The World

This Site Has Moved (At Least for the Time Being)

2011-05-24T04:23:00.005-03:00

Since I can't access this blog in China (well, I can, sort of, obviously, but it's a pain in the neck and I can't upload pictures), I've decided to move it elsewhere. So, for those of who you actually seem to enjoy my writing (a phenomenon I find personally baffling), set sail for The (New) World at http://lesamantsreguliers.wordpress.com, where you can find my belated response to David Fincher's Zodiac.

Keeping it Real (Somewhere, Biutiful)

2011-03-04T18:00:00.003-04:00

No actors.
(No directing of actors.)
No parts.
(No learning of parts.)
No staging.
But the use of working models, taken from life.
BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors).
—Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph (1975)

Like the characters in her earlier Lost in Translation (2003), the subject--one hesitates to call him the protagonist--of Sofia Coppola's new film, Somewhere (2010), is a guy with what might be described as "white people problems." Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a B-list Hollywood actor who's so bored with his debauched lifestyle (he's evidently slept with more women than the hero of a Gabriel García Márquez novel) that when he hires identical twin prostitutes to perform a striptease for him in his swanky hotel room, he finds it a struggle just to stay awake. To be sure, the performance is not particularly erotic (though well rehearsed and impressive from an athletic standpoint, it lacks passion), and that bed does look super comfy, but that's beside the point. If he's bored, he should quit his moping and read a book or something.

Stylistically, Coppola appears to have been influenced by Monte Hellman's Two Lane Blacktop (1971), the counterculture road movie written by Rudy Wurlitzer. As in that film (as well as Coppola's previous movie, Marie Antoinette [2006]), what little dialogue there is is of little consequence, and is overheard more than heard. The film opens with a static shot of Johnny's black sports car being driven around (and around) in circles, and there are many more shots to come of the same car being driven around Los Angeles--including the closing sequence in which Johnny takes his car out to the middle of nowhere, parks it beside a stretch of highway, and just walks away. I guess this is supposed to represent his walking away from fame and success, but while Coppola has a pretty solid grasp on what it's like to be rich and pampered and feel indifferent to it, she appears to have no inkling whatsoever as to how else a person might live. So the film simply ends there.

Between these bookending sequences, Johnny's eleven year old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), turns up at his door, and it's here that the film shifts into high gear. While Dorff is obviously an actor trying to seem like he's bored, Fanning really is a little girl. To be sure, there are moments when she's clearly acting, as when she breaks into tears at one point late in the film. But for the most part, although Fanning is a professional actress who's appeared in other commercial movies, what Coppola does with her resembles the use of non-actors by a director like Bresson in that she seems to choose her performers, not for their ability to transform themselves into a completely different person, but for who they intrinsically are. (That said, there's little to no evidence of any direct influence.)

It's impossible to tell just by looking at the film how much of the dialogue was prepared in advance, and how much was improvised by the actors. As in Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1960), the numerous celebrities who make cameos here simply seem to be dropping by, as opposed to playing a scripted role--most notably, Chris Pontius from Jackass (whom one doesn't normally think of as an actor at all) as Johnny's childhood friend, Sammy. When the latter jokes with Cleo about her ballet teacher possibly being an alcoholic, his dialogue may have been written by Coppola for all I know, but it sounds like something that Pontius would actually say in that situation to get a kid to laugh, and Fanning's reactions seem spontaneous (Coppola doesn't cut away to a separate reaction shot). In other words, rather than asking her actors to become some one else, Coppola tailors each role to the personality of the performer to such a degree that the viewer isn't always sure where the real person ends and the performance begins. And if you agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum that much of what's described as cutting-edge in cinema entails a blurring of the usual distinctions between fiction and non-fiction (Bresson's films being a prime example), then this may be Coppola's most avant-garde film yet.

To admit that X may be by turns Attila, Mahomet, a bank clerk, a lumberman, is to admit that the movies in which he acts smack of the stage. Not to admit that X acts is to admit that Attila = Mahomet = a bank clerk = a lumberman, which is absurd. [...] An actor in cinematography might as well be in a foreign country. He does not speak its language.

By way of contrast, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful (2010) is a tightly scripted neo-realist soap opera about a protagonist with actual problems, and in the role of Uxbal--a midlevel criminal who's trying to raise two kids on his own while dying of cancer, and whose bipolar ex-wife is schtupping his brother--Javier Bardem deploys all his craft as an actor to transform himself into the character. (Similarly, I suspect that the interior scenes were mostly shot on sets, and that Iñárritu didn't actually shoot in the slums like Pedro Costa.) Set in the poorest districts of Barcelona, and shot with a handheld camera in often low lighting conditions, the film is clearly intended as a realistic portrayal of a certain segment of Spanish society--if not a corrective to Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008), also starring Bardem, which views Spain from the perspective of a rich American tourist (Scarlett Johansson, who played the lead in Lost in Translation). But while Somewhere inserts real people into a fictional story, Iñárritu uses stagecraft to create the illusion of reality.

Coincidentally, both this movie and Somewhere centre on flawed father-figures. Here, although Uxbal never knew his own father (an exile from Franco's Spain who died shortly after arriving in Mexico), he clearly sees himself as a father-figure not only to his children but to the Asian and African immigrants that he's exploiting (he prefers to think of it as helping). And there separate subplots involving his attempts to help different single mothers: A Chinese woman who babysits Uxbal's kids when she's not making knockoff purses in a windowless sweatshop run by gay Asian lovers, and a Senegalese woman whose husband is deported after being arrested for selling said purses on the street. Oh, and did I mention that Uxbal can talk to ghosts? No, seriously.

For the better part of two and a half hours, the film is almost unrelievedly grim, yet Iñárritu pulls back at the very end to provide Uxbal with a solution that I found unpersuasive. Although the movie has a nondenominational version of heaven, which is represented by a snowy forest where his eternally young father is waiting for him, that's little comfort to Uxbal who doesn't know what's going to happen to his kids when he's gone. His ex-wife, Marambra (Maricel Álvarez), is unstable and abusive, but the Senegalese woman, Ige (Diaryatou Daff), is good with the children, and when Uxbal sleeps in one day, she takes it upon herself to feed them and take them to school. Besides, she needs a place to live, and the rent on Uxbal's apartment is payed up until the end of the year. For this ending to work, one has to believe that a woman who's inside the Eurozone illegally, has no means of supporting herself, and already has one child to feed would choose, purely out of the goodness of her heart, to take on the responsibility of two additional children. Not only is this a stretch, it's borderline racist.

Iñárritu seemed like a promising director a decade ago when he made Amores perros (2000), but since then he's fallen into the trap of being an "important" Hollywood director. His English-language debut, 21 Grams (2003), was a morose and idiotic movie about mortality with a telenovela-level story line, and Babel (2006) was even more bloated and self-important (although I didn't hate it as much as everyone else, maybe because I had such low expectations for it). Biutiful is the director's first movie since his dude-vorce from screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, and although it sticks to a single protagonist and a mostly linear unfolding of events, it doesn't budge an inch from the ponderous tone and thematic concerns (mortality, cross-cultural interactions) that characterized Iñárritu's two previous features. But while this strikes me as his most successful and compelling film since Amores perros (damning with faint praise, I know), for his next movie I'd like to see him do a disreputable stoner comedy.

Two Films of Some Intrinsic Value (Dogtooth, Blue Valentine)

2011-02-17T09:15:00.005-04:00

Songs of Innocence

A sicko incest fantasy with shocking bursts of violence, full frontal nudity, and symmetrical framings reminiscent of Chantal Akerman, Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth (2009) is, to start with, a curious movie for Greece to choose as its official submission for the Oscar for best foreign language film. Seeing as it doesn't have any stars and evidently didn't cost very much to make (it has only a few locations and a small cast), it's not the sort of film that usually wins industry awards. As a rule, instead of going to movies like this that achieve a lot without very much money, such awards typically go to films that cost a great deal and do virtually nothing.

By way of contrast, Canada's official submission this year was Denis Villeneuve's Incendies (2010), a Canadian-French co-production shot partly in Jordan about the civil war in Lebanon between Christians and Muslims. It's a good film, though not Villeneuve's best work (I prefer Maelström [2000]), and next to Dogtooth, it looks rather insignificant and square. Nevertheless, I don't need to tell you which movie is widely expected to win the Oscar.

Of course, the real question is: How did Dogtooth get an Oscar nomination in the first place? When Greece picked it as its official submission, I didn't think it had a chance. When it subsequently turned up on the nine-film shortlist, it seemed like a random anomaly rather than a meaningful sign. And now that it's been nominated, I frankly don't know what to think. Might Academy voters be a lot hipper than I've been giving them credit for?

The movie is a deadpan fantasy about three young people in their late teens or early twenties, who still live at home with their parents, whose house is surrounded on all sides by a tall fence. They have no neighbors, and it gradually becomes evident that the three kids have all never been outside, having been brainwashed by their parents to fear the outside world generally and cats in particular. In one of the film's funniest sequences, the father (Christos Stergiolou) convinces them that a nonexistent older brother, who disobeyed him by going outside, was mauled to death by bloodthirsty kittens. None of the children have names, so the older daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia) is simply referred as "the eldest."

The father occasionally leaves the house to go to a nearby factory, where he has a desk job (or perhaps he owns the place). On a regular basis, he brings home one of the factory's security guards, Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), to sexually service his son (Hristos Passalis). This arrangement has been going on for some time already when the story begins, so we never learn how Christina got involved with the family. (The film is as stingy with its exposition as '90s Kiarostami.)

Living in captivity has not only made the children infantile but polymorphously perverse. Early in the film, when the son refuses to satisfy her pleasure, Christina offers the eldest a shiny trinket on the condition that she "lick" her. Having grasped the basic concept, the eldest is soon bartering with her younger sister (Mary Tsoni) for licks on the shoulder.

After letting go of Christina, the father decides that one of his daughters should take over her duties. And to decide which one should do it, the kids come up with a means of choosing between themselves that is probably the simplest and most logical. Needless to say, this is profoundly creepy on number of levels, yet the young actors in the film are all so attractive that much of the movie seems intended to titillate. One comes away from the film feeling slightly dirty for liking it, as opposed to a more nobly intentioned work like Villeneuve's.

The picture takes a largely modular approach to storytelling, in which each event is of roughly equal importance, and the scenes could be shuffled in almost any order. As in Akerman's even more radical Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), narrative progression is evident only in the slight variations on rituals repeated over the course of the movie, such as Christina's regular visits to the house. (It's her worldly influence on the kids that leads to the breakdown of paternal order, while in Akerman's film, it's the monotony of the heroine's daily chores that's driving her nuts.) Ultimately, both films build to desperate acts of violence, reminding one of Mark Peranson's term, "the cinema of orgasm," which he used to describe such films as Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny and Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (both 2003).

(Again, compare this with Incendies, where the characters--both in the present-tense scenes and the flashbacks--have clearly defined objectives, and each event follows logically from what happened before in a tightly ordered sequence of causes and effects, leading ultimately to a big revelation that answers any unresolved questions and provides catharsis for the characters.)

In keeping with its approach to narrative, the style of the film tends toward static tableaux--often shallow, planimetric images of the characters framed against a wall (see above). The critical cliché about directors like Akerman, Douglas Sirk, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder "imprisoning" their characters in the frame, thus reflecting their metaphorical imprisonment by society, fully applies here. Rather than striving for naturalism, nearly every shot is composed and colour-coordinated in such a way that we're constantly being reminded that what we're seeing isn't a naturally occurring event, but something that's being done consciously for the camera. What's impressive about the movie is that there isn't a single composition that's predictable, yet every shot feels inevitable, and many of them are beautifully sustained over time by Lantimos' creative staging.

The very fact that the Oscars are treated as a news event, rather than simply a TV show, just goes to show how little difference there is between sycophantic "entertainment reporting" and bought publicity. At least the latter is honest about what it is, but the former--and the Oscars themselves--are closer to Stalinist propaganda, designed to trick us into better serving our corporate masters by rushing out to see the latest releases. You want to know what everyone's talking about, right? Well, they're talking about the Oscars--I know, I saw it on the news. So go see The King's Speech (2010) and watch the Academy Awards, or else you won't know what people are talking about at work on Monday morning.

In Canada, the news media has been trying to sell us on watching the Oscars by talking about the nominations for Incendies and Barney's Version (also 2010) as if they were a matter of national pride. When Roger Ebert predicted both films would win in their respective categories, the headline on CTV News was, "Ebert Gives Thumbs Up to Canada." The implication is that every person in the country has some personal investment in whether or not these films win an award, and it's our patriotic duty as citizens to watch the Oscar telecast. (Aren't we all living in a version of Dogtooth?) On the other hand, even if Lanthimos' film had never been chosen to represent Greece in the first place, and regardless of what country you happen to live in, it's still worth seeing for its intrinsic value. At the very least, it's a lot more fun than watching the Oscars.

Songs of Experience

A more traditional Oscar nominated film, Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine (2010) shares with both Incendies and David Fincher's The Social Network (2010) a flashback structure with two forward-moving timelines. And as in those films, the present-tense scenes are more concentrated, taking place over two days (and one night), in which a married couple, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling), whose marriage is disintegrating, leave their young daughter with Cindy's father (Jerry Doman) and spend the night in a cheesy sex motel in an attempt to reestablish intimacy with one another. The romantic evening is a miserable failure, and the morning after, Cindy gets a call from the hospital where she works as a nurse and leaves before Dean wakes up. (Dean then follows her to the hospital and causes a scene.) Finally, they go back to Cindy's father's house to pick up their daughter, where they get into an another argument and breakup for good. The film basically consists of a series of escalating arguments spaced out by flashbacks to happier days.

While the first two flashbacks, which take place prior to their first meeting, seem to belong exclusively to either Cindy or Dean, the subsequent flashbacks don't privilege one character's perspective over the other (at one point, the movie even cuts between them in separate locations). And the film's pseudo-documentary aesthetic (handheld camerawork, low lighting conditions) adds to the sense that these scenes are meant to represent an objective history of their relationship, rather than either one's subjective memories. However, unlike Incendies and The Social Network, here the flashbacks are not only expositional, explaining how the characters got to where they are (and in particular, the events that poisoned their relationship before it even started), but also comparative, so that we see young Dean getting beat up by Cindy's jealous ex-boyfriend (Mike Vogal) just before old Dean punches a doctor (Ben Shenkman) who's been putting the moves on Cindy. And later, the film cuts back and forth between the couple breaking up in Cindy's father's kitchen and the first time that Dean met Cindy's parents, when he came to the house for dinner.

What's interesting about the movie is how the flashback structure plays with our sympathies. When Cindy runs into her ex-boyfriend at a liquor store early in the film, we don't know anything about their past relationship, and it's hard to say based on their brief interaction whether or not he's a good guy. Subsequently, when Cindy brings it up in the car, Dean gets really upset. In that moment, we're likely to sympathize with Cindy, but as we learn more about the characters' past, we come to understand retrospectively why Dean reacted the way he did. If the movie ultimately seems to side with Dean, whose desire to keep his marriage together is what drives the entire plot, on a scene-by-scene basis, the film's mode of inquiry remains open-ended.

Notwithstanding the rather lovely final image, shot with a telephoto lens, of Dean walking away from the camera in the middle-ground, while people set off fireworks in the background out of focus, Cianfrance isn't doing anything very interesting in terms of mise en scène. So how much you like the movie is dependent largely on how you respond to the story and performances. Of the two leads, I found Dean the more sympathetic, simply because, as played by Gosling, he's this goofy, charming guy who's like a big kid--whereas Cindy, particularly in the present-tense scenes, often seems irritable and depressed (albeit justifiably so).

While both actors give very strong performances, knowing their past work in movies like Half Nelson (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), one is rather disconcerted by the absence here of politics of any kind. As with a lot of movies that come out of the Sundance Film Festival, it's refreshing to see a blue collar milieu portrayed in a mainstream American movie, especially when it's done as sensitively as it is here, yet the story is so specific to these two characters that feels like it's been neutered of any critical edge.

Without Feathers (Black Swan)

2011-01-15T17:59:00.007-04:00

You know, I kinda like Darren Aronofsky. Say what you will about Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), or The Wrestler (2008), not one of them was boring. And while his new film, Black Swan (2010), may not be very good, you can bet your ass it isn't dull. Aronofsky swings for the rafters with this one, and even if he doesn't pull it off, I'm still glad that he was willing to make the effort.

There's a fine line separating a film about hysteria from one that's simply hysterical, and Aronofsky boldly crosses it. The story is about a frigid ballerina, Nina (Natalie Portman), who still lives at home with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) in an apartment on the Upper West Side. As the movie opens, she's up for the lead in a production of Swan Lake, but while the director, Thomas (Vincent Cassell), knows that she can play the white swan, he isn't sure if she can play her evil twin. Eventually he gives her the part anyway (because the plot requires it), and to help her get into character, he tells her to go home and masturbate as a "homework exercise" (which she does, as if the idea had simply never occurred to her before). Apparently, nobody in this movie has ever heard of sexual harassment.

Oh, there's more. Like the white swan, Nina has her own evil twin, Lily (Mila Kunis), another dancer in the same company, who's as whorish as Nina is uptight (she always wears black, and has a giant, skanky tattoo of a lily on her back). Early in the film, while walking down a spooky corridor, Nina thinks that she sees herself walking towards her, when it turns out to be just a stranger in black. Later, when she suspects that Lily wants to steal her part, Nina starts to get confused about whether Lily is Lily or if she's Nina--as if, in addition to the part, she also wanted her face. At one point, Lily and Nina go back to her apartment, where Lily gives her oral pleasure... Or is it Nina giving Nina oral pleasure? This is Aronofsky's oh so delicate and subtle way of reinforcing the idea that Lily is supposed to be Nina's doppelgänger.

The movie has one idea about ballet, and it's incredibly facile: To play the black swan, Nina must become the black swan! Similarly, the characters are all miserable clichés: Nina is anorexic and obsessed with perfection; her mother is a failed artist who's living through her daughter; Lily is a slut, and therefore always late for rehearsals (as if there were some connection between promiscuity and tardiness). When Nina is confronted by the ballet's former leading lady (Winona Ryder) at a fundraising event, her mascara is running and she's holding her drink way up high where the camera can see it, so that we know at a glance she's drunk and upset (just one of many moments in the film that veer into self-parody). The movie relies so much upon this sort of visual shorthand and stereotyping that I seriously doubt the film's writers had any firsthand experience of the ballet world.

As for the dancing, Aronofsky only has one idea about how to film ballet: Shoot Portman from the waist-up with a handheld camera spinning around her really, really fast. Armond White has compared the film unfavorably to Kanye West's "Runaway" video, and it's not hard to see his point. While West's manner of filming his dancers strikes me as functional more than inspired (Jacques Demy he ain't), at least he seems to genuinely like ballet. Here, when Nina and Lily meet some frat boys in a bar, one of them asks, "Isn't ballet boring?" And judging by this movie, it looks like Aronofsky agrees with them.

In La Pianiste (2001), Michael Haneke covered much the same territory (domineering moms and sexual repression leading to madness and self-inflicted stab wounds), but like a million times better. Aronofsky's conscious model seems to be Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965)--again, a much better movie--and as in Pi and Requiem for a Dream, he uses non-diegetic sound effects and various horror movie tropes to place viewers inside the mind of a person losing their grip on reality. For instance, there are numerous moments when Nina suddenly backs into a person she didn't realize was standing right behind her. Ooooo!

What Haneke and Polanski have that Aronofsky lacks as a director is confidence and a gift for simplicity. In La Pianiste, there are several long close-ups of Isabelle Huppert just listening and thinking, and many scenes are played out in a single long take. Alternatively, Aronofsky shoots everything in close-up or medium shot, and covers even the simplest sequence from seemingly a dozen angles. This style is often a mask for uncertain direction: Cover everything and just pray that it comes together in the editing room. I'm not saying that's the case here necessarily, but just looking at the results, I'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

Because Aronofsky sometimes shoots the back of Portman's head with a handheld camera, some folks have been comparing his style here to that of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The difference is that when they do it, in films like La Promesse (1996), Rosetta (1999), Le Fils (2002), and L'Enfant (2005), it's actually for a reason. By withholding reaction shots, and holding a shot for a certain length of time, they tend to objectify their characters. It's sometimes hard to know what they're thinking and feeling. In this film, Aronofsky gives us essentially standard coverage with lots and lots of reaction shots. According to the website Cinemetrics, Rosetta has an average shot length of 33 seconds, and in Le Fils, that number jumps to 70 seconds. I don't think there's a shot in Black Swan that lasts longer than seven seconds. (Requiem for a Dream, maybe Aronofsky's most aggressively edited film, has an ASL of 4 seconds.) This is not surprising since Aronofsky presumably doesn't want his film to be shown only in art houses, which would hurt its chances of winning an Oscar.

Incidentally, although to my knowledge Rosetta has never been released on DVD in North America, you can watch the film in its entirety on YouTube. The quality's actually not bad, and if you've never seen a film by the Dardennes, it's a better place to start than Black Swan.

Flaccid Western (The Coen Brothers' True Grit)

2011-01-12T01:03:00.007-04:00

Well, I'm against it [aging]. I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don't gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you'd trade all of that for being 35 again.—Woody Allen

The Coen Brothers' True Grit (2010) is a perfect example of the negative influence that Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) has had on the western. Ending like that film with an epilogue set in a graveyard at sunset, it is so slow and talky and sepia-tone and elegiac that it makes one long for the virility of a young man's western like Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959), which ended with John Wayne fucking Angie Dickinson (or at least that's how I remember it). The problem with modern westerns is that they need to lighten up and get laid.

When did westerns stop being fun? The original True Grit (1969), directed by Henry Hathaway, appeared at a transitional moment. It had been thirty years exactly since John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made Wayne a star, and the popularity of westerns was in decline. With the war being fought in Vietnam, audiences were understandably weary of a genre associated with celebrations of ethnic cleansing, and it didn't help that Wayne was an outspoken supporter of that war. A few years earlier, Clint Eastwood had become a huge star for appearing in a series of gritty Italian westerns by Sergio Leone that positioned themselves culturally as demystifications of the west. And Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (released the same year as True Grit) went further still in its images of indiscriminate slaughter. The next decade saw even more revisionist westerns, and Wayne continued working steadily until 1976, when he made his final film, The Shootist, but the age of the western as a popular genre in Hollywood was essentially over.

These days not many westerns get made in Hollywood (notwithstanding those set on other planets, like Star Wars [1977] and Avatar [2009]), but when they do, they're invariably made by older directors for an older audience. Eastwood himself was a notorious womanizer in the 1970s (according to Wikipedia, he's fathered seven children with five women), and part of what makes his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me (1971), so personal and memorable (if not good, precisely) is the degree to which it reflects its maker's anxieties about the possible consequences of his promiscuity. Northern California in the late '60s was his happening, and it clearly freaked him out. But twenty years later when he directed Unforgiven, Eastwood was well into his sixties, so it's not surprising that he was thinking more about retirement than getting laid. That said, when it comes to making a genuinely mature western, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995) is virtually alone in offering a serious critique and revision of the mythology of the west.

Six years after Unforgiven, the Coens made their first film with Jeff Bridges, The Big Lebowski (1998), which wasn't a big hit at the time but seems now in retrospect possibly the definitive movie of its era, given how much sagging middle-aged male flesh there is on display here. Released in the same year as the Monica Lewinsky affair and Viagra, the film contains numerous references to the western (beginning with the opening shot of a tumbleweed), but far from the Duke and Dean Martin in Rio Bravo, here both male leads are obese and hilariously ineffectual if not literally impotent. (There's even a minor subplot involving the potency of the Bridges' character's sperm.)

But where The Big Lebowski provides an affectionate ribbing of baby boomer anxieties about decreasing virility, in their subsequent neo-western, No Country for Old Men (2007), the Coens attempted to elevate the same concerns into something far more grandiose. Adapted from a 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy (who fathered a child in his seventies--what's he trying to prove?), it starred Tommy Lee Jones as a Texas lawman who's metaphorically impotent in the face of the world's evils, represented here by a sociopath with an obviously phallic cattle gun. Perhaps it's a sign of the times that even in a western as vigorous as Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) there would be jokes about male impotence.

By my calculation, Hawks was about fifty-four when he made Rio Bravo (roughly the same age the Coens are now), and Hathaway was eight years older when he made True Grit, yet neither film feels like the work of an old man. The latter film ends with the Duke giving a joyous display of his mastery of horse riding, set to an upbeat western theme with horns that go dah dah-nuh dah-nuh--an image that all but shouts, "I ain't dead yet, partner!" Bridges, on the other hand, seems to have modeled his performance after the alcoholic doctor in Béla Tarr's Sátántangó (1994). To say that the film lacks energy would be an understatement; it is a depressed and lethargic slog of a movie. I think what the Coens need is some Viagra and a weekend with Angie Dickinson.

Make Way for Yesterday (Distant Voices, Still Lives)

2011-01-07T21:58:00.004-04:00

How is that Terence Davies, conceivably the greatest of all British narrative filmmakers, is also one of the most neglected? To answer this question, one has to begin with what's been termed the cinematic apparatus: that is, the processes regulating the production, exhibition, promotion, and discourse around motion pictures. In short, theatres need a constant supply of new movies (or they'll go broke), but for customers to want to see a particular film--whether it's a blockbuster like Inception or an indie film like Winter's Bone (both 2010)--it has to be well promoted. For instance, the latter film might have disappeared into the void with hundreds of other low-budget features which are produced each year had it not been accepted by the Sundance Film Festival (where it won the grand prize) and received across-the-board rave reviews from the English-speaking press.

However, when it comes to films that can't be easily classified or summarized (unlike Winter's Bone, as good as it is), all but the most adventurous distributors tend to lose their nerve. And the majority of reviewers, whose allegiances are to the studios more than filmmakers or audiences, are likely to react to such a film with hostility. If you go to the Telegraph's website, you'll find their two-paragraph review of Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) from the film's 2007 rerelease buried under much longer reviews of the Adam Sandler film Reign Over Me, and a documentary called Hacking Democracy (2006) originally made for American television (both unseen by me), which are evidently much more important to the art of cinema than Davies' film.

Davies wasn't the first filmmaker to receive this sort of treatment, nor was he the last. One only has to think back to last spring and the uproar surrounding Godard's Film socialisme (2010) from reviewers like Roger Ebert and Todd McCarthy. I've only seen the latter movie once, but I suspect that twenty-two years from now, when Winter's Bone and the rest of the year's Oscar contenders have all faded into insignificance, Godard's film will look almost as good as Davies' does today. But because the brilliance of both Davies and Godard--like that of Leos Carax, Pedro Costa, Philippe Garrel, Miklós Jancsó, Béla Tarr, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul--is more a matter of combining sounds and images than conventional screenwriting, their films don't fit into the steady, mindless flow of commercial movies that wash up on the multiplex every week.

Like his debut, The Terence Davies Trilogy (unseen by me), which consists of three short films made over a period of eight years (1976-83), Distant Voices, Still Lives is technically two shorts filmed two years apart. Both segments are set in Liverpool in the 1940s and '50s, and centre on the same working class family. Distant Voices opens (and closes) with the death of the family's tyrannical father (Pete Postlethwaite), which is followed sequentially by the marriage of the eldest daughter, Eileen (Angela Walsh), to a man who turns out to be just like him. Still Lives begins with the second daughter, Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), giving birth to her first child, and ends with her younger brother, Tony (Dean Williams), getting married. Much of the film's second half takes place at a local pub where the family goes to celebrate the birth of Maisie's baby, and these scenes, and the flashbacks they lead into, elaborate on the relationships between Maisie, Eileen, her childhood friends Micky (Debi Jones) and Jingles (Marie Jelliman), and the men they're married to. Needless to say, this brief description fails to do justice to the film's emotional intensity.

Unlike a traditional plot-driven movie, where Event A leads to B which leads to C, all in a logical sequence of causes and effects (even in films that play with chronology, like Memento [2000]), Distant Voices, Still Lives consists of a series of discrete moments of intense emotion. Early in the film, while posing for a wedding photo, Eileen remarks to Tony, "I wish me dad were here." The camera then turns to Maisie, who says in voice-over, "I don't. He was a bastard." This leads into the film's first flashback, in which the father forces Maisie to scrub the basement floor before giving her the money to go to a dance. As she scrubs the floor on her knees, the father throws some coins on the floor and then viciously beats her with a broom. This episode doesn't have any far-reaching consequences, nor is it ever referred to again later; it's simply the first of several instances in the film where the old man physically abuses the female members of his family. (Although he's emotionally distant with Tony, we never see him hit the boy.) Adding to the feeling of narrative stasis are the film's planimetric tableaux stagings, in which the characters seem to be forever posing for family portraits.

Whereas a traditional narrative film would give specific reasons for the father's outbursts (something would happen to set him off), Davies makes no attempt to understand his behavior, leaving open the possibility that he's just insane. The only time his behavior seems even somewhat understandable is during a flashback to the Blitz. The children are all outside collecting firewood when the bombs start falling, and after narrowly escaping an explosion, they're finally led into a bomb shelter by a soldier. There, the father slaps Eileen (played as a child by Sally Davies) and orders her to sing a song. (Her rendition of "Beer Barrel Polka" is one of the most moving moments in the whole film.)

I don't know if Davies intended this, but I can't help but draw a parallel between the randomness and viciousness of the Blitz and the father's sudden outbursts, and his need to hear a song--any song--as a means of dealing with the reality of the bombings and the pleasure the other characters take in listening to music throughout the film. Earlier in the movie (which is later in the story), when Eileen and Micky want to go to a dance, the father remarks that the two of them are, "Bleedin' dance mad." Even under the most difficult circumstances, the characters stubbornly attempt to go on with their lives.

The achievement of the film is that, while the characters' feelings are presented as pure states of emotion, without the usual narrative justifications to get from one moment to the next, at no point do the film's emotions feel under-motivated. A good example of this is the film's second flashback, which begins with Tony (who's gone AWOL from the army) punching out the windows of the family home and shouting at the father inside, "Come out and fight me, ya bastard!" The next shot shows Tony inside, calmly offering his father a beer, his hand still bleeding from the broken glass. The third and final shot of the sequence shows Tony being dragged out of the house screaming by two fellow soldiers, and tossed in the back of a van. Later, in a separate flashback, we see Tony in the brig playing the theme from Charles Chaplin's Limelight (1952) on the harmonica, which seems especially fitting in that Chaplin was another British filmmaker who specialized in moments of strong emotion, but wasn't much of a storyteller.

Although it was made a quarter of a century ago (Davies began filming on Distant Voices in the fall of 1985), Distant Voices, Still Lives, as well as Davies' subsequent features, The Long Day Closes (1992) and The Neon Bible (1995), feel like movies from the future--despite the fact that all three are steeped in nostalgia for the Hollywood cinema of the 1950s. As with the best films of Godard, all three are so far ahead in terms of sounds and images that, in comparison, most commercial filmmakers just don't seem to be trying very hard. But until distributors figure out a way to market this kind of cinema, and reviewers find a way of writing about it (and I should note that Jonathan Rosenbaum has written about all three films at length), we're doomed to living in a world where the multiplexes are full movies and there's still nothing to see.

Hindsight Is 2010 (My Favorite Movies of the Year)

2010-12-17T21:09:00.047-04:00

What, another top ten list?! I know, nobody wants this, and with the annual glut of top tens, why should they? But as with my list of the best movies of the decade one year ago, I was motivated by the thought (admittedly, a slightly arrogant one) that I could come up with a better list than most professional reviewers, who all seem to be shilling for a handful of well-promoted Oscar contenders (as usual), while lamenting what a bad year it was for the movies--which is only true if you don't look too far beyond what's showing at the multiplex. The usual rule is that only movies eligible for Academy Award consideration get included on these lists. But since I have nothing to do with that rigged horse race, I've broadened the scope of my list to include films that I saw at the Atlantic Film Festival or downloaded from the internet, but which haven't been released commercially in the US, as well as some slightly older ones that I belatedly caught up with in Montreal and on video.

1 Vincere (Marco Bellocchio) Giovanna Mezzogiorno gives the performance of the year in this wildly audacious biopic of Ida Dalser, who may have been the first wife of Benito Mussolini (played as a charismatic young socialist by Filippo Timi). When the latter switched from socialism to fascism and married Rachele Guidi, his relationship with Dalser (and their young son, Benito Albino) proved to be such an embarrassment that he had Dalser locked up in a mental hospital, and placed Benito Albino in an orphanage. In Bellocchio's hands, this shameful chapter in Italian history is given a mythic grandeur and operatic intensity. Boldly melodramatic and shamelessly manipulative, this is a political movie that can break your heart.

2 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Joe's best film yet is a rapturously beautiful magic realist fable about a man dying of kidney failure in a Thai farmhouse, where he's visited by the ghost of his dead wife, and his son who was transformed into a monkey with red eyes that glow in the dark. A visionary work encompassing the past, present, and future, the mythic and the everyday, the film also boasts the most impressive nighttime photography I've ever seen. (The cinematography is so dark that I seriously doubt the movie will work on video.) I've only seen it once, but it already feels like a classic.

3 The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel) The most audacious feature yet by the singularly talented Argentine filmmaker is a kind of reverse-amnesia movie about false memories, in which a middle-class dentist (María Onetto) comes to believe that she ran over a Gaucho boy with her car--not that anybody seems to care. Like Martel's earlier La Ciénaga (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), this is a film that benefits from a second viewing as her method of withholding exposition and her off-centre framings often make the viewer feel as disoriented as the heroine. Given that most commercial features are meant to be understood and consumed immediately (time is money, as they say), Martel's insistence on making films that require close attention and multiple viewings is almost a political act.

