Category: Foreign Language

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (FRENCH/PERSIAN)

By Marc S. Sanders

Writer/Director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language is the selected Canadian submission for the 2024 Academy Awards consideration in the category of Best Foreign Language Film.  Though the picture was shot on location in Quebec and Winnipeg, many of the characters are of Persian heritage in this absurdist piece that moves along three different trajectories before they all collide with one another.

I had the opportunity to see Universal Language at the 2024 AFI Film Festival. Rankin, who also leads one of the storylines, opens the film with brilliant comedy as an eighth-grade classroom of unruly children are quickly silenced by an angry teacher who blames his students for his own tardiness and then unleashes on a latecomer who is unable to read the blackboard because a turkey has supposedly run off with his eyeglasses.  The child sincerely stands by this excuse.  The humor of this introductory scene, which I only wish could have gone longer, relies on the outrageous over the top temper of the teacher and the melancholy response from the students.  None of them seem to fear this guy.  One of them is even daring enough to dress like his idol Groucho Marx complete with a prop cigar and the mannerisms, as he aspires to become a comedian.  The teacher wraps up his frustration by sentencing the whole classroom to stand in the tiny closet at the back of the classroom until the boy is able to obtain a new pair of eyeglasses or at least gives up on his silly turkey story.

One classmate, Negin, and her sister Nazgol take the long walk home through the snow-covered paths and come upon a five hundred dollar Rubie bill that is buried under the ice.  There is no way to get it out, but if they do, they can use the money to buy their classmate a new pair of glasses, and thus class can resume and they will be free of their closet detention.  They’ll need something sharp to crack the ice like an axe, and so a search begins.

Elsewhere, Matthew (Matthew Rankin) quits his job with the Quebec government in possibly one of the funniest “I quit” scenes since Albert Brooks angrily stormed out of his boss’ office in Lost In America.  Neither scene from each movie are remotely similar, but they are terribly hilarious.  Rankin is so hilariously smart when he cuts from his perspective to that of the supervisor and the joke delivers on what is mounted on the background walls that mirror the greenish drab room.  For an accompanying soundtrack, there is poor schlub hysterically crying within a cubicle.  It’s the second of a series of great scenes within this picture.  Anyway, Matthew opts to purchase a large bottle of sleeping pills, dispose of his wallet, passport and keys and board a bus to visit his mother who he has not seen for several years.  Unexpected circumstances take place as this scenario moves forward.

Lastly, there is Massoud who is a tourist leader escorting a group on the most mundane and sublime journey through the locales of Quebec, such as a small patch of grass in the middle of a highway exit fork in the road.  He encourages his group to stand for a thirty-minute moment of silence in front of a cemetery that is wedged within this area.  Traffic speeds on by though. 

Universal Language might have been a dystopian kind of setting in another filmmaker’s hands.  However, Matthew Rankin prefers to draw inspiration from his own upbringing within Quebec and Winnipeg where the buildings are drab earthtones of tan, gray and brown, outlined in white from the snowfall that doesn’t seem to melt or the cold that never rises to a warmer temperature.  I had a brief moment to speak with Mr. Rankin following the film, using my limited knowledge of French and then English. He told me that he has a deep appreciation for this kind of appearance that the Canadian towns offer.  When I was in Quebec earlier this year, I witnessed the exact opposite actually, a town full of vibrancy and color. 

Fortunately, Rankin found a story of absurdist, sometimes subtle, humor to emote the dullness of these people’s lives.  People don’t really live like this, do they?  Universal Language makes a convincing argument.  So, I can’t be sure. 

First Rankin and his cinematographer were wise to shoot the picture on what seems like 16mm film which adds a noticeably grainy layer to the picture.  Rainbows and bright sunlight are not what delivers cheer to these people, and this looks like a movie you would find on your grandmother’s Zenith TV set from the 1970s.  Then, there is an acceptance to how Massoud and the two sisters, Nagin and Nazgol, live within this realm where a Persian governance has taken over a Canadian province.  No one complains or revolts, but there is no chance for a life of luxury among these inhabitants, only acceptance. 

When the three stories finally intersect there is a realization to how they move on beyond the confinements of the film.  Turkeys abound, the money is recovered, only to take on a new destiny.  Something becomes of the missing eyeglasses and Matthew encounters a new development when he arrives at his childhood home. 

