cinema echo chamber

Conversation: Sean Baker, The Prince of Broadway

2010-09-16T12:02:00.003-04:00

First things first: This post marks the end of the longest posting draught in the short history of this little film blog. Its been a very busy summer. Its my hope to post on a regular basis again starting this fall.

Lets play catch up, shall we? Sean Baker's Prince of Broadway was one of my favorite films among the contenders for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You prize in 2008. After winning at Boulder, Torino, Woodstock and Los Angeles film festivals during its long festival run, Baker's film was nominated alongside his previous feature Take Out for the Independent Spirit's John Cassavetes Award for the best film made under $500,000. At Hammer to Nail, Michael Tully called the films' "two of the finest American social realist pictures of recent memory." It opened a couple of weeks ago in New York and last week in Los Angeles. Here's a chat I had with Baker via email last week.

CEC: Both of your films visit underrepresented corners of the city to reveal immigrants living on the margins. What draws you to these type of tales and how specifically did Prince of Broadway come about conceptually?

Sean Baker: I would say that I am drawn to tales of the city in general. Being that NYC is so diverse, and in many ways an immigrant city, I always found it unfortunate that there remained many groups and cultures underrepresented in New York cinema. I think my last two films are a response to this feeling. With Prince of Broadway, I didn't want to cover the same territory that Shih-Ching Tsou and I did in Take Out. Being undocumented doesn't define somebody. It is (hopefully) merely a temporary legal status. I knew if one of the lead characters was an undocumented immigrant, the film would be much less focused on their plight and more with how their status effects their everyday life.

Prince of Broadway stemmed from my desire to shoot in the wholesale district of Manhattan. Associate Producer and actor, Victoria Tate, and I spent many months in the research phase, interviewing and socializing with the men who work in the wholesale district. At first, I wanted to write a story about a rivalry between two shop owners on Broadway... similar in style to a film such as Wayne Wang's Smoke. One day, while making rounds in the area and interviewing some of the West African hustlers who make their money selling counterfeit goods, I came across Prince Adu (working a legit security job). He was the first person who showed genuine interest in what I was doing and, within a couple of minutes, expressed to me that he wanted to act and bring the story of a west African immigrant to the screen. I realized two things at that point. One, I wanted to broaden our story to focus on the life of a West African in this district and two, Prince Adu would play that role.

We still did not have a story however. At some point, someone asked me why I wanted to shoot in this area. I answered by saying that even though I’ve lived in Manhattan for close to 20 years, every time I enter the wholesale district, I feel that I am experiencing the city for the first time… almost through the eyes of a child. It was at that moment that I realized that placing a child in the center of this chaos would not only be dramatic, but hopefully get the audience to experience the area the way I do.

I had just wrapped up the IFC's 2nd season of Greg the Bunny and decided to use everything I made from the show to make the film. I asked Darren Dean, a friend and fellow filmmaker, to come aboard and co-write the screenplay with me. Victoria, Darren, Blake Ashman-Kipervaser (Associate Producer) and Stephonik Youth (Production Designer) set out as a team and moved quickly to take advantage of the winter months. The title of the film was obviously inspired by Prince Adu's name. It seemed appropriate and further calls to mind New York films that I personally love - Prince of the City, King of New York and The Pope of Greenwich Village.

CEC: How did you find financing?

Sean Baker: I have been incredibly lucky to be a part of the Greg the Bunny franchise which has made it possible to self-financed my films up to this point. The budgets have been very low, plus I do not have a family to support so I have been able to take chances. Also, I must mention the film festivals that provided generous cash awards. Prince of Broadway was mastered and prepped for release with the monies received from the Los Angeles, Canary Islands, Vladivostock, Woodstock, Torino, Belfort, and Cleveland Film Festivals. The film would not have made it to this point without the festivals.

CEC: The most visceral sequence in the film for me is when Lucky is given his would be son by his ex-girlfriend while trying to sell some bags to tourists. It had to be a tricky scene to pull off.

Sean Baker: From day one, we referred to this scene as the "operation baby drop." It was one of the few scenes that I had blocked out and shot-listed. We had filming permits so it wasn't as tricky as it may appear. The one thing I didn't expect was the cheering and applauding from the on-lookers across the street. When the NYPD came to check our permits, they would chant "PO, PO, PO PO!" It added so much to the chaos that I shot it and worked it in to the scene. This film is all about happy accidents.

CEC: At what point did Lee Daniels see the film and how did you make your way from the festival circuit to distribution?

