Dionysos

Khouri is shown here as a talented author who perfectly understands the medium and genre and knows how to use it for his purposes. Just as he later managed to crush the bourgeoisie with its own weapon - the Antonioni self-reflective mirror of empty nights and empty souls - he demonstrates here with subtle play with the film genre a bear service to conventional Hollywood drama, almost on the edge of parody. Hitchcock grasped, understood, and surpassed. Partial spoilers follow: the demonic character of the main antagonist, whose terrifying and alluring nature was heightened by the mise-en-scène game of delaying the reveal of her face, turns out to be a paper tiger after the cataclysmic revelation - the revelation of banality does not lead to any revelation of hidden evil behind a normal mask, thus intensifying its scariness ("even a normal person can tear us apart in the shower"), but rather the hidden evil is revealed as a demonstration of the principle "fear has big eyes" (like the exposed fixed gaze of the main protagonist, see also the film poster), thus revealing the typical process of bourgeois film audience psychology. The mysterious evil is revealed as a helpless neurotic. Similarly, where the viewer of conventional 1950s films expects the final shot of the happy couple around whom the whole melodramatic plot revolves, they find the exact opposite: instead of a happy ending (gain) with a man and a woman who have been waiting for each other and have become terrifying representatives of phantasmagorical happiness of Hollywood's alias capitalist-surrealist superhumans, they see the loss (sorrow) of a humanized character who, all the way up to the climax of the film, was associated with danger through the typical means of film symbolism (again emphasized in the mise-en-scène, for example, by wearing the same coat in the happy ending scene that previously symbolized danger). Moreover, the eyes of the main protagonist say much more than they would like to. And it could continue: Khouri's subversion of conventional genre meanings makes this film a unique foreshadowing of the fact that after understanding the rules of the game, every game is revealed as empty: including the film, including life.

The film already deviates slightly from amongst other Soviet films with its civilian plot about the relationship between a mother and her son, which initially creates the impression of a primary focus on the adolescence and rebellion of the young boy, but gradually involves the capricious (to put it nicely) mother, whose sadness fills the entire film by the end (the director and screenwriter are women, so the focus on the female character is only beneficial). However, the main advantage lies in the lightness and playfulness of the expressive means, which corresponds to avoiding the common Russian melancholy, fatalism, and deep thoughtfulness in terms of content (yes, despite the fact that the film is dominated by the sadness of its protagonist, that is where the art lies). Along with the attractive camera work and editing techniques, which serve better to create impressions than words alone and the plot, the film resembles (the 10-years-delayed and Soviet) French New Wave.

"Are you a communist?" - "No." - "Would you like to be a nun?" - "No," admits Ingrid Bergman at the end of the film. It could just as well be the epitaph of the fading neorealism of the time period, at least as far as Rossellini is concerned. The entire film is based on the tension between the personal story of a mother undergoing an inner transformation and a general message that the author (and the screenplay authors, as it is characteristic that Fellini was among them) wants to impress upon us. The whole film feels like a hidden advertisement for this message, where the main character is actually just a Trojan horse carrying the message, just as medieval legends were countless variations of advertisements for the truth of God. At first, the film feels like the intimate drama of one woman, then it turns into a social drama, and in the end, we witness a genuine parable of society as a whole (hence the depersonalizing title of the film). At the end of the film, there should be a warning about product placement, in this case, not about Red Bull or the proletariat, but about the grace of God. In my opinion, in this peculiar contradiction, which may not be a contradiction for some, the Italian neorealism in the film struggled, which diminished its power. In short, Rossellini attempts to provide us with a new version of religion while at the same time incorporating the atomic bomb era, the Cold War, the conflict between labor and capital, etc. The result, in my opinion, is slight schizophrenia. Nevertheless, this film is perfectly crafted, and all credit to it.

Who else is better suited to capture the minutiae of American middle-class life than an American director who impressively utilizes zoom and details? It is only through the camera that we can see up close that the faces of the protagonists are just character masks, from which despair, futility, and bitterness shine through in sneaky glimpses. Laughter, which is just a sneer, is only a means to convince others and, above all, ourselves of something. Similarly, searching for salvation and forgetfulness in entertainment is futile for people who no longer know how to have fun, and therefore their parties end in the hangover of falsity. In that moment of realization that we ourselves did not believe in our own pose, that everything is really screwed up, that instead of being in a luxuriously equipped row house, I find myself at rock bottom, that moment when the non-diegetic music stops (and Cassavetes can do without it just fine), Cassavetes knows how to direct it like no one else.

