Charlotte Rampling has a louche aura that will never dissipate. I have met other celebrities, hung out with them before or after press screenings, at festivals, Isabelle Huppert and Jon Ham come to mind, but it was my brief encounter with Ms. Rampling that left me wishing I had said something witty, along the lines of, “I discovered when I watched Night Porter that there is a correlation between power and sexual desire. I mean, sex without power structures is just fucking to have an orgasm. Good sex requires transgression, not permission nor equality,” at which point I imagine her breaking out into a husky better version than the original Marlene Dietrich rendition of “Wenn Ich etwas wunschen wurde…. .”

Yes, Charlotte Rampling made me “etwas wunschen,” in a way that continues to surprise me these many years later. When I met her, the sun was setting over the Hudson River, of which we had obstructed views from the penthouse perch where the soiree was hosted. People with influence mingled and drank French champagne over canapes and the Getty photographers prowled around the edges like crows looking to swoop in, if anything glittery caught their eyes, to center their lens on, to take a picture of for the record.

Ms. Rampling was tall, I suppose she always will be tall, but her bedroom eyes were a little more sleepy, although still sultry, and her cheek bones provided a classic feline frame. I was relieved to see that there were no lip injections and she was recognizable, like a finely sculpted marble statue that has weathered the hail storms and the unrelenting sun. She was not striving to freeze herself or to remove the marks of time, unlike Isabelle Huppert , who seems to be perpetually 44. There is always something disconcerting about a face with no marks, no smile lines, no spots, perhaps like a book that is never finished and leaves you wondering, “but what happened? Is there a punch line?” A good novel always surprises you at the end, provides an “Ah-ha moment,” that redeems the investment of your time as a reader. I recently read the Booker Prize winning Kairos and for the life of me couldn’t figure out why I should care about this young East German woman having an affair for many years with a man older than her father until the last page, and then I thought, “Oh, that was brilliant. I should read that again more carefully.” A very good book make makes you want to go back, to pay more attention, to connect the dots.

 You want to say to anyone over 51, “Please tell me your story, let me see your battle scars and I will show you mine.” I do not want anyone to be stuck at 44, a horrible age no matter how you look at it, for most women. The children are still at home, you have no bandwidth for yourself, your husband ignores you, like a comfortable armchair that should be sat upon but he prefers to stretch out on the sofa with plenty of distance between the two of you. You live in the same house but in adjacent spaces. He has taken up golf, you have taken up yoga between driving the teens to their after-school activities, grocery shopping and the endless errands that consume your days. Did I mention the dog?

Jon Ham was, surprisingly for the “Most Handsome Man in America,” rather non-descript. It could be that when I met him he was traveling “incognito,” not wanting to attract attention to himself. I was at a film festival, at an agent’s party and his latest film was premiering the next morning. He described the movie he was in as a Sci Fi film, and when I pushed further, confessed he was the lead actor. I am a slow monkey and thought, “Oh, another indie film premier,” even after I watched the film, which I liked very much, I did not connect the dots. The critics said it was “claustrophobic,” which made me laugh. It made me wonder if they have never lived with the dying, who do suck the air out of a room, never cared for someone with a terminal life sentence, a person with a tendency to live in the past, as most of us will at some point when our glory days are behind us? I liked the film and how it offered a shot at immortality through frozen memories because essentially aren’t we our memories, the stories we tell, and not our bodies? Our stories live on, if they are interesting enough, long after our bodies have disintegrated or been incinerated.

But back to Ms. Rampling. She is for me the female version of Sean O’Connor: sophisticated, debonair, subtle, with excellent sartorial discretion. She was mysterious and courageous when she walked across the bridge with Dirk Bogarde. She is walking away from bourgeois domesticity and marriage, from everything polite society approves of. She cannot go back once she starts to walk across the bridge. The Criterion Collection desdribes the film as, “Operatic and disturbing, The Night Porter deftly examines the lasting social and psychological effects of the Nazi regime.”

