Category: Drinks

I knew from the moment my Drink & a Movie series was born that I would eventually feature the Last Word, and by the time the credits rolled on my first viewing of Pyaasa last year there was no doubt which movie I would pair it with. I originally slotted this post for late fall with a vague thought that I could mention actor-director Guru Dutt’s facial hair in the context of Movember or because of National Novel Writing Month, even though the character he plays is a poet. Sadly, the recent passing of Seattle bartender Murray Stenson, who is credited with rescuing the Last Word from obscurity, made my timing even more appropriate.

The main things you need to know about this concoction in 2023 are that: 1) it’s not for everyone, as I learned the hard way about ten years ago when we ordered a round for our table at a conference and one by one they all got passed over to me as each of my colleagues decided they weren’t a fan, which eventually resulted in me singing karaoke in front of co-workers for the first and only time in my life; and 2) if you are a fan of Green Chartreuse, this is (along with drizzling it over the best chocolate ice cream you can find) one of the few uses for the bottle you hoarded away a few months ago that is superior to just drinking the stuff straight as a digestif. Here’s how to make it:

3/4 oz. Gin (Broker’s)
3/4 oz. Maraschino liqueur
3/4 oz. Green Chartreuse
3/4 oz. Lime juice

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled coupe glass.

Most Last Word recipes note that it was invented at the Detroit Athletic Club prior to Prohibition, included in Ted Saucier’s 1951 book Bottoms Up, then rediscovered and popularized by Stenson 50-odd years later. The origins of its name deserve to be more well known, too. As described in Gary Regan’s book The Joy of Mixology, it was introduced to New York by famous vaudevillian Frank Fogarty, who Regan quotes as saying “you can kill the whole point of a gag by merely [using one] unnecessary word.” The Last Word is rather tart, but although adding a bit of simple syrup might make it more accessible, I don’t recommend it: the assertiveness of this cocktail is its best quality! Acid, spice from the gin, and herbs from the Chartreuse explode on the palate. With the latter clocking in at 110 ABV, you definitely should consider making it your final drink of the evening, though.

The screengrabs in this post come from a copy of the Yash Raj Films DVD release which I borrowed via interlibrary loan:

I actually own a DVD copy of the film released by Ultra Media, but it has a persistent watermark in the top left corner (yuck!) and I was thrilled to get my hands on the edition that DVDBeaver identified as being the best one available. It can also be streamed on Prime Video for a rental fee.

Pyaasa begins with falling blossoms waking Dutt’s Vijay up from a night spent sleeping rough in a park:

The beauty of nature moves him to compose a poem: “These smiling flowers/These fragrant gardens/This world filled with glorious colours/The nectar intoxicates the bees/What little have I to add to this splendor save a few tears, a few sighs.”

But then, as he watches, a bee lights on the grass, where it is trampled by one of his fellow Kolkatans:

This may be for me the best example of what I think scholar Corey Creekmur is writing about in his chapter on the film for editor Lalitha Gopalan’s book The Cinema of India when he says it “may well be the Hindi Citizen Kane (1941), a work whose audacious style, autobiographical resonance and lasting impact on filmmakers have exceeded its initial success.” The scene is a subliminally effective stage-setter on the first viewing. It struck me as perhaps a bit heavy-handed on the second. Beginning with the third, though, all sorts of interpretations start to open up: the bee is Guru Dutt! It is a worker bee! One bee alone may be helpless to oppose a shoe, but consider the swarm!

The story is fairly straightforward. Vijay can barely afford to feed himself because no one will buy his poems, except when his half-brothers sell them as wastepaper. Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman) is a prostitute who chances upon them and recognizes their worth. They meet cute when, thinking he’s a potential customer, she tries to seduce him with his own composition in a scene which uses columns and shadows well to hide and reveal her face:

Vijay is initially oblivious to her affection both because he’s consumed with his work, and because his first love Meena (Mala Sinha) reenters his life in the following scene, which includes a flashback to the two of them in college:

As scholar Carrie Messenger notes in a chapter on the film in editor Marlisa Santos’s book Verse, Voice, and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema, this is a reworking of the themes of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Devdas with poetry taking the place of alcohol as an “addictive and destructive” force in the protagonist’s life. Messenger adds that the triangle of Meena/Vijay/Gulabo would have reminded many contemporary viewers of gossip that Dutt, Rehman, and playback singer Geeta Dutt constituted a real-life love triangle and that Pyaasa “features song sequences where the voice of Guru Dutt’s actual wife is channeled through the body of the lover, both through Gulabo and through Meena, a tension that disembodies the voice at the same time that it also creates the strange embodiment of an idealized creation, a Frankenstein, the best of both of these women as well as Geeta Dutt’s voice,” which is fascinating.

The songs are one of the best parts of the film. My favorite is probably “Sar Jo Tera Chakraye,” which is sung by Mohammed Rafi and set to a comic set piece featuring Johnny Walker, a member of my personal character actor hall of fame.

“Aaj Sajan Mohe Ang Laga Lo” features some first-rate unrequited longing, which I’m a total sucker for–Gulabo actually isn’t resting her head on Vijay’s shoulder here, but rather hovering just above it, and he has no idea she’s there:

And the extravagant production design in “Hum Aap Ki Ankhon Mein,” which obviously inspired our Last Word photograph, is exactly what a daydream sequence within a flashback (!) calls for:

Dutt saves the best for last, though. “Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To” builds to a crescendo in some of the most incredible marriages of image and music ever captured on film. The scene takes place at a ceremony commemorating what is presumed to be the one-year anniversary of Vijay’s death. Mr. Ghosh (Rehman Khan), the publisher who organized it and the man who Meena married for money, breaking Vijay’s heart, knows that he is very much alive, as do Vijay’s half-brothers and his childhood friend Shyam (Shyam). Everyone else is shocked when the poet they only know through best-selling book that Gulabo paid Ghosh to publish “posthumously” appears at the back of the auditorium and begins reciting a verse railing against the corruption of the world:

As Ghosh’s henchmen try to drag Vijay away, he breaks free of them and rushes forward as the camera pulls away from him, singing “burn this world! Blow it asunder!”

This scene is, in fact, primarily constructed of tracking shots, and they appear all throughout this film and the next and final one Gutt directed, Kaagaz Ke Phool. I consider them to be some of the most expressive camera movements in all of cinema. Creekmur says that “when the camera moves in and out throughout Pyaasa, it seems to replicate the physical act of breathing, or the opening and closing of the heart’s valves.” This is just about perfect, but it misses an important element: the velocity of the camera often changes during the movement, creating a disorienting effect like being on an elevator or a roller coaster, which to me feels like my heart skipping a beat or getting caught in my throat.

One of the best places to study these shots is during the scene where Vijay recites a poem for a reunion that his classmate Pushpa (Tun Tun) has told him about. As he spots Meena in the crowd, the camera tracks in to a close-up of his face then cuts to one of her which continues the motion:

As he begins to speak (“I am weary of this troubled life . . . “) the camera tracks away from him:

Then toward Meena and Ghosh, who is watching her intently, in the kind of rhythmic back-and-forth described by Creekmur:

The same thing happens as Vijay says “today I break all belief with the illusion of hope,” but with the addition of a sudden acceleration:

These shots also figure prominently in a scene in which Vijay, who Ghosh has hired to work as a servant at a literary party he is throwing, is moved to recite one of his own works in response to poems by two honored guests. Here and elsewhere the movements sometimes parallel each other, as when the camera tracks in first on Meena, then Ghosh:

In both cases the effect is to link the emotional responses of characters to a common event, here Vijay’s manifestation as a savior who could rescue Meena from her unhappy life if only she could transcend her desire for wealth and high position in society. Any doubts that a first-time viewer might have about whether this should be considered a deliberately Christ-like pose:

Will be laid to rest in either the next scene, in which Meena denies her love for Vijay to Ghosh three times, or if not then, when this Life magazine cover makes an appearance a bit later on:

Vijay spreads his arms wide again in the final reel:

Which also contains a direct callback to Pyaasa‘s opening sequence when Gulabo falls and someone steps on her:

As was the case with the bee, I found the Christ imagery amusing at first, then precious, but ultimately embraced it as representing more than meets the eye. Jesus died so that the world’s sins could be forgiven; Vijay doesn’t die and as a result its hypocrisy is laid bare. This is at worst an intriguingly cynical inversion, but I agree with scholar Arun Khopkar’s (as translated by Shanta Gokhale) in-depth argument in Guru Dutt: A Tragedy in Three Acts that its use here is far more complex.

Pyaasa ends with Vijay and Gulabo literally holding hands and disappearing into the sunset together:

Guru Dutt’s younger brother Devi describes it brilliantly in a quote included in Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema by Nasreen Munni Kabir as “a sort of [my italics] happier ending” than the one originally planned for the film. Here’s screenwriter Abrar Alvi’s account of it from the same book:

I believed that Vijay should not leave and go away in the last scene of the film, but that he should stay and fight the system. I told Guru Dutt, ‘Wherever Vijay goes he will find the same society, the same values, the same system.’ We discussed the scene at length, but I was overruled by Guru Dutt. So I wrote the ending in which Vijay comes to Gulab and tells her to go away with him to a place from where he will not need to go any further. I asked Guru Dutt, ‘Where does such a place exist in this world?’ But Guru Dutt put his foot down.

