OF GODS AND MEN (Des Hommes et des Dieux, 2010)

In 1991 an "Arab spring" came to Algeria in the form of a free election apparently won by an Islamist party. It was snuffed out when the government voided the election, provoking a violent uprising and a reign of mutual terror, with the common people caught in the middle. Also caught in the middle were the French Trappist monks of the Tibhirine monastery in a village in the Taurus mountains, a vestige of France's colonial presence in the country. As portrayed in Xavier Beauvois' film, the monks are a welcome presence in their village. Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale) runs a clinic for the poor, while the other monks earn their living by making jelly and other foodstuffs to sell on market day. At no time does the movie show them proselytizing to the Muslim natives. The villagers invite them to weddings and are entirely comfortable with the Christians' presence among them. Some even say that the monastery is the heart of the village. When the threat of terrorism closes in and some of the monks contemplate quitting the village, they describe themselves as birds on a branch, undecided about whether to leave or not. A village elder corrects them: they, the monks, are the branch, and the villagers the birds. The common people think the monastery offers them more protection than a government most despise. The monks themselves would rather not have the protection of a "corrupt" regime. Who'll protect them, then, when the terrorists come?...

Knowing little about Algeria except what I'd read about the civil war as it was happening, I don't know whether Beauvois painted too idealistic a picture of Christian-Islamic harmony in the mountain village, but it certainly is an appealing picture. I can imagine critics questioning the extent to which the village is portrayed depending upon the monks -- it could be called colonialist paternalism, I suppose -- but the monks themselves seem to live up to whatever vows of humility and service they took. They don't lord it over the villagers and clearly aren't out to convert anybody, based on what we see. Nor are the villagers uptight about their own religion; they're disgusted by the crimes of the Islamist terrorists, questioning whether the killers have read the same Qur'an they have. Some of them have, as we learn in a scene when Christian (Lambert Wilson), the monks' leader, persuades a guerilla leader to spare him with a quote from the Qur'an in French translation, which the militant finishes in the original. For the film's purposes, Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, as Christianity is also at its best, until political fanatics distort its message.

Of Gods and Men makes a point of not just avoiding but repudiating the obvious parallel that might occur to viewers watching the monks stand their ground without government protection despite the increasing hopelessness of their situation. Unlike the terrorists, the monks don't intend to be martyrs. When they finally decide to stay, they don't do so to seek death. Christian makes clear that they should do everything possible to avoid death -- and one of the monks will survive the picture because he finds a place to hide at the right moment. But they also admit that their calling comes with a risk of death, and that, too, they should not avoid. Each feels called to serve God by serving the poor in a distant land, and they owe it to God and the poor to stay on despite the risk. The best argument against staying, at least without protection, may have been made by a government official who warns the monks that their deaths would only be exploited, presumably for propaganda purposes, by other parties. Some critics might say that Beauvois himself and his collaborators have exploited the story, but they may have intended it as a corrective to other, arguably more exploitative accounts -- those that portray the monks as religious martyrs, for instance.

There's no plot to the picture apart from the monks' dilemma and its resolution. It accumulates detail rather than build up narrative momentum, establishing the monks' place in the village and the routines of their private devotional lives. The early part of the picture has an almost documentary quality before the monks develop distinct personalities and individual issues like Luc's declining health and some slight resentment by the others of Christian's dominance. The story develops into a kind of spiritual Alamo, as each monk has to decide whether to stay or flee. The actors, led by Lonsdale and Wilson, are convincing as aging, intelligent men who've known each other for many years. As fate closes in on them, the film seems to grow in scale with sweeping helicopter shots of the village and hosts of soldiers swarming and scrambling nearby. It becomes a kind of epic without conventional action -- we get one shot of throat-slitting to establish the nature of the threat -- with the monks as nonviolent heroes facing inevitable doom as a matter of duty. The epic feeling is only enhanced by the final scenes in a snowy landscape that I, in my geographic ignorance, didn't expect to see in Algeria. But the epic retains an intimate scale in which the fates of nine men mean something, however relevant the episode may have been to the larger conflict.

