Flicks with The Film Snob Chris Dashiell

If you want to experience Hollywood silent melodrama at its most refined, I suggest you watch Seventh Heaven, the 1927 film by Frank Borzage. Borzage was one of the most important directors of that era, making over fifty silent films that are cited by other directors of the day as influences. Tragically, as was too often the case with movies of that time, only a handful of these films survive. After a move to the Fox studio in the mid-’20s, Borzage entered into his most fruitful period, extending into the 30s and the coming of sound. Seventh Heaven was his breakthrough film, a huge popular and critical success which won him an Academy Award, in that ceremony’s first year.
In Paris, an orphaned waif named Diane (played by Janet Gaynor) is whipped and almost murdered by her vicious sister Nana (Gladys Brockwell). The girl’s life is saved by Chico (Charles Farrell), a sewer worker embittered against God for his bad luck. When the police come to take Diane away on Nana’s instigation, Chico claims that they are married in order to protect her. They must keep up this pretense for awhile, so Diane moves into Chico’s little flat on the seventh floor of a tenement. He’s a bit insensitive, and a braggart too, but their arrangement gradually turns into love. Then the advent of the Great War forces them apart.
The story, based on a play by Austin Strong, is extreme melodrama, and in less talented hands it could have been pure schmaltz, but Borzage knew how to combine passion with a kind of ethereal spirituality, and this is reflected in the film’s look, especially the lighting and camera movement. The nighttime sequences, and the action in the little attic and on the rooftops, seem almost lit from within, as if suffused with romantic memories. The crane shots with the lovers running up to the seventh floor, the overhead shots of Paris (these are all Hollywood sets of course), Gaynor walking across a plank through the window in a wedding dress, Farrell holding her up in the air when he declares his love, a ray of light falling on the couple—the picture is filled with such beauty, like an intoxicating and sometimes feverish dream.
The plot becomes even more outlandish during the separation of the lovers by war. The villainous sister returns, and then the tragedies pile up. Meanwhile, Diane and Chico are shown to have a supernatural connection with one another. They communicate across time and space. Nowadays we’ve grown out of these kinds of dramatic devices, but with Borzage we willingly suspend disbelief most of the time. What I find most interesting is that this elevated notion of love is at the same time grounded in the life of Paris and in relationships with friends. Spiritual love, for Borzage, does not retreat from the world, but transfigures it.
The 20-year-old Gaynor is luminous. This was the big year in which she also starred in Sunrise, and won the Best Actress award for Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, another Borzage film. She has great chemistry with Farrell, and after Seventh Heaven became a smash hit they were paired together eleven more times. Now, after years of being unavailable, Seventh Heaven has been released by Fox, in an excellent print, as part of a Borzage box set.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a movie whose hard-to-remember Latin title seems designed not to attract viewers, is a fascinating documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel. They got the world’s attention in 2012 with their film Leviathan. Leviathan used innovative techniques, including tiny water-proof cameras and immersive sound design, to show the workings of a commercial fishing vessel in the North Atlantic. In their latest film, they take us inside of a number of hospitals in Paris. The title, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, is from a groundbreaking 16th century anatomy text by Andreas Vaselius. In English it means “The Fabric of the Human Body,” and if you’re interested in watching, you can search by that title.
This is not only about the body, though. We observe many doctors, nurses, staff, and patients in these hospitals, and this footage is so intimate that I wondered how they pulled it off. People have strengths and flaws, of course, but the film favors the more general day-to-day behavior that is simply part of the process, yet is rarely depicted in medical dramas. The staff are dedicated to serving patients respectfully and with an eye to the best outcomes. But they also talk frankly among themselves, and one notices how strong emotions are carefully avoided in order to serve efficiently, avoidance that can at times sound like callousness. We meet a few patients as well—there’s a man who is awake and talking while the surgeons bore holes in his head, and in another wing, a man who wanders about in his dementia until staff members carefully persuade him to return to his room. It is unfortunately no surprise to find that the hospitals are inadequately funded and understaffed. The hospital morgue is always full. Considering this fact allowed me to appreciate the work being performed as vital and amazing, despite one alarming example of incompetence during a colonoscopy.
