Montreal Film Diary

Coming six years after her previous film, In the Cut (2003), a commercial thriller starring Meg Ryan that was panned by nearly everyone and which I haven't seen, Jane Campion's Bright Star (2009) is striking in part for the absence of both big stars and an original score (and for the most part, music in general)--the very elements that made The Piano (1993) so commercial. Not that I missed them, mind you. This intimate and subtle film about the unrequited romance between the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) shows that Campion is perfectly capable of getting on without either. The scene where Keats and Brawne kiss for the first time literally made my heart race because the film up till then had been so chaste. And their final goodbye, before Keats sails for Italy (where he would die at the age of twenty-five), is devastating because neither party has any illusions about his coming back. Such exquisite agony doesn't require musical accompaniment.



What's the point of allegory? Does Neill Blomkamp, who directed District 9 (2009), really think that the best way to confront South Africa's Apartheid history is to cloak it in the trappings of an SF-action movie, or is he merely being opportunistic? In the film, aliens arrive in Johannesburg, and a sinister multinational corporation moves them into a slum outside the city. Early on, in an obvious allusion to Apartheid, we see signs forbidding the aliens to enter certain areas. To point out that the film's allegorical approach dehistoricizes Apartheid (the film's backstory has no equivalent for British colonialism) almost seems beside the point, since Blomkamp isn't particularly committed to pursuing the parallels between his story and Apartheid anyway. Unlike the aliens in the film, South Africa's black population didn't have any cool space weapons, and once the characters start talking about (and inevitably using) said weapons, the Apartheid allegory is dropped for the sake of mindless splatter. This shift is even reflected in the style of the film, which begins as a pseudo-documentary with intentionally bad sound and talking head interviews. Gradually, however, this self conscious approach gets phased out in favor of a more conventionally invisible style that at times mimics the look of a video game (a soldier's point of view shot, with a gun protruding into the frame, looks like something out of Doom). The implication is that no one wants to see a film about Apartheid unless it has a ton of violence, and that even if people did, Blomkamp had no real desire to make one.



An anguished cry of "Oy vey!" into the metaphysical abyss, Ethan and Joel Coen's A Serious Man (2009) starts out semi-realistically, but grows increasingly surrealistic as its hero, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stulhbarg), a Jewish physics professor from the midwestern United States, is hit with one crisis after another. Eventually, the accumulation of misfortune becomes a kind of referendum on the universe itself: Is there some kind of divine purpose and meaning in Larry's suffering, or is everything one big cosmic accident? More than anything, Larry desires certainty. Where exactly is the property line separating Larry's lawn from that of his deer hunting Aryan neighbor? Did a South Korean student try to bribe him after failing the midterm? Is his wife leaving him, or are they getting back together? In desperation, Larry turns to a series of rabbis, each one hilariously less helpful than the last. When one rabbi tells him that one can't know everything, Larry fires back that he doesn't seem to know much of anything. The point seems to be that true wisdom consists of accepting how little you really know, and learning to live with this uncertainty.

As impressive as the Coens' earlier films are, with Burn After Reading (2008) and now this film, they've really become master stylists. The confidence and Kubrick-like precision of their framing and editing is almost scary. There's a simplicity and elegance in the way they set up each shot; nothing is done merely to grab our attention. The film has the same rightness of each shot that one finds in great classical studio films by Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, and more recently, James Gray. Which is not to say that their filmmaking lacks flamboyance. If anything, this is probably the weirdest movie the Coens have ever made. It opens with an entirely self contained sequence involving a Dybbuk (Fyvush Finkel), which is shot in a narrower aspect ratio and with an extremely shallow depth of field, like an early sound picture. Larry's dreams are so whacky they make the dream sequences in The Big Lebowski (1998) look downright sane. And the ending is radically ambiguous, upping the uncertainty level from No Country for Old Men (2007) and Burn After Reading. I don't expect to see a better American movie this year.



