In perhaps the most magical turning point in the story Harry Tuttle disappears in a whirlwind of red tape, receipts, vouchers and invoices that cling to his body, mummifying him, until the torrent of rubbish seems to swallow him. This all occurs within the protagonist’s nightmare. Sam struggles desperately to dig Harry out but the clutter blows away and takes with it any chance for glory, depositing Sam on the far side of madness at the end of the story.

It is significant that we never see anything bad happen to Harry Tuttle. He is never apprehended. Visually speaking it could be said Harry escapes unharmed. Most likely, as with another famous escapologist, Harry Houdini, Tuttle was named so to evoke such comparisons. I’d love to watch this film in a crowded stadium and lead a Q & A afterword to hear how many different opinions I could collect by asking “what happened to Harry Tuttle?”

I’ve finished watching this film now for the third time in six months and rewinding over selected parts a fourth and finally found a crack to get me out of everyman Sam Lowry’s dead end track. I should mention that there are five differently edited versions of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” out there in movie land. That’s how wildly people disagree over it, so if you enter the conversation, make sure you have watched the same one. I’ve been watching 142 minute edition released by The Criterion Collection in 2006.

Comedy or not, the idea that the only possible escape from slavery for Sam is psychosis is so distressing that I had to find an alternative solution for his predicament. Although this solution exposes a path Sam did not choose, it provides sanity to anyone who does. The fact that Sam did not choose this path is precisely why the movie had to end the way it did.

While Sam knew something was very wrong with the culture that supported him, but he never showed an interested in contributing to or improving it. He did his job and looked the other way. We sympathize with him. Everything in his life is a hassle. Sam simply takes the hassle of least resistance, but he does that instead of coming up with solutions like Harry does.

Sam was not interested in getting out of his situation except in dreams and even that was a selfish scheme. When the woman of his fantasies walks right out of them into real life and she turns out to be a free thinker, Sam never asks her why. He makes no connection when she asks, “Have you ever really seen a terrorist?”

The real hero of “Brazil,” Harry Tuttle demonstrates how helping fellow human beings is the only way out. In Sam’s final flip-out, Harry liberates Sam by helping him blow up the Ministry, but that all takes place in Sam’s head. This component of Sam’s fantasy serves to underscore Sam’s bureaucratic programming. The company man was never able to shake off the Ministry’s allegation that Harry was out for blood instead of good.

Other than Sam’s visually projected assumptions of Harry’s motives, all we know for sure from what we actually see is that Harry’s a multi-talented repairman on the run. Sure he’s packing a gun; he’s accused by the Ministry of terrorism, but we only ever witness Harry fixing folks’ utilities, which are constantly choked up and pinched in gridlocracy.

Whenever we see Harry, he’s engaging his gifts for the greater good. The unlikely superhero declares his intent loud and clear, “we’re all in this together.” Harry Tuttle is the only free man we see in “Brazil”. Anytime after Sam met Harry his fate could have been redeemed too, but freedom goes unclaimed. Gilliam’s lovable protagonist just wants to slip his chains in dreams. Instead, he is crucified while Harry avoids the scene.

Gilliam’s screenplay descends from last century storytellers, such as Franz Kafka, and George Orwell whose clairvoyant visions gave us today’s headlines fifty to a hundred years in advance. If we’d subscribe to the viewpoints of those scribes as passionately as we repeat the opinions of our political leaders today, we might still evade their frightening predictions.

The prototype attack drone of James Cameron’s “The Terminator,” which we looked at in post three was, for some reason, assigned the disreputable year 1984 to explode on the scene. This month’s title was released soon after “The Terminator” and features none other than Big Brother himself, from Orwell’s opus, or his next of kin at least, in any case a gargantuan government plays the devil in “Brazil.”

It’s a gnarly web to which Sam Lowry’s futuristic culture clings. Everything and everyone is connected by machine. A totalitarian eye eves drops on a first world countrymen much like my own. “Brazil” bureaucrats are able to obtain any material thing known if they have the money and connections. Those with neither must languish in a jammed socio-economic intersection.

The trappings are all familiar. Grotesquely cheap flats and mini-motorcars are an average carrot for the company man and for the elite there’s garish palaces and cosmetic surgery. However, progress along an orderly line is impossible for average folks in “Brazil.” Like the tubes and cables that twist through their living rooms, everything is overloaded, impounded or outdated. Any citizens’ life can take sudden turns and get spliced or derailed onto a random identity, torn from their homes and bound to the Ministry for rendition. In “Brazil,”lives are snuffed at the drop of a receipt. Thank God it’s only a movie.

The title refers to the song Sam Lowry sings to himself at the movie’s devastating end. An attribute of “Brazil” worth studying is how the movie maker embeds the musical score in the narrative, from  the first impression of its title and melody, to the way it accentuates the irony of its disturbing finale. Title and the theme song are like magnets that lock together at the last possible moment of the movie after having drawn the audience between them.

“Brazil” is hailed universally for its hyper-imaginative portrayal of life in a gridlocked bureaucracy. It is also frequently dissed as one of the most bleak and cynical journeys in motion picture history.  Even though this movie is futuristic, “Brazil” gazes back over its shoulder at a previous critique of totalitarianism, “The Conformist,” by Bernardo Bertolucci, another chapter from our past exposing how human beings can be chewed up in bureaucracy.

The design of the government buildings are closely related. Those clean, high contrast, echo prone interiors in either movie could share the same physical address. Not only that, notice how the sky and clouds on the wallpaper of the conformist’s bedroom, in the closing minutes of Bertolucci’s film, turn up as the virtual background for Sam Lowry’s eagle-like alter-ego in the opening scene of Gilliam’s tale. The major turning point in both films clicks when the protagonist chooses narcissism over heroism, trading freedom for slavery.

I’ll take this opportunity to point out how obviously “Brazil” furnished a model for the art design of “The Matrix,” too, that great sci-fi watershed from the very end of the last century mentioned in my last post. All three film’s designers owe a debt to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,”(1927) another controversial flick about man and the machine that has been repeatedly subjected to the scalpel, resulting in at least five different edited versions as well. I will comment on that film in greater length at a later date.

Concerning “Brazil,” let’s briefly delve in to Terry Gilliam’s choice of christening with the name Brazil the utopian destination in Sam Lowry’s imaginary escapes. Since there are so many tropical locales to choose from that evoke the exotic and the pristine, why did the filmmaker choose those hemispheres? Thinking of Gilliam’s orientation as a comic, I’d have to ask myself–with what conspicuous grotesqueness does the factual country of Brazil contrast with the unsettling, familiar looking dystopia where Sam and Harry exist?

Modern Brazil is an enormous land. Its not just driblets of paradise like Tahiti or Santorini. Brazil dominates its corner of the globe and is home to the Amazon, cradle of the most biologically diverse wilderness left on earth. Brazil literally gives us the air we breathe. From a prophetic standpoint, it stands to reason the region might become number one among humankind’s last hopes for survival.

