Category: Foreign Language

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (Italy, 1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Luchino Visconti
CAST: Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Claudia Cardinale
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 90% Fresh

PLOT: An impoverished family from rural southern Italy moves north in search of a better life in Milan, a “big city” that puts their familial bonds to the test.


Movies like Visconti’s celebrated Rocco and His Brothers are much-needed reminders that films need not provide explosions or alien invasions to be interesting or exciting.  I won’t say it’s perfect (several scenes could have been trimmed and still been effective), but I was as absorbed in the story as I am when reading a particularly good novel.  (For some reason, I was reminded of my headspace while reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch; the story and style grabbed hold of me and had me riveted the whole time, despite the fact my preferred tastes run to Crichton, Clancy, and King.)

Since I make no claims to be a historian, filmic or otherwise, I cannot vouch for the verisimilitude of Rocco and His Brothers in terms of Italy’s social and demographic picture in the late 1950s/early 1960s.  I seem to remember reading something somewhere about how this period reflected to some degree the Dust Bowl era in the United States when displaced midwestern families flocked to the West coast in search of better lives.  In the world of this film, we are led to understand that families like the Parondis, faced with financial hardships, were migrating north to Milan and other larger, modernized cities.  Some folks were able to adjust, others were not, and that was that.  The Parondis – Mamma Parondi and her five sons – are determined to make the move work no matter what.

The tone of constant struggle is set near the beginning when the Parondis arrive in Milan and, ominously, no one meets them at the station.  The eldest brother, Vincenzo, was supposed to be there, but he was distracted by a gathering of his girlfriend’s family.  When the Parondis arrive unannounced to the gathering, they are initially met with open arms, but innate prejudices about “country folk” get the better of everyone and they leave in a huff.  They find cheap lodging and the brothers make their first bits of money by shoveling snow.  A revealing scene shows the mother rousing her sons out of bed in the middle of the night at the first sign of snowfall so they can beat everyone else to the jobs.  Rocco and his brothers are reluctant at first, but they rally together and stay positive because, well, they must.  These strong ties will be tested as never before by the time the credits roll.

The film is broken up into sections, one for each brother.  The first section, “Vincenzo”, shows how his life seems to have changed for the better after relocating himself to Milan some months before the rest of his family, but their sudden arrival puts a crimp in his personal life when he is obliged to move in with them.  The next, very lengthy chapter focuses on Simone, a handsome, outgoing fellow who is spotted by a boxing coach and achieves local fame by winning a high-profile match soon after he begins training.

Shortly after this win, the family gets entwined with a local prostitute named Nadia who arrives unexpectedly on their doorstep in need of some clothes.  Before long, she becomes involved romantically with Simone, but tells him outright that she’s not interested in anything long-term, despite his obvious desire to be near her whenever possible.  The affair ends, and Nadia leaves town after having a crucial conversation with Rocco.

The third chapter, “Rocco”, follows Rocco after he serves a brief tour of duty in the military, after which he fatefully reconnects with Nadia after over a year.  They fall in love, and Nadia surprises herself by truly falling for Rocco despite her previous wishes not to be involved in anything permanent.  But when Simone discovers their relationship, events are set in motion that are as devastating as they are unexpected.

(The last two chapters, “Ciro” and “Luca”, focus on the fallout of the previous three sections.)

Rocco and His Brothers feels like it was adapted from an Italian opera.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if I learned that someone had turned it into an opera.  There are emotions and reversals and shocks and tragedies on display here that rival anything on American daytime television, but it rarely feels like soap opera.  Yes, there are some moments when the characters and the filmmakers take the time to deliver speeches that don’t seem to spring out of any true motivation other than to pound home the point the director is trying to make at that stage in the film.  (I’m thinking especially of Ciro’s final scene.)  But I am inclined to forgive these momentary lapses in momentum because, in retrospect, they lend emotional weight to the characters.  Novels can achieve this with a paragraph or two detailing the inner thoughts of their characters, but in film, the characters have to tell you what they’re thinking, verbally or nonverbally, or the audience gets lost.

I have hinted only vaguely about certain tragic aspects of the story.  This is because Visconti and his editor took great pains to allow them to arrive organically in a way that took me completely by surprise, so it would be wrong of me to give those surprises away.  For those of you who have seen the film, you know what I’m talking about.  It’s these moments that elevate Rocco and His Brothers into something more than a mere soap opera.  Some of the acting will strike modern audiences as exercises in histrionics, especially as exhibited by Mamma Parondi and Nadia.  To that I would say: “What do you want from opera, subtlety?”

Rocco and His Brothers is one of those elusive films that I’d heard and read about for some time now, and I’m grateful that I’ve finally seen it.  I’ll be honest, it’s not exactly a film I’ll take down and rewatch multiple times in a year, but it’s worth seeking out if you’re looking for a good old-fashioned family drama that’s not quite a tear-jerker, but it’s certainly no bed of roses, either.  Martin Scorsese once deemed it one of 39 foreign films every moviegoer should see before they die.  And if you can’t trust Marty, who can you trust?

HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE (1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Marcel Ophüls
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: A documentary about Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon, France, and his life after the war.


There is so much to unpack in Hotel Terminus, Marcel Ophüls’ epic documentary, that I am hesitant to even try to write about it.  In terms of the craft of filmmaking, there is nothing to critique aside from the skillful editing, which surprisingly makes its 4.5-hour running time fly by.  In terms of content…I mean, where could I even begin?  Here’s a summary I found online: “Marcel Ophüls’ riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed ‘The Butcher of Lyon.’ Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape – with U.S. help – to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.”

Wait, what?  The United States intelligence apparatus smuggled a brutal Nazi officer out of Europe?  Six years after the Nuremberg trials?  Yes.  Ophüls interviews various players from US Army Counterintelligence – known as the “CIC” in the 1940s – who state flatly on camera that Barbie had connections and information regarding Russian communists, so it was in America’s best interests to keep Barbie alive and out of prison and get him to South America.

So, at the very least, today I learned something.

This sprawling documentary also features eyewitnesses to Barbie’s atrocities in Lyon, France, where he was stationed.  I don’t want to recite a laundry list of these terrible acts, but the film does key on two specific events during his tenure: the arrest and execution of Jean Moulin, a French Resistance leader, and the deportation to Auschwitz of 44 Jewish children from an orphanage in a town called Izieu.  Ophüls interviews scores of people who were in the room when Barbie arrested Moulin.  Many of them disagree who was to blame – a rat or someone with loose lips – but they all remember who made the arrest.  The stories from witnesses to the deportation of the children are beyond belief.

What is the point of a documentary like this?  Why should it be important for a filmgoer, or just an average Joe, to block out nearly five hours to watch a series of talking heads tell story after shocking story about the inhuman tactics of a monster?  Well, for one thing, that’s not the whole story.  Hotel Terminus actually has an arc, because Barbie was discovered living in Bolivia in 1972.  In 1983, he was extradited to France where he was convicted on numerous crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1991.  The filmmakers didn’t know that in 1988, of course, but it felt good to throw that factoid in there.  Another interesting factoid: America apologized to France in 1983 for helping him escape to Bolivia in the first place.  Better late than never, I guess?