This makes me pause. Are all relationships that incorporate power and dominance a vestige of the Nazi regime? Are most sexual people actually secret closet Nazis because they like to be dominated or to dominate? I disagree with Criterion and would say that it is a film that examines sex between adults and its enhancing transgressions, similar to Last Tango in Paris or even A Street Car Named Desire. Does this mean Marlon Brando was a closet Nazi just waiting for the right roles to express his true fascistic nature? I always thought he was hot in a way that Hugh Grant was not.

Or, in our striving for equality, do we deny that there is hierarchy, power structures both visible and invisible? Is equality always the penultimate goal, not only in the board room and the classroom and the bedroom, or will we allow ourselves to explore what has become forbidden?

If we dare, who will stop us? 

Thoughts on Muriel’s Wedding and the Question of Whether Marriage Is a Competitive Sport?

My mother’s two favorite movies were Gone With The Wind and Muriel’s Wedding. I recently rewatched Muriel’s Wedding, thirty years after it was released in theaters in 1994, while soaring across the Atlantic en route to a film festival with my husband. It felt like a yellow, hand-written message sealed with a cork in a green glass bottle bobbing along with the ocean current.

Muriel’s world is similar to the one my mother grew-up in: marriage gave you status, an identity outside of your parents, a new name, perhaps access to money, and the right to engage in sex without incurring the labels that are easily assigned to women who are “easy”: slut, whore, cocksucker,… no need to continue.  These labels are bandied about between Muriel’s friends in a never ending need to determine social standing and dominance, which rests largely on being sexually attractive and having a committed mate.  Muriel’s desire to be a bride, to be successful, “to win,” as she confesses to her aspiring Olympian husband whom she has hastily married, is an obsession that she shares with all of her peers from her small, backward Australian community. For Muriel, marriage is an obsession from the opening scene where Muriel catches the brides maids’ bouquet to the almost immediate reveal that the marriages, whether of her girlfriends or of her own parents, are hollow if not nightmarish. There is no fidelity, no loyalty, no empathy, no respect and certainly no tenderness, support nor love. 

The death of her mother by overdose after her father leaves her for another woman and blames her for his failures, is too much to bear and her death opens Muriel’s eyes to the dark side of marriage. Her mother had set the lawn on fire and like Anna Karenina, decided to end her sojourn on earth. She never expressed anger or frustration, even when Muriel wiped out the family bank account and her other children refuse to help around the house. She fetches, she serves, and she shows up with gifts, which are never acknowledged. In exchange they lie to her, insult her and berate her. She loved those around her but they do not reciprocate. She is like a mountain lake that at the end of the movie has dried up for lack of any rain. 

Marriage was a risky gamble that could lead to early death, alcoholism, and poverty.  My mother frequently reminded me about her best friend Charlene, who married a Catholic and had four children, resulting in an early death. Or her Aunt Leona who died at the hands of her husband, Herman Hainney, because he had fallen for another woman and divorce was not an option. Or cousin Sarah who did divorce and was exiled to Texas to live in shame. Or there was my paternal grandmother Ethel, who took to the bottle after the death of my grandfather, who had been the local dentist in the small hamlet of Buhl, Idaho, leaving her broke with four children to raise. My mother always ranted against my grandmother that she didn’t leave my grandfather and I was always baffled at the accusation; where would Grandma Vondah have gone? Chicago? Kansas City? She had cousins in Kansas City but not real family, her mother and sisters who created a tight web of support in the hard scrabble years of the 1930s and 40s in Ash Grove, Missouri. My mother knew that to get a divorce was to shame your family, your children, a shame that was inescapable and scarred you for life as an outcast. 

Like Muriel, my mother was proud of her wedding dress and it still hangs in a back closet at my house, even though my mother has been reduced to an urn full of ashes that sits on a shelf in my garage, next to the photo albums from the 1970s and 1980s, images that are fast fading of cruise trips and road trips and dinner parties that mean little to me. I do not know the people in the pictures beyond their names and memories of my mother cancelling them as she moved up in the world. 