Universal Language sort of works like three bedtime stories rolled into one.  There are visual symbols and props to consider in addition to the principal players.  Most significant to me is the fact that I do not believe there is one solitary answer or point that Rankin’s film offers.  Much of the picture is left up to each individual viewer’s interpretation.  For example, while my wife and I strongly appreciate the movie, we still had very different perceptions of the film’s conclusions in relation to the building storylines.

A film that is titled Universal Language only welcomes open minded discussion. 

MEPHISTO (Hungary, 1981)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: István Szabó
CAST: Klaus Maria Brandauer, Rolf Hoppe, György Cserhalmi, Karin Boyd
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 80% Fresh

PLOT: In early-1930s Germany, a passionate, prominent stage actor must choose between an alliance with the emerging Nazi party or a life of obscurity in exile.

[Author’s note: this is another in a series of movies I’ve watched lately whose subject matters have intimidated me.  There are topics at play in Mephisto that are beyond my ability to analyze in coherent prose.  I must advise you, this is a BRILLIANT film, even if my review below does not convey that fact…]


Watching Mephisto reminded me of the early days of Covid-19.  As the infection spread and restaurants and other businesses voluntarily closed their doors, I was still naively hopeful that it would all just go away.  A friend asked me, “When will you take this seriously?”  I blithely said, “When all the McDonald’s restaurants close, that’s when I’ll know there’s a problem.”  Not long afterwards, that’s exactly what happened.  Then I was indefinitely “furloughed” from my job, and soon after that, the government shutdown occurred.  In hindsight, I was foolish.  The signs were all there.  Had I paid more attention, I might have been better prepared for the stressful days that followed.

This situation is echoed in director István Szabó’s Mephisto, the first Hungarian film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.  Mephisto tells the story of a popular actor in 1930s Germany, shortly before and after Hitler rose to power.  Hendrik Höfgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) is a hot-headed, passionate stage actor who throws himself into his performances with abandon.  We watch him evolve from an actor/director to the leading force behind a “revolutionary” theater company that exhorts its audience to acknowledge the plight of the everyman in their society.  He marries (for money more than anything else), but keeps a mistress on the side, a black German woman named Juliette Martens (Karin Boyd) who doubles as his private dance instructor.  He rails at his wife for riding horses before breakfast – the ultimate in bourgeois behavior – but engages in frantic frolicking with his mistress between dance lessons.

Brandauer plays Hendrik as a man who only feels like himself when he’s pretending to be someone else.  Onstage or when directing his cast, he’s filled with boundless energy, dancing with the chorus line or leaping across the stage with abandon.  Offstage, he is quiet and self-effacing, unless he’s socializing with other cast members.  Mention is made several times of his “limp” handshake, a direct contradiction to the strong characters he portrays, especially his most famous role: Mephistopheles in Faust, a role that brings him even more fame and prominence within the theater community.  The imagery of Hendrik is striking: He covers his face in white makeup like a kabuki player with sharply angled black eyebrows and red lips, the ultimate in being able to disappear inside a character.

But something is happening in the background that Hendrik is reluctant to acknowledge.  A fellow cast member almost gets into a fistfight with him when he criticizes another actress because of her associations with a member of the Nazi party.  His wife warns him about the dangers presented by this man who was just elected Chancellor.  [Interestingly, the name of Adolf Hitler is never once mentioned onscreen.]  She tells Hendrik that many of his friends are leaving Germany, fearing for their livelihoods, if not their lives.  But Hendrik refuses to panic:

“There is still the opposition, no?  They’ll make sure he doesn’t get too big for his boots.  And even if the Nazis stay in power, why should it concern me? … On top of that, I’m an actor, no?  I go to the theater, play my parts, then go back home.  That’s all. … I’m an actor.  You can design sets anywhere or buy antiques.  But I need the German language!  I need the motherland, don’t you see?”

Hendrik is so wrapped up in his profession that he simply cannot accept the fact that his freedoms are about to come crashing down around him.  He would rather formulate a far-fetched scenario based on nothing but hope so he can just stay where he is and keep performing.

(I have to be honest: when we took our first steps out of the Covid lockdown, I felt the same way.  Local theaters announced auditions for shows again, and I assured myself and my girlfriend that I would take the utmost precautions and wear masks at rehearsals and disinfect and wash my hands and I wouldn’t get sick.  And, of course, I eventually got sick.  I recovered, but you can probably imagine my disbelief when I tested positive that first time.  “ME?  But I was so careful!”)

