New from Criterion: Unforgettable Women

Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

When David Lynch premiered his TV series Twin Peaks in 1990, no one had ever seen anything like it: a surrealist teen soap opera, Peyton Place or Splendor in the Grass reimagined by René Magritte. His fans couldn’t get enough of it, and Lynch couldn’t get it out of his system. He kept the series going for two seasons (though he only directed half a dozen episodes). He filmed a prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, in 1992 – the year after he made Mulholland Drive – and rebooted the series in 2017. It was the last major project he worked on before he died last year.

Fire Walk with Me has now been absorbed into the whole Twin Peaks story, but it had a checkered career. It was booed when it was screened at Cannes – rather an ungenerous response if you consider that Lynch had won the Palme d’Or the year before for one of his worst pictures, Wild at Heart (it looks like it was made by a Lynch imitator). With his hushed images of wasted adolescents and Ron Garcia’s hushed lighting beautifully restored in the Criterion disc, the film fits snugly in the Lynch pantheon. Like the series, Fire Walk with Me is part poetic horror, part camp parody. The first thirty-five minutes, with Lynch himself as the deaf FBI bureau chief and Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Dale Cooper making psychic connections in his dreams with the person he knows is going to be a serial killer’s next victim and a nonsense narrative about agents receiving coded orders from a mime, takes a lot of patience. But as soon as we get back to Twin Peaks and those wayward, forlorn teenagers, the Lynch magic takes over, seeping into our bones like a recurring nightmare.

The original Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of a body floating near the mill in what was once a thriving mill town. It’s the corpse of Laura Palmer, the beautiful prom queen, beloved by the whole town. The two-hour pilot suggests that Laura and her cadre of devoted followers are leading secret lives more terrifying than we could have imagined. Lynch creates a landscape for Twin Peaks that is more shocking than that of Lumberton, the setting of Blue Velvet (1986). In Lumberton there is still a curtain between the high schoolers and the underworld ruled by the psychotic, drug-addled Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). In Twin Peaks the curtain has disappeared: the kids interact regularly with the Frank Booths; they’re addicted to cocaine and participate in orgies. Fire Walk with Me, which takes us up to the moment of Laura’s murder, digs deeper into that curdled innocence. It’s more explicit and more detailed. Laura (Sheryl Lee) is its protagonist, damaged beyond repair when she began to be raped as she was blossoming into adolescence. The story of Twin Peaks is so well known by now that it’s hardly a spoiler to identify her assailant as her father Leland (Ray Wise), though Laura has hidden the truth from herself; her imagination has reinvented her rapist as a slender creep named Bob (Frank Silva)with streaming dirty blonde hair and a growl like a feral animal’s. There has never been a movie that brought us closer to the anguish of incest and rape; you would have thought that its daring and sensitivity might have drawn more attention.

Much of the film focuses on Leland Palmer’s psychopathology, and Wise gives an amazing performance. But it’s Sheryl Lee’s lacerating portrayal of Laura that you can’t get out of your head afterwards. It’s central to Fire Walk with Me in the same way Naomi Watts is central to Muholland Drive. Lee was also sensational as the photographer Astrid Kirchherr in Iain Softley’s bio about the early days of The Beatles, Backbeat, but she hasn’t had anything close to the career she deserves. She’s a gorgeous camera subject but she’s too unconventional and uncategorizable for Hollywood; if she’d come up in France during the New Wave, filmmakers would have gone wild for her, and today’s French directors, especially the women, would know what to do with her. Lynch, bless his heart, brought her back at the end of the Twin Peaks reboot, and she’s still mesmerizing.

Édith Scob in Eyes Without a Face.

Among classic horror films, Georges Franju’s 1960 Eyes Without a Face is one of a kind. Shot in lustrous black and white by Eugen Schüfftan, with Gothic production design by Auguste Capelier and gowns by Givenchy and Marie-Martine, it’s defiantly art-house, and its approach to the grisly material is both clinical and esthetic. Yet the precision of the filmmaking, the lingering, lyrical imagery and the Poe-like narrative – adapted from a Jean Redon novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (who wrote the source material for Vertigo), Franju’s assistant director Claude Sautet (on the verge of beginning his own directorial career), Pierre Gascar and the author – has a magnetic power. It’s not remote, and it isn’t repulsive, like Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, released the same year.

Pierre Brasseur plays Génessier, a celebrity surgeon haunted by the death of his wife; their daughter, Christiane, was badly injured in a car accident, her face irreparably damaged. Obsessed with finding a way to replace her beauty, Génessier kidnaps a series of pretty young women, removes their faces and attempts to harvest them onto his daughter’s, but eventually the new face always crashes, so Christiane is a sort of ghost, wandering the halls of her father’s mansion, mourning the loss of her lover (Michel Etcheverry), who believes, like all the world, that she is dead. (Génessier identifies an unknown corpse, actually that of his first surgical victim, as Christiane.) His assistant in this ghoulish routine is Louise (Alida Valli, from Carol Reed’s The Third Man), who is in thrall to him because his attempt to rebuild her damaged face worked. The cast also includes Brasseur’s son Claude, as a police inspector.

Christiane wears a white mask that seems to be made of porcelain with slits through which her eyes peer searchingly. Édith Scob, who plays the role, is unsettlingly petite, like a doll, and her hair, hanging over the mask, looks like doll hair. The Givenchy gowns were designed for her, and they’re exquisite, but her body doesn’t seem connected to them, and when she walks she holds her arms back, as if something inside the dress were restraining them. When we finally see her face, it’s all slashes. There’s a jaw-dropping sequence where Génessier, with Louise’s help, removes the face of his latest discard. They are wearing surgical masks, so the only expressive part of their faces we see are their eyes. If Scob resembles a doll, then the patient suggests a puppet whose maker is fixing an impurity in the wood from which she was fashioned. One of the film’s piercing horror touches is the collection of caged dogs Génessier keeps for his experiments. (They get their revenge on him at the end.)