So let’s just assume that where Sam lives in the future is the opposite of what Brazil represents now. The symbolism suggests we still have a place to retreat to, or someone does. What matters to you and me is the same thing it comes down to for Sam and Harry in their world. Bottom line, we all want to live in a place free of slavery and terrorism. Sam tries for it with his fantasies of Brazil. Meanwhile Harry Tuttle’s busy solving practical problems right where he is. No wonder “Brazil” ends in tragedy for Sam.
Continued to next month…

All four directors assign this color to the enemy’s eye. Why? Firstly, so we see the enemy. Secondly, because that color fills our own eyes when they are closed in strong light. Literally speaking, is this what is meant by the expression, “eyes wide shut”? The pupils are wide open but the lids are tightly closed. Thirdly, and most obvious; while all these mechanical eyes are programmed by humans. Fact is, they happen to belong to three kinds of surveillance outfit.

Surveillance turns out to be a subject so huge it can’t be thoroughly covered in dozens of great movies, therefore we’ll just have to leave it for now with only one of it’s distressing riddles unraveled. In this month’s post, featuring “The Matrix,” the machine has become so insidious as to assimilate human minds and bodies, en masse, recycling, replicating and using our life force for an energy source. This is an apt metaphor for the relationship of the consumer and the multinational brands of today. The hero Neo breaks free with quantum leap, in the end. This is what it takes to restore the machines purpose to the service all humankind.

Surveillance is everywhere in our world now. Toxins are too. We filter them 24/7. Any story of end times identifies the same universal pinch–the sign of the beast, if you will. If you are born in end times, you have to bare some downward pressure. The Beast of the Bible turns out in modern times to be a machine that is broke and malfunctioning. That includes, governments, corporations and motion pictures too, unfortunately. Yes, there is toxic programming out there reddening everyone’s eyes, feeding off problems. Most of us can filter it out, but one in a million it bedevils.

So, might there be some clue here in “The Matrix,” while we sort through our real life predicament? How many of us have bothered to apply the lesson of the hero to our own life–a potentially great story still in the making? I suppose the question remains, what is the lesson of “The Matrix”? My presumption is that Neo finds his highest potential in acting for the common good.

Another person may take away a different lesson from the same movie. For instance, it is through mortal combat that the enemy must be vanquished. This is an example of the garbage I’m talking about. One must filter it out while watching “The Matrix.” Such faulty assumptions characterize the deviants that bring pandemonium into today’s schools, offices and movie complexes.

There is such a thing as mental pollution and that is what our children must be protected from at an early age. Adults are able to filter those toxins but not children. I was kept away from violently gruesome films until after my mid-teens. Maybe that’s why I can keep my peace. Perhaps others can’t because they were exposed too early.

Whether the Wachowski siblings and James Cameron be deemed perpetrators or pacifiers, they are world-class storytellers and they all deliberately identify a strong presence of toxins and surveillance in the opening scenes of “The Terminator” and “The Matrix.” Here are just two examples of foreboding prophecies from the tail end of the last century;  three great movie makers speculating, well in advance, on the roots of this weird, explosive variety of psychosis that has blasted itself into our headlines lately almost daily.

Their movies postulate out how toxins mutate humans into killing machines and also how a mind, constantly spied upon, can be driven to desperate means. Alternatives and options to our currently developing quagmire have been put forth by wise folk in our great stories for centuries. Why do we ignore them?

The machinations of movie making and digital entertainment are neither entirely sound or faulty, for the intent of the operator does matter. Filmmakers are hot-blooded operators steering lifeless machines through worlds both real and imagined. Are we making love or war here or what? What is the goal? The defeat of the beast in the apocalypse is a battle that wages in the heart of every human being on the planet, including filmmakers. It is up to each one of us to conquer what enslaves us, from within.

What a fine-tuned machine a camera and a screen can be for shedding light, both literally and figuratively on society. The same apparatus that confronts us with pointless killings in our streets also exposes us to countless examples of heroism. The number one challenge for movie makers is to be sure their works enlighten and don’t make us sicker.

Motion pictures on the Internet are our modern scripture–the word made light­­­–the universal library of common sense and culture. All great traditions can be brought forward with this marriage of poetry and science. Let them be celebrated and partaken in by the entire globe.

I am an advocate of cinema’s potential to encourage openness, tolerance, cooperation and goodwill. The digital roads we travel belong to no one in particular. Whoever is on them at any given time could be our audience. We have no idea who we are sharing our story with, but we have to live with them, so why not make friends. If you want to connect with someone that you don’t know, what do you do? Smile, at least. Maybe even shake hands.

Does the rest of the world comprehend now how random citizens go on killing sprees in my country? The malfunction of the American dream is not part of some twisted conspiracy, but an unfortunate side effect of toxins churned up by our misuse of machines.

In relation to most of the rest of our breeding, excreting kin on this earthly plane, my country’s an infant that needs its diaper changed. We won’t deal with our excrement so it piles to the ceiling. This lack of hygiene is bound to kill some and spoil things down stream. Toxins, like bad news, beget more of the same. Less than a week after Qatar comes Sandy Hook to heap shame upon shame. Why is it that suburban psychos targeting children and mothers confound us? Was it a wacko’s attempt to spare future refugees from the larger nightmare closing around us?

We overtook this country by force and we’ve been polluting it ever since we moved in. As far back as we are willing to look warnings about the consequence have been pouring in. Back when I first struck out on my own, we were being cautioned about a nasty dragon, somewhere upwind, wielding mechanical limbs beneath human skin. I saw him first on a giant screen at the drive-in. A cold-hearted robot, programmed for obsession, was stalking and slaying with automatic weapons. If you missed that particular sci-fi attraction, just imagine any suburban assassin from last year in action.

The film I was referring to is James Cameron’s “The Terminator”(1984), which features a mechanical hit man dispatched from the future to prevent the birth of a rebel redeemer. It has been said that Cameron took his story from Harlan Ellison, another insightful science fiction dreamer. But their bad guy was clearly nicked from the last book of the Bible in which a dragon threatens the mother of the savior. Both stories’ beasts personify our most toxic behavior.

So, if books of old also illuminate opposing sides of human nature, why blame popular songs, games and movies of the new and future? In the Bible, our internal opposites come to head in bloody war. When the Savior subdues the Beast, it settles the score. Cameron’s tightly plotted Armageddon of ’84 is an American factory assembly line noir, where a robot’s rampage ends with a hydraulic squish under the hand of a mother savior.

But first, the Beast, according to Cameron, arrives disguised as a man. From beside a dumpster, in a garbage truck’s beneficent shade, the monster embarks on its toxic crusade. Any one of the Terminators attempts on Sarah Connor’s life should easily have done her in, but John Connor, her future savior/son, sent to her a brave and horny warrior friend.

