"Beauty And The Beast" (1946)

Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty And The Beast” came out in 1946, just a year after the end of World War II, two years after the French Liberation and fourteen years after his first feature film, “The Blood Of A Poet”. Being a filmmaker was but one of the many talents of this complete artist. Cocteau was a poet, a playwright, a painter, a sculptor, a screenwriter, a novelist, a director of photography, a critic, an actor, a composer, an editor, a costume designer, an illustrator and a ballet creator as well as a film director.

As the title of his first feature film might indicate, Cocteau preferred to think of himself as a poet above all other things, and his adaptation of “Beauty And The Beast” makes it easy to see why. Modern viewers more familiar with the also-masterful Disney version might find themselves disconcerted by its lack of structure and character development. Cocteau is telling a fairytale, in every way. He doesn’t try and make it more sophisticated. It’s a fairytale and it’s told as such. This is made clear before the film even starts, as an opening crawl asks the audience to place themselves in the mindset of children, who accept the content of fairytales unquestioningly and unconditionally, their minds unshackled by logic or judgment.

Thus, like in fairytales, most characters are fairly archetypal without descending into caricature (Baz Luhrmann, I’m looking at you). Belle (Josette Day) is kind, honest, loving and compassionate. Her sisters, like Cinderella’s, are petty, selfish, arrogant and shallow even when reduced to poverty. Her brother Ludovic (Michel Auclair) is a well-meaning self-described scoundrel. This leaves the film’s two most complex characters and, not coincidentally, they are both played by Cocteau’s lover and muse Jean Marais: The Beast and Avenant.

 

Avenant is a character that did not appear in Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s original fairytale. He appears as Ludovic’s best friend and, most importantly, Belle’s suitor. A proud, handsome blond Adonis, Avenant attempts to woo Belle only to be politely turned down. She tells him she does not love him and is in any case too devoted to her father to marry. Avenant responds by forcibly trying to kiss her, stopped by Ludovic’s interference. They fight but still they remain friends. As the family’s merchant father is ruined by the loss of his fortune, Avenant convinces Ludovic to sign a contract with a moneylender enabling him to repossess their home and furniture to pay off his debts. This reduces the family to poverty.

Modern audiences will quickly recognize Avenant as the precursor to the Disney film’s Gaston. Like Gaston, he represents the Beast’s opposite number: Whereas the Beast is ugly, considerate and unselfish, Avenant is handsome, rude and brutish.

Yet he is not the monster Gaston turns out to be. When Belle returns for a week to take care of her ailing father and reveals the secret trinkets the Beast has entrusted her with, Avenant, Ludovic and the sisters concoct a plan to steal them, find the Beast’s castle and kill him. Whereas the sisters are motivated by spite, jealousy and envy, Avenant’s motives are nobler: he believes the Beast is keeping Belle under an evil spell and that he can use his treasure to pay off her father’s debts.

It makes sense from his point of view. If a woman you loved came back after spending a long time as the captive of a beast who had threatened to kill her father for picking his rose, claimed that he treated her well and was wearing magic jewelry, wouldn’t you assume her to be either under an evil spell or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

Avenant, while not an especially nice man, is not evil. But his love for Belle has driven him to attempt murder and burglary – the former crime being futile, since the Beast was dying of a broken heart until Belle’s loving tears resurrected him. Just at that moment, Avenant is punished by an arrow throw by the animated statue of Diane and turned into a Beast just as the Beast is resurrected with Avenant’s handsome traits. It is then that Belle finally admits that she did love him.

This is summed up by the ex-Beast, who observes that love can turn a man into a beast just as easily as it can turn a beast into a man. Specifically, the love that Avenant felt for Belle that she never openly returned to him turned him into a Beast, whereas the love that the Beast felt for Belle and that she reciprocated in his dying moments turned him back into a man. An interesting distinction that raises a few questions: Could Belle be held partially responsible for Avenant’s fate due to her refusal to admit her feelings for him, out of love for her father? If so, this would give an additional twist on the meaning of “love can turn a man into a Beast”. Not only did Avenant’s unrequited love for Belle turn him into a Beast, but so did Belle’s love for her father.

I am not highly versed in psychology, but this Oedipus-like quadrangle is well-suited to Cocteau’s oneiric style. Cocteau’s first film, “The Blood Of A Poet”, was a surrealist work of art about a young artists’ sexual insecurities. Sexual insecurity is arguably even more present in “Beauty And The Beast”, in the shape of the Beast.

Viewers like me who grew up with the Disney film will remember that film’s Beast being its protagonist in the classical sense as he is the one who undergoes a journey of transformation: Turned into a Beast as punishment for his arrogance and selfishness, he grows from self-loathing volatile brute to gentleman after Belle teaches him to control his temper.

In this film, the Beast’s demeanor is much more collected. He does not raise his voice often and generally behaves like a gracious, polite host. The beastly nature of his character is not so much temperamental as it is sexual. This is represented in several different ways:

 

-          His vehement rejection when she looks at him in the eyes after he carries her unconscious body into her bedroom and she wakes up. Was he tempted to rape her? Did her awakening and look in his eyes snap him out of it?

 

-          The ambiguous look on Belle’s face during their first nightly meeting, when he appears behind her. Is that fear, arousal, or a bit of both? Also, look how she handles that knife.

