The Ninth Gate

If you are familiar with this book, you may wonder why director Roman Polanski was so bent on transforming it into a film.  The book deals with, on the one hand, a club based on the works of a nineteenth–century Frenchman, and, on the other hand, a triptych of rather macabre illustrated tomes written by a seventeenth–century Italian who was burned at the stake.  We are all well aware how many innocents fell victim to inquisitions during that harried time, but this fellow, Aristide Torchia, seems to have had certain forces on his side that led to his downfall.  Yes, those forces.  And if this conceit is not painfully clear from the first few minutes of The Ninth Gate, this is probably not going to be your type of movie.

Regardless of the original novel’s name, the Dumas story line is both secondary and far less compelling (occupations of the idle rich usually are), so Polanski wisely elects to focus on Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) and his journey through a wicked game of cat and mouse.  The problem is that Corso is both the pursued and pursuer, slipping effortlessly from Spain to Portugal and then to Polanski’s beloved France on the trail of three extant copies (the rest were torched with Torchia) of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows.  Depp is particularly skilled at playing down a character’s inner needs in favor of reacting to his environment in a composed manner.  He is never really flustered, although he witnesses both death and evil deeds.  And when he understands a chance encounter in a train with a rather seductive blonde (Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski’s wife) as just that, a chance encounter, we know his character is far too intelligent not to suspect that more devious gears are churning.  Yet for some reason he feels that these gears have been in motion for a while now and that his entanglement is inevitable, as evidenced by the very last action he takes.

Without giving too much away, I should add that Polanski does a little tinkering.  Corso’s book dealer chum Bernie (James Russo) and the “dishy” (to use the film’s terminology) widow Leona Telfer (Lena Olin) are given slightly different roles, with the latter becoming a foil to the green–eyed stranger who keeps running into Corso at opportune times just like, well, a guardian angel.  Then there is the matter of Boris Balkan (Frank Langella), who in the film combines the roles of two of the novel’s personages.  Balkan, a fabulously wealthy man and renowned translator and bibliophile, is seen very early on giving a lecture that Corso finds soporific, but that doesn’t discourage him from accosting Corso and showing him the money.  The favorite subject of Balkan’s priceless shelves just happens to be the alleged collaborator on Torchia’s work.  And if you’re wondering who might be famous enough to have thousands of volumes written about him and still find a reason to help an obscure Italian achieve eternal infamy in the year 1666, of all years, I would recommend rewinding to the beginning to survey the entire audience at Balkan’s lecture.

In the novel Corso has a back story and a soul.  He loved a young Jewish woman, but his love for books and money has come to justify their separation, at least when he doesn’t think about her too much.  Polanski’s Corso, while perfectly cast, remains a shell seeking some kind of form.  Guidance from the stars, belief in the supernatural, skepticism of coincidence and human intentions — all of these may or may not be factors for his actions and statements, which belie his actions.  Corso is not a liar, but he’s not honest with himself or anyone else, and in time he begins to understand that the happiest of men are those whose lives permit them to tell the truth as often as possible.  There is no one to whom he can open up or reveal the mildest traces of humanity and compassion, but we recognize in this condition so many lives bound by invisible, self–imposed rules and past pain that Corso becomes a real person with real problems.  And what he chooses in the end is peace with himself, or whatever is left of it.   

Ae Fond Kiss

Once and rather peremptorily, I hypothesized to a young woman that the realization of love came upon reflection in old age.  And she, a fellow student at this German university, told me in no uncertain terms that I was an unfortunate soul who had not seen the bright side of life.  Well, she was quite wrong about what I had and hadn't seen; and as often happens when those of us prone to pondering come upon what they think is a piece of the truth, I repeated the same proposition to other people (that first student was someone I met and spoke to for thirty minutes who then vanished into oblivion).  Some were just as skeptical; others, more understanding of cranks and their speculation, nodded as if admitting that the plainest idea – and my idea was quite plain – sometimes juts forth like a crag of truth amidst the clouds of doubt.  Yet most of us do not want to find our alpha in our omega: we yearn for experiences of emotion akin to those in this world–famous play of star–crossed lovers, if without the final chapter.  Romance against impossible odds is the finest metaphor we have for forging lifelong human relationships, for beating time by engaging in something that is its superior.  Should you be a little along in years, or even just a particularly insightful if inexperienced person, you know how much easier it is to wait through an entire life for perfection than accept lapsarian shortcomings.  When luck prevails, we catch glimpses of paradise in the form of another mortal who appears as the answer to all the questions we never knew to ask.        

