tooter-ted

Carl Orff wanted to see some sort of staging of his musical score, Carmina Burana. I'd like to think he would have approved of this one. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle films Carmina among stage pieces that often take the viewer where no theater audience could go. The effect is a bit like entering a Bosch painting.

This is the same method Ponnelle used with a number of operas, but here he is more free to create a fantasy world of images; here he has only a series of poems; no plot structure to furnish. If a few of the effects look a bit primitive, others are magical. And sometimes the whiplash from comedy to horror was so swift that I found myself questioning the smugness that led me to question this or that image, and I quickly found myself immersed in the work again.

The DVD has English subtitles for the Latin. How wonderful finally to be able to follow the text all the way through! However, I urge you, watch WITHOUT TEXT the first time through. The musical performance is good enough that, if you like the work, you'll happily go back. Orff chose to set Latin because he wanted us to take the meaning from the music. Trust that the outrageous things occurring on stage grow from the text, and submit to the pull of sounds and images. Words will clog the process, and the images will surprise and delight best on that first encounter if you're not busy reading. I'm a fan of subtitled movies, but we process words differently from sound.

I bought the DVD of this for the movie, but any movie of Carmina would be of passing interest if not well sung and played. This one is excellent. I have long admired Lucia Popp's Queen of the Night for Klemperer, and she is as good here. The rest of the cast and the orchestra is also up to the competition.

Alas, to my knowledge the DVD has never been issued in the US. I got my copy from England and play it in the US on my laptop which knows nothing of region codes and is equally happy playing PAL as NTSC. With laptop connected to my sound system I had a front row seat. No extra software was required for this on my Mac. I've been trying to see this production for 30 years. It says a lot that I wasn't disappointed.

Max is an obsessed genius falling ever more deeply into migraine-ridden madness. As he himself suggests, his life has been about staring into the sun. What makes this film so powerful is its unflinching first person point of view as Max follows his harrowing path. Director Aronofsky's camera assaults us with starkly lit, B&W images that heighten characterization and sometimes strobe and make moires that blind us; the sounds often disengage us from the images, while film editing dislocates time. From the first moments of the film we are Max; his alienation is palpable, sometimes the pulsing of his nausea is as well.

This ride is harrowing, and not just the horror scenes, so much so that some will be put off. For me it is cinema at its most cinematic. Aronofsky makes Max's mental state palpable through cinematography. As Max spirals into self-destruction he also reaches for the mathematical beauty, the pattern that underlies all the forms in the universe. This opens the cinematography to a wonderful range of imagery handled so as to leave the audience to ponder possible symbolic resonances. The final beauty of the film rests in the fact that this is a tale told by a hallucinating madman. We may think we know what is real and what is his hallucination. Then again, most of us have awakened from nightmares unsure where dream stops and reality begins. This leaves fundamental questions of the film interestingly ambiguous: Is it the mathematical vision that short circuits Max's brain or is it all those drugs he's taking? Is that strange computer rig that envelopes his apartment a machine for solving fundamental questions, or is it merely the externalization of Max's agoraphobic, claustrophobic mindscape? Is the universe based on fundamental order or is the order Max sees merely the shape of chaos? The film does no more than pose the question.

The original for this film, Clouzot's "Wages of Fear," is one of the greats. It is not only a great thriller, but manages in the last minutes to tie a wide range of issues together and leave you thinking about all you've just experienced. In spite of excellent cinematography and first rate sound design, "Sorcerer" is a big bore that never adds up. The first half of the film spans the world and provides a sense of place worthy of Hitchcock. In fact, it really got me thinking about how the four apparently unrelated events might eventually fit together. Well, they don't It's sole purpose is to set out the back stories of the 4 main characters. Unfortunately, the 4 characters are never developed and what we learn here is largely irrelevant to the film's actions or themes.

When we get to the main story, we care little about the four characters and their fate. In fact you may have trouble remembering who two of the characters are and none of the characters ring true. Where does a guy who spent his prior life as a wealthy banker (or, in fact, any of the characters) get the skills to assemble and tune the engine, suspension, etc. of the trucks that he will use to transport the explosives? The back stories make up half the run time of the film but never answer such basic questions. As a result, we are left with a thin thriller about characters who behave in unbelievable ways and never arouse either sympathy or hatred. If well-shot thrill sequences are all you seek in a film, you may enjoy this. While it is true that there is something a bit Hollywoodish in Yves Montand's naiveté in "Wages," and that is contrasted with the grittiness of the characters in "Sorcerer," the ending of "Wages" gives that Hollywood simplicity just the right ironic twist.

In "Wages of Fear" Clouzot limits his focus to the backwater hell hole where everyone lives in poverty enslaved to the world oil market. Clouzot focuses much attention on making us feel how bad this place is. By the end of the film Clouzot has us thinking about the relation of the lives of these characters to our own. While I understand why Friedkin in "Sorcerer," might wish to show the global interconnectedness of the modern world, and that the whole world is now a mean and dangerous place, he never attempts to connect the meanness of that world to the poverty and brutishness of the oil backwater, the current lives of the characters, or our own lives. While he makes the squalor of the backwater convincing, it too has little connection to the world's meanness. Yes, the world is dangerous, revolution is always about to boil over, but what has this to do with us. Clouzot's characters learn and grow as the film accumulates ironies right to the final death waltz. Friedkin's characters barely exist and the film finds no thematic center to hold itself together.