Beauvois doesn't try to overdramatize this, with one awkward exception: a "last supper" scene in which the monks share wine and listen to a cassette of Swan Lake. This play for pathos seems superfluous and its focus on misty-eyed close-ups deprives the monks of their main strength as characters -- their intelligence. Worse, at least for some American viewers, the excerpt from the ballet we hear is the one long associated with the Universal Horror film cycle and now with the madness of Black Swan, so the effect for me was probably something different from what Beauvois intended. But this is an exceptional false note in an otherwise judicious portrait of men who became martyrs of a kind whether they wanted to or not.

MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS (Matka Joanna od Aniolow, 1961)

What do all those women do behind those convent walls? That's the question behind the nunsploitation subgenre, a global phenomenon that found expression inside the old Communist Bloc with this film by Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Some accounts of this movie claim that it's loosely based on the same historical incidents that inspired Ken Russell's ultimate nunsploitation epic, The Devils. If so, then it's more of a loose thematic sequel to that core story, with the charismatic priest played by Oliver Reed in the Russell film already dead by the time Kawalerowicz's film begins. Adapting a Polish novella, Kawalerowicz gives the story a different emphasis that makes Mother Joan more than an alternate version of The Devils while still touching many of the mandatory nunsploitation bases.

The story focuses on Father Joseph Suryn, newly arrived in a village dominated by a convent swept by demonic possession. The young priest has been sent to aid in a long-term exorcism project; the entire convent, led by the title nun, seems to be possessed. Suryn is unworldly and aloof, while in the village the possessions and exorcisms are the stuff of gossip as well as superstition. What gives Mother Joan its distinctive quality is the way both the possessions and the exorcisms are treated as an almost-normalized public spectacle. The villagers gather to watch the nuns march into church, the next-to-last in line spinning around compulsively, and subject themselves to attempted exorcism. The efforts of the priests only inspire the nuns to frenzy, with Mother Joan herself the most flamboyant performer. In some way the spectacle resembles a show trial, except that justice, or the will of God, never seems to prevail, while the suspects freely confess their guilt yet refuse to repent. One character suggests that Christians embrace the concept of demonic possession because it somehow confirms the existence of God, and that seems to be a key to understanding this film.

Lucyna Winnicka is possessed by the turbulent spirit of Mother Joan of the Angels.

Along the way, Suryn gets a major crush on Mother Joan. He tries to deal with it by flogging himself, but to no avail. Trying to get to the bottom of the possession question, he consults a Jewish rabbi who harangues him about the angels who mated humans and spawned a race of giants and finally tells Suryn that the two of them are the same. Given that they're played by the same actor, Mieczyslaw Volt, the rabbi has a point, though that fact also raises the question of whether the meeting was real or only in Suryn's head. In any event, Suryn finally decides that the only thing he can do to save Joan, and in some way save himself, is to invite the devils inside her to take him over. In fact, this licenses him to let the demons already inside him rise to the surface, with dire consequences for some of the other villagers....

Mother Joan is not one of the "history of cruelty" films I've seen from all over Europe from the 1960s. Kawalerowicz doesn't make a fetish of the ordeals to which Joan is subjected, and we never see anyone burnt at the prominently displayed stake. His attitude toward the people of 17th century Poland is generally compassionate. The common folk are folksy and bawdy and musical and superstitious, unafraid to peep through a window to watch Suryn and Joan in bed together. This movie isn't really about the overwhelming oppressive power of the state or the church, focusing instead on one man's breakdown and its several causes. Volt makes the breakdown convincing, while Lucyna Winnicka in the title role catches the unstable ambiguity of a character self-consciously committed to her role in the exorcism drama. She tells Suryn that she enjoys being possessed; is she acting possessed when she says that, or is she embracing the liberating power of performance? Whatever the answer, it's all too much for poor Suryn, and the two characters arguably illustrate a dangerous distinction between internalized private and dramatized public religion, the one corrupting the other.

