rapture


				In many ways, each time we go to the movies we hope to fall in love. We’re looking for a "relationship," a link between ourselves and the events on the screen, a correspondence between that self and the outside world – a new way of looking at things. We want to leave ourselves for a while in order to find ourselves again, to forget the dreariness and pain of life and escape to that other life where such things can happen, where we can be free to either succeed or fail, love or lose, dream or dare without consequence. In doing so, we enter an ambiguous space between the self and other, reality and ideal, terrestrial and cosmic, predestined and possible – all the things love is – where we become elevated and un-civilized, validated yet challenged, aroused and somehow transported. And when the lights come on and we must leave that place, we hope to carry with us an understanding that though it was all a dream, it was so beautiful at the time to think it could be real.



	for Cybele

Philosophers from Descartes, Kant and Hegel all saw love as a voyage to supreme Good and absolute Spirit – in Jungian terms, to the core, Edenic Self oftentimes obscured by age or civilization. As such, the story of Eden itself becomes a parable of socialization, where man, on leaving, learns to repress the archetypally feminine qualities of imagination and spontaneity – qualities also associated with the child – giving himself over again only when abandoning his ego to the throes of dreaming and sleep or romantic obliviation. That’s why the best love stories often take place in nature (seen many futuristic romances?), for the stuff of love is elemental: the flame of passion and the breath of release, the water of renewal and the ground of death and rebirth. We go to these movies because they restore us to our selves – the forceful drives, the unceasing, often purifying, sometimes destructive powers within we’ve somehow sacrificed to civilization and given over to commuting, housework, child-rearing: in other words, to growing up and becoming part of society.

At the same time, love is also a way of discovering an other outside ourselves (the allure of so many cultural-difference romances, from Romeo and Juliet to Mississippi Masala) and of experiencing something perhaps totally different – a vacation from the self, like the act of sleeping, or dreaming. For when someone gives us a part of themselves, we become a part of them, also, relinquishing our

ego to or for that other we recognize as both peer and superior, teacher and student at once. (It’s why I suspect most mainstream critics don’t actually love the movies; they seem almost relegated to them, as a job, or – worse – a marriage, rather than as carrying on a delirious affair; they don’t seem willing to give themselves over to what they’re watching, to humble themselves before an – eek! – possible equal.) As film lovers, we’re all whores, dreaming ourselves into new, potentially profitable ventures every night.

Gothic romance, however, demands more from us than even that. It is often so high-blown, so carried away by its own stormy devices and cruel conventions, you must suspend not only disbelief but often belief as well, its S&M dynamics relying not so much on a trust in the evil of the oppressor than in the assumption that he might be a victim equal to his variously victimized wife, daughter, or lover. Such stories are often less about the amendment to or perpetuation of a social order than the cutting of that authority down to size – and that less by suffering as by patience and understanding.

(If You Know Him, He Will Come.) Thus the tyrant becomes the peer, and the cycle of victimization truly ended. Into the bargain, man is returned to the nature he has sacrificed in the attainment of civilization (the Gothic construct erected to protect himself from the world of relation) and woman to the role of equal she enjoyed in the Garden before the Fall.

When Rapture was released in September of 1965 by Twentieth Century-Fox, it met with no remarkable critical response. TIME seemed to appreciate it, others found it a mediocre movie notable for its acting. Brendan Gill of THE NEW YORKER was plain rancorous. Although it shows up from time to time on midday and late-night television, the film was quickly forgotten; even Thomas and Solomon’s THE FILMS OF 20TH CENTURY-FOX: A Pictorial History (1979, Citadel Press) regards it no more than casually – "An unusual and very tragic romance."

Yet the film holds up and, with careful consideration, reveals layers of understanding not apparent on first viewing; it may even be read as a key work in the career of a little talked-about director, British-born John Guillermin. Known chiefly for his skillful and efficient jobs on expensive action-adventures, Guillermin here takes a disarmingly artful and low-key turn, with much softer material than usual. Indeed, many aspects of the production make it seem like a major studio’s big-budget attempt to break into the art-film market,

from its extreme reticence and detachment, "lyrical" love scenes, severe angles and at times ponderously slow pace, to the enlisting of Gunnel Lindblom from Ingmar Bergman’s acting stable.

