Are the hills going to march off?

Film Socialisme (2010) A Film by Jean-Luc Godard

2012-01-26T13:34:00.000-08:00

Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme recently happened to me. Happen is the right word not only because its robust and fractious sparring of image and sound pummeled me into a state of docile bliss, but also because my general ignorance of the latter half of the director’s career stranded me out at sea (quite literally) in what has clearly been a lifelong drift into a very specific philosophical framework, a set of signature themes and motifs that I have simply not followed. Even then, judging by the plethora of responses from seasoned Godard followers, Film Socialisme is a unanimously demanding, dense piece of filmmaking. Every time I sense myself getting a grasp on one of the many political, philosophical, metaphysical, or socio-cultural insights Godard offers up, it slips from my mind, getting swallowed up by the frenzied mixture of ideas. As such, I can only approach this delirious film in fragments of thought, and a proper, coherent essay will have to come much later after plenty of viewings.

1.) Before Godard dives into any of his more complex musings, the film’s deeply strange image-sound relationship asserts itself. At 81, Godard is now utilizing with unapologetic force techniques that would pass off as the very primitive failings of a young, first-time filmmaker. In the first of Film Socialisme’s three sections - which possibly aims to evoke a 21st century Noah’s Ark - the images are capturing with varying formats and levels of fidelity: crisp, sterile HD, muddy prosumer cameras, and even what appears to be intensely distorted cellphone footage. Further fraying the mise-en-scene is Godard’s soundtrack, which is probably his most daring invention: offscreen voices compete with each other in the left and right speakers, their entrances and exits not alleviated by fade-ins and fade-outs, all while crunchy environmental sounds caught by low-quality microphones and non-diegetic snippets of melodramatic music (shades of Contempt) fill out the mix. It's destabilizing and ugly, and there's no reason why it should possess such unlikely beauty at times, but it does. It's also the initial hint towards Godard's attempt to understand and reflect the technological anarchy of the contemporary world.

2.) The film harbors a complicated relationship with time and history. The cruisers in the first section are sightseeing Barcelona, Palestine, Egypt, and Naples, among other European and Middle Eastern territories with particularly turbulent histories that have been represented time and again through images. In approximating the surfaces and textures of modern life, Godard is simultaneously making hints towards the mutual obligation to acknowledge the past. Yet he is also suggesting, through the countless archival images of past dictatorships and wars (Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini all figure into the film's essayistic, aggressively Eisenstinean final section), that some of the travesties of history may still exist in less instantly identifiable forms. Money proves to be the fetish object for the passengers aboard the ship and for Godard's camera, an on-board Christian mass is stifled of its spirituality amidst the schizophrenic clamor of the neighboring activities, a hysterical young woman falls, perhaps to drown, into a swimming pool on a lower deck of the ship and no one seems to take notice, and in the film's second section a news crew gently terrorizes the casual bucolic lifestyle of a family with some connection to a local election. Little here is untainted by what Godard implies are the shortcomings of the day: greed, overindulgence, insularity, ideological tunnel vision, and general ignorance. Running through the film are questions left dangling in thin air. Do we merely repeat history? If so, how do we break the cycle? If not, are we better off for it?

3.) As for the future, Film Socialisme appears to preserve a great deal of hope. Caught within the vicious montage are occasional shots of comparative tranquility that are all the more lovely for their brevity. Several meditate on the ebbing and flowing of waves created by the ship's movement, one captures a woman framed within the shadow of a pinwheel, a visual emblem of the inexorable flow of time, and one that shows the golden sun resting on the horizon above the sea is downright Spielbergian or perhaps Felliniesque in its visual romanticism (Empire of the Sun and the latter's similar cruise flick And the Ship Sails On both come to mind). What these images share is a sense of looking beyond, past the veneer of the high-class cruise and past the political machinations of single family. They seem to possess a hope that perhaps the beauty of nature will cure things, perhaps it's enough to clear the slate and send the world on a better path.

4.) For Godard, this "better path" seems particularly Brakhagian. In his "Metaphors on Vision," Brakhage famously wrote:

"Imagine a eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception...Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'"

In presenting the film in a variety of languages with only fragmentary subtitles (in "Navajo English") that indicate only key words and act more as think pieces than translations of what's actually being said, Godard is reaching for a manner of perception that is more visceral, encouraging his audience to think on terms divorced from language, our easiest and most common route to comprehension. Resisting the alleged English-subtitled version that's been floating around on the internet seems the correct course of action, because such a linguistic specificity would squander the universal language Godard's attempting to impart. (Which is somewhat of a curiosity in itself; embedded within the film's unusual subtitling gimmick is also a critique of the loss of multilingualism, particularly in America, and the increasingly narrow scope of language-speaking worldwide. Perhaps a world in which everyone knows every language is ideal, but if that's unrealistic, a world where we can communicate through the primal vernacular of images is an adequate secondary option.)

5.) It’s no surprise that Godard declines to show up at press events and premiere screenings of his films and no longer bothers to maintain a public persona at all. There's so much about this film that indicts the idea of the single author, which is rather ironic given Godard's place in the pioneering of auteur theory. Film Socialisme offers up a stew of familiar images from the history of the world and the history of cinema (the Odessa Steps, the Holocaust, random spy characters who have seemingly escaped from one of Godard's 60's films, famous singer Patti Smith) and asks the viewer to assemble the pieces in whatever way they please. It's remarkably generous and not a tad lazy, since Godard's obvious labor assembling his feverish montages is noticeable throughout. That he has designed his film in such a way to provoke as much contemplation from the audience as possible is a refreshing decision, and it leads to an exhilarating, eye-opening, and truly democratic piece of cinema. Oh, and it's laugh-out-loud funny too.

Screening Notes #9

2012-01-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

Tokyo Sonata (2008): That so much of this film is eloquent, clever, and lovely makes its bombastic third-act derailing all the more disheartening. Kiyoshi Kurosawa manages at times to have an extremely light, yet gently unsettling touch, a tonal ambiguity that renders contemporary Japan simultaneously comforting, mundane, threatening, and otherworldly. His direction is supremely economical; like the best of Ozu, he chooses the ideal spot for his camera in a domestic space and lets action play out on several planes. The drama here is typically quotidian but also suggests life out of sync, the way every day would occur if the Earth were tilted slightly off axis. Kurosawa's premise speaks to that instability: a Japanese family unit is pulled apart by a father's sudden unemployment and two sons' desires to ignore their parents' conservative leanings by learning piano and heading to war, respectively. The film is riffing on classic Japanese concerns of tradition vs. modernity and the decline of filial piety, but its third act feels so overwrought because it leans too heavily into the melodrama bubbling beneath those themes. Still, a highly promising and engaging feature.

Last Life in the Universe (2003): In some circles, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang has been referred to as being among the crop of "contemplative" filmmakers that have arisen in the past decade. But judging by Last Life in the Universe, he couldn't seem further removed from the aesthetic disciplines of directors like Tsai Ming-Liang and Lisandro Alonso. Though it appears rather glum and controlled on the surface, the film is defined by the feeling of almost bursting apart constantly with the desire to conform to genre codes. Among the motifs Ratanaruang flirts with: the sad romance film as practiced by American Beauty, the road movie without a specific goal, and the punchy, silly gangster film. With a quiet, free-floating protagonist, a thinly sketched quasi-romantic interest, and a dead-serious Takashi Miike disguised as a mobster, Last Life in the Universe verges on being goalless, dropping its greatest strengths just as they start to accumulate into something meaningful to meander on gratuitous subplots. The film's central performances hold the attention, but Ratanaruang's flickers of visual invention and dramatic skill aren't enough to make it very substantial.

Paprika (2006): As far as wacky, off-the-wall surrealist visions go, this is pretty bottom-of-the-barrel. Emptily postmodern, mind-numbingly winky, and just plain unimaginative, Paprika's proto-Inception construction (yo, what if we go inside someone's dreams and just keep going, and the layers keep building, man?) takes it through a barrage of amateurish dream imagery and half-baked 21st century talking points (virtuality, globalization, technological progress, and the dissolving boundaries they create) en route to some gnarly animated spectacle: curious Big Man Japan omens and Miyazaki hodgepodges galore. The film approximates the trigger-happy fanboy sufficiently, but its aspirations to the zeitgeist are pretty laughable. Perhaps if Satoshi Kon dropped the conceptual gimmicks altogether and just let his visual sensibility run wild...well, that still wouldn't make him a good filmmaker.

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989): As Cliff Stern - a world-weary documentary filmmaker trudging his way through a dour gig constructing what is ostensibly a deified portrait of shamelessly big-headed television producer Lester (Alan Alda) - Allen is operating as a subtle variation of his familiar type here; he's often feeling too defeated to toss around one-liners hastily, and he's too sensitive to let his big personality explode to the surface all the time. As a result, it's a moving, unpredictable performance that feels shortchanged whenever the film obeys its rigid structural conceit to follow the story of Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau). Both men are dealing with marital apathy in very serious ways, but Landau is no Allen, and the film's even division between the two performers is a detriment to its own sense of propulsion. I like the ambition of Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen's willingness to tackle so directly the value of ethics and spirituality in a crumbling social landscape, but a simple close-up of Allen's uncharacteristically wrenching expression of sadness and defeat upon losing his lover towards the end of the film says more about this issue than any of the film's larger designs could.

The Big Chill (1983): The Big Chill has the ensemble precision of a great Linklater and the stylistic nonchalance of a late Ford. It's a very warm, loving film, all about the euphoria one feels when meeting up with a bunch of old friends, and equally about the regrets and bitterness that can rise to surface in such a scenario. One senses that these actors have brought a significant amount of personal passion to the project, filtering their own life dramas through their characters without descending into sentimentality. Moreover, it's a very American film, treating companionship, heartache, desire, and loss through a multitude of specific pop-cultural tropes: The Band, University of Michigan football, an old television show that's meant to evoke Baywatch, etc. I briefly considered revealing my 2011 top ten list through ideal double feature possibilities, and this would have fit nicely alongside Putty Hill; both films illuminate the positivity that can spring from devastating loss, and their greatest features are their denials of easy message-making.

Ring (2007): Experimental filmmaker Robert Todd refracts the lazy mid-afternoon stillness of an urban playground through double and triple exposures, macro lenses, and high-contrast film stock and stumbles upon some sublime imagery in the 12-minute Ring. In one instance, two shots of blurred undergrowth - one tilting up and one tilting down - are layered atop one another to create a mysterious visual illusion of perpetual motion, the direction of which ceases to matter. It's fitting, because the film's elegant capturing of mood distills the space into an abstract zone where time and space are negligible. This is the definitive cinematic expression of the feeling of being in a park on a quiet afternoon.

Starsky and Hutch (2004): Two or three funny jokes (the "do it" scene really stands out), an outrageous cameo or impersonation here and there (Snoop, I'm looking at you, though you did a fine job), and an insultingly generic/lunatic Asian supporting male doesn't make a good movie. Todd Phillips (unthinking perpetrator of aforementioned qualities), take note.

Zodiac (2007) A Film by David Fincher

2012-01-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

The analog precursor to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's endless barrage of digital facts and details can be found in Zodiac. Both films share the central conceit of a serial killer investigation and both chart similar processes of individuals becoming subsumed by their respective cases. That Zodiac's case isn't solved and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's is, and that the timeline of the former covers decades and the latter a single Scandinavian winter, is a reflection of the technological junctures and speeds of life of the time periods, not necessarily an indication of the differing impacts of investigation on the thinking mind during those time periods. David Fincher is chiefly fascinated by time and how the progress of human resources and knowledge capitalizes on the elasticity of it (observing the two films side-by-side produces an overpowering cumulative effect that neither film could achieve singularly). But if The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is ultimately the slight regression of Fincher's skills that I claimed it in my review, it's because Zodiac's aesthetic and thematic heft take it somewhere far beyond what the script can offer, and because Fincher is interested in not only detailing the sense of time and emotion being backgrounded by an accumulation of investigative matters but also in expanding upon that foundation to riff on the epistemology of knowledge, the flexibility of our understanding of what constitutes truth, and the ways in which abstract fear spreads across a large group of people, problem-solving becomes obsession, and time manages to resolve the unresolved.

All of which is to say that Zodiac is the film, despite its placement roughly in the middle of the director's oeuvre, that Fincher's surrounding work builds to and erects a foundation for. Fincher's four early films are about obsession in one way or another, and Robert Graysmith's (Jake Gyllenhaal) search for the Zodiac killer of Southern California from the late 60's to the late 80's is an evocation of obsession at its purest and most costly (in terms of time, attention, labor, family relationships, etc.). Moreover, every film after Zodiac is about the inexorable march of time in one way or another, and Zodiac represents time at its heaviest and most burdensome; every second that ticks by is another second that a savage killer is on the loose. Finally, all of Fincher's films are honed in on process, and Zodiac unflinchingly depicts nearly every step of approximately twenty years of a process that is, technically speaking, ongoing to this day. The film takes the director's many obsessions and crystallizes them into a compulsively watchable 2-1/2 hour investigation that never strays from comprehensively (and indeed obsessively) augmenting its thematic import in every frame.

What elevates Zodiac above the standard procedural or thriller is its deliberate denial of genre conventions. The film's structure is its obvious idiosyncrasy: rather than helping to get progressively closer to a solution, the fastidious research in Zodiac only complicates the characters' investigations, taking them further and further away from identifying the titular killer. As the film continues, the Zodiac - already a mysterious, shadowy presence at the beginning - retreats exponentially from view, becoming more and more of an abstraction so that by halfway through the film the characters are ineffectively chasing an absence. After an outburst of murders in Vallejo, Napa County, and a San Francisco suburban district, respectively, that scatter the film's first hour, the Zodiac soon vanishes from criminal behavior and public awareness, squeezing the determination from the police force - headed by Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) - in the process. The killer's fading from notoriety presents a complex police scenario that necessitates a redefinition of justice. For one, Toschi can't place the pursuit of a man who was once a murderer and now poses little ostensible threat above more relevant contemporary crimes. However, no murderer on the loose is ever safe, nor is the idea of a murderer going unpunished for his crimes remotely just. Toschi must resign from an understanding of time and history as a continuum, always weighing on the present, to something static. Time, in this scenario, becomes directly entangled with the relative need for justice.

When Toschi forces himself to drop the case, Graysmith is there to pick it up. Realizing that the past never goes away, and that danger is ever-possible no matter how removed it is from the present, Graysmith continues the investigation into the Zodiac, not exactly picking up where the detectives left off but rationalizing his own makeshift methods. In seeking the assistance of Toschi and the other policemen previously on the case - Jack Mulanax (Elias Koteas) and Ken Narlow (Donal Logue) - Graysmith gets a lot of backlash lobbed at his face, and Gyllenhaal conveys the nerdy teenage problem-solver disguised as a bored thirtysomething cartoonist dutifully. Also, as the lone everyman in top billing, Graysmith and his family represent a microcosm of the city's free-floating anxiety and seduction towards the case, itself a microcosm of a post-9/11 America looming with fear at the mere utterance of the word "terrorist" (released six years after the tragedy, the film's contemporary relevance is potent, if not the least bit overstated). In limited screen time, Chloë Sevigny as Graysmith's wife Melanie lends conviction and poignancy to the slow decay of familial intimacy brought about by her husband's obsessive-compulsive research.

The personal disruptions caused by the investigation are all the more troubling given the lack of real progress made. Red herrings come to define the narrative's activity: a celebrity lawyer (Brian Cox) connects to the Zodiac via telephone on live television and is predictably abandoned at the meeting they set up, Toschi, Mulanax, and Narlow interview a ridiculously applicable and deliberately doubt-arousing suspect in Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch) only to find his fingerprints don't match their records, a letter sent directly to the newspaper office from the alleged Zodiac after a long hiatus from murders is only a hoax, and Graysmith's visit to the house of a droopy, mysterious man matching many of his suspicions turns into a haunting near-kidnapping (at least in Graysmith's mind) that proves meaningless to the case, among many other minor and distracting diversions. Fincher documents the unique texture of analog journalism during the time - conducting interviews, group analysis of printed documents, rummaging through labyrinthine libraries of ancient newspapers and files - as well as the ways in which the many characters cope with the relative tediousness of the process: Toschi grows disenchanted and tired, Graysmith more enthusiastic, and fearful crime reporter Paul Avery (a typically actorly, irritatingly Deppian Robert Downey Jr.) unfailingly resorts to drugs and alcohol (when an airline stewardess designates the last few rows of a plane as smoking rows, it's no surprise when Avery hobbles back). One of the director's greatest strengths is in intimately connecting the various tics of characters to their milieus.

Like The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and, to a lesser extent, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button after it, Zodiac evokes a specific time and place with grace and precision, simultaneously rooting its drama in a rigid network of street names, office buildings, and moody nocturnal neighborhoods and its characters in perfectly tailored suits, retro ties, and earth-toned sweaters. The film is leisurely about getting into the thick of the plot, opening with a lovely horizontal tracking shot down on a moonlit suburban panorama animated by fireworks, succinctly capturing the romanticism of July 4th in a small town. Next, it travels to "Lover's Lane," a popular Vallejo makeout spot where a young couple (Lee Norris and Ciara Hughes) lounges in their lustrous sports car. The dim, noirish lighting here is exceptional, lending an ominous sense of foreboding to the scene while preserving strong visual clarity. When the Zodiac arrives to swiftly light them up, the disruption to the small town idyll is harsh and jarring, and it's only then that Zodiac announces its clinical sense of purpose and highlights the concisely developed setting as merely incidental. A scene shortly thereafter where another couple's relaxing picnic is ruined by the Zodiac's presence offers a similar walloping transition from repose to despairing violence and also displays Fincher's tonal proficiency in sunlight as well as streetlight. The script makes it very clear where the third murder occurs, and from then on any utterance or image of the street names becomes a palpable omen.

In its final hour, Zodiac becomes something quite distinct from what its initial setup predicts. Fincher's pacing of the narrative becomes increasingly unpredictable, as momentous scenes that appear to be building to a crescendo recede into cuts that take the narrative one, four, or seven years ahead. The film seems to be insistent upon not providing the audience any dramatic resolution, any feeling that justice has been properly served. Not only does the structure mirror the unsuccessful investigation, it also expresses how the passage of time has come to be malleable in light of such a pile-up of anonymous facts and faulty leads. Fincher is problematizing the idea of definitively knowing anything in this world, of having any grasp on the "truth." Furthermore, it questions the very nature of truth; is it something that must be backed up by conclusive evidence, or can it be supported by mere emotional certainty? If Graysmith's ambiguous final scene, where he stares down Arthur Leigh Allen - his favorite suspect - in the resolutely mundane atmosphere of a hardware store, suggests the latter, then it's a form of truth that receives no observable reward. Allen remains innocent in the eyes of the law, but it's the feeling that Graysmith's correct, that the unpunished Allen is indeed the Zodiac, that provides the film its chilling final punctuation. Beyond that, Zodiac is just thrillingly good narrative filmmaking, maintaining a firm grasp on the specifics of its large ensemble even as they are carried along by a maddening case that takes decades and feels like a lifetime.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) A Film by David Fincher

2012-01-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

At this point, the material that spawned Stieg Larsson's best-selling novel, a Swedish film adaptation, and now Hollywood pulp-whiz David Fincher's version has been beaten to death, sucked of any element of surprise or intrigue that might have initially accompanied its narrative contrivances. So unusual it is that the shallowest, murkiest, most uninspiring story gets the repeat treatment, the full media makeover. I should pose from the outset that I'm not too crazy about Niels Arden Oplev's original film, a grungy and exposition-laden bore that revels in confused sexual politics, and judging by that disinterest I can't be too sure I'd find much to love in the book either. So it's fascinating, and quite indicative of old-fashioned auteurist theory, that Fincher, despite his inability to replenish narrative excitement, is largely able to transcend the questionable concerns of the prior versions and make the material sing in a distinctly Fincherian manner. Yet at the same time, it's bizarre and slightly disappointing that Fincher has chosen to direct The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at this stage of his career, right when one suspected he was exiting serial killer territory with The Social Network. The result is a work that feels like it's dislocating internally from a simultaneous maturation and regression.

Perhaps more than any other contemporary mainstream filmmaker, Fincher’s latest films reflect the zeitgeist in a very direct, uncritical manner. Extending the material's understated digital vs. analog subtext much further, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo often appears to be exclusively about modern methods of rapid information retrieval and transfer, with its convoluted thriller premise a mere vehicle through which to observe these manners in contrast to old-fashioned (and in this film, old-fashioned might just mean yesterday) modes of investigation. The dichotomy is rather bluntly manifested in the film's two central characters, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). Blomkvist is the midlife everyman stuck in the mud of print journalism tactics such as interviewing and paper filing, meanwhile fumbling around with the technology of the modern world, while Salander is the no-nonsense techno-geek seasoned in Apple products and Google who can wrangle double the information Blomkvist can dig up in a week in a matter of seconds (the overt diametrical relationship, when played for belly laughs, is one of the film's subtlest strengths.) The film moves at a breathless rate, plotting the investigatory chasm between Blomkvist and Salander as it grows increasingly pronounced.

Fincher's particular manner of plotting, however, is unlike many other director's. He's not concerned with repeatedly taking stock in the emotional and psychological progression of his characters. Instead, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo files information like the laptops it regularly pays visual attention to; that is, with mechanical precision and organization. Blomkvist's habitual search for cellphone signal functions primarily as a logical step in his communication process, a cumulative time-waster, and only secondarily as an indication of the man's archaic, clumsy character, his tendency to always be one step behind the gadgets he uses. Salander's systematic grabbing of a Coca-Cola before she sits down to crunch keys is emphasized as the constant initial step in her research routine, not necessarily as a thirst quencher or as a beverage that she has taken a liking to. And finally, here's the key idea: Blomkvist and Salander's relationship is seen first as a working relationship, a meeting of two minds to solve a case, and only then as a relationship between two human beings with unique emotions. Indeed, Fincher seems to be positing that stopping for just one moment to analyze, to ask why, is to be disingenuous to the nature of our contemporary global network, where information moves fast and pausing means falling behind or losing comprehension.

The film is propulsive for this very reason. Fincher's habit of cutting scenes before they have "ended," of showing a great deal of specific details but leaving out more salient narrative chunks, ensures that the viewer must keep up to maintain a grasp of the narrative's progress. As a mystery thriller, the film operates unconventionally; the eventual solution to the disappearance of blonde bombshell Harriet Vanger (Moa Garpendal) from her family's island estate and to the rapist and murderer dwelling within that cosmetically safe family environment is unsurprising and ultimately insignificant, as the investigative processes shown are so detailed that nothing registers as a shock. Craig and Mara inhabit their roles so thoroughly - Craig a casually probing, effortlessly easy-going guy with the conservative stylishness of a J. Crew model and Mara a slinky, bold, jolty specimen - that there is little need to question who they are, or what they might do in any given situation. Fincher's characters are defined here by a sense of being lived-in, of not feeling an urge to change for anyone or anything, which makes the analogy of them as pieces of hardware performing automatic functions all the more irresistible. His stylistic methods follow suit; much like a computer, his compositions find the symmetry and order in the messiness of the world, and when the camera moves, it moves smoothly and slickly, eschewing evidence of a human touch.

There are casualties, too, to this fast, coded, information-transfer approach to storytelling. That the film finds its emotional riches only in its final minute (more on this shortly) is both a brilliant tactic and a disservice to what comes before. The script's aversion to getting close to its characters even as they get closer to one another inevitably produces types rather than people, which becomes an issue when Fincher approaches socio-cultural diagnosis. Salander's real complexity as a character is in her concealed vulnerability, in the emotional restrictions she imposes on herself to deny her own desires. Because she spends so much of the film practicing this social abstinence, she veers dangerously close - with her fingerless gloves and lanky physique - to a clichéd computer hacker, as well as to an affirmation of the audience's preconceived notions of what a garbed-in-black goth chick is: cold, insular, violent, and armed with a nasty tongue. Neither does her grotesque manipulation at the hands of her lawyer-cum-guardian Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen) and subsequent revenge go beyond shallow wish-fulfillment, despite Fincher's best efforts to keep the scenes direct and unglamorous. Not to mention Stellan Skarsgård's sick freak is everything Hollywood wants a sick freak to be: smarmy, chubby, clammy, initially welcoming (Skarsgård treats Craig to fine wine when he first meets him) and then sinister, and resolutely Aryan (that is, Nazi). Thus, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's macabre scenarios have a regressive core to them that Fincher's uncritical approach fails to crack.

But then again, even in the context of Fincher's characteristically sly ways, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo marks the first of his films where the complicated plot is this much of a ruse (that doesn't grant its missteps freedom, but it does downplay their importance). One might call these current Fincher films melancholy cyber romances, relatively sad films about how the endless build-up of information and connections in the modern world - specifically of a digital, programmed nature - paradoxically shields people from one another. Fincher's addition of the book's final scene (which Oplev curiously left out), wherein Salander buys a leather jacket of sentimental value for Blomkvist but throws it out upon seeing him romantically entangled with his previous assistant, Erika Berger (Robin Wright), is so powerful precisely because affect is avoided throughout the rest of the film, and its inclusion seems entirely designed to capitalize on this void. At this point, in this moment of downtime from the case, it's too late, just as Mark Zuckerberg's moment of downtime from the ceaseless growth of his international web phenomenon allows him to indulge a belated instance of reaching out towards his lost love. In a cinematic universe where the private is this public, these characters either do not realize their emotional connections or are unwilling to acknowledge them for fear of falling behind in a digital race. Salander knows that if she breaks the calculated facade she has built up and falls for Blomkvist because she will leave herself vulnerable to pain. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo concludes with a sharp feeling of sadness and loss entirely because a character has decided to make a sudden change in their external presentation, and, in effect, has become faulty data.

Barry Lyndon (1975) A Film by Stanley Kubrick

2012-01-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

Barry Lyndon, despite its superficial appearance as a departure for the great director, is Stanley Kubrick's immaculate, thought-provoking attempt to grapple with history, nature, storytelling, philosophy, war, and the follies of man, all themes that had come to define his work up to that point and beyond. The film, concerning the rise and fall of the titular figure in eighteenth-century Europe, is sparse, detached, and staid on the surface, comprising few of the cosmetic qualities - overt stylistic brio, provocation, explosive moments - associated with Kubrick. Yet its surface only disguises its extraordinary depth, which to some extent is also nothing new for Kubrick (think of the labyrinthine coded language referencing the Apocalypse in The Shining, or the casual black humor of Dr. Strangelove in lieu of a fictional military catastrophe all too feasible), but it's perhaps more understated in its idea delivery than any of his other films. In many ways, Kubrick flatters the conventions of a respectable period piece: a well-spoken, literary third-person narration by Michael Hordern, breathtaking costumes, sweeping scope, and linear, episodic progression. But a closer look yields subtle, significant mutations to these familiar tropes, all of which drastically alter the implications of the drama.

If there's one key subtext in the film that separates it from the conventional period piece, it's Kubrick's keen awareness of the nature of the material - drawn from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray - as historical, and therefore imaginary, even deceptive. Barry Lyndon is always sensitive to the fallibility of any attempt to narrativize history, using deliberate aesthetic maneuvers to remove the audience from the spell of dramatic involvement and belief. Its meticulous recreations of paintings which are themselves staged scenes, its hyper-articulate narrator who undermines the onscreen action and effectively stomps out suspense, and its propensity to zoom back and subsume its characters into flat painterly tableaus are all methods of drawing attention to the idea of history as illusory representation, a fitting analogue to Redmond Barry, a man similarly prone to “representing” different versions of himself, none of which can be said to be the real thing. Barry (Ryan O'Neal), exemplifying what must have been a pivotal belief in the notion of class mobility in 18th century Europe, starts as an ignoble Irish farmhand lusting clumsily after his gold-digging cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton) and subsequently becomes a British soldier, a Prussian soldier, a temporary surrogate husband to a lonely country widower, a wandering gambler with a rich Irish sidekick, a husband to the gorgeous and wealthy Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), a step-father to the jealous and vengeful Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali), a real father to Bryan Patrick Lyndon (David Morley), and an aging, lonely, anonymous member of the European financial elite.

All the while, the film's construction keeps the audience several steps ahead of Barry's inevitable rise-and-fall progression, making pre-ordained and inconsequential what might feel surprising and remarkable if pared down to its essential narrative movements. On the surface, Barry appears to suspend great courage in fighting a duel with the suitor of his cousin Captain John Quin (Leonard Rossiter), fantastic bravery in participating in a head-to-head battle in an open field, supreme cunning in escaping the British Army and eventually the Prussian Army, clever forward-thinking in his victorious gambling pursuits, and impressive charm in his wooing of Lady Lyndon. However, the film incessantly pries apart the idyllic appearances of Barry's life, revealing them to often be the products of little more than ignorance, absurdity, and fraudulence, and it does so largely through two contrapuntal elements of its cinematic expression: Kubrick's images, slow, observant, clinical, deprived of internal spontaneity, always squeezing the life out of otherwise romantic scenes, and especially Hordern's narration, which can be gently sympathetic but is more often ironic, prescient, and scathing, creating a small mockery out of a man who believed himself to be of utmost fascination and prestige. Crucially, the narrator is also fixated on mortality and fate, mirroring Kubrick's largely panoramic viewpoints with his dry pronouncements that reveal an awareness of the dwarfing tendency of the vast physical world, the brutality of its treatment to single human beings in a complex network of large groups.

As such, Kubrick’s film is an acknowledgment of the power of historicizing and storytelling (Hordern engages in both) as means for putting into perspective truths broader than the scope of individual lives, and as a correlative it recognizes the power of artifice in ignoring matters of infinity, mortality, and nature. The society Barry climbs through is defined by acts of performance, ritual, and fakery, with no distinctions made between the Irish peasantry he sprouts from and the aristocratic high-class he ultimately finds himself locked in. Barry's duel with Captain Quin is revealed to be an elaborate hoax, something designed by the referees (members of Barry's extended family) to drive Barry out of the town and allow Nora and Quin's marriage to run smoothly, which ultimately succeeds in blinding Barry to his own failings. The machinations of Barry in the Prussian Army - lying, acting, faking sincerity and allegiance to the military - are normally intercepted by the effortlessly utilitarian Captain Potzdorf (Hardy Krüger) and waged against Barry in some way. The wealth earned from poker and chess on the road comes initially from cheating and only then from acquired skill and insight, and still it's a pastime bereft of social interaction and emotional connection. Kubrick is suggesting that these performances and rituals function as tools for blinding one's awareness to the cosmos, no matter how - and sometimes because of how - absurd and unproductive they are. On the other hand, stories, or retroactive perspectives, are the only way of realizing the essential insignificance of man in a larger scheme of nature.

Kubrick's harsh critique and minimization of his characters is coupled with a paradoxical sympathy, a level of genuine feeling for these misguided and mismanaged figures. A key distinction must be made: in the face of all these people suspending doubt and disbelief and convincing themselves that what they’re doing is dignified and true, Kubrick expresses regret rather than hostility. He feels sadness and pity for Barry, whose biggest shortcomings are his immodesty, his boundless materialism, and his inability to define his tangible goals for happiness and value. In an endless grasp for a vaguely shaped satisfaction, Barry cannot accurately contextualize his life even as the steps he takes to realize his desires are continually thwarted by uncaring external forces. When he's not refusing to acknowledge the troubles facing him, he's dropping the blame on someone in his close proximity, leading to a warped vision of social behavior and upward mobility that dictates the evaporation of love from his life. In his wake, he leaves people bumbling in depression, anxiety, or rage. The point of greatest sympathy here is Lady Lyndon, who Marisa Berenson plays as a melancholic ghost somehow detached from Barry's life before she even enters it, a stiffly and perfectly decorated object floating silently through the simultaneously opulent and underfurnished spaces of the Lyndon estate.

This unerring regret for the courses of action taken in Barry Lyndon's stuffy milieu extends from the individual to the collective, from the private to the public, and from the small-scale to the large-scale. Much of the film's guiding principles can be culled from its final onscreen text, wittily deemed an "epilogue": It was in the reign of George the III that the above named personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now. Kubrick's reliance upon the reverse zoom to move from intimate moments to dehumanizing master shots (often the only camera "movement" in the film, likely because it suggests a museum viewer scanning a composition on a wall) is a way of proposing this essential equality from our backwards-looking perspective, the ultimate interchangeability of these individuals within this particular moment in history, destined to be washed away with the flow of time. Thus, their frivolous concerns and rash behaviors are all the more regretful for failing to create distinctions among the pack.

Similarly, the text of the epilogue indicates that although Barry is ostensibly the center of the story, his narrative is much like those other figures that dot the beautiful horizon. Lord Bullingdon, who eventually duels with Barry after his Freudian complex fizzles out and reaches its logical conclusion, is finally likened to Barry despite his role in orchestrating his downfall, what with his outsized ambition and trivial ruses (he devises a complicated plan just to get Lady Lyndon out of her own mansion before he arrives, ironically, to take the place of the man he hates). Kubrick implies that the many acts of dueling (three are shown in the film), so petty in motivation and so devastating in execution, are no different than acts of large-scale war, which trivialize human life with the same outrageous precision. It's the ease with which the idiotic behaviors of small, insignificant individuals can come to permeate vast quantities of people that supplies the real sadness and and poignancy to Barry Lyndon's tragedy.

2011 Round-Up

2012-01-01T15:04:00.002-08:00

It's ironic given the increasing efficiency of international media transportation via means both cyber and televisual that I found myself so frustrated in 2011 by the dearth of films available to my eyes. As countless tantalizing year-end lists have suggested, it's not an issue of quality but of access. Now, I can't entirely take the blame off myself (as I've still avoided jumping on the Fandor and Netflix trains), but there is still a sense that the major cinephiliac distributors have dropped the ball on what are clearly the most intriguing auteur statements of our time: Film Socialisme, The Turin Horse, This is Not A Film, Mysteries of Lisbon, etc. (Does any film fan not want to see these?) What's more, I live in a major city, not a tiny rural pinprick on a map. Even the stellar efforts of the Harvard Film Archive, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Brattle Theater, and ArtsEmerson couldn't account for the relative "obscurities" of contemporary cinema that litter every festival round-up (for an idea, of what I'm talking about, see my heap of unseen films at the bottom of this post). Thus, while I could have done a slightly better job of keeping up with the here-and-now, I am ultimately left without having seen enough this year to warrant a comprehensive, honest list.

The other issue with 2011 was that of what I did see, the films I was disappointed by or indifferent to massively outweighed the real gems. Highly anticipated fare like Alps, Drive, Melancholia, and Shame fell flat for me, while others possessing admirable thematic ambition and depth like Hugo and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy just nearly failed to attain the special spark emblematic of truly great cinema. Fortunately, there was always both the near and distant past to turn to, and as a result I stumbled upon some of 2010's best works (see my revised list here towards the bottom of said post - and yes, that includes Uncle Boonmee, Le Quattro Volte, Meek's Cutoff, and Certified Copy, which, because they were released to the world in 2010, are 2010 films in my mind), many of the finest works of transnational Asian cinemas of the past decade thanks to superb scholar and professor Shujen Wang, and a random assortment of other goldmines from the history of the medium. There's a ranked list of this hodgepodge (excluding the 2010 stuff) at the bottom of this post as well, and you can be sure it's more rewarding than any makeshift 2011 list I could have scraped up. All of that said, I did find myself loving a small, coveted handful of films - or sometimes just parts of films - from this year, which are paid tribute to below in a selection of my favorite moments (scenes, shots, etc.) from 2011.

Father Goes On Vacation in The Tree of Life
It's tough to pick a single moment from a film that is this overflowing with rich, evocative snippets and that is in fact defined by its fragmentary, episodic qualities. But I don't usually cry, and this particular scene was able to crack my calculated, detached critical stance and break the tears loose from my enraptured eyes. Marked by an absence (Brad Pitt has gone on a business vacation, leaving the kids alone to tease the playful Jessica Chastain), the scene paradoxically feels uplifting and whole, not to mention it rings piercingly true. It's rare that cinema is able to manage such remarkable nostalgic ecstasy as this, somehow feeling - despite its very specific context - like a moment stripped from the home video of any American Family in the past century. It's also the loveliest musical cue (Francis Couperin's lilting piano piece "Les Barricades Mistérieuses," as recorded by Angela Hewett) in what is the definitive cinematic event of the year no matter how you slice it.

Jake Williams Floats Across a Pond in Two Years at Sea
Here's what I wrote about it: "In one instance, Jake assembles a makeshift raft out of wood and jumbo milk cartons (a comparatively bombastic moment in an otherwise quiet film) and rows it out into a pond. Right when the viewer assumes he’s headed to the other side, he stops dead in the middle of the body of water to drift carelessly - his body entirely motionless – the long distance to the other side of the panoramic frame. And once his vessel has nearly bumped against land, he turns back. It’s an achingly poetic image that possesses the sparse, smeared beauty of a Caspar David Friedrich oil painting and most succinctly and elegantly communicates Jake's firm sense of inner peace."

Three Teenage Girls Visit The Home of the Recently Deceased in Putty Hill
An emotionally multifaceted scene from the most poignant and original indie feature of the year. From my review: "A brief episode where some of the wandering teenage girls visit Cory's empty house at night is a dark, foreboding vision that allows (Matthew) Porterfield to flirt with the aesthetic staples of low-budget horror: darkness, shadow, long takes, compositional tension. Unsurprisingly, the film doesn't entertain its subtle sensationalist gestures, keeping the scene to its bare essence. In doing so, Porterfield is able to bookend the film with a chilling re-visitation to Cory's house and vitally preserve the unique social experiment that is the film's backbone: the sense of individuals becoming personally affected by events to the point where fiction vs. non-fiction no longer matters."

An Ominous Invisible Transition in Martha Marcy May Marlene
Martha Marcy May Marlene is all smoke and mirrors, an elaborate maze built to unsettle foundations of reality, rationality, sanity, and especially time. Much of its powerful effect is nestled into its scene transitions, in the way one shot cuts across time and space to another while retaining an eerie sense of spatial and temporal coherence. This technique is at its most hauntingly effective during the middle of the film when Elizabeth Olsen's eponymous character leaps off her brother-in-law's motorboat only to land somewhere in the past in a dark quarry. Director Sean Durkin suddenly elevates the soundtrack's muffled rumbling and his camera tilts up to reveal naked legs dangling in a vulnerable and suggestive composition.

Restaging Méliès in Hugo
I recently saw Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which I was introduced to the theories of brilliant psychoanalyst Martin S. Bergmann. In the film, Bergmann utters a profound kernel: "so, love contains in it a contradiction, the attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past." He was referring specifically to human love, but nonetheless one can imagine it applied with alarming accuracy to Martin Scorsese's bombastic 3D tributes to the early handmade spectacles of his beloved George Méliès. When Scorsese gets his able paws on Méliès' proto-science-fiction content in a few delightful scenes during Hugo's mid-film history lecture, it bursts into new, three-dimensional life, taking it far from its scrappy analog origins.

Bruegel's Toddler Son Rips An Armpit Fart in The Mill and the Cross
Throughout The Mill and the Cross, Lech Majewski repeats a number of painterly wide shots, one of which is this perspective of the cramped wooden bedroom containing Pieter Bruegel's children. At one point, when a few of the kids are roughhousing around their dozing siblings, one of them unleashes a perfunctory armpit fart, proving that the crude joke knows no historical bounds. The sudden intrusion of the lowbrow in an otherwise cerebral, spiritual cinematic experience was truly unexpected and devilishly hilarious, forcing me to yelp in my seat. Fortunately, the theater was nearly empty.

The Ending of Contagion
While not many people dug Contagion, even fewer could stand by its ending, which is claimed to be "on-the-nose" and "formulaic." That I really enjoyed both the film and its ending makes me some kind of impoverished contrarian. But I still don't think any mainstream Hollywood filmmaker put together a more elegant, precise sequence of image (sterile, rapidly cut, succinctly narrativized footage of Gwyneth Paltrow carelessly extracting the first case of a mysterious worldwide plague) and sound (Cliff Martinez's eerie, throbbing whine) than Soderbergh this year (that includes you, Fincher, but not by much). The polemic, too, is necessary and timely.

Rooney Mara Steals Her Bag Back in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Just saw this and haven't written about it yet, but I will say that for me it was a vast improvement over the original film. Fincher's exacting formalism reaches its apex in a scene towards the beginning of the film when Lisbeth Salander's (Rooney Mara) leather bag is stolen in a subway station by a man passing in the opposite direction. Salander's reclaiming of the bag and simultaneous take-down of her opponent is clever and effortless, an approach mirrored by Fincher's mise-en-scene. When mapping out the scene's action, it certainly wouldn't appear to be a simple shoot, but Fincher makes it seem easy, while also refusing to make it feel like punctuation. An exhilarating 30 seconds or so.

Owen Wilson's Wide-Eyed Tour of 1920's Paris in Midnight in Paris
In spite of my lukewarm reaction to it upon first viewing, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris has stayed on my mind for much of the year, its honeyed depiction of the French city and varied historical humor gaining retrospective charm and power. The outburst of its best qualities - dry mockery of its own narrative gimmickry, pitch-perfect casting of revolutionary artistic and literary figures, Owen Wilson's stubborn and childlike Woody surrogate - comes during Gil Pender's inaugural adventure into 1920's Paris. Allen shoots the whole tour so as to literalize his protagonist's glorified vision of the past, and Wilson seems to have his pupils dilated and his mouth agape for the scene's entirety.

Charlotte Gainsbourg's Son Builds a Star-Gazing Tool that Incites Chaos in Melancholia
As much as I want to resist Melancholia and its cosmic cynicism outright, I struggle to deny Von Trier's vice grip on my consciousness, which was wielded aggressively in the following two moments: 1) Charlotte Gainsbourg holds up her son's homemade astronomical device only to observe the titular planet growing perilously in size, and 2) the subsequent apocalypse, after layers and layers of insanity, wherein Gainsbourg, Kirsten Dunst, and Cameron Spurr stare at each other in grotesque expressions of desperation, fear, indifference, hope, and concern. They're such exasperated moments of uncontrollable emotion that they're impossible to forget.

The Opening Shot of The Turin Horse
I heard it was on YouTube, and I couldn't help myself despite the poor viewing conditions. It's truly bravura filmmaking, announcing what surely must be a majestic piece of work.

The Smoke, The Light, The Wallpaper, and The Compartments in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
There's nothing specific to remember about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Alfredson is too democratic in his distribution of significance, and beyond that, the film's more about an accumulation of detail than it is about any one detail. Its evocation of a closed-off world of espionage jargon and bureaucratic indifference is in the particular elements that make up the mise-en-scene, all organized to amass a hazy atmosphere that defies comprehension. Just look at the shot above; how better to visualize Alfredson's idea of intellectual, social, and political compartmentalization?

The Opening Scene of Drive
A controlled getaway driver and his leather gloves, blobs of neon city lights dancing in the background, long stretches of dark road illuminated only by headlights in LA's featureless metropolitan area: these are the very best things about Drive, and they're all on display in its first scene. If the rest of the film conveyed as much stylistic assurance, abstract beauty, and quiet tension as this, Refn's confused pastiche might have had some weight of its own.