Sean Baker: We received a couple of offers after our festival run. However we felt that the money wasn't good enough given the period of time that we would be licensing the film. Elephant Eye Films came on board to do our foreign sales. They had just released Sebastian Silva's The Maid and I was very impressed with their line of films. When they offered to release the film, I jumped at the opportunity. Deliverables took a little awhile because I was in production on MTV's "Warren the Ape", plus I had to swap out alot of the music. Erick Sermon, from the famous hip-hop duo EPMD, came on board and generously provided me with six original tracks. We finally mixed and mastered the film and here we are.

Lee Daniels originally saw POB as a judge at the Independent Spirit Awards. We were nominated for the John Cassavetes award. I spoke with him shortly after the event and we discussed the guerrilla filmmaking style employed in both Take Out and POB. David Robinson from Elephant Eye was a producing partner with Lee on The Woodsman. Plus, they are the foreign sales rep for Precious so when the idea came about that Lee could possibly "present" the film, all it took was a call from David.& Lee generously agreed to lend his name to the project to help it along.

CEC: What were your influences when conceiving the project? I kept thinking of the Dardenne Brothers while watching it.

Sean Baker: The Dardennes were most definitely on my mind, as were Ken Loach, John Cassavetes, Lars von Trier and Jerry Schatzberg. The one film that I was thinking about the most while making POB was Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. I don't think that is in anyway apparent when watching my film. The influence had less to do with the style of filmmaking and more to do with Abel's utter willingness to push the envelope and take chances.

CEC: How did you go about finding performers to play Levon?

Sean Baker: Levon is played by Karren Karagulian. I have known Karren for over ten years and know he has the potential to carry a film. He was in bit parts in my previous features and in a short that I produced and edited. I hope to work with him again very soon.

CEC: You serve as your own cinematographer and editor. How does wearing all those hats inform your directorial style? Obviously you retain a tremendous amount of control.

Sean Baker: Yes, I will always want to participate in the editing of my films. I see editing as 50% of direction. With POB, I made a two hour and five minute cut and then worked with my team to streamline it to one hundred minutes.

Cinematography is something that I have done on my last two films because of budget constraints. I simply couldn't afford a DP. I even credit myself as 'shooter' out of respect for the true cinematographers out there. Looking back on both films though, I am happy I made that decision. With Take Out, Shih-Ching Tsou and I had to remain so clandestine that if we were any larger than a two person crew, the jig would be up. With POB, I think it was very important that I was doing camera operation because it allowed me to be very intimate with the actors. In some scenes, it was only the actors and I in a room together.

CEC: In what ways are filmmakers and hustlers essentially the same species? Watching your film again, I couldn't help but account for some similarities.

Sean Baker: Hustling has many definitions and at times refers to illicit affairs. When filmmakers use the term "beg, borrow and steal", in actuality the most we ever steal is a shot or two. Most of the time, we hustle, that is by trying hard. Indie filmmaking is about hard work, persuasion, high energy and not being afraid of living hand to mouth.

We're on Hiatus. We'll be back this summer.

2010-06-03T20:40:00.002-04:00

On The Eclipse

2010-03-26T12:58:00.000-04:00

By Evan Louison

Conor Macpherson's work has never offered itself to an American audience without the caveat that Ireland’s mystery, its people and its traditions, would always remain one step beyond American's understanding. Yet in all his work, Shining City and The Seafarer included, there exists a universality that transcends this cultural and geographical. The same can be said of his latest picture, The Eclipse which like Shining City contains a widower plagued by ghostly memories of his bride and like the The Seafarer maintains the conceit of a heaven that can be reached if you live a good, rich life.

McPherson's tale focuses on an Irish shop-teacher/widower named Michael Farr (Ciaran Hinds) who volunteers as a runner at the local literary festival, shuttling writers of certain famous (or infamous) ilk, back and forth from their quarters to the various readings and events at which they are expected to shine. All the while, mysterious spectral figures and noises haunt him, growing increasingly explicit and over-gored, resembling his institutionalized father-in-law, his late wife’s father, who strangely enough, is still alive. Michael leads the lonely life of a single father, nobly carrying on his work for the festival, secretly writing stories of these haunting visions. And remembering his wife and the suffering she endured before her death from cancer, which appears to be the source of all his nightmares.