Rapture shares with other Guillermin dramas primarily in its concern with the conflict between nature and civilization. Like Agnès, his main character here, the director demonstrates an affinity with the film’s Brittany coast locations, their flat countryside, dramatic cliffs, and restless seaside. Many of his films made similarly extensive use of the outdoors, and more than a few have featured characters such as Agnès who are closely allied with nature and their surroundings – the 1976 King Kong remake, for instance, a parable of man’s evolution from jungle to techno Trade-Center heights and falling, or returning to the earth – a subtext also of his earlier Tower[as of Babel]ing Inferno. Even the notoriously awful sequel, King Kong Lives, as well as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and a couple of Tarzan movies he did in the fifties and sixties fit well into this thematic frame. Although only a part of the rich and deeply moving whole of Rapture, the theme provides an excellent reference point for a more rounded analysis of this sadly neglected work.

The story, freely adapted by Stanley Mann from a treatment by Fellini collaborator Ennio Flaiano, was based on the novel RAPTURE IN MY RAGS by Phyllis Hastings, whose other work, if

her 1973 Gothic, THE CONSERVATORY, is any measure, also addresses the issue of women’s Eden versus masculine Society. Rapture details the transition into maturity and rationality of a lonely and more than slightly odd young woman: Agnès, a fifteen-year-old convinced by most of the people around her that she is mad when she seems in fact merely withdrawn, frequently found engaged in a slightly backward fantasy life involving her doll, some seagulls, and the seaside itself. She’s played by Patricia Gozzi, in an interesting

turnaround from her role three years earlier in Sundays and Cybele, in which she portrayed a relatively stable twelve-year-old who helps a disturbed young man readjust to society. There, she played Earth Mother to a downed pilot; here she is again a child of nature, lying in the grass, cavorting on the beach, standing in the rain, wearing primitive clothing and no makeup, and reaching up to her seagull "brethren" overhead.

While daydreaming one day, Agnès pretends to be a scarecrow, and decides to construct such a figure herself. "I want something of my own – my very own," she says, and her words may remind viewers of the similar sentiments of many

teens who find, or get, themselves pregnant. Indeed she is experiencing an awakening sexuality, as we see in an early scene in which she caresses herself roughly while Karen, the maid, carries on upstairs with a friend, in one of a couple of aspects reminiscent of the

same year’s Repulsion. Each film – as suggested by their titles – is an answer to the other, one dealing with the descent into dissolution and homicide of a deranged young woman, the other her redemption and vindication.

Agnès makes the effigy out of her father’s clothes and, in one of the film’s truly suspenseful moments, sees him come to life when a fugitive from the law (Dean Stockwell) appropriates the clothing for a disguise. The scene suggests the creation sequence in James Whale’s Frankenstein, with driving rains and harsh winds and Stockwell lurching about as though

newly reanimated when, in fact, he’s wounded and near death, and bolsters the effect of the girl’s fantasy as his "creator." (The story also bears similarities to the 1942 film Talk of the Town, also featuring a fugitive given refuge by a couple women, who has philosophical discussions about the nature of the law with a cold, dispassionate third-party male.) Agnès, of course, is in love with him from the start.

Men have been portrayed as fabricators of their own love objects at least since Athena sprang from Zeus’s head and Eve from Adam’s chest, but woman as such a creatrix, despite her position as true biological progenitor, is a rare thing indeed. There are subtextual hints of this in the recent Guncrazy as well as similar Mrs. Soffel, as in Susan Seidelman’s Making Mr. Right – all, tellingly, the product of woman directors. (Three out of four of these dream-lovers come sprung from prison, indicating the severity of the repression of what they represent in ordinary women’s lives.) Agnès’s creatrix-role reinforces her position as goddess and suggests the film as her dream of agency and independence, the scarecrow she fashions her own masculine persona at a time when many previously "kept" women were readying their own powerful identities, too, with the advent of the Women’s movement. We

	understand this to be her dream from an earlier shot of her lying on the ground pretending to be her scarecrow-self, his eventual vivification a triumph of the visionary will and imagination and a heretical resituation of the Genesis story. It also suggests Agnès as a new Virgin Mother without the benefit of a husband – generating her own, in fact, as the fugitive who adopts her father’s clothing is himself named Joseph. Presiding over all of this is the grim figure of Agnès’s father, l’Arbeau (Melvyn Douglas), a former judge who had some years earlier fallen from grace with himself and brought his daughters, Tempest-style, to this self-imposed exile.

