Le Midi, je t'aime

The Man in the Hat (2020) relates its hero’s travels through the Midi’s picturesque summer landscapes to light touchstones to memory. With poignant and comic vignettes in mime and an amazing soundtrack, all is order and beauty, luxury, peace, and pleasure.

The story at first feels as though a recurring dream in which The Man (Ciarán Hinds) drives a Fiat 500 on the narrow roads of rural southeastern France; on the seat next to him is the framed black-and-white photo of a young woman. The audience experiences the foreign life around The Man with his visitor’s reserve. His encounters are mostly in mime, like French classic Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot. As The Man makes his way, he draws out people’s best qualities and brings strangers together. Released in the UK in September 2020 and in the US last May, this unusual and entertaining sleeper deserves to be seen.

Camargue dogs (Richard Henry, Conor Levitt, James Lailey, Sylvain Thirolle, and Mike Pickering) in The Man in the Hat (2020)

The story gets off to a quick start when The Man flees Marseilles pursued by five bald reservoir dogs in an orange and blue Citroën Dyane. The men dumped a body-sized object in the harbor and then realized that The Man, dining at an outside café, had seen them. The Man and the audience recall an earlier tabloid headline “Meurtre parmi les Mafieux à Marseilles” (Murder Among the Marseilles Mafiosi). A woman in a roadside café (Claire Tran) later fans his fears when he overhears her stage-whisper to a friend (Laurie Ravaux) an oh-my-god! story that involves her husband and the Mafia and ends “Pouf! Disparu!” The Man continues his sentimental journey mindful only to keep out of the gang’s sight.

A café patron (Claire Tran) tells a friend (Laurie Ravaux) an oh-my-god! story that ends “Pouf! Disparu!” in The Man in the Hat (2020)

The Man at first experiences the narrative in images and music much as the audience does; the few spoken words throughout the film are incidental and in French (with subtitles). The Man may be a foreigner, though not necessarily so. The story pivots rather than plots; its episodes feature a cast whose performances are as rich and surprising as the film’s music.

An attractive middle-aged local, The Woman (Sasha Hails), rides a bicycle in and out of episodes. An eccentric who resembles Fedor Dostoevsky and whom the credits identify as The Damp Man (Stephen Dillane), appears at first depressed and alone and later much improved with a vivacious partner, The Chef (Muna Otaru), and a champion chicken. A pair of gay farmers (Sam Cox and Didier Bourguignon) are masters of pantomime, and a pair of “Measurers” (Amit Shah and Zoé Bruneau) uniformed as local government or utility employees keep turning up compulsively measuring roads and public spaces but more specifically each other. A uniformed Official (Xavier Laurent) appears when needed to validate “documents”.

Other characters appear in vignettes: The Hotel Manager (Brigitte Roüan), The Biker (Maïwenn), The Older Man (Joseph Marcell) and The Older Woman (Sheila Reid), a priest (Jeremy Herrin), moving nuns, a group of cyclists, actors staging “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and not least the five men in the Dyane (a car last produced in France in 1983).

But good music is the lifeblood of this film. Musicians turn up along the route, from a zydeco duo on small local ferry, to the tenor Mark Padmore breaking into song (“Venezia”) at an auberge dinner table accompanied by a classical guitarist (Dario Rossetti Bonell), to the singer Matilda Homer and two others in The Man’s Fiat singing “Memory” which Homer wrote for the movie, to women garage mechanics singing of lost cars and lost cigarettes, to The Nadine Lee Band performing Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” in a village square, to a klezmer band at a village festival.

Two lovely aural details are a recurring theme reminiscent of those Nino Rota wrote for Federico Fellini (though Alain Romans’s “Quel temps fait-il à Paris?” used by Tati may come nearer the mark), and a warm jazz saxophone like Cannonball Adderley’s on several numbers, including “The Pizza Van” in a scene in which The Man orders a pizza from a food van and The Damp Man and The Chef dance while making it.

The Official “validates” The Man’s journey which the latter summarized on the back of the woman’s photo with the opening lines of Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au Voyage” (the poem’s refrain is quoted in our opening):

“Mon enfant, ma sœur,
Songe à la douceur
D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!”

(My child, my sister,
Muse on the sweetness
Of living together there!)

The Man in the Hat 2020 U.K. (95 minutes) Open Palm Films/Rather Good Films/Gravitas Ventures. Directed and written by John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck; music by Warbeck; casting by Nanw Rowlands; cinematography by Kanamé Onoyama; editing by Peter Boyle; produced by Daniel-Konrad Cooper and Dominic Dromgoole.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Fifty years ago director Robert Altman put a glam 1970s couple in an unglam picture titled McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). The film is worth seeing today because Altman’s magic and the ability and star power of Warren Beatty’s John McCabe and Julie Christie’s Mrs. [Constance] Miller shine through just as freshly as they did fifty years ago.

