Electric Trio Vol. 2
'A Wife Confesses' (1961), 'Seven Beauties' (1975), and 'Twilight' (1990)
Electric Trio is a column where I look at some of cinema history’s countless underseen, underappreciated, and largely forgotten works. The format (or gimmick, if you prefer) is simple: three films, three paragraphs each. Hopefully these posts will, on occasion, move a few of my readers to seek out a film they were previously unfamiliar with. If not, I hope that reading about them proves a worthwhile experience, at least.
A Wife Confesses (1961)
The near-unanimous praise heaped upon Justine Triet’s prestige potboiler Anatomy of a Fall last year was yet another reminder of just how boring and predictable the sensibilities and politics of contemporary cinephilia can be. Described by film critic Richard Brody as “both a product and an echo of high-minded consensus,” the film falls short of its woman-on-trial forebears such as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité (1960), and, perhaps most glaringly, Yasuzō Masumura’s A Wife Confesses (1961).
Masumura is often brought up for his more transgressive, psychosexual outings, most notably Blind Beast (1969), but his talents as a director of (admittedly unconventional) melodramas remain underappreciated. What Masumura has on his melo precursors like Mikio Naruse is how deftly he wraps these impulses around different filmmaking modes, exemplified by his work on films like Red Angel (1966), a gruesome war flick that nonetheless makes room for romance and rich humanism, or his late-period drama Music (1972), a Freudian character study whose venereal preoccupations and perverse scissor metaphor belie a more tender sensibility and empathy for his repressed female protagonist.
A Wife Confesses is certainly less shocking in its subject matter but the stark black-and-white images and deep shadows do add a lot of menace and mystery to the film’s otherwise vague commitment to thriller ornamentation. (The claustrophobic framing, meanwhile, works on both a genre and character level.) But Masumura’s biggest feat is his rendering of Ayako (Ayako Wakao, who, along with co-star Hiroshi Kawaguchi, also starred in Yasujirō Ozu’s gorgeous 1959 drama Floating Weeds), a put-upon wife of an abusive husband who, in spite of her unenviable circumstances, defies reductive categorization as a victim and the expectations that such a designation brings with it. She’s depressed, manipulative, indecisive, and passionate — human in a way that most films still won’t allow their (female) characters to be and the fact that it is her lover’s former fiancée who sees her most clearly is a perfect Masumurian touch.
Seven Beauties (1975)
As far as cinematic portrayals of the gutless wonders that helped Italian fascism flourish between the world wars are concerned, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), an adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s 1951 novel of the same name, has more or less monopolized the conversation, no doubt owing, in large part, to the director’s reliably elegant filmmaking style. But only five years after the release of Bertolucci’s masterpiece, his countrywoman Lina Wertmüller released a masterpiece of her own in the form of Seven Beauties.
Unlike the younger Bertolucci, who was born into an educated middle class family, Wertmüller’s aristocratic background is more aligned with that of Luchino Visconti. Like Visconti, Wertmüller rejected her background in favor of leftist politics but both offer only limited insight into the psychology of working class characters. (For all of its sudoric passion, Ossessione, Visconti’s 1943 debut, very much feels like the work of someone on the outside looking in). Consequently, Seven Beauties is more adept at delving into the mindset of a particular type of petit bourgeois than her 1973 film Love and Anarchy was at capturing the desires of its peasant protagonist. Telling the story of Pasqualino (an incredible Giancarlo Giannini), a man trying to survive a concentration camp after being sent there for deserting the army during World War II, the film skewers his reactionary notions of “honor” — prewar flashbacks show him shooting his sister’s pimp in order to defend hers, or rather, his own — and lays bare the chauvinism from which his cowardly brand of survivalism springs.
However, Seven Beauties is ultimately more existential than strictly political (if one chooses to separate these realms at all): as an antidote to fascism’s fetishistic obsession with order, the director posits a kind of chaotic left-Nietzscheanism, articulated by Pedro (Fernando Rey), an anarchist camp prisoner. Though a Jump Cut piece from 1977 takes her anarcho leanings to task by bemoaning the absence of “collective resistance” from the narrative, Wertmüller’s individualist inclinations are a little more complicated. The ineffective, suicidal gestures of rebellion she includes aren’t products of heroism as much as despair — little more than desperate reactions to the broken down spirit of the collective.
Twilight (1990)
Felügyelõ (Péter Haumann), a weathered detective is called to a village in the Hungarian countryside to investigate the grisly murder of a young girl whose body has been found in the mist-enveloped woods that surround the hamlet. Though a suspect is swiftly apprehended, the case is closed when he commits suicide and no other leads turn up. Felügyelõ, however, has become a man possessed and he sets out to uncover the lingering mysteries on his own, all of which seem to be linked to a serial child murderer by turns referred to as “the Giant” and “the Wizard.”
Adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novel The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, György Fehér’s atmospheric 1990 detective flick Twilight plays less like a traditional crime thriller and more like an existential drama steeped in heavy fog and crumbling rural dwellings. It boasts neither the complex plot machinations of The Big Sleep (1946) nor the ingenious police work of High and Low (1963) but rather unravels in the drowsy register of “slow cinema” — an ill-defined category to be sure but not an entirely useless one when discussing a work so lacking in traditional narrative momentum and sustained by long shots that persistently wander into the disquieting.
Aside from sharing its rejection of the usual genre trappings in common with its literary source material, Fehér’s film also owes a debt to the cinema of fellow Hungarian Béla Tarr — Twilight evokes something similarly haunted about Hungary after the fall of the Eastern Bloc (though there is deliberate ambiguity as to when exactly the story takes place). Eerie choral singing and religious imagery enhance the despairing atmosphere, the latter perhaps suggesting something about the former socialist state’s uneasy relationship with religion. It is undoubtedly difficult to get a firm grasp on the film but even after a single viewing, the chilling scene of a child absent-mindedly whispering about the aforementioned giant will no doubt prove impossible to forget.