Now you may read a few thousand books and watch a few thousand films in your lifetime, derive from them expectations of plot, characters, and meaning, and then wonder whether we are all bound to certain role-playing modules.  Even for those of us who seek out cinema which (to paraphrase this fine author) alters the film machine and doesn't just feed it, there are a limited number of plausible scenarios.  I will not bore you with a disquisition on what themes arise most frequently, but you can be sure that one of them is forbidden love.  Forbidden not because it is perverse or in violation of some statute on indecency, but forbidden by much higher powers: by fate, by parents, by God.  The Montagues and the Capulets did not approve, and their children could not live in submission and so died in defiance.  Is love worth infringing upon your parents' ideals and dreams?   The question is so fundamental and at the same time so silly that only an example will suffice, which brings us to this fine film.
 

The title is not a misspelling but a quote from a poem by that most quoted of Scottish bards, Robert Burns.  It doesn't really matter what the title is anyway since the plot is formulaic and predictable and yet most of the time perfectly delightful.  The reason for our delight is the chemistry between Casim, the token Easterner (Atta Yaqub), and Roisin, the token Westerner (Eva Birthistle).  They meet in knightly fashion on her territory, a Catholic school where Roisin teaches Casim's younger sister music.  Nothing but the coincidence of location prepares the viewer for this relationship that will blossom, fade, then hopefully blossom again during the course of the film.  Casim’s family is Pakistani and Muslim, although both he and his younger sister, who dreams of studying journalism but will not be given the chance, are fully integrated, accentless natives of Scotland; their older sister is more traditional and already engaged to the son of other Pakistani immigrants on the straight path to becoming a physician.  What they wish for most of all, of course, is the right to choose how to live their lives.  For Casim that means the love of an Irishwoman and a Catholic.

They don’t get that right because that would deprive their parents of their very essence.  Love is great and wonderful and sometimes even blind, and romantic relationships are pieces of our soul that, at life’s end, form something particular, unique, and everlasting.  It may be that we have loved many or none; or maybe there was and will always be only one person for us.  Yet whatever final figure we reach, we will only have one set of parents and one life to make sure they know that we love and appreciate them (if they deserve love and appreciation, which most do).  Going headstrong against their wishes is as self-destructive as a parent’s insistence on being heeded simply because of seniority.  In either case, a reason must be presented and accepted, and if I’m getting a wee too philosophical about the whole matter, that’s because this is purely a matter of philosophy and how to deal with leaving our parents and starting our own life is one of our hardest projects.  Either extreme, complete rejection or compliance, should be avoided, which makes Juliet and her Romeo, while great poetry, a rather pathetic soap opera.

And where does that leave Roisin and Casim, the brainchildren of this fine director?  I cannot say I rightly know what to make of their relationship, improbable as it is because their attenuated music commonality (she is a music instructor, he a deejay) might be, apart from physical attraction, the only thing they share.  Loach loves his political statements and he usually makes them blunt, affable, and correct.  Roisin and Casim are certainly affable, blunt, and flawed, and that renders the whole affair less tragic and more substantial.  Yes, classic Greek tragedy is not real: it is an exaggeration of our emotions into the stratosphere of the gods.  These lovers thankfully don’t come anywhere near the stars.  

Tycoon

For many among us, outlaws will always be heroes.  Not only because most people do not benefit from laws, regardless of the society in which these laws were created, but also because most people during their lifetime do not become fantastically rich, famous, or infamous.  There is little glamour to the quiet, average (and often very good) life which many brave souls are content to pass but which few find inspiring.  Throughout history we have hailed renegades, from Simon Magus to Robin Hood to Jesse James, to the gangsters and goons worshiped by current generations, as the triumph of the simple man over the elite, the rebellion of the downtrodden that halted the unending reign of supremely divine tyrants.  Yet there is nothing bold or revolutionary about the luxurious wealth or hedonistic pursuits which this outlaw eventually flaunts.  Once power has been attained, you will never find a more bourgeois, money-grubbing, rule-oriented manager, since now the laws protect him from, well, other potential revolutionaries.  He is self–serving to the point of justifying his actions by claiming he alone was strong enough to stand up to the authorities and bring them to their knees.  And he will use every legal stipulation and wile to keep his property and influence from the hungry masses whom he invariably shuns.  Since the last twenty years in Russia have seen the mercurial rise of more than one such individual it may be a fine time, on the occasion of the Russian elections, to review this film.

