Right, let me start this thing off by saying that Catherine Deneuve is my favourite actress. There are others I love of course (Sharon Stone, Sophia Loren), but I feel Deneuve has consistently been brilliant for so long, given so many genius film performances, that I can't think of anyone who comes close to her - male or female. To prove my admiration, I have put together a 150 page book about her movies. It explores her filmography, beginning with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, on to Repulsion, through Belle de Jour and Tristana, the odd ball 70s, the likes of The Last Metro and Indochine in the 80s and 90s, all the way to up to recent gems like The Truth, In the Courtyard and The Midwife. The book looks at all the iconic work of course, but I also put a lot of attention on the films I personally love that are often a little under appreciated. And there are quite a few of them, to be fair. So here are my five personal favourite Deneuve performances. At least at the minute... A STRANGE PLACE TO MEET (1988) A Strange Place to Meet (1988), known in France as Drole d’endroit pour une rencontre, is one of those rare gems that, for one reason or another, has unfortunately disappeared into obscurity. Directed by Francois Dupeyron, from a script co written with Dominique Faysse, it’s a beautifully acted drama of unfulfilled desire and indifference. The plot, or the outline at least, concerns Catherine Deneuve having an argument with her husband - or as we are told - while he is driving them down a frantic highway. When he nearly runs over a mad woman who rushes into the middle of the road, he swerves the car off to one side, stops and ends up throwing Deneuve out into the night, leaving her there and driving off into the darkness. At the road side is Gerard Depardieu, a surgeon having some car trouble, claiming he has been there for two days trying to fix the engine. At first irritated by Deneuve’s presence, given she insists on waiting there for the husband she swears will return to pick her up, he develops a strange infatuation with her, masochistically pushing her away through the night, alienating her, and then trying to win her over. She sleeps in Depardieu’s car and wakes in the morning to frantically ask the other sleeping drivers in the lay-by if they have seen her husband. They answer no, but undeterred by the rejection, she refuses to leave and insists he will come back for her. Eventually Depardieu convinces her to come with him to a nearby cafe, where he hilariously fusses over choosing the right table where they can have their morning coffee and sandwiches. Tensions develop, with Depardieu clearly developing a crush on, if not an obsession with, this strange woman who would wait a year for a man never intending to return. She on the other hand, could not care less for Depardieu as a possible romantic distraction, irritated by his heavy handedness and ineptness with women. They stay at the cafe another full day and night, coming across all types of people; these include a woman who agrees to sell Deneuve the outfit she is wearing, because it reminds her of one she used to wear for her husband in happier times; and a group of crude, hard drinking truckers, one of whom spends the night with Deneuve, pulling the curtains closed on the window to his truck as Depardieu, sitting across in his car, reacts with the extreme jealousy of a bitter husband. What will become of Deneuve and Depardieu, the obsessed and the object of the obsession? When the film was released, Deneuve said in one interview: “Initially, Gerard only wanted to produce the film because he wasn't sure he wanted to play the role. Besides, he had other projects in mind. François Dupeyron therefore waited for Gérard to be free. On the set, he is a strong person who pushes his partners and brings a lot to the film. He is very generous.” A Strange Place to Meet is a play put to film, a series of unfolding events which border on the surreal, the absurd, and are often plain funny and strangely farcical. Depardieu puts in a complex, multi faceted performance as a man in love but also a slave to his own uselessness with the fairer sex. Deneuve is magnificent, striking as ever of course, but portraying a muddled, confused, put upon, if not totally mad woman. There is an air of mystery about her, with certain behavioural traits suggesting the husband is not a husband at all, maybe a boyfriend, perhaps something else. Some have even said she may be a lady of the night, one in the throes of madness, lamenting a husband that does not even exist. Either way, whether a crazed enigma or unhappy wife, slowly being dropped on to the rubbish heap, Depardieu is besotted, yet tortured by her disinterest. The most interesting dynamic here, between two of French cinema’s brightest lights, is the fact that Deneuve is desperate for love and acceptance, but attempting to earn it from a man who couldn’t care less. Perversely, Depardieu is the same, hungry if not starving for Deneuve’s love, but getting shunned heartlessly. Neither can see the truth before them, blinded as they are by their ignorance and love induced madness; Deneuve with a man who would drop everything for her, Depardieu faced with a woman denying him every step of the way. Curiously, Dupeyron does not make this a beautiful film. Even though I viewed an old VHS, it was clear to me that Dupeyron was not concerned with aesthetics, but tension, atmosphere and a certain raw reality. The camera stays on the characters in long takes, angles are straight forward, never fussy, and emphasis at all times is on man and woman; Deneuve and Depardieu, the spaces between them, the gaps which cannot be filled. The only real artful shot, repeated a few times through the long nights, is of a wispy mist drifting silently over the moon. This is a film to watch for the performances, and thankfully the director takes a step back and allows the two legends to do their work. They are marvellous from beginning to end. Speaking of her character in the film, Deneuve said, “She's a character that I completely understand. A woman terrified of losing a man slowly drifts into madness. The film is both incredible and believable: a guy is fed up with a good woman, opens the door and kicks her out. One can imagine an argument that goes to the end and a woman who has only one obsession: he has to come back. I could identify myself very easily… There is always a moment when passion creates an imbalance because we love more than we are loved. We are afraid, we are obsessed with the idea of losing the other. Loving that much is a form of madness, a perversion of love… If I took risks, it was for the purposes of the role. When we shoot with less make up, dark circles, less lipstick…. What is more difficult is to face the stares of the team for weeks, you feel more naked. Frankly, we filmed very often at night and I slept very little, so instead of hiding my dark circles they didn't hide them from me. And since I have pale lips, not wearing lipstick makes me look much more vulnerable.” It was greeted warmly upon release and is regarded highly by those in the know. Tine Out wrote: “Talk about minimal: Dupeyron's feature debut is a road movie where they only travel 10 kilometres. Deneuve's in the throes of a very heavy, possibly masochistic relationship with the man who dumped her; Depardieu is a lonely, romantic doctor who's doggedly hopeless with the opposite sex. Nothing is entirely resolved, tempting hints about the characters' lives aren't elaborated upon (is she married, mad, or a high class hooker?), and the film retains the haunting inconsequentiality of a chance encounter. The romantic protestations, set against the grim background of a plastic café, are poignant and dreamlike, the characters are drifters seeking refuge or escape, and the whole film is comic and bitter-sweet.” The New York Times however found it frustrating, perhaps confused by the lack of explanations and solutions, with Janet Maslin writing the following: “For neophyte acting students, this material might seem worth playing to the hilt, but for two of the French cinema's greatest stars it's an odd choice indeed. The reasons why Mr. Depardieu and Miss Deneuve chose to co-produce A Strange Place to Meet will be, for anyone who sees the film, a complete mystery. Among the more absurd touches here, beyond the sight of Miss Deneuve wandering dazedly around a truck stop in her dark glasses and sable, are the fact that Mr. Depardieu is supposed to be a surgeon and the peculiar identification that Miss Deneuve's character feels with a woman who has, at the beginning of the story, tried to jump in front of her car.” For me, the fact that Depardieu and Deneuve chose this abstract material proved they were happy to take risks, to go against the star system and choices expected of them. Admirers of the two leads will find A Strange Place to Meet an absolute delight, a film not afraid to go off track, dwell on minor details and go on side tangents. Refreshingly ragged in style, the lack of technique and reliance on frilly camera work makes more room for these two towering talents, playing the kind of characters you might meet in a strange dream, rather than on the big screen. On the movie itself, Deneuve said: “Maybe it's not completely successful, but even so, I find it much more interesting than other more square films. It is a deeply original and disturbing film. It's good sometimes to be disturbed at the cinema.” It was the end of a remarkable decade for Deneuve, one that she often said was her strongest. In a 1989 interview, looking back retrospectively at the ten years she had just lived through, she told one magazine: “I have the impression of having been extremely attentive to everything that was going on, but that it took time before it touched something essential in me. On the other hand, today, even if I stopped, I know that I would not stop thinking about the cinema: it has had a profound impact on my life. I am truly imbued with that today.” NIGHT WIND (1999) Directed and co-written by Philippe Garrel, this dark, unpredictable and totally original drama stars Xavier Beauvois as Paul, a young sculptor who is having an affair with an older married woman, the beautiful but clearly very sad, Helene (Deneuve). After a hotel meet up, Paul tells her he has to take off to Italy for work. While there, he agrees to accompany Serge (Daniel Duval), a rather intense man, back to Paris in his flash red Porsche. Serge opens up to Paul as they make their way back to France, telling him about his marriage and recalling his involvement with the French riots in 68. When Paul gets back, he meets back up with Helene for sex, and then is rather unexpectedly introduced to her husband. During the tense, bizarre meeting, Helene loses control and smashes a glass before cutting her wrist. Though she recovers, to Paul she is already dead, and he begins to think of her not as a woman who failed to commit suicide, but as a woman who might as well have already passed over to the other side. He tells this to Serge, which as it turns out, is rather ironic, given what eventually happens to his older friend. Near the end of the film, the three of them end up having a late night Chinese meal together in a restaurant. When Paul takes an early exit, Helene and Serge end up alone, dining together in silence. Though initially awkward, there is some kind of strange connection between them, though Helene seems to attach more importance to their union than Serge does. They end up in bed of course, but the experience achieves little but reminding Serge that suicide is the only way out. Hopelessly grim, you might think that such a film would be depressing and draining to watch, but strangely it’s anything but. Indeed, there is literally no humour or light relief, but this is a journey into the soul, of what it is to be human. Homing in on a young man with his whole life ahead of him, Garrel ensures that his casual but harbouring hopefulness juxtaposes with the doomed older woman Deneuve plays, and the wise but equally doomed Serge. The way Serge speaks fondly of his youth, of his younger days in Paris, reminds us that he’s run out of options, living a passion-free existence. While we feel for Serge, it is Deneuve’s Helene that gets most of our sympathy. I am not going to lie, but when I watched Night Wind, I was haunted by Deneuve’s portrayal of the sad, lost woman, and it took me some time to shake her performance off. There was something so gut wrenching about her character, and the way Deneuve embodied her, that I genuinely felt concerned about what became of Helene after the credits began to roll. She is the bridge between the two characters, the one who gives release to the younger man by letting him move on, and release to the older man by showing him the only way out he had left as an option. But there is such desperation in her, such painful hopelessness. As an actress however, Deneuve has some truly unforgettable moments; the scene, for instance, when she kisses her young lover’s hand in bed, so clinging and sadly child-like, so needy; and in the big scene, pacing as her husband and lover talk on obscure, meaningless