4 Un prophète (Jacques Audiard) Following a French-Arabic inmate (Tahar Rahim) from his arrival in prison as a teenager through his ascension to underworld kingpin, this ambitious crime saga has a novelistic scope that's inspired some reviewers to liken it to The Godfather (1972). But I like it even better than that film, in part because Audiard doesn't romanticize crime through his style. The drab institutional settings and unlikeable characters of this movie are a world away from the classy trimmings of Coppola's film, in which the mob is run by wise patriarchs who dress in smart clothes and live by a moral code. It's a bit of a sausage-fest, but I suppose that comes with the territory.

5 The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski) The hero of this atmospheric thriller, based on a 2007 novel by Robert Harris (unread by me), is a nameless ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to work on the memoirs of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) under investigation for war crimes. The latter is plainly a stand-in for Tony Blair, and the running gag about the writer having to go through constant security checks speaks to the times we live in. But above all, this is just a beautifully crafted movie. Paring down each shot and line of dialogue to only what's essential, Polanski is such a supremely confident storyteller that he makes it look effortless.

6 Greenberg (Noah Baumbach) A romantic comedy that you see alone, starring Ben Stiller in the title role as an abusive middle-aged crank, who agrees to take care of his brother's dog while he's away; Greta Gerwig as the brother's slatternly personal assistant, who has to take care of Greenberg; and Rhys Ifans as his best friend, a recovering alcoholic who still nurses a grudge against Greenberg for the breakup of their band twenty years ago. This is a quiet, sad, sometimes funny movie about three seriously screwed up people, and I loved every minute of it. I wasn't a fan of Baumbach's early work, but with Margot at the Wedding (2007) and now this film, he's emerged as one of the finest directors working anywhere, and one of the edgiest.

7 The White Ribbon: A German Children's Story (Michael Haneke) Set in a preindustrial German village on the eve of the first world war, this rare period film by the director of The Seventh Continent (1989) and Code inconnu (2000) is a chilling portrait of a repressive and puritanical society. Narrated by the local school teacher from a distance of several decades, the film centres on a series of unexplained crimes in the village, and Haneke uses the gaps in the narrator's knowledge to justify the gaps in the story, so don't go in expecting a conventional denouement. Characteristically spare and masterful as storytelling, this strikes me as Haneke's leanest and meanest effort since La Pianiste (2001).

8 Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) I suspect that this three-part semi-narrative by my favorite filmmaker will look even better in a few years, once I've had time to better sort through it. Godard's films invariably grow in stature over time (unlike most Oscar winners), so the fact that I couldn't always follow what was happening in the story is more of a positive than a negative. In the meantime, what I can say for certain is that the film's opening segment (set on a cruise ship sailing around the Mediterranean) is a dizzying assault on the senses, boasting the worst sound I've ever heard in a commercial feature. And what follows, though more expected, is consistently singular and beautiful.

9 Carlos (Olivier Assayas) Even in the severely abridged 140 minute version that I saw at the Atlantic Film Festival (cut down from a five hour miniseries), this epic biopic of the international terrorist and media superstar, Carlos the Jackal (Édgar Ramírez), is still rather a full meal, covering a period of twenty years during which Carlos' waning influence is mirrored by the effects of aging on his body. Despite the film's anti-psychological docudrama style, which seems to be merely reporting the facts of the case, Assayas freely invents wherever there are gaps in the public record--as in the film's lengthy account of the OPEC Hostage Crisis in 1975, which as a piece of filmmaking is as suspenseful as anything I saw this year. I can't wait to see the longer cut.

10 Night Mayor (Guy Maddin) Western Canada's greatest auteur commemorates the 60th anniversary of the NFB (and the country's policy of multiculturalism) with this allegorical avant-garde short about a Bosnian tuba player's experiences in the new world. Only fourteen minutes long, this is the shortest item on my list, but every second of it is densely packed. The flickering, rapidly edited multiple exposures and layered soundtrack demand multiple viewings, making this Maddin's best short film since My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005).

Some other movies that I liked:

Les Amours imaginaires (Xavier Dolan) Eastern Canada's youngest auteur follows up the success of J'ai tué ma mère (2009) with this funny and stylish homage to Godard and Wong Kar-wai, in which glam Francophone hipsters walk around Montreal in slow motion to an Italian language cover of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)."

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira) Adapted from a short story by the 19th century Portuguese novelist José Maria Eça de Queirós (which I haven't read) but set in the present, this singular and masterful film by the world's oldest living filmmaker is enhanced, rather than diminished, by its remoteness from the present. It's indicative of the film's endearingly old fashioned quality that when the hero (Ricardo Trêpa) moves to kiss the title character (Catarina Wallenstein), the film cuts away to their feet.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy) A multifaceted and very funny documentary about Thierry Guetta, who's better at playing the artist than he is at actually making art. In the late '90s, Guetta began documenting the work of several prominent street artists, including Banksy who inspired Guetta to become an artist himself. The film consists largely of Guetta's own footage, which Banksy has edited to make his former friend (and the art world in general) look as ridiculous as possible.

Les Herbes folles (Alain Resnais) Adapted from Christian Gailly's 1996 novel L'Incident (unread by me), this mind-boggling tale of l'amour fou is enhanced, rather than diminished, by its remoteness from sanity. It's indicative of how freakin' crazy this movie is that when the two leads (Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier) finally embrace, the 20th Century Fox fanfare rises on the soundtrack, and the word "Fin" blinks on the screen, even though the movie isn't over.

Hereafter (Clint Eastwood) I'm a devout atheist, but even I couldn't help being moved by this sombre afterlife drama which tells three separate stories, each set in a different country. The film opens with a harrowing recreation of the 2004 Asian Tsunami, but the most moving scenes are often the quietest--particularly those involving a solitary young boy from London's East End (Frankie and George McLaren) whose twin brother dies in a car accident, and between a former psychic who just wants a normal life (Matt Damon) and the nice girl he meets in his cooking class (Bryce Dallas Howard, playing Mary Jane to Damon's Spider-Man).

Home (Ursula Meier) Along with Exit Through the Gift Shop and I Love You Phillip Morris, the best first film I saw this year was this creepy French nuclear family freak out, which at times recalls Todd Haynes' Safe (1995). Meier shot the film on a remote stretch of highway in Bulgaria, and the landscape (which is as desolate as the surface of the moon) feels concrete and mythic at the same time.

I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa) The first film by the writers of Bad Santa (2003) is a bold and uncompromising biopic of Steven Jay Russell (Jim Carrey), a Texas con man whose multiple escapes from prison were such an embarrassment to then-Governor George W. Bush that he was given a 144-year sentence, despite being a nonviolent offender. I'm generally a fan of Carrey's (I even liked Yes Man [2008]), but this movie is especially intriguing for the way it undermines easy identification with him at every turn.

Milyang (Secret Sunshine) (Lee Chang-dong) I'm cheating a bit by including this Cassavetes-like freak out by the wild man of South Korean cinema, since I actually first saw it a couple of years ago. However, I've decided to put it on my list anyway as it's only now getting a limited US release.

My Dear Enemy (Lee Yoon-ki) Perhaps the most overtly populist item on my list, this is an old fashioned crowd-pleaser about people sticking together in tough financial times. The two leads, Jeon Do-yeon (who was also in Milyang) and Ha Jung-woo, are both delightful, and although this is essentially a light comedy, the film nevertheless gets into some interesting ethical grey areas involving friendships and money.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Woody Allen) Allen's best film since Match Point (2005) is a mostly lighthearted network narrative set in London about a group of people who are all in denial about various things. The movie has an unexpected ending that makes you look at the entire film in a different light, so that what seems to be a story about romance turns out to be about something else entirely. Allen is like a magician diverting us with misdirection while hiding his tricks in plain sight.

Senior Class: Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood

2010-11-09T23:34:00.005-04:00

According to a recent news item in The Telegraph, researchers at the University of Montreal set out to compare the views of men in their twenties who had never seen pornography with those of regular users. The problem was that they couldn't find anyone who had never seen porn. On average, the study found that single men in their twenties spend two hours a week watching porn, while men in relationships spend thirty-four minutes a week looking at it, and with no negative consequences.

I don't imagine that Woody Allen, who turns seventy-five in December, spends much (if any) time on the internet, where the study finds that ninety percent of wanking occurs. But watching his new film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) again after reading about the study, it seemed that Allen's insights into the male psyche shed some light on why men are such compulsive masturbators.

A multi-protagonist comedy-drama set in London, the film's subject is the different ways people find of not dealing with certain harsh realities. The movie opens with Helena (Gemma Jones), a visibly frazzled middle-aged woman, going to see a fortune teller, Cristal (Pauline Collins), who tells her what she wants to hear and charges her for the service. We learn that Helena's longtime husband, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), has left her because he's going through a midlife crisis and wants to have a son. After an unsuccessful attempt at the dating scene, Alfie calls in a professional, Charmaine (Lucy Punch), who tells him what he wants to hear and charges him for the service. Alfie soon finds himself hopelessly in love with Charmaine and proposes marriage.

Alfie and Helena's grown daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), also wants to have a child, but she needs to find a job because her American husband, Roy (Josh Brolin), isn't working at the moment. Early in the film, she interviews for a position at a posh art gallery run by Greg (Antonio Banderas), whom she quickly develops a crush on. Meanwhile, Roy, a former medical student turned novelist, is anxiously waiting to hear from his publisher about a manuscript he submitted. If Roy had a Wi-Fi connection, he might distract himself by spending thirty-four minutes a week on the internet, but instead, he begins spying on Dia (Frieda Pinto), a professional musician who lives in the apartment across the street.

Neither Sally nor Roy believes in fortune tellers, but Sally goes along with Helena's fantasy as long as it makes her happy. Conversely, although Sally disapproves of Alfie's marriage to Charmaine, Roy thinks it might be good for him. On their first date, Charmaine tells Alfie that she's primarily an actress, leading Sally to ask, "An actress in what?" This is the movie's most explicit reference to pornography, yet Allen (perhaps without even realizing it) seems to be working out some of the implications of pornographic films and literature. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), what pornographic books offer the reader are "fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world."

Here, the characters are all nursing their own hopeful delusions: Helena that Cristal can predict the future; Alfie that he's still a young man; Sally that Greg shares her feelings; Roy that he's a novelist. Perhaps Alfie is a little more deluded than the rest, and accordingly, his scenes with Charmaine are the film's most broadly comedic (even if Hopkins' performance is as understated as his work in James Ivory's The Remains of the Day [1993]). After all, several of Cristal's predictions do come to pass; Greg does say that he's having trouble at home, and Sally is an attractive woman; and we're told that Roy's first novel did show some promise. And if the delusion makes you happy, then why not? It's only when the characters' delusions start crashing against reality that the problems start. So naturally, the only character who finds some measure of contentment at the end of the film is Helena, who finds some one to share her delusions with.

The film is just brilliantly written. A lot of movies in recent years have had several intersecting story lines, but often with the characters isolated on separate continents. Here, where the characters all know each other, Allen is able to update us on the status of several different plot lines within the same scene. A key sequence here, which comes deep into the film, begins with Sally coming home in a state after learning that Greg is already having an affair with some one else. She finds Roy on the couch sipping a beer, and when she asks him if he's heard yet, he has to ask her, "Heard about what?" such is his present state of contentment with Dia that any anxiety he felt about his new book now seems like a distant memory.

As Sally moves about the room looking for an aspirin, she talks about how dissatisfied she is working for Greg (a complete reversal from her feeling earlier) and how she needs to start her own gallery (announcing a new goal for herself). Greg then gets a call from his publisher, informing him that his book's been rejected. And while he's talking on the phone, Helena shows up at the door to announce to Sally that she's had a breakthrough with Cristal, and now believes that she's lived before. Cristal had earlier predicted that Roy's book wouldn't be published because the timing wasn't right, and now Helena tries to reassure him by saying that maybe he'll be a writer in another life--which is manifestly not what Roy wants to hear.

As a rule, Allen's British films tend to be superior in craftsmanship to his recent American movies, even when the material isn't up to par, as in Cassandra's Dream (2007)--as opposed to Melinda and Melinda (2004) and Whatever Works (2009), which felt rather slapdash. (That said, I still liked the latter quite a bit.) Here, the cream-coloured production design by Jim Clay (who also worked on Match Point [2005]), and the light, airy cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond set just the right mood for the picture. Also, this is one of Allen's most inventively staged films with the actors in near-constant motion, often in extremely long takes with a mobile camera. But because Allen's technique is firmly "in the service of his material," as they say, you might not notice how masterfully constructed the film is unless you're paying attention. Nothing here happens by chance (seeing the film a second time, I realized just how obsessively colour-coordinated the film's palate is in every single shot), yet because Allen is so completely in control of the medium, it feels almost effortless. This is Allen at the top of his form.

I've seen Clint Eastwood's Hereafter (2010) twice, and I had a different response to it each time. The first time I saw the film, it just raped my tear ducts. But seeing it again, it put me in a more thoughtful mood--or maybe "thoughtful" isn't the right word, since I wasn't thinking about anything. Maybe the first time I saw the film I was responding more to the story, while the second time I was responding to the mood of the film.

This control of tone hasn't always been Eastwood's strong suit. Even in Changeling (2008), where he had a pretty good script by Michael Straczynski, the muted colour scheme and sombre, high contrast lighting seemed at odds with the cheerfully lurid story, and the performances were all over the map, from Angelina Jolie's aggressive Oscar-baiting as a saint-like single mom to Amy Ryan's streetwise prostitute to Jason Butler Harner, who attempts to outdo Peter Lorre in M (1931) for nervous excitability. Also, not to hate on Angelina Jolie just for being Angelina Jolie, but her lips are so big and so red, and everything else is so monochromatic and blue-grey, that they become the focal point of every single shot in which she appears. And you'll notice that whenever Jolie has a big, emotional close-up in the film, she always covers her mouth.

In this film, however, everything comes together in perfect harmony: The script, performances, cinematography, production design, sound mix, and score all work together to create a mood that's exquisitely subdued; this is one of the quietest American studio films of recent memory. Written by Peter Morgan, the film is a multi-protagonist drama which tells three separate stories, each one set in a different country, and its best scenes are often the saddest. One thread, set in San Francisco, involves a former psychic, George (Matt Damon), whose powers of perception make it difficult for him to have any kind of personal life. In an attempt to meet some one, George signs up for night classes in Italian cooking, where he meets Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), who's new in town and is looking to make new friends. The chemistry between these two provides some of the film's rare lighter moments, but when they go back to George's apartment and Melanie discovers his hidden talent, things take a sudden turn for the serious. Another story, set in London's East End, centres on twin boys, Jason and Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren), whose mum, Jackie (Lyndsey Marshal), is a junkie but not an unaffectionate one. When Jason is killed in a car accident, Marcus (the more introverted of the two) is placed in a foster home while Jackie gets herself sorted. Like Nicholas Ray, Eastwood seems drawn to stories about loners from broken homes.

The third story line is about a French journalist, Marie (Cécile de France), who almost dies in the 2004 Asian Tsunami. The sequence representing this event, though obviously done on computers, is nonetheless awesome because it gives you a sense of what it's like to be swept up in a fast-moving current which is less dangerous in itself than all the objects moving around in it (such as shopping carts and cars) that you can get caught on or crushed by. After getting whacked on the head, Marie sees a white light and lots of backlit figures which are supposed to represent the afterlife. (Just as the movie makes a point of not telling us which country she's in during the tsunami, the film's version of the afterlife is entirely nonsectarian. And later, there are broad satiric swipes at both Islamic and Christian whack jobs for good measure.) Upon returning to Paris, Marie finds that her heart just isn't in her work anymore, and her producer-boyfriend, Didier (Thierry Neuvic), suggests that she take some time off to write a book. But when she decides to write about her experience, she finds that no one wants to listen. According to the film, there is really is an afterlife and science can prove it, but the evidence has been suppressed by left-wing atheists in the media like Didier. In Switzerland, Marie meets a formerly skeptical doctor (Marthe Keller) who says that what convinced of an afterlife was that so many people reported seeing the same things, which is also true of UFO sightings.

Each story has a slightly different look, and in each one, the film seems to be referencing a particular genre associated with the different countries. The American story is like a superhero movie without any action scenes, complete with an origin myth (in this case, a childhood surgery gone wrong, rather than a mutant spider bite), and a hero who has to chose between using his powers to help total strangers and having a relationship with a nice girl. (George even says at one point, "It's not a gift, it's a curse!") The scenes in Britain are played for kitchen sink realism, and one early sequence is shot atypically with a handheld camera. And the Parisian story line, which takes place largely in steel-and-glass skyscrapers and fancy restaurants (reflecting the fact that the characters here are more affluent), is a politically tinged relationship drama. (Marie's first interview upon returning to her regular job as a news anchor is with a CEO whose company exploits third world labor, and before writing about her experience during the tsunami, she pitches her publisher a book about François Mitterrand.) The décor, particularly in Marie's apartment, tends toward bright, clinical whites, while the scenes in San Francisco and London emphasize blue and brown, respectively.

The film is not without its rough spots. Inevitably, the three stories converge at a book fair in London, where Marie is promoting her book. Marcus' foster parents take him there in order to meet their previous foster child, who has a job as a security guard. But Marcus, being the withdrawn kid that he is, asks if he can wander off on his lonesome for a while. George has just bought a copy of Marie's book when Marcus recognizes him from the picture on his website, which hasn't been taken down. But what exactly is George doing in London? You see, George's favorite author is Charles Dickens (more than once in the film, we see George listening to his works on tape), so when he needs to get away for a while, George decides on England. The first thing he does there is to visit Dickens' home, and it's there that he sees a poster advertising a reading of Little Dorrit (1855-57) at the book fair. Obviously all stories depend on coincidence, but as a character trait, George's enthusiasm for Dickens seems rather arbitrary. The cooking lessons make sense, because as the teacher (Steve Schirripa) says at one point, cooking involves all the senses (to add an acoustic element and set a romantic mood, the teacher plays Italian opera during class)--in other words, cooking is life. But why Dickens, and not any other British novelist, except of course that Dickens is by far the most famous? When Melanie notices a sketch of Dickens in George's apartment, he says to her, "People go on and on about Shakespeare, but Dickens is just as great" (never-mind that Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets in the Elizabethan era, while Dickens wrote serialized novels in the Victorian era), which is the closest he comes to explaining his affinity for the author of Bleak House (1852-53) and Great Expectations (1860-61).

Of course, that's pretty minor next to the lapses in storytelling in some of Eastwood's other pictures, such as Million Dollar Baby (2004), where Paul Haggis' (Oscar-winning) script suddenly introduces a glowering German villainess to paralyze the heroine for no reason at all, and then has her disappear from the film entirely. But here, even when the screenplay stumbles slightly, the look and sound of the movie (when there is music, it's non-obtrusive) and the performances are so much of a piece with one another that the execution carries the viewer over any tiny flaws in the conception. And despite the heavy tone (the film's cinematographer isn't named Tom Stern for nothing), Eastwood shows a lighter touch than in any other film of his I've seen. In part I think that's because Morgan's script doesn't portray any of the characters as a pure villain; even when George gets laid off from his warehouse job, he's not mad at the foreman, who's just protecting the guys who have families. But also, notice how in the scene where Melanie first walks into the cooking class, an old man standing next to George straightens his collar a little bit. The old man is in the background of the shot and out of focus, but by placing the teacher (the apparent focal point of the shot) to the left side of the screen, and the old man in the direct centre of the frame, Eastwood subtly shifts the emphasis away from the teacher. And when you compare this nice little comic touch with some of the comic relief characters in Eastwood's other films, like a dumb blonde in the otherwise brilliant White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) who's trying to sell a screenplay about a dog, you almost can't believe it's the same director. This is Eastwood at the top of his form.

How to Build a Better Filmgoer: Some Brief Thoughts on "Made in USA" and the Total Revolution of Society

2010-10-09T18:57:00.007-03:00

When most people go to the movies, they aren't looking for something new but something familiar, like a petulant child who insists on being read the same bedtime story every single night. At the broadest level, a commercial feature is supposed to tell a story in three acts with a turning point (David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson use the more precise terminology of setups, complicating actions, developments, and climaxes), and the rules of continuity editing, which were established in the 1910s, give viewers the feeling of being an invisible observer. More locally, mainstream films are classified by genre, although the rules governing genres tend to be more flexible than those around dramatic structure and editing. One intriguing example of genre-bending that was on TV a few days ago is Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which combines two genres not usually associated with each-other: the romantic comedy and science fiction. However, as unusual as the film is by mainstream standards, it still adheres to certain conventions which make it accessible to a wide audience. On the other hand, screening Film Socialisme (2010) for a mainstream audience (including most professional reviewers) makes as much as sense as reading Gravity's Rainbow (1973) to a four year old. The question is: How you do make better audiences?

Made in USA (1966) came towards the end of Jean-Luc Godard's most commercial period, and it has both a glamourous star (Anna Karina, in her next-to-last film with Godard) and something like a conventional revenge plot, in which the heroine, Paula Nelson (Karina), has to find and kill the person who murdered her fiancé. (As with Godard's earlier Bande à part [1964], the story is loosely derived from a pulp American novel.) However, the first thing one notices about the film in relation to most commercial movies is that it's abnormally talky, and (characteristically for Godard) the dialogue only intermittently advances the plot. (In one sequence in a bar, a working man spouts nonsense sentences, such as "The window looks out of the girl's eyes," while Marianne Faithful sings "As Tears Go By" a cappella.) The constant digressions and jokey tone prevent the viewer from getting very involved in the silly plot, so even though I've seen the film twice, I couldn't tell you what happened in any detail--not that it really matters anyway. So what actually interests Godard? The narration tells us that this is a political film, and the dialogue is peppered with allusions to current events (local elections, the Mehdi Ben Barka case), but Jonathan Rosenbaum's description of Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control (2009) as "filmmaking for its own sake" seems closer to the mark.

In Made in USA, local texture is everything, and the plot is simply a means of getting from one moment to the next. At one point, Godard lavishes as much time on a sequence showing Paula/Karina walking through a women's gym as he does on the perfunctory exchange between her and a doctor that supposedly justifies it. (When the latter insists that Paula's fiancé died of natural causes, she quips that, even in Auschwitz and Treblinka, there were people who died of heart failure.) Some other memorable bits: Paula playing "hot and cold" with a gangster (Jean-Pierre Léaud) in an abandoned garage; Paula beating an old man unconscious with a high heeled shoe, scored to a sudden burst of Beethoven; Paula in a plastic surgeon's office unwrapping the bloody bandages over a skeleton with bulging eyes resembling a Matt Groening character. To be sure, this yields diminishing returns as the film goes on (at eighty minutes, it's not a moment too short). However, I liked the movie (and The Limits of Control) better on second viewing, which is almost always the case with Godard. More than any filmmaker I can think of, his work requires a certain degree of adjustment on the part of the viewer. So whereas on first viewing I was still in the same frame of mind as I would be while watching any normal film, the second time around, I had a better idea of what I was in for.

Reviewing Film Socialisme from Cannes (or more accurately, reviewing its director and his fans), Roger Ebert described Godard's defenders as his "acolytes," and speaking as a fanatical Godardian myself, the question for me is how to convert the unbelievers? Rather than attempting to radicalize cinematic consciousness one person at a time, I think the simplest thing would be total revolution. After all, since commercial cinema is a product of the capitalist system, in order to reform it, we'd have to change society as well. The first thing we'd have to change is to make it illegal to make a profit off of cinema. So instead of major studios looking to maximize their profits, programming would be the responsibility of local curators--people with some knowledge of film history whose goal would be to educate the tastes of filmgoers. To this end, they would screen both classics and fresh discoveries from around the globe. The curator would be able to get feedback from viewers on the kinds of films they'd like to see, and independent filmmakers would have easier access to a local audience, fostering atomized, heterogeneous film cultures. So instead of a top-down system, in which the same blockbuster opens on three thousand screens simultaneously preceded by a massive ad campaign, we'd have a more democratic system that people could actively participate in rather than just passively taking it up the ass.

The Sound and the Fury: Some First Impressions of 'Film Socialisme'

2010-10-06T00:34:00.004-03:00

While it's too early on the basis of a single viewing to say whether or not Film Socialisme (2010) is a masterpiece, if nothing else, Jean-Luc Godard's latest mind-boggling contraption makes every other new commercial feature look horribly antiquated and square by comparison, like something you'd find collecting dust in your grandma's attic. Let's face it: Compared with Godard, most other filmmakers just aren't working very hard.

The opening scenes in particular, which take place on a cruise ship sailing around the Mediterranean, find the octogenarian master at his most assaultive and perverse. And I mean that as a compliment. The first thing one notices about the movie is that it has the worst audio you've ever heard in a commercial film. Godard shoots in windy conditions evidently without a wind sock. In some scenes, the ambient audio abruptly cuts out between lines of dialogue. And at times, there's a distinct hissing noise on the soundtrack--exactly the sort of audio glitch you'd expect to find in a video posted on YouTube but not a professional feature film. Audiences are pretty forgiving of crappy cinematography, but sound is another matter entirely; even the drabbest of drably-shot of American indies coming out of the South by Southwest scene will have a clean, professional sound mix. Here, it's as if the most sophisticated filmmaker ever to work in the medium, and one of the most innovative when it comes to sound, were trying to convince us that he's never used a microphone before in his life.

After this opening barrage, however, the film seems to back down somewhat. The second part of the film, set in a family-run garage in rural France (or is it Switzerland?), has good quality sound and is even slightly easier to follow as storytelling. Of course, compared to the majority of commercial movies, even this part of the film is radically unorthodox: Godard characteristically separates dialogue from image, and withholds exposition about the characters. But still, this isn't anything that Godard hasn't been doing for the last thirty years. Likewise, the film's final sequence is a typically beautiful, poetic, non-narrative video montage whose geographic itinerary neatly echoes that of the cruise ship in the movie's opening scenes: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Greece ("Hell As"), Naples, Barcelona. Godard gracefully weaves together documentary footage with clips from old movies (including, natch, the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin [1925]), and onscreen text and narration with a keen sense of juxtaposition and rhythm. Viewers who've made an effort to keep up with Godard's recent output will recognize some of the clips used here from his short masterpiece Dans le noir du temps (2002) and the "Inferno" sequence from Notre musique (2004). And if I'm not mistaken, he's used the same crashing piano theme before as well, although I can't recall where.

When the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it was shown with subtitles in "Navajo English." For instance, according to Michael Sicinski, the name Goldberg in the first part of the film was translated at one point as "gold mountain," which is obviously relevant given that the character in question is a Nazi war criminal who plundered gold from Spain during the civil war. Watching the film on my laptop, however, I had to settle for conventional English subtitles (which only translate the film's French dialogue and titles, and not any of the other languages spoken in the film). It's hard to say, alas, whether this puts me at an advantage or a disadvantage. In any event, I doubt that the subtitles I saw would change Todd McCarthy's mind about Godard being a member of "the ivory tower group" of filmmakers "whose audience really does consist of a private club with a rigorously limited membership." Now that the secret's out, I guess I might as well tell you that we don't actually meet in an ivory tower, but because of the recession, we've had to downgrade to a modest chateau in Switzerland, where we consider how many applicants we can reject each year for not being elite enough and still bring in enough money to keep the lights on.

Returning to the film, for McCarthy, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." My feeling is that people who talk about "getting" a film (including Pauline Kael, who famously never saw a film more than once on the basis that she "got" it the first time) really don't get it at all. McCarthy talks as if Godard only had one point to make, and that his job as a filmmaker is simply to get viewers across the finish line of understanding. (At which point, presumably, the movie ends and everyone can put on their coats and go home, having "gotten their money's worth," as the saying goes.) For one thing, Godard doesn't strike me as a very linear thinker. In this film, a young black woman says at one point, "You want to hear my opinion? AIDS is just an instrument to kill the black continent." To which her white companion replies, "Why is there light? Because there is darkness." Clearly the latter thought doesn't follow logically from the previous one, but by placing them side by side, Godard invites viewers to make an association. The same principle applies later on when Godard juxtaposes a shot from Battleship Potemkin of a crowd waving to the boat as it comes into port with a contemporary scene of two Ukrainian teenagers waving to a cruise ship as it sets sail. To make a connection between the two sentences or the two shots requires a degree of inference-making that goes beyond the letter of the text, but has nothing to do with getting (or not getting) a particular point.

To be fair to McCarthy and Roger Ebert, who also missed the cruise ship on this one, we should take into account that their job consists largely of reviewing films that are designed to be understood and consumed in a single go. The only American commercial film I can think of that even comes close to what Godard is doing here in terms of audio and montage is Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998), which split reviewers when it first came out but today feels like a canonical classic (especially now that Criterion's released an expensive Blu Ray edition). That's not to say that Godard's film will become an accepted classic in ten or twelve years (unlike Malick's film, it doesn't have studio backing or any stars, so it won't get a wide release), but I can't think of any recent commercial film that I'm as eager to watch again--maybe this time with those crazy Navajo subtitles so I can see what I'm missing.

AFF #5: When the Fact Becomes Legend

2010-09-27T19:59:00.006-03:00

Even in the severely abridged version that was shown at the Atlantic Film Festival (cut down to a 140 minute feature from a five and a half hour miniseries), Olivier Assayas' Carlos (2010) is still rather a full meal: an engrossingly factual account of the career of international terrorist and media superstar Carlos the Jackal (Édgar Ramírez) spanning more than two decades. The film opens in 1973, when Carlos was ordered by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to shoot Joseph Sieff, a Zionist businessman, in London in retaliation for the assassination of Mohamed Boudia by Mossad, and it ends in 1994 with Carlos' capture in Sudan by French authorities. However, as ambitious and as gripping as the film is, one can't shake the sense that Assayas is playing it straight here in relation to his even wilder films like demonlover (2002) and Boarding Gate (2007); aside from the rock music on the soundtrack, I don't think this is noticeably different from what the Paul Greengrass version would look like. Eschewing interiority, the film takes a radically objective approach to its subject, only hinting at Carlos' relationships with the various comely women who swim in and out of focus over the course of the movie, including his marriage to Magdalena Kopp (Nora von Waldstätten) of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. There are obvious affinities between this film and Steven Soderbergh's Che (2008), but Assayas' (at least in its abridged version) is much more confident as storytelling, moving with an ease and forward momentum that eluded Soderbergh, who tended to get bogged down in pointless minutia.

The obvious high point of the film is its detailed treatment of the OPEC Raid in 1975, in which members of the FPLP under Carlos' command stormed a meeting at OPEC headquarters in Vienna, taking over sixty hostages (among them eleven ministers from oil producing nations), and in the process, killing an Austrian policeman, an Iraqi OPEC employee, and a member of the Libyan delegation. (The movie opens with a title card explaining that there are still grey areas in Carlos' life, and that the film has to be taken as a work of fiction. And looking at the Wikipedia entry on him, the OPEC Raid appears to be one of them, with various conflicting accounts of what actually happened.) According to the film, the idea for the raid came from Saddam Hussein (some say it was Muammar al-Gaddafi), who wanted the FPLP to assassinate two of the hostages--the finance minister of Iran, Jamsid Amuzgar, and the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Zaki Yamani (Badih Abou Chakra)--in order to advance his own goals in the region (namely, war with Iran). In both the film and in life (at least, according to Yamani's Wikipedia page), Carlos informed Yamani during the hostage crisis of his intention to kill him and the Iranian minister, but in the end (spoiler alert!), he cut a deal with the Algerian government for the release of all the hostages, and was kicked out of the PFLP for not carrying out his orders.

If the film's energy diminishes in the second half (as is also the case with demonlover and Boarding Gate), perhaps that's by design. Or maybe Assayas just can't keep up this level of intensity, which is less a serious failing than an indication of how tight the early scenes are. After getting thrown out of the PFLP, Carlos started his own group, the Organization of Arab Armed Struggle, and formed contacts with the East German Stassi. However, when he and Kopp were expelled from Hungary in 1985, Carlos was only allowed into Syria on the condition that he not pull off any further terrorist attacks. By the end of the Cold War, Carlos had become completely irrelevant, and at one point in the film, he's told that the CIA now thinks of him as a "historical curiosity" (a line reminiscent of the description of Michael Madsen's character in Boarding Gate as a "perfect cliché of bygone times"). As Carlos becomes increasingly ineffectual and obese, the film begins to feel almost like a remake of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980); in both movies, the protagonist's sense of stature is intimately tied up with the physical condition of his body. Here, Carlos finds himself a lame duck terrorist, adrift in a world that's stopped paying attention to him. Che Guevara was killed and became a martyr, but fate was much crueler to Carlos, who's still alive, sitting a French prison, a forgotten man.

I rather dread having to write about Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl (2010) simply because I don't know the first thing about poetry. The film opens in 1955 with Allen Ginsberg (James Franco, looking like the offspring of Matt Dillon and Lee Evans' characters in There's Something About Mary [1998]) giving the first public reading of his poem "Howl" to an appreciative boho audience in a San Francisco café. Over the course of the film, we hear most or all of the poem, which is illustrated at various points by animated sequences in which we see, for instance, swarms of ephemeral white banshees flying sperm-like above city skyscrapers to represent Ginsberg's "Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night." Or at least I think that's what they're supposed to represent. Ironically, one definition we're given of poetry in the film is that it can't be explained, or else it would be prose. How are you supposed to illustrate a line like, "Who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night / with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls," and why would you want to? I'm asking.

The film also makes use of two related texts, both from 1957: An audio recording of Ginsberg talking about his early life and creative process, and the transcript of the obscenity trial that resulted from the poem's publication, both of which are reenacted for the camera using Hollywood actors. Mercifully, the film largely refrains from preaching the importance of free speech to a free society blah blah blah. Instead, the trial seems to have focused primarily on the question of whether "Howl" has any artistic merit, which required the lawyers for the defense (John Hamm) and the prosecution (David Straitharn), and their expert witnesses, all of them English professors, including Jeff Daniels in a virtual reprise of his role from The Squid and the Whale (2005)--alas, without the beard--to try to grapple with the meaning of the text in the author's absence (technically, Ginsberg wasn't on trial for writing "Howl," but his publisher for printing it). In other words, the film tries to make some sense of the poem for philistines like me who wouldn't know what to do with Ginsberg's poetry if they did read it. And in my uneducated opinion at least, that's a lot more interesting and useful than the usual biopic claptrap.

William D. Magillvray's Man of a Thousand Songs (2010) was the winner of the audience award at the Atlantic Film Festival, but I have two reasons for being dubious of this. One, it's a local production (well, Newfoundland. Close enough), so most of the people who went to see the film either worked on it or know some one who did, so of course they're going to mark "outstanding" on their ballots. Secondly, it's a music documentary, so if you like the subject, you're probably going to like the movie (unless, that is, you're a curmudgeon like me). All week long I've been trying to understand why people liked Johann Sfar's dreadful Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) (2010), which I saw in Montreal in the spring and was one of the big hits of the festival, and the best I could from anyone was, "I like Serge Gainsbourg." There isn't even that much music in the film, but maybe if I were a bigger fan of Gainsbourg's work, I'd be more interested in all the broads he schtupped between the Occupation of Paris and the mid-1980s. (The film ends just before L'Affaire Whitney Houston, maybe because she wouldn't schtup him--but then, why bother recreating something you can watch on YouTube?)

But I digress... Now, I don't want to skull-fuck a dead cat or nothing, but Man of a Thousand Songs is a rather unambitious documentary about Newfoundland singer-songwriter Ron Hynes that alternates between talking head interviews with Hynes and his nephew, and the former performing various gigs around the province. What the film lacks is a sense of urgency. The whole point of making a documentary is that you're filming an event that's unrepeatable, whether it's the Beatles' first US tour or Dave Chappelle's block party. So why is Magillvray making this film now? More importantly, the film lacks a structure, so even though it's not a long movie (ninety minutes), it just seems to go on and on and on. And without any attempt to place Hynes' music in a broader historical context, what we're left with is a walking cliché: The hard-living singer-songwriter whose early commercial success came to little, wrestling with his personal demons (i.e., cocaine). Didn't Jeff Bridges like just win an Oscar for playing exactly the same character?

AFF #4: Some Are Born to Endless Night

2010-09-26T22:34:00.008-03:00

It's a funny thing about festivals: Watch any random sampling of movies in a concentrated period of time, and eventually a theme will begin to emerge. And the major theme of the thirtieth Atlantic Film Festival (at least in my experience) was death. The best film I saw by a rather wide margin was Apichatpong Weerasethakul's mystical Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) about a man dying of kidney failure in a Thai farmhouse. There, he's visited by spirits, recalls his past lives as an ox and a princess, and describes a vision he had of the future. Joe said in an interview in Cinema-Scope that he still believes in reincarnation, but that he has doubts and would like to see more scientific evidence. The film's ending suggests that we not only live again and again, but that we live multiple lives simultaneously.

I was also impressed by Woody Allen's atheistic You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), a multi-protagonist comedy-drama set in London that only seems to be about romance, but ends in an unexpected way that makes you realize that the real subject of the film, lurking just behind the merriment, is death. I left the theatre feeling profoundly satisfied, making this the festival's most unlikely feel good movie. And then there was Yael Hersonsky's powerful documentary A Film Unfinished (2010) about the making of a Nazi propaganda film in the Warsaw Ghetto in the Spring of 1942--not to mention Javier Fuentes-Léon's disappointing Undertow (2009), a magic realist coming out story set in a Peruvian fishing village that suggested a cross between Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Ghost (1990).

To this inventory, I have two more films to add. First, Mike Leigh's Another Year (2010) is about a woman growing old alone. The plot is about a year in the lives of a happily married couple named Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and Gerri's unhappily single coworker, Mary (Lesley Manville), and as the seasons change, so does the film's colour scheme, reflecting the emotional tenor of the movie as it moves from a sad, blue spring to a cheerful, green summer, followed by a tense, brown autumn, and finally a winter that's sombre and black. I felt that the film peaked with the third segment, and after that, since there's really nothing left to say about how miserable and sad and pathetic Mary is, the story seems to be spinning its wheels. Leigh's mastery is evident throughout (a seemingly offhand remark turns out several reels later to be an ingeniously subtle bit of foreshadowing), but overall this strikes me as the least of his films since Career Girls (1997).

As in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Leigh's major insight here is that some people seem to have a natural gift for happiness which others simply lack. Leigh's most memorable characters are often the unhappiest--David Thewlis' existential drifter in Naked (1993), Brenda Blethyn and Timothy Spall as estranged siblings in Secrets & Lies (1996), the deranged driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) in Happy-Go-Lucky--and here Manville steals the show as a lonely woman heading into middle-age who drinks too much (even for a movie about British people, there's a lot of drinking in this film) and has a pathetic crush on Tom and Gerri's grown son, Joe (Oliver Maltman). I was hoping for a bit of spring at the end of the film's long, grim winter, but Leigh just fades to black on a note of despair, which I found unsatisfying. At one point in the film, Ken (Peter Wight), an old friend of Tom's who's even more of a loser than Mary, sports a t-shirt reading, "Less Thinking, More Drinking." And after a year with these characters, I felt like having a stiff drink myself.

The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs

Incendies (2010)--Denis Villeneuve's ambitious new film about the civil war in Lebanon, adapted from a play by Wajdi Mouawad--is a kind of unofficial companion piece to Villeneuve's earlier Polytechnique (2009), another story about massacres and motherhood. (That film was a dramatization of the 1989 shooting at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.) After the haunting opening sequence of child soldiers having their heads shaved, scored to Radiohead's "You and Whose Army?," the story moves to Montreal where adult siblings, Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux) and Simon Marwan (Maxim Gaudette), go to their lawyer's office for the reading of their mother's will. In the will, their mother, Narwal (Lubna Azabal), stipulates that Jeanne and Simon must deliver two letters--one to the father they never met; the other to a half-brother they didn't know existed--before they can place a tombstone on her grave. As Jeanne and Simon discover more about who Narwal was, there are flashbacks to her early life in Lebanon. As a young woman, we learn, Narwal fell in love with a Muslim refugee from Palestine, which was a disgrace to her Christian family. After giving birth to a son, Narwal was sent to live with an uncle in a city to the north, and the child was placed in an orphanage. (Importantly, Narwal's mother tattooed three dots on the baby's heel so that Narwal would be able to recognize him.) Several years later, when the war breaks out between Christians and Muslims, Narwal returns to the south in search of her son, and there she witnesses atrocities at the hands of Christian nationalists that radicalize her, leading her to fight on the side of the Muslims.

I'll leave you to discover subsequent revelations for yourself, except to say that I found the ending a little too dramatically perfect. Obviously all stories depend on coincidence to some degree, but here, the Big Reveal felt contrived in order to make the point that Villeneuve (and presumably Mouawad) wanted to make about this conflict. And while this is clearly the most ambitious feature that Villeneuve (a native of Trois-Rivières based in Montreal) has ever attempted, in terms of its overall narrative structure (which is essentially that of a procedural, not so very different from The Secret in Their Eyes [2009]), it's also his most conventional with Best Foreign Language Oscar written all over it. In Polytechnique and now this film, Villenueve seems to find it inconceivable that he might somehow reconcile the flair for the fantastic that characterized his exciting early features Un 32 août sur terre (1998) and Maelström (2000) with his ambition to grapple with serious issues in his later work. Consequently, he's become precisely what I used to admire him for not being: another square, middlebrow Canadian director like Thom Fitzgerald or Sarah Polley.

La Nuit américaine

Two other themes of this year's Atlantic Film Festival were nighttime photography (I still contend that Uncle Boonmee has the best I've ever seen, in any of my past lives) and stories about young lovers. On the latter count, the best film I saw was obviously Xavier Dolan's Les Amours imaginaires (still the Québécois film to beat for 2010) for its Wong Kar-wai inspired slow motion shots of the two leads walking down Montreal streets, memorably set to Dalida's "Bang Bang," and because Dolan seems to get that these people are idiots, making this one of the funniest films of the festival. (Its treatment of imaginary loves is, in any event, a lot more enjoyable and less depressing than Another Year's.) I was also charmed by Ingrid Veninger's Modra (which I would hope is not the best English Canadian feature of 2010) about a pair of cute kids from Toronto who have a mostly cute time together in Slovakia, which I liked mainly for the beguiling lead performances by Hallie Switzer and Alexander Gammal.

I was less keen on David Robert Mitchell's The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010), even though next to Modra it's obviously more accomplished as storytelling and more ambitious (but not that ambitious), crisscrossing between several plot lines that unfold over a twenty-four hour period--a structure that inevitably invites comparisons with Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993). However, I wasn't sure if the film wanted me to feel nostalgic for my lost days of youth (in which case it failed because the kids don't do anything very exciting that would make me think, "Oh man, I was I were a teenager again"--quite the opposite, in fact), or whether it wanted to show things as they really are (in which case it's authentic but just not particularly interesting). I wanted either the film to be lighter and snappier, or better still, darker and angrier. As it is, it's enjoyable but slight.

AFF #3: A Woody Allen Classic

2010-09-22T03:23:00.008-03:00

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) is one of Woody Allen's best and most fully realized recent pictures, a multi-protagonist romantic drama set in London that paradoxically handles a serious subject with a light touch. The film begins with Helena (Gemma Jones), an elegant middle-aged woman going to see a fortune teller, Cristal (Pauline Collins), as we come to learn, because she was so devastated when her husband, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), left her that she had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. Going to the fortune teller gives Helena some measure of comfort, so her daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), indulges her illusions, but Sally's American husband, Roy (Josh Brolin), a struggling writer with a background in medicine, doesn't like it one bit--especially when Cristal predicts that Roy's publisher will reject his latest book.

I was surprised at first that the film ended where it does, because it doesn't wrap everything up very neatly, but then, as I thought back on it, I realized what Allen was up to, and it actually changed in retrospect my whole understanding of what the film was about. This is a film that works through misdirection, so that the real subject of the movie sneaks up on you, even though it's right there in front of you the whole time. It only seems to be about romance--Helena's new relationship with a widower, Jonathan (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), who shares her spiritual outlook; Alfie's sudden decision to marry a prostitute, Charmaine (Lucy Punch); Sally's crush on her new boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas); and Roy's infatuation with the South Asian girl next door, Dia (Freida Pinto). But the film is really about the certainty of death, and how people try to deal with that fact by having children, making art and literature, believing in an after life or reincarnation. And yet, even though it's a movie about death, and even though what happens to the characters is pretty harsh, as I left the theatre I felt an incredible sense of satisfaction, having seen a film that is so thoroughly entertaining and so cleverly written. This is Woody Allen at the very top of his form.

Les Amants canadienne

The first thing one notices about Xavier Dolan's Les Amours imaginaires (2010) in relation to his earlier J'ai tué ma mère (2009) is that, on this film, he had considerably more money at his disposal. And the characters in this movie--a stylish, funny, beautifully color-coordinated comedy about a trio of Montreal hipsters--are accordingly a good deal more affluent, even though none of them appears to have a job. (One gets an allowance from his mother; and though the other two have frequent sexual encounters with various strangers, we never see any money changing hands, so it's possible they're just sluts.) For better or for worse, Dolan establishes himself here as Canada's answer to Sofia Coppola, and the real significance of the film's epilogue, in which Louis Garrel makes a brief cameo, and which brings the narrative full circle, is that it extends Dolan's cool beyond Quebec's borders, putting him on the same plane as Christophe Honoré, another Nouvelle Vague-inspired movie brat (one who, incidentally, owes his entire career to Garrel).

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the film--in which best pals Francis (Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) vie for the affections of Nico (Neils Schneider), while outwardly pretending to be uninterested--is how much comic mileage it gets out of such a threadbare scenario. There's a fine line between knowingly making a film about vapid characters and simply making a vapid movie (for instance, I disliked Coppola's Lost in Translation when I saw it at the film festival in 2003, but I loved Marie Antoinette [2006] enough to put it on my list of the decade's best movies), but I'm pretty sure that Dolan knows that these people are idiots. And as we know from J'ai tué ma mère, he's not particularly concerned with playing characters that are likable. However, although the film's central ménage à trois is calculated to remind us of Nouvelle Vague landmarks like François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962) and Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à part (1964) (Chokri has a face like Jeanne Moreau and hair like Anna Karina), the story lacks the serious undercurrents of those films.

J'ai tué ma mère established Dolan as an eclectic stylist, apparently willing to try anything once, and though that eclecticism is still apparent here, Les Amours imaginaires is a much more deliberate film. It feels like the work of a director who knows what he wants to do and how to do it, rather than a novice still feeling his way around. Again there are direct-address confessionals, but this time Dolan doesn't embed them within the narrative as a video journal, or bother with the redundancy of filming these scenes in black and white in order to distinguish them from the movie's dramatic scenes. Also, there are several speakers instead of one, and none of these characters appear in the narrative proper. And again Dolan employs slow motion like it was going out of style, and his debt to Wong Kar-wai is even more apparent here when he films Francis and Marie walking to various dates with Nico in slow motion, scored to Dalida's "Bang Bang." What's new is Dolan's frequent recourse to a more handheld style of shooting (rather than the sustained static two-shots of his debut), and a fantasy insert of marshmallows raining down on Nico (but then, it may be the case that there were similar scenes in J'ai tué ma mère that I'm forgetting). This is one scary talented kid.

The Kids Are Pretty Cute

Speaking of kids, Ingrid Veninger's low-budget Canadian feature Modra (2010) is a cute movie about a pair of cute kids from Toronto who spend a mostly cute time together in Slovakia, which is evidently so safe that they can sleep outdoors on a public bench without anyone harvesting their organs (as would surely happen on any street in Canada). As the film opens, Lina (Hallie Switzer), a seventeen-year-old girl, decides to take Leco (Alexander Gammal), a boy she barely knows, with her to Slovakia when Lina's boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her the day before her flight. ("Have fun in Slovenia." "It's Slovakia, ass-hole!") At times, the film suggests a children's-strength version of Billy Wilder's Avanti! (1972), but with fewer plot contrivances. It's not particularly ambitious or original, but after a somewhat heavy weekend (A Film Unfinished, The Illusionist), I was in the mood for something light and beguiling, and on that level, Modra delivered.

AFF #2: Fakin' It!

2010-09-21T13:46:00.009-03:00

The Holocaust is different from other genocides in that there exists so much footage of it. How many people remember the Herero genocide, other than those who've read Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973)? This time, the Germans kept meticulous records and made films because they wanted people to know what they were doing. Perhaps significantly, the best and most comprehensive film I've seen on the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), doesn't incorporate any archival footage whatsoever.

The approach taken by Yael Hersonsky in his powerful documentary A Film Unfinished (2010) is directly the opposite of Lanzmann's in that it focuses like a laser on one particular event: The making of a Nazi propaganda film in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1942. Four reels of edited footage, running about an hour, were discovered in an underground film vault in Eastern Germany after the war, but why the film was made, why it was never completed, and the names of all but one of the technicians who worked on the film remain a mystery to this day. The documentary consists primarily of the surviving footage, including outtakes that show the same events being staged over and over from several different angles. The footage, which lacks a soundtrack, is contextualized by the reminiscences of Holocaust survivors watching the film in a screening room, as well as excerpts from the diary of Adam Czerniaków, the head of the Jewish Council in the Ghetto, who wrote daily about the making of the film (his diaries are also featured prominently in the latter portions of Shoah), and from the testimony given by Willy Wist, a cameraman who worked on the film, during the trial of a German officer.

The film, titled simply The Ghetto, attempts to present a comprehensive view of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, including ritual baths and circumcisions, with a particular emphasis on the supposed disparity between the rich and the poor, and the indifference of more affluent Jews to those dying in abject squalor. One survivor of the Ghetto estimates that there were between twenty and fifty people who could afford to buy food right until the end (at exorbitant prices), but the scenes in the film of rich, healthy-looking Jews thriving and enjoying their lives were obviously staged for the camera. But what were they trying to prove? Apparently, the filmmakers themselves didn't know; they filmed what they were told to film. My guess is that the film was intended as a rationalization for the liquidation of the Ghetto, which occurred shortly afterward, but when it wasn't finished on time for whatever reason, the film was simply abandoned. As a record of how the Nazis wanted the world to see the Warsaw Ghetto, A Film Unfinished is a fascinating historical document.

Hasid Streets

A Rabbinical school version of Scarface (1983), Kevin Asch's Holy Rollers (2010) takes place in a black-and-white universe in which everything the characters do is either a step towards Hashem, or a step away. As the film opens, its protagonist, Sam Gold (Jesse Eisenberg), is an ultra-Orthodox George Michael (you better believe he's gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith... Baby!) whose parents want him to become a Rabbi. Sam, however, wants to continue working in his father's fabric store so that he can make some extra money to buy his ma a new oven, and support the girl he intends to marry, who comes from a more affluent family. Leon (Jason Fuchs), Sam's best friend, is also studying to be a Rabbi, but his older bother, Yosef (Justin Bartha), watches porn, smokes on the sabbath, and wears a gold watch. It's through Yosef that Sam meets Jackie (Danny Abeckaser), an Israeli drug dealer who imports ecstasy pills from Amsterdam using Hasidic Jews as drug couriers.

Jackie introduces Sam to a life of fast money and fast women, not to mention flashier clothing. But temptation begets temptation, and before long, Yosef is skimming drugs off the top to sell on the side, and Sam enters into an Oedipal struggle with Jackie over the latter's girl, Rachel (Ari Graynor), a blonde temptress whose first step away from Hashem was to drop out of Hebrew school. Throughout it all, Sam remains fundamentally a nice kid. When trying to convince Rachel to run away with him to Lithuania (where they'll live with his grandmother!), Sam tells her, "I think we make a cute couple." On the other hand, Leon stays on the righteous path and marries the girl that Sam wanted to, while Sam, Yosef, Jackie, and Rachel all go to prison. A bit neat, don't you think? The film's message is essentially that you should just do whatever your parents tell you to do.

The film is very well made. I liked the style of the film (shadowy handheld realism with virtually no non-diegetic music), and Asch has a good handle on the tone of the material. And I liked Eisenberg, who's more of a leading man than Michael Cera. In short, it's probably the best after school special ever made. But to cite the last mainstream Jew-fest to hit the 'plexes, I was much more intrigued by the Coen brothers' A Serious Man (2009), which is all about uncertainty and doubt. (Incidentally, both films use selective focus to represent an altered state of mind.) This movie, on the other hand, for all its claims to taking place in the secular world, never seems to leave Rabbinical school.

Down by Law

Cameron Yates' The Canal Street Madam (2010) is a documentary profile of Jeanette Maier, a self-described "whore" from New Orleans whose arrest in the late 1980s attracted national media coverage and inspired a made-for-TV movie starring Annabella Sciorra. Yates began filming Maier in 2004 and followed her over a period of several years, and the resulting documentary suggests at different times a political activism doc, with Maier campaigning to have prostitution decriminalized; a feminist statement about how Maier has been exploited by men; and a reality show train wreck in which Maier (unwittingly?) makes a fool of herself on camera.

It's not so much that Yates portrays Maier in an unflattering light so much as that's how she portrays herself. After being interviewed by the local six o'clock news, Maier gets into an argument with her boyfriend, who thinks that she should be more careful about the language she uses to represent herself--for instance, instead of saying "whore," he thinks she should use the more politically correct "prostitute." Maier answers, not unreasonably, that "a whore is a whore is a whore" no matter what you call her. And her best friend thinks it's okay to say "whore" if you are one. All valid points of view. But surely it doesn't help Maier's cause to decriminalize prostitution when, while campaigning for local office, she stands on a street corner holding up a sign while giggling her boobs at passing motorists.

Let's agree that the prostitution laws in the United States are ineffective and hypocritical, targeting the prostitutes while protecting their clients. (The film touches on the dubious suicide of the DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, after she decided to name names. And the undercover cop who busted Maier waited until after she sucked his dick before arresting her--or at least, that's how she tells it.) When you get down to it, the fact of the matter is that a woman with no education, no skills, no legitimate work experience, a criminal record, and three kids to feed can make a hell of a lot more money selling her ass than she can working at Denny's for minimum wage and tips. It's easy money, like teaching English abroad--except that you don't need a university degree to do it, and you don't pay taxes. (After her arrest, however, Maier started another business, selling candles for three hundred dollars a pop, and whatever she does with a customer afterward is simply for her own pleasure.)

Not surprisingly, all of Maier's children have criminal records. Her eldest son is an intravenous drug user; her daughter also became a prostitute; and her youngest son spent time in prison for an unspecified offense and now lives at home with his mother. Maier attributes her kids' problems to their having seen her being abused by the cops from the time that they were children, but this is obviously a self-serving rationalization so that she doesn't have to take any responsibility for her actions. My theory is that kids learn by example, and if they see a parent engaged in illegal activity, they're going to think it's okay. Do I need to tell you that Maier's mother was herself a lady of the evening? (Ellen Burstyn played her in the TV movie.)

Aside from infrequently asking a question while standing off screen, Yates mostly keeps himself out of the picture, letting Maier speak for herself. Watching the movie, I had the same queasy feeling that I got from Chris Smith's American Movie (1999), in which you sense that the people on screen aren't in on the joke. The curious thing about the movie is that Yates isn't pretending to be objective; rather, he seems to be giving Maier a platform to espouse her views. So when he includes footage showing her and members of her family in an unflattering light, I felt that he wasn't being entirely upfront about his intentions, either with Maier or the audience.

AFF #1: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Wookie

2010-09-20T12:48:00.009-03:00

My Atlantic Film Festival experience began on Friday with two very different ghost stories, one of them brilliant: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) is an enchanting, hypnotic, visionary film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul that, like all of Joe's movies, combines a feeling of mythic grandeur with an irreverent deadpan sense of humor. When Uncle Boonmee's son, Boonsong (who disappeared six years earlier), suddenly returns having been transformed during the interval into a monkey with red eyes that glow in the dark, the ghost of his mother asks him why he let his hair grow so long.

Notwithstanding the pre-credit sequence involving a cow (presumably meant to represent one of Boonmee's past lives), the film opens with Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), his sister-in-law, Auntie Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), and his chef, Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) traveling by car to Boonmee's country home, where he receives dialysis treatment from a Laotian man who's in the country illegally. (Boonmee believes that his kidney ails are divine retribution for killing too many communists during the '60s.) The film alternates between naturalistic daytime scenes and fantastical nighttime sequences in which Boonmee is visited by spirits, recalls his past life as a faded princess who meets a smooth talking catfish, and during a trek through a cave, describes a dream he had of the future, which is represented as a series of still images in an obvious homage to Chris Marker's La Jetée (1963). The latter scenes boast the most impressive night photography I've ever seen. The images are so dark that I seriously doubt the film will work on video; even more than a 3D spectacle like Avatar (2009), this is a film that needs to be seen on the big screen.

A large part of what makes the film so entrancing--like Joe's Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), and his avant-garde short Phantoms of Nabua (2009)--is its dense ambient soundtrack (chirping bugs, a waterfall, a low Lynchian rumble). Even when the characters are indoors, the natural world never seems far away. This is the sort of movie that some people feel the need to interpret symbolically, and Boonmee's vision of the future (which Joe has said is based on an actual dream he had) is obviously an allegory for the cinema, but I have a deep-seated resistance to this way of accounting for works of art, which reduces them to the level of the daily crossword puzzle. I think the simplest, and best, way to approach the film is to take it completely at face value as a sensuous experience. And I much prefer the ending as an open-ended question than as a definitive answer.

El Amor Prohibido

Set in a Peruvian fishing village, Javier Fuentes-Léon's Undertow (2009) is a perfectly watchable if utterly unnecessary magic realist melodrama that won't change anybody's mind about gays being real men. And just as it never occurs to Jack and Ennis to rent a loft in the Village, this movie's repressed fisherman protagonist only comes out to the community after his painter amigo con beneficios accidentally drowns, and the fisherman reconciles with his pregnant wife. Fox and His Friends (1975) it ain't.

To paraphrase Mike D'Angelo, it's getting to the point where I hope that gays achieve equality, not out of any humanist outrage, but simply so that filmmakers will stop treating gay relationships as an "issue." Hell, even if gays never achieve equality, somebody's gotta put a stop to this shit. I wonder if Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) keeps getting its release pushed back, not for its intimations of gay sex (Ang Lee and James Schamus' Brokeback Mountain [2005] brought spit-lubed butt sex to the multiplex ages ago), but because it doesn't flatter viewers for their open-mindedness, and its Brechtian treatment of its protagonist (Jim Carrey, in his nerviest role to date) undermines easy identification with him at every turn.

Tati's Last Sigh

Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist (2010) is a relentlessly downbeat animated feature that's never less than pleasurable to look at and to listen to, but which ultimately left a sour taste in my mouth. The story--about a simple Scottish girl from the highlands who runs away to London with a French magician named Tatischeff--is based on an unproduced screenplay by Jacques Tati (né Tatischeff), but in contrast with the Utopian spirit of Playtime (1967), this film is closer philosophically to the glib miserablism of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), which perverts the ending of Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria (1957) to make the useless point that life stinks and only Hollywood escapism makes it bearable.

Even at his most melancholy, as in Mon onlce (1958), which mourns the disappearance of Paris' historic working class neighborhoods (and the sense of community therein), and the rise of sterile gated communities, Tati is never depressing because the bulk of the film is devoted to showing us what we're losing, how great life can be, and how much fun you can still have, even in the suburbs--provided, of course, that M. Hulot is around to keep things lively. When this film opens, in 1959, Tatischeff is playing to a deserted auditorium with an uncooperative rabbit. Only the Scottish girl believes in Tatischeff's magic, and to keep her illusions alive, he takes a number of demeaning jobs, first at a garage and then in the display window of a department store. There are some good laughs, thanks mostly to Chomet's taste for caricature (I especially enjoyed the effeminate British rock band), but the film is essentially a dirge, a long uninterrupted sigh of resignation. Whether this is due to Tati's original conception, or to the changes Chomet has made to it, is not something I can say, but the film is the same either way: a bummer.

Things White People Like (The Darjeeling Limited)

2010-09-17T01:01:00.009-03:00

To me, the most interesting fact pertaining to Lady Gaga appearing on the cover of Japanese men's Vogue in a dress made out of raw meat is that there exists a publication called Japanese men's Vogue, which got me thinking: What kind of man would read it? My first guess was high-earning homosexuals, who have more disposable income because they don't have kids. But then I remembered that, in neighboring South Korea, dressing like a dandy didn't necessarily have a homosexual connotation. For instance, in the early part of 2009, the most popular Korean TV show was Boys Before Flowers, which was based on a Japanese manga and TV series about a group of effeminate teenagers called the Flower Four, who attend an exclusive private school in Seoul. The leader of the group, Gu Jun-pyo (Lee Min-ho), would often wear fur-collared coats and had a perm, and two of the secondary flower boys would sometimes make catty comments about the plot ("All I know is that school hasn't been this interesting in years"). In short, the only way for it to be any gayer would be for the boys to join a glee club coached by Jane Lynch and Rock Hudson.

Anyway, like the Sex and the City movie (2008)--also very gay--which I saw with Heather in Busan, Boys Before Flowers was in large part a fantasy of posh living for the masses. The heroine, Geum Jan-di (Goo Hye-sun), is a girl from a working class background who's courted by two of the flower boys. And according to Wikipedia, "The drama series influenced men to take their appearance even more seriously and try to gain the 'pretty boy' image that existed among the F4 characters in the drama. More South Korean males started to wear cosmetics and viewers in South Korea and beyond started to notice overseas filming locations of the drama as possible holiday destinations."

However, while Boys Before Flowers and Sex and the City represent an overblown fantasy of conspicuous consumption, during the US Open, all the ads for luxury items assume that the people watching can actually afford German cars, French cologne, and diamond-encrusted watches (no, seriously, diamond-encrusted wacthes). Advertisers, of course, want to pitch their wares to the most educated and affluent segment of the population, because they have the most money to spend. So even if Grand Slam tennis draws fewer eyeballs than other major sporting events, the people who do watch it are precisely those whom advertisers are most eager to target. I remember back when I "studied" commerce, in one of my lectures the professor mentioned how certain brands were particularly eager to advertise during an obscure MTV series called Aeon Flux (1995) because it had the audience they desired. In other words, to judge by the ads, the people watching tennis on TV are more likely to have helped cause the global economic collapse than to have lost their jobs and homes because of it. (One of the main reasons for the economic meltdown, incidentally, was that a lot of poor people got hoodwinked into spending, or rather borrowing, like millionaires.) Conversely, I'm sure that Glenn Beck's TV show gets huge numbers, but one of his chief sponsors is something called Goldline, which is so obviously a scam designed to bamboozle the least sophisticated members of society (that is, the people who like Beck and Sarah Palin--not to mention Beck and Palin themselves) that it's become an easy punch line for The Daily Show.

Speaking of rich people, it's impossible to discuss the films of Wes Anderson without talking about wealth and privilege, since the subject is almost as central to his work as it is to Sofia Coppola's. Anderson's second feature, Rushmore (1998), was about a teenager, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman, Coppola's cousin), who goes to an expensive prep school on a scholarship, and is so ashamed of his father (Seymour Cassel), who runs a barber shop, that he tells his classmates his father is a brain surgeon. Early in the film, Max befriends a self-made millionaire industrialist (Bill Murray) when the latter gives a talk at Max's school, in which he tells students like Max to take down the kids who were "born rich and are probably going to die that way" (which could refer to the industrialist's own sons, whom he despises). Anderson's subsequent film, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), was his first set outside of his native Texas, and it marks an overall shift in his orientation, with the rich kids taking centre stage. (Incidentally, one of the characters is a former tennis pro, and Anderson would later direct a commercial for a credit card company that advertises during the US Open.) And by the time of The Darjeeling Limited (2007)--written by Anderson with Schwartzman and Roman Coppola--it's simply taken for granted granted that the characters are fabulously wealthy without the film making any particular point about it.

The latter film invites comparisons with Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), since in both a colonized Asian country serves as an exotic backdrop for a story about rich white people. However, the two films differ significantly in how they view the people who live in those countries. Coppola's film, set in Japan (which was occupied by the United States after World War II), is a racist's view of Tokyo. Of course, it's possible to make a film about a bigoted character without making a racist movie (Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino [2008], for instance), but Coppola uncritically identifies with her characters' xenophobia, inviting viewers to laugh at how Japanese people mispronounce English words (it goes without saying that the American characters don't speak Japanese). In one of the film's broadest and ugliest scenes, a prostitute commands Bill Murray to "lip" her stockings, and then in case we didn't get the joke that Asian people are stupid, starts rolling around on the floor. On the other hand, The Darjeeling Limited, which is set in post-colonial India, sees the people there as people, even those that don't speak any English at all (although many do, India having the most English speakers of any country in the world), which is all you can reasonably expect from an American director making a film in Asia.

The story, about three brothers on a spiritual journey, can be divided into three large acts. As the film opens, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrian Brody), and Jack (Schwartzman) haven't spoken to each other in a year, but when Francis has a near-death experience, crashing his motorcycle, he asks his two brothers to come to India to join him on an adventure aboard the Darjeeling Limited and become brothers again. (Aside from Jack, who's a novelist, the brothers don't have any discernible source of income.) Like Wilson's character in Bottle Rocket (1996), Francis tries to micromanage everything, having his assistant, Brendan (Wallace Wolodarsky), print out a detailed itinerary for each day, as if one could build trust and find spiritual enlightenment on a schedule. However, the spiritual journey is an abysmal failure precisely due to the brothers' inability to trust one another, and when their constant bickering escalates into an all out brawl, the Chief Stewart (Waris Ahluwalia) kicks them off the train in the middle of nowhere. In the second part of the film, the brothers decide to abandon their spiritual journey and find the nearest airport. However, en route they see some peasant children who are about to fall into a canal. When they inevitably do fall in, the brothers jump in to try to save them, but one of the children doesn't make it. The brothers are invited to the funeral, and there's a flashback to the day of their father's funeral (which they missed due to their bickering). In the final section of the film, the brothers decide, instead of getting on the plane, to go see their mother, Patricia (Anjelica Huston), who's become a Catholic missionary at a secluded monastery. At each stage of the plot, the brothers attempt to perform a silly ritual involving three bird feathers. The first time they attempt it, when the Darjeeling Limited gets lost, they get sidetracked by bickering. After they get kicked off the train, they make a second attempt but do it wrong because of a miscommunication. But by the third attempt, at the monastery, they're in perfect harmony with each other.

It's indicative of the film's narrative density that I've had to leave a lot out of the above description, including the short film, Hotel Chevalier (2007), which is designed to be shown before the feature, and which the latter alludes to in a number of ways. In the short, Jack is hiding out in a ritzy Paris hotel, where he's been staying for over a month (he's only half kidding when he estimates that his bill so far is 750 million Euros, begging the question: Why doesn't he simply get an apartment?), when he receives a surprise visit from his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman). A cynic might view the whole thing as an advert for a posh lifestyle, down to the ex-girlfriend, whose chic androgynous haircut is obviously intended to remind viewers of Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle (1960), as if to say: If you crash at expensive hotels and listen to indie folk rock on your iPod, then you too can schtup anemic indie girls like ribby over here.