Top 25 Previously Released Films I Saw For The First Time in 2011:

1. In Vanda’s Room (Costa, Portugal, 2000)
2. Three Times (Hou, Taiwan, 2005)
3. Edvard Munch (Watkins, UK, 1974)
4. The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, USA, 1971)
5. State of Dogs (Brosens & Turmunkh, Belgium/Mongolia, 1998)
6. La Collectionneuse (Rohmer, France, 1967)
7. Happy Together (Wong, Japan, 1997)
8. Mouchette (Bresson, France, 1967)
9. The Thin Red Line (Malick, USA, 1998)
10. In the City of Sylvia (Guerin, Spain/France, 2009)
11. Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman, USA, 1971)
12. All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, USA, 1955)
13. The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, Russia, 1986)
14. The Holy Girl (Martel, Argentina, 2004)
15. Cyclo (Tran, Vietnam/France, 1995)
16. Summer Hours (Assayas, France, 2008)
17. My Winnipeg (Maddin, Canada, 2007)
18. Cat's Cradle (Brakhage, USA, 1959)
19. Some Like It Hot (Wilder, USA, 1959)
20. Hadewijch (Dumont, France, 2009)
21. Café Lumiere (Hou, Taiwan, 2003)
22. Tung (Baillie, USA, 1966)
23. The Big Chill (Kasdan, USA, 1983)
24. Almanac of Fall (Tarr, Hungary, 1984)
25. Santa Sangre (Jodorowsky, Mexico, 1989)

2011 Films Topping My Must-See List:

The Turin Horse, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Film Socialisme, Mysteries of Lisbon, Take Shelter, Nostalgia for the Light, The Kid with a Bike, A Separation, Margaret, This Is Not a Film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tuesday, After Christmas, A Dangerous Method, War Horse, The Adventures of Tintin, Carnage, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Extraordinary Stories, The Myth of the American Sleepover, Sleeping Beauty, Le Havre, House of Tolerance, The Descendants, Life Without Principle, Century of Birthing, The Loneliest Planet, Poetry

Two Years at Sea (2011) A Film by Ben Rivers

2011-12-31T10:54:00.000-08:00

Focusing with unflinching directness on the unbreakable bond between a human being and his environment, Ben Rivers' Two Years at Sea ultimately reinstates in 86 minutes both cinema's fundamental connection with labor and its function as a tool for comprehensive, peerlessly intimate portraiture. The camera is, at its technological and epistemological core, a device used to document physical reality, with people being its ideal and most revealing subject. Rivers, a London-based experimental artist who has been creating short, vaguely anthropological visual studies since 2003, does away with narrative trappings, explanatory details, and dialogue altogether to exploit this capacity in Two Years at Sea, his first feature-length work. Expanding upon the 2006 short This Is My Land, the film concerns the life of Jake Williams, a hermit living in the middle of a forest in Scotland. According to the brief production notes, Jake held a desire to live alone in the wilderness from a very young age, and "spent two years working at sea to realize it."

The film has no interest in revealing what exactly its title means, nor is it concerned much with providing any context at all for Jake's lifestyle. None of the aforementioned background information is revealed in the film itself (although there are occasional silent cutaways to photographs seemingly depicting Jake's past life with what are perhaps family members), leaving Rivers to immerse himself and his camera in the unconventional routines and temporal rhythms of his Herzogian subject without any urge for commentary. Jake has fashioned a decrepit one-story home filled with ungainly piles of tools, papers, and paraphernalia, a structurally questionable tree-house consisting of an old caravan hoisted up across the branches of tall trees, and a ramshackle yard that doubles as a holding ground for his gathered forest supplies (mostly wood) where he sits in a beach chair to enjoy the quiet tranquility surrounding him. A great deal of his time, however, is spent away from his home on day trips up misty mountains, across tree-less fields, and into derelict ponds. He has held onto a dusty Jeep in order to entertain some of his more far-flung adventures (how he obtains the gas is a negligible question mark), but the majority of the time he simply backpacks across land, whistling as he goes.

Rivers eventually finds a loose structure out of what is ostensibly a life without obligations and restrictions, defined only by the daily need for survival. The film alternates between passages of work and rest, with the transitional moments comprised of contemplative shots of the wilderness composed with a painterly sensibility for shape, texture, and light. For such a deceptively muted, peaceful, carefree film, Jake's life is punctuated heavily by labor, by the numerous manual tasks required to sustain even the humblest of livelihoods. Thus, the film restages life itself as labor, calling attention to the presence of humans as ultimately transitory in a larger, natural order. Jake, as all humans, is essentially a guest to nature, and his work is necessitated merely by the fact that nature throws obstacles in his way (weather, unpredictable availability of resources, etc.). What I love about Two Years At Sea is how it sidesteps the impulse to either glorify the isolated lifestyle as some agrarian, primitivistic ideal or predict its character’s inevitable loneliness to make a case for the necessity of sociality (see Into the Wild), which speaks to Rivers’ anthropological curiosity. No imaginary, non-human, or anthropomorphic friends here, just a man doing what he needs to do to survive alone in the wilderness, seemingly for the comfort and exciting freedom that isolation in the natural world brings.

As Rivers fixates his camera on Jake's routines throughout the film, the man himself largely remains an enigma. There's something so casual and well-adjusted about his behavior that suggests he has long ago shaken off any doubts about his radical lifestyle. Recurring shots show him sitting or lying down doing nothing to hold his attention, but rather than implying deep thought Jake's blank facade seems to express a transcendent tabula rasa, a total elimination of typical social concerns. At the same time, however, Jake has not entirely shed worldly materiality, showcased in his propensity for throwing on bluesy background music on his gramophone (he seems to have taken a special liking to the Jew harp and the bouzouki), or in the old photographs littered across his living space, fragments of a more traditional social history. That Jake can resemble anywhere from an excited boyscout to a Winter’s Bone extra to a great philosopher in a Rembrandt (a shot of Jake reading seems designed to banish any hasty assumptions of hippie illiteracy) depending on how Rivers frames and lights him only compounds his unknowable and eccentric personality.

In a truly original move, Two Years at Sea brings the real and intimate concerns of a documentary into the parameters of the hyper-cinematic, trotting out an absurdly wide ratio (2:75:1) via cropped Super 16mm that hasn't been touched since epic 70mm productions like Ben-Hur (1959) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). What Rivers does with the format is remarkable, lending a mythic quality to Jake and his environment even as he staunchly refuses the fussy cinematographic calculation of those Hollywood superproductions. Sometimes he will place the area of interest in the far side of the frame just because he can, leaving the rest of the frame black, whereas other times he animates every portion of the vast geography of the frame, watching as Jake takes the long hike across the composition. There's something truly sculptural - in Tarkovsky's sense - about the way Rivers carves out blocks of his subject's unique time and arranges them into striking, free-flowing images. In one instance, Jake assembles a makeshift raft out of wood and jumbo milk cartons (a comparatively bombastic moment in an otherwise quiet film) and rows it out into a pond. Right when the viewer assumes he’s headed to the other side, he stops dead in the middle of the body of water to drift carelessly - his body entirely motionless – the long distance to the other side of the panoramic frame. And once his vessel has nearly bumped against land, he turns back. It’s an achingly poetic image that possesses the sparse, smeared beauty of a Caspar David Friedrich oil painting and most succinctly and elegantly communicates Jake's firm sense of inner peace.

Further deglamorizing his bold format is Rivers' decision to leave evidence of the material wear-and-tear of his chosen medium. Throughout, the screen subtly flashes like a degraded silent film, evidence of a transfer from 16mm to 35mm that Rivers deliberately didn't refine, and blotches of dirt and dust accent the omnipresent grain. It's a fitting, and beautiful, aesthetic mirror of his subject, whose physicality and material well-being has been similarly deteriorated from continued exposure to the elements. As such, Two Years at Sea tends to feel like a lost film discovered beneath dirt, an organic object slowly dying like Jake's decrepit wilderness home and like the celluloid medium itself. In the marvelous eight-and-a-half-minute shot that quietly concludes the film, Jake drifts gradually into sleep beside a crackling fire, revealed only in a close-up that miraculously becomes less and less illuminated the more Jack slips out of consciousness. The film grain grows uglier and blotchier as the light source gradually disappears, eventually filling the screen with an indistinct mass of underexposed celluloid. Finding and watching Two Years at Sea is akin to discovering an unintentional objet d'art from this mysterious sleeping man.

The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) A Film by Manoel de Oliveira

2011-12-27T22:20:00.000-08:00

In the pivotal scene of Manoel de Oliveira's meditative, clear-eyed The Strange Case of Angelica, a curious detail emerges. A rural village's only photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), is hired to snap a posthumous photo of the recently deceased Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) in her family's posh, aristocratic hill-top hotel. Much of the photographic act is revealed in the same long shot. At first properly exposed (and indeed relatively dim), the image's highlights are blown out when Isaac requests a new, brighter bulb as a replacement in the overhead lamp hanging above Angelica's festooned corpse. The details in the lamp's cover are suddenly rendered indistinguishable, and parts of Isaac's face become a wash of white. Oliveira, the oldest working filmmaker at 103 years of age, surely possesses the chops to guard against such a "blemish," but he elects not to. In doing so, he problematizes the very nature of image production, calling attention to the materiality of the medium. It's only the first step in an elegant, compact metaphor for cinema itself, for what compels its making and what encourages our spectatorship.

Sure enough, this subtle manipulation of light is only of peripheral importance in the scene; rarely in The Strange Case of Angelica are there not multiple layers of meaning operating at once. More bluntly, the scene's purpose is to incite the conflict weighing on Isaac's psyche throughout the film. Upon peering in his camera's viewfinder, Angelica's eyes open and she bears a wide grin, shocking the already unsettled photographer. It's the beginning of a private pact between the ghostly Angelica and the weary, probing Isaac, which ultimately takes the two of them floating high above the village at night as Méliès-like specters, their bodies seemingly eternally embraced before Isaac is thrust abrasively out of the realm of dreams. Ayala, who enacted a familiar dance of unintentional playfulness and seduction in the similarly backward-and-forward-thinking In the City of Sylvia, taunts Isaac in both his waking and sleeping states, coming alive in his printed photographs and arriving as a glowing black-and-white phantom on his balcony. Often times it is to the unawares of Isaac, who, like a wide-eyed schoolboy, finds his lover disappearing every time he turns around sensing her presence. He is trying to capture that which is not there, that which is an illusion.

Of course, such is the apparatus of filmmaking, wherein celluloid presents images of a lost moment, forever consigned only to the physical medium. (Fittingly, Oliveira lingers on "empty" frames for some time after narrative action within those frames has ceased, quietly combating pictorial transience, the dominant mode in the modern world.) The film invokes a clear sense of Isaac's lineage: a dreamer, a poet, a thinker, a romantic, an introvert, an outcast, a cultural connoisseur, a revolutionary - in effect, a surrogate of the early film director. As such, he is prone to the two fundamental cinematic impulses: that of George Méliès, the grasp for the fantastical and unobservable, and the Lumière brothers, the realist urge. Alongside his compulsion towards Angelica, Isaac is indescribably drawn to taking photos of laborers in the hills, obsessively depicting their pickaxes pummeling into the Earth. Later, he begins following the gyrating gears of a tractor sifting through dirt, snapping as many shots as possible. Glancing over these and other images draped across a string beside his balcony, the suggestion comes gently to the fore: he has created movement.

Oliveira, on the other hand, humbly rejects camera movement for the vast majority of the film, preferring to keep his camera - like the Lumière's - a stationary observer. There is supreme formal precision to the film, a fixed understanding of the behavioral patterns within a single rectangular room that is reflected in nearly symmetrical compositions that allow space for multiple planes of action to occur in one shot. The Strange Case of Angelica, however, is not exactly a "room film" in the same way that a Roy Andersson or an Akerman is a room film; Oliveira has constructed a fully realized, hermetically sealed fable world with a firm sense of built-in rhythms and patterns. The film's repetitive skyline cutaways have a storybook quality to them, containing the action within a single community and also reinforcing a temporal linearity. It's fitting that the film concludes on the shot of a woman closing up the boards on a window until the screen goes black, an image that is instantly reminiscent of Satantango. Like Tarr, Oliveira is interested in maintaining a communal narrative and entertaining the many digressions it brings, and when that narrative reaches a conclusion there's no more space for it to live beyond the cinema. Allowing it to exist would mean suggesting a continuity in the cinematic space Oliveira has built, which runs counter to his intentions. Instead, he finds this world, drops in on it in the middle of the night and leaves with it faded to black, preserving its memory.

The Strange Case of Angelica is an argument for the timelessness of images, for the fact that pictures, particularly moving ones, can reflect an immortality that causes the mortal to pine in hopelessness. There are gentle, multifaceted dichotomies at the center of the film - mortality and immortality, life and death, realism and surrealism, past and present - that Oliveira wisely navigates, finally coming to the conclusion that they are irresolvable, that there is no ideal course of action, only an endless tug-of-war between two respective poles. In an act of pure selfishness that is the sum of all those ruminative stares off camera and into the Great Beyond, Isaac eventually implodes with consuming desire for Angelica and commits some unfussy form of suicide, running to the hillside and collapsing before a procession of chanting children. Back in his room under the detached care of a village doctor, Isaac finally succumbs to death in one of Oliveira's most elaborately choreographed, yet entirely modest, long takes. His concerned landlady enters the room, sighing in quiet despair and acknowledging the inevitability. Her sigh is quite like that of the filmmaker, who at such an old age presents with utter clarity a simultaneous fear and embrace of the void, which of course is entangled (as with all great directors) with an awareness of the enduring power of love.

My Favorite Albums of 2011

2011-12-21T13:35:00.000-08:00

2011 proved to be the year of the solo musician. Eight of my top ten picks are solo artists, as well as fourteen of my top twenty overall. Granted, several of these musicians simply release music under their own name but work with a band, but the statistic is still striking. In keeping with that trend, I found myself liking less and less of this year's rock offerings and discovering more rewards in the broad realms of folk and ambient. Interestingly, the year's overarching cinematic themes of nostalgia, memory, and history (Hugo, The Tree of Life, The Artist, Midnight in Paris, etc.) are also mirrored in the musical offerings, whether reflected in their cyclical structure and forms (Josh T. Pearson, The Caretaker, Tim Hecker) or in their lyrical content (Matana Roberts, PJ Harvey, Iron & Wine). It's funny, because there is always talk of the year at hand being "wretched" or "worst than last year," and in some ways these albums - in an echo of Woody Allen's Golden Age fallacy lesson - seem to argue against that path of thinking. Below is a comprehensive list of the best music I heard this year.

1. Josh T Pearson: Last of the Country Gentlemen

Too often when describing folk music catch phrases like “emotional honesty” and “raw power” are tossed around hastily, as if the mere presence of an acoustic guitar guarantees a special pact between singer and listener. So rarely are we greeted with real, tough, unguarded honesty, the kind that’s unsupported by lush arrangements and miniature, consistent relief, and that’s exactly what Josh T. Pearson’s Last of the Country Gentlemen accomplishes. The album is spine-tinglingly personal, a venture so deep into the bearded Texas believer’s head-space that it’s uncomfortable and off-putting at first. But repeated listens marry indelibly to the subconscious. Guitar motifs recur and scrape at the memory, creating a flowing document that shifts organically from climactic swells of violin and voice to barely audible whispers. Perhaps it’s because parts of Pearson’s lyrical content mirrors my own emotional trajectory this year, but ultimately there’s nothing more moving and cathartic as this.

2. Bill Callahan: Apocalypse

In a positive review of Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse, Pitchfork critic Mike Powell wrote that the 45 year-old Austin-based musician has “nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011.” Horseshit. Callahan’s particular brand of Americana – simultaneously dry, intimate, sardonic, casual, poetic, merciless, jagged, warm – is unparalleled in the 2011 musical landscape. The aforementioned stream of adjectives may represent a bundle of contradictions, but Callahan’s music thrives in tension with itself, the more the disparate elements converse with each other. Single “America!” is a lethargic pulse of gargled guitar distortion beneath Callahan’s witty celebration/indictment/elegy of/to his home country, “Free’s” is eccentric swing jazz laced with flutes and a bouncy bass line that questions the nature of freedom, and “One Fine Morning” is a soft acoustic waltz that fittingly sounds like waking up in the morning but is obliquely about leaving society, people, potentially even life itself. A mere seven songs possess more lyrical complexity and unexpected, seemingly improvisational musical energy than other singer/songwriter record this year. If that’s not adding to the general conversation, I don’t know what is.

3. Tim Hecker: Ravedeath 1972 / Dropped Pianos

Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972 is the most complete, immersive statement in the ambient genre since Jonsi and Alex’s 2009 album Riceboy Sleeps. It’s dense, riveting sound, stemming from cathedral organ and guitar recordings but transforming into something else entirely through the layering and processing of post-production. The organ can sound anywhere from grinding and oppressive to somber and elusive, slipping through the cracks of the surrounding textures and hovering behind snatches of piano melody. Ravedeath, 1972 is the desperate, unintelligible cry of laborers dehumanized amidst a brooding industrial landscape, eerily reminiscent of both 1984 and Damnation. Only recently did I discover Hecker’s subsequent record, Dropped Pianos, released only eight months after Ravedeath, and it’s almost equally fantastic, if lighter in tone and sparser in execution. Together the albums form one of the most impressive bodies of work in 2011.

4. Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place

This is a holy listening experience, as close to church as I get. It’s in the way Barwick’s voice pricks against the ceiling of her register in “Keep Up the Good Work”, the way that elongated, ethereal falsetto becomes inextricable from whatever instrument is creating the supplementary ambience (especially in “White Flag”), and the way layers gradually creep up in the mix. There’s no posing here, just a powerful wielding of the human voice without the weight of lyrics, supported lightly by the occasional bass movement or detached piano melody. Capable of recalling Hildegard Von Bingen, tribal chants, and children’s choirs all at once, this is timelessly soothing music that is somehow also distinctly contemporary. We can only hope this doesn’t get consigned to a pseudo-enlightening moment in the next Danny Boyle film.

5. Radiohead: The King of Limbs

If Radiohead doesn’t provide some earth-shattering sonic evolution these days (as they have done so many times before), there’s widespread skepticism, even backlash. But I see The King of Limbs as a remarkable refinement of their talent, a paring down and purifying, that seems to suggest a conscious denial of the radical leaps they’re expected to take. I’m tempted to declare this an even more cohesive, free-flowing album than In Rainbows despite the fact that it doesn’t approach some of that record’s grandiose high points. These tracks are compulsively groovy, favoring headlong immersion in rhythm (and in subtle changes in rhythm) over dramatic songwriting maneuvers. Yorke’s plaintive voice and Greenwood’s spare, sneaky contributions float gloriously over the album’s busy, frantic percussion. Pastoral field recordings compete for attention with the colorful digital atmosphere. For all the internal tension here, King of Limbs winds up sounding remarkably unified.

6. David Thomas Broughton: Outbreeding

As a contrasting case, the music of David Thomas Broughton is all the more striking for its intentional disunity, the way in which it feels like the music is being ripped apart at the seams as it’s performed. Broughton is a distinctive British artist working in the singer/songwriter arena who has continued to explore across six releases the discomfort aroused when jarring, often atonal textures are introduced to cozy folk music. Whereas the contrast was more pronounced in Broughton’s early, looped recordings (his debut, The Complete Guide to Insufficiency, was indeed a complete guide to the sound), Outbreeding seems to have stumbled upon a cranky way to meld the two, resulting in music that perches itself somewhere between pastoral folk and experimental, often resembling electroacoustic improvisation revved up to fit into traditional song structures. Admittedly, I was turned off to Outbreeding after a first listen, but upon returning (once, twice, now countless times) the album reveals lively, unhinged beauty tethered to Broughton’s deep, portentous, and deliberately whimsical bellow.

7. James Blake: S/T

James Blake’s a gifted songsmith, and a hell of a pianist (see “Why Don’t You Call Me” and “Give Me My Month”), who has discovered brilliant ways of implementing imposing, grimy dance-floor sub-bass and lo-fi keyboard patches into introspective ballads. His self-titled, full-length debut is an elegant catalogue of this approach, its lilting melodies gliding atop a jittery, cantankerous foundation. “The Wilhelm Scream,” a four-a-half minute layering of dark, ominous motifs and recurring lyrics culminating in a sublime throb of heavily compressed fuzz, is one of the best songs of the year, and “Lindesfarne” is a touching ballad about leaving an old friend that bathes its acoustic guitar and keyboard in nostalgic haze. Although a bit front-loaded, James Blake expresses melancholy, heartache, and frustration in striking, unusual ways.

8. Wilco: The Whole Love

Upon first hearing the nervous groove of “Art of Almost,” the opening track of Wilco’s latest, at low volume in a car, I interrupted conversation to turn and ask my friend if Radiohead had just released new music that I wasn’t aware of. (After all, one of the last lines on The King of Limbs is “If you think this is over, then you’re wrong.”) But when Jeff Tweedy’s familiar croon emerged, I knew I was in Wilco territory, albeit within a decidedly new and exciting avenue for their sound. The Whole Love strays quickly from the subdued funk of “Art of Almost” and into more recognizable fare, but it never quite settles into any one specific style, pitting raucous fist-pumpers (“I Might”), brooding folk songs (“Black Moon”), barbershop blues ditties (“Capitol City”), and lovely, pastoral shuffles (“One Sunday Morning”) aside one another without so much as a shrug. It’s that diversity and sonic adventurousness that is the album’s greatest feature, a reassuring testament that the aging band is far from withering out.

9. Kurt Vile: Smoke Rings for My Halo

Kurt Vile possesses a special, highly coveted gift that most songwriters yearn for: the ability to make a song feel totally tossed-off and organic. The Philadelphian records deliciously wistful tunes that sound like they were written while half asleep with a joint perched precariously against the lips. Despite his music’s accessibility and relative conventionality, it’s hard for me to find a truly satisfactory point of comparison here. Bob Dylan and R.E.M come to mind, but ultimately they’re inadequate. Vile’s carefree, catchy odes to inaction, restlessness, and the future rest comfortably outside of time.

10. The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

In subtly lifting the melodic shapes of the Big Band era music he regularly excavates just a bit more out of crackling murkiness, James Kirby (aka The Caretaker) has energized the profound sense of melancholy and loss he so routinely conjures up. What’s closer paradoxically feels further away. “An Empty Bliss Beyond This World,” the follow-up to 2008’s “Persistent Repetition of Phrases,” covers very similar ground as its predecessor – that is, vinyl recordings of the 1920’s and 30’s delicately manipulated with the technological luxuries afforded by the 21st century - but it strikes me as a more fully realized piece of work, utterly entrancing in its repetitiousness and more varied in its emotional spectrum. Generally, Kirby has shortened the track lengths too, which emphasizes the notion of these pieces being fleeting artifacts of a bygone past, slipping out of consciousness right when they start to make a warm, fuzzy impact.