subjects, putting on music and fidgeting before slicing her wrist. On the subject of the attempted suicide, I honestly feel that it was one of the best acted moments I have ever seen on film. Deneuve sits down, her eyes take on a kind of quiet madness, then the intensity builds as she hears her husband yammer on. She looks like she’s about to crack, moments from screaming, and then she does the deed, out of nowhere, totally unexpected. It’s truly disturbing, and so well acted that you wonder how Deneuve managed to conjure up such terrifying despair from out of nowhere. Indeed, it’s a stunning moment in a faultless performance, which for me is one of the best of Deneuve’s career. Given that Deneuve is France’s biggest star, her taking on such emotionally exposed, unflattering roles as this is truly laudable. The whole film is an unsettling experience, a meditation on the darkness that harbours within so many of us, bubbling away beneath the surface of fake contentment. Garrel directs with controlled grace, and the players are solid. Yet it’s Deneuve’s show, a fearless performer at her most raw and aggressively primal. In one interview Deneuve revealed a detail about working on Night Wind which may explain some of the urgency in her performance: “But another experience I've had that's quite peculiar and you cannot do that all the time is when I did this film with Philippe Garrel [Night Wind] and he told me that he wanted to try doing just one take. Which means that if we don't have any technical problems with a scene, he would want not to redo the scene at all. Which is so rare and such a big risk. But I said, Yes, why not? But it was a very strange feeling, because when he called, Action!, you felt like it had to be there, now or never again. So it was emotionally very strange. But I liked it.” Importantly I feel, Night Wind gets some attention in Close Up and personal, Deneuve’s published film diaries, and though the section on it is brief, there are some revealing details which will delight fans of the film itself. Deneuve writes that the filming begins on April 27, and that her hair is wet as she arrives for her first day of work. Her description of Garrel is one of warmth, taken she is by his looks, the “former hearth throb” who, as she can tell, has definitely enjoyed his life. Someone on set mentions the lack of a script, to which Garrel boldly replies, “We don’t need one!” Deneuve then recounts the activities that followed in a list-like fashion, yet somehow doesn’t make it seem remotely boring or repetitive. No, Deneuve’s casual recollections of the day are sparse yet evocative, and one can picture the bare set, the mattress on the floor, the descriptions of the shots, of how she’s feeling before the camera. She admits the atmosphere is oppressive, that they are all definitely making Garrel’s film, but she enjoys herself. Indeed, she comes across as an actress settling into a working method she is unfamiliar with, but is willing to learn. This is not the diary of a spoilt, pampered star. No, it’s the diary of an open minded working actress. She concludes the entry with the fact that the one luxury she has is her trailer. It’s a day on the set of an extraordinary film, but the entry also acts as wonderful psychology, a glimpse into the inevitable neurosis of an actor arriving on a new movie. AFTER HIM (2007) In the underrated Gael Morel-directed drama, she plays a mother whose son dies suddenly in a car crash. Divorced from her husband, the boy’s father, they work together to see about arranging the funeral and performing the expected duties. But pretty soon, things begin to take a turn for the strange. She develops an unhealthy attachment to her son’s friend, who happened to have been driving the car the night it crashed. At first her interest in him is understandable; she clearly wants to make it known that the accident wasn’t his fault. After a while though, she becomes obsessed, and though the infatuation never veers off into the sexual, it is a cause of concern to everyone around. She begins to act stranger and stranger, seemingly devoting all her energy and thoughts to the young man. She unravels, troubling everyone around her. In the end, though we are thankfully spared the kind of clichéd finale Hollywood would have not been able to resist, we are given one of the most haunting final scenes in the whole of Deneuve’s filmography. After Him is a superbly played drama. Unsensationalised, the film resists from going down tiresome, predictable avenues and stays grounded. It is, after all, the tale of a devastated, grief stricken woman, clinging to her son’s friend, searching for any shred of him that may have been left behind. Deneuve captures the anguish beautifully, but it is ultimately a disturbing, upsetting performance. Unafraid to dive into the deep end, this is an admirable feat of acting. When she breaks down upon receiving the dreaded phone call, we almost believe Deneuve herself has just learned of some devastating news. Intense, unhinged, and entirely believable, Deneuve’s performance in After Him proves she is not merely plodding along as an accomplished actress living off past glories, but delivering some of the finest work of her long and storied career. In fact, judging by such performances, she is getting better and better, her work taking on more poignancy and power as the years go by. Her emotional brittleness here, combining with her exterior sturdiness as she paints herself to be a woman in control, creates an unnerving balance. On her role in the film, she told Premiere: “I found it disturbing and the subject both serious and universal. This mother, deep down, does what shouldn't be done since she refuses to mourn. She operates a transfer of her son on the friend. Seeks to transform death into life. Decides that she will be useful to this boy in spite of himself. I dreaded the emotional investment necessary for Gaël's film. I also procrastinated before accepting it. Although the filming turned out to be very joyful, embodying this character for two months.” On the scene when she and the boy burn down the tree which her son crashed into, which must have reminded her of her sister’s tragic death in 1967, Deneuve said: “I understand it only too well. Yes, I understand that one might want to destroy the object of evil, the fatal object, since it is impossible to be reconciled with it or to tame it. In a first version of the scenario, my character arrived with a chainsaw. Some thought it ridiculous. Not me. I often take the same little road west of Paris. And every year, in the same place, I see a bouquet of flowers on a slide. We should forget the place of destiny. But how to do it? So we mark it. This is one of the reasons that made me very hesitant to embark on the adventure… I don't like the personal or the intimate to mingle with the fiction. I dread above all the indecency of the thing. But either we fear the pain that the filming will cause, or we hope to free ourselves from bad memories. I made my decision hoping it was the right one.” IN THE COURTYARD (2014) Which brings me to the charming and wonderful, In the Courtyard (2014), another one of Deneuve’s most likeable films of recent times. Directed by Pierre Salvadori, it stars Gustave Kervern as Antoine, a musician who has a personal crisis and takes on the job of caretaker at an apartment block. Going through his daily mundane tasks while snorting cocaine on the side, he meets Mathilde (Deneuve), a retired lady prone to obsession, and the two build up a relationship. He “understands her”, she feels, and does not judge her more fanatical behaviour as her husband Serge (Foedor Atkine) tends to. One day she notices a crack on her wall and becomes fixated on the idea that the building is about to collapse. Antoine encourages her in a kind manner, and she takes him into her heart. It does not develop into a corny predictable love story (thank God), but a mutual respect. Though the ending is rather sad and totally unexpected, much of the film’s tone is light, even when it’s at its most down beat. Indeed, Salvadori manages to make it both poignant and light, and not once do we feel bogged down in what could have been a heavy plot. Deneuve’s work is faultless, and we so warm to Mathilde that we wish we could go on to enjoy her story after the film is over. Indeed, if ever a Deneuve film warranted a follow up, this is one. She was rightfully nominated for a French Cesar Best Actress award, though I feel she should have won it. Contrasting this sweet, eccentric, loveable woman to the more professional, seemingly in control lady of a film like His Mother’s Eyes, highlights the sheer range Deneuve has these days, in what is arguably her richest and most versatile era as an actress and star. On casting Deneuve, Salvadori said: “I’ve wanted to work with Catherine Deneuve for ages. I wrote the film for her. I said to myself no one could ever imagine her going crazy. She comes across as someone you can rely on, someone brave who knows how to live, someone with a secret. Some actors tend to become their characters and you can play with that. I thought that if she played Mathilde it would be all the more surprising. And of course I thought of her quickness, her feeling for comedy and for shock. ‘I like people who lack self confidence, they try harder’ - I knew that she would deliver this sentence magnificently. She does rapid-fire like Katherine Hepburn! She is an actress with a real style. Maybe that’s why she enjoys such a lasting bond with the audience. She imbues her characters with a transparency and an opacity at the same time. Everyone knows she has an amazing voice - that she sings rather than speaks. It’s a real thrill when you’re writing dialogue. It allows the writers, whom she serves beautifully, to be literary, because in her mouth the words don’t sound literary. You can take risks with the text, and you won’t hear it. It will ring true. She eradicates anything that could seem artificial.” THE MIDWIFE (2017) Deneuve gave another glowing performance in Martin Provost’s sublime, The Midwife (2017). Deneuve is Beatrice, a fun loving woman who’s found out she’s dying of cancer and wishes to reach out to a woman from her past, the daughter of a former lover, Claire, played by Catherine Frot. Claire, who has a teenage son at college, lives for her work. She comes home from a long shift delivering babies (symbolically giving life without having one of her own) and shuts down the blinds to get some sleep. Her only past time is seeing to her allotment. But she is awakened by the arrival of chain smoking, hard drinking Beatrice, who though flawed, shows her that life is worth living, even as her own candle is burning to the bottom. Their reunion begins in a rocky manner. When Claire tells Beatrice that her father has been dead for thirty years, it naturally brings up old emotions and opens partially healed wounds. Not only is he dead, he committed suicide shortly after Beatrice walked out on him for another man. Beatrice is clearly upset, but at this stage the idea of a bond forming between the pair is the last thing we expect. Slowly however, Claire begins to lower her guard and Beatrice develops into a more caring, understanding woman. Though not schmaltzy, the relationship between the two women is very moving, perhaps because it’s so believable, and Deneuve’s warts and all portrayal of the brash, initially heartless woman carries the film and ensures it never dips into the predictable. And Deneuve reveals layers as she goes, making you warm to her character the further into the story we get. Free of cliches, it is a stand out from her most recent work. She is also extraordinarily funny in it, this woman who so longs to be free as she always has been, and is unwilling to bow down to the cancer that is eating her away. Give up smoking? Never! Stop eating meat? In your dreams! She wants to go on living the way she always has for as long as possible, but even she has to admit time is running out. It’s a terribly moving performance and a wonderful little comic-drama. On how his film came to be, Provost told the Upcoming: “It all started with the character of Claire the midwife, and I had written the script for Catherine Frot, so I was crossing my fingers and hoping that she would say yes to the role. And I have been wishing to work with Catherine Deneuve for a very long time, and at the time I was writing, I was surrounded by many women who were inspirational, particularly a friend who was about to die. And the character of Béatrice, and how she developed during the writing process, was as the sum of those women who were around me, along with my wish to work with Catherine Deneuve. I would have really been in dire straits if none of them accepted… So I was very lucky.” On her character, Beatrice, Deneuve herself told the Independent: “I cannot identify with the character, but I do understand her and I do like her.” And when one watches the film, you can tell Deneuve is having the time of her life playing the gutsy older woman, and it’s clear that she has a fondness for her. She may not agree with her choices, but Deneuve likes her just as much as we the viewers do.
