Three strains, youth, late 60s-early 70s American politics, and Nick Ray himself, become the core subjects of Ray's last feature film...
After returning from 10 years in Europe, Ray spent months trying to get a Hollywood job. When that failed, he took a job teaching film, a blessing in disguise. He was surrounded by young people he could sympathize with and respond to and in the position to finally revolt against the strictures of classical cinema and the political establishment, tendencies which had been in his work from the start.
Ray's students, their own autobiographies, and the process of making the film, become the subject of the film itself. It's a sort of meta-documentary: an experimental film about an experiment in filmmaking. Not only are the students both crew and subject, the director is both director and subject. What's more, it's a critical self-portrait of the director, warts and all. But Ray also pictures himself as a Santa Claus whose bag of gifts turns out to be pieces of film for the world.
Ray thought of the film as a Guernica. A poster of Picasso's Guernica is even seen on a wall in the film. The episodic structure of the film and the multi-image format creates the film equivalent of a cubist painting. As with Guernica, by no means did Ray think the counter-culture was winning. Instead Nixon is winning his second term.
The students didn't want to make a political film, however. Their concern was with love and sex. But Ray understood a bigger picture they didn't, that the political culture surrounding them still affected their personal pursuits regardless. In the film, sadly, none of the relationships seem to be working, not even the relationships people have with themselves. Leslie seems free: she sings, dances, and walks around naked, but she also debases herself so much that the crew finally throw tomatoes at her as if to say she's giving a bad performance in her own life. Tom, in the most emotionally intense moment in any of Ray's films, shaves his beard to escape and destroy his old identity. A love scene involves people trying to kiss each other while wearing full-face masks. Richie's girlfriend bluntly says she's leaving to sleep around, so he takes her to a pool and "in play" almost drowns her. Dissatisfaction, accidental deaths, and the possibility of suicide surround all the characters. These are not happy campers.
Near the end of the film, a previously minor character gets her own episode where she visits a man in the hope of having sex. When she arrives at the man's place, she finds he is already with another girl. That couple are "in play" physically fighting each other just as Richie was fighting with his girl in the pool. Here, men and women can only relate through violence. As the rejected girl walks out the door, her words explain the film's title. She can't return home again to childhood and virginity nor can she go forward towards positive sexuality and a fulfilling life either. This has been Nick Ray's complaint from They Live By Night on, that people deserve a better life, emotionally and materially, than they get. At the film's very end, Ray addresses this complaint with one last testament, the only solution he has or thinks will work, simply that people need to take care of one another. If that seems facile, Ray, of course, has covered himself earlier by saying "don't expect too much from a teacher". He doesn't have all the answers, he's in the same leaky boat you are.
The students' clothes, long hair, and 70s attitudes date the film. It's uneven. Some of its episodes work much better than others. There are multiple and polarized images, there's wild electronic music, it's presented as half document-half fiction, the narrative is episodic, and the exposition that might explain what is going on in certain scenes is missing. Also, the collage of images, one juxtaposed next to another, takes some hard thinking to "read", put together, and decode for extra meaning. Combined, all these elements can make the film look, for some, like an incoherent mess, but it isn't. It's simply a work of modern art. And like Picasso's Guernica, it's a violent cry with powerful content for those who can peer through or appreciate its unconventional style.
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