Though the Terminator appears to embody the human ideal, what moves him even alien fenders can’t conceal. Once he’s stripped down to the exo-skeletal core, he looks like some ruthless, rolled-Buick man-o-war. But it all comes down to a toxic program. So it is clear. We must extricate the program of the damned.

The Terminator’s is the ultimate killing machine. Brute force and hostility are calculated to win everything. It is not another warrior that finally does this Beast in. Mother Sarah pushes a button on a gizmo that caves him in. Let a constructive machine consume its destructive twin.

Part 4, the next in this series delves even deeper into the machinations of man and how they can either halt or hasten humanity’s stand. We’ll crack more clues to the mass executioner’s blues when we next begin. If you haven’t done so already and would like to, read the last book of the Bible, or watch “The Terminator” and “The Matrix,” then check back in.

I am not here to declare particular films or their makers as polluters. That is a matter of personal taste. Movies are essentially stories, or at least they appeal to our appetite for them, and everyone is entitled to their own preference. I will not impose my values on films that I don’t care for. They don’t belong to me. If I don’t like a movie, it may be because I haven’t taken the trouble to understand it. Or, it may be I understand it but have no present need or desire for its content.

Like many items for consumption nowadays, if it soaks up precious resources without delivering sustainable returns, I can’t be bothered. Such wasteful products are good examples of the machines taking over. But they can only do so with my agreement. So, while I will never agitate for a ban on bad movies, I will always encourage filmmakers to be benevolent with their art. The images we fashion and release into the culture can have unintended influence especially to people that might not be able to hear or understand the language the characters are speaking. Stanley Kubrick understood this when he made “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The history of motion pictures is filled with parables and metaphors that warn us of the dangers of the machine taking over. This month we will concentrate on Stanley Kubrick’s seminal science fiction masterpiece, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel.” Personally, I had not watched the film in more than 20 years.

Released almost 50 years ago, the film gave us advanced intel on our present day circumstances, predicting now commonplace innovations such as I-pad and Skype and such staggeringly complex achievements as space stations and Jupiter missions. I was particularly impressed, while watching the film this time, that government scientist Floyd Haywood’s four year-old daughter, with whom he Skypes on his way to a meeting, asks for a telephone for her birthday. I would not be surprised if 2001 was the precise coordinate point in history when little kids started asking their parents for their very own cell phones.

As someone who studied the Bible a great deal when I was growing up, I’ve often wondered why there are no prophets in the modern world? Has the Bible ever stopped being written? What is the difference between Ezekiel, who reports to have seen a great wheel way up in the sky, Kubrick who puts it up there on a movie screen for all to look at nearly half a century before it becomes a reality?

“2001: A Space Odyssey” predicts more disturbing trends that have come to pass as well, particularly mass surveillance and the virtual police state. I refer you, for instance, to a conversation HAL has with Dave just before HAL predicts (erroneously) that a key component of their spacecraft is going to fail within 72 hours. HAL probes Dave for any hints of doubt about the mission he is on. Dave gives away none of his private thoughts during this discussion and remarks that HAL must be working up his crew psychology report, to which HAL readily admits.

We now live with that all-seeing eye that socializes with us, like a real human being, and probes us with sympathetic dialogs that it can analyze to use for or against us in the future if it should become necessary. At first glance, the eye of surveillance is not so threatening to someone with a healthy conscience, who’s superego has always watched and kept him or her on a benevolent path throughout life’s long, winding passages.

I assume we all have abhorrent thoughts once in awhile. To quote another modern day prophet, in his song,” It’s Alright Ma’, I’m Only Bleeding” the poet confesses, “and if my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” As his illustrious career has proven, such thoughts are not dangerous. I hope our modern day eavesdroppers respect this. The real danger is when the machine flips out. This the catastrophy at the heart of Kubrick’s movie.

We see the sci-fi genre so often heading off in the direction of machines overthrowing the human race, such as “Blade Runner” “Brazil” or “The Matrix.” I will probably delve in to those titles in the coming months but I don’t want to present my subject as “man versus the machine.” As Kubrick so eloquently states, the machine is just man’s tool, like the bone our simian ancestor hurls unto the sky in the inciting incident of his movie.

The machine is never going to turn on us. Only we can do that. So one obvious question is, have we already turned on ourselves with our machines? The answer is yes. Anyone care to argue the point? The more important question is can we use machines to save ourselves? Again, yes. I have not, until now, emphasized the essential fact that corporations are also machines as are governments, but these are the most critical tools humans have invented to achieve the highest potential for all humankind.

Like many of us, the characters In “2001” lives seem utterly dependent on the trinity of technology, government and corporation. Of those three, the HAL 9000 computer that operates their craft is supposedly inviolable, like the Almighty of the Bible. As misinformation starts to pour in, the astronauts delve deeper into their dilemma, HAL reminds them he has never committed even the slightest miscalculation. To his credit, HAL admits a mistake was made and correctly asserts the blame rests with “human error.”

So what happens when God makes a mistake? It’s not God’s fault. It never is. It is, however, up to man to fix the problem. If the astronauts are going to survive, they must disengage from the artificial life support system that has sustained them up to that point. In “2001” the solution is to decommission HAL.

HAL resists the prospect of being taken offline by cutting Frank loose during a space walk and letting him die and drift off into deep space. If you put yourself in Frank’s place, this is the most horrifying image in the movie. It cuts to the bone most effectively because this is what the machine threatens to do to us if we mess with it. If we attempt to defend ourselves from its fallacies the machine will banish us outside its protective sphere. If we go along with its faulty program, we will most certainly be led off a precipice. So it takes tremendous courage to seize control of one’s own destiny.

It is no coincidence that the color of the lens of HAL’s all seeing eye is red and it happens to be the red that you see with your eyelids closed and pointed at the sun. That must be the first color we ever register, the same red of the inside of an egg sack, the illuminated bloodstream we see on the inside of our mother’s belly. When Dave gets inside HAL’s brain and starts disconnecting drives, the inner sanctum is the same shade.

Did Kubrick make that choice because he understood this world of machines, those made of materials as well as those made of men, were like a womb that we would have to abandon some day, when we’ve fully gestated and can no longer sustain life there? Are the mistakes of the machine actually the throws of birth, heaving us out of here and into some appointed place where the full color spectrum of lights, patterns, curves and angles accompanying Dave’s astounding right of passage through the cosmic birth canal portend great harmony within diversity.

Of course, Dave’s journey is assisted by invisible extraterrestrials, with whom he shares some destiny. We can’t rely on such interventions, at least not yet. That’s where the movies come in. I don’t mean all movies. I mean movies like “2001” and “Samsara,” movies that enrich humankind by showing us the truth. The truth eludes us in ordinary consciousness while we obsess about past and future. These are movies that urge us to leave the womb. Cinema is a technology that carries across that abyss of ignorance and apathy. Such movies awaken us to the errors that are built in to the faulty survival schemes of our present day and age.

