David Matthews

Robert Bresson’s Le Journal d’un curé de campagne  (The Diary of a Country Priest) (1951) is a minor classic from a bygone era. Can we imagine it filmed in the 21st century? There would at the very least be something overtly sexual involving one or both of the two young girls who torment a shy, unworldly young priest in the grip of spiritual crisis. And it would be in color. As it is, we should be grateful that films such as this seem to fly under the radar of the colorization vandals.

Assigned a parish in a small country town, a young priest, never named, struggles but fails to be accepted by the townspeople, who look on him with suspicion and scorn. His mentor, an older priest, advises that his problem is that he wishes to be loved by his parishioners. A priest does not need to be loved, only respected, feared, obeyed. In the old days priests were men, the old man laments in the manner of old men. Now the seminaries send out choirboys.

The young priest’s dark night of the soul is conveyed with restraint. The longing for the light of God’s grace and the despair that comes with its absence is neither overstated nor glossed over. Claude Laydu was a 23-year-old stage actor who fasted for the role of the gaunt priest, whose torment is physical as well as spiritual—he is plagued by an undiagnosed stomach ailment and subsists on a diet of stale bread soaked in cheap wine. Laydu’s face is uncanny, beautiful and pale. Not given to histrionics, he does not beat his breast or rage against a god who remains ever distant, speaking only in riddles, mystery, and silence, while his creatures suffer without reason or meaning, through no fault of their own but being born.

He chronicles his doubt and failings in his journal as what he takes to be a budding friendship with the local count unravels over the count’s affair with his daughter’s governess, which leads the priest into a morass of family drama, philandering, an ongoing serial of humiliation and betrayal, a mother still bereft from the death years ago of an infant son, her relationship with God sundered, their daughter’s hatred of her father for his infidelity and of her mother for putting up with it. The priest’s efforts to guide them to the consolation of faith are earnest but as ineffectual as his own striving.

His alienation is from his fellow humans as much as it is from God. A chance encounter with another young man, a relative of the count and member of the Foreign Legion, leads to the legionnaire’s observation that the priest is “one of us,” that special breed, those who do not fit into any conventional role that society might impose, not even that of priest, those who are at once lost and of an elect who make up the legion.

His struggles exact a toll on his health, yet he never embraces darkness, however powerless he is to find the light. Unable to pray, he observes that the urge to prayer is already prayer but is not consoled. Perhaps at the end the urge to faith is already faith. His final words are “What does it matter? It’s all grace.” Perhaps there is a measure of consolation here, and grace. Perhaps.

David :: Aug.20.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Octubre is of that species of cinema that leaves much to the audience. Events are related without pyrotechnics, melodrama, or convoluted plot machinations. Precious little background is supplied to illumine character. We can only extrapolate from actions, expressions, and the odd line of dialogue to conjecture as to thoughts, emotions, and motivations.

Clemente the moneylender is a solitary man of middle age and few words. He conducts his business over a table in his small, unadorned apartment, showing no interest in the lives of his customers and without empathy for the plights that bring them to him.

One day he returns home to find that someone has broken in and left a baby in a basket. Rather than turn the infant over to the police or welfare authorities, Clemente hires Sofía, another solitary soul, poor and devout, to look after it while he goes to the prostitutes he frequents in search of the mother. The general assumption, for the most part unspoken, seems to be that Clemente is the father and a prostitute the mother, and there is a passing suggestion that this is not the first child he has fathered by a prostitute.

Clemente’s efforts go awry as he is robbed by prostitutes who demand payment for bad information about the woman’s whereabouts. Distracted by the infant, he accepts a large, counterfeit bill as repayment for a loan. Repeated attempts to pass the bill on are unsuccessful and one such attempt leads to a beating at the hands of a cab driver who has driven him to a nonexistent address where he was told he could find the woman he seeks. Clemente endures it all with the weary resignation, if not exactly stoicism, of one who expects nothing more out of life.

Sofía’s attachment to Clemente and the child is revealed by a gesture here, a gaze there, until there are two understated scenes, strange to the point of uncanny, where she gets into bed with the sleeping Clemente and masturbates him. The second time he wakes and rejects her. This is followed by an equally strange sequence involving her underpants and a pitcher of water from which he habitually drinks while seeing customers. Is this her revenge for his rejection? Or perhaps some kind of folk magic to make him desire her?

Meantime, an old man deposits his savings with Clemente until he accumulates sufficient cash to leave Lima. He steals a wheelchair and bribes a nurse to spirit his comatose girlfriend out of the hospital and take her away, one presumes to his village, or hers, or theirs, where he will be at her side when she dies. When asked why he wants to do this when, after all, the hospital is taking good care of her, he replies, “She is my girlfriend.” No more explanation is required.

These events take place in October in Lima against the backdrop of the Our Lord of Miracles Procession, a religious parade honoring the patron saint of the city. Our Lord of Miracles dates to October 1746,

when an earthquake destroyed Lima. Only one wall, the wall of a little church in the city’s poorest quarter, was left standing, and on it was a painting of the Christ, made by a nameless mulatto. Word of the miraculous preservation swept the ruins, and masses of people crowding around the wall started the first procession. As the procession advanced—so legend says—the earth stopped quaking.

When Clemente  goes out among the crowded procession of penitents, Sofía among them, her face and heavenward gaze strong with faith, who or what does he seek? Sofía? the child? Will he find her and might they find in one another solace and respite from their solitude? Or did he have his chance and lose it without having suspected it was there?

Does Octubre  end with possibility and hope? Or pessimism and despair? The Vegas leave to us to make what we will of this quietly but deeply emotional film, and what we make hinges as much, maybe more, on our makeup as on intellectual analysis, not that the two are separable.

Octubre  was awarded the Jury Prize for the Un Certain Regard section at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. The Un Certain Regard section showcases films that stand out for their narrative and visual treatment.

memo from the editorial desk

Minor revision was made near the end of this essay after it was originally posted.

David :: Aug.08.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Paul Krugman calls the president’s surrender to Republicans on the debt limit a catastrophe (The President Surrenders):

Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.

Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo finds some positive aspects to the deal as he presents the good, the bad, and the ugly of of it (The Four Big Problems With — And Four Silver Linings Around — The Debt Limit Deal).

Finally, the blog The Strange Death of Liberal America suggests that talk about Tea Party influence on the Republican Party is misguided (Dysfunctional Republicans; Mythical Tea Party) and provides some good background on competing  claimaints to the Tea Party mantle:

The media continue to blame what they loosely describe as “the Tea Party” for the problem. Let me repeat one more time: there is no Tea Party, period. Any reporter who says there is is either stupid or lazy or both.

There are actually several potential claimants to the title of Tea Party and none of them like each other and all of them have questionable ties. All this was reported here last year. One group, the Tea Party Patriots has as one of its spokespeople a woman who owes back taxes and whose husband ran a company that recruited foreign workers for American jobs. The other, the Tea Party Express, is the creation of a political consulting firm.

The argument at Strange Death is that “[m]ore to fear–and to blame–for this mess are the shadowy figures like the Koch brothers and not so shadowy figures like Karl Rove who have been making their will felt behind the scenes.” The case made is certainly arguable.

David :: Aug.01.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: 1 Comment »