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Angel
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Unshown and Unspoken
para Cristina
At the
moment, I’m in Paris. By the way, I’m not in Paris.
– Maria in Angel
Ernst Lubitsch’s Angel (1937) is among the cinema’s perfect films. That it is not routinely cited as
one of the director’s greatest achievements is puzzling and irritating – until
we realise that, while often richly funny, it confuses many spectators by not
strictly playing by the rules of the comedy genre. Not even the romantic comedy
genre.
Indeed, it is among Lubitsch’s most dramatic and suspenseful
works, pitched between the exceptional melodrama of The Man I Killed (1932) and the comedy-laced-with-sombre-moments of Cluny Brown (1946). But its suspense
is of an especially intimate sort: purely focused on the hesitations,
equivocations, doubts, feints and realisations that play out between the
members of a romantic triangle composed of wife Maria Barker (Marlene
Dietrich), husband Frederick Barker (Herbert Marshall) and lover Anthony Halton
(Melvyn Douglas). A film filled with silences, mute stillness, stark pauses
without undue musical underlining.
Is there another movie before Alain Resnais’ Mélo (1986) so agonisingly fixed on the
time it takes for a character, in a drawing room of one sort or another, to discover
a photograph, see a face, recognise a melody, or hear a name spoken? “Surprise
is the central motor of the film”, wrote Jacques Aumont in 1968, “becoming more
than ever the very method of the narration which, at every moment,
systematically avoids the conclusion almost ineluctably determined, within
Hollywood’s scriptural system, by the given premises”. (1) Resnais is only one
of many masters who appears to have secretly borrowed elements from Angel: the nervous trembling of the
heroine at a race track, seen through the binoculars of an observer,
anticipates Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946); the elaborate camera
movement along the façade of a high-class Parisian “social club”, showing all
transactions from outside, through curtains and windows, is reprised in Max Ophüls’ Le plaisir (1952); the signalling of
the daily chill in a marital relationship by showing both parties diverting attention
to their morning newspapers was picked up by Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941) …
Perhaps these filmmakers, too, wished to collude in
the general occlusion of Lubitsch’s film, to bury the source of some of their
(and cinema’s) best ideas? Whether he knew it or not, at the end of this
transmitted history, Stanley Kubrick also channelled Angel in his Eyes Wide Shut (1998): another prime drama of remarriage (or rather, the revitalisation of
marriage), played out against an exotically, fantastically artificial,
Europeanised backdrop of cities and salons and adventures …
With characteristic precision and deftness, Angel establishes its central subject in
an opening scene that involves a complex interplay of words and actions, looks and
gestures. Maria flies into Paris (from her home base in London) and immediately
checks into a hotel – under a false name, “Mrs Brown”. The desk clerk asks for
her passport – for many international relations are unsettled and confused between
the two World Wars, and such details need to be checked and recorded. Maria
keeps her cool and hands over the document. The clerk, now alone, notices the name
discrepancy. When Maria returns, the clerk (whom we will never see again in the
film) has made his decision: he addresses her as “Mrs Brown”, thereby sealing –
without any discussion or negotiation – their pact of complicity. Their secret
is mutually understood, and unspoken.
Maria is introduced to us, in these first scenes of
the film, as someone who can read the signs of interpersonal relations, and can
play the game of manipulating these signs – making her the perfect Lubitsch
heroine, we could say a mirrored alter
ego of the director himself. Anthony, on the other hand, is slower off the
mark. As an American visitor to this City of Lights, he is “taken for a ride” by
the cab driver, and then fooled by the playful masquerade of Maria, whom he
mistakes as the Russian Grand Duchess Anna (Laura Hope Crews). However, in a
sudden shift of character position and perspective that Lubitsch exploits
better than any filmmaker, Anthony then “turns the tables” on the real Duchess,
pretending to be an innocent in Paris only to see the sites by day … as he
eagerly awaits his “private” date with Maria by night.
There is much in Angel that is shadowy, mysterious, implicit – as Hollywood standards would have
demanded by 1937, but in a way that Lubitsch knows well how to bend to his own
expressive ends. The Russia/France political-historical subtext, involving the
desperate diaspora of the pre-revolutionary Russian aristocracy, is subterranean
but definitely present in the opening part of the story – anticipating films as
diverse as Éric Rohmer’s Triple Agent (2004) and Vladimir Léon’s documentary Mes
chers espions (2020). When the narrative switches to London, another set of
geopolitical conflicts is indexed (via the banter of seasoned character actors
Ernest Cossart and Edward Everett Horton).
But this is, of course, primarily a tale of love (and
desire), of relationships (and marriage), not espionage. On the sexual level,
the Duchess’ “salon” suggests a high-class brothel (or indeed a chain of such
joints across Europe!), and Maria’s prior connection to this establishment
conjures Catherine Deneuve’s adventures as Séverine in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967). In whatever way
Maria’s past is entwined with this place and its dealings, however, it surely
involved a precarious struggle for survival: when Anthony asks her, “Have you
ever been at the mercy of loneliness? Have you ever been a stranger in a
strange city’”, she replies, “Often”. And when he further inquires, “What did
you do”, she plaintively responds: “I cried”.
