|
A German recreating 17th-century America in Spain cannot help courting dislocation, so it goes with Wim Wenders and his odd Hawthorne adaptation. The outsider's perspective is promptly declared, the first face belongs to Chillingworth (Hans Christian Blech) on his way back to Salem after his sojourn with the natives, the tale is halfway over. Hester Prynne (Senta Berger) already wears the marked frock, she's summoned to town for her humiliation and, in a distinct Wenders gag, Pearl (Yella Rottländer) giggles as the black-clad puritan leading the arrest slips and falls in the mud. The New World is a windswept coast with planks precariously laid over endless sandy expanses, blocky shrouded figures orate from the pulpit: "This liberty corrupts us all!" Prynne is a slumming-sexpot pariah, Chillingworth comes back from the woods with a clinical eye for vengeance, flabby-chinned Dimmesdale (Lou Castel) keeps fainting on the edge of the widescreen. Reaching out to the heroine is Mistress Hibbins (Yelena Samarina), the home-incarcerated "witch" who, decked out in the governor's judicial peruke, takes a torch to the gown she's wearing in a soupçon of Johnny Guitar delirium. A lumpy mélange of naturalism and melodrama, German and Spanish and Russian players bumping into one another, a score like a pile of bricks. Peculiarly compelling bits of misdirection, Anthony Mann for Chillingworth's entrance (cp. Victor Mature in The Last Frontier) and Straub-Huillet for the period décor. "My father is dead, I am looking forward to tomorrow..." It finishes back on the shore with Rüdiger Vogler, ready to escort Rottländer to modern times and Alice in the Cities. With William Layton, Ángel Álvarez, and Alfredo Mayo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |