Mrs. Brown: Top Drawer for the Post-Hogmanay Viewing

 

 

 

MRS. BROWN  (1997)

Directed by John Madden

Miramax, 103 minutes, PG

★★★★★

 

New Year’s Day is a holiday, but most people party on New Year’s Eve. Scots certainly do; for them, December 31 is Hogmanay. It roughly means gala day but whether it’s a Scots word, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, or French is up for debate. Today it bears similarities to First Night celebrations, but some places have bonfires, special foods, gift-giving, folk customs, and pipe bands.  

 

It just seemed the right time of the year to rewatch one of my favorite films, Mrs. Brown. I’d not disagree with charges of sentimentality, though I’d counter that it demonstrates how fine acting can carry a film in which relatively little action occurs. One reason why British films are, on the whole, superior to Hollywood movies is that many U.K. actors are classically trained and are hired for their chops, not necessarily their looks. Hollywood creates drama through pyrotechnics, loud music, and over-the-top speeches; British cinema finds drama in human interactions, even if the ”star” is a queen.

 

If you know about the British monarchy, you will have noticed there is a strict protocol for being in the presence of royalty. It prevails, though the monarchy has had no political power since 1689. Royals are to be treated regally and behave as such. You probably also know that little shocks U.K. tabloids as much as a good royal scandal. (Think Lady Diana, Sarah Ferguson’s divorce, and Prince Andrew for starters.) What we learn is that royals aren’t special when it comes to human foibles.

 

Mrs. Brown deals with one of Britain’s most revered monarchs, Queen Victoria (1819-1901). She took the throne weeks after she turned 18, married Albert (her first cousin) when she was 21, had nine children, and was quite happy until Albert died in 1861. We now associate Victorianism with a certain morbidity because the Queen went into mourning for most of the rest of her 63-year reign. When Albert passed, she stayed at Balmoral Castle draped in mourning gear and out of sight for two years. That was not a good thing for two powerful political figures vying for the prime minister’s chair in Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. As we see in Mrs. Brown, Disraeli (Antony Sher) and his party are sinking in popularity and hope to lure Victoria (Judi Dench) out of mourning to boost Disraeli’s electoral chances.

 

The question is how to get Victoria out of Balmoral Castle in Scotland and back to London’s Buckingham Palace where she can regularly wave to the citizenry. Enter John Brown (Billy Connolly), a former soldier who was once Albert’s ghillie (a gamekeeper).  He is called to Balmoral is to get Victoria to go riding and recover her health so that her closest advisors, Henry Ponsonby (Geoffrey Palmer), Dr. Jenner (Richard Pasco), and her son “Bertie,” the Prince of Wales (David Westhead) can convince Victoria to leave Scotland. (As the English often felt, they hated it there.) Problem: John  Brown was loyal to the queen but not to the toffs surrounding her. Brown reveled in being a rugged Scot who liked tweaking upper-class snobs. A bigger problem: Victoria adored Scotland and Brown. The film correctly infers that the two of them may have been intimate. There was also a rumor that they secretly married, hence the film’s title. (Recent evidence has revived that possibility.)

 

Mrs. Brown is also a story of intrigue and of hubris. As Brown’s star rose at Balmoral, his plotters sought ways to discredit him. Victoria is persuaded to make a triumphant return to London and, for a time, Brown’s ego got in the way and he was out of favor. Still, Victoria refused to dismiss him. He was head of security in 1893, when he died (not of pneumonia as in the film, but of a bacterial infection).

 

What a stroke of genius to cast Connolly as Brown. Billy Connolly is a seriously funny man who is far more coarse and irreverent in real life, just as Dench could herself be. I could go on about the crackerjack acting of this film, including Sher’s wiliness and Gerard Butler’s first role as Brown’s brother. The takeaway is the same; fill the screen with superb actors and let them metaphorically play winner-take-all chess. It was a surprise hit in 1997 and won numerous prizes despite being stiffed at the Academy Awards. Wha’ a bunch o’ glakits!

 

Rob Weir

 

Petite Maman is Touching and Enigmatic

 

 

 

PETITE MAMAN  (2021)

Directed by Céline Sciamma

Pyramide Distribution, 72 minutes (not rated)

In French (with English subtitles)

* * * *  

 

Petite Maman (“Little Mum”) is an enigmatic film. It’s clearly a meditation on grief, but everything else is up for debate. I would call it a work of magical realism, but I suppose it could be a deep dream, a fantasy, or a hallucination. However you interpret it, it’s unusual.

