Scotland 3, Greece 1

I post this effusively-narrated goal in honor of a favorite movie of Karin’s that we saw this weekend (after a wedding, no less): So I Married an Axe Murderer (1992).

Roger Ebert calls it

a mediocre movie with a good one trapped inside. … The good movie involves a droll and eccentric Scottish-American family whose household embraces more of the trappings of Scottishness than your average Glasgow souvenir shop.

“I don’t know if a market exists for feature-length Scots-bashing,” Ebert continues, “but the domestic scenes … had me laughing out loud.”

Not me. I guess the times have changed. What I kept thinking was, more should have been made of the parallels with Chabrol’s Le boucher.

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I wrote an entry called “Gastrointestinal Woes” and read it to Karin. She didn’t veto it, exactly, but her evident discomfort persuaded me to excise most of it.

This paragraph remains. (TRIGGER WARNING !!!)

Karin’s mom gave Samuel a “sensory” swivel chair for his birthday. (A chair like this one – a cheaper one, maybe.) Samuel named it “Mr. Spinner.” He and Daniel had great fun spinning in it until Daniel puked up his breakfast Pop-Tart. I heard the howling and saw the mess and thought it was blood until I noticed the sprinkles.

The excised bits were much worse.

My bracket, pt. 2; Beast; Orwell; the clink

Out go Nebraska and New Mexico, my underdogs. I’ve fallen from ~250,000th to ~400,000th place.

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I saw Beast (2017), set on Jersey in the English Channel. The leads are Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn. I was going to say, Flynn is one of the best young actors; but he’s forty-one; he’s been playing good and bad young men for almost two decades. In Beast, he’s a suspected serial killer. Is he guilty? And how is this possibility regarded by the turbulent woman (Buckley, even better than Flynn) who’s drawn to him “as a moth to the flame?”

Critics say this is a Badlands- or Bonnie-and-Clyde-type story. I think it’s more like Chabrol’s La cérémonie or, especially, Le boucher. Anyway, it’s an old story.

Much of Jersey seems manicured for tourists. But there are unkempt places. Buckley and Flynn climb cliffs, swim in the sea, roll in the dirt, tramp through forests, shoot rabbits.

Buckley wounds one. Flynn tells her to finish it off. It’s kinder, he says. As if kindness were the motive.

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I found a cheap copy of the large volume of Orwell’s essays and have been reading through them. He was a fine blogger from the get-go (“journalist,” I guess you’d call him). What essay are you reading, Samuel asked. “The Clink,” about how Orwell gets himself jailed for drunkenness, I said. Samuel built an enclosure with blocks and soon was playing that his action figures were in the clink.

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. 42: La cérémonie

I’m in no hurry to watch all the movies of Claude Chabrol, fascinating though they are. His is a nasty sort of oddness, a peculiarly repulsive amorality. The characters’ depravity is very gradually drawn out, with an effect less horrific than disgusting, as if we’d been led through a well-tended garden to be shown a dead rat.

The other day I saw, on some train tracks, a raccoon’s body neatly sliced in two. Chabrol’s movies feel like that. They even have titles like “A Girl Cut in Two” and “The Butcher.”

La cérémonie, elegant, streamlined, is no different. As Roger Ebert tells us, “The French have a name for the events leading up to death by guillotine. They call it ‘the ceremony.’”

So, in this movie, we have: (A) the exploiters: an industrialist, his pampered wife (an art-dealing ex-model), and their privileged, complacent children; and (B) the proles, played by two splendidly inscrutable actresses: Sandrine Bonnaire as the family’s quiet housemaid, and Isabelle Huppert as the postmistress, the housemaid’s aggressively disreputable friend. Chabrol has said that this is a “Marxist” movie. To what extent should we agree? Yes, there is a revolution; but are these revolutionaries the properly Marxian sort? If the housemaid and postmistress do belong to any Marxian category, they must be lumpenproletariat – the lowest of the low, the bottom-out-of-sights – even though they have jobs and don’t look down-and-out. They are antisocial criminals, rejected by and rejecting everyone else. Marx had little use for such people.

So, yes, Chabrol may be sneering at the upper classes, but perhaps he also is sneering at Marx and at other proponents of revolution. In this movie the rich are condescending and snobbish, but those who overthrow them have even less human feeling, and their actions are monstrous. If Chabrol is taking a side, which is it? Or does he just like to wallow?

Reviewers acknowledge the class conflict to dismiss it. The key dynamic, they insist, is psycho-sexual: the brash postmistress takes over the will of the weakminded housemaid.

I am not convinced. The housemaid may be illiterate, but she is no pushover. In the source novel, Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone, the housemaid clearly is the stronger figure.

In both the novel and the movie, the postmistress is pretty silly, but the housemaid is about as silly as a cancer.

The novel (set in Britain, not France) begins like this:

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

There was no real motive and no premeditation. No money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman’s disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as a twentieth-century woman.

Interpreted psycho-sexually, the movie fits into the tradition I discussed in my review of Normal Life. Interpreted in terms of class struggle, it is more like Parasite.

Only, Parasite is more straightforward and, in a way, more hopeful. It’s understandable enough for the classes in Parasite to exploit each other for their own gain. This is a problem that can be addressed.

The vengeance in La cérémonie is much bleaker.