The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Why the International Theatrical Cut Is Better Than the Extended Cut

by Willa Ross

This post tackles the most important of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’s ongoing problems, the inferiority of the easily-available “Extended Cut” to the more evasive “International Cut” — only the latter of which was prepared and approved by director Sergio Leone himself. The Extended Cut runs about 16 minutes longer than the International Cut, and since its debut in 2003, it has been the only English-language version available on physical releases until 2017, is still the only one screened theatrically outside of special presentations of old prints, and remains the only version available to stream. Because I believe it creates far more flaws than it removes, the Extended Cut’s dominance in the market has made it difficult to give unreserved recommendations for one of my very favourite films.

Regardless of the Extended Cut's exclusion from the new release, which only features the International Cut, the distinctions between these cuts will still be relevant. The Extended Cut has been the primary means of viewing The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, be it at home or in theaters, since 2004, meaning that a generation’s worth of discoverers were first acquainted with the Extended Cut. So while the Extended Cut was not approved by Leone himself (it was, after all, created decades after his death), it’s become a significant part of the film’s history, and deserves some critical consideration. What's more, for some who buy the film on Kino’s upcoming UHD Blu-ray and see the International Cut for the first time, the absence of certain scenes may be surprising, even jarring. Hopefully this post offers those people an understandable explanation of why the International Cut is not only more historically important, but often considered the better version.

Addressing the effect of scenes’ absence or presence upon the film is my primary focus here, but first I’ll address the most notorious issue with the Extended Cut: the dubbing on the added scenes. The goal of the Extended Cut was to recreate, as closely as possible, the cut shown at the film’s premiere screening in Rome on December 15, 1966, after which Leone continued post-production on the Italian cut for another eight days. However, recreating the Rome premiere cut with only the original materials would mean including numerous scenes that had no English-language audio. It was common in Italian film productions at the time to not record any sound on set, instead doing so in a studio during post-production. This meant that any scenes that were filmed but not used in the International Cut did not receive an English-language recording back in the 60s.

Switching to Italian audio for the Extended Cut’s added scenes would be a distracting change, and using only Italian dialogue for the entire film would be a major blow to the Extended Cut’s marketability given the popularity of the three lead performances and the iconic English language dialogue. The added scenes were, therefore, redubbed, with Clint Eastwood (then in his 70s) and Eli Wallach (in his 80s) brought in for their scenes, and a vocal imitator hired for the scenes of the then-deceased Lee Van Cleef. The dubbing of these scenes is terribly distracting — Wallach and Eastwood sound very little like they did almost four decades earlier, and Lee Van Cleef’s imitator sounds just like that: an imitator. What's more, the quality of the three leads' lip sync tends to be far below the rest of the film.

The dubbing alone is enough to bring the Extended Cut’s artistic value into serious question, but even when that issue is ignored each and every one of the added scenes is deleterious to the film’s quality. What follows is my appraisal of all of the major added scenes, with all their merits and problems. I’ll ignore small additions or subtractions of a few seconds here and there — while I generally prefer the International Cut’s versions of these scenes, their effect on the film is smaller and there’s less to discuss.

Il Grotto

The Extended Cut’s first added scene is also its most notorious, the one that Leone himself excised after the Rome Premiere: “Il Grotto”. Tuco enters the hideout of three of his former partners in crime, seeking their help in vengeance against Blondie. He plucks a chicken as he announces his offer to an empty room, which prompts the three outlaws to reveal themselves and accept.

On the level of plot, the scene’s sole function is to illustrate how Tuco came into league with the outlaws who attempt (disastrously) to ambush Blondie while he cleans his pistol at an inn. Tuco’s dialogue emphasizes wealth and poverty as he persuades his comrades with the promise of $1,000 each: “If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working,” “You’ve gotta be pretty poor to eat potatoes,” and the risible bluff “I’m rich, but I’m lonely.” 

Leone was right to cut this scene for the film’s wide releases. Tuco’s lack of means and down-on-his-luck position in life is clear from the first time we see him, crashing through a window with drumstick in hand. Without the scene, it only requires simple inference on the audience’s part to deduce that he’s recruited Blondie’s would-be killers off-screen. It’s also perhaps the least visually impressive scene in the film; outside of a lovely wide shot of Tuco entering the space, the blocking of the actors and the visual geometry of the scene are unusually flat, with little dynamism in its montage to enliven a straightforward plot point. 

Il Grotto is an excellent example of why plotting isn’t everything when considering narrative structure. The scene that precedes it, where Tuco intimidates and robs the owner of a gun shop, could theoretically also be removed without creating plotholes. As soon as we see that Tuco has survived being stranded in the desert by finding a town with food and drink, we could conceivably cut straight to the attempted ambush at the inn. But the robbery scene is dynamic, original, entertaining, and besides that it at last establishes Tuco as a force to be reckoned with and a serious threat to Blondie after he mostly bumbles through the film’s first half hour. We understand Tuco differently at the end of the gun shop robbery, but the same cannot be said of Il Grotto.

The Fort

A short time later, the Extended Cut’s worst added scene is followed up by its best, and the one with the most complex effect on the film. While on his search for Bill Carson, Angel Eyes follows a tip from Carson’s girlfriend Maria to track down the 3rd Cavalry, one of the units led by General Sibley. Angel Eyes finds a makeshift army hospital housing Sibley’s men among a ruined fort. The hospital is full of wounded soldiers, but Angel Eyes finds a healthy man and asks him where Bill Carson might be. After the man scolds him for asking traumatized soldiers for help in his own pursuits, Angel Eyes offers him a drink. In turn the man reveals that the 3rd has already left to cross a desert, and that in the unlikely event any are still alive, they’re probably imprisoned at the Betterville POW camp. With that info, The Bad takes his leave.

On a purely visual level, the scene offers many grace notes. The set is wonderfully detailed, large, and convincing. After Angel Eyes enters, a 180-degree dolly fully reveals the exterior set before a series of wide shots that beautifully capture the grim spectacle, making evocative use of the wayward diagonals and clutter of the spaces. 

The 180-degree dolly is oft-praised by admirers of the Extended Cut, and its circle around the brim of Lee Van Cleef’s hat has its conceptual appeal, but the following wide shots, with their gentle pans and tilts, are far more effective in setting the mood. Likewise, the exchange between Angel Eyes and the soldier is smartly-staged, especially memorable for the soldier messily tossing cobs of corn into a cauldron and letting the booze spill all over his face as he drinks it; the nihilism of his circumstance is palpable in these bits of business.

The scene also establishes some geographic proximity between Angel Eyes and the Blondie-Tuco chase that it interrupts. At the beginning of the attempted ambush sequence, the innkeeper watches retreating Confederate troops, many of whom are wounded, and points out Sibley himself, so seeing Angel Eyes connecting with one of the retreating units elevates the tantalizing prospect that he could meet up with Blondie and Tuco at any time — especially given that they find Carson himself in the desert that was mentioned to Angel Eyes. Besides the problematic dubbing, all these merits are more than enough for the scene to work well in a vacuum.

But the chief defense for including this scene is that it doesn’t only work on its own terms, it fills in a plothole. When this scene is taken out, Angel Eyes doesn’t appear at any time between leaving Maria and showing up when Blondie and Tuco arrive at Betterville — in the International Cut, it’s an almost 50-minute gap! If we disregard the army hospital scene, then why, exactly, did Angel Eyes go to a Union-controlled POW camp and take on a command post, if the last piece of information he received was to search for Union soldiers?

There is an answer, but it does require a hefty bit of inference. Maria tells Angel Eyes that Carson left with one of Sibley’s units, and shortly after we see Sibley and his men retreating in some apparent disarray. If Angel Eyes was unable to find Carson easily among this retreat, it makes some sense that he would take up shop in the nearest Union POW camp, where he might get lucky enough for Bill Carson to wind up — or, at worst, if the hunt for Carson winds up a wild goose chase, he can profit off a smuggling racket, which he does. That may seem like quite a lucky break, but bear in mind that both this explanation and the presence of the Extended Cut’s army hospital scene require him to get extremely lucky in Tuco showing up at the camp under the name “Bill Carson”. Regardless of how the scene is built up, it’s the biggest coincidence in the movie.