 

The film is based on a novel by Yuri Dubov, who was once the confidant of this billionaire in exile and public enemy of the Russian government denounced as having robbed his fellow citizens blind, deaf, and dumb.*  Whether such thievery actually occurred is less important than whether this life, romanticized as it surely must have been for the screen, could possibly provoke any aesthetic interest in us whatsoever.  The answer is yes, but not for the reasons one might think.  In this version, Berezovsky is given the first name of a philosopher, Platon (Vladimir Mashkov, above) and a last name that is almost that of a rather tremendous but troubled artist, Makovsky.  A little research would tell you that this shift in nomenclature, while elegant, is also not coincidental: in 2004 Berezovsky officially changed his name to Platon Elenin (again a letter shy of a poet’s name).  And all this shifting and guising has much to do with the subject matter, a traditional game of oneupmanship during the years in which the smart exploited what the law neglected, and found a way to circumvent the few stipulations it did contain.  So perhaps we should not be surprised that the novelty of unlimited capitalistic profit in post–glasnost Russia did not yield a new way of spinning an old greedy tale of young (and old) greedy men and the women who love them.  And in the same way, each action by Platon and his gang of cronies, a harmless bunch of smart but ostracized men, is given added weight by the revolution around them.  

The fictional Platon is a master of disguise, mood, and manipulation, as would be, we surmise, anyone moving in such dark and dangerous circles.  He emerges from this maelstrom in one piece thanks in no small part to his charisma, played up fabulously by Mashkov, a handsome and talented actor who exudes what one reviewer calls “reptilian charm” (there is no better description).  Detailing the plot might dissuade you from seeing the film, so I’ll just say that events do not unravel chronologically and, despite some half-hearted attempts, Platon’s love life remains secondary to his financial profile.  Nevertheless, the political implications of his rise to prominence and its rather minor subplots are not nearly as interesting as Platon’s own maneuvering, inevitable betrayal, and apotheosis – a story which, in the end, should sound extremely familiar.  Are the characters three-dimensional?  No, and for a very good reason: although one-man shows sometimes feature guest performers, these sidekicks only get billing far from the center and in very small print.  Tycoon is a upsized, occasionally preposterous tribute to one and only one of those magnates; everyone else is only important insofar as they help him achieve his goal.  

  

Unfortunately, nothing co-opts the spry and creative mind more than monetary success.  Even the wildest of imaginations considers, at least for a few moments, the life of material wealth and the ease and comfort such a life brings.  There is nothing wrong with ambition, nor with money per se; but when the goal of life and work and all your hours and minutes becomes a relentless hunt after greater and greater fortune, perspective on life’s best offerings is soon lost.  What Platon’s perspective is on the matter may be hard to say, because one gets the distinct impression that he really thinks of himself as some kind of artist.  And what you think of this tycoon, an oligarch in the original Russian, may reflect what you think of the new Russian revolution.  But then you may think of other riches – a live filled with goodness, love, laughter, curiosity, learning, and selflessness – and smile.  And you may gladly cede those outlaw desires to the Platon Makovskys and Charles Foster Kanes of the world.

* Note: Berezovsky ostensibly took his own life on March 23, 2013.