So, it’s good to know while watching that the man in question will eventually get his just desserts.  But there are times when it almost feels like the “A-story” of Barbie’s eventual arrest gets overwhelmed by the “B-story,” which is the paradoxical attitudes of many of the people interviewed.  One man wonders, what’s the point of it all?  Barbie committed his crimes forty years earlier, and France has a statute of limitations of twenty years, so just let the man grow old and die in obscurity.  Another theorizes that stirring up old memories of the war when many would rather move on actually created more civil unrest in France and Germany.  Barbie’s defense attorney at his war crimes trial (a Eurasian Frenchman) wonders why Barbie is being tried for crimes against humanity while France’s own acts of torture and horrific imprisonment during the Battle of Algiers are discreetly ignored.

And always Ophüls has rejoinders for each of these statements with stories of families separated, men and women tortured, family members whisked away and never seen again.  One woman recalls being tortured as a girl by Barbie, while her mother was told, “This is YOUR fault; if you would just talk, we would stop.”  And so on, ad infinitum.  But I am compelled to point out again how compelling this was.  These and so many other stories like them did not depress me or lower my spirits.  Instead, I was riveted.  I can’t explain why.  For myself, I felt like this was something I needed to hear, and other people needed to hear.  Here was a record of something that really happened, to real people in a real place in a time that was not so long ago, in the grand scheme of things.

There was also a section that really made me take notice.  Many, MANY people said on camera that, in his old age, Barbie was “a good man.”  He was friendly to his neighbors – even some Jews! – and a loving father.  His daughter-in-law is interviewed, and she states that he always had a kind word for her and always tried to include her in his family circle, even after her husband (Barbie’s son) died.  It made me think about the driving force behind last year’s brilliant Zone of Interest: the banality of evil.  Perhaps among many others, Barbie was living proof that evil will not always wear a black hat and have glowing red eyes.  Evil is just as capable of engaging you in friendly conversation as the next man.  (I was also reminded of a line from David Fincher’s Se7en: “If we catch John Doe and he turns out to be the devil, I mean if he’s Satan himself, that MIGHT live up to our expectations.  But he’s not the devil.  He’s just a man.”)  Is that one of the lessons of this film?  That evil is not supernatural or some kind of horrific aberration, but just a small person with delusions of grandeur?  Discuss.

There are echoes of Schindler’s List in the details of these stories, but Ophüls notably never uses any archival footage of concentration camps or of the Holocaust itself.  He apparently felt that audiences had, regrettably, become accustomed to the gruesome imagery of those events.  Instead, he relies on the viewer’s imagination to provide all the necessary details.

He also, tellingly, never provides answers to the stickiest questions that surrounded Barbie’s trial, especially the one about France being willing to charge him with crimes against humanity while ignoring their own history in Algeria.  I thought about that one a lot in relation to America.  Our country is great for a whole host of reasons, but it’s not perfect.  We rise up in vocal disapproval when a foreign country commits genocide, or when a country’s citizenry is threatened by totalitarianism…while ignoring (for the most part) the fact that our country exists because of genocidal practices against indigenous Americans.  Am I suggesting that perhaps Ophüls is wrong to focus on Barbie and not France’s history?  Absolutely not.  Barbie was a monster and got what he deserved, belatedly or not.  But I am suggesting that the film raises questions that deserve further discussion.

Ultimately, I’m glad I saw Hotel Terminus, and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone who asks.  The visceral nature of the stories told by some of the subjects is enough to make it compelling, even without the overarching structure of following Barbie to his downfall.  It’s a challenging watch, to be sure, but I promise you’ll never be bored.  Trust me.

DEKALOG (Poland, 1989-1990)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Krzysztof Kieslowski
CAST: A host of Polish actors unknown to me
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: Not Rated

PLOT: Director Krzysztof Kieslowski presents ten short films, each related in one way or another with one or more of the biblical Ten Commandments.


Nearly every review or description I’ve ever read of Kieslowski’s Dekalog states that the ten 1-hour films in this ambitious cycle are each based on one of the biblical Ten Commandments.  Not so.  I also assumed that each film would somehow be a moral tale ending with an unequivocal statement about right and wrong.  Also not true.  These films are the most mature and literate explorations, not of morals, but of ethics, that I’ve ever seen.  We believe we know what’s right and what’s wrong, and that we would have the ethical fortitude to do what’s right, given the option.  Dekalog argues that, in today’s world, whether it’s late-1980s Poland or present-day America, the moral absolutes dictated by the Ten Commandments are unachievable.  All we can do is choose what we believe is the right thing and hope for the best.

Kieslowski, much better known perhaps for his Three Colors trilogy, seems to have written these films, along with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, as case studies or thought experiments for ethical quandaries.  In Dekalog Two, a woman has a semi-comatose husband.  She approaches the doctor with a dilemma: she is pregnant with another man’s child, so she must know whether her husband will recover or if he is beyond hope.  If the doctor says he will recover, she will get an abortion.  If the doctor says he will die, she’ll keep the baby.  Now the doctor has two lives in his hands.

In Dekalog Four, a young woman’s father is away on business.  She discovers a letter, hidden by her father, from her dead mother, that says, “Open after my death.”  She opens it (dishonoring her father’s obvious wish that it not be found), and what she finds could radically redefine her relationship with her father, along with resolving some sexually ambiguous feelings she’s been having lately.

I could go on and on.  For the curious, a full synopsis of each film in the cycle can be found online.  But you get the idea.  Each self-contained story is a “what would you do” scenario where your answer may tell you more about yourself than you anticipated.  They seem more inspired by the format of Jesus’ parables instead of Moses’ tablets, just without the neat and tidy ending.  (Well, Dekalog Ten’s ending is cut-and-dried, but that’s all you’ll get out of me in terms of endings.)

For me, the weakest of the ten films was Dekalog Two, despite its sensational premise.  It gets a little too mystical for its own good at one point.  But setting that one aside, I was amazed at how enthralled I was while watching each chapter.  Kieslowski begins each film almost as if you were walking into the middle of the story instead of starting cleanly at the beginning.  Characters are introduced who appear to have no connection whatsoever, and you must be a little patient as the story develops.  At first, I found this approach a little discombobulating, but as I got more accustomed to it, I thought I could see its purpose.  This is real life, not the kind of storytelling we are accustomed to from Hollywood and (let it be said) elsewhere.  The stories we remember and retell from our lives don’t begin with a lovely credit sequence and stirring music.  It’s usually something like, “So there I was, at the doctor’s office, and he told me I was impotent…”

This method also had the effect of sharpening my attention as each film began.  Since I wasn’t being spoon-fed the story, I paid close attention to each shot, trying to memorize a face or recall a name.  And each story had this remarkable ability to lure me into complacency or banality, and suddenly BANG, a monkey gets thrown into the wrench, reshaping everything you just saw, or what you thought you were going to see.  I’m thinking especially of Dekalog Four, with the dead mother’s letter; Dekalog Seven with the ostensible kidnapping with hidden motives; and Dekalog Ten where a father’s death brings two estranged brothers together for one last surprise in his heavily secured apartment.