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Here is a sample from my book, FILM CLOSE UP: SMOKE AND BLUE IN THE FACE, which includes a new interview with the writer of both movies, Paul Auster. Getting to speak to Paul Auster is like entering one of his books. That familiar tone, the same one we imagine narrating his books when we are reading them (or quite literally, the voice that reads out the audiobooks of his work), is so known to us that you are surprised when he picks up the phone and doesn’t immediately begin leading you down one of the labyrinthine plots of his novels. He’s friendly, open, pleasant to speak to, and refreshingly happy to discuss his work. I called Auster from Yorkshire, England, on a Tuesday evening, which was mid-afternoon New York time. As he picked up the phone, I was instantly delighted, not only just to hear the iconic Auster voice, but also to learn that he was in the middle of a paragraph at the time of my call. I offered to ring back in five minutes. “No,” he said, “I’ll finish it later.” The work has to be done some time I guess, I added, feeling instantly foolish. Still, he laughed lightly, with kind patience. I had called to talk about Smoke and Blue in the Face, and we instantly fired up into conversation about the movies and their making. As is widely known, Smoke’s origins began with a short story Auster wrote for the New York Times. Though he had never taken on a commission he had been "asked" to write before, Paul was intrigued by the idea of having a Christmas tale on the Op-Ed page of the paper. “It all started with that commission from the New York Times, to write a story that would appear on Christmas Day,” Paul told me. “I hadn’t written a short story since high school, but I figured why not, at least I should take a stab at it, and see what happened. For days and days I had no idea what to do. Mike Levitas, the editor of the Op-Ed page, had asked me to write a story set in New York, and one day - still lost, still groping for a way in - I looked down at my desk and saw a box of the cigars I used to smoke. They were about the size of cigarettes and they came in tins of twenty. I started thinking about the person who sold them to me, a man named Rob who had a cigar concession at the back of a big drug store on Court Street in Brooklyn. I would go in once or twice a week and every time I was there we would talk. He was a pleasant man, very amiable. So that day in early November, as I was struggling to come up with an idea for a story, I started to think about large cities like New York, and how we live in neighbourhoods, and if we live in a neighbourhood long enough we begin to form relationships with various kinds of people - the butcher, the grocer, the wine merchant, the cigar man - and while those relationships are not what we would call friendships, they’re usually quite friendly, and those friendly interactions make life in a big city more palatable, more intimate, and prevent us from going mad with loneliness.” “So I wrote the story about my amiable cigar man, whose last name I didn’t even know. As for using my own name in the story, and as far for making him a writer, it was because I didn’t want the story to come across as a work of fiction, but as something that had really happened to me. After all, it was going to be published in a newspaper, the New York Times, no less, the so-called ‘paper of record,’ which as far as I know had never published a work of fiction - at least not intentionally (laughs). So, I tried to make it sound as authentic as possible, and that’s why I gave the character my name, only the first name of course. I cobbled it together and got it in on time, the editor liked it and he ran it. That was how it all started.” So rather than going for a schmaltzy story of Christmas trees, reindeer and a visit from jolly old Santa Claus, he decided to concoct the story of a man named Auggie Wren who sold cigars. Though in his piece Auster claimed that the Auggie Wren he wrote of was not the man's real name, Auster immortalised this individual as Auggie Wren, convincing readers he was a genuine cigar seller he knew in his daily life, despite the fact he did not even exist. A typical Austerian act. Even though Paul agreed to give the commissioned story a go (both within the published tale and in real life), in the story he admits he went into an instant panic when he realised he hadn't a clue what he was going to write about. Though he was familiar with the Christmas themed works of Dickens and O. Henry, Paul didn't know how to begin his own Yuletide yarn. In the story, feeling muddled, Auster goes for a walk to clear his head, and he winds up at Auggie's cigar store. Paul tells him his predicament, and sure enough Auggie says he will tell him the best Christmas story he’ll ever hear, and insists that it’s all completely true. Ironic, given the whole thing is an invention, both Auster’s story and the story within the story. (And stories within stories are another recurring device in Auster’s books. At one point in Oracle Night, we get a story within a story within a story; in The Brooklyn Follies, too, we get the same; and Man in the Dark spends a lot of time in a story that’s being concocted in a man’s mind as he lies in bed trying to get to sleep.) Auggie's tale, as it later appeared in Smoke as well, takes us back to 1972, and begins with him running after a young shoplifter, a black youth (though he is not black in the story itself, just in the resulting movie) who gets away but drops his wallet on the street. The young man's name and address are inside, as well as some family pictures. The images of the thief as a boy, hopeful and smiling, make Auggie feel slightly sorry for the "measly punk". Auggie hung on to the wallet, and eventually, curious and tempted, he paid a visit to the address in Boerum Hill. When he got there, it was a blind old lady who answered the door, naturally assuming Auggie was her grandson, Robert, the young shoplifter. Auggie sat with her for the afternoon, and even went out for some food shopping so they could have a Christmas meal together. Enjoying the dinner, Auggie guzzled a few wines to wash down his grub. Needing a pee, he went to the bathroom, and there, stacked in a corner, were Robert's stolen goods from his various thieving trips. There was a whole pile of cameras, high end, top quality equipment, and feeling impulsive, Auggie tucked one of the boxes under his arm. Coming back into the room, he saw Ethel was fast asleep. Quietly, he snuck out of the apartment with the camera, careful not to awake Ethel, leaving her grandson's wallet behind as he departed. He often thought of the old lady, and one day he went back to see her. Sadly, Ethel was gone. Auggie felt guilty about taking the camera, but Auster assured him (in the tale at least) that he had a done a good deed that afternoon with Grandma Ethel. The camera, after all, was not hers. "You made her happy," Auster told him. "And the camera was stolen anyway. It's not as if the person you took it from really owned it." The story was then presented and published in the exact way the fictitious Auggie had apparently told it. Obviously, Auster made it all up, but by setting the writer up as “Paul”, it naturally gave readers the impression that what they had just read was totally real and had happened to Paul Auster. In classic Auster style, the story itself plays with truth and lies, with fabrication and fiction. We believe Auggie Wren to be a real man, so therefore read with all earnestness that Paul Auster, the writer and the man here, personally heard this story from Auggie Wren's lips. Keeping it ambiguous, the reader (and viewer of Smoke as it later turned out) can either think Auggie is telling the truth or making the whole thing up. Few would have guessed upon reading the story that Auster himself had fabricated the whole thing. In keeping this aspect vague, Auster's little festive tale becomes a question on the very concept of fiction, and of story telling in general. Does it matter who tells the tale? Does it matter if it really happened at all? Does it make any difference? Again, Auster is concerned with the individual’s idea of the truth, with their sense of identity, and the bewitching mysteries of ambiguity. For Auster, the story was an experiment. "Everything is made up," he later said. "In fact I wrote it in the Times in such a way as to confuse everybody. I tried to blur the boundaries of what is real and what is not real and the proof that it worked was that Mike Levitas had hired a photographer to do it, and half the letters that came to the Times were letters of protest, saying, 'Why didn't you publish Auggie Wren's photographs, how could you rip that poor man off?'" To Annette Insdorf in the screenplay book for Smoke and Blue in the Face, Auster said of his story: “Everything gets turned upside down in Auggie Wren… What is stealing? What is giving? What is lying? What is telling the truth? All these questions are reshuffled in rather odd and unorthodox ways.” To read more, order the book here:
House of Lords member, film director and children's rights campaigner Beeban Kidron got the opportunity of working with and directing Marcello on Used People (1992), a rare American feature for the Italian icon. Here, Beeban speaks to me about her memories of Marcello on the making of that film. Used People had such a great cast. Was it a hard film to pull together? It was my first Hollywood film, so I was both casting and proving myself to the American agents and actors. My producer Larry Gordon is a legend in Hollywood and on his say-so I got to see everyone I wanted. When it came to Marcello - I put up a fight! Was he the only person you saw in that part? I met a few American-Italian Actors, some of them clearly very appealing - but Used People was a fairy tale and for me Marcello embodied the magical romance necessary. Do you recall your first meeting with him? I went to Paris and we met in a hotel, he was lovely and we talked about Henri Cartier Bresson - who I had known and who had lived up the street. I also remember when he first met Shirley MacLaine at the Tavern in the Park, and he brought a bouquet, and stood to bow at her in the middle of a crowded restaurant - all eyes on them both. It was a scene from a movie in itself. How did you convince him to do an American film? Was it the combination of his co stars, script and having you as the director? I am not sure. He did not really have it as an ambition; he was worried about performing in English. But he liked Todd’s script and was intrigued by working with Shirley. I told him it would make him the most recognisable Italian in America; in retrospect it seems a nonsense thing to say, but he was a man of appetites and I think it tickled him to imagine that. He has this image of walking straight into a role with a cool ease, but some say he did prepare meticulously. Is it true he arrived on your film all prepared with a back story written out? He was like a juke box with an infinite number of tunes - as soon as he understood what tune was required he played it. He did not make a fuss about his character - in fact he did not make a fuss about anything other than lunch! He found the culture of a Hollywood film a bit overblown & complicated; he always thought that things took too long - in Italy they worked from early until lunch and that suited him - so I tried to make it that he could get to a wonderful Italian restaurant in Toronto by 2 ‘o’clock and make his afternoons as free as possible. What was he like on set? I'm dying to know what it was like to watch him act up close. Wonderful. The AD’s would announce his arrival; “Mr Mastronianni leaving the trailer”, “Mr Mastroianni travelling”, “Mr Matroianni on set”, into their walkie-talkies, and he would follow mimicking them as he walked behind whilst looking over his shoulder pretending that he did not know they were talking about him. Once there he was ‘light’, he knew his lines, he understood the scene, he had where it was in the story; he was a total pro, nothing extra, nothing missing. The man was a consummate actor, an emotional human; “a simple man” as he would say. But he had a love of life. Remember he was 66 when I met him (I threw his 67th birthday party), he had a huge history; in a way he was like Chauncey Gardiner. He was surprised, grateful, proud, but incorruptible with his gift. What are some of your favourite memories of Marcello on the making of the movie? We had to do some close ups with me standing in for Shirley; it was the scene when he reveals he has loved her for all these years. I was a puddle, looking into his eyes. I know he loved me (for that moment at least). Shooting the moon landing on the roof was at the time the biggest set up I had ever done, and I had fought for the time and money to do it at scale. If the clouds had descended I would have been ‘out of luck’ - we did not use GCI then the way it's used now - so it was tense. The shot which was complex, ended on him - doing not a lot frankly. It was long and technical, but he just sat there all night through all the technical rehearsals, refusing to have a stand-in just in case that made it more difficult. At dawn I thanked him for being so generous on a big night for me. He said “You are my petite Fellini and I am your extra”, and he gave me a kiss before melting away. Out of all the actors you have directed, where does Marcello fit in? Close to my heart. Do you feel he gets the world recognition he deserves? The world is dominated by English language cinema so it is not a level playing field - so maybe let me answer in two contradictory ways. When I first said I wanted to cast him, someone at the studio said "but he doesn’t mean anything”. I got on a plane to London shortly after and the studio kept ringing my office in LA... eventually they asked what I was doing, and I said I was waiting until Marcello “means something’ in the US. It was a bit theatrical - but it worked. When we went to Japan for the release of the film, whenever we walked even for 10 feet in the street or got out of a car to enter a building, people would stop and gasp. Some would bow, others ran into the nearest shop to buy him a gift, many hands fluttered to their hearts - but no one approached. Before widespread distribution of American films in Japan, Marcello was their super-star. Our trip was miraculous, touching and very funny, a victory tour for a movie star now approaching old age being publicly adored as if he was Brad Pitt in his prime. One of the greatest weeks of my life. One other thing, that Marcelo came from a time when the movie business attached greater respect to writers and words. He occasionally tussled with how to say a sentence in English or if it was exactly right for his character. But for the most part he took the view that the writer had put it there for a reason, and his job was to make it make sense. He worked hard at that, and if you see his work in full, you can see that trusting the script (however surreal or fantastic) gave him the room to play. In the years since, and especially now I am in parliament rather than making films, I have mourned the loss of the authority of the script, disrespecting the carefully constructed works makes actors more powerful but less excellent.