Resentful and ashamed of the backward Agnès, he treats her scornfully throughout most of the picture, an attitude we later find is rooted in guilt over an episode involving his late wife, whom he had falsely accused of infidelity before making an attempt on the life

of her imagined suitor. Questioning his own capacity to judge other people, he becomes obsessed with "justice" and also taken with Joseph, seeing him as a victim of the same kind of justice-gone-wrong he rails against in the broadsides he prints in his study, which he distributes among the townspeople even though he knows they go unread.

His position as judge, as well as the biblical rages he is prone to, indicates him as a sort of self-loathing God. Accordingly, he is often found looming in discovery of characters caught in forbidden acts (as when Agnès and Karen steal the suit of his Agnès is to stuff to make her scarecrow), meting out judgment ("None at all!" he declares, in reference to alleged similarities between Agnès and her mother), and administering punishment (the beating he gives his daughter when he discovers she has spent the night with Joseph). The setting itself is an extension of his own brooding mind, for this is an angry God, as the Gothic extravagances of the stark interiors and crashing waves are constant reminders. His omnipresence extends

even beyond his seeming to appear around every corner when characters do wrong, however; his moodiness pervades every frame, his exile casting its guilty and isolated pall over the landscape, making him, also, one with the elements.

This is a significant characterization, for it has the audacity to imply, amongst its seemingly heartfelt religious trappings – even more pronounced in the novel – that Original Sin may reside less in a fallen Man as in an imperfect or tragic God, to whom the earth he created is a purgatory it does not represent to his daughter, to whom it is paradise. That there are three primary edifices in the movie indicates a correlation or communication between them, all representative of the civilization He has created in lieu of His own (supposedly) lost divinity: the church, home, and a nearby asylum to which Agnès fears she is fated, indicating a splitting of the formerly unified facets of the family and womb into their separate spheres of counsel, comfort and refuge. Divided, now, the insanity of one infects the other until there’s nothing left but fear and fantasy and a suffocation of the natural, uplifting (the girl and her seagull yearning) feminine creative force.

Joseph, in his position as l’Arbeau’s surrogate son (made, after all, in the father’s image, out of the old man’s clothes), is given to represent the figure of Christ: both father and son at once, as he is seen reflecting images of the elder in two key sequences. The

	scarecrow from which he was "made" is built upon a cruciform frame and hung on another cross for support; one lap dissolve reinforces the association when it takes us from a shot of the framework into a church scene, and another, shortly before the film’s ending, fixes both Joseph and the cross conspicuously in the same frame. When he spills out of the paddywagon, as from someone’s unconscious, it’s impossible to say from whose obscure heaven – l’Arbeau’s, Agnès’s, or Karen’s – he’s been delivered. His fugitive status – a sailor arrested for brawling with civilians, he grows more desperately wanted as one of the gendarmes wounded in his getaway comes closer and closer to death – strengthens the Jesus-connection; his appearance, on a Sunday, no less, is

suggestive of a resurrection and nursing back to health by Agnès and Karen, indicating the latter as a sort of Mary Magdalene.

All of which would add up to a lot of hooey were it left at that, for a Christ needs someone to redeem. So, in a recapitulation of an earlier sequence in which l’Arbeau throws Agnès’s doll from a cliff and we see it shatter on the rocks, in the end when the gendarmes

		have finally caught up with Joseph he leaps from the same cliff in effort to swim to safe cover ("The tide is out!" Agnès calls, as she had to her doll, earlier), and he, too, smashes on the rocks, blood streaking his forehead and cheeks like the striations on her doll’s face. When Agnès rejoins her father afterward, all is forgiven between them and the girl has assumed a caretaking role. Joseph’s death has freed her – from her fantasy world and, ostensibly, from the earthly, physical world of which she was so much a part – and brought her closer to her father; at the same time, that father is reunited with the gentler, compassionate counterpart he had earlier mourned in himself. Though the water rushes in to cleanse Agnès, it is really l’Arbeau who

receives the redemption. Humbled before her as Lear before Cordelia or Oedipus at Colonus, he is freed now from the mythical need to rule or govern, exempted from the judge’s role even exile had not cleansed him of. The pagan power of love thus has the authority to heal even fallen God.