Hendrik stays in Germany.  His wife moves to Paris.  Fellow actors either disappear outright or are arrested by the Gestapo in full view.  Hendrik accepts an offer to direct the official state theater, despite his past affiliations with liberal/Bolshevik causes, because of his prestige in the theater world.  A character known only as the General (probably intended to be Hermann Göring) gives him his marching orders as theater director.  He witnesses several Nazis beating a man on the street and walks in the other direction…best not to get involved.

So, what we have here is an actor willing to trade away his soul and his conscience in exchange for the opportunity to remain in the limelight, performing as Mephisto or Hamlet.  The metaphor is not exactly subtle, but director Szabó manages to land the message in such a way that it never feels like preaching.  It’s a masterpiece of storytelling that lands somewhere between satire and Kafka.

An especially telling scene has Hendrik explaining to an attentive crowd of Nazi journalists that his production of Hamlet will portray the lead character as “a hard man…an energetic, resolute hero”, rather than as a neurotic, “pathetic” revolutionary.  Hendrik tells them exactly what they want to hear so he can stay in the limelight.  He’s made his own deal with the devil.  I will not reveal whether Hendrik’s bill comes due during the film, but I will say the finale evokes the landmark documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl.  I’ll leave it at that.

As I said, watching the film reminded me of the Covid lockdown…but it also made me think about all those many, many times in the past that actors and other celebrities have been criticized for voicing their political opinions in public.  “Shut up and play/act!” is the usual cry.  Many people would prefer their favorite actors to behave more like Hendrik: just keep your head down and let everything blow over, don’t make waves, it’s not your place, etcetera, etcetera.  Mephisto argues that keeping silent in the face of injustice or tyranny is not an option, especially not for people in the spotlight.  Those who do so risk suffering Faust’s fate.  Or Hendrik’s, whose last words in the film are brilliantly contradictory.

THE SORROW AND THE PITY (Switzerland, 1969)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Marcel Ophüls
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: An in-depth exploration of the various reactions by the French people to the Vichy government’s acceptance of the German invasion.


When writing this review, I initially tried to provide a background to the film’s topic, attempting to summarize what Vichy France was, who General Petain was, and how bitterly French resistance fighters resented Petain and others who believed that acquiescence to the conquering German army was key to survival and avoiding further destruction.  That attempt at a “brief” summary ran to two full pages.  So, rather than teach a history lesson, I thought it better to just review the film and assume that readers will have an even better grasp of history than I do.  So here goes.

My enthusiasm for The Sorrow and the Pity, another sprawling film from documentarian Marcel Ophüls, is tempered slightly by my tenuous grasp of French history during World War II, and by the fact that, at least at FIRST, I did not feel I could pass judgement on the people involved.  One English interviewee says exactly that, in response to a question about whether he felt Petain’s life sentence after the French Liberation was unfair: “It is not my place to judge whether or not people’s anger was justified.  We haven’t been through it, so we cannot say.”

After watching the complete film, I have changed my tune a bit.  Under Petain’s leadership, Vichy France did indeed escape total destruction, but since they were essentially under German rule, they did end up deporting approximately 76,000 Jews to concentration camps during World War II.  Only a small percentage survived.  French Resistance fighters attacked when and where they could with immense dedication, believing it was better to fight and die than to live under the thumb of Nazi Germany.  Pro-Vichy Frenchmen denounced anyone they believed was a member of the Resistance.  In the documentary, the bitterness felt by surviving Resistance fighters towards surviving collaborators is palpable.

This documentary was (I believe) the first from a French filmmaker to openly discuss, on a world stage, the conflict between the Resistance and the collaborators.  Up to that time, it had been a virtually taboo subject, something swept under the rug or kept in the basement.  The attitude was one of, “Why bring up such a painful subject?  Why go over something so historically embarrassing?  Let’s just move on.”  This attitude reminds me of the thinking behind those who are in favor of redacting your kid’s history textbook or banning certain books from the school library.  The people interviewed in the film – people on both sides of the debate, mind you – demonstrate clearly that a national policy of polite silence on the matter is unacceptable.

In this way, The Sorrow and the Pity functions less as a film, an entertainment, and more like a historical record, the kind of thing you might see at a museum or on a college campus as part of a homework assignment.  I can’t promise watching this film will be as gripping as a typical Hollywood war film, but I can say I was never bored during the film’s running time.  I found myself intrigued by the fact this film was released in 1969, just 25 years after the end of the war in Europe, so the people appearing in the film were not just experts or college professors.  They literally lived through the events they were discussing.