Here's a little sample from the latest issue of SCENES, the Cult and Classic Movie Publication. The legendary Stacy Keach talks to me about working with director John Huston on Fat City in 1972. It was when making Doc (1971) that John Huston visited you to ask you to be in his next film, Fat City… That’s right, yes, he came to Madrid and visited us on set. I was flattered and honoured that he wanted me to do this role. He was amazing. I learned so much from him, not only acting in movies, but acting in general. He was a wonderful actor himself too. He understood the actor’s sensibilities. As a director he was more like a conductor. He really relied on his actors to provide the essence of the character, the particular moment of expression. He had two directions: ‘a little less’ and ‘a little more’ (Keach imitates Huston perfectly when quoting him), and that was it. One of the great moments in Fat City for me was the opening. We see Billy Tully in this flea bag hotel. I was coming down the stairs and outside John Huston came up to me and said, ‘And now Stacy, I want you to do something surprising, to do something extraordinary.’ I thought, Oh God what am I gonna do? Huston told me to trust myself. So in the beginning, Tully comes downstairs and on the street he pretends he’s on the stage or in the ring. And it was a wonderful moment. And at the end, in the cafe scene with Jeff Bridges, there was a card game going on in the background. And John told everyone playing cards to ‘Freeze!’ Everybody said, ‘OK’. The moment came, and John Huston said ‘Freeze!’… Then everyone was still, but you could see the smoke beginning to rise. You knew it was an interesting moment. It was as if time stopped. And he said to me, ‘When I say freeze, you do the same.’ So I did. He was an amazing man, John Huston. One day we were doing a scene, filming the workers getting off the bus, and we spent the whole day figuring out where to put the camera. It got past lunch. We were losing time. And interestingly, when they went to shoot the opening moment of the scene, the camera was in the exact position it had been at the start of the morning. So he wasn’t perfect, and he didn’t always know exactly what to do. But he was brilliant. I did three films with him; Fat City, Judge Roy Been and then we acted together in the Greatest Battle, which was not a very good movie (laughs), but it was wonderful working on it. One day during the filming of that movie, in one of the offices there, I had the great privilege of hearing John Huston and Ingmar Bergman having a long conversation about the weather in Mexico! That was all they talked about, I couldn’t believe it!
In 2020, just before COVID broke out, I travelled to London and visited the actress Bernice Stegers at her home. There we discussed Federico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni, and her life on the set of 1980's City of Women. We spoke for a couple of hours, she signed my City of Women DVD (of course), and I filmed it all for a documentary on Mastroianni. Here are highlights of the chat... How did you get the part of the woman on the train? Well Fellini had offered me another part in Casanova, but I couldn't do it because I was doing a TV series for Thames. Then he asked to see me again but I couldn't, because I was unusually on a yacht in the Caribbean. But later I went to see him, spent the day with him and he offered me the part. You know, it was all exciting being in Cinecitta. What I recall about my first day of shooting, was being told by Fellini and everyone there that I was incredibly beautiful, perfect in fact, and then I arrived in make up at 6 and it was not until 9, three hours later, that they had eradicated all the flaws they saw in me. It was quite amazing. That happened every morning, three hours in make up, with every bit of hair being curled. What I remember most about first meeting Marcello was his beef about having to be on a diet. Federico said if you are playing an intellectual you have to be slim. He also had to have all his body hair waxed off, so I remember him spending a lot of the morning being all itchy. Was your first day filming on the train then? Yes I think it was the train. That was all effect, you know. It was a false train being bumped up and down by these big guys. There was miles of painted landscapes being rolled across the windows. There was a lot of incense, church incense. Whenever I smell it now, wow! So the men were bumping the carriage on the big logs. You can not imagine. Being on that train was more like being on a real train, like some dream. Would it not have been easier to just film on a real train do you think? I suppose he did want that artificial look though didn't he? I know. I am not sure actually though. The whole thing was about having control of every bit of it. When we did go out to film the first bits, the palaver of that with the lights and watering the trees in the boiling hot weather... I think that was more of a fuss than if it was in a studio. Plus Cinecitta was Fellini's world, they were all at his disposal. What was it like acting with Mastroianni on the first day? Was it a natural experience? Oh no, I mean, I had to kiss him on the train. I did have this moment where I thought I am going to kiss this man who is the heart throb of Europe. I had to really pull myself together. Marcello had to bang on the door in the bathroom scene and say, "Were your husbands not very virile?" But what he said was, "Your husbands weren't wery wirile?" And I just could not... (Laughs)... I could not... I must have corpsed about four times whenever he came to this line. That took the edge off kissing him. But he was such an icon though wasn't he? This was about twenty years since La Dolce Vita. Yes, late seventies or so. He was still very beautiful, and he kept his career going. He was a very good actor, a marvellous being. He was kind of "action" and he was free, freer than off stage in fact. I also spent time with him off stage too, going on about this coffee and cigarette diet, going on about his favourite Italian soup. He would sort of dribble thinking about it. To me he looks just like he did in 8 1/2 in City of Women... Yeah. Marvellous looking man, nicely lit. Acting with him, once you got over the kissing thing, was it natural? Absolutely. He was an actor's actor. He didn't go in for the method, talking about acting or it being difficult, anything what he called rubbish. But actually, it was about that freedom. He let himself into it. He always said making a film was like a playground with Fellini... Oh yeah, the two of them, yeah. They had endless jokes about their cocks. Every morning was a whole malarkey, gags and jokes. Well Marcello was entirely in Fellini's hands. His mother would come and have lunch with us and she would berate Fellini about not working with Marcello more often, saying he'd made him the man he was and it had taken twenty years to work with him again. But they slipped in together like they were wearing an old jumper. Marcello would have done anything for him. Well he did do anything he wanted him to! It must be amazing to look back on working with fellas like Fellini and Mastroianni. I know you have worked with so many people... Well no one like them! Fellini used to take me out on a night to the circus after the show. He was keen on the lion tamer, all those things that sound clichéd now. I was 28, going to the big top with Fellini, sitting and eating with the performers. It was amazing. And then the people who would turn up, like Sartre, anyone passing through Rome would come and have lunch. And Fellini would have a guy come from Rimini with the new season's snails, the Rimini dish. I mean, the leisure, the schedule. The film took months. Massive sets were built. I had just fallen in love with a director and was very aware of schedule and budget, but Fellini's world had none of this. Eight months it took to shoot. I don't think anyone knew how to say no. I wonder if films like Casanova made any money. I know Amarcord made money, but I am not so sure about the others. He must have been bailed out by benefactors and the studios. What are your memories of the big feminist scene? That is such a massive sequence. God, I had three blouses made because it was the summer and I got so hot in my suit that the white blouse got dark with sweat. I think I had the fur hat on as well. I must have been about 100 degrees. I think I did like 30 or 40 takes. Someone would come on and whip the blouse off and change it. I remember people saying keep doing it, keep doing it. I think it took days. And Fellini always had his megaphone there too? Yeah. He was very charming over the megaphone. And because we didn't do synch sound, he had wonderful music playing. The script was neither here nor there for him. When I asked him for the script for my speech, he thought that was a piece of acting nonsense. He just wanted me to speak passionately. It was all dubbed afterwards as well. Italians didn't care if the mouth as in synch, it was all about watching the eyes to them. So do you think City of Women is quite a confused film? Yes I do actually; I think it's a right mess. I never found out what happened really. I was supposed to be a thread that ran all the way through it. But at a certain point, Fellini fell for a very gorgeous extra who had an exquisite body and he became obsessed with her. She gave an interview about them having an affair and all this kind of stuff. So this all made a kind of mess. I was sent home and recalled to do the last scene on the train. I never found out what happened. It would have made a lot more sense had your character run through the whole thing. Yes it would have. I was employed for 8 months and not used. But I could not get a straight answer. Fellini was making it up as he went along, having all these sets built. So somewhere in the middle of all this, with this girl and me being sent home... Do you think he tried to fit too much in there? Yes. I mean the film was a failure. Critics gave it a kind of "Thanks but no thanks". I haven't seen it for years. Such a shame actually. But I was thinking, I was 28 when we made it and Fellini was like 60. I took me twenty years or something to realise he fancied me something rotten. But that would literally have never occurred to me. It was like my dad or something. I mean, however old you are, add another thirty years, you wouldn't expect someone that much older to be thinking that. It would be so far out of your mind! I was fancying men of thirty then. I mean, the thought of Fellini… It never crossed my mind; which was quite good really, because it never got dodgy and awkward for me. Watch the trailer for my documentary on Marcello, which you can get on DVD here: http://wisdomtwinsbooks.weebly.com/documentaries.html