About the only way many modern people may return, anymore, to this restorative nature is in dreams, when we relax the authority of the ego and submit to the will of the unconscious, be it a personal or a collective one. The process of dreaming itself is a manner of deconstructing the material of consciousness, which we equate with civilization, to tear it down to its essence and return it to its

preconscious state of Nature: why so many fantasies begin or peak with a certain set of characters or situations only to have them dwindle by the ending to a select few. For Agnès, her and her family’s odd excursions to the social world suggest this very conscious material, which the child of nature needs to reduce and distill back to its element if she is to survive.

The first of these stints appears at the beginning of the film, as if to reinforce its primary, originating significance. As the credits roll, the family car is dwarfed by the flat, gray landscape, but as the camera cuts in to survey its occupants they take on an enormous and monolithic significance all their own, representing, as

in other women’s films with similar beginnings – compare, for example, the 1960 Carnival of Souls and 1962 Cabinet of Caligari – the unified facets of the ego, about to sunder. They are headed, paradoxically enough, for the marriage of eldest daughter Geneviève, suggesting this occasion as the point at which Agnès’s rational, socialized self splits off from the core personality at the beginning of the dream. Composer Georges Delerue’s free and pastoral theme music traces their car to the church and inside, where the crash of the reception band’s cymbals shatters the impression of unity contradicted even in the car by Geneviève’s enigmatic snickering, and introduces Guillermin’s tracking-shot set piece of various characters’ gluttony and self-indulgence in the dinner line and on the dance floor. This raucous sense of community is itself soon broken by the attempts of a would-be Lothario to impose upon Agnès, who has huddled in a corner of the cloak room. When she breaks from him and runs into the streets, Guillermin and cinematographer Marcel

Grignon’s transition from a previously continuous, dollying camera style to a jagged, handheld method indicates the break from even this sense of cohesion and signals the, in fact, dreamlike nature of reality, it’s so antithetical to Agnès’s perspective. All these disjunctions, then, hearken back to the parents’ primal rift, the psychological moment in which her personality was first formed.

When the film veers back to the Brittany coast, it’s a relaxation into the hypnagogic borderworld where Agnès is most at home. A tattered doll in the nearby blockhouse suggests her fractured identity, the unexplained

hash-marks on its face the incomplete development of a child who knew her mother too little – a mother returned to only in dreams, as demonstrated in the scene in which the new, extended family gathers to watch home movies of their idyllic life before the father’s

	fall. In these, which function as a kind of riposte to Polanski’s incriminating Repulsion family snapshot, the happiness and togetherness of the sisters, dressed attractively and playing in the brilliant sunlight, reinforces the unifying nature of the mother-father harmony on Agnès’s ego. (For a more detailed portrait of such constellation, see Anne-Marie Miéville’s short intro to Godard’s Hail Mary.) The silence of the images, their randomness, the whirr of the projector and the rapt faces of the spectators all lend the pictures a surreal, almost mythic quality: their existence on screen is so far different from their lives now, it seems more an idealization than a document of earlier times. When l’Arbeau freezes her image as the mother drifts ghostlike toward us on a screen illuminated by the light of memory it’s an

effort to maintain a false idealization, for it’s only later that he confesses to Agnès that "Your mother died without ever having loved me." His telling her this as she prepares to make her getaway with Joseph enables both her flight – to reality, freed at last from the unreality of his mythologization – and his ability to let go of the innocent he had held so unfairly in his grip.

If for Western men the dominant myth of civilization is the Oedipal story of transgression and recompense, then for women it’s the tale of Persephone abducted from her mother’s side by Pluto, where she is kept in the underworld but for periodic returns topside with the changing of the seasons, and where she learns to be content and to rule as Queen. This also is Agnès’s story, in essence, her home-movie heaven with its triunal feminine identification with the mother and Geneviève suggesting also the matriarchal harmony that supposedly preceded Judeo-Christianity and its legends of the Fall. The shattering of that community due to her father’s jealousy is suggestive of similar accounts of this matriarchy’s eradication at the hand of the new patriarchal hordes, Agnès’s removal to the coast reiterative of the goddess’s absconding to the underworld, where she remains, both politically and ecclesiastically, today. Oedipus ends with a blinding, Rapture with quiet revelation.

