Quinoa1984

The refreshing aspect of this documentary about the innovative Clarinetist and band leader Artie Shaw is how the director doesn't try to steer him in any direction in particular or to make him look or sound like he has finesse. That isn't Artie Shaw, certainly at this later stage of his life, and director Brigitte Berman, armed with a cornucopia of archival images and footage from the period and throughout his career, shows him as craggy and opinionated as he was then.

In truth, a lot of what he says makes sense, even when he sounds to be a little insulting (ie the highlight or one of them at least is his episode circa 1939 where he called teens who did the Jitterbug "morons" - he had a pretty good reason in context, but it would have been hard to communicate that in a headline). There is some heady and impressive points of history as well to take in, like during the second World War when Shaw and his band played for one of the great warships, but that isn't the main draw: what hooks us in is that this is about the needs and desires of an artist versus commercial expectations, and how that can lead to constant anxiety.

I do wonder if there were points Berman did steer the conversation or answers and we didn't see it so much, but I doubt it. The presentation via the narration is a little dry, and it may cover some parts I personally wanted to know more about (ie his marriage to Lana Turner seems to be hand-waved away), but that is my only main knock against it (that and perhaps those bits where he just sits listening to his own music doesn't add as much as Berman thinks).

This is a fascinating capital-C Character of the world of music and the 20th century American imagination; despite all of his existential troubles, Shaw's candid admissions and how often his ornery opinions mesh with a plain spoken sense of his life and career and collaborators (and even his psychotherapist) is involving and you want to keep hearing him talk.

Kind of like Paul Verhoeven's ARMY OF SHADOWS (which is to say there is a lot of intrigue and espionage and dirty Nazi business and scenes of torture and murder and betrayal and so on... and there are boobs - and sexual attraction as a weapon - and an April Fool's day joke involving public sex as a gotcha on some soldiers, and it is all so very impressive and dynamic). Unlike Jean-Pierre Melville though (and this isn't to put him down), this is not an icy examination of the tragic dimensions of resistance fighters; the ins and outs of the struggles for men and women against the Nazis in Holland (and the UK) has a fresh immediacy to the form. Verhoeven and his camera team have that is electric, like the way it will move across the room and it feels like it is in a space between a regular Dolly and Hand-Held.

This is a film that has scenes and sequences of adventure and daring-do - that is up to and including Rutger Hauer having to slather some weird liquid over his body that makes him vomit in an act of subterfuge in an espionage mission - but Verhoeven takes the dominance of Nazism seriously and for all of his flourishes of the exaravagant or for brief shock value this is a Suspense film that manages to tell a riveting story with two pivotal characters, Eril amd Guus (Hauer and Krabbe).

As much as the whole group of guys we meet early on are important to the story, it is the fates and chances and choices of Erik and Guus to unexpected places. Hauer already made an impression on audiences with Turkish Delight, but this feels like the kind of role for him (and Krabbe as well) to make a star; he has that kind of look where when a Nazi shines a flashlight in his face he knows just how to get out of that situation right quick. They have solid writing and the turns and developments are exciting, but the acting takes it to the next level.

Earlier today, I finished reading (or listening since audiobook) Shirer's the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It is very likely one of if not the most important book(s) I will ever take in about the world and how humanity goes to its lowest levels over and over again, and the evils and destruction at the concentration camps is detailed at length (though really confined to one section, if you ever happen to read the book, "The New Order" as it is described). The story of the concentration camps and what went on there is about cruelty on many fronts (such as, as seen in this film, the playing of light and "happy" classical music for newcomers to the camp) and that those who were kept alive were like the walking dead, deprived of anything humane before they were sent to their ends.

I didn't necessarily mean to seek out a film that showed the horrors of the Holocaust and the like right after it, rather I wanted something short from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and this happened to be one I knew was short. What I didn't know was how unique it still is as a film - both because it was left unfinished due to the death of its director, Andrzej Munk and that it was "completed" by others - and as something of a direct affront to what the Holocaust was. Passenger is actually about how love is something that does endure in the worst places in the world, as that connection is there for Marta and her partner and how that stands in the way of Liza "controlling" Marta as she is an overseer at the Auschwitz camp.

That sounds like a potentially sentimental subject for perhaps the notorious European location of the 20th century (not to discount other concentration camps of course, but is is the one that people think of the most due to, frankly, its numbers and particular brutality in the mass slaughter), but Munk never shows it that way. This is a very starkly directed film, very much showing things with a restraint and even a lack of a musical accompaniment for much of it. That may be because of its unfinished nature, but I'm not so sure. Really even as it is called unfinished it still works as a fully realized story - those still images that book end the film are presented like La Jetee and maybe that was an influence to Munk's collaborators - because Liza and Marta are fully dimensional and the emotional push and pull for them is so great.

Why does Marta want to "protect" Liza? Is it just about domineering control? Is there sexual tension? (That part would be tenuous though as it is never explicit). Maybe she just sees something in Marta, or knows deep down there is something human there... or that in reality, despite all the time Marta has been at the camp, she could be killed any time. We see people unwittingly being led down brick steps to their ends, and Munk knows we don't need to see more. What we are seeing of the torture as it is is just abhorrent all its own, like that one circle that is formed where a prisoner is tossed around, or when Marta is stripped down and forced to stand in front of other prisoners.

At the center I think is Slaska's performance who has that kind of formidable presence I see today in, oh, Sandra Huller or Isabelle Hupert, where there could be something tender or vulnerable but it is behind a thick wall emotionally that is put up for the character. And the power of the film lies in that performance and in Munk's clear, unflinching and devastating eye for the detail of the camp (ie everything with that camp dog and its demise) and how this unlikely relationship happened and how Liza is remembering it so many years later on this ship (after all, she couldn't possibly be Marta, right?)

Ultimately, Passenger is about what humanity means in a completely insane and inhuman context, how its mere existence is an act of defiance and how staggering it is to see against a system of oppression (and how much Liza doesn't look inward at... well, you know that meme).