In the end the performance does not rescue the dreary new production – still, the reason to visit the Met’s new Tosca is Karita Mattila’s bravura if wrongheaded interpretation of the title role. Mattila plays the prima donna Floria Tosca as an over-the-top old-school diva, all self-dramatizing nervous energy. This is dangerous, as the events of the last day of Tosca’s life would excite a buried Samuel Beckett heroine from torpor into frenetic activity: Tosca endures jealous frenzies, first soothed and then confirmed, a command performance before the queen, the torture of her lover, then betraying him, a brutal seduction, a hot-blooded murder, her lover’s apparent salvation, his actual death, and a desperate leap to her own.
If none of this penetrates her self-involvement, perhaps the business with Scarpia isn’t really so bad – she just gets carried away. You know: divas! Certainly the final scene of Act II in the Luc Bondy production is a tasteless mistake – Mattila’s Tosca seems neither stunned nor shocked by having been driven to murder. She plots it beforehand, hides the dagger, arranges her dress so as to incite him, kicks him off the sofa afterward to present a better “stage picture,” and in describing the event to Cavaradossi later, she acts it all out – clearly enjoying every moment spent in the limelight of her imagination. If Tosca is too self-involved to be touched by murder, if she looks upon it as just another chance to seize center stage, why should we care about her? why credit her with any genuine feelings?
While Mattila is performing, though, such thoughts seldom intrude. She whirls about the ugly barn of a church like a Roman dervish, she seizes her lover’s paintbrush to alter the Magdalen’s eyes; she exposes her legs for Scarpia’s rape; and she insists that Cavaradossi rehearse his “fake” execution with her. She cannot be still for a moment – and the payback is her “Vissi d’arte,” when, drained by Scarpia’s brutality, she goes pale and empty, lets her voice float stunned into the theater. She does not remain crushed – nothing but death will stop this woman’s playacting – but the moment itself is riveting, and the rest of Mattila’s Tosca seems designed to draw our attention to it. Since this is not the heart of the opera – Puccini reportedly found the aria a bit dull – her focus highlights Mattila’s errors elsewhere. Tosca must grow from the flibbertigibbet of Act I to the desperate adventuress of Act III, and Mattila’s Tosca does not make such a change. Her reaction to getting blood on her hands? She puts on purple gloves.
Mattila’s voice is not Italianate – as everyone has been saying since she took up Manon Lescaut a few years back. Her Manon Lescaut indeed lacked the opulent young sound of that teenage sensualist – but Tosca is a mature woman, and Mattila sings her with full-throated sensuality, passion without wilt or waver. I’ve seen Toscas of a dozen nationalities, and her sound is more idiomatic, and more beautiful, than many others of the “Nordic” school – Behrens, Nilsson and Vishnevskaya come to mind. More important is that she feels, and lives, the notes of this extreme character.
Marcelo Álvarez (an Argentine) sings a very Italian Cavaradossi, suave and romantic in “Recondita armonia” and the love duets. He lacked vocal finesse only in “E lucevan le stelle,” which was not the honeyed reverie many tenors give us. Álvarez seemed so involved in acting the words – each one clear – that the anguish of his situation choked him up. The elegiac scene that followed, however, found him Mattila’s match for power and expressive beauty.
Carlo Guelfi sang a gruff, barking Scarpia, brutally effective in Act I, but the nuanced slime of Act II was missing – and was missed. Part of the problem may have been the intrusion of three prostitutes fooling with him at the opening of Act II, and this is typical of the director’s initiatives in adding nothing to the show but unanswerable questions. Scarpia is explaining the trap he plans to set for Tosca – and why: he enjoys sex when the lady resists – and these women don’t take the hint – not at all. Are they the sort of persons in whom Scarpia would confide? No – he’s not the type to confide in anyone, least of all a woman – he’s an egotist who opens himself in soliloquy. So why are the dames here? If we’re not supposed to think about it, or to wonder why they’re hanging around, why their presence and those questions being shoved in our faces? Does Mr. Bondy not understand the words Scarpia is singing? Similarly, if the enormous church is built of unpainted brick – this is Rome? – why is Cavaradossi painting his Magdalen in it?
Tosca is a finely-crafted machine, every effect calculated to a hair; set it in motion with the proper fuel (voices and orchestra) and it will run smooth as a Lamborghini. Each entrance gives us the character: Tosca’s sensuous piety (in a theme that will come back in “Vissi d’arte”), Cavaradossi’s romantic idealism, Angelotti’s desperation. The first appearance of Scarpia is the most terrifying entrance in all opera – because Puccini set it up to be, thrusting it into the midst of a rollicking (but thirty-second-long) children’s scene. We are never supposed to relax after that, whenever Scarpia is around – and that tension pays dividends as Tosca takes her time suspecting what we feel in our skin: this man is setting his trap for her. Why are those whores getting in the way of our focus on a monomaniac evil?
Then there’s dawn amid the bells of Rome, gentle precisely so that it can be interrupted by the grim preliminaries of an execution. To rehearse the firing squad during this serene music does not bring us to the proper frame of mind for a jolt – on the contrary, it gives us a preliminary jolt that undercuts Puccini’s. We should relax until the jailor summons Cavaradossi – but try resting with all that pointless activity on Mr. Bondy’s stage.