The regular intrusion of the gendarmes onto the scene suggest a restless mind unable to find perfect peace and sleep, Joseph a renegade bit of psychic energy who must be captured and returned to repression or risk having him disrupt the dream. As a sailor, he represents the understanding that both Agnès and her father are, truly, free. The lovers themselves’ yo-yoing between home and the outside world suggests both an inability to totally "wake up" and the constant call of nature for civilized man, just as Joseph’s

attempted flight aboard a ship suggests both his inability to cross back over into his world (followed by Agnès, he’s driven by duty to return her to her home) and Agnès’s unreadiness to leave hers. When at last they succeed, it’s short-lived, she still ill-equipped to deal with society. The announcement late into the picture that the officer Joseph wounded has died signals the final dissolution of the "policing" ego, Joseph’s doomed leap a flight into that same sort of eternity.

In most "men’s" film, this leap suggests a passage into myth, as in Shane’s ride into the horizon, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s dive off a similar

precipice, or Dirty Harry’s discarding of his tainted badge. Here, however, it signifies exactly the opposite. Clutching Joseph’s blood-soaked body, Agnès confesses, "I always knew you were real," indicating his passage now out of the world of fantasy and into that of physicality and truth. For Persephone, fated to stay in the underworld but for her occasional forays outside, the dream isn’t so much a reducing of things to their entropic core but a magnification of them into a fully-rounded whole; the reality and order most men stereotypically seek to reestablish in their films asserts itself in the Gothic romance instead as bittersweet fate, the reluctant truth to which its characters all are relegated. When in the end the camera reassumes the gull’s-eye perspective it had so happily adopted earlier, Agnès’s disinterest is a disappointment to us, as viewers: we, too, feel earthed, the legendary fourth wall between viewer and

		image falling for us just at the moment it goes up for her. We are caught in the ambiguous state between dream and maturity she had recently inhabited, and the romance – ended, for her – has, for us, just begun. Romance, by its very nature, appeals to our most basic, primal selves in an often irrational fashion. As a result, it’s all the more important that the actors in Rapture appeal to us directly and with unaffected technique, if only to match the directorial construction of certain scenes (and even if that’s an invitation to excess). In the role of l’Arbeau, the fallen God, Melvyn Douglas abandons the tongue-in-cheek suavity of the roles which

marked his career as a younger man for a more private and solemn characterization, communicating not only the hardened and obsessive side of the old man but the conflicting emotions beneath that exterior as well. In his scenes with Stockwell his enthusiasm

	at having an audience tells us something of the loneliness which troubles him, and in some of the scenes with Gozzi he reveals his tenderness toward her, his secret dependence and inexpressible anguish over her condition. The force of his wife’s loss echoes throughout his performance, so that the fear we may feel toward him is tempered by a recognition of his hurt. The desolation in his appearance when Agnès returns to him after her flight with Joseph absolves him of all wrongdoing. As the brooding intellect of the movie, he stands in direct contrast to Joseph’s openness and instinctuality. This pairing and contrasting is communicated in an

early scene, recapitulated later on, in which l’Arbeau discusses with him his theories on "human understanding and the law." They are placed in a single low-angle shot pitting either of them on opposite sides of a mirror, characterizing each of the qualities described in l’Arbeau’s dialogue – the judge’s stern, almost biblical harshness making him the very image of the Law itself and contrasting the tender, non-judgmental honesty of the fugitive. Between them, on the bureau top, stand a bronzed, militaristic statuette suggesting

the judge, and a soft-focus photo of his late wife, indicating Joseph’s gentleness. "The law is meaningless unless it is compassionate," he tells the young man with an insistence that implies his own lost innocence and compassion and suggesting, also, Joseph as the image of him in his greener days.

