Wes Anderson vs. the Trust Fund Marxists + 10 Classic films for fans of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)

If you're as keen as I am for romantic pre-code Lubitsch--The Love Parade, Trouble in Paradise, The Smiling Lieutenant, Monte Carlo, and The Merry Widow (this Tues on TCM!)--and love Wes Anderson's previous films then you surely can/have/will appreciate the icy frosting splendor over-melancholy birthday cake of their combined flavor in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), released this week on DVD. Those enthralled by Renoir will appreciate oblique references to Grand Illusion; there are also the McGuffins of Hitchcock to be found; clues and puzzles like the protagonists like The Riddler on Batman; the gorgeous colors of Powell-Cardiff-Pressburger; the candy coatings of Jean Eustache; the epic swirls of Cy McGurknikov all swirled together like an excited boy using his sister's dollhouse and tea set to relay a tale within a tale to his agog younger siblings. The dollhouse hotel us run like clockwork by assiduous major domo Ralph Fiennes, and his deadpan Muslim lobby boy (Tony Revolori), who gets the one girl in the film (the ubiquitous Saoirse Ronan) and grows up to be F. Murray Abraham, narrating the tale to Jude Law in the now gone to communist bloc grey hotel. Law's making a book out of it, which in turn is read by a bright young Slav girl in the final, outer layer.

Anderson's previous film, Moonrise Kingdom (see my best of 2012 list) surged with young outlaw lovers' momentum detached cool and fervent devotion it marked real progress forward for Anderson, whose past films all focused more on male friendship compromised by rivalry over girls generally too mature or damaged for either of them to handle. Moonrise was like if Max in Rushmore hooked up with Gweneth Paltrow in Royal Tenenbaums - and neither was tongue-tied or awkward around the other, but pre-possessed with the refreshing eerie confidence that the first flush of mutual attraction can bring, almost Hawksian in their cool.

the coolest romance since Bogie and Bacall in To Have and Have Not? Maybe

But the relationships at the heart of Budapest indicate a racing away from the palm sweat stress of first love back to the safety of the Dungeons and Dragons kids you left behind, back to the younger Indian kid neighbor who always wants to hang out and does whatever dangerous things you tell him (in my childhood, his name was Sinul and the girl who made my palms sweat was Tracy). But the return to the boy's club makes the capering and gamboling less vital, doomed as are all quests to recapture innocence, to climb inside the tattered remains of your old coccoon. The word on the street is you need to see this film a few times to get all the little details, but the thing is, I don't want to. I'm not even sure I want to see Moonrise Kingdom again, at least not at the moment. What if a second viewing dims my love? Better the safety of one more viewing of The Expendables 2. Stallone, now that's a man's man.

That said, the critical and financial box office success of Grand Budapest is a good sign for future auteur "quirk" art, which isn't necessarily great for art, especially folk art, the last bastion of hardscrabble art world outsiders. With its lovingly ornate tracking shots, quaint train set miniatures, impeccable 30s costumery and decor (bright pinks and deep purples), wistful rainy day isolation hinting of some deep meaning, about loss, perhaps, there's so much rich detail, such macro/micro fullness in the historical period--the last gasps of innocence before fascism, communism, and nazism destroyed humanity's confidence in itself, and cakes stopped being decadent--that The Grand Budapest seems to risk trivializing it with its endearing little sister's toys-style playfulness. It left me wondering if it had anything to say other than that Anderson wishes he could go back in time and live in a grand hotel before the war, or a nice empty safe place where no one knows your name and cavernous steam bath facilities and snowy mountain tops give you hot and cold extremes for maximum coziness. This Hotel is self-aware, which makes some of it inexcusable. Just because it's a self-reflexive fractal inward spiral narrative doesn't mean it can avoid the cumbersome duty of meaning something. As it is, it's just a reverie imagining how nice it would have been to be around opulence in the days before the Nazis destroyed most of fancy Europe; it's all dressed up and has a few worthy places to go, so why does it feel still lost?

Putting one's own private nostalgic wistfulness on the big screen, we know, is the purview of the rich who can afford to create their pet time travel realities, ala Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris (see: Oscar Picks of the Bourgeoisie - in Salieri Shades). These dreamers can afford to create their own past worlds to vanish into. So while a state-funded auteur like Bergman could create vast worlds of resonance out of two women's faces in black and white close-up, he couldn't afford to build an escape past; he had to hide out on a desolate island for most of his life, where, as we know from The Most Dangerous Game, there's no place to hide or run for long. For Bergman, stripping down his style only deepened his resonance, proving that where art cinema is concerned, more is less. Unlimited freedom allows for laziness; excessive details undermine resonance. Anderson can only create a few chuckles out from the vast quantity of faces, vast painted flea-markets of sets, miniatures, and cameras at his disposal so it seems only fair that the fascist uprisings that bookend portions of this film should occur, indication of both the iron curtain evening the playing field, confiscating the cakes and artwork to enforce a strictly drab color code, and the intrusion on the Anderson fantasia by bubble-bursting bombs. As for Communism, Anderson never shows us the starving, huddled masses who aren't willing or able to work 24 hours a day for rich tourists, the types who realize it's their right to be equal to any rich punter. It's them he should be scared of!

