David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: By the
Grace of God and The Chambermaid)
By the Grace of God
How odd that the Roman Catholic Church, having survived
17 centuries through the Roman Empire, barbarian hordes, the Dark Ages, the
rise of Islam, the near-loss of Spain, the Renaissance, the brutal conversion
of the Americas, Henry VIII, the Protestant Reformation, secular science,
fascism and Soviet communism, should be so pathetically evasive about its
internal rot from pedophile priests. Maybe that’s because for so long the
Church had a virtual, assumed monopoly on cultural morality. And because, in
the male power hive of the Vatican (women mainly relegated to convents) the “holy
fathers” decided that priestly celibacy was a sanctuary in which starved
affection, hidden sexual alliances and erotic
predation on juveniles were left mostly to rumor. Some movies (Spotlight, Judgment, Bad Education, the
harrowing Deliver Us From Evil) have
cast light on this. The most articulate,
in a very French way, is By the Grace of
God.
Francois Ozon’s lay-it-open film closely examines the
actual case of Father Bernard Preynat (as in prey on nature, between prayers?).
He hawked onto dozens of boys at Catholic schools and summer camps. Bernard
Verley, who played Jesus in Luis Buñuel’s Milky
Way (1969), makes Preynat a furtive old monster with guilty eyes. He admits
his crimes but is locked into his pathology, addressing past victims, now grown
men, as if they were still “his” chosen lads. Cardinal Barbarin of Lyon
(Francois Marthouret) has known Preynat’s dismal story for years. Speaking an urbane
line, rich in modulated jargon, he’s a cover-up wizard (his chief advisor, a
woman, looks like she knows every dark secret of the Vatican). Ozon hates the plague
of pederasty, but he keeps a humane lens
on everyone, not tumbling into the traps of facile melodrama. He never tries to
lift this story onto the austere spiritual plane of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest.
Along with cascades of talk siphoned from journalism,
dossiers and testimonies, Ozon uses a triple perspective, that of three men who
found the courage to face their soul crisis and spill their often shamed pain
into public and legal view: Alexandre (Melvil Poupard), a refined bourgeois raising
his five kids as devout Catholics, fears losing his devout faith; Francois (Denis
Ménochet), a burly, impulsive guy who flaunts atheism, wants revenge fully
publicized; and Emmanuel (Swann Arlaud), an unemployed epileptic, blames the
Church for ruining his life. Arlaud raises the temperature quite a bit, but
Ozon keeps all in balance, never allowing emotions to become another masking of
the facts. This all happened, and partial justice has been served (quite recently).
Amid the personal agonies is a huge, festering wound: the failure of a great but
fallible institution, gripped by an old sexual neurosis that it confuses with
sacred purity. Even a universal vision can have blind spots.
The Chambermaid
Time to press the flattening pole on the bed covers – eliminate
the wrinkles! And don’t forget to fold the toilet paper’s edge, into a tidy
triangle. That has always been important, as supervisor Nachita tells Eve:
“They made me pray next to the toilet paper until I learned how to fold it.” This
is habitual but not dreary duty at the high-rise hotel. Eve has “her” floor to
clean and stock with “amenities” (one
guest is a real hog for them). The air conditioning is nice, and she can view
the smoggy sprawl of Mexico City through big windows (a window-washer, looking
in, thinks Eve is special). She eats tiny lunches to save money, and she misses
her young son. Especially when a chatty, sexy-thin Argentine guest recruits her
into caring for her baby, while mom bathes and dresses. The kid is adorable,
and Eve needs the extra pesos. This is not slavish peon work, but her life is
no pillow mint.
Not to be confused with either Renoir’s or Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, Lila Avilés’s exquisitely
nuanced directorial debut can be seen as an introspective satellite of Alfonso
Cuarón’s lauded, remarkable film about a Mexico City nanny, Roma (Netflix is still hobbling its video
release). Roma spreads out through
the vast capital. Avilés keeps us in the hotel, in mostly quiet rooms that stir
Eve’s moods. Cuarón’s nanny (Yalitza Aparicio) was a squat Mayan charmer, while
shy, sweet Eve has the almost Chinese-porcelain features of actor Gabriela
Cartol. Landing somewhere between the granular intimacies of the best Iranian pictures
and the work documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, The Chambermaid is a feat of sustained observation. Eve dreams, yet
mostly of ascending to a high floor, where furnishings are elegant and tips are
larger. She reads Jonathan Livingston
Seagull, but her flights are by elevator (which speaks computer-voice English).
Carlos Rossini photographed so that each room and corridor, wide or long, becomes
in effect a close-up of Eve’s mental spaces. She works hard, and some lucky day
she may supervise. Will cute robots fold the t-paper?
SALAD (A List)
12 Stirring
Performances as Catholic Priests
Claude Laydu in Diary
of a Country Priest,1951; Pierre Fresnay in Monsieur Vincent, 1947; Raul Julia in Romero, 1989; Montgomery Clift in I Confess, 1953; Michael Lonsdale in Of Gods and Men, 2011; Francisco Rabal in Nazarin, 1959; Brendan Gleeson in Calvary, 2014; W.G. Fay in Odd
Man Out, 1947; Karl Malden in On the
Waterfront, 1954; Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt, 2008; Adam Driver in Silence,
2016; Don Murray in The Hoodlum
Priest, 1960, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Léon
Morin, Priest, 1961.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
Charles
Chaplin’s most sophisticated movie is Monsieur
Verdoux (1947). The concept came from Orson Welles, who told Peter Bogdanovich:
“I had an inspiration on the subway. I saw an advertisement for an
anti-dandruff remedy, which had a picture of a bright-faced little hairdresser
type making that gesture of the stage Frenchman which indicates something or
other is simply too exquisite for human speech … (Bogdanovich: ‘It made you
think of Chaplin?’) … Chaplin as
Landru (the French serial killer of women). I’d gotten to know Charlie by then,
through Aldous Huxley and King Vidor, so I told him about it. He said,
‘Wonderful!’ So I went away and wrote a script, and showed it to him. He said,
‘Wonderful, and I’m going to act it for you.’ But at the last moment he said,
‘No, I can’t. I’ve never had anybody else direct me. Let me buy it.’ So I did
(sell), and he made Monsieur Verdoux.
My title was The Ladykiller.” (Not to
be confused with Alec Guinness’s great comedy The Ladykillers. Quote from This
Is Orson Welles by Bogdanovich and Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Few
films have caught the harsh demands of miners working so well as John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
directly inspired by B. Traven’s novel: “Muscular montage captures the grim
labor. Washing and rinsing, catching the sand up and washing it over and over
again, this alone would have been work enough. But first it had to be dug out.’
The opening of a log sluice channel is thrilling, but as sweat and soil merge ‘no
one could ever imagine any of these men holding a woman in his arms. Any decent
woman would have preferred to drown herself.” (From the Bogart/Treasure chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie
image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.
Smooth
killer Verdoux (Charles Chaplin) is amused by clueless Annabella (truly funny
Martha Raye) in Monsieur Verdoux
(United Artists 1947; director Charles Chaplin, d.p. Roland Totheroh, along with
Curt Courant).
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