Fricke’s pioneering camerawork was first seen by a larger audience in the groundbreaking non-verbal feature “Koyaanisqatsi” directed by Santa Fe resident Godfrey Reggio. Their collaboration deepened through two additional titles by Reggio entitled “Powaqqatsi,” and “Naqoyqatsi, while Fricke graduated to directing his own features including the award winning “Chronos” (1985) and “Baraka”(1992).

“Koyaanisqatsi” made its world premier at the Santa Fe Film Festival on April 28, 1982 and was immediately hailed as a groundbreaking cinematic achievement. It went on to be embraced internationally for its innovative presentation of moving images, as well as its landmark soundtrack by composer Philip Glass.

The man who inspired worldwide audiences and generations of film experimenters, started out life on a very different path. Reggio began his adulthood a Catholic monk and though he left the order decades ago, it is obvious that between his now graying eyebrows still springs the same determination to share spiritual sustenance with his fellow human beings.

At the Santa Fe Art Institute a couple of years back, I listened to him speak about modern life, creative work, and his thoughts on new media. Though his films demonstrate great technical mastery, the director does not place his faith in the future upon technology. It’s always the message that counts with that celluloid sage, much more than his method.

There is something distinctly biblical about the Qatsi Trilogy. I wonder if the director would agree with my description of his work as serving up a sort of a secular, non-verbal gospel. The word “sacramental” adequately describes my experience of watching any one of those movies with an open mind.

For the sake of better appreciating their place in the evolution of motion pictures, “Samsara,” “Baraka,” and the Qatsi Trilogy could be grouped together as state of the art examples of a long established sub-culture in movie making. Absent of actors and contrived sets, Pure Cinema enlarges upon the language of montage (film editing), which is distinct from theater or literature in that it encompasses a multidimensional choreography of light, lens, time, nature, humanity and machine. Very early experiments in this form include “Ballet Mechanique (1924),” “Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927),” and “Man with a Movie Camera (1929)” among others.

The films of Reggio and Fricke, from “Koyaanisqatsi” through “Samsara,” make particular use of an early editing experiment referred to as “The Kulishov Effect,” in which an actor was filmed with a dispassionate expression. The film was then cut together with contrasting images that lead the audience to conclusions by association, to prove it is not the content of the pictures, but their combination that imbues movies with their meaning.

For example, pairing the actor’s neutral close up with a steaming bowl of soup, Russian film pioneer Lem Kulishov made audiences unanimously presume that the man was hungry. Editing together the very same clip of the face with a child’s coffin made him seem to be grieving. The Kulishov Effect allows for a pronounced editorial tone, yet one that common sense must confirm in each of us, inviting the viewer to interpret for him or herself the emotional value an image.

Though we may think we have seen some of “Samsara’s” subjects before, time and again it is revealed to us that we haven’t. Contrasting a bird’s with a worm’s eye point of view, the filmmakers scrub our attention back and forth across a broad swath of earthly activities to gently cleanse our eyes of apathy and bias and flush out entropy and dysfunction in society at large.

Not all the scenes of nature in “Samsara” are upward gazing in awe. Neither are all views of the machine downcast with disdain. One of the most inspiring visuals I came away with was of a metropolis at night, glittering like crystal, firmly fixed, yet in perpetual motion, exhaling light into the darkness.

The transcendent power of these cinematic dissertations lie in there involvement of the audience. Movies mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Then in the movie theater, we’re all looking at them from a slightly different angle. While they were making the “Koyaanisqatsi”, executives warned them that no one would ever watch it because there was no dialog. When they would ask the director “Who’s in it?” He would say, “you.”

Whenever we buy a movie ticket, or click to a live stream we’re asking for the truth, The same thing that keeps us from seeing the truth while it’s happening to us is what makes it plane as day when we watch it replayed on screen.

Time is what shields us from the truth, not time itself, of course, but our attitudes toward it. An example of this would be to go to a movie like one of these for instance, and to be so preoccupied with your own past and future you completely miss the present purpose of the film you came to see. The same dynamic explains why the truth in life escapes our notice so much of the time. You go away wondering what’s the point.

Is it possible to watch any of these films and be distracted by anything more important? The genius of these films is that there is no better story than the one unfolding on this earth at this moment. The content in these assembled recordings absorbs its audience by enlightening them to the naked truth that eludes us night and day.

That’s why a new one of these titles has been released every decade or so. Motion pictures like these help us take the blinders off. Each is a multidimensional time capsule of natures wonder, plunder and blunder as well as a kind of mellow psychedelic trip without the attendant risks. After watching “Samsara,” I feel like I’ve grown as a human being, intoxicated by the elegance of nature and sobered by my complicity with the machine.

Just like every art form before it, movies will pass out of fashion some day. This may come to pass far in the future, or maybe way sooner. The mode in which they are told will continue to evolve, but stories and storytelling will never die.

A story is a product of our necessity to ruminate with language. It is the tongue of the soul. Stories began sophisticating our human brains long before they could be applied to any commercial pursuit or conscious artistic statement. Stories are a shared context inherent in everything we do. As storytellers humans themselves are the living record.

Motion pictures, coupled with the digital domain, are morphing into something more that we can’t yet fathom. Even as we speak, something more wondrous than cinema is being born in a way similar to how painting and music delivered us to the doorstep of motion pictures, but let us not forget that humans are the repository of these stories.

Neither the libraries, nor universities, not Netflix, Amazon or any religious institutions, nor even the gathering clouds of digital domination will ever have a corner on the market of story. We are supplying the stories to them. Nevertheless, while new mediums of storytelling are always being born, in our day and age, the common tongue is still spoken most eloquently with cinema.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), directed by Josh Zeitlen, has already garnered the film world’s most prestigious awards. It achieves awe-inspiring performances, gritty splendor and universal relevance with amateur actors, a miniscule budget, and a script adapted from a one-act play.

The most universal stories are also the simplest and this is the great achievement of “Beasts.” With stubborn, giddy pride and self-reliance, a motherless child and her undomesticated father obtain material sufficiency, one day at a time.

None of the three antagonists in this story are human. The foremost is Nature, with whom the characters collaborate for survival. The next most formidable threat is everything beyond the levee–our world in other words–regarded as a kind of modern Mordor by those gentle folk.

The opening shot elegantly represents the entire microcosm of the pre-adolescent protagonist’s ordeal as she coddles a little bird in one hand while fashioning a pillar of mud for the creature to stand on by itself. This procedure comes across as both child’s play and a demonstration of maternal instinct. If the bird represents the little girl, then the little girl represents a benevolent influence providing refuge in a dangerous world.

