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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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'

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.