Regardless, as I said, the International Cut demands a lot of inferences from the audience, but it does follow a plausible chain of logic, and besides, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is filled with such indirect exposition regardless of which cut you watch. But the film doesn’t merely survive the scene’s removal, it actively benefits from it. If Angel Eyes is absent for 50 minutes before showing up at Betterville, then the reveal of him in an officer’s uniform truly comes as a shock — a most unwelcome one, given how our two heroes are already in a hell of a lot of trouble. His appearance in an officer’s position cements his unpredictability and hypercompetence, and is the sort of moment that helps the film achieve mythic heights. In the Extended Cut, the only surprise is that he’s scammed his way into an officer’s rank.

There’s an even more important reason to remove the scene. One of the most important conceits of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is that while its three lead characters are entirely focused on their own selfish pursuit of the gold, there are far bigger, more important things happening around them — namely the Civil War. The war interferes more and more often as the film progresses, with increasing emphasis on its calamitous results for the world beyond the trio and their treasure hunt. The Civil War’s prominence is carefully increased throughout the film, from the ghost towns of the early scenes to the gangrenous leg of the POW camp’s chief officer to the enormous waste of the battle at the bridge. Over time such scenes are presented less as nuisances or obstacles and more as their own tragedies. This arc mirrors Blondie’s own moral transformation, and is why the film ends with him sparing Tuco’s life and leaving him with half the money.

It’s all a careful balancing act, an attempt to bring the horror of the Civil War to the audience’s attention as gradually as it comes to Blondie’s, and the hospital scene with Angel Eyes undoes it all. The grand melancholy of the set and the situation and the scene’s evocation of waste and misery are too successful, as they signpost this theme’s culmination before its time has come.

All that, and it stops the momentum and excitement of the Tuco-Blondie chase absolutely dead in its tracks. It’s hard to overstate how much the cut from a closeup of an empty, swinging noose to an extreme wide of Tuco riding through the wilderness in pursuit of Blondie — along with the almost ritualistic percussion that plays to begin a rousing performance of the main theme — creates a sense of escalation and excitement. The Army Hospital certainly has its benefits, and more than any other added scene I can understand arguments for its inclusion, but ultimately I prize the film’s gradual unfurling of its anti-war sentiment too highly to think it’s better off with this moment.

Enjoy a Sun Bath

This scene extends Tuco’s desert torture of Blondie with an especially cruel piece of mockery. After Blondie collapses, instead of rolling down a hill straightaway, he instead looks up to see Tuco’s boot right in front of him. After hesitating, he grabs the boot, only to find that Tuco’s foot isn’t in it — it’s in a bucket full of water a few feet away, where Tuco is washing his foot as he eats and tells Blondie to “enjoy a sun bath.” Blondie crawls over to the bucket for a drink, only for Tuco to overturn it, pouring the water into the sand. Blondie crawls away and Tuco packs up to go end his rivalry with Blondie once and for all.

It all does little more than further exhibit Tuco’s sadism and offer a sort of “last straw” for Blondie before he crawls away in desperation, but its contributions are mighty slim. It certainly doesn’t reach the operatic despair of the preceding montage and the soaring Morricone music that accompanied it, making this new scene less emotionally persuasive as Blondie’s breaking point. And speaking of music, the beginning of the scene reuses the beginning of the music from that desert montage; the film has a few reused musical pieces, but restarting the previous musical cue immediately after it ends is a step too far. (In the Italian Cut, which also features this scene, the moment simply has a single sustained bass note over it; hardly brilliant scoring but a little less distracting than just looping back to the start of the piece that just ended.)

Adding to the scene’s sonic issues, the sound design for the moment is inappropriately barren, given that we can clearly see from the nearby bushes and Tuco’s umbrella that it’s very windy. The Italian Cut appropriately includes wind sounds to match, but in the Extended Cut, when the scene cuts to Blondie rolling down the hill, the wind sounds suddenly manifest out of nowhere, in the space of a frame, unintentionally and implausibly implying that a lot of time has passed.

Finally, the sequence, while nicely staged and cut (especially the depth of the shot where the bucket sits in front of Blondie), interrupts the incredible formal evocations of dizziness and desolation that precede and follow it, filled with both extreme wides that place Tuco and Blondie as dots in the desert, or compositions that push extreme depth, or whirling pans and shaky handheld camera movements, before climaxing with the sun-flared shot of Blondie rolling down a hill and Tuco approaching to finish him off. In the International Cut, it’s the arrival of Bill Carson and his carriage that formally stabilizes the film’s visuals, and with it, Blondie’s odds of survival. All that is undone by the inclusion of the “sun bath” scene.

Confederate Checkpoint

The least substantial added scene shows Tuco, posing as a soldier, arriving at a Confederate checkpoint and asking where they are, only to learn that they aren’t far from the San Antonio monastery where his brother cares for wounded soldiers. Tuco thanks the Sergeant for his help and drives off.

The scene is so needless that I’m surprised it was included in any cut of the film. Its only conceivable function is to establish that Tuco wants to go to this specific monastery, but there’s no reason to think he has a special attachment to the place. Without the scene, Tuco just shows up at the monastery and we can reasonably conclude that he already knew that it was nearby. The wides offer some interesting nighttime lighting from Tonino Delli Colli, and the Sergeant makes a mildly amusing crack about needing to become Yankee prisoners to get good treatment (which proves darkly ironic when they reach Betterville), but otherwise the scene is entirely dispensable.

Those Men Aren’t Worried Anymore

After Blondie and Tuco leave the mission and Blondie kindly offers Tuco a cigar, Tuco describes the next few steps of their journey to the cemetery, withholding the full details of the route. Blondie sees some dead soldiers along the road and says “Since I’m alive and I’ve noticed we’ll be crossing Yankee and Confederate lines a few times, I thought you might tell me where we’re going.” Tuco refuses.

This moment serves as a reminder that Tuco and Blondie are still suspicious rivals for the 200,000 in gold, and is the first overt acknowledgment of Blondie’s sympathy for the war’s combatants. But it’s too quick to undercut their first moment of bonding together, a moment that’s critical to preserving their relationship’s complexity and ambiguity throughout the rest of the film — right up until the climactic duel. And it’s far too hasty in spelling out Blondie’s anti-war sentiment, rather than allowing his conscience to develop more subtly over time. The scene, in short, doesn’t introduce anything new or useful on a character or plot level, only offering a morsel of conflict for interest.

Another issue in this Extended Cut scene is the music. In the Italian Cut, the scene is scored with a unique, subdued performance of Morricone’s “Carriage of the Spirits” theme, but at the time that the Extended Cut was assembled, the original, clean masters of Morricone’s full recordings had not yet been discovered, and so a far more operatic recording was used instead, complete with soaring vocals. It’s far too much for a scene that offers very little, and the music is cut off mid-scene by a clumsy edit.

The Perfect Number

After Angel Eyes takes Blondie as a “partner” in seeking the $200,000, the two are seemingly asleep by the river when Blondie shoots someone spying on them in the bushes. Blondie tells Angel Eyes to bring the rest of his henchman out, and they emerge. Blondie counts the goons and Angel Eyes together, and comments “Six. The perfect number.” When Angel Eyes replies “Isn’t three the perfect number?” Blondie explains: “I’ve got six bullets in my gun.”

Like Il Grotto, the moment introduces henchmen arrayed against Blondie. It also reinforces this new duo’s distrust of each other while offering up another fun counter-ambush. That said, beyond the momentary entertainment of the shooting, the scene is unnecessary — it doesn’t actually explain how Angel Eyes gathered his men (in either cut one has to infer they’re the same ones who smuggled goods in and out of Betterville for him), and it doesn’t tell us anything about the duo’s animosity that we didn’t already know beyond building up suspense for their inevitable falling out. The blitheness of the “six bullets” quip has its appeal, but the exchange feels contrived to arrive at that quip — the scene ought to have trusted the audience to get why Blondie felt that six was the perfect number.

It also makes it far more implausible when Blondie is allowed to go off on his own later on, with Angel Eyes only sending one man to follow him. Blondie has straight-up killed one of them in this scene, and followed it up with a threat; are we supposed to believe they wouldn’t have multiple goons watching him at every moment after that?

All of Us Reek of Alcohol

As the captain walks Blondie and Tuco through the hillside trenches, he elaborates on his earlier statement that alcohol is “the most potent weapon in war”, saying that it’s easier to send drunk men to be slaughtered, and that the soldiers on both sides of the river “reek of alcohol”. He then asks for his recruits’ names, but Tuco and Blondie only say “uhhhhh” before the captain observes that “names don’t matter”.