As a film addressing the Eternal Triangle of two men
and one woman, Angel is scrupulously
fair, and extra-special because of this: there is no obviously “weaker party”
or “fall guy” in this trio, hence no easy choice for Maria, and no easy point
of identification for us. Lubitsch serves up longing galore, and inherent
rivalry between the men, but no outright enmity (male fights and battles, as in
Hawks or Ford, always clarify and simplify these situations) – instead, friendship
between the two men is the order of the day, even (as foreshadowed in the
opening sequence of Maria and the clerk) complicity.
This is what makes the tension so agonising for us as spectators of the
unfolding drama: we truly cannot predict what direction it will go in, or how
it will resolve itself. There are several believable, even “fair” ways that it
could end.
Underneath – or hand-in-hand with – the treatment of
the triangle lies another theme, especially pertaining to the film’s investigation
of marriage. It has been adroitly identified by Cristina Álvarez López: “What happens to a
couple when the woman is left alone at home while the man goes out to work?
Commanding the men’s attention, an important telegram or a commitment at the
theatre cannot wait; but the films stay with the women, accompanying them in
their dissatisfaction and portraying their wounded pride”. Men’s world of work
versus women’s world of the emotions: this is Gertrud (Carl Dreyer, 1964) territory. Comparing the Lubitsch of Angel to the Philippe Garrel of Jealousy (2013), she suggests: “The
directors, instead of judging these central characters, conspire with the
impulsive, irrational, illogical feelings born within them, opting for a
narration full of ellipses and gaps, sudden revelations, unexpected shocks,
things unseen and unsaid”. (2) From this angle, Angel is truly a “woman’s film”.
It is also a work, typical of Lubitsch, in which all
social relations (including the most intimate) are “read”, deciphered, decoded
– by the characters as much as by us. Lubitsch and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson
are masters at the tagging, circulating and “re-semanticising” of elements
(tunes, objects, clothes, words) across the turns and phases of the narrative,
which are always decanted by the differential levels of knowledge each
character possesses (and the way in which the dialogue indirectly dances around
these different levels – talk is always coded here, which is another form of
unspokenness). Maria “claims” the music that has been offered to her by the
strolling player in a restaurant, and that music (as we shall see) is drawn
into the excruciating tension of events; the tag-name “Angel” itself is
transformed from a term of endearment to a code-word (to avoid the use of real
names), and eventually an identity – a cluster of values – that must be either
inhabited or rejected (“You’re not Angel” … “You must say goodbye to Angel”).
Edgardo Cozarinsky in “The Gaze of the Outsider”, his superb essay on Lubitsch,
illuminates the metaphoric motif of food (and its being eaten or not) in Angel:
Lady
Barker’s servants study the plates that come back from the dining table so as
to read the moods of their masters: Sir has eaten well, Madame has not touched
her veal, and his guest has minutely cut up his without so much as tasting it.
Their deductions evoke less the classic auguries, divining the future in the
entrails of classic beasts, than the minor characters of a late Henry James
novel, such as the Assinghams in The
Golden Bowl, relentlessly cast off by a central intrigue that ignores them.
(3)
As always in Lubitsch, this intensely cinematic
configuration of chamber drama depends on the spatial relation of adjacent
rooms, on doors opened and closed, on precise entries and exits from the
screen, on pointed re-framings by the narrating camera … and on the sudden
narrative ellipses created by contriving to place key moments of action
off-screen. This is, of course, the very essence of what was sold, at the time,
as the “Lubitsch Touch”; but it was always more than a matter of simple, sexual
innuendo (although that it is a prime part of its pleasure). In Angel, the moves of Raphaelson’s
superbly constructed (and brilliantly dialogued) script are married to
Lubitsch’s formalist tendencies in an almost paroxysmic way: four privileged
moments of off-screen ellipsis mark, very precisely, the key turning points,
and ultimate resolution, of this triangular drama. (We must understand the
scriptwriting device of the turning point in a suitably formalist way here: it is not just a significant dramatic event,
but also one that, in a split second move, rearranges the configuration of the
characters’ relationships.)
The first moment comes 20 minutes in, when Maria and
Anthony walk in a park at the end of their first (and, as it turns out, only)
shared night of love – an intimacy that “may or may not” have occurred,
according to the necessary mystifications and indirections the film deploys to
avoid censorship. They sit on a bench, talk and kiss (Charles Lang’s
magnificent cinematography here recalling his work two years prior on Henry
Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson) until,
off-screen, an old flower-seller beckons, and Anthony exits their
two-shot. Lubitsch then stages a boldly
extended take of 45 seconds (which is quite long by Old Hollywood standards): the
camera tracks behind Anthony as he approaches the seller, a sweet old dear who
has a bunch of violets already outstretched toward him. He pays her and doesn’t
let her give him any change (his line “Merci beaucoup” neatly recalling and
reversing the earlier scene with the taxi driver). As the woman manages her
purse, Anthony exits their shared frame. Her eyes track everything that
subsequently occurs off-screen: Anthony calling out for the now-vanished
“Angel” (the name he has given Maria), and running about in vain to find her.
