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Into the Night (1985)
Memorable, scary, ridiculous and tragic
There is never quite certainty whether what unfolds and tumbles in this cinematic night is real or a dream of Jeff Goldblum's Ed who finally managed to close his eyes, and that is surely intentional. The same way In one of the scenes a black-and-white picture with Bela Lugosi and vampires quietly reels away on an abandoned TV in a vast and luxurious apartment that is empty like a house of ghosts, a Marie Celeste sailing sparkling and incomprehensible through the darkness (and everyone in the apartment has been murdered). Is this really happening? Can Ed understand the life of the rich or the concerns of foreign powers, terrorists, smugglers and party animals like Pfeiffer's character, Diana? The world has spun out of control some time ago, and all that remains is cubicle jobs and insane small-screen commercials. "Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal!"
Having been forced to enter the night but not its citizen, only a temporary visitor on a visa of his small abnormality - his insomnia, Ed wanders, he meanders. He curiously explores a film set, crashing through its fakery butt-first. Everything is strange and new to him, an ordinary man from the daytime world. But this daytime, as he realizes or perhaps always suspected, is a blanket that covers deep mysteries. For instance, some Iranians can kill you for whatever reason, perhaps not comical to them, if they are seeking to recover jewels from a precious relic of their country. Different assassins - French, British, African American - also pop out of thin air. Nighttime private casinos host demimonde characters. Big private boats rock on the waves like separate universes with their own rules. Even when the sun gets out of bed to pretend along with commuters that all is fine and beach houses appear standing over California tide, full of light, transparent, paradisiacal - until someone barges in and starts killing (remember the Manson family?) Everything is a convoluted knot that begins in no certain place, and money rules sovereign over all. So all this shooting and racing and hustling are quite conceivable in a society out of anyone's comprehension or control.
Is this is a silly flick with a cheap premise? Sure, but no one can swear that this sort of thing can't happen, LEAST of all the smart, wise, accomplished directors and actors subscribed here for cameo roles. There is a feeling of a conspiracy in the air because something is going on over our heads, and the memories of the Iranian crisis are very alive and well. As for Ed, he would just like to sleep - that is, to awake from the nightmare of his meaningless life. It is not his personal problem, however, it is everyone's, only Ed has been thrust in a situation of clarity about his predicament and given a chance for freedom - and that is the film's only Hollywoodian conceit. The key moment is the airport denoument where the last of the Iranian butchers left unshot, a young man and quite beautiful, is surrounded by police and FBI and god knows what disguised American special service ops and forced to back the wall. He holds a revolver against Diana's head, trembling, hopeless, with nowhere to run. Ed steps up to this young bearded barbarian from another universe and, looking in his eyes, asks him: "Maybe you can help me. What's wrong with my life?"
What's wrong with everyone's life? It's like a question without an answer...
Le diable probablement (1977)
"I believe because it is absurd"; such confused kids in a doomed world
But Bresson is not so simple-minded as to agree with his hero, even though the choice of honorable suicide is certainly heroic (I recall Sophocles' Ajax, whose motives were very similar). No person past a certain degree of spirtual advancement can take others' ideas and suffering at face value and simply side with them or against them, lay out the arguments or counter them one by one like in a game of cards. It is impossible to "argue" any real case, to lift a word from another reviewer here. One simply knows how things are, and beyond the facts faith, stubborn love of life begin. Bresson is dogmatic as someone who has lived and experienced enough and is not going to bother picking small fights with fools. Yet he is also sympathetic - always. He is kind. He shows everywhere great pity for Charles, all the way to the little glimpse of a TV screen that he catches on the way to his half-hearted appointment with death. This is life with its joys, being left behind. And Bresson lets Charles' better-integrated friend say at one point that he feels that despite everything, it's going to be all right.
Does this convince Charles? Of course not, and he consistently parries every other argument made to him, turns away every saving hand. He is in despair, and life is not a philosophy seminar, it is a choice. If one makes the decision to live, it can't be on rational grounds. As Max Stirner wrote, "I have founded my affair on nothing." Charles has standards. Is it wrong to have standards? What is the point of living without standards, indeed? Being young, he exercises the right every person has but most give up: to insist on satisfaction. He wants the world - or the social world, which is only how deep he penetrates - to exist on his intellectual level, not only on the emotional. Charles knows he could make himself "happy" by losing himself in love (strange again: no reviewer took the trouble to think about the significance of all of the romantic back-and-forth here). And he is not opposed to love. But he wants more. He is untrained but fresh, and he demands that the social world be fresh as well. He wants something worth doing, yet there is nothing. Had he stopped idealizing nature he only knows from a projector's screen or the cabin of a car and seen through to its own brutality, he would object to the physical universe generally, because there is nothing worth doing either. Then Charles' objection would grow to a titanic scale. But he is neither Ajax nor Hamlet, only a sad boy.
And this is itself sad, and that he gets himself killed, indifferently shot by someone who has degenerated below humanity and practically turned into another part of the machine is also sad. Everything is sad, and the future that awaits these boyfriends and girlfriends who did not kill themselves is sad too. What will they become? For they will become something. The devil will cook and flip them and make them into train conductors or mechanics or teachers or celebrated novelists. Within a decade of this time they will grow large and slow, rowdy and loud and insistent and ambitious, they will spawn kids and hang diplomas in the offices and eat at veranda restaurants - painting material for some sort of Renoir. The actors were not professionals, and something like this must have happened them - winds of change blown again by the same maw. And what happened to Antoine Monnier? Where did he go with his beautiful hair and soulful eyes, if not forward into the same lousy future that ends the same way?
And here faith comes again in another wave. Trumping cause-and-effect, the devil's invention. Love of humanity shows throughout this picture, Bresson's love, and it's a damn shame that the guy kills himself. Despite the newspaper headlines in the start, I all along rooted for a happy end.
Weekend at Bernie's (1989)
Appreciate your life!
Others have written enough about the plot and characters here, so you surely know it is about a corpse being banged around (literally and figuratively), but what no one has mentioned, I think, is the transparent moral of the story: that life is short, and can end of a sudden, and that when it's over, you are just junk. After that happens, and it will, you will only be good for lugging around, throwing over, getting stapled and at the most respectable and person-like being sat on the sand for a beach kid to play with. That's all, folks! So a couple of young guys would not at all be disrespectful or blasphemous to party at your (former) house, drink up your (bygone) bar and use your (late) boat - they would just be living their moment, their own time in the sun.
Just so you know, I'm trying to make peace with my own mortality, and I'm not getting anywhere. I look at photos of gorgeous, funny actors and actresses from across time, and I see their ruined faces and crippled figures, tapering careers on records from a few decades ahead. I look left and right, up and down for some meaning of this entropy that is in store for everyone, and there is nothing, no help or thought that stretches across the years to give it all a meaning. So enjoy this window into the party that is youth: glorious, colorful, obnoxious. "Bernie" is young vivacity staring incredulously at middle-aged terminus and not knowing what to do with it, because they are such polar opposites. So you too have fun while you can and throw consequences to the wind! Nothing can be worse than how it will be! Learn from Bernie to boogie post mortem and see the movie!