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The Sterile Cuckoo
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I must have first seen The Sterile Cuckoo when I was 10 or 11 years old – probably on
television, where I caught its re-runs obsessively over a period of several
years. In my pre-pubescent and early adolescent phases, it was the perfect
mirror of my crippling shyness and loneliness: I equally identified
with/projected into both the boy (Wendell Burton – who later became an
evangelical Christian! – as the ‘too normal’, conservative Jerry) and the girl
(Liza Minnelli as a pre-Manic Pixie named Pookie), and certain images and
scenes (such as the couple’s agonising phone call, focused solely on Pookie’s
end of it) burned into my brain forever more.
In my head, The
Sterile Cuckoo joined a special group of melancholic movies, most of them
also seen on TV: The Member of the
Wedding (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), East
of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), A Walk with Love and Death (John Huston, 1969), Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969), even (believe it or not) Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), are in that altogether personal genre. And
if I had caught it at the time, Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969) would doubtless have gained access to this cadre of films.
More particularly, it was among the works – another
grouping which includes Kazan’s Splendor
in the Grass (1961) and (believe it or not) Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) – that filled me
with a sad intimation of ‘how things will turn out’ in life and (especially)
love: something in the way these movies leapt, at the end, to an ashen
epilogue, long into the narrative future, sealed that deal. And The Sterile Cuckoo starts right in that
wintry mood, before its fumbling young lovers even meet, with a song that tells
us that the Great Day of life (which is, apparently, Saturday) will be
anticipated, lived, but then vanish too soon … “and we will remember, long
after Saturday’s gone” (more on this song – also burned into my brain – below).
But I haven’t seen The
Sterile Cuckoo (or heard that song) ever since, for 50 years! And it is,
for sure, a striking film to revisit today. Pakula, making his directorial
debut (he had already had served more than a decade as Robert Mulligan’s
producer, and been a part of the movie industry another decade before that),
appears to have chosen a ‘small’ subject that he could completely control. The
co-ordinates or parameters of this adaptation of John Nichols’ 1965 novel are
literally reduced: much of the film involves only the two main actors in
otherwise completely depopulated natural locations (green fields, empty roads,
a cemetery … ).
The découpage is, at all points, extremely precise, economical: every shot (by veteran
cinematographer Milton R. Krasner, just shy of his career’s end) was clearly planned,
and no shot is merely redundant. The first time Pakula uses a closer-in shot/counter
shot volley, for example, it carries a palpable sense of virgin discovery (the sort
of discovery that Bertolucci once ascribed to Pier Paolo Pasolini during the
filming of his debut, Accattone [1961]) – or rather, of personally mastering a given technique for the first
time.
This overall reduction tends to give The Sterile Cuckoo, at many moments, the
air of a genuinely minimalist film
(like – in a completely different dramatic register – Mike Nichols’ stunning
and today underrated Carnal Knowledge [1971]). The impression of minimalism arises, in part, from the soundtrack:
every single music cue in Fred Karlin’s score is a variation on some segment or
other of his composed song “Come Saturday Morning”, with lyrics by Dory Previn
and vocal performance by The Sandpipers. How market-driven this decision was in
relation to hoped-for (and duly achieved) success on the pop charts, I do not
know – but it definitely becomes an integral part of the film’s style and
effect. And it marks a difference from the more typical, dominant scoring
practice (then as now) of a tune for each mood, a melody for each main
character (a mode which belongs as much to Ennio Morricone as to, say, John
Williams) …
Although I am certain it is a coincidence, there are
uncanny echoes (to my eyes, at least) of an avant-garde feature made the
previous year, Philippe Garrel’s Le
révélateur: in the specific, highly wrought composition of two
‘decapitated’ heads (in both films belonging to the central man-woman couple)
swimming in a flattened scenographic space (an echo of Samuel Beckett?); and in
the more general detail of scenes composed on the inside/outside poignancy of
somebody driving or walking away, or being taken away on a train, from someone
else, with the camera taking the place of the departing one. Plus: Pakula and
Garrel alike are fond of ‘couples walking’ scenes, and both of them signal
estrangement through the subtle action of one partner being literally ‘out of
step’ with the other.
And wasn’t it around that time that Garrel said of his
cinema: “Let madness come …”? But I’m getting ahead of myself on that point.
One may well surmise that Pakula was not aiming for
anything especially experimental in his debut (or at any other point of his
almost three-decade directorial career). Stylish, arresting, different – yes.
Pakula decisively broke away from the more naturalistic (but still very
‘worked’ and exact) manner of Mulligan. Pakula made bolder, more modern
decisions of stylisation, as many toiling around him were doing: in his use of
the telephoto lens, for example, or his propensity for delivering a virtuosic
long-take soliloquy. In a TV interview, Jane Fonda once engagingly evoked the
‘macho’ approach of certain directors who would set up – at the most
challenging moment of the shoot – a long take sequence to not only prove and
demonstrate their own mastery, but also test the skills of cast and crew. The specific
example was her soliloquy scene in Pakula’s second film, Klute (1971).
