AFF #1: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Wookie

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)

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)

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)

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'

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.