An Education (2009), the second English language feature by Denmark's Lone Scherfig, is obviously an improvement in craft and storytelling on her earlier films, Italian for Beginners (2000) and Wilby Wants to Kill Himself (2002), even if the screenplay by Nick Hornby demands almost as little of the viewer as District 9, underlining points that have already been well established. As David, the cultured creep who's such a smooth operator that he not only seduces Jenny (Carrey Mulligan), a bland and anemic-looking piece of shiksa jailbait, but her parents as well, Peter Sarsgaard acquits himself nicely. But his mate's girlfriend, Helen (Rosamund Pike), is forehead-slappingly stupid, and not in a funny way like Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) in Singin' in the Rain (1952). And we get a reminder of this fact in every single scene in which she appears, which is surprisingly often for such an unimportant character. When Jenny's grades start to slip in Latin, Helen reassures her that in fifty years it'll be a dead language anyway (the film is set in 1961). Ho, ho. And I'm afraid that Alfred Molina, as Jenny's fuddy-duddy father; Emma Thompson, whom it seems hasn't had a good role since Remains of the Day (1993); Olivia Williams from Rushmore (1998) in schoolmarm overdrive mode; and Sally Hawkins for all of thirty seconds fare little better.

Still, this is decently engaging, though not enough to justify the ecstatic reviews it's been getting, which would only make sense if every reviewer in North America were somehow Mulligan's over-supportive father--something like that movie Twins (1988), where Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger had seven fathers. I kept waiting for David to do something really horrible to Jenny, to damage her permanently some how, but it just never happened. (That the film is based on a memoir by Lynn Barber begs the question: How on earth did she fill an entire memoir with what would make for, at best, an okay short story?) If ever a film needed a rewrite by Lars von Trier, this is it.

On Maturity or: Quentin Tarantino's Arrested Development

If you haven't read David Bordwell's thoughts on Inglourious Basterds (2009) in the second part of his blog entry, "(50) Days of Summer (Movies), Part 2," I highly recommend that you do as it's plainly the best and most detailed analysis of Quentin Tarantino's new film that I've come across. I was a little surprised to see Bordwell call it Tarantino's most "mature" film since Jackie Brown (1997), but what he meant is simply that the film "exploits [Tarantino's] strengths in fresh but recognizable ways." While I can't find anything here to disagree with, I must say that's not how I would've defined maturity in the cinema, and it's got me thinking about some different ways of looking at the issue.

Personally, I tend to think of maturity as an attitude towards content. A film might be considered mature for its philosophical outlook (reviewers routinely praise certain movies for their enlightened humanism), or its representation of history. Robin Wood likes to quote the literary critic F.W. Leaves, who thought that great art was characterized by an "intelligence about life." None of these definitions even remotely apply to Inglourious Basterds, so as much as I admire the film, I can't figure out why Bordwell regards it as less juvenile than Tarantino's previous revenge fantasy, Boulevard de la mort (2007), which he evidently hated.



Oh, the Humanism!

In a defense of Jafar Panahi's Offside (2006)--an exuberant comedy from Iran about a group of teenage girls who get caught trying to sneak into a soccer match disguised as boys--Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "What some critics are calling sentimentality may be simple humanism. Panahi refuses to make a villain out of anyone and I'm not persuaded that demonizing the mullahs who enforce gender apartheid (which bans girls from attending soccer matches, among other things) would have made us any wiser." In other words, Panahi's film rejects the simplistic, black-and-white morality that Tarantino requires to even function.

Tarantino's last three movies have all had villains who are soft-spoken, civilized psychopaths. In Kill Bill (2003-04), the title character (David Carradine) was capable of making a sandwich for his young daughter as well as shooting the heroine (Uma Thurman) in the head on her wedding day. Boulevard de la mort is about a movie stuntman and serial killer (Kurt Russell) who's similarly soft-spoken and genial when he isn't murdering women with his car. And in Inglourious Basterds, we not only get Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who recalls Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) in The Godfather (1972) when he's making a French farmer an offer he can't refuse, but also the young German officer, Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who spends much of the film politely (if insistently) attempting to court the movie's French heroine, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), unaware that she's Jewish. Eventually both characters drop the civility and go totally berserk, each attacking a different blonde woman--Landa at the discovery of a spy; Zoller at Shosanna's rejection of him. Given the film's numerous allusions to fairy stories, perhaps Tarantino sees these characters as big bad wolves dressed in Grandma's clothing. (Is Shosanna's dress supposed to remind us then of Little Red Riding Hood?)