Pakula, however, is not an especially exhibitionistic,
show-off director. His most modernistic film, the startling The Parallax View (1974), is so
fractured and angular because the paranoiac subject-matter strictly demands it.
He declared in 1976: “I hate camerawork for its own sake”. What he aims for,
above all, is an integrated, logical and expressive patterning of events, places, and the characters’ behaviour within
framed space. Already, in a special Pakula section of the September-October 1976 Film Comment, Richard T. Jameson
insisted on what he called this “patternisation”.
Let’s consider the category of screen events. Here we
must credit the talent of writer Alvin Sargent (he basically created almost
every detail in the script, retaining very little of the novel), who has often
helped provide the quasi-minimalist, elliptical intensity of a certain type of
‘chamber drama’ for works including Paul Newman’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) and
Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980). The Sterile Cuckoo is structured as a
succession of buses arriving (and depositing a character, like in several Otto
Preminger movies), cars or trains leaving, rendezvous in deserted spots …
Pakula is fond of pointedly reprising the use of a place: a cavernous sports
stadium, for instance, or a deserted chapel.
The Sterile Cuckoo is a very physical film (an aspect of Pakula’s art
I was first cued to by Daniela de Felicibus’ smart piece in the December ’73
issue of Australia’s Lumiere magazine):
every psychological and emotional interaction is given its correlative in the
embodied concreteness of the mise en
scène – differences in people’s placement within the frame, their ways of
carrying out actions, their deliberate, carefully choreographed, evenly-spaced-out
movements. Even the usual frolic-montage trap of the couple running and
laughing (which Roger Ebert, at the time, dubbed the Semi-Obligatory Lyrical
Interlude) gets a few inventive gestural tweaks worthy of Malick or Takeshi
Kitano.
But we are not dealing here with a film of mere
expressive touches: Pakula’s stylisation of The
Sterile Cuckoo is remarkably consistent and systematic – but with a
naturalism of characterisation and performance that saves it from Bressonian
schematism. Take particular note, for example, of the way he exploits just-off-screen space, what suddenly enters
a frame or just as suddenly departs from our field of vision for some moments –
a technique that Pakula exploited often, especially (I would venture) when
getting into comedy (Starting Over [1979], another underrated gem, offers a rich case study). In the crucial,
agonisingly prolonged bedroom scene of The
Sterile Cuckoo (as the couple is about to have sex for the first time),
Jerry’s nervous delay-tactics are pictured in a flurry of noisy actions below
and to the left or right of the subtly mobile frame (which keeps returning to
the initial, cramped angle). This had nothing to do with constrictions imposed
a location, since I am sure it’s a perfectly controllable, designed and built
set; rather, Pakula contrived the device of a constricted space for expressive
purposes. The architectural ideas become showier and more ostentatious, but no
less subject to the rule of pattern, in Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men (1976).
Above all – and once again in the realm of uncanny
resonances across film history! – The
Sterile Cuckoo could be well used as a textbook illustration of Alain
Bergala’s long-developed ideas about the creative use (and dynamic system) of intervals in cinema: i.e., the
choreographed distances between characters (which can be pictorially stretched
or closed, minimised or exaggerated); and, at the very same time, the distance
which the camera takes from the action it frames (which is also a matter of how
different views are edited in relation to each another). Just look at how
Pakula enlivens what was already, in 1969, a hoary visual cliché: the camera
tracking inexorably away (as if mounted on the fictive train or car) from a
lonely figure left behind (see first cluster of screenshots above). Among Bergala’s
favourite exemplars of the interval process are Ingmar Bergman, Abbas
Kiarostami, Jean Vigo and Kenji Mizoguchi but, as far as I’m aware, he’s never
noticed Pakula’s dexterity in this area (I’d personally also add John Cassavetes and Wes Anderson
to the list.)
Pakula displays an extraordinarily integrated grasp of this intricately
cinematic logic in his first feature; he spelt it out in the Film Comment interview with Rick Thompson.
Part of the tension is the constant change in spatial relationships,
which I love to do: the spatial relationships between the characters and their
world changing during a scene, as well as the spatial relationship between
characters changing during the scene.
First, let’s note how literally far out this film regularly gets: the vistas (often shot telephoto)
are vast, and the characters are often far, far away – remarkably so for a film
of this type (the type being, loosely, romantic comedy – a genre with which
Pakula had a unique relation, as also in Starting
Over and Love and Pain and the Whole
Damn Thing [1973], although the majority of critics were far happier to see
him work over the mystery-noir-thriller template, and caricatured his career
curve accordingly – even Pakula himself, in his ’76 Film Comment feature interview, obligingly mentions only his
‘thrillers’).
Next: the wide open spaces often occupied by Pookie
and Jerry when they are alone, versus the exaggeratedly agglomerated,
packed-in, truly claustrophobic frames of social activity (almost as messy and monstrous
as the decadent party in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds [1966]) that have recently become the trademark of the
Zürcher brothers – a dialectic that Bergala mentions as regularly operative, if
on a gentler pendulum, in Garrel.