11. PJ Harvey: Let England Shake

I hadn’t listened to PJ Harvey before hearing Let England Shake, but I’ll certainly be exploring her catalogue after this gem. It’s a remarkably crafted and insistently paced album on which Harvey sounds fully and comfortably submerged in the worlds created by her songs, never forcing anything beyond her range but not limiting her approach either. Her lyrical content is often reminiscent of politically engaged punk rock, but she’s self-aware enough to acknowledge the inevitability that music cannot simplistically change the world of violence and war-torn political relationships. In repeatedly asking the question “what if I take my problems to the United Nations?,” the answer never comes, only receding into the forward gallop of the music. Harvey has crafted gorgeous, melodramatic rock’n’roll that swims in a pool of unsettling imagery and sly bravado.

12. Kreng: Grimoire

Grimoire, the latest album by Belgian avant-garde composer Pepijn Caudron, who goes by the moniker Kreng, expands upon the pitch-dark menace of his debut L’Autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu with more nuanced compositions and assured pacing. Caudron, no stranger to using a vast array of tools to induce a trance-like state of stasis and creaking hesitance, calls upon clarinets, pianos, somber strings, shrieking opera howls, unrecognizable electronic textures, and sparse percussion to flesh out his orchestral doom here, seducing the consciousness through a terrifying strip tease wherein some sounds tickle your ears with uncomfortable intimacy (the pitter-patter of snare drum in “Satyriasis”), and others act as wispy phantoms in the night (the devilish repeating violin line in the song of the year, “Wrak”). It’s the best and most unrelenting horror film I’ve witnessed in quite a while, and there’s not a single image.

13. Christian Fennesz + Ryuichi Sakamoto: Flumina

Christian Fennesz has repeatedly displayed a knack for collaboration, bouncing his distinctive atmospheres off the respective talents of other bold performers (David Sylvian, Sparklehorse, Jim O’Rourke). For the second time, he has teamed up with Japanese pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto to create a double album that luxuriates in a cool, pensive ambiance. Flumina doesn’t push beyond its strict and stripped-down formula – twinkling piano melodies over beds of rich guitar drone – but it’s gorgeous and evocative music nonetheless, defined by a supreme understanding between two musicians feeding off each other.

14. Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres

Opening with the single shriek of a saxophone and expanding limitlessly from there, Matana Roberts Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres instantly feels like a major statement, yet there’s also something intriguingly incomplete about it, a notion hinted at by the title’s use of “Chapter One.” Roberts casts herself as an early slave struggling for freedom during Civil War-era America, and it’s exactly as fearless and disturbing as such a description would suggest. The music follows suit, alternating between quiet, ominous free jazz to primal explosions of messy noise. Roberts, never hiding behind her band, rambles unflinchingly about her fictional (but utterly convincing) life and roars desperately as the instruments swell up around her. With its narrative and emotion cresting and falling, this is an album to be experienced in one go.

15. Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues

Despite the often silly pseudo-cosmic, coming-of-age, Malick-lite lyrical content of Helplessness Blues (which routinely sounds like a heavily praised indie rocker trying to prove he has some philosophical aspirations to go along with his musical chops, and frankly I prefer the guileless poeticism of the band’s debut), Fleet Foxes are such gifted musicians that the irresistible progression of the songs renders obsolete the negligible meaning of it all. Helplessness Blues exceeds Fleet Foxes in ambition and scope (if not always songwriting) and introduces faint gestures towards potential new directions for the band: freak-out saxophone and ominous strings in “The Shrine/An Argument”, wistful flute on “The Plains, Bitter Dancer”, and no reverb (!) in “Blue Spotted Tail.” Ultimately, Fleet Foxes have a tremendous sense of how to pace and order an album.

16. Nicolas Jaar: Space is Only Noise

Space is Only Noise, the debut album by Nicolas Jaar, is often subject to the kinds of issues that commonly plague debut efforts: uneven pacing, lack of focus, etc. But despite these small problems that can hinder the experience of listening to the album straight through, Jaar has devised 14 tracks that really stand on their own as exciting, unpredictable minimalist electronica tunes. He has a tremendous grasp on effectively compiling disparate and unique sounds, recalling both Books in the sheer diversity and the more restrained work of Hot Chip in the propulsive catchiness. When Jaar starts singing in his goofy deep voice, the album loses a bit of its low-key moodiness, but fortunately that’s not frequent.

17. Tom Waits: Bad As Me

I feel comfortable saying that no one sounds quite like Tom Waits, and Bad As Me’s sporadic, even schizophrenic nature only further exemplifies the man’s enigmatic singularity. Seriously, this album is all over the place, leaping from a lo-fi, reflective lounge ballad like “Kiss Me” to the loud, embittered stomp of “Satisfied,” or from an in-your-face militant march like “Hell Broke Luce” to the boozy, vaguely patriotic waltz “New Year’s Eve.” But it’s Waits’ energy and swagger that sends it galloping along; the album holds you by the throat and threatens to kick your teeth in if you turn it off.

18. Iron and Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean

One of the best voices to hear harmonizing with itself on several layers of audio track (besides Julianna Barwick, of course) is Sam Beam’s, and luckily Kiss Each Other Clean, more than any of his other records, is built around that idea (see “Godless Brother In Love” for a really great sampling). Iron & Wine’s most adventurous album, Kiss Each Other Clean plays with funk, soul, and R & B, and is for the most part successful. Beam’s lyrics are at their most evocative, traversing imagery both beautiful and saddening. It’s not necessarily their finest work, but it’s further proof that the group can openly explore their sound without falling off the deep end.

19. Bon Iver: Bon Iver, Bon Iver

So much of the hype surrounding Justin Vernon really grates on my nerves (He recorded in a log cabin in seclusion? Woah, really? He must be the first! Now he’s working with Kanye, huh?), but beneath all that the dude’s a rather talented songwriter. Bon Iver, Bon Iver (which is a pretty dumb name for an album) definitely expands upon For Emma, Forever Ago with some better hooks, more ambitious instrumentation and song structures, and tighter performances. It’s mostly the warm, cozy pop atmospheres that appeal to me here; lyrics are out of the picture.

20. Bright Eyes: The People’s Key

Part of me wants to think the concept of The People’s Key is all a big wink-wink, that it’s not as sincerely mystical as it seems, but the other part insists that Conor Oberst long ago lost his bearings. Integrating goofy poetic monologues by Denny Brewer of Refried Ice Cream and covering topics such as the cosmos, the future, and “the essence, the basis of life,” Bright Eyes have thrown out all the down-to-earth introspection (with the exception of the truly affecting “Ladder Song”) for what is proposed to be their final album and the results can be both exhilarating and laughable. Some critics and fans have likened the album’s electronic sound to the band’s superior Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, but ultimately this is unlike anything Bright Eyes have ever done: poppy, bombastic, ecstatic, and demented.

Some Honorable Mentions and Recent Listens:
Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Wolfroy Goes to Town
Okkervil River: I Am Very Far
Grouper: AIA
The Dogs: Camping
David Lynch: Crazy Clown Time
Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer
Death Cab for Cutie: Codes and Keys
Kaboom Karavan: Barra Barra

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) A Film by Tomas Alfredson

2011-12-20T18:27:00.000-08:00

Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy provides visual evidence of the significant distance between the impulses of literature and cinema. The tension between the two mediums tugs at every frame. There is Alfredson's conflicted relationship with the source material, John le Carré's original novel, the sense of the film paying lip service to the vertiginous strands of plot. Meanwhile, there is an intuitive feel for mood, atmosphere, mise-en-scene, and the various other elements that construct the cinematic world, elements that are somewhat jeopardized, or at least made secondary, when the film indulges a necessary urge to unspool plot. Alfredson has shown a curious propensity for downplaying exposition, for making narrative details and back-stories feel democratically unimportant. In Let the Right One In, this resulted in an intriguingly incomplete sense of the foundation for the characters' histories that effectively complimented the film's spare plot. In a story with such thickness of exposition as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, however this low-key approach to dramatic detail is quickly distancing, deliberately failing to provide a base of comprehension as the enveloping mood overwhelms the specific words, behaviors, and conflicts marking the larger narrative design.

And yet, there's so much conviction in the film's construction - its acting, cinematography, blocking, production design, costumes, etc. - that the film remains entirely riveting. Alfredson has so thoroughly sunken into the gritty, unforgiving, desaturated Cold War milieu that his film exudes a sense of being lived in, as if it's a pre-existing artifact rather than something that was built from scratch to approximate a bygone time. Smoke and dust fill the air, splashes of light poke through windows, seemingly important papers and other bric-a-brac cover nearly every square inch of table-top, and faded, garish patterned wallpapers peel slowly off walls. Through these decrepit spaces weathered men in similarly discolored sports jackets brood silently or merely pass by, their perpetual exasperation leaving a bitter taste in the air. Someone in a tight knit circle of British intelligence officials has revealed vital information to a Soviet spy who's now likely running amok with it. Not one man will budge with any revealing news, so semi-retired espionage expert George Smiley (Gary Oldman, who paradoxically never smiles throughout the film) is elected to take the place of the recently resigned Control (John Hurt), who clearly felt significant pressure from all of his somber right-hand men (Toby Jones, Mark Strong, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch).

Tinker, Tailor becomes centered on Oldman, a ruthless, uncompromising, and melancholy spy master whose hardened exterior Alfredson refuses to penetrate. Thus, the film's design - insistently paced, nearly inscrutable, and never stopping to check for audience comprehension - mirrors the rate at which and precision with which Smiley ponders his next move. A great deal of the film's major plot progressions are telegraphed not with dialogue but only with Smiley's gestures and sneaking eye movements (for the most part drooped in shadows). When the men do speak, often in long shot or peeped through telephoto lenses, they do so in espionage jargon (Operation Witchcraft comes up frequently), meaning that their political sleights of hand are obscured thickly by code words. As clues accumulate and suspicious men start to behave less and less suspiciously, one suspects the cool disorientation to be precisely Alfredson's point. It is so often in such ambiguous political affairs that the comparatively morally pure outsiders cannot pass judgment on the events because of sheer lack of insider knowledge. As a result, cruel, unfaithful, and insular men are the movers and shakers of a cycle of events that leave innocent people dead.

Alfredson tracks this cycle of events with clinical rigor; if the characters he's portraying are caught in an existential black hole with no escape (Tom Hardy's character is the best example, not known to the audience at first but quickly yanked from reclusion into the narrative), the director himself presents his material with the straightforward duty of an existential anti-hero. Rarely is his camera devoid of modest acrobatics, tracking around rooms slowly and unassumingly, gracefully shifting focus, giving visual attention to every member in a room, equally unsure of who to trust. With the help of the brilliant interior lighting by DP Hoyte Van Hoytema (definitely the cinematographer's finest moment since Let the Right One In) wherein light falls with seemingly malign intent and every lamp and overhead appears to cover only a one-foot radius (the inability to see clearly - what with the smoke and darkness - is often played into the narrative), the film's backhanded maneuvers are utterly enthralling to behold. It is quite simply the best looking film of the year, lovingly designed to recreate its setting and shot with an Ozu's eye for symmetry and indoor details. The film only grows more confusing as it presses on, but the mood of enveloping doom and sadness surrounding Oldman's compulsive workman expands. Rarely has being out of the loop felt so engaging.

Backs to the Wall: Alps and Shame

2011-12-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

Both Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos and British director Steve McQueen have released massive international festival hits in the past few years: Dogtooth, a singularly unsettling allegorical black comedy, and Hunger, a transcendent chronicle of the IRA Prison Strike of the 1980's. With their latest films, one director has kept it low-key and local, and the other has gone American, keeping his Irish lead actor but moving to an NYC setting. The films, Alps and Shame, are both unmistakably their maker's, which is admirable for directors with only one previous feature (or in the case of Lanthimos, one obscure flop and one breakout success) to their name. Furthermore, they're also curious objects that suffer from very similar issues: they both tackle their ideas - fuzzy and vaguely complex in Alps, simple and familiar in Shame - in an oblique, non-confrontational manner, shying away from direct exploration and seeking to invite larger significance that's not warranted in the execution. But since I genuinely enjoyed their previous efforts, it's an example of sophomore slump that I greet more with interest and confusion than with frustration and hostility.

Following Dogtooth's primal scream of oddness and ambiguity, Lanthimos has decided to capitalize on the success of those traits and elevate them in Alps only a year later. Transplanting the social retardation and behavioral quirkiness of Dogtooth's suburban prison to a wider, more public and less specific milieu, Lanthimos reveals a group of eccentrics slowly and mysteriously, only exposing that which loosely connects them in an offhand bit of dialogue a third of the way through the film. It turns out that their regular meetings in a nondescript gymnasium are for an under-the-radar social service (deemed "Alps" for seemingly no reason other than to justify the title) that assists grieving individuals and families in the event of the sudden loss of a loved one by performing as that person and fully adopting their day-to-day routines. Aggeliki Papoulia, the brave actress who played the older sister in Lanthimos' prior film, is the performer we see most in Alps and the one who delivers said line of dialogue to an aging couple whose tennis-playing daughter was just killed in an accident. There's a cult-like strictness and dedication to the group that registers in Papoulia's consistent expression - which seems to suggest dread struggling to conceal itself beneath a collected exterior - and in her colleague Ariane Labed's nervous posture, a side-effect of her submission to a terrifyingly imposing dance coach played by Johnny Vekris who restricts her from graduating to pop music. Meanwhile, in episodes that are peripheral to the other narratives, members of Alps rehearse melodramatic, inscrutable dialogues to each other in clipped, uninflected tones as if amateur actors preparing for an audition, but they never break character.

The scenario is intriguingly flamboyant and fittingly bizarre, and as such it's a shame that Alps remains the mere skeleton of a film, a brilliant idea that was stillborn at the conception phase. Like Dogtooth, Alps presents a handful of motifs, metaphors, and subtexts to be sorted out, and specifically amplifies Dogtooth's concern for the influence of American media consumption on its characters. But rather than letting his ideas arise organically through the interaction of characters and environments, Lanthimos exerts a rigid conceptual grasp on every scene until the purpose of each individual shot is exhausted the instant an idea is effectively elucidated. What’s left is a series of repetitions of the same few notions, triggered with an approach to scene structure that grows increasingly coded and formulaic. Alps functions in the theoretical arena of spectatorship, aligning both the act of the griever and the movie-goer (in this film, everyone's an implicit movie-goer, reciting lines and ranking favorite actors and actresses) as false respites from death, fundamentally flawed attempts at forgetting that nonetheless ease the pain of reality. Unfortunately, there's rarely any basis of reality to assist the process of empathizing with these acts of profound selfishness. Lanthimos is too busy deflating his characters into controlled, undiscerning props (in order to warn against the mechanization of modern life that might result from projecting our emotions onto media) to examine the reactions of the married couple to their surrogate daughter, or to allow his main characters to contemplate the ethical implications of their service. As a depiction of a lopsided practice in an already lopsided world rather than a misguided venture unleashed on a convincing population, Alps neglects to confront the complexity of its themes as they relate to reality.

Because Dogtooth already took this route, it doesn't help that Lanthimos' treatment of the concept lacks the structural firmness of that film, which was a careful crescendo to a devastating final shot. Where Dogtooth's narrative assurance hinted at a conceptual assurance, Alps' insistent skirting around its major themes resembles the work of a director who is either too fuzzy on whether or not they make sense or too unsure of their legitimacy. Fittingly, the film waywardly shifts between its several mini-stories through fractured and vague cinematography, wherein only objects closest to the camera earn focus and the physical world is reduced to a smear of gray. When it's not hilarious - Lanthimos is better at making dark jokes of his characters than he is at drawing them as serious, if exaggerated, models of real human beings worth sympathizing with, which suggests a lot about his outlook on life - it's frequently dull and repetitive, evoking the feeling of a lecture that reached its climax early on and kept repeating minor variations on the same idea. What was seductive, suggestive, and horrific in Dogtooth is alienating, stiff, and preposterous in Alps, and unfortunately the film suffers from the feeling of being half-finished, its realization carrying only phantoms of the core ideas Lanthimos clearly wanted to tackle and its sense of ambiguity adrift from any semblance of cohesion.

Shame, on the other hand, is so coherent to the point of being simple-minded that McQueen's insistence upon creating an enigmatic, ambiguous atmosphere feels awkwardly disingenuous at best and utterly silly at worst. The entire film essentially advances the idea that Michael Fassbender's Brandon is a man whose seemingly high quality of living - a well-paying job, an uptown apartment with a panoramic view of the biggest city in the world, devilishly good looks - belies his emotional impotence and severe inner turmoil. Although this is the ultimate thesis, McQueen is persistent upon allowing the audience to try to tease out their own meaning by gesturing faintly in several different taboo-breaking directions - sex addiction, incest, corporate dehumanization - with ominous long takes and Duchampian blankness. When Brandon's predictably damaged vagabond sister Sissy Sullivan (Carey Mulligan with an alliterative name that sounds like a whore's psuedonym) arrives to crash at his apartment with nowhere else to go, the past's infiltration of the present metaphor is literalized by Brandon's inability to get down and dirty with NYC prostitutes and spend quality time with himself due to his sister's presence. The rampant sexual thirst so forcefully telegraphed in the film's opening montage is suffocated, the male ego is compromised, and regular, unquestioned behaviors Brandon mechanically performs (ogling women on the subway, extending his encyclopedia of internet porn) are put into perspective.

Unlike in Hunger, a work of great empathy, McQueen appears to despise his main character here, taking every opportunity to bounce light off of bar tables to demonize him. Whether subsuming him into a generically flat and sanitary office environment or scrutinizing his clumsy attempt at dating with a newly single co-worker (Nicole Beharie) whose smiley excitement swiftly degenerates throughout the course of a dinner ominously punctuated by McQueen's languorously zooming camera, Brandon encompasses the Rich, Privileged, Unappreciative Schmuck that is seemingly ubiquitous in New York (his boss, David Fisher (James Badge Dale), is another sterling example, and represents the only character McQueen dislikes more). Eyes Wide Shut and Last Tango in Paris already peered into - as rapper Nas put it - the "N.Y. State of Mind," and these types of sex-addled characters in particular, in much subtler ways, and it seems that the one new inquiry McQueen is bringing to it is his questionable implication, when Brandon attends a hellishly red gay club in a ditch effort for satisfaction, that homosexuality is the lowest form of debasement for this kind of soul-sick urban individual.

What makes Shame tougher to swallow is McQueen's reluctance to pick up the great opportunities he lays down for himself to understand his character. Crystallizing his irritating diffidence here is a sequence about halfway through the film when Sissy takes Brandon's boss back to the apartment after a night at the lounge club where she had a gig. Upon hearing the muffled noises of cheerful sex in a room nearby, it appears Brandon is destined for one of the possible courses of action: 1) confront the two of them angrily, 2) passive-aggressively masturbate in his room, or 3) call up a prostitute to assert his power in his own apartment. He does none of the above, and instead fleas the scene to go for a jog outside. Given his visceral outbursts throughout the rest of the film (screaming at Sissy, provoking jealousy out of anonymous strangers), it feels less like a natural extension of his character than a cop-out by McQueen when given a chance to thoroughly explore the inner state of his character. He favors a technically complicated and lushly photographed tracking shot that simply illuminates Brandon's anxiety and drops the troubling scenario placed before him. In numerous other instances, McQueen resorts to his stylish aesthetic flair (and he has a great deal of it) in ways that purport to visualize inner conflicts but actually just de-emphasize and abstract them. What is left is a shell of a person and a conflict, the gaps of which are filled with repeated shots of Fassbender ruffling his perpetually feathered hairdo or crying out in the rain with a scrape on his face as the predictable downfall narrative reaches its fruition.

Just as Lanthimos devises esoteric codes and ciphers for his messages, McQueen shrouds in mystery a schematic script that redundantly exposes its character's primal sickness and aversion to emotionality. Both directors have taken a prior strength and applied it forcefully to new material only to reveal the specificity and shortcomings of that strength. Lanthimos' preference for broad allegory over narrative and characterization is jeopardized when aimed at a larger ensemble and a more diffuse setting. McQueen's artful detachment made poetry out of a historical event that was chiefly about collective action and brutality, whereas the same approach is rendered empty in the face of original material that favors individual introspection. Perhaps the bright side is that there is still great promise contained in these films that ensures future improvement: the squirmy comedy and dissociative editing in Alps (the superior of the two films) and the bold visual statements and skill with actors evoked in Shame. But the films' fear of direct engagement is their fundamental undoing. Quite simply, these are portraits of people with their backs to the wall in which the directors themselves have their backs to the wall, refusing to speak on the matter.

The Contemporization of Hou Hsiao-Hsien

2011-12-12T06:28:00.000-08:00

Renowned for his mastery of the static long take, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien caused quite a stir in the critical film community when his camera first began to move in 1995’s Good Men, Good Women. While it may seem like a superficial, ultimately insignificant stylistic tic to get hung up on, there was something simultaneously disconcerting and exciting about a director so committed to stasis and detachment suddenly deciding to openly follow his characters around their environment. With the mere loosening of a tripod head for greater mobility, Hou embarked upon a new chapter of his career that continues right up to his most recent film, Flight of the Red Balloon. This is a chapter of willful naiveté and unassertive observation that intentionally removes the traditional director/subject dynamic. For the first time, it is the agency of the characters - more so than the direction - that seems to dictate the flows and meanings of these post-2000 works.

Hou’s early films, right up until his renowned Taiwan Trilogy, were already thought of as radical redefinitions of conventional film grammar. They were particularly antithetical the films residing within Taiwan’s cinematic heritage. Using long, single-take scenes and a suppression of dramatic events and dialogue, the films luxuriated in objective reality in a way that is not entirely dissimilar from the director’s contemporary approach to his material, but there was a dense, serious historical-political dimension to the work, a predilection towards grand and unorthodox statements about Taiwan’s troubled national heritage that suggested a common understanding of cinematic authorship. The film’s lofty intentions were distinct, if not always totally clear. In the past decade, however, Hou has preferred to leave the meanings of his films in the hands of the viewer more openly than ever before, and his focus has shifted in more ways than one. Particularly when placed aside his early, heavily studied, and historically engaged offerings, these films (Millenium Mambo, Café Lumiere, Three Times, and Flight of the Red Balloon) not only signal the director’s substantial artistic and intellectual development, they also yield abundant insights into the still-turbulent relationships between Taiwan and its neighboring East Asian countries, and introduce new perspectives on his signature motifs of time, history, and the irreversible effects of the political on the personal.

