Author: Jim McLennan

Dir: Lena Wertmüller
Star: Rutger Hauer, Nastassja Kinski, Faye Dunaway, Massimo Wertmüller
a.k.a. Up to Date
Crystal or Ash, Fire or Wind, as Long as It’s Love
On a Moonlit Night

I’ve always been a fan of Rutger Hauer, and think he’s generally a much better actor than he’s given credit. He’s best known for his work in Blade Runner, in particular the “attack ships on fire” speech at the end, which is one of the most memorable ever in SF cinema. He’s just as wonderful in The Hitcher, but as I explored his filmography beyond those two great movie villains, I gradually came to appreciate his subtler talents. Films like The Legend of the Holy Drinker show what a solid talent he genuinely is, and Hauer helps elevate what could otherwise be schlocky genre crap, like Split Second, to thoroughly enjoyable. He’s one of those actors who is always worth watching, regardless of the type of film he’s in.

I hadn’t seen this one, however. It didn’t seem to receive any significant kind of distribution. Not one IMDb review, and less than 200 votes, despite a pair of leads who were still well-known internationally, plus Wertmüller being the first woman ever nominated for the Best Director Academy Award, for her 1976 film, Seven Beauties (though she’s probably better known as the director of the original Swept Away, later butchered in a remake by Madonna). Perhaps the plot was considered a tough sell. Hauer plays European journalist John Knott, who is working on a project exposing prejudice against those infected with AIDS, by telling restaurants, priests, etc. that he is HIV positive, and documenting their reactions, along with his photographer. He’s reunited with an old flame, Joëlle (Kinski) and her young child, and they resume their relationship. But then a devastating blow descends. Know that disease he had been pretending to have? Guess what he now actually has.

He quietly arranges for Joëlle and her daughter to be tested; fortunately, they get the all-clear, but he decides that the best thing to do is simply leave them, without telling them why. He moves to New York, and forms a partnership with another victim of HIV, Mrs. Colbert (Dunaway), to work on funding research into a cure. Joëlle, meanwhile, is devastated by his apparent abandonment. Years later, John discovers she is becoming close to another friend of his, unaware that her new boyfriend is also HIV positive, and goes to confront him about behavior which is potentially lethal to the woman John still loves. Joëlle shows up in the middle of the resulting bloody brawl, and is distraught when she is chased away at gunpoint, unaware John is simply trying to protect her from the risk his contained in his body fluids. His photographer finally tells her the truth about why John felt he had to go away, and she flies to America to confront him.

This almost feels like a period piece now, set at the height of AIDS hysteria. Was it really the case that restaurants would refuse to serve HIV-positive patrons? I can’t say, as at the time, I was attending university in the North of Scotland, which was not exactly AIDS Central. It certainly seems an entirely different time, with the various treatments now available no longer making it the death sentence it once was. As a result, any modern viewer has to adopt a different mindset in order for much of this to resonate. It does also come across as fairly contrived: exactly how or where John became infected is never made clear, except for his mention that it was “on a moonlit night.” And the social consciousness on display is painfully obvious. In this world, seems that only heterosexuals get AIDS, while the only people who treat the fake-infected John with tolerance are London dockworkers. Not buying it, sorry.

What does make it work are the performances, Hauer’s in particular. He received an additional credit for work on the dialogue, and according to his official website, “While Lina Wertmüller was more interested in the social aspect of the plot, Rutger wanted to give more emphasis to the love-story.” I’m with Hauer there: John comes off as a genuinely likeable guy, and it’s painful to watch him be torn between his love for Joëlle and their daughter, and his desire to protect her from the agony of having to handle his slow, irrevocable demise. You can see why he chose to do what he did, though it causes a different kind of agony. Call it the Sophie’s Choice of romance. Kinski holds up her end of the film well, though it’s very much Hauer’s movie, particularly in the second half. Joëlle is just as devoted to John, but is unaware of the whole picture, and her mix of bafflement and despair is pitiable.

There aren’t many other films I can think of like this, and it deserves credit for being one of the earliest acknowledgments in mainstream cinema of AIDS. I guess Tom Hanks in Philadelphia might be about the closest in tone, and that came four years later; this also pre-dates Longtime Companion, which appeared the following year. I wonder if the film’s story perhaps had a long-lasting effect on its star, because Hauer would go on to set up a charity, the Starfish Association. Its website describes it as, “A non-profit organization aimed at raising help and awareness on the HIV/AIDS situation, focusing especially on support to children and pregnant women.” If so, even if the movie is largely now obscure and forgotten, its message of tolerance and love does carry on.

Dir: Jerzy Skolimowski
Star: Timothy Hutton. Nastassja Kinski, Valeria Golino, William Forsythe

“You talk about freedom, but it’s only freedom for yourself. You destroy and you kill everything, everything around you. People only exist for your pleasure and your amusement, and you enjoy the torture and the ridicule. It is monstrous what you’re doing!”
— Dimitri Sanin to Maria Nikolaevna Polozov

After the awfulness which was Magdalene, this was like a lemon sorbet on my cinematic palate. It is still something of a Euro-pudding, with token Hollywood actor Hutton playing Russian land baron, Dimitri Sanin. Yet it works, in part because Kinski gets to play an utter c… Er, let’s just say, she’s not very nice, probably for the first time in her cinematic career, and seems to relish the opportunity. Her character, Maria, like Dimitri, is also Russian and upper-class, but appears to have been twisted by her upbringing. She was born into a family of serfs, and only recognized by her father, the local land-owner, on his death-bed, when she was 13. Perhaps that’s why she resents the “genuinely” aristocratic Sanin, and sets about single-mindedly destroying his happiness.

In particular, she aims at his relationship with Gemma Rosselli (Golino), who works in a pastry-shop in the German town Mainz, which Sanin is visiting. He saves the live of her brother, is invited to dinner, and the two fall in love. Which is unfortunate, since she is already engaged. However, when Dmitri shows himself willing to fight a duel to protect Gemma’s honor (even though the incident was actually provoked by Maria), she breaks the relationship off, and Dmitri begins preparing to sell his Russian estates and move permanently to Mainz. He bumps into an old friend, Prince Ippolito Polozov (Forsythe), who says his wife may be interested in purchasing Dmitri’s land – but this is merely a ruse for Maria to get up close and personal with our hero. She reels Dimiri in, seduces him, then invites Gemma over, for what rapidly becomes a credible candidate for Most Uncomfortable Dinner Party Ever.

It’s a beautifully shot work, right from the opening scene of a coach on a ferry, and much credit to cinematographer Dante Spinotti, who would go on to be Oscar nominated twice, for his work on LA Confidential and The Insider. The beauty on display – not least Kinski, who is positively luminescent, particularly in one scene, which we’ll get to later – is in sharp contrast to the moral corruption and decay on display here. It’s based on a largely auto-biographical work by Ivan Turgenev, best known for Fathers and Sons and doesn’t make for a cheerful film. Admittedly, merely knowing it’s based on a 19th-century Russian novel, probably is enough for a reasonably safe bet that you’ll be watching people making poor life choices, with bad things happening to them, and those they love, as a result.

Skolimowski was a contemporary of Roman Polanski – he wrote dialogue for Knife in the Water. While he has never had anything like the commercial success, I guess neither has Polanski acted in a year’s top-grossing movie – Skolimowski played Georgi Luchkov in The Avengers. He also appeared in Eastern Promises and Mars Attacks!; here, he has a camei as a balloonist at the local fair. As a director, it seems this film fits right into his cinematic wheel-house. Glenn Heath wrote, “Skolimowksi’s films have always been about cornering psychologically fractured men, blurring their rationale, and sending them to hell. The reasons behind their continued suffering may vary, yet the end result always succumbs to tragedy,” and that’s what we have here. Dimitri steals Gemma’s heart away from her fiance. Then he discovers what it’s like to be on the receiving end, as Maria sweeps in and takes possession of his heart – not because she loves him, mostly because it amuses her.

