every other part of their ultimately separate lives. The illusion is masterfully created through the intimate collaboration between Bergman, cinematographer Sven Nykvist and the two main actors, already familiar to viewers from previous roles in several prominent Bergman films, and the result is extremely moving.

But with Saraband (2003), also made for television and which Bergman has announced as his final work, time is no longer an illusion: Ullman and Josephson really are 30 years older now and their age is not only noticeable but an intrinsic feature in the affectionate but no less unwavering gaze of Bergman’s camera. What’s impressive about this is not simply that we, for example, notice the disquieting involuntary tremor in Josephson’s hands (he’s 82), but that he and Ullman, two of the world’s most accomplished living actors, have somehow managed to completely integrate their own ageing process with those of their characters. As with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy’s characters in Before Sunset (04), the actors have managed to, with utterly convincing nuance, evoke the same characters they played previously and to do so in a way that manages to account for all the messy life these characters have lived in the interim. What’s more, they make it look organic and easy.

Bergman, however, is not revisiting a previous incarnation but simply delivering the work he’s compelled to at this stage, breaking away from nearly all of the conventions of Scenes that don’t suit his current temperament. Nothing stinks of excess sentimentality or gimmickry here (aside perhaps from a slightly winky reference to 1968's Hour of the Wolf early in the film), but it’s played out like business as usual in the pared-down aesthetic characteristic of all Bergman’s television work undertaken after his last cinematic feature, 1982’s Fanny and Alexander. It begins, rather disarmingly, with Marianne addressing us directly, looking through old photos, giving a brief recap of her perfectly ordinary life since Scenes, and explaining the impulse to end her 30-year estrangement from Johan that sets Saraband in motion.

Marianne and Johan’s reunion anchors Saraband, but, wisely, it’s not made the whole of the film’s content. In fact, the more dramatic conflict isn’t between those two at all but between Johan’s son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and his daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius), both of them cellists living off Johan’s considerable wealth and alongside the phantom of Karin’s long-deceased mother, who remains as beloved to all involved as Henrik is resented. The complicated, tormented (and clearly incestuous) nature of the relationship between Henrik and Karin certainly complies with the intense skepticism of family values that informed Scenes, but is offset by Karin’s youthful luminosity in a superb performance that implies the fruitful collaboration Dufvenius and Bergman might have shared if her career wasn’t just starting as his apparently reaches its end.

As observed in Time Out’s review, Saraband is “less a sequel than an expansive coda,” and while the psychodrama plays itself out in the foreground, the story of Marianne and Johan quietly re-blooms and then fades before once again becoming some densely potent image in their past. The reconfirmation of their love isn’t a magical remembering and correcting of love, as in movies like Random Harvest (1942), but a reminder of the genuine enigma of a love that cannot be managed. The combined effect of seeing both Scenes and Saraband leads us to the notion that while we’re helpless to control or predict the sudden shifts of love, we must stay attuned to that voice within us that might some day compel us to just reach out toward others regardless of what may happen. In short, it urges us to not let time just slip away.

Love in the round: the tightrope world of Sawdust and Tinsel

Before we witness lulling images of a circus caravan wobbling under a dim, rainy Scandinavian sky, before we’re privy to the ongoing love affair between the plump circus owner and his beguiling horseback-riding mistress, before we’re drawn into the rotunda of humiliations and grappling with the impossibility of love, the fanciful opening titles of Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel describe what proceeds as “a broadside ballad on film.” It brings into question the true nature of broad entertainment, what tumultuous personas prop it up, and why, perhaps above all, we’re attracted to their grotesque faces, gaudy spectacle and hysterical laughter. In escapism there is always the shadow of whatever it is we’re trying to escape.

Released in 1953, Sawdust and Tinsel, written and directed by a young filmmaker still struggling for respect in his native Sweden and waiting for that crucial applause from abroad, drifts through the floating world of nomadic entertainers to observe their own particular brand of ordinary madness. The first event is a flashback set on a beach pebbled with soldiers, the image overexposed to evoke the blasted-out feeling of a painful memory. It features an elder member of the circus, the striking but already middle-aged Alma, swimming naked for the amusement of the grunts. Her husband, a gawky clown, comes to remove her from this salacious audience but, when he returns from the sea with his naked spouse cradled awkwardly in his skinny arms, their clothes have been hidden, and he must stumble along the rocky shore to a chorus of laughter.

The scene introduces only minor characters but announcing the major theme: the shame that befalls couples seeking the attention and desires of outsiders yet unable to part from each other. The actual protagonists, Albert (Åke Grönberg) and Anne (the delectable Harriet Andersson), both want to run away from the circus, not to mention each other. Having set up in the town where his abandoned wife and kids reside, Albert will be compelled to return to them and embrace domestic bliss, while Anne will retaliate by courting the local theatre and submitting to the sexual proposition of its lead actor. Yet they cannot escape the circus ring, where marriage must play itself out for better or for worse. Theirs is a poetic, resonant dance of love and its inherent unease, set to seductive images, particularly of mirrors and faces, which Bergman would here begin to close in on with increasingly obsessive focus.

Criterion’s DVD of Sawdust and Tinsel is a highly significant release for enthusiasts whose knowledge of the late master’s work doesn’t predate his initial triumphs Smiles on a Summer Night or The Seventh Seal. Here, we see an auteur finding his mature voice, not to mention the cinematographer who would come to be his greatest stylistic collaborator, Sven Nykvist. The disc features an excellent commentary from Peter Cowie, a short intro from Bergman, and essays from John Simon and Catherine Breillat.