June 18, 2007

If...

All is Disgrace

"Just give me a black mask," wails The (International) Noise Conspiracy's Dennis Lyxzen on the track "Black Mask." "To explode - to overload - to lose control - to steal your soul." If you like Lyxzen -- and I do, most of the time -- you'll probably admire Lindsay Anderson's 1969 film If..., fable of romance and revolution, newly released on DVD by the Criterion Collection this week -- as I did, most of the time.

Just give me a black mask... If... opens in the halls of a British boys boarding school. Lyxzen's lyrics are appropriate because Mick Travis, If...'s principal rebel played by Malcolm Mcdowell, enters both school and the film with a black mask -- a scarf to be more precise. Mick fights to keep it on but it doesn't last; soon it's gone revealing a transgressive moustache. Mick quickly cleans it up for class, but we realize his black mask revealed more about his character than it hid: ever the subversive, his face shines at any whiff of possible revolution and romance. The oppressive nature of the boarding school provide opportunities for both in spades. Scores of bloody righteous spades.

From the start, If... more or less closes in on itself, staying within the interiors and grounds of the boarding school, excluding the outside world and any reference to then current events in a bid for universality. "It's a film about law and order, about freedom and responsibility, about love and the denial of the heart," Anderson explains in an interview he self-conducted for If...'s press materials, helpfully included in Criterion's DVD booklet. But Anderson has at least one clear outside film reference in mind: Jean Vigo's 1933 cinema classic Zero du Conduit (Zero for Conduct), another tale of boarding school rebellion.

If... is in the same manner of poetic farce as Vigo's film; it even cribs several scenes, as well as its narrative structure. But whereas Vigo's boys were squarely preteen, Anderson's lot represents a hierarchy of all ages. The story is fleshed out (in more ways than one; there's more nudity in this one) while the dialogue is increased ten-fold (Vigo's was an early talkie); but above all, as a militant might say, Anderson takes the struggle to another level. As David Ehrenstein points out in his Criterion essay, Vigo's tots tossed vegetables at their oppressors; for Anderson's adolescents, as Mick whispers gravely, it's "Real bullets."

To explode - to overload. In one way, If... is Zero du Conduit gone guerilla -- it was made during 1968, after all. In another way, though, it's just Conduit reimagined as a modern day school shooting. From material compiled in Criterion's DVD booklet, it's clear Anderson was out to draw a line: the poster he composed for the film proclaims "Which side will you be on?" and divides critics' responses into two camps: artistic acclaim on the one side, and on the other, aghast antipathy. The funny thing is -- and it really is funny -- is that If... is so over the top, Anderson never seems to choose sides. It leaves things open to interpretation, but one has to wonder whether all that blood muddies the film's intentions.

One thing about If... I can't fail to enjoy is Malcolm Mcdowell. "My face is a never fading source of wonder to me," Mick says as he shears his 'stache, as it is for me. Mcdowell doesn't need a black mask to steal your soul -- all he needs is that stare, that sneer, that grin. It's sinister, deady and serious. Interesting -- perhaps frightening -- to ponder is the thought that A Clockwork Orange may never have been made were it not for If... The story goes that Stanley Kubrick had to have Mcdowell for Alex or his film was a no go, and it's a fair bet that Mick's bloody good time in If... is what helped Kubrick develop that conviction.

To lose control. I'm no fan of Orange -- to me, it's about as politically and problematically uneven as any film I've ever seen, and there are times in If... when I start to feel the same way. The first thing Mcdowell is shining that grin of his at is a magazine clipping of a big black guy with a big gun. "Fan-tastic," he exclaims, several times for emphasis. The clipping goes spot on the wall with assorted others of naked ladies and 'Nam, motorcycles and Mao. Mick's wall makes clear that, as Richard Porton has pointed out in his book Film and the Anarchist Imagination, despite Anderson's stated intentions (again, see the press materials), as well as Criterion's own description of the film, If... is less anarchistic than it is a pastiche of incoherent ideologies.

What Mick and his comrades' clippings, as well as their short, sharp quips, reveal that their hazy ideology does clearly revolve around, if not anarchism, at least one thing: their dicks. For If..., this turns out to be both good and bad. The bad: Mick and his comrades never fail to be schoolboys. For a film so concerned with liberation, it's markedly pre-Women's Lib, largely reducing women's acts of resistance to sexual ones, even refusing to give Mick's source of rebel romance a proper name; she's just "The Girl." The good: director Anderson's own sexual preferences fuels the film with sustained flourishes of homoeroticism, including one bit that David Ehrenstein christens "the most beautiful homoerotic scene ever filmed... better than sex."

Better than sex? Could that be just brash hyperbole? Sure, but it's appropriate. If... itself is pure hyperbole, a full farcical assault, which is, at last, its saving grace. Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest ends with its titular father's last words: "All is grace." Well, what's the grace of film that ends with an uzi attack on the house of God? That would be a sense of humor -- all is disgrace. Mick says in dead-pan seriousness, "Violence and revolution are the only pure acts. War is the last possible creative act... [to the picture of a naked woman] The only thing to do to a girl like that is walk into the sea together naked holding hands, make love as the sun sets, then die." Mick's too serious; it's too funny. I'm not about to follow Anderson into war or the water to die -- it's not always clear he knows or cares what we'd be dying for -- but I could follow him into the sea for a quick dip, even if I'm not sure I feel cleaner by the end of it.