Histoire(s) du cinéma

One of the things that the cinema can do is represent history, which it seems to me often supplies the most potent subjects for any kind of art. Some of my favorite films of the last few years have been Philippe Garrel's Les Amants réguliers (2005), about the events of May '68; Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (2006), about the Dutch Resistance during World War II; Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. (2007), a sort of bio-pic of Bob Dylan; Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes (2006), another World War II film, this one about North African soldiers fighting for France; Lars von Trier's Manderlay (2005), about slavery in America; Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006); Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis (2007), adapted from Satrapi's autobiographical comic book about the Iranian Revolution; Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006), about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam; André Téchiné's Les Témoins (2007), about the AIDs crisis; and Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero (2008), set in Chile during the Pinochet-era. All of the above function as myths about the past.

This kind of myth-making is the explicit subject of Inglourious Basterds. In the first chapter ("Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France"), Landa tells the farmer that he's thrilled about the nickname he's been given by the French populace, "The Jew Hunter"; he's literally become a legend in his own time. Similarly, one of the Basterds has earned the nickname "The Bear Jew," and word of his earlier exploits is what led to the Americans recruiting him in the first place. Myths aren't the same as reality, but I'm a little skeptical of Tarantino's motives for rewriting history in the way that he does here.

When Edward Zwick's Defiance (2008)--which I haven't seen--was released last winter, its director wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times stating that one of his reasons for making the film was to replace the image of Jews as victims during the Holocaust with, I guess, Daniel Craig kicking ass in the forest. And Tarantino has upped the ante here by fabricating a myth about Jews brutalizing Nazis. In any historical event, there's always more than one truth (Zwick's film is, as they say, "Based on a true story"), but Tarantino, by demolishing any pretense of accuracy, lays bare the motive for representing Jews as macho action heroes: He wanted to make a film about the Holocaust that makes us feel good.

Of course, Steven Spielberg did the same thing in Schindler's List (1993), a film that I love. At least Tarantino is being honest about what he's doing, beginning with "Once Upon a Time...," while Spielberg's use of onscreen text to convey factual information--as well as Janusz Kaminski's naturalistic black-and-white cinematography, and the appearance of real Holocaust survivors in the film's final sequence--make the movie feel almost like a documentary. (Of course, documentaries are myths too.) For better and for worse, Inglourious Basterds ultimately has less in common with Schindler's List than The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), including an equivalent for the close-up of the villain's face melting. (Don't get me wrong: I like The Raiders of the Lost Ark a great deal, but "mature" isn't one of the words I'd use to describe it.)



Life, and Nothing More...

The phrase "intelligence about life" could be interpreted any number of different ways, but what Wood means specifically are questions of value: What do we live for? What should we live for? What might we live for? One of his favorite movies is William MacGillvray's Life Classes (1987), which ends with a self-referrential sequence set in a shopping mall. On a TV set under a banner reading "Clearance," we see the film's leading lady, Jacinta Cormier, giving an interview as herself at the premiere of Life Classes, which we're told was sparsely attended. For Wood, this is a profound statement about the debased values of capitalism, which reduces everything to its market value. Therefore, a low-budget film from Nova Scotia without stars is doomed to languish in the clearance bin in order to make room for more commercial fare from Hollywood. (Personally, I'm more inclined to read it as a swipe at Canadians for not supporting Canadian films, as if it were our obligation.)

