buster-crashtestdummy Reviews

The Double Life of Véronique (1991)

On the suffering of Christ.

[29 December 2005]

St. Veronica, often called the patron saint of photographers, was, according to legend, one of the women who followed Christ to his crucifixion. At one point she handed the weary savior a cloth to wipe his face on. He did so, and when he handed it back to her, there was imprinted an image of his face on the cloth. The name Veronica, indeed, is a corruption of the Latin "vero icon" - the true image (yes, a contradiction in terms, I know). When Kieslowski's Veronika is unknowingly walking to her death, that is, to the audition that will lead to it, the French Veronique unknowingly photographs her from the bus in the Krakow square, while frantically trying to get snapshots from the ongoing riot.

Veronika, of course, ends up straining herself too hard singing, and because of her heart condition, snuffs it while singing those beautiful lines from Dante's Paradisio, about the ascent to heaven. Veronique, in turn, for some reason realizes that she has to give up her own singing career, and, seemingly without a single moment of regret, instead dedicates herself to teaching the music of Van den Budenmaier to untalented, bratty schoolchildren. There is little doubt, after watching the movie, that the Polish Veronika did indeed, somehow, die so that the French Veronique might live.

The opening sequence of the movie also contains the outline of Christ's life. Veronika is shown "the star that will start Chrismas Eve" (oh, the horrifically nonsensical astronomy we teach our children... but I digress. ;-) ), and immediately afterwords we are taken to France, where the child Veronique is being told about the leaves of spring. Christmas is the birth of Christ, while spring is the time of Easter, and his suffering and death.

So, is this, indeed, Kieslowski's very radical, and breathtakingly beautiful, take on the story of the suffering of Christ? Discuss, class. ;-)

What Time Is It There? (2001)

On connections.

[28 December 2005]

No lengthy review from me this time, just a very small personal musing, as I'm in a melancholy mood, because it's Christmas...

Funny how movies can connect. Like lives sometimes do, I suppose. The oddball male protagonist of "What time is it there" watches Truffaut's "Les Quatre-Cents Coups", as a way to somehow connect himself to the girl who is obviously the girl of his dreams, even though he's only barely met her, when she bought his watch before going away to Paris. He also, of course, sets all the clocks in his house, and all other clocks he can get his hands on, to Paris time, prompting his mother to think that the ghost of her dead husband has returned. The watch can show two different times at once, and the girl want to be able to see Taipei time as well as Paris time, to keep herself connected to her own country whilst abroad.

In one scene in "Les Quatre-Cents Coups", the two rebellious boys steal a movie poster outside a theater. The poster (look carefully, or you'll miss it) shows Harriet Andersson in a famous pose from Bergman's "Summer with Monica". Another connection. I don't know if it means anything.

This year, I gave my ex-girlfriend all three movies - "What Time is it There", "Les Quatre-Cents Coups" and "Summer with Monica" - for Christmas. I guess it was an attempt to connect myself back with her. We always shared a love of movies, Bergman in particular, and I think I wanted to tell her something. Perhaps that sometimes lives and the common themes in them stick together and connect across oceans, across time, across our personal universes, in ways that can be hard to recognize, but that are impossible to deny.

Well, in any case, I don't think she picked up on it. She's still my ex-girlfriend, she's still away in some far-off land, and I'm still here alone and pretty much miserable. I'm still glad that I gave her those three movies, though. It's only right that she should have them, too, as she still has my entire DVD collection.

I guess I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that in all three movies, human connections ultimately fail or break down. The two boys in "Les Quatre-Cents Coups" are broken out of their doomed youthful rebellion and torn apart by society and the pressures of the world. In Bergman's film, Monica abandons Harry by her own volition and leaves him heartbroken (like I am now) because she is to much of a dionysiac to deal with an ordered, adult, appolinian life. In "What Time is it There", there's hardly any initial optimism to destroy. Every person is an island from the outset, and when they long for connectedness, it's in a silent, subdued way, like their hearts have already been broken in advance and they are only going through familiar motions by some force of habit, but without real hope. The girl attempts a lesbian affair that fails as soon as it's initiated. The boy takes out his frustration in an impersonal encounter with a prostitute. The mother is last seen in a heartbreaking masturbation scene that more than anything else seems like sex with a ghost.

