The Emigrants is an almost three-hour-long Swedish saga about a mid-19th-century migration of peasants to America, made by a director, Jan Troell, who is his own photographer, and who composes each shot with the care an artist might give to his canvas. Which is to say that I had every reason not to like it, and yet I admired it greatly. The usual compliment paid to films of its length is that it seemed shorter than it was, but, in fact, The Emigrants seemed longer, even years longer, and yet I found myself hoping (at several points where I thought it might be ending) that it would go on longer.

If I ended by being thoroughly swept up in the narrative of the film, what first drew me resistingly into it was not that but its look. Though generally I dislike films so obviously attentive to the beauty of their visual composition, I gradually became aware—roughly about the time of the Renoiresque first shot of Liv Ullmann on a swing—that The Emigrants was not merely (cf. Visconti, Losey, et al.) a film striving for beautiful images but one in the act of achieving them. And though the visual composition of the film is exactingly planned, one doesn’t sense it (of. Eisenstein) as either posed or emotionally constricting. The images of The Emigrants may be exceedingly controlled, but its emotional life flows freely from them; indeed, much as one may speak of a Peckinpah liberating the aesthetic of editing from its Eisensteinian rigidities, so, too, does The Emigrants redeem the values of the composition of the individual image.

And the emphasis on composition is right for The Emigrants, with its attempt—rather like that of Shane, however odd the comparison may seem at first—to fix permanently the essence of a central mythos of a people’s history in a kind of frieze at once historical and timeless. By which I mean not that the characters, however much they are imagined as types, are flat or lifeless, but that they are kept somewhat remote from us, idealized and larger than life; their capacity to suffer and endure and to persevere in a simple faith seems both distinctly human and unalterably beyond us. The life they are to leave in Sweden ebbs away: crops fail, children die, a barn and its precious hoard are destroyed by fire. But though they are slow in reaching their decision to emigrate, leaving only after the weight of years of hardship and diminishing prospects has been piled crushingly on them, once they have made their resolve, their unshakable determination to reach their promised land is awesome.

The Emigrants is about the idea of America, about America as an idea, and the observation is no less true for being trite that at present probably no American could have made it. This is true not only of the details: there is a sequence once the characters have reached America in which the principal couple’s child gets separated from them as their river boat is about to leave port which wonderfully conveys, without any symbolic baggage, the panic-stricken experience of being imprisoned by a foreign language and unable to communicate in a moment of desperate need. But what I mean even more than this is that probably no American could have come to The Emigrants’ subject at present with such confidence and equanimity, without either shrill chauvinism on the one hand or bitter irony on the other. When the settlers do finally reach America, it is an Eden in which ironies abound, but they are simply there, unstressed and matter-of-factly: the snake-oil salesmen, social stratification, slaves; at one point, one of the new settlers, a dissenting minister, exclaims with ingenuous wonderment, as he reads the legend, “In God We Trust,” on a coin, at the exemplary piety of a people who “put their creed on their money.”

Yet, essentially, what The Emigrants conveys is not the failure of a faith but its power: the sense of what it must have been like fully to believe in that idea of a land where men might live unshackled and expansively, in perfect freedom. It is an idea no less powerful for the fact of its attainment forever receding; when the emigrant party finally lands at New York, after a voyage of almost unendurable misery, one of the first things to be seen is a posted handbill proclaiming the lure of yet a new El Dorado: California. Some of the party press on to California, others stop short of it; and, for all the movie’s possible endings, it couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful moment on which actually to end than that of Max von Sydow’s beatific smile as he decides he has reached the place where he will settle. But in both those who go on and those who drop off along the way, the faith in an America burns with a fierce intensity. It is an intensity such as to fill us with shame for all the facile derision of American ideals of which I suspect all of us have occasionally been guilty. And it fills one with shame also for the ways those ideals have been failed.

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Though much of its detail is already lost to me, I rather liked Fellini’s next-to-last film, The Clowns. In its modest way, it seemed a sign of self-renewal, a self-renewal in its very modesty after the bloated wreck of the Satyricon. By now, however, searching Fellini’s work for signs of self-renewal requires a greater gullibility than any long-time Fellini-watcher should be capable of. , too, signaled self-renewal, and was immediately cheapened into the male half of a his-and-hers set by Juliet of the Spirits. So, too, with the director’s-journal form which helped keep The Clowns to its modest proportions: here, in Fellini’s Roma, it has become the pretext for self-indulgence run rampant. It seems that outside every lean Fellini film is a fat Fellini film waiting to get in.