I don't know if Wood has written anything on Inglourious Basterds, but if he does, I'm sure it'll be worth reading. Perhaps he gave us a preview in his essay on MacGillvray's films, which was published in CineAction! a few years ago. Defending his decision to vote for Life Classes in the 1992 Sight & Sound poll of the ten greatest films, Wood says that he much prefers it to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), which he grudgingly admires for its technique but doesn't find sufficiently intelligent about life. For Wood, that MacGillvray's film offers no formal interest whatsoever is, it would seem, entirely to its credit. To be sure, in the same essay he praises Patrice Chereau's Gabrielle (2005) in passing, calling it undeniably masterful. (I don't have the exact quote with me, but I believe that's correct.) Yet in the piece he wrote about Chereau's film for Film Comment, Wood makes no mention of its aggressively unusual formal strategies, including abrupt switches from colour to black-and-white and silent movie inter-titles. Does he regard these stylistic flourishes as merely empty, Wellesian technique? In the article on MacGillvray, Wood confesses that, while watching Chereau's film, his thoughts often drifted away from the story to the expense of the upscale furnishings and Isabelle Huppert's fat paycheck. He's not claiming that the film would be improved if, like MacGillvray's, it did without the extravagance of Chereau's attractive mise en scène and a charismatic star, but that he prefers Life Classes anyway because it has more resonance. Then again, returning to Inglourious Basterds, maybe he'll surprise me and really enjoy it. Lord knows he's full of surprising opinions.



Conclusion (Development Arrested)

It's possible that Bordwell is defining "juvenile" in a different way than I am when he applies this label to Boulevard de la mort (or Death Proof, if you want to be an American about it), but judging from his phrasing, I don't think that's the case. Somewhat like the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours [2002], Tropical Malady [2004]), the movie is divided into two part of roughly equal length, both telling more or less self-contained stories, and both variations on a theme. In the first half, a group of empty-headed, profoundly uninteresting working class women make boring small talk about obscure pop music from forty years ago until the movie's macho villain, Stuntman Mike (Russell), comes around to kill them all with his car. Tarantino lingers on the grizzly details of the fatal car crash with almost as much relish as he did the women's conversations, replaying the crash several times to show each character's death in turn and in slow motion. In the second half, a group of empty-headed, profoundly uninteresting rich women make boring small talk about obscure car chase movies from thirty years ago until Stuntman Mike returns to harass them. But this time, the women manage to turn the tables on him. After chasing him down in their car while delivering stupid one-liners about tapping Stuntman Mike's ass, they drag him from his car, and he's quickly killed off with a stiletto heel to the face, crushing his skull instantaneously. What's truly alarming about the film is that Tarantino seems to think this adds up to some kind of feminist statement.

The underlying situation is basically the same in Inglourious Basterds with the Jews turning the tables on their Nazi oppressors. Tarantino even announces his solidarity with the Native Americans, I guess, by having the Basterds scalp their victims in homage to the Apache Resistance. That the film is doubtlessly more interesting than Boulevard de la mort doesn't necessarily make it less juvenile.

So while I agree with Bordwell that Jackie Brown is one of Tarantino's most mature films to-date (and I would go so far as to call it the most mature film he's made), my reasoning for this is simply that the characters played by Pam Grier and Robert Forster seem closer to real people than any other characters in any of Tarantino's films. This is in part because they have more conventional jobs (a flight attendant and a bail bondsman, respectively, as opposed to, say, a hit man). And much of the credit for this achievement can likely be traced back to the Elmore Leonard novel, Rum Punch (1992), that the film is based on (which I haven't read), as well as the actors, who bring a real sense of weariness to their scenes together. They're almost too tired and worn out to have a relationship with each other. The film feels like the work of some one who's had some life experience. Inglourious Basterds feels like the work of a young kid who's seen a lot of old movies.

Manifesto for an Ideal Film Festival

If I had my own film festival, I swear that...

* I wouldn't invite any stars. Fuck the red carpet.

* I wouldn't invite any directors to talk about their work. The work speaks for itself.

* There wouldn't be any parties. That's time I could be watching films.

* I wouldn't program any Canadian films unless I actually liked them. Less Can, more Con.

* All tickets for all screenings would cost five dollars. No galas or special screenings. If it costs five thousand won (five bucks) to see a film at PIFF, why should any one have to pay twenty dollars to see a movie at TIFF?

