The Milky Way

THE MILKY WAY   ***

Luis Buñuel

1969

IDEA:  On the famous Way of St. James pilgrimage route, two vagrants encounter a panoply of characters and incidents from ecclesiastical history.

BLURB:  A heretical theological seminar by way of picaresque, The Milky Way contains all the irreverent religious commentary one expects from Luis Buñuel. Here, he uses the episodic literary format to take aim at the contradictions and hypocrisies of Catholicism, populating the titular pilgrim’s route with figures from centuries’ worth of Christian history and iconography. The encounters between these figures and a pair of vagabond protagonists form the film’s loosey-goosey structure, through which Buñuel playfully dramatizes and skewers the absurdities of a variety of Christian dogmas. Although it’s chockablock with symbolism and allusions, The Milky Way is admirably straightforward. Each vignette on its winding road trip stages a debate about the nature and calculus of faith, especially with regard to Catholic tenets, in which one or many characters pronounces a belief that is then challenged by others or delivered in such a way that its logic is implicitly called into question. Buñuel depicts the resulting opprobrium, rhetorical confusion, and defensive certitude with a jauntiness that lends everything sardonic bite. As always, his ire is not directed at the idea of religion or piety as at the institutions built around them, and all the ways their absolutist strictures have historically functioned to keep people in line. Much of the gleeful iconoclasm and ironic sermonizing does grow repetitive after a while, but Buñuel tempers his impudence with a poignant recognition: that the true believer is one who embraces more than a single possibility.

A Zed & Two Noughts

A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS   ***

Peter Greenaway

1985

IDEA:  Following the deaths of their wives in a swan-related automobile accident, twin zoologist brothers struggle to process their grief while having an affair with the car's one-legged driver.

BLURB:  What is most pronounced about A Zed & Two Noughts is the dissonance between its focus on nature and its monstrously anti-naturalistic aesthetic. This paradox is aptly encapsulated by the zoo that serves as the film’s setting. A collection of wild animals categorized, arranged, maintained, and kept as objects of human inquiry in an institutional space, the zoo as figured by Greenaway is an uncanny Frankenstein’s lab where the natural world is bent and molded to the shape of human schemata. Art and science are both criticized and upheld as methods of manipulating and regulating nature, with Greenaway’s hyper-stylized, symmetrical frames pointing up the constructedness of the systems we use to classify, organize, and represent the world. Like the two “noughts” of the title, who haplessly attempt to reinstate order to the suddenly volatile reality in which they find themselves by photographically documenting processes of decay, Greenaway uses the cinematic medium to create visual taxonomies that become simultaneously undermined by the excesses that confound their (coherent) meaning. The images of A Zed & Two Noughts may be painstakingly designed with attention to line, color, perspective, and composition, but their elements exist in absurd and decadent relation, organized less by the semiotics of narrative than by some internal, often inscrutable system of aesthetic-symbolic associations. A Zed & Two Noughts is thus a series of alien vitrines, of exhibits of human specimen grasping at illusory mastery, engaging in arbitrary rituals before time and, as it turns out, snails, consume them.

Kung-Fu Master

KUNG-FU MASTER   ***1/2

Agnès Varda

1988

IDEA:  A divorced woman becomes besotted with her daughter's 15-year-old classmate.

BLURB:  The arcade game that gives Agnès Varda’s film its title takes on an unexpectedly poignant significance. Beyond its most obvious narrative functions – as escapism for Julien, as metaphor for his “rescuing” of the “captive” Mary-Jane – it demonstrates how both people and things can become sites of our imaginary identification. In other words, the Kung-Fu Master is Julien’s ego ideal, possessing all the physical strength and mastery he himself lacks. This is crucial to understanding Mary-Jane’s infatuation with the boy. She is drawn to him because in her mind, he represents things she’s missing, or things that have been putatively lost: innocence, vitality, romantic and filial ideals of love. Jane Birkin’s intense but distinctly gawky performance communicates the emotional stuntedness that would lead an adult to seek, and desiringly project, these things in a child. And Varda, ever delicate and nonjudgmental in approach, defuses this potentially sensationalistic relationship with a sensitivity toward the psychologies of the humans that comprise it. Mary-Jane desperately longs for an affection deferred in her past, and she regresses so she can rediscover it; Julien wishes to grow up. But they are not, and could never be, on the same page. Varda wistfully conveys the vagaries of aging through Mary-Jane’s sad yearning, using the generational gulf between the characters to underscore the distances that time inevitably creates, but that hopefully aren’t unbridgeable.