Jules Dassin brings the destructive tumult of Greek tragedy straight into 1962 into the stylish Phaedra, but the picture ultimately founders on the rocks. No amount of art can make up for wooden chemistry, and that’s especially true when the characters need to convey a passion worth wrecking their lives for. Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins both do fine work individually as the two halves of this desperate, doomed stepmother and stepson romance, but the energy between them is, if not quite inert, more embarrassing than tragic.* I can buy Phaedra and Alexis are attracted enough to each other for it to be awkward. But to destroy themselves and the man they both love? Come on, guys. It’s not that hot.
But Dassin and cinematographer Jacques Natteau do their level best to convince me otherwise, and in a handful of scenes, they almost succeed. It’s all about the framing.
Greek shipping tycoon Thanos (Raf Vallone) asked his wife, Phaedra, to fetch his wayward (and half-English) son Alexis from London and convince him to stay with them for the summer. (It’ll shake him out of his nascent art career, Thanos hopes.) As a child, Alexis resented Phaedra for “stealing” Thanos away from his mother, so the two of them have never met. Now that he’s in his twenties and his mother has long-since remarried too, it’s easy to let bygones be bygones. The two quickly connect, and Alexis’s youthfulness brings out an answering whimsy in Phaedra. Back in Greece, she’s a mother; here, she seems more like a teenager.
The precision comes from noting only in retrospect when that playfulness reached dangerous heights. Phaedra tells Alexis that ancient Greeks used to cast sacrifices out onto the waves when they made wishes, and then she makes a wish for him to come home—and throws an ornate ring, a gift from her husband, out into the water to show him how much she means it. In the moment, Alexis is horrified by the waste—he makes to dive in after it—but laughingly so. They’re in a fantasy bubble where feelings matter more than reasons and consequences. For now, it’s all funny.
Later, Alexis, Phaedra, and Thanos lounge about together, and Thanos asks a natural question: what happened to Phaedra’s ring?
The atmosphere changes, and Natteau captures it beautifully. Phaedra and Thanos share a shot, physically intertwined, but the frame cuts Thanos’s face off halfway and gives us Phaedra in full: opposite her, we see Alexis, too, as a complete figure. They’re sharing an understanding that, thanks to the framing, literally passes over Thanos’s head; he’s only a pair of eyes, a potential witness to a secret they’re now realizing is too much. Right after this exchange, Alexis will offer to leave, and Phaedra will beg Thanos to stay.
The harsh, severing edges of the frame come back in a different way in the ultimate seduction, here used not to exclude and alter Thanos but to exclude and alter the parts of themselves that know this is a bad idea. Alexis is on his knees before the fire, and Phaedra, behind him, is only a pair of legs; she confesses her love, and he grasps her knees and draws her against his back. The unconventionality of the pose makes its erotic need come through; this isn’t a normal romance, so it needs an abnormal gesture. (Really, the specificity of the image is something more stories, vanilla or otherwise, should embrace.)
It’s easy to see the kaleidoscopic series of shots that follow as cheesy, a way of evoking fragments of sensuality without ruling out widespread distribution, but even if that’s part of it, that’s not—appropriately—the whole picture. This is a love story where it’s crucial for neither of them to ever be their full selves. This can only go on with this intense near-happiness if Phaedra forgets she’s Thanos’s wife and Alexis forgets he’s Thanos’s son. They can only love each other in (and to) pieces.
Phaedra is streaming on Amazon Prime.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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What did we watch?
Justified, Season Five, Episode Twelve, “Starvation”
“Your savior has arrived.”
“You are who you are, I find it amusing. No, enlightening.”
Dewey’s reach has exceeded his grasp. Dewey’s story isn’t a lesson in not being stupid – although it’s inescapably also that – it’s a lesson in knowing what you want. A stupid person with total certainty on their aim is unstoppable. Dewey just wants to feel tough; arguably, that fucks with your rationality more than anything else in this world.
Raylan seeing Ava really puts into perspective how much she’s changed since the start of the series. Boyd fucking up her way out is also a hitch in her development into Crime Matriarch; she almost seems to trip over herself in shock.
“Why don’t you leave out the parts we’d like to skip?” Incredible Elmore Leonard reference.
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: N/A
Biggest Laugh: “Mr Yoon prefers the skin.” / “Like… the scalp? The whole thing?”
Top Ownage: Raylan getting Kendall tried as an adult. Absolutely cold-blooded, I love it.
Columbo, “Étude in Black”
There are some hiccups here–I have trouble believing that Columbo would arrive at the scene of a presumptive suicide and repeatedly talk about the dead woman’s slamming body and “bedroom eyes”–but the episode is really destabilized, and subsequently redeemed, by John Cassavetes’s performance as murderer Alex Benedict. He’s arguably miscast here, too ineluctably live-wire to play a classical conductor–I have trouble believing he’s ever opted for largo or lento in his life (let him head up a bop or free jazz quartet, on the other hand, and we’re in business)–and too naturalistic for the show’s overall style, which is more likably artificial. If Cassavetes is a killer, you’re waiting for him to cut somebody; the fussy alibi preparation his character does here, as clever as it is, doesn’t gel with the performance. He doesn’t mix with anything Christie-esque.
