Close-Up on Ermanno Olmi's "The Legend of the Holy Drinker"

A fabulist Parisian parable suggests a side of the great director Ermanno Olmi—who died earlier this year—that lies open to discovery.
Lawrence Garcia

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Ermanno Olmi's The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988) is showing July 19 - August 18, 2018 in the United States.

The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Ermanno Olmi was not an artist ignored in his lifetime. A recipient of the Honorary Golden Lion in 2008 (a full decade before his passing earlier this year), Olmi managed acclaim not just in his home country of Italy, but also in the broader international eye. In 1978, he took the Palme d’Or for The Tree of Wooden Clogs, his best-known work. And although relatively less discussed, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, an adaptation of Austrian writer Joseph Roth’s 1939 novella of the same name, won him the Venice Golden Lion just a decade later. Given the unreliability of such awards nowadays, it’s fair to wonder whether Olmi’s film—a discursive, bibulous Parisian odyssey of a clochard, Andreas (Rutger Hauer), who struggles to repay a stranger’s gracious gift of 200 francs to the local church—represents the staid median of the contemporary arthouse scene or a radical, groundbreaking achievement. After all, one has little reason to assume that awards juries were any less erratic three decades back.

The answer, as it often is in such cases, is neither. Which is to say that while Olmi’s 1988 Venice entry might not be the line-up’s most recognizable title from today’s vantage point—Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown stands out in that regard, if its Criterion Collection inclusion is any indication—it remains a fascinating film, in part because it runs so counter to Olmi’s reputation as a staunch humanist deeply indebted to Italian neo-realism. In the wake of Olmi’s passing, President Sergio Mattarella praised the way he “gave voice to a peasant civilization by going back to its origins, honoring the feelings of simple people and places where nature meets man,” which seems to encapsulate his reputation in the larger public sphere. Even more telling, however, is avant-garde historian and academic P. Adams Sitney’s assessment of Olmi as having “worked extensively with amateur actors, chosen simplified naturalistic settings, eschewed elaborate artifices or lighting, and employed an ascetic camera style.”  

The latter is especially curious when considering The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which is anything but ascetic. The title suggests a fabulist parable and Olmi renders it as such, constructing scenes as one would a burnished half-memory. The opening alone is staged like something out of a dream. After Hauer’s besotted figure receives a gift of 200 much-needed francs from a bespectacled man who believes himself blessed with the “miracle of conversion,” he proceeds along the banks of the Seine into the shadows of a familiar archway, fronted by the amber glow of early evening and framed by windswept leaves. He opens a box of meager belongings—his last worldly possessions—and cradles the pocket-watch within it, which triggers a two-fold memory shrouded in smoke: of a speeding train and the platform from which an elderly couple sends him off. Although the film mainly follows Andreas’ attempts to get back on his feet, cobble together some money and keep it from slipping away into drink before Sunday mass, it's filled with such reminisces, staccato bursts of motion or plays of light triggered by hazy half-recognitions.

Bolstered by the initial miraculous encounter, Andreas attempts to make good—though, of course, not before a celebratory glass of liqueur, the first step to disaster given his evident weakness for drink. But in the generous universe of Roth and Olmi’s imagining, disaster turns into serendipity and Andreas ends up securing two days’ work from a nearby patron. (Naturally, a toast is required to seal the deal.) The offered remuneration? 200 francs, exactly what Andreas needs—no more, no less. The entire film is filled with such improbabilities, coincidences and chance encounters, as if the universe were conspiring to aid Andreas in his quest. No matter that every time he reaches the church for Sunday mass, he’s waylaid, as if borne by some unseen force, his pockets emptied by yet another flowing glass of wine. All is grace—and the universe just keeps on giving.

The Legend of the Holy Drinker was, oddly enough, made in English, though some conversations proceed entirely in (unsubtitled) French, and most in a mix of the two. But its barriers of misunderstanding are ultimately rather minimal—in large part because the film traffics in the kind of physical comedy that Olmi had cultivated as early as 1961 with Il posto (which, given its Kafkaesque streak and droll humor, might be more productively linked to Tati’s PlayTime than neorealism). Also, for a film that runs just over two hours, there’s precious little dialogue—and what dialogue there is scans as relatively inconsequential, more akin to the intertitles of a silent comedy than indispensable text. Instead, the sprightly woodwind-fueled score dominates. 

“These last few days, I’ve really started to believe in miracles,” Andreas tells a woman in a restaurant, one of several figures from his past whom he encounters across the runtime. A world away from Sitney’s summation of Olmi’s methods, the scene is lit like something out of a Terence Davies film, which gives the impression of an experience being embalmed in memory even as it occurs. The scene afterwards, set it a cavernous ballroom backed by the light of a full moon and a constellation of orange lamps, is perhaps even more breathtakingly realized and completely up-front about its artifice. (That latter quality, especially, is indicative of Olmi’s later works, which suggests a dimension to the Italian director that lies open to discovery.)  

Indeed, the entirety of The Legend of the Holy Drinker could be said to take place in a sort of phantom Paris—less populated and more brightly lit, its rains heavier and its neons more intense. It has the quality of a delirious refraction, as of images warped by molten glass. And throughout, given Andreas’ tenuous hold on the usual currents of waking life and the fragments of memory that surface intermittently, there's ample reason to assume that what’s on-screen is no more than a reconstruction, a present-tense reordering of reality. A night at a hotel brings all manner of delights, not least an encounter with Sandrine Dumas’ seductive, unpredictable figure, introduced by an elevator cage spatially obscured by literal smoke and mirrors; and the day after—a rainy trip to Fontainebleau, prompted by nothing more than a picture hanging on the hotel wall. Each cut or aural intrusion brings yet another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment and barely-perceptible slip away from reality.

All in all, The Legend of a Holy Drinker is, rather appropriately, a delirious ramble—somewhat slack and occasionally dull, but always infused with a casual wonderment and inexhaustible delight. The grace accorded to Hauer’s undeserving figure practically propels Dante Spinotti’s restless camera, which swerves and floats, continually distracted by stray textures and minor details. “Please pay attention,” a policeman says to Andreas during an encounter that lies on the edge of irreparable harm, but then pivots into a touching act of grace. And that's all Olmi seems to ask—that we keep on looking. View the world with grace and the universe (or God) will respond in kind; the veracity of it all is immaterial.

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