It is here in the context of these late-night visitations and the ongoing festival that he stumbles across a quite beautiful writer, Lena Morelle, with whom he slowly falls in love (a brilliant Iben Hjejle), and her not-so-beautiful or pleasant to be around ex-lover Nicholas Holden, the darling of this literary set, self-important et al, played in an annoying, brash tone by Aidan Quinn. Mr. Quinn is not to be found at fault here, he’s brought great emotional and honest performances to the screen in the past and will again, it’s just that his character, a gauche, bravado ridden, pompous ass of a writer is so obtusely written, that the cards are tipped immediately, we read quite clearly that we are intended to hate him, and have no real choice in the matter of choosing. In this, the story falters, disappointingly, and we are drawn more and more to distracting elements of reality that seem hokey or modern than the underlying mystery of the supernatural that Mr. Macpherson clearly hopes for our sense of intrigue to be spurred by.

The most beautifully composed part of the story happens about three quarters the way through, when a harrowed and spent Michael, exhausted from the rush of demons never ceasing to plague him, and a quite unnecessary and ugly fight with Nicholas, awakes in the light of the morning to his dead wife, looking as she did at death’s door, sitting at the edge of the bed. She changes before our eyes, looking younger, more vibrant and full of life, as she must have when Michael first met her. She pulls herself closer to him, a soothing touch of comfort amid the storm of his story, finally a ghost of solace. It is a touching, all too real moment, note-worthy, and of the picture’s finest. It contains in it the essence of the story I believe Conor Macpherson wanted to and perhaps set out to tell: One of loss, of the paranormal, of memory, and eventually, of some kind of resolution.

Ciaran Hinds turns in another graceful turn as his warmly welcomed, perennial, brooding everyman. The wonderful, underexposed Danish actress Iben Hjejle (High Fidelity, The Boss of It All), with her innate ability to quiet and punctuate a scene, no matter how violent, no matter how dominated by men much larger than she, is equally fine. However as the rivalry between Hind's modest, small-town Irish Joe and the arrogant American author reaches its crescendo and the visions become more explicit, and more reminiscent of Evil Dead and its descendents, the piece comes unhinged. The film has the ability to scare, this much is true, but not to leave us affected in the way it would like to.

Rotterdam comes to BAM

2010-03-03T15:19:00.000-05:00

I didn't get the chance to cross the pond last month for the 39th International Film Festival Rotterdam. Damn recession. This irked me to no end, in large part because I regard the festival as the world's most intricately programmed cinematic event, one that invites both traditional crowd pleasers (Slumdog Millionaire screened among the hundreds of titles at last year's affair) and works that stretch the boundaries of cinematic representation in bold and innovative ways (I missed Lav Diaz's 8 hour Melancholia last year, but from those who forged their way through it, I hear it's a trip). The IFFR is an indepensible event of the cinematic calandar and I look forward to making my way to that surprisingly inviting Dutch port city in the future.

Lucky for me and Brooklyn cinephiles in general, BAMCinematek has forged a new partnership with the indelible Dutch film festival of record to screen its Tiger Award competition features as part of an annual program to take place each March. As one of last year's IFFR Young Film Critic Trainees, I had the opportunity and obligation to see all last year's competition films, a group that contained some pleasant surprises, but no real revelations. Still, it was an honor and a privilege to sit on the FIPRESCI jury (even as a junior member with only a partial vote). We ultimately settled on awarding our prize to Edwin's outlandish and subversive Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, a choice which as time passes I'm even more satisfied with than a year ago.

I'm happy to report that Rotterdam@BAM, which begins tonight with a screening of Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio's much lauded Mexican feature Alamar, includes a group very impressive competition films. Although I haven't had the chance to see all of them as I did last year, several among the works I have had a chance to see stick out as the work of incredibly promising new filmmakers.

Set along the beaches of Costa Rican resorts, Paz Fabrega's Cold Water of the Sea shared the Tiger Award with Alamar and Anocha Suwichakornpong's methodical and illusive Mundane History. It is a ravishing and quietly moving little story of the unlikely encounters between a local family that is supported by the tourist economy and a young couple who are staying at the resort within which the family makes a living. Centering on the wayward seven year old daughter of one of the maids and a young, malaise filled woman who wets her bed and fears diabetes, it is a film that contains not a single uninteresting image. Fabrega withholds just enough to keep us off kilter and searching within her frames for clues to these people's lives. While she evokes the stylings of Michaelangelo Antonioni and Lucretia Martel, her unlikely milieu and careful mise en scene lack any sort of familiar derivation. This could have easily devolved into a simple tale of the bored bourgeoise and the watchful underclass, but the picture transcends these expectations and leaves one quietly refreshed and delighted.

