Winging it

Ricky 2010 France (89 minutes) written and directed by François Ozon.

This movie adapts a dark modern fairy tale by Rose Tremain that adds a dimension to the concept of a child ‘taking off’ at the mall, losing its original edge in a fruitier cocktail.

Tremain’s story, Moth, set in an American trailer park, centers on the emotionally overtaxed, separated mother of two with a difficult infant who develops an unsettling physical feature, and the consequences of this development. It has a sharp, cruel ending, not unlike some of the Grimms’ tales.

Ozon and his writing collaborator Emmanuèle Bernheim refashioned and padded Tremain’s sparer original American Calvinist hardwood furniture, moving it to France and making it more Roman Catholic and rococo.

The movie generally follows the story’s plot lines, but the changes make the tale wobble. The main problem is that the central role of the mother as Ozon and Bernheim conceive her—the actress is just following a script and direction—makes for a squishy center, too wishy-washy as a character to hold the story together. In the short story, the mother has a brittle toughness that snaps, where in the movie she just flakes away.

The film is worth seeing nevertheless.

Ozon sets the table by opening his story with a scene from the middle, in which a social worker counsels an abandoned working mother at the end of her tether with a small child and difficult baby. His narrative then proceeds chronologically from the beginning, roughly a year earlier. It moves in episodes, covering a period of about two years in a loose sequence of scenes. An all-seeing camera is his narrator.

The working mother is Katie (Alexandra Lamy), a factory worker, who begins the story a single mother leading a quiet life in a French high-rise housing project with her seven-year-old daughter Lisa (Mélusine Mayance, the child Sarah in Sarah’s Key 2012).

One day at work Katie has sex in a restroom with a new coworker, Paco Sanchez (Sergi Lopez, the cruel stepfather in Pan’s Labyrinth)—a random sexual encounter that seems unlikely for a stressed-out mother on a smoke break at work. This liaison leads to a relationship in which Paco moves in with Katie and Lisa; he and Katie produce the Ricky of the title.

Daughter Lisa is responsible beyond her young years. Her ‘objections’ to her ‘new father’ feel more like adult misgivings about Katie’s judgment than any resentment at being ‘replaced’ in her mother’s affection. Lisa as though resigns herself to the fact: all right, now I have two of these monsters to deal with—Ab-Fab, French style.

Along comes Ricky (Arthur Peyret). Katie as though awakens and scales untold heights of protective mothering which result in driving Paco away. Ricky develops his ‘unsettling physical feature.’ Katie gives the thing a stab but clearly is out of her depth. Ricky provides Lisa, with her little pink fairy wings, tiara and wand, something decidedly more interesting to take care of than her doll.

The little family’s secret flies the coop in an inspired scene at a big box Hypermarché Cora at Christmas time. (In Tremain’s story, this scene takes place in a more prosaic Kroger’s grocery store in Knoxville, Tennessee.)

A media circus ensues; a hang-dog Paco returns with gently-used mixed motives; none of this lasts long. Ricky takes off; Paco stays.

Then Katie, possibly intending to drown herself (as does the mother in the short story), has a Bergmanesque medieval ‘vision’ at the lake—or else a kind of rococo Annunciation. She returns home renewed and inspired to start over, all wet and flakier than ever, to Paco, who-only-ever-wanted-things-to-work-out-all-right-after-all, and Lisa, concerned as before about Mom’s woolly judgment.

Life goes on. Paco assumes Katie’s parenting duties. Katie is pregnant again, this time with a thousand-mile gaze and a New Age smile awaiting the Second Coming. And the audience is left trying to iron all these wrinkles into continuous narrative pleats.

But Ozon’s version is worth seeing, especially the scene at the big box store and Katie’s lakeside vision. Ricky and his ‘special feature,’ and Lisa, are the film’s best made parts, along with the haunting original score composed, arranged and directed by Philippe Rombi, who also played the piano solos.

Tremain’s title, Moth, refers in part to Ricky’s attraction to light. Light also attracts Ozon’s Ricky, but as a real baby with a human face and personality he feels like a more evolved legendary creature than the fabulous figure of the story. Ozon’s Ricky is less a moth to light than a form of New Age Ikaros.

MP encourages readers to find Tremain’s short story in her 2005 collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson. In the remarkable title story, the longest of the dozen, the dying, senile Duchess of Windsor searches her colorful, passionate history unable to name ‘the pale little man’ that so often turns up in the background. 