In the feature, this visit--like the incident at the garage that made the brothers miss their father's funeral--becomes the basis for an autobiographical short story written by Jack, which he reads to Francis and Peter near the end of the film. At the end of the short, Jacks' relationship with his ex-girlfriend is very much unresolved (they're neither broken up nor back together). Similarly, while aboard the Darjeeling Limited, Jack gets involved with an Indian woman, Rita (Amara Karan), who isn't sure whether she has a boyfriend, or if they just broke up, or if they're about to. Twice in the film, Jack, who knows the code for his ex-girlfriend's voice mail, jealously listens to her messages. The first time he does this, it's at a small train station during a routine stop. (Jack is even wearing his yellow Hotel Chevalier bathrobe at the time.) As Francis and Peter watch from the train, the latter betrays Jack's plan to flee to Italy, inspiring Francis to take Jack's passport. When Francis and Peter get into the brawl that will get them all kicked off the train, Jack maces them in the face, shouting when they come after him, "Stop including me!" Similarly, by spending the last year abroad, Jack has excluded himself from the family. (An important prop in both the short and the feature is the designer suitcase that Jack takes with him to Paris, which was part of a set owned by their father. We learn in the flashback that Jack discovered it in the trunk of their father's car on the day of the funeral.) However, after their visit to the monastery, when Jack reads his short story about the breakup to Francis and Peter, he adds the ending, "He would not be going to Italy." And when Peter pays him a compliment suggesting that the story is autobiographical ("I like how mean you are"), Jack doesn't try to deny it as he did earlier with a different story story based on the incident at the garage. At the end of the film, as a sign of their renewed trust, Francis returns to Peter and Jack their passports, but they agree that it's safer if Francis keeps them. And rather than getting on a plane, we see them boarding another train, the Bengal Tiger (obviously an echo of the opening sequence, in which Peter has to run to catch the Darjeeling Limited, but this time, leaving all their luggage on the platform), which one might infer is taking the brothers further into India rather than immediately back to the west.

Of Anderson's six features to date, half of them--The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)--are about patriarchs (and in two of those, as well as this film, Huston plays an estranged matriarch). In a sense, The Darjeeling Limited picks up where The Royal Tenenbaums left off, with the death of the father. (One could also see it as a bizarro world remake of Bottle Rocket, but instead of real life brothers playing unrelated friends, here you have three actors who aren't related and don't look alike playing siblings. And at one point, Jack wonders aloud if they could've been friends in "real life--not as brothers, but as people.") Early in the film, Peter confides to Jack that his wife, Alice (Camilla Rutherford), is seven and a half months pregnant with their first child (and to pay him back for spilling the beans about Italy, Jack reports this back to Francis--or was it the other way around?), but before he can become a father himself, Peter needs to first grieve the loss of his own. It was Peter's insistence on driving to the funeral in their father's car (in order to demonstrate to Francis that he was the one who was grieving the most) that caused them to miss the service in the first place. At the end of the flashback, when the three brothers are in the limo on their way to the funeral (which has already started, and which we never see them arriving at), Peter discovers that he's still holding the keys to his father's car, and a year later in India, he's still hanging on to them, as well as his father's prescription sunglasses. By superimposing Peter's grief for his father on top of that of an Indian peasant (Irrfan Khan) for his son, whose death Peter blames himself for ("I didn't save mine"), Anderson suggests a commonality bridging cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic differences that's denied to the characters in Lost in Translation, where Japanese culture is viewed as impenetrably weird.

During the flashback sequence, Francis learns that Patricia won't be attending their father's funeral, having evidently thrown him over for another father-figure, Jesus Christ. Her short haircut, incidentally, links her to Jack's ex-girlfriend, and during the brothers' visit to the monastery, she fiddles with a miniature music box fixed to Jack's suitcase, echoing one shot in the short film. Also, the brothers' visit coincides with Ash Wednesday, and the black soot on Patricia and the brothers' foreheads rhymes with an earlier sequence in which Rita puts a red dot on the same spot on the brothers' foreheads, suggesting another cross-cultural commonality.

At the risk of reviewing the audience, Anderson (like Coppola) essentially makes movies for rich white people--and I include myself as a member of said audience, even though I'm not really rich (not Sofia Coppola rich, anyway) and I'm not really white either (I could pass for Italian). In an essay on Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008) in CineAction!, Ajay Gehlawart writes, "'Crucial' for Boyle is that his film be seen as 'a Bollywood film in the sense that virtually all the cast and crew are from Bollywood,' yet also, crucially, not as a Bollywood film, in the sense that, 'it is a good story'"--which is to say that, in contrast with Bollywood pictures which are aimed at the broadest and least sophisticated audience, Boyle's film is intended for a relatively discerning western viewership. And The Darjeeling Limited assumes an even more sophisticated viewer. Significantly, its primary invocation of Indian cinema isn't Bollywood-style spectacle (as in the rather dreadful musical number behind the closing credits of Boyle's film), but Ravi Shankar's sitar music from Satyajit Ray's neo-realist inspired Apu trilogy: Pather panchali (1955), Aparajito (1957), and The World of Apu (1959). And in contrast with the ugly music video aesthetic and broad melodrama of Slumdog Millionaire, Anderson's style is as refined and elegant as Stanley Kubrick's, and his nice guy humanism places him in the same company as François Truffaut.

Anderson's films not only function as advertisements for luxury items (here, the brothers' suits and suitcases were designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton), but are themselves luxury items, and he's been as savvy about protecting his brand as Jim Jarmusch and Wong Kar-wai. (The Darjeeling Limited I hear will soon be coming out in a deluxe edition Blu Ray from the Criterion Collection with a cover designed by Anderson's brother.) A few years ago, some one remarked to me that they felt Rushmore was "pretentious" compared to a comedy like Penelope Spheeris' Wayne's World (1992)--which I also consider a masterpiece. At the time, I found that inexplicable, but now I think I understand what they meant. Anderson is an incredibly sophisticated filmmaker, arguably the most impressive now at work in the American mainstream (rivaled only by the likes of Noah Baumbach, Todd Haynes, Jarmusch, Spike Lee, David Lynch, and Terrence Malick). So no matter how much of a humanist he may be, making films for such a discerning, knowledgeable audience (i.e., hipsters) is inevitably kind of elitist.

The Limits of Control 2: Cruise Control (The American)

2010-09-02T07:55:00.004-03:00

Have you ever met a hit man in real life? I haven't, but in films like Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control (2009) and now Anton Corbijn's less interesting The American (2010), they're portrayed as nameless, monastic, sharply dressed professionals who spend a lot of time in picturesque European cities where they perfect their craft in solitude. That they kill people is less important than the fact that they do it elegantly. In Corbijn's film, an American-born assassin who sometimes goes by the name "Mr. Butterfly" (George Clooney) flees to Italy after a pair of hired guns ambush him outside of his Scandinavian fortress of solitude. Once there, his handler, Pavel (Johan Leyson), assigns him to build a custom rifle for a female contract killer, Mathilde (Thekla Reuten). We're evidently not supposed to be very concerned about who's behind the hit, who's in front of it, or why (Mr. Butterfly certainly isn't, trusting Pavel for much longer than is dramatically credible), because the second that you do stop to think about these things--and considering that the film doesn't have that many characters--it becomes painfully obvious where this is headed.

The schoolboy mythology of these films can be traced at least as far back as Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (1967), and Jarmusch brought a certain poignancy to it in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). Here--working from a screenplay by Rowan Joffe, based on Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentlemen (1990), which I haven't read--Corbijn sees it as an excuse for a George Clooney movie: Mr. Butterfly is another one of Clooney's bachelor workaholics who long to settle down with a good woman. As the film opens, Mr. Butterfly is living in a secluded cabin in Sweden, where he's kept company by a young lady (Irena Björklund). But when she learns a little too much about how he makes his money, Mr. Butterfly coolly shoots her in the back of the head. In Italy, when Pavel asks who she was, Mr. Butterfly replies that she was, "A friend." You see, Mr. Butterfly used to be a professional, but now he's going soft, making too many "friends." Pavel advises him not to make anymore, and sends Mr. Butterfly to a dusty secluded village to hide out for a while, which would be perfect if not for the fact that everybody he meets there speaks perfect English, including the local mechanic. He's played by Filippo Timi, who played Mussolini in Marco Bellocchio's Vincere (2009), and here he smolders his way through a brief walk-on role, as if auditioning to be the next Javier Bardem.

Needless to say, there is a woman. Her name is Clara (Violante Placido), and she is a prostitute. Never having been to a brothel anywhere, let alone provincial Italy, I have to take it as an item of faith that there are prostitutes this attractive and healthy-looking, although one wonders why Clara doesn't give it up and become a Hollywood actress. However, the town's population never seems higher than double digits (there are numerous scenes of Mr. Butterfly sitting in deserted cafés and walking along empty streets), which makes me wonder if a fully-staffed brothel would be economically viable. The way that the mechanic smolders, you wouldn't think that he has to pay for it. Neither, incidentally, does Mr. Butterfly, who's such a stud in the sack that Clara stops charging him and starts seeing him outside of work. One thing I absolutely can't accept is that, during one of their initial encounters, Mr. Butterfly would eat her pussy and kiss her on the mouth. How many dicks have been in those orifices that day alone? Then again, Mr. Butterfly appears to be the brothel's only client, and the room where Clara plies her trade is so clean and new-looking that it's almost as if it were designed and built specifically for their meetings.

Incidentally, Mr. Butterfly's name refers to his tramp-stamp tattoo, and at one point he's shown reading a book on butterflies. Later, during a rendezvous with Mathilde, set in an idyllic spot in the woods, a butterfly happens upon the scene, and he remarks that it's endangered. This sets up the final shot (spoiler alert!) in which, after Mr. Butterfly is killed, we see the same butterfly flying higher and higher, symbolizing his soul ascending towards heaven. Uh-huh. Oh, and did I mention that, early in the film, Mr. Butterfly befriends a local priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonachelli)? When Benedetto asks him what he does for a living, Mr. Butterfly claims to be a photographer who's taking pictures of the area ('cause he shoots people, get it?). Benedetto then inquires if he's researched the town's history, and when Mr. Butterfly answers that he hasn't, Benedetto remarks, I kid you not, that Americans try to live without history. Thud.

This is Corbijn's second feature after Control (2007). That film, a biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (Sam Riley), was stately and professional but not brilliant; I watched it the same week that I first saw Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. (also 2007), and it didn't benefit from the comparison. This film is also stately and professional, like Mr. Butterfly, and it's enjoyable to the extent that you're willing to forget about plot and character, and simply soak up the mood and atmosphere of the film.

You could also say the same about The Limits of Control, which is an even sillier movie. How is it then that a reviewer like Roger Ebert could pan Jarmusch's film so viciously, and then turn around and award this one four stars? I could go all Rosenbaum and make the case that, while Jarmusch's film is in part an attack on American imperialism, The American, despite its title, doesn't engage with politics at all; like its protagonist, it tries to live without history. Mr. Butterfly doesn't work for the CIA, and the only people he kills are his Swedish friend with benefits and some generic henchmen who are trying to kill him. Mathilde's intended target, meanwhile, is Mr. Butterfly--a plot twist which calls to mind Martin McDonagh's recent In Bruges (2008), which was a more enjoyable hit man movie. In other words, the film views the idea of killing for profit "existentially," as something divorced from politics.

That's certainly a limitation that shouldn't be overlooked, but I don't think it accounts for the vast differences in how the two films have been received. (In Bruges, after all, alludes to the sex scandal in the Catholic church, although that aspect of the film has been largely overlooked by reviewers.) Rather, I think that The American, for all its moodiness and withholding exposition, is simply a more traditional sort of film--what Ebert would call, "a real movie." Mr. Butterfly never does anything as inexplicable as ordering two espressos in separate cups, or walking into an art gallery to look at one painting and then leaving. Ultimately, whether you prefer The Limits of Control or The American says as much about you as it does about the movies. And being the perverse guy that I am (I'm a huge fan of late Godard), I like The Limits of Control.

They're Doing the Time of Their Lives (I Love You Phillip Morris)

2010-08-28T23:26:00.009-03:00

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's I Love You Phillip Morris had its world premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, but its release has been pushed back several times and it's now tentatively scheduled to open in early December. Having seen the film (which was surprisingly easy to download), it's easy to see why a major studio would be hesitant about distributing it, and not simply because Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor play a gay couple, though it's impossible to explain why without ruining the film's best surprises. If you've seen Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa (2003), written by Ficarra and Requa, you know that these guys are fearless and uncompromising in their comic vision, and this film is even more audacious (and more political) than Bad Santa, which I wouldn't have thought possible before seeing the film.

The film begins with a title informing us, "This really happened," and if you look up Steven Jay Russell on Wikipedia (although I wouldn't recommend doing that until after you see the movie), you'll find that the film's most outrageous elements are based on fact. Russell was a deputy police officer and family man who became a con artist, and managed to talk his way into a job as the chief financial officer of North American Medical Management, where he embezzled thousands of dollars. (In the film, it's hundreds of thousands, and the exaggeration of this crime--and by extension, the swanky lifestyle the money was used to furnish, which the movie simultaneously parodies and celebrates--seems intended, paradoxically, to make Russell seem like more of a hero. If he stole less we probably wouldn't like him as much.) But what's really wild is how Russell was able to escape from prison repeatedly using various ruses and disguises.

The story, told largely in flashback, begins with Russell (Carrey) on a hospital bed waiting to die. In the film, as in life, he was put up for adoption by his biological mother, and while working as a cop, he used police resources to track her down. According to the movie's psychological shorthand, because he never knew his mother, Russell doesn't know who he is, and is therefore condemned to living a lie. After suffering a near-fatal car accident, Russell decides to come out as a gay man (as he's wheeled into the ambulance, he bellows, "I'm gonna be a fag! Faggot!"), only to discover subsequently that, "being gay is expensive," and turning to crime in order to support his lifestyle. In 1995, while doing time for insurance fraud, Russell met Phillip Morris (McGregor), whom the film makes out to be the love of his life. Their relationship is the film's weakest element, functioning merely as a motivation for Russell to steal and escape from prison. While the moms in Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right (2010) are more rounded characters who happen to be gay, for Russell, being gay is his whole identity: The only thing he knows about himself for sure is that he loves Phillip Morris. That said, I Love You Phillip Morris is indisputably the better film; it's more accomplished in terms of storytelling and craftsmanship, and unlike Cholodenko's film, it's actually funny.

Spoilers begin here.

If I had to guess why the studio seems so reluctant to release the film, I would assume that it's the part of the story where Russell pretends to be dying of AIDS in order to escape from prison, which is surely the most audacious segment of the whole movie on a number of levels--and yes, this really happened. Up till this point, our range of knowledge has been limited exclusively to Russell's point of view as he narrates his life story in flashback, although the filmmakers have already shown a taste for self-conscious narration. Earlier, for instance, after establishing that Russell enjoys (or appears to enjoy) having sex with his wife Debbie (Leslie Mann), when we subsequently see him thrusting away at some one off camera, it comes as a surprise when a man's head pops into the frame. In the narration, Russell says, "Did I mention I was gay?" as if it had simply slipped his mind to mention it, but Ficarra and Requa are actually being very clever about how and when they reveal certain things, and what information they withhold, so as to make the revelations about Russell's character even more surprising, and as viewers, we can't help but be aware of how skillfully they're manipulating us. (I'm reminded of that quote by Alfred Hitchcock, where he said that he wanted to play the audience like a piano.)

Similarly, it's only after Russell falls in love with Morris, and when he's arrested for embezzlement that we get a flashback (actually, a flashback within a flashback) in which we see Russell's previous boyfriend, Jimmy (Rodrigo Santoro), dying of AIDS. In prison, Morris, who's angry with Russell for making him an unwitting accomplice (which requires him to be very, very stupid, considering Russell's lavish spending), says that he never wants to see him again, and the narration confirms that this was the last time Russell ever saw him. Needless to say, this is a particularly black period in Russell's life, so when we see him refusing to eat in the prison cafeteria, throwing up in his toilet, and then a shot of him lying on his bed, so thin that his rib cage is visible, one might conclude that he's attempting to kill himself by starvation. It's only then that a prison doctor informs him he has AIDS, which brings us back to the beginning, with Russell on a hospital bed waiting to die. At this point, the point of view shifts to Morris, who learns from another inmate that Russell has died. So when Russell then turns up at the prison, alive and healthy, impersonating Morris' lawyer, and Morris punches him in the face, we're in complete sympathy with his disgust at Russell. But, as Morris makes contact, Ficarra and Requa employ a freeze frame, and Russell takes over again as narrator, explaining how he did it over flashbacks to earlier events, filling in the gaps in our knowledge, in which we're encouraged to marvel at his daring and ingenuity in pulling it off, leading up to the unforgettable punch line, "And for all that time, all those doctors, all those nurses, all those facilities--not one of them ever thought to give me an AIDS test."

Ultimately, Russell's numerous prison escapes proved so embarrassing for the state of Texas, and then-Governor George W. Bush, that he was handed an absurd 144 year sentence, despite being a non-violent offender. There's now a campaign to have Russell released, and the film is clearly designed to generate sympathy for his cause, even if it's a little too clear-eyed about him to function as simple propaganda. As in Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), the film goes out of its way to make the people that Russell steals from as unsympathetic as possible. For instance, his decision to embezzle funds from the North American Medical Management was motivated less by greed than by his hatred of the stupid and racist people he was working for. Furthermore, according to the film, his scheme of investing medical cheques for the short time the company had them, and then pocketing half of the interest for himself, was actually making the company money. All things considered, Russell's crimes seem positively benign compared to the hucksters on Wall Street, who caused a global economic recession while raking in billions in bonuses for the good work they were doing.

Despite their audacity in asking viewers to sympathize with Russell, Ficarra and Requa are still operating within the bounds of traditional Hollywood filmmaking, and I know that I won't see a better crafted studio comedy this year (although Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World [2009] is more formally audacious in its Stephen Chow-derived live action-cartoon silliness, in terms of dramaturgy, none of the characters have the slightest shading or nuance, and the whole enterprise runs out of steam in the closing stretch), or for that matter, a funnier one. It's really, really funny. Seriously.

The Agenda-Setting Media, Cultural Relevance, and the Awesome Power of 'Vincere'

2010-08-28T00:23:00.007-03:00

In Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick's documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chompsky and the Media (1992), Chompsky refers to the New York Times as "the agenda-setting media," and one of the most interesting facts I learned from the documentary is that the A.P. wire service announces the afternoon before what tomorrow's headline will be on New York Times, so that local media can follow suit.

Similarly, for a movie--particularly an independent movie--to be considered culturally relevant, it has to open in New York and Los Angeles, thus making it eligible for the Oscars, and be reviewed in major publications like the Times. For instance, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right (2010) was undoubtedly the indie film event of the summer. It had a relatively wide release, garnered glowing reviews from most major reviewers, and the three leads (Annette Benning, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo) are all likely to be nominated for Academy Awards. Thus, an aesthetically bland liberal message picture is made to seem more culturally relevant than more adventurous indie movies, not to mention every avant-garde film, which happen to fly under the radar of large national publications (to say nothing of the Oscar race).

Now let me just say that I think that Manohla Dargis, Stephen Holden, and A.O. Scott are all doing a bang-up job over at the Times, and they do review a lot of small independent and foreign films. And I can't really fault Dargis for liking The Kids Are All Right more than I did. My point is simply that for a film to be considered culturally relevant--that is, to be considered worthy of being discussed in the national media--it needs to be relatively new (there's usually a gap of a few months or more between a film's festival premiere and its commercial release stateside) and playing on a certain number of screens. And the newer a film is, and the more screens it's playing on, the more relevant it seems. Lee Yoon-ki's My Dear Enemy (2008), which I belatedly caught up with in Montreal last spring, was reviewed positively in both the Times and the Village Voice, but was ignored by everyone else when it turned up in the States last fall, and Anat Zuria's documentary Black Bus (2010) still has yet to open there (perhaps because it was dismissed by a reviewer in Variety). Therefore, regardless of their individual merits, those films are going to seem less relevant to the national discourse on film than Cholodenko's film.

As somebody who writes about film strictly as an amateur (i.e., I don't go to press screenings and nobody's sending me DVD screeners come Oscar time), and who lives in a part of the country that doesn't get a lot of foreign or independent movies, I'm almost always playing catchup in writing about particular films. I prefer to write about the movies I see on my occasional trips to bigger cities like Montreal, because they're still relatively new (Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop [2010], which I saw in May, didn't open in Halifax until August); or at festivals prior to their getting a commercial release (the Atlantic Film Festival is just around the corner, so that's something I have to look forward to). When I do write about older movies, I prefer it to be à propos of a cinémathèque screening, as when I saw Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) last spring, or at the very least, somehow related to something in theatres at the moment. For instance, although I didn't make the connection explicit, my short essay on Alain Resnais' L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) could be seen as a sort of followup to my piece on Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), which was easily the most discussed, most culturally relevant wide release movie of the summer to the point that I was somewhat reluctant to write about it after so many others had already done so. Although I'm not some one who rushes out to see the latest blockbuster on opening weekend simply to be in the loop (accordingly, it took me a week or so to catch up with Inception), the idea is that I want to participate in a larger discussion about cinema.

So when I finally caught up with Marco Bellocchio's Vincere (2009), I thought I should write something about it for this blog, considering that it moved me like no film has in years (no new film, anyway). But at the same time, writing about it seemed vaguely futile, as if having come too late to the party. The film premiered in competition at Cannes more than a year ago; was praised by major reviewers, including Dargis and Roger Ebert; and is now on DVD (which is how I saw it). It's technically eligible for this year's Oscars, but Giovanna Mezzogiorno is about as likely to be nominated for best actress (despite being vastly more deserving, in my opinion, than Benning) as the United States is to elect a socialist president. (Maddow-Stewart 2012!)

The film is about the life of Ida Dalser (Mezzogiorno), a mistress and the possible first wife of Benito Mussolini (played as a young man by Filippo Timi), and her son, Benito Albino (played as an adult by Timi). The story begins in Milan in 1907, when the young Mussolini, Sr. was a socialist, who was both anti-clerical and anti-war. In the opening sequence, Ida sees him speak at a debate where he challenges god to strike him dead in the next five minutes, and when the time elapses declares that god doesn't exist, and falls instantly in love with him. Barred from entering politics herself (at one point, she's turned away from a socialist party meeting for being a woman), Ida, a passionate socialist, pins all her hopes on Mussolini, selling her business and all her possessions so that he can start the newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia.

The film shows Mussolini as a man lacking the slightest political conviction, willing to sell out any principle in his quest for power. There's an audacious, unforgettable sequence in the film in which Mussolini is awoken in the middle of the night by visions of his own greatness, and as if in a trance, steps out on to a balcony overlooking an empty courtyard while completely nude. A jeep drives by announcing the start of World War I, and Mussolini becomes an ardent supporter of the war, which he says (but probably doesn't believe) will be the war to end all wars. So anti-clerical is the young Mussolini that he tells Ida, "Whenever I see a priest, I feel like washing my hands," but after coming to power, he married his other mistress, Rachele Guidi (Michela Cescon), and in 1929 founded the Papal state. When he and Ida have sex, he never looks her in the eye, as if his true object of desire lay beyond her.

Inevitably, Mussolini casts Ida aside for the sake of his political career. Ida, however, persists in loving him--or rather, the man he used to be. (When Idea sees him in newsreels, Bellocchio uses footage of the real Mussolini as a means of distinguishing between the young socialist and the fascist dictator.) And when Ida refuses to go away quietly, she's locked up in an asylum, and Benito Albino (played as a boy by Fabrizio Costella) is placed in a boarding school. (To underline his isolation, he's only shown there during school vacations when all the other students are at home.) Before this happens, however, there is a curious sequence, possibly a dream, in which Ida and Mussolini marry, and she would insist until her death in 1938 that she was the first and legitimate wife of Mussolini, although a closing title informs us that the marriage certificate was never found.

The film contains two sequences of extraordinary power. After spending time in one institution presided over by bitchy nuns, Ida's transfered to one where she's cared for by a sympathetic anti-fascist doctor (Carrado Invernizzi). If the doctor is in love with her, his feelings never rise to the level of action because Ida is still hopelessly deluded about Mussolini. (I'm reminded of a line from Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves [1996]: "Love is a powerful sickness.") In one sequence, the institution has a movie night for the patients, and Bellocchio cuts between a scene from Charles Chaplin's The Kid (1921), Ida's reactions to it in close-up, and the doctor looking at Ida.

Later, Benito Albino, now a young man, sees his uncle, Riccardo (Fausto Russo Alesi, an actor who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Jon Lovitz), whom he hasn't seen since he was sent to the boarding school. Benito Albino follows him into a movie theatre with a date, and hands Riccardo a letter for his mother, which the latter is able to sneak into the asylum. (This of course never happened; the real Benito Albino was told that his mother was dead, and was adopted by a fascist family.) After handing him the letter, Benito Albino leans back and puts his arm around his date, and though out of focus and in the background, it's clearly Mezzogiorno he puts his arm around. After reading the letter, a sympathetic nun helps Ida to escape. When she arrives at Riccardo's, she's told that Benito Albino was informed and is on his way, but curiously, we never see their reunion, assuming it takes place. This is fine by me actually, as to have such a scene in the film would be a lie.

The most extraordinary moment in the whole film comes when Ida is led out of the house to the car taking her back to the asylum, where an angry crowd has gathered in protest--the only time we see any overt popular support for Ida's plight. As the car pulls away, we see out the window some of her supporters running alongside the car (echoing the scene in which Benito Albino was removed from Riccardo's home), and as the car passes a slogan painted on a wall ("Mussolini is always right"), Idea, in the foreground right, turns to face the camera directly. The film is boldly and shamelessly manipulative, and I mean that as a compliment.

With its onscreen text, liberal use of archival footage (beginning with the Dziga Vertov-inspired credit sequence), and the desaturated, highly textured cinematography by Daniele Ciprì, the film self-consciously harks back to the silent cinema, and the story is unabashedly melodramatic. Indeed, despite its basis in fact, one could read the film as a sort of fairy tale about an ambiguous mother whose masochistic devotion to a cruel father makes her implicit in the suffering of her child; imagine a less kinky version of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). Wildly audacious and immensely moving, it makes cinema seem exciting again.

When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong: Mosque Edition

2010-08-24T09:40:00.002-03:00

I just want to make one point regarding the controversy surrounding plans to build a mosque in lower Manhattan, two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center. Opponents have attempted to portray the Imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, as a radical using a quote from a 60 Minutes interview in September, 2001 in which he said:

I wouldn't say that the United States deserved what happened. But the United States' policies were an accessory to what happened. [...] We have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.

Now, maybe he could have phrased his point more sensitively, but to deny any connection between US foreign policy and the attacks on September 11; to go along with the idea that, "They hate us for our freedoms"--which President Bush trotted out in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when a lot of stunned Americans were asking why, and which served as comforting self-deception--is to fundamentally misread the meaning of the attacks.

The attacks weren't aimed at centres of religious freedom and tolerance; they were aimed specifically at the economic and military institutions of the United States. The key word in World Trade Center is 'trade'. The twin towers were located in the heart of the country's financial district. For the attack to be an assault on freedom would mean first equating liberty with economic and military influence abroad.

The fact that the United States is the most powerful nation on earth means they have the power to impose their will on other countries, not always for the better. In the Middle East, the US financed and armed the Mujahideen when they were fighting the Soviets, and supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war--all towards the goal of protecting American business interests in the region.

In short, the controversy over Rauf's statement is simply another case of what happens when keeping it real goes wrong. According to the editors of the National Review, "While [Rauf] cannot quite bring himself to blame the terrorists for being terrorists, he finds it easy to blame the United States for being a victim of terrorism." So let's be clear: I don't think mass murder is ever justified, but the terrorists who crashed those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon obviously thought differently. That's how they were able to do it, because they thought that American aggression in the Middle East justified killing a lot of innocent people. However, it's more comforting to believe that US foreign policy had nothing to do with it, and the terrorists hate America because it's too free and tolerant. Yeah, right. Have you seen the fuss they're making about this Mosque?

Cross Country Checkup: The Kids Are All Right, Winter's Bone

2010-08-12T21:56:00.007-03:00

Although it seems unlikely that many people today preserve strict monogamy, its ghost lingers on, manifested in guilt feelings, in the secrecy and furtiveness of 'infidelity'. The rationale for monogamy (surely by now thoroughly discredited) was based purely on the supposed sanctity of the patriarchal line, on the husband's need for assurance that his sons were indeed his... Victorian men were officially supposed to be monogamous, but few thought it really mattered.

[...] I assume that [Michael] Haneke, in La Pianiste [2001], would have liked to show us everything, since one of the film's central projects is the demystification of sex. In a healthy sexual climate, full-frontal nudity (of both genders) and actual intercourse would be shown in movies as a matter of course--not as the latest form of titillation, but as casually as scenes of people eating their dinners. We need to see Isabelle Huppert sucking Benoît Magimel's cock, not because it would give us our latest thrill but because it is an intrinsic part of the scene, and to conceal it is to continue the repression that is the mere obverse of our 'liberation'.
—Robin Wood, "'Do I Disgust You?' or Tirez pas sur La Pianiste," CineAction no. 59: p. 56.

A stable relationship? What happened to traditional gay values? You know, hot, sweaty, rock-hard men slapping against each other in a dark room to a pulsing beat. No names.
—Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, August 5, 2010.

The spirit of Stanley Kramer is alive and well in Lisa Cholodenko's eminently mediocre The Kids Are All Right (2010), which is simply the worst kind of liberal message picture: One in which any kind of formal or narrative experimentation has been studiously spurned in the interest of communicating a well-intentioned message to the widest possible audience. However, despite the film's smug, self-congratulating Look-How-Far-We've-Comeisms (the apex of which is a toast to an "unconventional" family in a film that's anything but), the depressing irony is that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was far more advanced in his treatment of a lesbian relationship thirty-eight years ago in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). Cholodenko's film suggests a toothless girl-girl dramedy equivalent to Brokeback Mountain's gay male tragedy, the Indigo Girls to Ang Lee and James Schamus' the Smiths. Not knowing whether there was an organized gay rights movement in Germany in the '70s roughly analogous to post-Stonewall America, it's tempting to hypothesize that Fassbinder had the benefit of not being a slave to a liberal movement (not that I imagine he would've cared anyway). Incidentally, it seems relevant that in Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009), adapted from a pre-Stonewall 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood, the narrator's mocking criticisms of liberal platitudes have been carefully excised from his monologue on the oppression of minorities, which is otherwise faithfully reproduced in the film.

It's true that I praised Ford's film in a previous entry written prior to my reading the book, and I'm not about to take that back. It's still an accomplished piece of filmmaking, embedding within a Dalloway-esque day-in-the-midlife-crisis narrative five flashbacks spanning sixteen years which are placed in reverse chronological order, and two dream sequences which bookend the film, as well as using extreme close-ups and slow motion to suggest a subjective gaze in a manner that recalls the best work of Martin Scorsese--to say nothing of the particularly fine, understated performance given by Colin Firth. Here, one has to give Cholodenko credit for framing her actors largely in medium and long shot, thus affording them the opportunity to act with their whole bodies, but her approach to sounds and images is strictly functional, and at times downright awkward. There's one shot of a kitchen in which a sink faucet is given more prominence than any of the performers (whose distance from the camera is exaggerated by the use of a wide angle lens) by virtue of being framed in the foreground centre, so that one almost begins to expect that the faucet will play an important role in the scene. (Perhaps Alain Robbe-Grillet would've appreciated how forcefully the faucet asserts the fact of its existence without being reclaimed by any human use.) And the one time Cholodenko gets fancy with the sound mix, turning down the volume on the ambient dialogue during a dramatically significant close-up, it's clearly "motivated" by the story, the subject being too absorbed in her thoughts to pay attention to what's being said around her.

In terms of narrative, the film couldn't be more conventional. Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a stable, monogamous couple living in an affluent suburban neighborhood with their bland teenage offspring, Joni (Mia Washikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), who are each afforded a minor subplot regarding their own burgeoning sexuality. The status quo is threatened when the kids decide that they want to meet their sperm donor dad, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), who soon becomes almost a member of the family, much to Nic's consternation. Paul hires Jules to do some landscaping for him, and they wind up going to bed together, making Paul essentially the Other Woman. (Laser's discovery earlier in the film that both of his moms enjoy gay male porn has already established that one can be a total lesbo and still dig cock.) This leads to a crisis when Nic discovers the affair (cue dramatically significant close-up), with Jules ultimately deciding to go back to her wife, and Nic calling Paul an "interloper" (i.e., not a member of the family) before literally slamming the door in his face. In an epilogue, Joni moves into a college dorm room, and Nic and Jules happily reconcile.