To this ugly and irritating concept, the familiar Met forces under Joseph Colaneri brought a symphonic grandeur: the pounding strings rising to climax in Tosca’s scream as Scarpia corners her, the surge of life around the organ processional that ends Act I, the subtle flicks of this instrument or that to comment on character or story or the very real world in which the opera was set – all reminded us of how fine a contraption of interacting parts Puccini devised, even as Mr. Bondy was tearing them apart and flinging them to the winds. I liked Mattila’s abruptly blank face during “Vissi d’arte,” and Joel Sorenson’s (Spoletta’s) look of frustrated, “You’re going to let her get away with that?” during Scarpia’s interrogation, and the way Álvarez was always gazing at, and admiring, his lover – but these touches were probably invisible to most of the house.
The problem with this school of direction is that its practitioners seem to regard the score like music in a film, as an afterthought, mere accompaniment to action. It is not. In opera, the music is the main event – or as much of it as the action is. Action need not be invented to fill up spaces where there is merely music – the spaces of mere music are there for dramatic reasons. To change things without justification is not very good theater.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Posh Nosh
"We make our own stock, but by all means buy prepared stock if you have
no self-esteem."
"I use only Tuscan Extra VIRGIN olive oil. This is an old tart."
"Cooking really upsets food."
"We bamboozle our samphire - there's no other way."
"Better get your bottarga from the source - right off the docks at
Calegari - no later than six in the morning when the fishermen are still wet."
"Thoroughly exasperate your currants ... then vilify as usual."
"Today we're focusing on the wine's color - it's gold - heavenly gold -
like God's weewee." (sips) "Better."
-----------------------------------------------
WHY have all you people been keeping this glorious gift of the BBC from me
for whom (obviously) it was designed? Or (gasp) are you too in ignorance of
its wonders? I found out about it from my next-door neighbors, and in
New York, you know, one never even talks to one's next-door neighbors.
The comedy is deceptively mild, deceptively quiet - words superbly, elegantly mis-used in highfalutin ways to mean "cook": "Degrade the eggplant into one-inch cubes"; "Brando your chicken with the butter," "assault an aubergine." Further, there's that old standby, the funniest thing in the world to any Brit, someone of the lower classes aspiring upwards and getting the tone just a bit wrong - remember Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket? On Posh Nosh, our hostess, "my father was a publican," seems blissfully unaware that the handsome, upper-class husband whom she has married and with whom she runs a restaurant is gay as Ikea on Superbowl Sunday. "Where would you be without me?" "Mykonos." In fact - the series' final episode reveals - she knows just what is going on; as long as he's happy and she's upper class, she doesn't care. "You know what mother said when she first met you? 'She'll make the trains run on time.' You know, like Mussolini." "Wasn't he a man?" "It's a compliment!"
Fortunately the eight ten-minute bite-size bits that constitute the show are to be found under "Posh Nosh" on youtube. God bless youtube - it's like sipping whiskey (notes of apple, charred sticks and plastic) through a noose.
no self-esteem."
"I use only Tuscan Extra VIRGIN olive oil. This is an old tart."
"Cooking really upsets food."
"We bamboozle our samphire - there's no other way."
"Better get your bottarga from the source - right off the docks at
Calegari - no later than six in the morning when the fishermen are still wet."
"Thoroughly exasperate your currants ... then vilify as usual."
"Today we're focusing on the wine's color - it's gold - heavenly gold -
like God's weewee." (sips) "Better."
-----------------------------------------------
WHY have all you people been keeping this glorious gift of the BBC from me
for whom (obviously) it was designed? Or (gasp) are you too in ignorance of
its wonders? I found out about it from my next-door neighbors, and in
New York, you know, one never even talks to one's next-door neighbors.
The comedy is deceptively mild, deceptively quiet - words superbly, elegantly mis-used in highfalutin ways to mean "cook": "Degrade the eggplant into one-inch cubes"; "Brando your chicken with the butter," "assault an aubergine." Further, there's that old standby, the funniest thing in the world to any Brit, someone of the lower classes aspiring upwards and getting the tone just a bit wrong - remember Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket? On Posh Nosh, our hostess, "my father was a publican," seems blissfully unaware that the handsome, upper-class husband whom she has married and with whom she runs a restaurant is gay as Ikea on Superbowl Sunday. "Where would you be without me?" "Mykonos." In fact - the series' final episode reveals - she knows just what is going on; as long as he's happy and she's upper class, she doesn't care. "You know what mother said when she first met you? 'She'll make the trains run on time.' You know, like Mussolini." "Wasn't he a man?" "It's a compliment!"
Fortunately the eight ten-minute bite-size bits that constitute the show are to be found under "Posh Nosh" on youtube. God bless youtube - it's like sipping whiskey (notes of apple, charred sticks and plastic) through a noose.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
"Too Late Now"
Do you know this lovely song?
"Too late now to forget your smile/ The way we cling when we dance a while/ Too late now to forget and go on to someone new..."
It suits my mood these days: the wry, smiling, self-conscious lyric (Alan Jay Lerner), the gently dawdling, reflective melody (Burton Lane) that matches it superbly: the A theme is in two parts, going to a false high the first time, then to a surprisingly higher one to send the sentiment soaring. A really fine merging of words and music - I wonder which came first? (With both Lane and Lerner, the words usually came first.) No wonder jazz men love to play with this tune.
