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FILM COMMENT
March / April 2004
DOUBLE PLAY
Continually reinventing his career and eluding all categorization, Joseph Losey defied the axiom that there are no second acts.
by Richard Combs
Above: Mr. Klein
3. Eve
Eve (62) was Losey's watershed, or Waterloo, the film where he tried to break with his past as a jobbing director in the U.S. and U.K. film industries and produce both a personal testament ("It was a film in which I was not only working out my sexual, personal relationships, but also working out my exile") and his most elaborate exercise in style. The relationship between callous, high-class prostitute Eve (Jeanne Moreau) and insecure Welsh writer Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker) is wedded to the decor and architecture of Venice and Rome, which in turn is wedded to a vision of the bourgeois, materialist prison Tyvian and Eve inhabit.
In the end, Losey's testament was severely cut in a highly publicized row with the producers. But the very purity of statement and style that he was trying for may have been the real misdirection. Impurity was the circumstance in which Losey's art had flourished in the past: the hybrid genres, the melodramatic plots, the pulp sources (Eve shares that much, being based on a James Hadley Chase potboiler). Losey's camera drifting after his heroine through the frozen stone landscape of the Piazza San Marco was seen as a bid to join the modernist cinema of Antonioni (detached, ambiguous, alienated). But equally dense, tactile, and disturbing (and perhaps even more alienating) is the emphasis on decor, on stone, rock, and, of course, a myriad of mirrors, that had already featured in films as diverse as The Prowler, The Criminal (60), and The Damned.
Losey has said (in his interview book with Michel Ciment) that Eve also sprang from his love of Venice: "It immediately made visually specific all my preoccupations with mirror vision, left-handedness, sexual reversals, the fragmentation of water." But splitting, reversals, and ambidextrousness had always been part of Losey, creating a riot of doubleness more entertaining than the hieratic posing of Eve. There are the teddy boys of The Damned, with leader Oliver Reed's rolled umbrella and arch slang ("Forward into battle, dear chaps"), grouped around a unicorn statue in the town center. The romantic or magic reversals of The Boy with Green Hair are also never far away in Losey.
There are the two proletarians of Blind Date, one who has become a hardboiled cop and the other who's a naive artist (a miner's son, no less; an unneurotic Tyvian Jones). And there's a strikingly double dramatic structure in this film: the first part is anchored in the flat of the dead prostitute/lover, with the cop probing the artist with questions about a crime that hasn't been revealed yet in a style that can only be called Pinter-before-the-fact.
Losey's career in the theater is another important arena, both a specific period and a background to everything he did in film. It also makes nonsense of the assumption that the first collaboration with Pinter, on The Servant, was a revolution for Losey, taming his excesses and indulgences, and that their three films together consititute a special, elevated plateau in his work. In fact, The Servant is so rich because it incorporates the Pinter idiom with many of the tensions of pre-Sixties Losey, while Accident and The Go-Between are more attenuated exercises in the idiom.
Part of the richness of The Servant is the indeterminability of its subject (even Losey couldn't say what, exactly, it was about). Is the master-servant reversal an incident in the class war, or something more spiritual, mystical, ghostly? Durgnat says: "Thinking he has bought Barrett's soul, Tony loses his own," and that in his overweening desire to please, "Barrett gives his master his soul-and exchange is no robbery." The master (James Fox) is Mr. Nobody, The Servant (Dirk Bogarde) is Mr. Know-It-All - a relation of householder to intruder that The Assassination of Trotsky reverses. In Accident, one might note the unexpected magic of the night of the Accident: a white horse (not a unicorn) beneath a full moon and the princess (Jacqueline Sassard) asleep amidst a froth of ostrich feathers in the death car.
4. Figures in a Landscape
Far from the stones and gargoyles of Old Europe, the most visually ravishing moment that Losey, the celebrated metteur en décor, ever put onscreen may be the opalescent dawn of the first shot of Figures in a Landscape. The distant speck of a helicopter hovers at the point where this wash deepens into the blue of the sea; in the next shot, two silhouetted men are running, their hands tied behind their backs, along the seashore. For a while, without dialogue or explanation, the camera magnificently maps out this corrida. Close tracking shots follow the men as they crash through a forest; seen from inside, the helicopter sweeps down valleys and up cliff faces, scattering birds and flushing out a herd of horses (the wildlife one would never associate with Losey but that has a kind of underbrush presence throughout his films).