 

-          The scene in which she observes him from a hiding place as he paces the corridors, gazing at his smoking hands. Whenever he has killed or appears to feel a strong emotion, the Beast’s hands or back smoke as if they were on fire.

 

-          A few minutes later, he goes into her bedroom and voyeuristically uses the magic mirror to see where she is hiding. She then goes into her bedroom and orders him to get out, he reacts with embarrassment and shame, like a boy caught masturbating by his mother.

 
He can only appear to her later in the night, supposedly because his beastly impulses are more controlled than during the day. In one scene, an early stroll in the late afternoon is briefly interrupted when the Beast senses a doe nearby and is almost overcome with the urge to hunt it.

The Beast is mysterious and fascinating because of what he represents. We never find out exactly why or how he was cursed, or even if he was cursed in the first place. For all we know, he could have been born that way. He is an embodiment of Man’s innate compulsions, resisting sexual temptation and violent urges.

None of this, of course, is explicitly defined as such. The film’s surface is that of a fairytale, and its sexual undercurrents can easily slip through the minds of children. But it is there, in the subconscious. And what better way to express the subconscious than through dreams? This is where the extraordinary sets and special effects come into play: The Beast’s castle serves as a refuge for repressed desires and feelings. Visitors are constantly surrounded by protruding arms, silently guiding them through dark corridors and luxurious meals, protruding out of walls and tables. The statues silently observe them, like voyeurs, watching their every move.

The darkness created by scarce lighting accentuates a mixture of uneasiness and fascination, particularly in the dining room and hall corridor. The backgrounds seem barely existent, the furniture and candle-bearing arms coming out of seeming nothingness. It mixes both intimacy and claustrophobia; you feel both alone and surrounded, attracted and repulsed, much as Belle feels towards the Beast.

 

A “Beauty And The Beast” review would be incomplete without mentioning Jean Marais’s performance as the triple role of Avenant, the Beast and the ex-Beast. It is a complicated and fascinating one. As Avenant, Marais is as masculine and brash as one would expect a swashbuckling hero to be, arrogant but not entirely devoid of charm. The charm is merely buried by the arrogance. As the Beast, that charm is present in his high raspy voice, creepy yet oddly seductive. His eyes do the rest of the work, enhanced rather than burdened by an astonishing makeup that reportedly took 5 hours a day and makes him look like a cross between a lion and a bear. So compelling is he that, when turned into a human, he becomes comparatively bland and uninteresting even compared to Avenant. Reportedly, the final transformation prompted Greta Garbo (or Marlene Dietrich according to Roger Ebert) to shout out "Give me back my Beast!" during the American premiere of the film.

Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty And The Beast” is a beautiful work of art not only because of its timeless visual magnificence but because it visually conveys the source material’s subconscious meaning with subtlety, attention and intelligence without straying from the story.

"The Seventh Continent"

The film opens with close-ups detailing a number plate, a wheel and headlight being washed by a hose, the sound of the running water sounding strangely like a sea storm. Then we get a frontal shot of the windshield, covered in water. Then finally, we cut to the inside of the car. The camera is in the backseat, standing perfectly still. The opening credits roll as the car drifts slowly through the great washing machine, in a long shot that lasts approximately 2 minutes and 55 seconds.

Rarely has an opening sequence more adequately set its film’s theme and tone. This will be a slow, inexorable, unforgiving journey through everyday life in all its banality, from the start of the machine down to its inevitable end.

The sound is omnipresent, overwhelming, as if to compensate for the camera’s lack of movement. Indeed, the camera rarely moves at all during the film. The memories I have are of still shots, mostly middle ones, rarely wide, generally showing only a fraction of the space and characters. Indeed, in the images following the opening credits, we don’t see the characters’ faces until the eighth minute. The family is introduced to us through the actions of their morning routine, but not through the way they feel about them. And for good reason: There really is nothing much to be felt at all. The morning routine is familiar to most viewers, but Haneke’s strict focus on the actions and movement drains the comfort out of that familiarity, exposing it as nothing more than a series of gestures and movements accompanied by a few meaningless words.

 
I mentioned the importance of the sound. It’s particularly present in those scenes. The everyday sounds of footsteps, milk being poured into a bowl of cereal, kitchen utensils being put down on the table and bed covers making contact with their owners’ bodies, are recorded and mixed in a way that makes each one distinct and gives the viewer an impression of extra realism, even though we don’t really hear these sounds as clearly and separately in real life. Since the shots are quite long and do not have a lot of things happening in them, the viewer is forced to focus on content, on what they see AND hear and the effect it has on them.

One particular sound that dominates all others – without obscuring them – during these scenes is that of the radio. For some reason, the version I saw did not subtitle the words being broadcast, but the recurring mentions of Israel, the Soviet Union, the Vatican and Yitzhak Rabin make the nature of the program clear: International news bulletin. The story is divided into three parts, each taking place in a separate year between 1987 and 1989. Each part – and thus each year – begins with a news bulletin dominating the soundtrack of the first few images.

This narrative device gives “The Seventh Continent” adds a new layer to this Austrian middle-class family’s deterioration: As the collapse of the Berlin Wall – and thus of the Eastern Bloc and of the communist ideal – grows more and more imminent, so does the family’s implosion. As Austria was part of the Western bloc and the family is very clearly bourgeois, this should not be taken as a political statement so much as a contribution to maintaining an atmosphere of impending doom.