The sentiment, too, is superbly ambiguous: It is not clear whether it's "too late" because the affair is over and the singer blew it, or because it's too late to break it off now that s/he realizes s/he's fallen in love, that some other person has become necessary. Both melancholy catastrophes! Thus it can be sung sadly or with an uplift at the end.
Jane Powell introduced it in Royal Wedding, the very bad 1951 film with wonderful songs (including "I Left My Hat in Haiti" and "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I've Been A Liar All My Life") and the famous sequence when Fred Astaire dances up the wall and across the ceiling, which was later mimicked by Ingmar Bergman in Hour of the Wolf, which I suggest would not make a good musical. (An opera by Franz Schreker, maybe.)
I have recordings of "Too Late Now" with Jane Monheit (too expiringly smokily languid) and Michael Feinstein (who just plain sings it badly, with gaping ugly hollows under his voice like puddles under icy slush that you slip into and get muddy ice in your shoes) and Dorothy Loudon (who sounds 85 years old). None of them inspire me, but the lovely song does.
Happily, my friend Irwin made me a CD of 13 other versions from his matchless collection of you-name-it, including superb renditions by Mel Tormé and Ann Hampton Calloway.
On youtube, I have found Audra Macdonald in a superb "straight" rendition (she has the voice for this melody) and Peggy Lee, who seems to sing it with a sexually content smile on her lips. (I mean, that is how the lyric comes through - we do not see her on this clip.) Judy Garland is a bit too husky with it. Paul Sheesley a little too jazzy - the jazzy mind set fights with the sentiment of the song. (Of course, wandering around youtube this way, I stumbled on something else wonderful, Frank Sinatra's somewhat too up-tempo version of Johnny Mercer's "I Thought About You," another song currently repeating in my head.) (No iPod here! I just sing them to myself while biking around town!)
A fine tunesmith Lane, mostly for the movies - he had one great Broadway hit - at the same time as Royal Wedding (Finian's Rainbow, soon to be revived, a show on which I passionately fixated at age six, memorizing all the songs in Ella Logan's Scottish accent though I had no idea what two-thirds of Yip Harburg's glorious lyrics meant). Then Lane was blacklisted for years. He got back to Broadway together with Lerner for On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (Richard Rodgers having given up in exasperation at Lerner's dilatory ways - Rodgers was used to Hammerstein, who would sit in the office with him all day and come up with a lyric a few hours after they had decided what sort of song ought to go in what part of a show). On A Clear Day is also full of great tunes (and great lyrics) - "What Did I Have That I Don't Have," "The S.S. Bernard Cohn," "Don't Tamper With My Sister," the talking-to-flowers song - but the book is a mess.
Due to an accident backstage (an actress fell off a ladder), I was deprived during the recent New York Fringe Festival of a revival of 1967's How Now Dow Jones, a show that flopped memorably and was excoriated by Ethan Mordden. But friends who did see the brief revival said it wasn't bad at all (heavily rewritten, songs by Carolyn Leigh and Elmer Bernstein), and I'm in the mood to learn a new musical - but it would have to be a musical with clever lyrics and dreamy or delicious melodies, and they stopped writing that kind thirty years back when Lane and Lerner and Styne and Comden & Green were still alive, and Kander & Ebb were in their heyday.
(This is my idea of a brief, casual blog post.)
"Too late now to forget your smile/ The way we cling when we dance a while/ Too late now to forget and go on to someone new..."
It suits my mood these days: the wry, smiling, self-conscious lyric (Alan Jay Lerner), the gently dawdling, reflective melody (Burton Lane) that matches it superbly: the A theme is in two parts, going to a false high the first time, then to a surprisingly higher one to send the sentiment soaring. A really fine merging of words and music - I wonder which came first? (With both Lane and Lerner, the words usually came first.) No wonder jazz men love to play with this tune.
The sentiment, too, is superbly ambiguous: It is not clear whether it's "too late" because the affair is over and the singer blew it, or because it's too late to break it off now that s/he realizes s/he's fallen in love, that some other person has become necessary. Both melancholy catastrophes! Thus it can be sung sadly or with an uplift at the end.
Jane Powell introduced it in Royal Wedding, the very bad 1951 film with wonderful songs (including "I Left My Hat in Haiti" and "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I've Been A Liar All My Life") and the famous sequence when Fred Astaire dances up the wall and across the ceiling, which was later mimicked by Ingmar Bergman in Hour of the Wolf, which I suggest would not make a good musical. (An opera by Franz Schreker, maybe.)
I have recordings of "Too Late Now" with Jane Monheit (too expiringly smokily languid) and Michael Feinstein (who just plain sings it badly, with gaping ugly hollows under his voice like puddles under icy slush that you slip into and get muddy ice in your shoes) and Dorothy Loudon (who sounds 85 years old). None of them inspire me, but the lovely song does.
Happily, my friend Irwin made me a CD of 13 other versions from his matchless collection of you-name-it, including superb renditions by Mel Tormé and Ann Hampton Calloway.