Poverty was the greatest fear and there were three steps to prevent poverty: not having too many children (thank God for birth control), obtaining an education and employment, and marriage. What was high risk was depending solely on a man to provide for you and/or having too many children. Muriel’s mother had too many children, Charlene had too many children. My mother’s problem was not too many children but a husband whose ambition did not match hers. She was not content with a teacher’s salary and did not hide her lust for luxurious cars, fur coats, jewelry, and travel. She needed a partner who could satisfy these urges but was trapped because divorce was taboo and my father was a kind man who enabled her. She couldn’t leave him because what other man would cook, shop, iron, chauffer the children around and still want to have sex at the end of the day? But it wasn’t enough. She wanted the tokens of success that she saw around her and she knew that access was only possible through men and not to her, as a woman. Only men earned six figure salaries, until my mother did it in 1986. She felt like she had won and she had. She was invited to speak at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. She was successful.

The final scene of Muriel’s Wedding is of Muriel and her now wheelchair-bound, best friend Vanda leaving Tortoise Bay together in a taxi. They say goodbye to the plaza, to the tourists, to the high rise apartment buildings that litter the skyline, as they return to Sydney with their friendship intact, their loyalty recovered, their integrity restored. It is a vision of female fidelity and friendship. It is an optimistic end that promises a world in which women can forge identities outside of marriage and family, outside of male dominated relationships, where women can have autonomy and make decisions about their fates.  Muriel will face challenges but she is a gutsy, brave young lady who isn’t going to quit nor be stopped and my impression of Australia from the movie is that an ambitious young woman like Muriel with a little tenacity, a little charm and a little imagination could go far.  

I wonder what Muriel is up to today?

What is this movie about? About a simple man who loves his donkey and his sister? A man who strives to be kind and then becomes mean when his donkey dies and his sister leaves? Is it a story about a sophisticated man who strives for immortality and in the process forgets the Golden Rule? Is the simple man that simple? Is the sophisticated man truly sophisticated? Colum is a composer and musician, he listens to music on his phonograph, his simple house is furnished with objets d’art, such as African masks that dangle from the ceiling, out of place on a verdant Irish island. He knows who Mozart and Beethoven are and he emulates them. That’s much more than what Padriac brings to the table.

Padraic appears simple and his sister, when he asks her, reassures him that he isn’t but people mistake his kindness for stupidity. Certainly, I did. It is a common mistake. Padraic finds that the crueler he becomes the more respect he receives. He experiments with cruelty, sending one of Colum’s students away after telling him his father has been hit by a bread truck. It is a baseless lie but it accomplishes his goal: the student disappears clearing the way for Padriac to rekindle his friendship with Colum.  The lie is a means to an end.

Colum has no talent, since his music does resemble the wailing of banshees (not that I have ever heard a banshee wail, although I have seen Suzie and the Banshees perform live) but most people cannot distinguish between talent and empty noises; witness most pop and rock music of the 20th and 21st century. The priest asks during both confession scenes if he is keeping the despair at bay or is Colum expressing his despair in music that lacks melody or beauty? The priest intimates that Colum is responsible for his despair but Colum makes clear he is not interested in managing his despair but prefers to wallow in it. He cannot even remember nor recount his many sins, such as self-mutilation, much less acknowledge or address his despair verging on nihilism.

What is the significance of the self-mutilation? The priest declares it is a sin. Why is it a sin and what does Colum’s perverse decision to snip off all five of his digits reveal to us about his personality? Why would he swear to harm himself and not his old friend, Padraic, whom he has exiled socially on a small island, on which there is no escape nor alternative to the local pub where both are regulars? Surely, threatening to kill Padriac or his sister would have been more to the point and effective? In self-interest, Padriac could have left Colum alone, but Colum does not threaten to harm Padriac nor Siobhan. He threatens to harm himself, in an act of manipulation that Padraic cannot imagine; self-harm is not in his repertory because he is not psychologically sophisticated enough nor cruel enough to intentionally hurt himself or others. In fact, many tell Colum he has gone “mental.” It is only when Padriac’s beloved donkey Jenny dies as a result of Colum’s self-mutilation does Pardiac snap and come around to recognizing the hatred that has been kindled in his heart. But this hatred is not turned inward but outward towards the object of his suffering.

It is when Padriac experiences the rejection of his apology, the rejection of his attempt to reset the friendship and put the escalation aside, and the unintended death of his beloved donkey, along with the departure of his sister Siobhan, that he is able to tell Colum what his plan is and he says it loud enough for the entire village to hear, including the policeman: He will burn Colum’s house down, preferably with him in it Sunday afternoon at two.