The 5,327,708.80 rupee question is, I think: will Vijay find it satisfying to, in the immortal words of Eden Ahbez, simply “love and be loved in return?” If I could wave a magic wand and conjure up a lavish Criterion Collection release of any film, it would be a box set of Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool. Perhaps I’ll wish for an essay answering this question to include in the booklet while I’m at it!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

As a kid who liked school, I’ve always been fond of September. Now as a higher ed lifer, the part of it I look forward to most is Labor Day. The fall semester of every college and university I’ve ever worked at has started during the last or penultimate week of August, and the holiday long weekend is a perfectly-positioned opportunity to recover from those frantic first few days. Although we currently live hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, the beach remains the best place to spend it in my book, hence this month’s Drink & a Movie selections. The Last Wave (get it?) is a film which has loomed large in my memory ever since I saw it as an undergraduate film studies major at the University of Pittsburgh, while the White Negroni Daiquiri was created by bartender Mary White at The Lobo in Sydney, Australia where that movie is set. Here’s how we make it:

1 oz. White rum (Clairin Communal)
1 oz. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Suze
1/2 oz. Lillet Blanc
2 tsps. Simple syrup
3 dashes orange bitters (Fee Brothers West Indian)

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with a triangle-shaped lemon twist.

I can’t remember whether I first came across this drink in Imbibe, which simply calls for “white rum,” or in Australian Bartender, which specifies Bacardi Carta Blanca; meanwhile, the Lobo’s website currently lists Plantation 3 Stars as an ingredient. The latter two would both make a fine cocktail, but Clairin Communal, which blends distillates from four Haitian villages, caught my eye on recent trip to Ithaca establishment The Cellar d’Or and I think it works brilliantly here. The nose is intense and led me to expect Cachaça-level funkiness, but it’s remarkably smooth and thus lends complexity and intrigue without changing the essential character of the drink. Speaking of which: it is bracing thanks to the Suze, but goes down easy thanks to the Lillet, and has a relatively low ABV courtesy the 50:50 ratio of base spirit to fortified wine and liqueur, making it an ideal beachside sipper. Finally, as anyone who has already seen The Last Wave no doubt realized, the triangle-shaped garnish is meant to evoke this prop from the film:

It also contrasts nicely with the square base of the glass we chose, yeah? Which, by the way: like most of the glassware we’ve been featuring this year, my loving wife found this at Finger Lakes ReUse. Anyway, here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release of The Last Wave:

It can be streamed via the Criterion Channel or Max with a subscription as well or via most other major commercial streaming video platforms for a rental fee.

In a review included in 5001 Nights at the Movies, critic Pauline Kael insightfully notes that the plot of The Last Wave “is a throwback to the B-movies of the 30s and early 40s, and the dialogue–by the young director Peter Weir and his two co-scriptwriters, Tony Morphett and Peter Popescu, is vintage R K O and Universal.” More importantly, as Kael continues, Weir “knows how to create an allusive, ominous atmosphere.” This starts with the film’s first image of an Aboriginal Australian man who we will come to know as Charlie (Nandjiwarra Amagula) painting signs on a rock outcropping :

A dissolve creates the impression of one of them looming over the outback community where the next scene is set:

Two Aboriginal children walk toward the camera down a dusty road:

As they reach an elder, he stands up and gestures at the sky:

Cut back to the road, which momentarily changes color:

Cut to a group of white children playing cricket in a schoolyard:

Although the sky is virtually cloud-free, there is a clap of thunder followed by a sudden torrential downpour. The children’s teacher (Penny Leach) hustles them inside. Suddenly, they hear the sound of hail on the roof of the school:

A giant ball of ice crashes through the window, bloodying a student:

The scene ends with the teacher contemplating the scene outside as the storm ends as abruptly as it started:

Cut to a strange rainbow over Sydney, where the rest of the film takes place:

Which reminds me of the functionally-similar crescent moon omen from Prince of Darkness:

Kael’s review skews negative: she calls it “hokum without the fun of hokum” because “the occult manifestations are linked to the white Australians’ guilt over their treatment of the aborigines.” Like scholar Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield, I believe she’s missing the point somewhat. The subject of The Last Wave isn’t guilt, but rather anxiety over what Hollyfield describes in a chapter about the film for the book Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance as “the problems inherent in any attempt at reconciliation between Aboriginal and white Australian culture.” He notes that Weir bookends the narrative of lawyer protagonist David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) with images of water “demonstrating the limits of systems such as pipes to control nature.” Scholar Michael Bliss also discusses the film’s water images, which I personally find quite fun, in Dreams Within a Dream: The Films of Peter Weir, arguing that they “have a virtually surrealistic force.” Here’s one of my favorites:

Per Bliss, this “absurd and contradictory” shot “succinctly communicates the tension between the spigot (a man-made object meant to restrain or divert water) and a natural force, the rain, that is simultaneously available in its unrestrained form.” Or take this faucet outside David’s house:

Bliss argues that it foreshadows “the eventual conflict between white civilization and natural phenomena that is one of the film’s primary concerns” because it drips: “this man-made bulwark against water’s pressures cannot stop the force of the water any more than the flimsy awareness of David’s conscious mind can prevent the repeated intrusion of visionary episodes.” I’d be tempted to call this reading overdetermined were it not for the fact that this shot appears twice. Speaking of visionary episodes, here’s one in which water pours into David’s car through the radio:

He looks up from this to find that the people he saw outside his windshield a moment before are suddenly submerged:

The man with the palm in the middle image actually appeared much earlier in the film carrying the same plant. I appreciate Bliss’s comments about the pictures of animals which adorn the bus in this scene, a leopard and a chimpanzee:

One of the ways that Weir maintains a successful ambiguity in the film is by concentrating on action and images that at first seem to have nothing to do with the story. At one point, Weir zooms in on a British Leland car, only vaguely intimating that there is some connection between the leopard on the car’s logo and the film’s story. The car logo, as well as the bus poster for the [Taronga] Zoo, which features two chimpanzees, not only demonstrates how white society appropriates the power and significance of animals and turns them to commercial account but also highlights the society’s use of natural images as nothing more than superficial signs instead of meaningful symbols.

This is a big part of what Chris (David Gulpilil), an Aboriginal man David defends in court against a charge of murder, is talking about when he says to him, “you don’t know what dreams are anymore.” This in turn becomes the primary cause of David’s fear that he is failing to apprehend something important, which drives him as mad as a Val Lewton heroine. This manifests most clearly in a confrontation between David and his pastor stepfather (Frederick Parlow) after David loses his case when Chris chooses to incriminate himself instead of revealing the secrets of his tribe:

REV. BURTON: You lost the case, but you haven’t lost the world.
DAVID: Haven’t I? I’ve lost the world I thought I had. The world where what you just said meant anything. Why didn’t you tell me there were mysteries?
REV. BURTON: David, my whole life has been about a mystery.
DAVID: No! You stood in that church and explained them away!

In an essay astonishingly written at the ripe old age of 19, Australian critic Adrian Martin identifies “the suggestion is that children are closer to the marvellous, and have a potentially keener perception of it – that is, before the adult world socialises it out of them forever” as a key motif in The Last Wave, citing David’s daughter Grace’s (Ingrid Weir, real-life daughter of director Peter) interpretation of a vivid dream she had as being about Jesus as an example.

This, to me, is the slam-dunk argument against the idea that the film is preoccupied by liberal guilt. If it were, we might have expected David to channel his angst into making sure his children grew up with a better sense of the history of the land they live on than him or his wife, a self-described “fourth-generation Australian” who had never met an Aboriginal before Chris and Charlie join them for dinner in the film. Instead, because he is egocentric, he convinces himself that he has been chosen to save his people from destruction.

In a conversation with Tom Ryan and Brian McFarlane published in Peter Weir: Interviews, Weir admits to being dissatisfied with The Last Wave‘s ending, and I agree that it’s the weakest part of the film. This absolutely does not extend to the final shot, though! There’s a time and place for Hollywood-style special effects, but this isn’t it: give me a screen full of color and motion every time!

I love this sequence of shots which precedes the fall of a “black rain” that a newspaper headline will later suggest was caused by pollution for similar reasons:

This is the same kind of economical filmmaking that I applauded when I wrote about Hester Street last September. And that brings me back to the White Negroni Daiquiri. Although I consumed the ones I made while writing this in my back yard, I felt like I was at the beach. Hopefully this pairing will transport you to Australia, with no need to purchase an airplane ticket or gas!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

My favorite cocktails are generally the ones that taste the best to me. This might not seem like such a revelatory statement, but appearance and aroma are also huge parts of a beverage’s appeal, and since this blog’s primary focus is on film, a visual medium, you might think that the former in particular would be just as big a factor in determining which ones I feature on it. While my loving wife and I have spent more and more time thinking about glassware, garnishes, and how we stage our photographs, though, all of this decision-making usually follows our selection of what to include in our Drink & a Movie series. But there are exceptions. The brilliant hue of the Yellow Cocktail immediately made me think of the word “Technicolor,” which led me to Suspiria in short order last October. This month’s pairing also started with the drink.