 

Perhaps the name Céline Sciamma sounds familiar. She directed Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), a celebrated and steamy lesbian romance. Because of that and other works such as Tomboy (2011), some analysts expect everything Sciama does to have lesbian subtexts. Petite Maman was actually up for gay film awards, though it would take someone with an agenda and a college sophomore’s misunderstanding of Freudian symbolism to find anything sapphic in Petite Maman. It doesn’t get any more sensual than a pair of 9-year-old girls hugging, and the actors happen to be twin sisters in real life. Were it rated for U.S. audiences, it would be PG-13, and only because it deals with death.

 

It begins innocently enough. As is her custom, 9-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) goes room to room bidding “au revoir” to everyone she sees in an assisted-living facility. When she reaches the room in which her namesake grandmother Nelly was housed, it’s empty; she has died from an unnamed hereditary condition. Nelly’s father (Stéphane Varupenne) and her mother, 31-year-old Marion (Nina Meurisse), are left with the grim task of clearing out the home in the woods where Marion grew up. Marion is shattered by her mother’s death and not even her daughter can cheer her. Marion flees and Nelly and her dad take care of the packing.

 

So far, so sad. Here’s where things get weird. Marion has told Nelly of how she built a fort in the woods when she was young. Nelly goes off to see if anything is left, and encounters a little girl in the act of hauling tree branches to a site and building a skeletal lean-to. Nelly is surprised to learn that the girl’s name is Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) and that her mother’s name is Nelly. When they depart from their daily building project, Nelly returns to her grandmother’s house and Marion goes the opposite direction. Nelly is also surprised on a deeper level by how much small Marion looks like her. As their friendship deepens and a cloudburst soaks them, Nelly accepts Marion’s offer to play at her home. A path leads them to a house that’s identical to the one Nelly’s grandmother lived in, except it’s not overgrown or rundown. When she reciprocates and invites Nelly over, Marion is similarly startled to see a house that looks like the one where she lives with her mother (Margo Abascal).

 

In a scene that some have found hard to fathom, small Marion scarcely registers disbelief when Nelly tells Marion she is Nelly's mother and that Marion’s disabled mother is Nelly’s grandmother. Somehow, time has come unfixed in a way in which the present and the past of 22 years ago coexist. In the short time the two girls are together, Nelly learns a lot about her mother, such as her unrealized desire to be an actress and the deeper roots of her melancholia. In this context, the abrupt and surprising ending makes complete sense.

 

At 72 minutes, Petite Maman is a very short film, yet it is punctuated with still moments that tell us just enough for us to feel the film’s weight. How did either girl get caught in the disruption of chronological time that led to their meeting? Sciamma does not tell us, and that’s a good thing. The point of the film isn’t the particulars of whatever sci-fi or magical explanation is at play, it’s about how a 9-year-old connects with her mother.

 

The Sanz twins are, in a word, sensational. That’s because they are 9 and act 9. (Watch them make pancakes!) They reminded me of my nieces when they were 9, by which I mean they were old enough to question, but not old enough to be cynical about things adults say make no logical sense. As the 17^th-century French moral philosopher Jean de La Bruyère put it, “Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.”

 

Rob Weir

 

This Poetic Realism Film Rewards the Patient Viewer

 

 

Port of Shadows (1938)

Directed by Marcel Carné

Osso/Film Alliance of the United States, 91minutes, not-rated

French (with English subtitles)

★★★ ½

 

For a modern viewer, Port of Shadows is an odd film to watch. Though it’s only 91 minutes, it seems longer because of its casual pacing, it’s comparative lack of dialogue, and its drab tones. It helps to know that director Marcel Carné was interested in a film-making style popular in the 1930s and 1940s known as poetic realism. Despite its name, it was more associated with film than poetry. The poetic part is that directors often used symbols as metaphors for realistic details. In this one, for instance, we know that its central character of Jean (Jean Gabin) has rough edges bordering on uncouthness because he eats with his knife rather than customary tableware.

 

The look of Port of Shadows is so much like film noir that it is sometimes viewed as one. Perhaps, but you would need to replace many of the blacks with dull gray. The namesake port is Le Havre in Normandy, a major industrial and trade center. It is socked in by fog when Jean arrives, though talking about the fog is a forbidden subject. Allegedly that’s because it hurts the tourist trade, though this could be a joke within a joke as it’s hard to imagine 1930s Le Havre, whose waterfront and factories were too grimy and the city too run down to pass as an outing destination. Plus, it’s on the English Channel, whose chilly waters have seldom been associated with beach culture. Jean is there because he plans to catch a freighter and escape from France. An overnight at Panama’s throws a kink in that plan.