When we do get to see the family members’ faces, they only serve to baffle us further in our attempts to figure them out. We can never truly understand exactly what is going on in their minds. Consider the letters sent to grandparents, read in voice-over by the family’s mother, Anna, telling them (and us) that the father, Georg, is making good progress in his job in spite of a boss she tells us is incompetent. This is read over still, distant shots of Georg going to work and entering his office. Nothing we are told in the letter is ever truly confirmed or denied by what we see. It doesn’t need to be because it is irrelevant. Yes, Georg has a job in which he seems to occupy a fairly respectable position. But so what? It does not appear to bring him any happiness or even any unhappiness for that matter. Indeed, in most of these shots, he is barely visible. He looks like he's in a Stanley Kubrick film, rendered tiny and insignificant by his job.

There is also a brother, whom Anna’s letter informs us is recovering from depression, though that does not stop him from slowly breaking down in tears during a family dinner. He is the only member of the family who will not be involved in the final, terrible act of self-destruction.

 

But most cryptic of all is the family’s young daughter, Evi. She causes a commotion in her school’s toilets when she appears to panic. Her teacher repeatedly questions her, but she stubbornly refuses to tell her what’s wrong. After some coaxing, Evi claims to have gone blind. The teacher tests her by waving her hand in front of her and asking her if she can see “it”. Evi says no. Her teacher asks her what she can’t see. Evi replies “Well, your…” and glances at the hand, betraying herself.

 
Several scenes later at home, Evi is again subjected to questioning, this time from her mother who demands to know if she really did pretend to be blind. Again Evi stays silent at first, looking at her mother blankly. Her mother, seen in close-up from Evi’s subjective point of view, looks her in the eye, calmly telling her that she will not hurt her and just wants to know if the story is true. Still blank-faced, Evi caves in, not out of pressure, it seems, so much as out of boredom. Anna stays silent for a second or so before breaking her promise and slapping Evi in the face, as the scene immediately cuts.

Evi’s behavior, much as the rest of the family’s, will never properly be explained. Was it merely an attempt to draw attention? Or maybe to get a brief respite from the soul-crushing mundaneness of the world in which she is trapped. A world of artificiality and coldness from which the only hope of escape lies in an idealized dream of a made-up Australia, the titular seventh continent, represented by the image of a beach with plastic rocks and a matte background painting of a stormy sea, with accompanying sounds of waves. Even their dreams are fake.

“The Seventh Continent” was Michael Haneke’s directorial debut and set up most of his recurring themes: Emotional alienation, the perceived falseness of the bourgeois way of life, the damage television and film do to the “video generation”, and the implosion of the family unit. His films have a reputation for being bleak and even depressing. The bleakness of this film is inarguable, yet even in darkness, it reaches beauty that make the term “depressing” inapplicable to it. I think of a scene towards the end, as the family has all but completed the systematic destruction of their house and have all swallowed poison. Waiting for the end, they sit on a sofa and watch their television play a clip of Jennifer Rush performing the classic 80’s pop love song “The Power Of Love” (I think there must be at least 3 of these). Haneke has previously shown television clips playing during dramatic scenes to highlight the programs’ shallowness and the falseness of the universe they depict. Here, however, the contrast between the grim reality of the family’s slow death and the upbeat song makes for a poignant image: That of people whose life is literally crumbling around them, using their last moments to try and cling to some last fabric of happiness, even if it is manufactured.

 Haneke’s stylistic sobriety recalls Robert Bresson’s later films – particularly “L’Argent” (1983), his last, grimmest and greatest film. He observes the family’s inexorable march towards death with detachment but not without compassion. He is like a visitor from another time and another place, watching from a glass, unable to help these people but able to record them so that others may avoid repeating their mistakes.

"The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser"

Kaspar Hauser is probably the most famous of all recorded cases of unidentified people. He was found as a teenager in the city of Nuremberg with a Bible and a poorly-written letter purportedly written by a guardian, explaining that he had been instructed in reading and writing but had never set foot out of his house until now, and that he wished to become a cavalryman. Though he initially seemed barely able to speak or understand German, Kaspar knew how to write his name and eventually became loquacious enough to tell people he had spent his entire life locked in a small dark cellar, visited only by the same man who later released him into Nuremberg. His custody was passed on to several people until he died of a mysterious stab wound in 1833.

Over the centuries, there has been a great deal of speculation about Kaspar’s identity. A popular theory was that he was an illegitimate heir to the House of Baden. Others point to his stories’ inconsistencies and reputation as an attention-seeking liar, and deduce that he may have been nothing more than a vagabond trickster who ran away from home and feigned mental illness for attention, sympathy and free lodging.

Whatever the factual truth may be, it is the least of Werner Herzog’s concerns. Though the opening scenes depicting Hauser’s last days in his cellar and subsequent abandonment seem to indicate he believes Kaspar’s story, Herzog is not interested in historical reconstitution or drama. He exposes the mystery of Kaspar Hauser’s identity as mere blinds covering a window into a more elusive and fascinating mystery altogether; that of human nature.