Who is the protector, while her six-year-old figure wanders half-naked through a shabby, littered landscape, interacting familiarly with a turtle, chicken and hog? When she confides how little she understands them, the filmmaker is inviting us to discover how inadequately we comprehend his subject and the squalid environment she calls home. A visual clue is inserted in the introductory shots to listen for the heartbeat, the mystery that unites the greater universe.

Her immediate universe is revealed to us as a rag-tag regiment of raunchy revelers on Fat Tuesday. They savor their seclusion and simplicity relying on meager livestock, abundant booze, and semi-regular boons of gulf shellfish for subsistence. In that universe life is a party and the party goes on pretty much uninterrupted on top of whatever calamity happens to befall them.

With the glow of moonshine and fireworks on their faces, an assortment of sodden misfits, young and old, parade, royalty-like, down the same single track that most of them will jamb in order to escape nature’s wrath the next day. Among them are fishermen, freeloaders, saloon owners and a witch/teacher that warns her of global warming and the cowardliness of “pussies.”

The imagination of our child hero concocts an apocalyptic myth, woven through her voice-over, about how she prepares for the return of prehistoric predators unlocked from the melting ice-caps. The quest for her present day mother is contrasted with this and her future, destined with the fate of mother earth, to be drowned by the flood. It’s either that or be domesticated and formally introduced into institutionalized poverty.

Most of humankind huddles closely together over the dividing line between poverty and self-sufficiency and Josh Zeitlen’s lens stands squarely over that fulcrum in “Beasts.”

“When you get sick over there,” she says, “they plug you into the wall.” Is this meant to epitomize the sacrifice of the “wild” who become domesticated? The country they are talking about is our country. We must be the “pussies,” they keep referring to.

Like any animal in her jungle, the turns of events in the life of this little girl are fateful and decisive from the beginning. In an early scene her daddy collapses from a mere thump of her fist. Shocked and bewildered, she skedaddles to the witch,” I think I broke something.” When the flood does come, engulfing everything, she faces fear valiantly, while her juiced-up father calls out the rain groping with shotgun blasts for the jugular of the hurricane.

In nature, there are always casualties. This film is an ode to the offspring that survives. “For all the animals that got caught in the flood, the end of the world has already happened.” The little moppet grows philosophical under pressure, with wisdom well above her years, yet never do any of her quips seem fake spilling from her lips. “They’re all down at the bottom now trying to breath through water.”

This film speaks so elegantly in the common tongue to anyone that feels the constant dread of impending disaster hanging over their head. It articulates the pressures of living on the shifting sands of modern existence and it indicts preceding generations for inadequately providing for and preparing us to meet the future.

Therein lies the real antagonist in this rural chamber piece and how you would identify it depends on your social orientation. It’s been called poverty, ignorance, the ravages of alcohol, the existential crisis of being human. I grant it a distinct regard from the previously described beasts because, while we can not tame the monstrous destructiveness of Nature, or reverse the damage our bad upbringing has had on the modern world, we can, and this diminutive heroine does, confront the adversary at her core and does so in a way that is an example to us all.

Re-imagening our fable in his characteristic, tawdry, telanovela fashion, if I were called upon to name Almodóvar’s 2012 masterpiece, it would be, “The Recently Widowed Super-Surgeon’s Revenge,” but thematically “The Skin I Live In” lovingly teases apart our obsession with human perfection and makes art out of the slick sciences that promote it.

Sr. Almodóvar imagines his story at the junction of where art and science are increasingly intertwined and how that phenomenon, coupled with the film medium itself it would seem, along with the characters in the story, all combine to reflect our current disposition towards gender. His characters also conveniently embody all the archetypes of the popular fable we have been discussing in the past three posts.

The fable “Beauty and the Beast” fits perfectly under the surface of this “Skin,” with an opening identical to the other three–the Beast eavesdrops on Beauty through a glass. From there on out,“The Skin I Live In” takes the notion of scrutiny, surveillance and invasion of privacy to outlandish lengths through the character of Robert, the super surgeon who uses every means at his disposal, from giant screens to microscopes to get to the bottom what makes Beauty immortal.

At home he sits in front of a monitor zooming in and out on his captive with the leer of a peeping tom. At work Robert busies himself in the operating theater with research, examinations and invasive procedures upon his unwitting model.

The story threads together a panorama of relevant scenarios involving the sculpture of skin, the culture of clothes, assorted aspects of gender identity that relate to flesh, fashion, hide, masks, mirrors, armor and genitals.

As far back as we look there exist stories of gods and mortals who suffer from such dire cases of unrequited love that they simply must sculpt an idol to their ideal and make love to it. Almodóvar assumes we are still caught up in this preoccupation in modern times.

In this case Robert’s ideal is a dead ringer for his wife. He just happens to be fashioning her out of a young man who Robert believes ruined his daughter’s life. In the most perversely artificial way imaginable, Robert’s revenge conveniently manages to keep his love for his wife alive as well.

Addressing the artist/model relationship from the previous posts, there is always a predicament for the model in having to share the attention of the master with the creation he is working on, “The Skin I Live In,” imagines a case of the model being literally transformed into his creation.

Gender hybrids in art interests me in the light of the fact that Leonardo and Michelangelo, among others, painted women’s heads as well as their organs on men’s bodies to communicate the Renaissance concept of God-given human perfection. Though this all sounds chauvinistic now, we cannot possibly judge the mentality behind such choices with accuracy from the cultural reference point of our times. Was this really blatant disregard for woman, or some desire to imbue her with man’s strength? In other words, if only you could take the best of men and combine it with the best of women, that would be perfection. But who knows if that’s what was intended or something else?

If you are an artist absorbed in the act of creating, you work at all hours, often in the middle of the night, imagining, observing, probing, shaping, and caressing. The work becomes like a lover with whom you gladly elude sleep. Robert’s falling in love and sleeping with his Vera would be nothing scandalous if it weren’t for the revenge plot which makes a twisted horror flick out of our familiar fairy tale.

Most, if not all, of Pedro Almodóvar’s films portray situations of abduction and victimization. He’s well known for trafficking in images of rape, incest and assorted taboo which I’ve always assumed relates to the director’s feeling like a female trapped in a male body.

Within the first forty minutes of “Skin,” we’ve been shown kidnapping, drug abuse, burglary, a flaming car wreck, rape, bloody murder and several shameless breaches of medical code. Vera’s story should be interesting to anyone that feels trapped in a male dominant paradigm. Almodóvar’s story should be interesting to all genders when it addresses anxiety generated within our rigidly enforced hierarchy’s dominant sexual codes, and Beauty’s story should be interesting to all humanity in any way it might articulate our frustration when we are confronted with any of life’s polarizing dilemmas.

Indeed, one could read endless comparisons into the dynamic between the super-surgeon and his subject, not the least one being the corporation vs. consumer relationship and perhaps that is what makes the horror of Vera’s situation so disturbing to us.

