'Lilith' is an overpoweringly claustrophobic film - I left the cinema gasping for air. Although it sometimes rather self-consciously strains for poetry, there is very little like it in American cinema. Not only is 'Lilith', like its characters, largely restricted to one setting - an insane asylum for the rich - it is locked in the heads of two protagonists, who filter the world with their mental imbalance. There is no respite, we can never stand outside them, stand back. Imagine 'Vertigo' if Judy hadn't revealed to us who she is. Sometimes it's too much. The only other film I can compare it with is 'Curse of the Cat People', another twisted fairy tale overwhelmed by the subjectivity of its alienated protagonist.
Like many fairy tales, 'Lilith' opens with a stranger entering an enchanted realm, walking up an avenue towards a 'castle' with huge rolling grounds, an island surrounded by a sea of forest. It is Vincent Bruce (a beautiful Warren Beatty, a sad James Dean shorn of all the mannerisms), an ex-soldier who has come to work in this sanitorium. Only very later on do we discover that his own mother was mad. Before we know what the place is, we might think we've entered a dream, such is the suspended nature of the grounds, the reflections of the light giving a magical sparkle. But it is a nightmare too, as Bruce passes what look like zombies, shattered people locked in their own world, petrified. One doctor calls them singularly brilliant people who got too close to revelation and were destroyed by it.
One of the problems faced by films on this subject matter - from 'King of Hearts' and 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' to 'Smiling Suicide Club' is the tendency to allegorise, to suggest that rather than looking at a specific group of people with genuine problems, we are actually looking at a metaphor for America, a capitalist system that has crippled its servants, about the emotional cost of the struggle for wealth and status. How offensive would it be if we used the disabled or AIDS sufferers in the same way? Rossen, of course, was a Communist, and I don't think he avoids this wider political dimension here, but mercifully he works out the surface narrative properly, never betraying his characters and their world.
the film opens with a kind of Chinese shadowplay of sinister webs; and later the doctor will use this metaphor to describe the difference between 'normal' people, with their unthinkingly ordered webs, and the schizophrenically insane, with their nightmare constructions. The story itself could be described in similar terms, with Bruce, and the viewer, as the innocent fly caught in Lilith's nightmare web. It's crucial, however, that we think of Bruce as at the very least on the verge of mental breakdown himself. The film's chronology is appropriately suspended, so it's not clear what war he fought in, but its physical scars have had a traumatic psychological effect. Even before we discover his mother's past, we wonder how Bruce ever got into a position of responsibility in the asylum - his blank gaze, his withdrawn personality, his difficulty with communication, never mind his tendency to hallucinate and watch, as he gibbers, Japanese World War Two victories on TV, show someone as emotionally fragile as Lilith.
When Lilith and Bruce meet, different worlds collide. Lilith, appropriately, is a sphinx-like figure, who talks in unanswerable epigrams, communicates in a language only she understands, whose 'insanity' seems disturbingly sane, as she, siren-like, destroys all the males in her wake, turning Bruce into a knight-cum-killer, Stephen into a despairing suicide. God knows what she whispers to the boys. Yet the recreation of her world, linked to water, nature, sun, archetypally female principles (and Lilith was biblically the first woman) inscrutable, pregnant with mystery and seeming truth, is extremely, dubiously, beautiful.
She is destructive and creative, as all artists must. Bruce is wholly destructive, someone who obliterates the boundaries between helper and patient, exploiter and lover, insane and sane, just as the film crosses from Lilith's unseen, all-seeing point of view, powerful because disembodied, her body being the 'cause' of her 'madness', to Bruce's domineering (again like the viewer), treacherous gaze. The final killing is ambiguous - how much do we infer, in Bruce's motives, jealousy, male insecurity at alternate sexualities, his mother's past (the mirror (photographed) image of Lilith, another reference to 'Vertigo', men trying to dress women up according to the past), his military training. He is the critic, the man who discusses and analyses Lilith, finally killing the artist. The visualisation of his breakdown, as narrative and point of view fragments, must surely have influenced Polanski and Scorcese in 'Repulsion' and 'Taxi Driver'.