Viva La Revolution! 

That said, I'm on congressional record railing against the Trust Fund Marxist movement re: Godard (see: Sullivan's Jet Travels: Rich Kid Cinema) as much as Anderson seems to be railing against spoiled rich kid collaborators in Budapest, which is one of the reasons I respect his frivolous whims. Recalling the big split during Great Depression pre-codes between harsh reality films like Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale, and musicals and escapism, comedies and stories of the wealthy enjoying their wealth, the Sullivans and Andersons often don't factor in that their glorification of the poor is actually a rich kid fantasia, the imagination of a lonely Lord Fauntleroy whose only friends are the household servants and so fantasizes about how much joy and fullness he brings to their lives, justifying the one-way flow of attention.

For the middle class, the fantasy of being rich never includes having servants, but they're an inescapable part of real wealth, and as Hegel knows, never having to ever have to fend for oneself gradually leaves the rich so vulnerable--so dependent on hoteliers, bellhops, maids, and consierges when abroad--that it's critical to their sense of self to believe there's a means other than money by which these supplicants are bound to them, that the servants and hoteliers love serving them hand and foot, for service's own sake, and that they would never abandon their rich clientele to starve or have to pack their own bags.

Reality is surely different but in Anderson's world these usually tertiary characters all work their fingers to the bone, 24 hours a day, to make the Grand Budapest and its ilk excellent --why? Because they love to serve the jet set? Non, monsieur, because Wes Anderson's camera transcends both the trust fund 'present of liberty' Kane-ism and socialist hand-wringing of some of his peers without careening into the life-is-a-circus Fellini-ism. So what else is left in its stead?

Let us recall that quote from William Powell as Godfrey Parks, the rich scion who finds his mojo by becoming first a forgotten man and then a butler for a spoiled dingbat family in My Man Godfrey. "You're proud of being a butler?" asks a bewildered Eugene Pallette. "I'm proud of being a good butler, sir," Godfrey answers. "And  if I may so, sir, one has to be good to put up with this family." In other words, excellence of service is its own reward, even when those being served are undeserving, setting vast karmic chains in motion wherein even labeling someone as undeserving of special service is forgotten, as all judgment is suspended, creating humility, grace, and good fortune. There's not even a sense of class resentment in the effeminate reedy voice of the prefect of police (a slumbering Ed Norton), as ineffectual a depiction of law enforcement as Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me.

But like the 'glorious' martyrdom offered unwed mothers in soaps of the 1930s-50s after they work their fingers to the bone for undeserving illegitimate D.A. sons, there's the dubious aftertaste that this martyrdom is really in the service of some nefarious purpose. The 1% patriarchy plays up the grace and nobility of being a second-class citizen in this, the greatest of all possible worlds.

On the flipside of that there's also the trust fund Marxist, who blames "the rich" (i.e. his dad) for sucking the blood of the proletariat in parent-funded films. He's glamorizing the poor - but must I reach for my frothy tome of 'wise old sayings by butlers?' to find out what Burrows said to Sullivan in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (above) in order to dissuade him from playing amateur mendicant, that "only the morbid rich would find the subject glamorous?"

Godard is my boiler plate for this theory, but I still love Godard because he remains hilarious despite and even because of his leftist propaganda; he's trying something new with cinema, to connect the New Wave with Eisenstein, but no matter how didactic and naive, his playful cinematic wit endures. And the more Jean Pierre Leaud tries to look politically serious, the funnier he is. He's like Harpo Marx crossed with Young Trotsky in Love (below)

Godard's La Chinoise 

That's the strange rich kid cinema angle that is both transcended and indulged by Anderson's film. The leads of Grand Budapest (like William Powell) become rich because they are tireless, loyal, fearless servers of the rich. They reject the communist ideal of equality by force, due perhaps to proximity to the wealthy (and ample leftovers back in the kitchen). Their jobs are frivolous - bellhopping and major domoing aren't necessary as we all know from carrying our own duffel into a Ramada-- and so their indispensability must be underwritten by adoring old lady residents; meanwhile the unwavering subservience of the hard-working baker (Saoirse Ronan) laboring under the callous gaze of the bakery owner seems a bit strange - a girl this hot and fearless wouldn't need to sweat her days away in a bakery making ornate sugar-coated little cakes for the rich and imprisoned! She'd be a first rate government agent or high-end prostitute. And is there a difference? Not according to Hitchcock... or Lacan!

