1997 ‘Von heute auf morgen’ Directed by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet
Based on a rarely performed Schoenberg opera from 1929, From Today Until Tomorrow explores one night in a marriage. A husband and wife return from a party where she has flirted with another man while he has cast an appraising eye toward one of her acquaintances. Each dreams, briefly, of leaving the marriage for the excitement and mystery of a new lover.
Du jour au lendemain
Where does the hidden smile lie indeed....one of the best relationship dramas, depicting relationships as performances & 'dramas' itself... Husband tests Wife's patience with lechery, then Wife provokes Husband with her own tales of desire for another man (echoes of Eyes Wide Shut!) These provocations eventually turn into an open rejection of their lifestyle and patriarchal dominance (though of course this couple is haute-borgeouis, and of course this film would reveal itself to be far more political than it seemed). Within these acts of the film music is used more than sensorially, it is almost expressionistic as it relays an intensity which the 30's Art Deco style cannot - as nrh describes in his review "almost viscerally disturbing" But (spoilers lol)…
adapting schoenberg the only way that's possible - with an architect or a sculptor's sense of space, history and time. maybe this is a refelction of my spending so much time with films dominated by playback singrs, but the physical exertion necessary to perform vocal music at this level becomes part of the mise en scene, in a way that is almost viscerally disturbing; talking to another, even to yourself, becomes an act of performance and will. what were modern people, yeah........
The camera turns the opera into an intimate affair, wherein we witness a symphony of physical movements, entrances and exits from the frame, and most astonishingly: faces. Where does your hidden smile lie? It depends on how many frames it takes to show it.
There's nothing I can say about this movie that Neil hasn't already covered yet I'm almost in shock at what Huillet and Straub have accomplished here. Calling their ouevre difficult is an understatement, of all the directors in the "auteurist sphere" there is not a single one who consistent makes films as textually dense and inherently difficult to comprehend as S/H. This isn't to say they're bad by any means. While my personal tastes drift towards the brilliant duality in Too Early, Too Late which juxtaposes fluid camerawork and static images forming a parable about historical events and From The Clouds To The Resistance's lush visual metaphors in their richest work cross cutting between languages, myths and the history of…
I'm far less engaged with source material than I usually is with Straub/Huillet's texts, so more than usual my appreciation is formal: space, shadows and cutting are as impressive as usual. Like a lot of their work what also stands out is how they manage to make their two main performers relate with each other which has an easygoing intimacy that gives the movie an extra charge.
A screwball comedy from hell. Oddly, the closest analogue that came to mind was Kaurismäki; his films are essentially opposite in tone (deadpan, where Straub/Huillet are here histrionic), but meet From Today Until Tomorrow in their abstraction. Discussing a moderate domestic quarrel in staid monotone or turgid opera evoke a similar distance (Brechtian or otherwise), and at once a similar comedy. The scrimmage that makes up this film’s entire is, inherently, funny; the phone conversation (in which the ‘famous tenor’ audibly croons through the receiver) is so ridiculous as to meet no other descriptor. So too is the moment in which, after a good twenty minutes of barreltone opera, the wife warns her husband to quiet down lest they wake…
I prefer the Maurice Chevalier / Jeanette MacDonald version:
"Isn't it romantic
I'm a model of bourgeois propriety
Isn't it romantic
Please listen as I sing atonally
Myyyyy wife is rather frowsy, marriage is a crock
Wait! She's looking much less dowdy, in that nice new frock"
"mama was sind das 'moderne Menschen?"
a filmed staging of a one act schoenberg opera is an odd jumping off point for straub/huillet, but I enjoyed it
It opens with an empty audience and ends with empty statements
light and shadow translating the most beautiful of spatial derivations. the film's displacement of dramaturgy, destabilizing it towards schoenberg, is as blissful as it is unsettling.
