From Today Until Tomorrow

At the start of Arnold Schoenberg's one-act opera Von heute auf morgen, a middle-class couple in evening dress come home. The man gripes about the boredom of their marriage and announces an interest in his wife's fashionable friend. The wife vengefully feigns a transformation into the soul of modishness, changing her clothes every 15 minutes and declaring that she will have many lovers, starting with the popular tenor they met tonight. The husband decides he wants his old wife back, and, reconciled, the two face down a siege by their would-be tempters, the tenor and the wife's friend.

Schoenberg's deep, dark modernism turns this attack on trivial modernism into a sacrificial rite. Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet's magnificent 1996 film -- a cause célèbre in Europe -- preserves and sharpens the work's eerily out-of-time ambiguity. The setting, costumes, and situation suggest one of Ernst Lubitsch's intellectual comedies; the wavering presence of the singers against translucent jalousies, darkly menacing plants, and pools of soft light recalls the drifting sensuality of Jacques Tourneur. The oppressiveness of the incredibly astringent music and the simple living-room set is at once fulfilled and resisted by Straub & Huillet's perennial procedure of filming everything "live," with direct sound. Holding shots on vacated spaces and, above all, on the singers as they listen to their partners, Straub and Huillet evoke a world in which the on-screen is haunted by the off-screen, strains toward it, and desires it. At the Harvard Film Archive this Sunday, December 5.

-- Chris Fujiwara