There’s more than a hint of Dangerous Liaisons in her manipulative scheming, though she’s much more “hands-on” than Glenn Close – I kinda want to jump ahead and watch the French version of that, in which Kinski appeared. However, Catherine Deneuve is the uber-bitch, with Kinski playing the Michelle Pfeiffer role, which is probably not nearly as much fun, let’s be honest. The best sequence has Maria and Dimitri going on a horse-ride, which leads to them fortuitously being invited to a gypsy wedding. It’s incredible eye-candy, and Kinski looks absolutely stunning: you know Dimitri’s fate is sealed, especially considering how we have already seen how easily he gave his heart to Gemma. Hell, I’ve been happily married for over a decade, and it would take me at least several seconds before deciding to stay faithful. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Of course, this is a 19th-century Russian novel, as mentioned, so we know Dimitri will make no such sensible decision.

My main problem is with the ending. After the Most Uncomfortable Dinner Party Ever, things gallop to the end credits in a manner that feels incredibly rushed. There’s a very strange epilogue, set in Venice, with Hutton made up as an old man, roaming the streets in a harlequin costume, looking for Maria. Maybe it’s a dream – or a nightmare – as much as it is a memory. Then we get a quick recap, telling us the fates of the lead characters, which I guess is what passes for a moral, and we end where we began, with the coach on the ferry.  If you want a summary of the relentlessly tragic approach here – not that it’s a bad thing, I should stress – you can probably do no better than the final voice-over: “Looking across life’s ocean, Sanin saw himself in a small boat, staring down below at hideous monsters like enormous fish. These were life’s hazards: grief, madness, poverty, blindness. Rising higher, one of the monsters becomes so horribly distinct that the next moment, the boat will be overturned. But it slowly sinks to the bottom, where it waits the appointed hour.”

Yeah. It’s like that.

Dir: Hugh Hudson
Star: Al Pacino, Dexter Fletcher, Nastassja Kinski, Donald Sutherland

It’s at this point that you begin to wonder if Kinski was cursed, this being the third film in her relatively short career, to have helped trigger the bankruptcy of a movie studio. Admittedly, this was not single-handedly responsible for the end of Goldcrest – Absolute Beginners and The Mission certainly played their part. But there are not many large-budget movies, which take in barely one percent of their budget at the North American box-office, as Revolution did. The fallout was not limited to the production house. Hudson, who had recently been Oscar nominated for Chariots of Fire, never made a major Hollywood film again; Pacino quit acting for four years; and Kinski headed back to Europe for the best part of the next decade.

So, is it that bad? No. Not that bad – though nor is it as good as certain revisionists would now assert. Not least among these is Hudson, who released a director’s cut a few years ago, featuring an additional voice-over by Pacino. I will confess, while I haven’t seen this, I am dubious of its supposed merits, simply because what we have here in the original film is still undeniably bad – in some quite large and spectacular ways. But it’s not as terrible as you might think, and I’d rather have something like this, which is at least making an effort, than the tedium of Harem or Maria’s Lovers. There are many things which Revolution is: bloated, incoherent and poorly thought-out would be among them. However, at least it’s never boring.

It tells the story of trapper Tom Dobbs, who ends up unwillingly recruited into the American army, along with his son, Ned (Fletcher, as the teenage Ned; Sid Owen plays the younger version), after his boat is commandeered in New York harbour. Over the following years, as the rebellion blooms into a full-blown revolution, they cross paths in particular with two people. Daisy McConnahay (Kinski) is the firebrand daughter of an aristocratic family, who takes her new cause to heart with the passion of the young. And on the opposition side is Sgt. Maj. Peasy (Sutherland), a sadistic enforcer for the British cause, who flogs Ned to within an inch of his life, after he is forced to switch sides and become part of the redcoat forces.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first: truth be told, that won’t take long, because its main redeeming feature is that it looks good. Hudson, and cinematographer Bernard Lutic, used a lot of hand-held camerawork, which was well ahead of its time for the era, and is undeniably effective at plunging the viewer into the chaos of war. The period look is also excellent, with the East Anglian port of King’s Lynn dressed up to look like New York, and doing a very good job of it. It’s particularly impressive in one shot at the end, which follows Tom through the docks, as he tries to find Daisy in the seething swarm of humanity, and is epic in both scale and scope.