The scene puts a finer point on the ramshackle, alcohol-drenched despair of the bridge standoff — too fine a point, if you ask me, as it’s not hard to guess why the captain considers booze an asset. What’s more, Blondie and Tuco’s apparent loss for words when asked for their names seems out of character, especially for Blondie, who just finished deadpanning “Illinois” when asked where they were from. Surely he’d have no trouble inventing a name (perhaps “Joe” or “Manco”)? The scene at least offers a nice closeup of the captain with the bridge visible in the distant background — except that the riverbed is very obviously completely dry, visually negating the strategic importance of the bridge! Oops. They must’ve caught a tough break on that day of filming. I feel for them.

Once more the score is subject to unfortunate edits. Again, the clean master for the unique cue used in the Italian cut was unavailable; there, the scene begins the “Marcia” theme a moment before it transitions into the footage that’s present in all cuts. For the Extended Cut, a version of the “Marcia” theme is similarly started shortly before this added scene ends, but its melody is cut off and the cue is restarted when the next scene begins. There’s a reason why the International Cut doesn’t start this scene by cutting in while the music is already halfway through playing — Leone was meticulous about ensuring that any version he approved had a smooth, coherent use of music. (The 2009 Mondo blu-ray, while generally approximate to the Italian Cut, suffers from even worse music edits than the Extended Cut.)

Conclusion

That covers all the major additions to the Extended Cut. My flat rejection of all of them might seem unreasonably harsh, but if you’re not accounting for the problems with the new dubbing that was done for them, I think it’s fairly clear that only one or two could be argued to earn their keep. With the dub, it’s clear to me that none do. While he may have been prompted to create the International Cut by pressure to shorten the film’s runtime, Leone took full responsibility for any defects of both of the cuts he approved, and regardless, the result was a shorter film that lost very little and, by my estimation, gained very much. The International Cut of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is one of the fleetest, most thrilling, most economical films ever made with such detail and epic scale. The Extended Cut reintroduces the chaff to the wheat.

Other posts in this series:

Comparing Audio Presentations on Home Video

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Comparing Audio Presentations on Home Video

by Willa Ross

For admirers of Sergio Leone’s seminal western The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, an era may be coming to an end. After decades of problematic home video releases, Kino Lorber is releasing a new UHD Blu-ray of the film which appears to be directly addressing every major issue with the film’s previous home video representations. It’s an exciting moment to be a fan of the film (which, erm, I am).

As we wait for that moment in late April, it seems a good occasion to write a series of posts detailing some of my opinions about the film’s many different releases, be they the distinctions between different cuts of the film or the disparate audio quality of different discs. This first post covers the latter, specifically comparing the representations of the film’s original mono audio track in the Laserdisc releases of the early 90s and the Blu-ray releases of the mid-2010s. Below is a video comparing these two tracks; to be clear, this is from the English-language track created for Leone’s International Cut of the film.

It should be clear both from the text and the audio evidence itself that I much prefer the Laserdisc audio. I had the opportunity to screen a version of the film that used it as its sound source, and can’t begin to describe how magical it was to hear, for the first time, such detail in the soundscape and such soaring heights in the music. It may seem odd that such an early home video release can handily best contemporary releases decades later, but it’s not uncommon, and can be caused by overzealous filtration of audio tracks or the deterioration of the original elements over time. Because of this, accurate rips of Laserdisc audio are sometimes an unlikely boon to the task of film preservation.

In spite of its astonishing sound design and meticulously recorded dub, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’s audio has had a bumpy ride on home video. After the Laserdisc releases, the 1998 DVD edition of the film featured a mono track with boomy low-end and less high-frequency detail. In 2004, the mono track disappeared from home video entirely along with anything resembling an original cut of the film, as the Extended Edition became the only version available in the English-language market.

The new 5.1 surround sound mix prepared for the Extended Edition had numerous issues. The mix would suddenly pan a character’s dialogue to another part of the mixing space in mid-sentence, a terribly disorienting use of the added channels. New sound effects were added to the mix, most notably gunshots, and their more contemporary sound was terribly out of place both stylistically and technically. The overall quality was also worse than the Laserdisc’s mono track. Some of these issues are clearly presented in this video by “RaccoonWarriorPrincess”. (Note that the mono track used for comparison here is not taken from the Laserdisc.)

For educational purposes onlyDecided to compare the original mono mix and the shitty 5.1 remix of the movie The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which replaced a...

The 2009 Blu-ray of the Extended Edition responded to the controversy of this mix by including a mono mix, however, it was not the mono mix prepared by Leone and his collaborators almost five decades earlier.  Instead, the entire 2009 mono track simply “folded down” the surround sound audio into a single channel — meaning that the new sounds were still present. At last, in 2014, a “true” mono track was included by MGM on a Blu-ray that featured the film’s then-new 4K restoration. While this release’s use of the Extended Cut meant that it wasn’t completely accurate to the original, it was preferable to anything that had been available in the previous 10 years. However, for the few that had heard it, the Laserdisc audio offered clear evidence that the film could still sound much better. The 2017 Kino Blu-ray of the film retained the same mono track used in 2014, both in the Extended Cut and in that edition’s reconstruction of the International Cut. (The Kino 2017 “Theatrical Cut” was at once flawed and a welcome improvement of the film’s presentation, and it will be discussed in a post detailing the film’s history of cuts on home video.)

Kino’s upcoming 2021 UHD Blu-ray disc touts “Restored 2.0 Mono audio, after going back to the 1993 MGM laserdisc PCM monaural track”. In an industry that tends to overlook the importance of audio, this is incredibly promising, and it speaks to a dedication by Kino to correcting the wayward course the film has been on since 1998. However, this blog post you’re reading may not be irrelevant for a while yet — while Kino’s release may at last place the best available audio for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly back in the hands of the public, the English-language streaming copies of the film continue to exclusively present the revisionist 5.1 mix. That’s likely to be where the majority of people experience it at home for the foreseeable future, meaning that advocacy for the best possible audio will continue to be vital in ensuring its longevity.

Other posts in this series:

Why the International Theatrical Cut Is Better Than the Extended Cut

Notes on Tati: Soigne ton gauche

by Willa Ross

It’s common consensus that Soigne ton gauche is the best of the three 30s shorts to star Jacques Tati, a consensus with which I’m inclined to agree. And while it gives strong indications that Tati was growing as a writer and a screen performer, an equally critical factor in its success is René Clément, one of his only comedies and earliest efforts as director here but a competent and accomplished work nonetheless. Clément favours a rapid, highly dynamic pace through highly varied and dynamic camera angles, energetic camera movements, occasional undercranking, and rapid edits. This last point — at once the most accomplished stylistic trait of the film and perhaps its most misguided — makes itself clear as soon as the short opens: a postman cycles along the country paths and roads of rural France, zipping around corners, signaling though there’s not a soul in sight, and finally stopping in the village by simply tumbling forward off his still-moving bike. That stunt itself uses a jump cut just before the fall; it’s a rare instance in a Tati-starring film of an edit that allows a physical performance to cheat, but it works anyway, largely because the quick pace of the cuts already feels stylistically in line with the film and serves the slightly panicky, physically chaotic entrance. “Must be the postman!” exclaims a man who hears the crash but does not see it, and the postman delivers a letter to a group of men reclining by a boxing ring.

This sets up a plot similar to On demande un brute. One of the men is a star boxer, the rest help him to train, and the letter is insisting that they continue to train, as there’s a big crowd booked for their next match. They set out to training, but he’s a little too good: he knocks out his sparring partners straightaway. His manager quickly finds him a local farmhand named Roger — our Tati — who agrees, though he’s never boxed a day in his life.

This is drastically different from the tense setups of On demande un brute and Gai dimanche!, both of which involved characters forced into their actions by financial stress. Roger enters the bout willingly and knowingly. But why? Like those past films (and his future ones!), Tati plays a man unafraid to play, to imagine, to pretend. We first meet him playing with local children pretending to be a famous track star and they play the media, performing mock news reports and even pretending to film with a handmade toy camera, complete with a crank. Roger’s post-victory is cut short when he is called to work moving bales of hay near the boxing ring, where he quickly gets bored and mimes at boxing himself when he’s spotted and asked to spar. So here we have a dreamer, someone who wants to see what it means to live as other people do, and who gets his chance. He accepts not in spite of the physical danger and reality, but because of it.