Because I was watching so carefully, there were several things I noticed that carried over from one seemingly unrelated tale to the next:

  • REFLECTIONS: Every film makes liberal use of reflections for some compositions, whether it’s a scene shot in a mirror or a pane of glass or a puddle or even just reflections on the lens of the camera.  I am not enough of a film scholar to elaborate what that could mean, aside from the obvious: these films are intended to elicit self-reflection from the viewer.  Passive viewing of these films simply will not do.
  • CAMEOS: All ten films take place mostly in or around the same imposing apartment complex in Warsaw.  (Look closely at the structures and the beams for the outside porches resemble church crosses.)  As such, characters from one chapter will “bleed” into at least one of the others.  The father in Dekalog One appears near the beginning of Dekalog Three.  The pregnant wife in Dekalog Two is trying to catch a cab in Dekalog Five.  The impotent husband in Dekalog Nine shows up in reverse order as a bike rider in Dekalog Six.
  • EXTERIORS: I cannot recall more than two or three shots in all ten films that showed an unambiguously sunny day.  Daytimes in Dekalog are invariably overcast and gloomy.  If we are meant to interpret that as a symbol, and the apartment complex is the world we all inhabit, then Kieslowski seems to be saying that the world is a dark and dreary place, indeed.  Is there any hope at all in this gray cycle of films?  I think so.  Many of the films end on, if not exactly a happy note, then at least a hopeful note.  For myself, I watch the credits roll on each one and I imagine the characters making peace with their choices, because…well, that’s what I have to do daily.  If I can do it, they can do it.  Or vice versa.
  • THE WATCHER: There is one actor who appears in nine of the ten films in Dekalog.  He never speaks, is never named (on IMDb, he is credited simply as “Young Man”), and never directly interacts with any other character.  I took to calling him The Watcher, after the Marvel Comics character who is doomed to spend eternity witnessing human history without the ability to help in any way.  What does he represent?  Is he an angel, in keeping with the cycle’s biblical name?  He seems to appear whenever a main character is about to make a choice of some kind; in one instance, he gives an almost imperceptible shake of the head as if to say, “Don’t do this.”  If you ask me, I would say the Young Man is the embodiment of guilt, a warning stare from some cosmic force that is saying, “Can you live with what you’re about to do?”  The main characters make their own choices, deciding what they can or can’t live with.  Discuss.

I hope all this mumbo jumbo hasn’t deterred you from seeking out this series and giving it a go.  All the same, as much as I do recommend Dekalog, I’m a little stuck on who exactly I would recommend it to.  All told, it’s a 9-hour-34-minute excursion into the kind of ethical dilemmas that could occupy an entire semester at a film school…and probably has.  On the other hand, with streaming popularity at an all-time high (depending on who you ask), one can think of it as a 10-part HBO miniseries…in Polish.  After all, that’s how it was originally envisioned anyway, as a limited series for Polish television. Take a chance.  Find a copy to buy online.  Or stream it if anyone is offering it.  I promise, you will be mulling over these films long after the latest Venom movie has faded from memory.  (Sorry, cheap shot, couldn’t resist, but you know I’m right.)

LACOMBE, LUCIEN (France, 1974)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Louis Malle
CAST: Pierre Blaise, Aurore Clément, Holger Löwenadler
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: In 1944, an 18-year-old boy from a small French village collaborates with the Gestapo and subsequently falls in love with a Jewish girl.


The effectiveness of Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien may depend partially on how much you know about cinema history after World War II.  It’s a historical fact that there were French countrymen who sided with the invading Nazis, going so far as to infiltrate the French Resistance and inform on their neighbors to the Gestapo.  When the war ended, that fact was politely and discreetly avoided in war films for decades.  No one wanted to spoil the notion that the whole of France united with each other to harass the Nazis at every opportunity, and that the Resistance fighters were unambiguously, morally pure.  In France, surviving collaborators went about their business, some more anonymously than others.

In 1974, Lacombe, Lucien became one of the first, if not THE first, French film to not only broach the topic of Nazi collaborators, but also to depict the French Resistance as employing guerilla tactics and carrying out assassinations that were just as morally questionable as any other similar attacks in history.  It was a bold move, to be sure.  Even when you remove that context from the film, when you watch it as a stand-alone piece of cinema, it is still makes for compelling viewing.  However, for my part, the very ending of the movie left me frustrated.  While French audiences may have seen it differently in 1974, I saw it almost as if the filmmakers simply ran out of story and used a title card to tie things up in a bow.  But the journey to get to those final frames is worthwhile, even though the lead character is one of the most loathsome people I’ve ever seen on film.  I would compare him to Amon Goeth from Schindler’s List, not because they are similar characters, but because they elicited the same reaction from me: disgust.  (Or maybe they are similar characters…you tell me.)

The film opens in 1944, just a few weeks after D-Day, in a small town in southwest France.  We first meet young Lucien Lacombe, maybe 17 or 18, mopping a hospital floor, apparently doing a good deed for his community.  Through an open window, he spies a small songbird chirping on a tree branch.  Lucien makes sure no one is watching, pulls a slingshot from his pocket, takes careful aim, and kills the little bird with one shot.  He smirks and goes back to the business of mopping.  We will witness many other instances of Lucien killing other animals.

Indeed, many of these scenes are done for real: the actor playing Lucien clearly kills several rabbits with a shotgun, one with a wooden club.  In another scene, he catches, decapitates, and calmly starts to pluck a chicken for dinner, all in one unbroken take.  Now, this would have been normal behavior for someone living in a farm community in the French countryside, where someone has to prepare tonight’s dinner.  The difference is, Lucien seems to enjoy these tasks a little too much.  Even worse, though, are the times where he is utterly impassive about it, especially with the one rabbit he catches in the snare.  These are hard scenes to watch, but in hindsight, they are vital to unpacking or interpreting Lucien’s actions later in the film.

Through a series of events that reminded me a little bit of Goodfellas (“All my life, I wanted to be a gangster”), Lucien allows himself to be recruited into a cadre of French collaborators whose base of operations is a fancy hotel where their opulent lifestyle is a rebuke to those silly Resistance fighters who must scrape a living from the dirt.  He is more than willing to do what it takes to get a taste of the good life.  He turns in a schoolteacher who is also a Resistance officer; he makes a show of being contrite about it, but he quickly gets over it.