For an audience that knows Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), the Coens’ True Grit (2010) and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), and Quentin Tarantino’s neo-spaghetti Westerns, it might be difficult to see this film as a break from the genre as it was seen in its day. Fairer perhaps to classify movies like this in their own sub-genre of “auteur Westerns”; the trails of this and other genres were blazed by auteurs finding their own way. If anything, Altman’s focus here on his two stars is a break from his characteristic narrative flow of multiple simultaneous story lines.

Part of the unglam and wonder of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is that the filmstock was “fogged”, a technique which makes the images grainy. Another part is that Altman shot the film in a frontier town built for the project from trees felled and milled on the site of a formerly unspoiled location in British Columbia. During the fall and winter of shooting, the crew expanded the set from a tent camp to a small town. The structures are not theatrical flats: Altman’s crew lived on the site and people building the sets appear in the background of the action: casual clothing and tonsorial styles from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s sometimes followed received notions of how frontiersmen dressed. The fall rain and mud and winter snow and cold also are real.

The film opens with McCabe riding into Bearpaw to Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song”. This gives the picture a 1970s period feel. The viewer sees little more than a tent mining camp with a dominant church. The well-dressed stranger has big plans to open a saloon with a gaming parlor and a whorehouse. The innkeeper Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois) and the other locals guess that McCabe is a professional gambler from the glib way he deals cards. Word soon goes round that he is a dangerous gunman: Bearpaw has no sheriff and no one else in town wears a sidearm or carries a gun. McCabe brings in three whores he bought from a pimp in another town to get his business going. The women are far from pinup models. But the locals long without women are no less impressed by “the girls” than they are by the rest of McCabe’s effects.

Before long, an experienced madam brings her own stable to town. Mrs. Miller, from London purportedly by way of San Francisco, sees right off that McCabe wows the locals because he can patter circles around frontier miners. But he lags a fur piece behind sophisticated city folk. In her secretly opium-assisted semi-retirement, Mrs. Miller also knows a male ally gives her the best shot at growing a nest egg. McCabe and Mrs’ Miller’s combined services delight the locals and their relationship develops with their little “empire”.

But no Eden lasts forever. An American corporate interest smells money in them thar hills and offers to buy out McCabe. McCabe reckons he can hem and haw, scratch his head, stroke his chin, and shake down the city slickers. Mrs. Miller knows he can’t; she warns him. Men with guns turn up. McCabe’s high noon tolls in a blizzard while the townspeople bond putting out an accidental fire that threatened their unused church.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller 1971 U.S. (120 minutes) David Foster Productions/Warner Bros. Directed by Robert Altman; screenplay by Altman and Brian McKay from the novel “McCabe” by Edmund Naughton; cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond; editing by Lou Lombardo; music by Leonard Cohen; produced by Mitchell Brower and David Foster.

Poetic license

Babylon Berlin 2017- Germany. X Filme Creative Pool; ARD Degeto (German public broadcasting); Beta Film; Sky; Netflix. Created and written by Henk Handloegten, Tom Tykwer, and Achim von Borries, based on the eight-novel Gereon Rath crime series by Volker Kutscher.

The creators of the German television series Babylon Berlin take inspired and energetic leaps of the imagination to put modern viewers in the midst of feverishly vibrant, spiritually-ailing Weimar-era Berlin.

Weimar-era Berlin Alexanderplatz is resurrected in Babylon Berlin.

Rather than strictly follow the popular series of “neo-noir” crime novels on which it is based, showrunners Henk Handloegten, Tom Tykwer, and Achim von Borries have taken poetic license to reimagine Volker Kutscher’s characters and plots, as well as period and historical details, in a highly stylized way that suggests to modern viewers a time perhaps not unlike our own.

The cast of this ambitious project, from its principals to information-peddling drag queens and incidental street urchins, is as fascinating as the set at the center of the drama, Berlin’s reimagined and restored 1929 Alexanderplatz and its former famous police “Rote Burg” (Red Castle) headquarters destroyed in the Second World War. The series is shot at the legendary Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, where F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch made films at Universum Film A.G. (UFA)—and Alfred Hitchcock learned his art. A major plot point takes place at UFA on the set of an Expressionist film made for the series. And, in addition to snatches of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 “The Threepenny Opera”, the series soundtrack features reimaginings of the period sound, by Johnny Klimek, showrunner Tom Tykwer, and Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry who appears in a glitzy cabaret singing his own “Bitter Sweet” in German (the show uses several Ferry numbers in German).

What holds Police Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) together is his job investigating crimes in Weimar-era Berlin, a young Sam Spade in the making.