One major shift is clear enough from the outset: though already present in his filmography in less overt fashion, Hou’s work in the 2000’s displays an intimate fascination with the youth of Taiwan. A possible practical explanation for this is that Hou is now 64 years old, and nestling his camera within the environment of twentysomethings is one convenient route to feeling younger. But over thirty years of work commenting upon the fractured history of the island nation of Taiwan, it’s easy to see this recent preoccupation as a gesture of simultaneous hope, concern, and curiosity. The idea that history repeats itself, and that shocking national changes force a rupture in collective psychology that remains insoluble, is given repeat emphasis in Hou’s cinema, so naturally his contemporary films reflect a profound desire to break that damaging mold. Guo-Juin Hong summarizes this tendency in his book Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen: “To write history, to represent history, is finally a desire for a future hidden under the backward temporal movement of cinematic retrospection that has been, from the beginning, casting its longing gaze forward.”

This desire points to Hou’s trend of imbuing his recent films with a serene romanticism, a delicate surface beauty that contrasts the often harsh, uncompromising verisimilitude of his earlier work. It’s a feeling – somewhat vague and indescribable, but a feeling nonetheless – that sends a ripple through his entire contemporary aesthetic. Hou’s still faithful to the long take, but the timbre of his shots has changed. Figures get closer to the camera than ever before, causing elegant shifts in depth of field that result in the lovely, amorphous blobs of background color that characterize a great deal of his films’ visual palettes. As previously stated, the camera now moves luxuriously with the characters, nudging slowly with every shift (minor to major) in body position. Finally, his films now entertain the possibilities of non-diegetic sound, brimming as they do with the pop, techno, and romantic music listened to by their characters. All of this – and it’s by no means an exhaustive list of the subtle changes in Hou’s style - indicates, as Haden Guest puts it in his essay Reflections on the Screen: Hou Hsiao Hsien's Dust In the Wind and the Rhythms of the Taiwan New Cinema, the “attempt to understand the larger rhythm or design of these worlds.”

Hou’s talent, however, is not merely in his quiet, surface-level observation, but in the way he manages to instill thematic complexity into his seemingly minimalist films. Understanding the director’s background provides a key to unraveling the many layers of meaning cloaked within his modern work. Born in Mainland China to a Hakkan family (Hakka and Minnan are two Taiwanese languages inherited from early Chinese settlers), Hou moved to Taiwan in 1947 only two years after the cessation of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and right around the time of the tragic February 28th massacre of non-violent protesters in Taipei by the violent Chinese nationalist government, the Kuomintang (KMT). This caused the decades-long White Terror period of extreme suppression by the KMT of any Taiwanese citizens potentially bearing Communist sympathies, which cast a dark shadow over Hou’s entire youth. As his filmmaking career progressed, he became increasingly willing to speak directly about these historical taboos, culminating in the internationally acclaimed Taiwan Trilogy (The Puppetmaster, City of Sadness, Good Men, Good Women), which engaged with Japanese colonial rule, the February 28th incident, and the White Terror period, respectively. These marked some of the first attempts by a Taiwanese filmmaker to raise the difficult issue of the nation’s own complex and traumatic identity. But the history presented in Hou’s work is rarely free of a subjective filter, indicative of a pluralist conception of history that speaks to the fractured collective psyche of Taiwan.

If Hou’s earlier films represented direct engagements with the troubles of the Taiwanese nation, his attention to these political and social realities in contemporary films has been abstracted, no less important but still peripheral to the central narratives. Further underlining this concept are the films’ settings: Millenium Mambo spreads its time between Taiwan and Japan while Café Lumiere and Flight of the Red Balloon are Hou’s first productions set entirely outside of his home country and China, in Japan and France respectively. Here, a practical perspective may be instrumental in this shift. In describing the “miserable” state of the Taiwanese film industry, he mentions that the country “produces just a dozen or so films each year, and most of them depend on official funding. There are perhaps only three exceptions—Yang Te-chang [Edward Yang], Tsaï Ming-liang and myself—who can get financing in France or Japan.” But he alludes to something else that influences his turn away from explicitly political subject matter: “The trilogy of films I made [Taiwan Trilogy] was closer to the background of my own age-group… I always wonder, why don’t the directors who are ten or twenty years younger than I am record what was happening just before they grew up?” He continues his thought with a vague but telling point: “I have moved to another stage in my own creative work, and it’s difficult to go back to an earlier one*.”

This new stage is markedly clear, and it begins with Millenium Mambo (2001). The film was released three years after Flowers of Shanghai, one of Hou’s few films to not present the past through a subjective account. Millenium Mambo drastically reverses that framework in its approach to a historical narrative. Taiwanese starlet Shu Qi plays Vicky, an aimless young club hostess whose occasional narration recounts her story from ten years in the future. This gentle structural device puts the ostensible present through a dubious filter of recollection, making Vicky’s comments on the narration windows into her motivations and emotions as well as parables on the distinctions between past and present. As her relationship with her roommate and romantic partner Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan) derails into verbally abusive and passive-aggressive territory, Vicky’s consciousness is slowly brought into focus through long, lingering medium shots following her mundane daily adherence to smoking and drinking while Hao-Hao indifferently concocts club music in his room, out of which glows an ominous neon haze. Out of boredom and apathy, she drifts into a tenuous relationship with Jack (Jack Kao), the enigmatic mob proprietor who is a regular at her club.

Despite her intended ambivalence to her surroundings, Vicky is a thoroughly insular individual, capable of suspending attention and interest only on the people and objects in her immediate vicinity (an idea that receives stylistic heft in Hou’s aggressively shallow focus). She is very much confined to the dance club scene she immerses herself in and the romantic relationships she is involved in. This shortcoming cuts to the heart of one of the major themes on the director’s mind as of late: the inability of his young characters to actively contextualize their lives within the larger scope of history. Hou has chosen to feature young men and women who show a propensity for compulsive border-crossing – Vicky travels to Japan for a film festival twice during Millenium Mambo, Café Lumiere’s protagonist shuffles between Japan, Taiwan, and China, and one of Flight of the Red Balloon’s characters is a Taiwanese woman studying in France – and as such their disregard of the complex historical relationships between these nations is made all the more visible.

Café Lumiere represents Hou’s most bald-faced exposure of this postcolonial dynamic. A daringly non-descript tribute to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu on the occasion of his 100th birthday, the film follows Japanese language teacher and modern-day Tokyo resident Yôko (Yo Hitoto) as she travels back and forth from Tokyo to Taipei studying Chinese composer Jiang Wenye (whose piano pieces of the 20’s and 30’s pepper the film’s soundtrack). Wenye was himself a regular traveler between China and Tokyo at a time when Taiwan was a colony of Japan. That Yôko is following a similar path through the countries illuminates the changes brought about in the decades since Wenye’s prime, and, as Song Hwee Lim writes in the essay Transnational Trajectories in Contemporary East Asian Cinemas, “demonstrates that the triangulated relations between China, Taiwan, and Japan throughout the twentieth century up until today are as complex as Jiang Wenye’s multiple identities and transnational career.” Hajime (Asanu Tadanobu), a secondhand bookstore owner in Tokyo, joins her in her research. Because she is so obsessive in her immersion into Wenye’s life, Yôko fails to register Hajime’s affection, and the two remain regrettably platonic. History, Hou suggests, is not the only blind spot in modern life.

The film’s debt to Ozu, witnessed in the faint narrative echoes of the Japanese director’s 1953 classic Tokyo Story, ultimately overshadows its concentration on Wenye. What’s fascinating is that Hou remains intimately connected to the Taiwanese state of affairs by supplanting the issue of single motherhood that he is familiar with from his own country - and which is prevalent in Japan as well – into Yôko’s narrative. Her affair with a Taiwanese student only mentioned in conversation in the film has resulted in a pregnancy that she intends to keep to herself. When her parents are informed in their rural home, the film becomes fixated on the changing dynamic of the generational gap. In Tokyo Story, the daughter’s impending marriage is met with both happiness and resignation from parent and child. In Café Lumiere, marriage is not even in the equation, causing unspoken concern from Yôko’s conservative father and stepmother and plainspoken indifference on the part of Yôko. This predicament is visualized in Hajime’s piece of computer artwork depicting the Tokyo railway network as a circular womb housing a fetus. Yôko’s baby, it suggests, will be born into a world where ideologies are, like the many trains in Tokyo’s complex metropolis, increasingly headed in different directions.

A bold and subtle thematic statement such as this firmly separates Hou’s modernist project from the unmistakably traditional work of Ozu, and it’s indicative of the director’s fearless engagement with the tensions and contradictions of the globalizing modern world. In Café Lumiere, the traditional family unit has been severed, and in Hou’s subsequent film, Three Times, even the connections between individuals have broken off. The film observes modern Taipei as a schizophrenic war zone of competing stimuli, but not before it hops back to 1966 and 1911 to take note of the remarkable divergences in the texture of life, from modes of communication and behavioral formalities to political atmosphere and professional habits. Hou segments the film into three disparate chapters: “A Time for Love” (1966), “A Time for Freedom” (1911), and “A Time for Youth” (2005), setting up such on-the-nose headings only to reveal their fundamental inconsistencies. For instance, “A Time for Love” tells a story about a young soldier (Chang Chen) and a pool hall hostess (Shu Qi) who struggle to find a way to consummate their mutual affections (in effect, to love each other), “A Time for Freedom” - which is presented as a silent film with intertitles - involves a young man fighting for a revolution in China who fails to see the oppressive restrictions and lack of freedom imposed on the courtesan he regularly visits, and “A Time for Youth” features characters so self-absorbed and worn down physically and mentally that they exemplify nothing of youthful exuberance.

Chang Chen and Shu Qi play the featured man and woman of each respective tale. That they consecutively fall short of love hints at Hou’s melancholy worldview: real connection between two people is impossible in a world where, no matter what the time period and social context, external political, sociological, economic, and technological factors erect hurdles to be overcome. World War II, and the shifting economy it forged, dooms the lovers in the 60’s to a perpetual cat-and-mouse chase. Imperial rule in China and the leftist movement in Taiwan and Japan, as well as the behavioral constraints governing the self-contained brothel, result in physical proximity but no chance of emotional honesty. Finally, the contemporary lovers are so submerged in emails, texts, photographs, and not to mention other romantic affairs, that they lose sight of each other. During all of this, Hou is casually observing the changes brought about by time: the simultaneous accumulation of speed in communication (from written letters to instant texts) and the de-prioritization of communication. There’s a faint suggestion that the modern day people are more silent, inexpressive, and lost than the characters in the literal silent film, but overt messages are avoided. Hou’s overarching compassion, his modest acceptance of these inevitabilities, displaces the analytical work on the viewer.

Interestingly enough, Café Lumiere was Hou’s most decidedly unassertive and sparse feature of the 2000’s; Three Times, on the other hand, resembles the director’s comparatively maximalist effort. While the former comprised entirely of wide shots, quotidian details, and atmospheric silences, the latter uses regular cuts within scenes to close-ups and medium shots, entertains the occasional pop song (The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and Aphrodite’s Child’s “Rain and Tears”) to comment on the characters’ emotional states, and incorporates dramatic incident into its narrative. In acknowledgment of the many aesthetic shifts marking Hou’s career, James Udden offers a potential explanation for this phenomenon in 'This time he moves!': the deeper significance of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s radical break in Good Men, Good Women:

“Hou has given Taiwanese cinema an identity not just through style alone, but by using that style to convey the unique flavor of what is now commonly called “The Taiwanese Experience.” And if anything sums up both the Taiwanese Experience and Hou’s films, it is sudden, unexpected, and often irreversible changes.”

Similarly, if Hou’s decision to adopt a relatively mainstream style (at least when placed aside the rest of his work) in Three Times has a political or extratextual motivation, it’s a side effect of his increasingly noticeable urge to “[think] about the difficulties of representing [modern times].”

Of course, given this penchant for artistic shifts, there was no concrete expectation for Hou’s next project. Not only did he decline to take the Three Times aesthetic further, he made the unlikely decision to pay homage to French director Albert Lamorisse’s delightful 1956 short, The Red Balloon. Hou decided to slightly morph the title into The Flight of the Red Balloon, and justifies it by having a bright red balloon float freely throughout Paris for the entire film, revealing itself here and there as a gentle grace note. The feature was commissioned and supported by France’s Musee D’Orsay in an instance of cross-cultural appreciation that has become increasingly common in the transnational film landscape. (Also involved in the museum’s commission was Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s Visage/Face and French director Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours.) Like his pastiche of Ozu in Café Lumiere, though, Hou’s references to Lamorisse’s film are only surface-level, and instead of blithely recycling the previous film’s themes and images, he works them into his own signature perspectives. In a delicately postmodern touch, his character Song (Fang Song) is a young Taiwanese woman studying film in Paris and concocting her own remake of The Red Balloon on the side, all while babysitting Simon (Simon Iteanu), the son of a busy Parisian woman (Juliette Binoche), during the day.

The Flight of the Red Balloon recalls Café Lumiere at first in its low-key urban poetry, but it’s ultimately a more accomplished and dense clarification of Hou’s themes. Again incorporating the idea of geographical displacement into the narrative, Hou now extends it to become an omnipresent trend in the globalizing world, a result of practicality and not merely the globetrotting adventurousness of the individual. Song represents the director’s surrogate as a Taiwanese filmmaker working in France, while the central Parisian family she deals with has their own family member studying abroad in Brussels. Within this framework, the balloon becomes a cipher for the absent sister and - as it’s pushed throughout the city by wind - a reminder of the transience of the life. Simon seeks solace in a memory of his sister, but the past is merely a subjective narrative prone to fallacy and is ultimately unfulfilling. Multiple shots of glass reflections emphasize the illusory layers of consciousness as well as the chaos of modern life. In Hou’s cinema, the past is but a reflection in the mind’s eye. Ultimately, however, art does provide a place of refuge for the mutual imaginations of Song and Simon; one of the persuasive secondary motifs of the film is the uniting power of art and, specifically, the moving image.

At their essence, Hou’s latest films have been rapt portraits of individuals living within their various subcultures. In each film, the central individual is a woman (though it’s hard to designate one member of Three Times’ ensemble as “central”), and one senses these characters gaining increasing agency and authority throughout their respective narratives and throughout the chronological progression of the films, culminating in Binoche’s character in Flight of the Red Balloon, an intelligent, persevering, and utterly self-sufficient voice actress who dominates the frame in her frenetic domestic behavior. Contrary to Tonglin Lu’s findings in her book . Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China that “in Hou’s search for a Taiwan identity, women play only passive and subordinate roles,” the director’s interest in the place of women in society now runs parallel to his desire for a harmonious democracy in Taiwan, and his concern for Taiwan’s “problem of mentality” and “incomprehensible narrow-mindedness.” His casual observation of these women represents a frank attempt to raise their dramas - and indeed their mere physical existences - into public awareness. The camera peers long and hard at them, often seeming taken aback by their movement and only catching the tail end of an activity offscreen. It’s as if the director has purposely severed off his control of the scene (something that would have been far less likely in his earlier work), preferring to consider the free will of the actress.

Many commentators have tossed around the term “documentary” when grappling with the feeling evoked by Hou’s non-confrontational filmmaking, but these contemporary films are too lush, romantic, and quietly surreal, their structures too subtly clever, to entertain the question of verisimilitude. Mark Lee Ping-bin, the cinematographer of all four features and indeed a longtime collaborator with Hou, exercises lighting schemes that are natural to the films’ settings, but his rendering of those settings in voyeuristic perspectives with blurs of shallow focus attempts to capture the uncanny atmosphere of them rather than depict them objectively. It fits with Hou’s complicated understanding of the Taiwanese condition that his latest work should present yet another subjective illustration of the country and its troubled past, and that he should often do so divorced geographically from the country itself. Few filmmakers manage to engage so deeply and unmistakably with the identity of their own nation through a vision so discreet.

Melancholia (2011) A Film by Lars Von Trier

2011-12-10T12:06:00.000-08:00

Twenty years from now and henceforth, Lars Von Trier will be a fixture in surveys of film history. It’s hard to even say that about some of the greatest directors working today (of which I would not include Von Trier). He perpetually has his finger on the pulse of his viewers and is so gleefully and powerfully able to exploit that. One cognitive approach to cinema is as a tool of manipulation, and, setting aside the problematic ethical implications of that course of thinking for now, Von Trier is a master of manipulation. No director provokes such a physical response (nausea, chills, ecstasy) out of me, and no director gets me so livid one moment and so impressed the next. (I realize that by now this response to Von Trier is a cliche.) Melancholia is certainly no exception. Its opening montage is the most superficial, plastic-looking pastiche of Tarkovsky, Bruegel, and Last Year in Marienbad I've seen, yet it's somehow fascinating. Comprised of shots so slow-mo'd that they might as well be still frames and set to the Wagner symphony that is repeated bombastically throughout the film ("Tristan and Isolde"), the sequence feels emotionless and contrived. When Von Trier cuts away to the cosmos first for an elegant planetary dance and then for a representation of the titular planet bulldozing Earth, I couldn't help but recall Tree of Life, and in doing so, I was struck by the contrast between Malick's graceful, unassertive skill and Von Trier's self-serious, in-your-face heckling.

But it is precisely that heckling that makes Von Trier's work so distinguished. His aesthetic has taken a turn towards the romantic and the sensational since Antichrist that is aggressively singular: all downtrodden faces, gnarled jump cuts, deep, dark earth tones, and oppressively mangy tableau presented in rich high-fidelity widescreen. It's a look that can be both striking and thuddingly overwrought, like a melodramatic prime-time network TV drama. (The rate at which Melancholia vacillates between the two extremes suggests Von Trier rushed through production, spending more time on scenes he felt were of greater importance.) Even sillier is the insistence upon narrative segmentation, with title screens rendered in scratchy, prehistoric text or (as in Melancholia) iconic, Biblical scroll. Here, Von Trier divides his narrative into "I: Justine" and "II: Claire," the names of two sisters played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively. There's the predictable trope of the sisters being psychological binaries, an arthouse fetish that is by now old as dirt and that used to hint at auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni feverishly dissecting the female psyche but now often resembles a cop-out for a director who doesn't feign to understand how a woman's mind operates in the modern world.

Fittingly, Melancholia works best in its second half when Von Trier has all but abandoned introspection and obliterated the sanity of his leads. That's when the film starts aiming for the jugular and stops pretending to isolate its characters in a context that resembles real life. The latter is reserved for the first half, a wedding-from-hell scenario that hearkens - likely deliberately - back to 1998's The Celebration by Von Trier's Dogme colleague Thomas Vinterburg, by all accounts a superior anarchic outburst of familial tensions. Emerging out of the grandiose prelude, Von Trier's wedding narrative is souped up with jittery cameras and radically compressed perspectives to intentionally jar the viewer out of swoony stupor, regardless of the emotional texture of the scenes themselves. Unfortunately, the first scene Von Trier shows is a rocky attempt at comedy wherein Justine and her newlywed Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) shout in vein at their limo driver who can't seem to parallel park. The wide gap between style and content is surely one of Von Trier's many ill-conceived Brechtian devices, but it serves more to discombobulate the viewer's stomach than to actively foreground the chaos to come. Michael will soon be derailed out of the picture as Justine's mental illness takes the fore, and in doing so the rudimentary shaky-cam approach starts to find its footing: Von Trier seeks out the petty smirks and backhanded maneuvers that form a foundation for Justine's depression, and it starts to make sense; the people surrounding her (Charlotte Rampling as mother, John Hurt as father, Stellan Skarsgård as boss, Udo Kier as wedding planner) are all so cartoonishly rude, immature, and clueless that no relatively sane individual could stay with them for long. It's for the better that Michael's gone, and Claire's husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) ought to find his way out too.

Not that it matters, because everyone in Melancholia will be exterminated on and offscreen by the destructive finale of the film. Von Trier has always been at his best when dealing with ugly, extreme emotions (fumbling, of course, with the subtleties of human behavior) and the sci-fi scenario looming heavily over the characters - planet Melancholia is on a collision course with Earth - provides what is perhaps the perfect route to this emotional spectrum. Claire's herculean anxiety in the face of this perceived apocalypse, despite her astronomer husband's unconvincing declarations that Melancholia will miss Earth, is the focus of the second half, while Justine approaches a catatonic bliss at the mere thought of nothingness. Meanwhile, Von Trier orchestrates the growing disparity between the sisters' mental states with giddy stylishness, suspending the four actors - Sutherland, Gainsbourg, Dunst, and Cameron Spurr, who plays Claire's son Leo - in a Strindbergian, Dreyer-esque, existential black comedy complete with crazed horses and roiling layers of fog. In spite of the fact that the relative complexity of Justine's psychology is effectively stomped out by a line of dialogue about how "she knows things," or something, the effect of all this is hypnotizing. Von Trier's reliance on a DIY astronomical gadget concocted by little Leo out of metal wiring brilliantly elevates the tension as the mysterious planet nearly misses and then returns to Earth.

Melancholia is Von Trier's second quasi-autobiographical study of depression in a row, and with its final annihilation of the planet we live on, it stands to be miraculously bleaker than the pitch-dark Antichrist. The only perverse hope to be found is the supposed ecstasy that Justine achieves in putting a period on all things. Perhaps no director could entirely pull off making this small celebration convincingly triumphant, so it's remarkable that Von Trier manages to convey the ounce of euphoric grandiloquence that he does in the final back-and-forth of stirring close-ups, easily the film's best and most emotionally rich scene before it settles for an aggravatingly CG-laden money-shot of the Earth exploding around Justine, Claire, and Leo's triangular final dwelling. This is the most direct and unflinching capitalization on the climate of fear mounting around the allegedly incoming 2012 apocalypse that we've yet seen, and though I'm not ready to clasp hands with the devil the way that Justine does, Melancholia certainly evokes the soul-shattering intensity that such a cosmic event would inspire.