TEN CLASSIC FILM RECOMMENDATIONS 

FOR FANS OF THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

1943 - Dir. Powell and Pressburger 

****

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's tale covers a similar old Europe canvas in its chronicle of of a spy in pre-War Vienna, a duel with a German who will become his best friend, and two world wars, all as recalled in the mind of an old general while wrestling with his younger secretary's fiancee in a Turkish bath. Jack Cardiff's eye-popping colors and the superlative set design make even the war ravaged countryside beautiful and shares Budapest's melancholy air as the onrush of mechanized warfare slowly obliterates the sporting codes and artistic splendor, the colors, elaborate customs, flavors, and decency of old-world class system Europe. (also second pic from top)

2. The Love Parade

1929 - dir. Ernst Lubitsch

 ***1/2

One of Lubitsch's less-revered works, this has Maurice Chevalier as a romantic soldier who winds up marrying the queen of his small country (the sort that would cease to exist when the map was redrawn at the end of WWI).

3. Shanghai Express

1932 - dir. Josef Von Sternberg

****

What better place to ride from Peking to Shanghai than in a first class train compartment with two cultured high fashion courtesans like Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong, especially if they take such languid pleasure in shocking an MGM-style fussbudget boarding house matron. Dietrich is at her most luminous and morally ambivalent, and incredibly cool; her crazy black feather outfit fulfills the promise of the slinky black feathered collar. There's great fuck yous to the censors with Dietrich turning the tables on the old Professor Henry Davidson type and counter-snubbing an old lady with a dog, but even better is her teasing treatment of brooding British military doctor whom she loved long ago. When he tells her he tried to forget her she replies, eyes wide like a child's, "Did you try very hard?"  See: 1933, not 1939 was the greatest year for Hollywood Movies...

4. Trouble in Paradise

1932- dir. Ernst Lubitsch

****

It took awhile for this pre-code Paramount to resonate with me, but now I dig that it doesn't 'Americanize' the dialogue like so many lazier Hollywood films, instead playing up the linguistic difficulties where everyone in Europe is constantly searching for the one language each of them knows just a little bit of, as in the excited way the Italian hotelier translates EE Horton's story of how he got robbed in his room. Like BUDAPEST, a great fuss is made of getting the first class hotel experience exactly right, and there's the issue of an unscrupulous charmer butting heads with an evil conglomerate in order to fleece rich perfumer Kay Francis. While Herbert Marshall isn't Cary Grant, or even Ronald Coleman, but he's also not George Brent. He swoons well and convinces you through two layers of subterfuge that he's genuinely in love with the moon (he wants to see it reflected in champagne) and the women around him, each more beautiful than the last. (See: Pre-Code Capsules 9)

5. Grand Hotel

1932- dir. Edmund Goulding

***1/2

Greta Garbo is the melancholy ballerina who finds a reason to dance again after she falls for the down-and-out baron (John Barrymore). In another room a ravishing young secretary (Joan Crawford) succumbs joylessly to the advances of an arrogant industrialist (Wallace Beery, with a terrible buzz cut). In yet another thread, a fatally ill office clerk (Lionel Barrymore) drains his life savings in a desperate effort to derive some first class pleasure from this bleak and brief existence. Downstairs at the bar, a disfigured doctor (Lewis Stone) dispenses wry commentary as people come and go. (MUZE) 

6. The Saragossa Manuscript

1965- dir. Wojciech Has

***

Like the narrative framework of an Eastern European girl reading a novel at the graveside of  an author whom we meet in flashback who in turn hears the story from one of its participants, this film is told via an ever-more-innate story within a story within a story structure and set in a colorful past that may never have existed but at any rate is now certainly gone (and the film was made in Eastern Europe!)

7. Secret Agent

1936 - dir. Alfred Hitchcock

***

Set in the Alps (via Gaumont's finest painted backdrops), this tale of intrigue is a fine companion to Hitchcock's original version of The Man who Knew too Much. John Gielgud doesn't make much of an impression in the lead but he looks a bit like Ralph Fiennes and hey! Peter Lorre. The ever- saucy Madeleine Carroll makes a fine femme fatale and there's a memorable chase through a Swiss chocolate factory. One of my favorite $10 public domain titles I got as a kid, from Waldenbooks at the mall, in the early years of VHS.

8. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

1969 - dir. Peter R. Hunt

***1/2

Bond in the Alps, and a great skiing downhill chase, slalom, ski jumping, cable car rides, as well as the cool vibe of having to take long cable cars to visit the evil Telly Savalas' lair. He hypnotizes a bevy of socialite debs as they sleep using colored lights and his own grinning, cigarette-congested voice uttering instant mix CD-worthy lines like "You love chickens..." That part has no bearing on Budapest, but the Alpine adventures and clues and skulking is all on point.

9. Torn Curtain

(1966) - dir. Alfred Hitchcock

***

This later period Hitchcock film doesn't get the love it deserves, but Wes Anderson is beholden to it for the flavor of Eastern European intrigue and the near-silent museum chase scene (just the sound of footsteps for suspense, etc.), and the anxiety of being asked to present your papers and/or discovered on some communist bloc public conveyance. It's worth revisiting, and I wrote about it way back in '04 here

10. Million Dollar Legs

(1932) - dir. Edward F. Cline

***1/2

Co-written by Citizen Kane scribe Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with uncredited touch-ups by the great Ben Hecht, Million Dollar Legs is the nationalism-satirizing predecessor of Marx Bros' Duck Soup, which makes sense since the heroine in Legs was married to Harpo Marx. Cockeyed Caravan's Matt Bird calls her "absurdly deadpan." Centering around the fictional nation of Klopstockia with its majordomo who can run faster than a speeding car, the president (W.C. Fields) stays on top of his plotting cabinet through games of toss wrestling, and there's a Mata Hari-style hottie spy (doing a great Garbo impression, "I'm wery fond of yumpers!"). Budapest fans will dig the colorful cast and pre-WWII fictionalized little mountain nation vibe.