Christian Petzold’s extraordinary 2014 film Phoenix stars Nina Hoss as a Jewish woman whose face is damaged during concentration-camp experiments; she survives and presents herself with a new face to the Gentile husband who betrayed her. Phoenix has its origins in both Vertigo and Eyes Without a Face. The magisterial beauty of Franju’s picture glows on the Criterion disc. So does Scob, who has the presence of a great ballerina. This was her second film; her career went on for six decades, until her death in 2019. This is the second week in a row I’ve had the occasion to refer to her work in Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, where her character dies a third of the way through the movie but hovers over the rest of it – not like a ghost, as in Eyes Without a Face, but like the spirit of a bygone era in French art, which was, of course, what she was.

Anjelica Huston in The Dead. 

Writing about The Dead, one has to resist the temptation to use the adjective great in every sentence. So let me load up my opening paragraph with greats and move on. It was the greatest achievement of the filmmaker who was the movies’ greatest reader, a man who put Dashiell Hammett, Stephen Crane, Carson McCullers, Herman Melville, Flannery O’Connor, Malcolm Lowry, Rudyard Kipling and Genesis on the screen. It was also his last: he filmed it from a wheelchair and died of emphysema before it opened. (Among the extras on the stunning Criterion disc is Lilyan Sievernich’s lovely documentary John Dublin and the Dubliners, which includes footage of the filming and interviews with the cast.) And I believe it is the greatest movie adaptation of a timeless work of literature.

James Joyce’s story is famously interior; it takes place almost entirely in the head of a university professor named Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) early in January 1904 in Dublin, when he and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston) attend the holiday party his Aunts Kate (Helena Carroll) and Julia (Cathleen Delany) and their niece Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie) give annually. Gabriel, his aunts’ favorite, knows they will call on him, as always, for the carving of the goose and the presentation of an after-dinner speech and also to lend a hand with whatever little social gaffes ruffle the surface of the event. This year the incorrigible drunkard Freddy Malins (Donal Donnelly) took the abstainer’s pledge but has already broken it by the time he shows up. Everyone loves and respects Gabriel, but at this wonderful feast that represents the joy of community, he is more interested in himself, First he’s obsessed with his speech, which is stuffy and pompous, though the gracious, grateful reaction it gets from the three hostesses redeems it. And then he’s focused on the night of lovemaking he has planned at the Gresham Hotel with Gretta while their children are at home with the housekeeper. The party turns out to be a spirited night of nostalgia – of remembering the dead. But Gabriel keeps himself apart from the others. When an old Irish ballad, “The Lass of Aughrim,” reminds Gretta of a boy who loved her, his reflexive response is jealousy. Only after she relates the boy’s unhappy fate does he make the human leap to empathy, to “generous tears.” Only at the end does he truly join the community of the living and the dead.

Tony Huston’s screenplay is a model of what can happen when an adaptor truly moves inside a text – of how much freedom he can find, how much opportunity for dramatic space. The script is extremely faithful to Joyce’s story; in terms of content, all he adds are a short, comical scene between Gabriel and Freddy and, more radically, a new character, Mr. Grace (Seán McClory), the headmaster at Gabriel’s school, who recites a mysterious love poem called “Broken Vows,” enhancing the musical entertainments and recitations section of the party that comes between dancing and dinner. But there’s a significant change in perspective: we aren’t up in Gabriel’s head. That decision dramatizes the story because both Hustons, writer and director, have to engage the other characters directly to reveal Gabriel’s thoughts. Only in the last ten minutes of the film does the screenplay revert to Joyce’s prose, putting Gabriel’s thoughts directly onto the soundtrack. One can’t imagine Tony Huston making any other decision. He’s working from one off the most glorious pieces of writing ever consigned to paper; if he’d thought he could improve on Joyce he’d have been a fool.

The shift in the story is in Gabriel, from self-absorption and emotional isolation to fellow-feeling and acknowledgement that he belongs to a community. In order to accomplish that shift Joyce has to move, through Gretta’s story about her dead sweetheart, Michael Furey, from Gabriel to her – to allow Gabriel to leave his own petty concerns behind (including his unreasonable jealousy of a long-dead seventeen-year-old) and cry for the sorrow of the woman he loves. Donal McCann gives a remarkably supple performance as Gabriel, but the movie couldn’t work as it does without Anjelica Huston, whose portrait of Gretta locks so tightly onto Joyce’s conception that you feel you’re reading his character through her. Other actresses have done this in literary movies: Vanessa Redgrave in The Bostonians, Judy Davis in A Passage to India, Maggie Smith in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. The transference, if that’s the right word, feels even more miraculous to me in Huston’s performance because you can’t hear the lock click into place; it’s as if she had been waiting all along at the bottom of the story, at the bottom of Gretta’s character. The moment that clinches it is the one where Gretta pauses on the stair at the end of the party, transfixed by the tenor Bartell D’Arcy’s a cappella rendition of “The Lass of Aughrim,” which throws her back into her memory of Michael Furey. It isn’t a replication of the scene in Joyce’s story; it’s that scene fully animated. I’ve been watching that scene in The Dead for almost forty years and I still haven’t the faintest idea how she does it. This is the kind of work that can make you worship an actress.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.