On youtube, I have found Audra Macdonald in a superb "straight" rendition (she has the voice for this melody) and Peggy Lee, who seems to sing it with a sexually content smile on her lips. (I mean, that is how the lyric comes through - we do not see her on this clip.) Judy Garland is a bit too husky with it. Paul Sheesley a little too jazzy - the jazzy mind set fights with the sentiment of the song. (Of course, wandering around youtube this way, I stumbled on something else wonderful, Frank Sinatra's somewhat too up-tempo version of Johnny Mercer's "I Thought About You," another song currently repeating in my head.) (No iPod here! I just sing them to myself while biking around town!)
A fine tunesmith Lane, mostly for the movies - he had one great Broadway hit - at the same time as Royal Wedding (Finian's Rainbow, soon to be revived, a show on which I passionately fixated at age six, memorizing all the songs in Ella Logan's Scottish accent though I had no idea what two-thirds of Yip Harburg's glorious lyrics meant). Then Lane was blacklisted for years. He got back to Broadway together with Lerner for On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (Richard Rodgers having given up in exasperation at Lerner's dilatory ways - Rodgers was used to Hammerstein, who would sit in the office with him all day and come up with a lyric a few hours after they had decided what sort of song ought to go in what part of a show). On A Clear Day is also full of great tunes (and great lyrics) - "What Did I Have That I Don't Have," "The S.S. Bernard Cohn," "Don't Tamper With My Sister," the talking-to-flowers song - but the book is a mess.
Due to an accident backstage (an actress fell off a ladder), I was deprived during the recent New York Fringe Festival of a revival of 1967's How Now Dow Jones, a show that flopped memorably and was excoriated by Ethan Mordden. But friends who did see the brief revival said it wasn't bad at all (heavily rewritten, songs by Carolyn Leigh and Elmer Bernstein), and I'm in the mood to learn a new musical - but it would have to be a musical with clever lyrics and dreamy or delicious melodies, and they stopped writing that kind thirty years back when Lane and Lerner and Styne and Comden & Green were still alive, and Kander & Ebb were in their heyday.
(This is my idea of a brief, casual blog post.)
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Thalia Nights (An homage to Ingmar Bergman)
Must have left twenty running shoes over years
Stuck to the floor of the gum-mangled Thalia
Long summer nights there in Plato’s glum cavern
Observing, believing, the motile shadows,
God-knows-what going on, behind, in the booth…
Arletty, the goddess, Laughton, the painter,
Mifune, the warrior, Moreau, the temptress,
Signoret, the cynic, Masina, the clown, Mastroianni, the bored –
these were our gods in the Thalia pantheon,
our greater trumps, our cards of fortune;
shaping our summers, haunting our winters.
Sing out, o bards!
Bunuel! Renoir! Satyajit Ray!
Eisenstein! Kurosawa! Fellini! Truffaut!
The syllables sing in the mouth like wine.
But most mighty of all, filmgoers’ philosophe,
Bergman the troubled, cantankerous Swede,
Took a sing-song tongue, made it sound prophetic,
Gnomic, organic, epigrammatic, portentous;
Made us see with the eyes of men being Bergman
And idealize the actress he currently bedded,
Bergman heroic! The atheist pastor!
The Freudian mystic! The thinker on film!
Even his jokes were layered with mythos –
Isn’t Death playing chess the art-house totem?
His actors were family: we followed the serial,
Image by image, aspect by aspect –
Never doubting that one would serve family supper.
Harriet, swinging the hips of false promise,
Doe-eyed Liv, crazy waif, suffering wife,
Bibi as sane as she ever was sensual –
Given the choice: Liv or Bibi or Harriet
And one long solstice Swedish night,
Which would you take?
Defend your position in two hundred words
Dripped in the glass like water-of-life.
Max, noble everyman, serious, murderous,
Handsome as some austere cathedral;
Gunnar, the distinguished we feared we’d grow into;
Erland, bitter fellow we feared that we were –
So: mix and match and match and mix –
Playing chess with the puppets he whittled unceasing
(If there isn’t a maze, there can be no solution):
The face overhearing (or reading the diary);
The couple enisled, spitting intimate daggers;
The acting troupe, offstage, lounging and lusting;
The man of God who is losing his faith;
The man of no God losing his mind;
The unman made-up,
The maid unmade;
Sex as war and war as sex;
The sea-borne dream, waves troubled as nightmare;
Papageno Vogler and Alma, the Soul –
We’ve done it that way; let’s try it this way:
The point is amusement while stating the problem.
I sing of Ingmar – Scanian lodestar –
unsinking sun of the Nordic night –
unwarming depth of the Baltic tide –
whose coolness freshened our Thalia summers.
Stuck to the floor of the gum-mangled Thalia
Long summer nights there in Plato’s glum cavern
Observing, believing, the motile shadows,
God-knows-what going on, behind, in the booth…
Arletty, the goddess, Laughton, the painter,
Mifune, the warrior, Moreau, the temptress,
Signoret, the cynic, Masina, the clown, Mastroianni, the bored –
these were our gods in the Thalia pantheon,
our greater trumps, our cards of fortune;
shaping our summers, haunting our winters.
Sing out, o bards!
Bunuel! Renoir! Satyajit Ray!
Eisenstein! Kurosawa! Fellini! Truffaut!
The syllables sing in the mouth like wine.