In contrast to Ozon’s camera, the narrator of Tremain’s Moth is Annie, a friend and trailer park neighbor of Pete, the baby’s mother.

Annie is a middle-aged working class woman whom nothing particularly fazes. She speaks in flat folk tones that alternate between irony and self-deprecation about what she saw, as though to say, ‘Now you may not buy this, but I am here to tell you what I saw with my own two eyes.’

The children have the same names. Annie tells us that Pete supports the family by making appliqué items she sells at a craft venue through a ‘hippie’ with whom she has a ‘Platonic relationship.’ Chester, the father of both children, is a Joycean Cyclops, an abusive, overweight fireman ‘with a big appetite’ who leaves Pete for a woman half his age. He comes back in the midst of the media circus to cash in on the baby, and then disappears.

Tremain’s tale comes to a dark end. Pete’s sewing machine, the source of her livelihood, becomes the instrument of her destruction.

Annie does not ask questions while the story unfolds, so all we have is her word via Tremain’s able craft and our imaginations.

Ozon’s main challenge was that his silent, all-seeing narrator had to resolve the questions Annie did not ask in order to fabulize this fairy tale into pictures. The central conceit still requires an audience to suspend disbelief. But unlike a DreamWorks extravaganza, for instance, Ozon’s sophisticated technical wizardry brings off what is essentially a discreet domestic story.

Gangsters of love

Daisy Kenyon 1947 Twentieth Century Fox (99 minutes) produced and directed by Otto Preminger; cinematography, Leon Shamroy; set decoration by Thomas Little and Walter M. Scott; edited by Louis Loeffler; screenplay by David Hertz, based on the novel by Elizabeth Janeway.

This is a love triangle tale told as a detective story, with beautifully stylized mis-en-scène, camera work and lighting, a keen eye for detail, and a seasoning of social issues. 

These issues include extramarital sex, child abuse, and the psychological injuries of soldiers coming home from war. The movie also comments on the racist treatment of American-born and -raised Nisei Japanese, a number of whom served with distinction in Europe.

The plot is straightforward. Daniel O’Mara (Dana Andrews) is a bright, ambitious lawyer from a hardscrabble background who married into the family of prominent Manhattan attorneys and became a partner in the family firm.

His skills as a litigator and lobbyist carry the firm. He patronizes his law partner father-in-law—‘Sugarplum,’ ‘Dew Drop,’ or ‘Walking Dead’ Coverly (Nicholas Joy), the apparent lightweight heir to a legal legend father—as well as his neurotic Upper East Side society wife, Lucille (Ruth Warrick).

Played by the low-key Andrews, the star of Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic Laura and William Wyler’s Oscar-sweeping The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), O’Mara at first comes off as a confident, entitled alpha-type used to getting his way.

The O’Mara family dynamic is complex. O’Mara’s 13- and 11-year old daughters, Rosamund (Peggy Ann Garner) and Marie (Connie Marshall), call him ‘Dan’ rather than ‘Dad.’ They take their cues from him in gaming their emotionally insecure mother. Rosamund challenges her mother for Dan’s affection; Lucille takes out her frustration at being patronized by Dan and outplayed by the girls by physically abusing Marie.

Dana Andrews, Peggy Ann Garner, Conniie Marshall, Nicholas Joy and Ruth Warrick in Daisy Kenyon. 

Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) is the ‘other woman.’ Kenyon, O’Mara’s long-time mistress, is a professional illustrator who lives and works in a dream Greenwich Village walkup apartment of yesteryear—the more dreamlike for being on a West 12th Street corner created on a Hollywood studio lot.

Despite their history, her feelings for O’Mara and everything he tells her, Kenyon knows that he will never divorce his wife and leave his comfortable circumstances to be with her. He has too good a set-up as things are.

Kenyon has been seeing Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda), whom she met socially. Lapham, an Army master sergeant, is a Yankee hull designer from Cape Cod who joined the Army after his wife’s death in an automobile accident at the beginning of the war. He was affected by his war experience in Europe, wounded twice, and stayed in the service in Germany after the war, depressive and still not over his wife’s death.

