If ever there were a documentary that feels like a PD James murder mystery, it's "Natchez." The setup is almost too good to be true. In Natchez, Mississippi, there are eccentric boomers who belong to a "Garden Club"; each boomer leads tours through his or her own haunted mansion. Tension arises because a Black woman joins the Garden Club, and the Black woman wants her white colleagues to begin to wrestle both with slavery and with the *legacy* of slavery. The ensuing "community meeting"--with deep sighs, half-ironic statements, and the frequent clearing of throats--is a wonderfully passive-aggressive disaster. It is miraculous that someone agreed to have a camera present for this event. That's frequently the case throughout the movie--people say terrible things. People say these things on camera! The filmmaker must have counted her lucky stars night after night after night. (It's unfortunately a cliche of documentary filmmaking that the final ...
Hammerstein's "If I Loved You" is more complicated than it looks. A descendant of Hammerstein's "Make Believe," "If I Loved You" is about coyness. Billy *does* love Julie Jordan. He can't say that. Pretending he does *not* love Julie, he suggests that he is going to weave a "counterfactual tapestry," but what he sings is (in fact) the truth. If I loved you.. Time and again, I would try to say... All I'd want you to know... If I loved you... Words wouldn't come in an easy way. Round in circles I'd go... Billy is of course predicting the future; he will be a very flawed husband, more flawed than the portrait he offers in his song. Julie understands this -- and, regardless, she says yes. Yes to everything. We're often most articulate when we're wearing a mask. Billy can find the perfect words to describe reality...but only when he is role-playing: Longing to tell you -- but afraid and shy -- I'd let my golden cha...