What is the difference between mean and cruel in the movie? Padriac is mean when he tells the lie to the music student but he is not cruel. His act of meanness accomplishes a goal. Cruelty, in contrast, is the desire to inflict lingering pain that haunts the recipient either mentally or physically. You can understand why someone is mean, see their motives, perhaps have empathy for that person but cruelty is motivated by malice and the end goal is to inflict pain that lingers; pain is both the means and the end of cruelty and it does not need to justify itself.

Padriac is good for his word and at two o’clock on Sunday afternoon the house is ablaze with Colum in it. But this is not an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth revenge, as he does not harm Colum’s dog in an act of revenge for the death of Jenny the adorable and beloved donkey. Rather, Padriac declares war against Colum, to the death. Like the soldiers on the mainland fighting between themselves, the war will drag on with no end in sight except for more bloodshed. Whatever triggered the fight no longer matters; we are now in a state of war, the catalysts and antecedents long forgotten in the fog of vengeance. The Irish have entered a cycle of violence between the Protestants and the Catholics; Padriac and Colum have also entered into a cycle of violence that I am sure will leave one of them dead and my guess is, it’s not Padriac.  

Colum’s desire for immortality, for student worship, for his superiority to be confirmed at the expense of Padriac’s friendship is the basis of his despair and the nihilism that will swallow him whole. Padriac will live with the hope that this sister will return and hope is the very thing that Colum lacks, along with his fingers. Because why would a composer and fiddler chop off his fingers? Vincent Van Gogh might have cut off his ear but it didn’t stop him from painting. Colum chops his fingers off to spite himself and his aspirations as an artist.  Why is he spiteful? Because he knows when he dies, no one will attend his funeral, no one will dig a grave for him and place a marker. No one will remember his compositions. In short, he is lower than a simple ass who was loved.

Ultimately, it is Padriac who earns our respect and our derision is left for Colum, who stands alone on the shore, back to his burnt-out house, no fingers on his right hand, coat singed from the flames, facing an infinite ocean with the whisperer of death to his right. She has prophesied that two people will die this weekend, inseminating an embryo of fear that it will be Siobhan and Padriac but justice on the island is more complicated. 

Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Churchill meet in a purgatorial netherworld through deepfake animation in the Russian director's new film.

Fairytale, director Aleksandr Sokurov’s first film in seven years, arrived at its world premiere at last year’s Locarno Film Festival with little advance notice. A fanciful title and a cryptic artist’s statement was all most viewers had to go on when encountering what is, as I wrote in my festival report, arguably “the Russian master’s most left-field offering yet: a speculative fiction made with deepfake technology that imagines an encounter between Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill.”

Composed almost entirely of lightly animated archival footage, Fairytale plays like a belated companion piece to Sokurov’s series of biographical and mythological portrait films (collectively known as the “Tetralogy of Power”) that explore the psychological nuances of tyranny. But whereas those films centered on single subjects (Hitler, Lenin, Hirohito, and Faust), the director’s latest brings together four figures—plus Jesus and Napoleon Bonaparte—that altered the course of world history. Set in a monochrome netherworld, with subtly shifting backdrops fashioned from a variety of 20th-century paintings, sketches, and still photographs, the film unfolds in extended dialogue passages that find these men exchanging insults and morbid barbs (“Stalin smells of sheep,” goes one of Hitler’s characteristic jabs) as their surroundings crumble from on high and the souls of their victims cry out from beyond the grave. In a perverse bait-and-switch, Sokurov forgoes any sort of dramatic historical appraisal, opting instead to stage a kind of comedic burlesque in which three of the world’s most notorious dictators are reduced to disparaging each other’s body odor, while one comparatively well-respected statesman—seen in a near-constant state of worry over his next call to the Queen—assumes the role of eternal simp. A history film unlike any other, it’s proof that while Sokoruv’s productivity may be slowing, he is in no way resting on his laurels.

Read more on  Notebook Interview

Fairytale is released in  the United States, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands by Juno Films.

Juno Films acquires Mark Cousins’ bold new documentary looks at death in the atomic age, and life too.