I Lift Up My Finger and Say Tweet! Tweet!

Louis Malle's Black Moon, out tomorrow from Criterion, would rather you didn't assume too much about it. It doesn't necessarily reject any attempts to solve its puzzle, but it knows, and believes that you will learn, that such attempts will be futile.

That's my take on it, anyway. Black Moon is an exceedingly bizarre movie, one of the few works of pure surrealism I can think of from a major filmmaker in the late 20th century. I don't happen to know how closely or consciously Malle adhered to the concret tenets of surrealism, but part of Andre Breton's definition of that movement reads "Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation." And in her criterion essay on the film, Ginette Vincendeau talks about Malle using a sort of automatic writing technique with the film, implying that he wrote down or shot whatever occurred to him, free of any concerns about narrative. As I've said, Black Moon feels pure in that way.

So why the tendency by so many, when confronted with a work like this, to break it down in absolute terms? Vincendeau herself does this, stating baldly that Black Moon is the story of a girl's sexual awakening, but it's sort of hard to see how she can be so certain. There is stuff in here about women maturing -- in terms of nursing, but of course in this film the two woman who perform that act are nursing not a baby but an elderly woman -- and there's a unicorn, which tend to find their way into questions of sexual awakening, but the unicorn gets chased by Lily (Cathryn Harrison, the Alice-like figure in the film), and she could be said to be chasing that awakening, I suppose, except that sort of reading gets derailed, or deflected, by Lily's eventual confrontation with the beast, which has to do with which of them is being more cruel to the crying flowers over there.

Black Moon is fascinating in its go-for-broke oddity. Most films and fiction that traffic in surrealism tend to have a pretty clear satiric satiric, and while not every scrap of weirdness can be pegged to that structure, the base tends to support the satire. Black Moon is not like that. There is a war in the film, apparently between men and women (and in fairness Malle did claim that idea came from the social events of the time), but in her attempt to flee that danger, Lily finds herself pretty well removed from it, in a country house occupied by an old woman (Therese Ghiese) and a brother and sister, both also named Lily (played by Alexandra Stewart and Joe Dellasandro). The house is full of alarm clocks and glasses of milk that refill themselves and huge talking rats and naked children and pigs and snakes and badgers. The war can be heard still, sometimes off in the distance, sometimes a bit closer, but not too close. Strange scene after strange scene pile up with no sense of narrative momentum. Even the seemingly climactic moments near the end only seem that way because one's sense of time passing indicates the movie should be over pretty soon. The same events could have occurred within the first half hour without any great impact.

Which is not a criticism. What's engaging about Black Moon is its utter nonsensicality. No film like this will ever escape claims by some viewers that they've figured it all out, but those claims won't alter the film's true madness.

Another film of a type you don’t really see anymore, and also out on DVD tomorrow from Criterion is People on Sunday, a late-era silent film about something that is immensely important to the vast majority of the movie-going public, but rarely dramatized, or not realistically dramatized: weekends. Weekends of frolic, more specifically, and of the mass winding down and lightening up that takes place as people shrug off the burdens of their goddamn jobs and just go to the lake or have a picnic or do whatever else strikes their fancy (stay home and watch People on Sunday, for instance). That really is what the film’s all about, though there is some jealousy-tinged tension among the core group of characters, three woman and two men, one of those men being interested in two of the women, who find him interesting right back.

Those core characters, and everyone else in the film, are played by non-actors, who had never appeared in a film before, and (mostly) never would again. This is part of People on Sunday’s curious history, and rather staggering list of behind the camera talent: directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and Robert Siodmak, cinematography assistance by Fred Zinneman, screenplay by Billy Wilder, which in turn was based on “reportage” done by Robert Siodmak’s brother Curt. Or Kurt, seeing as the film was made in 1930, before those men, and many other people, fled Germany. The film was shot in Berlin, and it’s both tempting and depressing to think things like “Well who knows what that guy did eight years later!” while watching all the happiness unfold onscreen – even the aforementioned jealousy ultimately doesn’t appear to do anyone very much damage – but to think along those lines will get you nowhere, and expose you as a joyless ass. Because of course People on Sunday was not made eight years later, it was made when it was made, by a group of filmmakers it’s almost shocking to imagine together in one room, and who would go on to make one classic after another in Hollywood, many of them of a much darker and more cynical cast than this modest little affair.