A woman who sided with Petain was tortured by Resistance fighters after the Liberation; she still holds to her belief that Petain was a good man.  A Resistance member who was denounced and sent to prison returns and is told by a friend that he knows who denounced him and he will avenge him with a nod of the head.  The man refuses to allow that to happen, even though he knows who the denouncer was; in fact, he still lives around the corner from him.  “It’s something you can’t forget.  But what can you do?”

A former Nazi soldier is interviewed at his daughter’s wedding reception.  (I would LOVE to hear how Ophüls managed to wrangle this particular interview.)  Ophüls asks why he still wears his military medals when many Germans refuse to wear them because they were awarded by a Nazi state.  The former soldier says the only people made uncomfortable by them are men and women who never fought.

Another former soldier (now apparently a waiter in a pub) makes this startling statement: “We’re not stupider than anyone else, and yet we lost the war.  Nowadays we have to wonder if we’re not better off like this.  After all, if we had won, Hitler may have continued, and where would that leave us today?  Perhaps we’d be occupying some country in Africa…or America.”  It’s hard to tell whether his statement is remorseful, grateful, or wistful.

The Sorrow and the Pity is a remarkable record of a time when a nation had to choose between subservience or resistance.  That some chose resistance is not hard to fathom for Americans, whose existence is founded on resistance to tyranny.  That some chose to collaborate is perhaps unthinkable, but if I look inward, can I say with certainty I would have chosen differently?  I’d like to think so.  I hope so.

Just recently I was looking at a bookstore’s window display with a “banned books” shelf filled with novels that have recently been banned by school libraries in several states.  A woman walked by, noticed the display, and said as she walked away, “This store is degenerate.  I can’t believe they’re glamorizing this shit.”  I found myself wondering how many of those volumes she had read herself.  I wondered which side she would have taken in France when Nazi policies banned certain texts.  It never occurred to me to start an argument with her right there in the street.  Will there come a time in this country when it becomes our duty to openly oppose those who support totalitarian policies?  I don’t know, I’m not a political Nostradamus.  But The Sorrow and the Pity argues that, if that time does come, sitting on the fence should not be an option.  And the world will not soon forget those on the wrong side of history.

THE BLUE ANGEL (Germany, 1930)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg
CAST: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron, Rosa Valetti
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An elderly professor’s ordered life spins dangerously out of control when he falls for a nightclub singer.


There are so many things I admire about The Blue Angel that I hardly know where to begin.  The cinematography, the story, the acting, the unbearably tragic arc, the dichotomy of the main character, the debut performance of Marlene Dietrich…just ridiculously top notch all around.  The final 20 minutes or so of the film are so searingly tragic and raw that there were times when I wanted to look away, not out of disgust, but out of social embarrassment.  I’m fully aware of Emil Jannings’s Nazi sympathies, but love him or hate him, this is one of the greatest performances I’ve seen from any film of this period.

[Fair warning, I’m about to really run off at the mouth about this one, so make yourselves comfortable.]

Jannings plays Professor Immanuel Rath, a fussy, stuffy little man who teaches at a local school in Germany somewhere around 1924.  Director von Sternberg directs Rath’s introductory scenes almost as if he were using sound only reluctantly.  With a bare minimum of dialogue, we watch Rath’s morning process as he prepares his clothes just so, eats his breakfast just so, carries his books just so, and arrives at his classroom like Gandalf: never late, never early, but precisely when he means to.  His upper-high school students, all male, respect him just enough to stand at attention upon his arrival, but are rebellious enough to write graffiti on his notebooks, turning his name from “Rath” to the German word for “trash.”

One day, he discovers that several of his male students are in possession of scandalous little postcards picturing a sensuous burlesque performer whose lower regions are covered by a little tuft of actual feathers pasted onto the card.  Blow on the card just right, and her little feather skirt rises to reveal – well, nothing terribly scandalous by today’s standards, but certainly not family friendly in 1924.  Rath is incensed.  How dare these students profane their minds with such affronts to decency?  (We get a brief glimpse of his hypocrisy as he experiments with the feather skirt himself when no one is watching.)

Rath discovers that some of his students have been frequenting a burlesque house called The Blue Angel to see the girl on the postcard.  Her name is Lola Lola, portrayed by Marlene Dietrich in the role that made her a star.  It’s all here: the skimpy outfits, those long legs, the pouty face, sitting backwards on a chair, and the singing voice that eventually led to concert hall appearances in later years when her acting career waned.