After the Wedding

There is a certain melancholy in seeing how the impoverished live that cannot be set aside when you get home like a scarf or coat.  It is not provoked by guilt, because guilt is simply feeling bad for yourself: it is provoked by shame.  Shame for participating in a society that allows millions to have nothing, not even hope, and going about your daily business without any plan for changing the situation.  Shame for smiling upon moneyed persons and defending their wealth by claiming that they worked harder than anyone else to get it.  For your information, no one works harder than those who have nothing to lose and will plough a field for a day’s ration of bread.  They have nothing but a slim chance of sustaining themselves past a certain age, and their children are doomed to the same cycle of poverty (which one courageous soul decided to break a few decades ago by founding this bank).  Shame for permitting your petty imperfections to justify your lashing out at loved ones and friends, thinking of yourself as some kind of victim because you can’t quite get the most beautiful young woman in the office to go out with you, and wallowing in the existential angst that is the calling card of selfish, bloated postwar Europe.  Shame for not giving a damn about distant and irretrievably estranged countries that produce your entire wardrobe and the coffee you spend hundreds of dollars on per year, and which have the gall and cheek to ask you to support their children for a third of that daily latte budget.  Shame for sitting back and thinking that you deserve these privileges and opportunities more than other human beings. You may not quite believe these statements, but you would do well to consider their seriousness.  Disparities in global wealth are rather staggering and will continue in the years to come to thunder past our ingenuous notions of equality.  Some of us, braver than any man of violence, actually uproot our easy lives and travel to the less fortunate nations of the world with more than just a heavy heart, but to live and work and help.  Oftentimes it does not even take a lengthy stay to convince someone to amend his perspective on aid (as in the case of this rather dashing fellow), and we realize that if just ten percent of us either propagandized against greed or helped onsite, we could work absolute wonders.  And all these statements – every last one of them – could have been uttered by Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), the protagonist of this recent film.

Jacob is so good that our knowledge of humanity tells us he is either not human or making up for some blemish on his conscience.  As it were, neither assessment does justice to the breadth of his personality, which is idealistic, stubborn (no one is more stubborn than an idealist), and toned in just the right way as to avoid sentimentality and gushing pathos.  You and I know Jacob is a good man: he runs an orphanage in one of the more miserable parts of India, and he runs it passionately because he knows that few others would or could.  That noble assumption of responsibility drives him to rather extreme categorizations (no one is more categorical than an idealist), with a contempt for luxury and the rich that borders on the homicidal.  He is tempered in his hatred by Pramod, his eight-year-old ward whose life spans precisely the same period as that of the orphanage’s financial decline.  This may or may not be a coincidence (many numbers within a work of art are often repeated accidentally, especially if they don’t really matter), but it is certain that Jacob’s shelter may be crushed by the eternal evil of insufficient bankrolling.  He is desperate but positive (no one is more positive than an idealist), and he reassures Pramod and us that he will find a way to keep helping the abandoned, the poor, and the very unlucky.

With this type of setup we know full well what will occur, but perhaps not quite how.  Jacob will be tempted by the money he needs to retain his orphanage, yet this wonderful beneficence may come at the cost of his generous soul.  So when he is summoned to his native Denmark by a billionaire (Rolf Lassgård) interested in supporting his charitable endeavors, we understand that this will be a most fatidic encounter, and that a series of intertwined decisions will cincture him like barbed wire.  He will endure a lot of soul-searching before he either accepts or recants the devilish proposal laid out before him, and these trials and tribulations will compose the suet of the film’s pudding.  If you are very familiar with these sorts of films, you will know something else: that Jacob has a secret or two, as does the Mephistophelian robber baron who tasks him with an ethical quandary.  I am loath to reveal even the first of these twists as it may lead you to derive the last of them, which would preclude sitting through to the rather melodramatic end.  There is value in these moral adventures, not because instantiating shame in all of us is necessarily art’s concern, but because meticulous casting and a strong epicenter (Jacob) allow us to see how a good man can reflect on his life, admit his mistakes, and become in some ways even better.  And the wedding in the title?  That would feature the billionaire’s twenty-year-old daughter (Stine Fischer Christensen) and one of his business protégés.  They don’t really need to get married to propel the plot forward, but, in addition to being a rather harmless contrivance, it does shed some light on a couple of characters.  And just as much takes place before the nuptials as after, which leads Jacob to do something he hasn’t done in over twenty years, but he's a better man for it.  And in his case that is saying a great deal indeed.

The End of the Affair (film)

There is an old adage about serious writers’ contempt for thrillers, detective novels, and other such crime games, and truly, the vast majority of these products do not need our dislike, since their wooden characters, lackadaisical style, and preposterous plotting indicate they already despise themselves.  Certainly, they are not meant to be re–read and are as disposable as the brown paper bags in which we carry other guilty pleasures.  Yet most of us, I think, enjoy a good mystery if indeed there are still good mysteries to be enjoyed (they are perhaps fewer about than in mystery’s Golden Age, but many page–turners can still be found).  The premise behind these works, be they literary or cinematic, is that either something extraordinary or unusual will be revealed to us, or the process by which this revelation is made will be fascinating (in the best mysteries, both these features converge).  The thrill of discovering a solution to a complex gambit — or, to be more modern about it, some multi–tiered conspiracy — is very satisfying after a long day of work, and gives us the impression that we are in tune with the shapes and shifts of the world, that our intuition is still sharply honed, and that we have learned from life and can apply these lessons to future days. 

