Garnered Thoughts

I intended to review Classic Stage Company's production of Age of Iron today. But a sick actor resulted in a cancellation of last night's performance. So instead, my thoughts on two films I recently watched.

Alain Resnais' Muriel (1963) and Lars von Trier's Europa (1991, or Zentropa, as it was titled in the 1990s release) share many elements. These European films, partly dealing with the wake of war and war atrocities, both push and experiment with cinematography and narrative in various ways.   But I love Muriel and hate Europa!

I have to admit that Europa aims to be serious artistically and conceptually. Although the photography and sets hardly ever aim at conventional realism, they do aim to convey a reality about the devastation  in Germany after WWII. But von Trier strikes me in the end as sensationalistic and scattered and pretentious. The art simply doesn't seem to gel, and the themes ultimately seem lacking in complexity.

The French debacle in Algeria forms part of the background for Muriel, although the broad time frame of the film encompasses WWII as well. This film is artistically blessed in a host of ways. An eerie score was composed by Henze, one of the 20th century's most serious composers. The voice in the score is Rita Streich, a magnificent singer of the period both in opera and song. Resnais' cameraman was the wildly talented Sacha Vierny. The film deals with broadly with memory. I find it the closest thing in film to something like Proust's interest in the complexity of memory, consciousness, and emotion. The characters' lives and memories intersect in dazzlingly complex ways. I love the ways that the lives of the main characters overlap and interact in such accidental and messy ways. The film abounds in haunting, poetically suggestive images--buildings built but never occupied, apartments that serve as antique stores, films, photographs, old letters and diaries. Here each element seems to me to reenforce all the others. Quick cuts, mosaic construction, half-explained events, minor characters for whom one can easily imagine fuller roles... My guess is you haven't seen this film. Give it a try. It's not as well known as some other Resnais--say Hiroshima Mon Amour, or Last Year at Marienbad...but it's by far my favorite.