 
Kaspar Hauser, if his story is accurate, has spent his entire childhood without any contact with the outside world other than his mysterious black-clad captor, whose face is never completely clear. The man is seen teaching him how to write and how to say certain specific words and phrases, such as “I want to be a gallant rider like my father before me”, rewarding him with toy horses and punishing him with a stick to the arm. Kaspar takes all of this unquestioningly, without protest or resistance. When a police officer tests him by pretending to thrust a sword at him, he does not react. He accepts a brief career as a circus freak, where schoolmaster Daumer finds him, and takes him under his wing.

A two-year ellipse passes. Kaspar has a better grasp of the German language and can better express how he feels and what he thinks, but that does not make him any less hard to understand or more in tune with his fellow man: The thoughts he expresses are at times childlike and seem to indicate mental retardation.

Consider: Kaspar is in the garden with Daumer and a pastor, looking at the apple tree. He talks of apples as if they were living, sentient beings. Daumer gently corrects him, telling him that they have no mind of their own and are subject to human will. To prove it, he tells him he can throw it and it will land where he wants, on the path. Instead, it lands in the grass. He tries again, this time aiming at the pastor’s foot. It goes over it. “Smart apple”, remarks Kaspar.

 

This would seem to indicate a mentally retarded man, except that his way of thinking and acting defy such simplistic diagnosis. At times, he expresses himself with a strange kind of poetry that would indicate a creative and philosophical mind. Upon hearing the music of a blind pianist, he remarks “The music feels strong in my heart…I feel so unexpectedly old”. Earlier, when rocking a baby’s cradle, he pronounces those mysterious words to no one in particular: “Mother, I am so far away from everything”. He has strange, beautiful dreams whose abstract nature and visual presentation – as grainy video footage – seem to suggest distant memories of a past life.

 At other times, it is unclear whether Kaspar operates within his own logic or whether he possesses logical abilities that simply do not fit into society’s conventions:

-          The former is illustrated by a scene in which he walks by the tower he briefly lived in before coming into Daumer’s care. This does not make sense to him: Whether he looked right, left, frontwards or backwards, all he could see was room; whereas he just has to turn away from the tower to stop seeing it. Therefore, to Kaspar’s mind, the room is bigger than the tower. Of course Kaspar is incorrect, but one can see the thought process that led him to such a nonsensical deduction.

-          The latter is illustrated by a scene in which Kaspar is visited by a professor who gives him a test of logic that goes thus: Two villages, one inhabited by liars, the other inhabited by truth-tellers. Each have a road that cross into one. You are at that crossroad, where you meet a man coming from one of the villages. What is the one question that will inevitably lead you to know which village the man comes from? To the professor, there can be only one correct question: Do you come from the liars’ village? Kaspar has a much odder yet simpler solution: Ask the man if he is a tree-frog.

Of course, in both cases, Kaspar is incorrect – the question may let him know where the man is from but it would not give him the direction of the villages. Yet in both cases, one can see the thought process that would lead him to such deductions. Kaspar confronts us with common knowledge so obvious that it never required any explanation for us, knowledge and common sense we take for granted, that he was not introduced to and therefore is as alien to him as he is to us.

Herzog’s previously-reviewed 1970 gem “Even Dwarfs Started Small” gets a couple of shout-outs in the form of cameo appearances by lead actor Helmut Döring as a circus freak and the kneeling camel he was laughing at. It is fitting, even logical: Both films examine otherness, challenge our perceptions of it with respectful restraint and detachment. Herzog shoots in mostly short focals and keeps a certain distance from his characters, usually filming in middle shots. He is an observer in a way only an artist can be, watching this man interact with a strange, foreign environment and people that feel so familiar to us despite being set in a historical past. He does not consciously try to teach us a lesson in humanity or make us feel empathy for Kaspar.

 He does so because he trusts Kaspar to do all the necessary work. That work is achieved through one of the purest, most authentic performances you will ever see in your life. The actor in question is Bruno Schleinstein, credited as Bruno S. Bruno was the mentally ill, unwanted son of a prostitute who, according to his IMDb biography, had been experimented upon by the Nazis and had spent most of his life in a mental hospital until he caught Herzog’s eye in the documentary “Bruno The Black”. As Kaspar Hauser, he captures your attention without any conscious effort on his part. His eyes are all over the place, even when his body is stiff and still. When he speaks, he makes a habit of punctuating every word with his index and thumb, in remarkably successful attempts to look and sound as dignified as possible. Herzog could not possibly have obtained this kind of truth with a professional actor, no matter how skilled. Everything about Schleinstein’s performance feels simultaneously real and alien, a very difficult combination indeed.

 “The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser” is part of a certain group of films that all evoke the mystery of human nature and examine the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Those films include Arthur Penn’s “The Miracle Worker”, François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child” – whose lead titular character was also played by a non-professional – and Hugh Hudson’s “Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes”. All of these films are admirable, but I feel Herzog’s film supersedes them by the humility it displays in refusing to answer the many questions it asks. Just as we will never know what happened after the beginning of the story he tells before dying, we will never solve the enigma of Kaspar Hauser and, more importantly, we will never solve the enigma of the other’s perception of ourselves and our world. And it is doubtful that any scientific progress will ever make us come closer to understanding ourselves. Like the film’s scientists, we may perform an autopsy on Kaspar and find several abnormalities in his liver and brains (the latter part is historically disputed) and we may congratulate ourselves on our discovery, but we will hardly know him better for it. That, I suppose, is the artist’s job. At least to try.

