Ken Russell's The Devils

The Devils is here in a restored director's cut, every inch of nudity and blasphemy on full display.

It was a bomb hurled from the barricades of 1971. Russell's need for nudity seems a trifle silly, but he was breaking barriers that needed to be broken. Vanessas Redgrave's acting, with only a wedge of her face, and various contortions of her robed body, left me breathless. Oliver Reed was already past his prime, his rugged beauty besotted by drinking.

The second viewing revealed more to me, such as realizing that the citizens outside the iron gate denouncing the torture were the town's Protestants, at some risk to their lives. Many things were compressed to visual representation rather than speech. Smashing pagan art and toppling bookshelves in Grandier's home compresses intolerance into key gestures.

The sets by Derek Jarman make The Devils look a bit like Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The white tiles and white stones and the compression of city walls, cathedral, convent, and town square into one set viewable at one wide angle shot, gave it a stage-play atmosphere, the plague scenes especially claustrophobic.

Alexandre Dumas wrote up the Grandier story twice, first in his series of historical sketches called Celebrated Crimes, and then in a novel about Grandier. It was Celebrated Crimes that first taught me about the Borgia Family, and about the Cenci. The Catholic-Huguenot struggle is also given in agonizing detail. Dumas also set some episodes of  The Three Musketeers amidst the effort to tear down town and city walls throughout France, with Cardinal Richelieu as one of the key villains. A key plot turn in Three Musketeers involves the use of a pardon-in-advance written and signed by the Cardinal, whose words have stayed in my head since the age of ten: "The bearer of this has done what he has done, by my order, and for the good of the State."

Review of "Maestro"

This afternoon I viewed the film, Maestro, a biographical film about the personal life of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. It is a powerful and convincing impersonation of a man whose appearance, speech, and mannerisms are already known to millions. It is a daring thing to do.

What most everyone has always known is that Bernstein was a gay man in a generation where that mere fact, on top of being Jewish, would have meant no conducting career with a top-tier orchestra. So like many in his generation, he hid behind a marriage. That he loved his wife Felicja is undoubted, and they had three children. The film depicts the kind of marriage that existed then, when a wife endured and overlooked her husband's boyfriends as long as he was "discreet."

 

It is a torture to see this, and I have seldom seen this caged unhappiness so well portrayed. Bernstein's giant talent and giant ego made it all the more difficult. He is the greatest American-born conductor of the 20th century.

 

I did not enjoy seeing Bernstein drunk and snorting cocaine, and I assume this is all true since it is an honest, and authorized, biographical depiction. But these are further demonstrations of emotional repression. Despite his triumphs, this is not a happy man.

Those who love Bernstein the musician may not care a jot about his personal life. I think it matters that people should know, especially in this time when some want to drive gay people underground again, what that dishonesty costs.

 

The only lengthy musical excerpt showing Bernstein conducting is the finale of Mahler's Second Symphony, and this is the high point of the film. For those coming to the film knowing nothing about Bernstein, this recreation of his conducting style with the most wildly stirring finale in all Western music, shows what he meant to musicians and to his listeners. He did indeed set people on fire.

 

That said, do not expect this to be a film with long musical intervals. It's an emotional and packed life history. You have to bring your own memories of Bernstein's recordings to it.