Insidiously disturbing and yet almost never less than great fun, Georgian filmmaker Levan Koguashvili's Street Days centers on a middle aged Heroin addict named Checkie (an absolutely brilliant Zura Begalishvili), who spends most of his time trying to score with a small pack of equally ravaged older men in a small Georgian hamlet where everyone knows everyone else's business. A peppier, less formally austere take on the themes of Police, Adjective, Koguashvili's film shows great empathy for this broke and and unskilled junkie and his cohort while reveling in the corruption which grips the town from head to toe. Busted by the cops, Checkie is forced to score heroin for the son of a prominent minister (and his former childhood classmate) in order for the police to shake down the goverment official. The moral conundrum which ensues is handled with great delicacy and much humor, but their is no escaping the sense that this is a diseased place, haunted by the fall of the Soviet Union and the introduction of street capitalism.

Perhaps the most formally challenging film in the competition, Chicago based filmmaker Ben Russell's Let Each One Go Where He May is made up of thirteen shots that each run ten or so minutes. Shot in Suriname, its quiet investigation of the places upon which the international slave trade was formed is built for maximum glide. It's a moving postcard of both the modern and indigenous aspects of that country, a film that asks you to truly take a journey into the past with it in ways that the most ornate historical biopics can only flail at. Make sure to watch it on a full stomach. I'll be on hand for the 2pm Sunday screening to discuss it with director Russell.

On Promised Lands

2010-02-04T13:58:00.002-05:00

Shot for five weeks during during the waning days and aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Susan Sontag's first and only documentary Promised Lands is one of the most perceptive and troubling looks at the seemingly never ending Arab-Israeli conflict. Of her four films, it's the one she considered her most personal; history has revealed it to be her most relevant as well. Promised Lands is part visual poem, part cinematic essay. Its an overwhelmingly sad work, yet one which treats both sides with something approaching empathy and fresh intellectual engagement. It dispenses with title cards and objective voice over, dwelling instead on the daily activities of soldiers and civilians, both inundated with the psychological effects of war.

Intellectuals and physicists fill in the ideological gaps on both sides of the debate, but the film's engagement with the literal conditions of war is its most profound aspect. People of both faiths continue to pray to their God as soldiers lie on the fields of battle, graves yet to be dug. PSTD suffering men reenact their worst nightmares for sympathetic male nurses. Palestinian children go to and from school in the Gaza Strip under the watchful guard of armed Israelis. While containing quite a bit of hard information and no small amount of political editorializing on the part of its interview subjects, it is these images, some as haunting as any I've seen in a war documentary, that allow this work to stand the test of time as none of the prodigious author's other film output has. It opens tonight at Anthology for a week long run.

An evening with Jim Finn tonight at MoMA

2010-02-01T13:53:00.001-05:00

One of the best films I saw this year at Sundance was Dane Mads Brugger's The Red Chapel, a madcap peek inside the repressive walls of North Korea that won the World Documentary Competition Grand Jury Prize on Saturday. Tonight, another filmmaker who has made a highly unusual film concerning that befuddling totalitarian country will visit MoMA. The museum's An Evening with Jim Finn will include a screening of the the versatile filmmaker's mindbending faux North Korean artist colony doc The Juche Idea and a couple of short films, Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell (2009) and la loteria (2004). I first encountered Finn's work while sitting on the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You panel. We admired Finn's startlingly original concoction, but it wasn't ultimately one of our finalists. Still, there seemed to be a general agreement in the room that The Juche Idea was one of the most intellectually rigorous of the films we saw; of course, it would struggle to find audiences. The film follows a South Korean filmmaker who ventures into the great repressive north to revive the legendarily campy Juche cinema sponsored by that country's mad cinephile in chief, Kim Jong-Il. Using the techniques of Asian propoganda, verite documentary, B sci-fi interludes and various pits of archival footage from North Korea cinema, Finn leaves Kim Jong-Il cinematic platitudes in tatters, exposing with vicious satire the excesses and dangers of ideological purity mixed with maddening self-delusion.

The Most Overlooked Movie of 2009: Exhausted

2010-01-05T22:50:00.008-05:00

It's the one nobody told you about. The one you missed. The one you may never get to see. Yes, even in this age of Netflix Instant Watch and streaming everything, there are films that lurk in the shadows. The Most Overlooked Movie of 2009 is one of them.