"Aguirre, The Wrath Of God"

He limps around the corpses of his followers, his torso arched sideways as if he were half-paralyzed, his wide blue eyes scouting the wild, unforgiving environment as he rants about his plans to take over the New World to the monkeys that have invaded his raft. He is Don Lope de Aguirre, self-described wrath of God and greatest traitor, and last remaining survivor of the film.

This is the final image of a film that challenges all conventions typically associated with its kind. Consider: The true story of a doomed expedition of Spanish conquistadors who set out on a long deadly journey across the Amazon River to find the fabled city of El Dorado, and never returned. One of its leaders, Aguirre, takes control of his party and turns it into a grotesque little parody of an empire whose strings he pulls.

Such a tale of hubris, greed, manipulation and lust for power appears to have all the necessary ingredients worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. Indeed, the story is said to have inspired Joseph Conrad’s “Heart Of Darkness”, which has since been somewhat clouded by its masterful cinematic adaptation “Apocalypse Now” (1979). One might expect something similar to the latter film, something both grand and complex, with detailed, memorable characters and dialogue; suspense, action and excitement. 

But “Aguirre, The Wrath Of God” is something different entirely. It is grand, yes, but it does not flatter its characters’ desires about themselves by granting them any more importance than what they already have. The dialogue and acting are kept to an understated minimum. Even Aguirre himself only appears on screen from time to time at first, before his presence gradually devours all those around him. And when he does appear, rather than the unpredictable torrent of fury you’d expect from the notorious Klaus Kinski, he is quiet and restrained, like a boiling cauldron of insanity waiting patiently for its time to erupt before simmering down again. His wild eyes observe his surroundings, not quite understanding and never completely decided on what his reaction will be. Observe him as he looks at a Native slave playing a dissonantly cheerful tune on wooden pipes, standing right next to him. He moves about, looking at the man and looking away, as if unable to make up his mind whether or not the music offends him or leaves him cold.

The film is visually striking from its very first scene, which shows what must be at least a kilometer-long line of conquistadors descending the cloudy mountains and into the jungle, set to reverent South American choir music. After a few shots establishing the mountain's majesty, the camera slowly pans from the clouds to the top of the trail on the other side of the mountain where the leaders are. We may not realize it yet, but Herzog is introducing us to the true protagonist of the film: The rainforest, as powerful, all-encompassing and ruthless as God himself.

This is reflected in Hezog’s cinematography and editing. When his camera isn’t gliding inconspicuously around his characters’ bodies, he’s cutting from one face and object to another. Scenes of attacks by native cannibals go completely against what expectations one might have based on preexisting cinematic experiences: No action, no suspense, no valiant attempt to evade and fight an invisible enemy. Only shots of dead and dying men who, by the end of the film, have become so accustomed to this that one of them remarks that “long arrows are gaining fashion” before falling dead in the water.

This is one example of quite a few instances of black humour in the film. A more surreal one comes after Aguirre overhears one of his men conspiring to desert him, and has him beheaded as he counts seconds. The head comes off, rolls on the floor and finishes counting “ten” before staying still. A more subtle example comes when the horse on the raft goes berserk and Aguirre orders it removed from it. The horse is pushed off the raft and the men watch to see whether or not it will drown. A couple of shots later, it has made its way on the land and watches as its ex-owners drift away, still locked in their mad little empire and still running out of food that it could have provided for them. These unexpected moments of humour make the film almost seem like an exceptionally dark Monty Python comedy.

Ultimately, “Aguirre, The Wrath Of God” is a film driven less by its character and more by its own theme, which the characters all serve. It continues Herzog’s pitting of humans against their environment – which he did with more overt humour and affection in “Even Dwarfs Started Small” – but gives the environment every possible advantage. Alfred Hitchcock once said that in a traditional film, the director is God; whereas in a documentary, God is the director. This film is like a documentary directed by God, gazing upon the fools who thought they could defy him with a mixture of amusement and pity.

"Django Unchained"

I hesitated for some time before watching “Django Unchained”. As cinephiles no doubt know, every Quentin Tarantino film is heavily (and lovingly) influenced by a specific film genre. In this case, it is the spaghetti western, more specifically the films of Sergio Corbucci, none of which I have seen. Thus, I feared I would not be able to give a proper review to the film due to my ignorance of its roots. I would be unable to compare the film to those it was inspired by, and see how Tarantino understood the way they worked and adapted them to his own style.

I soon realized the futility of such considerations. I had never seen – and still have never seen – a single Bruce Lee film or martial arts film before I watched the “Kill Bill” duology, and it did not stop me from enjoying both films immensely because they stood on their own two legs. If film references and tributes were all that there was to “Django Unchained”, it would be a very shallow film indeed. Fortunately, that is not the case. “Django Unchained” draws heavily from Spaghetti westerns and Blaxploitation films but it is neither one nor the other. It is too self-consciously witty and dialogue-heavy to be a spaghetti western (in my experience, dialogue in such films is only used when absolutely necessary) and it is too driven by a white co-protagonist to be a true Blaxploitation film.