In one celebrated scene, the girl meets Jean-Pierre Leud, who played the lead role in "Les Quatre-Cents Coups", in a Paris cemetery. He is now a middle-aged man. He's a ghost as well, the ghost of the boy in Truffaut's movie, that another boy is compulsively watching in Taipei while thinking of the girl, who in return hardly knows that he exists. She doesn't recognize him. He gives her his phone number and tells her only his first name. She just seems to think he's some nut case. Nothing comes of it. That is all. Connections attempt to be made. They fail completely.

At the very end, of course, the ghost of the dead father and husband does indeed materialize itself. However, it is not to the wife and son in Taipei, but, mysteriously, to the girl in Paris. She doesn't see him. She is asleep in a chair in a Paris park. Perhaps she's just exhausted from loneliness, perhaps her own personal clock is still set to Taipei time.

Oh well. Maybe I'll feel better in the new year. Happy holidays to all.

La Dolce Vita (1960)

The Car and the Flat: Periphery and center in "La Dolce Vita".

[4 November 2005]

"-What now? -Drive, or stay here."

Marcello Rubini is the outsider looking in. He is a character torn between the the safety of the center and the lure of freedom found in eccentricity.

The Rome in which he moves is created by centrifugal movement. The center of this space is shifting, mobile, never remaining in one place for long. It is located wherever what happens to be in vogue at any given moment happens to be, as Marcello moves through it throughout the episodic and discontinuous plot of the movie. Whether it's the arrival of an American movie star (Sylvia) to Rome, the apparition of the virgin Mary, or the latest adventures of the rich and famous in the bars on Via Veneto, Marcello is there, accompanied by his trusty photographer, Paparazzo. Marcello spends a great amount of his time in his car, moving from one assignment to the next. He circles Rome as a perpetual wanderer, a modern Oddysseus. This circulating movement is opposed to the place that is supposed to be his immobile place of refuge, his flat, a place he hardly ever enters during the film, except on a few occasions such as to save his fiancée from suicide in one of the film's early scenes. His life, as a journalist, as perpetually unfaithful lover, and as the film's anti-hero, consists of a dialectic between these two modes of habitation. "Journalism pays well if you're good", Marcello tells his father in one scene in the film. "I have and a car, and a flat - una macchina, e uno appartamento." Indeed, and the tension between these two modes of habitation is what structures his days and the film.

Sometimes, however, the categories can shift, or be transformed into one another, like in the early scene when Marcello and Maddalena meet the whore and agree to drive her home. The whore is so impressed with the luxuriousness of Maddalena's car that she exclaims that "it's not a car, it's an apartment!" Indeed, and Maddalena, like Marcello, is perhaps only really at home when she is in motion. This occurs shortly after a conversation where Marcello and Maddalena debate the advantages of rest versus movement. "-I need an island", Maddalena proposes. "–Buy one", Marcello responds. "–I've thought of it. But would I stay on it?"

The center, by contrast, is epitomized by Marcello's friend Steiner. Indeed, the essential scene where Marcello and his fiancée visit Steiner's apartment is located temporally at the dead center of the movie. It is the eye of the storm, the still point where the ceaseless motion of the rest of the movie comes to a halt. However, later on it really becomes a truly "dead center", a place of death, as Steiner kills his children and then himself.