Or ostensibly modest, anyway. One thing that struck me was how much the camera moved. It’s often jittery, and just as often clearly attached to some form of conveyance (boat, car, etc.), but it still moves a lot for the era, indicating that in this ode to free time, Ulmer, Siodmak and the rest were nevertheless pushing very hard.

When the Wolfbane Blooms

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The rap on this year's remake of the Universal classic The Wolf Man (or The Wolfman, as the new version would have it), which was directed by Joe Johnston and written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, seems to be that it's not enough of one thing or another. It's not crazy enough, nor is it enough fun. I've also heard conflicting reports that suggest that Johnston's film runs from the Oedipal implications of the story, and conversely embraces them too earnestly. One begins to think that this whole "criticism" deal is a bit subjective once the actual filmmaking reaches a certain level of professionalism. But in any case, and because of that, I can't argue against much or any of the preceding complaints, except for the idea that a movie like The Wolfman is stepping wrong by taking itself too seriously. In a purely literal sense, I can't deny that this new film does, indeed, take itself too seriously, but I would rephrase that, and say that The Wolfman is not ashamed of itself.

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You won't be getting much plot summary from me here, because, really, how much do you need? Benicio del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, a man born of an English father (Anthony Hopkins) and a gypsy mother (now deceased), who fled England to New York -- at a young enough age to have since lost the accent -- to become an actor. He's summoned back by Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), his brother's fiancee. His brother, we know (or rather suspect, which suspicion is rapidly confirmed) is the guy who, in the film's prologue, was killed by a werewolf. Nobody knows this yet, and Ben Talbot is at first believed to be missing. So Lawrence goes home, where he's left a lot of unhappy memories and uncertainties regarding why his mother slit her own throat with a straight razor.

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So Talbot's back in England with his dad, there's a werewolf on the loose, and if you've seen George Waggner and Curt Siodmak's original film, you can pretty much fill in the rest. Up to a point, anyway. This remake deviates from that earlier film in a bunch of small ways, and in one big way: this time around, the werewolf that bites Talbot, thereby dooming him to a bestial existence, isn't killed that same night. It's the way of things nowadays to take a basic idea that worked in the past and then double it, but in Johnston's film this actually works pretty well. The Wolfman flirts with the idea of making the identity of this other werewolf a mystery, but gives up on it shortly after Talbot's first transformation, probably because the filmmakers realized they weren't fooling anyone. The moment of the reveal -- or rather, the moment when the last tiny shred of the audience's doubt, which was hanging on only because the movie hadn't come out and said anything yet, is finally removed -- is handled very nicely, in a moment that is genuinely chilling, and that hints not only at how badly the Talbot bloodline is screwed, but also of an evil that has roamed the moors for a very long time.

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Speaking of bloodlines and cursed families and things of that nature, like many classic horror stories, The Wolfman lays its themes right out there. Human nature is referred to as "shiftable", Talbot retreats from his own ill-fated family to hide himself in a profession that calls for him to take on other personalities (we see him playing Hamlet, no less). This subtext-laid-bare approach is an effective one, even time-honored, but doesn't get much respect these days. In the classic horror films of the '30s and '40s, such as the best of the Universal cycle and the Val Lewton films, and even up to the best of the Hammer films, there was often a lot of strangeness and subtlety to chew on afterwards, but just as often the gist of things, the meaning behind the conflict, was plain as day. This kind of storytelling is as engaging as the folktales that led the world to know what the hell "lycanthropy" was in the first place. The mindset that now leads people to sneer at this narrative device is the same one that caused everyone to begin thinking that "melodrama" was a synonym for "bad".