The latter point leads me to one of the film’s greatest strengths as well as one of its more problematic elements: The character of Dr. King Schultz, the polite, well-spoken German bounty hunter played so perfectly by Christoph Waltz. In one of the many comparisons I will be drawing to Tarantino’s previous film “Inglourious Basterds”, one could say King Schultz is almost a polar opposite of Colonel Hans Landa, Waltz’s character from that film. Landa, like Schultz, possessed great charm, wit, intelligence and predatorial instincts. But he worked for an evil racist and genocidal force, only turning on it when it benefited him. He was an opportunist who used his detective skills to find and kill Jews.

Schultz has many things in common with Landa, aside from his actor: He’s also skilled at finding and killing people; he’s charming, charismatic and polite; and has a talent for taking control of seemingly every possible situation. But he also shares an important trait with another “Inglourious Basterds” character, Aldo Raine: A sense of justice that compels him to help the Other. In Raine’s case, it was helping Jews killing Nazis. In Schultz’s case, it’s freeing black slaves and killing criminals, most of whom are either racists or work in the slave business.

 

It is this aspect that makes Schultz’s character morally admirable, yet it also brings in a potentially problematic element in the film: For about half of the film, it is Schultz who is the main driving force of the film. Django is a stoic, quiet man who spends that same half of the film following Schultz. He does as he says. He only mildly questions him. He does not argue with him. He does not display a particularly strong personality, and tells very little about how he feels or what he thinks. He is the quiet partner who counterbalances Schultz’s more extroverted persona.

This led me to wondering: Is Schultz really so different from the slavers he kills? Is he not using Django as much as they were, minus the physical and verbal abuse? Certainly, he treats him as an equal and seems genuinely concerned about his wife Broomhilda and her fate. But his use of Django as an accomplice in his killings with the promise of eventually rescuing Broomhilda, as well as Django’s silent acceptance of that, does raise ethical questions of that order that could have been explored a bit further, yet they are not.

Racial matters aside, Schultz and Django’s relationship is fundamentally no different than the classical mentor-hero relationship:

-          The older, more experienced mentor teaches the inexperienced young hero – who is at that time a blank slate – how the world works, how to use weapons, how to use trickery, etc.

-          The hero gradually improves and picks up on the mentor’s ways. In Django’s case, he notices how amused and impressed the evil plantation owner is and thus frequently provokes his men, temporarily alarming Schultz until the reasoning behind his behaviour is explained.

-          The mentor dies after accomplishing half the job, leaving the hero to finish it using what he has learned from him.

This classical narrative does justify Schultz’s prominence in the first half of the film, yet at times, I could not help wondering if this was not an unintentional example of the “white saviour” trope. It is the gradual way Django gets to have his say – such as the aforementioned example of him apparently disrupting Schultz’s plan – that saves him from being too passive and makes him more than a mere obedient follower. It makes his application of Schultz’s methods to gain his freedom back, avenge his mentor and rescue his wife in the final half-hour, all the more satisfying.

Regardless, it is Schultz’s importance in the film that prevents it from really being a Blaxploitation film, but I do believe that was Tarantino’s intention. It is no coincidence that Broomhilda’s full name, Broomhilda Von Shaft (her first owners were German), is supposed to mark her as an ancestor of black cinematic hero John Shaft. Although widely thought of as a Blaxploitation hero, John Shaft was written by a white man and more politically astute than the subversive borderline anti-white mentality that permeated many Blaxploitation films. In “Shaft”, the titular hero was an egalitarian, reluctant to snitch on “brothers” to white police officers but willing to do so for the good of the general community, casually dismissing black radicals’ “uncle tom” charges. The film even has a scene set in a bar tended by an openly gay friend, who casually pats Shaft on the backside without any discomfort or repulsion on the latter’s part. In that same scene, Shaft replaces his friend as bartender and pretends to be gay in order to lure a gay mobster in a false sense of security. Keep in mind this film came out in 1970, a time when being openly gay was arguably as difficult as being black. Bottom line, Shaft was a progressive man, ahead of his time. King Schultz, in that respect, is his equivalent: An unusually enlightened man hailing from what was, until the 1930s, one of the most progressive countries in the world.

 

After killing three of Django’s old slave-handlers and a few other criminals (including one in front of his young son, from a distance, much to Django’s displeasure), Schultz finally takes Django to Mississippi and formulates an overthought, unnecessarily complex plan to free Broomhilda from the clutches of depraved plantation owner Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, in a performance I’ll be commenting on later). They impress him enough for him to invite them to his estate. It is there we meet the film’s most fascinating and most important character, Stephen.

Played by Samuel L. Jackson in what is easily his best performance since “Pulp Fiction”, Stephen initially looks, sounds and acts like a grotesque “uncle Tom” caricature as played by Stepin Fetchit: Speaking a barely-articulate pidgin English, stooping on a cane and sporting a permanent scowl, Stephen initially appears to be a slave with Stockholm Syndrome, constantly licking his master’s boots and obsequiously repeating every last word he says. So devout is he to the slavery system and to the subjugation of his own people that the sight of Django – a black man riding a horse – causes him even more anger and disbelief than his white masters.