On the nunsploitation spectrum Mother Joan falls closer to the high-end, high-toned stuff like Black Narcissus than to the wild, salacious fare that gives the subgenre its name. Nudity is at a minimum here and there's no hint of lesbianism. That may disappoint hardcore nunsploitation fans, but if you just like to see women in habits acting nutty, this film as plenty of that to offer. In the bargain, you'll also get a persuasive period piece with strong performances that are marred somewhat by the awful English subtitles on the Polstar DVD. Spelling and grammar errors abound, and some lines simply don't make sense as translated. Fortunately, the story still makes sense and you can still appreciate the overall effort. This is another film of surprisingly subversive potential from a Communist country, and an interesting one by any country's standard.

TATTOOED LIFE (1965)

The Japanese direcor Seijun Suzuki is notorious for making genre films that became such eccentric expressions of personal style that they got him fired from the Nikkatsu Studio. This particular film comes late in his Nikkatsu tenure but finds him on relatively good behavior from the studio's standpoint. Tattooed Life is a fairly conventional drama that brackets a story of working class life and doomed romance with outbursts of yakuza violence. It's in vivid color but could pass for one of the black-and-white "Nikkatsu Noirs" or "cosmopolitan" films Suzuki had made while paying his dues at the studio.

Like many of the Nikkatsu Noirs collected in Criterion Eclipse's essential box set, Tattooed Life deals with characters who are waiting for a chance at a better life. But while the "cosmopolitan" films are set in their present day, Suzuki's film is a period piece, set in 1926, aka Showa Year One, the first year of Emperor Hirohito's reign. The heroes' waiting, meanwhile, is complicated by the fact that they're fugitives from justice. Testu (Hideki Takahashi) is a yakuza, nicknamed "the White Fox," who recently carried out a hit but is now targeted for one by his own bosses. His younger brother Kenji (Kotobuki Hananamoto) aspires to attend art school, but when he sees his brother set upon by the killers, he impulsively kills one of them. Guilt-stricken, he wants to turn himself in to the police, but Testu can't stand the thought of the gentle youth in prison and proposes that they run off together.

They end up in a port city in northern Japan where business is booming. Well before Japan invaded Manchuria, Japanese migrant workers were making a living there, and that's where the brothers intend to make a fresh start. But they have to start from scratch after they get swindled by a local bar owner who promises to get them passage on a steamer. They end up going to work on a tunnel construction project for the Yamashita family, and once they settle in to the working-class community of roughnecks and losers, each gets a romantic storyline. Interestingly, Kenji ends up falling dangerously for the boss's wife, while his elder brother, a more reticent Tetsu, struggles to resist the affections of the boss's daughter. Tetsu has kept aloof from the crowd, notably refusing to bathe with his co-workers. The reason, of course, is that he doesn't want to show the tattoos that identify him as a yakuza. Once badges of pride and belonging, Tetsu now regards them as brands of shame. He isn't like that any more, which is what they all say just before the past comes strolling into town to prove them wrong.

The tunnel workers are capable of some rough justice themselves. Here they subject one of their own to water torture to find out who's been sabotaging their project.

Thanks to its nuanced portraits of the brothers and the people around them, Tattooed Life ends up being one of the most humane of the Suzuki films I've seen to date. It's also one of the most naturalistic, making good use of outdoor locations on the coast and along a river. Suzuki saves his more typical pyrotechnics for the very end of the picture, when Testu at last puts on his "White Fox" kimono and settles scores. The director has Takahashi run amok in a traditional home, stepping through layers of passageways deeper into the frame, then racing horizontally across the wide screen to engage the enemy. Suzuki catches the action from above and below, shooting down from an imaginary ceiling and up through a transparent floor. If anything, the gimmickry seems wrong because Suzuki has been so restrained until then, but the dynamism of it all overcomes any objections.