 

Panama (Édouard Delmont) runs a bar and flop house on the edge of the city. He asks no questions and volunteers no information. He is content to play his Spanish guitar and  offer hospitality to anyone who ventures through the door. On the night Jean arrives, it’s the town drunk, a cynical and depressed painter (Robert Le Vigan), and Nelly (Michèle Mogan). At some point during the night gunshots ring out, but apparently no one is injured, though a man named Zabel (Michel Simon) cuts his hand on a splinter. Jean and Nelly are immediately drawn to each other, though they first play a game of tough guy and vulnerable young girl. Nelly is just 17 and has run away from her godfather, Zabel. She insists she’s trying to find out about the fate of her boyfriend, Maurice, who several people have asked about.

 

When it seems clear that Maurice has been killed, Nelly turns her full attention to Jean. Those gunshots outside Panama’s were fired by hoods posing as dangerous mobsters, but Jean recognizes their leader, Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) as a common street punk with a big mouth and the courage of a kitten. (When Lucien, who also yearns for Nelly, tries to confront Jean, Lucien is slapped on two occasions and can hardly contain his tears.) After a date, Jean and Nelly spend a concupiscent night in Jean’s room at Panama’s in the arms of Cupid.

 

Poetic realism films are usually more fatalistic than romantic. Is this one of them? I shall say just these things: a change of clothing, face-shaming, a threat that borders on incest, suicide, mistaken identity, a murder, and another on the streets of Le Havre. Think of Port of Shadows as a film that slowly establishes deep atmosphere as a prelude to several bursts of action. The musical score by the masterful Maurice Jaubert greatly enhances moods without resorting to cliché. The film is in French, but if you’re a person who hates subtitles, no worries; there isn’t much in the way of substantive dialogue.

 

I liked it quite a lot, but my rating is lower because I’m not sure it’s a film for everyone. Much of the plot and relationships between characters is doled out in asides and inference. Although it’s widely available online and on DVD, some prints of Port of Shadows are not well-preserved. Poke around online to find a good one and, by all means, avoid a colorized version. In this case, color is neither poetic nor dramatic. Be patient; the slow roll out of the drama is worth it.

 

Rob Weir

 

Sylvia Scarlet: Great Moive? No!!! Great Camp? Maybe.

 

 

 

 

SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935)

Directed by George Cukor

RKO, 91 minutes

★  (add stars if you like camp)

 

I watched the 1935 movie Sylvia Scarlett with the intent of writing about actors breaking gender roles. Who could resist seeing a movie with Katharine Hepburn in drag? Pretty much everyone! It was a bomb in 1935 and has aged about as well as an apple rotting in an orchard. When famed director George Cukor saw the rushes he begged RKO not to release it. It was so bad that he (unsuccessfully) promised to direct another film for free if they’d trash Sylvia Scarlett.

 

Nonetheless, there are reasons to review it. You may have heard that Katharine Hepburn–now considered a Hollywood legend–once had trouble getting roles. She was pegged as “box office poison and this was the picture that earned that baggage. If  you’ve ever heard the phrase so bad I couldn’t look away, that sums up Sylvia Scarlett. My wife and I constantly remarked, “This is incredibly bad. Should we turn it off?” I even interjected, “Good heavens! Why are we watching this?” Yet, both of us stayed to the putrid end. Without intending to be so, it’s the very definition of camp.

 

It was the first time Hepburn and Cary Grant were in the same movie. Neither could blame it on youth; Grant was 31 at the time and Hepburn 28. The putative story is distilled from two 1918 novels from Compton MacKenzie. Sylvia (Hepburn) is the pigtailed daughter of widower Henry Scarlett (Edmund Gwenn), a gambler. His profligacy bankrupted him to the point where he is being pursued by thugs poised to relieve his debt mob-style. Henry throws clothing into a bag with the intention of hightailing it to France with money and 30 yards of lace he stole from his firm. Sylvia intends to go with him. When Henry insists he’d be an easy mark if traveling with his daughter, she offers money her mother left her and impetuously chops off her pigtails and announces she will be “Sylvester.” A little tidying up and she passes as a teenage boy (sort of like a shaved cocoanut could conceivably pass as an ostrich egg).