* There wouldn't be any midnight screenings. I don't want to see another zombie movie as long as I live.

* There would not be something for everyone.

Inglourious Basterds

What I liked most about Quentin Tarantino's new film, Inglourious Basterds (2009), is also what I liked about Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), and to a lesser extent, Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004): the slow, patient storytelling; the amount of time he spends on every sequence, milking it for all it's worth--the most obvious legacy on Tarantino's work of his hero, Sergio Leone. Consider the film's long opening sequence, in which a Nazi officer, Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), arrives unexpectedly at a French dairy farm. Landa doesn't come immediately to the point of his visit, but first ingratiates himself with his manners, and then over a glass of milk, talks at length about himself--his nickname, "The Hunter," and what he believes makes him such a good one. It's a terrific sequence, brimming with tension, and the film is full of scenes like it. This approach can backfire, as in Boulevard de la mort (2006), where the characters are all idiots, whose conversations are no more exciting than those you might overhear at a junior high school cafeteria; but when Tarantino is on, he can be very good.

However, I don't think Inglourious Basterds is as satisfying as Pulp Fiction. In that film, the pay-off for each vignette is that almost all the important characters get a second chance at life: Mia (Uma Thurman) is literally resurrected after overdosing on cocaine; Butch (Bruce Willis) squares himself with Marsellus (Ving Rhames) by literally saving the latter's ass; and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) succeeds in changing his life. In this film, the ultimate pay-off (spoiler alert!) is getting to see an American soldier, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), carve a swastika in Landa's forehead, after which Raine chuckles to the camera, in a thick Tennessee brogue, "I think this ma-ight be my massturpiece." End of film, roll credits.

The films has been criticized because it shows Jews acting like Nazis, but Tarantino doesn't stop there; he apparently thinks no better of his audience. The film's climatic sequence is set at a film premiere, and the film within the film is a Nazi propaganda piece about a German soldier who single-handedly picked off about one hundred fifty Allied soldiers. Watching the carnage onscreen, the German audience laughs and cheers with delight--exactly how the crowd that I saw Inglourious Basterds with responded to the scene mentioned in the second paragraph of this blog entry.

Of course, I can already hear one of Tarantino's defenders saying, "But Nazis are evil," period. Indeed, at one point late in the film, when a Jewish movie theatre owner, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), takes pity on a private in the German army (after shooting him several times in the torso), the film equates her empathy with weakness, and it effectively seals her death. The private in question, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who's both the subject and star of the film within the film, is initially made to seem sympathetic (he spends most of the film politely, if insistently, trying to court Shosanna, and at one point leaves the premiere because he doesn't like to be reminded of killing all those men), but in the blink of an eye, he turn into a total psycho when the plot requires it. As Raine puts it near the beginning of the film, "A Nat-zee ain't got no humanity," so presumably it's okay for the audience of this movie to lap it up when, for instance, one of its Jewish-American heroes bashes a Nazi officer's brains out with a baseball bat. I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds, and then I felt like a goon for liking it so much.

Year of the Dragon

After the disastrous reception of Heaven's Gate (1980), Michael Cimino had to wait five years to direct another picture, and like Spike Lee's recent Inside Man (2006), Year of the Dragon (1985) seems intended to show that Cimino could still deliver the goods--that is, make a perfectly conventional cop movie. Ironically, it was only once Cimino abandoned the languorous pacing and Visconti-like spectacle of The Deer Hunter (1978) and Heaven's Gate that he became a mannerist. The plot, with Mickey Rourke as an honest cop taking on corruption in Chinatown, is so threadbare that it's hard to think of anything else besides style as you're watching it. I don't mean to imply that the project is impersonal; in fact, all of Cimino's usual thematic hang-ups have been inelegantly ladled onto the standard genre script, so that the hero, a war veteran of Eastern European descent, keeps saying, "This is just like Vietnam!" Cimino also sets some scenes in Thailand, where parts of The Deer Hunter were shot, and he even manages to work in some mandolin music. It's the sort of film where you can talk about Cimino putting his stamp on the material because all of his auteurist flourishes feel so inorganic.