Surreality Shows
Fantasy and reality wear each other's clothes in LACMA's 'Looking Glass' film series
By Andy Klein
About a month ago, in writing about David Lynch and Inland Empire, I mentioned certain connections to Jacques Rivette's 1974 Céline and Julie Go Boating, which is not available on American DVD and almost never shows up on the big screen. By happy coincidence, it is showing up (Sat., Feb. 3, 7:30 p.m.) in Through the Looking Glass (and Down the Rabbit Hole), a six-week series starting this Friday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Probably Rivette's most easily approachable film, Céline and Julie is the only movie I can think of that could be described as a three-and-a-quarter-hour romp. The plot - a dubious word in this context - involves librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) and magician Céline (Juliet Berto) running around Paris and intermittently eating a special "candy" that turns them into characters in a (literal) Henry James adaptation.
No, I haven't really explained that right, and I probably can't. It's been at least a decade since I've seen it, and I couldn't synopsize it meaningfully five minutes after that viewing. It's that kind of film.
The 2002 edition of Sight and Sound magazine's once-a-decade critics poll of Greatest Films Ever put Céline and Julie at 88th place, which may not seem like that high an honor until you consider that it was tied with (among others) All About My Mother, Blue Velvet, Casablanca, The Conformist, GoodFellas, His Girl Friday, Last Year at Marienbad, The Night of the Hunter, Persona, Pulp Fiction, Raging Bull, To Have and Have Not, Trouble in Paradise, and The Wild Bunch. Several of these are as great as any movie ever made, which goes to show the relative absurdity of critics polls.
The opening of Rivette's film consciously invokes Alice in Wonderland - with Céline playing white rabbit to Julie's Alice - which fits right in with the series title. Not everything in the schedule is quite so blatant: The real unifying theme is the fragility of the line between the real and the imagined, between sanity and madness, between wakefulness and dreams. Cinema is already the storytelling medium closest to dreams, and most of these selections violate, twist, or otherwise play on our conventional assumptions about the reality and reliability of what we're watching.
When talking to directors of such films, it's hard to resist asking them to pin down whether a sequence is supposed to be part of the general "reality" of the film, i.e., not a dream or delusion or unreliable flashback. In the grammar of classic Hollywood cinema, this is rarely an issue: Anything unreal is clearly "punctuated" as such, with a hazy dissolve or a track-in on the sleeping face of a character. If the front end is left undefined - to temporarily mislead the audience for humorous or shock purposes - the end mark is clearly defined, typically (even stereotypically) with the character bolting upright in bed.
A decade ago, I tried to get Roman Polanski to define most of his thriller Frantic as being the protagonist's dream, since the movie plays much more convincingly and interestingly that way. He responded almost exactly as David Lynch does to such traps: "There are things I feel very uneasy to talk about. I hate to explain certain things - it's like writing a poem and having to explain the metaphors."
Point taken, and more power to both of them: Indeed, they shouldn't definitively reduce the rich ambiguity of their narratives. After all, that's my job.
Well, actually, no: It's not my job to pin down a "correct" reading but rather to suggest different readings that may be helpful in getting a handle on - or simply enjoying - their art.
The boundaries are clearer in some of the films in the series than others: The Wizard of Oz (Sat. at 5 p.m.) and Alice in Wonderland (Sat., Jan. 27, 5 p.m.) seem to basically embrace their it-was-all-a-dream resolutions (though there's always room for doubt).
In other cases, the ambiguity seems to be the entire point. As Ingmar Bergman's Persona (Fri., Feb. 23, 9:30 p.m.) breaks down the identities of its characters, we might wonder: How "real" is what we're seeing? The answer is: That's the wrong question. It makes more sense to ask: What does it tell us that such a confusion is even possible? (One inadequate, partial answer: that the line separating our identities from the rest of the world is frighteningly tenuous.)
Is Rosemary's Baby (Sat., Jan. 27, at 7:30 p.m.) a supernatural tale? Or a textbook case of postpartum psychosis, as presented through the POV of the patient? Is Point Blank (Fri., Feb. 16, 7:30 p.m.) a revenge story? Or a revenge fantasy in the mind of its dying hero? Does all that stuff in Eyes Wide Shut (Sat., Feb. 10, 7:30 p.m.) really happen to the Tom Cruise character? For that matter, does all that stuff in War of the Worlds - not included in this series, more's the pity - really happen to the Tom Cruise character?
Perhaps my favorite instance of this sort of ambiguity is in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (Sat., Feb. 24, 7:30 p.m.). When I first saw Vertigo on TV in the early '70s - right before it disappeared from circulation for nearly a decade - I thought it was kind of cool but was bothered that the plot made no sense at all. That is - spoilers ahead - here we have a guy who wants to bump off his wife and, rather than hire a hit man or cut the brake lines in her car, he sets up an intricate plan in which innumerable uncontrollable events have to happen right on cue, including the utter certainty that Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) will fall in love with the woman he's tailing and then won't conquer his acrophobia in time to save her. Has there ever been a more ridiculous murder scheme?
Probably, but, in the realm of mystery/thrillers, the actions of Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) are lame beyond belief, and it was certainly within Hitchcock's talents to have made them more plausible. A few years later, upon seeing the Brian De Palma/Paul Schrader film Obsession, I thought, "Great! It's Vertigo with the stupid plot holes fixed!" - an opinion that I now cringe to repeat. In fact, the "fixing" of the "plot holes" destroys nearly everything that makes Vertigo great.
Does anybody actually believe that the last third of Vertigo takes place in "reality"? (I guess so: I used to, and for years.) Hitchcock shows Scottie sitting catatonic in a mental hospital. After a fadeout/fade-in, he's back out on the streets, where he discovers that, noooooo, it wasn't his negligence that led to the death of the woman he loved. It couldn't be that. In fact ... she's still alive! And it was all an intricate scheme! And he was the poor dupe being manipulated by an archvillain!
That whole final act goes from the implausible to the brilliant if you view it as the self-exculpating fantasies of a guilt-ridden basket case. I'm not saying this is the "right" reading, just that this is a reading that makes Vertigo way more fascinating. And it's the sort of analysis that makes most of the movies in LACMA's series, not only worth seeing, but worth seeing over and over.
Published: 01/18/2007
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