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Red is the color of my true love's helmet: QUEEN OF BLOOD, JET PILOT

Top: Queen of Blood (Florence Marley) / B: Jet Pilot (Janet Leigh)

On Netflix Streaming comes a film that--were it not so beautifully restored--would be much harder to watch: QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966). As it is, the colors have been freshened up and the footage fairly glows. And what footage! recycled from a bunch of Russian science fiction films like 1965's MESTRE NASTRESHU, it's almost Bava-esque in its deep reds and eerie gel lighting, and the AIP-shot material is directed by Curtis DEVIL DOG Harrington!

Dennis Hopper and John Saxon are the recognizable faces amidst the astronauts, who in the ALIEN-prefiguring plot are sent to Mars where a delegate from another galaxy has crash landed. Get the picture? Do I need to draw you a map to Mars' orbiting moon, the Island of Phobos? Why not ask the ancient remains of Basil Rathbone, still sharp as a tack and nutty as an heir of Frankenstein, as the lead scientist of earth?

 

Acting as a fine mirror to issues of gender as well as Soviet-American relations of the era, the footage is matched brilliantly to its respective sides - the Dionysian and ornate deep red Russian footage for the female vampire martian - while the Earth scenes and space ship interiors are re-shot on threadbare Apollonian sets by Harrington (with some Russian film crowd scenes spliced in). The result is a perfect metaphor for the repulsion/attraction between the US and Russia...one side an ornate red samovar, the other an institutional gray cafeteria. Together it's like an unholy union written in the stars and read by lovers holding hands across the Berlin wall. When the astronauts of both planets get together for the flight home, the hypnosis starts and the blood drinking and the orders from on high not to harm the specimen follow. This time however, everyone but John Saxon agrees: save the queen! If she wants to drink Dennis Hopper's blood, fine, just warn her: the thorazine is long gone!

 

The point is, if if you ever watch Mario Bava with the sound off just for those great lighting schemes and purple gel spots, you'll love QUEEN OF BLOOD. All the metatextual Russia/Dionysian/Female/Plant/foreign-shot exteriors vs. US/Apollonian/Male/Us interior-shot/mammal dichotomies are just gravy on the train... the GHOST OF MARS train! And Judi Meredith as Laura James. She's got enough black eyeliner to darken the sun, and a sexy smoker's voice. In short, the film would be a great double bill with Josef Von Sternberg's JET PILOT (1957) and is clearly meant for a double bill anyway since it's so short (78 minutes).

 JET PILOT comes directed (mostly) by Josef Von Sternberg and produced by Howard Hughes, so you can imagine the arguments. Apparently Sternberg walked off at some point, objecting to Hughes' Russ Meyers-esque mammarian American obviousness, so like QUEEN, JET has a split identity which works meta with the Red meets White and Blue in bed scenario. The film has its flaws, but Wayne as the gruff Yank pilot ain't one, and neither is Janet Leigh as the hot, defecting Soviet pilot. They cram as much lust into their restricted gazes as the censor will allow while the cold freeze of the empty gray sky makes a great metaphor for the general iciness that is the post-code American perennial stalemate battle of the sexes.

 

 
It's a suitable metaphor not just for sex, but for bad sex… cold sex, post-children (no privacy) sex; Hughes’ sex, in short; the most unsexy of sex. Like an early version of Roger Vadim or John Derek, Howard Hughes was notorious for seducing pretty girls and making them stars via inert films with awesome posters (like THE OUTLAW), and usually firing the original director along the way in order to ensure no scrap of fun or originality survived. But in this case, Von Sternberg at least got in some good subtextual masochism in depicting the attempt of a pair of red star-crossed lovers to escape their respective ideologies and just get it on, alone, for a few hours. And in doing so, JVS mirrored perhaps his own problems trying to make a good movie with Hughes sending him a zillion contradictory memos. The Russia/US divide angle also illuminates the disparate polarities’ lack of ultimate difference: when her Soviet relations cockblock it’s because of proletarian group living conditions; when Wayne's US relations cockblock it’s because of a temporary housing shortage. Either way, it's enough to send a pervy masochist like Von Sternberg into paroxysms of ecstasy and Lenny Maltin to award it a scant two stars as if begging to be punished. Find it hidden deep in an old John Wayne set that includes--Lenin preserve us, THE CONQUEROR: John Wayne - An American Icon Collection (Seven Sinners/ The Shepherd of the Hills/ Pittsburgh/ The Conqueror/ Jet Pilot)

Thanks to Another Film Blog for some of the above stills!