The ideological thrust of the film is to validate Nic and Jules as a legitimate couple, so there's really no way the film could end without them reconciling. Similarly, in A Single Man, the protagonist, George Falconer (Firth), asserts emphatically and emotively that his sixteen-year relationship with his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode)--which we see in flashback, and which ended when the latter was killed in a car accident--was as real as any straight relationship, and that they'd still be together if Jim hadn't died. Fassbinder, on the other hand, doesn't feel the need to validate anyone's relationship, which liberates him from the shackles of political correctness. In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Karin (Hannah Schygulla) goes back to her husband, and Petra (Margit Carstensen), far from being a noble victim, takes out her anguish on her teenage daughter (Eva Mattes), mother (Gisela Fackeldey), and mute assistant, Marlene (Irm Hermann), in an extraordinary extended sequence. It's unlikely that many of the people who are going to see The Kids Are All Right are ignorant homophobes whom the film's advertising campaign has some how tricked into buying a ticket and come out two hours later having been enlightened. So one has to ask: Why is this film a hit, both with audiences and reviewers? And I think the answer, depressingly enough, is that liberal viewers, like their conservative counterparts (think of Michael Medved), simply want to see a conventional movie that unambiguously confirms their values.

(Incidentally, if you want to see what the neoconservative take on the film is, I can direct you to Victor J. Morton's blog entry on it. Originally, I had intended to respond to Morton's piece in some detail, but I think his creepy and hateful essay--in which he describes artificial insemination as a "despicable perversion" that turns children into "manufactured products"--speaks for itself.)

And now the story of a poor family who had nothing, and the one daughter who had no choice but to keep them all together...

Although it has no overt political agenda, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010) is a film that lays claim to representing a certain aspect of American society--particularly, the lives of poor rural whites in the Ozark mountain range. Early in the film, the teenage heroine, Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), observes a group of high school students carrying rifles into the gymnasium to practice military-style formations, and later she talks to a military recruiter about enlisting because she wants the forty thousand dollar signing bonus. Also, there's a scene in a character's living room in which a photo of a man in an army uniform is visible in the frame. Although no one in the film ever mentions the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one inference I drew from the film is that the resources spent on the wars might've been used instead to help the disadvantaged communities whose children are actually fighting it. Rather than offering an escape from reality, the film wants to enhance our perceptions of it by showing us a glimpse of a section of the American populace that seems as remote to educated, middle-class liberals (the sort of people who typically go to see independent movies) as the nomadic Kazakh sheepherders in Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan (2008). And as in that film, a great deal of craftsmanship has been enlisted in the service of absolute verisimilitude.

The question is then one of telling a story (or not telling a story), and the opening scenes of Winter's Bone suggest an American Claire Denis film. We see snatches of the characters' daily lives, but scenes aren't held together by any causal link, and the style affords each (non-)event an equal degree of (non-)emphasis. Ree is brushing her mother's hair when her younger brother comes in the room with a dog he just found. At the high school, Ree, who evidently had to drop out in order to take care of her two younger siblings, silently observes a home ec class in which students are given cabbage patch dolls to take care of. Because her family can't afford hay to feed their horse, Ree asks a neighbor if she'll let it stay with her lot. Well, that doesn't last very long before the plot kicks into gear, presenting Ree with a clear-cut objective, consequences, a deadline, obstacles; and a chain of cause-and-event takes shape which links one sequence to the next. In short, the film becomes a conventional thriller.

And as in a lot of thrillers, the characters seem to exist solely for the plot--a trait the film shares with Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). In that film, if the protagonist had a dead wife, it's because Hollywood screenwriting manuals prescribe that characters have a personal demon which they need to overcome before they can achieve their goal. Winter's Bone isn't even that character-driven; every obstacle Ree faces is external to herself, and she pursues her goal with boundless self-assurance and doggedness. So it's appropriate that Lawrence plays her as a determined, self-reliant young woman who doesn't betray a lot of emotion; like a Buster Keaton hero, she never seems to ask for our sympathy. There's something stoic in the way that she and Granik trust the situation to be inherently compelling without attempting to make Ree particularly lovable.

If there's a Sundance spectrum, The Kids Are All Right and Winter's Bone err towards the conservative end of it. They, and countless other US independent films, including such recent examples as Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (2008) and Oren Moverman's The Messenger (2009), seek only to tell a good (read: entirely conventional) story, as opposed to self-conscious narrative experiments like Hal Hartley's Flirt (1995), Todd Haynes' Poison (1991) and I'm Not There. (2007), and Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991). If I slightly prefer Winter's Bone, it's because it doesn't seem to set out from the beginning to illustrate a predetermined thesis (for instance, that gays can be great parents), which reduces Cholodenko's film to pious agitprop. (Gays can also be lousy parents, which might produce a more interesting, Fassbinderian film. The fact that gays can't marry or adopt kids in the States simply because they're gay is unambiguously fucked up, but that doesn't mean that marriage is for everyone, or that all gays would make great parents.) However, setting a traditional thriller in a realistic milieu doesn't seem to me an ideal solution either, even if in the case of Granik's film, I find the results less offensive and exploitative than Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008), not to mention more entertaining (though still fairly grim). It plays like a juiced-up version of a Canadian social realist film of thirty or forty years ago, like Don Shebib's Goin' Down the Road (1970) or Francis Mankiewicz's Les Bons débarass (1980), which focused on marginal, disempowered rural characters (which is to not to say that either of those films were exactly masterpieces). I suppose it comes down to what sells, and the indie movies that typically get a big push--Alexander Payne's Sideways (2004), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Jason Reitman's Juno (2007)--tend not to be the most challenging films. In fact, next to those movies, it's almost understandable why reviewers are making such a fuss about Winter's Bone.

Marienbad Explained

2010-08-12T14:29:00.012-03:00

"It was absurd to suppose that in the novel Jealousy [1957] [...] there existed a clear and unambiguous order of events, one which was not that of the sentences of the book, as if I had diverted myself by mixing up a pre-established calendar the way one shuffles a deck of cards. [...] There existed for me no possible order outside of that of the book."
—Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Time and Description in Fiction Today," For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (1963): p. 154.

In most (if not all) narrative experiments made in Hollywood, particularly those that play with time, there is the habitual assumption that there exists an objective chronology of events which is different from the order in which the film's sequences unfold. Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000), Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002), François Ozon's 5x2 (2004), and one episode of Seinfeld all tell linear stories in reverse chronological order, while Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989) and Doug Liman's Go (1999) tell multiple stories which are meant to occur simultaneously, following one set of characters and then moving back in time to follow another over the same period (in both films, a single night). Similarly, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) and Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) both show the same event (namely, a robbery) from multiple points of view, creating a layering of perspectives, and Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) begins with a botched bank robbery, and then moves back and fourth between the events leading up to it and those which proceeded it. Such films are sometimes referred to as "puzzle movies," the implication being that viewers are given the pieces of the story all in a jumble and are invited to sort them out, reconstructing the chronology of what happened.

Alain Resnais' second feature, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), written by Robbe-Grillet, is something rather different and more radical. The story is about a man, X (Giorgio Albertazzi), who meets a woman, A (Delphine Seyrig), at a ritzy European hotel. He believes they met there the year before and had an affair. She has no recollection of this, and he begins to tell her the story of their affair: how he asked her to come away with him, and she asked him to wait a year. The scenes representing his story are clearly demarcated from the present-tense story in various ways as "flashbacks," although as we shall see, the word is rather imprecise in this context. For instance, a shot of A walking in the hotel garden with one shoe is retroactively identified as a flashback later on, when X describes it to A as part of his story.

Sounds simple, right? What makes the film so unusually challenging is that the present-tense scenes don't follow each other in the way that we're accustomed to from conventional narrative films. Resnais will cut from X and A standing in a salon, the former extending his hand to her (see above), to a shot of the two of them in a in a different part of the hotel, in different clothes, X's hand still extended to her (see below). Yet this is neither a flashback nor a flash forward, words which imply a sequence of events. Here, there is only now. Now they are standing in one place, and now they are somewhere else. Or as Robbe-Grillet himself puts it, "The duration of the modern work is in no way a summary, a condensed version, of a more extended and more 'real' duration which would be that of the anecdote, of the narrated story. [...] The entire story of Marienbad happens in neither two years nor in three days but exactly in one hour and a half" (p. 152-53). The scenes representing X's story aren't objective flashbacks, or his memories, or the images they conjure up in A's imagination, but exist only in the mind of the spectator: "In his mind unfolds the whole story, which is precisely imagined by him" (p. 153).

Early in the film, there is a scene where A becomes frightened, and as she backs away from X, bumps into another woman, causing the latter to drop her glass, which shatters on the floor. Later, the film seems to return to this scene to show us what happened next, yet if these two sequences seem to represent two parts of the same continuous action, there is no overall timeline in which the viewer can place them. In a conventional film, like Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon (1992), X would meet A to tell her part of his story, and then make another appointment to see her again the next day. Here, they simply run into each other somewhere in the hotel, and the interval of time between each encounter is ambiguous. It could be several hours, days, years. Time has no meaning here; if we take Robbe-Grillet at his word, the interval between each encounter is is duration of the intervening sequences. These are often static tableaus of hotel guests, filmed with an elegantly tracking camera, or idle conversation; scenes of men standing in a shooting gallery, or X playing a game with A's companion, M (Sacha Pitoëff), using matches. M always wins, but from a purely narrative standpoint, the game is of no real consequence. Like Jealousy, the film is essentially the description of a static situation.

Consider the sequence which occurs forty minutes into the film: It begins with a group of people standing in a corridor, making idle conversation about something which may or may not have happened at the hotel the previous summer. They decide to go to the library to verify whether the story is true, and walking away, they reveal that X was standing there the whole time, hidden by another member of the group. He looks as though he's about to follow them when he notices something off-screen right.

A closer view of X reveals A approaching in a mirror. She stops when she sees him; it is evidently a coincidence that they should run into each other here, rather than an arranged rendezvous. (In many meta-narratives, such as Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon [1950], the listener is intended as a stand-in for the viewer who wants to see how the story ends, but here it seems that A would rather avoid him.) He explains to her what the group was just discussing, that the previous summer at the hotel it was so cold the lake froze, remarking, "That's surely wrong."

Following a close-up of A, there is a shot of the two of them standing on a balcony overlooking the garden, which is evidently a continuation of a flashback begun earlier in the film. Then there is a cut to a close-up of A in her room, which is virtually identical to the close-up we just saw of her standing in the hallway.

Over the latter shot, X says in voice-over, "One night, I came into your room," identifying this shot as also being a flashback, perhaps following the previous shot chronologically, although A's line on the balcony, "What do you want from me? You know it's impossible," hardly sounds like an invitation. The film cuts to a more distant, full body shot of A standing in her room. Looking offscreen left (presumably at X, as if to maintain the axis established at the beginning of the sequence in the corridor), she says, "Leave me alone, please." Finally, the film cuts back to X and A standing in the hallway, where she repeats the line. He says to her, "You're right, ice would've been quite impossible," as if responding not to what A says, but to what he himself said earlier. The same mirror is visible behind him, and the axis is maintained with X on the left and A on the right. However, while in previous shot in her room, A is wearing the same black dress as at the beginning of the sequence, now she's wearing a white coat, and X is likewise wearing a suit and tie instead of a tuxedo.

Of Jealousy (the third, and in many ways the most audacious of the four novels he published prior to L'Année dernière à Marienbad), Robbe-Grillet writes that the narrative was, "made in such a way that any attempt to reconstruct an external chronology would lead, sooner or later, to a series of contradictions, hence an impasse" (p. 154). In the case of Marienbad, the flashbacks at one point refuse to obey the narration (X insists the door was closed, but we see an open door), and are elsewhere contradicted the present-tense story. In flashback, we see M shoot A with a gun, but here she is alive and well in the present. In the final sequence, we see A and X leaving the hotel together instead of her asking him to wait a year--or is this part of the frame story in the present? If there is no past or future, only now, then last year is this year (and the next, and all others), and the flashbacks are not flashbacks but are happening right now, as if by saying, "One night, I came into your room," X were calling the event into existence. Does that clear things up?

It's All a Dream: On the Okay-ness of 'Inception'

2010-07-24T13:44:00.003-03:00

Reviewing Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) in the Village Voice, Nick Pinkerton compared it (unfavorably) to an Olivier Assayas thriller, and there are some notable similarities between this film and Assayas' demonlover (2002), one of my all time favorites. Both films tell stories about corporate espionage that shuttle between Tokyo and Paris, and each has a scene in which a character is drugged during an international flight. However, where the infernal fantasies that eventually take over Assayas' film are terrifyingly real, and the movie's implications are deeply political (like Charles Chaplin's no less misanthropic Monsieur Verdoux [1947], it links big business with murder), Nolan's film is resolutely apolitical, and philosophically speaking, it's closer to a virtual reality thriller like David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999) with its suggestion that nothing is real.

As some one who's favorably predisposed towards movies that attempt to represent the world we all live in, the more political the better, I'm not the ideal viewer for a film like Inception (or eXistenZ, for that matter), whose primary objective is to make me forget about that world for a few hours to the point of suggesting that it's no more real than the fantasy world onscreen. If I slightly prefer Cronenberg's film, which still seems to me a long way off from his best work, it's simply because he's a better filmmaker than Nolan. In contrast with eXistenZ, with its backwoods setting and the ooey-gooey organic-looking quality of the special effects, neither Inception nor any of its characters ever seem to have any blood pumping through their veins. The settings are all anonymously upscale (a Marienbad cocktail party in a Japanese palace; an expensive hotel in Matrix City; a spic-and-span Paris in which no one is ever heard speaking French), and the photography tends towards commercial-slick high contrast lighting. At one point, Ken Watanabe (Hollywood's all-purpose Japanese guy) gets shot in the chest--in a dream, of course--and thereafter, some one will periodically lift open his suit jacket to reveal a tampon stain-sized pool of blood on his shirt so as to remind us that he's dream bleeding to death without anyone having to get their hands dirty.

The plot has no connection with reality, even in the sense that dreams are a part of real life. The protagonist, Cobb (Leonardo DiCapprio), is a corporate spy who enters into peoples' dreams in order to steal their secrets. (Unless I missed something, the film never explains how he's able to do this, but really, who cares? Could there be any explanation more satisfying than, "It's a movie, numb-nuts"?) Living in exile after being framed for the murder of his wife (Marion Cotillard), Cobb, like Homeless Dad, just wants his kids back (they're back in the States with Granny). As the film opens, Cobb and his team botch a job, and their intended mark, a Japanese CEO, Saito (Watanabe), decides to make them a counter-offer: If Cobb can place an idea inside the mind of a competitor (Cillian Murphy), Saito will make the murder charge disappear with a single phone call. (If only Roman Polanski had his connections.) But to accomplish his goal, Cobb will have to confront his own personal demons.

The film tells us that implanting an idea in some one's mind is more difficult than extracting one (which is already impossible), and to do the job, Cobb and his team devise a plan involving four levels of dreams and dreams-within-dreams, reminding one of the cons-within-cons in David Mamet's House of Games (1987). And Nolan cross-cuts between parallel action in all four levels like D.W. Griffith on mescaline (alas, none of Nolan's razor-flat images has one-tenth the wonder of Griffith's gargantuan Babylonian sets in Intolerance [1916]). This proves to be a pretty nifty means of cranking up the suspense, with an SUV full of dream thieves on the top dream level plunging ass-backwards into a river in super, super slow motion. Since the further down you go into dreams-within-dreams, the greater the feeling of time expands (one waking hour at the bottom level feels like fifty years), the action in the second, third, and fourth levels all happens in the time that it takes for the SUV to hit the water. As I said, this has nothing to do with actual dreams as they're experienced by human beings, but as a variation on the ticking clock (i.e., the characters have to get in and do their thing before the car hits the water, waking them up), it's pretty neat.

As accomplished as the film is as an SF thriller, I can't help but wish that Nolan had found space in this two and a half hour movie to give his characters a reality beyond their function in the plot. Sometimes typecasting fills in the blanks (DiCapprio is traumatized by the death of his wife and living in a dream world for the second time this year; Michael Caine is fatherly and distinguished for about five seconds), but the younger actors, like Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, simply draw a blank. The former plays an architecture student, Ariadne, who's tasked with designing the levels of the dream world, but her real function in the film is to discover things about Cobb that the rest of the team is unaware of. Gordon-Levitt fares even worse: They post his character, Arthur, on the second level of the dream to distract the Murphy character's subconscious, which has Matrix-like goons chase him around a hotel with guns, while the other characters venture deeper into the mind to do the real work. When the SUV in the first layer goes off the bridge, this disrupts the gravity in the second layer (but not the third and fourth) so that Arthur spends most of his scenes floating in mid-air, like Kier Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

If the story, particularly the ending, contains echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), Nolan's high-gloss style and intensified continuity cutting are as far from the authentic griminess and meditative rhythms of Tarkovsky's work as one could possibly get. Of course, some one will point out that Nolan's film is essentially a fast-paced thriller, and wouldn't be well served by Tarkovsky's heavy, long take style. Still, I find it slightly ironic that, as the characters move "deeper" into the second and third levels of dreams-within-dreams, the film becomes increasingly reliant on external violence, as opposed to Tarkovsky's film, which is all talk and no action. Also, I wish... well, I was going to say, "I wish, for the sake of realism, that everything didn't look so gosh darn clean," but then I realized, just as I was about to type it, how utterly absurd the phrase "for the sake of realism" was in this context. This is what I meant about me not being the ideal viewer for this movie.

Rather unfortunately, in a farce resembling the plot of Life of Brian (1979), Inception was appointed, even before it opened, to be the film that saved the summer--which surely says less about the film itself than the overall wretchedness of most Hollywood movies that, when a moderately ambitious blockbuster does come along, it's praised well out of proportion to its modest but very real virtues. Much the same thing happened when Nolan's previous film, The Dark Knight (2008), appeared two summers ago. Faced with a prosaic, noisy, and undistinguished action movie, and a hammy performance by a recently deceased Heath Ledger, the critical community lost its shit, as if a girl who should really know better suddenly decided to drop her panties for the biggest schlub at the party. The film was widely read as a complicated political allegory, and Ledger's performance was praised as the greatest piece of screen acting since Renée Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928). I suppose it all depends on what you go to the movies looking for. And speaking as some one who'd generally rather see a film about something real, like Pedro Costa's movies about the slums of Lisbon, or demonlover for that matter, I can't see too much reason for getting so excited about a movie defined by its unreality, no matter how skillfully made it is.

Qu'est que Mumblecore? (On Cyrus)

2010-07-20T12:16:00.009-03:00

I don't have a great deal to say about Jay and Mark Duplass' Cyrus (2010), an engaging and funny if not very distinguished romantic comedy, but I am intrigued, sort of, by the way people are talking about it. The Duplass brothers' previous films, The Puffy Chair (2005) and Baghead (2008), both unseen by me, were low-budget, low-fi "Mumblecore" movies, while this film, though resolutely low-budget and low-fi, features mainstream stars articulating clearly and is getting a much wider release (Ridley and Tony Scott are credited as executive producers). In his review of the film, Mike D'Angelo finds that the filmmakers don't seem to know whether they want to make an independent feature or go Hollywood, which begs the question: What exactly is the difference between an indie movie generally, and a Mumblecore film in particular, and most mainstream studio fare?

First of all, what is Mumblecore? According to Wikipedia, the term was coined by Eric Masunaga, a sound editor who's worked with Andrew Bujalski, to describe a small number of US directors whose handmade aesthetic helps to distinguish their work from the professional model of filmmaking associated with Hollywood and emulated by most independent features which turn up at the Sundance film festival (Frozen River [2008], Precious [2009], et al). A Mumblecore feature is shot on 16mm or video rather than 35mm, and the actors are more often friends of the director than experienced professionals. The brand takes its name from the tendency of the non-professional actors who appear in these films to mumble their lines, and most Mumblecore movies have their premiere at the South by Southwest Music Festival.

However, once you get past their homemade quality, a Mumblecore movie is anything but experimental. They rely on the same principles of story construction and continuity editing which have been the basis for commercial filmmaking for more than ninety years. The brand has even produced its own stars, with Greta Gerwig going on to appear in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg (2010). (Mark Duplass also makes a cameo, and Baumbach served as producer on Joe Swanberg's Alexander the Last [2009].) Contrary to what D'Angelo claims, it seems to me that, apart from Cyrus having an obviously low-budget look (which I guess is supposed to denote uncompromising artistry and realism), the Duplass brothers have transitioned rather seamlessly into professional filmmaking. In other words, Mumblecore isn't an attempt to break away from Hollywood so much as a means for aspiring directors like the Duplass brothers to get their foot in the door.

One might argue that in Cyrus, the protagonist, John (John C. Reilly), has the potential to alienate viewers. A desperate loser who evidently hasn't been on a date since his ex-wife, Jamie (Catherine Keener), dumped him seven years ago (the film opens with Jamie walking in on him masturbating), John meets a woman, Molly (Marisa Tomei), at a party early in the film, and miraculously, she goes home with him at the end of the night. However, John begins to suspect that she's married because of the way she always leaves right away after intercourse, and one day, in stalker fashion, he decides to follow her home. Surely this is more characteristic of edgy indie fare than a safe Hollywood romantic comedy?

Actually, as David Bordwell argues in his book, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (2006), starting in the 1970s, screenwriting manuals began to place a much greater emphasis on having a flawed protagonist, which becomes the basis for an internal conflict between what the protagonist wants and what they need. As an example, Bordwell cites Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in which the protagonist is a workaholic who learns to be a devoted father: He wants to succeed in the business world, but he needs to be a good dad. Ironically, although indie movies are often associated with character-driven stories (in contrast with action-orientated Hollywood features), the plot of Cyrus is all external conflict.

The story charts John's substitution of one brunette mother figure for another. (In the first sequence, Jamie shows up at his house to tell him she's getting remarried.) However, since John's stalkerish tendencies never pose a threat to his relationship with Molly, the only obstacle to his goal (that is, to make it work with Molly) is an external one--namely, Molly's grown son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill), who sets out to sabotage their relationship. (Cyrus' attachment to Molly is mirrored in John's attachment to Jamie, and the irritation it causes her fiancée.) In the end, the character who grows the most is actually Cyrus, who learns to be less selfish in his relationship with Molly.

The plot moves through the four stages outlined by Kristin Thompson as the basis of Hollywood storytelling: setup, complicating action, development, and climax (sometimes referred to, more vaguely, as three acts and a turning point). Upon falling in love with Molly, John discovers that she has a grown son (setup). Although Cyrus pretends to like him, John begins to suspect that Cyrus is out to sabotage his relationship with Molly when his sneakers mysteriously disappear (complicating action). After John discovers his shoes in a closet, it's all out war between the two men, although they try to hide their mutual enmity from Molly (development). Things boil to the surface at Jamie's wedding when Cyrus gets drunk (echoing John's behavior at the party where he first met Molly), and attacks John in the bathroom. In the scene where John first confronts Cyrus, he takes his sneakers down from the closet, and he shows them again to Molly when breaking up with her in order to explain how the situation with Cyrus has become intolerable. (In screenwriting jargon, the breakup is "the darkest hour," where everything looks bleak for the characters.) Finally, seeing how despondent Molly is without John, Cyrus goes to his apartment to beg him to take her back (climax).

Stylistically, the film bears many of the hallmarks of what Bordwell terms intensified continuity, which isn't a violation of continuity editing, but rather continuity on steroids. This aesthetic is characterized by the use of long and wide lenses, close framings (often of one person, or an over-the-shoulder angle), fast editing even in conversation scenes, constant camera movement (in Cyrus, some handheld shots are punctuated with sudden zoom ins), and insane redundancies (I counted no fewer than four nearly identical establishing shots of Molly's house). In the hands of a director like Baumbach or Spike Lee, these can be effective tools, but too often, as is the case here (not to mention every Christopher Nolan movie), it seems to encourage unimaginative staging and découpage.

Politically, the film is essentially conservative. The sole obstacle to John having a normal (heterosexual, monogamous) relationship with Molly is her abnormal (vaguely incestuous) relationship with Cyrus, whom as they say, has boundary issues. (When John spends the night at Molly's for the first time, she tells him that she and Cyrus always keep their bedroom doors open during the night.) To put it in the most Freudian terms possible, the first thing Molly notices about John is his "nice penis," and it's Cyrus realization that Molly needs John to love her in a way that he can't (i.e., with his penis) that brings about the happy ending.

So, what can an indie film do that a Hollywood film can't? D'Angelo associates indie films with subtle character studies, and mainstream fare with broad comedies, but as we've seen, that's an inaccurate generalization. Tom Ford's slick Hollywood feature A Single Man (2009) is as subtle and character-driven as a low-budget item like Cyrus is broad. There are, however, experimentally-inclined US commercial filmmakers, such as Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine, Richard Linklater, and David Lynch, not to mention still more radical avant-gardists like Craig Baldwin, Ernie Gehr, and Michael Snow, and video artists like Gary Hill, Steve Reinke, and Bill Viola. Under the Mumblecore umbrella, there are those who are simply auditioning for a studio gig (like the Duplass brothers). But others, such as Bujalski, seem driven by a desire to see represented on film a segment of American life that's so far been ignored by the mainstream--although I wish that Bujalski's wholly apolitical films about the romantic entanglements of a bunch of boring white heterosexual hipsters, such as Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005), were darker and edgier, like the Baumbach of Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Greenberg. In other words, Bujalski and the Duplass brothers could stand to learn a thing or two about flawed protagonists from the screenwriting manuals.

The Wretched of the Earth (On Pedro Costa)

2010-07-04T22:36:00.004-03:00

Broadly speaking, there are commercial movies and then there's everything else, films which sometimes get filed under categories like "avant-garde" or "experimental." Though none of them were exactly colossal hits, the first three features by Pedro Costa--O sangue (The Blood, 1989), Casa de lava (1994), and Ossos (Bones 1997)--are all nonetheless, technically speaking, commercial films in that they were shot on 35mm with a professional union crew; are a commercial length (in the area of ninety minutes); and most importantly, they all tell stories. Casa de lava (the only one of Costa's early films which I haven't seen) even features a recognizable star (Isaach de Bankolé, who's best known for appearing in films by such commercial figures as Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch), though reports that he and Costa nearly came to blows over the fact that his character spends almost the entire movie in a coma suggest that, even then, the director's methods were rather at odds with industry norms.

Though they both tell stories, O sangue and Ossos are both full of lingering ambiguities. The latter, set in a slum neighborhood in Lisbon, is about the interactions between three impoverished characters and a middle-class nurse who adopts each of them in turn. Early in the film, a teenage girl, Tina (Mariya Lipkina), brings home a baby boy from the hospital, and the father (Nuno Vaz), who isn't given a name, takes him to a downtown area to beg for money in front of a metro station. Just prior to this, there's a long lateral tracking shot of the father walking down a sidewalk, holding a garbage bag which may or may not contain the baby. Outside a pastry shop, a sympathetic nurse, Eduarda (Isabel Ruth), gives him milk for the baby and a sandwich for himself. But after feeding the baby milk and bread crumbs in an alley, he's shown rushing him to the emergency room. There, he tells Eduarda that, should the baby die, it's her fault for giving him "bad milk"--a statement typical of his refusal to take any kind of responsibility. (Eventually, he and the baby move into Eduarda's apartment. And later, he'll abandon the baby in a corridor.) Although he's shown following Eduarda as she walks away from the pastry shop, it's never explained how the father got her name.

The other major character is a neighbor of Tina's, Clotilde (Vanda Duarte), who eventually becomes Eduarda's maid. Clotilde isn't the most responsible person either; in one scene, her husband (Miguel Sermão) finds her at a party and tells her that her children haven't eaten. It's strongly implied that Clotilde, Tina, and the father are all drug addicts (at one point, the latter passes out on a bed, and Tina, in the middle of a suicide attempt, drags his unconscious body into the next room), but we never seen any direct evidence of drug use in the movie.

Costa favors a de-dramatized style of acting, which has the effect of making his actors seem at times like vacant zombies--an approach that works wonderfully in a movie about hopeless drug addicts living in abject poverty. (Some of the actors are old pros, such as Ruth, who's appeared in films by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Manoel de Oliveira; but even the non-professional actors, like Duarte, who would go on to play herself in two of Costa's subsequent films, are here playing characters.) Writing about Costa's work, Jonathan Rosenbaum observes that his films aren't populated "so much by characters in the literary sense as by raw essences--souls, if you will" (and likens him in this regard to such exalted figures as Robert Bresson, Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Demy, Alexander Dovzhenko, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jacques Tourneur), but in a separate capsule review of Ossos notes that, "the Bressonian vacancy of the leads sometimes feels spooky rather than soulful." Like Philippe Garrel, Costa often lingers on his actors' faces in medium close-up as if they were painterly subjects, but even when the story comes to a halt, the film's dense ambient soundtrack is buzzing with offscreen activity.

To pursue a crude analogy between Costa and the marginal characters who populate his films, while mainstream figures such as Pedro Almodóvar, Noah Baumbach, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, and Martin Scorsese (to pick half a dozen names at random) can afford to live downtown, filmmakers like Costa are kept in a ghetto, invisible to the public. And just as a rich person can afford a bigger place, a huge blockbuster like James Cameron's Avatar (2009) will open on many more screens than a more specialized commercial movie, like Tom Ford's A Single Man (also 2009). If Costa started his career on the outskirts of commercial filmmaking--the Scarborough of cinema, if you will--with his fourth feature, In Vanda's Room (2000), it's as if he had dropped off the grid completely. Marking a radical break from the conventions of commercial cinema (which his earlier films at least nominally adhered to), this three-hour film was shot on video with a crew of less than five people, and it doesn't tell a story. A singular and unclassifiable work, it blurs the distinctions between fiction and documentary, as much of what we see looks like it's really happening. For instance, in contrast with Ossos, drug use is so ubiquitous here that very often one of the characters will be having a conversation while an unremarked upon syringe hangs out of his arm.

One might describe the movie as a kind of phenomenological documentary, in which each shot seems to say, "This is so." Included on the DVD as a bonus feature is Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female (2005), a video installation Costa made for a museum in Rotterdam incorporating footage from In Vanda's Room, which provides a window into how Costa shot the movie. On each side of a split screen, we see an unbroken take, of which only a small snippet was used in the feature. As the piece opens, we see on the left a building being demolished in the background, as passersby (who may or may not be aware that they're being filmed) move in and out of the frame; on the right, we see some of the film's stars doing nothing in particular. However, unlike a traditional, vérité-style documentary, which positions itself as an objective record of a pre-existing reality, Costa's film is reportedly a collaboration between himself and his actors, and the film's soundtrack is obviously constructed. During one scene in a living room, we hear a violin being tuned offscreen; Costa then cuts to a man tuning a violin, creating the illusion that the man is sitting in an adjacent space to the living room.

Structured as a series of days and nights in a slum neighborhood, the film is mainly about a woman named Vanda (Duarte), who--when she's not holed up in her room with her sister, Zita (Zita Duarte), smoking crack--goes door-to-door selling vegetables, and a neighbor of theirs', Nhurro, who's an intravenous drug user. As the film opens, Nhurro has just moved into a house whose previous tenant was a girl who tried to sell her baby, or left it in a trash can, or both, and gradually it's revealed that Vanda and Zita's sister has been sent to prison for some minor infraction, but there's nothing here that you could call a story (at least, not by the standards of a Robert McKee screenwriting seminar, the aim of such seminars being to make commercial films). Most of the film consists of the characters hanging out and getting high, tidying up (early on, Nhurro tells a fellow addict that he wants the place to be clean so they can feel at home), and trying to make money wherever they can.

For me, Costa's most difficult film is Colossal Youth (2006), even though, at first glance, it looks closer to a conventional narrative than In Vanda's Room as it has something like a protagonist, and indeed something like a plot. Again, the movie is structured as a series of days and nights in the life of its subject, Ventura (Ventura), a retired Cape Verdean laborer whose daily rounds involve visits to a loose assortment of wretched-of-the-earth types who comprise his adopted family. In an early scene, Ventura goes to the home of a young woman, Bete, who may or may not be his daughter, to tell her that his wife (whom we never see) has left him. Bete tells Ventura that he has the wrong house, but over the course of the film, the two gradually become more and more intimate.

What makes the film so difficult is Costa's willfully static staging of his actors, who remain seated or standing in one place during extremely long takes, and the trance-like quality of the performances (in contrast with the more naturalistic and energetic performances of In Vanda's Room). As David Bordwell often points out, when we look at other people, our gaze is instinctively drawn to high information areas like faces and hands, and looking at Colossal Youth a second time, I was able to downgrade my attention enough to focus on what the actors were doing particularly with their hands. The high point of the film in this regard is a long monologue delivered by a recovering drug addict, Vanda (Duarte), relating the pain of childbirth, in which her way of talking with her hands helps the viewer to imagine the scene she's describing. This sort of downgrading inevitably leads one to the question: Is this really the best use I could be making of my time, focusing so much attention on every minute gesture these people make? The film made me realize how most commercial movies are filled with big, exciting events, which are presumed to be the only ones worthy of our time and attention. (Accordingly, when I saw Lone Scherfig's An Education [2009] a few months back, I was disappointed that the heroine didn't suffer more.) Still, even after downgrading my attention, as the film went on I found myself becoming increasingly restless, and I'm left wondering: What makes the difference between an interesting downgrade movie, like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and one that's simply boring and a waste of time?

The Virgin Is Dirty or: The Strange Case of 'The Headless Woman'

2010-06-10T19:29:00.008-03:00

It occurs to me in retrospect that, of all the movies I saw in Montreal over the last few months, none of them--with perhaps the exceptions of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon--needed to be seen more than once. Yes, I returned with pleasure to Noah Baumbach's Greenberg, Ethan and Joel Coen's A Serious Man (twice), Tom Ford's A Single Man, and Jacques Audiard's Un prophète, and look forward to revisiting Werner Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant—Port of Call: New Orleans, Bansky's Exit Through the Gift Shop, Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, Felix van Groenineg's The Misfortunates, and Lee Yoon-ki's My Dear Enemy when I get the chance. I'd even be willing to take another look at Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island just to see if my opinion of it improves on second viewing. But that said, all of those movies, and even Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes, were designed to be understood and consumed in a single viewing.