City of Women, the first of Federico Fellini's final five films, seems to divide long term admirers of the maestro. Some see it as a film which begins well, very well in fact, but descends into repetition about half way through. Others, while not claiming it to be Federico's finest film, or for that matter even among the best, admire it for the filmmaking feat it truly is, a typically dazzling Fellini dream, with the great man's imagination switched to eleven. Personally, I fall into the minority camp that sees City of Women as one of Fellini's true masterpieces. Not only is it possibly his most enjoyable picture, it is also one of his most direct, which leads to serious thought about the themes which come to the fore throughout. On a basic level, this is another one of his fantastical descents into the subconscious, a surreal odyssey, which like both La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, defies the usual logic associated with the modern narrative film and takes our lead character, once again Marcello Mastroianni, on an epic journey that is both an education and an enlightenment for him and the viewer. Beneath this well orchestrated, head spinning and dazzling surface is a film whose aims have been interpreted and unfortunately misinterpreted down the years. It is, we can all agree, a film about women and feminism, but what people have argued about is on which side Fellini stood; was he for or against it? The birth of City of Women was not as simple as just Fellini settling down to make a movie about women. He originally wanted to write and direct a film about death, but producers steered him away from such an uncommercial subject. Fellini lifted some of the themes from his proposed projects and put them into the screenplay for City of Women, which he co-wrote with Bernardino Zapponi and Brunello Rondi. City of Women would be Fellini's unashamed exploration of the fairer sex, firstly as a species objectified by the male, and secondly as a gender who he believed to be superior. While making the picture Fellini made his views clear on women, when he was quoted as saying "I have the feeling all my films are about women. I am totally at their mercy; they are the only people I feel really at ease with. They represent the myth, mystery, diversity, fascination, the thirst for knowledge and the search for one's own identity. Women are everything. Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb. You sit there and meditate in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen." For Fellini, City of Women was more than a chance to make a film simply about women, but one which placed the male and the female in the centre of the feminist ideal. Friends say Fellini saw feminism as a caricature of an important belief system, rather than a serious manifesto, feeling it had gone down the wrong track and perhaps that the aggressive side of early feminism would only detract from the aim of the movement. He makes this clear in the film, though he does not completely damn it. That said, he did not go running in with this theme in his head. "I could even say," he said, "that it is not I who choose a theme but the theme that chooses me, and then the film immediately takes shape and acquires images and feelings. In the end I come to the conclusion that I am enormously ignorant." In the film, Marcello plays Snaporaz, a man in his fifties who wakes up while on a long train journey. He raises his head and has an instant attraction for the lady opposite him (played by Bernice Stegers) who he follows to the bathroom and attempts to have sex with. She gives him a passionate kiss but abruptly announces she is leaving the train. Speedily she hops off, heading not off the platform but towards a wooded area. Snaporez, debating mentally his next move, finally decides to follow the mysterious but sexy woman. Despite her brisk pace and increasingly mocking tone, he continues in his foolish pursuit. After she pushes him against a tree and convinces him to close his eyes for a big kiss, she disappears and Snaporez is left alone and lost in the thick wood. Eventually he stumbles across a building and heads inside. The place is crammed full of activity, all of it female and chaotic. Snaporez finds himself in the thick of a feminist convention, something of a nightmare for an old fashioned sexist, but he tries to see things their way despite their full on aggression. When the women begin to turn on him, he is led away into a lift by the kind and beautiful Donatella (played by Donatella Damiani). Bizarrely, she takes him to a skating rink and convinces him to put on a pair of skates. Again, the room is invaded by dozens of women skating round, eventually resulting in him taking a tumble down a staircase. In the basement he meets a larger woman who is seeing to the hotel's furnace, but promises to take him to the train station after she has washed. Mounting the back of her motorcycle, Snaporez and the lady breeze through the country side. But his adventure is not over yet. The woman insists they stop to see to some seeds in a greenhouse and they head inside, where she reveals a breast, tells him to feel its firmness and attempts to have sex with him, after which she is punished by her scrawny, aggressive mother. Snaporez is then escorted to a car where a group of girls who he hopes will take him to the station. He winds up in the middle of a convoy of female gangs and upon escaping their sinister presence he winds up being taken in by Dr Katzone, an ageing lothario who resides in an eccentric mansion, the corridors of which are decorated with surreal artworks dedicated to each of his many conquests. Later that night a party is hosted in honour of his 10, 000th sexual partner, and the lion haired doctor blows out all his candles in a rush of energy, even pissing on the highest circle of flames to extinguish them. Snaporez's journey continues. At the party he encounters his wife, who announces she is leaving him, and is led to a bedroom by the kind and now scantily clad Donatella, who tucks him up in bed in an oversized night shirt. In an Alice in Wonderland-like turn of events, Snaporez winds up going under the bed and heading down a tunnel which leads to a surreal fun fair. He slides down a huge helter skelter, where actors recreate the women he adored as a child, as if to recount his sexual history. After this he is presented to a strange court that judges him for his machismo, who eventually set him free by directing him towards a huge ladder. While climbing up he breaks his glasses, the only thing left from the real world. It leads to a boxing ring, inside which sits a hot air balloon which is in the shape of Donatella herself. As he flies away to an apparent freedom, the real Donatella, who has offered him so many pleasant escapes throughout his adventure, shoots holes in the balloon, which begins to collapse. As he falls to what will surely be his death, Snaporez wakes up to find he is back on the train in the carriage. Seated before him is his wife, and coming into the carriage is the lady from the start of the film, who smiles knowingly. Other women from the supposed dream are also present, and, confused, Snaporez kneels down and picks up his glasses to see they are broken. The unusual atmosphere, the unsettling smirks from those around him and his broken spectacles suggest the dream may have been anything but a dream. As the train zooms speedily into a tunnel, the film comes to a close. One's first thought is how City of Women could be Federico's own Alice in Wonderland, but from an adult male point of view. Snaporez, a veteran of love's harsh battlefield (or should that be lust), is paradoxically in both his own personal heaven and his purgatory. On the one hand he is surrounded by women throughout, some of them very attractive; however, they are all out for his blood, and these young, free, liberated, radical women see Snaporez in his old fashioned sexism as the enemy, anything but the Latin lover he may have been twenty years earlier. The ageing, tired lothario is a dinosaur in the face of their advancements, though he doesn't seem to learn from or absorb their ideas. At one point, when coming across three smiling women in relief, he comments on the aggression of feminism, perhaps unmasking Fellini's personal feelings about the movement's misdirection. But Snaporez is anything but an alter ego of Fellini, especially in his egotistical sexism. Fellini stated that he exaggerated certain aspects of feminism as if it were being viewed through the eyes of a man who not only couldn't understand it, but didn't really wish to, being so stuck to his antiquated views on women and their place in society. Snaporez, quite simply, typifies the outdated Italian male, the heartless ladies' man who objectifies the female and sees her as a play thing, clearly a man looking for trouble in the city of women. Fellini saw Snaporez as a "little red riding hood wandering about in the forest." And though he surely knew the film was bound to be dissected and picked to pieces by modern thinkers, he wanted it to be a purely cinematic experience, another filmic dream, the kind he excelled at delivering to the public. "As the film is a dream it uses the symbolic language of dreams. I would like people to see it without trying to understand it, as there is nothing to be understood," he added. "I hate that contemporary sickness which manifests itself in a desperate need for an ideology. Everything has to be tried in a court of reason which analyses, diagnoses, and orders treatment for the unintelligible." If taken as a film, a piece of dream like entertainment defying explanation, City of Women is enormously enjoyable. It is an odyssey, a film which never lets up and keeps on moving forward, though never becoming tiresome or tiring as it does so. Going form one exotic, lavish set piece to another, it is Fellini extravagance at its best, where one can see where the budget went and that not a penny was wasted. The convention sequences are spellbinding, magnificently handled by the master and staged wonderfully. The home of the womanising doctor, himself an example of the mad lover who yearns for all females to be submissive and highly sexualised, is a cave of wonders, hiding another surprise around each corner. It is Snaporez's only respite from the onslaught of the females, with Katzone being a safe face amidst the chaos. Katzone is also part of a dying breed, outlawed by the women who are out to demolish his home and put an end to his decades of shameless womanising. Yet even in the safety of Katzone's home he is attacked by his wife, a character Fellini referred to as a parody of the "pain in the ass housewife". Another key character is Donatella, played by the gorgeous Donatella Damiani, a woman Fellini first saw on a picture showing only her face. He was transfixed by her features, her "sightless eyes", and thought she looked like some mythical woman from a tarot card. Only when meeting her did Fellini see her unusually large breasts, especially for her slender frame. Federico was smitten, seeing her as a muse, so Donatella became an even more vital character in the film; a mother, a siren, a saviour, the approachable and kindly everywoman in the midst of this mad dream, and in one scene, clad in a glittery bikini, every man's sexual dream. "Although she is practically nude throughout the film," Fellini said, "she is never obscene. She is a kind of elfin or sprite like figure." Damiani is beautiful, of that there is no doubt, though in her versatility in the eyes of Snaporez she is never an object. Donatella may be one of the most striking women to ever have appeared on screen, but Fellini steers clear of making her a cliché. Anyone looking to get offended by Fellini's supposed view of women and sexism, not to mention the nudity and sexual material in the film, should remember that not only is this a dream, it a dream of Snaporez, not Fellini. Snaporez does not understand women, meaning of course that he will not understand feminism either. Women are a mystery to him, explaining why when he does reach the boxing ring it is empty. Women are not opponents to him because they remain an enigma; and they, needless to say, remain mightier than he, above his simple minded objectifications. Yet with all this said, Fellini discouraged such speculations. It was, in his mind, simply about film as a magical experience, and City of Women certainly lives up to that ideal. At the centre of this insanely enjoyable adventure is a marvelous performance from Mastroianni, once again perfecting his role as Fellini's journeyman, his involved but simultaneously disconnected male amidst the spinning tornado of wonderment, unable to make sense of the dream but happily (and sometimes unhappily) experiencing it for what it is, taking the rough with the smooth. While on set in 1979, Marcello spoke to Corriere della sera about his part in the film: "What are you shooting tomorrow they always ask me. The fact is I haven't a clue. I don't even bother asking myself these days. I have gotten to the point where I'm simply enjoying myself. The psychological make up of this character is the same as in the other roles I have played for him (Fellini). Sometimes I even forget I am an actor; what I've become is a blend of myself and this character. What's important... is that it is a surrealistic journey. We have a man immersed in the adventure of re-encountering all the women who were most nutritious to him in the course of his life. Yes, nutritious is the very word." For Marcello, the ageing ladies' man who had enjoyed romances with Catherine Deneuve, Faye Dunaway and Ursula Andress, a man who represented the old fashioned Italian no-nonsense viewpoint, of mid twentieth century masculinity, City of Women may have felt a little like looking in a mirror. The part called for self reflection, of that there is no doubt. In the same interview he spoke of the fact that for him and Federico to understand modern women they would have to be twenty again. He says he