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Sprays of Heaven: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (1976)

"Help means so much more than giving you weapons." 

What happens when a peaceful rocket full of sexy East Germans are lured to a western colonized planet and are subject to drugs (the red spray is "spicy" while the blue spray is "sweet"), erotic dancing and orgiastic staring contests?  Das ist die frage in Gottfried Kolditz's colorful, cool and just plain weird film, 1976's IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (Im Staub der Sterne). Classy is the word I use to describe this crew, four women and two older guys, well-dressed and even-tempered. Nice hair.

Answering a distress signal, this East German rocketship (from the planet Cynro) emergency lands and is greeted first by a woman dressed like Pocahontas driving a combination school bus-railroad handcar who comes rumbling up to the ship in welcome like she's Robby the Robot in FORBIDDEN PLANET. Suko stays behind to spy while the rest ride over to the club to sit on divans and catch snide insults from the local bosses. Someone wants this spaceship to go home, but first, why not invite them to the party? Pocahontas comes by later with prismatic plastic fantastic invitations for each of them.

The "boss" of the planet is a fey German artiste who gets his hair spray painted blue and is forced to play with lite-brite and a keyboard that controls a disco dance floor full of pythons and gel-lit frauleinen. Don Draper this guy aint. And let me tell you, his army sucks. Mostly the battles consist in a lot of standing around, working up the nerve to bust a cap, like a high school dance in Hell. These cavorting hedonists never speak, but spend most of their time spraying drugs of one color or another into their mouths, brainwashing nosy visitors with pen flashlights and doing licentious dances. The costumes aren't up to Mario Bava PLANET OF THE VAMPIRE standards but nonetheless pretty fetching, with an uncanny resemblance to UN peacekeepers. And it's nice that they change clothes about five times a day and stay color coordinated with each other, as if through telepathic EFSP (Extra-Fashion-Sense Perception). The patterns and styles are elegant and mod without being tacky or cumbersome, and they go well with the natural blonde shag haircuts of the majority of the crew. Jana Brejchová is the hottie commander (at right). She was once married to Milos Foreman!

In a way, DUST OF THE STARS is the perfect Iron Curtain counterpart to the American space fantasia of 50's sci fi films, ala: CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON/MISSILE TO THE MOON/QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE and THREE STOOGES IN OUTER SPACE, wherein dopey male astronauts land on a planets run by space women with a hankering for new blood... in their lineage and on their mandibles. In DUST there seems to be mainly dudes on the planet, at least with speaking roles (aside from Pocahontas) and the men are in weird Studio 54-esque "boytoy" attire, all ready to offer a hit of primo "spray" to any crew member with an open nostril, er, I mean mouth. And the girls in the crew are the ones who call the shots! The two men on the crew are clearly both well-laid and mildly emasculated... a perfect Euro combination that Americans can only sneer at in envy. Both Paul Lind and Mae West would have loved them!

Kind of like HELL HOUSE (the Halloween 'haunted house' wherein Christian kids finally get to dance, pretend to do drugs and worship Satan in their own way), the licentious dancing and spraying of the aliens here presumably was acceptable to the East German censors because it was negatively depicted as a trap-- set by decadent western Imperialists--to ensnare good honest communists.

The parties these aliens throw are awesome, but for my money nothing can beat the black tights beatnik bar modern expressionist dancing of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Man, those girls just nailed it! And though one of the two men on the Cynro crew is pretty smart (usually in these films, only one paranoid crew member smells danger while the others consider him a buzzkill), the commander is a woman--and competent!-- navigating her sometimes overly compassionate female emotions with the same objective grappling of, say, Kirk on STAR TREK, and between all of the crew is a sexually relaxed vibe (they sleep with each other and make no big deal of it? Man, those East Germans!). My favorite is the girl at lower left; what a magnificently sensual pout!

I think her name is Miu. She's played by Regine Heintze, and I love her. Also, I love the offhand way that the film's sexuality and lovely female forms are displayed without any leering and/or slavering. It's like the characters in this film actually have sex rather than just winking and drooling and then finally having one chaste kiss like they're David Manners at an ice cream social. In DUST, they just do it and forget about it. The Germans have no patience for lovelorn leering! Stand straight! Are you slouching?! Achtung!

I am grateful to Netflix for having this film on instant stream and thus indirectly introducing me to the wonderful site known as Teleport City ("Bringing you yesterday's tomorrow... today!"). I love what their writer says about the loose nature of the crew (remember this was the 70s, pre-AIDS awareness, when sex wasn't a four letter word):

Now, in addition to their refreshing gender make-up, there are other things about the Cynro crew, only subtly hinted at for the most part, that make them just a little different from what you'd normally expect from the militarily-ranked team manning your average movie starship. I think, also, that these things are meant to suggest the way things roll back on Cynro. For one thing, this gang is just a tad more touchy-feely with one another than the behavior of those serving aboard the Enterprise and its like have accustomed us to. Secondly, Suko, as a not-all-that-in-shape middle aged guy with thinning hair, clearly has the arrangement to beat onboard the vessel, as he seems to be the boy toy of at least two of the female crew members, including the Captain and her blond colleague Miu. Miu, for her part, also might have a thing for the ladies, as one later scene seems to suggest. While all of this implied hanky-panky provides the opportunity for a bit of casual nudity and light petting between the cast members, it's all presented very matter-of-factly, with none of the exploitational hubba hubba you might expect. Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman this is not -- and the tone seems to suggest that the egalitarian ethos observed on this lots' home planet extends to everyone getting an equal piece, not just of the proverbial pie, but of each other, as well.