Hugo (2011) A Film by Martin Scorsese

2011-11-27T14:37:00.001-08:00

For two films in a row now, Martin Scorsese has staged a climactic scene around the ascension of a staircase. Atop one staircase is light (Shutter Island's lighthouse) and atop the other is time (the massive gears of the clock in his latest, Hugo), two of the primary elements that are manipulated in the creation of cinema. In some ways, this image represents the restless progression of this stage of his career, a continuous climb into the higher reaches of technology in search of new ways to heighten his expression. Of course, this attitude was there from the beginning: look no further than Mean Streets' SnorriCam scene or Taxi Driver's famous aerial tracking shot to witness Scorsese's compulsion towards technical spectacle. But in the 2000's, his awe of new gadgetry has been more pronounced. The blending of Super 35, Technicolor, CGI, and scaled miniatures for The Aviator, the soaring IMAX perspectives of Shine a Light, and now the most drastic shifts to 3D and digital with Hugo have all signaled a heightened desire within the aging director to tackle the many opportunities offered by new equipment.

As if to consciously separate himself from mindless gear-hound filmmakers like Michael Bay and James Cameron though, Scorsese uses new technologies (Alexa, 3D) in Hugo to educate about old ones, the final message being that the technology is negligible, that it's ultimately what one does with it that matters. The central paradox of Hugo - a digital celebration of celluloid and a plea for the importance of film preservation writ in 0's and 1's - is less a hypocrisy than a self-aware attempt to acknowledge the magic of the forebear and then take a leap into the unknown. Scorsese speaks to the mainstream using the tools of the mainstream about the critical responsibility of our culture to actively preserve our works of popular media at a time when the survival of film itself is jeopardized, when spectatorship trends are most schizophrenic, and when the public knowledge of what it takes to make movies is at its nadir. In a word, Hugo is timely, and its near-blockbuster status is sure to raise some awareness of the cinematic heritage Scorsese is building from.

Of course, if it achieves anything of the sort it's because of its accessible family adventure film patina (surely if the message was strong enough in itself Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma saga might have been a modest commercial echo of the Twilight franchise). The film is set in the Paris Montparnasse train station in the 1930's and follows the titular character (Asa Butterfield) as he scrounges his way through the walls overseeing the maintenance of the station's many over-sized clocks. Hugo's a mopey orphan who lost his beloved father in a factory accident years before the narrative begins, and therefore sustains a livelihood by refining his skills as a thief, grabbing croissants with the detached precision of Michel in Bresson's Pickpocket (Scorsese, as always, finds some joy in gently recreating the aesthetics of one of his favorite films). It's fitting that the film's somewhat slow and clumsy in establishing Hugo as a rounded individual and a boy whose issues of loneliness are worth investing in, because it turns out that he's, frankly, only of peripheral interest here. It doesn't seem obvious at first, but the embittered toy-shop owner (Ben Kingsley) who routinely barks at Hugo for stealing and/or breaking his gadgets eventually becomes the emotional and thematic center of the film. Conveniently, he's also Georges Méliès.

Early silent cinema starts to bristle from Hugo's sharp, kinetic edges, and it's here where the encylopediac cinephile-cum-technologist Scorsese of the modern day meets the asthmatic, attic-dwelling, projector-hunching Scorsese of old. Hugo's clearly a surrogate of the latter (staring out from behind the holes in the clocks, he sees the train station drama inside a cinematic frame), but it's in line with the gently self-loathing tendencies of this Little Italy filmmaker that what Hugo observes and explores is of greater emphasis than what he feels. His self-proclaimed "adventures" with Méliès' goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) - whom he also, for good reason, happens to harbor a bit of a crush on - lead the two to unlocking the toy-shop owner's true identity through a series of narrative incidents involving Hugo's ancient broken automaton and a silent film scholar working at a Parisian library. What ensues with Kingsley illuminates what a classic Scorsese character Méliès really is; isolated and repressive, he is a man, like many of the director's protagonists, suffering because of his inability to come to terms with the past.

The cathartic transformation of this tragic figure is not as convincing as it is in some of Scorsese's recent immersive character studies (Kingsley's heart suddenly swells when he spies a screening of one of his last surviving film prints), but the better to launch Scorsese into the passage of the film he cares about most: the heartfelt seminar on Méliès' invaluable contribution to cinema. Hugo presents a succinct history of the early spectacle filmmaker that is never once dry or academic, delighting in three-dimensionally recreating his already magical output in joyous bursts of color, smoke, garish costumes, and cardboard sets. The comparatively flat, tableau look of these recreations only underlines what magic Méliès was able to bring to the screen with mere two-dimensionality. Scorsese can't resist the gag of putting himself in the film briefly in reference to the pioneer's own onscreen efforts, but for the most part Méliès' life and work is all there unfiltered: the glass studio, the many enthusiastic laborers, the childlike dedication and delight he brought to the process, and the magician's urge to enthrall.

Hugo's film history mania does not end there. A flip-book held by Hugo at Méliès' toy store is a tribute to Eadweard Muybridge, the English photographer who took the first steps towards the moving image. Hugo's frightful cling to the outside of the clock at the top of the station recalls Harold Lloyd's even more terrifying - and certainly more vulnerable - stunt in his Safety Last!, which is also the film viewed by Hugo and Isabelle when they sneak into a theater earlier in the film. Moretz manages to evoke something of Lilian Gish in her awestruck expressionism, which is probably why it's no surprise that the most cloying parts of the film are when she opens her mouth, spewing the forced intellectualism of an overeager European student; Gish didn't have to speak to send audiences to worship. This is to say nothing of Hugo's structural reliance on two of the most iconic motifs in film history: trains and clocks.

Scorsese integrates this dense pastiche with great fluidity and visual energy, animating his Paris of the imagination with ubiquitous smoke shoots, vibrant colors, and a restlessly mobile camera (if Robert Richardson is not awarded in some capacity for his brilliant cinematography, it's a disservice to the dignity of the medium). What's more, the film makes a rare argument for the legitimacy of the much-maligned 3D format. Near the conclusion of the film, Scorsese throws in a dolly zoom (famously first invented by Hitchcock for Vertigo and later used by Scorsese in Goodfellas) with the added disorientation and depth of the 3D to create an image that tricks the viewer into thinking Ben Kingsley is literally floating in space, gloriously disconnected from the background. It's a spectacle that not even Méliès, despite his innovative wizardy, could have dreamed of.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) A Film by Sean Durkin

2011-11-17T12:17:00.000-08:00

This year, the annual film to inspire typically half-baked inquiries over reality vs. fantasy, questions such as "is it all in her head?", and roundabout discussions entertaining such insipid snippets of dialogue as "did you ever have that feeling where you can't tell if something's a memory or if it's something you dreamed?", is Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene, a film that, as the title suggests, apes the classic arthouse cliche of a woman with an unstable identity. But while the extratextual experience of the film may make the eyes roll, there's no doubting the unnerving impact of the film itself, which Durkin - a first-time writer/director with the aesthetic precision of a seasoned auteur - confidently orchestrates. As much as Durkin embraces and recycles (sometimes self-consciously, often not) the conventions of the independent thriller, he does so with such conviction that the conventions no longer feel conventional. Martha Marcy May Marlene is a film that cancels out its own shortcomings through the dexterity of its craftsmanship and the abundance of its termitic ideas on how to tease, thrill, and confound.

Structurally, Durkin follows a familiar formula: an initial set piece that attempts to build up a handful of mysteries while simultaneously refusing to explain those mysteries, the subsequent gradual accumulation of details forming a full picture of the mystery, and the final hint, just before the roll of the credits, of some new mystery once the prior one has been comprehended. Perhaps the word mystery is misleading though, because Martha's (Elizabeth Olsen) mystery is less of a definable presence than an enigmatic psychological condition, and it isn't so much solved as it is fleshed-out. Her story is fragmented into two timelines that the film hopscotches between: 1) an extended stay at a rural cult managed by Patrick (John Hawkes), from which she escapes to 2) her estranged sister Lucy's (Sarah Paulsen) isolated lakeside getaway. It's not quite a simple case of past and present, however, because Martha's memories of the cult are so vivid in her mind that it's as if they're submerging her ability to remain mentally tethered to the physical world around her. Everything shown in the film is a part of Martha's harrowing here and now, where mental fragments lead to impulsive actions disconnected from reality.

The realization that the film is a portrait of Martha's subjectivity does not come instantly due to Durkin's emphasis on long takes, his suppression of extra-diegetic sound, and his refusal to write his way inside his main character's head space, all of which are general signifiers of objectivity. But what Durkin has achieved is a way of presenting the subjectivity of a person who no longer understands her own ideals, desires, and actions, who indeed is a mere physical shell missing a cohesive soul. Thematically speaking, the film's post-Manson indictment of the identity-shattering mob mentality of cults couldn't be clearer, but it's the depth of detail that Durkin and Olsen infuse into Martha's character that really allows the parable to breathe. The longer Martha stays with her sister, the more her irreversible psychological issues come to the fore. Early on, she strips down entirely right beside Lucy and her workaholic husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) to take a quick mid-afternoon dip in the lake, a sign that the new-age hippie attitudes of Patrick's camp still dictate her behavior, and later, in the outburst that finally puts Lucy and Ted into the mindset that they can no longer live with her, Martha openly chastises Ted for his allegedly soulless working-class lifestyle. That Lucy takes so long to come around to the idea that Martha may have issues that go beyond mere sibling rivalry is evidence of Durkin's secondary critique of bourgeoisie complacency. In effect, this multi-leveled analysis of the modern world puts the film in the Haneke territory, coldly observing human behavior without attempting to explain the psychological perplexities.

This detached perspective works so well because Martha Marcy May Marlene is ultimately a horror film about the failure to understand ourselves and others, a crisis that not even communication can solve. In fact, the one scene where Martha and Lucy appear to be having an emotional breakthrough suddenly devolves into another one of the chilling, one-sided verbal beatdowns that Martha regularly churns out, outbursts of angry, vague rhetoric that sound like they are stemming from another vessel within her. These vessels include the wandering free-spirit disdaining materialism, the immature teenage girl, the insecure younger sister taking every opportunity to predict her older sister's inadequacy as a mother, and the confident "teacher and leader" that the members of the cult insist she is, and the spectacle of Olsen's performance is her ability to seamlessly transition between them. This fracturing of the self is marked in some ways by the progression of the editing, which vacillates between moments of serenity at the cult and horrifying episodes of sexual and verbal terror, usually match-cut with a scene provoking a similar emotional response at the lake house. Durkin's imagination in stitching together these two emotional realms within Martha seems boundless. The fluidity with which Martha exits one state of mind and enters another is evoked no better than in a startling cut from Martha jumping off Ted's motorboat and suddenly landing in a quarry with fellow cult members, the camera floating around underwater to a deep hum and glimpsing nude bodies through the murky darkness.

Durkin is collaborating with hugely talented cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes here, and their collective achievements powerfully enhance the immediacy of Martha's horror. The film is reliant upon strategic uses of negative space offered by long lenses. Figures are framed against vast expanses of blurred background, often with their backs turned against it as if pictorially predicting an incoming threat that never appears. Windows, in particular, appear in frame continuously after a breaking-and-entering thread is revealed in the narrative of the cult, elevating the tension further. Similar visual strategies are utilized by Lucrecia Martel, most hauntingly in The Headless Woman, and both techniques are traceable to Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur. It's a method of creating unseen horror that Durkin handles beautifully; as the tension seems to rise exponentially, the film gets slower and more teasing in its rhythm (one fade out/fade in evaporates the image like molasses, and it's one of the most nail-biting uses of the fade in film history). Durkin and Lipes also manipulate the robust texture of 35 mm to achieve a color space where blacks are more brown than black and the surface of the image feels milky, like a matte photograph. All are methods of conjuring a subtly off-kilter physical reality.

As for the aforementioned semantic debate, it's all rather negligible whether Martha actually witnesses (or witnessed) any number of scenes that deliberately tow a line between reality and illusion or whether they're elaborate projections of a mind tainted by perversions of group behavior and astray from functional morality. Either way one looks at it, they're visions of a person disconnecting gradually from "normal life", incapable of pressing on with society as the traumas at the cult continue to weigh on her. Looking at a confused female through the prism of post-traumatic stress disorder is nothing new in American cinema, but the care with which it's handled here is refreshing. Durkin's tantalizing final image cannot be attacked from the angle of reality vs. illusion because Martha Marcy May Marlene becomes more fascinating the less you deal with it in psychological binaries. The film is about the enigma of psychology, the fear that we may not be able to pinpoint any scientific justifications for human behavior after something as horrendous as the events at the cult.

Screening Notes #8

2011-11-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

Not One Less (1999): Despite his activist aspirations, Zhang Yimou just ends up generalizing notions of rural poor and urban bureaucracy to muse on the age-old "triumph of the human spirit" platitude. In doing so, Zhang only dehumanizes the destitute and loses sight of any tangible specifics. A social problem film should not end with this kind of crowd-pleasing, heart-warming crescendo; it should conclude ambiguously, incompletely, to emphasize the fact that these issues of poverty and the national exploitation/disregard of it are not in any way solved. It's pretty disappointing, because Zhang knows how to construct a drama fairly well, even if his pretensions to vérité social realism feel contrived. Not One Less is at its best when it's not hammering home a didactic and obvious message and Zhang's simply watching the chemistry between his many child performers, who are the real core of the film.

Mouchette (1967): The opening minutes of this classic are pure Bresson: he shows a man in the forest looking on as another man sets traps to catch rabbits and birds. In only a few descriptive visual fragments (close-ups on eyes, on hands, on the behaviors of the woodland animals), Bresson mythologizes the act of voyeurism and conveys deep guilt. This gets to the heart of his strength in dealing with the spiritual consequences of actions, so often telegraphed in the fewest number of shots yet pervading throughout the course of an entire film. The individual guilt in Mouchette is gradually extended to a collective failure to recognize the indecent treatment of the young titular character. There's always something enticingly cryptic and almost cubist about the films during this period of Bresson's career (Pickpocket, Au Hasard Balthasar) - his summit as an artist - wherein gestures are defamiliarized by the camera but add up to some oddly discernible whole. Critics often point to The Devil Probably and L'Argent as Bresson's most ascetic work, but it's here where behaviors seem most alien and stripped-down, and it's also where the human soul is made visible.

Khabi Kushi Khabi Gham... (2001): Even Ophuls would have been impressed with the vigorous use of the moving camera here. Big-name Bollywood helmer Karan Johar toys around with every variety of dolly, crane, and jib he can get his hands on to highlight, underline, embolden, and ultimately scribble out all the loud, overwrought emotions of love, separation, and reconnection in this four-hour family epic. K3G, with its grandiose declarations of filial piety stylized as the kind of melodramatic camp parodied in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, among other things, forces a shifting of our viewing preconceptions in order to fully digest the utter sincerity of Johar's messages. Once digested, it's a fascinating, troubling film rife with abysmal ambiguities in its relationship to the capitalistic West; one moment, it's glorifying the accumulation of British wealth and materials (Johar includes some montages that play like TV commercials for not one, but several major fashion companies), the next it's demanding a purification of the Indian people, a return to the mainland values. Furthermore, its debt to Western culture - already strange for a film about the reintegration of the diaspora with India - bears no temporal specificity, with Johar's general mise-en-scene refracting classical, Technicolor, Sirkian Hollywood and other passages echoing Mean Girls and Legally Blonde. With all this directorial ambivalence, Johar sure has a firm grasp on one thing: the movement of dancing bodies in space.

The Clock (2010): Like many others, I'm pretty stunned by Christian Marclay's towering museum exhibition The Clock, a towering monument to time and cinema. My first reactions were purely practical. How did Marclay manage this feat? How much time did it take? Did he survey everything from the aggregate history of film and television to find those tidbits that expressed, somewhere in the frame, the time of day? Beyond that, how did he begin to assemble what feel like miniature narrative and rhythmic movements within the perpetual onslaught of varied media? Sure, sometimes Marclay's tempo is sketchy, but the guy is allowed a few hiccups in 24 hours if some filmmakers manage to make an hour and a half an intolerable disaster, right? The Clock is a compulsive viewing experience that simultaneously alerts the viewer nearly every second of the irresolvable slowness of time and the mysterious elasticity of it. Somehow you can lose sense of real time even as you're experiencing it directly within the theater, and miscellaneous characters from narrative history seem perplexed by this paradox as well ("What are you staring at?" one man says, to which the other responds, "Time", or, in another instance, "Describe this time machine of yours. How does it work?") I can't think of a film in recent memory where the gap is so narrow between simply enjoying the film for its gleeful pop-cultural sampling and thinking seriously about its endless conceptual inquiries. I'll be heading back to the Museum of Fine Arts for a few more hours with this daunting achievement in the near future, and may write more about it.

TIE: A Selection of Shorts

2011-11-02T16:14:00.000-07:00

TIE, the International Experimental Cinema Exposition, is a traveling program of experimental films curated by Christopher May that seeks to bring to light the impoverished image of contemporary experimental cinema to a broader filmgoing public. What's more, May is working hard to revive the nearly extinct ghetto of 16mm exhibition, a medium that has become less and less attractive to the profiteers of international cinema curation. TIE's latest program, which recently made a pit stop in Boston, is a collection of short films by mostly American filmmakers ranging from 5-22 minutes that loosely explore the notion of travel and aim to transcend conventional anthropological approaches. Further affinities between the six films reveal themselves throughout the program - the idea of the outsider, the trajectory through a space, certain visual and editorial rhythms - that speak to May's sharpness as a curator.

The program began with Diane Kitchen's Penfield Road, the oldest film of the bunch from 1998. It's a playful meditation on travel, specifically contrasting the ideas of vacation and of merely occupying a place. Kitchen uses postcard pictures rather than here own footage and accumulates a bizarre editing rhythm by alternating back and forth between two images several times before introducing a new image to alternate with the second in the first pair. This somewhat unsettling pictorial rhythm, akin to a line of dominoes reversing their inevitable momentum every other piece, is set to rough, fuzzy ragtime that skips as if spinning on a bad record player. Kitchen's clearly suspending a sense of irony when she shows uninhabited nature alongside dolled-up middle-aged women peering out at the world from an observation tower, but the effect is less often funny and more often stuck between bluntly didactic and curiously thought-provoking. Whether one thinks of these small and iconic figures in the postcards as exploiting the beauty of the natural world or respecting their small roles within it, Kitchen is at least attempting to make the viewer consider the way we inhabit the physical world.

In Death Throes #1, filmmaker Tony Balko goes way beyond Kitchen's rapid photomontage to achieve pure frenzy, an assault of images that paradoxically achieve a mood of relaxation, of quietly taking in the stillness of nature. The effect is not unlike some of Stan Brakhage's shorts that use fast bursts of images to reach for something warm and ephemeral, such as Cat's Cradle or Mothlight. Balko assembles hundreds of fragmented shots of Northern California mountain regions, combining rocks, leaves, dirt, insects, trees, sky, and mountaintops to gradually form a cumulative mental picture of the landscape. Usually the same piece of scenery, no matter how undramatic, will be shown several times in a row from slightly different angles, perhaps some blurred and some not, offering multiple ways of looking at the same thing before the image quickly recedes into the rapid movement of the film and reveals something else. The editing is relentless but often strikingly beautiful, such as when Balko creates an extended stretch of shots that form their own miniature progression. And despite the seeming chaos, one could similarly apply an overarching narrative to the entire short; the images, abstracted from the utter speed and momentum, appear to tell the internal, emotional tale of a sunny hiking trip.

If Balko's objective is to aggressively interrogate the objective to locate the subjective, Chilean filmmaker Jeannette Muñoz' Villatalla takes a more reserved stance on objectivity and aspires to suggest nothing more than the physical world before her camera. Muñoz' film is split into two parts - one in color with field recordings and the other in black and white with no audio - that observe the daily happenings in a remote mountain village in Liguria. So drastic is Muñoz' shift that the project feels like two separate films, the first of which is superior in mood and discipline. It is there that her compositions are at their best, fragmenting the space visually while uniting the village through the quiet, spacious field recordings. In the second chunk of the 22 minute running time, the camera observes a sun-bleached forest where a farmer collects various sticks for an unspecified task. Muñoz' attention to the rhythms of the man's work wavers, making it a somewhat incomplete study of labor and solitude. Instead, her focus drifts to a seemingly endless succession of indifferently-framed shots of forest undergrowth. Still, however unfocused, there's a real sense of an outsider's compassion for her new and humbling surroundings.

The highlight of the showcase was Jonathon Schwartz' Between Gold, which possesses a measure of thematic complexity to coincide with its casual and nuanced observation of an exotic country. The film grew out of Schwartz' brief stay in Istanbul, where he brought along a Bolex and indiscriminately filmed people and places, and it concerns itself with the docking grounds on either sides of the Bosphorus Strait, which mark a divide between Europe and Asia as well a distinct separation of the Turkish areas of Anatolia and Rumelia. Being an economic center, the Strait sees great amounts of back-and-forth migration. Schwartz focuses on this unceasing movement while keeping his images unobtrusive, languid, and ruminative. As much as people are traversing from one space to another, there is also stasis between transportation, and it is during this layover that Schwartz finds his most evocative images of quiet, lonely figures, partly dehumanized in the midst of the ongoing cultural exchange (is Schwartz' insistent non-diegetic soundtrack of dogs barking a suggestion of the ultimate debasement inherent in all this monotony?) yet elevated by the camera's gaze. The finest example of this act of individualization is the film's centerpiece, a long and repetitive passage focusing on a young woman's face, back-lit by the sun, as she rides the ferry from one continent to another. Few films in the program allowed such transcendent moments of introspection, and Between Gold was the humanistic triumph because of it.

Samaritan Girl (2004) A Film by Kim Ki-Duk

2011-10-27T09:02:00.001-07:00

Historically, Samaritanism is defined not by the geographical association with Samaria but by the Hebrew term Shamerim, which means "Keepers of the Law," and refers to the conservation of traditional practices. There's a great deal of law-keeping going on in Kim Ki-Duk's Samaritan Girl: policemen encroach on instances of prostitution, a father distributes humiliation and pain to a variety of sexual offenders, an innocent passerby frantically calls 911 when he sees a bloodied and mangled man lying on the floor of a bathroom. The most unsettling implication of the film's alleged Samaritanism, though, is the idea that the director is the ultimate "keeper of the law," and that the "law" is of his own devising. We rarely think of cinema as a pedantic tool of justice, but Kim has singlehandedly with Samaritan Girl attempted to make a case for the director as policeman. But how do we trust a law-enforcer who's Buddhist one minute (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring), nihilistic the next, and all of a sudden Samaritan, not to mention one who erratically shifts his values in the middle of a day's work?