That fat film is by now so formularized as to have become almost a genre in itself: the “Fellini film.” With it comes invariably the familiar entourage: the priests, fat whores, ham actors, music-hall performers, Earth Mamas, greasy lady-killers and their female counterparts, androgynes, grotesques, freaks, carrion journalists, and (lately) movie-makers. The stock company has by now grown so formalized, its members’ appearances so conventionalized, as to be available to almost anyone. “Let’s make a Fellini film,” a director might say, and evoke as firm a mental image as if he had said, “Let’s make a Western.” And indeed, watching Fellini’s Roma, one can almost imagine its origin in Fellini himself deciding: “Let’s make a Fellini film; let’s give Rome the full Fellini treatment.” Only by this time self-reference has become virtually indistinguishable from self-parody. And things which, in the work of other film-makers, once seemed like imitation Fellini (like the Walpurgisnacht in Mike Nichols’s Catch-22) now reappear in Fellini’s own work (the extended tour of a high-volume whorehouse in Roma) and look like imitation Mike Nichols.

Writing of Fellini in 1963, I described him as, with Kurosawa, probably the most erratic of those usually considered to be among the world’s most important filmmakers, but erratic is no longer the word for it. Of his films, is the last which might defensibly be called major, and that work was itself preceded by years of floundering. But since : a failure with Juliet of the Spirits, with Fellini Satyricon, and now with Roma; one minor success with The Clowns; and only one brief return to former brilliance in Toby Dammit, Fellini’s contribution to the omnibus Spirits of the Dead, and a last blooming of the rich fruitiness of Fellini’s late style before its relapse into the oily virtuosity of Roma. (Generally, with the notable exception of , Fellini’s work has been little served by his increasing virtuosity; the earlier works may lack the technical dazzle of the later ones, but they have all the technique they need, and one feels of them, as one doesn’t of the later works, that technique and expressiveness achieve a parity.) And increasingly the director’s fixation on the decline and fall of the Roman empire (with Fellini, as someone has remarked, emceeing the apocalypse) begins to seem less a vision of the world and of a subject than an only half-acknowledged projection of the artist’s own loss of creative vitality. Compared with the ferocious blasphemy of Bellocchio’s In Nome del Padre (which is probably to 1971 what Days and Nights in the Forest was to 1970: the year’s best foreign-language film, and still unreleased), the “ecclesiastical fashion show” in Roma is the feeblest of anti-clerical tittering; and the apocalypse itself, one suspects, is of interest chiefly as it provides a spectacular show, the director’s misanthropy less a Swiftian disgust with humankind than a distaste for its cosmetic blemishes. And with the surrender of subject comes the rise of narcissism and of fetishistic “self-expression.” Though, unlike Pauline Kael, I didn’t object to Fellini casting Mastroianni as the director in , since Fellini and the character didn’t seem to me finally equatable, I do balk at seeing the young Fellini in Roma impersonated by some girlishly beautiful male starlet, as I do also at the phenomenon of the artist’s name (Fellini Satyricon, Fellini’s Roma) now sharing billing with his subject in his works’ titles.

But not only is Fellini now able apparently to manufacture fraudulent self-renewals at will, he is actually able to palm off his essays in egomania as exercises in modesty—fleeting images and tentative impressions, randomly culled from the director’s notebook: “My first childhood memory of Rome is. . . ,” etc. This is sham and charlatanism of an almost admirably brazen order. That Fellini is capable of an ironic awareness of the role he has chosen to play can be seen both throughout and in the very funny moment in The Clowns when a journalist inquires, “Signor Fellini, what is the message of your film?” and, as Fellini begins to reply (“My message is . . .”), he is silenced by a bucket dropping over his head. In Roma, the director is far too clever to be caught delivering messages, deferring instead to Gore Vidal, who, fawned on as a Celebrity, launches glibly into his well-worn waiting-for-the-end number. Unfortunately, no one drops a bucket over his head.