Yet before we even get to this point, the very first image introducing Stephen belies what follows and reveals his true nature: He is shown meticulously signing checks in Candie’s name, forging his signature with great care. So spectacular is the following “uncle Tom” act that we forget this crucial introduction and what it says about Stephen. It becomes more clear as soon as he spots Django and Broomhilda’s obvious attraction and informs his master of Django and Schultz’s true intentions. In the latter scene, he discards his cane, speaks more articulately and eloquently, and scolds his master like a father would an inattentive son.

At that moment Stephen’s true nature becomes more evident, as does the real reason for his animosity towards Django: Far from the obedient, happy house slave he pretends to be, it is he, Stephen, who truly runs Candieland while Candie is off having fun torturing slaves and entertaining guests. Having lived his entire life as a slave, he has learned how to turn his position of inferiority to his advantage, using it to dominate and terrorize other slaves and act as his beloved master’s confidante. As far as Stephen knows, he has earned his position of power and influence, and the system works to make him “the one in ten thousand”. To see another black man, a free man, step into his kingdom and disturb the order he has worked so hard to build and preserve, represents a grave threat that must be eliminated.

It is Stephen who provides the film with the moral complexity it somewhat lacked until then, the complexity that made “Inglourious Basterds” and “Pulp Fiction” so rich. Yet it does not quite suffice to make “Django Unchained” profound. Along with the “Kill Bill” duology, this is the Tarantino film in which bloody violence is at its most aesthetized. In most of his films, such violence is used to shock the audience into laughter (“Pulp Fiction”, “Inglourious Basterds”) or for grim dramatic effect (“Reservoir Dogs”). Some of the latter is present in “Django Unchained” (especially when showing the treatment of slaves) but most of it, such as the final shootout, is directed towards villains whom we are encouraged to think of as deserving the treatment, even as they scream in horrendous pain. This is not in and of itself a bad thing, as the overall film is really meant to be an entertaining spaghetti-western homage. Yet, after “Inglourious Basterds”, in which both sides displayed violence that humanized both victim and aggressor, it feels like something of a step back.

Another step back is the role of women in Tarantino’s films. Tarantino’s women are known for being intelligent, strong-minded and complex avengers (the exception to the latter trait being Mia Wallace, who is still an interesting and layered character in her own right). Here, the only prominent female character is Broomhilda and she exists purely as a damsel in distress. All that Kerry Washington is given to do is scream, cry and look scared. She displays little depth other than informed escape attempts, an ability to speak German and nicknaming Django her “big troublemaker”. She plays absolutely no part in her own escape, and even makes things worse by making her knowledge of Django visible to Stephen.

I know I have been focusing a lot on the film’s flaws and the overall impression must appear mixed at this time, but I hasten to point out that I did enjoy the film. Before we arrive at Candieland, “Django Unchained” is at its best when it plays as a barbed attack on 19^th century racism by 21^st century values represented by King Schultz. One of the film’s best and funniest scenes involves a ragtag group of proto-Ku Klux Klan – one of them played by Jonah Hill – preparing to attack Schultz and Django but arguing about how the bags block their eyesight. It’s the kind of scene that showcases Tarantino’s knack for making extremely funny and lively dialogue out of small, seemingly unimportant details. Visually, it appears the dreaded yellow/orange color grading popularized by the Coen Brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” has contaminated Quentin Tarantino too, though his use of it is mercifully sparing, mostly justified (artificially lit scenes that, in-universe, are supposed to be lit only by candles or torches) and not distracting.

 

But as a director, I feel Quentin Tarantino’s single greatest strength is getting outstanding performances out of his actors. As King Schultz, Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz is even better than he was as Colonel Landa: As he is on the side of good, the viewer is put in a more comfortable situation and his affability and showmanship are more sincere. They are used to glorify him and make him look cool, yes, but they also work against him and allow him to unintentionally expose his constant need to be in control and put on a show as a weakness as much as a strength. Waltz is thus allowed to explore a wider, subtler range of emotions, and come across as more of a human being than a pure force of power and entertainment.

Jamie Foxx, one of today’s most charismatic actors, is stoic and quiet, his eyes attentively observing each situation, building up his knowledge until the time is right to start “unchaining” himself from his sidekick role. It’s this subtle little detail Foxx provides that keeps the viewer interested in what could have been a dull, one-note character.

But the film’s biggest acting triumph comes from Leonardo DiCaprio as Calvin J. Candie. Quentin Tarantino’s most prominent feature as a filmmaker is taking known entities – like film genres, tropes and pop culture elements – and examining them under a new light, revealing previously unseen aspects of them to his audience. It is something he is also skilled at doing with actors. He did it with John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction” – presenting a cool, likeable leading man and revealing him to be an awkward, clumsy whiner – and with Kurt Russell in “Grindhouse Presents: Death Proof” – casting the tough-as-nails anti-hero of the 1980s as a creepy serial killer who screams like a little girl when his would-be-victims fight back.

Here, he provides the great Leonardo DiCaprio with a chance to show a manic, scary side of him we’ve been getting hints at in films such as “The Departed” and “The Aviator” but never have seen in broad daylight until now. His Calvin J. Candie is like a dark caricature of Tarantino as seen by the media: An egotistical overgrown hyperactive adolescent who is as entertained by deadly violence as other men are by boxing matches, and loves making a constant show of himself as much as Schultz. DiCaprio, always an extremely dedicated actor, slips into the part with such ease that I even forgot he was playing against type at all. You’d never expect to see him play such a part, and yet it clicks naturally.