The Aviation was one of my first favorite classic cocktails, probably in large part because The PDT Cocktail Book is organized in alphabetical order. But Jim Meehan’s accurate description of it as “azure-colored” also played a role: it absolutely does remind me of the sky! My research for this post led me back to Hugo R. Ensslin’s Recipes For Mixed Drinks, where a recipe for the Aviation was first published. Unlike most pre-prohibition tomes, his begins with a guide to measures; unfortunately, it indicates that a “pony” equals a “jigger,” which doesn’t make a lick of sense and therefore is of little help in figuring out what he means when he says that one of either is also equivalent to “1/4 whiskey glass” and two (i.e. “1/2 whiskey glass”) make one “drink.” Luckily, the Aviation’s proportions of 2/3 gin to 1/3 lemon juice plus two dashes each of Maraschino and crême de violette closely resemble those of Ensslin’s Manhattan: 2/3 whiskey, 1/3 sweet Italian vermouth, and two dashes of Angostura bitters. These are of course the very proportions most bartenders use today. If we assume that Ensslin’s drink should also contain about three ounces of spirits, we can work backwards and determine that his Aviation calls for two ounces of gin and one of lemon juice.

Setting aside a second the fact that this cannot possibly taste balanced to anyone (we tried it and it’s every bit as overbearingly tart as you’d assume), we can at least make an educated guess what the original Aviation looked like. Using David Wondrich’s recommendation to interpret one “dash” of liqueur as being approximately equivalent to 2/3 of a teaspoon per two ounces of base spirit, Ensslin’s concoction can be assumed to have contained 10 parts clear (gin + Maraschino) and 4.5 parts cloudy (lemon juice) ingredients to one part purple (the crême de violette), or a 14.5:1 ratio of non-purple to purple components. Many updated versions of this drink either omit the crême de violette (a trend which began with a mistake or editorial decision in Harry Craddock’s influential Savoy Cocktail Book) or contain so much of it that the resulting mixture more closely resembles that ingredient’s namesake flower than any shade of sky I’ve ever seen. This is not true of Ensslin’s recipe, though, or the one in PDT that I originally fell in love with, which consists of 10 parts clear and three parts cloudy ingredients to one part purple. Wondrich’s own Aviation recipe calls for 1/2 ounce of lemon juice and 1 1/2 teaspoons of Maraschino, which conveniently equates to 1/4 ounce. He only uses one teaspoon of crême de violette, but if we scale this up just a smidge to 1/4 ounce we end up with a drink that contains nine parts clear and two parts cloudy ingredients to one part purple or an 11:1 ratio of non-purple to purple ingredients, which in’t too far apart from Ensslin’s. And it tastes great! So here, then, is how we make an Aviation:

2 ozs. Gin (Aviation)
1/2 oz. Lemon juice
1/4 oz. Maraschino liqueur
1/4 oz. Crême de violette (Rothman & Winter)

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled Nick & Nora glass. No garnish.

Hugo Ensslin specifically calls for El Bart gin, which only recently resumed production and which I’ve never seen in the United States, but Aviation gin was created with this cocktail in mind and is “clean and balanced and not too intense” like Wondrich calls for in his tweets, so it’s perfect here. The result is a balanced drink which is floral but not at all to the point of tasting like “fancy hand soap.” Beautiful and delicious!

The movie I’m choosing to go with it features the purest depictions of aviation as a means to escape the surly bonds of quotidian reality that I’ve ever seen, Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko’s Wings. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection Eclipse Series DVD release of the film:

It can also be streamed via the Criterion Channel with a subscription, and some people may have access to it via Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Wings begins with a strikingly layered composition:

Which is revealed to be even more complex than it first appears when a tailor emerges in the foreground:

The opening shot is succeeded by a title sequence (which it may be interesting to compare to Tár) consisting of a series of close-ups which critic Dave Kehr reads as depicting the film’s protagonist Nadezhda Petrukhina (Maya Bulgakova) “being fitted with a straitjacket, a garment that will leave her no room to spread the wings that war had given her.”

She was a fighter pilot during the Great Patriotic War but now works as the administrator of a vocational school and serves on Sevastopol’s city council. Despite her lofty position she is demonized by her students:

Can’t go into a restaurant after 6pm without an escort because she’s a woman:

And is generally out of synch with post-Stalin Soviet “Thaw” society:

Meanwhile, she is prone to staring off into space and dreaming of flying, which is depicted each time via a two-shot combination of a close-up of Petrukhina followed by aerial footage accompanied by the film’s wistful main theme:

Gender is definitely a contributing factor to Petrukhina’s sense of alienation. A rare interlude in which she and a café owner named Shura (Rimma Markova) allow themselves the luxury of reminiscing about their school days and wind up waltzing together ends with them self-consciously realizing that a group of men is gawking at them through the window:

Or consider scholar Lilya Kaganovsky’s description of another key scene:

Nadezhda has no place to occupy in the patriarchal system that tries to reassert traditional and normative gender roles after decades of Stalinist reorganization. This is particularly evident in the concert hall scene, when Nadezhda volunteers to take a student’s place during a performance. The costumes are large Matryoshka dolls, but while all the other girls are neatly enclosed inside their doll costumes (which have both a front and a back, indeed are “seamless”), Nadezhda has to be supported by two boys as she awkwardly fits herself inside the largest doll. This doll has only a “front,” and the boys carry Nadezhda around the stage while she crouches inside waving her arms. The “donned armor of an alienating identity” is here represented as incomplete and “propped up” by the male. The boys offer Nadezhda’s “feminine” representation a scaffolding without which the illusion would collapse and be exposed for what it is: a dominant cultural fantasy resting on a phantasmatic support.

Scholar Anastasia Sorokina further notes that “Nadezhda” is “a name unique to women that means ‘hope,’ an irony lost on non-Russian speakers” which helps “shed light on Nadezhda’s alienation as a middle-aged female war veteran occupying a society in which she is no longer relevant” and that Matryoshka dolls are “a traditional symbol of motherhood” used here “in a sarcastic nod to Nadezhda’s lack of biological children and her inability to connect with her surrogates at home and at school.”

Of course, there’s a fine line between inability and unwillingness and some of this is undeniably her own fault. Petrukhina’s daughter Tanya (Zhanna Bolotova) doesn’t know she’s adopted, so this doesn’t explain why she’s estranged from her mother. The scene where the latter surprises her outsider her apartment complex with a bottle of wine and cake might, though. Petrukhina is there to finally meet her son-in-law Igor (Vladimir Gorelov), but whatever inclination we might feel to sympathize with her is quickly undermined by her stubborn insistence on guessing which of the people gathered in the living room is him. She chooses . . . poorly:

Embarrassed, she proceeds to exhort the assembled “young people” to cheer up and “play [their] boogie-woogie.” Oof! But underlying all of this is the trauma Petrukhina experienced during World War II, especially the moment when she watched her lover Mitya (Leonid Dyachkov) die in a fiery crash, which brings us to the film’s controversial ending and back to the reason I chose to write about Wings in relation to the Aviation. Mitya appears for the first time in the final third of the film following Petrukhina’s purchase of handful of cherries from a street vendor.

She attempts to run them under a faucet, but it doesn’t work:

Just that moment it starts to rain. Petrukhina holds the cherries up to be washed:

As everyone around her scatters:

She beholds the empty street:

And the camera tilts up to a white sky:

Suddenly we behold a lone figure running through a forest. We hear Petrukhina’s voice say “Mitya.” As the figure materializes into a man, we realize it’s a POV shot. He sits down next to Petrukhina. As he turns to look at her, the image freezes:

This is followed by four more freeze frames, all on shots of Mitya. The following scene finds Petrukhina visiting the museum directed by her friend Pasha (Panteleymon Krymov) where there’s an exhibit devoted to Mitya which she figures in as one of his apprentices:

Cut to aerial footage of a plane:

Followed by a close-up of Petrukhina flying another craft:

She tries to talk to Mitya over the radio, but there’s no response. She attempts a maneuver to revive him, but his plane continues to trail smoke, and all she can do is fly next to him as he plummets to the ground:

There is one final freeze frame over a POV shot of his wrecked plane in flames on the ground:

Followed soon after by a shot of a photograph of Mitya which is part of the museum exhibit:

Which pans down to one of Petrukhina:

Pasha finally shows up and begins rambling on about scientists finding a mammoth frozen in the tundra, thawing it, and cooking its meat. Petrukhina interrupts him: “marry me,” she says.

When he doesn’t reply, she continues, “you don’t want to. Can’t you see it? The museum director marries one of his exhibits.” She wonders aloud if perhaps the woman pictured in the exhibit did die in the war after all and tells Pasha that she has quit her job at the school and is starting a new life. The next scene finds her watching children fly toy planes:

There’s an abrupt cut and suddenly she’s at an airfield:

It begins to rain. Petrukhina starts to seek shelter under the wing of a plane:

Then climbs into it:

There’s a POV shot of the instruments followed by a close-up of Petrukhina smiling:

A group of pilots show up and decide to push her to the hangar in the plane so that she can “feel the wind in her face.” There’s a shot of her looking happy followed by one of her with a tear in her eye:

As the plane approaches the hangar, Petrukhina shakes her head no. Suddenly the plane starts up:

There is one last shot of Petrukhina:

Then the plane begins to taxi and as the pilots watch helplessly it takes off and disappears into the fog:

The film ends with two aerial shots followed by the end title. Scholar Åsne Ø. Høgetveit notes that this is most commonly interpreted as implying a suicide, but observes that throughout this scene Petrukhina’s facial expressions “change from nostalgic to insecure, determined, bold, happy, sad, melancholic, rebellious and victorious—quite an emotional roller coaster!” and that “[s]he does not seem like a defeated woman as she fires up the engine and takes off.” I agree. In fact, I was tempted to interpret the film’s conclusion as one more fantasy, only it begins and ends basically the same way as Petrukhina’s first visit to the airfield at the beginning of the movie. There, as Petrukhina leaves with her neighbor’s children, who she is babysitting, the camera racks focus to a close-up of a flower:

The final shot of Wings is, like this one, an image of hope. Høgetveit is not wrong that Petrukhina “takes off in what has got to be difficult flying conditions, keeping in mind the heavy fog on the airfield and the airplane model she has not flown before.” She might not land safely, and she will presumably be in a lot of trouble even if she does. But in Larisa Shepitko’s own words (as quoted by Høgetveit), she has also “come back to heaven, to herself, to her talent, to what she was born for, so to speak, because this is her natural vocation.” It’s an ending for dreamers, and the Aviation is the perfect drink to accompany it, so be sure to save some for the final reel!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

My favorite thing in the whole entire universe, after my family, might just be the black raspberry bush growing in my back yard. It only produces fruit for a few weeks each summer, but those are some of the best days of the entire year because they begin with a harvest of berries that find their way into nearly every meal we eat during this time. They make terrific muffins and pies, are a brilliant addition to salads and yogurt parfait, and can even be converted into a wide range of savory condiments like barbeque sauce or salsa. They also go great in cocktails, of course! Raspberries freeze well, and thusly preserved can be made into tasty syrups all throughout the year, but my favorite way to use them is fresh off the vine in a modified version of the Knickerbocker in Dale DeGroff”s The Craft of the Cocktail. This drink, which DeGroff notes is adapted from Jerry Thomas, is emblematic of the fresh fruit-forward concoctions he and restauranteur Joe Baum championed it at New York City’s Rainbow Room in the 80s when nearly everyone else was relying exclusively on commercial mixes. Here’s how we make it:

2 ozs. Appleton Estate Signature rum
3/4 oz. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Orange curaçao (Cointreau)
1/4 oz. Honey syrup
10-12 black raspberries
Lemon wedge

Muddle 7-9 raspberries with the lemon juice and curaçao in a mixing glass. Add ice and rum. Squeeze the lemon wedge into the glass, drop it in, shake well, and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with three fresh berries on a pick.

Appleton Estate Signature is a workhorse rum that’s perfect here because it isn’t showy and this drink is all about the berries; if you have another go-to for mixing, I’m sure it would work fine as well. DeGroff calls for 1/2 oz. raspberry syrup in lieu of fresh berries when they’re out of season, but our “blackcaps” are more tart than red raspberries, so we like to add a bit of 1:1 [water to] honey syrup to add sweetness even when they are. I’d normally reach for Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao in this situation, but it hasn’t been in stock in Ithaca the last few times I looked. Based on comparisons to the other orange liqueurs we do have on hand, though, Cointreau works just as well or possibly even better. Last but not least, we’ve tried this both with and without the lemon wedge, and it definitely is worth the extra step: versions that include it are discernably more complex than those without.

The movie I chose to pair with this showcase for upstate New York produce is famous Knicks fan Spike Lee’s underrated heist film Inside Man. Here’s a picture of my Universal Pictures Home Entertainment DVD release, which is suddenly a bit worse for wear after some recent shabby treatment by the baggage handlers at BWI airport:

It can also be streamed via Netflix with a subscription or most other major platforms for a rental fee.

Inside Man opens with a credit sequence set to the song “Chaiyya Chaiyya” from the Indian film Dil Se. Contemporary reviewers mostly saw this as a nod to New York City’s multiculturalism, but with the benefit of hindsight it is obviously significant that the latter movie is an extremely political: it starts out like a simple love story, but ends with the protagonist blowing himself and the woman he is infatuated with up to prevent the latter from committing a suicide bombing. Similarly, although the beginning of Inside Man appears at first glance to consist of nothing more than a simple series of establishing shots, R. Colin Tait argues in Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader that it in fact is “confronting [viewers] with the early iconography of the financial origins of New York City” through images of ships:

“Gargoyles” (I believe this is actually technically a grotesque because it isn’t a waterspout):

And the New York Stock Exchange:

By the time it ends, we will have learned that one of the motives for the robbery that the film is about is to expose banker Arthur Chase (Christopher Plummer) as a war criminal who made his fortune by selling his friends out to the Nazis. In addition to making the film more interesting, this also provides an explanation for how Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) came to know about his target, safety deposit box 392, in the first place. After all, one of his accomplices (Bernard Rachelle) is a professor at Columbia Law who specializes in genocide, slave labor, and war reparation claims and who also has a nephew who is a jeweler.

This seems like exactly the kind of person who might be able to track down a Cartier ring missing since the French Jewish family it belonged to was shipped off to concentration camps during World War II:

But this is all window dressing. What makes Inside Man noteworthy is the way Russell Gewirtz’s screenplay turns out to be an ideal showcase for Lee’s signature style and themes and performances by an outstanding cast led by Denzel Washington. His Detective Keith Frazier has great chemistry with his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and its tons of fun to watch them riff off each other and Peter Gerety’s Captain Coughlin:

Frazier is also one of cinema’s great people managers, with a judo-like preference to let his adversaries and co-workers make the first move that works wonders on Willem Dafoe’s initially standoffish Captain John Darius:

Jodie Foster’s stylish fixer Madeline White, whose condescending smiles turn to an icy stare when she realizes he has beaten her at her own game:

And even Russell, who secretly slips a diamond into his pocket as a token of gratitude (paid in advance) for bringing Case to justice and sign of respect:

The dialogue is full of lines that might not have worked if other actors were reading them, but that I’ve been quoting regularly since 2006 because of how they sound in this film. My favorite belongs to Washington: “thank you, bank robber!” he replies when Russell tells him that if he and his girlfriend really love each other, money shouldn’t get in the way of them getting married. But the best example of what I mean might be Al Palagonia’s construction worker Kevin, who identifies the language being spoken in audio footage the cops record from inside the bank as being “100% Albanian.”

Neither really makes sense unless you’ve seen the film, but if you have they work beautifully in all manner of situations! Similarly, Inside Man features some wonderful reaction shots, including Captain Darius’s puzzled response “five bucks?” to a cryptic reference by Frazier to the “last time [he] had [his] Johnson pulled that good” and this look that Victor Colicchio’s Sergeant Collins gives everyone else in the Mobile Command Unit following a clueless comment from a not-yet-disgraced Arthur Chase, who thinks their only problem is that they can’t afford a jet:

Sergeant Collins, along with his fellow police officers, is also a vehicle for Lee’s typically nuanced treatment of racial tensions, here in a specifically post-9/11 America setting. They are all clearly competent and apparently decent, but their speech is nonetheless peppered with unequivocally racist language. Additionally, Lee adds a Sikh character named Vikram Walia (Waris Ahluwalia) to the film who wasn’t originally in Gewirtz’s script. “Oh, shit! A fucking Arab!” a SWAT team member shouts when he emerges from the bank with a note asking for food for the other hostages. Darius will later say “I don’t think you heard that” to him in a conversation that begins with Walia refusing to talk to the police until they return his turban, but ends with him laughing at a Mitchell’s joke that although he can’t go through airport security with being “randomly” selected for a security check, at least he can get a cab.

And stages a conversation between Frazier and White in front of this mural:

Lee is, I think, drawing a distinction between personal and institution racism. He doesn’t let people guilty of the former off the hook: Frazier calls Collins out for his “color commentary,” and I don’t doubt that Detective Mitchell really will help Walia file a formal complaint against the NYPD for the way they treated him. But Case walking around free is a bigger problem than any of this, and if even he must ultimately be held accountable for his misdeeds, it’s evidence that the long arc of the moral universe really does bend toward justice.

Inside Man also contains multiple examples of one of Spike Lee’s favorite techniques, whereby both the actor and camera are placed on a dolly to create the effect of a character gliding through space. In his book Rumble and Crash: Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film, Milo Sweedler describes the function of the first and last of the four such shots he catalogs, which depict Dalton Russell in his “prison cell,” as establishing and then confirming that “things are not what they appear to be in this movie, where appearances are perpetually deceiving”:

They also connect the character that most people who write about this film assume is the “inside man” of the title and Sweedler’s nomination, Arthur Case, who gets the double dolly treatment during a scene in which Russell describes his ruthlessly selfish actions during World War II to Madeleine White:

In his monograph Spike Lee, Todd McGowan suggests that this shot reveals that “what defines [Case] as a character–what gives him his singularity–is his act of profiteering on the Holocaust” and that “[n]othing can remove this singularity, not simply because of the horror of the act itself but because he continues to enjoy the monetary gains from it.” McGown also writes at length about the last remaining double dolly, which shows Detective Frazier moving toward the Manhattan Trust Bank following what he believes is the execution of a hostage:

Per McGowan, “Lee opts for the signature dolly shot here because Frazier’s anger separates him from his context. Though his anger is justified (unlike Case’s profiteering on the Holocaust), it nonetheless exceeds the context in which he is located. He can no longer act in the objective capacity of the negotiator but now has a passionate investment in the situation. His singularity at this moment comes to the fore.”

In other words, there’s much more to Inside Man than meets the eye! In this respect it’s actually quite different from the Knickerbocker, which is very much a case of what you see is what you get. But contrast is a perfectly legitimate basis for a pairing, and the main thing here is that the two together constitute a fine way to spend a warm summer evening. Like the carefully-adjusted hat that Detective Frazier wears:

Which casts a perfect Sam Spade shadow:

They’re cool. Ya dig?

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

My loving fiancée Marion became my loving wife on August 9, 2014. We really wanted to make something for our wedding guests, and given our interests a cocktail was an obvious choice, so we infused Woodford Reserve bourbon with local Ontario peaches, prepared some homemade vanilla bitters, taught our younger brothers the correct ratio of these ingredients to sparkling white wine, and asked them to make sure they were ready in time for the toast. When one of these brothers (mine) announced that he was getting married this month, I knew exactly what my corresponding Drink & a Movie pairing would be. To start with the second half of the equation, here’s a picture of my Milestone Film Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection DVD release which includes My Brother’s Wedding:

It can also be streamed via the Criterion Channel with a subscription, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

As far as the drink goes, I’d long been meaning to explore what else The Twentieth Century Guide For Mixing Fancy Drinks by James C. Maloney had to offer aside from the “bell-ringer” (his term for an apricot liqueur rinse) drinks that inspired me to purchase this book in the first place after Frederic Yarm mentioned them last year. The Peach Blossom caught my eye because it features a prominent flavor from the cocktail we served at our wedding, but like many pre-prohibition recipes it struck us as far too sweet. A gratifyingly small amount of tinkering fixed that right up, though! Here’s our version of this forgotten classic:

1 1/2 ozs. Smith & Cross Jamaica Rum
1/2 oz. Cornelius Peach Flavored Brandy
3/4 ozs. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Rothman & Winter Orchard Apricot Liqueur
1/2 oz. Pineapple syrup
1 oz. Roederer Estate Brut
12 drops Fee Brothers Peach Bitters

Shake rum, brandy, lemon juice, apricot liqueur, and syrup with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail class. Top with sparkling wine and garnish with 12 drops of peach bitters.

Veteran mixologists may have already realized that this is the same 8:4:3 ratio of strong to citrus to sweet utilized in a Gold Rush as adapted by Jim Meehan for The PDT Cocktail Book, which in my opinion is a perfect drink. I thought of Smith & Cross Jamaica rum as my base spirit because it works great in David Wondrich’s Fish House Punch, which also contains peach brandy. For pineapple syrup, we use the recipe from Employees Only’s Speakeasy book which produces a fresh, pure fruit flavor. Last but not least, the idea for the peach bitter garnish comes from The Bartender’s Manifesto, which uses this technique to great aromatic effect in the Woolworth Manhattan and elsewhere. Throw them all together and you get a balanced concoction that showcases the rum and is full–but not too full–of peachy flavor.

I believe I saw My Brother’s Wedding for the first time in 2007 at the Three Rivers Film Festival shortly after the long-overdue first theatrical run of director Charles Burnett’s debut feature Killer of Sheep. Although the latter is almost universally regarded as the superior movie, I’ve always thought of the former as my favorite. I realize now that this is due in large part to its central character Pierce Mundy, who is played by Everett Silas, and the way he relates to his family, friends, and neighborhood of Watts. According to James Naremore Silas delayed production by disappearing in the middle of the shoot (Naremore also notes that he reappeared “wearing a Dracula cape and demanding more money”), which perhaps explains why this is his only film credit, but I think his performance is terrific. Like the brothers in The Flowers of St. Francis, he and his best friend Soldier (Ronnie Bell) are perpetually in a hurry to get from point A to point B:

In an interview with Monona Wali published in a book by Robert E. Kapsis, director Charles Burnett describes this as a metaphor:

In My Brother’s Wedding, three different things are going on at the same time: the wedding, his friend getting killed, and Pierce’s promise to his mother. The conflict evolves: Pierce has got to be at his brother’s wedding at the same time as his friend’s funeral, and he can’t decide which is most important. So, he’s no help to anybody. It creates a conflict–a crisis–because he’s not able to evaluate things. If he had made a decision and not made promises he couldn’t keep, he wouldn’t have created a sad situation. […] The metaphor is running blindly–a man who refuses to take control of his life. These guys are rushing into life with limited knowledge. No, it’s not so much knowledge they lack, it’s wisdom.

This explains why Pierce runs in the scene which I think depicts him at his very worst, when he chases after a woman (Julie Bolton) that Soldier has forced himself on:

Running is also associated with tragedy: after Pierce finds out that Soldier has died, Burnett (who is also the film’s cinematographer) shoots him from so far away that it initially seems like he’s stuck in one spot:

Finally, in my favorite running scene of all, Pierce and Soldier don’t just chase a would-be assassin (Garnett Hargrave) through the streets, they hurl themselves after him with utter disregard for their bodies or the law of gravity, skidding across and careening off features of the urban landscape:

Although elsewhere the behavior is more innocent and pure, the multiple instances of roughhousing are probably even more reminiscent of the simple enthusiasm of Francis’s followers. Wrestling seems to be Pierce’s love language. Here he grapples with Soldier:

And here his father (Dennis Kemper):

This and his mother (Jessie Holmes) swatting him hard on the back in one scene and shoving him down a short flight of steps in another lets us know that it runs in the family. But the strongest indication of all that, despite his complicity in Soldier’s misdeeds, Pierce is at heart a good person can be found in the way his neighbors regard him. The narrative begins with a woman trying to recruit him to be the father of her sister’s baby:

Later, Pierce is unable to find Soldier a job, but it’s clear that any of the prospective employers he talks to would hire him in a heartbeat. His mother may not be able to look past the fact that he isn’t a lawyer like his brother, but everyone else in Watts seems to see him as a pillar of the community. This is, by the way, a neighborhood in transition: it’s becoming a much more dangerous place. Everyone who lives there keeps a gun handy, including Pierce’s mother:

His Aunt Hattie (Jackie Hargrave):

And the owner of the yard he and Soldier are wrestling in above:

My Brother’s Wedding doesn’t include any individual images to rival those in Killer of Sheep of children gliding from rooftop to rooftop or chasing after a freight train, but it does include a number of memorable compositions. My favorite is this one of Pierce lost in his worries:

The opening shot of a man playing the harmonica (Dr. Henry Gordon) is also striking:

As is a later shot of Pierce and Soldier talking about how all their friends are dead or gone:

Other pictures worth a thousand words include Mrs. Mundy sighing over split pants:

Aunt Hattie’s bottle of vodka:

And the look on Mr. Mundy’s face when Mrs. Dubois (Frances Nealy) hisses “where is your son?” at him:

This is so different from her conduct up until now that it suggests that Pierce wasn’t entirely off-base when he referred to his future sister-in-law Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett) as being “as fake as a three-dollar bill.” I’m not sure whether the best thing about the scene where the two families eat dinner together (which Amy Corbin calls “Brechtian”) is this wallpaper and tablecloth:

Or the glances Maria (Margarita Rodríguez) and Pierce exchange after he makes an obsequious show of thanking her in an attempted gesture of working class solidarity:

My Brother’s Wedding ends with Pierce unhappily stuck at the titular event while Soldier’s funeral takes place across town. He tries to take advantage of a delay caused by the late arrival of Sonia’s favorite uncle by borrowing a car from someone, but by the time he gets to the mortuary, the mourners are all gone:

The movie ends with a slow-motion zoom in on the wedding ring which Pierce suddenly realizes he still has, concluding with an out-of-focus freeze frame:

Marion commented that this is a good example of a scene that wouldn’t make sense in the age of cell phones the last time we watched it together. While she’s obviously right that the execution would be different, I don’t think it would need to substantially alter the meaning. Instead of blindly rushing off from one event to the other and missing them both, perhaps Pierce foolishly tries to time everything perfectly and still gets stuck in traffic. Either way he is still impulsive and immature and relatably stranded between mutually exclusive life choices.

It doesn’t ultimately matter whether or not My Brother’s Wedding is a *better* film than Killer of Sheep, just as I could care less if the Peach Blossom in this post is superior to the drink we served at my wedding or the ones James Maloney mixed back in the 19th century. There’s a time and a place for all of them, which: I actually believe that may be the whole point of this series!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

Bacurau is one of my favorite movies from the past few years, so it was always a candidate for a “Drink & a Movie” post, but it became a mortal lock a couple of months ago when I was flipping through the PDT Cocktail Book. I could hardly have failed to notice the drink called a Rio Bravo before because that’s also the name of a Howard Hawks film I love. It never jumped out at me as something to make, though, because while I’ve been a fan of the Brazilian spirit cachaça since my friend Thiago introduced me to it in college, it isn’t something I typically stock. This time, however, I was struck by an amazing coincidence. Hawks is one of the chief influences on John Carpenter, who was such a big inspiration to the makers of Bacurau that they named a school after him:

And cachaça is, of course, the national spirit of Brazil, so I picked up a bottle of Novo Fogo Silver and started mixing. When the Rio Bravo unsurprisingly turned out to be delicious (everything in PDT is!) the only thing left to do was to get writing. The drink, which was created by Nidal Ramini in 2006 while he was working at the London bar Dusk, is made thusly:

2 ozs. Cachaça (Novo Fogo Silver)
3/4 ozs. Lime juice
1/2 oz. Orgeat
3 quarter-sized slices freshly peeled ginger

Muddle the ginger and orgeat in a mixing glass. Add remaining ingredients, shake with ice, and strain into a vessel like the one Lunga (Silvero Pereira) drinks out of in Bacurau. We call them “pizza glasses” since we usually have red wine in them when that’s what is on the menu.

In addition to serving his rendition in a chilled coupe, Ramini also employs an orange twist garnish, but we omitted both to better match this image:

The glassware is pretty close, yeah? The orgeat in the drink also evokes the cashew milk that Domingas (Sonia Braga) serves Michael (Udo Kier) later in the film:

Anyway, my favorite thing about the Rio Bravo is probably the ginger, which gives the drink a real kick. This is a great showcase for orgeat as well. We use a recipe from Smuggler’s Cove that contains both orange flower and rose water, which complement the floral notes in the cachaça. The orgeat contributes sweetness and a creamy texture to balance out the acid from the lime juice and vegetal qualities of the spirit as well. Overall, the Rio Bravo is a refreshing, invigorating concoction that is perfect for sipping outside on a spring or summer afternoon. Or inside while watching a movie! Speaking of which, here’s a picture of my Kino Lorber DVD release of Bacurau:

It can also be streamed via most major platforms for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library.

In addition to the school, John Carpenter is also directly referenced in Bacurau via the song “Night” from his excellent Lost Themes album which plays over a capoeira scene in advance of the film’s climactic showdown:

His presence can be felt all throughout the movie, though, most interestingly to me in its setting “a few years from now.” Carpenter’s Escape from New York, which was made in 1981, begins with a title informing us that in 1988 “the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent.” That film’s action takes place about a decade later after the American government has responded by turning the island of Manhattan into a giant prison, but the plot of Bacurau seems to be unfolding *during* society’s dystopian transformation. There are a few overtly sci fi touches, such as its opening in space:

The retinal scanner which corrupt mayor Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima) offers as an alternative to going to the polls to vote for him in person:

Or a UFO-shaped drone:

Mostly, though, this mood is created via small touches at the edge of the frame like this television news broadcast about public executions resuming in São Paulo:

Bacurau culminates in a bloody confrontation between the inhabitants of the eponymous village and a band of foreigners led by Michael who have apparently paid Tony Jr. for the right to hunt them down as part of some sort of twisted “The Most Dangerous Game” fantasy camp. In typical ugly American fashion, everything they see and hear only confirms their preconceived notions about the place they are visiting. Thus, they fail to correctly interpret things like this bullet-riddled police car as signs of Bacurau’s rebellious past until it’s too late:

This leads to one of the movie’s most darkly humorous moments when Tony Jr. comes to collect them. He knows that they have literally wiped Bacurau off the map, as teacher Plinio (Wilson Rabelo) and his students discovered when they attempt to locate themselves using Google Maps:

I love the kid on the left who is staring directly at the camera! Anyway, Tony Jr. arrives in a luxury van complete with complementary bottles of spring water:

But instead of thirsty “gringo tourists” eager to return home after a massacre, he encounters the wrath of a populace which is still very much alive led by Lunga and his no-longer-former comrade in arms Pacote (Thomas Aquino), who Manohla Dargis memorably describes as having “bedroom eyes”:

This does not end well for Tony Jr.:

The most enjoyable part of Bacurau are the glimpses into the town’s unusual social dynamics and traditions, including funeral rituals like singing Cinema Novo director/composer Sérgio Ricardo’s haunting “Bichos Da Noite” during the procession:

Or waiving white handkerchiefs in unison during the burial:

A museum celebrating the village’s defiant history which gets a new permanent exhibit to commemorate its most recent violent episode:

And of course the psychotropic seed they all consume:

As a librarian I applaud this film for making the shabby treatment of books synonymous with villainy:

And as someone who has a deep, decades-long relationship with The Searchers, I feel compelled to call out the startling three-shot sequence in which Joshua (Brian Townes) appears out of the darkness, which directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles have confirmed is a deliberate reference to Scar abducting Debbie:

Speaking of westerns, I very much hope this dog received hazard pay for being placed directly in the path of stampeding horses:

And whoever designed these outfits hopefully saw an enormous uptick in sales following the release of this movie:

Finally, I’m an absolute sucker for beautiful sunrises and sunsets, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight two additional three-shot sequences, this one:

And this one:

Above I talk about some of the affinities that I think a Rio Bravo has with Bacurau. One thing I did not mention is that homemade orgeat doesn’t like to STAY mixed with things. You probably won’t have problems with it separating unless you, too, are trying to get a perfect photograph of whatever you put it in. But this definitely is a cocktail to drink, in the immortal words of Harry Craddock, “quickly, while it’s laughing at you!” In this it is quite *unlike* Bacurau, which only gets better the longer you spend with it.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

The night I moved in with my loving wife (then girlfriend) Marion in Baltimore in 2011 we went out to dinner at a place down the street called B&O American Brasserie. I don’t remember what anyone ate, but I’ll never forget my first sip of a concoction called a B&O Manhattan, an original creation by bartender Brendan Dorr (now co-owner of Dutch Courage, which I hear raves about and am determined to visit the next time I’m in town) that contained maple syrup and port in place of the traditional sweet vermouth, or the clever dehydrated orange wheel garnishes. I knew immediately that I had probably lucked upon the city’s best cocktails and I never went anywhere in the subsequent eight years I lived there that came close to changing my mind.

I can’t swear that Dorr’s El Oso was on the menu that evening, but I’m certain I had it there more than once. I found myself thinking about this drink the other day and was pleased to discover that it appears in Gregory and Nicole Priebe’s book Forgotten Maryland Cocktails: A History of Drinking in the Free State, so I bought a copy and whipped a couple up. The Priebes note that El Oso was created for the 2010 U.S. National Bärenjäger competition and that the judges who awarded it first prize called it “perfectly balanced” and “an instant classic.” We very much concur! Here’s how you make it:

1 3/4 ozs. Añejo tequila (Espolón)
3/4 ozs. Bärenjäger
1/3 ozs. Maraschino liqueur
2 dashes Jerry Thomas’ Own Decanter bitters
Dehydrated orange wheel (we used this recipe by Martha Stewart)

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a rocks glass which contains the orange wheel and one big ice cube.

Maraschino is to me the flavor of sophistication, but only if you don’t overdo it. Here, as in a Martinez made with barreled gin (my favorite is Ransom Old Tom), the warm and lively base spirit and distinctive bitters keep it in its place. The drink has a great texture as well.

El Oso is Spanish for “bear,” and between that name and the fact that Bärenjäger hails from Germany, it felt obvious what movie I should pair with this drink. Here, then, is a picture of my Lions Gate Home Entertainment DVD release of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man:

It can also be streamed via most major platforms for a rental fee.

Grizzly Man‘s most famous scene is without doubt the one in which Herzog listens to audio tape of the film’s subject Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard being mauled to death by the bears they visited Alaska each summer to study and protect:

The person holding the camera in this screengrab is Jewel Palovak, Treadwell’s friend and collaborator and an executive producer of Grizzly Man. “Jewel, you must never listen to this,” Herzog says as he puts down his headphones. “I’m never going to,” she replies. It’s tempting to read this scene, which is positioned halfway through the film, and this extreme close-up of a bear which appears near the end as comprising a thesis statement of sorts.

“What haunts me is in that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy,” Herzog says in voiceover during the latter. “I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” These moments seem to hearken back to beginning of the movie and suggest that the “story of astonishing beauty and depth” that Herzog found in the 100+ hours of footage that Treadwell shot during his last five summers in Alaska before his death is, to paraphrase Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration,” a mysterious and elusive one that cannot simply be shown straight-on, but only fully apprehended via imagination.

Upon revisiting Grizzly Man, though, I found myself thinking that Herzog is perfectly serious when he suggests the part of his mission is to defend Treadwell “not as an ecologist, but as a filmmaker.” A comment that his footage contains “such glorious improvised moments the likes of which the studio directors with their union crews can never dream of” is accompanied by this delightfully abstract shot of the inside of a tent while a fox climbs on top of it:

Herzog includes others criticizing Treadwell in Grizzly Man on the grounds that “he was acting like he was working with people wearing bear costumes” and didn’t sufficiently respect nature, but also demonstrates that however rightfully or wrongfully distraught Treadwell was by the violent acts that occurred around him, he didn’t shy away from filming things like the skull of a cub that starved to death which had been picked clean by its fellow bears in a matter of days:

Or the severed limb of one killed by a male that wanted its mother to stop lactating so that he could “fornicate” (Herzog’s word) with her:

Treadwell clearly intended to eventually assemble his videos into a cohesive work. Herzog calls him “methodical” as a filmmaker and reports that he often repeated takes up to fifteen times. Some of this footage presumably wasn’t meant to be included in this project, such as a lengthy tirade against the National Park Service:

Treadwell may have filmed the dead bears just for himself as well, but he was always going to have to work with a professional editor and it’s not at all hard to picture this material finding its way into whatever they created together. In fact, Jewel Palovak’s comment in Eric Kohn’s 2020 oral history of Grizzly Man that “Timmy would’ve really liked the movie” invites one to imagine a world in which the person Treadwell collaborated with somehow turned out to be Werner Herzog, who presumably would have insisted on it. And maybe scenes like the one in which Treadwell turns his ire on the gods (“Let’s have some water, Jesus boy! Let’s have some water, Christ man or Allah or Hindu floaty thing. Let’s have some fucking water for these animals!”) as well:

Meanwhile, the bear fight that Treadwell captures is every bit as astonishing and dramatic as anything you will ever see in any nature documentary ever:

I always thought of Grizzly Man as a great film that Werner Herzog made out of Timothy Treadwell’s footage, but now it seems to me more of a sincere attempt by the former to finish the latter’s work. Of Herzog’s original content, my favorite is probably this interview with Willy Fulton, the pilot who dropped Treadwell off at Katmai National Park at the beginning of each summer and picked him up again in the fall. What appear to be flashes of light in this screengrab are actually flies:

The air is thick with them and as they flit about the camera they make little pinging noises. Maybe more than anything else in the film, this constant sound and motion illustrates just how uncomfortable the life Timothy Treadwell chose was.

Also deserving of mention is the music improvised by an ensemble led by Richard Thompson and the excellent DVD extra In the Edges: The “Grizzly Man” Session which documents its creation. By drawing my attention more explicitly to touches like the ominous cello tones present during this scene it increased my appreciation for how music shapes our perception of Treadwell’s footage and elevates it:

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Timothy Treadwell is wearing a Cornell t-shirt in a photograph from his youth:

Finally, Grizzly Man contains some terrific landscapes including these aerial shots of the areas where Treadwell camped at the beginning and end of each summer respectively which are effective at establishing a sense of space. Here’s the plain he called the Sanctuary:

And here’s the “densely-overgrown” Grizzly Maze:

But even better is this nearby glacier “in turmoil” which Herzog calls a metaphor for Treadwell’s soul:

Which kind of reminds me of the album cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures? Normally I’d conclude this post by circling back to the drink and talking a bit more about why I think it pairs well with the movie I chose, but this month it really isn’t any more complicated than just “bears.” I’ll therefore instead leave you with this image of coroner Franc G. Fallico:

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

I started my Drink & a Movie series last January as motivation to write more. I quickly discovered another reason to keep it going, which was as a convenient excuse to spend time with films I love but haven’t seen recently. I’m happy to report that thus far not a single one has disappointed! In fact, I’ve been discovering all sorts of new things to admire about them. Case in point is this month’s selection, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us. I remembered it for Behzad Dorani’s madcap (Kent Jones described him as “looking as if he had been drawn by Chuck Jones” in a 2000 Film Comment review) dashes through the streets and alleyways of the Kurdish village of Siah Dareh:

These scenes are some of the cinema’s finest dramatizations of how technology is simultaneously liberating (Behzad never would have traveled to such a remote place if he wasn’t able to remain in contact with his home base of Tehran) and binding (but every time his phone rings he needs to drop what he’s doing, run to his car, and drive to a place where he has better reception), but they’re far from the only reason to watch this film. First things first: the drink I’m pairing it with is the Hurricane, which has a surprisingly murky provenance. It is popularly believed to have been invented at the New Orleans stalwart Pat O’Brien’s in the 1940s in order to put their excess quantities of rum to good use and named after the lamp-shaped glass it was served in. Others trace its origin to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, New York where there was an establishment called the Hurricane Bar. The problem with both of these theories is that a drink called a Hurricane was apparently served in a 1939 movie I haven’t seen called Naughty but Nice which per IMDb was in production from October-December, 1938. Whatever it’s origins, one thing is for certain: the Hurricane is a delicious cocktail! The ingredients and proportions below are taken from Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log by Jeff Berry and Annene Kay, but can be found reprinted in all sorts of other books including Smuggler’s Cove, whose passion fruit syrup recipe (equal parts passion fruit puree and 2:1 simple syrup) is just about perfect in my opinion. Here’s how we make this drink:

2 oz. Dark rum (Gosling’s Black Seal)
1 oz. Lemon juice
1 oz. Passion fruit syrup

Fill a 10 ounce hurricane glass with crushed (use of a “Schmallet” is highly recommended!) ice, add all ingredients, and gently stir a few times to combine. Garnish with a lemon slice.

Most Hurricane recipes call for at least four ounces of spirits (according to Wikipedia the one in Naughty but Nice uses a whopping six!), but that’s a bit much for a single serving under normal circumstances, yeah? You’ll also find recipes for it which include additional ingredients like fassionola and Galliano, but for me it’s all about the brilliantly simple combination of passion fruit (a personal favorite), a bit more tartness from lemon juice, and the molasses and vanilla notes of a good dark rum. Our go-to in this category is Gosling’s Black Seal, which we keep on hand for Dark and Stormys.

The screengrabs in this blog post come from my trusty 2002 New Yorker Video release of The Wind Will Carry Us:

Gary Tooze and Jordan Cronk both say the version you want is the 2014 Cohen Media Group Blu-ray, though. Sadly, both are out of print, but the film can be streamed via Amazon Prime for a rental fee.

The Wind Will Carry us opens with an extreme long shot of a car traversing a winding road as the inhabitants argue over directions.

This may not resonate with anyone else, but revelation number one for me was that this sequence ties The Wind Will Carry Us to another one of my all-time favorite movies, Groundhog Day. Here’s how Ryan Gilbey describes the beginning of that film in his BFI Modern Classics monograph on it:

The first thing we see is a completely blue screen. Phil’s opening line gives a hint of what lies in store for him. ‘Somebody asked me today: “Phil, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be?” And I said to them, “Probably right here.”‘

On ‘here’, his hand moves into view. He is gesturing at the middle of the vast blue void. The place where he would most like to be is in that void: the middle of nowhere, off the map.

Now consider the opening dialogue from The Wind Will Carry Us:

BEHZAD: Where’s the tunnel then?
CREW MEMBER: We’ve passed it.
BEHZAD: When?
CREW MEMBER: Someone’s been sleeping!
BEHZAD: Where is it?
CREW MEMBER: We’ve passed it, back near Biston.
BEHZAD: We’re heading nowhere.

The two films are similar in the way they depict the repetitious events that comprise the core of their respective narratives. Just as we only need to see Phil Connor’s morning routine once in its entirety to understand the subsequent reappearance of bits and pieces of it to mean that he’s living the same day over and over again, so too is Kiarostami able to rely just on shots this increasingly well-traveled road to depict Behzad’s second through fifth phone calls:

Both films also advance their plots at crucial moments via characters quoting poetry, and even their endings have the same bittersweet flavor. Despite everything they’ve learned, Phil’s final line is “we’ll rent to start” and Behzad snaps a few photos of the mourning ritual he came to Siah Dareh to film on his way out of town:

More relevant to this month’s pairing is the cellar scene which takes place just over halfway through the film. Behzad goes looking for the home of the woman he has spied bringing milk to the ditchdigger named Yossef he has befriended from afar, ostensibly because he wants some for himself and his crew, but more likely in the hope of seeing her close up. Upon arriving at the correct house, he is directed by an offscreen voice to go down to the cellar.

“Why is it so dark here?” he asks. “There’s a hurricane lamp (Ed: !), it’s not dark,” the voice answers. “Is there someone down there?” Behzad asks. “Yes, Miss Zeynab,” is the reply. “Zeynab, come here, this gentleman needs milk,” the voice continues. Despite what the voice (which we will soon learn belongs to Zeynab’s mother) says, it is dark in the cellar: in fact, the screen goes completely black for about fifteen seconds after Behzad enters it. But then we hear a cow low and the same woman Behzad glimpsed earlier appears holding a lamp:

“Can you milk the cow for me?” Behzad asks. Then: “It’s so dark. How can you milk in here?” Zeynab replies, “I’m used to it. I work here.” He asks her age (16), whether or not she has been to school, and if she knows the poet Forugh Farrokhzad. Then, as Zeynab milks the cow, he flirtatiously recites one of Forugh’s poems, stopping occasionally to offer unsolicited interpretations of its meaning.

The poem concludes with the line, “the wind will carry us!” Behzad tells Zeynab that he is Yossef’s boss and attempts to command her to raise the lamp so that he can see her face. She freezes. After a few seconds pass, Behzad says, “at least light the ground so I don’t trip.” She rises and they exit the cellar together. As they walk, she asks how long Forugh studied. “You know, writing poetry has nothing to do with diplomas,” Behzad tells her. “If you have talent, you can do it too.” When they reach the door he asks how much he owes her. “Pay my mother,” she says, but as he walks away after completing the transaction she calls to her mother, “why did you take the money? Go and give it back to him.” She briefly peeks around the corner to make sure he turns to come back:

Scholar Hamid Dabashi famously called this scene “one of the most violent rape scenes in all cinema” in his 2001 book Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future but this is difficult for me to square with the fact that it’s tonally very similar to a later one in which a frustrated Behzad kicks over a tortoise:

That scene ends with the tortoise righting itself with little effort as Behzad drives away, and in a 2009 Journal of Film and Video article scholar Chris Lippard argues about the cellar scene that “[i]f there is much of the feel of a seduction here, there is also, to extend the metaphor, a firm and decisive no.” To me Behzad’s admittedly aggressive behavior is reminiscent of the petulant outbursts of a bored child. Because he does not appear to cause any lasting damage, it seems fair to say no harm, no foul.

Zeynab’s job as a basement milkmaid is just plain bizarre, but in other moments The Wind Will Carry Us definitely seems to have something to say about gender roles in Iran at the turn of the millennium. A spirited argument breaks out in a café when the proprietor Tajdolat observes that “[a]ll women serve. They have three trades: by day, they’re workers. In the evening, they serve and at night they work.”

To which her husband offers the rejoinder, “don’t men have a third job, too?” Later, Behzad’s hostess resumes her waiting on him and his crew one day after giving birth to her tenth child:

It also absolutely must be noted that the village of Siah Dareh is a character in its own right and looks fabulous in shots such as this night/morning dissolve:

Finally, another reason to pair this film with a Hurricane is because the color of the drink closely matches the amber hues of the barley fields that Behzad rides through on the back of the motorcycle of the doctor who attends to Yossef when the hole he is digging caves in:

The Wind Will Carry Us ends with Behzad washing the windshield of his car, then throwing a femur bone from a nearby ancient cemetery that he has been carrying around on his dashboard since the beginning of the film into a creek:

The final images follow the bone as it floats downstream accompanied by the film’s first non-diegetic music:

I mentioned a number of similarities between The Wind Will Carry Us and Groundhog Day above, but left out the most obvious one. Behzad and Phil Connor both work in television, travel from the city to the sticks, get stuck there much longer than they intended to, and leave transformed. How exactly and to what extent they are different is largely left to viewers to decide for themselves, which is one of my favorite things about both movies. The universe holds Behzad and Phil in place until they start to truly see what’s all around them. We can learn from their example to do so of our own accord and reap the same rewards. No one trip or cocktail is likely to change your life, but each has the potential to make it better as long as you’re paying attention. So, in the doubly apropos words of Omar Khayyam as quoted in The Wind Will Carry Us:

They tell me she is as as beautiful as a houri from heaven!
Yet I say that the juice of the vine is better.
Prefer the present to these fine promises.
Even a drum sounds melodious from afar.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual credits a recipe in Louis Muckensturm’s Louis’ Mixed Drinks as the inspiration for bartender Jack McGarry’s Massagrand:

When Jack first read Muckensturm’s recipe, he was reminded of the famed Café Brûlot, a postprandial staple of the grand French-Creole restaurants of New Orleans. Consisting of coffee, spices, sugar, and cognac, that drink is ignited tableside and ladled from a silver bowl.

The Massagrand has similar constituents, but is not intended to combust. The flavor structure is the same, but with stone fruit notes from eaux de vie and liqueurs, plus calamus, an interesting botanical that combines the qualities of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.

Which, cool! But I happen to own a copy of Louis’ Mixed Drinks. Here’s what it lists as the ingredients for a Massagrand:

• Take one teaspoon of sugar,
• One-half a bar-glass of Kirschwasser, and
• One breakfast-cup of strong black coffee

That’s it! But in McGarry’s hands this simple concoction became a cocktail with no less than nine ingredients including the (two) garnishes and a calamus tincture that needs to be prepared at least three days in advance. This is simultaneously exactly why I dig Dead Rabbit and why I don’t make drinks from it all that often: although it’s frequently the first place I turn when preparing for a special occasion, it isn’t a volume I reach for when I’m mixing just for me and my loving wife. The Massagrand may turn out to be an exception that proves the rule, though. Here’s how we make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Caffè Americano
1 1/2 ozs. Cognac (Rémy Martin VSOP)
1/2 oz. Cherry Heering
1/2 oz. Kirsch Eau de Vie (Alfred Schladerer Black Forest Kirschwasser)
1/2 oz. Mirabelle Eau de Vie (Trimbach Grande Réserve)
2 dashes Bittermens Transatlantic Bitters
2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled wine glass. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg and the oils from an orange twist.

I was originally drawn to this drink by the combination of coffee, cherry liqueur, and bitters which I enjoyed in Rafa García Febles’s Dale Cooper. According to Dead Rabbit, “[i]f espresso for caffè americano is not available, your favorite strong coffee will do,” but it seems hard for me to believe that someone able to source all the other ingredients wouldn’t also have access to a Starbucks! One thing that really might be hard for you to come by is the Mirabelle eau de vie, which we had to special order.

The Massagrand is impressively balanced considering how many assertive components it has. Coffee and kirsch in particular tend to take over a drink, but play together nicely here. The word which immediately springs to mind as soon as I take a sip is “sophisticated”: you can tell that the Massagrand has been around, but it isn’t desperate to show off. And it isn’t nearly as hard to make as the long ingredient list might imply, either, especially assuming you’re substituting something else for the calamus tincture, which is classified as a “substance generally prohibited from direct addition or use as human food” by the FDA and thus isn’t easy to obtain in the United States. The team at Dead Rabbit responded to an email I sent them inquiring about alternatives within 24 hours (!) to recommend Bittermens’ Transatlantic bitters, a neat product that their website describes as follows:

We’ve merged the great bitters of the world to create an aromatic bitter that is useful in such a wide array of drinks.

• From the most classic Aromatic bitters of Venezuela and Trinidad, we created a base that includes gentian, clove, allspice and cinnamon
• From New Orleans style bitters, we blend in angelica and anise seed
• From the iconic Italian Fernet, we fortify the bitterness in a touch of aloe and chicory
• From the Alpine Amaro tradition, we add in chamomile and dandelion
• From the tradition of German digestives, we incorporate cherry bark and licorice

In total, sixteen botanicals make up this unique aromatic offering.

If I had any doubts about what movie to select for this month’s pairing, this substitution clinched it. Dead Rabbit actually specifies eaux de vie by F. Meyer, a distillery in France, which is also of course where cognac hails from. The addition of Cherry Heering reminded me of The Passion of Joan of Arc, a French movie with a Danish director (Carl Theodor Dreyer) that also figures prominently in Jenny Hval’s song “American Coffee”! As if that wasn’t already enough, here’s how scholar David Bordwell describes the film in a 1973 monograph: “[i]n the context of film history, then, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc becomes significant as a summation of many major film styles of the silent era.” Sounds like the movie version of Transatlantic bitters, right? What could be more perfect?

Anyway, here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release of The Passion of Joan of Arc:

It can also can also be streamed via both the Criterion Channel and HBO Max with a subscription and on most other major streaming video platforms for a rental fee. Some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well. It will be interesting to see how many more places it might pop up next year when it enters the public domain (along with Steamboat Willie, by the way!) in the United States on January 1.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of just a handful of films that I know for certain I would have included on my hypothetical Sight & Sound Critics Poll ballot. In the book I quote from above, David Bordwell also notes that “[m]any viewers erroneously remember Jeanne d’Arc as a film composed entirely of close-ups,” which: this was definitely true for me for a long time! And to be sure, there are many such shots. Of Joan (Maria Falconetti), “suffering in black and white” (to quote Hval):

The priests and soldiers who sit in judgement over her:

And the people of France who watch her burn at the stake then rise up afterward:

The latter are almost exclusively shown as part of camera movements which include more than one person, whereas Joan and her tormenters are frequently depicted in single shots. These images are powerfully moving and/or disturbing, especially when faces seem to lunge at Joan like this soldier (whose uniform, according to scholar Stephen Larson, bore enough of a resemblance to those worn by British soldiers during World War I to upset that country’s censor) does:

Following my last few viewings, though, I’ve found myself thinking more about shots like the one of these mismatched windows:

Or this warped doorway, both of which show the influence of German Expressionism:

The Passion of Joan of Arc might be the most thorough application of the advice that John Ford (David Lynch) gives Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) in The Fabelmans that when the horizon is at the bottom or top of the frame, it’s interesting, but “[w]hen the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit.” The fate of the lone priest who dares to defend Joan, for instance, is depicted by alternating shots of just the helmets and spears of the soldiers leading him away and the horrified reactions of his fellow judges:

Or behold this shot of onlookers with Catherine Wheel:

There are interesting anachronisms like this fella’s glasses:

And this cannon which swivels not because 15th-century cannons were actually able to do that, but rather because the ones in Battleship Potemkin could:

We are also occasionally treated to multi-level compositions like this one which shows off the skills of legendary cinematographer Rudolph Maté as well as anything else in the film:

Finally, for my money the film’s most haunting moments of all are images like this one:

Now of course none of this is to say that The Passion of Joan of Arc‘s close-ups aren’t every bit deserving of their legendary status! Here are the lyrics from the “American Coffee” verse about the film:

I give you that time at the cinematheque (Give you that time)
I was watching La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
While I was having a UTI
I stared into Jeanne’s face, suffering in black and white
I’m sure I saw her wink at me
Then I peed blood in the lobby bathroom
The blood color seemed so insanely alive
Too alive, too alive to be just mine

Like Anna Karina’s Nana in Vivre Sa Vie, Hval feels connected to Falconetti’s Joan (who is also the subject of her earlier song “Renée Falconetti of Orléans”). I think the wink she imagines is interesting because this is how the characters in The Passion of Joan of Arc communicate with one another throughout Joan’s trial, with winks and nods and other small gestures:

One of the things that keeps me coming back to this film again and again is the mystery of when exactly the narrative shifts. Is this the precise moment when Joan realizes that Loyseleur (Maurice Shultz) is not really her ally or is the Kuleshov effect just doing its thing?

But here’s the verse from “American Coffee” which immediately precedes the one excerpted above:

I wonder who I’d been if I never got to go
Get a fine arts degree and American coffee
With irrelevant quotes from French philosophy
And we’d meet in the climax of a clever sci-fi movie
But that would just be, but that would just be, be stupid

The Passion of Joan of Arc is often described as an emotional experience, but it’s an intellectual one, too. One doesn’t really happen upon a silent film in this day and age–you have to seek them out. Part of what makes The Passion of Joan of Arc great is that it provides a lot of bang for your buck. It’s a master class in the film traditions of the early 20th century, just like Transatlantic bitters are a world tour in a bottle. But your initial reaction to it is liable to be the same one-word sentence I predict you’ll speak after you try a Massagrand for the first time: “wow.”

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.