1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 69: Lust and revenge

Australian tycoon George needs a project for his spoiled, crisis-prone daughter, Georgina, to supervise. Why not commission a bronze statue? It’d be bulky, costly, valuable (at least, once the right critics have approved it), conspicuously placed in the wing that George built for the Adelaide museum, and therefore indisputably worthy of a tax write-off. As for Georgina, this is her sort of thing; she has trendy artist friends.

Lily, Georgina’s handpicked artist, wants to subvert the male gaze by sculpting a larger-than-life male nude. That’s fine with George as long as his tax write-off goes unchallenged.

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Enter a plebeian married couple, Cecilia and Karl-Heinz. She works in a New Age shop. He is unemployed. They need money. He wants to buy a cottage in a “cultured” suburb. She wants to give money to her cult. They’re at odds in the bedroom, too (he wants more sex, she doesn’t). One night, as they lie in bed, he propositions her. “Do you know what an OBE is?” she retorts. “Order of the British Empire,” he whimpers. “Out-of-body experience,” she explains.

Karl-Heinz submits his photo to the artist, who selects him as her model. The gig pays well. Now Karl-Heinz and Cecilia will have enough money for a down-payment on the cottage. Or to subsidize the cult.

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The modeling sessions would be utterly professional were Georgina not lurking in the studio. Cecilia isn’t threatened by her husband’s proximity to lesbian Lily, but she rightly mistrusts Georgina.

She confides in her guru, who has arrived from California to raise funds. The guru, realizing that a tycoon’s money is involved, sniffs a big score.

At this point, I had better stop describing the plot, except to note that (a) Georgina’s shrink prescribes her an SSRI with aphrodisiac effects, (b) other people end up taking the drug, (c) Cecilia is urged, against her conscience, to participate in the sculpting project, and (d) the artwork, for financial reasons and with the artist’s bland acquiescence, is turned into a subversion of a subversion of the male gaze.

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I haven’t seen anything much like Lust and Revenge, except one of the director’s celebrated earlier efforts, Lonely Hearts (1982), a work that is, if anything, stranger because its oddball characters enact a more conventional plot. Both movies hinge on the conflict between barely-suppressed male desire and the integrity of an odd but fiercely conventional woman. Lust and Revenge is particularly inspired in channeling Cecilia’s puritanism through kooky New Age beliefs. (Do these two elements combine in real life? I wouldn’t know.) Cecilia looks, speaks, and behaves rather like Ingrid Bergman in Cactus Flower; imagine that character in a cult.

Paul Cox, the director, is also known for a movie called Man of Flowers, summarized thus by IMDb: “An eccentric elderly man tries to enjoy the three things in life that he considers real beauty: collecting art, collecting flowers, and watching pretty women undress.” I haven’t seen Man of Flowers, but, having seen Lonely Hearts and Lust and Revenge, I’d wager that it, too, is more amusing than salacious.

Another movie of Cox’s, one I have seen, is the devastatingly serious Innocence (2000). In it, also, a woman’s integrity is challenged. That movie purports to be realistic. Lust and Revenge is deliberately cartoonish (and Lonely Hearts is somewhere in between). Tonally, Lust and Revenge is rather like Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One, with its skewering of the commerce in sacred things (art, love, spirituality) and its grotesque concluding image of a human body’s (clandestine) desecration. South Australia may as well be Southern California.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 3: From the journals of Jean Seberg

This is a documentary. Its subject, the actress Jean Seberg (Breathless), recounts her life story. Only, she does so from the perspective of someone who is dead – Seberg committed suicide in 1979 – and “her” words are uttered by another actress who looks how Seberg might’ve looked, had she kept on living. They aren’t really Seberg’s words, but, rather, the documenter’s. He’s pretending that Seberg would have spoken these words, had she spoken from beyond the grave.

The narration doesn’t sound as if it’s been mined from journal entries. It’s too meticulously planned out, too retrospective, too lecture-like. That’s how it’s supposed to sound. The unnaturalness isn’t in the narration but in the title.

“Seberg” (the narrator) shrewdly analyzes the lives and careers of other actresses of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s: Ingrid Bergman, Vanessa Redgrave, and, especially, Jane Fonda. These actresses made it to the top of their profession. The movie asks whether this was a victory or a degradation.

Just as the movie is concerned with an entire cohort of actresses, it also discusses the men who directed or acted with that cohort: in Seberg’s case, Otto Preminger, Jean-Luc Godard, Romain Gary (her husband), and Clint Eastwood. The men generally crafted their movies so that the male characters would seem powerful and the female characters would seem weak. Preminger and Gary were particularly ruthless in this respect.

There’s an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire,” in which a vile old man sets his daughter on fire to make a compelling TV scene. Well, this documentary shows how Otto Preminger set Jean Seberg on fire when she played Joan of Arc.

There’ve been lots of Joans of Arc, but none except Seberg was ever literally set on fire.

All the Joans were exploited, however (as one fascinating montage makes clear). All of them – Seberg, Falconetti, Bergman, and others – were shown burning at the stake because men enjoyed watching women suffer.

Watching the Joan of Arc scenes, I thought: This is awful. What directors do to actresses – and what audiences want to see – well, it’s just inexcusable. If movies encourage people to look at women in this way, they shouldn’t be viewed.

When a manly actor such as Eastwood is photographed, the close-up evokes alertness or grit – something active. On the other hand, when the performer is a woman, the close-up evokes longing (Greta Garbo) or piety (Bergman) or, worst of all, blankness (Seberg) – that is, some form of passivity.

As this documentary explains it, actresses don’t have much control over their own performances. The director has the control. The director can edit the shots before and after a close-up to favor a certain interpretation of the actress’s state of mind.

You might wonder if the documenter, Mark Rappaport, has contempt for his subject. After all, he puts words into “Seberg’s” mouth. He’s the one who has “Seberg” interpret her life and those of her fellow actresses chiefly in terms of victimhood. According to the documentary, Seberg is a victim of Preminger and her other directors, of her husbands and lovers, of her audiences, of the FBI. In the end, she barely has the agency to kill herself – it takes her several tries, and while she is still alive in between those tries, her friends treat her as a breathing corpse.

Rappaport has made other movies in a quasi-documentarian style (the best known is about Rock Hudson). I haven’t seen them. But it would be useful to compare them to this one. Does he always turn his subjects into victims – the men, as well as the women?

(In this shot, the narrating “Seberg” is superimposed over footage of the real Seberg. The documentary does a lot of that sort of thing. In one scene, for instance, it glues Audrey Hepburn’s head on top of Seberg’s body. It also juxtaposes footage from different movies, and it digresses from its biographical narrative to explain certain aspects of film grammar. It certainly is educational.)