Now, on to everything else, and it’s more a question of “where to start?” It’s mostly a scripting issue, with scenes that seem to possess little or no connection, resulting in a near-complete absence of narrative flow. There’s also way too much reliance on happenstance, with Daisy and Tom coincidentally bumping into each other about every third scene, giving the impression the entire Revolutionary War took place in a single zip-code. That entire love story is never even slightly convincing, not least because Kinski is considerably closer in age to Fletcher (five years) than Pacino (two decades). Even Hudson tacitly acknowledges this: in the recut version, he cut back Kinski’s scenes, excising completely her character’s final reunion with Ned, which was apparently forced on him by the distributor. Sad though it is to say it, she’s basically superfluous to the entire movie, especially considering it’s over two hours long.

There are also the accents used here. To her credit, Kinski is not the worst offender. Indeed, since her dialogue is clearly audible, she’s ahead of the curve, compared in particular to Pacino, who affects a mumbled approach, supposedly historically accurate, but which grates horribly on the modern viewer’s ears. It is, at least, consistent, which is more than can be said for Sutherland, whose accent appears to go on a nomadic tour, veering wildly from Yorkshire to Ireland and part in-between, apparently at random. The huge birthmark affixed to his face is a welcome distraction. Mind you, none of the British are portrayed as anything else than outrageous, braying caricatures: I’d be offended by the relentless stereotyping, if it wasn’t so utterly laughable in its excess. When you have the creator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show playing a suitor for the McConnahay girls’ hands, it’s clear you’re not trying very hard.

The results certainly showed the audience was unimpressed, though Hudson has since complained the movie was rushed out, to try and resolve a sticky cash-flow situation for Goldcrest, the film having cost $28 million, which was very expensive at the time. The gambit didn’t work, to put it mildly. The take at the North American box-office – and one imagines it hardly did anything elsewhere – was a mere  $358,574. That’s just 1.3% of its budget. As a yardstick, perhaps the biggest box-office bust of last year, 47 Ronin, returned about 20% of its budget in North America. Critics were no kinder, led by the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, who infamously described it as “England’s answer to Heaven’s Gate.”

The American Revolution has always seemed neglected by its native cinema, for reasons which I don’t quite get – it was a rather more successful exercise than, say, Vietnam. However, outside of this and the rather less historically accurate The Patriot – interestingly, also using a father-son relationship as the focus of its dramatic dynamic – there have been no large-scale attempts in the past half-century to capture the conflict. You can see what Hudson is trying to do here: bring a smaller, more personal focus to historical events, by showing their impact on a single man. It’s a laudable enough goal, and is not entirely dissimilar from his approach in Chariots of Fire. However, there’s a yawning chasm between good intentions and successful execution, and despite some positive aspects, this ends up stumbling into that chasm, far more than it soars over it.

Dir: Arthur Joffé
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Ben Kingsley, Dennis Goldson, Michel Robin

This is a rather odd film, which starts off playing like a modern update of those “white slavery” films, which go back about a century ago, to titles such as Traffic in Souls. Though the specifics e.g. the villain may have varied over the years, the common theme was that they all saw the ‘nice girl’ heroine abducted and forced against her will – if not, one sensed, that of the viewing audience – into a sordid life of sexual debasement. Here, it’s stock trader Diane (Kinski), who enjoys sex with a casualness befitting an era when AIDS was barely on the radar. However, a missed boat leads to her accepting a drugged cup of tea, and she wakes up to find herself the only white occupant of a harem somewhere in the Middle East.

An escape attempt only proves to show how utterly remote and hopeless her situation is, and she resigns herself to life as the plaything of a depraved sheik. Only, that’s not quite the case. For Selim (Kingsley) turns out to be charming and all but disinterested in the large number of women hanging about elsewhere in his palace – as he explains, some of them are relations, others were handed down from his father, and to be honest, he more or less only keeps the harem running because it’s traditional for someone in his position. Selim is kinda big on tradition, but is torn between that and modernization: he video conferences, but he also practices falconry. It’s that contradiction which at the heart of things, and gradually Diane finds herself realizing Selim can offer her more than the meaningless sex she had in New York: companionship.