But reality and imagination prove at odds with each other. As he fights, Roger looks through a little booklet of boxing advice in the ring, and every time he adopts a technique, he takes a punch, turns around, and looks through for more techniques. It’s a gag repeated again and again — with only slight variation — and while it gradually wears thin (save a lovely twist where Roger mistakes a back cover advertisement for a fencing booklet for advice on a boxing stance), it’s given more attention than any other gag in the movie, and so must have been especially attractive to Tati. Perhaps it’s because every variation is a chance for a new pose, a new bit of physical comedy for the performer whose miming act “Sporting Impressions” was in the process of making him a music-hall star across Europe. But it may also have been a moment of recognition for Tati of one of his pet themes, that of the outsider trying to understand the proper way to emulate a social behaviour and inevitably failing and watching chaos ensue around him.

And so chaos does, for after the pro boxer unknowingly connects one of his punches to the postman, the latter stomps off to find people to help him retaliate, and finds two tough-looking farmers who don’t take kindly to people who attack helpless postmen. Soon five men are in a fistfight on the ring, whose cheap structure gives way and leaves them finishing the fight in a broken down shambles of a wooden frame.

While the cutting is at times a little too brisk for the leisurely pace of the plot and the truly graceful acting that Tati delivers, the short is well-crafted and offers a coherent artistic vision. Tati-esque touches abound in general. We may easily mistake the overeager postman for Francoise, the subject of Tati’s L'École des facteurs and Jour de fête; likewise, Roger resembles a slightly more sullen Hulot, curious, befuddled, and entirely good-natured. Unlike the earlier shorts, both of which used faster pace musical scores to create a frantic soundscape, Jean Yatove’s for Soigne is mostly more relaxed. Rather than a driving underscore, the soundtrack’s jovial, fair-like atmosphere is more in line with Tati’s eventual musical modus operandi, even if it seems likely Tati had no direct hand in influencing it. Consistent with that convivial tone, there is no villain here: Roger’s opponent is patient, indulgent, friendly even, and the brawl that destroys the ring is instigated by an accident. And like the Royal Garden restaurant in Playtime, when it collapses, it becomes an entirely new structure that is now better suited to Tati’s character than those around him, and he quickly claims a KO and a decisive victory. While the satirical import and mind boggling complexity of that late masterwork certainly aren’t present here, one can leave Soigne ton gauche with a far better-formed impression of the artist than Une brute or Gai dimanche!. The final image, more than any one moment before it, bears Tati’s unmistakable signature in its wistful ode to the imagination: a wide shot of the kid with the toy camera as he rushes to film the postman cycling away down a long road.

Other Essays in This Series

On demande une brute
Gai dimanche
Soigne ton gauche

On the unknown self in "Asako I & II" (2018)

by Willa Ross

This piece references plot details indiscriminately.

In romance stories every happy ending is the same, and every tragic finale is different. If there is a space between, it’s maddeningly difficult to define in anything but contradictory terms: if love does not end happily, how can it avoid some trace of tragedy? But how many of our own personal stories of romances cannot be cleanly sifted into one box or another, but are instead held in our memory in a slow, wobbling uncertainty, for months or years or decades before we can finally pack them away and assume they’ll never come open again? And who doesn’t on some level fear the re-emergence of some past romantic episode? More than anything, Asako I & II, is about these fears, a treatment of their simmering, unacknowledged presence in our lives that ends with a terrifying affirmation of a notion famously expressed by Faulkner: "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

A romance film in the arthouse tradition, that is, one about obsession and doubles and finally an acceptance of one’s own long-denied perversity, Asako I & II may resemble familiar works in some ways, but it is, at long last, too tragic not to stand alone. After a few months of a reckless, love-at-first-sight relationship, the stone-faced, beautiful, and dangerously carefree Baku goes out to buy shoes and never returns to his lover, the meek and distantly sweet Asako. Years later, she meets Baku’s doppelganger, Ryohei, and soon falls into a long and loving relationship with him without ever mentioning his uncanny resemblance to her former lover. As the years pass by, the two clearly forge a more complex and communicative bond with each other than what Asako ever had with Baku; the outgoing, emotional, cautious and slightly needy Ryohei is pointedly sketched as Baku’s inverse. Then tremors of uncertainty emerge when Baku is suddenly reintroduced into the outskirts of her life: he’s become a celebrity through a career in modeling and acting. Asako can no longer ignore him.

That description forms the vast majority of plot, but the events are not linked through any traditional cause-and-effect construction. Explanations for characters’ decisions or outcomes cannot be decisively proven, only plurally hypothesized. Ultimately, we judge these people because we cannot understand them. We are called on to observe them with empathy, but Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s direction and his co-written script studiously avoid tidy conclusions. This is a script dedicated to suggestion and possibility, and so its tone is rife with uncertainty and melancholy.

The aim is not to psychologize characters by slowly unveiling the full breadth and depth of their inner lives. Such an approach would in fact be antithetical to its core thesis. Instead, it advances a disturbing implication that a person who is ignorant of their own thoughts and desires is not necessarily ignorant, but that in the absence of certainty they have to work off a best guess. That is, the choice is to live forever with the destabilizing forces of trauma and loss, or to choose to tell one’s self a story that offers the best hope for moving forward, with “truth” as a faint and ephemeral Macguffin. Point of view shots, the most direct evocation of subjectivity and selfhood here, do not clarify feelings and identities; instead they render the thoughts behind their gazes disjunctive and ambiguous. One scene has a group of strangers insisting that Asako — whose perspective the frame assumes for a moment — eat an oyster for the first time. When she tries it, she quickly puts her hand to her mouth, seemingly revolted or even sick, and after a long moment she pulls her hand away, smiles, and says “It’s good!” Is she merely saving face? Is she lying to herself and them? Whatever the answer is, stepping into her shoes via the camera brings us no closer to it.

Above all else, Asako I & II is about the impossibility of yoking Identity to experience, and the scenario tests this premise in different variations and combinations. Most obviously there are the doppelgangers and the divided inner self of Asako herself (the English title probably doesn't go far enough in merely suggesting duality). But other echoes, reflections, and imperfect impressions of characters' interiority make this not merely an intellectual exercise but a mysterious experience. Asako's close friend Maya, an actor at the outset of her career when we first see her, is particularly memorable as a character who doesn't merely yearn to be with someone else, but to be someone else; most obviously she wants to perform as other people on stage and television. But it’s strongly hinted that she is also in love with Ryohei, and rather than competing for him she contents herself by vicariously enjoying his unflagging adoration for Asako.

The film is at once committed to suggesting psychological spaces by elliding them, and to maintaining a focus on interiority at all cost. Even acts of nature are blatantly symbolic: the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake is almost entirely severed from its sociopolitical consequences or even much of a procedural look at how people on the ground reacted to it. Instead, like the fireworks that explode in the moment she first locks eyes with Baku, it signals a violent rupture more for an individual than a wider population, and marks an uncanny shift in Asako’s attitude and choices. Whether this is meant to portray a world whose whims of chance and coincidence determine people’s lives, an outward expression of inward states, or both, is left somewhat frustratingly unclear, not to mention confusingly inconsistent: the most perilous moment for Asako, a motorcycle crash that occurs offscreen moments before we see her and Baku splayed across the pavement unharmed, arrives with no corresponding moment of inward change, and is simply used to illustrate her naive willingness to put her life — emotionally and physically — in the hands of someone who seems bound to destroy it. Like the earthquake, it’s a powerful moment taken on its own. But it’s also part of a wider approach to symbolism which (far more than its unwillingness to explain or diagnose its characters) sometimes renders Asako’s storytelling too diffuse for its own good.

Water is the most frequently summoned of these symbols, in rain, rivers, kitchen sinks, and elsewhere. It recurs so often that its significance demands attention (in the full sense of “demands”). Characters expose themselves to it, shield themselves and others from it, yearn for what (or who) is in the rain, settle for a life safely sheltered from it. When Asako and Ryohei move back to Osaka, where the obsession with Baku began and — for a few years — seemed to be buried, the impending disaster is underscored by a river next to their new home that runs so high a flood seems inevitable.

