Moviegoer Diary: Calmos, The Landlord

CALMOS

Plot In A Nutshell
Bertrand Blier’s loony 1976 comedy about two Frenchmen, a pimp and a gynecologist (Jean Rochefort and Jean-Pierre Marielle), whose decision to abandon all contact with women and live in the countryside sparks a surreal battle of the sexes all across France.

Thoughts
Calmos may be the most misogynist comedy that I’ve ever loved. It reminds me of the comic novels of Philip Roth, like Portnoy’s Complaint, the ones where he really gets his most outrageous ideas cooking, the ones where he just lets his id take over the writing process while his ego and his superego laugh helplessly from the sidelines.

What I admire most about Calmos from a writing standpoint is how it wastes absolutely no time establishing its premise. It begins with a hilariously tasteless, dialogue-free opening scene in which a well-dressed female patient comes into gynecologist Jean-Pierre Marielle’s office, strips naked, climbs onto the examination table, and puts her feet into the stirrups — and then has to stay there, her legs spread open, while Marielle sits behind his desk, more interested in fixing himself a lunch of bread and fish pâté than in examining yet another vagina.

It’s the maw that broke the camel’s back: he unceremoniously leaves his office, and as he’s striding down the street, he strikes up a conversation with Jean Rochefort, who’s feeling exactly the same way about women. Within a couple of minutes, they’re fast friends. They don’t even go home to collect their things; off they go to the train station to move to a new town and start a new woman-free life.

How many comedies hit the ground running the way Calmos does? One of the great things about Blier’s movies is the ease with which his male characters form instant bonds with each other, no matter what their regional or class differences might be. I love the way every man in France becomes magically aware of Marielle and Rochefort’s plan to avoid women — halfway through the film, they’ve somehow acquired an army of hundreds of followers without doing a single bit of recruiting.

Of course, one of the problematic things about Calmos — especially if you’re not a man — is that all the female characters really do turn out to be as rapacious and insatiable as Marielle and Rochefort say they are. Not that Calmos is remotely interested in social realism, of course — it’s a cloud-cuckoo-land satire, sort of a gender-reversed spoof of Lysistrata in which the women are the ones for whom living without regular sex is torture. They even mobilize an all-female army to take the runaway men prisoner. In one of Blier’s wildest setpieces, Rochefort and Marielle are strapped into a pair of beds, given chemical treatments that render them permanently, hugely erect, and forced to service dozens of women every day in an antiseptic white space that’s part hospital room, part torture chamber. (The process seems just as humiliating to the women, who must strip naked before being herded one by one to the copulation room.)

But Blier has at least one more surreal twist in store for us: a disorienting jump cut several decades into the future, as Rochefort and Marielle, now old men with long, white beards living as fugitives in the countryside, make one final escape attempt from the enslavement of women. They hop onto some hang gliders and fly for days, landing on a gorgeous Caribbean beach. Well, not technically on the beach: they land in the pubic hair of a gigantic naked black woman and crawl inside her vagina where they discover a small group of male characters from earlier in the film, living in the cave like Pinocchio inside Monstro.

The final image of the film shows the giantess’ equally huge black lover joining her on the beach, presumably to make love to her. It’s unclear whether this will mean oblivion for our heroes (and if it does, whether they’ll be crushed, suffocated, or drowned) — but Blier at least deserves credit for giving new meaning to the phrase “le petit mort.”

Stray Observations
• Jean-Pierre Marielle was also terrific in Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. I’d never heard of him before, but he’s quickly turning into one of my pet discoveries. I wonder where I’ll stumble across him next?
• Here's a YouTube clip of the film's nuttiest scene. There are no subtitles, and it's definitely NSFW.



RATING: 4.5/5

* * * * *

THE LANDLORD

Plot In A Nutshell
Hal Ashby’s 1970 social comedy about Elgar Enders, a privileged young white man (Beau Bridges) who buys a run-down tenement in an all-black neighbourhood in Park Slope with the intention of evicting all the tenants, only to decide instead to fix up the building and become a proper landlord to the residents.

Thoughts
I’ve been reading a few articles and listening to a couple of interviews with Nick Dawson, the author of the new biography Being Hal Ashby, and so many of them make special mention of The Landlord as one of Ashby’s greatest achievements — and this is the guy who made Coming Home, Harold and Maude, Shampoo, and The Last Detail — that I was eager to check it out.

The film’s handling of Bridges’ character turned out to be more complex and ambiguous than I thought it would be from the synopsis. I had expected a story in which, after some initial hostility and miscommunication, Bridges’ characters gradually becomes accepted (and even beloved) by his black tenants. But that’s not quite what happens: even at the end of the film, most of the people in the building still distrust him or outright resent him, many of them take advantage of him, and one even attacks him with an axe. Bridges doesn’t even stick it out in the building; he moves away (although he does decide to raise the baby he fathered with one of the tenants during a drunken party).

In a fascinating scene near the end of the film, a Black Muslim tenant named Professor DuBois, who has always shown Bridges nothing but stony dislike invites him to sit in on one of the classes he teaches. His students turn out to be about nine or ten years old, but DuBois has got them so well drilled that they seem ready to attend grad school. At the end of the lesson, DuBois calls on each of the kids by name, who stand up and proclaim, “I’m black and I’m beautiful!” Finally, DuBois calls on Bridges, who remains silent. “You see, ladies and gentlemen?” Dubois says. “Some people can’t learn what we learn.”

That’s the film’s key line. Bridges does eventually become a little more comfortable in his new surroundings, but he never quite stops making gaffes (like taking his half-black, half-Irish girlfriend to a very white-bread charity costume ball where his brother-in-law has come dressed as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, complete with blackface). He can’t ever quite learn what his tenants instinctively know. He tells one black woman he meets that she’s beautiful, and he means it, but he doesn’t really understand what his tenants mean when they say, “Black is beautiful.”

As in his second film, Harold and Maude, Ashby’s depiction of the uptight establishment is pretty cartoonish, but Lee Grant’s Oscar-nominated performance as Bridges’ dotty mother is so funny and the scenes are edited with such energy and staged with so much action within the frame that the lack of nuance doesn’t really hurt. (That said, the scene where Bridges takes out his anger at his family’s Republican values by garishly humiliating their black butler is so rooted in the racial attitudes of another generation that it’s hard to know how to react to it in 2009. Or maybe I just didn’t know what to make of it when a character I wanted to identify with did something so appalling.) The script was by a black screenwriter, and adapted from a book by black woman, so it makes sense that the black and female characters are all so well-rounded.

Al Kooper’s funky score, featuring The Staple Singers, is terrific too — although I wonder if music clearance issues are what’s holding up the release of the film on DVD. Who would have ever predicted that a special extended cut of Ashby’s late-career flop Lookin’ to Get Out would beat The Landlord onto home video?

RATING: 4/5