Montreal Film Diary or: The Fantastic Mr. Firth

Broken Embraces (2009). Unlike Rainer Werner Fassbinder, that other European disciple of Douglas Sirk, what seems to interest Pedro Almodóvar about Sirk's late period technicolor melodramas are their soap opera story lines and flamboyant mise en scène, which he's detached from any social commentary with surgical precision. At best, in all his films since Live Flesh (1997), he displays a generosity towards his characters that might pass for humanism; not having seen Almodóvar's earlier pictures I can't comment on them, but his most interesting recent film is undoubtedly Talk to Her (2002), which challenges viewers to empathize with a rapist. Even here, where the story has a clear-cut villain, he's actually a rather nice fellow to begin with, but is twisted by jealousy. Still, despite Almodóvar's obvious mastery as a storyteller and a stylist, the film is limited by its lack of a connection to any social reality, and he's done this sort of thing before in films like Bad Education (2004), his previous neo-noir meta-narrative which itself struck me as overly cautious and apolitical. It's flashy and fun, but it left me wanting more.



Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Now see if you can wrap your head around this: Wes Anderson's new film--despite being his first literary adaptation and his first animated movie--is, like the Almodóvar, very similar to Anderson's previous films in both style and story, and it doesn't represent any social reality either, but almost from the moment it began and until it was over, I stared at the screen with an unceasing sense of wonder and delight. I also laughed a great deal. First of all, I was just blown away by how detailed Anderson's mise en scène is. There's too much happening on screen to notice everything that's there, especially in those endless lateral tracking shots which have become Anderson's signature, but that's clearly by design; this is a film that's meant to be seen more than once. And the story is delightful. Anderson and his co-writer, Noah Baumbach, not only expand greatly on Roald Dahl's original story in terms of character and incident, but without exactly betraying the source, do this in a way that makes the material thoroughly Andersonesque. In Dahl's story, Mr. Fox (George Clooney) had no choice but to steal chickens or else starve to death; but as the film opens, he renounces a life of danger at the behest of his wife, Felicity (Meryl Streep, in the Angelica Huston role), and gets a steady job as a newspaper columnist ("Fox About Town"). However, like Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), the "quote-unquote fantastic" Mr. Fox is a rogue patriarch whose reckless behavior betrays an ambivalence towards the constraints of family life. (As in the original story, his nighttime raids on the nearby farms endanger his family by bringing down upon them the wrath of the three farmers.) Yet, rather than feeling like a retread of Anderson's earlier movies, by making the protagonist's animalism literal and adapting his style to animation, he defamiliarizes his usual style, which is exactly what Almodóvar failed to do.



A Single Man (2009). I didn't use to be a fan of Colin Firth, who in films like Girl With a Pearl Earring and Love, Actually (both 2003) struck me as rather mopey. So part of what's surprising about his performance in this film is that he manages to be at once mopey and debonaire, like a depressed Cary Grant. His character, George, is a gay English professor living in Los Angeles in the early 1960's who's only slightly better dressed than a character in an Antonioni film. And for lack of a better word, Firth's performance is very British in its restraint; he's playing some one who's holding a lot back, choosing his words with great caution so as not to give himself away (as one of George's students observes, he doesn't say everything he knows), and feigning detachment so that it's only when you look into his eyes that you see that his heart is breaking. It's a great performance.

This is the first feature by fashion designer Tom Ford, whose main influence appears to be the early work of Martin Scorsese. One scene in particular, shot in slow motion, in which a neighbor's son pretends to shoot George with a toy gun as the latter drives to work, and George, holding his index finger like a pistol, pretends to fire back, is an obvious nod to Taxi Driver (1976). But apart from this self conscious homage, Scorsese's influence is felt less in specific references than in the way that Ford, through his style, strives to put the viewer inside of George's head. Instead of "invisibly" recording the performances, Ford's camera techniques suggest a way of looking at something. The huge close-ups of eyes and mouths imply a close, scrutinizing gaze. And whenever George feels a connection to another person (or gets a boner while looking at some college boys playing tennis), the colours suddenly become more saturated. It's a remarkable debut.



Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009). The first thing one notices about Lee Daniels' film is its extraordinary verisimilitude. Apart from the heroine's relatively glamourous, light-skinned teacher (Paula Patton), all the characters look and speak like "real people"--that is, not movie stars. The film makes this contrast explicit in the fantasy sequences where the title character (Gabourey Sidibe), an overweight African-American teenager living in Harlem circa 1987, imagines herself as a fashion model. The scenes, brightly lit and edited like a music video, stand in stark contrast with the scenes representing reality, which take place entirely in drab, colourless settings. The performance by Mo'Nique as Precious' verbally and physically abusive mother is remarkable for its unvarnished naturalism, and the actors playing Precious' skanky classmates (almost a trashy Greek chorus) are so dead-on that there were moments when I started to forget that I was looking at a movie. All this inevitably begs the question of how realistic this story actually is as a representation of African-American life, but whatever you decide, you have to concede this: It's not boring.