During this protracted eye-tracking gesture, Frederick Hollander’s plangent
waltz score is held back until the woman, too, leaves the frame. In the next
shot, a coda to the scene, she decides to pick the discarded violets up, dust
them off and re-sell them to next pair of lovers along her park way.
The second major turning point offers, at 52 minutes,
an extraordinary reprise of the first, but in an ultra-condensed fashion (like
in the best cartoons, Lubitsch always uses repetition to speed things up).
Anthony and Frederick have become friends, since they realised they once
“shared” a woman in Italy during World War I; they have no idea that they now
share another (but Maria, elsewhere in the house, has already nervously
inferred who the “Poochie” is that her husband has invited over). Anthony looks
up at a picture on the wall – at first off-screen – which turns out to be an
old painting; then the camera whips down (it’s Anthony’s POV) to what we know
to be a photo of Maria, but turned away from view. Two-shot of the men sitting
together; as Frederick pours the drinks, Anthony leaves the frame (as he did at
the first turning point) to take a look at the photo. Then a 10-second pause,
as the camera stays on Frederick (as it did on the flower seller); lap-dissolve
to the next scene. No view of Anthony’s action; no playing-out of the
consequence; no off-screen exclamation (or off-screen sound of any kind: a very
ghostly effect). The unspoken and the unshown rule the scene. What breathtaking
economy and suspense!
The film’s third major turning point at 75 minutes is
not (perhaps could not be) elided: alone in his study, Frederick finds out, via
his servant and a telephone call, about his wife’s secret trip to Paris on
their privately chartered plane – an inference painfully confirmed by her very
next proposition to travel there again “for shopping”. The event, however, is
granted a poignant, elliptical coda some moments later, tied into the
representational style of the first two turning points: Frederick rings
Anthony, and as the latter’s servant lays the open phone down on the table, we
realise that Frederick is hearing his rival play the “Angel” theme on the
piano, the worst possible confirmation of all … but without, once more, any
reverse shot of Fredrick’s reaction.
With a pleasing circularity, Angel returns to, and ends in, Paris – at the Russian Salon of the
Grand Duchess, no less. Something established in the earlier sequence is here
amplified: the arrangement of this establishment into multiple, separate
chambers (Lubitsch need not bother to show us the other, “communal” spaces).
“Waiting rooms”, as the expression goes. And what waiting happens here! Anthony
with the Duchess; Frederick with the Duchess; and another spot to which the
Duchess is called to confer with an “old woman” … I won’t say too much, for the
sake of those yet to experience this film for the first time, but what it
builds to and where it closes is extraordinary: a decision (taken off-screen,
no discussion heard), and an act (shown as simply and plainly as possible, in
one 23-second shot, without expressionistic shadows) that is perfectly pure –
without words, without any sound until the final reprise of the music before the
final fade-out. And with no facial expression either, by the end, whether in
mid-shot or close-up: with supreme eloquence, mastery and tact, Lubitsch bids adieu to his characters by framing and
filming them from the back.
When I look back today over the PowerPoint
presentation I made in 2014 for a university lecture on Angel, I see that my final slide bears a (mainly rhetorical)
question heading: “Is this the greatest final shot in cinema?” (This frame comes a few moments before the final one reproduced above.)
Maybe, in his career too swiftly truncated by death at
age 55 (which is what I was in 2014), Lubitsch achieved only one other ending
that is more sublime than this: in The
Man I Killed, where the playing of a piano and a violin, and the presence
of an older couple, cement a man and woman in the face of all the
near-impossible obstacles that the plot has set up. (4) Here in Angel, the film of surprise, we know
that things could go either way – as Aumont remarks, “everything is equally
possible”, anything can happen. (5)
It’s true,
the dream is over. But it doesn’t have to be.
– Maria in Angel
MORE Lubitsch (book review): How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride 1. Jacques Aumont, “Angel”, in Bernard Eisenschitz & Jean Narboni (eds), Ernst Lubitsch (Cahiers du
cinéma/Cinémathèque française, 1985), p. 122; reprinted from Cahiers du cinéma, no. 198 (February
1968), p. 41. back
2. Cristina Álvarez López, “Fantasy Double Features of
2013”, MUBI Notebook, 13 January
2014. back
3. Edgardo Cozarinsky, “Le regard de l’outsider”, in Ernst Lubitsch, p. 77; a later reworking
of this essay appears as “Lubitsch como outsider”
in Cozarinsky, Cinematógrafos (BAFICI, 2010), pp. 25-30. back
4. On this ending, see William D. Routt’s magisterial
essay on Lubitsch, “Innuendo 1.5”, LOLA,
no. 1 (2011). back
5. Aumont, “Angel”,
p. 122. back
This text was initially published in Portuguese
translation by the website À pala de Walsh on 18 March 2021. © Adrian Martin 2014 / 2021 |