In one respect, Tattooed Life is more noirish than the so-called "noirs" marketed by Criterion. Those films often had happy endings, or at least victories for their protagonists, but Suzuki's movie takes the more familiar noir line that one can never really escape the past, especially when you have to answer for it. The villains are defeated, of course, but the film ends with one brother dead and the other going to jail, with romance possibly to come only after more years of waiting. Despite the violent climax, this is a sobering rather than exhilarating story, and it may be the last time that Suzuki could really take the genre seriously. It was worth his trouble to do so.

THE FIGHTER (2010)

One of the most frequently repeated criticisms I've read of David O. Russell's latest film is that it ended too early. Reviewers familiar with "Irish" Micky Ward's career often opined that the film would have had a more fitting climax had it shown Ward's fights with Arturo Gatti, which are considered some of the best, from an action standpoint, of the last decade. Never mind that Ward lost two of three of those bouts; they're all presumed to be more dramatic or cinematic than the fight in which Ward actually won his championship and which closes The Fighter. These complaints missed the point. The complainers thought they were watching a boxing movie, or The Micky Ward Story, instead of the film Russell made, which is about something else.

The confusion may be understandable given that the film is named after Mark Wahlberg's character and that Wahlberg has top billing. But you may recall that Christian Bale won an Oscar for playing Ward's crackhead brother, and that Melissa Leo won an Oscar for playing their trashy, controlling, clannish mother, while Wahlberg went home empty-handed. That's because he walked into a kind of trap. Sometimes the lead actor or star is doomed to have his film stolen from him by a flamboyant supporting player. But The Fighter is a film designed to be stolen from its star by everyone else on screen. This isn't Wahlberg's fault, unless you blame him for taking the part in the first place. He actually gives a very creditable performance, but the story requires Micky Ward, the ostensible man of violence, to be the relatively calm, almost passive center of a maelstrom of dysfunction. Everyone in his orbit is some sort of white-trash gargoyle, including not just his mother and brother but all his shrieking skanky sisters and even his otherwise sympathetic girlfriend (Amy Adams was also nominated for an Oscar), who becomes as territorial and possessive toward Micky while protecting him from his kin as they've been protecting him from her. The irony of the piece is that Micky doesn't see why everyone should be fighting over him. Forced into an either-or choice late in the picture, he rejects it. The film's been setting us up to want him make a clean break from his dreadful family, but at the climax, which comes before the title fight, he insists that he can't walk away from either his family or his girlfriend or his new handlers -- he needs them all on his side to prevail. There's something almost wholesome about the film's endorsement of compromise, however anticlimactic it may seem in performance. And when you consider that that's Wahlberg's big moment rather than any fight he's in, you see why he's been eclipsed, however unfairly, by his supporting cast.

By comparison, Christian Bale dominates the film as if this were the Dicky Eklund comeback story that his character presumes that the HBO crew is shooting as they follow him into crack dens. Look at the poster above and tell me who the star is. If you told me that second-billed Bale actually had more screen time than top-billed Wahlberg, I'd believe it. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with this, except that it doesn't make sense to nominate such a performance for Best Supporting Actor. Bale is clearly the co-star of the movie and the Academy should have treated him as such. As for Melissa Leo and the other performers, I'm not familiar enough with them to judge their skills as actors, but they were uniformly convincing in their trashy roles, while Russell planted them in an equally convincing milieu. Style takes second place to storytelling here, and that's appropriate for the subject matter.

Micky Ward presumably had his family issues straightened out by the time he fought Arturo Gatti, so from Russell's standpoint there wasn't really a story left to tell, however dramatic fight fans found those battles. But I can understand the reviewers somewhat. A few years ago, after watching Cinderella Man, I thought that Ron Howard should have ended it with Jim Braddock losing his title to Joe Louis, one hero yielding his place to a greater, but not without a valiant struggle. Given that Braddock did floor Louis during that fight, I felt that it had real dramatic potential. But Howard had told the story of overcoming adversity and despair that he wanted to tell, and I don't think his film is really worse for ending when it did. The same goes for The Fighter. Sometimes boxing films are about more than boxing, and then the last thing they need is more boxing.