So, the moral of the story is, it’s perfectly alright to drug and abduct a woman that takes your fancy, because if you’re nice to her, she’ll end up falling in love with you – though “Stockholm syndrome” would perhaps seem a more credible explanation. Man, I’d have got laid so much, if only I’d known that in the eighties. Okay: known that, and also been a Middle Eastern potentate with apparently unlimited resources. Of course, Middle Eastern is kinda relative too, since Ben Kingsley was born in Yorkshire. I was going to get all snarky about Kingsley playing this in brownface, but I then discovered Kingsley is actually half-Indian, and was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji. Certainly makes him playing Gandhi a bit more acceptable, even if there’s still some distance between there, and the oil-rich kingdom inhabited by Selim.

It’s another of his Oscar-nominated roles which I found more of a problem. Every time Selim opened his mouth, I expected to hear the broken-glass voice of Don Logan from Sexy Beast, berating Diane for making him “look a right cunt.” Not Harem‘s issue, of course, but that role is Ben Kingsley to me, and colors everything else in which I see him, whether made after or (in this case, 15 years) before. [And as an aside, just to confuse matters, the following year, there was a TV movie of exactly the same title, starring Omar Sharif. Albeit set in Victorian times, it’s also about a Western girl getting kidnapped, and her subsequent relationship with an Arab lord. Yeah, that’s 1.39 Gb of bandwidth I’ll never get back…]

I’m just not very sure what the point of this is. There is certainly not much in the way of chemistry between Kinski and Kingsley. who are rarely even slightly convincing as a couple. As mentioned, the culture clash between old and new, is referenced frequently, and indeed, is what leads the eventual downfall of Selim and Diana’s love-affair. A visiting oil-worker spots Diana, and reports her presence to the American embassy, causing enough of an international incident that the couple must split up. However, that’s just the start of things: funnily enough, allowing Western blue-collar workers to know you’ve got a harem, then heading off for a few days at a hotel, is not the wisest of moves. Salem returns to find the kids have broken into the liquor cabinet, so to speak, and things go south from there. So is that the moral here? It’s best to keep quiet, if you have large quantities of fertile women locked up in your basement?

There’s no denying, it’s nicely photographed, the other technical aspects are good (the soundtrack by Phillipe Sarde was particularly well-crafted), and both Kingsley and Kinski give decent performances. Nastassja has the more significant character arc, going from an independent-minded single woman in the big city, to one face in a crowd of potential bed-mates for Salem, but then reclaiming her individuality and forming a relationship which is probably the equal of anything she had in New York. But I still have moral qualms about whether that end actually justifies the means used by Selim, and the film has no real interest in this question. I guess the way it ends could be seen as providing some divine retribution for his sins – or alternatively, a lesson that certain people should not be given guns.

I suppose, in the end, the film is a role-reversal of sorts, deliberately playing against type. Contrary to the old white slavery films mentioned in the intro, the life to which Diane gets whisked away, is much less sexual then the one in which she was initially comfortable. And far from the archetypal sheik of Rudolf Valentino, Kingsley is almost painfully shy around women. However, it’s a perilously thin conceit on which to hang a film, and my attention was wandering off through the desert for much of the second half, in much the same way Diane was during the first.

Dir: Andrei Konchalovsky
Star: John Savage, Nastassja Kinski, Keith Carradine, Robert Mitchum

“When I came to Hollywood, no one knew me, basically, except for Kinski. She was just coming up as [a] star, and she asked me if I would do something with her. I had this script which I had planned to make in Europe with [Isabelle] Adjani. Kinski was hot, so I got some clout, and finally Menahem Golan said, “Set the story in America and we will do it.” But I thought it would not be right in truly American society, these characters, too emotional, so I put it in a Yugoslav enclave.”
— Andrei Konchalovsky, quoted in Baby I Don’t Care, by Lee Server

The Cannon Group studio of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus was not exactly renowned for its art-house output, being better known as home of the Death Wish franchise and no small number of Chuck Norris films. But, for some reason, Golan-Globus also had a good relationship with Konchalovsky, who had been a collaborator with Andrei Tarkovsky, and he directed several films for the company, of which Maria’s Lovers was the first. Indeed, it was Konchalovsky’s first English-language feature, and is a rather lugubrious tale of GI Ivan Bibic (Savage), who returns from war to marry Maria Bosic (Kinski), the woman whose image kept him going through time spent in a Japanese POW camp, only to find himself unable to perform sexually with his new bride. One can only wonder what Charles Bronson would have done in the same situation. It would probably have involved a pool ball in a sock.