The (lost) center for Italian men is the place of the wife and the mother. La Dolce Vita also amounts to one long caricature of these men, sometimes going into open ridicule. Let's recall Marcello's tender declaration to Sylvia: "You are everything. You are the first woman on the first day of the creation. You are mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home." This speech, though wonderful, is also superbly comical, not least because Silvia doesn't understand a word of Italian. Marcello is ultimately only talking to himself, and if someone was really listening, one doubts that he would find the nerve to speak. His speech is echoed and turned even sillier by another character in the movie. One of the guests at Steiner's party is an old, ridiculous professor. An oriental-looking girl has been brought to the party to entertain, and with her sitting at his feet, the professor passionately declares: "The only true woman is the oriental woman. Where was Eve? In the garden of Eden. That was in the east. There, love is truly at once mysterious, maternal, lover, daughter, oriental women crouches at your feet like an infatuated tigress." For Marcello, this woman, in the form of Silvia, comes from the west, for the professor, she comes from the east – the direction of the compass doesn't matter, she doesn't really come from anywhere but their own dreams.

Marcello's view of this is ambiguous, but for the viewer the effect seems clear. The deep irony of the movie places the idea of the center where it belongs: it's the old idea of the essence, that can only belong in the junkyard of European metaphysics. In light of this realization, it's impossible for this movie to have a happy ending, it must turn on itself and take itself apart. The remaining part of the scene at Steiner's house becomes tainted with melancholy. Not much later, of course, the dream of the quiet center receives its death blow, with Steiner's murder of his children and his following suicide. The rest of the movie, with its culmination in the famous "orgy scene", is a story if disillusionment and destruction.

The movie is filled with gestures of broken illusions. When Marcello retreats to the ocean to find peace to write, he encounters a beautiful young girl who works as a waitress, and for a moment he pictures her to be "as beautiful as an angel from an Umbrian church". The illusion doesn't last. Before long, she is revealed to be just a normal little girl who wants to dance to the latest tunes on the jukebox, human, even possible to love, but no angel. And yet – and yet – at the very end, it is once again morning. The exhausted party guests go out to the beach, and the last thing we see is the face of Marcello's "Umbrian Angel", as she tries to get in touch with Marcello, her words drowned out by the sound of the waves. We do, finally, not know what Marcello thinks in this moment. Perhaps there is still some hope, if not in delusion, then in truth.

8½ (1963)

"I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway".

[4 November 2005]

Fellini's films is one of the main reasons I came to love movies in the first place. I first saw 8 1/2 several years ago. I remember it quite clearly: I went to see it with a small group of fellow students at a friend's house. It was at the beginning of a now already long-since destroyed relationship. It was a cold day in early January. As the film started, a girl who was there, who happened to be a make-up artist and hairdresser by profession, remarked on the odd juxtaposition in the opening scenes of hair-styles and dresses from different eras, the 30's and the 60's. Surely, this was a strange anachrony?

My friend calmly remarked: "Time doesn't exist."

Heck, I won't pretend to know just what he meant by that, perhaps it wasn't as profound as it sounded. In any case, after that, no one spoke. For the next couple of hours, I certainly lost track of place and time, as I was hypnotized, mesmerized and amazed by the images on the screen. Since then, I've always kept a copy of it within reach (even though I am one of those people who can usually never hang on to my possessions for any length of time), and it has lost none of its power to continually amaze me. I've seen it more times than I can count, and yet, it must always be seen again. It's a movie about which everything seems to have been said, and yet, everything still remains to be said. Thanks to the wonders of DVDs and MPEG encoding, I can keep it one mouse-click away whenever I'm working on my computer. I must admit that by now, its already from the outset discontinuous and jumbled content has been spread all over the place for me. Unlike Woody Allen, I'm not anal. I've never had a compulsion to have to watch movies straight from beginning to end, without interruptions. Of course, that's how I watched 8 1/2 the first few times, but now it seems that I'm always chopping it up, skipping at will between my favorite sections, always moving around it and rearranging it in new and unexpected ways. I hope Fellini, in his Heaven, forgives me for it, because it seems to me that I'm in a way just continuing what he began. 8 1/2, even in its purest state, does of course blow the traditional temporal narrative, with a defined beginning, middle and end and a causal relationship between its parts, to complete smithereens, and in the jumbled landscape that is left behind, nothing can ever be as it was before, as what we are left with is a completely new world, of new possibilities and new kinds of beauty. It's a story of dream-logic, held together by different kinds of connections that transcend temporal sequence and causal relationships. It's a film that never begins, and still has always been there.