This is only Daniels' second film as a director after Shadowboxer (2005), which I haven't seen, but looking back on the films he produced prior to his directorial debut, it's clear that he was an auteur even then. Like Precious, Monster's Ball (2001) and The Woodsman (2004) are both heavy, performance-driven films about extreme human behavior (Daniels doesn't do anything in half-measures), and child abuse is a theme in all three. Indeed, the scenes of Halle Berry's character berating her overweight son in Monster's Ball so closely prefigure Precious' relationship with her mother that you gotta wonder: What's this guy got against black single mothers? As the film opens, Precious is pregnant with her second child after being repeatedly raped by her father, but Daniels seems to view this primarily as an instance of bad mothering. Precious' father is absent completely except when he turns up to molest her, and in the fantasy sequence where we see Precious being abused, her mother is shown standing in the doorway to the bedroom, letting it happen. She even blames Precious for the abuse, insisting that the latter intentionally stole her man. And in the film's climatic sequence, where we learn how the incest began, the film again puts the majority of the blame on the mother for not preventing it from happening--as if the father couldn't control himself, and therefore isn't responsible for his actions. Seriously, what's up with that?



Youth in Revolt (2009). The fourth feature and first studio film by indie director Miguel Arteta, who made Chuck and Buck (2000) and The Good Girl (2002), neither of which I've seen, is a dumb teen comedy that's a little too smart for its own good. The film's idea of a cool girlfriend for the pasty protagonist is one who likes Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Gainsbourg, and knows that Tokyo Story (1953) was directed by Yasujiro Ozu, not Kenji Mizoguchi. If you know that films like Tokyo Story exist, you're probably too intelligent to be making a movie about a dorky teenager trying to lose his virginity. At the very least, you should be trying to make a smart teen comedy, like Allan Moyle's Pump Up the Volume (1990) or Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World (2001).

Insofar as the protagonist invents a badass alter-ego for himself, the story could be said to resemble that of Bernardo Bertolucci's Partner (1968), which was made at a time when the young actually were in revolt. But this film, in addition to lacking any stylistic interest whatsoever, is conspicuously apolitical as well. The only characters with any political convictions at all, liberal or conservative, are portrayed as entirely foolish: The love interest's strict parents (Mary Kay Place and M. Emmet Walsh, both squandered) are red state religious whackos, and the hero's neighbor (Fred Willard, who at least gets one funny scene) is a "bleeding heart" who harbors illegal immigrants in his basement. (Eventually, all three are unwittingly fed hallucinogenic mushrooms.) As an example of its genre, this is obviously superior to the likes of Superbad and Juno (both 2007), the two previous teen sex comedies starring Michael "Douche Bag" Cera. (Unlike the bland, white bread heroes of the former, in this film Cera's character actually gets into some real trouble, and unlike the latter, the film doesn't seem to care if we like him.) However, I kept wishing that it would edgier and angrier, like Gary Burns' memorable Kitchen Party (1997). Maybe with less money and fewer guest stars (Steve Buscemi and Ray Liotta are both wasted), Arteta would've been freer to make a more intelligent movie.



Avatar (2009). In 1961, John Cassavetes wrote that, "Audiences go to the cinema to see people: they only empathize with people, and not with technical virtuosity." James Cameron seems to believe something closer to the reverse to the point that technology is the explicit subject of all his films. (After all, like the Terminator, the Titanic, and the hero's avatar body in this film, what are Cameron's movies if not expensive pieces of technology?) And with the possible exception of David Cronenberg, no other filmmaker is as obsessed with prosthetics. When I was thirteen and thought that Aliens (1986) was the greatest film ever made (but wouldn't even consider going to see Titanic [1997]--that's girls' stuff), my favorite part was the metal suit that Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) wears during the climatic fight sequence. In Avatar, which brings back both Weaver and the metal suits, the generic protagonist (some white guy; I don't know his name) is a paraplegic who has his brain hooked up to an alien body, allowing him to walk around and have some less than freaky forest sex with a blue Pocahontas (some chick whose face we never see). However, despite the film's environmental message (backed up with lots of new age hooey about a mystical force that connects all living things), this lacks the ambivalence about technology expressed in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), a pre-millennial doomsday fest about machines rising up against humanity in which the butch heroine (Linda Hamilton) and her ambiguously gay son (Edward Furlong) nevertheless have to rely on an ass-kicking Austrian android (Arnold Schwarzenegger) for their survival. (Not having seen the 1984 original, I can't say whether or not that ambivalence was there already.)

The film has caught some flack for its unoriginal story and weak dialogue (upon being shot, Weaver quips, "This is gonna ruin my whole day"), but as Youth in Revolt demonstrates, you don't want a dumb commercial movie to get too smart. (That doesn't, however, rule out the existence of smart commercial movies, like Fantastic Mr. Fox.) If nothing else, I don't think Cameron, who has the clout to make any movie he has a mind to, is cynically dumbing down his material; I think this is the story he wanted to tell. Meanwhile, no one seems to have noticed how racist the film is in its portrayal of the alien race (who are obviously based on the Native Americans) as noble savages. That said, neither of those things has any real bearing on what I liked about the movie--specifically, the colours and textures of the aliens' skin, which looks really cool in IMAX and 3D. If I was thirteen, I'd probably think it was the greatest movie ever, but for better or for worse, I'm not thirteen and it's just pretty good.