Most remarkable are the numerous filmed surgeries and procedures, from removing a prostate gland to brain surgery, breast cancer, delivering a child via cesarian, and more. The doctors chat somewhat casually while performing these stressful tasks. Most of the time we are seeing through the microscopic cameras showing the tunnel-like insides of people with the equally tiny surgical tools used to do the complicated work. We see a lot of this incredible internal footage, and I realize some people don’t want to see this, and would not be a surgeon for that reason. In my case, though, after a short time, all the blood and organs and squishy stuff stopped bothering me. I was able to watch it long enough to attain something akin to the real-life composure required by doctors and nurses when dealing with the human body. The reality begins to seem abstract, an organic world separate from any personal association. Then, if in the midst of this hidden realm, we think of the actual people on the operating table, a profound sense of wonder can result.
In the finale, we go to a dance club where the doctors go after work. As Gloria Gaynor sings “I Will Survive,” the camera slowly pans across a huge painting on the walls, featuring a wealth of symbolic medical imagery.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica, The Fabric of the Human Body, is as precise as the surgeries in it.

Trenque Lauquen, a film by Argentine director Laura Citarella, presents a two-part mystery. First, the mystery of things we investigate to learn more about them. Second, the mystery of things that are beyond what we can fully know.
The story takes place in and around Trenque Lauquen, a small city in central Argentina. Laura, a young botanist played by Laura Paredes, has gone missing, and her boyfriend, a university professor played by Rafael Spregelburd, searches the area trying to find her, with the help of her married friend Chicho, played by Ezequiel Pierri. Chicho is at first a baffling and rather amusing character, a shaggy teddy bear type of guy, who responds to someone talking to him with thoughtful silence much of the time, hardly ever smiling, even appearing a bit dumb, but we eventually find that there’s a lot more to him.
The film jumps back in time where we see that Chicho was assisting Laura in the search for samples of different types of orchids, and that she needed one more plant to complete her study. But one day, as they meet at her favorite restaurant, she tells him that she has stumbled upon a mystery, one that has nothing to do with plants. It so happens that Laura also does guest spots on a local radio news show about women’s history. She checked a book out of the library called “Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Women” by a Russian author (I found out later that this was a real book), and hidden between some glued pages she found a love letter. Following clues contained in the letter, she checked out other books and found more letters. A married man, who it turns out was a wealthy Italian landowner, wrote these deeply passionate and erotic letters many years ago to a local woman teacher, who then hid them all in these books that were donated to the library after she died. Who exactly were these lovers, and in what circumstances did they meet? Laura enlists Chicho to help solve the mystery.
Laura Paredes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Citarella, draws us totally into her character’s curious and imaginative world. She is the star whose presence is felt throughout the film, even in scenes where she’s absent. As Chicho helps Laura find evidence about the two mystery lovers, we can see him gradually falling in love with her. Meanwhile we still follow the boyfriend Rafael in his search, and the contrast between his rigid, uptight personality and what we have seen of Laura’s intuitive openness is remarkable.
Trenque Lauquen is a four-hour film, originally screened in two separate two-hour parts. Citarella’s style is sensuous, beguiling, and featuring many shifts back and forth in time. In part two, Laura’s discovery of the missing variety of orchid leads to a new mystery about a strange creature, either a feral child or an animal. This part becomes an increasingly enigmatic dive into questions about identity—of oneself, of women, of our being in nature without our customary labels, of that within is which is unknowable.
Trenque Lauquen is a beautiful tapestry of stories within stories, just the kind of free-spirited film that I admire.

In 1831, Victor Hugo wrote one of his most popular novels, “Notre-Dame de Paris.” In English translation it was renamed The Hunchback of Notre Dame, after its main character, a deformed bell ringer at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in 15th-century Paris named Quasimodo. The story tells of a gypsy dancer, Esmerelda, who unfortunately falls under the lustful eye of the cathedral’s archdeacon Claude Frollo. When she rejects his advances, he frames her in a murder, but as she’s about to be publicly executed, Quasimodo, whom she had shown some kindness to earlier, swoops down with a rope from Notre Dame to rescue her and keep in the cathedral under the church law known as “sanctuary.” The novel has since been made into plays, musicals, operas, and a lot of movies. There’s something about this tale that touches people; I think mainly the idea that someone shunned in society for his looks can be lovable, and even a hero.