...But for those who are curious, here's the sequel, Ward-Gatti I, as condensed and uploaded to YouTube by the folks at HBO.


April 28th: And here's another sequel: Alice Ward, the fighters' mother, passed away this week.

AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (36 vues du Pic St-Loup, 2009)

After more than fifty years, the surviving directors of the French New Wave are the elder statesmen of global cinema. Their ranks have been thinning gradually -- Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol died last year -- but recent years have also seen a spate of activity from the old gang, including this latest film from Jacques Rivette. Known for making films of extraordinary length, Rivette got 36 vues du Pic St-Loup in under 90 minutes, and that's really about all the story needs. It's a familiar, archetypal sort of story about a man who runs away to join the circus. More accurately, Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto) stops in the middle of a journey to join a circus. He's followed Kate (Jane Birkin) there after helping repair her car on the road, and his vague interest in her becomes an obsession with the circus to which she once belonged and has returned. Something about circus life fascinates him beyond reason; he laughs like a rube at an unenthusiastically performed clown skit, yet also seeks to advise the head clown on how to improve the act. He becomes a bystander in the standard personal dramas of circus life and is accepted as part of the landscape if not part of the extended circus family until he is recruited to perform in the very routine that first captivated him.

While the Nouveau Vague is probably ancient history for many movie fans today, Rivette's film reminded me of even more ancient history. Around a Small Mountain is reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin's The Circus in its attempt to find a kind of humor in the protagonist's failure to be funny in a conventional way. That is, Chaplin's tramp tries to do things funny in the circus way but fails, yet becomes a star accidentally by just happening to stumble into the center ring in a funny way. In Rivette's film, Vittorio thinks the lame clown routine (one cajoles another into trying to catch a bullet with his teeth) is hilarious, and thinks he could make it even more funny. But when the opportunity is thrust upon him to perform the skit, he forgets the lines, tries desperately to improvise (as the lead clown heroically tries to keep up) and finally rampages around the stage waving a (loaded?) gun as the lead clown tries to talk him down. This isn't necessarily funny (I found it so) but the point seems to be that here, on the stage, Vittorio finally has to work out some of the issues that have kept him here rather than finishing his journey. Rivette seems to be saying something about performance as a form of intimate expression. He says it most blatantly in a scene near the end in which Vittorio and some circus folk have what sounds like an ordinary chat. But instead of filming the dialogue in one shot, or cutting from Vittorio to the circus folk, Rivette has each character walk out of a tent to perform his or her line, exit stage left or right to make room for the next actor, then go through the tent again to do the next line. Again, the idea may be that everyday life for everyone is a kind of performance, an idea echoed in Kate's storyline, in which her return to performing is a quest for redemption or closure following a fatal accident in her past.

Rivette tells his little story in a potentially alienating way. His circus is not about entertainment in any recognizable way. It's either too poor to afford musical accompaniment or else including music didn't occur to or interest him -- or else that's just how the smaller European circuses work. But it makes the routines look particularly lifeless, as does the lack of audience response, though that does serve to highlight Vittorio's exceptional response to the clown skit. This also reminded me of Chaplin and his failure to include a laugh track for his vaudeville routines in Limelight. The reason then was that he expected the actual movie audience to do the laughing, while for Rivette, I suspect, the main idea is that audience response matters less than whatever the circus performers get out of performing for themselves.

However you interpret it, the story's a trifle, but it is a pretty one. Sergio Castellitto is an increasingly familiar face around the wild world of cinema, having turned up even in a Narnia movie, and so far I've liked him whenever I've seen him. He keeps this film watchable even if Vittorio's character arc proves inscrutable. I've only seen one other Rivette movie and assume that this one's far from his best work. But I found it a work of strong artistic personality, however vague or abstract he gets, and it leaves me still willing to discover more of his work.