And it is. When Baku returns, it's so sudden and brazen that the gentle rhythm of life Asako has built with Ryohei and her friends is ruptured with a hallucinatory suddenness. The results are an apocalyptic realization of everyone's worst fears: Asako runs off with Baku, tells Maya (devastated more than anything by Ryohei's despondence) that she will never come back, and throws her cell phone out the window of Baku's car. He seems to feel neither here nor there about it. They seem to be driving into nowhere. Asako balks at the emptiness of her lover and her future; she goes back to Osaka and begs Ryohei to forgive and trust her. He eventually offers the former, but forever precludes the latter.

These final scenes are the film's only serious misstep, ending on a belaboured attempt at ambiguity and an on-the-nose recitation of water's symbolic significance (with Ryohei disgusted by a river's underlying uncleanliness, and Asako entranced by its aesthetic beauty). In truth, the trajectory of these people is too far down past too many points of no return to imagine their relationship as anything but an unhealthy one, and the attempt to tease out hopes to the contrary offer little to persuade otherwise. With the over-elaborated plotting and symbolism of the last 15 minutes, Asako I & II writes itself into a corner, but it's a corner that never really needed to be there in the first place. Just before this epilogue comes a moment that renders all that follows redundant with its totalizing immensity: Asako and Baku stop the car on a long, faceless stretch of highway, effectively walled in by concrete embankments shielding it against the sea. "You can't even hear the waves," Baku remarks, and it's true; this is the one moment when the sound design's ambience becomes uncanny, when we cannot resolve our intellectual understanding of the space with our visceral reception of it. In this moment Asako sends Baku on without her, and after he drives away, she climbs the embankment to face the vast water. Once more, a POV shot filled with the merged grayness of sky and water raises more uncertainty than clarity, but now the oceanic confusion is at last confronted head-on. Everything that follows over-enunciates what we learn in this moment: there are no easy answers as to where that confrontation leads, or the right way to handle it. Avoiding it may be the most monstrous choice of all.

Notes on Tati: Gai dimanche (1935)

by Willa Ross

In Jacques Tati: His Life and Art (Panther), David Bellos mentions an anecdote in which Tati would claim the early shorts he wrote and performed in were funded entirely through his work in music-hall performances. As Tati told it, he would save some money, buy a few meters of unexposed film, and repeat the process. Bellos points out that his early shorts were either too expensive to entirely jibe with this shoestring funding story or made before he had any music-hall income to speak of. Given that these early shorts were such collaborative efforts (with directors, co-writers, producers, etc. working in what seems to have been a horizontal production structure), perhaps they represented a pooling of resources that had each party dredging up cash in their own ways, and one of Tati’s tasks was to purchase the footage. Whatever the truth of the matter, the anecdote stresses that these shorts were not cynical or merely desperate attempts to escape the challenge of making a living as a live performer in depression-era France; by all appearances they seem to have been labours of love.

While On demande une brute is by any standard a thoroughly clumsy work that neither conforms clearly to Tati’s pre-filmic mime act nor the tastes and interests he would come to display as the world’s pre-eminent master of cinematic high comedy, Gai dimanche is both an unmistakably formative work and a far greater success. The short centers on two homeless grifters who one day decide they’d like a day in the country, and set about to realize it by stealing a rickety 10-seater charabanc and charging tourists for a leisure tour, complete with meal and entertainment. The setup foregrounds the modus operandi that came to define Tati’s approach: breakdowns of human behaviour across class that show up the absurdity of social programming and how it pervades spaces of work and of leisure.

In an early scene, as the pair of con men search a car lot for a workable ride, one nearby jalopy seems to start up all its own; when they open the lid, they find a kid in the empty compartment, blowing against his lips and making believe that he’s an engine as he holds a steering wheel in front of him. They wordlessly close the lid and leave him alone. While the gag isn’t especially complex or surprising, its use of sound without a clear originating source — what Michel Chion called “acousmatic sound” — foreshadows Tati’s obsessive play with the source, perspective, and audience assumptions attached to sounds in his films, and the way that our expectations of sounds play into our instilled sense of proper behaviour. The reaction is equally telling: as we’ll see time and time again in his Hulot films, the typical reaction of onlookers to an outsider’s well-meaning transgressions is to ignore it. That reaction is often more absurd than anything done by the unwitting interloper, and it’s there that Tati finds the core of his humour, both in its famously gentle observation of foibles and its acclaimed satiric intelligence.

That gag, while formally interesting, is nonetheless slight; mildly clever but lacking in elaboration or depth. Much the same can be said for the rest of Gai Dimanche, whose best gags either have a ring of familiarity from silent comedies by Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, and others, or from their development into far superior forms in Tati’s features. Indeed, while his personality is on clearer display, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Tati is less impressive than his co-star and co-writer (and close friend), Rhum. The scarce dialogue given to Tati is delivered with a positively leaden lack of energy, and while his physical performance once again shows the clear skills of a uniquely talented mime (particularly in a sequence where the two con artists make a spirited attempt to attract customers to their tour, then gradually deflate into dejection when nobody shows interest), Rhum is his near equal that regard, and his skill with rat-a-tat verbal delivery make him the de facto star of the short.

After the disastrous excursion plays out in scenarios both funny (a passenger’s legs breaking through his seat, forcing him to jog along the pavement as the charabanc drives on) and unfunny (a large woman has trouble getting up into her seat), the final gag shows Gai dimanche’s most Tati-esque side as well as its still-unformed comic voice: after a train obliterates the charabanc, the drivers and passengers walk back to the city on the road in the exact same formation as before, with Rhum pointing to the side and guiding the sightseeing tour as Tati grasps the detached steering wheel in front of him. It’s an amusing-enough articulation of people’s desire for routine and normalcy, and the paradoxically absurd results of that attitude. At the same time, the complete lack of indignation from even the most well-to-do of Tati’s and Rhum’s customers feels unconvincing. Tati would eventually recognize the resistance people tend to have to paradigm-shattering playfulness and endow it with a sense of pathos that elevated his Hulot comedies from amusements to masterpieces, but the partial gestation of his worldview visible here — especially when assisted by competent direction and far more involved sound design — makes for a fun Sunday viewing.

Other Essays in This Series

On demande une brute
Gai dimanche
Soigne ton gauche

Shot Analysis: The Matrix (1998)

by Willa Ross

To date, the original Matrix film is arguably the summit of both Bill Pope and the Wachowski sisters’ careers as imageists. The film’s camera direction, lighting, and compositions brim with the best kind of pop-cinema inspiration, with even the most modest sequences offering much to admire. The film is packed with justly iconic moments — Morpheus’s sunglasses, Trinity breaking the glass (and implicitly the fourth wall), the moment when Neo plucks a floating bullet out of the air, among countless others — whose craft could easily merit their own post. My favourite shot in The Matrix doesn’t have quite the same glitzy showiness as so many of the movie’s other high points; I hope I can be forgiven for declaring a self-consciously arty and moody moment as the visual peak of a film that raised the bar for accessible pop moviemaking with its photographic bombast. But my favourite it is, and I’d like to deconstruct it to explain why.

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Let’s run down the necessary dramatic context: Neo — who hasn’t yet been awakened from his simulated existence in a matrix designed to mollify all humanity while machines suck their juices out for battery power — is waiting for his contact, known only as Trinity. Neo internally understands that the world he lives in is somehow not the world as it really is or ought to be, that he does not fit, that he desperately wants answers but doesn’t know his own questions. So he waits at the agreed upon place, under an overpass, watching the pouring rain.

The shot makes clever use of several compartmentalized elements in order to achieve a complex expression of that dramatic situation within a simple frame. Let’s first consider the composition. The shot is a clear example of a frame within a frame, with Neo situated within a semi-circular arch in front of the wall of rain. Yet the image is even more sophisticated than that: not only does the frame-within-a-frame of Neo in the arch function coherently as its own separate image, the material surrounding Neo would survive the removal of that semi-circle. Here are visual examples to illustrate what I mean:

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The “Tunnel” shot works as a spare, simple frame. Its concrete textures and soft, minimal lighting creates a sense of inevitability, foreboding, and tightly constructed oppression. The “Rain” image is much more emotionally tumultuous and personal, connecting a human silhouette to a complex textural experience (the water) that cannot be described in simple geometry. The falling water furthermore suggests a vast and oceanic internal state, and its bold blue-green colouration — along with the hints of red scattered throughout — contribute to its evocation of a subjective state. Only the reflections on the ground connect the two images (I’ve darkened them above to better illustrate my point), which are otherwise discrete and easily readable in and of themselves. The shot’s multi-layered construction invites us to consider it in part as two separate competing images. Such an approach yields narratively appropriate results: the oppressive, precise geometric image represents the world of the machines, which, from the shadows, encloses and subtly controls the emotional world of the humans represented by the inner frame.