Now I don't know about you, space neighbors, but that seems pretty cool to me. If the wall hadn't come down, I might be tempted to hurtle it. I would disagree with Teleport City about the score (they don't like it). Yes, it's a bedroom-ish low fi casio-guitar soundtrack, but it's superb in its monochromatic moodiness; it's low-fi shoegaze twenty years ahead of schedule and as such is 100 times better than those super-slick-hyper-cliched Danny Elfman orchestral/children's choir cues that have been deadening so many big budget sci fi and fantasy films here in the states in the last 20 years.

Similarly ahead of his time is the fey "boss" of the bad guys, a prancing Caligula-wannabe who parties with snakes and likes to change his hair color to match his mercurial mood. He could be knocking back drinks with any 1990s Manhattan loungecore crowd and everyone would assume he's in advertising -- but it's still only 1979 and he's a communist. And we think those East Germans were behind the times? In 1979 they were partying like it's 1997, which is to say, hard and unsmilingly.

In typical commie fashion, the action break-out finale looks more like a labor strike than a shootout, replete with hundreds of confused, identically-dressed male extras hacking at rocks, locking arms and shuffling around in nonviolent protest. No one seems very militarily coordinated on this planet, with opposing armies running to and fro like herds of awkward antelope, but they look good, specimen-wise. Boasting a mix of modular architecture and muddy grassland roughly parallel to Gene Roddenberry's TV special futurescapes of the era, the film earns extra points for the natural and uncanny weirdness of East German design, and the refreshing lack of western sexism. Not once does any male say anything condescending! And our director manages to make them all seem both vulnerable and strong, smart and gullible -- all while never missing a chance to show some sexy thighs (below left).

Much more bizarre in terms of sci fi plots is the moral quandary the crew faces: If they intervene on behalf of the oppressed workers of the planet, they'll have to stay around like a peacekeeping delegation and will probably get involved in an interplanetary war; if they just leave then they've turned their back on a people in need. It makes a good modern parable for a UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, Liberia or Darfur--or the reason, for example, that George Bush Sr. was too smart to invade Iraq ("no exit strategy").  The conquering Tem people know they can't kill or attack the ship directly if they want to avoid an "inter-galactic incident," but the miners are all fair game, used as human shields, slave labor and so forth, again, just like real life!

Another perhaps more controversial analogy is with modern UFO philosophy--i.e. the notion that we're (as in earthlings) under the rule of trans-dimensional aliens who harvest our genetically modified souls and have worked their way into the fabric of all levels of social leadership. The space travelers tell the enslaved Tekk: "We can't build a force field around your planet so you can develop undisturbed like we would like"-- a lament very similar to UN policy toward underdeveloped nations undergoing exploitation by slick multi-nationals, or the way grays try not to disrupt our evolution even as they tinker with our DNA on the sidelines.

Whoa! Don't think I'm crazy. I've just been reading Nigel Kerner's new book all weekend. It's not that I 100% believe we're a soul farm stud on Orion's Belt, but if we in the first world can't/won't imagine there might be some extraterrestrial race for whom we're a third world primitive society in the midst of being exploited (we learned colonialism from somewhere) maybe we deserve all we get, or may have already gotten. Plus, our East German rocket comrades bear more than passing resemblance to the "blonde" aliens sometimes seen cruising around in saucers or European dance clubs.You will now please erase this nonsense from your mind. Alles ist schone. Alles ist schone...

Due to budget or obscure communist censorship laws we don't see too much violence or special effects; most of the attacks are offscreen and we hear about them on the ship's radio. The big climax just involves one "important" death, which causes "the Boss" to smash his orbs, if you know what I mean. On both sides of the squabble there's a remarkably etched-in sense of collective teamwork, decision making and leadership skills. But hey, we don't have to see scenes just because the rickety sci fi framework plot requires them;  we've seen it all before -- fill in your own blanks, let your tongue feel the spray, and dig those astro-boots (right).

In the end, DUST says more about communist notions of decadence, binaca-style spray drugs and open-sexuality than a whole festival of Amerikanische schweinhunde filmen ever could. Most devastating is the implication that the need to get high and exploit nude bodies is perhaps just a capitalist-conditioned response to the repression and misery instilled by our Puritan forefathers. These East Germans don't need to do all that because they just have casual sex with each other, wear cool clothes, and forget about it. With a crew of beautiful, healthy German women to give your aching head a maternal massage as needed-- and/or dance while you eat breakfast, maybe you'd be just fine as a cog in the people's machine. After all, what are you exploiting the workers and getting high for, anyway?

