1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 65: Mission: Impossible

Brian De Palma likes to begin with a “movie within a movie”; see, for example, Sisters, Blow Out, and Body Double. (Well, Sisters begins with a game show broadcast, but same diff.)

He’s signalling that the movie is going to be about other movies. Hitchcock movies, usually.

Indeed, this is how Mission: Impossible begins, with a spy watching other spies on a monitor as they perform a macabre deception upon another spy.

One of the performers is Emmanuelle Béart. She looks glamorously bloody and dead. Another is Tom Cruise, in a grotesque old-man disguise. If we didn’t already know this was a spy​/​gadget /​action flick, we’d think it was about vampires. Thematically, it is a vampire movie, kind of.

De Palma isn’t alluding so much to old Mission: Impossible TV episodes as to other De Palma, and, by extension, to classic cinema of the darkly comical, foreboding sort. That’s how you’re supposed to watch this.

There are six other Mission: Impossibles after this one. A seventh is forthcoming. All are Tom Cruise “vehicles.” De Palma’s, the series opener, is the oddball, the parody of the whole series. Talk about prescience.

I suppose, if you take the vampire suggestion seriously, you could interpret the whole series as a vampire story: Tom Cruise is a decent young guy who catches the vampire disease in the first movie and then must avoid transmitting it as he ages. But that’s hardly a necessary interpretation.

Most theatergoers probably went to see the helicopter in the Chunnel. That sort of thing is fine. It’s done better in the later Mission: Impossibles. I love it when Cruise climbs the Burj Khalifa in a sandstorm (movie no. 4) and when he skydives onto Paris in a lightning storm (movie no. 6). I have near-zero desire to see either of this summer’s dueling blockbusters, Oppenheimer and Barbie, but I’ll be sure not to miss Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

I have inordinate affection for Cruise. I expect him to’ve further perfected action-movie-elder-statesmanship, just as late-career Cristiano Ronaldo refined the tap-in goal.

That’s why it’s so funny to see Cruise in 1996 shuffling about in old man’s wrinkles and a prosthetic nose and mustache in the series’s first scene. People talk about Cruise’s self-mocking mask in Vanilla Sky, but Mission: Impossible did that gag first.

Reading M’Cheyne; 1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 55: L’enfer (Torment)

If you follow M’Cheyne’s reading plan, then every so often, by coincidence, you’ll encounter some pretty stark juxtaposition. Yesterday I read Ezekiel 32, in which Egypt repeatedly is cursed to “lie among the uncircumcised.” Yes, it’s better to be circumcised, I couldn’t help thinking. But then I came to Galatians 5, which says that “if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you … in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything.” Oh, snap.

I’ve read these passages before, of course; and I know that no one passage should be interpreted apart from the rest of the Bible. But there’s something to be said for reading a passage naïvely, as if it were unfamiliar. The power of the M’Cheyne plan is that it allows you to approximate this state of mind while recalling other parts of the Bible (because you’ve just read them). Everything feels more fresh. It’s one thing to hear Paul rail against circumcision; it’s another to hear him when you’ve just gone through a passage like Ezekiel 32 in which uncircumcision is abhorred.

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2 Samuel and 1 Kings also have been on the schedule lately.

King David was old and advanced in years; and although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm. So his servants said to him, “Let a young virgin be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king, and be his attendant; let her lie in your bosom, so that my lord the king may be warm.” So they searched for a beautiful girl throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. The girl was very beautiful. She became the king’s attendant and served him, but the king did not know her sexually.

In the same chapter, David talks with Bathsheba – whom, long ago, he took for himself because he desired to do so – who now must “[bow] and [do] obeisance to the king” to plead for her life and her son’s, while beautiful young Abishag is in the room “attending the king.”

Gripping, hardboiled stuff.

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L’enfer

I can’t figure out why Kanopy lists this among its movies of 1996. It was shown in France in 1994, and that’s when it was reviewed in the USA, so that’s when it must have been in theaters here.

Call it an honorary ninety-sixer.

Nasty old Claude Chabrol remakes an unfinished movie by Henri-George Clouzot (director of Diabolique, The Wages of Fear, etc.). It’s the flip-side of those “French people on vacation for weeks and weeks” movies, the kind that Éric Rohmer does so well. L’enfer is about the hoteliers, not the guests. For these characters, there is no vacation, no regeneration, not even in the off-season. Nevertheless, the owner’s wife (Emmanuelle Béart) disappears a lot when she’s supposed to be working. She’s beautiful. Her husband (François Cluzet) suspects that she is cheating on him. He walks down to the dock of their pleasant but hardly splendid little lake, and mutters to himself. The guests notice; the hotel staff notice; his doctor notices. His wife? “You’re jealous!” she gleefully taunts him, and runs off to the shower. As if she didn’t see that he’s coming apart at the seams.