It's a movie about the most glorious success that can only be brought around through complete failure. It's about how we can only find ourselves when we let go of ourselves - and discover that the only place we can fall is into ourselves, our true selves. It's the ultimate self-referential masterpiece, and the ultimate piece of self-reference, as it is, of course, about nothing except itself.

It really is, in my opinion, the best movie in the world, and by now I can't even imagine a world without it. That's really all I want to say.

Three Colors: Blue (1993)

Addition and subtraction.

[3 November 2005]

Taken as a whole, the "Thee Colors" trilogy is certainly a work that is greater than the sum of it's part. It represents the totality of life by way of trichotomy, and by a process of addition, each film adding on another aspect, another color, to what came before. Blue is tragedy, white is comedy, and red is... well, it is indeed hard to pin down, but I would think that it is perhaps romance. At the same time, like the way bits of each film make guest appearances in the others, each of these aspects, each color, is mixed with parts of the others. Therefore, it's important to see all the films, and they really should ideally be seen in their chronological order, for only at the end of it all - when it all adds up - do we find the sense of completion that gives the work its true magic. Therefore, I won't be commenting on Blue and pretend the others don't exist. They must be taken together as a three-course meal.

In light of this it may seem almost paradoxical that each of the individual films in certain respects are based on an opposite process, an act of subtraction. The beauty and poetry of these works is just as often as not a result of what is not said, what is left out and must be inferred, what is never confirmed, what is left hanging. This act of subtraction is given most poignantly in "Blue".

The accident that opens the movie and grants Julie that tragic liberty that she never asked for and never wanted, sets in play a process of removal that we feel cannot be stopped, until it either reaches its conclusion or some greater outer force intervenes. Julie never, for a second, attempts to restore the fragments of her lost life. Once the process of destruction is started, she does not attempt to stop it. The bulk of the movie shows her systematically destroying what is left, and all memories of what was. She gets rid of the mansion where she lived with her family, including all furniture and belongings. She angrily, in an act of stunning subdued violence, chews and devours a lollipop that had been her daughter's. Finally, she tries to destroy the score for her husband's symphony for the Unification of Europe.

In a movie about a woman who has lost her husband and her child, we may expect certain kinds of scenes: flashbacks, memory sequences, returns to what has been lost. These are all notably missing from "Blue". Julie doesn't return, not to her past or to the world of the living, not until outside forces – Kieslowski's wonderful random acts of genius storytelling - intrude.

At the end of the day, "Blue", mercifully, ends on a note of affirmation of life, optimistically, even happily. It is, of course, a "happy ending" unlike any other in cinema, one that can only be brought about by way of the most extreme grief and loss. It's a phenomenological process of sorts, in the Husserlian sense. For Husserl, only by removing the objects of consciousness, by constantly subtracting what is in it, can we hope to arrive at understanding of consciousness itself. For Julie, only be removing everything that her life contained, by going down to the bare bones of her self, can she truly find herself, and start living again. In the end, life wins out and starts anew. Even after the greatest apocalypse, some seeds of life have escaped death, and they will continue to grow and to flower.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time, an opinion that is, I believe, shared by everyone who sees it. It's more than a trip to the movies. It's even more than an experience of immense beauty, even if it is, of course, that too. It is, in my opinion, an opportunity to take part in a process of discovery of what it is to be human, that will leave you a better person afterwards.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

An infantile movie.

[2 November 2005]

Firstly, a word of warning: Once again, as it's obviously what I do best, I will play the devil's advocate and lambast another great movie. The reason I feel I can do this is that it's already praised so highly by just about everyone else one this site and elsewhere, so that more positive reviews would be pretty much redundant. Yes, I know I'll probably burn in the pits of cinema's hell for this, if there is one. Or, I'll be sentenced to spend eternity watching endless reruns of Mel Gibson movies. When it's all said and done, though, I'll try to make some amends by rating it... well, maybe not a 10 this time, but at least an 8. So please, try to forgive me.