Enraged by the thought of his students attending something as inappropriate as a burlesque show, Rath storms to the Blue Angel that very night to try to catch them red-handed.  All his wrath evaporates, though, when he spies Lola in the flesh while she performs.  From that moment, he is doomed.  He winds up in Lola’s dressing room where Lola, seasoned performer that she is, treats him as if he were a rich patron, showering him with compliments and, daringly, gifting him with a pair of her underpants.  Talk about chutzpah.

Predictably, Rath’s students see him at the Blue Angel, and his authority in his classroom starts to wane.  He returns there to give Lola’s underwear back, winds up in a box seat, and watches as she trills the song (in German) “Falling in Love Again.”  She sings directly to him.  He is smitten.  He drunkenly stays the night in her boudoir (nothing happens) and is late to school the next day.  At this point his authority over his students utterly vanishes, he announces his plans to propose to Lola, and his superior essentially fires him from his post.

It’s here where we get one of the first real masterstrokes in von Sternberg’s direction.  Rath carefully empties his desk drawer, fussy as always, picks up a few books, stands, and then slowly looks over the empty classroom.  As he stands, the camera slowly dollies back away from him, increasing our awareness of how large the empty room is, and putting a visual exclamation point on just how momentous his decision is.  He’s throwing away his vocation, everything he’s ever known, and perhaps there’s a moment during this camera move when he is thinking to himself, “What the hell am I doing?”  I’m not doing it justice verbally, but it’s a sensational moment, reminding me of the famous moment in Taxi Driver when Scorsese’s camera tactfully dollies off Travis Bickle during an embarrassing phone call.

The second half of the film involves Rath’s rash proposal to Lola, her improbable acceptance, and his slow inevitable decline.  Up to now, von Sternberg’s direction has been impeccable, using dialogue only when necessary, relying on Emil Jannings’s imposing presence and impressive non-verbal acting, and on Marlene Dietrich’s inimitable beauty and sensuality to underscore their scenes together.  Now, in the tragic second half, von Sternberg REALLY impresses.

Without going into too much detail (you deserve to be as wowed by this movie as I was), let me just list some moments that stood out to me, moments that felt as fresh and moving as any other movie I can think of.

THE WEDDING RECEPTION: At Rath and Lola’s reception, a magician conjures eggs from under Rath’s nose.  The kittenish Lola playfully clucks like a hen.  Rath, besotted beyond reason, smiles and crows like a rooster.  The sight of him making such a ridiculous noise filled me with unease, a reaction I am still unable to completely unpack.  Did I feel sorry for Rath?  Maybe, but why?  He has brought this on himself.  Lola isn’t to blame for his unseemly behavior, though it is all too easy to see how she could be seen as the “villain” of the film.  That is wrongheaded, in my opinion.  If there is a villain in the movie, a person who brings about every bad thing that happens to Rath, it’s Rath himself.

THE EDITING: At one point, Rath discovers that Lola still carries large numbers of those feathery postcards to sell at her performances.  He is adamant: “While I have a penny to my name, you will never sell another one of these postcards!”  Lola’s response is simple, but both wise and somehow chilling: “Well, bring them with us anyway…you never know.”  The camera fades out, and in the very next scene, Rath is sitting at a table, watching Lola perform, and as her song ends, he carefully gathers up the postcards before him and goes table to table, hawking them.  With one single edit, von Sternberg captures not only how wrong Rath was, but also how quickly he has fallen from a place of petty pride to a lowly peddler.  The effect was startling and disheartening at the same time.

THE CALENDAR: Lola is preparing for another performance.  Rath is helping her with a primitive curling iron, but she complains that it’s too hot.  To cool it down, Rath turns to a small day-to-day calendar on the wall, pulls a sheet off, and touches it to the iron to, I guess, burn off some of the heat.  One isn’t enough, so he pulls another sheet off.  We watch as the calendar’s sheets disappear one by one, then in a montage of burning sheets and curling irons as March turns to April turns to November turns to December, and quick as a flash it’s suddenly 1930…four years later.  This astonishing sequence has as much impact as that moment in Cast Away when we fade out on Tom Hanks in the cave and fade back in with the title card FOUR YEARS LATER.

