And I liked the wrong one.
Movie #1: Into Great Silence, German Die Grosse Stille, which, if I remember my high school German correctly, is simply The Great Silence, which I like better.
I’m going to have to be the first Catholic I know to be unenthusiastic about this lengthy (almost three hours) visit to one of the most famous monasteries in the world, the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps. Well, one of the first two Catholics, anyway—my wife shared my opinion. We had to force ourselves to watch it all the way to the end. The first time we tried it, I fell asleep after forty minutes or so. We tried it again a few days later, backing up to the point where I had fallen asleep. After half an hour or so we were both getting sleepy and gave up. At the next attempt, a week or so later, we made it up to roughly the 90-minute mark, and she fell asleep. A couple of weeks went by before we decided (well, actually, I was determined, and she came along reluctantly) that we would make one last push. This time we made it all the way to the end.
This film is very, or rather very, beautiful, but it has no narrative at all, and—this is maybe what made it so difficult for us—often not even a coherent sense of connection from one scene to the next. After our first failed attempt my wife referred to it sardonically as “Sesame Street Monastery.” Like Sesame Street, it’s a sequence of vignettes ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes in length, and there is often no transition or apparent connection, other than the monastery, between one and the next.
I think it would work in a theater. The images are rich and striking, and I can well imagine that if they were the size of a wall they would be hypnotic. Maybe on a large and detailed TV they would work similarly. But we were looking at it on an ordinary CRT television from across the room, and it just didn’t hold our attention. It was made worse by the fact that many scenes are very dimly lit, and the shiny reflective surface of a CRT always makes those problematic. It was only toward the end, when one of the monks is allowed to speak and the thing somehow comes together, that we began to feel as we were supposed to feel throughout.
Here, for instance, is what the film company says about it: “One of the most mesmerizing and poetic chronicles of spirituality ever created, Into Great Silence dissolves the border between screen and audience with a total immersion into the hush of monastic life.”
I’m sorry, it didn’t do that at all for me. Here’s the official web site, where you can get some sense of what it’s like.
Movie #2: Mulholland Drive. This is one of only two or three David Lynch films I’ve seen, and by far the best. It’s weird, of course; sometimes disturbing, of course; often mysterious and in fact baffling. And it also has that odd Lynchian quality that I’ve called “bent nostalgia” which I suspect is effective only on Americans of a certain age. Some of Lynch’s fans seem to regard it as his masterpiece. I don’t know about that, but I’m not likely to forget it.
I think I’m glad I didn’t see this one in a theater—it might have been too much, too creepy. There is not much violence, but there is a pervasively menacing feel about it. I’m not going to say much about the plot, because to know very much of it in advance would seriously spoil one’s first viewing. I’ll just say that it concerns a young woman who has come to Hollywood to make her way as an actress. And it will not make you feel good about Hollywood.
My wife and I were so taken by it that we watched it a second time a day or two after the first. Many elements of the plot remained, and remain, cryptic, and I suspect that the legion of people who have attempted to figure it all out are wasting their time, because I’m not convinced all the mysterious pieces really fit together logically, but rather are there to create visual and emotional impact. And I’m not convinced that it adds up to a profound philosophical statement, as some of Bergman’s similarly cryptic work often seems to do. But it was, especially on second viewing, very moving and, like I said, I don’t think I’ll forget it.
I recommend it only with caution. Some would find its menace too disturbing, and I should mention, too, that there are a couple of somewhat graphic lesbian sex scenes, which I have to admit are artistically justifiable, although they could just as well have been less pornographic.
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