Although a handful of his films are of undoubted quality, Rossen has always been too wordy a director for my tastes, too in love with the sound of his own voice. There are a lot of words in 'Lilith', but at last, Rossen has managed to make them serve a complex pattern of sound and image, rather than tell the whole story themselves. His compositions here are stunning, alternating wide, melancholy, almost Resnaisian spaces you could get lost in, with close ups and mid-shots that seem ready to burst the screen, while miraculously, coolly avoiding a hysteria the subject could so easily have descended into.
Like many fairy tales, 'Lilith' opens with a stranger entering an enchanted realm, walking up an avenue towards a 'castle' with huge rolling grounds, an island surrounded by a sea of forest. It is Vincent Bruce (a beautiful Warren Beatty, a sad James Dean shorn of all the mannerisms), an ex-soldier who has come to work in this sanitorium. Only very later on do we discover that his own mother was mad. Before we know what the place is, we might think we've entered a dream, such is the suspended nature of the grounds, the reflections of the light giving a magical sparkle. But it is a nightmare too, as Bruce passes what look like zombies, shattered people locked in their own world, petrified. One doctor calls them singularly brilliant people who got too close to revelation and were destroyed by it.
One of the problems faced by films on this subject matter - from 'King of Hearts' and 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' to 'Smiling Suicide Club' is the tendency to allegorise, to suggest that rather than looking at a specific group of people with genuine problems, we are actually looking at a metaphor for America, a capitalist system that has crippled its servants, about the emotional cost of the struggle for wealth and status. How offensive would it be if we used the disabled or AIDS sufferers in the same way? Rossen, of course, was a Communist, and I don't think he avoids this wider political dimension here, but mercifully he works out the surface narrative properly, never betraying his characters and their world.
the film opens with a kind of Chinese shadowplay of sinister webs; and later the doctor will use this metaphor to describe the difference between 'normal' people, with their unthinkingly ordered webs, and the schizophrenically insane, with their nightmare constructions. The story itself could be described in similar terms, with Bruce, and the viewer, as the innocent fly caught in Lilith's nightmare web. It's crucial, however, that we think of Bruce as at the very least on the verge of mental breakdown himself. The film's chronology is appropriately suspended, so it's not clear what war he fought in, but its physical scars have had a traumatic psychological effect. Even before we discover his mother's past, we wonder how Bruce ever got into a position of responsibility in the asylum - his blank gaze, his withdrawn personality, his difficulty with communication, never mind his tendency to hallucinate and watch, as he gibbers, Japanese World War Two victories on TV, show someone as emotionally fragile as Lilith.
When Lilith and Bruce meet, different worlds collide. Lilith, appropriately, is a sphinx-like figure, who talks in unanswerable epigrams, communicates in a language only she understands, whose 'insanity' seems disturbingly sane, as she, siren-like, destroys all the males in her wake, turning Bruce into a knight-cum-killer, Stephen into a despairing suicide. God knows what she whispers to the boys. Yet the recreation of her world, linked to water, nature, sun, archetypally female principles (and Lilith was biblically the first woman) inscrutable, pregnant with mystery and seeming truth, is extremely, dubiously, beautiful.
She is destructive and creative, as all artists must. Bruce is wholly destructive, someone who obliterates the boundaries between helper and patient, exploiter and lover, insane and sane, just as the film crosses from Lilith's unseen, all-seeing point of view, powerful because disembodied, her body being the 'cause' of her 'madness', to Bruce's domineering (again like the viewer), treacherous gaze. The final killing is ambiguous - how much do we infer, in Bruce's motives, jealousy, male insecurity at alternate sexualities, his mother's past (the mirror (photographed) image of Lilith, another reference to 'Vertigo', men trying to dress women up according to the past), his military training. He is the critic, the man who discusses and analyses Lilith, finally killing the artist. The visualisation of his breakdown, as narrative and point of view fragments, must surely have influenced Polanski and Scorcese in 'Repulsion' and 'Taxi Driver'.
Although a handful of his films are of undoubted quality, Rossen has always been too wordy a director for my tastes, too in love with the sound of his own voice. There are a lot of words in 'Lilith', but at last, Rossen has managed to make them serve a complex pattern of sound and image, rather than tell the whole story themselves. His compositions here are stunning, alternating wide, melancholy, almost Resnaisian spaces you could get lost in, with close ups and mid-shots that seem ready to burst the screen, while miraculously, coolly avoiding a hysteria the subject could so easily have descended into.