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All of which is not to say that The Wolfman is perfect. There's a lot of dodgy CGI, which is made all the more frustrating by the fact that there didn't need to be any CGI at all. And I should say here that I saw the director's cut, which, in a break from tradition, is actually significantly longer than the theatrical cut, with a full sixteen minutes added. In this form, the film does feel a bit thick (I wonder, though, if Max von Sydow's mysterious and welcome cameo was one of the added scenes?). And either way, the werewolf battle that is the film's unavoidable climax feels a bit tedious, as well as a sop to modern audiences (I was also amused by the fact that the filmmakers seemed to realize that when the two werewolves were flailing around, audiences might have a hard time telling who was who, so they devised a way to make the fight a "shirts vs. skins" situation).

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But the film still works. I remember reading Benicio del Toro say that when he first got into acting, his two dream roles were Che Guevara and the Wolf Man (like there's a difference!*). As Lawrence Talbot, it is true that del Toro occasionally feels like a man out of time -- he's a bit modern for 19th century England -- but boy does he sell Talbot's haunted nature, his doomed-since-birth aura. At one point, after he's completely accepted the truth of his mad situation, he pleads, to a group of men, "Kill me!" Only in a story like this, told by people who, however occasionally misguided in the telling, have the nerve to take it seriously, can those two words read as the equivalent of "Save me!"

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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Well, what else? The original The Wolf Man (d. George Waggner) would not be held up by anyone as the crown jewel of Universal's original series of horror films, and prior to checking it out again tonight my comments here would probably be a bit more dismissive than they're actually about to be. My basic complaint had been that as Larry Talbot, Lon Chaney, Jr. is a bit of a stiff, lumbering goof. Somehow, in my previous viewings of the film, I missed two things: 1) that Chaney is not stiff, and 2) while he is a lumbering goof, that is in no way a bad thing.

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Before I talk about Chaney as Talbot, Waggner and screenwriter Curt Siodmak's film does seem to be at war with itself for quite a while, and it may be true that they never settled on an approach to the material. It's very odd to watch the many scenes in the film where the themes are being clearly stated, to hear all this dialogue about the dual nature of man and the particulars of insanity, while we already know that Talbot really is a werewolf. This is when that kind of plain-spoken attitude I was just praising can seem clumsy. In the remake, any talk of man's two-sided nature jibes perfectly with del Toro's basic, tragic demeanor, but Chaney projects a kind of soft-headed, happy simplicity, belying no trace of a tortured inner life. So when his father, John Talbot (Claude Rains), dismisses the idea of seeing mankind in terms of black and white, and that it is the appreciation of shades of gray that feeds the werewolf myth, we can't help but wonder how exactly this ties into the Larry Talbot we know whose life is burning up before our eyes.

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And this is precisely what's so wonderful about Chaney. His Talbot is just this guy. He's been disconnected from his family for eighteen years, and while his return home is rooted in sadness (his brother was killed in a hunting accident), he's happy to be forming a relationship with his dad. He likes this old town, and this big house, he'll now be living in. He thinks the girl in the antique store is pretty, and he wants to take her out on a date, to that old gypsy camp, to get their fortune told. He's a nice guy. And when that date ruins his life, he is scared shitless. He doesn't know what's happening, he doesn't want to hurt anybody -- at times, Chaney's portrayal of Talbot's terror and panic brings him close to tears. It's hard to imagine del Toro's Talbot freaking out like this. Del Toro's fear has a Gothic strength to it, a sense of resignation that indicates in his quieter moments, he has no truly happy memories to make him mourn the life that's rapidly slipping out of reach. As played by Chaney, however, Talbot is a guy who is going to specifically think about, and miss, eating a ham sandwich, drinking a beer, and listening to the Dodgers on the radio. Those are his happy times, and that's what he doesn't want to lose.

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In The Wolfman, you look at Talbot and think, "You're doomed." In The Wolf Man, you look at Talbot and think "You poor dumb bastard."

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*Alternate joke, shopworn but more to the point: "The difference between the two being that one is a blood-thirsty, animalistic maniac, and the other is the Wolf Man."