Crazy Heart (2009). Scott Cooper's first film (which I keep wanting to call "Crazy Horse" for some reason) starts out like a Wim Wenders movie with its hero, a washed-up country 'n' western singer, Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges, looking not unlike Kris Kristofferson), traveling in his SUV to different gigs across the southwestern United States. But Cooper is far more tunnel-visioned than Wenders, who in his recent films, like Don't Come Knocking (2005), is more than willing to go off on a tangent. In that film, Sam Shepard's aging cowboy actor wasn't the whole show, but shared the screen with a large and colourful supporting cast. Crazy Heart, on the other hand, is essentially a vehicle for Bridges to win an Oscar, and as such, is monomaniacal in its focus on his character (I don't think there's a single scene in which he doesn't appear), so even actors as talented as Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell, and Maggie Gyllenhaal fail to make much of an impression. Also, this is much more tightly plotted than a Wenders film. Once redemption rears its head in the form of a good woman (Gyllenhaal), which is fairly early on, nothing happens that doesn't in some way lay the groundwork for a late-film crisis that predictably motivates Blake to turn his life around (i.e., quit drinking and write some new songs). Even worse, Cooper has none of Wenders talent for composing sounds and images; he seems perfectly content to merely "cover" a sequence and move on. It's not a terrible film, but there isn't any compelling reason to see it; Don't Come Knocking is a bit of a mess, and it's certainly not one of the great Wenders films, like Alice in the Cities (1974), The State of Things (1982), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987), but there are good things in it that I remember.

Heather's Half-Hearted List of the Decade

Alright, it's Heather: the generally invisible partner in this blog. Weakened under massive bullying from Michael, the actual blogging fellow, I have decided to throw in my own two cents regarding The Greatest Films of the Past Decade. Now, disclaimers are boring, and give perhaps an unpleasant flavour to what is to follow them, but I feel I need to say that I have not seen enough films to make some sort of definitive statement on the topic. The following is simply a list of films that I would be able to say I love. And it's really only two cents worth:



10. Oh yeh, I put them in order.. Starting off light (love-wise), since I really only could think of eight films off of the top of my head, I decided to throw in Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. I haven't seen Shine, or anything else by Scott Hicks, but this was pretty good. Best film I've seen recently, maybe since I haven't really been watching a lot. One thing I liked about this film was how false and staged it was, despite its At Home feel. Not being sarcastic; I liked that. In the age of 'reality' tv, this is something worth looking at, for me. Images like Philip's current wife vacuuming up broken glass seemed like hopelessly corny (and empty?) metaphors or puns or something. But maybe they were just honest coincidences. The things I remember most from the film are a shot of Chuck Close in his wheelchair in a doorway, with a walk light carefully visible in the highly composed but "hand held documentary rugged messy" shot, and also how jealous I was of Philip Glass and his success and his Qi Kong. Something personal which I need to work on.

9. Sorry that the documentaries got shunted to the end of the pile, but next: When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee). I can't put this any higher on the list, because it isn't really the filmmaking that's so moving, but of course the content. I guess there's an argument lying inside that statement as to what filmmaking really is, and I seem to be making the assumption that form is what's important. Which is the opposite of what I often claim. Hmm. Nevertheless, this film is an endlessly important and heart-rending documentation of Hurricane Katrina, and therefore its human and political impacts. This is the power of "George Bush doesn't care about black people" presented in a respectful, articulate filmic format. It broke my heart so many times.

8. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai) Yes, Michael, when I couldn't make ten, I started pilfering your list. Such a beautiful and elegant film, though. Form at its finest. The dresses, of course, the mise en scène on the whole, the music, the pace, the sweetness, the performances. Really lovely. Yep.

7. Inland Empire (David Lynch) I've written about this film before, on this very blog. It f---ed me up. In that good way. I had such a visceral reaction: my body was stiff from intense tension for hours later. David Lynch is the King of making people uncomfortable. And usually I whine about things like that - screwdrivers in guts, lengthy descriptions of holes in reproductive organs, etc. I am anything but a fan of gore. But here it is used to such effect that I almost embrace it. I'm such a wimp that I still haven't psyched myself up for a second go, knowing this time around what I'm in store for. But from a filmmaker who is soooo male voyeur, this film really surprised me with its thoughtful representation of women and their ... struggles? in society. And on such a broad spectrum. It's like he finally stepped back and hit himself with a feminist reading of his entire previous body of work (which I do like, but come on ... misogyny abounds). It disturbed me how deeply I connected to such a dark, dirty film. But the presence it made in my life makes it a very important work for me personally. (I'm not a maniac.)

6. Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin) I think I saw this roughly around the same time as Inland Empire, and so now I'm not sure if I am relating the two solely because of that connection, but they definitely both deal with sexuality and gender in disturbing, great ways. Maddin's film is a lot more fun, and funny, yet still quite dark. The style is elegant to no end, the humour is smart and just plain funny, and I like this movie! (I told you Michael's analyses were gonna be better...)

5. Uzak {Distant} (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) This movie gets a vehement Frig Yeh from me. I have never seen another film that made me agree with every second of its pacing. It's a wonderful representation of family and awkward connections. Somehow, Ceylan manages to make a masterwork out of every single shot, even though it takes place mainly in the same apartment. Although I loved the plainness of the script and its dawdling pace, watching Ceylan's other films (none of which I liked) (haven't seen them all - I know Michael will correct me there if I don't) does make me question whether the simplicity of this film was effective because it was excellent, or because it's all he can do. I guess either way it's effective, and I can say I loved it wholeheartedly. [A Turkish girl I met complained that this film makes Istanbul look depressing and dirty, but I couldn't agree less. The shots that are outside of the apartment and in the city (or dans le paysage) are just overwhelmingly beautiful.]

4. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson) For years, when someone asked me to name my favourite film, this was the first thing to pop out of my mouth, and I won't turn my back on it now. Of course Wes Anderson equals production design, and this film is just gorgeous to see. I love the scene where Gene Hackman drags Luke Wilson into the closet that's full of vintage board games. Beautiful! I have seen it so many times I can perhaps never watch it again. I more likely will. 'Why do I connect with it so strongly?' I have asked myself. Two answers: Dysfunctional Family and Nostalgia. Both run rampant in this film, and in my own life. I think those are two themes that are just about universally interesting in our times. Maybe not. Also, it's hilarious. (Remember when Gene Hackman tries to reach out his hand to Ben Stiller who slaps it childishly away as he walks by?) All-star performances. This movie will be a classic, at least for me.

3. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes) I don't think I've seen another film by this fellow, but, man, it was great. I was mesmerized during the first two viewings. It's just so friggin engaging. You're with him (Haynes) every step of the way. It's beautiful, and thought-provoking, with spot-on performances and excellent music (of course), poetic, etc = basically all the things that great films should be. It's entertaining and interesting for a single viewing, and can't be easily exhausted on subsequent turns. Great stuff.

2. Bamboozled (Spike Lee) I don't know that Spike can ever top this one, but if he can, I am at the front of the line. This film serves as an entry point to a much needed dialogue on race in cinematic history, and how that relates to our society on the whole. These are topics I have always been drawn to, so this film certainly caught my attention. I think its success, and the success of Lee in general, lies in the fact that he explores ideas rather than presenting them. He does not tell us what we are supposed to think, but rather sets up a space where we can do that for ourselves. (Lee himself complains that artists are too often expected to have answers. He jokes that a general criticism of Do the Right Thing was that he did not produce within it an answer to racism.) I think this is his best example of that thoughtfulness, although, of course, Do the Right Thing rocks. But Do the Right Thing has more emotional strength (I think) whereas Bamboozled does a friggin excellent job of combining those emotions (which can never be discounted, or separated) with sobre discussion. I prefer that sort of bridging of intellect and emotion. I can't overstate how much I love this movie. I may just watch it tonight.

1. Number One! I've also only had the opportunity to see this one once, but Les Amants Réguliers took my breath away. (I like it so much I don't even care how cheesy that sounds!) It's my first entry into the world of Philippe Garrel, and I'm anxious for more. Anxious! In my journal, after watching this film, I (disconnectedly) started thinking about what things are important to remember. Maybe my mind went in that direction because of the way that Garrel deals with history, and connects historical periods in such a personal way. Re-enactments of the French Revolution sitting beside the events of May '68 don't feel heavy-handed in this film, but very simple and fitting. Garrel doesn't glorify anyone or anything, he observes and then he passes it on. I might say this is the best film I've ever seen, but before I do, I need to see it again. Another good point about this film: who doesn't love love? Look at that image: this relationship is as awesome and difficult as any I've ever experienced.

The Decade's Best Movies: The Best Movies of the Decade

1. I'm Not There. (2007)

Todd Haynes only made two films this decade, but they were worth waiting for. First there was Far From Heaven (2002), his affecting homage to Douglas Sirk's technicolor melodramas, and then this even more ambitious work that's not exactly a bio-pic of Bob Dylan, but is more like a series of myths loosely inspired by his life--sometimes very loosely. Marcus Carl Franklin is a natural charmer as an African-American child calling himself Woody Guthrie, who rides the rails singing songs about the union cause that are twenty years out of date (the story is set in the late 1950s). And Charlotte Gainsbourg and Heath Ledger both deliver fine performances in the story of an actor, Robbie, who becomes famous for playing a Dylanesque folksinger in a movie, and his wife, Claire, an abstract painter, whose relationship runs parallel to America's involvement in Vietnam. In total, there are six different Dylans, none of them uninteresting, and the impossibility of reconciling them all into a single person is what gives this mosaic its enduing tension. Stylistically, Haynes and his cinematographer, Ed Lachman, up the ante in relation to Far From Heaven by filming each segment in a different style, ranging from a spot-on recreation of Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) to pastiches of the French New Wave and several hippy westerns. Bottomlessly stimulating, this is the only movie I've ever seen four times in theatres.

2. Yi Yi (2000)

Edward Yang's magisterial final film is a real heartbreaker--despite, or perhaps in part because of, his meditative long take style. Some reviewers have compared Yang to Yasujiro Ozu, and the English title of his second feature, Taipei Story (1985), is obviously an allusion to Ozu's work. But in both his earlier masterpiece and this film, Yang's concern with alienation, and the absence of close-ups, bring him closer to Michelangelo Antonioni. (Yi Yi means "individually," and Yang's suggested English title, A One and a Two, is both an allusion to music--a major leitmotif in the narrative--and to the characters' shared sense of isolation from one another.) Set in Taipei at the end of the twentieth century, this film about a severely dysfunctional middle-class family is an uncommonly bleak and pessimistic portrait of modern life, and Yang's contemplative style does nothing to temper the story's seething anger. I remember how mad this movie made me the first time I saw it for a scene in which the family's eight-year-old son, Yang-yang (Jonathan Chang), brings some out of focus snapshots he's taken to school, and is cruelly mocked by his teacher, who snidely remarks to the class that avant-garde art is worth a lot of money. Part of what made me so mad is that, in a society driven by the pursuit of profit, the teacher's hostility towards art is hardly exceptional. This is a movie about the way we live.