The rest of the movie shows Lucien puffed up with pride in his new social status, bullying anyone and everyone who dares to talk down to him.  There are, to be sure, broader statements being made here about the psyche of anyone who deludes themselves into believing in their inherent superiority over their fellow man just because they’re handed a membership card, regardless of how small-minded or shallow they might be.  However, during the movie, I never thought of those broader implications.  It’s a testament to how well the movie was directed and acted that I was concerned only with how Lucien behaved and acted, and not with whatever director Malle was trying to say from a metaphorical or allegorical standpoint.

To watch Lucien bully people around was sickening and pathetic.  He is introduced to a tailor, Albert Horn, who will make him some new clothes.  Lucien’s friend in the Gestapo casually informs him that Albert is a Jew who is only allowed to live in relative peace because of his skills as a tailor, and because he makes regular payoffs to the Gestapo.  Albert has a 20-something-year-old daughter, improbably named France, with whom Lucien is almost immediately smitten, despite her ethnicity.  He tries to impress France by getting her to the front of a food line, but she demurs.  When people in line complain, he smugly explains he’s with the German police and he can do whatever he wants.  The idea of that kind of power in the hands of someone as despicable as Lucien made me as angry as I can ever recall being while watching a film.

In the background of Lucien’s plotline is the shadowy Resistance itself.  Various members of the French collaborators are being killed here and there, certainly not a bad thing.  But the aftermath of their attacks is no less disquieting than anything perpetrated by the pro-Nazi collaborators, especially after a brazen attack on the fancy hotel headquarters, where the bodies of the collaborators are just as dead as the bodies of the Resistance fighters.  Perhaps the film is making a point that dead is dead, no matter which side you’re on, so you’d better be sure you’re dead for the right reasons because history will remember you one way or the other.

At the center of all this is Lucien’s face with his cold eyes and virtually expressionless mouth.  He doesn’t smile, he smirks.  He threatens Albert and France with exposure and arrest if Albert doesn’t allow Lucien to date, then marry, France.  For her part, France is wise enough to know when to humor Lucien and when to go along with his behavior, for the good of her father.  Lucien, besotted with power, is too clueless to realize how smart she really is.

I have a general guideline that I dislike movies with rotten characters at the center of them.  But I must admit that Lacombe, Lucien sucked me into the story and kept me there, despite how much I disliked Lucien himself.  I guess I wanted to see how much the filmmakers would allow him to get away with before he was swatted down.  Whether he gets swatted down or not is for you to discover, but let it be said that the ending manages to have it both ways, which was challenging for me.  I both did and didn’t get the kind of closure I wanted, which explains my somewhat median rating despite how well-made the film is.

It may be that I’m not old enough, or knowledgeable enough, to really appreciate the impact Lacombe, Lucien had on 1974 audiences.  I can only report how it made me feel right now.  It made me feel anger and indignance towards Lucien throughout the whole movie, even when he makes a crucial decision that seems as if it will redeem his character.  I don’t think it does, because the damage he instigated has been done and cannot be undone by a single act of contrition when it’s far too late to make any difference.  Perhaps that’s not a very Christian idea, but that’s how the movie made me feel, regardless.  Lucien deserves what he gets and more.  Does that apply to the real-life French collaborators, many of whom were still alive when this movie was released?  It’s not for me to pass judgement on those people.  But I can’t deny how the movie itself made me feel towards the people within the world of the film.

THE VANISHING (Netherlands, 1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: George Sluizer
CAST: Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Fresh

PLOT: A young couple, Rex and Saskia, stop at a service station during a road trip.  Saskia vanishes without a trace, prompting a years-long search by Rex…while an unassuming family man monitors his progress.


[WARNING: This review contains unavoidable spoilers.  If you have any plans to see this movie, trust me…stop reading now.]

I went into The Vanishing absolutely cold.  I knew nothing about it aside from the name of the director, the bare outlines of the plot (a young woman vanishes while on vacation), and the fact it was a critically acclaimed foreign film, remade in America with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland, which I never saw because it was, quote, “laughable, stupid and crude” (Roger Ebert).

With absolutely no gore, no unnecessary side plots, and no clichéd final chase between the killer and the cops where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, director George Sluizer has crafted one of the most compelling, creepiest abduction films I’ve ever seen.  By not showing the actual abduction when it happens, by focusing on the boyfriend’s frantic attempts to track her down immediately afterwards, and by abruptly shifting gears twice in the first hour, the viewer is kept constantly off balance (in a good way).  If she was abducted, how did the kidnapper accomplish his task in broad daylight?  WAS it even an abduction?  We get a good look at the person who most likely committed the crime, but his process looks almost comic…how did he pull it off?

We first meet Rex and Saskia as they’re driving to France to do some cycling.  After Saskia relates a recurring nightmare to Rex (she dreams of being trapped inside a golden egg floating through space), there is an early crisis when their car runs out of gas in the middle of a long tunnel.  We get an early, incisive look at their relationship when Rex elects to walk back for gas, while Saskia stays behind frantically looking for a flashlight she insists they will need.  Later, at a crowded service station, they kiss and make up.

This scene at the service station looks entirely mundane at first, but it is interrupted by a sequence in which we are shown the man who pretty clearly is about to commit a kidnapping.  When we cut back to Rex and Saskia, their interactions become charged with tension.  They talk and tease and kiss, while we are suddenly hyper-aware of their surroundings.  Director Sluizer fills the background with extras, and we start scrutinizing them to see if any of them might be the kidnapper.  Or perhaps there will be a clue later, a Hitchcockian callback which relies on our recall of the crowd scenes.  Rex takes a random Polaroid as a blue semi rolls past the lens, obscuring the front of the store.  Sluizer’s camera lingers on the semi, and we immediately wonder if there is any significance.  (There both is and isn’t.)

The creepy effect of these scenes cannot be overstated.  I can easily imagine some people watching this movie and immediately changing their travel habits.  Never go into a crowded store alone.  Carry mace.  If you must separate, stay in touch with your cellphone until you meet up again.  Stanley Kubrick knew what he was talking about when he told Sluizer that The Vanishing was the most terrifying movie he’d ever seen.

After Saskia’s disappearance, there are the nominal scenes of Rex searching the store and grounds for her, asking if anyone has seen her, giving her description, and so on.  Interestingly, we never get a scene of Rex being interviewed by the police as the day drags on.  Looking back on it now, I get the feeling that Sluizer perhaps thought those scenes would be way too familiar for audiences who have sat through any number of police procedurals in the movies and on TV.  Better to stay with the matter at hand and keep the story moving.

It’s at this point that the movie makes its first abrupt shift in tone and focus.  With no warning, we suddenly spend a good 20-30 minutes, not with Rex’s search, but with the apparently happy family life of the man we got a good look at earlier in the film, the man who appeared to be prepping for a crime.  These scenes are even creepier than the earlier scenes at the service station because we are pretty sure this is the kidnapper, but his home life seems stable: a wife, two daughters, a well-paying job as a chemistry teacher, and the financial wherewithal to buy a large farmhouse in the country…where we discover, in an INTENSELY creepy moment, that no neighbors will hear any screaming.