Michel Ciment suggested to Losey that many of his films are fables in the American tradition, "Manichaean, Puritan-inspired · creating allegories like Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter." Losey agreed but found this "a weakness because it's a way of evading," compared to realist psychological traditions. His three films between the Pinter bookends of Accident and The Go-Between-Boom, Secret Ceremony (68), and Figures in a Landscape - offer themselves most clearly as fables. With its cycle of careless parenting/cursed childhood, Secret Ceremony could belong with the "blighted hopes" dramas of M and The Damned. Dealing the least in explanation, Figures is the most fabulous.
And, again, perhaps, it is only Losey's theater background that makes all three possible, because where language enters it must be hyperbolic, specifying character while at the same time ridiculing it, rendering the notion of self-sufficient, psychologically "real" characters absurd. Figures is the riskiest proposition, with a Pinteresque screenplay by one of its stars, Robert Shaw (also a dramatist and novelist). It plays out the conflict between the older fugitive (Shaw) and the younger (Malcolm McDowell) in all the Pinter registers of class, generational, and sexual paranoia, but completely detached from his social landscape. It is Losey's most experimental film, and it excitingly adumbrates an even more experimental one, made entirely in the style of its opening sequences.
5. Mr. Klein
Mr. Klein (Alain Delon), the hero of Losey's greatest (and last great) film after The Servant, is also a kind of repository of his career. Klein is an art dealer; he brings together all those signs of status, icons of identity, even clues to policier mysteries that have proliferated through the preceding three decades. In Losey's first British film, The Sleeping Tiger (54), a police inspector peers at a Miró on the wall of a psychiatrist's office as if it were an ink-blot test of personality. Jan, the young artist of Blind Date, identifies a small picture ("It's 17th century, a study for a larger portrait, probably Van Dyck") that's plucked from the less high-toned bric-a-brac of a murder scene and will point to the identity (or at least the social milieu) of the real murderer.
A similar trail, or research with more psychic reverberations, is followed through Mr. Klein. Klein is first seen haggling over "a portrait of a Dutch gentleman" by Adriaen Van Ostade. It is 1942, and his client is a Jew, desperate to leave Paris before the imminent roundup of the Jewish population. The deal is done, and from that moment Klein finds himself being mysteriously mirrored by another Mr. Klein, a Jewish version, whose mail is redirected to him and whose identity is steadily foisted onto him. As he tries to unpick this mystery, Klein discovers a "nostalgia" for his own origins, leading to the revelation of "another race" of Kleins in Holland. As his world collapses around him, he begins clutching the Van Ostade portrait as an emblem of identity. His pursuit of the other Klein finally takes him, blindly, to the stockades of the roundup and a cattle car to the concentration camps.
The art that begins as a commercial commodity (and the art market goes multinational in La Truite [82]) becomes identity's last holding point and a conduit to wider identifications. Neither stream excludes the other; it's as if there is a constant cycling process, a cycle of sublimation, which could take in other sublimations as well. Losey has said that the effort of repudiating his religious upbringing, and the guilt surrounding that, found "an outlet in political commitment" that "took on a religious bent." From which it has found its way back to the heavily religious iconography of his films: the great stone angels that fly through Eve and Secret Ceremony; the bells that can be relied on to toll in Venice, Oxford, and Mexico City.
It's all significantly Catholic, perhaps a sublimation-within-repudiation of Losey's Episcopalian upbringing. But Lenora (Elizabeth Taylor) in the confessional box of Secret Ceremony also complains: "For three years, I've been wandering from place to place like a Jew," which is where, through the other Mr. Klein, she might meet the exiled Losey. "Politically, I was persecuted, a Jew, so to speak," he told Michael Ciment. Jew, Catholic, and Episcopalian - there's mirror vision and left-handedness here, too, perhaps. More fragmentation in the water.
The author is indebted to David Thompson for invaluable assistance in the preparation of this article.
Richard Combs is a regular contributor to Film Comment.
© 2004 by Richard Combs