Irregardless of connotations, intended or otherwise, the quality of the film making is superb. His country’s illustrious fine arts heritage seems to have taught the director well. Visually speaking, the flourish with which some of the technological imagery is presented recalls the most poetic science sequences in cinema from Lange to Kubrick.

“The Skin I Live In” expresses an undeniable dedication to the goddess of beauty. The filmmaker’s deeper allegiance is made obvious for us, for example, by posting enormous reproductions of “Venus D’Urbino” by Titian, along side “Venus in a Mirror” by Rubens, in the upstairs grand hallway. Like those masters before him, this one lavishes loving attention even on the most obscure element in the piece, investing painstaking care in the way it contributes to the refinement and dimensionality of the finished product.

A meticulously matched soundtrack selection, for instance “Shades of Marble,” by Anders Trentemøller evokes, with strident strings, the violent occlusions of geological upheaval. Almodóvar repurposes it ingeniously to express the fragility and vulnerability of flesh to intrusion by the scalpel, or the violent will of rapist against victim while, at the same time, paying homage to the classic Greek sculptors that labored to encode our modern obsession with flawless beauty.

Beginning with this past June’s post, I have been discussing Bertolluci’s charming coming of age flick, “Stealing Beauty” from 1996. Along side it, I have compared Jacques Rivette’s artist/model drama “La Belle Noisseuse.” From 1991, and proven that all are re-workings of the Jean Cocteau’s venerated classic, “La Belle et la Bete,” from 1947.

This final variation is the most exotic extreme. Whereas, in “La Belle Noiseusse”, the role of Beauty was stripped down and exposed, by the rigors of the master’s process, to possess a kernel of the beast inside. The genius of Almodóvar turns the screw a notch deeper, forcing man to be changed into woman against his will, for the purposes of sexual slavery, effectively transforming the Beast into Beauty to let him feel what it’s like to be preyed on.

In the opening credits of “Stealing Beauty,” Bertolucci casts his audience as the Beast to achieve essentially the same thing. All three are cinematic stunts designed to place the Beast in all of us, in Beauty’s point of view in order to foster compassion and respect for her. All three are acts of homage to idealized feminine and an appeal for her welfare which is too often taken advantage of in real world scenarios. All the more reason why she must be defended in our make believe ones.

La Bête, on the other hand, represents our uncivilized self, having overwhelming temptations that we somehow just barely manage to contain and, in so doing, over time, manage to temper with the refinements of beauty and love. The fable reassures us that beauty melts even the most overpowering brutality and the tamed beast can be counted on to supply ample potency and instinct to make all of Beauty’s romantic dreams come true.

All this is made possible when La Bête submits to Belle. Even though he is holding her against her will, she manages to befriend him. Belle developes compassion for La Bête restless longing and then, in a final twist, the secret is revealed. A dashing Prince was trapped, by an evil spell, inside the body of la Bête. Suddenly a handsome young man, chins forward to claim Belle’s hand. By the grace of some wondrous power, they are joined in sacred bonds and swept up into the sky to fly to the Prince’s kingdom.

Like Bertolucci did in “Stealing Beauty,” the 1991 film “La Belle Noiseuse” by Jacques Rivette also uses the artist/model relationship to pay homage to Venus, reworking the “La Belle et la Bête” fable through a very different lens.

“La Belle Noiseuse” is another film that dispenses dear old, eternally young Venus into new human skin, this time by way of some ingenious thematic inversions. Here, in this version, not unlike the sculptor in “Stealing Beauty,” that lived in a villa in Tuscany, the virtuoso of our next version is a renowned painter who lives a quiet life in the French countryside. The investigation into which this artist plunges with his model is quite different than the father/daughter blueprint we were submitted to in “Stealing Beauty.” As a quintessential modernist would, Fernhoffer, the maistro of “La Belle Noiseusse,” has given himself the daunting task of de-idealizing Venus.

In the opening scene, we immediately find an inversion worth noting. Instead of Beauty being spied on by the Beast in the beginning of the affair, this time we eavesdrop on the beautiful Marianne as she is stalking a second floor balcony snapping candid pictures of a handsome young man in the courtyard below whom, it turns out, is actually her boyfriend. Note how prevalently the act of spying on Venus is positioned in the first acts of all these movies.

The entire opening sequence, it is soon revealed, is a game Marianne and Nicolas play for two tourists in the courtyard, who are supposedly the real eavesdroppers. So, for the astute film watcher this turns into a kind of running “who’s on first” joke, but the punch line is not trying to tell us that Europe is Beauty and tourists are the Beast. I doubt that, anyway.

In the transitional sequence between the previously described eavesdropping game and the first meeting with Fernhoeffer, at least a couple of important details should be mentioned. Marianne, the model-to-be, takes off her shoes on her way to the artist’s villa, unselfconsciously marking herself as a pilgrim. What kind of pilgrim? An art pilgrim? A truth pilgrim? If so, not a religious one, but in no way a tourist on holiday either.

A second precocious detail in this film comes when Liz, the artist’s devoted former model and presumed wife, remarks on a room in their villa that houses two chimeras. “You’ve found the Chimera Room, which is my favorite because it is completely unnecessary”–no doubt a comment on the way a model feels when she gets replaced by a younger one but also on what a fleeting creature she supposes to represent whenever she poses. In the end, the model herself is left behind. Only the artist’s portrait of her is considered.

As I’ve eluded to, the most prominent inversion in “La Belle Noiseusse” comes when Fernhoeffer tries to exorcize all the idealism out of beauty and expose the raw, unglamorous organism of his exceptionally lovely, intelligent and game accomplice. This requires, from both artist and model, three essential qualities; absolute trust, ruthless will, and physical stamina.

The scenes of artist and model working together start off like a master class in studio technique. There seems to be an emphasis on the scratchiness of the drawing instruments on the paper and canvas. The incessant noise, on the otherwise almost vacant soundtrack, can be off-putting at times, but this sound assists the image by emphasizing the mesmerizing intensity of the creative act. However, for this story to hold the attention of anyone but an art lover or aspiring painter, gradually, the model must become a fully participating collaborator, and then, in the end, after total surrender, be shocked at the outcome.

Their respective tasks look pretty overwhelming for them both at first. Her challenge is to devote herself completely to the expressed goal of the master. His has to do with seizing a lightening bolt that first struck him when he was in his prime–about which, now, he thinks himself long past.

There is much well conceived, well-defined character detail in “La Belle Noiseusse”. The masterpiece that is born at the climax manages to surprise everyone differently than everyone else including the audience. All of this requires brilliant storytelling, which is also what this movie is a master class in.

The model breaks through earlier on, but the master surprises himself only in the final brushstrokes and we can even sense that he’s exceeded his goal just as he steps back from the finished work. This is all made more significant when fulfillment turns out to be for him alone as his model appears distressingly shocked, exposed in some way with which she does not feel comfortable.