But most mighty of all, filmgoers’ philosophe,
Bergman the troubled, cantankerous Swede,
Took a sing-song tongue, made it sound prophetic,
Gnomic, organic, epigrammatic, portentous;
Made us see with the eyes of men being Bergman
And idealize the actress he currently bedded,
Bergman heroic! The atheist pastor!
The Freudian mystic! The thinker on film!
Even his jokes were layered with mythos –
Isn’t Death playing chess the art-house totem?
His actors were family: we followed the serial,
Image by image, aspect by aspect –
Never doubting that one would serve family supper.
Harriet, swinging the hips of false promise,
Doe-eyed Liv, crazy waif, suffering wife,
Bibi as sane as she ever was sensual –
Given the choice: Liv or Bibi or Harriet
And one long solstice Swedish night,
Which would you take?
Defend your position in two hundred words
Dripped in the glass like water-of-life.
Max, noble everyman, serious, murderous,
Handsome as some austere cathedral;
Gunnar, the distinguished we feared we’d grow into;
Erland, bitter fellow we feared that we were –
So: mix and match and match and mix –
Playing chess with the puppets he whittled unceasing
(If there isn’t a maze, there can be no solution):
The face overhearing (or reading the diary);
The couple enisled, spitting intimate daggers;
The acting troupe, offstage, lounging and lusting;
The man of God who is losing his faith;
The man of no God losing his mind;
The unman made-up,
The maid unmade;
Sex as war and war as sex;
The sea-borne dream, waves troubled as nightmare;
Papageno Vogler and Alma, the Soul –
We’ve done it that way; let’s try it this way:
The point is amusement while stating the problem.
I sing of Ingmar – Scanian lodestar –
unsinking sun of the Nordic night –
unwarming depth of the Baltic tide –
whose coolness freshened our Thalia summers.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Multi-tasking
I'm sitting at the play, writing my own play
Or I'm at a poetry slam, writing a sonnet
Or I'm at a Handel opera, humming Verdi
Or I'm at a film, tightening the edit
Or I'm at a musical, tossing the pointless song or the pointless singer.
It's when I'm alone with the paper
My mind contains nothing.
Or I'm at a poetry slam, writing a sonnet
Or I'm at a Handel opera, humming Verdi
Or I'm at a film, tightening the edit
Or I'm at a musical, tossing the pointless song or the pointless singer.
It's when I'm alone with the paper
My mind contains nothing.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
The Passion of Ingmar
What to do in New York at 1a.m. on a Monday when it's too hot to sleep and you're too old to face Splash or anyplace else that might be open and entertaining:
Borrow an Ingmar Bergman movie from the library!
There seems to be a general change in attitude towards Bergman, once regarded as among the cinema's authentic living geniuses, ranked with Fellini and Bunuel and Ozu when few others were (no Americans, needless to say), a man whose profundity of vision, his conflicted attitude towards God, parents, mistresses-as-muses, solitude in Scandinavian winters, sex in Scandinavian summers, madness and art seemed close to the core of Western thinking on these subjects. We (in New York) flocked to the Thalia and the other art houses to take it all in, parse it, get our heads around it. His disgust at civilization, even civilization taken sparingly from the p.o.v. of a barren island in the Baltic, seemed to mirror our own disquiet at the inadequacy of the civilization of free, consumerist satiety. If God had no use for us (being in an existential crisis), we wanted Bergman to use us, or tell us at what star to gaze in God's stead.
From this emerged a dozen films as good as any anyone made in the postwar era: Wild Strawberries and Monika (Scandinavian sex!), Sawdust and Tinsel and The Magician and Fanny and Alexander (life is theater! or it would be better if it were!), Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly and Hour of the Wolf (there is no God; I might as well go mad), The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring (life was lousy in the Middle Ages, but at least it was intense in those days, not crass!), Shame and Passion and Scenes from a Marriage (I'm breaking up with my girl, no wonder the world is coming to an end), Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata (even women can't handle family - we already know men can't) and even so perfect a "costume" sex comedy (Smiles of a Summer Night) that Woody Allen and Stephen Sondheim tried without avail to imitate, to build upon, to improve its magic. (Sondheim's version is at least pretty to hear.) Even Fellini and Bunuel would be hard put to equal such a variety of masterpieces. For two or three decades the ideal collegiate thinking-couple's double bill (or, one filmbuff dorm neighbor said, the ideal film to take a dumb girl that would keep her quiet while he had time to think) was Wild Strawberries and Seventh Seal - so much so that a celebrated short in subtitled nonsense-Swedish (Madeline Kahn's film debut: "Have a cigar?" "Phallica symbole?") was Die Duve, a parody of both of them at once. (Death and Inga play badminton; the Dove of salvation intervenes ... all over Death's black nightshirt.)
Okay, I didn't understand them. Or I thought I understood them. Or I had no idea what was going on. Watching The Virgin Spring and The Magician for the first time at maybe 18, I remember, I was puzzled that the story wasn't "signaling" good guys, bad guys, what the hell this tale was about in the way I was accustomed to having stories laid out for me in Hollywood movies. Why was the girl raped and murdered, when she had done nothing to deserve it? (One may ask the same in Rigoletto, eh?) Because that's how it happens in real life: grow up and try to understand that. Why did the lawyer let his young wife elope with his half-wit son? It didn't seem fair. It wasn't fair - but it was the more understanding conclusion. Why did the knight lose at chess? Why did the madwoman rape her brother? Why do people in these movies pretend to go out the door, but actually stay behind to overhear a phone conversation or even a seduction?