Stockwell, who in later years had enjoyed somewhat of a vogue akin to his friend Dennis Hopper’s, also succeeds in a difficult and disarmingly complex role. His flight from the gendarmes for little cause, fling with Karen in spite of Agnès’s obvious infatuation, and theft from l’Arbeau and betrayal of his

trust (and general thoughtlessness in the commission of all these acts) add up to a character audiences would be hard-pressed to warm to or regard so uncritically. Yet Stockwell’s unactorly approach emphasizes Joseph’s natural, unaffected attitude; he’s hard to dislike, because the ambiguity about him is in his total lack of ambiguity – he’s all on the outside. His role is practically built upon his boyish good looks and seeming care-lessness: not governed by intellect or morality, he’s the physical aspect of the film, acting according to his instincts. When returning to the l’Arbeau house, he’s like a dog finding its way back home.

Where he comes across strongest, however, is in conveying the total yet not unworldly honesty of the character. He demonstrates this in several scenes with each of the three inhabitants of the house: with the father contesting some of the old man’s harsher assertions about his daughter, with Agnès refusing to play her games and encouraging her to face reality, and with Karen, in a more limited capacity, offering a companionship she apparently can’t find in the others or in her somewhat loutish boyfriend. And it’s this very openness that provides the key to his likeability despite the character’s more questionable attributes and reflects warmly on Stockwell’s then-professed disinterest in acting on the whole: not governed himself by ego or insecurity, he brings to the part the very unaffected attitude needed to make Joseph "work."

Any consideration of Rapture, however, must inevitably resolve with a meditation on the phenomenal portrayal of Agnès, the soul of the film, by Patricia Gozzi. In her hands, the oddest facets of the character – her "savagery," the games she plays, the almost canny

	prop of her fantasies – emerge as utterly familiar; anyone who has known such a maladjusted or asocialized young woman will recognize her here. So seamlessly has Gozzi fashioned the role, however, like Agnès stitching her scarecrow, that she turns both the character and herself into not only a child of nature but a veritable force of nature as well. When her dementia takes literal form in the story – her belief in the scarecrow-come-to-life – it’s believable partly because we see it in the acting, in her own unquestioning, unreserved immersion in the drama. When she clutches the lifeless Joseph at the end and makes her confession that it was all an act, the effect of her performance is such that the spell is still unbroken; it’s a confirmation for the audience, as well, that the protagonists truly were real. Her rawness and

candidness permit us to get so close to the character that Agnès’s love is personalized, made painfully real; her emotional honesty is such that if we trust her and the film we may know a little of what it is to be loved in a way that few of us will ever actually experience – her need is so great – and know, too, what it is to love greatly and to be a big enough human being to be able to turn that love into something more than even love in its loss.

For if in love we become something more than ourselves, then in Gozzi we see an actress become something more than a character. Her personification takes us to the emotional heart of the film, as of romance itself, in both its generic and literary senses. In her realization, we come to understand the need to love itself, a need so strong that it can, by force of its own sheer will, create the object of its desires, and then find something meaningful and renewing in its loss. Agnès knows it isn’t possible for her dream – her scheme – to’ve come true, yet still she has the courage to make-believe it, so that when she does, Joseph actually "comes alive," if only for a

		while. It’s a formula for revolution of a sort, a recipe for the betterment of a people – meaning women, especially, but possibly any other downtrodden group or individual – who, denied a representative in the socio-physical world, can create one out of the remnants of its own history and by the spark of its own irrationality and longing. The hatred – the crushingly sensible rule of a secretly self-loathing old order married to its own illusion of a Golden Age and Fall – will burn itself out eventually, yet the elemental loving creative power it also secretly loves and longs to return to will endure and, finally, prevail. For, in the end, Agnès is not only a character, but a part of us, an amoral freespirited imperative desiring only to liberate, the film’s title that same fecundating

emotion and virtual origin of life; not in pain, as the bible would have it, but in true spiritual-sexual elation. She is the earth itself, which hath the power to restoreth even fallen God to himself.

It would have been a good enough movie without Gozzi, but it would be hard to imagine a more effective, a more personal – a more romantic one. And it may be self-inflating and false to say that Rapture is all hers, but it might be safe to say that Rapture is all her; for, as the embodiment of that very nature and purity the film deliberates upon, she creates an indelible new life within the viewer, an awareness of and regret for our own lost innocence, for our disconnection from our own stabilizing and free imaginative selves; from our own lost nature.

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