The Pagan Agenda

Rating:

Who is this Henri-Georges Clouzot and where has he been all my life?

Well he was a contemporary of Hitchcock, one of the post-war French directors who, with films like Diabolique and The Wages of Fear, greatly contributed to the art of cinematic storytelling and raised the bar on the genre of suspense. The Criterion Collection has also acknowledged the high mark of quality of his films, yet I still feel like the depth of recognition owed to this man and to his films are not properly rendered. Had he made even half as many films as Hitchcock perhaps this would be different, but nonetheless I feel like what I am about to review is for all intensive purposes an overlooked masterpiece, a film just as reticent today as it was when it premiered in 1953.

In an unspecified ramshackle village in South America, a motley crew of European expatriates whittle away their hours in a purgatorial state of impoverishment waiting for an opportunity of steady employment and a means of escape. A collection of working class personalities emerge as the expatriates, immobilized by the midday rays, loiter in the shadows of a tavern, and in quiet acts of rebellion take out their misery on the resident proprietor of the tavern, a burly mercantile brute of a man who dishes out as much as he takes.

The film takes on a diptych structure. The first half establishes the antagonistic atmosphere of class warfare in the tavern, something reminiscent of Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths in its convincing portrayal of the daily routine of poverty and its architectonic use of setting, here replacing the squalor of The Lower Depths with a richly evocative South American tavern that oozes authenticity. The squabbling amongst the characters is interrupted with the arrival of Jo, an aging criminal who marks his territory amongst the downtrodden, and with the alliance of another Frenchman, Mario, together become the principle characters, imposing a new rung to the class warfare ensuing in the tavern. There is a comical yet earnest vying for dignity amongst the expatriates which I found particularly touching, and which becomes a significant counterpoint to the behavior which unfolds in the second part of the diptych structure, when the rhetoric and posturing of dignity is put to the ultimate test: to transport two truckloads of nitroglycerine to a raging oil fire in the depths of the South American countryside in exchange for the financial means of independence.

So begins one of the most staggeringly unnerving passages of cinema, one which encompasses nearly half of the film in a well-laid minefield of suspense. With at least three massive set-pieces involved along the journey, drawing upon every ounce of cinematic expression, The Wages of Fear is a calculated coronary waiting to happen. The air is thick with anxiety particularly since one feels in this filmic world that no punches will be pulled. There is a gritty nihilistic edge to the dialogue and to the way the characters wrestle with the impending fear which humanizes their plight and makes it that much more worrisome to watch; added to this, is the unsympathetic deluge of obstacles which continually obstruct the characters’ journey, going beyond the purely functional mandates of suspense to the wholly nasty (think of the tasks endured in Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and you get the idea). This situated realism is absent from many of the works of Hitchcock and becomes one of the problems I have with the sort of half-hearted suspense he achieves; only in a film like The Wages of Fear does imminent danger feel genuine.

Not merely a well-executed exercise in suspense, ‘The Wages of Fear’ serves as a parable of the plight of the working class and provides some heartfelt commentary on masculinity in the face of fear. It possesses all the dramatic effects of a war film, engaging the common tropes of male bonding and existential dread, but in place of war the threat is embodied by a treacherous stretch of road, a truckload of nitroglycerine, and fear itself. It situates dignity as a resonate goal and asks how far one is willing to go to obtain it. Each of us sits inside the truck uncovering our own limitations alongside the characters, a captive to the harsh realities before us.

[It is interesting to note that when the film first premiered in America it was highly censored for its portrayal of American imperialism, its nihilism, and oddly enough, its supposed overtones of homosexuality (an element I never saw in the film)]