TRON: LEGACY (2010)

To be honest, I have stronger memories of the Tron video game than I do of the 1982 film that after 28 years -- is that some sort of record? -- generated a sequel. I remember seeing the original on the big screen, and I know I saw it at least once on video -- but apart from the then-innovative visuals and certain verbal tics like "End of Line," little about it made an impression on me. Many other people must have had a different experience, as I assume the sequel was made to satisfy Eighties nostalgia as well as to show off Disney's current bag of 3D and IMAX tricks. On that assumption, I shouldn't have been surprised to see the film burdened with so much of the "fathers and sons" bushwah, though for once I can complain that a movie doesn't push this theme hard enough. That's not -- I assure you -- because I find the usual intergenerational guff compelling. Too often "fathers and sons" seems like a gimmick designed to make a film seem meaningful. With Joseph Kosinski's Tron: Legacy, however, the filmmakers had the material for an ultimate "fathers and sons" story, but largely ignored it.

What is Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) if not the god of the merry little world of anthropomorphisized programs he helped create within that wonderful computer above the old video arcade? Add in his lookalike program, Clu, who plays the jealous, vindictive demiurge after seizing power from Flynn and his faithful e-companion Tron, and Flynn's real-world offspring Sam (Garrett Hedlund), who manages to get digitized the same way his father did way back when, and you have a holy trinity at war with itself. Or you could have had it. But since this is a "fathers and sons" movie, Sam is interested only incidentally in redeeming the world within the computer, and primarily in saving his dad. Dad's not that interested in being saved, if only because he can't imagine it being done without opening the door for Clu to run amok in the flesh world, and he isn't even that interested in saving his world, since he considers a rebellion inevitable and is willing to simply let it happen. For his part, Clu protests his purity of motive, insisting that he has only fulfilled his User's mandate to perfect the program world. Gladiatorial combat, it seems, is a prerequisite for perfection. On the other hand, he seems to enjoy power too much in a swaggering, virtual Jeff Bridges kind of way. Whatever else you say about Tron: Legacy, it does give Academy Award Winner Jeff Bridges a double ham sandwich of opportunity. He provides the skeleton of Clu's performance to play off his slightly Dudish, slightly Jedi-ish Kevin Flynn and indulges both selves, really letting it rip in his climactic showdown with himself. It is a rare master thespian who can pull off a "fathers and sons" scenario entirely on his own -- and maybe it's regrettable that CGI isn't yet so far advanced that he could have played Garrett Hedlund's part as well.

"They stole my monolith, man! It really held the room together." Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, right) abides.

But Tron: Legacy is nothing if not a laundry list of opportunities ignored. Its biggest disappointment is how ordinary its fantasy world seems, or how like a vodka advertisement it often looks. Nothing afterward ever lives up to its one ingeniously disturbing sequence, after Sam has been digitized, arrested for vagrancy and condemned to the games. He's left in a vast chamber, where from the four walls emerge identically, fetishistically dressed females equipped with laser-tip fingers who first strip and then prep Sam for combat. The identically coiffed women -- two black, two white -- move in an unnatural, robotic choreography for no apparent reason, since the ritual isn't being transmitted anywhere, as far as I could tell. No other "programs" behave this way, and when we encounter one of them again, it's surprising that she doesn't live in her little alcove at the arena. The scene is obviously designed to be erotic on a superficially wholesome level -- the women are fully dressed -- but it also meets, however momentarily, our expectation of how strange this world should be.

I can predict at least one scene in Tron Legacy: the XXX Parody.

For the most part, however, the programs are all too human, or all too cartoonish. One wonders what the original program function of Castor (Michael Sheen), a pale, flamboyant fixer whom Sam is sent to meet, could possibly have been. But I suppose the point of such personalities is to show how decentralized sentience has evolved in that lonely computer over the arcade. It's even evolved entire neo-aboriginal species from nothing. All this should serve to remind viewers to schedule their antivirus programs to run regularly. Look what might become of your computer after 30 years.

If this isn't a malicious file, what is? Michael Sheen (center) as Castor.