If there’s a common theme in Chabrol’s work, it might be this: some people get their kicks egging others on.

(Isn’t that the basis of a lot of horror? Of Wake in Fright, for example? Of Neil LaBute’s infamous movies? Of Shakespeare’s Iago? Of the serpent in the garden? The satanic impulse isn’t just to ruin; it’s to persuade others to freely ruin themselves – to entice them to enslave or mutilate their own flesh.)

She flirts; she provokes. She literally drives her husband mad. Or maybe she’s just being friendly with the guests. It’s unclear whether she really is unchaste or even flirtatious: certain scenes must be entirely inside her husband’s head; possibly, others are, too. There’s no firm basis for the viewer to assign guilt or innocence to the wife. As for the husband, the evidence he has is ambiguous at best. So he is always trying to gather more evidence, spying upon his wife, questioning her. He wears her out. She threatens to really cheat on him if he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop.

Is he deliberately provoking her, then? Is he dragging her down into his hell with him?

Is this what she wanted all along? That’s what Roger Ebert suggests, on the premise that the movie needs this extra level of perversity to be interesting.

Well, I doubt the movie is meant to be interesting. It’s meant to be pretty. It’s meant to keep the viewer endlessly, fruitlessly guessing the wife’s real motives, as the husband must do.

Ambiguity is the task that some movies set for themselves. This one ends with a caption: SANS FIN. Without end. That’s ambiguous, too. Does this movie conclude like No Exit, in which the characters are in an unending hell? Or does it conclude like Last Year at Marienbad, with no resolution, no determinate meaning, no point: is it just an exercise in stringing the viewer along?

Or is the torment of uncertainty the attraction of the movie, as in “The Lady, or the Tiger?” Some people like to be frustrated. They seek it out. Maybe the husband in L’enfer does this. Maybe the wife does. Maybe, especially, the sort of person who watches a lot of movies by Claude Chabrol likes to be frustrated. Who’s the pervert, then?

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 24: (a) Les rendez-vous de Paris; (b) Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud

Both of these movies, released a week apart from one another in the USA, are about men and women who talk about love while keeping it at arm’s length. In Les rendez-vous de Paris, they do much of their talking out of doors, in and around parks, markets, graveyards, and cafés; in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, they talk in restaurants and apartments. All the locations are stereotypically Parisian. Together, the movies suggest: If you want romance, go to Paris; if you want true love, stay away.

The great and prolific director of Rendez-vous is Éric Rohmer. (I’ve already reviewed another of his movies, A Summer’s Tale.) Gene Hackman, playing a hard-boiled detective in Arthur Penn’s thriller, Night Moves (1975), says, “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” This is correct. In Rendez-vous, the characters literally watch the paint dry in order to talk about it.

Roger Ebert says:

I think [Rohmer] believes that love is love and that flirtatious conversation is an entirely separate pleasure, not to be confused with anything else. … What the people in Rendezvous in Paris are really saying, underneath all of their words, is: “I am not available. You are not available. But let us play at being available because it is such a joy to use these words and tease with these possibilities, and so much fun to be actors playing lovers, since Paris provides the perfect set for our performance.” Rohmer splendidly illustrates the theory that Parisians possess two means of sexual intercourse, of which the primary one is the power of speech.

Ebert’s review is spot-on, and I have little to add to it. The same is true of his review of Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud:

What a delicate dance they perform. … It is a matter of great erotic fascination when two people are intrigued by the notion of becoming lovers, but are held back by the fear of rejection and the fear of involvement. Signals are transmitted that would require a cryptographer to decode. The difficulty is to send a message that can be read one way if the answer is yes, and the other way if the answer is no.

I’ll say nothing about the movies’ respective plots. (Rendez-vous alone contains three separate stories, and each is fairly complex.) I’ll just note this difference between the two movies. In Rendez-vous, the characters are still young, and their flirting is fraught with insecurity. Not so in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. Nelly may only be in her twenties, but, as played by Emmanuelle Béart, she’s an expert at wielding her beauty against men. And M. Arnaud (Michel Serrault) is a wily ex-judge and businessman who knows precisely what sort of allure he holds for one such as Nelly. Theirs is a dance, yes, but also a sparring match between two assured veterans. Compared to them, the lovers in Rendez-vous are amateurs.

Oh, and this: M. Arnaud and Nelly have money (or, at least, Nelly reasonably expects that she’ll end up with money because of her looks). For the students, scholars, and artists of Rendez-vous, life is more threadbare. This difference also matters.