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Buñuel on Fellini: “Up to La Dolce Vita, Fellini was one of the directors whom I found most interesting. Now he’s always playing the genius. I saw Juliet; it’s worthless. Neither true nor false surrealism, nothing.”

Surrealism is alive and potent in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel of 1962 had as its premise a dinner party that inexplicably couldn’t be ended; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is constructed of a series of dinner parties that cannot be consummated, the meals all interrupted and either not begun or left half-eaten. Somehow The Exterminating Angel never quite worked (except in its parts); the device seemed either distractingly supernatural, or allegory arbitrarily imposed by the director on his characters. The device of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, however, works brilliantly. Each incident flows casually and “naturally” from the one before with the compelling logic of a dream; and, in fact, much of the latter part of the film is cast in the form of a series of interlocking dreams, encompassing that of one character dreaming he is participating in the dream of another. But it is, I think, fruitless to speculate, as one critic has, that the entire film is to be taken as the dream of the character whom we see last awaken, nor is there anything to be gained from Buñuel’s work generally by playing Marienbad games: trying to distinguish dream from “reality.” Buñuel’s work in its entirety, however much it is fundamentally within a tradition of narrative realism, is filled with elements of the fantastic, and I wouldn’t want to demystify a work such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie even if I could. Who, after all, awakens from the dream of Un Chien Andalou or Land Without Bread or Los Olvidados? Or to put it another way: the dream is ours.

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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie opens on the ultimate in bourgeois tragedy (a mode in which pity and terror are replaced by embarrassment): guests arriving for a dinner party on the wrong day, and catching their hostess by surprise. An impromptu decision to repair to a neighboring restaurant proves no more satisfying; it is “under new management,” and as the characters (two married couples—the husband of one, that evening’s supposed host, absent—the younger sister of one of the wives, and the ambassador of Miranda, a mythical South American country) prepare to order, conversing enthusiastically about food and wine, the meal is aborted by sobs which distract them to an alcove where the manager’s corpse is laid out to await a tardy undertaker. The next day, the two husbands visit the Mirandan embassy to arrange another date to dine. While they are there, the ambassador spies from his window a girl selling wind-up toys on the street, and shoots one with a rifle causing the girl to flee; she is, he explains, a terrorist from Miranda. He tells them he is reluctant to call in the police because of a recent incident in which they attempted to search his diplomatic pouch—shortly before, the American ambassador’s diplomatic pouch was searched and found to contain 80 pounds of cocaine—and his friends sympathize indignantly. He then produces 30 pounds of cocaine from his own pouch, which they proceed to test for purity before concluding a cash transaction. Some concern is expressed about the threat posed by a gang from Marseilles. The ambassador says he intends to invest his share of the money where the other two have—not in Miranda. “What’s the rate of the Deutsche mark?”

The guests arrive for the rearranged luncheon. This time, host and hostess are there, but about to make love, and send word, via an impeccably imperturbable maid, that they will be down shortly. The guests amuse themselves with the husband’s lecture-demonstration on the art of mixing a dry martini while the ambassador clandestinely fondles the wife’s neck, the entertainment concluding with their inviting the ambassador’s chauffeur in to join them in a drink. (“That’s what shouldn’t be done with a dry martini.”) Meanwhile, host and hostess have decided to leave the house to make love (he tells her she makes too much noise for them to stay), and are observed by the maid, unflappable as ever, as they climb down from their second-story window and run into the bushes, the latest comic instance of that motif of l’amour fou which recurs throughout Buñuel’s work from Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or on. When the maid casually mentions to the guests that their hosts have left in a hurry, they express fear that the lot of them have been denounced to the police, and they, too, flee.