The decision to focus on this man was jarring and disturbing to me, but in that good way achieved only by the best crime thrillers.  We get more details about his life and his “preparations” that I won’t spoil here.  The film almost seems to have forgotten all about Rex and Saskia; this man is now the primary character.  (In fact, this actor gets top billing in the credits).  He has the kind of forgettable face and unimposing persona that would fly under anyone’s radar.  By showing us the fact that he has two sides to his personality, we come to the uneasy realization that evil could easily lurk behind the cheerful facades of just about anyone we meet.  This concept is far more terrifying to me than a slasher wearing a mask.

But The Vanishing has two more tricks up its sleeve.  It takes yet another dramatic shift when we abruptly jump forward three years.  Saskia is still missing.  Rex has a new girlfriend, but he still posts flyers asking for any information on Saskia.  He makes appearances on local news programs, pleading for the perpetrator to step forward, promising not to press charges; he just has to know whether Saskia is alive or dead.  He craves closure more than anything else.  It has consumed him.  And…he has received several anonymous postcards from the kidnapper asking to meet in a public place, but whenever Rex arrives, the kidnapper has never shown himself.

This creeped me out even more than I had already been.  But the screws get tighter still.  At one point, the kidnapper offers Rex a choice: turn me in, in which case you’ll never find out what happened to Saskia, or I show you what happened to her…by going through the same ordeal she did.

This has all SORTS of psychological implications that I don’t feel fully qualified to sort out.  I have to wonder about those families and friends who have suffered through the disappearance of a loved one.  (I looked up the statistics on missing persons on a whim…they are horribly depressing.)  I can only imagine what those people would do to finally get closure on what happened.  Would they accept this kidnapper’s offer?  Even if it means they might possibly die?  What price would they be willing to pay to finally get an answer after years of searching?

I hope I never have to answer that question.  Rex goes back and forth in agony before finally making his choice.  His decision leads to an ending that was probably inevitable, but which still took me by surprise.

In an interview with the actress who played Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), she states that when the movie was finally released, she was deeply disturbed.  She went to George Sluizer and asked him, “What is the point of this movie?  What do you achieve by telling this kind of disturbing story?  What are you trying to tell the audience?”  If I had to answer that question, I would say that the first motive was to make an entertaining crime thriller, which it is.  But perhaps there’s also a deeper statement about the banality of evil.  One does not have to wear a black hat and twirl his mustache to be the bad guy.  Sometimes you just have to blend into the background.  The film opens and closes with shots that include a praying mantis, a creature that relies on stealth and speed to capture its prey.  The kidnapper in The Vanishing has learned that lesson in spades.

LA GRANDE ILLUSION (France, 1937)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Jean Renoir
CAST: Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim, Marcel Dalio
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: During WWI, two French soldiers are captured and imprisoned in a German P.O.W. camp. Several escape attempts follow until they are eventually sent to a seemingly inescapable fortress.


What a pleasure it is sometimes to be proven wrong.  Years ago, back when Netflix was still sending physical DVDs to subscribers, I watched Jean Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece La grande illusion.  Unfortunately, I either could not or would not appreciate it for what it was, and I returned it after giving it a mediocre rating.  Flash forward to today, and even in the midst of suffering through my second Covid infection (thank YOU so much, [establishment name redacted]), I rewatched La grande illusion and found it charming, delightful, poignant, and full of (for me) unexpected comedy and ominous foreshadowing, especially because it’s a World War I film made two years before Hitler invaded Poland and ignited World War II.  Turns out this is one of the best war films ever made, whose influences are clearly seen in later classics like Stalag 17, Casablanca, and The Great Escape.  Who knew?

The film centers around two French soldiers in particular, Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay).  They are captured after being shot down during a reconnaissance mission and are taken to a German prison camp…camp number 17, because of course it is.  There they meet the paradoxical camp commander, Captain von Rauffenstein, portrayed by Erich von Stroheim as a man who knows the rules of war, but is willing to bend them – slightly – when it comes to imprisoned officers.  He invites them to dine at his table and even offers de Boeldieu a private cell because, wouldn’t you know it, he knew de Boeldieu’s brother before the war.  It’s almost like he’s saying, yes, we’re enemies, but we’re not savages.

There’s another reason for von Rauffenstein’s behavior that has nothing to do with chivalry.  It’s very clear that de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein are both aristocrats.  They demonstrate this class affiliation by occasionally holding brief conversations in English, which the other soldiers, being mostly of working class, would not have understood.  It’s fascinating to watch the German and the Frenchman interacting with each other, stubbornly maintaining an air of sophistication and bonhomie required of their class, when de Boeldieu knows he must attempt escape, von Rauffenstein knows it, and de Boeldieu knows he knows it.  This might be considered the first and most obvious level of meaning in the film’s title: the grand illusion that we can still be friends, despite the war, because we’re both members of aristocracy.

Ironically, de Boeldieu doesn’t share this same kind of camaraderie with his own countrymen.  Maréchal, the man he was imprisoned with, is clearly a working-class soldier, a bit less refined, and doesn’t know a lick of English or German.  He makes one escape attempt too many and is put in solitary.  Interestingly, de Boeldieu makes similar escape attempts (we learn later), but we never see him having to experience solitary confinement for his actions.  Double standards?

The fourth major player in this drama is another fellow prisoner, Lieutenant Rosenthal, a French Jew played by Marcel Dalio.  He and several other prisoners are in the process of digging an escape tunnel under the barracks, using gear and methods that are directly quoted in The Great Escape, especially the problem of soil disposal.  It was fascinating to see so many elements in this 1937 film featured so prominently in later films.  I never realized just how influential this movie was, and probably still is.  (There’s even a scene – I won’t spoil the setup – that features a small orchestra spontaneously breaking out into La Marseillaise at a key moment…tell me the Casablanca screenwriters didn’t have this movie in mind when writing their script.)

After some months (perhaps longer, it’s unclear), Maréchal, de Boeldieu, Rosenthal, and several other prisoners are unexpectedly transferred to another camp before they can finish their tunnel.  Their new digs are at an enormous gothic castle, also run by von Rauffenstein, who by now has sustained injuries from some kind of airplane crash which require him to wear a neck brace.  He is still exceedingly friendly to de Boeldieu but assures him escape is impossible from this new “camp.”

What happens from there, I’ll leave for you to discover.  What I will repeat is that this movie covers some heavy territory with a deceptively light touch.  There is a scene where a prisoner receives a parcel from home, a large box containing nothing but women’s clothing, so the men decide to hold a mock “revue” with the male prisoners doubling for the showgirls.  One of the soldiers tries on a dress and wig and walks out and asks, “Don’t I look foolish?”  Au contraire.  The men are struck dumb in a moment that is at first hilarious, then poignant, as they feast their eyes on the first thing even resembling a woman for the first time in forever.  Another parcel arrives for some Russian prisoners in another barracks, a large box which they are sure contains food, but instead it contains – well, I won’t spoil it, but to say they are disappointed would be an understatement.