When Lon Chaney played Quasimodo in the 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had already been four previous versions made. But this one, from Universal, was that studio’s biggest and most profitable production in the silent era. An astounding reproduction of the cathedral was constructed on the studio back lot, and there were huge crowd scenes. Lon Chaney had made his name transforming himself into strange characters. Quasimodo was his most elaborate creation up to then, in which he contorted his body and designed genius-level makeup to portray this scary-looking man that we ultimately grow to care about. It’s a fine performance.
However, movie technique before the late ‘20s was still often tentative. The director, Wallace Worsley, was a reliable but rather pedestrian studio hand. The film also has the melodramatic overacting, and banality of script and pacing that were acceptable then but difficult to put with now.
Sixteen years later, in the next version, from RKO in 1939, English actor Charles Laughton made a triumphant return to Hollywood playing Quasimodo. Undergoing an impressively grotesque makeup job, he brings out the pathos of the hunchback character in convincing fashion. Once having seen this performance, you won’t forget it. Laughton was smart enough to know that he could emphasize the character’s idiotic side, and his potential for menace, without diminishing our sympathy. The picture is a glorious, old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle, but he makes it seem like more than that.
Maureen O’Hara, in her American debut, plays Esmerelda. She’s stunningly beautiful, if not exactly gypsy-like. Rounding out the excellent cast is Cedric Hardwicke as the villain Rollo, who plays his part with a gloomy implacability that attains just the right tone of self-righteous malevolence.
The talented director, William Dieterle, let his impressionistic tendencies run free, with beautifully choreographed crowd scenes, dynamic moving camera, and a talent for bringing night scenes to life. The costumes, scenery, and production design represent the studio system at its finest. This is widely regarded as the best film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I would have to agree. The final shot, with Laughton talking mournfully to a gargoyle, is among the most moving cinematic images of all time.

American Fiction is, on the surface, a film satire on how African American stories are marketed by the publishing industry. But more than that, it’s about the representation of race in popular culture, and how Black Americans are forced to deal with such misconceptions in their lives. With such a weighty subject, you might not expect the film to be funny, but it is. It’s based on a 2001 novel by Percival Everett called “Erasure,” and first-time director Cord Jefferson has adapted it with only minor changes.
Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed “Monk” doubtless because of legendary pianist Thelonious Monk. And the last name, Ellison, is surely meant to invoke the great Black writer Ralph Ellison. Monk is an English professor in Los Angeles, and the author of several works of literary fiction. Monk’s novels are intellectually complex and subtle in style. The critics praise his work, but not many people buy it. Frustrated by this perceived failure, he responds to a comment in class involving race by lashing out. The university makes him take a break to go to Boston for a seminar. Boston is his home town, so it’s a chance to connect with family as well.
At the seminar he attends an interview with a black woman author whose new novel, which has done very well, panders to “ghetto” stereotypes such as poor illiterate unwed mothers and such. This really bothers Monk, who then writes a short novel, in an exaggerated “ebonics” type language, about a black criminal in the ghetto, signs it “Stagg R. Leigh,” and sends it to his agent as a joke. As it turns out, the joke’s on him. The agent, genially played by John Ortiz, asks if he can publish the book under the pseudonym. After some hesitation, Monk agrees. Surprise! A major publishing house offers him a $750,000 dollar advance, and the novel goes on to become a best seller.
This then is the comic premise, from which the film gets a lot of mileage. The absurdity just keeps building, with the white publishing executives depicted as farcical empty-headed culture vultures, and although we know this is an exaggeration, it’s still funny.
Besides all this, however, is the story of Monk’s family, with which he reunites on this trip: his aged mother, played by Leslie Uggams, a supportive sister, and a gay brother who has had issues with Monk in the past. He also meets a potential romantic partner, played by Erika Alexander.
Here I think the film is gently poking some fun at another African American genre: the middle class family drama. But the picture is also meant to be sincere, and Jefferson, the director, makes it work—most of the time. A native of Tucson, he’s had success as a writer on TV, and this is his debut film, so there are bound to be rookie mistakes. But there aren’t many people who win an Oscar for their first film, and Jefferson deservedly won it for his adapted screenplay.
Then there’s Jeffrey Wright. He’s one of our best living actors. Here he ably carries the movie, vividly conveying Monk’s isolation and alienation, which causes him to push people away, but at the same time Wright convinces us of his basic decency.
American Fiction ends with a very clever and funny meta-narrative offering multiple endings. It’s the one major detail that wasn’t in the book, a highly original flash of brilliance from Cord Jefferson.