3. Dogville (2003)

Lars von Trier is one of the most consistently exciting filmmakers on the planet, and is possibly the boldest and the most confrontational. He began the decade with Dancer in the Dark (2000), an audacious neo-Stalinist musical about a Scandinavian woman (Björk) who's crushed by American capitalism, and ended it with Antichrist (2009), a film that's impossible to be indifferent about. Even better were this Depression-era drama set in the Rockies and its sequel, Manderlay (2005), about slavery in the deep south. (If I have to pick just one for this list, I'll say Dogville because I've seen it four times, while I've only seen Manderlay twice.) Frankly allegorical, both films were shot on a bare soundstage with chalk outlines to represent streets and buildings, and Dogville gets a lot of mileage out of symbolic fruit. At three hours, this tale of a woman, Grace (Nicole Kidman), on the run from gangsters, who's exploited by the wretched townspeople who agree to help her, is a virtuoso piece of storytelling, gripping and stately, building steadily to its chilling climax. It's also perversely funny in the way it plays the heroine's suffering for dark comedy. Papa Fassbinder would be proud.

4. demonlover (2002)

Olivier Assayas is a director whose restless intelligence is manifested in his restless style, which is characterized by a probing handheld camera that's alive and alert, not merely a passive recording device but an active participant in the story. This dark and seriously deranged thriller begins as a lurid yarn about a cutthroat multinational run by Amazon fashionistas that distributes anime porn over the internet, but halfway through, the narrative goes haywire with the accumulating ambiguities making it increasingly unclear just what the heck's going on in this movie. Five years later, Assayas tried to do something similar in Boarding Gate (2007) to lesser effect, but here he's in total command of his material even as the plot seems to spin wildly out of control. Or maybe he's really not and I'm just misreading the film, but either way, I was captivated throughout. A bold, brilliant, bewildering mind-fudge of a movie.

5. La Pianiste (2001)

This elegantly clinical character study by Michael Haneke is especially noteworthy as it contains the best performance yet by Isabelle Huppert, my favorite actor of all time. Adapted from a novel by Elfreide Jelinek (which I haven't read), it's about a Viennese piano teacher, Erika (Huppert), who's leading a double life, presenting herself as the living embodiment of bourgeois respectability while acting out her perverse impulses in secret. And Huppert, who's often pegged as an ice queen (she has a hilarious cameo in David O. Russell's I ♥ Huckabees [2004] as an existentialist philosopher), is totally convincing at portraying both sides of this character. There's a wonderful scene in which Erika runs into some of her teenage students at a sex shop, and lectures them on their disgusting behavior so that they're too embarrassed to ask her the obvious question of what she herself is doing there. Benoît Magimel is almost equally impressive as Walter, the cocky piano prodigy who sets out to seduce this reserved older woman as a kind of macho challenge, and gets in way over his head. And Annie Giradot is truly terrifying as Erika's monstrous mother, with whom she shares a bed. This is a film about extreme, shocking behavior, but Haneke's approach to the material is ferociously coolheaded, so that we come to empathize with Erika instead of merely recoiling from her.

6. Marie Antoinette (2006)

I wasn't a fan of The Virgin Suicides (1999) or Lost in Translation (2003), but Sofia Coppola finally won me over with this sensuous bio-pic of the last queen of France, which is a major step forward in terms of both subject and style. After the lazy and dehumanizing Japanese stereotypes in her (Oscar-winning) second feature, here Coppola does something unexpected and kind of radical in attempting to empathize with Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) as a human being--something that upset a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum, who would apparently prefer a simpler, less nuanced version of history that ends with a good, clean beheading. Beyond that, this is a feast for the senses. Coppola's mise en scène--the soft, naturalistic lighting, candy coloured costumes, and Versailles locations--is exquisitely beautiful, and the film boasts the most radical sound mix of any Hollywood picture of the last decade. This is an uncommonly quiet film, and in many scenes the dialogue is barely above a whisper (I found myself leaning forward in my seat and really listening to the film in a way that I don't often do at the movies). So when the rabble start to assemble outside the palace, the contrast is overwhelming (an effect somewhat diminished when watching the film on DVD). This would make a great double bill with Eric Rohmer's L'Anglaise et le duc (2001), which offers a more overtly political (and unapologetically monarchist) take on the French Revolution.

7. Femme Fatale (2002)

It's a neat paradox that the more Brian De Palma borrows from other directors, the more singular and personal his films become (something you might also say about Haynes). A work of consummate craftsmanship and inspired goofiness, this daffy thriller tips its hat to everyone from Louis Feuillade and Claude Chabrol to Luis Buñuel and Andrei Tarkovsky, but the extreme high angles, dramatic slow motion shots, and complicated split-screen sequences are pure De Palma--not that he invented any of these techniques, but brought together, they add up to a unique sensibility. Opening with an improbably elaborate jewel heist at the Cannes Film Festival, the audaciously nutty story line embraces obvious devices like coincidence and mistaken identity, but De Palma truly outdoes himself in the film's final scenes, which don't make any logical sense, but as pure filmmaking come together with clockwork precision. If there was ever an illustration of Stanley Kubrick's description of a movie director as a kind of taste machine, this is it.

