Film Secession

Prodigal Sons

The Return of the Prodigal Son
(Rembrandt van Rijn, 1663-1669,
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg)

As in Exodus, the "sins of the father" bear down upon sons in James Gray's films.
This is counterbalanced, as it is in seminal novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky, by a strong and persistent emphasis on redemptive imagery associated, iconographically and thematically, with the Prodigal Son. In the parable (Luke 15:11-32), a wealthy man has two sons, one of whom is upstanding and devoted, while the other leads a dissipated, distracted life. Peter Paul Rubens distills the latter aspect of the story in his painting of the scene in Antwerp (The Prodigal Son, 1618, below).
The return of the wayward son is treated with dismay by the hardworking brother, but the father instead chastises him, explaining that all that matters is that "what was lost has now been found." Christian exegetes have long understood the parable as one of the fundamental descriptions of the overwhelming power of divine forgiveness (in the words of 18th century clergyman John Newton, "Amazing grace, that saved a wretch like me").
Gray repeatedly uses gestures derived from Rembrandt's painting at the top (the most celebrated painting held in Russia) in his films. This is powerfully expressed in the extracts from We Own the Night (2007) and The Yards (2000) below.
Significantly, in Gray's very masculine cinematic world, the gestures are often connected with wives and mothers. They synthesize and movingly incorporate the equivalent female sacred gesture, the maternal cradling of the body of the dead Christ in a Pietà.

The Prodigal Son (Peter Paul Rubens, 1618, Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp)

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

Brothers united at the end of We Own the NIght (James Gray, 2007)

Pietà (Michelangelo, 1499, Saint Peter's Basilica, Vatican City)

Pietà and Prodigal Son imagery in The Yards (James Gray, 2000)

Hitchcock alerts the viewer to a "very important" painting in the trailer for Psycho (1960)

Virtue Redeemed

Much like the protagonist of many Giacomo Puccini operas, Ewa in Gray's The Immigrant (2013) is plunged into prostitution by her dire circumstances. As the film proceeds, however, it becomes clear that she was raped on the ship and her reputation was tarnished by her attacker (word has spread enough that the immigration official she speaks with in the beginning has heard something).
This information transforms the narrative into a version of "Susanna and the Elders" (Daniel 13). Susanna was assaulted by two respectable village elders who came upon her bathing. She maintained her honor and resisted their advances, but they retaliated through calumny and slander. When their deception is eventually uncovered, they are publicly executed.
The subject was particularly favored by Renaissance artists from Venice like Tintoretto as well as Baroque painters like Rubens and Artemisia Gentileschi. The narrative served perfectly as a form of reflexive mea culpa to grapple with the ethical consequences of the voyeurism intrinsic to all representational art.
Alfred Hitchcock made these themes explicit in Psycho (1960) by having Norman Bates pull away a reproduction of the scene to illicitly watch the female protagonist. In the trailer for the film (left), Hitchcock jovially points at the reproduction and says the painting is "very important."
Unlike Marion Crane, Hitchcock's soon-to-disappear protagonist in Psycho, Ewa is eventually able to change her situation. Doing so requires a series of reciprocal exchanges and sacrificial gestures. First, Bruno, who has been acting as her pimp, endures a vicious beating to protect her (in tunnels, which have deeper psychological meanings in Gray's work). In the final sequence, conflict instead resolves itself into a Pietà.
It is unclear how this Prodigal Son, who has himself been transformed by witnessing Ewa's Confession, will proceed, but Gray eloquently uses the mirror on the right to to close the circuit of moving getures.