Besides Hour of the Wolf and The Magician (ur-documents of the LSD generation), Persona, Smiles, Virgin, Strawberries, Seal and the splendid autumnal masterpiece Fanny and Alexander (and how many other writer/directors have produced eight supreme masterpieces?), and The Magic Flute, the first of the great filmed operas that set a whole generation rethinking the unfashionability of that form, the Bergman work I would select as his most perfect work of art is the seldom-cited Shame.
The story seems typical of Bergman after he had got over his middle class Stockholm soap opera settings of the '50s and could create whatever world he wanted: Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman (two of the most famous faces of the period, precisely because of the range of roles they played in Bergman's films - Max usually standing in for IB, Liv often standing in for IB's current lover, who was Liv for about five years) are a married couple living on a farm on a small island somewhere. Where isn't clear, and isn't important - what is important is that it is the center of a war zone, that armies and guerrillas are battling through the movie, taking as much notice of the rights and feelings of the couple as armies usually do. (The marriage might almost be a metaphor for Sweden, neutral since 1814 but hardly immune to upheaval as two world wars and the cold war erupted around it. Bergman was among the few notable Swedes willing to remember how pro-Nazi many of his countrymen were.) The destruction of their world, of their relationship to it, mirrors the increasing bleakness and violence and dishonor of the couple's relationship to each other. When she commits adultery and he avenges it with a horrifying betrayal, we are shocked. When he commits a skulky murder, she (and we) are too stunned to react any more. The ruin of their civilization mirrors the ruin of their marriage - at the end they cling to each other because neither of them has anything else - including hardly any will to survive. Most magical and unsettling of all: just as the film began with Max recollecting a pointless, ominous dream, it ends with Liv recounting a different, equally ominous one. It is bitter and beautiful and complete.
In contrast, The Passion of Anna (as it was called in the U.S. - as Ullman points out in the commentaries, that is not its title in Swedish, which is merely The Passion), Bergman's next film and his first one in color, which uses the same cast (plus Bibi Andersson, last seen in Persona), is a mess. When I saw it, still under the spell of the genuinely strange Hour of the Wolf and the genuinely perfect Shame, I was confused. For one thing: who is killing all those animals? Somehow I got the impression it was Anna (Liv), probably because of the American title. Use Bergman's title, remove that clue, and I have no idea.
So I got it from the library and watched it again last night, for the first time in forty years, and now it makes sense - aided by the commentaries of three of the stars (Ullman, Andersson, Erland Josephson). The movie doesn't make sense, but now I know why it doesn't. Bergman, a control freak (what great director has not been?), always had his scripts down, and his shots calculated, and there wasn't much to do but shoot them (Nykvist did that, of course) and barely edit. But whatever was in the original script, it wasn't what got filmed. For one thing, the dinner party of the four leads, when Max von Sydow's Andreas really encounters the others for the first time (he's already met, and eavesdropped on, Ullman's Anna), is not scripted: they were told to improvise as if inhabiting the characters as they then understood them, and quite a lot of the personal got into it. Ullman is still upset that much of her improvisation was edited out - though she asked for it, because she felt Bergman's idea of Anna (who believes she is living the utter truth when in fact she has based it on a lie to cover an unpalatable truth) was unjust, a blow aimed at herself for breaking up with him - so she defended Anna, and herself - and Bergman got back at her (she feels) by cutting the speech.
The film is not neat, as Shame is neat: it is an incomplete metaphor, perhaps because Bergman knew life is not neat (but art is our attempt to correct that). I found the dawning relationship between these two damaged, lying people, Andreas and Anna played by Max and Liv, unconvincing - a desperate move on the part of both - because they find themselves with nowhere else to go and nothing to do. I was more stirred by the scene where Bibi's Eva, unhappily married, gets drunk and, dancing to some old bebop, casually seduces Max - not because she wants him, but because he happens to be there and somewhat sympathetic, and sex will take her mind off her insomnia and her unhappy marriage. Erland's Elis takes photographs of Max, but the tension in the air during this session leads nowhere - he remains utterly enigmatic - though he suspects his wife has slept with Max. There is none of the power of the scene in which the vampire makes up Max's face in Hour of the Wolf. Perhaps the moral is IB telling me to get over my obsessions with artistic artifice and face the reality that there aren't always neat endings and solutions and meanings. And the greatest sign of this is that the brutal murder of animals (a puppy Max rescues from a noose, eight slaughtered sheep, a horse set on fire) does not end when the likeliest suspect is brutally driven to suicide. Max and Liv seem to have alibis, Bibi is utterly unlikely, Erland was in Milan, or was he? No, the slaughters go on to the end, as if they were occurring spontaneously (like the war in Shame) to mimic the breakdown of our characters, which climaxes with a furious Max, chopping wood, turns the axe on Liv, then beats her up on camera.
Just to make it all the more confusing, there are postmodern moments that were not scripted and seem to be trendy afterthoughts (responses to Bunuel and Godard?): each of the four actors is asked, on camera, to discuss the character s/he is playing. We get a lot of background that way that the screenplay does not give us, but still ... it comes across as cheating, as trying to be au courant in 1969. It is beneath Bergman, I think.