Samaritan Girl is a whopper of an odd and discomfiting film, confusing justice with oppression, progress with backwards conservatism, control with love, and vengeance with enlightenment. It's divided into three sections: Vasumitra, detailing a naive young prostitute named Jae-yeong's (Yeo-reum Han) attempt to emulate her idol, the ancient, titular prostitute who supposedly made all her clients lead Buddhist lives; Samaria, which watches as Jae-yeong's best friend Yeo-jin (Ji-min Kwak) commemorates Jae-yeong's early death by sleeping with all her old clients and returning their money, all while Yeo-Jin's father Yeong-ki (Eol Lee) angrily pursues his daughter's victims; and Sonata, wherein Yeong-ki brings his daughter to the countryside with ambiguous intentions. Each part is brimming with its own ideological contradictions and contrivances. For instance, what is Yeo-jin's tribute of following in her friend's footsteps if not a reinforcement of the same troubled aversions to connection and meaning that she despised in her friend? Why does Yeong-ki act so proactively on his daughter's behalf but display no tangible affection for her as a daughter? The final third of the film desires to say something about the reemergence of the family unit, but don't Yeong-ki's illusions of pastoral simplicity expose his similarly puerile attitudes towards family and love?

There are answers to these questions - indeed pretty obvious ones - but Kim is unaware of them, and equally unaware of the deeply chauvinistic patina of his work. Yeong-ki avenges his daughter's exploitation not because he genuinely seeks to align social equality but because he fears her sudden agency and wants to reaffirm his position as a stern, autocratic father. Instead of disavowing an awful imbalance in social mores, he simply realigns them to fit his equally nonsensical vision of patriarchal dominance. Kim's emphasis is not on the justice over depravity but rather on the brute masculine force of vengeance, revealing that his true concern is not egalitarianism but the idealization of the male. Fittingly, Kim litters the film - really, plenty of his films - with blunt phallic imagery. It's usually a popsicle or a corndog or some such food on a stick (and the perpetual sucking is just one example of erotic fantasy), but these more blatant surrogates spread the thought of sexuality to any other image remotely indicating a narrow cylinder. Most bombastically, during Yeong-ki and Yeo-Jin's day trip to the countryside, the sensual consumption of hot sweet potatoes leads right to an overhead shot of the two sitting on a canoe, their bodies facing ahead along with the forward-thrusting shape of the male.

Kim's women are endlessly stubborn and resigned, and they tend to stay that way throughout his narratives. His men are always looking for ways to "purify" them, to return them to a state of total submission. Note Yeong-ki's murder and subsequent burial of his daughter by a lake; it is there, in the tranquility of nature (itself a stand-in for regressive purity), that he can finally cease to worry about her threatening his control. Granted, the scene is "only a dream", but it seems a dream that Kim is waiting for to bleed into reality. In fact, the whole film is a dream, a dream of how Kim wants his society to be, with teenage girls always naked and homoerotic in their private time, men always searching for a quick way to assert their power, and families always disillusioned and criminalized without the grip of a father. Sure, he may disapprove of prostitution, but he is fond of a quieter, more invisible form of masculine domination. The simplest offense of all - and the area where Kim has been able to trick the international art cinema crowd - is that he's a clumsy, pedestrian filmmaker, cutting when he doesn't need to cut, punctuating when he doesn't need to punctuate, and aiming for emotions that miss the mark. If the audience is supposed to feel empathy when Yeong-ki's stuffs his face with sushi and subsequently throws it up to the tune of a sappy piano melody, something is severely off-kilter.

The Mill and the Cross (2011) A Film by Lech Majewski

2011-10-26T20:07:00.000-07:00

It has become an increasingly rare occasion to be able to use the word "original" or "unique" with utter sincerity when dealing with a work of art these days, a trend attributable more to the generally clever recycling of forms and narratives as well as the oversaturated proliferation of media than it is to any (nonexistent) widespread dearth of inspiration or imagination. Lech Majewski's latest film, The Mill and the Cross, however, proves the exception to that rule. It's the kind of mysterious creation that fully, coherently, and convincingly erects its own hermetic and uncanny world that exists only for the duration of the film proper and subsequently enlarges in memory. It belongs to a special league of films that include Werckmeister Harmonies, Eraserhead, and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. This kind of spellbinding world-building does not always lead inexorably to a great film, but it nonetheless represents an exalted category of filmmaking: the ability to conjure a world that seems, at least superficially, to operate according to the laws of our own yet simultaneously feels alien and fantastical. And Majewski's film is so mystifying because it manages to take something so earthbound - Peter Bruegel's famous painting "The Way to Calvary" and the historical events surrounding it - and succeed in infusing it with an overpowering sense of the surreal.

Majewski, who has dealt with famous paintings and painters in his work before (The Garden of Earthly Delights most notably), canned the project's original conception as a traditional art history documentary to instead dive into the world in which Bruegel lived. The result is a loose, free-form exploration of the Flemish milieu and the people who inhabited it, all placed inside the context of Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer) conceiving, planning, and painting his epic panorama, "The Way to Calvary." In charting the mundane labor of various townspeople - the miller perched high atop a forbidding rock formation, Bruegel's wife and children, the Virgin Mary (Charlotte Rampling), and various peasants and Shakespearean simpletons - as well as the devastating turmoil caused by the Spanish rejection of the Protestant Reformation, Majewski employs a languid, observational style, his unpredictable structure mirroring the slow roving of the eye across any number of Bruegel's famously packed compositions, overflowing as they were with unrelated mini-stories. Despite the sheer scope of the narrative collage, however, The Mill and the Cross maintains a light, ethereal quality even in the midst of watching red-coated conquistadors brutally torture and hang those who actively opposed Spanish rule, Jesus among them. This is a deeply spiritual work, borne from the self-imposed calm of the artist quietly observing and reflecting his surroundings.

I would probably break my back trying to describe the myriad ways in which Majewski delicately conjures the religious and political upheavals of the time and makes a case for their profound influence on Bruegel's work, but that's probably best left to a historian. I was struck most by Majewski's typically jaw-dropping approach to the material. His body of work continues to be marked by drastic technological and artistic innovations, including the 33-short-films-within-a-film approach of Blood of a Poet and the hand-held digital of The Garden of Earthly Delights. But here, Majewski takes his biggest leap yet into the domain of digital layering and CGI while keeping the painterly, tableau-like blocking of much of his work intact. The landscapes in The Mill and the Cross are composites of pieces of Bruegel's original painting and various nature footage captured on a Red One (clouds, trees, rocky mountains), creating a startling hybrid of real and unreal planes that recalls Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (one recurring image of the God-like miller peering down upon passersby is instantly reminiscent of that film's celebrated money-shot) but goes even further in the pursuit of three-dimensionality, thinking of a backdrop not just as one homogeneous surface but rather as a compilation of many different visual elements. It makes The Mill and the Cross infinitely pleasurable to gaze at, as well as - with the exception of one digital "camera movement" during the film's impressive 4 1/2-minute choreographed shot of the collective procession towards the Crucifixion - gloriously free of the ugliness that plagues so much contemporary post-production gimmickry.

Majewski acted as co-cinematographer on the film along with Adam Sikora, and the two of them showcase an innate grasp on the quality of light in Renaissance artwork. A single source of hazy outdoor light creeps through windows to flood dusty, wooden interiors, while bare bodies tend to be encased within a soft, amorphous glow, as if brighter paint were bleeding into the dark tones of the background. This light achieves a mystical, fable-like aura, culminating in Majewski's irreverent rejection of established codes of lighting continuity by occasionally using two sources of light in one shot: that of the sun and that of the holy spirit. The film also has a special feel for composition; among plenty of iconic images captured in The Mill and the Cross, Majewski and Sikora watch two peasants climbing up a steep precipice before a majestic landscape, a mill-worker ascending his cavernous dwelling towards the light of day, two imposing gears churning like molasses in the darkness, and a group of toddlers roughhousing in their claustrophobic domestic environment, one of them cementing the timelessness and rootlessness of the armpit fart. One of Majewski's key compositional motifs is the vertical angle, underpinning the constant presence of divine observation.

In a film so heavily reliant upon the visual, peripheral aspects (narrative, sound design, acting) take a backseat in terms of emphasis, but Majewski's equally careful in dealing with each. The film's minimalist, but nonetheless multi-layered narrative, actually comes to a harmonious crescendo towards the end of the film, with each of the individual characters appearing in the massive gathering that inspired Bruegel's painting. Majewski makes no attempt to round out the stories or to bring them some sense of closure, instead preferring to subsume them into the whole and imply a cyclical movement of individual and environment. In fact, in some ways The Mill and the Cross is reminiscent of Tarkovsky's epic on painter Andrei Rublev, in that it divvies its attention up to fragments in the lives of the people surrounding the artist in question in an attempt to reflect the social inspiration that guided their work. The film's soundscape is similarly democratic, and incorporates the same principles of sampling inherent in the visual design. Combining both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds atop snatches of whispered voice-over by Rampling and periodic inserts of Józef Skrzek and Majewski's pensive, operatic score, the film pares down its aural world into something of sparse, creeping dread, occupying yet again an unsettling middle ground between the real and the unreal. This tension between a faithful representation of Bruegel's universe and something more detached is perhaps the ideal way for Majewski to impose his own singular vision onto a piece of art that is itself so exalted, influential, and majestic.

Gatekeepers: Tarantino v. Besson?

2011-10-17T21:02:00.000-07:00

A concept such as a “Gatekeeper Auteur,” as outlined by Leon Hunt in his book East Asian Cinema: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, is less a useful critical term than a vague and pedantic categorization. Hunt uses the term to refer to Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson, two Western director/producers – one American, the other French - who are “attuned to cults surrounding Hong Kong, Japanese, and South Korean cinema” and end up “displaying their connoisseurship of Asian cinema” in their films. Tarantino is the more flagrant and unapologetic of the two, as well as the figure that is seemingly less at fault, while Besson reveals his fanboy status through allegedly invisible appropriations. For instance, the agile street fighting and urban parkour of Besson’s Banlieue 13 shares a kinship to Chinese martial arts, while Tarantino’s much-lauded Kill Bill series has an aesthetic field day with the Shaw Brothers, Yakuza films, Seijun Suzuki, Bruce Lee, and Takashi Miike, among countless others.

The more one digs into the surfaces of Kill Bill and Banlieue 13, however, the less they really seem to represent any sort of binary representation of Asian cinema influence. To what extent are Tarantino and Pierre Morel (Besson’s hired director) really operating on different ethical planes? How is Morel’s borrowing of a twice-recycled tagline recipe (“No Wires, No Special Effects, No Limits”) not a blatant admission of homage in the way of Tarantino? How is it fair for Tarantino to overflow his film with snatches of canonical influences whose specificities are likely to fly over the head of the majority of the target demographic and unfair for Morel/Besson to take the lesson of no more than one Asian reference point (the Kung-Fu street fighting of Ong-Bak) and let it billow to the surface only sporadically throughout the course of an entire film? (That David Belle’s pectorals remain elegantly exposed for much of the running time isn’t enough to concede Bruce Lee theft). Both directors seem to take sly advantage of their viewers - merely a fraction of which probably have any clue what’s being plundered – to present images and forms that fly as “homage” to one crowd and as “originality” to another.

Either way, there’s a long lineage of artistic borrowing that the directors are continuing here, a trait that hearkens way back to the earliest practitioners of motion pictures and even beyond the cinematic medium itself. Hunt problematically seems to draw the line of acceptability at this notion itself rather than at the particular modes of borrowing the filmmakers indulge in, as if to suggest that most American narrative cinema since the 1930’s is somehow “Russianized” because of its indebtedness to Eisenstinian montage, or that Godard is a phony because of his regurgitation, and simultaneous commentary on, a hodgepodge of global cinemas. Artistic recycling may be erroneous in the case of Morel/Besson and Tarantino, but it is so for different reasons, none of which include the mere fact that they are resorting to Eastern media consumption as influence.

It is a crucial distinction here that Tarantino is unabashedly honest and borderline arrogant in his film-literacy while Morel/Besson are more populist and unassuming in their ambitions. Nearly every shot and every sequence in Kill Bill is spiritually tethered to a similar moment in a marginalized (by Western standards) Asian Kung-Fu film, yet Tarantino’s ultimate resignation to “Orientalist tropes of impenetrable psyches and exotic otherness” betrays his appreciation. This is one area where Hunt nails it, discussing how Tarantino can only "have Asian" and not "be Asian." Morel and Besson feel no inclination to loudly proclaim their idolatry, instead disguising their influences in the comparatively unique French habit of parkour, which is questionable in an altogether different way. They, on the other hand, "have Asian" without seeming to desire to "be Asian", preferring to morph to their own context. The “right” thing to do here – that is, the approach that yields the greatest degree of respect and admiration and the lowest levels of hasty exploitation – is perhaps somewhere in the middle.

Happy Together (1997) A Film by Wong Kar-Wai

2011-10-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

Although Happy Together is only one of two of Wong Kar-Wai’s films to be set almost exclusively in the Western Hemisphere, it perhaps more pointedly concerns the Hong Kong Condition than any of his Hong Kong-set films. The year of its release is of fundamental significance; 1997 was the year that Hong Kong would forgo its position under the colonial rule of Britain and return its sovereignty to mainland China. Curiously enough, as a colony of Britain since it was ceded in 1841, Hong Kong is a space associated more with Britain than with China, and it possesses a destabilized historical and political identity that could only be further confused by its belated assimilation into Chinese culture. As such, issues of identity and stability abound in Wong’s film, and its plot of two young gay lovers relocating for a vacation in Argentina right in the midst of this national event is a fittingly exaggerated concession of spatial displacement. Buenos Aires, conveniently, is a port city much like Hong Kong, a place of heedless immigration and expatriate activity - indeed, the mirror image of Hong Kong as implied by Wong's upside-down shot of the city late in the film. From this contextual foundation, Wong builds a film about the search for connection and meaning in an environment that seems incapable of offering such rewards with people who seem blind to them.

Happy Together’s abstracted representation of Argentina - all time lapse, claustrophobic interiors, and heightened colors - becomes a surrogate for 1997 Hong Kong, where transients have been assigned a newfound sense of identification, just as Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung) assert themselves into the Argentinean milieu that is simultaneously strangely familiar and foreign. The lovers go to the city in the first place to visit the Iguazu Falls, a vast waterfall canyon that comes to represent an unattainable oasis as their relationship gets increasingly unstable, breaking out in fits of rage and jealousy that keep them confined to a tiny, dilapidated apartment room within the city. Wong bookends the film with a magnificent aerial shot of Iguazu, its dark mist billowing from the gulf in between. It's very likely the same image used twice, but it nonetheless transforms from something that is sublime and seductive to something forbidding and impersonal, a powerful indication of how turbulent Ho Po-wing and Lai Yiu-fai's journey is and how much intimacy Wong is able to capture in the process. Like their own native city, the location has become warped and unreal, no longer possessing its initial magic and seemingly inhospitable to life.

The lovers' relationship is plagued from the beginning of the film by bitterness and jealousy, and only fleetingly interrupted by rare moments of compassion and physical contact. Wong’s extratextual context suggests that the trauma of the lovers is due largely to a missing basis of stability. Both men’s families are out of the picture, underlining Hong Kong’s larger issue of social division and individualization, and one gets the sense that Ho Po-wing and Lai Yui-fai would completely disappear were it not for their frail connection to each other. They're both true wanderers, lonely souls without a clear idea of what they are searching for or what they want out of each other. While Lai Yui-fai internalizes his disappointments, Ho Po-wing returns almost nightly bragging about his sexual encounters and ordering treatment for his cuts, bruises, and broken bones, symptoms of a dangerous and unfaithful lifestyle. In many of the film's finest scenes, Leung and Cheung deftly convey the schizophrenic tendencies of a relationship without defined boundaries, swapping mid conversation to become the powerful or the powerless. Wong's sympathy generally leans towards Lai Yui-fai, the more sensitive of the two, but he invests compassionately in the rebellious, traitorous Ho Po-wing too, who finds himself alone in their Argentinean apartment without Lai Yui-fai late in the film, one of the many instances in Wong's filmography of characters connecting through absence. So often it is distance - not proximity - that denotes intimacy.

This sentiment is stretched to a subplot involving Lai Yui-fai's co-worker at a tourist-friendly Chinese restaurant in Buenos Aires named Chang (Chen Chang), a character who is only introduced late in the film at a time when Ho Po-wing is at his most emotionally distant. Lai Yui-fai, despite his intentions of indifference and overwhelming feelings of heartbreak, relays an instant, if hesitant, connection to Chang. Their time together is limited to the fast-paced kitchen environment where they work and where Chang regularly stays overtime to survive financially, but when Lai Yui-fai cooks him dumplings one night it immediately recalls his similar nurturing of Ho Po-wing in his time of injury. It's a relationship that never moves beyond the platonic (there are the minor details, too, that prove Chang is straight), yet there is an undeniable charge in their shared moments, especially considering Chang is hyper-sensitive to Lai Yui-fai's emotional state given his unusual condition of heightened hearing and defective sight. As is so typical of Wong's films however, potential connections are swiftly extinguished as people are separated geographically, succumbing to the flow of the impersonal globalized environment. Still, in a poetic epilogue intercut with Ho Po-wing's embrace of a Iguazu-themed lamp that sits in the lovers' apartment throughout the film, feelings of attachment are memorialized across spaces, as Chang listens to a tearful voice recording of Lai Yui-fai in a remote region in the south of Argentina and Lai Yui-fai visits Chang's family business at his home in Taipei. Material evidence of connection trumps connection itself.

These memorials also point to a potent longing for a paradise, for something beyond the ordinary (family, new locations, love), which can be linked to Hong Kong prior to British colonization. Such a backwards-looking perspective necessarily shrouds the future in uncertainty, leading to Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yui-fai’s failure to commit. It’s as if in setting his film in a foreign land, Wong is suggesting that 1997 marks the complete and utter disappearance of Hong Kong as an independent culture and the reinvention of the city as something alien even to longtime inhabitants. The lovers feel a desire to leave because they feel the growing disconnect from permanence and tradition. Not only is Hong Kong displacing itself from the country that afforded it the luxuries of capitalism for over a century, it is also attaching itself to a country that is now comparatively less developed in the avenues of technology and economy. Therefore, a radical illusion of a temporal shift occurs: the future, represented by Hong Kong’s vast technological gridlock, is returning to the authority of a politically distinct and technologically slower China, emblematic of the past. All of this leads to a heightened fracturing of time, which has forever been Wong’s visual forte. Happy Together, despite adhering to a linear narrative approach, utilizes an editing system that implies a disruption of chronological time, jumping occasionally from the urban squalor of Argentina to the waterfall at Iguazu, or taking jarring stylistic leaps such as from black-and-white to color, or from film noir to romance. The outside world is reduced to a blur, whipping by these characters in their walled-off torments, either right-side-up or upside-down.

Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yui-fai’s romance becomes an allegory for the turbulence of this uniquely global city, comprising as it does an initial level of comfort, then a prolonged era of confusion and frustration, and finally a complete extinguishing of affect, a disappearance of the entity. But Wong does not view this new phase with total cynicism; rather, his perspective is surprisingly light and forward-thinking, shedding the melancholy weight of the narrative proper at the end to muse on the possibility of new connections. (The inevitable subject of the film’s title perhaps has more to do with Lai Yui-fai and Chang’s tenuous relationship than with the unstable romance at the center of the plot.) While Hong Kong threatens to reduce the characters to ghosts without identities wandering in a limbo state between constancy and progress, they have continued to deal with these conditions by leaving, splitting apart, regrouping, and starting anew; always restless, Wong's lonely figures are at the very least striving for something meaningful.

Contagion (2011) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

2011-10-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

While critics and viewers continue to single out Cliff Martinez for his lush but silly musical efforts on Drive, I'd like to turn the attention towards his work for Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, a score as organically suited to the material as that of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for last year's The Social Network. The music, taut and propulsive and dark and nail-biting, is the aural equivalent of the phantom virus that defines the film's plot. Its skittery electronic beats sound like the distorted, panicked workings of the internal body, its rapid pace echoes the unrelenting speed of global information-transfer, and its continued use of delay, with indistinguishable techno textures bouncing around the speakers until they slowly disappear in the back of the mix, resembles the cascading effect of the epidemic. The music is weaved in and out of Contagion for a large majority of its 106 minute running time, never directing the audience's feelings but reinforcing and heightening the sense of do-or-die suspense.

I begin with Martinez's score because it's one hell of a useful entrance into understanding the effect of Soderbergh's film, seeing as it crystallizes so precisely the ideas that the director and cinematographer is working with here. On the surface, the film fits cozily into the disaster movie genre, reflecting the global meltdown of people in the face of an entirely uncaring and irreversible force, and Soderbergh seems both embracing of that populist mode as well as defiantly committed to straddling genres, confronting heady themes, and - as is typical of late-period, digitized Soderbergh - at least partially ignoring Hollywood codes of characterization, audience reinforcement, and stylistic norms. This is a film made on an international scale with a plethora of A-listers that boasts a premise tailor-made for cheap gimmickry and gratuitous production expenses, but Soderbergh keeps the whole thing so intimate and focused that it can mostly be reduced to a crisply edited succession of interior dialogue scenes. Not only that, but its horrors are decidedly mundane: the touch of a hand, a doorknob, a piece of food, a previously germ-infected room, all of which lead perilously to rapid physical decline. The first twenty minutes of the film are masterful in their economic precision, paying vivid attention to the invisible enemy and creating anxiety out of absence and abstraction, such as in the image of a door slowly swinging back on its hinge long after a person has passed through, temporarily disrupting the breakneck pace of the montage.