La grande illusion is brilliant at balancing profound ideas of men at war with the occasional humor in the everyday rhythm of life in a prison camp.  It even gets into the ingrained prejudices of so many people against Jews, views that in 1937 were sweeping across Germany like a plague.  (Nazi Germany banned the film, of course.)  This dichotomy is a little hard for me to describe without just giving a play-by-play of the film in its entirety.  Watching it again today, it’s impossible for me to remember what I didn’t like about this movie the first time around.  It has everything: drama, suspense, comedy, daring escape attempts, a showdown between friendship and duty, men in drag…I mean, everything.  This is one time I’m happy to admit: yes, I was wrong.  La grande illusion is not mediocre.  It’s a masterpiece.

KAGEMUSHA (Japan, 1980)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Akira Kurosawa
CAST: Tatsuya Nakadai, Tsotumo Yamazaki, Ken’ichi Hagawara
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 88%

PLOT: A petty thief with an utter resemblance to a samurai warlord is hired as the lord’s double. When the warlord later dies, the thief is forced to take up arms in his place.


Kagemusha is a double-edged sword for me, no pun intended.  On the one hand, its visual beauty is virtually peerless.  Only the films of Kubrick, Lean, and those shot by Vittorio Storaro are even in the same league as Kurosawa.  There are shots in Kagemusha that will remain in my mind long after the details of the story have been purged by old age.  In particular, there’s a shot with Japanese soldiers crossing a ridgeline in the background, more soldiers in the foreground, and the setting sun positioned perfectly, so the shadows of the soldiers in the background reach out towards the viewer and interact with the foreground soldiers.  It’s a masterpiece.

On the other hand, the pacing is so sedate that newcomers to Kurosawa or foreign films in general might wonder, my god, when is something going to happen?  At one point, a key figure is taken out by musket fire from an enemy soldier.  This happens so early that we haven’t been introduced to all the main characters just yet, so the conversations surrounding the gunshot were a mystery to me until later in the film.

On the other hand, Kurosawa proves himself over and over again to be a master of the visual aspects of cinema.  In addition to the shot I mentioned above, there is a trippy dream sequence that looks as if it were painted with an explosion at the paint factory (I mean that in the best possible sense), a wonderful camera move that reveals two characters who are conversing in a plain room are actually overlooking a stormy lake, and an eerie moment when the contents of a large vase are revealed after a lengthy burglary attempt.  There are way too many other examples, you simply have to see the film to appreciate what I’m talking about.  I suppose the way to get the most out of the Kagemusha experience is to surrender to the visuals, much like I do with Barry Lyndon or Doctor Zhivago.

I wouldn’t advise anyone to completely ignore the story, though.  There is immense food for thought here.  A condemned thief is conscripted to act as a warlord’s double.  We never learn the thief’s real name.  He is credited only as “Kagemusha”, aka “The Shadow Warrior.”  He must present an outward face to the other generals, friends and foe, in the event that the real warlord is injured or killed, which (SPOILER ALERT) inevitably happens.  There is portentous dialogue about how a shadow only exists if the man is alive.  Remove the man, and how can a shadow remain?

There are several close calls where Kagemusha’s secret is almost revealed.  His grandson – well, sort of his grandson, it’s a long story – immediately yells, “THAT’S not my grandfather!” when he sees him after a long absence.  The real warlord, Shingen, had a huge black horse that only he could ride.  The inner circle who knows Kagemusha’s secret agrees immediately that he should never try to ride it; you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can never fool a horse.  Shingen’s mistresses present a real danger.  Kagemusha squirms for a few moments as they slowly start to question his identity during tea, but he brilliantly defuses the situation by telling them the one thing they would never believe: the truth.

There’s also a much larger issue at work in Kagemusha.  Shingen’s own generals (the ones outside of the inner circle), and the opposing warlords, all believe Shingen is still alive when they see him on the battlefield.  They have no reason to think he’s an impostor.  There are some skeptics, but their spies are helpless to discover the ruse.  For all intents and purposes, that is Shingen, and they behave accordingly.

There is one battle at night where this, I don’t know, philosophy becomes all too real for Kagemusha.  In the darkness, Shingen’s forces can hear enemy armies approaching, and then musket fire breaks out.  Instinctively, Shingen’s bodyguards leap to shield Shingen/Kagemusha from enemy bullets.  Some are killed.  The look of horror on Kagemusha’s face as the dead bodyguards are piled on top of other bodies is indescribable.  They gave their lives for him.  Or, more importantly, they gave their lives for the idea of Shingen, their belief that he was the most important person on the battlefield.  I was reminded of a bit of dialogue from American Sniper, of all things, when the lead character, an accomplished sniper, is asked to cover some soldiers on a raid.  He is told that the soldiers feel invincible with him up there.  He says they’re not, and the reply is eye-opening: “They are if they think they are.”  Just like the soldiers in American Sniper, the soldiers in Kagemusha are prepared to lay down their lives for a concept.  The man is nothing, a thief.  They don’t know that, though.

This took me down a little bit of a rabbit hole.  I thought of Secret Service agents whose literal job is to protect our President and take a bullet for him if necessary.  It doesn’t matter whether he (or she) agrees with the President’s policies.  That is secondary.  Their job boils down to one thing: I will die to protect this person if that’s what it takes.  The dedication on display by these men and women humbles me, and it makes me think.  Surely, they have opinions about world and national policies.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s not part of the job.

Watching those bodyguards fall in front of the imposter warlord made me think really hard about those kinds of jobs, about anyone in any branch of the armed forces.  Ready to kill and die for what they believe in.  In the case of Kagemusha, these people died for a fake.  It makes their deaths sad, but are they any less honorable?  Like I said, food for thought.

The film ends with a massive battle where, curiously, we are not shown any deaths, only the aftermath.  (The opposing general is especially cruel: “Shoot the horses first.”)  Then there is a dreamlike coda that recalls that philosophy of dying for the right cause.

To recap, though, the movie is slow going, at least as slow, if not slower, than Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.  I can see that Kurosawa has a lot to say with this movie.  He employed thousands of extras and lavish costumes (financed thanks to the involvement of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, which is this whole OTHER thing).  It’s not my favorite Kurosawa film.  That spot is reserved for Ran (1985), which I consider his career-capping masterpiece.  Kagemusha sort of lays the groundwork for that movie, in my opinion.  It was one of his first films in color (I think) and it shows a natural talent for the medium.  Like I said before, surrender to the visuals and contemplate the story, and the slow pacing will take care of itself.  (That doesn’t make much sense, but I’m sticking to it.)

COME DRINK WITH ME (Hong Kong, 1966)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: King Hu
CAST: Pei-Pei Cheng, Hua Yueh, Chih-Ching Yang
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100%

PLOT: A highly skilled martial artist (Pei-Pei Cheng) is dispatched to rescue her own brother from kidnappers.