The master is detached enough from his ego that he can happily deny himself for her sake. The satisfaction of turning out a late career tour de force comes from the act of creation itself. We alone are allowed to revel in this old dog’s new trick with hiim while he sequesters away his magnum opus behind mortar and brick.

That, indeed, would seem like the ultimate surprise. Surely it is the masterstroke of storytelling in this story, but no, the ultimate transcendence is reserved for what the model saw when she took her first look at the work. Only once it is finished and she’s put her clothes back on, does it become clear what she laid on the line. We’ll never see the actual painting, but her reaction strikes the most raw, emotional chord in the film.

That canvas must have revealed something about hers that Marianne least expected. In the process it takes the blinders off her eyes about life, her future and lover Nicolas who is supposed to be some up-and-coming young stud on the modern painting scene.

In the end, having only seen a substitute for the masterpiece, Nicholas passes arrogant judgment on the maestro. Fernhoeffer, in rebuttal, says to Nicholas, “I hope you never change.” Nicholas must feel some sense of being bested or busted by that remark, but he’s perhaps too self-focused to get it before we do.

Marianne appears quietly philosophical about the experience of posing for a living legend. Her satisfaction consists in being a peer to the master, in how she overcame her own self-imposed limits to occasionally even surpassed the master’s commitment as she applied her body and soul to his intention.

Fundamental symmetry would be disturbed if the master’s neurosis were not on full display in these proceedings as well. This was never reflected with more unflattering candor than in the performance of model-turned-wife Liz played by Jane Birkin and how she seems to be almost entirely consumed in the master’s shadow.

The surprises, at the end, certainly resonates different ways with different viewers, but it is far from ambiguous to me that something positive has taken place. In fact, satisfaction ripples out in direct relation to the importance each character plays in the birth of the new work. Ferhoeffer gets his edge back. Marianne is shown some mysterious truth about herself. Liz receives her hero from a successful conquest. Nicolas leaves with a deluded notion of his superiority.

Even the art dealer, Balthazar, though hardly in possession of a masterpiece, wanders proudly away with what he was after, and we, the audience have indulged another couple hours in the company of Venus.

This is part 2 of a continuing investigation into a Cult of Venus that thrives today in modern movies.

I recommend, if you haven’t recently, or perhaps ever, take a look at “Stealing Beauty”(1996) and “La Belle et la Bête” (1946)–a double feature in which we compare a movie that is often ignored with one that is beloved by all.

We might as well resume with a film made by someone from the culture that gave Venus her name. Bernardo Bertolucci has been probing, adoring and obsessing over modern versions of her for over five decades. Take his movie, in which Liv Tyler plays a cosmopolitan virgin on the verge.

“Stealing Beauty” has been trivialized by some critics who fail to find real nourishment beneath its confectionary facade. To be sure, the picture looks like something a food writer might describe as pastel farmhouse over a bed of grapevine on terra cotta crust. Why the visual excess? Because “Stealing Beauty” is a fable. If you do not subscribe to this, you may be dismissed.

Anyone who paid keen attention would be able to guess, with the backdrop of idealized nature, archetypal sculpture and the way director and crew pump the painterly schema, “Stealing Beauty” automatically adopts an atmosphere of mythic escapades.

Young love never looked so yummy. It smacks sugar sweet indeed, but there is blood at the center of a good allegory and a hyper touch of it’s color is found in almost any composition in this film. Take Lucy’s last act skirt, or her father’s first act shirt–a photographic rapport that suggests their bond. The attention-getting hue calls to mind menstrual flow, birth blood and wedding night scarlet too, but especially the precious, stirring succulence that circulates the limbs of holy youth which fine art and the movies entice us to adore.

While we’re delving in to Bertolucci’s eye candy, let me point out that silk-draped portal off the barn that billows like some feverishly stoked kiln, which is echoed later by that campfire that permits just enough exposure in the obligatory scene.

Before the days of color cinematography there worked, in motion pictures, a fanatical servant of Orpheus. He too, like Bertolucci, was a poet before he became a filmmaker. He was born before cinema, but then perhaps we are speaking of the first poet of cinema too. They became one in the same in Msr. Jean Cocteau.

I cannot contain my suspicion that Bertolucci installed his curtain in the farmhouse to connect it with a fabulous opus on celluloid that the first poet took upon himself to frame. With his stolen one, Bertolucci often cheers Beauty on from the sidelines of that French master’s enchanted tale. He is also, coincidentally, restating for everyone or at least everyone paying attention, that this film is a fable like Cocteau’s inimitable “Beauty and the Beast,” better known as “La Belle et la Bête”.

If you’ve watched Cocteau’s masterpiece, you’ll never forget the sequence in which the character of Belle, played by the luminous Josette Day, arrives and enters Bête’s magic castle. Watch as she pushes in those massive doors and is snagged by the magnetism of her terrifying host. The halls are lit both-sides with regiments of disembodied arms, sprouted from walls instead of human ribs and each supports a glowing candelabra. One room is followed by another even more mysterious. The inner sanctum is decorated with a row of moonlit, floor-to-ceiling-draped windows.

The magnetism of La Bête grows so strong, by then, that something between the floor and Beauty’s feet conveys her to Him. The possessed castle inhales and sucks the diaphanous shades toward the swooning Belle. She comprehends only later that this is Bête in magic drapery drag, privately pawing her as she passes.

This brief passage is one of the most sumptuous in film history. It reveals not only the perverse pleasure that Bête takes in observing Belle without reserve, but takes in the ravishment of the senses that she experiences inside his enchanted in-breath before fear sets in.

First hints of dread come from a dressing room laid out for Belle. Objects in there whisper aloud, offering their service to her. With such animation in the world of things she is unfamiliar, or perhaps she comprehends, finally, that this castle has eyes to which she does not wish to be further exposed. So she runs but, naturally, all roads lead to La Bête. Suddenly, there he towers, with dashing, full-face beard, ivory fangs and diamond spangles. “Ue Allez Vous,” he bellows, blocking her way, and the trembling, exquisite, adorable and defenseless Belle instantly faints…

…meanwhile, back in our movie seats, ten bucks makes the goddess appear overhead, flick, flick, flick. Once more, radiant Venus descends to the world of men, flicka, flicka, flick…

The opening credits of “Stealing Beauty” play over a home made video. Here again we have a voyeur stalking a beautiful maiden from behind a magic glass. In his prying lens, Lucy is unsuspecting captive. Ironically, it is Bertolucci voice issuing from the secret admirer as he drops the tape of Lucy in the sky down to Lucy on the tracks. The video was recorded on the plane from America and then by train to Siena. It’s all we’ve had to look at so far. We’ve watched a lot of claustrophobic angles of Lucy sleeping, thinking, looking out the window, moving freely about the cabin, listening to music, sleeping some more. We get a cool glimpse of some drool dripping down her chin.

