Manhunter (1986)

 

Manhunter

At this point I should have been reviewing “The Color Purple”, but when I inserted the DVD, I quickly realised I had bought the remake instead of the original. While I look for the right version of the movie, I am jumping ahead to 1986, to “Manhunter”.

“Silence of the Lambs” was not the first time Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon” was made into a movie. Six years earlier, Michael Mann did his take on the story. One that, sadly, is now mostly forgotten.

The story is pretty much the same as in any of the other versions of the “Red Dragon” novel. An insane serial killer is on the loose (Tom Noonan). The FBI agent (William Petersen as Will Graham), searching for the murderer, consults criminal mastermind and monster superior Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) in his attempt to get into the mind of the killer.

The main difference is the emphasis in “Manhunter” on the police procedure and less on the gory details and with a much-reduced part for Dr. Lecktor. To my personal taste this was a good decision, but also likely the reason the later movies are very much popular culture and “Manhunter“ is not.

Graham has retired from the bureau when his former boss, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), brings him back to do his magic again. Graham’s speciality is to get into the mind of the murderer and use that to stop him but when he did just that to catch Hannibal Lecktor, he suffered a nervous breakdown and retired. Needless to say, Graham’s wife is not happy about him going back to work.

The murderer apparently kills an entire family every full moon in the most gruesome manner. To all appearance, nothing connects the murdered families, but clearly it is the same murderer. The FBI follows every clue possible, and Grahams immersive work keeps producing hints for the police to follow. His consulting with Lecktor has the unpleasant consequence that Lecktor and the murderer starts to cooperate, endangering Graham and his family personally.

This is all about the chase. The clues, the police procedures, the attempts to lure the murderer out and the clock ticking until next full moon and a new victim. It is highly detailed and sometimes a bit difficult to follow, but wonderful with such attention to actual police work.

The second focus, of course, is how Graham gets swallowed up in the nightmare mind of the murderer. While Mann tries to make a lot out of that, I do not think it is being taken as far as the following movies and that means that the Lecktor element, while prominent, is not played as hard as in the later movies.

Instead, there is room for the Tooth-fairy, as the murderer is known as, and he is one sick person. The scenes where he takes his blind colleague Reba McClane (Joan Allen) home are creepy way beyond what is actually shown through what is hinted at.

 “Manhunter” is very much a movie of the eighties. The soundtrack, the dialogue and the editing, all make me expect some wobbly VHS effects. It is almost as if the budget is not quite enough for what it wants to do, but most of that is simply because it is older than the movies I would compare it to.

I am not certain why we need so many versions of this story, but this one at least scores points for being the first and it is really not bad at what it does and deserves to be remembered.

 

Shoah (1985)

 

Shoah

Over the past few weeks, I have been watching “Shoah”. It is a lengthy affair on a very tough subject, so it took some time to get through. I was joined by my wife who has a more direct connection with the Holocaust than me.

From 1975 to 1985, the French journalist and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann gathered first hand testimonials on the Holocaust from people who were there. Holocaust survivors, Polish neighbours and even from the Germans who ran the infrastructure (camps, trains, the ghettos). From this mountain of material, he pieced together this remarkable documentary.

It is a very authentic documentary in the sense that we hear the story told exactly like Lanzmann heard it. There is no filter, no re-enactment, no stock footage, no explanation of context beyond a few subtitles. This is simply a collection of testimonials. Lanzmann interviewing people and their answers.

And what testimonials they are! The stories told are the stuff of nightmares. It is experiencing the extermination of a people first hand. The industry of killing people, the horrors of sending people to their deaths and shovelling them first into mass graves and later into crematories. The Holocaust survivors are clearly damaged people and more than once they break down when they recollect their past.

As a collection of first-hand witnesses, this is a very important movie and my wife told me she learned a lot she did not know and so did I, though I have not watched through half the amount of Holocaust material she has. There is a nakedness here that makes this movie an experience I will never forget, though it conjured up images in my head that I would wish I could unsee. This is horror in its most undiluted form.

There is no doubt that “Shoah” is a commendable achievement in terms of material.

As a movie, though, it is a train wreck.

