Category: Filmography

Dir: Wim Wenders
Star: Otto Sander, Horst Buchholz, Willem Dafoe, Nastassja Kinski

You, whom we love, you do not see us, you do not hear us.
You imagine us in the far distance, yet we are so near.
We are messengers, who bring closeness to those who are distant.
We are messengers, who bring the light to those who are in darkness.
We are messengers, who bring the word to those who question.
We are neither the light, nor the message.
We are the messengers. We are nothing. You are, for us, everything.
— Opening voice-over

Kinski hasn’t appeared in many sequels. I’m not sure if this is a conscious choice, or one dictated for her by the market – there didn’t appear to be much demand for Revolution 2. This was a rare, perhaps unique, exception, her third collaboration with Wenders being a sequel to Wings of Desire from six years earlier. It’s not as highly regarded generally: by IMDb rating, Wings is #3 of the 42 titles for which Wenders received a directorial credit, while Faraway comes in at #10, though the 7.3 grade for the latter is still one many directors would kill for. [It’s also the lowest of the three Kinski films, with Paris, Texas at #2] The main criticism appears to be Wenders’ efforts to bolt aspects of a thriller onto a more contemplative approach. It just isn’t a genre with which he seems comfortable, either writing or directing.

The star is Cassiel (Sander), an angel who roams the streets and skies of Berlin, listening in on humanity’s troubles, yet still yearns to experience all life has to offer. After he intervenes to save a child falling from a balcony, he loses his wings, and is helped by another former angel, Daniel (Bruno Ganz) – now a pizza-maker, he was previously an angel too, whose transformation into a human was the main focus of Wings. Cassiel still struggles to come to terms with the more earthy aspects of life, and unwittingly falls in with shady gangster Tony Baker (Buchholz), not knowing that Baker’s business involves trading bootleg porn for guns. Shocked when he discovers this, Cassiel vows to destroy Baker’s facility, with the help of a group of circus performers and Colombo. Yep, Peter Falk. I’ll get back to him in a bit. However, a rival of Baker hijacks their barge, taking hostage both Cassiel’s friends and the girl whose rescue ended his divine status.

Kinski plays Raphaela, an angel who remains in that form, so serves a similar purpose to the film, as the one Cassiel did in Wings. She is just one of a selection of supporting characters who populate the fringes of the movie, and damn, she looks the part with a pair of wings, almost as much as another Euro-starlet, Emmanuelle Beart, did in Date With an Angel. If Raphaela serves no real purpose except giving Nastassja that once per decade paycheck from Wenders, her mere presence is enough to justify the character’s existence. She’s a good deal less jarring than some of the others, notably Dafoe as “Emit Flesti”, which is one of those names which is nowhere near as clever as Wenders thinks it is, there solely to push events along as necessary – or bring them to a grinding halt, at one point. There’s also Lou Reed, who shows up, for little or no reason. Peter Falk also seems incongruous, both playing himself as an artist, and playing himself playing Colombo, though he played himself in Wings as well, where it was revealed he too was a former angel.

Easily the worst of all is Mikhail Gorbachev, who sits in a hotel room, observed by Cassiel, burbling cod philosophy about how “A secure world can’t be built on blood, only on harmony.” Coming from the former President of the Soviet Union, that’s more than faintly ludicrous. Oh, I get what Wenders was aiming for: between Wings and Faraway, the Berlin Wall had come down and Germany reunited, after 40 years of the Cold War, and the resulting uncertainty and spiritual chaos was clearly a major influence on him. Charitably, it probably had more cultural resonance at the time. But two decades later, Gorbachev’s presence now seems like little more than stunt casting of the highest order, and badly dated at that. Though I’d expect little else from the only former Russian President ever to appear in a commercial for Pizza Hut. Can’t see Joe Stalin doing that, somehow. Hell, or even Vladimir Putin.

It’s a mix of the transcendentally beautiful and philosophical, with the laughably pretentious, overblown and ludicrous. The opening shot is simply one of the best in all cinema, telescoping out to swirl and circle round the 200-foot tall Berlin Victory Column, with its angel statue on the top – on whose shoulder, Cassiel is perched. As in Wings, the film switches between black and white, for the angels’ perspective, and color for the human point of view, and the transitions are often breathtaking in their impact. The movie is generally at its best when there’s nothing much happening: Cassiel wandering the city, either listening in on the inhabitants’ thoughts, or after his transformation, coming to terms with being human, and all that entails, both good (the ability to enjoy a stuffed olive) and bad (it appears former angels have a weakness for hard liquor, and unfortunately little tolerance for it). And Sander is perfect for the role, his face capturing both the innocence and wisdom you would imagine such a character having.