So, not a satisfying Bergman film - not one of the great ones by a long chalk - but further meditation on his besetting themes. Recommended for that, and for the first experiments in color (the olives and oranges and browns that would remain his palette in Autumn Sonata, and only shift to scarlets in Whispers) and the shots of Liv Ullman at the height of her imperious, vulnerable beauty, and Bibi Andersson utterly adorable just a little past the peak of hers, and Max the very symbol and totem of Scandinavian manhood in the aging prime of his.
Borrow an Ingmar Bergman movie from the library!
There seems to be a general change in attitude towards Bergman, once regarded as among the cinema's authentic living geniuses, ranked with Fellini and Bunuel and Ozu when few others were (no Americans, needless to say), a man whose profundity of vision, his conflicted attitude towards God, parents, mistresses-as-muses, solitude in Scandinavian winters, sex in Scandinavian summers, madness and art seemed close to the core of Western thinking on these subjects. We (in New York) flocked to the Thalia and the other art houses to take it all in, parse it, get our heads around it. His disgust at civilization, even civilization taken sparingly from the p.o.v. of a barren island in the Baltic, seemed to mirror our own disquiet at the inadequacy of the civilization of free, consumerist satiety. If God had no use for us (being in an existential crisis), we wanted Bergman to use us, or tell us at what star to gaze in God's stead.
From this emerged a dozen films as good as any anyone made in the postwar era: Wild Strawberries and Monika (Scandinavian sex!), Sawdust and Tinsel and The Magician and Fanny and Alexander (life is theater! or it would be better if it were!), Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly and Hour of the Wolf (there is no God; I might as well go mad), The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring (life was lousy in the Middle Ages, but at least it was intense in those days, not crass!), Shame and Passion and Scenes from a Marriage (I'm breaking up with my girl, no wonder the world is coming to an end), Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata (even women can't handle family - we already know men can't) and even so perfect a "costume" sex comedy (Smiles of a Summer Night) that Woody Allen and Stephen Sondheim tried without avail to imitate, to build upon, to improve its magic. (Sondheim's version is at least pretty to hear.) Even Fellini and Bunuel would be hard put to equal such a variety of masterpieces. For two or three decades the ideal collegiate thinking-couple's double bill (or, one filmbuff dorm neighbor said, the ideal film to take a dumb girl that would keep her quiet while he had time to think) was Wild Strawberries and Seventh Seal - so much so that a celebrated short in subtitled nonsense-Swedish (Madeline Kahn's film debut: "Have a cigar?" "Phallica symbole?") was Die Duve, a parody of both of them at once. (Death and Inga play badminton; the Dove of salvation intervenes ... all over Death's black nightshirt.)
Okay, I didn't understand them. Or I thought I understood them. Or I had no idea what was going on. Watching The Virgin Spring and The Magician for the first time at maybe 18, I remember, I was puzzled that the story wasn't "signaling" good guys, bad guys, what the hell this tale was about in the way I was accustomed to having stories laid out for me in Hollywood movies. Why was the girl raped and murdered, when she had done nothing to deserve it? (One may ask the same in Rigoletto, eh?) Because that's how it happens in real life: grow up and try to understand that. Why did the lawyer let his young wife elope with his half-wit son? It didn't seem fair. It wasn't fair - but it was the more understanding conclusion. Why did the knight lose at chess? Why did the madwoman rape her brother? Why do people in these movies pretend to go out the door, but actually stay behind to overhear a phone conversation or even a seduction?
Besides Hour of the Wolf and The Magician (ur-documents of the LSD generation), Persona, Smiles, Virgin, Strawberries, Seal and the splendid autumnal masterpiece Fanny and Alexander (and how many other writer/directors have produced eight supreme masterpieces?), and The Magic Flute, the first of the great filmed operas that set a whole generation rethinking the unfashionability of that form, the Bergman work I would select as his most perfect work of art is the seldom-cited Shame.
The story seems typical of Bergman after he had got over his middle class Stockholm soap opera settings of the '50s and could create whatever world he wanted: Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman (two of the most famous faces of the period, precisely because of the range of roles they played in Bergman's films - Max usually standing in for IB, Liv often standing in for IB's current lover, who was Liv for about five years) are a married couple living on a farm on a small island somewhere. Where isn't clear, and isn't important - what is important is that it is the center of a war zone, that armies and guerrillas are battling through the movie, taking as much notice of the rights and feelings of the couple as armies usually do. (The marriage might almost be a metaphor for Sweden, neutral since 1814 but hardly immune to upheaval as two world wars and the cold war erupted around it. Bergman was among the few notable Swedes willing to remember how pro-Nazi many of his countrymen were.) The destruction of their world, of their relationship to it, mirrors the increasing bleakness and violence and dishonor of the couple's relationship to each other. When she commits adultery and he avenges it with a horrifying betrayal, we are shocked. When he commits a skulky murder, she (and we) are too stunned to react any more. The ruin of their civilization mirrors the ruin of their marriage - at the end they cling to each other because neither of them has anything else - including hardly any will to survive. Most magical and unsettling of all: just as the film began with Max recollecting a pointless, ominous dream, it ends with Liv recounting a different, equally ominous one. It is bitter and beautiful and complete.