Kenyon feels that she must get her life on track by breaking up finally with her charming, attractive lover who is never going to leave his wife and family to be with her, and making a relationship with a partner who will, such as the Christopher Marlowe-quoting, ‘nice but a little unstable’ Lapham.

She also appears to have a close relationship with Mary Angelus (Martha Stewart), a fashion model with whom she works. Angelus is lovely in black and white and gets a lot more screen time than usual bit-part characters. This has suggested to some critics that Preminger meant to intimate Kenyon’s ambiguous sexual orientation, at a time when the movie industry’s morals code put the topic strictly off limits.

(Preminger was among the first Hollywood directors to test the limits of industry self-censorship which had been rigorously enforced since 1934.)

Kenyon and the audience can see that Lapham has unresolved psychological problems—a ‘project’ for her. His directness and intensity appeal to her, not to mention Fonda’s distinctive open, earnest face. The actor conveys his character’s subtle turn of mind through a wry smile similar to that on the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Voltaire.

Lapham knows that he needs to come to terms with the loss of his wife and his war experiences and start his life over in a stable relationship with a partner.

O’Mara’s problem—and the main story line—is that his ideal life, which includes a perfect wife and family, a loving mistress, and successful, high-powered career, comes apart at the seams when each begins to tug him in a different direction and looks less than ‘perfect,’ ‘loving,’ and ‘successful.’

These characterizations hint at the outcome. The scenes develop in long takes which invite viewers in rather than telegraph pat judgments. The threat of violence lies just beneath the veneer of civility; at times, this civility has an edge. This gives the story dramatic tension and lends to the film noir atmosphere, but there are no guns or saps; nor are there clear good guys or bad guys. Preminger does not tip his hand as to how the story will end until the final moment.

By placing Crawford between these two strong, understated male leads, Preminger tones down the operatic, sometimes freakish affectations her performances take on with lesser lights and uses her iconic star quality to full effect: she is a thorough professional and a great subject to shoot. It is fun to watch these three actors work together.

Among the period and place details are O’Mara’s exchanges with overworked postwar New York cabbies in beat-up prewar cabs (no new civilian models were built during the war). The Nisei reference comes when O’Mara decides to represent pro bono a decorated Nisei soldier whose California farm was ‘legally stolen’ from him while his family was interned and he was serving in Italy.

Also, visit to a studio mock-up of Manhattan’s storied Stork Club includes cameos of radio star and gossip columnist Walter Winchell and New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons. Broadway boulevardier writer Damon Runyon and actor John Garfield are sitting at the bar in the background.

Speak to me of love

Who’s That Knocking at My Door 1968 U.S. (90 minutes) written and directed by Martin Scorsese, with Mardik Martin and Richard H. Coll; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker.

Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, is like a teaser to the body of his work that followed.

It has Scorsese’s mobile, inquisitive camera eye, his ingenuity for telling a story with pictures, his stylistic use of popular music, and his male Italian-American New York neighborhood characters. It also is a movie about movies, filled with references to and discussions of classic movies, scenes and actors.

The story is a simple boy-meets-girl formula. J.R., a young, working class Sicilian-American like the boys Scorsese grew up with in his neighborhood on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy, meets The Girl, a bright, attractive, well-educated uptown girl, on the Staten Island Ferry. They have a brief relationship which their vast cultural differences probably doom from the start.

Harvey Keitel stars in his first feature role as The Boy, J.R. The Girl is Zina Bethune, a dancer and successful soap opera actress.

The story focuses most on the boys’ background. Scorsese knows this well, particularly the boys’ Manichean view of woman. The movie opens with images of The Holy Mother, from the ceramic Madonna on the bureau to J.R.’s mother (Catherine Scorsese, the director’s mother) whom the camera watches prepare food for a family meal and feed five children. Yet the boys’ hangout—8th Ward Pleasure Club, Private—is replete with centerfold images of wanton sex goddesses. And the boys’ main topic of conversation is ‘broads’—female objects of their sexual fantasies whom they should never dream, much less dare, to marry.

The holy mother on the one hand—church doctrine makes clear that the divine conception was an entirely unerotic, automatic transaction undertaken to make God a man (as presumably were the boys’ own origins); and on the other, the pleasure-giving whore, with sisters and other off-limits relations sexless in the middle. This view clearly makes ‘dating’ and ‘petting’ fraught subjects.   