But, oh dear… The more worldly aspects are just terrible, completely implausible and feeling like they strayed in from a bad pastiche of a Coen Brothers film. Witness the witless scene were Cassiel and Baker are held at gunpoint by Baker’s rival, who has Baker’s feet in a bucket of cement and is waiting by the side of a canal, for it to harden. Cassiel’s flailings somehow knock the rival into the canal, and his minions squawk about like headless chickens. It’s more or less impossible to take anyone seriously as a threat after that point, and that’s before we get to the bumbling security guards, talked by Colombo into searching for a non-existent contact lens and pretending to sleep. It’s such a sharp contrast to the more thoughtful and spiritual aspects, you are left to wonder if Wenders allowed a nine-year-old child to handle these sections of the script, and they completely destroy the atmosphere which had been lovingly created. A far greater consistency of tone is the main reason why Wings of Desire is the better movie.

Dir: Andrei A. Eshpai
Star: Nikita Mikhalkov, Nastassja Kinski, Victor Rakov, Sergey Perelygin
a.k.a. The Insulted and Injured

My editor, Alla Savranskaya, was working for the Moscow Film Festival in 1988 when producer Ibrahiim Moussa was a jury member. She told him my film had just entered production. He said, “Did you know my wife is Nastassja Kinski?” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Did you know her children are named after Dostoevskian heroes and that she dreams of playing Dostoevsky?”
— Andrei Eshpai

Following up on Torrents of Spring (based on a work by Ivan Turgenev) and Il sole anche di notte (Leo Tolstoy), Nastassja completed the set of films inspired by Russian authors with this period drama, based on a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which was first published in 1861. And, boy, is this one a downer. By the time you reach the end, you wonder why anyone chooses to read 19th-century Russian literature, unless it is to achieve a realization that, no matter how bad your own life is, it could always be worse. That’s clear from the opening speech by the narrator, Ivan (Perelygin): “I cannot help continually recalling all this bitter last year of my life. It was a gloomy story, one of those gloomy and distressing dramas, which are so often played out unseen.” When a 19th-century Russian author starts off by telling you this is going to be “one of those gloomy and distressing dramas,” you’d better make sure all sharp objects are well out of reach before proceeding further.

Ivan holds an unrequited candle for Natasha (Kinski), with whom he has been friends for a long time. It’s in this spirit of friendship that he helps her see her love, Alessia (Rakov) in secret. Subterfuge is necessary, because he comes from a poor but noble family, and his father (Mikhalkov) has plans for an arranged marriage to Katya, the daughter of a rich family, in order to restore their fortune. In order for this to happen, he has to wreck the relationship between Alessia and Natasha, and tries various ploys to that end, hoping either for Alessia to fall for his intended bride instead, or by using Ivan to drive a wedge between the couple. Adding to the difficulty of matters, Alessia and Natasha’s father are embroiled in a legal battle that has set them at each other’s throats. Meanwhile, Ivan has taken in a young girl, whom he saved from abuse, only to find that she has a connection to events at hand too.

As the quote at the top suggests, this was very much a passion project for Kinski, and remains the only Russian language film in her career. She is apparently “fluent” in Russian, according to the IMDb, but I’m not certain she wasn’t over-dubbed here, as her voice seems rather different from her other movies of the time. It’s not exactly much of a stretch for her to play the object of desire for two men, but she handles it well. Perhaps the standout moment is when she rises from her sickbed, to fiercely reject Alessia’s father. He has come visiting while she’s ill, and offers to give her back the money her father lost in the lawsuit, as “proof of his sympathy.” It’s just one of his many, similar schemes, and Mikhalkov is very effective in his role, playing someone who is unwilling to let any moral scruples get in the way of doing what he genuinely believes is best for the family. And he doesn’t care what you think.

The main problem here, is that none of the other characters can stand up to him, either in terms of the story or in cinematic presence. Alessia is a dim pawn to his father’s schemes, and perpetually vacillates between Natasha and Katya, burbling on to the former about the marvelous qualities of the latter: “If only you knew what a tender soul she is!  When I think of her I always feel I become somehow better, cleverer, and somehow finer.” Ivan is probably worse still: I’m guessing Dostoyevsky took himself as inspiration, with Ivan being a struggling writer, but the way he follows Natasha around like a puppy, unable to voice his affection for her, is immensely irritating. It’s the behavior of a love-struck teenager, not an adult male, and the longer the film went on, the greater my urge to reach into the screen, back to the 19th century, and strangle Ivan.

Watching miserable people do miserable things to other miserable people, only to sink further into misery, all set against a historical backdrop that alternates between grinding poverty and moral disdain just isn’t my idea of entertainment. This kind of thing can work, shedding light on man’s inhumanity to man in a way that has relevance to a modern viewer, or simply creating memorable characters, that stick in the viewer’s mind. But it needs a clear goal as well as a firm hand to carry this off, and despite Mikhalkov’s solid work, Eshpai never gets very far off the ground, in either direction. Of the three adaptations of Russian literature, filmed in short order by Kinski, this is very much the least of the three. Perhaps a less apparently reverential approach toward the subject matter might have paid off better.