Like his 2000 film Traffic, Soderbergh is using the template of the geographical network narrative to dramatically connect people and spaces. But Contagion is less about drawing gimmicky, deterministic ties between different individual narratives (the Inarritu mold) than it is about charting how the modern world manages to erupt very similar types of paranoia across the globe in response to a quickly spreading threat. Few contemporary filmmakers, other than, say, David Fincher, are as attuned to and fascinated by the ways in which information is spread rapidly around vastly separated territories (phone calls, news broadcasts, internet blogging abound), and how that information becomes a kind of currency. The tension between what characters know for sure and what they perceive to be true is a guiding dramatic force in the film, eliciting the many phone calls that instantly disseminate data or otherwise withhold it and motivating the ideological conflict between Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and conspiratorial blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) that acts as a collision of the concerns of capitalism, ethics, and science running through the film. Soderbergh doesn't pick a side here (his ambivalence may be a tipping point for some, but I see it as an admirable stance on the notion of such an unexpected tragedy), instead pointing to the complexity of the issue and acknowledging that both schools of thought - Ellis' practical, methodical, and ultimately slow-moving research methodology and Krumwiede's anarchistic support for a homeopathic remedy called Forsythia that he believes to be of immediate assistance - are concerned first and foremost with the containment of the disease and the survival of the greatest possible number of people.

Within this framework where time passes and casualties exponentially rise, Soderbergh cuts between the various characters with increased efficiency and spreads a heightened awareness to issues of sanitation and isolation. Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) and his daughter Jory (Anna Jacoby-Heron), the family of the first virus victim Beth Ernhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), hole themselves up in their Minnesota suburb, Dr. Ellis orders head Dr. Sussman (Elliott Gould) to extinguish all samples for fear of their contamination outside the lab, medical researcher Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) gets kidnapped in China and taken to a remote, allegedly safe village to order for the quick relief of the group of survivors, and Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) is rendered impotent with the virus during her creation and management of a massive refuge center. Meanwhile, the disease seems to act in utter counterpoint to the vain actions of humans, brutally disregarding and embarrassing their cautionary maneuvers. Of course, its actions have nothing to do with humans, only with nature, but it's tough for the characters not to think there's some supernatural force of evil dictating the vicious path of the contagion. It's this vision of nature as disconnected from morality and only containable through the often unwieldy efforts of science that distinguishes Contagion's blunt, oppressive, and entirely plausible worldview.

In a film where the putrid, lifeless shades of green, brown, and blue expose the clammy textures of hands and faces, it's only natural that criticisms of misanthropy are raised, and that attempts to sketch a complete portrait of humanity fall short. Then again, Contagion is a horror film that's more about process than people, and it becomes more effective the less it characterizes and individualizes. Not only does Soderbergh's overflowing cast undercut the hegemony of the Hollywood star system, it situates people beneath the alien processes of nature. That no character takes center stage here - when Damon begins to, the film lurches awkwardly - is a testament to the collective paranoia at work, the fact that no individual is above the heedless trajectory of the virus. Damon's story of knee-jerk survivalism overwhelming deep feelings of confusion (over his wife's pre-death infidelity) and grief (it was his wife after all, and he loved her) is blandly written and melodramatic despite the actor's skillful work sinking into the restrained emotional world of the character. In fact, nearly all the actors do a terrific job of breathing palpable life into their sometimes thinly written characters: Fishburne with his deep, soothing voice, Cotillard with her expressive physicality, Winslet with her longing eyes and persistence, Law with his no-nonsense sloganeering, and Jennifer Ehle with the delicate care and concern writ across her entire face. In regards to these formidable presences, questions of three-dimensionality and screen time become negligible.

The widespread panic caused by the virus, as well as the alarming stubbornness of the civilians, becomes reminiscent of that which is caused by any modern alert of terror, newsworthy spectacles that ignite increased ventures of national security. Here as well as in the "real world" (though Soderbergh attempts to erase the boundaries on a sociological and political level), corporations are the mouthpieces that define the actions and movements of people. Although Contagion flounders when it moves abroad - falling into the trap of generalizing the Third World as a place of poverty and in need of rescue - the film certainly understands the American power hierarchy and the public reaction to it. In charting some of the human resistance to this top-down process of information-transfer, Soderbergh also finds unsettling instances where compassion falls to the wayside and people rob and kill for their own attempted survival. It is this collapse of human dignity and companionship that ultimately disturbs on the deepest level in Contagion.

In the end, Soderbergh nearly pulls a Spielberg and erases the frightening implications of his film in a flimsy scene of suburban sentimentality featuring a homemade prom for Mitch's daughter and her recently vaccinated boyfriend, but as if to overturn feelings of resolution and tranquility, cuts right to an eerie, stomach-turning epilogue that thoroughly traces the cause of the virus back to poorly prepared meat that Beth ate on her business trip to Hong Kong. The scene might feel tacked-on were it not cut, lensed, and integrated so beautifully, if it didn't adequately literalize Mitch's connective thought process when flipping through the photos on Beth's digital camera (ever since Sex, Lies, and Videotape Soderbergh has been struck by the connection between recorded images and the brain), and if it didn't tie the film's vital cautionary morale back to a tangible source. Soderbergh's stressing the need for resilience to capitalistic forces, which can so easily (especially in a timely industry like the food industry) overlook public interests in the name of financial gain. Not to mention that in the midst of the uproar and chaos captured so precisely by Soderbergh, one might have forgotten that these tragedies have real, physical reasons for being. And one might recall an earlier, rapid insert of meat-chopping at a street vendor, which has now been given retrospective resonance.

Putty Hill (2011) A Film by Matthew Porterfield

2011-09-29T12:40:00.000-07:00

Avoiding cliché, hyperbole, and mumblecore posturing, Matthew Porterfield's Putty Hill gets right to the heart of its eponymous community, a small working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Baltimore. It is there that he loosely documents the undramatic goings-on of a faintly connected group of people in the limbo period before a funeral. Porterfield points to Pedro Costa, particularly his sprawling In Vanda's Room, as inspiration for his approach here, which casually jockeys between narrative and non-fiction, ultimately raising questions about the origins of each. What's more, drugs play a pivotal role in the subject matter; here, they are the cause of the premature death of Cory, a local skater whose untimely and offscreen overdose is the impetus around which the film is structured. It's also a matter of fiction that Porterfield constructs to examine the virtues of community, family, and memory as united by tragedy, but what's so extraordinary about Putty Hill is how honest and authentic it feels. I didn't know Cory's death was a ruse until after seeing the film, when Porterfield unassumingly addressed the matter in a post-screening Q&A.

Erecting an observational ensemble study atop a fictional foundation allows Porterfield to achieve two unique effects: that of drama and reality coexisting in never quite clearly demarcated degrees, and that of real people pulling from their own memories and life experiences to comment on the subject of mortality. Putty Hill is essentially about people, their stories, and the way that those stories find ways to link up, and Porterfield's attention to the simplest, most mundane of behaviors is never less than rapt. After a wordless opening consisting of shots inside the barren rooms of Cory's apartment, the death quickly becomes peripheral to the film's engrossing immersion into the day-to-day rhythms of the milieu, merely a jumping off point for Porterfield in his insistent probing of individuals. Without warning, the director will hang on a close-up of some townie - young or old, boy or girl - and begin asking prosaic questions from behind the camera: "What is your name?"; "Did you know Cory?"; "What do you think about going to a funeral?"; "What do you do here in Putty Hill?" The performers - many of which are playing near exact versions of themselves - relay a comfortable spontaneity before the camera in their uncomplicated, often choppy answers, blurring the line between what is rehearsed and what is lived-in and authentic.

Because many of the individuals Porterfield focuses on are people who once lived in Baltimore and have since moved away only to return temporarily for the funeral, the film gathers a striking tension between stability and transience, a mood of dazed pre-funeral stasis where the visitors have nothing to do but visit their old friends and family and the townsfolk feel perhaps too devastated to carry on normally with routines and obligations. A trio of skater girls wander aimlessly in the woods, Cory's mother sits on her porch in the middle of the day blankly, and Cory's friends lounge in pools and inscribe his memorial in spray paint at the skate park. These people are defined by a dumbstruck silence, a disinterest in doing much to divert their thoughts away from the somber event. One notable exception is the local tattoo artist, who Porterfield shows a particular interest in. His tale of vengeance over his wife's assault is the dialogue that inspired the film's making, and the artist delivers the harrowing words in clipped, quiet tones that are nearly stifled beneath the high-pitch buzz of his tattoo gun. The scene, and Porterfield's tight, slowly panning camera, are blunt and intimate, refusing to sensationalize the grim story or the man's clear sadness upon hearing the news of Cory's death. But work must go on, as Porterfield chooses to return to the makeshift tattoo shop later in a scene that eschews dialogue in favor of an extended wide shot of the lowly lit room (it's here that Porterfield's Costa influence is strongly felt).

The tattoo artist's daughter Jenny (Sky Ferreira) is also a special subject for Porterfield. At once echoing the indifferent, emo-punk attitudes of her peers, Jenny is also the most thoughtful and complex of the bunch. She takes time out of her day to visit her chain-smoking grandmother for lunch in a geriatric home, and later has the film's only emotional outburst, sobbing and stomping her feet on the second-story porch of her father's house. Porterfield challenges the limits of the long take here, suspending deep sympathy for the girl's somewhat incoherent ramblings to her father about her alleged hatred for him and for Baltimore. Then, as if oblivious to her personal drama, peers into her soul shortly after in the backseat of a moving vehicle as she answers questions about the minor ethical dilemmas of funeral-going. Porterfield so genuinely wants to reflect the varying shades of these people, their dramas and routines, their goals and dreams, and their thoughts and emotions.

Putty Hill culminates, fittingly, at Cory's funeral, a rather unfussy affair at a karaoke bar where the entire array of individuals Porterfield interviews pack into a small room to exchange their sorrows. At this point, this fictional death seems to have bore into the actors' collective consciousness so deeply that it effects their every gesture. It's a remarkably low-key, moving sequence, never devolving into melodramatics or over-stylization. Porterfield and his cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier are decidedly unshowy with their digital images, usually sticking to close and medium shots that keep faces as their primary interest. But the film does not quite conclude here, digressing to a brief episode where some of the wandering teenage girls visit Cory's empty house at night, a dark, foreboding vision that allows Porterfield to flirt with the aesthetic staples of low-budget horror: darkness, shadow, long takes, compositional tension. Unsurprisingly, the film doesn't entertain its subtle sensationalist gestures, keeping the scene to its bare essence. In doing so, Porterfield is able to bookend the film with a chilling re-visitation to Cory's house and vitally preserve the unique social experiment that is the film's backbone: the sense of individuals becoming personally affected by events to the point where fiction vs. non-fiction no longer matters.

Cyclo (Xich lo) A Film by Tran Anh Hung (1995)

2011-09-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

The traditional tenets of a Westernized concept of a nation – those of family, gender difference, and cultural identity – have been splintered beyond recognition in Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo. In the overcrowded post-war ghetto of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, characters sleepwalk through their daily grinds, taking whatever meager job they can get to struggle by. It's a place of perpetual hustle-and-bustle, an assault of urban stimuli that Tran captures in a collage of fleeting impressions ranging from labor to violence to sexuality to spirituality. The film’s central focus is an impressionable teenage boy who is identified in the script - like the rest of the figures who are defined by their professional type - only as Cyclo, the name given to the tricycle taxi he peddles around to carry supplies from one place to the next. When he is beaten up and his mode of transportation is stolen by a group of thugs, Cyclo’s already thin grounding of stability and identity is forced into flux as he descends into a shady underworld of violence, drugs, and sex.

It’s a scenario that is instantly familiar for its allusions to Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic The Bicycle Thieves as well as countless gangster films exploring the subject of innocence lost, but Cyclo’s brilliance lies less in its recycled narrative than in its harrowing depiction of a bruised nation, something it effortlessly aligns with the fate of its protagonist. Tran’s presentation of Vietnam overtly dissects the archaic metaphor of the “national family” by shattering every potential local family in the film. Since his single sibling (Tran Nu Yên-Khê) and mother lead lives just as turbulent as his, Cyclo is conspicuously lacking in any routinized domestic experience, and a gaping absence of a father figure is carved into the film’s DNA. The immaterial presence of Cyclo's father is felt only through periodic bits of poetic narration, seemingly the only fragments of wisdom handed down to Cyclo before his likely death in the war. It is telling that the only fathers in the film - Cyclo's grandfather (Le Kinh Huy) and the father (Din Tho Nguyen) of the gangster leader known as "The Poet" (Tony Leung) - are impotent and irrelevant to the progression of the narrative, wiling away in their drab apartment buildings smoking cigarettes. Without a firm sense of immediate family to fall back on, generations of young people are absent of moral guidance and thus, Hung suggests, turn to illegal activity to scrape by.

While Tran's representation of this illegal activity as reducible to the trades of drugs, sex, and violence may be a deterministic oversimplification of the vast scope of post-war Vietnamese societal degradation, it's important to note that he's attempting to work through the tactile grit of the everyday to get to the level of the allegorical. Characters are unnamed because they are microcosms of more widespread trends of hardship. Cyclo's sister, who is whored out by The Poet, is not necessarily an instrument of Tran's misogyny but rather a symbol of the lamentable tension that forces women in this society to resort to their bodies to get by. Interestingly enough, some of the real movers-and-shakers of this fatherless milieu happen to be women, as glimpsed in the shadowy old mob boss who mediates the economy-defining world of drug and sex trafficking. Alternately, The Poet, her leading subordinate, questions his position of authority in leading his overanxious thugs through a carnival of violence that escalates further and further away from perceivable motivation and logic. (Leung is quietly devastating in the role, even as his actions can be whittled down to moodily smoking cigarettes and dispassionately stabbing victims.) Such imbalances between youth and old age, action and inaction, knowledge and leadership, not necessarily themselves indicative of disorder or chaos, at least point towards a radical reordering of social and national identity as well as a profound disillusionment with morality.

Cyclo meticulously ties its central concepts back to potent visual metaphors nestled within. Tran presents a country forever scarred by violent American occupation during a vicious and prolonged war with an onslaught of intense, savage imagery. His critique of the needless exploitation of the Vietnamese public is never less than teeming with anger, as he frequently collides moments of relative serenity (schoolchildren singing, Cyclo joking with friends, his sister enjoying a night of glamor) with harsh jabs of inner-city bombast as if to juxtapose What Could Have Been with What Is. Accordingly, his camera leaps from being controlled to agitated, with nearly kaleidoscopic bursts of ugly color and movement. Violence sprouts within the film like a tree, branching out to its several characters until Cyclo himself is so entrenched in memories of it that he too loses a sense of rationality; he douses his body in bright blue paint in the climactic scene of the film to signal a complete retreat from reason (and to clarify that Hung was absorbing Pierrot Le Fou at the time). The collective burden is often anthropomorphized, too, in both the shot of a lizard's tail being cut off, in a poultry slaughterhouse (a savagely beautiful scene), and in the throughline involving a fish tank in the mob apartment. There's an inherent imperialism reflected in the gangsters' ownership of the fish that is not unlike that of the American relationship to Vietnam during the war, and when Cyclo stuffs his dirty head into the fish tank in one scene it's a similarly disruptive force.

The integration of violence into the flow of everyday life seems an irreversible phenomenon for the nation of Vietnam, where demoralized endeavors of violence are spread to new generations with regularity. A potent indicator of this fluid assimilation is the omnipresence of liquids - mud, water, paint, blood - in many of the film's compositions. Everything feels soaked in grime, and it seems inevitable (though Tran leaves it up in the air as to whether there is optimism or pessimism to be taken from his recurring shots of schoolchildren) that this dirt will trickle into the incoming generations of Vietnamese people. Tran’s vision of the battered nation is perhaps best visualized by the sight, late in the film, of a goldfish floundering on a wooden floor. Like the fish, the nation, seized and left to die by an outside force, is struggling to survive.

Drive (2011) A Film by Nicholas Winding Refn

2011-09-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

It's pretty clear at this point where Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn's strengths and weaknesses lie: his eye for cinematic space and feel for primal (mostly aggressive) emotions has a way of obliterating nearly all nuance from character, theme, and story. Drive, his latest Ryan Gosling vehicle and Hollywood breakthrough, may be the film where that dichotomy is most evident. Like last year's The American (one wonders what might have caused this sudden urge to ape the contemplative action movies of old), Drive inserts a European flair for atmosphere and emotional restraint into a conventionally American conception of genre cinema. But Refn, unlike Corbjin, falls into thinking that stylistic affectations are enough to elevate trite material into something mythic and monumental, and ultimately Drive settles into a half-baked fever dream of flimsy homage - Mann, Wong Kar-Wai, Melville, and McQueen all join the party - to support a desperately Screenwriting 101 narrative of crime, film noir, and romance cliches. Regurgitated before a general American public, Drive's aesthetic signposts may look and feel novel (and I suppose they are when placed aside the majority of contemporary action movies), but they are for the most part merely rehashes of techniques and moods applied more convincingly and fittingly to the sources they sprang from.

The crux around which the film's ambitions can be measured is a montage sequence towards the end of the first act conveying a nameless Driver's (Gosling) infatuation with his doe-eyed neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan). Driver lusts after her apparent innocence, and it's made blindingly clear through Refn's many symmetrical compositions, where any human imbalance could throw off the pictorial and implied thematic unity, that he is the surrogate father of Irene's son, indeed even an ideal missing link to their family trio. (Considering Irene's jailed and "imperfect" husband is Hispanic, Refn seems unaware of the illicit racism inherent in the suggested betterment of this familial entity, but that's another line of thought entirely.) For Gosling, as with every existential anti-hero in the history of American cinema, getting the girl appears to be an instantaneous escape from the imprisoning drudgery of his repetitive role in life, which, in this case, consists of acting as the driver in big-budget movie stunts and manning the occasional getaway car for heists overseen by Driver's exploitative agent Shannon (Bryan Cranston). The montage in question covers Gosling's first leisurely endeavor with Irene and her son, when, given the task of driving her back to her apartment from the auto shop, he takes a diversion to a secret nature spot. Intending to crystallize Driver's single guiding desire and thus establish the backbone of the film's dramatic conflict, Refn instead reduces the scene to a brief, kitschy interlude where the gauzy blend of 80's synth pop and sunny visuals pillages the moment of any human tenderness that might have organically existed had Refn not indulged in the aesthetics of a television commercial. Disastrously, the entire justification for Refn's supposed character study feels tacked-on and superficial from the get-go.

Once Irene's husband does enter the narrative, of course he's tied up in some seedy shit left over from his pre-prison days. Taking it as his perverse strategy for acquiring Irene, Driver offers to assist the husband by providing his escape car in a heist that will help shake off his debts. In doing so, the tension between Driver's existentialist trap and his transcendent desires is erased, since pleasing Irene means doing what he already does. Henceforth, Drive spirals into an ultraviolent revenge yarn wherein Driver's life-or-death stakes rise, making his stoic put-on less and less convincing. Gosling, of course, has a role here that oozes cool, that is so indebted to historically badass representations of introspective action heroes (equal parts Delon, McQueen, and De Niro) that it demands a lot. And while Gosling is able to bring a formidable, enigmatic presence to the first half of the film, those same qualities of wordlessness and spare physicality are exposed later on as the self-conscious poses of a man disturbingly astray from functional morality. The issue is not that Gosling doesn't feel realistic, it's that he just doesn't feel like a human whatsoever and more like a pastiche of various tough-guy, anti-hero tropes (his resignation to a stuntman mask at the finale of the film suggests he has fully submerged his identity). Ironically, the same reasons Clooney was lambasted for The American are the grounds on which critics find ample praise here for Gosling, but the difference is that Clooney functions well as an interior actor, finding subtle ways to externalize his inner turmoil. Gosling, on the other hand, can only stare.

Refn, who has displayed a continued lack of imagination in his dealings with supporting role in the past, struggles to counteract Gosling's inertia with any vibrant, emotive characterizations for him to play off. The offhand glorification of Driver allows little screen time for characters like Irene, Shannon, and the movie producer-cum-mob boss Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks), to whom Driver becomes dangerously entangled following the film's central set piece. Mulligan, her suspected talents impoverished yet again by lack of screen time or one-dimensional writing (see also An Education), becomes little more than an abstract still frame of a Romantic Interest with no agency in the progression of the narrative. Sure, she's a symbol, a cipher more than anything meant to challenge Gosling's passivity, but her obliviousness makes her a moot point, not a tantalizing enigma. Brooks, meanwhile, injects artificial menace into the latter half of the film more by humorlessly cutting throats and slicing wrists than by actually telegraphing any convincing sense of doom in his facial expressions and body movements. His character, like Gosling, is a rudimentary idea of a genre archetype (the no-nonsense, antisocial mobster), and therefore is devoid of multiple layers.

All of this being said, Drive is a sufficiently assured film in several departments aside from narrative and character. I can practically hear the proverbial chorus of supporters stomping their foot down to the chant: "it's a film about atmosphere, not story!" Indeed, on that level Drive is a luscious ode to the nighttime gridlock of LA as a place of pulsating beauty, and one needn't look further than the film's first and finest scene, a calmly paced, compositionally tight getaway sequence following a too-close-for-comfort heist. It is here, in Driver's special habitat, that Refn really locks in to his character, paying close attention to the squeeze of his leather gloves against the clutch and the rapidly shifting eyes from road to rear-view mirror as he waits for the robbers and navigates the dark labyrinth of streets. Refn will frequently fill three-quarters of the frame with blackness and amorphous clusters of streetlights towards which his characters will apprehensively peer, evoking the claustrophobia that accumulates when there are so few options on where to hide a hulking piece of metal. The film almost never missteps in its calculated approach to shooting action in a way that respects silence and space while also ensuring that bursts of violence and noise are especially earth-shaking.

Trouble is, it's already well known that Refn succeeds on this level. He's been an atmospherically adept filmmaker from the start, but he's yet to marry his uncompromising craft with material that it can do justice to. And beyond that, he's yet to find aesthetic heft from within. As much as Refn's hypnotic treatment of driving is well-intentioned and well-delivered, it's pulled from Mann (Collateral in particular), Two-Lane Blacktop, and Walter Hill's The Driver. As pained and passionate as Gosling and Mulligan contrive to look at each other, their gazes - and the souped-up visual treatment of those gazes - is excavated from late Wong Kar-Wai, especially when Refn resorts to operatic slow motion for good measure. And as much as Drive pushes to become the next seminal anti-hero saga, it's constantly drowned underneath the weight of its towering predecessors (Taxi Driver, The Conversation, To Live and Die In LA, etc.) and relegated to the level of pedestrian.