We can further observe the overall shot’s lack of discernible depth — the walls of the tunnel are too indistinct to evoke distance, and the sheets of rain pouring off the walls of the overpass form a “wall” directly in front of Neo that prevents him from being able to “see” farther than himself. There is therefore a sense of immobility, of being “trapped” within a broader structure that cannot be seen or articulated, as well as a sense that the inner and outer image are inseparable, albeit distinct. It’s a rich metaphorical statement of Neo’s place in the world at the beginning of the film, but the final touch that makes it my favourite is yet to come.

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Trinity’s car, its tail lights glowing red, violates the perfectly balanced ecosystem of the frame from the extreme foreground, violates the flattened z-axis, violates the hermetic and colourless space of the tunnel. It provides the means of escape for Neo, like a 2D character being introduced to the concept of 3D movement for the first time. It effectively revolutionizes the status quo of the frame.

How elegant is that? A single frame, its logic carefully worked out in each element of colour, light, and composition to describe one state, and then those elements thrown completely out of order by an invading element that reconfigures that state and throws the situation into tension. It’s an excellent example of how cinema can formally recontextualize itself in clever ways, wordlessly evoking a world of ideas in just a single four-second shot.

A Monument to Death: The mad melancholy of Ed Wood's "Bride of the Monster" (1955)

by Willa Ross

Following Glen or Glenda and Jail Bait, Ed Wood somehow managed to get his hands on a budget more than triple that of his first two films, and used it to make his most overtly melancholic picture, a riff on the Universal Frankenstein films that starred Boris Karloff. As the second (and most substantial) collaboration between Wood and Bela Lugosi, this film gives the old horror star a role as Dr. Eric Vornoff, a long-banished scientific genius of some European power, who has committed himself to using atomic energy to create superhuman soldiers and revenge himself upon a world that jeered him and took his home away.

This is the first and most expensive film in Wood's legendary Kelton Trilogy, and in many ways it shows: sets frequently resemble the locations they aim to represent, camera movements are fairly regular occurrences, and the lighting is more elaborate and attractive than anything seen in Plan 9 from Outer Space or Night of the Ghouls. What's more, while the film's construction is shabby by any typical Hollywood standard of craft, this provides more genuine technical showmanship than any other Wood movie I've seen, with ambitious and well-motivated movements, expressive blocking, and a daring willingness to slow the pace down — and yes, it’s on purpose.

It is also, by far, the most melancholic Ed Wood movie I've seen — and the Kelton Trilogy does not lack for melancholy. Vornoff is, unequivocally, a villain — delighting in siccing his giant octopus(!) on people, beating his mute, mentally disabled assistant Lobo (who is heavily implied to be the result of a failed experiment), and lamenting the death of his home and the ruin of his name. Twice he ruminates that his name is little-recognized; the erasure of his existence and his gift weigh heavily on him. Meanwhile, a very low-stakes feeling main plot draws a newspaper reporter and her police lieutenant fiance into their own respective investigations of Vornoff and the rumours of a giant monster killing people in the swamp.

All this is peppered with just enough Wood-ian moments to make it an enjoyable viewing experience; sometimes those moments are risible, and sometimes reaches for and achieves a true poetry, as in one scene where two police officers reflect on the swamp that serves as the center of the story, and as they speak Wood cuts to a lengthy lateral tracking shot that slinks across a river as the trees on the far shore slide past. "This swamp is a monument to death," Craig says, and for a moment a true sense of mortal anxiety palpably emerges.

It all seems to be a slightly battier progression from Jail Bait's mostly-conventional plotting and presentation, and therefore primed for placement among Wood's minor work. Then Lobo knocks out Vornoff, places him on his own operating table, and the film goes absolutely nuts, escalating until its explosively discordant ending.

There are more than a few resemblances between this film and Kiss Me Deadly, a film released only a week after this one, which similarly deconstructed and criticized its genre before an ending that explodes the film's structure itself with a nuclear flash. Bride takes this atomic explosion even further — both in terms of its rapid narrative deterioration and by the depiction of an actual nuclear test footage when Vornoff and the octopus are inexplicably destroyed by lightning. The doctor is, at last, disintegrated, not only his name but every atom of his body cast into the fire.

In this sense, the film is Wood's most direct and successful allegory for the threat of nuclear weapons, a threat that churns reason into madness and whose logical endpoint is illogical destruction. Plan 9, of course, would deal with similar themes, but takes inter-cultural paranoia as more of an interest than nuclear devastation. It may not have the scene-for-scene bombast of Wood's other great works, but it trades that for his only honest-to-god big-picture structural setup and payoff, one that renders the ending all the more astonishing and confusing and entertaining by its relative meekness in advance. That makes it a perfect introduction to Ed Wood, whose internal sense of poetry will not be shackled by the strictures of conventional "quality" filmmaking.

"He tampered in God's domain," intones the old police chief as he and the film's other stars watch the mushroom cloud. As a caution against overreaching science, it's not especially convincing — after all, this guy had no way of even knowing about Vornoff's experiments. But take the other possible meaning of that phrase, and it becomes apropos, even poignant. Wood, an avowed cross-dresser and artist who was punished again and again just for who he was, must have felt acutely for the man who was destroyed for having a unique mind. It wasn't for challenging the rights of God to create life that Vornoff was shunned and finally annihilated; it was trying to rise above the circumstances of his fortune-blighted existence that earned him his cosmic judgment.

Notes on Tati: On demande un brute (1934)

by Willa Ross

As the oldest surviving film to feature Jacques Tati, this provides an interesting ground zero for his talents, even if it's a pretty lousy cast-off of a comedy. Here, Tati co-wrote with Alfred Sauvy this short about a young, lanky actor named Roustabat, who has trouble getting cast, and whose domestic partner is constantly insulting him and his vocation. Meanwhile, a low-level fight organizer is having trouble booking an opponent for a wrestling match he's already sold out (nobody wants to fight his infamously brutish star fighter), and so he publishes in the newspaper a vague call for men "specializing in violent roles". You can probably fill in most of the blanks from there.

This makes direct show of Tati’s love of silent comedy — most obviously, in the fight sequence, Chaplin and his City Lights — but unlike his features that evolved a more open-ended structure to scenes, each vignette here takes on a clear comic premise by way of a sitcom-y point of tension. The use of sound is also not especially crucial to anything in the movie. In fact with the dialogue removed and a few intertitles added, On demande une brute would work as a silent. In some ways, it might even be better off in such a form: the music, a first-time score by Marcel Landowski, frequently competes with the dialogue, and heavily punches up most of the slapstick gags, leaving hardly any work to be done by sound effects.

On the other hand, one of the most effective moments of the film comes when  short, pathetic little crunch as the scene fades out. It’s a very Tati-esque use of sound by the director Charles Barrois, and one wishes he displayed the same light touch and attention to the most effective points of comic focus throughout the film. Sadly, he often drops the ball in this respect; not only are many of the cuts to reverse shots and close ups awkward and disorienting, but Barrois will frequently miss major opportunities for laughs. For example, just before the fight, as the announcer is still addressing the audience, someone accidentally hits the gong, and Roustabat’s opponent mindlessly charges the poor man in the middle of the ring, leading to a moment of chaos where several men have to pull it off. It’s a perfect moment to indulge in a closeup of Tati’s worried face as the punchline, but that fairly clear chance for a payoff never comes. Not that Barrois’s work has nothing to recommend it. Now and then a shot or series of cuts will show an interesting sense of staging or strangeness (as when Roustabat is hung upside down near the end of the ring and sees a face next to his ringside, and a series of cuts flip quickly between his POV and a right-side-up view of the man). But in the main it’s a visually disinterested, burdensome comedy, both stylistically anonymous and quite poor at emphasizing comedy.

