THE SIGN OF LEO (Eric Rohmer, 1959, France)

Pierre lives his life day by day, one handout away from poverty and homelessness. He is awoken one morning by a telegram (he doesn’t even have change to tip the delivery boy) stating that he has inherited his aunt’s fortune. His luck soon changes from good to bad and he finds himself alone and disenfranchised with no one to turn to for support, walking the filthy streets of Paris on a road to nowhere.

Eric Rohmer’s first film introduced the world to the French New Wave, a cinema verite style of seemingly unscripted natural dialogue of bohemian artists living on the edge of a static society, a self-expression that at once condemns the status quo while appealing to the hearts and minds of a new generation. While Chabrol, Godard, and Truffaut conquered the box office, Rohmer’s feature was critically acclaimed but a financial failure. Devoid of sentimentality, Rohmer’s film depicts the end results of a middle aged artist whose life of self-acknowledged laziness leads to an empty existence, a life one twist of fate away from becoming a drunken bum, a laughing stock whose dignity is discarded like ragged clothing.

Rohmer’s style owes more to Neo Realism than any of the other early Nouvelle Vague, his camera roaming the streets, alleys, and busy sidewalks of an unscripted Paris. He utilizes long tracking shots that focus upon Pierre, isolating him even in the large crowds that haunt the nightlife, while often cutting to a reaction shot or POV as the camera pans the pedestrian and faceless mob. Rohmer reveals the ugly and gritty streets of the iconic city eschewing maudlin cinematic tropes. To put it simply: THE SIGN OF LEO is depressing. But it’s not without its rewards.

Pierre is an American musician and generally a hanger-on who lives by his whims and immediate desires. He is heavy and middle-aged (another fact differentiating the story from others in the burgeoning genre) as his years of sloth have added to his girth. Jess Hahn who  plays Pierre isn't an unattractive man but not typical of a feature protagonist, unlike Jean-Paul Belmondo or the uncanny Jean-Pierre Leaud. His casting gives the film a realism and immediacy that hot-wires the narrative; it’s slightly off-putting but totally believable from the first rumpled scene. As we invade Pierre’s life and celebrate his luck, we soon digest the empty calories that are his friends, people who seem to share little in common except wine and cigarettes. Godard shows up in the apartment as a nameless cohort who plays the same chorus over and over again on a record which becomes a metaphor for Pierre’s life. The talk is mundane and at one point Pierre picks up a violin and attempts to play a sonata he dreamed the night before. His friends are surprised at his talent which shows that they only understand each other superficially: these are party people.

Rohmer uses Pierre as a cipher to forge his message that luck and justice are both blind, that anything can happen in anyone’s life at any moment. Pierre doesn’t deserve what happens to him as the punishment and reward fail to meet the crime of his laziness and exploited friendships. At one point Pierre collapses after walking all night and on the wall is a map of Paris. Rohmer zooms in on the map to show Pierre’s location and then slowly zooms back, as if a ghost rising from his corpse to see the entire city from a godlike perspective. We suddenly understand just how insignificant one person is in this great big world.

Pierre’s pride and dignity are slowly torn away as he finally concedes defeat and becomes that which he always feared: homeless. He is saved from a slow death by a friendly but quick talking bum who performs drunken soliloquies for handouts, a man who has forsaken his own dignity for survival, a man whose soul now nestles safely at the bottom of a whiskey bottle like a drunken genie. Even Pierre looks down upon this man but soon becomes his cohort, grudgingly joining in his intoxicated performances for sustenance. Pierre’s pride is his downfall, his road to madness as he struggles futilely against the rock of the city, against the immovable fate that has brought him low in this middle age. But fate is soon to raise him up once again.

Pierre said that he never made a cent from his music but it is his music that brings him his fortune. As two acquaintances search for Pierre after discovering a registered letter that exclaims his newly acquired inheritance (at the death of his cousin), they overhear his violin sonata outside a restaurant where two drunks perform for handouts. Pierre is at his wits end and runs away, despising himself and what he’s become, angry at the world and ready to kill himself. He is rescued and whisked away to an unknown fate of wealth where happiness isn't guaranteed. His drunken friend is left standing alone, asking Pierre to not forget him and become his salvation, to lift him from poverty as he lifted Pierre from death. Rohmer never gives him (or us) an answer as he pans upwards to the indifferent stars, to the constellation of Leo. 