THE FINALE: Wow, I’m really going to have to tread carefully here, but the last 15-20 minutes seal the deal and make The Blue Angel one of the greatest classic films I’ve ever seen.  There is enough heartbreaking pathos and awkwardness and humiliation to satisfy any fan of melodrama.  It’s practically operatic, right down to the image of an anguished clown (long story, watch the movie and see what I mean).  Rath’s rooster crows make an encore appearance, but the circumstances under which he makes those noises are just…I’m having trouble finding the right words.  It’s genuinely hard to watch.  Lola’s portion of responsibility in this sequence is undeniable, but honestly, it’s like that fable about the scorpion and the frog that ends with, “What’d you expect me to do?  I’m a scorpion.”  She is no more evil or immoral than a shark or an earthquake.  In the end, Rath’s hypocrisy and intolerance are rewarded with a comeuppance that is richly deserved, but also pathetic and pitiful, in the most literal sense of those words.

The Blue Angel is one of the most uncompromising depictions of a tragic arc that I’ve ever seen, but it also manages to make the tragic figure inexplicably sympathetic, despite his hypocrisy.  It is achingly, wonderfully sad and melodramatic and heartbreaking, tempered by the occasional song from Marlene Dietrich as well as just being able to gaze upon her from time to time.  Watching it for the first time is an experience I will not soon forget.  I hope I haven’t spoiled too much of it for you if you’ve never seen it, either.  If you haven’t, I urge you to seek it out immediately.  (The German version whenever possible…I’ve seen clips of the English version, and it simply does not carry the same weight as the German version.)

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (Soviet Union, 1929)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Dziga Vertov
CAST: Mikhael Kaufman, Elizaveta Svilova
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: This highly influential quasi-documentary captures a day in the life of a Russian city, as well as the cameraman doing the filming.


Film scholars more highly educated than I may be able to dispute this, but I think Man with a Movie Camera qualifies as the most “meta” film ever made: a movie about the making of itself.  Filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who cut his teeth on Soviet newsreels, cobbled together three years of footage of everyday life in Moscow and condensed it into a 68-minute quasi-documentary/newsreel that acts as a virtual wormhole into the past, revealing people and activities and life that is not that far removed from our own experiences.  Spliced into this footage are shots of the film’s cinematographer carrying the camera around on a tripod, setting it up, and shooting the footage we’re seeing, sometimes putting himself in mortal danger for the sake of getting the perfect shot.

Vertov used every camera trick available at the time, including [bear with me while I consult IMDb]: double exposure, time lapse/fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, reversed footage, and even stop motion animation.  The resulting film is extremely reminiscent of two of my other favorite films, Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Baraka (1992), though the reverse is clearly more accurate.  When those two movies were hailed as art house masterpieces, fans of Vertov’s film must have been thinking, “Yawn, been there, done that.”

I’m sure entire books and even college courses have been written and designed around Man with a Movie Camera with its metatextual layers and its impossible-to-overstate influence on filmmakers up to and including the present day.  (There was even a small scene that reminded me of those spinning-atom “flashbacks” in Oppenheimer [2023].)  As a wise man once said, “Better to be remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”  I won’t attempt to approach this beautiful movie from an intellectual standpoint.  Rather, I want to convey the emotional effect Vertov’s techniques succeeded in creating in me as I watched.

Basically, the movie can be broken down into several chapters.  We first see a city asleep: Moscow, mostly, though some sequences were shot in Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkiv.  Early morning streets are deserted except for street sweepers and homeless folks on park benches.  Department store mannequins stare blankly onto empty sidewalks.  A young woman lies in bed asleep.  We see a car pull up to a building and pick up a passenger: a cameraman, who is “played” by the film’s cinematographer, Mikhail Kaufman.

The city awakes.  Store shutters are thrown open.  Electric streetcars and motorbuses pull out of their “stables” and head for the city.  The young woman from earlier gets out of bed and, as the quaint phrase goes, “performs her ablutions.”  In a couple of interesting sequences, homeless men on the street awake to discover a cameraman filming them.  Invasion of privacy?  Exploitation?  Perhaps.  But of the two men I recall seeing filmed this way, one of them simply made no reaction, while the other smiled and laughed, then rolled over to snooze for a few more minutes.  Hey, a cameo’s a cameo.

Then the city gets to work.  People arrive at their factory jobs.  Vast machinery is switched on.  Steel mills rumble to life, and smoke belches from towering smokestacks.  We see the cameraman climbing the crude ladder on the side of one such smokestack with no visible safety equipment.  My palms got a little sweaty just watching it.