“Django Unchained” is a very entertaining adventure that earns most of its successes through its lively characters, even if the screenplay doesn’t put as much meticulous attention towards their development as “Inglourious Basterds” did. Even as I enjoyed it, I could not help but worrying that Tarantino might be paradoxically growing less mature as he gets older. I hope to come out of his next feature with the knowledge that his experiences as both a filmmaker and a cinephile have taught him more than just how to entertain. “Inglourious Basterds” gave that impression. For his next film, I hope to have the confirmation.

"Even Dwarfs Started Small"

I wish I had been alive during the late 60s – early 70s. Those were the years during which cinema was experiencing a rebirth that enlightened many a cinephile with new experiences, revealing such filmmakers as Scorsese, Kubrick, Spielberg, Resnais, Cassavetes, Roeg, Godard, Truffaut, and Herzog, whose film is the subject of this review. To have seen these films with the collective consciousness and mindset of the period's filmgoers must have been an intense, unique experience, something akin to the discovery of new colours or feelings.

“Even Dwarfs Started Small” is one such experience. It came out in 1970, a year that was full of new cinematic experiences, from John Cassavetes’ “Husbands” – a thinking man’s “The Hangover” before there was even such a thing – to Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s “Performance” – an acid-fueled dressing-down of traditional masculinity and male sexuality.

But when compared to other films that came out that year, “Even Dwarfs Started Small” is closer to Robert Altman’s “M. A. S. H.” in that both films are anarchistic counter-cultural satires in which the system’s disease is exposed when it is overrun by those who are supposed to make it work –medical officers in “M. A. S. H.” – or those who are supposed to benefit from it – asylum inmates in this film.

 As most people who have heard of the film know, the cast is comprised entirely of dwarfs. Every single person who appears on screen is a dwarf, from the asylum’s instructor to the female driver who stops by for directions. For all intents and purposes, the film appears to be set in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone is a dwarf and thus in disproportion to utilities and furniture.

Herzog shoots the cast closely, often using mid-shots. Over time, I started to forget that I was watching a film with an all-dwarf cast. Herzog does not exploit them for cheap laughs. He puts us uncomfortably close to their “otherness” but he doesn’t do it patronizingly. The rare use of their height for comedic purpose is not made at their expense, but with affection and humanity. Best exemplified in one of the film’s best scenes, in which Hombre and a woman are forcibly pushed into a bedroom to have sex. The woman gets on it without any problem but Hombre repeatedly fails to do it. He doesn’t think to climb on the chair and jump on the bed, but rather to make a footstool out of magazines. He never manages it, but the scene isn’t shot as slapstick. Herzog shoots in a fairly wide frame, forcing the viewer to focus on Hombre’s movements and actions. It is a study in disproportion, not a gag.

Through the anarchistic chaos created by the inmates, Herzog laughs at normality – one scene has them reading an erotic magazine and giggling at the women’s bodies – but doesn’t entirely condone their behavior. The dwarfs display apparently unsimulated cruelty to animals and to blind dwarf guards. Both cases of violence are filmed beautifully, particularly their attempts to evade or trick the blind guards by creeping past them without being seen, or interfering in their game of hockey. The latter two scenes are filmed in long, steady shots similar to the aforementioned bedroom scene. It is reminiscent of silent comedies such as “Safety Last!” in that regard, keeping the camera at a distance and letting the actors’ bodies interact with their environment. Even the cruel cockfight scene is shot with beauty, the camera swooping over the fighting birds almost like a divinity overseeing it. The outside world is temporarily forgotten as we get lost in the fight.

 The beauty of these scenes is not used to distract the audience from the cruelty of the characters’ actions, but rather to soften the blow. What the characters – and by extension the cast and crew – are doing to these animals is cruel, and no attempt is made to deny that. It is not entertaining, nor is it funny in the primary sense. It is merely what it is, shown as such, and the artistic pleasure derived from the way it is filmed and edited makes it more palatable to us but does not desensitize us from its nature.

If it weren’t for the use of German language and the opening credits, you would be forgiven for mistaking “Even Dwarfs Started Small” for a Luis Buñuel film. It bears many familiar thematic and visual hallmarks of his cinema, from the arid, desert setting in the Canary Islands reminiscent of “Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread” and “Simon Of The Desert” to its visual blasphemy worthy of “Viridiana”:  

-          The dwarfs parading a monkey tied up on a cross.

 

-          A pre-supper grace prayer that turns into a food fight.

 

-          The film’s final image is that of its protagonist, Hombre, laughing maniacally for over two minutes at a camel kneeling as if in prayer that eventually defecates, as traditional South American chanting and music plays on the soundtrack.

I am too much of a neophyte to detail what truly separates this film from a Buñuel film, but I think I can be quite safe in saying that Herzog seems to have more affection for his characters than Buñuel did. While Buñuel was not devoid of empathy and kindness – see “Los Olvidados” – he often treated his victims as badly as his villains. Herzog, while not shying away from his protagonists’ insanity and cruelty, puts the blame on the system, as was the popular thing to do back then. Even his hapless instructor – who ends up stuck in a parody of a Nazi salute, arguing with a tree trunk – is just another victim of the institution he runs.