At the center of the story is Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), a police inspector originally seconded to Berlin from Köln where his father is police commissioner and a close associate of the mayor. Rath also is a former line soldier who survived the Allies’ hellish final 100-day offensive on the Siegfried Line; he suffers from post-traumatic stress which he treats with unconventional therapy and under-the-counter drugs. Like his tattered and dispirited country, Rath has other issues. What holds him together is his job investigating crimes in Berlin. His focus lands him on some of the most sensitive and complicated cases—cases for which typically there are no legal solutions.  

Police Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) submits to unconventional therapy by Dr. Anno Schmidt (Jens Harzer) to treat his post-traumatic stress from the First World War.

Anglo-American movie audiences are used to seeing the horrific effects on their countries’ soldiers inflicted by the Terrible Hun of the First World War. Here we see the other side, the remains of a German generation who set out with the same high spirits as their opponents, fought as hard and suffered similar frightful losses and injuries, but lost their war and returned home with a rifle and the clothes on their back at best cynical, like Rath’s police supervisor Bruno Wolter (Peter Kurth), shell-shocked like Rath and former policeman turned snitch Franz Krajewski (Henning Peker), or missing limbs, to a country in social, moral, political, and economic turmoil. 

Communists take to the streets on May Day 1929 in Babylon Berlin.

Rath’s investigations escort viewers down the mean streets of Weimar-era Berlin, a young world capital the writer Alexander Döblin called at that time “the Brandenburg Nineveh”, where it was said that no one who lived there was born there and everyone was in a hurry to grow up. This brash capital is developing into the city it would be in new century. In addition to Rath and his police colleagues we see Russian emigres and Soviet Chekists; German monarchists and nationalist-conservatives who want to rearm Germany’s army illegally with Soviet help; German leftists and fledgling Nazis; organized crime groups; gays and the underground sex market; movie people, reporters, and everyday Berliners just getting by.

Mutual curiosity brings Police Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) together with Charlotte “Lotte” Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries) in Babylon Berlin.

Among the everyday Berliners is Charlotte “Lotte” Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a young woman who lives in “rental barracks” flat shared grudgingly by three generations of her family. Lotte is the household breadwinner. She has a day job as a police stenographer but moonlights as a hostess at a nightclub, a taxi dancer who occasionally turns tricks that can cause bruises. She has the curiosity, smarts, and resourcefulness of a good reporter and aspires to be a police detective at a time when women did not do such work. Lotte’s activities quickly overlap with Rath’s.

August Benda (Matthias Brandt), head of the political police, and his housekeeper Greta Overbeck (Leonie Benesch) broaden the scope of the narrative with serious ultimate consequences for each.

Lotte runs into Greta Overbeck (Leonie Benesch), a childhood friend, on a Berlin street. Greta is a country mouse with a healing jagged Caesarian scar from the baby she had out of wedlock and gave up to adoption. She is looking for work but too modest to share her friend’s moonlighting gig; Lotte finds her a place as a maid in the household of August Benda (Matthias Brandt), who is Jewish and heads the country’s political police. This connection broadens the scope of the narrative with serious ultimate consequences for each.

Imperious Anne-Marie Nyssen (Marie Anne Fliegel, left) and Colonel Gottfried Wendt (Benno Fürmann, right) confer with like-minded nationalist-conservative political insiders in Babylon Berlin.

There is Alfred Nyssen (Lars Eidinger), the adult scion of an influential industrialist family ruled from a castle by his imperious mother Anne-Marie Nyssen (Marie Anne Fliegel). Nyssen sees the stock market crash coming. He wants to enrich himself in his own right and to impress and ultimately revenge himself against his mother and nationalist-conservative political insiders such as Generalmajor Wilhelm Seegers (Ernst Stötzner) and “Colonel” Gottfried Wendt (Benno Fürmann) who do not take him seriously.

Not far from Sam Goldwyn’s Hollywood: Edgar Kasabian “The Armenian” (Misel Maticevic), his wife Esther (Meret Becker), and Walter Weintraub (Ronald Zehrfeld) at the movie premier of their big project.

And there is the ménage-à-trois of Edgar Kasabian “The Armenian” (Misel Maticevic), an organized crime boss and film investor, his wife Esther Korda Kasabian (Meret Becker), a former actress, and Walter Weintraub (Ronald Zehrfeld), a gangster film executive, all of whom would have been at home in Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles.

But this brief dramatis personae barely scratches the surface. The narrative tugs between style, content, and action as it recreates an extraordinary time and actors find ways into characters’ personas high and low; the narrative locks in late in the second series when the scattershot details begin to fall into patterns. Series three wraps with a stylistic flourish that points to the new season four.