Look at this: a one-shot vignette, which begins with
Pookie and Jerry embracing. Then, troubled by their own urges (this is before
the consummation scene), they quickly separate. At this point, the camera zooms
out – way out – to reframe their emotional freeze in the vastness of the green landscape.
More generally – in fact, I would estimate that it
informs and structures every scene of the film – there is the careful work on
the ever-changing distance between Pookie’s and Jerry’s bodies in the scene,
and in each frame where they are both present.
In several scenes, Pakula makes use of a
distance-marking (and intensifying) device that Bergala noted in Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963): the vertical
objects that, for several beats, seem to magnetically keep the characters apart
– tall trees in one instance, gravestones (a brilliant variation) in another.
I’ve concentrated here on stylistics, but there’s
plenty left to discuss in The Sterile
Cuckoo. Two notable things for me today: the curious way (characteristic of
many movies of the time) that the film dances around the topics of pregnancy,
and mental illness. Neither, tellingly, is mentioned or named as such. Pookie –
without ever seeing a doctor for any diagnosis (a detail that infuriates Jerry,
repeatedly) – experiences both the onset and the termination (within her body)
of pregnancy; it’s curious that, in 1969, this still seems such a taboo area of
representation. The ambiguity of what happens in this plot thread – with nobody
around to corroborate, did she only imagine she was pregnant, how did she know she lost it? – anticipates the premise of
the Dardennes’ Lorna’s Silence (2008), where a woman’s
belief or conviction that she is pregnant matters just as much as its ambiguous
physical reality/unreality.
This ambiguity takes us to the mysterious matter of
Pookie’s psyche. Is she cracked from the word go, does she get cracked by the
failure of the relationship (and/or the loss of a child)? There’s a deliberate
obscurity surrounding many of her large-scale off-screen actions and behaviours,
doubtless a residue of the fact that Nichols’ novel is narrated from Jerry’s
perspective: the relationship with her father (he is glimpsed, closed-mouthed,
in the opening shots); and her seemingly total non-relation to scholastic study
(a shock moment comes when Jerry discovers that she has quit her education).
All her manic jokiness – not to mention her desperate dependence on Jerry –
seems to be in compensation for something in her past that is never fully
articulated, only suggested. And what grim destiny is Jerry waving her off to
at the end (the waiting on a bus bench precisely echoing the opening scene),
after what seems (especially in the penultimate hotel room scene) like a total
mental and emotional breakdown on her part: back to home and Dad, really? The
extremely downbeat, long-held final frame of a decentred Jerry hints at his vague
awareness of this abyss.
It is a characteristic of several Alvin Sargent
scripts – not to mention Western culture in general between the 1950s and the
‘70s – that mental illness (of various kinds or, in the all-purpose lingo of
the time, “madness”) tends to be confused with many other
things … if, indeed, it is really mental illness at all (remember that the ‘70s
is also the era of R.D. Laing, Fernand Deligny, and A Woman Under the Influence, among other works and practices that bravely
contested the very notion of mental illness and its medical ‘classification’). The Effect of Gamma Rays …, adapted from
Paul Zindel’s 1971 autobiographical play, is (as I argue at length in my 2018
audio commentary on the Indicator DVD) a prime example of the categorical
confusion that arises from a volatile, almost hysterical mix of memory,
resentment, blame, projection, revenge motive, preconceptions of gender (women
are flighty and so emotional!), empathy, and unresolved “unfinished business”:
the behaviour of the mother (Joanne Woodward as Beatrice) can be ascribed,
alternately or all at once, to drink, mental illness, “bad mothering skills”,
financial desperation (she’s a single, working class Mum with two teenage
daughters, after all), emotional imbalance, past trauma, or just a plain, nasty
temperament (“unable to love”).
In the case of The
Sterile Cuckoo, this entire complex is dialled down – somewhat – to the
kooky Pookie type, closely keyed to Liza Minnelli’s then-burgeoning persona: a youthful,
high-spirited, funny-zany, “scatterbrained” girl who’s just “longing for love”
and lovably, eccentrically nuts, cuckoo! (The very words that come to me
suggest that a comparative study of Barbra Streisand’s screen roles is in order
here.) Until, that is, she clearly exhibits a “problem” (of functionality and
adaptation to anything resembling ‘normal’ life – the very thing she has railed
against all along as the drab, conformist regime of “weirdos”), and has to be
carted off somewhere or other.
It would be interesting to study the symptomatic terms
in which reviewers of the time – as well as Pakula (who, we are told by Film Comment, “once considered a career
in psychoanalysis”), Sargent and Minnelli herself – described this character
and her trajectory. But the pictures may speak louder (and truer) than the
words …
MORE Pakula: Consenting Adults, The Pelican Brief, Rollover © Adrian Martin 5 & 6 April 2022 |