Coming out of a movie theater together just having seen Rio Bravo (1959), The Girl comments to J.R. on the character played by Angie Dickinson:

‘I really liked the girl in that picture.’

‘Well let me tell you something. The girl in that picture was a broad!’

‘What do you mean, abroad?’

‘A broad! You know, there are girls, and then there are broads.’

The scene cuts to J.R.s visually interpreted definition of ‘a broad,’ a fantasia of J.R. and four prostitutes (Anne Collette, Tsuai Yu-lan, Saskia Holleman and Marieka) having sex, cut-choreographed to Jim Morrison and the Doors’ The End.

The street scene resumes:

‘You know, a broad isn’t really a virgin, you know what I mean? You play around with them, you don’t marry a broad, you know what I mean?’

‘Come on, you don’t mean that?’

‘Oh I mean it. Sure I mean it.’

These words and attitudes, which bear a catechismal echo of fatherly advice, frame The Girl’s ‘secret,’ later told in shots and stills cut-choreographed to The Dubs’ doo wop Don't Ask Me (To Be Lonely) when revealed at the film’s dénouement.

The matter comes down to a consideration of the enchanting creature who, dressed in fantastic expectations, is just another being as mystified in her own way as any male could be. What makes Scorsese’s telling so striking is that while he is so entirely of the boys and their world, he shows us this girl, mystified in her own way, with Ingmar Bergman-like insight and sensitivity.

Bethune is one of the wonders of this remarkable picture. Scorsese said that Bergman’s films had influenced him as a student. Apart from her Nordic looks, Bethune would be an easy fit in a Bergman movie because she has a lively, intelligent, expressive face that also would have made her ideal in silent movies. It is easy to imagine falling in love with her. In this work, Scorsese gets great work out of her: he watches her very closely and his camera loves her.

The film, which began as Scorsese’s thesis, can feel like a patchwork because the finished work is a combination of at least four distinct shoots between 1964 and 1968. The soundtrack is the first clue: it ranges from early 1960s bubblegum doo wop and rhythm-and-blues to The Doors’ spooky The End, first released in 1967. The final title, which changed several times during the film’s long gestation period, derives from the song Who's That Knocking? by the New York-area rockabilly band The Genies. Another tipoff is that Keitel changes from the kid–looking character (aged 25) he appears to be in some scenes to the more knowing adult male (aged 29) in others. This serendipitous tic lends mystique to his character.

The film has an interesting backstory.

Scorsese’s first shoot was the party scene edited to Ray Barretto’s 1963 hit Latin song El Watusi. The highly stylized four-minute scene begins as a slow pan from left to right and turns into a slow motion dance, in which about a dozen young men in sharp suits horse around with pistols at a drinking party in an apartment. It looks and feels as though it were a test run for Goodfellas (1990). Scorsese is among the revelers.

The following February or March (1965), Scorsese shot his main boy-meets-girl story with J.R. and his friends Joey (Lennard Kuras) and Sally ‘Gaga’ (Michael Scala) but no girl. At this stage, The Girl, whom J.R.’s friends never meet, is an unseen presence, the reason for J.R.’s distracted attitude as the trio kill time horsing around in the ‘hood and take a side trip to rural Copake, New York, two hours north of the city in the Berkshires.

About two years later, Scorsese cast Bethune as The Girl, shot her scenes with Keitel, and edited these scenes into the existing work. This version exhibited at the Chicago film festival in November 1967 as I Call First.

Distributor Joseph Brenner subsequently bought the film on the condition that Scorsese add a ‘nudie scene’ to increase the film’s marketability. Scorsese was in Europe in the spring of 1968; he brought Keitel to Amsterdam where they shot the J.R. fantasy sequence, which out-[Jean-Luc] Godards Godard—as most of the rest of the film does anyway. It opened that fall in New York as Who’s That Knocking At My Door.

It is hard not to think this lovely-made, free flowing scene influenced the scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! (1980) in which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard has a drunken episode in a Saigon hotel room.

There is a lot more to discover, appreciate and enjoy in this movie. It is far from perfect, but it does many good things amazingly well and intimates the great things that followed it.

Additional music credits:

Jenny Take a Ride, covered by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels (opening scene)

I've Had It, The Bell Notes

Shotgun, Jr. Walker and the All Stars

Ain't That Just Like Me? The Searchers

The Plea, The Chantels