Final Grade: (B+)

SOMEWHERE IN TIME (Jeanott Szwarc, 1980, USA)

Richard Collier desperately bids for time’s return, his lost love reduced to an anachronistic penny worth only hopeless thoughts. Richard Matheson, better known for his novels I AM LEGEND and WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, adapts his own prose into film with French director Jeanott Szwarc: the result is an emotionally powerful yet rather straightforward narrative that dilutes the horrific essence of the source material. But a few dark elements remain, and herein beat the heart of the story because romance and tragedy walk hand in hand, the joy of love contrasted by the eventual death shroud that parts us from our soul mate, as we then fear to walk the world alone.

Matheson redefines his character Richard Collier to accommodate Christopher Reeve’s strengths: he imbues the protagonist with a healthy dose of humor and kindness and removes the obsessive possessiveness and tumorous dread that haunts the novel. He also replaces Mahler with Rachmaninoff, amending the death theme that runs its poisonous course through BID TIME RETURN. Szwarc also replaces the Hotel del Coronado with the Grand Hotel, transposing the clean lines of modern architecture upon the magical towers and gables of the novel’s environment.  Jane Seymour as Elise McKenna is a beautifully rendered portrait of perfection, her diminutive stature incongruous with her fiery independence. She is also a victim of The Moirae as her love affair is cut short by Atropos’ fateful shears, her affair dwindling away into the recesses of future time: her only memento a lovely pocket-watch that will be a gift to the future Richard Collier, which will ensure that he will “come back to her”. 

Isidore Mankofsky’s lush color photography brings the past to life, making it more “real” by contrast with the modern time-frame which is infused with harsh and oblique lighting. The world of 1912 seems more alive and romantic with the vivid costumes (though Collier’s is at least ten years out-of-date!) and set designs, as Szwarc attempts to keep anachronism out-of-frame and is largely successful if one doesn’t look too closely. For me, suspension of disbelief  came easily thanks to the wonderfully nuanced performances by not only Reeves and Seymour but the entire supporting cast! If one takes a darker view of the story that this is all a death-dream, the anachronisms then become keys to understanding Collier’s lack of detailed knowledge of the past his mind resides in. 

A flicker of doubt remains: did Richard actually transcend time, or did he starve to death, isolated in his own world of fantasy? The final scene could exist as a death dream, a wish fulfillment as his consciousness fades towards oblivion. But for romantics, it‘s the perfect ending. 

Final Grade: (B)

THE BAD SLEEP WELL (Akira Kurosawa, 1960, Japan)

"Alas poor Nishi, I knew him Itakura!"

Nishi is consumed by more than a new identity; the cold breath of revenge fills his lungs and clouds his mind, contaminating his true nature with toxic tragedy. Akira Kurosawa condemns the cankerous contemporary Corporation, a conglomeration of poisonous individuals who subsume public funds to deposit in their own trust. It has become a prescient tale of Wall Street run rampant without regard, where the love of money is the tangled root of human bondage, people willingly enslaved for profit at the expense of others.

Kurosawa begins the film with an elaborate wedding that serves two purposes: first, it introduces the characters and their status in the Corporation; second, it explains a past crime and every major character’s alleged involvement. This is done by a chorus of reporters; in SCANDAL, Kurosawa decried journalism as a corrupt institution but here, the writers are after the truth and newspapers are the ultimate weapon to fight Corporate Greed. The wedding culminates with a huge cake in the shape a building with a black rose like an accusation, inserted in a window on the seventh floor. The businessmen gasp and sweat profusely, as all becomes quiet as the grave because this is a representation of the past crime, a confectionery accusation. 

The story is a bleak parable as Nishi rejects his own nature and becomes a weapon of mass destruction, his fuse ignited by an unquenchable fire. He has married the Vice President’s daughter under an assumed identity just to get inside the organization and murder those responsible for his father’s suicide. He has planned this for five years, willing to sacrifice innocents to see the guilty punished. Nishi is lost in selfishness, convinced that the means justify the ends. He marries the crippled Yoshiko but she and her brother do not share their father’s guilty burden and they become collateral damage. Nishi uses everyone (including his best friend whose identity he traded) for his own purpose: he kidnaps, tortures, steals, and becomes the very thing he despises; the abyss not only peers into him…it devours his soul. 

Kurosawa depicts Nishi’s penultimate failure off-screen in bloodstained twisted steel and this narrative blunt force trauma hammers the audience with existential dread. Though the VP loses his son and daughter, he gains a promotion as Big Business continues to sleep well with politics. 

Final Grade: (A)