 

In this way, mysteries are the most basic form of literature.  They simultaneously explain and amuse, which accounts for the development in the twentieth century of this novelistic form as well as the proliferation of books and films that exploit chicanery, deception, and cabalism to wretched commercial ends.  One topic that seems caught in the undertow of this wave of intrigue is actually the most exciting of them all: that of personal mysteries and personal discoveries.  Introspection is a nice and trendy word, but it also breeds bellybutton–staring.  More acceptable practices are learning about ourselves through others and learning about these same people through ourselves.  In other words, mastering the basic recipes of human psychology and then serving them to guests.  Some guests (as we have learned) always praise the food, regardless of what they really think; others will only emphasize what could be improved; then there are those most maddening and unreadable types who say nothing and just chew quietly like some lonesome cow.  It is not clear whether they are being politely taciturn, whether they are incapable of expressing what they really feel (either good or bad), whether they do not care about food in general and consider it a biological necessity, or whether they do not care about you, the cook, who, in principle, believes in what you are serving and tries to accommodate your guests as best you can.  Now make all those guests the romantic interests you have had over the years and make your food emotion and affection, and we come to why today is about love, which is the greatest mystery there could ever be.  It is the greatest of mysteries precisely because it involves a continuous revelation of something extraordinary and unusual, and because no solution is ever guaranteed.       

The setup for this film by renowned director Neil Jordan is the mystery of how people may spend years apart and, upon seeing each other again, be swept up by that same wave and dragged mercilessly down to a bottomless trench.  The afflicted is a young novelist called Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), and the year is 1946.  England has survived the war, or so it claims, and quilts of memories are tattered by the losses that each endured, even in a country that hardly bore the brunt of the destruction.  Maurice has lost enough of his sense of idealism and optimism to become surly and resentful towards this new world, and although he maintains a rough exterior, inside he is ravaged.  His ravager has long red hair, incomparable cheekbones, and a plain name, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore).  Maurice and Sarah are as old as the war, having begun their love in 1939, and like the war they are over, although Maurice is as haunted by what went wrong in his small, private tragedy that is utterly unimportant for the history of the world as every citizen wondered how in God’s name such a calamity could befall civilization.  The most injurious part of Maurice’s pain is his love’s inexplicable termination towards war’s end: he is, as he always will be, in Sarah’s arms, when a shell smashes into his London home.  For a few minutes both he and Sarah think they are dead, or, much worse, that only one of them has survived.  We are given Sarah’s point of view on this event, and it takes more than a few minutes for her to realize that Maurice is still alive and will probably live.  But she leaves, wordlessly, submissively, and cannot or will not explain why she feels this step to be necessary.  I should add that she has been married all this time to a rather sympathetic civil servant by the name of Henry (Stephen Rea), and she is still married to him at the beginning of the film when Maurice bumps into Henry one miserably rainy night.

There's a mystery here having to do with Sarah’s reason for leaving Maurice’s house that day, and the reason is both good and ludicrous.  To carry out a story of such basic structure requires exquisite acting, which is provided by Moore and Fiennes, but also by Rea, who just wants his wife to be happy and understands she could never be happy with only him.  The original novel has components of the time period that allow Jordan’s adaptation to give us flavor without intrusion into the mores of the era (a tactic that is far less successful in the hopelessly anachronistic love affair in the filming of this book).  Doubtless, the steady, cuckolded husband is an old cliché, as is the artistic lover who makes life and love more intense, or the seductive beauty caught between duty and passion, and so forth.  But there are other details as well, including a small boy with a horrible affliction, that seem at first superfluous but then turn out to be essential.  Fiennes and Moore are so skilled at the small gestures and tortures of genuine affection that you will have a hard time believing they are not a real–life couple (this film might well be banned in both actors’ family settings, and not just for the corporalities).  You will also marvel at what people in love do for one another, even at the risk of losing them.  And that is a mystery that will never be solved.