In contrast, The Passion of Anna (as it was called in the U.S. - as Ullman points out in the commentaries, that is not its title in Swedish, which is merely The Passion), Bergman's next film and his first one in color, which uses the same cast (plus Bibi Andersson, last seen in Persona), is a mess. When I saw it, still under the spell of the genuinely strange Hour of the Wolf and the genuinely perfect Shame, I was confused. For one thing: who is killing all those animals? Somehow I got the impression it was Anna (Liv), probably because of the American title. Use Bergman's title, remove that clue, and I have no idea.
So I got it from the library and watched it again last night, for the first time in forty years, and now it makes sense - aided by the commentaries of three of the stars (Ullman, Andersson, Erland Josephson). The movie doesn't make sense, but now I know why it doesn't. Bergman, a control freak (what great director has not been?), always had his scripts down, and his shots calculated, and there wasn't much to do but shoot them (Nykvist did that, of course) and barely edit. But whatever was in the original script, it wasn't what got filmed. For one thing, the dinner party of the four leads, when Max von Sydow's Andreas really encounters the others for the first time (he's already met, and eavesdropped on, Ullman's Anna), is not scripted: they were told to improvise as if inhabiting the characters as they then understood them, and quite a lot of the personal got into it. Ullman is still upset that much of her improvisation was edited out - though she asked for it, because she felt Bergman's idea of Anna (who believes she is living the utter truth when in fact she has based it on a lie to cover an unpalatable truth) was unjust, a blow aimed at herself for breaking up with him - so she defended Anna, and herself - and Bergman got back at her (she feels) by cutting the speech.
The film is not neat, as Shame is neat: it is an incomplete metaphor, perhaps because Bergman knew life is not neat (but art is our attempt to correct that). I found the dawning relationship between these two damaged, lying people, Andreas and Anna played by Max and Liv, unconvincing - a desperate move on the part of both - because they find themselves with nowhere else to go and nothing to do. I was more stirred by the scene where Bibi's Eva, unhappily married, gets drunk and, dancing to some old bebop, casually seduces Max - not because she wants him, but because he happens to be there and somewhat sympathetic, and sex will take her mind off her insomnia and her unhappy marriage. Erland's Elis takes photographs of Max, but the tension in the air during this session leads nowhere - he remains utterly enigmatic - though he suspects his wife has slept with Max. There is none of the power of the scene in which the vampire makes up Max's face in Hour of the Wolf. Perhaps the moral is IB telling me to get over my obsessions with artistic artifice and face the reality that there aren't always neat endings and solutions and meanings. And the greatest sign of this is that the brutal murder of animals (a puppy Max rescues from a noose, eight slaughtered sheep, a horse set on fire) does not end when the likeliest suspect is brutally driven to suicide. Max and Liv seem to have alibis, Bibi is utterly unlikely, Erland was in Milan, or was he? No, the slaughters go on to the end, as if they were occurring spontaneously (like the war in Shame) to mimic the breakdown of our characters, which climaxes with a furious Max, chopping wood, turns the axe on Liv, then beats her up on camera.
Just to make it all the more confusing, there are postmodern moments that were not scripted and seem to be trendy afterthoughts (responses to Bunuel and Godard?): each of the four actors is asked, on camera, to discuss the character s/he is playing. We get a lot of background that way that the screenplay does not give us, but still ... it comes across as cheating, as trying to be au courant in 1969. It is beneath Bergman, I think.
So, not a satisfying Bergman film - not one of the great ones by a long chalk - but further meditation on his besetting themes. Recommended for that, and for the first experiments in color (the olives and oranges and browns that would remain his palette in Autumn Sonata, and only shift to scarlets in Whispers) and the shots of Liv Ullman at the height of her imperious, vulnerable beauty, and Bibi Andersson utterly adorable just a little past the peak of hers, and Max the very symbol and totem of Scandinavian manhood in the aging prime of his.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
An exchange at Les Huguenots
On the damp campus of Bard, where four performances of Les Huguenots are a highlight of this year's Summerscape Festival, illustrating the theme of influences on Richard Wagner (while he rolls in his grave), I ran into many, many friends.
Neil and James: Are you familiar with Meyerbeer's music?
Moi: Am I familiar with Meyerbeer's music?! Why, I had it with my mother's milk (between Cole Porter numbers). I even sang Meyerbeer at my bar mitzvah, instead of that tedious old Biblical exegesis.
Neil: What did you sing? "Si j'étais coquette"?
James: No - he sang "Prëtres de Baal."
Perhaps you'd have to know my rabbi to understand why this was so funny.
All right - full disclosure - I do not have a rabbi and I never had a bar mitzvah. But I am fond of Meyerbeer (up to a point). And I do have witty friends.
Neil and James: Are you familiar with Meyerbeer's music?
Moi: Am I familiar with Meyerbeer's music?! Why, I had it with my mother's milk (between Cole Porter numbers). I even sang Meyerbeer at my bar mitzvah, instead of that tedious old Biblical exegesis.
Neil: What did you sing? "Si j'étais coquette"?
James: No - he sang "Prëtres de Baal."
Perhaps you'd have to know my rabbi to understand why this was so funny.
All right - full disclosure - I do not have a rabbi and I never had a bar mitzvah. But I am fond of Meyerbeer (up to a point). And I do have witty friends.
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