Of course, we are dealing with a profound implausibility at the very core of the movie: that a virginal Nastassja Kinski causes erectile dysfunction. Yeah. I’m finding myself struggling with that concept a bit, and wonder if casting a slightly-less attractive actress might have helped with the disbelief. Admittedly, part of the point is that it’s Ivan’s idealized image of Maria which is the problem, coupled with his apparent case of PTSD, back when it was still called “shell shock.” The film opens with clips from John Huston’s documentary, Let There be Light, showing interviews with returning veterans, on to which Ivan’s presence has been tacked, and his sleep is peppered with nightmares – the most ludicrous of which sees Savage cramming half a fake rat into his mouth. Still, it’s a fairly specific disorder in its symptoms, Ivan both apparently functioning better than many vets, and also having no issues with other women, judging by an early fling with a family friend.

But he marries Maria, despite his father (Mitchum, filling in for an unwell Burt Lancaster) believing her to be “too good for him,” and that’s when everything starts to fall apart, as the stress of his problem grinds incessantly on the newlyweds. Not helping matters is the presence of her former boyfriend (Vincent Spano), who still carries a torch for Maria, or the arrival of an itinerant musician, Clarence Butts (Carradine), who can apparently cause pantie-wetting with the drop of a minor chord. After Maria has experimented with self-pleasuring, it’s Clarence who seduces her, though apparently racked by guilt, she tosses him out of the house immediately. Not soon enough, however, for the pregnancy which results, though Ivan is now off working in a hellhole slaughterhouse (alongside a very young John Goodman). After an uncomfortable encounter with his heavily-pregnant wife, Ivan’s dying father makes an emotional plea for them to reunite. And, hey, it turns out that knowing Maria was no longer an untouchable goddess was all Ivan needed to get it up. Who knew?

It apparently took four scriptwriters to come up with this nonsense, along with uncredited work by Floyd Byars, according to the IMDb. Beside Konchalovsky, there was Gerard Brach, who was one of the writers on Tess, Paul Zindel and Marjorie David. Quite why it took so many fingers on the typewriter to come up with this, it’s hard to say, because there’s nothing particularly complex or demanding about the storyline, which is not much more than “boy meets girl” stuff. Nor, to be honest, is there much of interest in the plot. What the film does have, fortunately, are a slew of good performances, probably topped by Savage. While the situation in which he finds himself may stretch the viewer’s credulity, there’s no denying the sense of real pain which results. He first achieves the nirvana of marrying his childhood sweetheart, only for things to implode in a welter of guilt, recriminations and sexual paranoia (albeit the last eventually proving fully justified), and you can’t help but feel for the man.

The other performances are somewhat less memorable, largely because they’re more restrained, probably for the best. It’s nice to see, for the first time in a while, Kinski paired with a man of her own age – or, at least, relatively so, Savage still being her elder by more than a decade, though he plays younger than that. She does capture the wild-eyed innocence of youth nicely, and it’s hard to resist the imagery of a stocking-clad Nastassja, writhing around on the bed like a serpent. That’s appropriate, since here she is like Eve, whose quest for forbidden knowledge  brought about her expulsion from paradise, along with her husband. I dunno. I may be stretching a bit here, visions of Richard Avedon photos bubbling around my subconscious. There may also be an element of art imitating life here: according to Konchalovsky, Kinski was having a love affair during shooting with Spano “and she had a baby from that.” Which must come as a surprise to the baby’s acknowledged father, Ibrahim Moussa, though he was rumored at the time to be responsible.

There’s no denying that Konchalovsky brings a distinctly European feel to what is a very blue-collar American location, Brownsville, Pennsylvania [the house used in the film is still standing there, albeit in rundown condition]. It’s certainly easy to see how it was originally conceived as an Old World film, and the attempt to shoe-horn it into American culture can’t be described as enormously successful. However, it does just about skate past, on the strength of some good performances and effective period atmosphere.