fears that modern young men may be dissatisfied with their relationships, what he refers to as "conflicts with modern women". Though no Snaporez, Marcello was certainly an old fashioned man feeling somewhat bewildered in the face of this female revolution. In the film his character makes a valid point however. Repeating what one of the feminists said - "a scoundrel never changes" - quietly to himself while cleaning his spectacles, he asks himself, without expecting an answer, "but change into what?" Indeed, it's as if Marcello, and Fellini essentially, are accepting of these ideas, but wonder, quite validly, where they might be leading to. Castrated by the modern world, Snaporez/Marcello becomes de-masculinised, a man built on his libido forced to question his very existence as the alpha male in a world which sees him as a hopeless relic. Yet Marcello defended the film's views on feminism, a movement he clearly accepted as a force for good. "There's been a lot of talk about a possible feminist reaction," Marcello added. "The fact is, the feminists in the film aren't put into a bad light at all. If anything, you can say that Federico views them through the eyes of someone his age. There is no judgement involved. And from time to time, Snaporez - me that is - observes all this, is touched and moved to feelings of great tenderness." One hopes that Snaporez understands women better after his dream, and ideally might change his views on the fairer sex. Fellini himself explained Snaporez's understanding of himself through his subconscious: "In the end of City of Women the protagonist consciously accepts the fact that he is dreaming. Waking up in the train, and deciding to go back to sleep because reality is beginning to become upsetting again (he sees his wife in the seat previously occupied by the feminist, the feminist has become a sort of courtesan, the two terrorist sou- brettes turn out to be student girls), he accepts to go back into the tunnel with the knowledge that he now has made a contact with his inner, profound, mythical being. This time he will dream because he is deciding to dream. It will be a vigilant dream, full of attention for the profound, a witnessing dream. He goes back consciously into the dream in order to have a more lucid contact with himself." But as Marcello himself stated in the interview, City of Women's philosophising is secondary to the very idea of it as a cinematic experience, an epic of the mind which, considering its existence in the subconscious, makes anything and everything, no matter how seemingly far fetched, perfectly acceptable. And like in La Dolce Vita, it is Marcello's controlled performance, his lack of over the top reactions and his measured, straight faced bewilderment, but also his dry acceptance of whatever comes in his path, which makes the film a perfect example of pure surrealism at its best. Abandoned, liberated and highly imaginative, it is for me the most underrated of Fellini's films, and arguably, though I may be on my own here, his finest achievement. City of Women received some good reviews, but didn't set the world alight or garner the kind of acclaim it so rightly deserved. Roger Ebert, who so loved Fellini and Mastroianni's other work, felt it was seriously flawed, and found it hard to understand Fellini's view of women, who once had been important in his films as symbols but now had to be dealt with as human beings. Ebert wrote, "City of Women does nothing original or very challenging with this material. Although it pretends to be Fellini's film about feminism, it reveals no great understanding of the subject; Fellini basically sees feminists as shrill harems of whip-wielding harridans, forever dangling the carrot of sex just out of reach of his suffering hero. Fellini has rarely been able to discover human beings hidden inside his female characters, and it's a little late for him to start blaming that on the women's liberation movement. Is City of Women worth seeing? Yes, probably, even though it is not a successful movie and certainly not up to Fellini's best work. It's worth seeing because it's a bedazzling collection of images, because at times it's a graceful and fluid celebration of pure filmmaking skill, and because Fellini can certainly make a bad film but cannot quite make a boring one." The New York Times, who saw City of Women as such a counterpart to 8 1/2 that it should be called 18 (given it was Fellini's 18th picture, including half entries for anthology instalments), found it a riveting spectacle: "Though the film is overlong, even for a Fellini aficionado, it is spellbinding, a dazzling visual display that is part burlesque, part satire, part Folies-Bergeres and all cinema. To interpret City of Women as antifeminist would be, I think, to underrate the complexity of the man whose vision this is. Mr. Fellini obviously adores women as much as he adores making movies, especially movies that find substance in gaudy artifice..." Of Marcello's controlled efforts, they wrote, "Mr. Mastroianni has never been better than he is here as the now well-seasoned Fellini surrogate figure. It's a supremely accomplished performance, modest and grand, broadly comic at times, even touching in its details. One special highlight: Mr. Mastroianni's doing a brief, elegiacal, Fred Astaire turn to the music of 'Let's Face the Music and Dance.' There is, though, no other single image in the film that equals the sight of Mr. Mastroianni's Snaporaz as he creeps under a bed, in pursuit of some new mystery, with a small hole in his left sock. It's at this moment that he finally surrenders his dignity. Forever." Some modern reviewers, perhaps misunderstanding the main protagonist and mistaking him for a direct Fellini alter ego, have criticised its supposed sexism. The Quietus damned it as "Vulgar, Vampish and Vacuous. Fellini delves into the dark and obscure recesses of his psyche in search of his true self and turns up tumescent amid a carnival-esque cast of female beauties, hags, housewives, rampantly militant lesbians and a miniscule birdlike celebrity named Mrs. Small who has found inner sanctum through marriage to six docile husbands. Never let it be said that Federico Fellini was a crusading feminist, a beacon of hope for mis-represented females across the world. He wasn’t. City of Women does nothing to alter this assessment." Just as critics would misinterpret a film like Woody Allen's Stardust Memories as a direct attack on his fan base, naysayers too have targeted City of Women in their PC crusade as an outdated view of feminism through the eyes of a Jurassic creature. If they could perhaps see past the idea of it being autobiographical, rather than multi faceted and all encompassing, then they might enjoy it for the extravagant pleasure it truly is. This is a statement on women from various viewpoints, though it is vital to remember that Snaporez is not Fellini as 8 1/2s Guido surely was. Though City of Women will never be as praised as Fellini's more iconic work, one could argue it flows more smoothly than 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita, feels more complete and focused, and also provides the viewer with more food for thought. One cannot undermine the brilliance of Marcello and Federico's earlier classics together, of course, but it must be said that City of Women, in all its glorious splendour, startling visuals, stunning set pieces and towering entertainment value, deserves to be up there with the great man's most appreciated work.
"JACK IS THE DEFINITIVE ACTOR OF MY GENERATION!" HENRY JAGLOM ON HIS FRIEND, JACK NICHOLSON4/8/2022 Henry Jaglom is an acclaimed and fiercely independent filmmaker who has been directing his own brand of very individualistic pictures since the early 1970s. Starting out as an actor, he appeared in the swinging freak out movie Psych Out (1967), which also starred Jack Nicholson, with whom he became friends. He went on to edit Jack's scenes in the cult classic Easy Rider, with Jack sitting in his own editing suite beside him. Then, as a kind of loyal pact, both friends appeared in one another's directorial debuts - Jack's Drive He Said and Henrys' A Safe Place, both released in 1971. I've spoken to Henry a few times about various things. On the phone in 2016 he revealed something extraordinary to me. "There's a scene when Jack is in the cafe in Five Easy Pieces," Henry Jaglom said, "and he orders bacon and lettuce or something and the waitress won't give him it. That scene was originally written for him by me for my film Tracks (Jaglom's 1977 drama about a Vietnam vet who goes crazy on a train). He was gonna be the solider in Tracks. He and I had been very close friends, and made a promise to be in each other's films. And he was in my first directorial film, and I was in his, Drive, He Said. Yeah! Well, we had similar beliefs and feelings, so we were going to do Tracks. By the time I got to do Tracks (mid seventies) he had priced himself so far out from me that I could not make that movie with him. No way. By the time I was ready four years on, Jack was way too big a star to work my way." A few years earlier, and Jaglom's first shot at directing came in the form of A Safe Place, a film that set the mould for his very individualistic approach to filmmaking for the rest of his long, and still very rich, career. Painfully underrated, Jaglom is one of the very few directors from that age still making decent films in his own way, outside the studios and free from outside interference. In fact, I think he is the only one. A Safe Place follows Noah (Tuesday Weld), a young woman living alone in New York who looks back to her childhood, "her safe place" from long ago. She has flashbacks to an enigmatic street magician she met as a child, played by the wonderful Orson Welles, while getting through two relationships, one of which is with the modern and hip Mitch, played nicely by Jack Nicholson. The film is a trippy, arty and imaginative journey inside Noah/Susan's head and is crammed full of marvellous imagery. Apparently put together from 50 hours of footage, Jaglom's film is of its time but also separate from it. She is an isolated flower child, but the film works effectively outside its early 1970s framework. Reaction to the film was poor, and box office burying it speedily into the vaults of obscurity, but it has since garnered a cult following, thanks to a Criterion Blu Ray release. I view it as a free, liberated, intriguing bit of introspective cinema, an experiment few, if any, filmmakers would dare to make these days. Jack's part is brief, but notable, and he was happy to be starring alongside one of his idols, Mr Welles. "It's a film about the loss of innocence," Jaglom later said. "About how dwelling on the seemingly beautiful past is really a killer and stops you from being able to live in the present and function for the future." A message we can all learn from I believe. Jaglom knew Jack when he was unknown, and in all has worked with him on four different film projects - Psych Out, Easy Rider, Drive He Said and A Safe Place. He also stayed friends with him after Nicholson's fame sky rocketed. In early 2018 I spoke to Jaglom about his memories of working with Nicholson in those early years. Do you remember how you first met Jack at all? I first met Jack at a restaurant we both frequented called The Old World on the Sunset Strip. I think it was Rupert Crosse who introduced us. We discovered in deep conversation that though we were both actors, we both really wanted to direct. He invited me to a screening of a little film he had acted in for our mutual friend Monte Hellman. It was called Ride the Whirlwind. Ten or 15 minutes into it, two women seated behind me were talking, which bothered me. I turned around and asked them to be quiet so I could see the film. They turned out to be Carole Eastman (who would later write Five Easy Pieces) and Helena Kallionotes, who was in it. I'm sure you know about her, she lives in Mexico now. Jack and I talked endlessly about the movies we wanted to direct, and we went together to a lot of European films and every Kubrick film for a few years. You both acted together in a late sixties freak out film, Psych Out. I think it's quite an enjoyable film myself. What do you think of it? I think Psych Out is pretty silly in that faux-60's way but is sure fun to watch, I must agree. Jack got me the part, or rather he arranged my audition and I got it over my teacher's son, my friend John Strasberg. Silly film but fun to watch as a '60s artifact. You ended up editing Easy Rider with Jack didn't you? How did you get this job? On Easy Rider, Bert Schneider was solely in charge. When Rip Torn got in a fight with Dennis, Jack didn't want to take over Rip's part and he especially didn't want to have to cut his hair to play that southern lawyer. Bert made me accompany Jack down to the Columbia Barber Shop to make sure they cut it short enough. I kept saying shorter and Jack kept wincing. Jack had given up acting mostly at this point and hair was important to many of us, weird as it now sounds. Anyway, after the film was shot (I got Dennis to use Karen Black in it), Dennis Hopper made a cut of it that went over three hours. I went to the rough cut screening and I think I was the ONLY one in that whole screening who wasn't high. There were endless motorcycle rides and songs. Some French director was there, I can't remember which one, and he said to Dennis "It's great, It's perfect, don't let them cut it any shorter". Others at that stoned screening said the same thing. 