Truly loneliness and isolation, but this time on a higher level: as if the transition from the jungle to the city not only meant a change of scenery but also a transition from one structure of the human self to another - the unconscious and the fantastic. It is as if the phantasm, embodied by Vargas as the main hero on the silver screen, only doubled Vargas' despairing isolation as a real person, instead of serving the human subject in a better light (as a proper psychoanalytic phantasm). No, Vargas is both in the world of illusory film and in the real world, all alone, sentenced to become a literal wandering "specter" (a literal "phantasm") alongside the other characters of the film ("Los Muertos" and "Phantom"). A crushing view of humanity, which cannot escape reality even in its dreams and films, from which it seeks to escape through them. The comparison to Hotel Monterey is fitting (hallways, elevators) and we can also appreciate the overall change of location - after all, the cold lines of lifeless architecture correspond better to the fate of the human characters (and make them precisely "human" indecent) than the vibrant green of the rainforest.

Painful decision-making between two equally valid social demands - preserving the past, including its material remnants, which may become obstacles to progress at a certain point, or sacrificing something from ourselves and our ancestors for the sake of the future. Because if we want (and we must) move forward, we have to leave something behind. But on the other hand: "We are what we remember. Without memory, we disappear, cease to exist, and our past is erased, and yet we pay little attention to memory except in cases where it abandons us. I do very little to exercise, nurture, strengthen, and protect it." (Mark Twain) Yes, we must look forward, but at the same time, we must not forget what we have left behind. But what if we are in a fog, where is the front and where is the back? In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Russia found itself in a fog, as it had so many times in its long history...

"They'll slit your throat for a nickel. Nothin' personal. They just want the extra nickel." A poignant critique of mammoth corporations and all-capable companies, striving only for profit maximization and loss minimization. It is particularly sad when confronted with Mexican immigrants who seek work and a better life in the USA but are only granted the honor of being plucked within the wheel of corporate capitalism.

Earthly life is sad and violent, while the world of supernatural beings is magical and pleasant. In this film, however, things are definitely not like that. Yet in the supernatural world, you can at least eventually find justice. In the earthly world, no. Or yes? Just as Ophelia cannot reconcile herself with the (albeit inconspicuous) injustice done to an innocent creature and, as a result, becomes an innocent victim herself, Spain was forced to become a victim of Franco's fascism for four decades. Ophelia is rewarded for it in the fairy tale world. Spain, in the real world, may not seem like it at first glance, but there is still a chance - if the Spaniards were not willing to sacrifice the innocent for their own happiness, the new generation, even if it emerges from the horror of the previous generation, can experience more just and free times.

The greatest strength of the film is its greatest weakness: the counterpoint of matter and spirit, body and soul. The materiality of the body brilliantly intrudes into Sokurov’s otherwise typical slow flow and into lyrical classical/preromantic images. The repulsive bloated body of Mephisto amidst female purity in the beginning; Margarete’s beauty gradually ending in a shot of the vulva: the symbol of the gradual disturbance of the balance between soul and body, and the reduction of what is noble in a man (his disgust for God) to an animal (non)essence. Who introduced imbalance and Sin into the world of balance between soul and body? Who abandoned patient asceticism of knowledge, and who exchanged the promise of a constantly advancing future of science for one night with Margarete? The answer is also the answer to the question of why this typically religious interpretive framework is the film's greatest drawback: unlike Goethe's masterpiece, it completely flattens Faust's story into a Manichaean struggle between soul and matter - only Mephisto can come from the body, matter, and sex. Faust is no longer a self-destructive hero who has already achieved everything in knowledge and who joins forces with the devil to know even more, and thus he must also know what escapes science. Now he is just an impatient and defeated renegade of spiritual work, who succumbed to desire and ended up in a barren desert on his journey for bodily pleasures, which means the death of the body and the spirit. Sokurov's Days of Eclipse also took place in a desert, but the direction was the opposite: detachment from a filthy reality led upwards... here, falling away from God is inevitable. Therefore, the review must also be less.

Pier Paolo Pasolini vs. Federico Fellini. Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom vs. Fellini's Casanova: the score is one to nothing. What do both films have in common? It is the effort to go through allegory and analogy to the furthest extreme of the depicted topic, to explore the very limits of the matter through metaphor, and even to go just beyond those limits where the true nature of the matter is revealed. Both films portray the vanity and debauchery of seemingly noble life (of the higher classes, although this detail probably did not matter to Fellini), the hidden essence of human entertainment, which quickly turns into a sneer and depraved orgies, etc. Yet while Pasolini had the courage to undergo this cinematic game of searching for the ultimate extreme, where society and film can essentially reach to metaphorically depict all of this, Fellini stops somewhere halfway. Fellini's Casanova is not surprising in any way - in fact, Americans could have made it, they just would have to find a European who would package the film in pastels and tinsel a la Rococo. Well, it is no wonder that Fellini won several Oscars in his career, while Pasolini received a different honor the year before, which speaks much more about his art than Fellini's golden statue (and I am back to that tinsel, Mr. Fellini, where are your earlier films...).