 

On the voyage they meet Jimmy Monkley (Grant), a Cockney (ahem!) gentleman. Sylvania/Sylvester smells a rat, but Henry tells Jimmy of his plan for the lace. Henry learns the hard way that Monkley is a grifter in fancy duds. When the boat lands and Monkley fingers Henry so he can get off the boat without being searched for the jewels he stole. Once ashore via unlikely circumstances, the trio decide to work cons as a team. Sylvester blows the first attempt, but Monkley leads them to a mansion whose owners are on a trip. Jimmy, though, knows Maudie (Dennie Moore) the maid. At this point, abandon all logic. After several hours of guzzling the owners’ booze and playing dress-up with their finery and valuables, Sylvester makes Jimmy leave the pearls he stole lest Maudie risk arrest and they vamoose.  

 

Henry is besotted with Maudie, so the trio becomes a quartet. They set off as a traveling troupe of entertainers to bilk country bumpkins. Where did they get the truck and stage? Don’t ask. Likewise forget about Grant’s variable accent. Or whether Hepburn convinces as a snooty teen. “Sylvester” catches the eye of playboy artist, Michael Fane (Brien Aherne) who wants to paint his/her face. Fane invites her to pose at his villa after an odd encounter that implies Fane swings both ways. But she takes the guesswork away by showing up the next day in a dress and bonnet she stole from a beach bather.

 

Sylvia is smitten but is crushed when Lily (Natalie Paley) shows up. Lily is Fane’s sort of girlfriend, but is basically a mean-spirited sot who tells Henry that his love, Maudie, has run off with another man. A distraught Henry drowns himself, though Maudie is rescued from the ocean and from the film. After we play a game of who’s with whom–Jimmy is attracted to Lily–this mess plops into the sickness bucket and ends. It is so bad that the actors playing Maudie and Lily were uncredited. Lucky them.

 

Three years later the Hepburn/Grant combo made Bringing Up Baby, one of the greatest comedies of all time. Who says there are no second chances? It’s just possible, though, that you’ll laugh harder at Sylvia Scarlett.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

The Black Wolf: Thriller or Bummer?

 

 

 

THE BLACK WOLF  (2025)

By Louise Penny

Minotaur Books, 370 pages.

★★★

 

 I have a dilemma. I’m a huge Louise Penny fan who devours her work like a starving man at a banquet table. That said, objectively her work has taken a darker turn in the past few years that makes it less satisfying as it once was. I say this not as one of those rabid fans who wants every book to frolic on the green in Three Pines and whilst uttering witticisms with friends and enjoying wholesome moments in the village. I still find Penny a compelling writer, but I’m not fond of the transformation of her central character: Armand Gamache.

 

Penny’s mysteries are character-centered, but recent works have been more action-driven and violent. Gamache has become harder and cynical about most things that don’t relate to the residents of Three Pines and his immediate family. In addition, though Penny’s plots have grown more complex, the tone of her books has drifted further from the mystery category and into thriller territory. This may make them enormously popular, but I find them less likable.

 

The Black Wolf is the sequel to The Grey Wolf, which definitely should be read first. As was discovered at the end of The Grey Wolf, Gamache, his son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Isabelle Lacoste, Gamache’s post-retirement successor as head of the Sûreté du Québec, thought they had jailed the “Black” Wolf by breaking a plot to kill hundreds of thousands by poisoning Montreal’s water supply. They did so based on their reading of a notebook and piecing together evidence that allowed the investing team to stop the massacre. Upon further reflection, though, Gamache realized that the “wolf,” Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, was not the Black Wolf at all. In the Cree legend that names both books, the Black Wolf is evil and the Grey Wolf is one of kindness and compassion. Lauzon insisted he was framed and Gamache considers it a possibility. He even secures Lauzon’s temporary release from prison and brings him into his home to celebrate Christmas, though Reine-Marie is appalled for reasons beyond the fact that Lauzon is more an arrogant prig than grateful.

 

The first revelation is that another notebook exists that details an evil far worse the one Gamache, et. al. first found. That notebook, an ambiguous map, and a cryptic semi-warning of “a dry and parched land where there is no water…” leads Gamache on a mission to delay a plan that some believe is inevitable. In fact, there are those who would implement it in the name of preventing an even greater catastrophe. Herein lies a paradox; in the Cree belief system, the grey and black are equally necessary to keep the world in balance; in Gamache’s world view, the black wolf must be destroyed.