Well, to the point, and it's actually a brief one. There will be no attempts of armchair philosophy this time. The reason why I could not stomach this movie is a simple one: it's a movie for kids. Make sure you take your children along to see it, or if you don't have any, bring along some of the juvenile punks in your neighborhood. They will probably enjoy it more than you, even if it's for all the wrong reasons. By this I mean something more than the obvious fact the the plot and the ideas of the movie are simple and dumbed down enough for a four-year old to understand. From beginning to end, "Ladri di biciclette" is marked by a profound infantilism, and a bad sort. It's not the wonderful and honest infantilism of, say, Fellini, where you'll find a real and often very painful account of the reality of being a child, as well as showing the child that still is inside us when we're long since grown up (especially the experience of being an Italian male child with all the traumas of dealing with authority, with the church, with the mothers and fathers of that place and time). That kind of child is shown as a true human being, not least (and we can of course thank psychoanalysis for this, in Fellinis case mostly the theories of Carl Jung) with a true will to power and an extremely powerful sexuality. It's a childhood that is no longer innocent.

The childhood of "Ladri de biciclette" is more of the Disney variety. For all its highly praised "social realism", the movie doesn't have much psychological realism, and the social critique actually suffers profoundly as a result. This is because its social "theories", if that's not too strong a word, are based on an idea of "a fall from paradise", the paradise of childhood or childishness. As I said, Fellini's children, like the children of Freud or Jung, are no longer thought of as innocent. The very notion of innocence itself is revealed as a myth. De Sica, however, seems to think of childhood as something profoundly innocent and pure, "uncontaminated" by those "evil" social forces that corrupt people and turn them into egoists, make them violent - and make them bicycle thieves. This state of childhood extends into adulthood as well, until it's "ruined" by society. When I say it's a movie for kids, I should add that it's mostly a movie for little boys - "good" little boys. The protagonist Antonio is nothing more than a big kid, just as childlike as his son Bruno. The other male "good guys" are either kind and friendly uncles, or also, again, children themselves. The one, at least partly, adult character in the movie is, of course, the mother, Maria. Good grief, of course she could not have been known by any other name. She is a virgin mother if ever there was one, asexual or perhaps pre-sexual, profoundly kind and caring, the kind of mother any good little boy could want - or the kind of mother-substitute any good infantile Italian husband could want for a wife. Even so, even she does not escape being treated as a little girl for a good part of the story.

Sexuality is more or less completely censored from the film. Even in the scene in the bordello, where the focalization changes to the kid Bruno - and he can, of course, not come in. The camera, and we along with it, is left waiting on the outside.

I had not seen much, if any, mention of this profoundly infantile stance in articles and reviews of the movie, and it honestly caught me by surprise. Still, it's the impression that stays with me. This is a tale of the corrupting forces of society, that ruins our original purity, and if not for those forces, we would still all be little boys and girls, playing our games, lacking nothing and never having to grow up. Well... it simple beyond belief, and just doesn't ring all that realistic to me.

The fact that the whole thing was rehashed in the dreadful "La Vita è bella" by Benigni (bicycle and all), is another sad chapter, but I won't get into that, as that, at least, it's obviously not De Sica's fault directly.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

I love this movie for all the wrong anachronistic reasons.

[2 November 2005]

Frankly, I don't usually like to talk about "old movies". When I even hear someone use the term, I usually instantly brand them as teenage punks, with no real sense of temporality. Honestly, folks, the medium is still in its relative infancy when you look at it on a grand scale, and one of its great strenghts have always been, and probably will be for a while yet, its consciousness of its own youth. It gives it lightness, and allows it, as a format, a license to be inventive and fresh, to be frankly irresponsible, but in a good way. Additionally, I'm a historicist at heart, in the sense that I think everything should be judged on the merits of what it did and was when it was new, in the context of its own time, not from whatever completely arbitrary vantage point we happen to occupy in the "here and now". In any case, some movies can be enjoyed ahistorically, as they seemingly never grow older. Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" is as fresh today as it was in 1960, and Chaplin is as new to us as he ever was. Others, granted, don't age well, but let's not mention names. So, I don't like to talk about "old movies", but even so, today I will.