The price of giving us the first-hand experience of the interviews is that we witness everything. The pauses, the translations, the inconsequential questions, the roundabout answers. This is very slow going. There are interviews where it is difficult to see where they are going at all and the images used for variation, so we not always watch talking heads, are static panoramas, a vue across a landscape or the drive down a road. It reminded me of “Zu früh, zu spat” both for the laconic inaction and the lack of relevance to the spoken words. There are images from the camps, but they are present day (eighties) images and show very little but a lot of old trains.

The result is a movie that ought to be two to three hours long but clocks in at over nine hours. This works counter to the stories told in that as a viewer you get lost or bored and the imagery makes you lose interest. It is a very strange feeling to be listening to people talk about the death of thousands while you are fighting off sleep.

The interview technique of Lanzmann is also problematic. His interview style is not neutral but attempts to draw out the answers he is looking for. It is an aggressive style that frequently makes the interviewed look worse than they deserve or place them in uncomfortable situations they did not ask for. On several occasions he breaks his promise not to film the interview and when the interviewed breaks down he presses on until he gets the story he wants. Abraham Bomba is interviewed in his barbershop among clients and colleagues and rather than back off when Bomba clearly had enough, Lanzmann brutally makes him carry on.  Lanzmann clearly believes that the story is too important to be shy on his means.

It becomes very clear as we work through the interviews that the personal story of these people, how they themselves survived and what it did to them personally are very interesting stories in their own right, but Lanzmann clearly feels that such stories are just distractions from the larger picture. He may be right, on an academic level, but from a cinematic point of view this omission is almost criminal

The result is perhaps the most important movie ever made on the Holocaust but one I dearly wished had been made by a more competent filmmaker.

 

Vagabond (Sans Toit Ni Loi) (1985)

 

En pige på drift

What is the price of signing out of everything? My guess is this is not the question Agnes Varda, director and writer of “Vagabond” (“Sans toit loi”), wanted to ask, but my read on this movie is that it answers that question quite well.

At the opening of the movie, a dead body of a young woman is found in a ditch on a farm. The girl froze to death. We quickly learn that this girl, Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), is the focus of the movie, so, yes, we know how the story ends. What follows is a journey through the last weeks of Mona’s life.

Mona left her life as a secretary to be a drifter and this is where we find her, wandering around the countryside of southern France in the winter. Mona has a number of encounters with other people which always end with Mona leaving. Invariably. There are many kinds of people and while their interactions with Mona vary, Mona always asks something from them, a ride, money, shelter, food or company and they always want something in return. A truck driver wants to talk, at the car workshop they want sex, Assoun, the farmhand, wants a friend, Landier, the forest professor, wants to help her and Yolande, the maid, wants a share in romance. When she meets a family of goat farmers, they tell her they have also signed out of society, but living like that is hard work and they offer a share in that with Mona.

Mona is happy to receive, but whenever it comes to give, she shuts down. There is no way anybody is getting anything from her. I fully understand her shutting down demands for sex, but saying no to friendship, care or help to help herself?

I suspect that the angle Varda was aiming for is how vulnerable Mona is and how she bravely defends herself from people who want to take advantage of her. In this light all the people she encounters are not really interested in her, but what she can do for them, even if it is just to make them feel better with themselves. Altruism in this light is aimed at oneself with no real interest for the person you are trying to help. True, several of the people Mona meets are selfish people and has a personal agenda and some of them are real creeps. But is that so entirely wrong, to have personal purpose to so something for another person? And frankly, some of those characters were genuinely good and decent people, so I do not agree with this reading.

The way I read it, Mona represents a type of person who wants to receive but never give, who never offer to invest anything, even to her own benefit if it means she has to commit, give or make an effort. For her any obstacle is resolved with refusal and escape. She is free, yes, nothing ties her down, but that life choice destroys her. The goatherder is perfectly right when he predicts this outcome. The price of disconnecting from society is that you must do everything on your own and that is very hard work.

Technically, Varda presents the movie almost like a documentary. From time to time, the characters Mona meets break the fourth wall and talk directly to the camera, about their choices and views. It seems odd, but it is also an interesting move and rather than making it more realistic, it gives the movie an almost fantastic element that makes this more of a fable than realism.

Agnes Varda made interesting movies in her career and some of them are on the List. While “Vagabond” won a lot of prices, I do not think it is one of her better movies. I think she wanted to drive an agenda with this movie, and I do not think she succeeded. At least not the way she intended.