 

There is a sense in which what Penny is dealing with is more in line with a Star Trek scenario than something appropriate for a retired chief of the Sûreté. Who is the black wolf? Crime investigators are trained to pursue individuals. The Black Wolf is filled with bad actors, but who are they? Organized crime? Crooked cops? Governments? International villains? All of the preceding? The black wolf has the characteristics of a massive conspiracy that is beyond borders and beyond individuals. Who gets taken down and how does one decide? The parched land reference is from Psalm 63, but what does it mean nearly 4,000 years later?

 

Had The Black Wolf been written decades earlier, it would have been dismissed as preposterous. The “ouch” moment of the novel in 2025 is that it’s distressingly easy to imagine the events described in the novel as feasible. One hopes that they aren’t, but the immediate question is whether Ms. Penny has written one big bummer of a novel that takes Armand Gamache too far from the determined optimism of previous works. Saying more would risk spoilers, but I will note that a key moment in the book rests upon Gamache deliberately telling a lie. This violates one of his four paths to obtaining wisdom, admitting “I was wrong.”

 

A final note is that in the last two novels Canada’s Liberal Party has taken it on the chin. Does that mean anything?

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

Black Angel: Second Look

 

 

 

 

BLACK ANGEL (1946)

Directed by Roy William Neil

Universal Pictures, 81 minutes, Not Rated.

★★★★

 

I keep a careful list of movies I’ve seen. Or so I thought until I borrowed Black Angel again on Monday. Because I was an idiot, I thought I’d watch it again and I liked it better this time. Here’s a slightly altered review from an earlier post.

 

Black Angel was considered a second-tier film noir, though its reputation has trended upward and is now viewed an underappreciated classic. “Classic” might be a tad grandiose, but it’s worth 81 minutes of your time.

 

It’s one of those did-he-or-didn’t-he movies that will leave you guessing until the very end. Catherine Bennett (June Vincent) is married to Kirk (John Phillips). He’ burning the candle at both ends with such heat that he is being blackmailed by his blonde bombshell mistress, nightclub singer Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling). Marlowe is two- or three-timing her estranged alcoholic husband, songwriter Martin Blair (Dan Duryea) who mopes outside of her apartment.

 

Things go considerably more than wrong when Kirk shows up and finds Marlow dead in her bedroom. Like the sap he is, he touches things in her swanky apartment, including a gun on Marlowe’s bed. Kirk is arrested for the slaying and the evidence is airtight. Catharine knows that her hubby done her wrong (as thugs might say), but she doesn’t believe him capable of homicide. Because justice moved faster in those days, Kirk is quickly convicted, and if Catharine she doesn’t clear his name, Kirk ‘s last breath will be in the gas chamber.

 

So, who else would you enlist to help you find the “real” killer other than Martin, a hopeless boozer so pathetic that he needs a keeper/friend Joe (Wallace Ford) to pick him up off the street and tuck him into his flop house bed. Marty’s cynical about most things, but he has a soft spot for Cathy’s sob story. Or is it the shapeliness of her legs and her décolletage? The cops don’t want to help, as they have Kirk dead to rights. Captain Flood (Broderick Crawford) tells Cathy that, though sympathetic, he’s heard sob stories like hers before.  

 

Martin, though, saw another man coming out of Marlowe’s building. The more he and Cathy investigate, the more they believe that Marko (Peter Lorre), a former thug turned nightclub owner, killed Marlowe. Marty doesn’t stick his neck out for anybody, but he doesn’t have much to lose and the more time he spends with Cathy the more he finds himself falling for her. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse story that hinges on a brooch. 

 

Both June Vincent and Constance Dowling–both successful models– were knockouts. Then we have two guys born for the roles they played. Crawford as a flatfoot? The man made his future living playing one (TV’s Highway Patrol) and was always convincing in doing so. Of course, there’s Peter Lorre, who is like a ferret-come-to-life and as furtive as one. (Would you trust Peter Lorre?) Dan Duryea is also superb. He was a malleable actor who excelled at playing world-weary losers as he does in this film. He was equally adroit as a chiseler, a cowboy, a romantic lead, and a dancer.