This is because there are also those movies that were great in their own time that are still great today, but precisely because of the distance in time. Therefore, I will throw all my historicism overboard for the day, and say bluntly that it's great to watch "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" today, when it's soon about to celebrate its fiftieth birthday, precisely because it's in its middle age, because we can see it as a wonderful period piece from those good old days of the horrendously paranoid cold war, with the atomic bomb hanging over everyone's head and everyone going bonkers with all kinds of fear. Along with other gems like the original series of "The Twilight Zone", this is first class paranoid cold war comic fiction.

I love this movie, and I will darn well allow myself to do so, with an ironic look at all the oddball pieces of strangeness that were probably never meant to be ironic, comic or even strange in 1956. Let's start listing some: the fact that the movie warns of the horrors of conformism, when all its characters by our standards are unbelievably conformist and conservative from the outset, with their perfect houses and perfect attitudes, their small-town-American lives, and their patriarchal gender roles (the ultra-masculine hero and the damsel in distress). The fact that it has a plot hole the size of the Albert Hall and demands to get away with it (already impossible by the time of the 1978 remake). Odd kinds of behaviour typical for movies of the time - "Why, there's a dead alien on our pool table. What to do? Of course - let's all have drinks!" The fact that the young handsome medical professional is a compulsive cigarette smoker. Concervativism, paranoia, alcoholism, nicotine addiction, a sexuality as straight and streamlined as the fold in your pants and the style of your hair, and a gosh-darn wholesome attitude to keep it all together. If that's not the Brave New World of Fifties America, I don't know what is.

Yeah, there you have it, I like this movie for all the wrong anachronistic reasons. But then again, if I was around in 1956, I would probably have liked it then, too, if I hadn't been too busy being scared out of my wits by the horrors of communism, McCarthyism (who's to tell what's the worst? It's all the same as far as this movie is concerned) and the thought of having an atomic bomb land on my front lawn. Of course, in addition to that, I also love it for the very real suspense that ensures that your heart is in your mouth most of the time, and for its frankly surprising intelligence and wit. And for those wonderful double entendres, too.

Go see it, or get the DVD. Bring your family. Bring your friends. Be prepared to have a ball, to be scared stiff, and to want to do it all again tomorrow, and probably in another fifty years as well, if we haven't come up with some new way to kill each other off for good by then.

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

It's magnificent, but it's not a movie.

[22 September 2005]

Witnessing the charge of the doomed Light Brigade against Russian artillery, the French general Rene Bosquet famously remarked: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre" - "It's magnificent, but it's not war". After watching 'Singin' in the Rain' again yesterday, I'm strangely left with a similar feeling – it's magnificent, but it's not really a movie, is it? That is to say, although it is on the outset even a movie about movies, about Hollywood and about the making of movies, it's not really cinematic. 'Singin' in the Rain', for all its spectacle, just doesn't do what great movies, in my mind, do and ought to do – namely, tell a story in a way that is specific to the movie as a form. Of course, the dancing is wonderful, but it strikes me as being a beefed-up Broadway show put on the screen.

Don't get me wrong. I love this movie. I absolutely adore it. It's like a birthday party with cake and soda for two hours straight. So, this isn't really offered as negative criticism, at least I don't think so, because I really don't want to speak badly about something wonderful. It's more a kind of puzzlement.