8. In the Mood for Love (2000)

Not an authentic recreation of Hong Kong in the 1960s but a throwback to the glamour of films from that era, Wong Kar-wai's tale of unrequited romance is as visually ravishing as it is poignant. The screen is awash in deep purples and reds; the camera's languorous gaze regards the characters' daily rituals in slow motion; and Nat King Cole croons smoothly on the soundtrack. Maggie Cheung is dressed to impress, and Tony Leung smokes and smokes and smokes. They play neighbors who discover their spouses are schtupping on the sly, and together begin to speculate about how it started, each one acting out the part of the other's spouse, like a dress rehearsal for an affair of their own that never quite happens. Both actors give subtle performances as people who never say exactly what they mean. Early in the film, they both individually suspect that hanky-panky is occurring, and notice the cautious, indirect way that Leung tries to broach the subject. Undoubtedly, the decade's greatest love story.

9. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

A bleakly beautiful, beautifully bleak meditation on order and chaos, adapted by Béla Tarr with his usual collaborator, László Krasnahorkai, from the latter's 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance (which I haven't read), this awe-inspirng masterpiece is nearly two and a half hours long, but consists of just thirty-nine unbroken takes, most of them elaborately choreographed tracking shots. Set in a crumbling Hungarian backwater ruled by suspicion and rumor, the story is set in motion by the arrival of a traveling exhibition of natural wonders, including a giant whale carcass on the back of a truck, and an anarchist prince whose followers soon descend upon the town, gathering in the main square to wait for his instructions. In response, a group of influential townspeople form a committee for the restoration of order. Tarr has said that the film was a response to the war in Bosnia, and like all his movies, it's uncompromisingly serious and unfashionable, so it's no wonder that he only gets to make a film every seven years. But as Roberto Rossellini said of Charlie Chaplin's A King in New York (1957), this is the work of a free man.

10. The Holy Girl (2004)

Remarkably, this absorbing and singular Argentine film was only the second feature by writer-director Lucrecia Martel, who with La ciénaga (2001) and this film established herself as one of the most distinctive stylists now working. Her shallow, claustrophobic compositions are striking for the way she crops her actors' faces and bodies, which are constantly spilling out over the sides of the image, as if there's too much going on to get it all in frame. Yet, far from being congested, her staging of actors is surprisingly elegant (and elegantly surprising) so that we always know exactly who we're supposed to be looking at in each shot. And seeing the film again recently, I was reminded of Martel's light touch with actors. There's a lovely scene in which the heroine's mother, Helena (Mercedes Morán), is flirting with a married man, Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso), who's staying in her hotel for a medical conference, when she gets a call from her ex-husband. "It's Manuel," the bartender informs her. "Which Manuel?" she asks, knowing perfectly well who it is. "Your ex-husband Manuel." Martel's third feature, The Headless Woman, premiered at Cannes in 2008, and I can't think of any film I'm more eagerly anticipating.

Geeking Out on Mulholland Dr.

"'The cinema,' said André Bazin, 'substitutes our gaze for a world that corresponds to our desires'."

This quote, read by an off-screen narrator at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard's greatest film, Le Mépris (1963), is a good entry point into David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001)--not quite his best film but close (Heather says Inland Empire [2006], but I'm partial myself to Eraserhead [1977])--as its two-part structure is virtually an illustration of the different ways this quote can be interpreted (and because the Angelo Badalamenti theme over the credit sequence is almost a dead ringer for George Delerue's score for Godard's film). Le Mépris playfully turns Bazin's quote on its head, so that "a world that corresponds to our desires" doesn't mean a world of easy gratification but a confirmation of our worst fears--namely, that a loved one would cease to love us--and Lynch's film, which is no less of an epic break-up movie, gives us both sides of the equation. In the movie's first and longest part, an aspiring actress, Betty (Naomi Watts), moves into a swanky apartment, is discovered by a casting director, and falls in love with a glamourous amnesiac, Rita (Laura Elena Herring). Betty's meteoric rise is contrasted with the decline of a unibrowed Hollywood director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), who in the same day loses control of his film, and is left by his wife for the pool man (Billy Ray Cyrus, in a surreal cameo), which is retroactively recoded as wish-fufillment in the second part of the movie when Rita (who's now called Camilla Rhodes) leaves Betty (now called Diane Selwyn) for Adam, and to add insult to injury, Adam is rewarded with a fat settlement in his divorce ("I got the pool, and she got the pool man"). This part of the film begins with Diane waking up in a much dingier apartment than the one where Betty was living, and it's Camilla who's discovered as an actress, landing the lead role in Adam's film, The Sylvia North Story. The important thing to note is that neither part of the movie is more real than the other.