The city streets become unbelievably congested with mobs of people, herds of streetcars, and only crude manually operated street signals to maintain order.  Trains pull in and out of train stations right on schedule – presumably.  In one absurdly dangerous shot, we watch as the cameraman places his camera directly on the track in front of an oncoming train and then remains behind the camera for as long as possible, checking focus or whatever, as the train gets closer and closer and CLOSER…then we cut to a shot of the train rolling over us as if the camera was right on the ground underneath the train.

(In the first of several such sequences, we then see a series of shots showing the cameraman has dug a hole in the middle of the tracks large enough to fit him and the camera so he can still crank the film while the train rolls over him.  First the magic, then the explanation.)

Here and there in the middle of all this, we also get shots of the film’s assistant editor, Elizaveta Svilova, laboriously poring through endless feet of film, searching for the perfect shot or the perfect splicing point, cutting and pasting, and sometimes storing small reels on shelves marked with categories like “Factory” or “Street” to be used later.  We’re really getting a look at how the sausage is made here.  But to what purpose?  Perhaps Vertov is going to great pains throughout the movie to demonstrate to the audience that the magic of montage and any emotional reactions they may experience while watching is the result of intensely hard work by manual laborers much like themselves.

Vertov even exhibits a wicked sense of timing and dark humor.  We see a short scene in which a man and woman visit a city office to sign a marriage certificate, all smiles and nerves.  This is followed shortly by another couple, who are NOT smiling, visiting the same office…this time to sign a divorce certificate.  At this point I started to wonder if these scenes were being staged.  But there is a third sequence set in the same office, where a woman hides her face from the camera with her purse.  This time they are signing a DEATH certificate.  We’re then treated to a mixed montage showing a wedding, a live birth, and a funeral: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Manipulative?  I guess you could make that case, but that does not diminish its power one little bit.

The raw power of the freeze frame is utilized to great effect in several shots of athletes, horses pulling carriages, and children watching a magician.  Time lapse footage shows clouds scudding past a statue, a technique that would not be widely appreciated until over fifty years later.  Workmen push heavy wheelbarrows and walk directly over the camera, followed immediately by a shot showing the cameraman lying on the ground filming the workmen as they walk over him.  This kind of juxtaposition does not ruin the film’s impact, however.  For me, it emphasized something I tend to forget: this movie – in fact, ALL movies – are created by someone with an idea and a movie camera and the chutzpah to do what it takes to make it happen.

Another idea that deserves mentioning is that Vertov created a compelling and enduring film out of vignettes of everyday life in the city.  No melodramatic scripts, no overacting, no impossible coincidences…just life.  Maybe Vertov was reminding the audiences of his day that their lives, their recreation, their struggles, were no less enthralling or exciting than anything that could be dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter.  “You want to see something interesting?” he seems to ask.  “Look no further than yourselves and your family and your neighbors.  You are more interesting and unique than you believe yourselves to be.  Watch…I’ll show you.”

To summarize: Man with a Movie Camera is nearly a century old, but it has lost none of its power over the years because of the director’s utilization of groundbreaking techniques that are still being used – and, in some cases, copied – in today’s film industry.  Even more so than any of the silent films by Chaplin or Keaton, it feels like a time machine, beaming images to us today from a bygone world with none of our modern luxuries but all the emotions and experiences that make us human.  There is a quick sequence showing a hospital nursery, giving us closeups of several newborns.  I found myself wondering…it’s been 95 years since the movie was made and released.  It’s conceivable that one or more of those babies might still be alive today.  I don’t really know what that would mean in the grand scheme of things, but wouldn’t that be something?

THE TWO OF US (France, 1967)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Claude Berri
CAST: Michel Simon, Roger Carel, Paul Préboist, Alain Cohen
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Fresh

PLOT: In German-occupied France during World War II, a Jewish child is sent away from his family and conceals his religious affiliation from the anti-Semitic elderly man that takes care of him.


What are we to make of Pépé Dupont, the grandfatherly old man at the center of Claude Berri’s film The Two of Us?  Here is the kind of craggy, crotchety, yet endearing old man we’d like to turn into when we get to be his age.  He loves his 15-year-old dog almost as much as he loves his wife, if not more.  He’s a vegetarian who doesn’t like it when his wife cooks rabbit for dinner.  “Cannibal!” he exclaims.  He makes friends easily with Claude, the little 9-year-old boy who comes to live with him and his wife in the French countryside in late 1943, sent away by his Jewish parents who feared for his safety during the German occupation of Paris.