What is the specifically cinematic anyway? Well, it's hard to say, as it could be a lot of things, but let's look briefly at one possibility. If you look at Bergman, for instance, (yes, an unfair comparison if ever there was one), you'll find the cinematic in an exploration of the unification of photography and theatre – the two antithetic sources of cinema. Yes, if you want to play Hegelian, you could say that there is dialectic here. Theatre is the theses – it's all about the forward movement of the plot in time, it's action-packed, it's a temporal art form. The action is viewed at a distance. We know characters by their actions. The antithesis is photography. Here we have slices of time, extrapolated from movement and frozen in single moments. Photography makes close-ups possible. It allows a different way of knowing people. It lets us look for an essence, a timelessness in them, by way of the exploration of portraits. The synthesis of these two forms is the cinema, realized at it's height by Bergman in movies like 'Scenes from a Marriage', and perhaps above all 'Cries and Whispers'. Perhaps it reaches it's peak (or perhaps it goes too far and turns back on itself) in the relatively unknown 'Karin's Face', which consist of a series of photographs, a montage.

The cinematic could be a lot of other things as well, of course. In Fellini it is produced by the way the scenes are linked and cut. But I won't go further with this now.

Anyway, Singin in the Rain, despite taking movies as it's very theme, never becomes cinematic. It never moves beyond the theatre. There are hardly a close-up of a face throughout the movie. Those that are there seems either just not important, like the one of Gene Kelly in the beginning, or actually attempts to turn the face into another comical prop by treating it as a plastic instrument, distorting it, actually removing human personality from it – I'm referring to the, admittedly side-splittingly hilarious, funny faces made by Donald O'Connor.

Well, I don't know… I could be way off the mark here, it was just something that occurred to me. In any event, I'm still rating it a 10, because, cinematic or not, it's still magnificent... whatever it is.

Marnie (1964)

A modern Taming of the Shrew.

[29 August 2005]

I find this movie tricky to rate, as it is, obviously, not a bad movie. On the contrary, it has a well-paced plot, good performances and fine visuals, even if it's not among Hitchcock's best. The problem with Marnie, in my opinion, is not that it's a bad movie, but that it's an evil one. It is a modern version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, and as that play is a black sheep in Shakespeare's otherwise glorious oeuvre, I think this movie holds the same place in Hitchcock's. The reason: it is, as the Taming of the Shrew, plainly misogynic and anti-feminist. In one scene Marnie comments about men: "You say no thanks to one of them and you're a candidate for the funny farm". In that particular scene, the comment is surely meant to be read ironically. However, sadly, when all is said and done, I feel that Marnie could be right about that after all.

You may notice that the notion of "frigidity" in women is not often heard of these days. The reason is that the idea to a large extent belongs to a different era: one where young women were expected to subject themselves sexually, without questions, to much older men (who were often their husbands). If a woman resisted this, she could easily be dubbed "frigid". The same label could quickly be given to any woman who wanted a life of her own, without the need of a "protecting" husband to support her. Developments in psychology made it possible for men to use a medical jargon and imagery to regain control of these women - in effect, to turn a woman's attempt to have control over her own life and her own sexuality as a form of disease. This is cruelly understandable in a way - in a patriarchal society where men rules women, any form of "deviant" female sexuality, that does not include a dominant male subjecting the female, is a great threat - such a woman, after all, does not seem to need men, and she may emancipate herself from them.

In this light, the character of Marnie can be understood - or at least the way that character is created by men, including all characters as well as the implied author of the movie. She has no need for men to provide for her, and so she must be "cured" by this dangerous delusion by the ultra-masculine Sean Connery. The ending of the final scene really hammers the point home - Marnie chooses to stay in her marriage over jail. Only in this way is she finally "cured", "reformed", and allowed to return to society - by subjecting herself to a husband, and realizing that she must "serve, love, and obey", as Katherine does in the Taming of the Shrew. Of course, she is a thief and a murderer, because the only reason a women may choose liberty is that she has a "dark secret" or mental problems.

In a way, this version is even more evil towards woman than Shakespeare's. At least Shakespeare is honest - the shrew Katherine is strong-willed, she is her own person, and she wants her freedom. In "Marnie", with the use of Freudianesque psycho-babble, such traits are actually deemed as "insanity", and the "cure" is to allow yourself to be dominated by men. For that reason, as much as I love Hitchcock's other movies, I just can't bring myself to like this one.