The other important reference point in relation to Mulholland Dr. is Fritz Lang's greatest film, Spies (1928)--another movie in which some of the characters have multiple identities. At the beginning of Lynch's film, Rita is about to be killed in a limo on Mulholland Dr. (we learn later for stealing money from the mob) when the parked car is hit head-on by another vehicle, and Rita walks away from the accident with no physical injuries but total amnesia. (Rita is the name she gives herself after Rita Hayworth.) The efforts of the gangsters to track her down unfold at the same time, but apparently unrelated to, their taking control of Adam's film. Pulling the strings behind both operations is a single all-knowing mastermind, Mr. Roque (Michael J. Anderson), who like Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), the master criminal in Lang's film, is confined to a wheelchair. And the office where Mr. Roque receives information from and gives orders to his henchmen is almost as anonymous and abstract as Haghi's. In keeping with the generic abstraction of Lang's film, where it's never explained what's in the stolen documents, Lynch's film never explains why Mr. Roque is so keen on having Camilla Rhodes (played in the first part of the movie by Melissa George) star in Adam's film, or why he decides to shut down production on The Sylvia North Story instead of simply replacing Adam. Additionally, other gaps in both films add to the sense that their villains are omnipotent: In Lang's film, a soldier claiming to have seen Haghi is promptly shot by an unseen assailant, while the gangsters in Lynch's film are some how able to track Adam to the dodgiest downtown crack house dive hotel imaginable, even though he payed the improbably friendly concierge in cash. However, in the second part of the movie, Mr. Roque is effectively replaced by a hit man (Mark Pellegrino) that Diane pays to bump-off Camilla using the money that Rita stole from Mr. Roque. Needless to say, the movie doesn't explain how Diane got this money, but as part of an overall system of rhymes between the film's two parts, it fits cinematically even if it doesn't make any sense literally.

Where the Wild Things Are: Trier and Herzog

As a rule, Lars von Trier's English language films are a lot more ambitious and interesting than his movies in Danish, where one gets the impression that he's merely keeping himself occupied in between bigger projects. Coming four years after Manderlay (2005), his boldly un-P.C. allegory for slavery in America, and two years after The Boss of it All (2007), a slight and uneven office comedy, Trier's Antichrist (2009) is certainly audacious and singular, as much for its style as its content (although it's the latter that caused such a stir at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and indeed, everywhere else the film's been shown). However, I'd hesitate to call this A-squad material because I find its subject--or perhaps I should say the film's treatment of the subject--has less resonance than Breaking the Waves (1996), Dogville (2003), and Manderlay.

Like most of Trier's films, Antichrist alternates between two diametrically opposed shooting styles: A pseudo-documentary style characterized by a handheld camera, sync sound, and jump cuts (though it seemed to me there were fewer jump cuts here than in Trier's previous films, particularly Dogville), and a more dreamlike style characterized by a stable camera, slow motion (according to David Bordwell's blog entry on the film, some shots were filmed at one thousand frames per second), and in place of sync sound, off-screen dialogue and a low Lynchian droning. (Additionally, the bookending sequences, which are also shot in slow motion with a stable camera, are distinguished from the rest of the film by being photographed in black and white, and scored to a baroque aria.) The film is about a man (Willem Dafoe) and a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose infant son, Nick, falls from an open window and dies in the opening sequence while they're schtupping in the next room. At the funeral, the woman collapses, and when the man goes to visit her in the hospital, Trier boldly cuts 180 degrees on a close-up of the man's face in profile, so that he seems to jump from one side of the 'Scope image to the other. When Trier cuts back to the woman, they both seem to be looking in the same direction, at something off-screen left, rather than each other. After the woman is released from the hospital, the man--a therapist who thinks he knows better than his wife's doctors--decides to take her, for therapeutic reasons, to the place she fears the most: the garden outside of Eden, their cabin in the woods. On the train ride there, the man asks her to imagine herself arriving at Eden and becoming one with nature. And the sound of their conversation continues over a scene representing her fantasy, shot in slow motion and accompanied by an ominous rumbling on the soundtrack. The first style is associated with reality, while the second is linked to dreams and flashbacks, but as the film continues, the line between fantasy and reality becomes increasingly ambiguous.

The film is dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian master of mysticism, misogyny, and mist (all of which are highly pertinent to Antichrist), but the dead white guy who seems most relevant as a reference point is Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose Day of Wrath (1943) is about a witch hunt in 16th century Denmark. In keeping with the characters' puritanical worldview, Dreyer's film never questions the existence of witches and associates nature with evil--an outlook shared by Antichrist. Roger Ebert has been aggressive in pushing the interpretation that the film is about a universe created, not by God but by the Devil, which is consistent with the woman's belief that nature is evil, and therefore, human nature is evil as well. (It could also be read as a fairy tale with a cruel father and an ambiguous mother.)

However, unlike Dreyer's film, and Trier's earlier Breaking the Waves, about an isolated religious sect on the northern coast of Scotland during the sexual revolution, Antichrist is set, like F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), in no particular time or place, so the characters exist in a historical vacuum. Despite its 16th century outlook, Dreyer's film is also something of a proto-feminist statement about how women are oppressed by patriarchy. (When the heroine discovers that her late mother was a witch, she's sexually aroused by the idea that a woman could have such power.) And in Breaking the Waves, set during the time when the feminist movement was in full swing, the heroine's behavior confounds not only the rigid church elders, but the more secular and progressive characters as well (and poses a comparable challenge to viewers). I'll need to see Antichrist again to be sure, but it seems like this time Trier is siding with the church elders.