But Dupont makes some comments at the dinner table about Jews that makes it very clear: he is anti-Semitic.  He quotes statistics about how the percentage of Jews in political office is vastly higher than the percentage of Jews in France.  The little boy, Claude, is instantly cautious and tentatively asks Dupont, how can you tell if someone is a Jew?  “Why, by their smell, and their large noses, and their flat feet that keeps them out of the army, but look how fast they run to make money!”

These scenes and others like them are intentionally jarring because they emerge from a man who is utterly unaware he’s talking to a Jewish child.  Dupont’s deep-seated bigotry is as much a part of him as his beloved dog, Kinou, but it is so blindingly wrongheaded that he completely overlooks the fact that Claude is Jewish himself.  It’s a situation that is both funny and heartbreaking at the same time: funny because we laugh at the ignorance of someone blinkered by his prejudices, and heartbreaking that such attitudes are harbored by a man who would otherwise be the perfect picture of a loving grandfather.  (Or surrogate grandfather in this case, but you get the idea.)

The Two of Us is based on the actual experiences of director Claude Berri, which makes the film even more poignant.  Over the course of the film, little Claude will cautiously befriend Dupont, but he is careful to never let Dupont’s wife wash him (it wouldn’t do for her to see he has been circumcised).  He memorizes the Lord’s prayer.  He assumes a new last name – Longuet instead of the more Jewish “Langmann.”  Over time, he even becomes bold enough to tweak Dupont’s ignorance.  When Dupont says all Jews have large noses and curly hair, Claude gleefully points out Dupont’s own bulbous nose and frazzled hair and runs away in mock terror: “You’re a Jew!”

Perhaps I’m making this film sound like a dreary exercise in pointing out the obvious – anti-Semitism is wrong, DUH – but it’s far more than that.  Berri’s film is very careful to never, ever include a scene in which Dupont is shown the error of his ways.  The closest we get is when Dupont’s son refuses to enter his house because Dupont supports the Vichy (pro-German) Prime Minister Pétain as opposed to Charles de Gaulle.  Aside from that, we are simply allowed to observe Dupont’s behavior and Claude’s reactions.  Berri is smart enough to realize that people (generally) know right from wrong on an instinctive level and do not need to be preached at.  So few films dare to assume their audiences have a brain that it’s a relief when one is discovered, waiting in some long-forgotten corner of cinema history.

The dichotomy between Dupont’s beliefs and his obvious affection for Claude define the word “provocative.”  It forces us to realize that not all bigots are loud-mouthed blowhards.  They can be just as charming and effusive and loving as your best friend’s favorite uncle or aunt.  Is Dupont evil in The Two of Us?  Some of his core beliefs are rotten, for sure, but I started to take pity on him a little bit.  Like so many other racists, his attitudes were probably taught to him by his own parents, and he simply accepts them as reality without realizing how deeply wrong he is.  The phrase “the banality of evil” has perhaps been overused of late (especially in the wake of Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant film The Zone of Interest), but it occurred to me time and again during scenes showing Dupont playing with Claude, doing chores with Claude, helping Claude with his first crush, and so on.  We get lulled into the idea of a wonderfully jolly fellow…and then he says something anti-Semitic, and it all comes crashing down again.

Not only that, but we get hints and omens of what is occurring on the wider world stage during the war.  At Claude’s new school, children’s heads are checked for lice.  When they are discovered on another boy’s head, the teacher immediately sits him down and shaves his head, right then and there, using a pair of uncomfortable-looking clippers, to the amusement of the other schoolchildren.  As the boy’s hair falls to his feet in clumps, and the other kids are laughing, Berri cuts to Claude, who observes the process without a trace of emotion.  What is he thinking?  Is he aware of the concentration camps?  Or were they still just rumors to everyone else in France in 1943?

The Two of Us feels like a Fellini film (poignant reminiscences of childhood) cross-bred with a Stanley Kramer message picture, minus the sermonizing.  It shifts between delight and solemnity with no warning, making each shift stand out that much more, and enhancing the storytelling by making us passive observers, letting us make our own judgements without guidance from an overanxious screenplay.  This movie was made to be discussed around the water cooler, or on a podcast, or in a movie chat room, just so we can try to wrap our heads around exactly what this film is trying to say by making the kindly old man at the center of the film the source of all of its moral and ethical conflict.

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.