Umbrellas and Panic
I watch a great picture. I read classic newspaper comics. I play a round of Roulette. I finish an unsatisfying novel.
Film Selection: A Continental Classic
The poll tied between The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Defending Your Life, so I will watch both. I started with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg from 1964, directed by Jacques Demy. I was very impressed.
The story is surprisingly, pleasingly straightforward: two impossibly beautiful young people, a teenaged girl played by Catherine Deneuve and a young auto mechanic played by Nino Castelnuovo, fall madly in love in the port city of Cherbourg in 1957 and plan to wed. Circumstances beyond their control separate them and force them to make difficult decisions about what kind of lives they want to live, what they are willing to sacrifice and whether they are able to move forward and accept the irrevocability of their choices.
What distinguishes this film from similar such melodramas and rescues it from banality and predictability is that the entire piece is composed as a unique form of movie musical in which literally every single line of dialogue is sung to accompanying orchestration, and every choice related to design, staging, composition and camera movement is choreographed to convey and enrich the emotional content of each moment and gesture. Writer-director Demy and his composer Michel Legrand evidently set out to do nothing less than model a perfectly hybridized opera-movie, thereby demonstrating that there is no reason this novel concept in entertainment can’t encompass the best aspects of both media.
The viewer is clued in to this thesis early on when a few characters dabble in a good-natured debate about which are more fun to sit through, movies or operas. The rest of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg says in effect: why not both at once? It has the musical construction, cohesive visual design and thematic grandiloquence of opera, but applies them to a quotidian and painfully relatable scenario and squeezes the whole package into a breathless ninety-one-minute running time that leaves no room for tedium or restlessness. (I’ve only withstood one opera and that was on Blu-ray, but it can be a slog even when you’re alone in an easy chair and armed with a pause button.)
But then, the film’s lofty goal of combining the best qualities of cinema and opera into a new type of musical film can also be fully disregarded in favor of simply enjoying how well-made and entertaining this film is in every way. The acting, of a sort which must have been especially difficult to pull off given the need for precision in every vocal note and pre-crafted movement, is fairly solid. The use of color, particularly in stark design choices that often intentionally match or contrast costumes with accompanying set designs and backgrounds, is delectable. And the camera’s movements are incorporated right into the choreography of its subjects, all of which is in turn interlaced with the musical compositions.
This is a real winner and begs the question of why it didn’t inspire a whole new genre in musical film. Maybe simply because auteurs with enough good taste to conceive of such material and performers with enough talent to realize it are just too uncommon.
Trailing Balloons and a Fragmented Ellipsis
January 5, 1932. While he and Olive Oyl are camping their way out into the Wild West to take charge of Olive’s father’s ranch, Popeye becomes frightened and jumps off sprinting across the desert in fear. This punchline panel is composed to show him running from Olive, who is left back on the horizon, and right up into the reader’s field of sight — indicated by his full line of dialogue being broken out into four trailing speech balloons showing where he was when he said each bit of it:
“RUN”
“WITH ALL”
“YER MIGHT”
“OLIVE”
…culminating in Popeye’s foreground exclamation “I SEEN A GHOSK!”
I’ve never seen this motion-indicating speech balloon trick used in comics until now and I love it. Segar must have felt similarly because he used it in the very next panel he drew, the first panel of the next day’s strip. Olive takes off after Popeye and her path is indicated by the same set of five trailing speech balloons. In her case all five contain only the word “HELP.”
February 20, 1990. Linus utters one of my favorite-ever Peanuts lines, a signal indication of why he has always been the character in the strip with whom I’ve identified most closely: “I fall in love with any girl who smells like library paste..” (Two-point ellipsis in original.) If I ever compose my own riposte to Ellroy’s The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women, I’ll keep this Linus line in my back pocket for when it comes time to pick a title.
Roulette
Terry and the Pirates volume I 1934-1935 by Milton Caniff, read in 2021. Reading this book of comics made me realize how directly Caniff’s work was an influence on the Indiana Jones franchise. Still gotta get around to re-scrutinizing the surprisingly good fifth Indy picture.
The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual In an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford, read in 2015. One of the most thought-provoking books I’ve ever read and one that I’ve contemplated and re-skimmed often as I’ve tried to become a less bad cartoonist and designer. Crawford is a highly-trained student of philosophy who is also an unorthodox thinker and working motorcycle mechanic. This book is about how getting handy with tools and materials connects one’s mind and soul to the physical world, providing room to grow as an individual by expanding the scope of what is within one’s control. From there Matty Craws wheels off down all sorts of interesting alleys and byways in work, philosophy, science and creativity. I forget if he explicitly uses the term “flow state” but I seem to recall that the concept comes in for some interesting scrutiny in Crawford’s parable of a short order cook. A lengthy section at the book’s end documents his visit to a shop that works on old pipe organs. I recommend this book to everyone, even as I decline to read Crawford’s most recent book.
A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership by James Comey, read in 2018. At the time I really wanted to read what Comey had to say about the 2016 Presidential election and about working for and getting shitcanned by that asshole who won it. There was some interesting stuff in here but the book is padded with some less-than-captivating autobiographical meandering. I don’t know just what I think of Comey as an individual of integrity and I’m not qualified to say what I think of him as a lawman, but I can report that he’s not an especially invigorating prose author.
This Is a Rather Lifeless Outing
I finished that Ellroy novel. The ending was a tedious morass. The most interesting part was Ellroy fictionally implicating James Dean and Nicholas Ray in a bizarre and dastardly thrill-killing.
Coming after This Storm, Widespread Panic marks two unimpressive Ellroy books in a row (in the order they were published and also in which I’ve read them). I’m flipping through a few non-fiction things, but if I can’t come up with some other more diverting prose book soon…then against my better judgment, I may plunge headlong into the last extant work of Ellroy fiction that I’ve never read: his 2023 novel The Enchanters.
Next: Hopefully defending Defending Your Life.