It was an incredible emotional drain and huge challenge because Dostoevsky is one of the deepest novelists in the history of literature, and the demands of the prose itself were enormous.
— Nastassja Kinski

Dir: Paolo/Vittorio Taviani
Star: Julian Sands. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Massimo Bonetti, Nastassja Kinski
a.k.a. Night Sun

While separated by more than a century and half a continent in their settings, there are some interestingly similar resonances with Tess here. In both cases, we have a couple, engaged to be married across a class divide. However, a dalliance in the woman’s past derails the matrimony – though there’s more than a whiff of societal double-standard, with the man no less guilty of the same sort of thing. Still, stunned by the revelation, he abandons the woman in search of happiness and fulfillment elsewhere – only to discover he might well have been better off showing some more tolerance.

Of course, it’s certainly not an exact parallel. The class divide here goes the other way, with promising but low-born young soldier Sergio Giuramondo (Sands) getting an arranged marriage to the noble Cristina Del Carpio (Kinski) for career purposes, at the behest of the king. And, in this case, there wasn’t any rape or coercion involved: Cristina and the king were actually lovers for a year, which is why she’s willing to consider Sergio as a match and marry below her station. Her fiancé is so upset by the revelation, he enters the priesthood (rather than heading for the colonies like Angel Clare), only to find himself the clerical equivalent of a zoo exhibit, a soldier turned priest trotted out for the amusement of his former colleagues.

Realizing it’s not the escape for which he hoped, Sergio takes the place of a hermit in a remote hovel, only to find neither the rest of the world still unwilling to leave him alone. Another aristocratic woman shows up in on his doorstep in the middle of a rainstorm, and attempts to seduce him – his resistance involves an axe and a body-part, shall we say. Sergio also is credited with restoring the power of speech to a brigand’s son, and When word of that miracle gets out, any hope he might have for a peaceful life pretty much gets up and leaves. The church moves to take advantage of its newest religious superstar, and it’s not long before there is a constant stream of supplicants awaiting his blessing – it’s a religious groupie (for want of a better phrase) that eventually proves Sergio’s downfall.

Kinski doesn’t get much more than a couple of scenes here, but they are pivotal, setting the hero on his path to solitude. When we first see Cristina and Sergio, they’re preparing for their marriage, scheduled to take place the following day. While he confesses to having originally approached her out of self-interest, saying “I was thinking of my career… I wanted to be part of the aristocratic society that excluded me,” he has now genuinely fallen for her, saying “How paltry all that seems next to you.” Their conversation is interrupted by her being requested to sing, but the audience’s attention in turn is stolen by the arrival of a gift from the king: a pair of mechanical birds in a cage. It’s this which triggers Cristina’s confession of her affair with the monarch, telling Sergio, “Everyone knew about it. That’s the only reason my family accepted you.” He leaves without another word, and we never see her again, though at times it seems every other woman he encounters, is an echo of his first true love.

In this area, I note particularly the presence of Charlotte Gainsbourg, who doesn’t just resemble Kinski, but was also the offspring of a notorious European father. In her case, Dad was a one-time lover of Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsbourg – of particular resonance, I note rumblings that have surrounded the Gainsbourgs ever since they released a song called Lemon Incest when she was 12. That aside, the rest of the film is largely Sands’ to carry, and I’m fine with that. I’ve enjoyed his performances in a wide ranges of films, even cheerful B-movies like Warlock, and he gives the film here a spiritual center that’s extremely solid. I can’t say I’ve seen any other of the Taviani brothers’ films, but on the evidence of this, they would seem worth checking out: they and cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci have an eye for the pastoral landscapes which, again, is reminiscent of Tess. Particular praise here should also go to composer Nicola Piovani, who seems to be a frequent collaborator with the Tavianis, and whose soundtrack here provides an excellent companion to the storyline.

Like Torrents of Spring, this is based on a work of late 19th-century Russian literature, in this case, Leo Tolstoy’s Father Sergius, although the hero in the original short story was a prince himself, rather than a career soldier. As with Torrents, I do have an issue with the ending, which sees the hero do not much more than exit, stage left, without any true sense of resolution. However, it works rather better here, as Sergio returns to his roots, and appears to discover that that the true secret of happiness is simply wanting what you have, rather than yearning or striving for some idealized existence, that can never be achieved. It’s quite poignant, in particular that Sergio has to go through so much pain, both emotional and physical, to come to the realization that the happiness he sought was probably to be found with the woman he abandoned, in pursuit of an apparently mythical Nirvana.

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.