I don’t want to give the impression here that Barrois fails because he fails to highlight Tati’s great performing ability, since Tati’s performance itself here is, shockingly, kind of lousy. While he shows some of the precise control over his body that would make him one of the most graceful physical actors there ever was, his sense of how to exploit little changes to the angles of his limbs, affect an entire personality in his gait or lean or cock of the head, or use tiny changes of facial expression to worldlessly communicate a universe of inner thoughts... well, that sense simply isn’t visible here. Instead, it’s a performance with a fairly game willingness to emphasize Tati’s stick-like figure and a lot — a shocking amount, really! — of mugging.

After Roustabat upsets the fight and wins (by cheating), he, his friend Mérandol (who smashed the other fighter’s head with a lead pipe), and his now-admiring wife head to a car outside. After the three disappear behind the vehicle, it drives off and leaves his formerly-nagging wife behind. It’s a surprisingly mean-spirited ending for the future auteur whose own films would only gently mock the vices and pretensions of others. It may be one of the best-staged gags in the movie, but that ought to lend you a sense of how low the bar is set here. It’s a mostly good-natured and well-intentioned film (short of the caustic depiction of its only female character and a scene that makes rather cruel use of a live fish). That it was made by a combination of upstart professionals and rank amateurs to film (the latter category including Tati himself) accounts for its issues, though when viewed an early attempt for the destitute-at-the-time Tati to break from the music-hall into motion pictures, there are hints of his future output’s ethos, in particular a sympathy for the dim, hapless, and incurably uncivilized but thoroughly well-meaning outsider.

Other Essays in This Series

On demande une brute
Gai dimanche
Soigne ton gauche

Notes on John Wick: Chapter 3 (2019)

by Willa Ross

Sure, you can make the case that the John Wick movies — his entire filmography to date — aren’t ideal uses of Chad Stahelski’s talent, but as far as the setup and execution of car chases, gunfights, knife fights, and kung fu battles, I don’t think there’s many ways to fault him for lacking competence or creativity. The particular brand of pop cinema that Stahelski and his team pull off here is something that you can’t find anywhere else, and in a way that makes John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum one of the best modern action movies of its kind. That it is still a decidedly flawed movie may speak to the lack of great work being done in that sphere by Hollywood filmmakers, but it also shouldn’t deter appreciation by what it gets right, and what it gets so, so right is its ability to economically introduce interesting fight scenarios and then capitalize on them with panache.

The plot reconfigures the rules and stakes from the last chapter, but still feels very much of a formula: Reeves is back as John Wick, the former assassin who took revenge on a low-level mobster for killing the puppy his wife had delivered to him just after her death, setting off a chain of resentment and attempts of payback all the way up to the “High Table”, a council of the most powerful criminals in the world who have a text message to every criminal in the world that they should kill John Wick, or at the very least not help him. Enforcing the will of that council is the “Adjudicator”, a brusquely direct emissary who informs those who have displeased the high table (usually by helping John Wick) that they have to accept punishment in the form of a bunch of scarring sword slices or having their hands stabbed or being fired. I’m not sure why she doesn’t just have them killed, which crime bosses tend to do to avoid having maimed or humiliated underlings turn against them, but I’m not gonna raise too much of a stink about a premise that is openly ridiculous in the first place. I wish the plot of these movies made more sense, but it rarely gets in the way of the action.

That’s similarly the biggest compliment you can pay to the music, which, to be 100% clear, is me damning it with faint praise. While Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard once again avoid the overwhelmingly generic rock beats ‘n’ guitar chords of the first film by using a broader palette of electronic rhythms and ambiences, the music remains frustratingly limited in its development and tonal flexibility. The main theme in particular has received virtually no meaningful embellishment over the course of three movies now, which particularly stings given it was never a complex or especially expressive theme to begin with. One could argue that John Wick himself isn’t the most dynamic character, but that’s no excuse for this kind of musical inertia. It certainly doesn’t stop the film’s other craftspeople from trying new things elsewhere.

(A sidebar on a particularly annoying aspect of the score: The single most interesting musical decision in the film is the use of the first Winter movement from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Unlike the second film’s Vivaldi cue, which used a heavily electronic remix of the third Summer movement, the use of Winter I here is a straightforward orchestral performance of the original composition, which works terrifically well to create a chilled sense of foreboding. Confusingly though, rather than changing to an action-movie styled take on the movement or using the fast-paced third Winter movement, once the fighting starts the soundtrack reprises that same damn Summer electronic piece from Chapter 2, a nonsensical choice that once again foregrounds what an ineffective redo it was. Given that the credits feature a similar remix of Winter I, it seems like a safe assumption that Stahelski was unsatisfied with the new cue, opted to reuse the old piece, and stuck Bates’s and Richard’s take on “Winter” in the credits. I can’t entirely blame him, since the piece heard in the credits once again scuttles the rhythmic glories of Vivaldi’s piece and uses a dull electronic arrangement, but undercutting the continuity of the musical concept by using the reprise was at least as bad a choice, especially when it meant reusing a cue that wasn’t good to begin with.)

Just as Bates and Richards earn the same criticisms, every positive thing I said about Dan Laustsen’s cinematography in the last one applies here (though sadly this time Kevin Kavanaugh’s production design finds less opportunities for those ornate parodies of locations). Laustsen’s work in this series is a highlight of the 2010s’ neon revival, tremendously baroque with its placement of coloured lights and shadows and thoughtful in its scope framing, assisted by Stahelski’s marvelous gift for camera direction, which is more consistent here than ever, both in the loud and quiet parts. That goes for the loud parts especially though; the clearness of the staging belies the complexity and precision of the camerawork here. In particular, one sequence involving two gunfighters fighting alongside two dogs makes incredible use of the camera to establish the lateral space and track how quickly and efficiently the dogs can close that distance while keeping everyone’s position’s clear in any given moment. A John Wick movie could work with a lot of parts or personnel shuffled around, but it’s hard to imagine one this good without Stahelski and Laustsen behind it.

While John Wick mostly confined itself to superlative displays of driving and gun fu from Reeves and Chapter 2 added interest by setting up his limitations and making more extensive use of the fight settings, Chapter 3 blows elevates the series to new levels of complexity and invention. There are multiple action sequences in Parabellum that take unusual premises (fighting in a stable full of horses, fighting in a room full of antique bladed weapons behind glass, fighting goons who are so heavily armoured that the only way to actually kill them is by walking up, opening their helmets’ visors, and shooting into them) and explore every logical avenue imaginable and, most delightfully, many I didn’t imagine at all. One of the most relieving things about this is just how funny the action is, how almost every fight indulges over and over in those Buster Keaton-esque setups and payoffs, those logical extremes that shock you, but at the same time make complete sense for the characters and their situation. While the last two or three fight scenes lack this sense of humour on account of being standard melee combat, they are at least excellent melee combat, if a bit of an anti-climax (made all the more familiar by an obvious nod to the structure of Game of Death). The only real complaint I have is that the sound design, while mostly terrific, is a little overeager to make every impact a thooming, bone-crushing smash, which makes it hard to distinguish the big hits from the really big hits. You can’t go up from 10, as they say.

One way that Parabellum achieves such diverse action scenarios is by leaning harder into an episodic story structure than either of the Wicks before it. On one hand, this means that dramatic development is extremely minimal, as characters tend to show up, have their personal conflicts introduced, and then either be killed outright or be shown the door for potential reuse in a sequel. By traditional standards of feature film storytelling, this is a problem; here, though, quickly sketched, entertaining characters are entirely suited to economically setting up the conditions and stakes of the next big rumble. I don’t think I’d go so far as saying it’s a good script — the writing is mostly boilerplate as usual, the rules of the universe are still a bit arbitrary and inconsistent, and the material is primarily elevated by the cast’s more over-the-top performances and Stahelski’s direction — but Derek Kolstad has sanded off a lot of the issues that his scripts caused for the first two movies. This time around his most unforgivable sin is having Keanu Reeves deliver a weightless nostlagia-boom for fans of The Matrix by having him say, “Guns, lots of guns”. I mean come on, man. We’re all aware he was Neo.