I've seen Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman (2008) twice now, and though a second look was enormously beneficial, part of what's so exciting about this unclassifiable Argentinean oddity is that I still don't feel like I fully understand it. And given Martel's tendency to withhold exposition, which in all her films helps to foster a feeling of cozy intimacy between the characters (as if they've known each other a long time, and know more about one another than we can even imagine), and given how rooted all her films are in the day-to-day experience of life in Argentina (at one point, a character announces that the kids have hepatitis as casually as if it were chicken pox), it's unlikely that any viewer could feel as though they've exhausted the film's mysteries no matter how many times they see it, let alone some one such as myself who isn't familiar with the culture. I already can't wait to see it again.

The first time I saw the movie, it truly knocked me on my ass, throwing me into a maelstrom of disorientation, and then, once I started to find my bearings, undermining what little certainty I had. (If you thought Shutter Island was a mindfuck, wait until you see this.) The film opens with three peasant boys and a dog running on a dirt road. One of them falls into a canal by the side of the road and appears unable to get out. Cut to a group of middle-class ladies and some of their children getting into their cars in the aftermath of some unspecified social gathering. There's talk of a new swimming pool that's being built next to the animal hospital, and one of the women, Veró (María Onetto), is complimented on her blonde dye job. In the next scene, while driving down the dirt road and listening to a kitschy catchy pop song ("Soleil Soleil"), Veró is distracted by her cell phone and hits something with her car. In the rearview mirror, she sees the dog lying dead on the road. Veró gets out of her car, exiting the frame, and drops of rain begin accumulating on the car's windshield. The sequence ends with the film's title on a black background. Country vs. city; poor vs. rich; animals vs. people; and, as always with Martel, water water water.

Now here's where things get really crazy, as the film makes the viewer feel as disoriented as Veró is in the aftermath of the crash. After the title card, the next shot is of Veró being driven to the hospital, but because Martel isolates her in close-up and shallow focus, we don't know who's driving her, or for that matter, if this is Veró's car or some one else's. Of course, on second viewing, we know that the figure riding on a motorcycle alongside the car, in the background and out of focus, is likely Veró's niece's lesbian girlfriend, meaning that Veró's sister, Josefina (Claudia Cantero), is probably the one driving her. We've already glimpsed Josefina earlier in the parking lot, but her relationship to Veró hasn't yet been established. At the hospital, Veró is treated for a concussion, and when she's asked to write her name on a release form, she quietly slips away while the nurse isn't looking. However, this attempt at elusion (if it is that) is in vain as she's recognized as the wife of a doctor well known to the hospital staff.

Veró has a cab take her to a hotel, and there she falls asleep on top of the sheets with her shoes still on. Through the window in the background, we can see that it's daytime. In the next shot, a maid opens the door, and seeing Veró, apologizes and leaves. But when the film cuts back to Veró, it's now nighttime. Neat. In the next scene, Veró walks into the hotel restaurant and sits down, evidently oblivious that it's the middle of the night and the restaurant is closed. There, she runs into a man she knows, Juan Manuel (Daniel Genoud), or Juanma for short. They go back to her room and have sex, but Juanma is not her husband. When he drops her off the next morning, he asks Veró if she wants him to drop her at the door or down the street. Juanma may in fact be her cousin, but that's not clear. Earlier in the hotel room, he asks Veró if her Aunt Lala (María Vaner) has the same painting as the one on the wall.

The next few scenes show Veró trying to go about her daily routines while still in a daze. After Juanma drops her off at home, Veró's husband, Marcos (Cesar Bordón), is introduced in one of the film's most spatially disorienting shots. First, Marcos walks through the door holding something in a garbage bag (we later discover a dead dog), and exits the frame to the left, passing behind a staircase.

He then reappears reflected in a mirror on the far right side of the frame, walking into the kitchen. A few seconds later, we see Veró's feet reflected in the top section of the mirror as she descends the stairs.

Veró then reappears at the bottom of the stairs on the left side of the frame.

Veró turns and looks offscreen left into the kitchen. Reflected in the mirror, we see Marcos turn and see her.

Veró runs back upstairs, and Marcos follows her, exiting the field of the mirror and reappearing on the left side of the frame behind the stairs.

Upstairs, to hide from Marcos, Veró takes a shower with her clothes still on. (Marcos, at this point, doesn't know that Veró has had an accident, as due to the storm, he didn't come home the previous night either.) After her shower, Veró goes downstairs to find the dead dog on the kitchen counter, which it appears Marcos brought home to eat. He takes the dog into the backyard, and the maid asks him if he wants her to skin it.

In the next scene, Veró walks into a dentist's office and sits down in the waiting room; the secretary has to remind her that she's the dentist. Later, when the secretary presents her with a wrapped present, Veró thinks it's for her until the secretary reminds her that she asked her to pick it up for Aunt Lala. It just occurred to me as I was writing this that Veró might be suffering from amnesia, rather than simple befuddlement. That would explain why she doesn't write her name on the release form (because she doesn't remember it); why she goes to a hotel instead of straight home (because she doesn't know where home is); why she tries to hide from Marcos (because she doesn't know who he is); and why, when Josefina prompts her to remind Aunt Lala of certain facts, Veró doesn't answer, waiting instead for Josefina to say something. It would also explain the film's title.

However, about midway through the film, something happens to jog Veró's memory. As she walks around a park, we hear a loud thump off camera. The next shot shows an injured boy lying on the ground. Offscreen, we hear a dog barking, reminding us of the one Veró hit. She goes into the washroom and cries, and in the next scene, tells Marcos that she killed some one with her car.

Marcos tries to convince Veró that she's just imagining things, driving her out to the site of the accident, and then calling Juanma, who would know if some one had been killed the weekend of the big storm. However, it soon becomes apparent that some one did die along the dirt road that weekend. On an outing with Josefina and her children, Veró sees that the canal is flooded, as often happens when a dead animal gets stuck in the pipes. Later, Veró goes to pick up some pots at the nursery for her garden, and she learns that one of the boys who works there hasn't been showing up since the night of the storm. Eventually, his body is found in the canal. In the paper it says he drowned, but Josefina's daughter, Candita (Inés Efron), mentions offhandedly that he was murdered. Just to be safe, Marcos has the car repaired, and Veró's brother, Marcelo (Guillermo Arengo), steals her x-rays from the hospital, so that there's no evidence of Veró being in an accident.

Meanwhile, Veró--having mentioned earlier that she's been colouring her hair so long that she no longer recalls her natural colour--dyes her hair brown, and acts extra nice to the peasant boy who comes by regularly to wash her car, giving him some old t-shirts and offering to let him take a shower in the maid's bathroom. In other words, just as Veró choses her hair colour, she makes a conscious choice to remember hitting the boy with her car (whether she did or not). Likewise, Marcos and Marcelo make a decision to forget it ever happened. In the final sequence, Veró returns to the hotel where she slept with Juanma, and is told by the woman at the desk that room 818 was unoccupied the weekend of the storm, further undermining our certainty about what happened.

The cinematic apparatus is set up to ensure a constant product flow (movies magically appear at the multiplex, and after a few weeks, new ones materialize to take their place), and reviewers are part of that system whether they like it or not. With new films opening every week, the vast majority of them McMovies designed for easy consumption, reviewers usually only see a movie once before writing about it. So a film like The Headless Woman, which needs to be seen at least twice, gets in the way of business as usual. Although Pauline Kael's refusal to ever watch a movie more than once is an extreme case (I wonder what she'd say about Film Socialisme [2010] if she were alive), reviewers have to speak from a position of relative certainty to be able to do their jobs at all. Therefore, it's cheering on the one hand that the reviews for Martel's film in the American press have been largely appreciative (though if memory serves, wasn't it booed at Cannes?); however, it's hardly surprising on the other to come across Andy Klien's hostile dismissal in The Christian Science Monitor, in which he writes, "The disjointedness of The Headless Woman might be the result of narrative complexity or of directorial ineptitude or (my favorite) of narrative complexity mangled by directorial ineptitude." The possibility that the film might be so disorienting on purpose, or that it might require a second viewing, doesn't appear to have occurred to him. And certainly both possibilities are perversely contrary to the business as usual of movies designed to be understood immediately by everyone. In this context, a film like The Headless Woman is nothing short of a political act.

24 City

2010-06-04T19:05:00.005-03:00

I admit it, I'm stumped. Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City (2008) is as perplexing a moviegoing experience as I can recall, but not in a fun, David Lynch sort of way. My immediate, knee-jerk reaction would be to say that it's a bad film by a major director--talky, boring, "uncinematic"--except that, so far as I can tell, it does exactly what it sets out to accomplish. Therefore, the problem must be with me, not the movie. Maybe all those commercial movies I saw in Montreal have ruined me for the sort of demanding festival fare that I thought I was craving back when I was complaining about how traditional and safe everything was, even so-called art movies like Greenberg (2010) and The Secret in Their Eyes (2009). Or perhaps being back in Nova Scotia has destroyed my ability to take pleasure in anything. On the other hand, a film that does what it sets out to isn't inherently interesting (take Chloe [2009], for instance), so the question becomes: Why has Jia--whose films Platform (2000), The World (2004), and Still Life (2006) are masterpieces--made this film in this way?

The subject of 24 City is a military factory that was built during the Korean war to manufacture airplanes for the war effort, but has since fallen on hard times (despite China's booming economy), and is to be torn down to make way for an upscale condominium complex. As in Still Life, about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the implication is that the workers who made the country's economic growth possible are being gentrified into obscurity by an emerging upper-class riding the wave of their alienated labor.

But where Still Life dramatizes this thesis, 24 City consists primarily of shots of seated interviewees telling sob stories to a stationary camera. For instance, we learn that one factory employee, nicknamed "Little Flower" due to her resemblance to Joan Chen, was a woman from Shanghai who had many male admirers, but--like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905)--never married. Over the course of the film, the people being interviewed get progressively younger, arriving finally at the daughter of two factory workers whose job is to buy clothes for rich people who are too busy to shop for themselves.

I've enjoyed talky documentaries in the past, like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), which juxtaposed contemporary interviews with silent footage of the Nazi death camps in much the same way that Jia's film alternates between interviews and short, vérité-style scenes of the same people (one woman is introduced walking around holding up her I.V.), and shots of the factory being demolished. And of course, one of the most powerful scenes in all the cinema is Bibi Andersson's monologue about the orgy on the beach in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), which Jean-Luc Godard effectively paid homage to a year later in Weekend (1967). I think the difference is that the interviewees in Lanzmann's film, and the actors in the films by Bergman and Godard, are describing specific incidents, and their words conjure up vivid images in the viewer's imagination. Rather than activating my imagination, Jia's film remains resolutely on the screen.

One wrinkle differentiating Jia's film from a traditional documentary like Shoah is that two of the people interviewed here are recognizable stars, and others may be actors as well. Little Flower is, in fact, played by Joan Chen, and the woman who shops for rich people is played by Zhao Tao, who appears in all of Jia's movies. However, whether or not the interviews are true, they're no more or less compelling either way.

In the film, Jia has made a deliberate choice to tell rather than show, and I understand this intellectually. But unlike Anat Zuria's Black Bus (2010), which invites us to imagine more than what's represented on screen, 24 City I felt simply talked at me. Not one of its interviews stimulated me in any way. But is that a problem with the film or with me? (It's been praised by a number of reviewers I admire, including Manhola Dargis, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Michael Sicinski.) Watching it, I knew how Roger Ebert must've felt watching Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997), and I sincerely hope I'm as wrong about 24 City as Ebert was about that film.

Ballet Is a Bitch That Never Sleeps

2010-05-27T20:22:00.013-03:00

Once again, the five movies I saw on my latest trip to Montreal were all resolutely old fashioned in one way or another, but only one of them was actually old. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) isn't their greatest work--that would be The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), a far more ambitious, political, and moving film--but it's still a glorious achievement in its own right, outclassing any of the new movies I saw, all of which happened to be pretty good.

The story--which is divided into six large movements--begins at the premiere of a new ballet in London. First, we're introduced to some music students who arrive forty-five minutes early in order to get seats in the upper balcony. The score for the ballet was composed by their professor, who sits down in a private box with Boris Lermontov (Anton Wolbrook), the director of the ballet company. As the performance begins, one of the students, Julian Craster (Marius Goring), realizes that the professor has plagiarized his work. Meanwhile, an aristocratic lady sends a note to the professor, asking him to bring Boris to a party at her home after the show. The lady is planning to have her niece, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), dance for her guests, but Boris tells the lady that he came for a party, not an audition. Victoria's performance is cancelled, and she has a Meet Cute with Boris, who carelessly remarks to her while getting a glass of campaign that they've been spared the horror of having to watch a performance by the lady's nice. ("Mr. Lermontov, I am that horror," she announces, rather amused.) This opening, which begins with students and bohemians, and ends at an aristocratic soirée, seems to promise that the film will be in part about class, but that's not what happens, even when Julian and Victoria fall in love.

The second part of the film begins with Julian going to see Boris at his home the next morning. Boris tells him to forget about his professor ("Remember that it is more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from"), and offers him a job coaching the orchestra. Victoria begins at Boris' company at the same time, and when she's offered the lead in a ballet being put on by a smaller company, Boris sees her perform for the first time. He seems transfixed by her dancing, but mysteriously leaves before the end. However, when his company leaves for Paris at the beginning of third part of the film, Boris decides to take her on permanently. In Paris, Boris asks Julian to work on the score for a ballet of "The Red Shoes" (1845) by Hans Christian Andersen. And when the star of the company leaves the ballet to get married--which Boris sees as nothing short of betrayal--he offers the lead to Victoria. Next, the story moves to Monte Carlo, where the company begins rehearsals on "The Red Shoes," and Victoria and Julian fall in love. In the fifth chapter, Boris discovers their romance and becomes enraged. He and Julian have a falling out over it, and Victoria choses to leave the ballet to get married. In the last part of the film, Victoria returns to the ballet, and the company performs "The Red Shoes" a second time.

Like Jacques Rivette's La Belle noiseuse (1991), the story comes down to a conflict between art and life. The most interesting character is Boris, who demands from Victoria complete devotion to the ballet to the exclusion of all else. "Love" doesn't seem an accurate description of how he feels about her; rather, the ballet is a means for him to possess her body solely. Though the relevance of "The Red Shoes" is obvious enough to the story (it's about a girl who can't stop dancing), it seems to have another, private meaning for Boris. When Julian and Victoria leave the company, Boris ensures that no one else will ever perform it. That she's in love with Julian is bad enough, but that it began during "The Red Shoes" adds another level of betrayal. I suspect that when he sees Victoria perform for the first time, the reason he leaves early is that he never wants to see her stop dancing.

Trains are a recurring motif in the film, associating the ballet company with constant motion. So to settle down and get married--to get off the train, so to speak--means to stop moving, both literally and metaphorically. When Victoria's predecessor decides to get married, the company takes leave of her at the train station, where she remains standing on the platform as the train pulls away. When Boris has to return to Paris at the end of the fifth section, Victoria goes to the train station to tell him that she's going to marry Julian. The next time they see each other, Victoria is on a train headed to Monte Carlo, where she's to meet her aunt on vacation. Boris surprises her at one of the stops, and as the train begins to move, he asks her if she's ready to come back to the ballet. Finally, when Victoria falls to her death, we hear the chugging of a train off camera, and see a puff of smoke from the engine rising into the air. Another motif with no obvious meaning is one in which Julian twice plays the piano for some one while they're eating a meal. The first time he meets Boris at his home, the latter is having breakfast, and as Julian plays, he pours a spoonful of sugar onto a melon. Later, during the rehearsals for "The Red Shoes," Victoria is having trouble with the music, so Boris has Julian play the score for her during meals. And as he plays for her, Victoria adds a spoonful of sugar to a glass of orange juice.

The centerpiece of the movie is the performance of "The Red Shoes" at the end of the film's third movement. In style and length, this sequence anticipates the extended ballet numbers in two subsequent Gene Kelly musicals, An American in Paris (1951) and Singin' in the Rain (1952). I have no way of knowing if The Red Shoes popularized such sequences, let alone whether it was a direct influence on those two movies, but it seems probable. (There's no such sequence in Vincente Minnelli's underrated The Pirate [1948], also starring Kelly, which was made the same year as The Red Shoes.) In all three films, the ballet is a self-sufficient narrative, and their durations are such that, after a certain point, one begins to forget about the main story line. However, in this film, at one point, we see Victoria exiting the stage to take a breather, returning us momentarily to the world of the main story. Also, here there's a thematic link between the ballet and the larger narrative that frames it. In all three ballet sequences, the style is deliberately artificial and theatrical, though in neither of the Kelly musicals is the number meant to represent an live ballet performance. However, The Red Shoes employs various effects like multiple exposures, and has numerous scene changes, which would be impossible to do on stage. Indeed, there are moments when the ballet seems to be happening inside Victoria's head, as when she confuses the shoemaker with Boris and then Julian (again bringing us back to the main story, and reenforcing the parallels between it and "The Red Shoes"), which is inconsistent stylistically with the rest of the picture (including the other ballet performances), in which we aren't given access to subjective states, like dreams and memories.

If the film has a flaw, it's that it doesn't have a satisfying conclusion. When Victoria falls to her death, the parallels between the plot and the story of "The Red Shoes" begin to feel forced to the point of taking precedence over logic, and after three viewings, I'm still not sure whether her death is supposed to be an accident or suicide.

Just as a side note, in Montreal I saw a restored 35mm print of the film, and though it looks fine, there's a very noticeable, constant hissing on the soundtrack throughout the entire movie, which is also audible on my pirated Korean DVD. I wonder if the restoration was only for the image, or if due to damage to the original negative, this is the best sound we can hope to have.

Moving from the really old to the really old fashioned, Juan José Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes (2009) is the kind of squarely conventional procedural that Hollywood used to churn out in the 1940s and '50s (the dialogue is salted with references to Mike Hammer and Perry Mason). It has clear-cut good guys and bad guys, a romantic subplot, and the hero even has an alcoholic sidekick, who has sudden inspirations about the case and belatedly redeems himself with a heroic gesture.

As the film opens, its hero, Benjamín Esposito (Ricardo Darín), is a retired DA--or whatever the Argentinean equivalent of a DA is called--who's haunted by a case he investigated in 1974, which he plans to use as the inspiration for a novel. What's special about the case is that the woman who was raped and murdered was Benjamín's ex-girlfriend. The opening sequence is a flashback to the last time he saw her alive, as he boarded a train. (Again with the trains!) This turns out to be the first of three possible openings Benjamín is considering for his book, each shown in a separate flashback (the other two are of him having breakfast with the woman just prior to boarding the train, and her being raped). In the second sequence, Benjamín pays a visit to his former boss, Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), and tells her he's having trouble getting started. She recommends that he start with his most vivid memory, triggering a flashback to Irene's first day on the job, introducing the second main thread, which is Benjamín's unrequited love for Irene. If you're hoping for a self-conscious meta-narrative in the spirit of Alain Resnais' Providence (1977), you can just forget about it; there's nothing to indicate that Benjamín is doing anything but sticking to the facts, and when he shows the book to a friend to get some feedback, they remark that it reads like a long memo.

The story is broken up into five large sections by fades to black. (If you haven't seen the film, you may want to skip the next three paragraphs.) The first and longest portion of the movie is principally about the identification and arrest of the killer. Looking through some old photo albums kept by the victim's last boyfriend, Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago), Benjamín notices that one of the woman's friends, Isidoro Gómez (Javier Godino), is staring at her creepily in several pictures. And luckily, Ricardo keeps fastidious records of the names of each person in every photo so as not to forget who they are. I suppose one might accuse the film of lazy screenwriting in this department, but all clues in murder mysteries are essentially arbitrary, so I don't mind Campanella taking shortcuts to expedite the identification of the killer. Furthermore, one could add that it speaks to the film's themes of photography and memory, the point being that, just like how a photograph is a moment frozen in time, Benjamín and Ricardo's love for the dead woman is an unchanging constant.

Isidoro is obviously the one whodunit, but the case is stalled by bureaucratic red tape when he goes into hiding in another province. (There's a running gag about the ridiculous amount of paperwork that Benjamín and his colleagues always have piled on their desks.) That's when the sidekick, Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Fancella), gets his sudden inspiration, which is also completely arbitrary. Meanwhile, Benjamín instantly falls in love with Irene, but lacks the courage to say anything because he thinks she's out of his league (she went to an ivy league American university and has a Scottish name), and eventually, Irene gets engaged to another man.

In the second part of the film, Isidoro gets out of prison by informing on subversives (at that time, Argentina was under a dictatorship), and comes after Benjamín. At the same time, Benjamín makes some progress with Irene; she knows how he feels about her, and one day makes an appointment to meet him after work. However, he never makes it due to Pablo's heroic act. In the next section, Benjamín goes into hiding, leaving Irene behind, and again there's a farewell at a train station. This is where Benjamín's book ends, but not the film, and in the fourth part of the movie, he resumes his quest to bring Isidoro to justice after a twenty-five year hiatus. He goes to visit Ricardo at his home in the country, and discovers that the latter was only able to find justice (as opposed to revenge) by imprisoning Isidoro in his basement for life. And in the final section, Benjamín finally makes his move on Irene. If you want to get psychoanalytical about it, the film is about the failure of the male to protect the woman, which represents a challenge to his manhood, and it's only when that threat, embodied by Isidoro, is neutralized that he feels confident to pursue another relationship.

At the level of local texture, there are some memorable isolated sequences. For instance, there's a wonderfully funny scene in which Benjamín and Pablo search the home of Isidoro's mother. Sequences like this, in which the hero is snooping around somebody's house for clues, are almost inherently awesome (see Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep [1946]). And there's one particularly effective shot in which Benjamín is sitting on a bed in the foreground, reading some letters he found in a drawer, and in the background, out of focus, we see a figure enter the room and slowly creep up behind him. Also, there's that really neat handheld sequence shot at the soccer stadium. Part of it was obviously done on computers, but most of it is just crazy, pointless ingenuity.

Some commentators were surprised when the film won this year's Oscar for best foreign language film, beating out Jacques Audiard's Un prophète and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (both 2009), although after last year's ceremony--in which the Academy passed over festival favorites like Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs, Götz Spielmann's Revanche, and Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir in favor of Yojiro Takita's Departures (all 2008), which I haven't seen--I was sort of expecting something similar to happen this year. Not surprisingly, Campanella's film is the sort of crowd-pleasing middlebrow effort that the French like to call "cinéma de qualité," and which Roger Ebert would deem a "real movie." I liked it only moderately (for one thing, it's not as ambitious as the films by Audiard and Haneke, nor is it as accomplished stylistically), but for an old school Hollywood thriller, it's pretty good--not in the same league as The Ghost Writer, but better than Shutter Island (both 2010).

Even more than the (rather stale) conventions of a teen comedy, what makes makes Jacob Tierney's The Trotsky (2009) feel so much like a trip on Mister Peabody's WABAC Machine--and for these conservative times, something of a provocation--is its suggestion that the life of Leon Trotsky has something relevant and useful to teach us for the present. The film is about a Montreal teenager, Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel), who believes that he's the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, and in contrast with Miguel Arteta's politically neutered and defeatist Youth in Revolt (2009), which sees teenage rebellion as an empty pose designed to impress girls, this film is unwavering in its optimism that the world can be changed for the better, including high school.

The film opens with a pre-credit sequence in which the young Leon tries to unionize the workers at his father's factory, and stages a hunger strike in protest of management's exploitation of the workers. His father, David (Saul Rubinek), has Leon arrested, which has two consequences. First, he seeks out a commie law professor, Frank McGovern (Michael Murphy), to help him sue David, but Frank tells Leon that he hasn't got a case. Leon subsequently discovers that Frank has a twenty-seven year old daughter, Alexandra (Emily Hampshire), who Leon believes he's fated to marry (and later divorce) as the other Leon's first wife was also an older woman named Alexandra. The second consequence is that David decides that Leon, like his idol, should attend public school. There, Leon tries to organize a real student union, and when the school board rejects his idea (because otherwise there wouldn't be a movie), Leon stages a student walkout (which fails) before turning to more radical action. If much of the plot (overachiever, public school, older woman), and the opening shot (an overhead view of a book), remind one of Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998), Tierney is far less of a humanist, neatly dividing his characters into cool revolutionaries and shrill, conservative ass-holes who need to be told to, "Shut the fuck up."

Nor, for that matter, is Tierney much of a stylist. As in two other superior teen movies I can think of--namely, Allan Moyle's Pump Up the Volume (1990) and Brian Dannelly's Saved! (2004)--the screenplay and the performances are everything, and mise en scène counts for nothing.

Back in the giddy heyday of Marxist film theory in the 1970s, there was an irreconcilable split between those who thought of cinema as merely a vehicle for radical content to spur the masses to revolution, and those who felt that radical form could demystify the cinematic apparatus and/or revolutionize consciousness. In a 1974 essay titled, "Political Formations in the Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub" (Jump Cut, no. 4), Martin Walsh writes, "The central problematic of radical art has been the extent to which the form of the art work must be radical, in support of its content." Those on the radical content side of the fence tended to accuse filmmakers like Straub and Danièle Huillet of being obscurantist, and The Trotsky, which is perfectly conventional in style and structure, no doubt would've reached a much larger audience had it an expensive ad campaign on par with that for Youth in Revolt. But even if that were the case, its unlikely that the film would've inspired a revolution. However, in positing Trotsky's life as a kind of object lesson to learn from and emulate (which leads one to the question of which aspects of his legacy are still relevant, and which should be modified or discarded), the film certainly offers viewers something to think about.

If The Trotsky views the present from the perspective of the past, another retrograde Canadian teen movie, Leslie, My Name Is Evil (2009)--the third feature by prairie flower child Reginald Harkema, which is no less preoccupied with the 1960s counterculture, and the pre-'68 work of Jean-Luc Godard, than his earlier Monkey Warfare (2006)--sees both the counterculture and Godard as relics of the past with no relevance to the present whatsoever. Ultimately, Harkema's interest in both is symptomatic of a political stalemate: He despises the status quo, but sees any attempt to overthrow it as fundamentally misguided. Like Bernardo Bertolucci's equally defeatist but more entertaining The Dreamers (2003), Leslie, My Name Is Evil wants to celebrate the sexier aspects of the counterculture while giving a disclaimer that you shouldn't try this at home.

Like Monkey Warfare, the film is essentially a cautionary tale about how the counterculture turns white teenage girls from the suburbs into dangerous psychopaths. However, in Leslie, My Name Is Evil, Harkema gives us a psychological explanation for why Leslie Van Houten (Kristen Hager) became a follower of Charles Manson (Ryan Robbins): You see, her parents got a divorce, and Leslie was looking for a father-figure, and then her mom (Tracy Wright) made her get an abortion... In regards to Godard, his influence is mainly felt in the casting of Gregory Smith, an actor who resembles a young Jean-Pierre Leaud; the use of bold, primary colours; and the film's anger at civilian casualties in the American war in Vietnam (and in particular, the massacre at My Lai), leading one to wonder why Harkema is so concerned with civilian deaths in a war that ended thirty-five years ago, but apparently not at all with civilian deaths in Afghanistan in the present. It's telling that, unlike Leaud's character in Masculin féminin: 15 fait précis (1966), none of the characters in this movie are involved in the anti-war movement, least of all Manson and his followers.

The film opens with a Meet Cute, in which Perry (Smith), a straight-laced young man who's been selected for jury duty, is being questioned by two lawyers in the murder trial of Charles Manson (referred to in the film simply as Charlie) and three of his female followers. When the defending attorney asks Perry if he would assume that some one's guilty of a crime simply because they're a hippy, he takes a long look at the defendants, finally resting his gaze on Leslie. She flashes him a little smile, and Perry shyly reciprocates. The two never have a real conversation, so the film is essentially a love story in eyeline matches.

Following the credit sequence, the first half of the movie crosscuts between Leslie and Perry's lives before the trial, finding parallels between Nixon's silent majority and the Manson cult. Leslie's story opens in 1963 when she was still living at home. (In one scene, we see John F. Kennedy's funeral on a TV in the background.) After her parents divorce, she drifts into the orbit of Katie (Kaniehtiio Horn, who was also in The Trotsky), a hippy chick who introduces her to Charlie. This leads to a love triangle involving Leslie, Charlie, and Leslie's boyfriend, Bobby (Travis Milne), which is resolved when the latter pledges his alliance to Charlie. In the very next scene, we learn that Bobby's been arrested for murder, and he's never mentioned again.

Perry's story begins a few years later (something indicated by a poster of Lyndon Johnson in a library) when an innocent Christian girl, Dorothy (Kristin Adams), asks him if he'd be interested in hearing about Jesus Christ. And even though he's already a Christian, Perry pretends to be interested. (She shows him a comic book about a girl named Leslie who falls in with a crowd of hippies and takes acid. Likewise, the first time Leslie meets Charlie, he's tied to a cross, and he frequently quotes from the bible.) Perry and Dorothy start going steady, and when he learns that he can get out of the draft by taking a job at a chemical factory that manufactures Agent Orange, he decides to propose. However, in the second half of the film, when Perry is summoned for jury duty, he has to be sequestered due to media coverage of the trial, and their marriage is postponed indefinitely. According to Perry's father, it's his patriotic duty to serve in Vietnam and find Leslie guilty, and it's only when Perry can bring himself to sentence her to death that he's able to marry Dorothy and go to work as a chemist. (The final shot is a parodic image of a Vietnamese woman with intentionally fake-looking burns all over her body from Agent Orange, seated in front of a painted backdrop of a rice field, and holding a dead baby with smoke coming out of its eyes.) In Lacanian terms, the film is an Oedipal narrative about submitting to the Law of the Father.

Throughout the movie, Harkema maintains a satiric tone in part by calling attention to, and exaggerating, the film's artifice. When Perry is interviewed for the job at the chemical factory, he asks what chemicals have to do with the war effort, and his interlocutor replies enigmatically that sometimes the war has to be fought at home (or words to that effect). The film then cuts directly to archival footage of Vietnam War protestors clashing with police. Cut to Perry walking out of a building where he's met by Dorothy following his interview. Looking offscreen to the left, Perry asks what's going on, and Dorothy answers that it's just a bunch of troublemakers with nothing better to do (or words to that effect). Harkema then cuts back to the archival footage, as if the protest and the conversation between Perry and Dorothy were happening simultaneously in close proximity. Yet, the film makes no attempt to disguise the incongruousness of the two types of footage (fiction and non-fiction, colour and black-and-white), which are diametrically opposed to each other.

For all its formal hijinks (which more closely resemble early '90s Oliver Stone than the Godard of La Chinoise and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle [both 1967]), the film's defeatism tends to preclude the viewer from thinking too hard about any of the issues involved. It mourns the inability of the anti-war movement to stop the war in Vietnam without bothering to examine why it failed. Instead, it focuses on the Manson cult, which is a lot sexier than the anti-war movement (the psychosexual subtext of Leslie repeatedly thrusting a butcher knife into a dead body couldn't be more blatant), but is basically apolitical. Though less formulaic and more stylistically accomplished than The Trotsky, it leaves one with a good deal less to think about.

The most pleasurable new movie I saw, as well as the funniest, Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) is a rather scathing documentary by the British street artist Banksy about his former comrade, Thierry Guetta (aka Mr. Brainwash). There aren't many movies that qualify as works of art history, and this one offers a virtual crash course in the history of street art by one of its leading figures, capturing the moment when graffiti went from being an anti-capitalist underground movement (almost a bridge between the anti-institutional bent of Conceptual Art and the aesthetics of commercial art and Pop Art) to being a very hot commodity in the legit art world.

Narrated by Rhys Ifans, the film is a straightforward account of how Guetta, who had a natural talent for making money and a private obsession with videotaping every waking moment of his life, came to document the work of several prominent graffiti artists, including Shephard Fairey (who designed the Obama "Hope" poster), and the elusive Banksy, who's identity is a closely guarded secret. (He insisted that Guetta only film his hands and stand behind him while shooting. And in the talking head interviews, his face his hidden in shadow and his voice digitally altered, as if he were in the witness protection program.) The relationship proved mutually beneficial, as Guetta needed a subject and the artists needed some one to document their work. (Guetta was also a good lookout, in case the cops showed up.) He and Banksy bonded during a stunt at Disneyland, when Guetta was detained by security for four hours and interrogated by a man claiming to be from the FBI. So what could Guetta have done to make Banksy mad enough to make this documentary about him?

First of all, though Guetta claimed to be making a documentary about street art, that turned out to be not technically true. And when he did assemble the footage he shot, it was an unqualified disaster--a structureless, monotonous turd of a movie. To distract Guetta while he reedited the footage (presumably into this movie), Banksy encouraged him to do a small show. And that's when Guetta lost his mind. The last half of the documentary is almost a step-by-step manual on how not to put on an art exhibition. Basically, when Guetta should've been working on his art, he was busy hyping the show in the press. Although Guetta had to put down his camera while working on the exhibition, titled "Life Is Beautiful," he evidently had some one follow him around with a camera to record the unfolding train wreck, and the question I have is: How on earth did Banksy convince Guetta to hand over the footage? I can't imagine they're still friends after this.

