Breathless's Jean Seberg

Jean-Luc Godard was a bad filmmaker who rose to mediocrity, then faded back to nada. He was part of a bad group of film critics for a magazine called Cahiers du Cinema. I mention this because I was recently thinking of his first film, the Charles Bukowskian 'so bad some idiots think it's genius' film, Breathless. The link will give you my take on this lame film.

But, in scanning over some of the increasingly inane comments over at Roger Ebert's post about me, and aside from the silly digressions on Hitler, perhaps the oddest claims (made by Ebert and others) is how the film Casablanca is so geared toward the beauty of Ingrid Bergman. True, she is highlighted, and she was quite a looker, in her day. So?

The film is not even about her character, nor even the two men in her life's takes on her. To read some of the comments one would think she was the first actress to ever be adored by a film camera. Hello? Two words: Greta Garbo.

But, this returns me to Seberg:


Godard and his camera fetishize her even more than Curtiz did Bergman. And, while Casablanca's not a great film, it is a fun film. Breathless is neither. But Breathless is far more about the beauty of Seberg, by Ebert's definition of 'face time', than Casablanca is about Bergman. And, let's face it, attraction is subjective, beauty is not, and Seberg's face is as flawlessly symmetrical as Halle Berry's. In short, Ingrid was a babe, but Seberg was a goddess. I'm talking rival to Grace Kelly gorgeous.

But, again: so? Does her beauty make Godard's bad film good? No. Neither does Bergman's lesser beauty make the solid and enjoyable Casablanca a great film.

A few other cleanup points: I'm hardly a snob. On Cosmoetica I've written of soap operas, Godzilla films, and pro wrestling, enjoying them all. There's simply a difference between liking something and its quality. I like many bad works of art, and dislike great ones. But, I recognize the differences. I like Richard Brautigan's doggerel, but don't really like Ingmar Bergman films. But, I know Bergman was a great artist. However, Saraband was a terrible film. And I didn't like it. Plan 9 From Outer Space is a terrible film. So is Robot Monster. I love them. It's really not difficult to grasp. No one has ever said it's wrong- in a moral sense- to like bad art. But, acknowledge the bias. I prefer Roger Moore to Sean Connery as James Bond. I can make good arguments as to why. But, on a purely acting level, Connery's a better actor. So? I like Moore's irreverent Bond more. But, I acknowledge my bias. That's not snobbery. It's honesty and intelligence.

Folk like the Cahiers du Cinema critics were snobs, broadbrushing whole schools of work, rather than seeing good and bad in all. They were the film school/film theory/auteurist snobs. Folk like Ebert or Siskel or Maltin are pop critics of film. I bridge the gap between both, exposing both the extremes' flaws: the fundamentalism of the snobs and the embracing of dumbed down culture of the pop crowd.

On a small note: I've gotten some bizarre emails re: this whole thread- ranging from the sinister to the absurd. On the dark side, an emailer who claimed to have posted on the thread issued me a dire warning that the original emailer to Ebert, Peter Svensland, had intended his email to cause Ebert to unleash a firestorm of scorn against me- thereby consigning my website to a Dantean outer ring, but it all backfired, and that there might be hell to pay from a cyberstalker's revenge denied. Well, while I wouldn't put it by that character, I doubt it. I do believe I may have been just a tool to get Ebert's attention because when the great man deigned to recognize him, he went into ecstasies, and this is a familiar pattern with stalker types. Either way, this isn't 2001, and I'm much more prepared for shenanigans of the cyber/virus sort.

On the absurd side, one of my biggest fans thinks I blew it with Ebert. He claims that Ebert is on his death bed and (having watched too many samurai films) was looking for a successor to bequeath his critical fiefdom to, and that I was not suitably deferential enough ('You gotta kiss the brass ring, Baby!'). This fellow, I know, is harmless, although his own home planet is a place I do not think I'll travel to. But, if correct, it means I won't 'own' Chicago, like Ebert, and Capone, before him. Too bad, I've always heard Chicago had fine babes.

Natheless, I'll always have Jeannie:


Y'all can have Ingrid!

Peter Lorre, Again

Casablanca is a good solid little film, but it's not a masterpiece. As I wrote in my review of it:

'Casablanca is quite a modern film, in terms of pacing (and in some aspects of editing), for within the first ten or twelve minutes, you feel as if you know these archetypal characters (for good or ill), as if you’d already had a full movie’s worth of them under your belt, and this is part of the reason why the film sucks you in to its vortex, and gets better, subjectively, as it goes on, even if, objectively, it’s a fairly static film, in terms of plotting. Yet, the film has not dated well. The two most obvious aspects of this are the not so special effects (at the level of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930s British films) and the handling of the black character, Sam. Yes, the film reflects its time fine enough, in that sense, but there still is a cringe-inducing quality to Dooley Wilson’s slightly above coonish attitude of deference to Rick. Despite many critics’ claims that the film portrays the two men as equals, this is clearly not so. Sam’s deference is typical of black depictions of the time, as if he had no personal nor interior life of his own, as if he exists merely as an extension of his white friend and employer. The worst scene in the film, though, in this aspect, is when Bergman’s Ilsa offhandedly refers to same as the ‘boy’ who plays piano, even though he’s clearly fortysomething years old, and a decade and a half or more older than Ilsa. The moment is teeth-grinding to a modern sensibility because, unlike the black characters in Gone With The Wind, with this film set in France’s colony (as well as Africa), there was no reason to not reflect the more modern and accepting French attitude toward blacks. Naturally, this aspect dates the film, cementing it to a bygone era (in the worst sense), as the lack of other contravening social or aesthetic pluses means this flaw is unmitigated. This, and many of the other flaws I’ve enumerated, certainly makes Casablanca far from the great or ‘perfect film’ its champions claim. The truth is, the more one cogitates on the film, the more flaws one finds with it, and the lower it sinks in estimation. Yet, this serves to point out the power and correctness of objectively critically evaluating art, because it does not allow personal biases to cloud judgment, pro or con; for, criticism is analysis, and analysis is always about evaluation, for analysis without evaluation is merely recapitulation and description, and what is the point of merely describing a work of art? The art should always be its own best description.'

But, there's also the acting. I wrote of the three main leads:

'....it is also the flaw of acting that ranges from mediocre to bad. First, let’s go with the performances of some of the leading characters, and let me start by stating that most of the characterizations of the acting abilities of the actors in this film, by critics, are often quite wrongheaded. Let us start with the three top billed actors, Humphrey Bogart as club owner Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman as his ex-lover Ilsa Lund, and Paul Henreid as Ilsa’s husband, the Czechoslovakian Nazi Resistance outlaw, Victor Laszlo. Virtually all critiques of this trio leave Henreid as the odd man out, mainly because the film focuses on the love angle between Rick and Ilsa. But, from a purely technical standpoint, Henreid gives, by far, the best acting performance of the trio (and, it’s not even close). Because it is the most restrained and understated, however, it usually gets dismissed as stiff acting, rather than good acting of an intentionally stiff character. Well, the character of Victor is certainly restrained, and a bit stiff, but the performance of Henreid is not. In many ways, his performance reminds me of the performance of Masayuki Mori, as the murdered samurai husband in Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, Rashomon. Like Mori, Henreid conveys emotional depth and complexity with his eyes alone, or even the slight lift of a brow. He is restrained, but this is because his character is über-disciplined. He (the character) is a concentration camp escapee, and a guerilla fighter, who has to not draw attention to himself, and must repress his emotions. He is not demonstrative in his overt feelings toward Ilsa, but one need only look at Henreid’s eyes, and the physical postures of his constant leaning in toward Ilsa, to see how Victor truly adores his wife. And, despite what some critics say, his two time overt declaration of love for Ilsa stands in stark positive contrast to the more cartoonish and caveman-like refusal to utter such words by Bogart’s Rick. Furthermore, Victor shows his love for Ilsa throughout the film, while Rick’s love is displayed only in the final scene, but even Rick’s final gesture is not something that emanates from within. Why? Because he ends up doing the very thing that Victor initially suggests to Rick that he is willing to do- allow Rick to leave Casablanca and take his wife with him, for her own safety! Why? Because we never get a moment that we doubt Victor’s love for Ilsa, whereas there is the sneaking suspicion that Rick merely had the hots for Ilsa, even if he blew it up into more than it was. That not a single critic, to my knowledge, in the nearly seven decades since the film’s release, has ever commented on Rick’s final ‘grand and altruistic gesture’ merely being the inverse of Victor’s earlier suggestion, and that this places Victor at the center of the film, heroically, maturely (in contrast to the more puerile Rick and Ilsa), romantically, and dramatically, is further proof that a) most critics simply are not good enough at their jobs to break down more complex aspects of a work of art, and b) they too often rely on critically cribbing others in their profession. This means that a few ‘talking points’ per film are disseminated by the most widely known and read critics, and all the ancillary ‘second and third tier critics’ merely regurge the same talking points, supplemented with their own biased and emotion-bases yeas or nays on the film. But, getting back to Henreid’s characterization, one need only look at the cheesy scene in the bar, where Victor hears the Nazis singing their song, Die Wacht Am Rhein, and dares to get the band to play La Marseillaise, then look in Victor’s eyes, to see that, far from what critics claim, Victor is a man of great passion and principles from the get go, and this break from his usual restraint gains in power precisely because it is a break, but one that seems wholly natural for a man who has been frustrated for the bulk of his scenes in the film, and then feels he is having his face rubbed in it. While the political implications of the scene have lost their resonance (as do most blatantly political gestures in art), Henreid’s volcanically restrained performance in that scene has not. '

But, look at Lorre's performance. It is small, canned, and off the rack, as was much of his work in Hollywood, after M skyrocketed him to acclaim. Hollywood did not invent typecasting in the last quarter century, but just compare the scenes and writing.

'Tis a shame, but Lorre never really hit his full potential as an actor, although he may have cashed in well.