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MADE IN USA: Someone left a Maoist in the Rain

AKA: BITCHES OF '66
"We were in a political movie, which means Walt Disney with blood."

It's exciting times for Godard lovers as two of his 1966 films: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Made in the USA make their way to the few remaining stores next week. Set in "Year Zero" at some Alphaville-esque locale called "Atlantic City," (apparently Suburban France), Made in USA is a great little road marker connecting the dots of Godard's earlier and later pop cinematic narrative deconstructions like Pierrot Le Fou (1965) and First Name: Carmen (1983), the stuff before and after his anti-entertainment unionist phase, providing surrealist wordplay, collage, satire, intellectual critique of the right/left dichotomy, a eulogy for countercultural idealism almost before it starts (May '68 was still a couple years off), and a last waltz for his crumbling marriage to the leading lady, the heavenly Anna Karina (she looks weary, as if she's been screaming at him between takes).

If you've ever basked in the primary pop glow of Pierrot Le Fou and wished Godard had made a whole slew of movies in widescreen color with Karina, guns and anti-American sloganeering, then Made in USA is your film. It delivers the goods while showing you just how much less good such goods are a second time. Made just one year after Fou, it seems as if it's the end of a twenty year run of sequels. Karina's femme fatale is still beautiful but less fresh, less gaminesque. There's no trickster male of Jean Paul Belmondo's manly charisma to balance her star wattage and sex appeal (Jean Pierre-Leaud tries hard to be manic, and maybe that's the problem) and so she has only the mirror to work with. In this noirscape of bright primary colors Paula Nelson (Karina) is all alone with a sea of bit players, trying to find the one guy she liked from earlier films, a raving commie intellectual believed dead, named Richard P. Though hard to find, we get to hear him ranting away in the form of shrill tape recordings (of Godard reading Maoist obtuse ideology with the terseness of Milenay and pomp of Renfraux).

Paula is a possible spy for either side of the left/right divide but her true motives for wanting to find Richard P. remain unclear; we assume he's an on-again/off-again boyfriend and/or symbol for Godard's own lost idealism, a Maoist Rosebud. As she hunts this invisible, presumed murdered communist through Raoul Coutard's impressionistic landscape (at one point Karina name checks Monet while standing in the foreground of a backyard full of beautiful trees out of focus behind her -- was Impressionism a symptom of weak eyesight?) we get the notion that this is just one of those films that masters make when they're off their a-game, like Dial M for Murder or Testament of Orpheus.

I don't mean to disrespect it, because many a master's b-game is still fascinating and worship-worthy, maybe even more so than their A game (I like Made in USA much more than the dreary industrial landscape of 2 or 3 Things, which most critics consider superior) so long as they include deconstruction of B gameishness into the film itself, as in riding right along with audience expectations and observations, tweaking or thwarting them at every turn (without turning them off) and yet delivering what is promised in such a way that our own desire for it is called into question.

What Godard is chronicling here, then, perhaps, maybe, probably not, is the evolution of B-movie convention from The Big Sleep to Easy Rider. The exact second you realize that the hot blond waif sitting in the background at the bar looks a bit like a really young Marianne Faithful (above), she suddenly starts singing "As Tears Go By" - not lip syncing, but singing right there, a capella, trilling her voice gently and feeling every word of the song, expressing some longing we have no idea about but the mood of wistful sadness overwhelms the film in a summer of love tsunami, before it's even begun, only to resume its dry sand babbling even before she finishes the song. Compared to this bit of subdued emotionalism from a rising starlet of British rock royalty, the ensuing G. Marxist wordplay between Leaud and the bartender suddenly seems tired, yesterday's model. There's a new sincerity in town and it's cool to have feelings, or at any rate it's cool if you're Marianne Faithfull. Karina, instead, is trying on the outfit of a bitchy too-cool-for-modernism contemporary diva (the host instead of the contestant on Europe's Next Top Model) for size. She's not about to pick up a flower and take off her shoes just because the other kids are doing it. So instead she just freezes from the knees down and looks at the floral arrangements like a penniless, starving lotus eater.

No wonder in the next scene Karina visits a health spa beauty parlor, where-- fittingly--any possibility for tranquility amidst the clients is destroyed by shrill announcements over a crackly PA system. When she tells the resident doctor Ludwig during her interrogation to stop "dicking around," you feel her weary rage, that she's indirectly talking to Godard, wishing he'd just write a script and stick to it so she could go home on time and put her feet up. She must have been full sick of his 'dicking around' by then, of waiting around on a hot set for his little direction notes, film after film. It shows. Only when she gets to be mean does she light up with the synthesis of truth and illusion.

The counterculture was beginning to catch fire in 1966, and Faithfull still looks like she was recently conjured out of a magic cloud of smoke, or pulled out of a junior high school gym class before she bruised her complexion in dodgeball, but Godard and Karina were already burning out on decadence and freedom. Even if that's not true, it shows. This isn't complaint, just observation, since Godard naturally ties in this weariness to the film itself, the way for example, Tippi Hedren's bitchiness about working with an obsessive like Hitchcock two films in a row may have led to the audience-alienating (but great!) outbursts of castrating rage in MARNIE.