King Hu’s Come Drink with Me feels like a multiverse version of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and no wonder: Lee, like so many of his countrymen, is a huge fan of the wuxia genre of films that have been around since the 1930s.  Come Drink with Me created the template that was faithfully followed by many other films in the succeeding years, and while I cannot claim to have seen them all, it is plainly visible that this film was their prototype, much like Halloween laid the groundwork for countless other slasher films.

Right from the opening scene, the focus is clearly on action above all else.  We watch a caravan taking prisoners to jail, in the traditionally accepted timeframe of what looks like medieval China.  The caravan is stopped by a lone figure who announces himself as the leader of the bandits known as The Five Tigers.  The gang’s name alone evokes scores of kung-fu films aired on Saturday afternoons on Channel 44. A furious battle ensues in which the prisoners are freed, and a government official is kidnapped by the bandits and ransomed in exchange for the release of another one of their comrades.  Rather than pay the ransom, the government sends a lone warrior, Golden Swallow (Pei-Pei Cheng), to rescue the captured man. (If Golden Swallow looks familiar, that’s because she played the villainous Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, further enhancing the idea that we’re in some kind of wuxia multiverse.)

That’s all in literally the movie’s first five-to-ten minutes.  Everything that happens afterwards is one action sequence after another, with only two breaks for a breather.  There is a bar brawl that looks curiously similar to the one featured in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, complete with some impossible acrobatics from the heroine as she leaps from a wall to the upturned legs of a table to the other side of the room.  Granted, it’s not as technically sophisticated as the newer film, but the influence is undeniable.

There is a chase across the rooftops at night, another element clearly appropriated by Crouching Tiger.  Golden Swallow fights off wave after wave of enemy thugs, most of them wielding swords, but some of them hurling wicked needles and darts, one of which finds its mark and lands Golden Swallow in the care of a man, Fan Ta-p’I, who she thought was a drunkard, but who turns out to be a skilled martial artist himself.  These two will eventually cooperate to accomplish their mission, along with a second mission that reveals itself organically.

I must say I wasn’t altogether thrilled with this secondary plot element because it takes the spotlight from Golden Swallow, who dominates three-quarters of the movie.  However, I immediately let it slide when it provided the opportunity to showcase one of Fan’s hidden skills: the ability to manipulate and focus the air so it flows from his hand and can part the cascading stream of a nearby waterfall.  That’s right out of comic books, man.  Or “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”  Take your pick.

To say Come Drink with Me is inferior because it is not as technically sophisticated as modern martial arts films is to overlook its relevance.  Yes, there are a lot of quick cuts used to hide some otherwise impossible-to-perform maneuvers.  Yes, a lot of the dialogue (what little of it there is) is either hammy or overly expository, or both.  Yes, the fight choreography, on close inspection, is not as polished as we’ve come to expect after seeing The Matrix or House of Flying Daggers.

But as an artifact of where today’s martial arts films began, Come Drink with Me is incredibly valuable and still entertaining, even in its relative crudeness.  I loved being able to draw straight lines from specific scenes in this movie to Crouching Tiger, or even all the way to the John Wick franchise.  The last John Wick film featured a scene where Wick fights off an almost literal army of henchmen on a long staircase.  I laughed at the audacity and absurdity of the situation…but I rolled with it, because that’s just what John Wick does: he fights, and he endures.  Why?  Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be named John Wick.  Same thing applies to Jason Bourne and James Bond.

And the same thing with Come Drink with Me.  The obviously overmatched Golden Swallow picks off the hordes of attackers one by one because they’re foolish enough to only attack her one or two at a time.  Why?  Because the story demands it.  It’s tradition, even when it looks goofy and unrealistic.  It took me some time to grasp that core concept, but when I did, my enjoyment of these older swordplay films deepened considerably.

ONIBABA (Japan, 1964)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Kaneto Shindô
CAST: Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Satô
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 90%

PLOT: In feudal Japan, two women kill samurai and sell their belongings for a living. While one of them is having an affair with their neighbor, the other woman meets a mysterious samurai wearing a bizarre mask.


Squint your eyes, and long stretches of Onibaba look as if they were adapted from comic books.  I’m not talking about the eye-popping colors of Kirby, though.  More like the moody noir of Miller or McFarlane…especially Miller.  Extreme closeups, off-centered faces (to make room for word balloons, of course), sneering lips and bared teeth, gratuitous female nudity, shocking violence, the possibility of supernatural elements getting involved in the story – we’ve got all the makings of a new chapter for the Sin City saga.

But Onibaba misses its chance for true greatness by the disappointing nature of its ending, which I cannot, in good faith, describe in detail here.  The last time I felt this cheated by the ending of a film was when I watched the original Night of Living Dead for the first time.  When the credits for that movie rolled, I wanted to throw popcorn at the TV.  Since I didn’t have popcorn, I cursed out my friends instead.  C’est la vie.

The story of Onibaba begins as we see two women – one older, one younger – living in poverty in medieval Japan.  Some later exposition informs us of an ongoing war far away between two warlords.  Weary soldiers from both sides wander into the tall grassy fields where the women live, and the women promptly kill them, take their clothes and belongings, and sell them to local merchant for bags of millet.  (We never learn the women’s names, by the way.  They are identified only by how they relate to Kichi, a man we never see: one is Kichi’s mother, the other is Kichi’s wife.)  The bodies of the men they kill are disposed of in a large, ominous pit hidden by the tall grass.

I should mention yet another stylistic and visual flourish.  The two women live in a grass hut constructed in a vast field of tall grass at least six, possibly seven feet tall.  There is poetry in many shots when the wind rises and pushes the grass.  In one neat overhead shot, the only way we can see a man pushing his way through the grass is by tracking the hole he makes as he walks.  It’s an indescribably lyrical moment in an otherwise mundane scene.

ANYWAY.  A neighbor arrives, Hachi, with sad news for the two women: Kichi has been killed.  When he asks how the women got by during his absence, they are cagey.  It’s here where we get the first of many masterful sequences where faces and eyes are used to convey emotion more vividly than any prose could.  When Hachi propositions the young woman, now a freshly-minted widow, she sneers.  But as days go by, Hachi wears her down, and they begin an affair, much to the mother-in-law’s disapproval.

Night after night, the young widow wanders off to Hachi’s shack, while the mother-in-law sneaks off and follows her, disapproving but never interrupting their liaisons.  All she offers as a rebuke are stern words and resentful glares.  This cycle repeats itself several times, and despite the visually unique methods of showing us these middle passages, I found myself wondering where this was going.  No doubt people more knowledgeable than I can make conjectures about how this might be a representation of Japanese culture at the time: the old severely disapproving of the young, but powerless to stop the march of progress.  It’s not a far-fetched theory, but if so, it’s an obvious one.  So, what’s the point?