After three movies of insanely brutal carnage, though, it probably behooves one to, uh, think about violence for a second. What, after all this, almost six hours of headshots and flipping people over and smashing vehicles, does it all mean? The easy (and filmmaker-intended) answer is “not a thing, it’s a cartoon, enjoy it,” but that feels a little too pat. I’ve seen reactions to John Wick: Chapter 3 that chastise it for indulging so gleefully in gun violence, but that feels too exclusionary towards the self-aware cartoonishness that the series has cultivated and improved from one entry to the next (and I do not have the patience to return to a debate about whether violent cartoons are “moral”). Maybe what squash and stretch physics do for the emphatic motion and chaos of Bugs Bunny, brain matter and broken bones do for the John Wick movies; mutual exaggerations of the physical effects of violence. Maybe laughing at most of a head disappearing under a shotgun blast is different than laughing at Wile E. Coyote turning into an accordion. Maybe one is more honest, maybe one desensitizes you less. Maybe it’s okay to have fun in a movie where horrible people who are caricatures of organized criminals in an absurdly implausible global gang hierarchy murder each other in creative ways. Yeah, that last one feels good. Let’s go with that.

Other Essays in This Series

John Wick
John Wick: Chapter 2
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

Notes on John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

By Willa Ross

If this was 2014 and I was allowed to offer one piece of advice to the makers of John Wick for their development of a sequel, it would be to adopt a greater commitment to tone. While that film played with some goofier material and sprinkled in some personal pathos and indulged in some heightened crime drama, its expression of each tended to feel like half-measures, rubber banded to an indistinct center whose emotional heft was murkier than the film’s needlessly low-contrast photography. The crime material offered up hammy line readings but ought to have pushed the juvenilia of its world-building up to the hilt, the mourning and reflection was given time to but rarely aimed for the melodramatic operatics that could make it proportionate to the action-crime-drama material and give it emotional credibility, and Wick’s unfathomable power to survive shootouts with any number of hired guns was given some wry nods, but a force so brutally unstoppable should be less like the Wachowskis’ Neo and more like Chuck Jones’s Road Runner.

For Chad Stahelski (this time directing solo), the new comic point of reference isn’t quite a Looney Tunes cartoon, but arguably the closest thing to it in live action cinema, Buster Keaton, a declaration I’m not making based on careful scrutiny of the film’s stylistic properties but based on the fact that one of the film’s opening shots focuses on a scene from Sherlock Jr. projected on the side of a Manhattan building. While it’s not a comparison that the film always strives for, the influence is felt and appreciated, and the in-your-face delivery of that influence to the audience also reflects a very welcome post-modern playfulness with its own identity. That identity, for what it’s worth, never successfully resolves, but Chapter 2 imperfectly points a potential path for an action movie whose split personality is half the fun.

The opening sequence — where Wick storms a garage serving as a front for the Russian mob — is better than anything in the original. First and foremost, you have Peter Stormare playing the brother of John Wick’s chief antagonist, and his bit part (confined to appearances in a single room in the first 15 minutes) is the best performance in either film. If Michael Nyqvist’s Russian crime boss was slyly parodic, Stormare’s is an abject mockery of the stereotype. Or maybe it’s just an abject mockery of “acting” as a “character” in a “movie”. Either way it’s absolutely hilarious, not just exploiting the humour of the lines as written but pouring excess all over them and singlehandedly breaking the illusion of a contiguous fiction. It’s more syrup than pancake, and I love it.

The opening also announces Chapter 2’s shift in focus in that it is completely irrelevant to the film’s plot. While there is a plot that threads the movie together and it is an entertaining plot, it’s also a lot of nonsense, and by opening with 15 minutes of wholly disconnected action rather than the studious character development of John Wick, Stahelski and returning scribe Derek Kolstad signal heavily that literary levels of dramatic structure are not the point of the plot. The point of the plot is to deliver inventive and well-staged action set pieces and moments that try to make you laugh as hard as Peter Stormare.

The plot, for what it’s worth, involves John continuing his fruitless quest to re-retire from the underworld. Instead he causes an extreme crescendo of pissing powerful criminals off, and gradually seems to accept that this is his life now, just headshotting people who try to kill you until you can get to antagonist du jour and killing him and enjoying a moment of respite before all the people who liked or worked with that antagonist tell everyone they know to kill you. It’s a formula that’s carried over from the first film and would feel stale if it weren’t for the fact that it rises to such crazy heights here; the fact that Wick gets himself into much deeper shit than turning the entire Camorra crime syndicate against him should give you a hint at how giddy this series is about turning almost literally the entire world against him.

That tidal wave of would-be killers translates to an enlarged body count, which means killing a whole lot more people on average in the handful of section pieces that give the movie reason to be. While John Wick’s action sequences derived their success almost entirely from Keanu Reeves’s ability to fluidly launch his body from one position to the next in reaction to his assailants — a quality retained and even enhanced here — Chapter 2 adds numerous elements to give each fight and shootout its own arc. That often entails greater interaction with the environment, as in a hall-of-mirrors sequence that confounds our sense of spatial orientation, or more diverse tactical decision-making, displayed up-front when Wick outfoxes his motorcycle-driving quarry in a car chase by swinging through a route with faster traffic before stopping his car dead in the middle of an intersection, right where the chopper can’t help but slam into the side and send its rider sailing into the concrete.

But the most important and effective way this Wick crafts more satisfying fight scenes is by incorporating a whole lot more table setting. John’s loadout before each fight is introduced in (sometimes laboured) detail, and those setups are paid off amply every time: in one fight his frustration at being given a single pistol with a seven-bullet magazine pays off multiple times as he angrily runs short of bullets, switches guns, throws the cast-offs at his opponents; in another, he removes a piece of kevlar shielding that was sewed into his jacket when he thinks a gunfight is over, only to desperately hold the floppy bullet-proof oval in front of him as he’s ambushed. It’s these logical (and usually comical) extrapolations from Wick’s toolkits, more than anything, that reveals the Keaton influence.

I also have to single out the film for its improvements in music and cinematography, two of the biggest problems with its prequel. While the music by Tyler Bates and new composer Joel J. Richard is only a marginal improvement from the last (thanks mostly to adopting a slightly expanded sonic palette), the cinematography, this time headed by Dan Laustsen, hasn’t just escaped liability; it’s now one of the film’s biggest assets. Laustsen retains the film’s love of colour splashes, ditches the blue and orange filters and low contrast of the last film (there are numerous scenes with neutral skin tones here), and displays a far greater utility with composition than Jonathan Sela’s work last time around. It’s not just a big step up from the cinematography in the last Wick movie I saw, but the last Dan Laustsen movie I saw: the fact that it was the sloppy visuals in The Shape of Water that gathered Laustsen all the accolades in 2017 while his work here received no attention is a prime example of how farcical the Hollywood awards season is. It also helps that the production design — with Kevin Kavanaugh heading that department this time — is lovely and well-tuned to the movie’s aesthetic and sense of humour, full of baroque parodies of the settings — museum, modern art installation, Italian hotel — that both help the film’s comical tone and give a more robust colour arrangement. It’s Kavanaugh’s best work to date, and a great example of a project that gives a production designer room to do something truly unique.

In fact, I could almost say that the improvement on offer here is nearly across-the-board. That doesn’t mean Chapter 2 is flawless, mind you. A little bit of the first film’s half-baked attempts at psychoanalyzing Wick rears its head from time to time (most irritatingly in an excruciating “I think you enjoy this” speech given by the bad guy as he hides around the corner”). There still isn’t much of a sense of palpably rising stakes and heightening tension over the full runtime. And a lot of the dialogue still feels very written, the attempt to be cool coming through much clearer than any actual sense of being cool. The music, while a bit better, is still wallpaper-y at its best and irrirating at its worth (as in a baffling remix of one of the Summer movements from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that strips out almost all the rhythmic urgency). And finally, I’d be remiss if I said that as of this chapter this series is developing something of a problem with associating its few female characters with sexualized violence, particularly a scene where a character strips nude before slitting her wrists and lying face-up in a pool of water. I’m happy that Kolstad is pushing for more operatic levels of melodrama here, but scenes like that show a thoughtlessness about the approach that I dearly hope changes in Chapter 3, and make the overwhelmingly male crew a lot tougher to swallow.

That, ultimately, is the most telling compliment I can pay to John Wick: Chapter 2: it shows artists committed to improvement and confident enough to deliver an undeniably entertaining pop cinema experience. While I came into John Wick and Chapter 2 with a sense of obligation to stay in the loop about modern action movies, I’m actively excited to go see the new Parabellum chapter later this afternoon and find out what new ideas and improvements these artists have to offer. He may not be the Road Runner, but Wick is definitely starting to really step on the gas here.

Other Essays in This Series

John Wick
John Wick: Chapter 2
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum