If You Love It So Much Why Don't You Murder It?

La Bete Humaine(1938)

Directed By Jean Renoir

“La Bete Humaine”, by Jean Renoir is a grim and macabre noirish film about people doomed by childhood, genetics, or just plain star-crossed fate to destroy and defile the things they love and care for the most.

Roubaud is an ostensibly normal trains-station master, married to Séverine a beautiful woman of questionable virtue. Lantier is an engineer on a Locomotive who is occasionally seized by fits of manic rage which he believes come from his fathers and grandfathers history of alcoholism.

Only the roar of the trains calm Lantier’s inexplicable rages. Roubaud seems to love his wife, and due to a complaint from a wealthy patron asks her to see if she can have her wealthy land-baron godfather named Grandmorin, smooth things over.

Séverine agrees, but after a stray joke about how it’s possible that he could be her father, is forced to confess to having long ago been the old man’s mistress.

This drives Roubaud to decide to kill Grandmorin, and forcing Séverine to help, so that they may be “bonded” together anew and forever. They commit the murder on an all but empty train, all but empty save for Lantier.

When the cops question Lantier however, he says he saw no one. To “win him over”, Séverine begins an affair with him. Here’s where things got complicated.

There are many ways to view “La Bete Humaine” from this point on in the film. Séverine may be incapable of love as she says due to being a teenage mistress to her godfather (or possibly real father), and intends only to use Lantier to get rid of Roubaud whose become a melancholy gambling louse since the murder. The picture perfect femme fatale.

It’s also possible that though she has never loved anyone prior to Lantier, that her feelings for him genuine, and that she sincerely sees no way for them to be together while she remains married.

Roubaud’s absence from the later half of the film, his diminishing importance and only referential presence, would seem to argue in favor of Séverine as manipulator. After the murder he seems unconcerned with Séverine affairs, as if avenging his/her honor removed any desire he had to preserve it thereafter.

Lantier’s violent actions are equally mysterious; either he is destroying what he cannot have, because he cannot have it, or destroying what he wants most deeply for reasons beyond his control. Is it the “drunkards in his blood” that eventually triumph over him, or do his own resentments and fears over this specific situation get the better of him?

The trains connect all the characters together, but the trains also have no resting place, they are in constant motion save for the occasional breakdown. They could symbolize the alienation of the characters from the natural world around them, or from normal healthy relationships which travel makes tenous.

The trains mostly serve director Jean Renoir, in setting the tone for the brisk pace of the film and providing opportunities for excellent cinematography.

Their use as symbols is less fruitful than the questions of the motivations of the characters who inhabit and surround them.

Though it’s arguable that no one truly loves anyone else in this film, I believe I will remember "La Bete Humaine" (the Human Beast) as a love story more than a noir or crime thriller. That is to say I side with team-Séverine was being genuine with Lantier.

It’s only after we’ve been made to feel for the characters and to truly and fully hope with them that they may escape their predicaments, that the full force of the tragedy can take effect.

I was much more impressed with “La Bete Humaine” than I had expected to be, it has none of the pacing or acting problems I normally associate with films of this era (though at least one review from the films release complained of Renoir “jumping too fast from scene to scene” and the characters being difficult to comprehend.). Its story was timeless in the best possible ways, and its execution close to flawless, at least as far as I think I understand Renoir’s aims.

A quick peruse of a summary of Emile Zola’s novel of the same name, tells a much darker and broader tale, with more characters, more deaths, and goings on long after the film’s version ends. Focusing on Lantier and Séverine, their relationship and the murder, Renoir forces us to ask these questions about why we destroy the things we love.

Roubaud destroys his relationship with his wife, which we discover only later was not ideal when the film began, but certainly not in smolders as it is later. Séverine has many opportunities to leave and start again herself. The trains are always coming and going. Why does she remain where she is most miserable?

As for Lantier why does he do what he does with regard to Séverine, and why does he hold back earlier in the film?

Was he afraid she would leave him after he became useless?

Early traumas come back to haunt our two desperate lovers, who though connected to the constantly coming and going trains and their illusion of freedom, are permanently attached to their rails of their own destinies and mangled desires. For better in the short term, and worse in the long.

Join The Party

Carlos(2010)

Directed By Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas’ “Carlos” is six hours of sound and fury signifying very little.

We follow bygone terror-celeb “Carols The Jackal” aka lich Ramírez Sánchez from his early days of soviet schooling to terror attacks at OPEC, to eventual irrelevance discussing “Lawrence Of Arabia” at a school for African insurgents.

What do we learn, gain, or feel? Not much.

Typical rise from rags to bitches story, and the eventual downfall of the young prince who gets greedy.

Though Carlos is resolutely insulted by any suggestion that he is motivated by financial gain, or any gain other than “the cause”, he is accused early on in the film, and accurately of valuing things his life, liberty, and reputation over “the cause” (which is pretty mutable).

Causes are interchangeable for Carlos, anything “anti-imperialist”(and there doesnt seem to be too much of a fixed definition here either) will do. Venezuelan born, Carlos comes to be involved with the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and something called “The Armed Wing of the Arab Struggle”. Human beings are little more than avatar’s of political ideologies (exemplified in the OPEC attack scenes where delegates are divided between friend, foe, and neutral states)

This may be true to the spirit of the 60’s and 70’s radical politics of those who rejected humanism and “non-violence” as a bourgeoisie value at best, and counter-revolutionary sabotage at worst.

Carlos’ opinions are inherited from his socialist father who sent him to be educated in the USSR, and as such don’t require too much explanation.

He lived a comfortable middle class life as Illiach, before his birth as “Carlos”, and despite his revolutionary ethos, he never steps outside of its confines.

Prostitutes, drinks, drugs, stylish hotels and expensive multi-story safe houses, and all the power lunches and intense power-meetings you would expect from an episode of “Entourage” (but not as entertaining).

I didnt think him to be Ghandi, but I didn't expect a lefty Dean Martin either.

Carlos’ brand of terror is different from the displays of mass-chaos and devastation we associate today with Al-Qaeda or the Mumbai attacks. The OPEC attack involves only one or two accidental deaths, and functions more like political theater than anything else.

The second episode in the series, which is divided into three pieces, is the most exciting and by the time we reach the airplane debacles the most absurd. Critics have rightly pointed out this middle passage could be (and probably should have been) a film unto itself.

The almost comical predicament of terrorists, whose high jacked a plane but for bureaucratic reasons can’t find an airport to land in safely, could be a short play by Samuel Beckett or Don Delilo, but Assayas stretches it out an entire additional episode to show the detailed and typical downfall.

Carlos is comfortable as “mastermind” but not so much as "martyr”, and doesn’t become the kind of terrorist we know today, more concerned with body count and sheer terror than anything else, at least until his wife is imprisoned.

Than in action movie fashion “this time it’s personal”, and an ineffective though highly publicized bombing campaign begins.

“You have to follow my instructions absolutely. I demand complete revolutionary discipline.”, he tells his soon-to-be German feminist wife on their first meeting. In response she promptly and without another word, gives him a blowjob. It’s good to be famous.

International terror for the most part seems a sexy proposition in “Carlos”; kill all the cops and officials you want, and have all the sex you can stand, have a smoke, and enjoy yourself. "I don’t normally drink beer, but when I do its Dos Equis." The revolution will provide.

In the end an overweight D-list Carlos is made redundant by the collapse of the USSR. He “converts” to Islam (in name only) to endear himself to the surviving Arab and African cells still engaged in armed struggles, but in the gap between the early 90’s and rise to media prominence of Al-Qaeda (whom the real life Carlos has expressed being fan of from behind bars) there was little in the interest in the poor man’s version (or rich man’s or hipster’s version) of Che (who had already become that version of himself after his early death).

It’s better to burn out than to fade away.

Carlos is a series about celebrity at the extreme political fringes. The recent film “Bronson” understood the theatrical aspects of its character and how they can obscure personality. “Carlos” seeks this same sense of sleek style with its numerous out of period post-punk songs in the soundtrack, several of which are by “Wire”. The songs add a music video appeal to the humdrum historical proceedings, and despite their lack of context, prove one of the films more enjoyable and memorable qualities.

Where “Bronson” and Warren Beatty’s “Reds” kept an even balance between self-mockery, fact, and mythologizing, Carlos remains bloody serious to a fault.

The series is ike a friend at the political fringes whose long since become dull and predictable to talk to. Monty Burns to Lisa Simpson: “My God are you always on?”

The series is superior to the “The Red Riding” trilogy, and curious parties who enjoy historical biopics will likely find interests in “Carlos”, but if the film’s anti-hero were fictional rather than “historical” (I’m not gonna touch the issue of “real”) than this series would be regarded as juvenile power fantasies and vague left-wing fetishism and sloganeering, and not just a reflection of these “socio-political forces” manifested in a dull subject.

Though there are some good moments, “Carlos” is a pretty good example of why the revolution should not be televised.