The Tron sequel is less interested in such eccentricities than it should be. Castor is really the way he is because that's the kind of character who always turns up in utterly generic adventure stories like this one. Look past the fancy graphics and it's the same story you've seen hundreds of times. An unlikely hero must recover the special artifact that opens the portal to redemption with the aid of a loyal band, not all of whom will be able to go through with him. There must be sacrifices and arguments about sacrifices, the eternal choice between personal loyalties and the mission. And it's about fathers and sons! That doesn't mean there isn't some spectacle to enjoy -- and it was probably more enjoyable on the really big screen. But Legacy isn't anything more than cinematic candy, and not the kind that's filling in any way. It's like a box of Runts: tasty enough in a tangy chemical way, but you wouldn't want to be stuck somewhere for two hours with only those to eat.

VENUS IN FURS (Paroxismus, 1969)

Jazz musician Jimmy Logan seems to be recovering from a bad trip -- he digs his trumpet out of the sand and can't remember why he buried it -- when a body washes up on a beach to launch him on an even worse trip. Jimmy recognizes the body and can even guess why she's dead. He witnessed the gang-rape of Wanda Reed (Maria Rohm) by three decadent characters in Istanbul -- but apparently did nothing. It's not clear whether people know generally that Wanda is dead. At least no one but Jimmy bats an eye when she turns up, live as life, in Rio during the Carnival. One of her tormentors is also there, but he ends up dead. In fact, Wanda has somehow loved or at least stimulated him to death (hence the movie's alternate title). She'll repeat that trick elsewhere on the globe, somehow following Jimmy as he goes from gig to gig like her spotter, to take out a bisexual woman (Margaret Lee) and Ahmet (Klaus Kinski), who either has a turban fetish or is supposed to be a Turkish man. Wanda's mysterious movements pretty much kill Jimmy's interracial buzz with nightclub singer Rita (Barbara McNair), but obsessions are like that. And when all's said and done Jimmy's back on the beach playing a personal requiem for Wanda, only to see a body wash up on the beach. So is it one of those movies where the hapless hero has to repeat the story over and over for eternity? No, because this time the body is different, and the difference is twist enough for this picture.

Ladies and gentlemen, James Darren on trumpet and Jess Franco at the keyboard.

I'm tempted to shrug my shoulders and say, "Well, that's Jess Franco for you," but Paroxismus is actually one of the Spanish director's more accessible movies. What I mean is that, despite its impenetrable story, which bears no relation to the Sacher-Masoch novel it's sometimes named for, it's mostly free of Franco's signature idiosyncrasies and personal mythology. While we do get one of his favorite motifs, a singer writhing on her back, there's no "Dr. Orloff" or "Morpho" running around, at least in the English-language version. Venus in Furs takes us to a very strange place, but it isn't Jess Franco's personal world. Franco just makes it compellingly colorful and musical, if also a bit campy and sensual at the same time.

Above, Maria Rohm puts the moves on Margaret Lee. Below, Klaus Kinski contemplates his ill-fated one-man show about the Prophet Muhammad.

The movie actually sustains an air of genuine supernatural mystery until the ending leaves the story making almost no sense whatsoever. As I said, it's unclear how many people know that Wanda is dead, and it's even less clear whether anyone's investigating her apparently unnatural demise. The story as told may be possible only in the absence of a criminal justice system. But given what we can assume finally to be Jimmy's special perspective, can we really be sure that Wanda is dead. On the other hand, what we learn about Jimmy makes his relationship with Rita hard to explain -- except if we assume that his interpretation of his final vision is unreliable. For that matter, the entire film may be nothing but Jimmy's jazzy delirium on the beach, his fantasy of supernatural vengeance substituting for the steps he was apparently incapable of taking to secure justice for Wanda. At its trippy heart, Paroxismus may simply be a guilt trip.

If you're willing to do the interpretive work on your own, you could well appreciate Franco's film as an impressionistic puzzle, a set of variations on an ultimately hidden theme. But you could just as easily dismiss Paroxismus as reels of incoherent pretension, redeemed or not by visual flair and period flavor. It seems appropriate, somehow, that this movie is ultimately whatever each viewer makes of it.