'It's a masterpiece. Don't cut it.' And Dennis refused to cut it. When Bert asked me what I thought I told him that it was much too long and the endless rides and songs were incredibly repetitious and boring. Also there was too little of Jack in the movie, I knew that he had been much more in the campfire scenes that were missing and Dennis' character should be much less. Bert had seen hours of an 8mm "home movie" I had made in Israel after The 6 Day War as my first attempt at filmmaking. He liked the editing and asked me whether I'd work on editing Easy Rider. He gave me an editor and an editing room and Jack was in the adjoining editing room with an editor of his own. We discussed it and Jack said "I'll take it from the front, you take it from the back", something like that. I saw those campfire scenes and Jack was almost absent, it was all Dennis talking and Peter Fonda listening. I asked my editor to put Jack's stuff back in so I could see it and, in my opinion, it was the best thing in the whole film - still is! I reconstructed that scene using every frame of Jack that existed. I think that's my biggest contribution to the film, which Jack and I cut down the rest of to whatever length it is today. Of course, all this was under the supervision of Schneider, who ultimately was responsible for the huge success of that sweet, silly film. This led to your directorial debut, A Safe Place, which Jack was in. Bert is the hero of the whole story of the New Hollywood of the early 70s. Because of Easy Rider he gave me a chance to make A Safe Place. When I ran the rough cut of it for him, he said as the lights came up, 'this is going to lose every penny it cost. But I'm not going to even try to edit it into something commercial, I won't even touch it like we did on Easy Rider.' I was happily stunned and asked him why. 'Because,' he said, 'it made me cry,' and I saw that there were still tears in his eyes. He was right about it not making a cent, of course, but he said he never regretted it. There was no one in the film business like him. Ever! Jack saw A Safe Place, loved it but said, 'Now what you should do is dub it entirely in French with English subtitles, call yourself Henr-i Ja-glom and it will be a smash. But not in English, not in America, not for at least 25 or 30 years, they'll hate it if it's made by an American, it goes way WAY too far, they're not nearly ready for it.' He was right, of course. Jack had already done Five Easy Pieces by the time you were making A Safe Place, hadn't he? Jack's price had gone up so high after Easy Rider that I, of course, couldn't afford to hire him. But we had made a deal when we went to all those Kubrick films that when either of us would finally get to direct our first film, we would use the other one to act in it. So he did that for me in A Safe Place for a colour TV, his price had gone so high by then that it was triple the entire cost of A Safe Place. I charged him more for my bit part in his film, Drive, He Said. What was Jack like to direct on A Safe Place? Jack was incredibly easy to direct, more giving and immediate and real within the character than anyone can imagine, more open and vulnerable and allowing me to get into his character, which we both knew connected private things I knew about him with things I needed his character to express to the Tuesday Weld character... Is that clear? He used to say in some interviews that he is more himself in A Safe Place than in ANY other part he ever played And what about the reverse? What was Jack like directing you in Drive, He Said? He was fun to have as a director, knew exactly what he wanted from my character (and everyone else's character) and knew exactly how to get it... For generations Jack has been this larger than life character, but a lot of friends say how loyal, kind and deep he really is. How do you view Jack? I think it not too much to say that Jack is the definitive actor of my generation and one of the greatest male stars of all time. Also one of the sweetest, most vulnerable and most touching people I've ever known.
Here is my Q and A with Bertrand Blier, not only my personal favourite French director, but a man I deem to be one of the world's finest. Here he speaks about working with his father Bernard Blier, Gerard Depardieu and Marcello Mastroianni, as well as some of his most acclaimed films. Note some classic French sarcasm when we discuss long dead composers... The first film I saw of yours, Bertrand, was Buffet Froid. I immediately became comfortable and excited by the style. What kind of experience was Buffet Froid, working with Gerard and your father in one film? This film was very hard to realise. All of the people I proposed the film to said it was absolutely crazy, nobody would go and see it… so, don’t do it. But, I fought very hard and did it. It took a long time but was an easy film to do because of the script and actors. All I had to do was to put the camera in the right place and say “Action”. Working with my father was not a problem, more like a reward; and Gerard, with whom I have worked many times, is just like my cousin or uncle If I can ask about Going Places I would be so pleased. That is still such a wild and exciting film. Was it difficult adapting your own book to the screen and working with the three lead actors when they were so fresh and inexperienced? It was a great memory (les Valseuses). When I transposed my book to film I wrote three different scripts which I found interesting, each one written with different coloured ink to use for the film. It’s not important whether it’s a book or film, it’s the same. We were all young and inexperienced as were the people in the film. It needed young actors who were not ‘box-office’, so it was perfect to use Depardieu and Dewaere Get Out Your Handkerchiefs remains a masterpiece to me. How did the idea of this film originate? Was it a difficult film to make? It is very multi layered and complex. It was difficult to make, like many other films, and it is always a miracle to end up with a film as good as you imagined it to be. Thank you for the compliments, I see that you have good taste. I have to say my favourite film of yours is Merci La Vie. I find it so liberating, the way it dispenses with logic and parodies cinema. I imagine this was quite a difficult film to make with the locations, actors, changes in colour and black and white. I have seen a lot of behind the scenes videos and it seems to have been a fun film to make despite the challenges, almost like a party in some ways. Where did the idea for this film come from? When I was older, about ten or fifteen years later I was in a hotel room in the States. I asked myself if I could re-write a film like ‘les Valseurs’. And I came to the conclusion that it would be impossible unless I used two girls instead of boys. Girls who were dangerous and who broke up everything… i.e. their lives and everyone else’s. I wrote the script from beginning to end and came back to Paris with the finished script. Everyone said that it would cost a lot of money to realise, and I said “yes, it would be expensive”… But we did it. Too Beautiful For You is possibly the ultimate film about the madness of love. I love how Schubert's music invades the soundtrack. Given the character's obsession with Mozart in Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, what is your view on the relationship between music and film, how a soundtrack often manipulates the viewer? Is this something you've been interested in playing around with? We were very lucky with this film because we had a marvellous composer called Franz Schubert who came to make the music. He was a little bit sad and depressed, but with Depardieu we had a few jokes and drinks with him, and he became more friendly. I also had a good contact with Mozart in a film before. It’s important to take good musicians. It’s true that he was sad and getting on our nerves. But, as I say, the Music was just as important as the actors. You have to chose carefully, except the music cannot be done again but the actors can, and the takes can be re-done, but Schubert “non”. Just like love, you have to work with it. Gerard Depardieu is one of my very favourite actors, but Marcello Mastroianni is the one actor whose work affects me the most. What was it like working with him on 1, 2, 3 Sun? I think that is a very overlooked film compared to some of your others. Depardieu is a great actor, but Mastroianni is a great actor and also an exceptional man, which is sometimes not the case with Depardieu. Depardieu is, as I said, a great actor but sometimes difficult... However, he’s like a brother or a friend. Mastroianni is always pleasant and charming so my fondest memories are of working with him. It is a shame that we started late, we should have started sooner. How Much Do You Love Me is another film I really love. How did you come up with this great idea and how was the filming process with Bellucci and Depardieu? The question is “how did I get the idea?” I was known for working and for being a director for films about “bad boys” etc. So the idea was to steal an actress well known for her beauty and fashion sense and in demand, but someone who was not in my actor’s ‘Stable’. It’s a film about a prostitute used by a stupid imbecile. Belluci and Depardieu working together were very irresistibly funny. To finish off, can I ask when we might expect to see your next film? Very soon, I hope. You have to ‘organise’ a film of course. Maybe 1 ½ to 2 years. END…
