Issue 194 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published February 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review
Heat
Dir:Michael Mann
Heat is an action movie with attitude, pretensions even.
Al Pacino is LA cop Vincent Hanna. He's so obsessed by his job that his (third) marriage is on the skids. Robert De Niro is crook Neil McCauley. He's so obsessed with the job that he daren't form any relationship he can't leave 'in 30 seconds flat'.
Neil has his gang of bank robbers. Vincent has his homicide and robbery squad, including one Native American (Wes Studi) and one black (Mykelti Williamson). These last two obviously aren't invited to the parties which former detective Mark Fuhrman revealed during the O J Simpson trial are held by the LAPD every time they 'kill a nigger'.
So far the plot follows a formula taken from a thousand cops and robbers films, notably Walter Hill's The Driver. But Michael Mann's film is a cut above most of the competition.
Firstly, Mann is an excellent director of action films, as his Last of the Mohicans proved. The pace is crackingly sustained throughout--no mean feat in a film that lasts nearly three hours.
Secondly, Heat is strikingly shot. It's common to talk about films as if they were novels--about plot, character, dialogue--without acknowledging that they are also a visual art. Mann's film impresses this fact on even the most recalcitrant observer. The colours and view from Neil's apartment recreate a Hockney painting. The lemon yellow triangle of sand against the blue sky as Hanna arrives to question a snitch, and the sudden blaze of white as Neil's car enters a tunnel keep the eye riveted to the screen.
Thirdly, Mann clearly wants to say something about emotional relationships and the pressures of modern life. All the relationships in the film--between Vincent and his wife, Neil and the girl he meets, gang member Chris and his partner--are central to the plot. They are also all falling apart under the pressure of the lives led by the protagonists, usually much to the detriment of the women involved.
So the film takes the brave step of periodically breaking off from the action to examine the advancing decomposition of one or other of the relationships. This is ambitious, but only half works. The half that doesn't work is the social content. Precisely because the characters are so completely removed from any community, real workplace or social environment, the pressure on the relationship is too one dimensional to be convincing.
The only exception proves the point. The black parolee who becomes the gang's substitute driver is shown having to get by flipping burgers, under the thumb of a racist boss, but he is supported by his girlfriend. It's the least important of the relationships in the film, brilliantly sketched in a few minutes of screen time. But it's more engaging and effective than any other in the film precisely because it's the only relationship not totally abstracted from real life into some other world of professional careerism, albeit of a rather unique kind.
The historical perspective of Last of the Mohicans allowed what minimal social content there was--questions of class and colonialism--to stand out clearly. But Mann is much more uncertain where contemporary social issues are concerned.
There are other faults. Although in their one scene together Pacino and De Niro are a joy to watch, in some other scenes Pacino overacts. It's as if he's worried that, in another part of the film, De Niro is outclassing him, leading
him to caricature his own trademark gestures.
Nevertheless, Mann's ambitions, even if not fully realised, are more interesting than other people's more limited successes. As film makers Powell and Pressburger used to say, 'Better to aim at Naples than to hit Margate.'
John Rees
Ulysses' Gaze
Dir:Theodoros Angelopoulos
'In my end is my beginning.' At one point in Ulysses' Gaze, A (Harvey Keitel), the central character, cites this line from T S Eliot's poem East Coker. The original Ulysses' journey described just such a circle--from the island of Ithaca to Troy, and then, after many years wandering, back to Ithaca and his wife Penelope.
A too is on a journey. A controversial film director, he returns to his native Greece after 35 years in America. He doesn't stay, however, but begins a restless search that takes him across the Balkans. He is looking for three undeveloped reels of film made by two Greek brothers called Manakias before the First World War, perhaps the first ever taken in the peninsula.
A believes that these lost reels may somehow contain the key to the tragic modern history of the Balkans, today once again wracked by war. All the ambiguities, contrasts, conflicts in this area of the world are reflected in their work, he says. As in Angelopoulos's best known film, The Travelling Players, set in mid-century Greece, a journey is used to explore history.
But A's obessession with the reels reflects a more personal quest. He is a disillusioned man of the left. In one scene he and an old friend stagger drunkenly through the streets of Belgrade, mourning their youth in Paris. They toast the women they knew, great film directors, May 1968, and 'a world that hasn't changed'. Their lost hopes are symbolised by the barge on which A travels down the Danube, and which bears a huge broken statue of Lenin.
A travels in time as well as space. He wanders into moments from his own past and that of the Manakias brothers which recall the other wars that have tormented the Balkans. And, like the original Ulysses, he meets and loves various women (all played by Maia Morgenstern).
But the end of his journey is no return home to Ithaca. A traces the lost reels to besieged Sarajevo, where he finds them in the care of an old film archivist (Erland Josephson) who describes himself as a collector of vanished gazes. What A discovers there leaves him at the end of the film bereft and alone, telling a lost Penelope about the whole human adventure, the story that never ends.
Ulysses' Gaze is a demanding film to watch. Angelopoulos has a reputation for leisurely takes, and the film is full of long slow pans and tracking shots. Nevertheless, if one has the patience to persist, one is well rewarded.
Though the entire film is very beautiful, two sequences in particular stand out. One is a wonderful scene, at once comic and melancholy, in which A, middle aged, wanders into his own childhood in a prosperous Greek family in Romania. One long take packs in a whole history through a succession of new year parties--1945, as A's father returns from a concentration camp, 1948, as the new Stalinist regime tightens its grip, 1950, as the family prepare to leave for Greece.
Another kind of beauty is revealed in the final sequence, set in Sarajevo and at least partially filmed in Bosnia. We watch the inhabitants enjoy a temporary respite from the siege as mist descends on the city, blinding the gunners and the snipers. The Sarajevans throng the snow covered streets, to watch plays, hear concerts, dance, or just stroll, in what proves to be a tragically deceptive moment of peace.
Throughout the film we are constantly reminded of the borders that divide the Balkans. Like the brothers Manakias, A ignores them in his wanderings. But those who are not so lucky are constantly present--from the Albanians being expelled from Greece as he crosses the border, to the Bosnian family he befriends. Perhaps the greatest significance of Ulysses' Gaze, lies in its sympathetic identification with the victims of the petty nationalisms that, once again, threaten to tear the Balkans apart.
Alex Callinicos