However, the untamed realism he brings adds an incredible power to the ending. The killers in these stories generally bow out with dignity, which I appreciate, and he does too, but there’s a genre-breaking fervency to how he whispers his real confession and real love to his wife (Blythe Danner), who’s just doomed him even though she’ll also be heartbroken by losing him. All of a sudden, it feels like I’m watching something too intimate, something outside the lines that’s really none of my business, and it steals the episode. I think this is also accordingly the first case we’ve had so far with a distinctly downer feel to the wrap-up, where an innocent supporting character is there to react but can’t be pleased or satisfied, only destroyed. Good stuff.
We also meet Columbo’s dog! He’s a good dog.
Etude in Black is the first two hour episode, mandated by NBC to add more ads. The scene where Columbo and Benedict are talking about the latter’s house was added later, and not written by Stephen Bochco.
It’s very clear that Falk and Cassavettes like working together, as they had before this and would again later. But they didn’t just act together. Nicholas Colasanto (yes, Coach from Cheers) is listed as director but due to both a heart condition (which ultimately killed him) and a drinking problem (which he would seek help for a few years later), the friends took over as co-directors.
And Blythe Danner was expecting at the time, which is sort of visible in a couple of scenes. So you can say that Gwyneth Paltrow made her screen debut in vitro.
I remember hearing about NBC mandating the two-hour runtime at Serlingfest, actually, because apparently it cut into Night Gallery’s time, and it seemed to be a “rivalry” neither of them wanted, because Columbo’s writing staff actually felt like that they had the right amount of time already and didn’t actually want any more. Interesting to see the settling-in process in action here.
I noticed Colasanto as the director here but didn’t know that Falk and Cassavetes actually had to step up do the bulk of the work. That’s sad, althuogh it’s good to know Colasanto later got the help he needed.
I wonder how much input the real life recovering alcoholic gave Ted Danson about playing the fictional alcoholic Sam Malone.
Pluribus, S1E3 – Despite the hand grenade, has a bit of Prestige TV Syndrome where nothing much really happened this episode beyond Carol discovering that the Pluribi want to make her happy to the extent that they would give her any weapon, though they hesitate about an atomic bomb (“We would weigh the pros and cons”). Most interesting insight here may be that Carol is perhaps not capable of being happy, or at least not the way Helen or the Pluribi would want, which is to say content. What makes Carol dissatisfied is something she probably couldn’t quantify and it’s what makes her human as well and not so strange and smug as the Pluribi. (I agree that the sci-fi here is not an exact 1:1 metaphor, yet I see the techies in the invasion of private life and the unsettling, placid friendliness.)
Pluribus does have some good plotting, but overall I’d say it’s not the strongest or most memorable part of the show. (There’s only one failure on that front that genuinely annoys me, though, and I feel confident that you’ll know it–the world’s most useless cliffhanger!–when you see it.)
Just this week’s Twilight Zone, which was a bit too much like an abridged TV version of Sunset Boulevard really, although not without its pleasures.
Naturally, there is a review on IMDb with the title “I’m Ready for My Close-Up, Mr. Serling.”
I’ll get into this in the review, but some of what makes this one interesting to me is how it will eventually be in conversation with other episodes of the show that haven’t, uh, happened yet, especially “Walking Distance,” for next week. Nostalgia is a theme the show keeps coming back to, but it’s usually handled rather differently than it is here.
Elementary, “Internal Audit” – The mystery involves the murders of N0t Legally Bernie Madoff and the reporter who broke the story, which only makes sense when we learn that not-Bernie did have a conscience and told the reporter he’d discovered the director of a non-profit devoted to getting Holocaust survivors reparations was skimming off the top. It’s a bit diffuse and how we get from point A to point B is messy. What makes this one memorable to me is that the “Holocaust survivors are being used to skim money” thing actually happened, and that the agency it happened at was where my wife was working. (She wasn’t connected in any way to the people guilty of this rather hideous crime, but it was not a fun time to be working there.) Meanwhile, Sherlock is struggling with his guilt over Bell being shot – he’s never felt guilt before! – and his sponsor recommends he become a sponsor as well. And Bell is offered a post with the, er, Demographics team. Which thankfully the high ranking official in charge of it here would prefer to call Counter-Terrorism (and which of course is interested in one specific demographic). The character stuff is a lot more interesting than the murders. Richard Masur, a familiar face to decades of TV watches, is the killer of the week.
Frasier, “Murder Most Maris” – The combination of trying to help Maris and the accompanying media frenzy (plus a really weird gaffe by Frasier on live TV) push Niles to the brink. Hyde-Pierce is very good as a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but the tone is never quite right.
Big fan of Dassin, I’ve never really understood why he isn’t considered one of the greats. Haven’t seen this one, though – sounds like there’s some interesting ideas present but it’s a shame about that lack of chemistry.
The director of Rififi will always count as a great in my book!
I’d say this is still worth watching (especially since the chemistry bit is always subjective): it has a terrific, vibrant style, and there’s some interesting subtextual queerness. I just now realized I accidentally left out my own footnote, which I can’t fix until I get home tonight, but Mercouri has a deliberately homoerotic relationship with her maid/former nanny (?), who seems to be in love with her, and there’s at least one scene where Perkins has so much charged chemistry with Vallone, who’s playing his father, that you’re almost watching an entirely new Greek tragedy get created here. (My wife saw that one scene out of context and assumed, quite fairly, that they were meant to be playing lovers.)
In my eyes his filmography boasts an all-time-great heist movie (Rififi), noir (Night & The City) and prison movie (Brute Force), plus unique oddities like Thieves Highway and The Naked City, and then the underrated pleasures of his later films after he got booted unfairly out of Hollywood and became a classic Wife Guy director. I also still need to see Uptight which also sounds great!