Why cool? Because this is Venus, adorable, immortal, woman-child, sex diva, war goddess. Though it should not be true of the audience, all of this is lost, of course, on luminous Lucy who embodies a ravishing ideal of lady luck with, delectably, zero awareness of our prying eyes.

Now would you just look at how that hand of hers sleeps so close to her blue jean-ed crotch. Is it meant to recall that infatuating pose painted by another celebrated high-priest of Her sect? He who is nearly five hundred or so years Bertolucci’s senior, and is known as Titian, a northerner like him, but from Venice instead of Parma. That Titian was a titan of Venus.

In case you never have, allow your gaze sufficient contact with the “Venus d’Urbino” to observe how gratified she is to lay naked in your presence. It is enough to make one doubt her virginity no? Edward Manet recaste that archetype a few centuries later, transforming Venus into Olympia, a haughty, prosperous, young whore (1864). Next up, Signore Bertolucci rigs his photo reel to ritually restore Venus’ virginity so he can steal it once more.

What is it about this little rite in which movie going mortals regularly love to partake? It is far from the first time that Venus has been around this block. That hottie and her posse are preserved in stone hewn from cultures that reach back to earth’s earliest inhabited zones.

Meanwhile, back to the future, Lucy’s awake again and looking out the window, descending to the land of men. She never acknowledges being watched by them though. You, I and the filmmakers are as graced as La Bete to peek into this pure maiden’s personal space.

Getting back to Bertolucci’s “Beauty”, is Venus really listening to those headphones? No, she’s asleep again. So we begin probing even closer, with the insistence of this mystery lens–much closer than we should. The filmmaker has gradually imposed on his audience a hip, ethical predicament, but it’s not our camera, so we can’t be blamed. Right? We are only watching.

Is that right, or wrong? We’ve just been going along. Now, we begin to ask ourselves if we should continue on when, suddenly, Venus is awakened by the mystery documentarian, advising her to un-dock now, having arrived at her destination.

Lucy grabs her grips and flits onto the platform stopping quick to fix a lace. “What are you doing?” she asks, staring down the lens for very the first time? “I was on the plane.” He whispers, just like Beauty’s dressing mirror in “La Belle et La Bête”. “This is for you.” The tape drops out the window. “Shit!” Lucy exclaims as fright breaks over her fetching forehead. Bingo, Bernardo, you just scored! That furled brow shows how it feels to be Venus in a Venus crazed world.

Because the maidenhead of a virgin is referred to as “her secret,” it makes sense that there is a secret at the core of this story. Is it the same mist that shrouds the sculptor when he wonders why Lucy’s stepfather wants him to sculpt her? “Why did he send her to me?” he confides to his fellow Irish ex-pat wife. “He’s never liked my work?”

I prefer to think the sculptor and Lucy’s step-father both understand why the step-father sent her from New York. I prefer to think that the sculptor’s wife, with whom he is speaking at this moment, does not know the reason and the sculptor is probing just to be certain.

There is also, most definitely, a beast at the core of this Beauty tale. It amounts to almost everyone else in the script. The whole world seems to be chasing this fox. The character of Richard presses most aggressively but, ever since the man with the video camera, each new character from the sculptor to the dying playwright is poaching after her. Every female in the script is getting off on Lucy in some way or other as well. Beastly nature–what can you do?

If I had a daughter, I’d encourage her to see this film as she approached adulthood, with the hope that it could provide a pertinent preview of the pleasures and pressures of becoming sexually active.

After the close call with a young seducer, it is a relief that the boy Lucy eventually connects with is not a slave to the sexual mores of his peers. Lucy’s salvation materializes in the form of the rake’s gentler cousin, a boy of the same age. Osvaldo is the only character in the story that hasn’t attempted to steal her beauty. His head of bucolic locks spells out “nature boy”, cinematically, and foreshadows the spherical canopy of a great tree suspended over Beauty’s sexual setting free.

This iconoclastic heist flick argues that all larcenies perpetrated on Venus are not equal. The sculptor has permission and his wife’s offense, for instance, is petty and meant to amuse when she outs the 19 year-old’s maidenhood. She and her family and friends all indulge in good-natured gossip out of sheer boredom.

Other predators in the upper age limit commit benign infractions as well, filling out this randy romance with spicy minor roles like a sleepwalking art dealer, played, most charmingly, by none other than our most beloved Beast player of all, the French matinee idol Jean Marais and Jean Cocteau’s erotic muse until death. Does anyone out there still dismiss the notion that this film is Bertolluci’s “La Belle et La Bête”?

Embracing a bountiful bouquet of wildflowers that she’s gathered from a classic Monet meadow nearby, Lucy finally asks the sculptor point-blank for the last piece of her puzzle. Where were you in August of 1975?” He takes a while to answer, “That must have been when I did your mother’s portrait.” With this line, the sculptor admits to Lucy her paternal claim. “That’s what I thought,” she replies to accept it. The sculptor levels his next line so that it’s meaning cannot be misunderstood. “It was one of the few times we (he and his wife) have ever been apart.” “Oh, I wouldn’t ask her,” she says, to assure she’s understood. “These are for you.” Lucy hands her father the bouquet, then dabs a tear. Whether it comes from a sense of profound connection or the lack thereof is only next made clear.

The master shows the finished work for which she modeled. It is pure essence. A massive tree trunk yields to sensuous curves in smooth, even grain, articulating immaculate skin on cheeks, forehead and chin. All this is presided over by inquisitive eyes of a curious, absorbent youth in soft, yellow pine. The sculptor confesses, in an earlier scene, his works are about himself. In this case it rings true at least a couple of ways.

Rather than dwell on his accomplishment, the sculpture praises Lucy for how lovely she turned out and she, in turn, looks proud as any branch could ever be for being immortalized by her secret trunk in the trunk of a real tree. To prevent hurt feelings with the sculptor’s wife, it is framed as cool to keep their truth concealed. On this she does agree, then father and daughter embrace, finally. Ironically then, the camera tracks away, in a wide radial around that great chunk of tree, finally showing some respect for Venus’s privacy.

This surprise plot detail attempts to define the unique bond of the artist and model. It points to a shared ambiguity, the secret to which each of them holds a key. I haven’t time to go into this subject here carefully but I will, in the next installment of this series on Venus, so stay tuned, please, if you will. Now, with Lucy’s daddy I.D.’d, we can get on with her inaugural foray.

Sweet surrender in the Siena hills under the verdant ball of an enormous tree. Earth pauses on the head of a pin for Venus and the Chosen One to get it on. Come spy with me on the pretty pilgrims perched above a vine-rowed rise, with the Tuscan sunset reflected in their eyes. Dappled cloudheads cradle rising stars. Campfire illuminates breeze-blown branch sighs, while down slip virgin panties from virgin buns and thighs. Nature Boy avails and proceeds to make love instead of screw. The coolest thing, besides the obvious, is next morning when Osvaldo confesses, “It was my first time too.

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