I'm not the world's biggest enthusiast of street art, but it seems obvious that Banksy is one of the more creative people working in the genre, and that Guetta, despite his talent for publicity, is not. Some of Guetta's ideas are cute, but most of his pieces (like his composite images of various celebrities' faces with Marilyn Monroe's hair) are horribly repetitive, not in the least critical, and derivative of better artists. As Bansky puts it in the film, Guetta is the true heir to Andy Warhol because, where the latter, by endlessly repeating images of various icons, made them meaningless, Guetta, in repeating the same icons, has made them even more meaningless.

Impressively, even though Banksy evidently had no intention of making a film in the first place, he and his editors bring a structure and a perspective to the mass of material that Guetta had shot over a period of ten years, and keep the story moving at very brisk pace. (I don't envy the people who had to go through all the footage in search of useable material.) The film it reminds me of is Orson Welles' F for Fake (1974), another art world documentary (although not one that qualifies as a history of art), which liberally incorporates material from a French documentary that Welles himself had appeared in. Exit Through the Gift Shop isn't as good as Welles' film (otherwise, it would be the best movie of the decade), but it is very funny, albeit in a cringe-inducing sort of way, and Guetta is one of the most fascinating screen characters of recent memory.

The Funeral

2010-05-19T21:38:00.003-03:00

Abel Ferrara's The Funeral (1996) is a collection of fragments--fascinating, eccentric, incomplete--that don't quite fit together as a coherent whole. The crowded screenplay by Nicholas St. John (his tenth and final script for Ferrara) tackles a buffet of heavy subjects, including revenge, suicide, and labor disputes, but never more than one of these things at the same time. The obvious upside of Ferrara's scattershot approach is that there's too much going on for the film ever to become boring; the downside is that he never pursues an idea to its logical conclusion.

Set during the Depression, the film is a gangster story about three brothers. The movie opens with the coffin containing the body of the youngest brother, Johnny (Vincent Gallo), being delivered to the home of the middle brother, Chez (Chris Penn). The oldest, Ray (Christopher Walken), wants to find who did it and take revenge, but his wife, Jean (Annabella Sciorra), who still believes that the family can be saved, pleads for him to let it go. In a flashback to Ray's childhood, his father (Gian DiDonna) has him kill a man as a kind of rite of passage, explaining that if they were to let him go, the man would inevitably come back and kill them in case they changed their minds.

Also in flashback, we see the days leading up to Johnny's death. One day, a rival gangster, Gaspare (Benicio Del Toro), comes into the brothers' bar, representing a factory owner who wants to pay the brothers a thousand dollars a week to have the union lay off the factory owner. And Johnny, who's a communist, takes an instant disliking to Gaspare ("You could hire a lot of workers for a thousand dollars"). Later, Johnny starts sleeping with Gaspare's wife, which makes Gaspare a suspect in his murder. In the middle of the night, Ray's henchmen bring Gaspare in, and Ray comes to the realization that he can't let him go, even if he didn't kill Johnny, echoing the scene with Ray's father ("I have no choice. You're never going to forget this"). For his part, Gaspare seems remarkably coolheaded about the prospect of having his legs chopped off with an axe.

Additionally, there's a third subplot involving Chez, who has a traumatic flashback of his own. We learn that their father committed suicide, and as a result, Chez suffers from depression. His wife, Clara (Isabella Rossellini), wants him to go to a clinic in Belgium for treatment, but when she assures him that no one would know, Chez replies, "I'd know," which effectively ends the discussion. If the revenge plot is an awkward fit for the stuff about labor unions, this whole subplot seems to exist in isolation from the rest of the movie, almost as if their father's suicide had no effect on either Johnny or Ray.

Maybe Ferrara wants to show that all three brothers are beyond saving, although that probably wouldn't matter to Johnny, who's almost certainly an atheist. In any event, there's a curious sequence set in a whorehouse in which Chez offers a teenage prostitute five dollars to go straight home ("You could have a life," he tells her). The girl replies that, if he gave her five more, they could have sex; Chez responds by giving her twenty and then raping her while shouting, "You just sold your soul!" Ferrara takes Catholicism, and the conventions of film noir, too seriously for women to have any role in the story except as nagging wives or whores.

Ferrara is willing to spend a lot of time on scenes that are not particularly essential to the plot. In one long sequence in a bar, a friend of Johnny's acts like a drunken buffoon, which starts to wear on Gaspare's nerves. A little later, when the friend goes outside to pee against a wall, Gaspare stabs him in the belly. I think the point of this sequence is to show that Gaspare is capable of killing, making him a more credible suspect in Johnny's murder, but the length of the sequence is far out of proportion to its importance to the story. On the other hand, when Ray uncovers Johnny's killer, both his identity and his motive seem rather arbitrary. We don't even see the event that motivated Johnny's murder, which is probably just as well since it sounds more like something Chez would do. Likewise, Gretchen Mol is supposed to play Johnny's girlfriend, but unless I'm mistaken, she and Gallo don't have a single scene together.

Would Ferrara produce a better movie if he were more disciplined? His best known work, Bad Lieutenant (1992), also has a rather full plate and again Ferrara creates some memorable isolated sequences (the scene in which Harvey Keitel pulls over two teenage girls is some kind of creepy masterpiece), but there, the film's apocalyptic vision of Dinkins-era New Yawk gives the story a kind of scuzzy coherence, so it adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. The Funeral has some very good scenes, but they don't add up.

I haven't seen all of Ferrara's films, but at the risk of generalizing, The Funeral feels like a tipping point between the relative coherence of Bad Lieutenant and his more confused (but still interesting) later films, like Mary (2005)--that is, the moment when structure and theme go out the window, and the scene becomes everything. In addition to The Funeral being his last collaboration with St. John, all of his subsequent films--with the exception of 'R Xmas (2001) and his documentary Chelsea on the Rocks (2008), which I haven't seen--have been shot abroad, presumably because it's become too expensive to shoot in New York; Martin Scorsese hasn't made a film there since Bringing Out the Dead (1999), and Woody Allen works primarily in London now. If Ferrara's become unhinged structurally and geographically, the results are often thrilling, as in his more languorous and experimental New Rose Hotel (1998), but they also lack resonance.

Around the World in 48 Hours, Part 2

2010-05-13T22:15:00.005-03:00

Not to be confused with Shortbus (2006), Anat Zuria's critical documentary Black Bus (2010) begins with a title informing us that the women profiled in the film grew up in Israel's ultra-orthodox community, against the backdrop of its "modesty revolution," which places appalling restrictions on the freedom of Hasidic women. For instance, there are special buses for orthodox Jews, in which women are required to sit in the back third of the bus. Even for a woman to enter by the front doors is forbidden.

The film is about two women who've left the Hasidic community: A blogger, Sara, who writes about her own experiences, as well as those of a few informants still on the inside; and an amateur photographer, Shulamit, who confronts the orthodox community more directly by taking pictures on the street and on the bus. As she no longer has any contact with the community, including her own family, the only arena in which Shulamit (and Zuria) can engage the Hasidic community is in the public sphere.

Because the film views the orthodox community entirely from the outside, it requires in spots a leap of imagination. In one sequence, Shulamit is lying on her bed, uploading some photos to Facebook, and Zuria frames her face in close-up. After a while, Zuria inquires from offscreen if any of Shulamit's friends have also left the Hasidic community. She answers that one did, but it's a sad story and she's not ready to talk about it. Zuria keeps recording, at one point panning down to show that Shulamit is fiddling with her glasses, and then back up to her face as, gradually, tears begin to form. It's a very long shot, and there's something shockingly intimate about it (especially if you're watching the film in a theatre, as I was, sitting in the second row), yet at the same time, something is being withheld, and the tension between intimacy and mystery is really intriguing.

In so many words, the film shows us only the tip of the iceberg and asks us to imagine its depths. In the film, we see Hasidic men and women as they appear in public, while the recollections of Shulamit, Sara, and her informants (whose faces are blurred so they can't be identified) invite us to envisage what goes on behind closed doors. Incidentally, one of the things we learn is that the orthodox community is obsessed with appearances above all else. Sara recalls how, when she was living with her parents, if her clothes were acceptable, that meant she was acceptable. Her family never really saw her, just her clothes. I'm reminded of a quote from Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1925): "In reality, they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs."

There is at least one thing I agree on with the orthodox community: couples kissing in public. I don't want to see that, but by doing it out in public, it's like they're forcing me to look at it. And if I do look, then I'm the one who's creepy. Have some shame, people.

David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier's American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein (2009) is an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying documentary about Norman Finkelstein, an American political scientist of Jewish descent who's become a pariah for his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and his book The Holocaust Industry (2000). Using talking head interviews, and video of Finkelstein giving talks at various universities and in Palestine, the film traces Finkelstein's life from his childhood in Coney Island to the controversy around his writings, and in particular, his feud with Alan Dershowitz, but it leaves the substance of his writings largely untouched.

From what I've read on Wikipedia, the crux of Finkelstein's writings is that Israel has one of the worst human rights records in the world, and that a powerful Jewish lobby has exploited the memory of the Holocaust to portray Israel as a victim state, while at the same time, shaking down western Europe for huge legal settlements, which ultimately go to the lobby and its lawyers rather than Holocaust survivors. In Dershowitz's book, The Case for Israel (2003), he argues that Israel has done more to obey the rule of law than any country with comparable security risks (a thesis he succinctly reiterates in the film), and Finkelstein refutes this claim in his book, Beyond Chutzpah (2005).

What do we see in the film? Finkelstein goes on a speaking tour of Canadian universities, and when one student challenges him on his likening of Israel to the Nazis, he shouts at her until she cries (something roundly applauded by most of the students in attendance), while a vocal minority tries, in turn, to shout him down. On a radio debate with Dershowitz, Finkelstein not only argues that The Case for Israel leans heavily on Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial (1984) as a source--a book which Finkelstein himself is credited with discrediting--but goes on to accuse Dershowitz of outright plagiarism. Dershowitz, in response, accuses Finkelstein of being an anti-Semitic Jew, and leads a campaign against his receiving tenure, which is ultimately successful.

More than once in the film, Finkelstein says that--though he's been smeared as a self-hating Jew, and his writings marginalized by mainstream academia--no one has actually challenged his research or his conclusions. I'm not a political scientist, but after reading the article on Israel's human rights record on Wikipedia, my impression is that the country has the best human rights record in the region by far, so long as you don't live in the occupied territories. Obviously it's a complicated issue, more so than either Finkelstein or his critics appear willing to concede. On the one hand, Finkelstein demonizes Israel by likening it to Nazi Germany (while at the same time uncritically endorsing Hamas and Hezbollah), which leads his detractors to demonize him in turn as an anti-Semitic Jew.

Rather than interrogating the factual claims of either side even a little bit, the documentary wants to teach the controversy with the result that it winds up confirming the viewer's pre-conceived ideas on the subject, no matter which side you happen to be on. Despite their attempts to keep it fair and balanced, Ridgen and Rossier are obviously sympathetic to Finkelstein; simply by making a documentary on him, they help to legitimize his work, and they make no attempt to debunk his theories. However, waiting in line for Black Bus, I overheard the guy in front of me say that Finkelstein had an Oedipus complex and was sexually frustrated. Like an afternoon of watching cable news, American Radical is entertaining but not particularly edifying.

Around the World in 48 Hours, Part 1

2010-05-09T20:56:00.008-03:00

Populist in the best sense of the word, Lee Yoon-ki's My Dear Enemy (2008) is a beguiling South Korean comedy about people sticking together when times are tough. One of the movie's strengths is how quickly it gets the plot moving: In the opening sequence, Hee-su (Jeon Do-yeon, from Milyang [2007]) confronts her ex-boyfriend, Byeong-woon (Ha Jung-woo), demanding that he repay her the 3.5 million won (or three thousand five hundred dollars) he borrowed from her a year ago, just prior to their breakup. Byeong-woon, who isn't the most reliable fellow, doesn't have the cash, and the film follows them over the course of a single day as Byeong-woon visits several other women he's acquainted with in order to the borrow money to repay Hee-su.

Although this is essentially a light comedy, and the lilting, jazzy score--which recalls the music in Jacques Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Mon oncle (1958)--indicates that we're not supposed to take its story too seriously, the movie nevertheless gets into some tricky territory involving money and ethics. At first, Hee-su appears to be unambiguously in the right, demanding repayment from Byeong-woon on an overdue loan, but as the day goes on, she feels less and less comfortable taking money from him. The first person they visit is a successful businesswoman, who readily hands over a cheque for a million won. But afterwards, Byeong-woon explains that the collateral for the loan is his having to do whatever the businesswoman wants, which may or may not involve sleeping with her. And by accepting her money, Hee-su is complicit in Byeong-woon's compromising behavior.

The film only gradually reveals information about the two leads. In an early scene, they stop to get a snack at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and when Hee-su refuses to share her food (which is common in Korea), Byeong-woon remarks, "Still don't like sharing food?" In other words, Hee-su has always been a self-reliant person, and the film (which is Korean to the core) argues that it's better to be generous. The last person they visit is a single mother, and when Hee-su (who doesn't need the money) tries to refuse, the woman insists that Hee-su take it, as she made a promise to help Byeong-woon. (Keeping promises in order to save face is a big deal in Korea.)

Though the film lacks the dramatic shifts in tone we've come to expect from Korean movies and TV shows, such as Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy (1999) and Boys Before Flowers (2009), it does have a varied style. The film opens in a parking lot with a man and a woman (who are never seen again) talking about a friend of theirs who made some money in real estate. (This not only introduces the theme of the movie, but anticipates a story involving a man, a woman, and a car.) As they walk away from their car, the camera continues following them in an unbroken steadicam shot. When the couple passes a group of men, the camera begins following them, and then Hee-su as she enters a horse racing track. This lengthy tracking shot is immediately followed by a rapidly edited sequence showing Hee-su frantically searching the track with a jump cut every few seconds. The rest of the movie is somewhere between these two extremes, and what Lee appears to be doing here is preparing the viewer for the film's elastic rhythm. Written, photographed, and edited with impeccable precision, this is popular filmmaking at its near-finest.

Sebastián Silva's discreetly charming Chilean black comedy The Maid (2009) is similarly quick about setting up its premise. The film opens with the title character, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), eating alone in the kitchen, while the family she works for has dinner together in the next room. Afterward, while washing the dishes, Raquel takes a pill for her chronic headache (our first indication that she's unwell), and the family's mother, Pilar (Claudia Celadón), suggests hiring some extra help to lighten Raquel's workload--an idea Raquel fiercely opposes. In the course of the film, the family tries out three different maids, and each time, Raquel tries to scare them off.

In the same scene in which Pilar suggests hiring a second maid, the family's teenage daughter, Camila (Andrea García-Huidobro), goes into the kitchen to get a snack, and Raquel chases her away, introducing a subplot involving Raquel's irrational hatred of Camila. (We've already had an indication earlier in the film that Raquel's affection for the children isn't equal. When the family wants her to come into the dining room, they have to send the eldest son, Lucas (Agustín Silva), who's her favorite, to fetch her.) Why does Raquel hate Camila? We learn that she started working for the family a year before Camila was born, and considers herself a member of the family. And like the new maids she tries to chase away, Raquel sees Camila as a rival for the parents' affection. (Raquel's real family lives in the north of the country, and her only contact with them are infrequent phone calls from her mother on Raquel's birthday and at Christmas.) In so many words, the movie is about how the bourgeois nuclear family is making the working-class heroine sick, both physically and mentally. However, its class politics are less clear-cut than in My Dear Enemy, as the family is portrayed rather affectionately, while Raquel is kind of a weirdo. (In this regard, the film calls to mind Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie [1995].)

The narrative is structured around various rhymes and repetitions. In the opening sequence, the family calls Raquel into the dining room, and she pretends not to hear them--something she'll do several times throughout the movie. Raquel locks each new maid out of the house in turn, and twice turns on the vacuum cleaner to make it seem like she can't hear them calling her. Earlier in the film, she uses the vacuum cleaner no less maliciously to annoy Camila while she's trying to sleep. And when each new maid takes a shower, Raquel goes in afterward and disinfects the tub with bleach, not because she's afraid of germs but to make the new maid feel unwelcome. (The film is almost an encyclopedia of different ways to express hostility through cleaning.) There are two birthday parties, and twice in the film Raquel gets a phone call from her mother which takes her away from a different surrogate family.

At first glance, the film might look like a work of low-key observational realism (something apparently confirmed by the handheld docudrama style), but it gets steadily weirder as it goes on, and I didn't know how the story was going to end. My initial guess was that either Isabelle Huppert was going to show up and kill everyone, or that Terrence Stamp would show up and have sex with everyone. Needless to say, I was way off, and the movie has an ending that's not only unexpected, but absolutely right. The Maid is a wonderfully peculiar, playful, and surprising film.

In contrast with My Dear Enemy and The Maid, Jacques Audiard's epic French prison saga Un prophète (2009) is more stately and novelistic. Spanning six years, the story--which is broken down into chapters by fades to black--begins with a French-Arabic teenager, Malick El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) arriving at prison after being convicted of hitting a cop. There, the guards throw out his old sneakers and give him a new pair, which are promptly stolen by two other inmates. Sneakers are a recurring motif throughout the film, and in the final episode, in which El Djebena is released from prison, as he walks through the doors, the camera pans down to his feet.

Sandwiched between his arrival and his release, there are four major episodes. The first begins with a snitch, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), arriving at the prison. The Corsican gang wants him dead, but they only have fourteen days to do it before Reyeb gets transferred to another prison. One day in the shower, Reyeb makes an offer to El Djebena to give him hash in exchange for oral sex. The latter initially refuses Reyeb's offer until he's approached by a middle-aged Corsican mobster, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), with an offer of his own: Kill Reyeb or be killed by César. The film then flashes forward a year. Before he dies, Reyeb advises El Djebena to learn how to read, and in class he meets Ryad (Abdel Bencherif), who's about to be released due to ill health. In the next segment, El Djebena goes into business for himself, dealing hash with another inmate, Jordi the Gypsy (Reda Kateb). With his sentence half over, El Djebena becomes eligible for day release, and César has him do various jobs on the outside. But when César discovers that he's dealing hash, which could cost El Djebena his day release if he's caught, César attacks him with a spoon. In the last long episode, César sends El Djebena to Marseilles to meet Lattrace (Slimane Dazi), who tells El Djebena that one of the Corsicans is a rat. And when César uncovers his identity, he asks El Djebena to kill some one for the second time. I've had to leave a lot out of this summary, and despite Audiard's patience in unfolding the complicated story, I couldn't always follow the plot in all of its particulars, even on second viewing.

At the level of local texture, Audiard's patience as a storyteller and his attention to detail are evident in the build-up to Reyeb's murder. After César makes his offer in the yard, El Djebena walks away mumbling to himself that he can't kill some one, setting up the next six scenes in which we see his reluctance to go through with it. El Djebena makes two attempts to get out of it, first by trying to speak to the prison warden. Immediately, two Corsicans barge into his cell and put a plastic bag over his head to show that they mean business. Later, when a fight breaks out in the prison sweatshop where El Djebena works, he walks over and starts kicking one of the prisoners involved in the fight. Viewers like me, who aren't too swift about these things, might wonder why he did that until the next scene, in which César asks him if he wasn't trying to get thrown in the hole. Meanwhile, in three separate scenes, we see El Djebena preparing for the murder. In the first, a Corsican explains the plan to him (he's to use a razor hidden in his mouth), and later we see him practicing alone in his cell. Finally, we see El Djebena rehearsing with the same Corsican who explained the plan to him. Of course, when the time comes, it doesn't go smoothly as planned, except for the fact that El Djebena manages not to step in any of the blood. (This movie's all about the sneakers.) Conversely, when César sends El Djebena to kill another snitch later in the film, he pulls it off like he's Uma Thurman in Kill Bill (2003-04).

Throughout the movie, Audiard employs the silent movie technique of masking the edges of the frame. He first does this in the opening sequence to create a sense of disorientation, and it appears again whenever the camera assumes El Djebena's point of view, as when he takes a reading test and in two dream sequences. After César attacks him with a spoon, El Djebena has a dream that the former is yelling at him, and the fourth long episode begins with a multiple exposure dream sequence in which the camera moves out of the prison and down a country road with galloping deer, which turns out to be prophetic. (After his death, Reyeb appears to El Djebena in visions like a guardian angel and makes predictions about the future. Lattrace is about to uncover the fact that El Djebena's the one who killed Reyeb when the car they're driving in slams into a deer, saving his life. Afterward, Lattrace asks him, "Are you some kind of prophet?") Another silent movie technique is the use of onscreen text, which Audiard employs to introduce several supporting players--Reyeb, Ryad, Jordi the Gypsy, Latif the Egyptian (Mamadou Minte)--in conjunction with either slow motion or freeze frames, as well as two montage sequences ("Eyes and Ears") and to establish time ("One Year Later," "Christmas"). Like the Truffaut of Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), Audiard is broadening his stylistic options by reaching back into a silent movie syntax.

Though not quite a masterpiece in my books, Un prophète is a hugely ambitious work with a narrative density and formal sophistication that puts it in the same league as Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). Now let's just hope that Audiard doesn't freeze up completely like Coppola and Scorsese.

Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani's Ajami (2009) is another novelistic crime story with a prophetic character, although it's less accomplished stylistically and its use of onscreen text is more predictable ("First Chapter," "Second Chapter," etcetera). Set primarily in an Arab-Israeli neighborhood in the city of Jaffa, the film is even quicker than My Dear Enemy in getting its plot moving: The film opens with a pre-credit sequence in which a young boy is fixing his car on the street when some gangsters pull up on a motorcycle and shoot him. We subsequently learn through flashbacks and narration that the intended target was the boy's neighbor, Omar (Shahir Kabaha), who had recently sold his car to the dead boy. The motive for the killing was revenge, as Omar's uncle shot a gang member who came into the restaurant where the uncle was working and started shooting. Even though the gangsters had already burned down the restaurant and shot the uncle in retaliation, they still wanted to kill Omar. Omar's parents decide to send his younger brother, Nasri (Fouad Habash), who narrates the story, to live in another city, but Omar chooses to stay behind. We only get our first glimpse of Omar at the end of the first sequence, as the car with Nasri pulls away from their house, in anticipation of the first chapter in which Omar is the focus. Additionally, the flashbacks in the pre-credit sequence prepare us for the film's non-linear structure, in which we see the same botched drug deal from three different points of view.

Not including the pre-credit sequence, the story is divided into six chapters, each one following a different character with a different problem. In the first chapter, Omar goes to the head of a rival gang, Abu-Lias (Youssef Sahwani), for help, and learns that he can buy a ceasefire for a price. And to raise the money, he turns to dealing drugs. The next chapter follows Malek (Ibrahim Frege), a Palestinian who works illegally in Israel at Abu-Lias' restaurant. He too needs money, as his mother has leukemia and requires an operation, and decides to sell drugs with Omar. In chapter three, a friend of theirs, Benj (Copti), comes into possession of a large quantity of crystal meth. The fourth chapter follows a Jewish cop, Dando (Eran Naim), whose son went missing during his military training. In the fifth chapter, Abu-Lias discovers that his daughter, Hadir (Ranim Karim), is in love with Omar, which is forbidden because she's Christian and he's Muslim. And the last chapter returns to Nasri, who insists on coming along with Omar to the drug deal, because he senses (correctly) that something bad will happen. Because of this layering of perspectives, each time we see the botched drug deal (at the end of chapters two, four, and six), we see more of what happened, so that by the end, we know more than any of the characters do individually.

Network narratives have gotten a bad rap lately, thanks to the likes of Crash (2005) and Babel (2006). And for the record, I sort of liked both of those films (although given how overrated they were, the backlash against them is understandable), not to mention superior examples of the genre, such as Atom Egoyan's Ararat (2002), Alain Resnais' Coeurs (2006), Matteo Garrone's Gomorra (2008), Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret's Jellyfish (2007), Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), and John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006). Ajami probably won't appease the folks who thought that Crash was "contrived," as the screenplay relies on old devices like coincidence, mistaken identity, and a token which reveals a killer's identity at the most dramatically opportune moment possible--which is actually one of the things I like about it. With its intimations of predestination, the story is clearly meant as a contemporary Greek tragedy, and as such, it's pretty darn good.

Kickin' it Old School

2010-04-07T21:04:00.008-03:00

If there's a common theme linking the six films I watched on my last two trips to Montreal, it's that they're all resolutely old-fashioned. The best film that I saw, Noah Baumbach's Greenberg (2010), self-consciously positions itself as a throwback to the American auteur cinema of the 1970s, particularly at its most writerly. Our first tipoff is the retro font used in the opening credits, and there are moments when the film, shot by Harris Savides, looks almost like a '70s movie: the repeated close-ups of the heroine (Greta Gerwig) in profile while driving; a high angle shot slowly zooming in on the hero (Ben Stiller), alone in a crowd. Baumbach's previous film, Margot at the Wedding (2007), was virtually a remake of Woody Allen's Bergmanesque bitch-fest Interiors (1978), and this film contains echoes of Annie Hall (1977)--the protagonist is a New Yorker adrift in Los Angeles; the heroine an aspiring singer--although its tone is far less comedic. This is a quiet, sad, sometimes funny film about three very unhappy people, and I loved every minute of it.

Part of what makes this movie old-fashioned is that it's a character study rather than a genre film. The story is about a forty-one year old carpenter, Roger Greenberg (Stiller), and his relationships with three other people and a dog. Florence (Gerwig) is Greenberg's brother's personal assistant, whose job is to run various errands such as picking up dry-cleaning and walking the dog. When his brother's family goes on vacation to Vietnam, Greenberg arrives in Los Angeles to take care of the house and the dog. And since Greenberg can't drive, Florence has to take care of him. (Having just been released from a mental hospital where he was treated for a nervous breakdown, he's like a big baby.) One night, Greenberg calls Florence to see if she wants to go out for a drink with him, and they wind up going back to her apartment. There, Greenberg starts eating her pussy, but Florence stops him, saying that she wants more than just sex. However, Greenberg (who says that he's trying to do nothing for a while) isn't sure if he wants the responsibility of a serious relationship.

The film isn't so much about whether Greenberg gets the girl as whether he chooses to continue living in the moment or starts acting his age and accepts some responsibility. (If you haven't seen the film, you should skip the next four paragraphs.) Late in the film, when Florence learns that she's pregnant by her previous boyfriend and decides to have an abortion, Greenberg offers to take her. ("How's that going to work? Am I going to take you to take me?") After the operation, Florence decides to spend the night in the hospital, and Greenberg goes home to find Sara (Brie Larson), his sister-in-law's twenty year old daughter from a previous marriage. Sara is flying to Australia the next morning and invites Greenberg to come along. In so many words, Greenberg can act like a twenty year old and go to Australia, or be a man and pick up Florence from the hospital.

The other important characters are two people from Greenberg's past. Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a former girlfriend who's now going through a divorce, is introduced as a more age-appropriate rival to Florence, who's fifteen years younger than Greenberg. Early in the film, he runs into Beth at a party and says that he'd like to call her. He makes a first attempt a few nights later, but when Beth picks up the phone, he immediately hangs up. Then he picks up the poster Florence gave him on his first visit to her apartment, advertising a gig she's playing in a bar downtown. On his birthday, Greenberg asks Florence to meet him at a restaurant, but as soon as she arrives, he excuses himself to call Beth to ask her out on a date. Later, when Florence asks Greenberg if he could love her, he freaks out, saying at one point that he should be with a thirty-eight year old divorcée like Beth. However, when he finally has his date with her, Beth makes it plain that she has no intention of getting back together with him.

The Florence-Beth connection is reenforced through a motif. At the party where Greenberg first sees Beth, she points out her young son who's dressed as the devil (or maybe The Flash). Later, during Greenberg's first visit to Florence's apartment, she shows him the puppets she intends to give her four year old niece as a birthday present, one of which is a devil character. On his second visit there, Florence gives one (a blue witch) to Greenberg as a birthday present, since they're too old for her niece. Although Greenberg initially agrees to go to Australia with Sara, he changes his mind when the sight of a giant, red hot-air man at a used car lot reminds him that he has to pick up Florence. In the final sequence, after taking Florence home in a cab, she gives Greenberg the second puppet as a gift.

The other major subplot involves Greenberg's relationship with his friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans). The first time he sees Greenberg, Ivan tells him that he's having a trial separation from his wife, whom Greenberg detests, and that he'd like for Greenberg to get to know his eight year old son (an idea the latter seems apathetic to). We subsequently learn that they were in a band together fifteen years before, but the group broke up when Greenberg blew their chance at signing a record contract. It was the demise of the band--and by extension, the life that Ivan dreamed of living--which forced him to grow up and accept responsibilities, quitting drugs and getting a job fixing computers. (Significantly, he met his wife in rehab.) This was by no means an easy process, and Ivan still nurses a grudge against Greenberg for the breakup of the band. When Sara throws a party for her friends, Greenberg calls Ivan to invite him over only to discover that he's gone back to his wife. When Ivan does make an appearance, it's to end his friendship with Greenberg (who's wired on coke and Duran Duran, as if regressing to his twenty-five year old self) over the fact that he tried to hide it from Ivan that he'd been in a mental hospital. The last thing Ivan says to Greenberg is that it would've been nice if he had made an effort to get to know his son.

This is the kind of movie that really depends on the quality of the dialogue and the performances. Stiller played an angry character before in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and his performance here is like an extension of that one, but this time more fleshed out and finely shaded. And Gerwig, who has eyes like Sean Young from Blade Runner (1982), brings to the role an appealing vulnerability and sweetness. In the scene where Florence asks Greenberg if he could love her, her plea is so direct that it caught me off guard with its emotional impact. Similarly, when she invites him to stay the night on his second visit to her apartment ("The dog's at the vet. Hint hint"), there's something about her delivery that's sad rather than sexy. They make an interesting couple: Where Greenberg uses hostility as a defense ("Hurt people hurt people" is a key line), Florence seems to have no defenses whatsoever. It's only April, but I doubt I'll see a lovelier new movie this year.

Lovely is not a word I'd use to describe Felix van Groenineg's coming of age tale The Misfortunates (aka The Shittiness of Things, 2009), but it deals with some of the same themes as Greenberg. As the film opens, Gunther Stobbe (played as an adult by Valentin Dhaenens) is an unpublished author whose girlfriend is pregnant with a child he adamantly doesn't want. When she goes into labor, he says in voice-over that if the baby were black or stillborn, he'd find it hard to conceal his delight. Like Greenberg, Gunther's reluctant to accept responsibility for another person.

Told mainly in flashback, the story plays like a Flemish white trash version of Precious (2009) with a similar whiplash tone, alternating between crude, raucous humor and violent domestic squabbles. In 1988, Gunther was a mulleted teenager (Kenneth Vanbaeden) who seemed destined to follow in the footsteps of his father (Koen de Graeve) and three uncles, who are all trapped in a cycle of abject drunkenness and unwanted pregnancies, and live at home with the boy's grandmother. Gunther has a passion for writing that could save him, but when he says that he wants to go to a boarding school, his father (who sees this as a betrayal) beats him viciously. Unlike the mother in Precious, he's nothing if not a loving father, however unfit he may be as a parent.

I realize this summary doesn't sound like a high-spirited comedy, but the surprising thing about the film is how much humor and joie de vivre it finds in this bleak material. When the family's TV is repossessed and they want to watch a Roy Orbison concert, the Stobbe men decide it's time they met their neighbors, a young Persian couple. The Stobbes believe that Orbison's sudden resurgence in popularity is a sign that their own fortunes are about to change as well. (As Orbison goes, so goes the nation.) It doesn't exactly work out that way, but there are small victories along the way, as when one of Gunther's uncles wins a drinking contest and then crashes his car into the getaway vehicle of some criminals on the run, making him a hero twice over. Appealingly crass and often hilarious, the film more than lives up to its shitty title--and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

Roman Polanski's films are as much about mood and atmosphere as story. An old-fashioned Hollywood thriller (made entirely in Europe), The Ghost Writer (2010) moves between downtown London and small town New England, but wherever the characters go, dark, menacing clouds hang in the sky. The title character (Ewan McGregor) stays at an inn in Cape Cod with more vacancies than the Bates Motel. And there's a running gag, very Polanski, where characters are constantly making ominous statements to him. When the protagonist says that it's his first time on a private jet, his interlocutor (Kim Catrall) replies optimistically, "Let's hope it's not your last." Between this film and Shutter Island (2010), another rainy Massachusetts thriller, the tourism board must be furious.

The story, based on a novel by Robert Harris (which I haven't read), is old school Polanski to the point of feeling almost like a remake of The Tenant (1976). That film was about a Polish émigré who takes a flat in Paris after the previous tenant attempts suicide. Gradually, the hero comes to suspect that the last tenant was the victim of a complot, and he could be next. As he identifies more and more with the girl who attempted suicide, he even starts dressing in her clothes. Here, the unnamed protagonist is hired to ghost write the memoirs of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the previous writer dies in an apparent suicide. (As in Chinatown [1974], the cause of death is drowning, and the Prime Minister even has an Asian gardener and maid.) When his motel is suddenly swamped with reporters, the ghost moves into the Prime Minister's house in Cape Cod. Sleeping in the same room as his predecessor, at one point wearing some of his clothes, the ghost comes to suspect that the previous writer was murdered, and that his own life could be in danger. I won't spoil the ending except to say that, unlike Shutter Island, this film has a genuinely satisfying (if almost equally far-fetched) conclusion, and the last shot is a real doozy.

Above all, this is a work of consummate craftsmanship. The storytelling is patient and clear, and I can't think of any director who's as skilled at paranoid suspense. There's a gripping, nearly wordless sequence in which the ghost thinks he's being followed by a black car that's as suspenseful as any movie sequence I've seen in years. And Polanski's compositions in 'Scope are elegant in their simplicity. I particularly admired the Bresson-like tracking shot following a handwritten note as it's passed from one person to another at a posh book signing, which Polanski holds for an unusually long time as a means of drawing out the suspense. From the opening sequence, I felt that I was in the hands of an authoritative old master.