Werner Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant—Port of Call: New Orleans (2009) is one seriously loopy movie. Although it doesn't slow down long enough to lull the viewer into the same druggy stupor as Herzog's '70s films, its story is trippy enough all by itself; as he did in his earlier remake of Nosferatu (1979), Herzog reinvents Abel Ferrara's anguished Bad Lieutenant (1992) as a stoner comedy. (There's a sequence in a retirement home, which I won't describe here because you absolutely have to see it for yourself, except to say that it made me laugh as much as anything in Todd Phillips' The Hangover [2009]--maybe more.) Then, to add an extra dash of weirdness to the proceedings, the more desperate its crack-smoking cop protagonist becomes, the more he starts to talk like Jimmy Stewart. The tension between the constraints imposed by working in a commercial genre with big stars, and Herzog's yearning to sail off into the wild blue yonder of cine-craziness, is only slightly less apparent here than in his stylistically bland Discovery Channel co-production Grizzly Man (2005), but in light of how compelling and funny this film is, maybe it's churlish to complain.

Considering the huge differences between the two films in terms of character and plot (to say nothing of tone), Herzog's Bad Lieutenant feels closer, in some respects, to a crypto-remake of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956) than it does Ferrara's bellow of Catholic angst. For starters, Ferrara didn't give his character a backstory or even a name; instead of trying to explain his behavior, Ferrara's lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) simply was. Here, the screenplay by William Finkelstein not only gives the lieutenant a name, Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), but a more detailed backstory as well. Like Ed Avery (James Mason) in Bigger Than Life, Terrence is diagnosed early in the film with an incurable condition that will require him to take medication for the rest of his life. In Ray's film, Avery goes cuckoo for Cortisone and tries to kill his son; here, six months after his doctor prescribes him Vicadin for chronic back pain, we see Terrence snorting a little cocaine in his car before walking into the scene of a murder. Later, we learn that Terrence's father is a recovering alcoholic. (Like father, like son, we're obviously meant to conclude.) Also, like Bigger Than Life, Herzog's film has an ambiguous ending, since in each movie the protagonist will have to continue taking drugs indefinitely to treat his condition. The sinister implication of both films is that the characters were already bad, and the drugs merely exacerbated an existing situation. Other changes to the story are more dubious, like the substitution of a pair of wretched Latino rapists in Ferrara's original for a flashy black gangster (Xzibit) in Herzog's remake, which is indicative of how the material has been Hollywoodized in certain respects.

Stylistically, this doesn't look very different from a Hollywood feature, apart from Herzog's taste for the occasional handheld sequence shot--here broken up by jump cuts that don't reappear elsewhere in the film. Herzog's touch is particularly evident in the scene where Terrence tells his girlfriend, Frankie (Eva Mendes), a story about his childhood, which is filmed in an unbroken take (without jump cuts) with a handheld camera, and set to a score by Mark Isham doing his best Popul Vuh impersonation. But what's most Herzogian about this scene, which recalls the best moments in Herzog's non-fiction work, is the way it invites the viewer to fill in the gaps with their imagination. And then there are the reptile point of view shots, and in particular the already famous scene where Terrence sees some iguanas on a table that no one else believes are there. Herzog employs a wide angle lens to distort the space of the room, and the story comes to a complete halt as Terrence just stares at the iguanas while an old blues song plays on the soundtrack--a moment that feels closer to the work of Herzog's American disciple Harmony Korine than Herzog himself. (Making this scene even stranger is the fact that none of Terrence's coworkers seem even remotely concerned that he's apparently hallucinating. As in a later sequence where he sees the soul of a dead man dancing, the obvious explanation is that Terrence is straight-up tripping; but a crazier, more Herzogian explanation is that the world is an illusion and Terrence is simply being given a glimpse into the reality of dreams.) But apart from occasional non-narrative interludes like these, the film is, on the whole, a fast moving piece of storytelling, lacking the meditative quality of Herzog's German films, like Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Heart of Glass (1976).

It's curious how, in a matter of only a few years, Herzog has gone from being a slightly marginal cult hero to something like a bankable Hollywood director. It all started when Grizzly Man became an art house hit and was shown endlessly on the Discovery Channel. I was in the minority in finding it a disappointment, and passed on Herzog's subsequent Rescue Dawn (2006)--a fictionalized version of the story Herzog told in his already pretty conventional Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)--and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), his Antarctic documentary which was nominated for an Academy Award. My immediate knee-jerk conclusion was that Herzog had been tamed enough to be embraced by the mainstream, and I probably would've passed on The Bad Lieutenant as well had it not gotten such ecstatic reviews coming out of TIFF.

My own enthusiasm for The Bad Lieutenant has forced me to rethink some of my biases, but as with Grizzly Man, its craziness is largely a matter of pro-filmic content rather than anything Herzog's doing behind the camera. And even then, the delirious hyperbole of the story is tempered somewhat by leftover obligations to the detective genre, like a sub-Peckinpah slow motion shoot out, which was less the case with Ferrara's original despite it being less ostentatiously weird. Also, one misses the the presence of real people in Herzog's films, as opposed to actors, which was so effective in Invincible (2001), where he contrasts Zishe Breitbart's total lack of guile as the simple strong man with Tim Roth's performance as the sinister illusionist. As with Fritz Lang, another German who made some impressive films in Hollywood (but nothing to rival Die Nibelungen [1924], Metropolis [1927], Spies [1928], M [1931], and The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb [1959]), Herzog's talent seems diluted rather than enhanced by his access to the resources of a Hollywood studio.