Hope arrives (story-wise) in the form of a tall samurai warrior the mother-in-law encounters in the tall grass one night.  He wears a fearsome demon mask and demands the old woman show him the way to the nearest town.  She asks him to remove the mask.  He refuses, but he assures her that he is very handsome underneath.  Right.

At this point, I was on the edge of my seat.  At last, here we go, some real horror-story stuff.  The mask looks awesomely horrifying, not like the kind of demons we tend to think of, but a weird, bug-eyed, fanged face that still looks vaguely human, which only makes it that much creepier.  When the old woman finally gets her hands on the mask (I won’t say how), she formulates a plan.  The next night, when the younger woman sneaks off to another rendezvous with Hachi, she is confronted by a tall figure with long black hair with the face of a demon…gliding through the grass is if it were floating over the ground.  Floating?  People can’t float.  …what exactly is going on here?

At this point, I was primed for a Twilight Zone kind of twist, revealing the true nature of the samurai warrior, the mask, and the old woman.  (Onibaba translates to “demon woman”, according to the main titles of the movie.)  But what?  I was pleasantly surprised by my eagerness to see what would happen next, even if it were mildly predictable.  The movie had shown great visual flair, so even if the ending was a cliché story-wise, it would look really cool.

But…alas.  The film’s ending teases us with several minutes of truly disturbing stuff psychologically, and then throws it away in a moment of ambiguity, the kind of open-endedness that may inspire discussions on the movie blogs, but which is terribly unsatisfying when it doesn’t work.  And here, unfortunately, it doesn’t work.  It leaves us with more questions than answers, and when “The End” appears, it almost feels like the director and/or screenwriter said, “That’s it, I’m out of story.”

The liner notes of the Criterion Blu Ray for Onibaba inform me that it’s based on an ancient samurai legend, so I guess I can’t totally blame the director/screenwriters.  But I just wish there had been something meatier waiting at the end of what had been a visual treat.  If it had provided a nudge into something deeper or more visceral, I’d have been ready to put Onibaba near the top of my favorite Japanese films.  Visually, it’s stunning with a surprisingly modern feel.  But, oy, that ending.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (France, 1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Georges Franju
CAST: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Edith Scob
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A surgeon goes to extreme lengths to give his daughter a new face, which was disfigured in an accident he caused.

[NOTE: This review contains mild spoilers.]


I have become a fan of many of the new breed of horror films released in the last ten years or so – Under the Skin, The Babadook, Get Out, Hereditary, Doctor Sleep, and Saint Maud, just to name a few.  Despite their cosmetic differences, these movies all accomplished the same thing: they got under my skin.  They were genuinely unsettling as their stories unfolded, and they can still creep me out to this day.

Imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, a French horror film released over sixty years ago, during a time when most mainstream American horror films (Hitchcock aside) were exercises in jump scares, cheesy special effects, and outrageous premises.  I was not prepared for how effectively this movie grabbed me from the outset and, except for a brief middle passage, did not let go.  When a movie from 1960 begins with a woman dumping a corpse into a river…a corpse with a clearly, hideously disfigured face…I don’t know about you, but I sat forward a little in my seat.  Where is THIS going?

When the body is discovered, the esteemed Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) solemnly identifies it as his daughter, Christianne.  There is a funeral, Christianne’s fiancé is distraught, and the police are satisfied.  When the good doctor returns home to his large, gothic estate in the country, he goes upstairs to a room where we find his actual daughter, still alive and so disfigured the camera dares not show her face.  The doctor’s assistant, Louise (Alida Valli, still exotic-looking 11 years after The Third Man), brings in a simple but disturbing mask for Christianne to wear.  “Get into the habit of wearing it,” says the doctor.

Who was the girl in the opening scene?  What happened to Christianne’s face?  And why does Louise start searching the nearby city for young unattached women with blond hair and pretty faces?  Why, indeed?

Eyes Without a Face may not have a particularly inscrutable or complicated story, but that doesn’t matter.  The movie unfolds like a modern-day Grimm’s fairy tale, poetic, with princesses locked in tall towers, an evil father figure, and unspeakable violence hinted at but never quite seen.  Except this time, in an unforgettably shocking scene, we witness one of the doctor’s operations.

In most films of this era, shockingly violent acts were tactfully carried out offscreen.  I am thinking, for some reason, of Lawrence of Arabia, where Lawrence must execute a man in order to keep the peace between two Arabian tribes.  Lawrence pulls his gun, we see the bound man try to escape, and we cut to Lawrence as he fires his gun, once, twice, several times.  It’s a shocking scene, but we never see the carnage of those bullets.  It’s left to our imagination.

In Eyes Without a Face, we watch as the doctor gently draws a grease pencil outline around his anesthetized victim’s pretty face.  (“I must try removing it in one large section, not in pieces as before.”  Yikes.)  Then Louise hands him a scalpel, and the camera stays on Louise’s face, and I expected it to stay there for several seconds as the horror of what the doctor was doing was left to our imaginations.  But no.  We cut back to the scalpel piercing the skin as he gingerly follows his outline around her face.  Some excess blood drips down, and Louise dutifully sponges it away.

This is already pretty strong stuff for 1960, at least when I compare it to other films I’ve seen from that era (again, Hitchcock aside).  But I was doubly shocked when the movie didn’t stop there.  The face must still be removed, but to do that we need clamps, more incisions (taking care around the eyes, of course), and we watch this process in several long takes which must have had some audience members fainting in disbelief.

When the doctor is finished, another body must be disposed of, Christianne has a new face, and all seems to be well.  (The doctor reminds his daughter: “Smile.  Smile.  …not too much.”)  What makes this movie great is that there is still so much more to the story, but I’ll leave that for you to discover.

This is the kind of gothic stuff that screams for a remake today, maybe by del Toro or Ari Aster.  Although perhaps they are already fans and have made the decision that the film is too perfect as it is.  I can’t blame that viewpoint.  Eyes Without a Face has just about everything a modern horror fan could desire.  Franju plays many of the film’s creepiest scenes with no score, creating a deeply unnerving mood like in The Blair Witch Project.  It doesn’t shy away from disturbing gore.  Christianne is not just a shrinking violet, but prone to heartbreaking philosophy.  (“My face frightens me.  My mask frightens me even more.”)  To say the resolution of the story is satisfying is an understatement; it takes “poetic justice” to a whole new level.  There is Hitchcockian – or, perhaps more accurately, Clouzot-esque – suspense when Christianne’s fiancé begins to suspect there is something fishy about Dr. Génessier’s clinic and tries to set up a sting operation with the help of local police.

And so much more.  Eyes Without a Face is, for me, one of those buried treasure movies that I normally do not seek out, but when they turn out to be more than worth my time, I can’t help but share it with others.  It holds its own with modern horror films, and then some.  The fact it was made in 1960 still boggles my mind, and that just makes it even more fascinating.

[P.S… According to IMDb, John Carpenter once suggested that the selection of the mask worn by Michael Myers was influenced by Christianne’s mask from this film. I believe it.]