Lixin Fan's Canadian documentary Last Train Home (2009) is an old school vérité job about China's 130 million migrant workers, who move from the countryside to the cities in search of low-paying, industrial jobs. But unlike The World (2004), Jia Zhang-ke's film about the same subject, which pointedly blurs the distinctions between fiction and documentary (and whose main documentary subject, a cheesy Beijing theme park, is patently fake), this is a more traditional non-fiction film, shot on grainy digital video, which presents its story with a minimum of overt commentary. The implication of this style is that the filmmakers are merely unobtrusive observers. The best moment in the whole film is when one of the subjects, in the middle of a domestic dispute, turns to the camera and says, "You want the real me? This is the real me!" Fan goes to great lengths to mystify his role in filming these people's lives, and then they go and bring it up themselves.

Still, this is a fascinating glimpse into modern China. The migrant workers only go home once a year to see their families at Chinese New Year, and the film contains astonishing images of crowds of literally thousands of people waiting for trains. Fan and his crew follow a single family over the course of a few years, leading up to the 2008 world financial crisis. As the film opens, both parents are working in a dimly lit sweatshop so that their children (who are being raised by a grandmother in the country) can have a better life. So it comes as a particular blow to them when their rebellious teenage daughter decides to drop out of school and takes a factory job in a city close to the one where her parents are living in a cramped single room. (The factory mass produces jeans for westerners, and at one point, an employee marvels that a person could have a forty-inch waist.) Contrary to the received wisdom in Hollywood, the world we live in is always the most interesting subject for works of art.

Though not the worst movie I saw in Montreal (that would be Joann Sfar's shapeless biopic Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) [2010]), Atom Egoyan's Chloe (2009) was certainly the most disappointing. A sexed-up, dumbed-down remake of Anne Fontaine's Nathalie... (2003), this begins well but eventually devolves into a simplistic stalker thriller. The main difference between this film and the original in terms of plot is that here the heroine (Julianne Moore, in the Fanny Ardant role) winds up boning the bug-eyed wench (Amanda Seyfried, who's no Emmanuelle Beart) she pays to do a sting operation on her husband (Liam Neeson, who looks less like Gérard Dépardieu than Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, especially when he squints). While the film's second half isn't as much of a hoot as Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), the lesson of both films is the same: There's no such thing as an NSA booty call. However, to the credit of this film, Seyfried's character isn't crazy (like the Jessica Walter character in Eastwood's film) so much as really persistent; when Moore rebuffs her and Seyfried decides to seduce the former's hobbit-like teenage son, it's not an act of revenge but a form of substitution.

Though ostensibly set in Toronto, the film really takes place in an interior designer's wet dream of fancy bourgeois living spaces (complete with framed Ed Burtynsky prints on the wall), which miraculously manage to stay organized all by themselves, as Moore (a busy gynecologist) and Neeson (an even busier professor, who commutes by plane everyday) don't appear to have any servants. Although some of the exteriors capture the awful blandness of an architecturally unremarkable medium-sized city (such as a brief scene of Moore getting some cash from a Royal Bank ATM), the interiors feel only slightly more authentic than Barbie's dream house. And despite Egoyan's stated ambition that the film be a showcase for Toronto as itself (rather than a cheap stand-in for New York or Chicago), there are fewer black, Middle-Eastern, and Asian people in this movie than there are in the stadium during a Maple Leafs' game. At one point, Seyfried is standing in front of the newly renovated AGO (are we to conclude that her character, like Egoyan, is a Cinémathèque regular?), but there appears to be some kind of forcefield keeping her from entering Chinatown while not letting any Chinese people out.

The movie's saving grace is Moore, who gives an extraordinary performance, especially when Egoyan lingers on her reactions in close-up as she listens to Seyfried's reports. The latter, who played Meryl Streep's daughter in Mamma Mia! (2008), is adequate for the role, and it's a relief simply to see Neeson in a film that isn't Taken (2008).

So, is there anything really new, or is everything just a throwback to something else, whether it's classical Hollywood cinema (Chloe, The Ghost Writer, Greenberg), or to a simpler time when one could believe that film represented truth--whatever that is--twenty-four times a second (Last Train Home; the Dogme 95 aesthetic of The Misfortunates)? Obviously I don't mean something like Avatar (2009), which uses state of the art technology to tell the same damn story we've seen a thousand times before. Some of the most original films of the last decade were hybrid movies that blurred the usual boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, narrative and non-narrative, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia (2007), and Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008). Cinema isn't dead, but it can feel that way when you're spending too much time at the multiplex.

The Last Temptation of Christ

2010-03-29T21:49:00.004-03:00

Jean-Luc Godard's comment from 1996 (recently quoted by Jonathan Rosenbaum on his website), that Jane Campion is a perfect example of a talented filmmaker "completely destroyed by money," is one that could be applied to the careers of a lot of directors. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that Martin Scorsese has been "destroyed" by money, but it's effect on his work has been largely negative. The Last Temptation of Christ (1998)--his adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, which I haven't read--was one of the last films he made before his budgets started to balloon out of control, and it's sobering to try to imagine what the film would look like if Scorsese made it today with a hundred million dollars at his disposal and Leonardo DiCapprio in the role of Jesus Christ.

Admittedly, even this movie is a bit too polished for my liking. While it's still a long way off from the slick artiness of Mel Gibson's hard-sell passion play (to borrow a term from Manny Farber), in the sequence where Jesus (Willem Dafoe) has the crown of thorns placed on his head, Michael Ballhaus just can't resist lighting the scene as if he were Caravaggio (see above). The least pretentious movie I've seen about the life of Jesus is Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which presents the story as simply and as matter-of-factly as possible. And the harsh beauty of the landscapes and Pasolini's non-professional cast (including his own mother as Mary, the mother of Christ) is often stunning.

Incidentally, Pasolini was an atheist (and a Marxist and a homosexual), while Gibson and Scorsese are both devout believers. That's not to say that Scorsese's personal beliefs are irrelevant to his films, but personal filmmaking doesn't necessarily equal good movies. Mean Streets (1973) is highly personal in its tortured Catholic outlook and Little Italy setting (which never feels less than authentic, even though, amusingly, most of the film was shot in Los Angeles). But speaking for myself, I can only watch so many scenes of guys in bars arguing about debts without being bored by the repetition. On the other hand, I learn from Roger Ebert's book on Scorsese that he only agreed to direct After Hours (1985) when studio funding for The Last Temptation of Christ fell through at the last minute. But I think it's one of his very best films--and it's certainly the most tightly scripted, the funniest, and the least pretentious of all his movies.

The Last Temptation of Christ begins with a cautious title card, explaining that the film isn't based on the gospels, which ironically mirrors the pretentious quotation from the bible that's attached to the end of Raging Bull (1980)--Scorsese's previous biopic written by Paul Schrader--where we're apparently supposed to take boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert DeNiro) as some kind of Christ figure, rather than just a run-of-the-mill wife beater. In The Last Temptation of Christ, the text positions the movie as a fictional exploration of the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. Basically what that means in terms of the story is that Jesus can either chose to live like a man, and have a family, or die on the cross and be the messiah. The two key supporting players are Judas (Harvey Keitel) and Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey), who represent his conscience and his penis, respectively. As the film opens, Jesus has turned his back on both by building crosses for the Romans. As he hauls one through town en route to a crucifixion, Mary emerges from a crowd of hecklers to spit in his face. Later, when Jesus goes to see Mary at her place of employment, we learn that she only became a prostitute after her relationship with Jesus fizzled out. That'll show him. (Convincing female psychology has never been one of Schrader and Scorsese's strong suits.)

The film has been criticized for its antiquated sexual politics, with Rosenbaum writing, "Scorsese's use of females throughout the film to signify only maternity and temptation (of the male) makes me wonder if women of all denominations should be objecting to this film rather than fundamentalists of both sexes." In the film's long, climatic sequence, Jesus is tempted by the devil--embodied by a little girl (Juliette Caton) claiming to be his guardian angel--with a vision of the life he could have if he renounced his divine mission. In the vision, he marries Mary Magdalene, but she dies giving birth. The devil/angel girl consoles Jesus by telling him that there's only one woman in the world with many faces, and suggests he marry another Mary, the sister of Lazarus (Randy Danson). This leads to a curious scene in which the second Mary steps out for a second, and the girl suggests that Jesus schtup his wife's sister, Martha (Peggy Gormley), repeating her earlier statement about there only being one woman in the world in order to convince him. This is the only point in the film where Jesus is seriously tempted to do something really sinful, but it's fully in keeping with the rest of the movie in which women are portrayed essentially as things to have sex with and make babies. The only female character who winds up making much of an impression is the guardian angel, who's neither a mother nor a sex object. (Significantly, that this character was a boy in the novel.)

One intriguing subtext of the film is the implied parallel between the Roman occupation of Israel, and the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. In the opening sequence, Jesus is visited by Judas, who's a member of the Zealots--a group not unlike the French Resistance--who want the Romans out of Israel. In the scene, Judas chews him out for collaborating with the Romans by making crosses, saying at one point, "You're a Jew killing Jews." Later, when Mary Magdalene is about to be stoned to death by an angry mob, her crime is servicing Roman soldiers on the sabbath, recalling how after the liberation of France, the girlfriends of German soldiers had their heads shaved in public. However, the parallel only goes so far, as Jesus poses a threat not only to the Romans but the Zealots as well, as his teachings offer an alternative to their (more direct) form of revolution.

Formally, the film benefits from being one of Scorsese's least stylized, most naturalistic films. Early on, when Jesus is delivering a sermon outdoors, and the handheld camera follows him in medium close-up as he moves through the crowd, the film comes within hailing distance of Pasolini's documentary approach--even if the blue-eyed Dafoe looks a little too clean for the role, his shining hippy hair always perfectly coiffed. Adding to the film's naturalism is that the characters aren't quoting the bible word for word (as in Pasolini's film), but speaking in a modern American idiom. The actors deliver their lines as if no one had ever said these things before, and they were just making it up on the spot. I learn from Rosenbaum that Kazantzakis' novel was written in the "demotic" dialect of the Greek peasantry, and in the film, the New York accents of Jesus and his disciples are effectively played against the British accents of the guardian angel and David Bowie, who gives a fine, understated performance as Pontius Pilate. Additionally, the film has an excellent score by Peter Gabriel, blending traditional Middle Eastern melodies with subtly employed electric guitars, which lacks any trace of pompousness--something The Passion of the Christ (2004) exudes from every orifice of its being, the awful score included.

In hindsight, Scorsese's subsequent feature, Goodfellas (1990), could be seen as the tipping point between his earlier, less commercial work, and the expensive blockbusters that followed. I'm sure Scorsese had artistic reasons for making Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), and--who knows?--The Departed (2006) and Shutter Island (2010), but because of the money involved, he's now in the position of having to make films that appeal to teenagers in the suburbs. (I haven't seen Kundun [1997], but Bringing Out the Dead [1999], a relatively low-budget character study with echoes of Taxi Driver [1976], is obviously an exception.) At this rate of decline, it won't be long until he's making 3D special effects films, and kool-aid sipping reviewers will be trying to pin the whole thing on Michael Powell in order to avoid facing up to the reality that Scorsese's been in a ten-year artistic recession.

Notes Towards a Reading of 'A Single Man'

2010-03-13T20:25:00.006-04:00

1. Influences. Not having read Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel A Single Man, I can't say to what extent it was influenced by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). However, Tom Ford's 2009 film version of Isherwood's novel strongly echoes Mrs. Dalloway in its concentrated time frame (both take place over a single day), its attempt to capture a particular moment in history (London in the aftermath of World War I; Los Angeles during the Cuban Missile Crisis), and Ford's style, which finds cinematic correlatives for Woolf's stream of consciousness narration in its use of dream sequences, flashbacks, and various camera techniques to place us inside the mind of its protagonist, George Falconer (Colin Firth), although unlike Woolf's novel, the film restricts itself to the point of view of a single character. Coincidentally, the film occupies the same mainstream literary adaptation/queer cinema cultural niche as The Hours (2002), which is based on a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham that's explicitly an homage to Mrs. Dalloway (a connection reenforced by the presence of Julianne Moore and the Philip Glassian score by Abel Korzeniowski).

2. Narrative. The film is bookended by two dream sequences. In the first, George comes upon the scene of the car accident that killed his longtime lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), eight months earlier, and lays down beside his corpse in the snow. (We discover later that George wasn't present for the accident, but learned of it by telephone.) Distraught by Jim's death, George intends to commit suicide. Late in the film, George, who teaches literature at a university, runs into a gay student, Kenny Potter (Nicholas Hoult), at a bar, and the two decide to go for a late night swim. George nearly drowns, and the bond between them is sealed when Kenny pulls him out. Since it's his friendship with Kenny that convinces George not to kill himself, it's as if Kenny saved his life twice in one night. However, when they go back to his house to dry off, George has a heart attack and dies. In the film's final scene, Jim appears to him to deliver the kiss of death.

In between these two dream sequences, the film follows George as he goes through the motions of a normal day. As he gets dressed in the morning, he says to himself in the mirror, "Just get through the goddamned day" (that's what they'd call in the screenwriting manuals the statement of goal), before commenting wryly in the narration, "A bit melodramatic." The opening scenes establish five main lines of action. In the morning, George takes down from his bookshelf a copy of Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer (1939), which I haven't read, in preparation for a class. As he's doing this, the ringing of the telephone triggers the first of five flashbacks spanning sixteen years, which recount George's relationship with Jim in reverse chronological order, ending with their first meeting in 1946. While rereading Huxley's novel on the toilet, George looks out the window and sees his neighbors, the Strunks, on their front lawn. The phone starts ringing again, and this time George answers it. It's his best friend, Charley (Moore), calling to invite him for dinner at her house. Lastly, he packs Huxley's novel and a revolver in his briefcase before leaving for work.

3. Minorities. An Englishman, a homosexual, and an intellectual, George is a minority thrice over. In class, he departs from his planned lesson on After Many a Summer to talk about the fear of minorities who pose an imaginary threat to the majority. On the surface, he's talking about the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany in response to a student who believes he's found a veiled anti-Semitic remark in Huxley's novel. And George's allusion to minorities who can make themselves invisible might be interpreted as a reference to the Jews, since not all Jewish people have quote-unquote "Jewish characteristics," which is why the Nazis made them wear the star of David; the idea was to make them more visible. But on a subterranean level, George is clearly talking about gays--another group targeted by the Nazis--albeit in a kind of code. Overall, his comments don't go over very well with his students since only Kenny is capable of cracking the code. After class, Kenny asks him why he doesn't talk so candidly in class more often, and George explains that he has to be cautious about what he says, because not everyone would understand. Later in the afternoon, when George meets a gay street hustler, Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), in the parking lot of a liquor store, the two men converse in Spanish, which in this context functions as another means of sending coded messages.

However, being invisible cuts both ways. The first flashback in the film is to an evening eight months before when George received a phone call informing him of Jim's death. The call is made by an empathetic cousin without the knowledge of Jim's parents, who didn't think George deserved to be notified. When George inquires about the funeral, he's told that the service is for "family only." Jim's parents are treating George as if he were invisible by refusing to acknowledge his very existence.

After hanging up, George runs over to Charley's house in tears. Later in the film, when he goes there for dinner, as he walks through the door, there's a sudden flashback to him collapsing on her doorstep. After dinner, Charley asks George if Jim wasn't a substitute for a "real" relationship, which understandably causes him to explode. These are the only two scenes in the movie where George loses it emotionally, and in both, the other party (Jim's parents, Charley) is denying the validity of his relationship with Jim. Appropriately, the call that triggers the first flashback is from Charley.

4. Time. The film begins with a title card, "Friday, November 30th, 1962," that's only slightly less specific than the one that opens Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Indeed, at one point in the film, George parks his car in front of a giant billboard for that very movie. Throughout the film, there are inserts of clocks which betray the influence of Wong Kar-wai. (It's not a coincidence that the movie features music by Shigeru Umebayashi, who composed the scores for In the Mood for Love [2000] and 2046 [2004].) And when George has a heart attack, as he falls to the floor, he knocks his alarm clock off his bedside table. On the soundtrack, we hear a loud ticking that abruptly stops at the moment of his death. This emphasis on time points to another one of the film's themes, which is letting go of the past.

In the opening narration, George says that, for the first time in his life, he can't see his future as he simply can't imagine living without Jim. And Charley is likewise stuck in the past. ("Living in the past is my future," she quips at one point.) A fellow Brit who evidently has no other friends in Los Angeles, Charley is a boozy divorcée with a cheerfully vulgar sense of humor who would feel right at home in John Cassavetes' Faces (1968). In flashback, George explains to Jim that they were once a couple in London ("Doesn't everyone have sex with women when they're young?"). And Charley evidently still has feelings for him. In anger, she shouts at George that if he hadn't been such a "poof," they'd both be happy. (George might not be, but she would.) What keeps both of them from moving on with their lives is the memory of a past relationship.

In the closing narration (as George burns the suicide notes he's written), he describes having moments of total clarity that bring him back to the present. Accordingly, for most of the movie, the colours appear faded except when George has one of his moments of clarity. The first time this happens in the film is when George arrives at the university. There, he compliments a secretary (Kerri Lynn Pratt) on her beehive hairdo, and when she smiles, the red of her lipstick instantly becomes much brighter. Given the film's debt to Martin Scorsese, which is evident in Ford's taste for high angle shots and slow motion, I wonder if Ford wasn't inspired by the desaturated colours in the bloody climatic sequence of Taxi Driver (1976), where the colour was taken out so the film could get an R rating.

5. Appearances. George is very guarded about his emotions. Even though his heart is (literally) breaking, he keeps it all bottled up, as if it would be impolite to bother anyone with his problems. Similarly, the Strunks are at pains to keep up the pretense of being the perfect family. In the morning, George looks out his window and sees Mrs. Strunk (Gennifer Goodwin) playing with her three children on the lawn. The only crack in the facade is when Mr. Strunk (Teddy Sears) walks out the front door, and he and his wife appear to have some argument. (Like George, we can't hear what they're saying.) Later, while at the bank to clear out his safety deposit box, George is approached by the Strunks' young daughter, Jennifer (Ryan Simpkins), who repeats to him some of the homophobic comments her father makes behind closed doors. We gather that Mr. Strunk has a rigid idea of what's normal, is making his wife and himself miserable by attempting to impose it on their marriage, and he fears and despises gays because they don't fit into his narrow view of how people should behave.

The film makes a point of George being highly observant. In complimenting the secretary, he observes that she always looks beautiful, and the extreme close-ups of her eyes and lips imply a close, scrutinizing gaze. Following Scorsese's example, Ford uses slow motion to suggest heightened concentration, as when George, while talking to a colleague about the Cuban Missile Crisis, becomes distracted by the spectacle of some shirtless college boys playing tennis. (For George, who's already planning to commit suicide anyway, the potential annihilation of the entire planet is a great deal less immediate than his feelings of lust for athletic young men.) Conversely, in the sequence where George is staring at the Strunks, Mrs. Strunk sees him at his window and waves a friendly hello, reversing the gaze. Caught being a peeping tom, George immediately tries to hide from sight. After class, when he's clearing out his office, George appears to be alone. But as he's getting into his car, he's approached by Kenny, who saw him packing up his things and wants to know if he's going somewhere. Like George, Kenny is unusually perceptive and senses that the older man could use a friend. Later at the bar, George tells him that he's exactly as he appears to be--if you look closely.

6. Conclusion. I've only seen the movie twice, so these comments are preliminary rather than exhaustive. I haven't said anything, for instance, about the contrast between Jim, who's carefree and an anti-intellectual, and George, who's just the opposite, or the significance of dogs in the film. And in discussing the film generally (its basic structure, some major themes), I haven't done justice to the sensuous experience of its moment-to-moment unfolding--particularly, the rather astonishing performance by Firth, but also the subtle jump cuts, which I only noticed on second viewing. Like its protagonist, it's a film that merits a closer look.

An Open Letter to Martin Scorsese

2010-03-04T18:20:00.003-04:00

Dear Marty,

Really, dude, this is getting embarrassing.

You used to make character-driven films like Taxi Driver (1976), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999)--all three, incidentally, written by Paul Schrader--but now it seems you just want to make big-budget blockbusters.

Of your last four films--all of them, incidentally, costing in excess of one hundred million dollars, and starring Leonardo DiCapprio--the best is undoubtedly The Aviator (2004), an exuberantly overambitious biopic of Howard Hughes (himself something of an overachiever) that was funny, stylish, and fascinating for all of its three hours.

However, the other three are more impersonal. Gangs of New York (2002) is a threadbare revenge drama with an Oliver Stone-like fixation of good and bad father-figures. I know that you'd dreamed of making this film for a quarter-century, but I have little idea as to why.

Even worse was The Departed (2006), a bloated remake of a forgettable Hong Kong policier, Infernal Affairs (2002), which is an hour longer than the original, is full of violence where Infernal Affairs relied on suspense, brings out the worst tendencies in Jack Nicholson, and is again about young men torn between good and bad father-figures. It's undistinguished even on the level of a frankly commercial genre film.

Your new film Shutter Island (2010) begins promisingly. It's based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, whose work also inspired Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone (2007), one of the most powerful and thought-provoking films of recent years, although it opens more like a Val Lewton B-picture with two U.S. marshals (DiCapprio and Mark Ruffalo) traveling by ferry to a mental hospital on a secluded island off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate the disappearance of a patient. (That said, at 140 minutes, it's twice as long as a Lewton film.) I was intrigued by the mystery, and in terms of pure craftsmanship, the film is flawlessly made. But Marty... Marty, Marty, Marty. That twist is just so lame.

I know, you didn't write it. But is this really the kind of film you want to be making? We already have an M. Night Shyamalan. My advice is to do another small film, like After Hours (1985). Make a movie just for the love film, whether or not it has commercial appeal. And if DiCapprio loves working with you so much, let him take a pay cut.

Your friend,
Michael

Inferno and a Prophet (Montreal Film Diary)

2010-03-04T18:03:00.003-04:00

One way of approaching Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot (2009) is to look at it as two movies for the price of one. On the one hand, it's a documentary account of the making of a film by Clouzot, using interviews, narration, and archival footage to explain why the project was never completed. On the other, it uses the footage Clouzot shot in 1964, as well as camera tests and dramatic reenactments (shot by Bromberg and Medrea), to give viewers a sense of what the film might've been like. However, unlike its nearest precedent, It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles (1993), where the archival material assembled by Bill Krohn, Myron Meisel, and Richard Wilson provided an introduction to the footage shot by Welles in the 1940s (and edited after his death by Ed Marx), in this film, Clouzot's material is intercut with interviews and archival footage. In other words, while Welles' material in It's All True retains its autonomy, here Clouzot's footage is integrated into the structure of the documentary, turning it into another form of archival material.

The plot of Clouzot's L'Enfer echoes Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel Jealousy (1957) in its story of a husband who suspects his wife of cheating based on ambiguous evidence. Inspired by Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), Clouzot intended to incorporate into the film several dream sequences in which the distorted images were symbolic of the husband's distorted view of reality. Prior to shooting, Clouzot and his team spent months doing camera tests, experimenting with a wide variety of techniques, including multiple exposures, lights that circle around the actors' faces, and inverted colours with the actors wearing green-grey makeup so that their skin tones come out looking normal. The tests resemble a cross between the nightmare sequences in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), a Kenneth Anger film, and a late '60s psychedelic head movie.

As in It's All True, the audio from Clouzot's film didn't survive, apart from a twenty minute test of distorted sound effects he intended to use in the dream sequences. (Technically, there never was a soundtrack for Welles' film, since the project was cancelled before he had time to write the narration, much less record it.) Some of Clouzot's sequences, such as the husband (Serge Reggiani) following his wife (Romy Scheider) through the streets of a tiny resort town, are carried entirely by the images, so Bromberg and Medrea have only to add foley effects and a George Delerue-esque score by Bruno Alexiu. For the dialogue scenes, they have actors (Bérénice Bejo as the wife and Jacques Gamblin as the husband) deliver the lines in a generic theatrical setting. Conversely, when the filmmakers interview members of Clouzot's crew, they're seated in front of a green screen with clips from the film and the camera tests playing behind them.

Ultimately, the documentary is of limited interest. The tests Clouzot shot, though sometimes bewitching, are hardly groundbreaking. After all, filmmakers like Lang have been incorporating avant-garde techniques into narrative films since the silent era. (More recently, one can point to some of the trippy effects Martin Scorsese uses in Shutter Island [2010] during the dream sequences, such as Leonardo DiCapprio inhaling a puff of smoke in reverse motion.) Perhaps if Clouzot's footage were more exciting, his inability to complete the film would take on the tragic dimension of a lost movie, like Welles' unfinished Don Quixote. As it stands, the documentary should appeal to people who are interested in film technique, and are intrigued by Clouzot's experiments, but the behind-the-scenes drama isn't very compelling, as it lacks a Quixotic director-hero for us to root for.

The moral seems to be that Clouzot, beginning with a simple idea, lost his bearings during the months and months of camera tests. So when it came time to shoot, he no longer knew what he wanted. Early in the film we're told that Clouzot's American backers, after looking at some of the early tests, decided to give the director an unlimited budget--effectively handing him the rope to hang himself with. Not an easy director to work for at the best of times, Clouzot became truly insufferable on the making of L'Enfer. The director had three camera crews, so that while he was working with his actors on one shot, the other crews could do the next two set-ups, or at least that was idea. What actually happened is that Clouzot wanted to supervise everything, so the other two crews would have to wait while he watched one working. It's fitting that Clouzot's inspiration was 8 1/2, which is about a director who can't make a film; the difference is that Fellini's film is only about a confused director, not the product of one.

Since narrative films are generally less fun to write about, I'll be brief about some of the other films that I saw on my last trip to Montreal:

Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells (2009) is a mind-numbing animated feature from Ireland, set during the time of the Viking invasions. The story essentially boils down to a conflict of father-figures: Will the young hero obey his strict uncle, or follow his dream of becoming a manuscript illuminator with the help of a laid back monk? The only slight pleasures in this long 75-minute film are the two-dimensional animation style, which looks like a cross between a medieval religious icon and a Saturday morning cartoon, and the sound of Brendan Gleeson's voice.

The Messenger (2009) is the disappointingly conventional directorial debut of Oren Moverman, who co-wrote the screenplay for Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. (2007) A returning soldier (Ben Foster) with three months left in the service is assigned to casualty notification under the guidance of an older officer (Woody Harrelson), who believes in doing things by the book (i.e., no touching!). But Foster is more empathetic and gets involved in the life of a young widow (Samantha Morton). Romance and male bonding ensue. Since Moverman isn't doing anything creative stylistically, the entire enterprise rests on the story and characters, which are both terminally familiar.

Jacques Audiard's Un prophète (2009) is a novelistic crime saga set in a French prison. A nineteen year old Arab (Tahar Rahim) arrives in the joint, and is aggressively recruited by a Corsican gangster (Neils Arestrup) to whack a snitch in exchange for protection. Male bonding definitely does not ensue. The film's principal pleasures are the patient unfolding of a complicated narrative spanning several years, and the precise understanding of the ins and outs of the criminal underworld, which both invite comparisons with Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). Although the drab institutional setting of this film is a world apart from the expensive period furnishings of a Hollywood film like Scorsese's, Audiard offsets his documentary aesthetic (handheld camera, shallow depth of field) with magic realist touches. From time to time, the protagonist is visited by the ghost of the dead snitch, who tells him the future. A must-see.

The Kids Aren't Alright: The White Ribbon and Fish Tank

2010-02-26T21:29:00.008-04:00

This entry contains spoilers.

One characteristic distinguishing art movies from Hollywood fare is a tendency to severely restrict the kind of information the viewer has access to, either by withholding exposition or by deliberately leaving some events ambiguous. The former approach has become increasingly popular in recent years, as evidenced by the influence of the Dardenne brothers on films like Julia Loktev's Day Night Day Night and Kim So-Yong's In Between Days (both 2006), and Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding (2007), while the latter dates at least as far back as Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), and possibly has its roots in the early novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet--The Erasers (1953), The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957), In the Labyrinth (1959)--in which the author's meticulous descriptions of the visible invest in every gesture or turn of phrase a number of potential meanings while refusing any definite conclusions. I'm a sucker for this sort of ambiguity, so it's no surprise I'm such a huge fan of Michel Haneke, whose films 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (2000), and Caché (2005) announce their fragmentary, incomplete elusiveness in their very titles.

Haneke's latest film, The White Ribbon (2009), is about a series of mysterious crimes that take place in the town of Eichwalde (located just southwest of Berlin) in the year before the start of the first world war. None of the crimes are ever solved, but the town's school teacher, who narrates the story, eventually comes to suspect the pastor's teenage children, Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) and Martin (Leonard Proxauf). In the film's second scene, the teacher learns that the town's doctor (Rainer Block) was injured in a riding accident when his horse tripped on a wire tied between two trees. In voice-over, the teacher remarks that he found it odd that the girls around Klara, instead of scattering to their homes after class, walked together to the edge of town where the doctor lived--something he didn't assign much importance to at the time, but which in hindsight helps to confirm his suspicions. (The teacher, who isn't given a name, is played as a young man by Christian Friedel, but the narration is delivered by an older actor, Ernst Jacobi, implying that the teacher is looking back on these events after several decades.)

The first thing we hear in the film, over a black screen, is the teacher's voice explaining that he doesn't know if the story he's about to tell is entirely true, as he learned much of it through hearsay and many things remain obscure. This effectively gives the film an out, allowing Haneke to provide us access to private moments between the characters without the teacher having to be present, while still concealing the identity of the person or persons responsible. For instance, I don't know how the teacher could've learned of the intimate details of the doctor's relationships with his two children and the midwife (Haneke regular Susanne Lothar), since all of them disappear near the end of the movie. Similarly, when the camera remains in the corridor while the pastor (Brughart Klaußner) is caning Martin on the other side of a closed door, the choice of camera angle obviously isn't motivated by any character's point of view, since there isn't anyone standing in the hallway.

Child abuse is ubiquitous in the film. When Klara and Martin are late for dinner one night, the pastor explains that they'll have to be caned in front of their younger siblings "if we're to continue living together with mutual respect." He explains this so calmly that some viewers might conclude he isn't such a bad guy. But when the baron's son, Sigi (Fion Mutert), is found hanging upside down and bleeding from being caned, it's pretty obvious who did it and where they got the idea. Later, when the midwife's mentally handicapped son, Karli (Eddy Grahl), is found beaten in the woods, there's a note around his neck explaining that the town's children are being punished for the sins of the parents. As in Caché, the film's theme is how sin is passed down from one generation to the next. (The film's full title is The White Ribbon: A German Children's Story.)

Given the elusive nature of Haneke's plots, his uncompromising seriousness, and the austerity of his style (like all his films, The White Ribbon has no musical score), you wouldn't think of him as a multiplex director. But with Caché, he had a genuine commercial hit. It even played in Halifax, which has no independent cinemas. And The White Ribbon, which could theoretically win Oscar, is playing in Montreal at an AMC multiplex, even though it was shot in black-and-white and has no stars. On the other hand, Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009)--a relatively conventional English-language film in colour, starring the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender (Hunger [2008], Inglourious Basterds [2009])--is playing at Cinéma du Parc, presumably because it was shot in the narrower academy ratio (1.33:1), and no multiplexes have the proper plates to project it.

Arnold's previous film, Red Road (2006), was a Dogme 95 offshoot, based on characters created by Anders Thomas Jensen and Lone Scherfig, that took the notion of delayed exposition about as far as it could go. Working here with her own material, however, the results are more predictable. Set in a public housing complex in Essex, the opening scenes introduce the teenage heroine, Mia (Kate Jarvis), through a series of short, disconnected scenes in which she calls on a friend to apologize (it's never explained what for), head-butts a girl on the street, and attempts to liberate a horse she finds chained up in an empty lot. (That's what you call symbolism.) These scenes have the spontaneous, offhand quality of Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher (1999). But once Fassbender turns up as Mia's mother's hunky new beau, Connor, it becomes painfully obvious where the story is headed. In fact, despite the film's affinities with the Dardennes' Rosetta (1999)--tight, handheld compositions; no non-diegetic music; an angry, teenage brunette from a poor, single-parent household--the movie Fish Tank most resembles in terms of its plot is Scherfig's über-bourgeois An Education (2009).

Like that film, Fish Tank is about a teenage girl who's seduced by an older man with a knowledge of art. (Here, Connor introduces Mia to Bobby Womack.) And in both movies, there's a scene in which the heroine belatedly discovers that the man has a wife in the suburbs. However, it's worth noting the differences between the two films in how this scene plays out. Scherfig's film gives us a brief, expository dialogue scene between the heroine and the man's wife. Conversely, Arnold is an uncommonly gifted visual storyteller. Here, Mia breaks into Connor's house while he's out, watches a home movie of him playing with his daughter, and then urinates on his living room floor. When Connor and his family suddenly return, Mia runs out the backdoor. Then, as she's walking down the street, she impulsively decides to kidnap Connor's daughter. Even though I generally knew where the story was headed, on a moment-to-moment basis, Arnold is able to make her tired material seem reasonably fresh.

Montreal Film Diary or: The Fantastic Mr. Firth

2010-01-31T15:32:00.006-04:00

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

2010-01-14T17:57:00.007-04:00

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.