 

Now for the head-scratching stuff. If you were trying to prove that a wise guy was guilty of a murder, would you form a lounge act? Marty can tickle the ivories and Cathy can pass as a sultry torch singer. Now all Cathy has to do is get the act booked at Marko’s club, catch Marko’s eye, gain his confidence, and find evidence without being fingered herself. Her motive is odd. We can sympathize with her desire not to see an innocent man die–if Kirk is indeed innocent–but what’s with her professions of love for the man who jilted her? At some point, we also wonder about Marty’s dangerous subterfuge. He’s physically attracted to Cathy, but all he can foresee is that he’ll be left in the lurch if Kirk is sprung.

 

Some 81-minute films are taut. In this case, more background into the evolving relationship between Catharine and Martin would help the ending make more sense. Blame the film’s shortcomings on holes in Roy Chanslor’s script, not Roy Wiliam Neill’s direction. Black Angel is often stylish and it holds together, but not brilliantly so. Call Black Angel a B-level noir with lead performances that make it a B+.

 

Rob Weir

 

Lascaux: Amazing and Frustrating

 

 

 

Perhaps you’ve heard this story before. In 1940, 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat was walking his dog near the village of Montignac, France. The pooch found an uprooted tree that proved to be the entrance to a cave. Ravidat returned with three teen-aged
friends and scrambled some fifty feet underground into a chamber filled with ancient art.  That alone wasn’t all that remarkable; the Dordogne Valley was filled with caves and quite a few of them have prehistoric paintings on their walls and ceilings. We explored such a remarkable small cave in Cougnac the previous week. But the cave in Lascaux surpassed anything found before. There were more than 600 paintings and etchings made 17,000-22,000 years ago. Most were of animals–aurochs, bison, bovines, large cats, deer, horses, rhinos–plus several mysterious figures, including indecipherable geometric designs and a human figure with a bird-like head and an erect phallus.

 

Lascaux was open to the public from 1948 to 1963, when it was closed to the public because the breath of visitors caused mold and other visible damage to the paintings. UNESCO listed it as a world heritage site in 1979, which prompted the French government to display a travelling replica of one hall, which was dubbed Lascaux II. Lascaux III expanded upon Lascaux II, but in 2016 Lascaux IV opened on site, a full 3-D recreation of the entire cave. No, you can’t see exactly what Ravidat and his friends saw in 1940, but the recreation is so well done that you can imagine their amazement. It looks and feels like a cave, unless you accidentally brush a stalagmite and feel its synthetic surface. It’s a great way to preserve the original cave from further damage and is better lighted than “authentic” caves.

 

That’s the good news; now for the bad. Lascaux is a guided tour that is designed to give visitors information in their native languages. It’s also designed to shuffle as many people as possible through the cave as quickly as possible. Read: No dawdling. You are then ushered into a corridor with four theaters spotlighting various aspects of Lascaux from discovery to preservation to ongoing scientific studies. The films are well done, but chances are that if you are with a tour group you won’t get to see more than ¾ of one of them before your guide hustles you into a gift shop selling all manner of tchotchkes such as horse stuffies and coloring books to keychains, picture books, postcards, and garish t-shirts. Frankly, I found the touring experience so frustrating and distasteful that I began to identify with cave paintings of herds of buffalo.

 

At the end of the proverbial day you will come away with more appreciation for the skill of ancient artists, but probably no wiser on what it all meant. For instance, one theory that is mostly discredited by the visual evidence is that the ancients used the images as a form of imitative magic; that is, hunters threw spears at them in hopes that a magic force (called mana) would inhabit those spears in a real hunt. A relative lack of chipping on the rocks makes that less likely. Those figures strongly suggest that the art is the point. But the why is left up in the air. Why Lascaux? Was it a ritual or religious center? What’s the current theory on who made these images? Explanations of “early man” tell us little. Does that mean homo sapiens or Neanderthal sapiens? (The latter is probably more likely, but not a particularly strong marketing piece!) Could Lascaux have been little more than an ancient art gallery? A school for making art?

 

I suppose that, for me, I wondered why there was so much effort to effort to convince us of the quality of the art. We can see that it is expertly done given the imprecision of available tools. What’s wrong with admitting that Lascaux remains cloaked in mystery? Or at least highlighting competing theories. There are other ancient sites–Skara Brae and Stonehenge come to mind–where ambiguity and uncertainty are embraced. I think also of the pyramids of Giza, where periodic new finds put the sites back in the news. In short, Lascaux IV is a nice job of re-creation, but falls short in presentation. If I ever return to the Périgord, I shall seek out smaller caves to avoid both the crowds and what feels perilously close to Disneyfication of ancient history.

 

Rob Weir