What saves MADE from being just a misfire, in the end, is the way Godard accommodates his ingenue's hostility by linking it to the shocking effect of watching people get casually and suddenly shot--or seduced--without all the usual booming orchestral music of Hollywood that gives each romance or death such magnified resonance. MADE teaches us that in real life people don't have to brandish their gun and make speeches before firing- it can be so random and sudden that you never know what hit you. During a philosophical discussion with a suspect, for example, she asks, "Would you prefer a long slow old age death or a short exciting death in the moment?" and when he answers the latter, she shoots him on the spot. No fanfare, no warning. Crack!

In addition to the violence, there's some welcome cultural intolerance: When Paula meets a guy who does an impersonation of a typical American--a lobotomized hick Jerry Lewis--Karina ups the ante by making slanty eyes to indicate it's "all Chinese to her." In addition the usual disruptions appear: random silences, the roar of passing planes or honking cars, and many stabs of Ludwig Van's 5th keep interrupting the dialogue, making full grasp of the plot impossible, though oblique interview sequences help, as do peculiar conversations overhead in front of comic book splashes, movie stills and mentions of streets with names like Preminger and Ben Hecht, and of course a pinball machine, though every bell and ping seems to hurt Karina's hangover.

More than most of the films that would follow in Godard's cannon, MADE actually struggles to maintain just enough plot to flirt with your attention span, luring you close enough to the amniotic wall between alienation and narrative immersion that you feel like your whole movie-going life is flashing before your eyes, as in the slim gap between watching a film and reading its back cover synopsis at the video store. Godard's idea of a mystery film is to have a character read Dashiell Hammett aloud in front of a gas station, but for MADE, though the characters may read a bit, they at least still shoot each other.

The shooting is key, since it fits the anti-American ruthless amorality on display (i.e. our production code wherein femme fatales must never go unpunished). Paula is a lethal combination of unpunished femme fatale and Chandleresque gumshoe. Her blase attitude towards being arrested and/or murdering people in cold blood is charming and alienating at the same time. Dario Argento could have spun her into three separate characters, but Godard is too political to divide a fractured psyche for the purpose of mere suspense; even the climactic showdowns are filtered through rhetoric and suffused with ennui, as when Paula--almost apologetic for the film's inertness--remarks:

We live in a part of the universe that's already old, nothing much happens, while elsewhere new galaxies are exploding into action.

A fatal mistake of many lesser filmmakers is the idea that mid-career crises make good cinema. You just tie a film up with past tricks and successful ideas like a greatest hits collection, it wont work on either front, unless you keep the energy high (as in Scorsese's Casino, which moves too fast and vicious to let you realize it's not that great). Godard is too frenetic and hip to let the acres of sadness between Karina and himself sink the movie's energy level, so he focuses his rage on Madison Avenue, which has dared to co-opt Brechtian "full disclosure" (recuperation!) and metatextual self-mockery. Godard wants Brechtian cut-up techniques to be sole domain of the French Communist Party, but Madison Avenue wants to use Godard's methods so they can appear to enjoy their own intellectual self-loathing. For example, if Godard says "Down with Kelloggs!" then Kelloggs' says "Godard says 'down with delicious Kelloggs!'" to which Godard can only get redder in face and party, trying to end the game by saying "Down with advertising that co-opts the tactics of Debord and detournement, to infinity squared!


To a Brechtian post-modernist who loves quotations as much as Godard does, this is the ultimate defeat: you can't critique a power system that incorporates its own critique--Todd McGowan wrote about this in his Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment:

The insight into the functioning of power... has the effect of cementing power's hold over us rather than relaxing it. It does this by cutting off all lines of critique prior to their articulation. (54)

In the end, none of it matters, because we have Anna Karina. Young and gorgeous, she's preserved for all time in vibrant, colorful dresses against the same color scheme of Pierrot Le Fou, which is probably the movie to see first if you're new to the game. After Made in the USA and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (shot at the same time, with Godard originally wanting to show them in alternating reels), Godard would begin his descent into nihilistic ranting (Weekend) and post-modern Commie pedagogy (La Chinoise, Tout Va Bien). Still witty, but sullen and sanctimonious as well, enraged that his rage hasn't made a discernible difference. His became for awhile a fate that I've watched subsume many a Cultural Studies professor who gets mad at contemporary culture the way an impatient gardener might get mad at a reticent flower.

Luckily, old Godard got his Baudrillard-esque groove back as a mid-life crisis 80s reward, finding a vein of poetry deep under absurdity's skin and he's been popping it ever since. And even now, 40 years later, Anna Karina and Marianne Faithfull are paragons of cool, still appearing regularly on TV and in movies, acting and singing with their beautifully smoke-ravaged voices. In an era when our own president is harassed by the media for occasionally having a cigarette, these two ladies are reminders that you can all just take a fucking walk / and I guess that I just don't know / and I guess that you've come a long way... baby.

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