A bishop arrives, tipping his hat to the departing guests, and asks to see the people of the house. Told by the maid they are out, he goes to the gardener’s shed, where, with a strange gleam in his eye, he examines the gardening tools and work clothes. The host and hostess return, annoyed to find their guests have left. The doorbell rings; it is the bishop, in gardener’s clothes, who introduces himself to them as the bishop of their diocese. They throw him out. A few minutes later, he returns in full clerical garb, graciously accepts their apologies, and applies for the job of their gardener; the church has changed, he explains, and, just as they’ve heard of worker-priests, so, too, are there worker-bishops. Does he know how to do the work? Yes, his parents, who were murdered, had had an experienced gardener, and the bishop learned everything from him. The question of pay? Union scale; but it seems the previous gardener had been non-union. “Perhaps,” the bishop replies firmly, “but I live by the rules.” The sequence gives way to a shot of the characters—the two couples, sister, and ambassador—walking down a long country road stretching into the distance.

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Alice in Wonderland, yes, and no more so than in these first few sequences of the film. The women pay a visit to a tea room, which is out of every beverage except water, where a “sad lieutenant” formally presents himself to inquire, “Madam, did you have a happy childhood? My own childhood was tragic. May I tell you about it?”—and then proceeds to tell them the story of how his mother’s ghost persuaded him to kill “the man who calls himself your father.” A dinner party is suddenly augmented by some marijuana-smoking military officers on maneuvers, and talk turns to marijuana-smoking by the American soldiers in Vietnam (the result is that once a week they bomb their own troops, someone observes; “if they bomb their own troops, they must have a good reason,” a colonel replies). The dinner with the officers is interrupted by an urgent message that the war games have begun, brought by a sergeant who nevertheless “has a very curious dream to tell,” and does so at length while all attend; “tell us the train dream, too,” one of the officers requests at the first dream’s conclusion, but they decide to “keep the train for some other time.” A return invitation from the colonel brings them to a dinner table where they suddenly find themselves on a stage, a curtain rising, and a prompter feeding them lines while an audience looks on. (“God, what am I doing here?” one of them exclaims in panic as the audience jeers and the others flee. “I don’t know the lines!”) The final dream—it is the ambassador’s—concludes with three men (Mirandan terrorists? Marseilles gangsters?—the candidates are legion) bursting in on yet another dinner party and machine-gunning all, except for the ambassador, hiding under the table until he gives himself away by extending his arm to get a slice of perfectly-cooked lamb. The ambassador awakens, makes for his refrigerator, and begins to eat voraciously. The film ends with the third punctuation of the action by shots of the characters, a bit rumpled perhaps but not really downcast, walking down their endless road.

Alice in Wonderland, yes, but with a difference: for this cuckoo clock of a movie has something added ticking in it. Writing of Buñuel a few years ago, I argued that (but for the short Simon of the Desert) none of his deliberately light or playful films was as funny as his darker ones, a claim which I’m happy to admit The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie stands on its head. It is light and playful, and yet no other Buñuel film has been funnier, or, despite its leisurely pace, more densely packed, or (even if it lacks one single great performance on the order of El or Nazarin) better acted from top to bottom, or more rigorous formally (organized, in this case, around pairs or doublings—of murdered fathers, ghostly mothers, gardeners, etc.—and their symmetry).

What The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is, in fact, is a masterpiece by one of the half-dozen or so great artists to have worked in films. (If it astonishes me to realize, on reflection, that five of those on my own short list of six are still living, it depresses me even more to realize that only two of them are still working.) Until now, I’ve had at least slight reservations about all the films Buñuel has made since Simon of the Desert in 1965; something driven seems to have gone out of even the best of them, Tristana; they showed signs of mellowing, but, if a film such as The Milky Way is mellow, it is so at a price.

The Buñuel of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie has mellowed, but in a way to cause me to wonder that, if his later films seem less the product of an incendiary rage than his earlier ones, it may be only that their fuse is longer and more coiled. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is Buñuel’s tribute to an adversary; the title is both ironic and not; these people really do, in their total insulation from the world beyond their dinner table, their imperviousness to all but their own creature comforts, exude a certain childlike charm. And, however grudgingly, Buñuel clearly does admire their resilience; in the end, despite every threat to their well-being, the bourgeoisie march indefatigably on.

Yet one cannot fail to see that the precarious world these moral idiots and their servants tenaciously inhabit, and shape to their own image, is hell. It’s a sunnier, less oppressive hell than any in Buñuel’s films before, filled with good wine and food (at least in prospect) and convivial small talk—a world, however cockeyed it is seen, not unlike our own. But it is hell.

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