In a sample from an upcoming study on Catherine Deneuve's filmography, here is a little piece about the 1968 film, La Chamade, co-starring Michel Piccoli... Next up for Deneuve was a lead role in Alain Cavalier’s romantic drama, La Chamade (also 68), based on the book by Francoise Sagan. She plays Lucile, a seemingly care free young woman who is the mistress of the wealthy businessman Charles, played by Michel Piccoli. Though she has a good time with Charles, and he in turn treats her well, he is perhaps a little too old for her. Suddenly she meets a man her own age, Antoine (Roger Van Hool) while out for the evening with Charles. As Charles can clearly see, she is instantly attracted to the younger man. As expected, she falls in love with Antoine, who gets her a job in a publishing firm, though she proves incapable of holding it down. Things become much more serious when she falls pregnant to her new man. But will she keep the baby, and will Lucile come to her senses and see that Charles is the man for her? Coming right after the smash success of Belle De Jour, it’s no surprise that La Chamade did well commercially. It was also warmly received in the press. The New York Times wrote of it: “Alain Cavalier's French screen adaptation of Francoise Sagan's 1966 novel, is like a glass paperweight in which something small and exotic has been embedded—a seahorse, perhaps. It is elegant and lucid, something very pleasant to have around even though it's not exactly an objet d'art of the first order.” They also commented on how plastic Deneuve had looked in the recent The April Fools (explained by the fact she did not enjoy the shoot one bit), and added that she is “very much alive as the unhappy Lucile. Miss Deneuve suffers—always beautifully—the guilts and betrayals and compromises that dilute the value of love, which, in Sagan's world, is both the literal and figurative currency. Deneuve, in my eyes, is excellent in the film, and she proved here that she was not just the ice queen of Repulsion and Belle De Jour. In La Chamade, she desperately wants love, craves affection, and she finds herself in a spot of trouble trying to find the right man to get it from. Though not cold, she does have an air of melancholia about her, which adds a quiet sadness to her predicament amidst the love triangle, and the fact she is beautifully costumed throughout by Yves Saint Laurent only makes it more poignant, the crisp and superficial surface masking an inner conflict. Cavalier, certainly a lesser figure of the French New Wave, had by the late sixties gone into making more straight forward and commercial pictures than some of his contemporaries; and while La Chamade is certainly conventional, bordering on melodramatic at times, it is engaging and though provoking with its solid acting and ironic twists. Piccoli is watchable as ever, here playing a man who knows it pays to be patient, but like a father he waits with rolling eyes for his mistress to return to the good life he can provide her. Still, this is a film quietly dominated by the presence of a Deneuve whose every movement and word we hang upon. When I spoke to Deneuve for a previous book on Piccoli, La Chamade did come up during our chat about working with Michel. "The one where we really had a close relationship during filming was on..." Catherine paused to remember the title. It was 1968's La Chamade, I reminded her. "Absolutely, that's it! On that we had a relationship as a man and a woman, a closer relationship in the scenes we had to shoot together. I think that's the one, because we spent more time together. We bonded together on the film. We were close, because of the filming. But he was a very strong actor, a strong character, you know. When you see him on screen he is very deep. His look, his voice, you know. He is deep." Dario Argento has been one of the most prominent names in horror for the past 50 years, and his influence on the genre is immeasurable, given how many filmmakers and writers have been inspired by his demented genius. He's directed some of the most striking and disturbing movies of recent times, and his images are among the most traumatic ever committed to celluloid. Yet there is a paradoxical beauty to his work; bizarrely, he makes the act of murder a kind of warped art. Highly stylised, and often inflicted upon beautiful women, the violence in Argento's giallo thrillers is real but unreal, shot in an almost operatic fashion which enhances the gore beyond its trashy roots and lifts it into high art. Argento's debut feature was 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a financial success which established Argento as a force to be reckoned with. He was of course highly influenced by Mario Brava, a man many see as the original purveyor of giallo horror. "I knew Mario Bava since I was a small child," Argento said in one interview. "Mario was a technical genius, a real master who discovered many tricks – in the use of lenses, camera movements, and so on – that nobody else could do." But Argento was fascinated even more by what the giallo genre could offer. He told Interview Magazine: "Giallo has always fascinated me — whether Italian or international — because of its mysteries, enigmas, the charm of the forbidden, the impossible love stories, the sensational plot twists, and a not-too-linear storyline. In the 1960s, when I actually started dealing with cinema — first as a journalist, then as a screenwriter--giallo was of very little interest to intellectuals. My grandma, a truly conservative woman, didn’t allow me to read them, so I would sneak into the attic to do it in private." Argento aimed to bring those forbidden themes, of murder and sleaze, into the mainstream. His next two films were big hits too; The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971), and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972), though his follow up picture, 1975's Deep Red (known in Italy as Profondo Rosso) proved a turning point. Undoubtedly a masterpiece, this macabre tale of murder and intrigue stars the great David Hemmings as Marcus, a musician who, from the street, witnesses a grisly murder of a psychic named Helga in her apartment. The killer, wearing black leather gloves, slays her in a sickeningly brutal fashion, and after watching the vile act, Marcus fixes himself on finding the killer and solving the increasingly murky mystery he finds himself in the middle of. It's important to note that Deep Red was Argento's return to giallo after a brief break from the genre to make a historical drama called Five Days. It was shot in Turin in a 16 week slot, with some scenes shot in Rome. Turin was chosen as the main destination because, fittingly so, it had more active Satanists than any other city in Italy. Argento upped the gore from his previous films, taking great delight in snubbing out his cast members. It seems perversely fitting that the hands we see acting out the killings belong to Argento, meaning that the man having the dark fantasies is not only seeing them come to life before the camera, but he's the one enabling them. Though Deep Red is driven by its sense of dread and the anticipation which builds towards the next killing, there is much more to the movie than brutal violence. Argento proves himself to be a master of suspense and of establishing mood, an atmosphere of doom. It is, in many ways, a study in existential fear. Hemmings, brilliant in his role, becomes the embodiment of our apprehension, and we cringe with him around every blind corner, down every weird corridor, through each winding twist of the plot. One stand out sequence for me is in the weird mansion, "The House of the Screaming Child", a genuinely creepy location where Hemmings spends a considerable amount of tense time during a particularly revealing section of the plot. It's one of the most genuinely unsettling scenes from any film I have ever seen. It's partly how Hemmings plays it, this inquisitive man who so desperately wants to solve the mystery that he's dared to go where few others would. While many think of the blood, the gore, the cruel killings, I think of the unnerving vibe that runs through the whole film, and reaches a peak in the old house. The soundtrack, provided by rock group Goblin, is in my view one of the greatest in the history of cinema, a fittingly creepy accompaniment to the slaughter on display. It was Argento's first collaboration with the Italian prog rockers, and the beginning of an unmatched run of horror soundtracks for other films, most notably perhaps George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead. The music in Deep Red, however, might just be their finest hour. Deep Red was a huge success at the time of release and was seen as something of a breath of fresh air amidst the hugely popular giallo boom of the time. Speaking to UK's Horrorville Magazine in 2017, Argento put its success down to its straightforwardness. "The genre became too psychological," he said. "Too much about trying to work out why the killer was committing the crimes. But what audiences responded to in Deep Red was more the horror element - the fact that the film was all about fear and the build up to murder." Many reviewers now see Deep Red as a transitional film for Dario, bridging as it did his more straight forward murder flicks and his supernatural themed work. This theory is dead on, especially when you learn that Argento purposely moved away from giallo with his next movie and headed towards a more ambiguous, subtle exploration of pure, undiluted, often suffocating terror. Suspiria, the next film Dario took on, was released in 1977, and is now seen as his seminal offering to the world of cinema. Another visual treat, it is a masterclass in establishing uneasiness and intrigue. Aesthetically perfect, Suspiria makes most horror pictures look like a visual mess. It stars Jessica Harper as Suzy, an American ballet dancer who arrives in a small German town to enroll in a dance school. As she arrives it's raining heavily and initially she cannot get inside. On top of this, she sees a student leaving the building, terrified and hysterical. Unable to get in, she spends the night in a hotel. Meanwhile, the hysterical girl, Pat, stays at a friend's apartment, but is stalked and then murdered, very brutally I might add, by a mysterious killer. In the morning, Suzy is let in the school and introduced to the staff and other dance students. In very little time though, Suzy learns that there is something not right with the place and grows increasingly suspicious of everyone around her. Argento first came up with the idea for the film when he visited the Magic Triangle, the specific point where Germany, Switzerland and France meet, and learned of its ties to witchcraft, something Argento said was nothing to joke about. "It's something that exists," he added. He saw Suspiria as his first film of a new trilogy, Three Mothers, and wrote the script with Daria Nicolodi. They took inspiration from fairytales and old stories, Alice in Wonderland and Snow White being specific inspirations. Visually, Argento has said that he wanted to replicate Disney's version of the Snow White story, insistent on the usage of rich colours. The deep and often unnatural shades are both pleasing on the eye, in all their glowing glory, and slightly disconcerting. There is an atmosphere of the unreal throughout, even though the fear we experience with Suzy could not be more real. As the Snow White at the centre of this surreal odyssey, it's hard to imagine anyone but Jessica Harper in the role, her face perfect in the midst of the terrifying mayhem which surrounds her. Dario cast her after seeing her performance in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise. In truth he couldn't have found anyone more fitting. She is our eyes, our guide through the unsettling mysteries which unfold. Goblin's music, one of the most terrifying horror scores in history, also enhances the experience from the first frame onwards. Suspiria was both a critical and box office hit upon release, establishing Argento as a genius of horror. Refreshingly, Argento himself remains satisfied with the film and looks back with fondness. In one recent interview he said: “The success of a film is a strange accident you can’t control,” says Argento. “So I never think about the success of my films, I think only about the result, and I was satisfied with Suspiria; satisfied with the music, the colour, the acting... I wouldn’t change anything about it; it’s a perfect product of its time.” Argento also spoke about his delight in the audience's reactions to the film. "I did not know if the audience would like Suspiria because it was so different from my other films. It was a classical fairy tale, and not a giallo. But I hoped they would and after it was done I began thinking about how to continue the story and when I got the idea for Inferno I knew I had to do it." The worldwide acceptance of Suspiria led Argento into new areas, new horizons he might not have had the chance to explore had Suspiria not been a success. It gave him confidence to grow and evolve. It's been noted that critics initially focused overtly on the technical skill in Argento's films, as opposed to plot, the script or the acting. It took some time before people started looking closer at Dario's films beyond their aesthetics. Argento said in one interview: "When the critics are confronted by a different way of making cinema, one that changes the rules a bit, they are puzzled and don’t understand what they’re experiencing. All the critic sees is the surface... he sees the surface of the water, which we could call the technique, the style… but he doesn’t go under the water’s surface to discover what lies there, and there’s a lot! It’s deep... there’s politics, there are symbols." Like Stephen King, Argento is misinterpreted as a man working exclusively in horror. It's incorrect. Argento deals with fear, that most primal and relatable of emotions. His studies may lead to the extreme, but these extremities ignite fires within us, whether we enjoy Dario's work or find it repulsive. And whichever side you fall on, you cannot deny the power of his cinema.
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