Developed in the his bathtub, South Korean director Kim Gok's Exhausted, which went quietly into the Dutch night after a World Premiere in Rotterdam (it had its US debut at the Syracuse International Film Festival of all places), was the most unforgettably terrifying narrative film I glimpsed in 2009. I counted fifteen walkouts at the P&I screening I first caught it at; I had just seen the brutal and brillant Tony Manero (not sure how that didn't land on more best of 09' lists) and thought there was no way I was going to get anything more readily stocked with human cruelty than that, but two hours later the world looked a little different. Exhausted is auteur cinema that stretches the limits of decency about as far as I care to stomach, reimbuing the term horror film with potency and sacrilegious inventiveness. It was certainly too much for most serious festival audiences outside of typically adventurous outposts in the aforementioned Dutch port city and Kim's homecountry turf at Pusan. While transcending the level of porn (it does not hope in any way to arouse or titillate; heavens help those that it does) or snuff cinema (with its sublime trash aesthetic and lack of actual death), it maintains the stench of the merely profane. Gutter Cinema was avant-gardist and IFFR stalwart Kevin Jerome Everson's preferred moniker after seeing Gok's painful, essential film, but it's an oddly graceful if ultimately unforgiving gutter.

An unnamed pimp and prostitute/girlfriend live and work in a dive apartment where men on the outskirts of a destitute, unnamed, post apocalyptic South Korean city come to have sadomasochistic sex with the flaccid, semi-retarded woman at the film's center. They have a domestic routine of sorts, eating cheese sticks and porridge, attempting to fetch new bowls and silverware, taking walks along a dirt and industry strewn beach that inevitably turn into yelling matches and fights. They occasionally go and hang signs that read "We have girl". These excursions lead, of course, to more chases and hysterics, which play in a madcap, outrageous way in Gok's gauzy, wide compositions. Eventually a homely young woman takes notice of the prostitute's powerlessness and after one of many escape attempts on the part of the whore, rescues her from her provisional refuge among trashed tires on a beach, but she too has intentions for the young woman that prove to be the most degrading and disturbing of all.

The first spoken line of the film is "You have a lot of shit in your stomach", a line which pays off quite unexpectedly, at a moment late in the picture, once your stunned mind has been convinced that this terrifying film can't get any more horrifying. It pretty much sums up what's on display here. This is the dirt cinema we've been looking for since Paul Morrissey; A by product of not just Morrissey but of filmmakers as varied as the Kuchar brothers and Takashi Miike, Exhausted exists on its own plane of depravity in the annals of modern narrative cinema, but unlike anything else that might fit that description, it is not without its share of plainly expressed truths about codependency and that small desire for self-destruction that exists in many of us.

The desperate inarticulateness of the characters and the rough, gauzy Super 8mm images make the surroundings seem as threatening for this woman in peril as they did for Monica Vitti in Red Desert, of which this is some sort of perverse remake, another film of sexual malice amidst the ruins of modernity. Yet where the green clad temptress of Antonioni's filmic universe could find some small salvation in her child, the only children in the land Exhausted share the color of Ms. Vitti's jackets, one which expresses a small oasis of hope in the cesspool of the industrial West in that film, but only affirms life's passing and pain in Gok's uncompromising picture. It has a visual rigor, a representational courage and a discomforting amorality that are rare even in these nihilistic times.

The test of watching it certainly seems like no mere empty provocation; I've glimpsed the entire thing once in a cinema and two or three times on a screener in the last year and I've yet to come to full terms with its mix of the grotesque and the sublime, the deranged with the even more deranged. It is truly the bleakest film I have ever seen.

Taking Off w/Forman on hand tonight at Film Forum

2010-01-05T13:58:00.003-05:00

Wrapping their Madcap Manhattan series tonight, Film Forum will screen Milos Forman's often name checked but rarely played debut American feature, Taking Off. Perhaps the Czech wildman's most formally off kilter narrative, it features Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin as a pair of squares searching desperately for their daughter, who has disappeared into the bohemian East Village with various lefty and druggie types. Made long before Forman entered his "cinema of quality" phase (something even the most uncompromising or inventive European directors have always halfheartedly embraced or furiously struggled against when coming to America), it's a small dynamo of a film. Having recently screened at one of Cinema Nolita's final weekly screenings, tonight offers the chance to see it in a rare 35mm print with Mr. Forman on hand before the 7:20 showing.

New Year Linkage

2010-01-04T11:25:00.001-05:00

I'd be remiss not to extend a happy new year's greeting to my readers. I hope you like myself, escaped the first weekend of the new decade unscathed. The news wasn't any better than it had been for most of the disappointing year that preceded twenty ten (Yemenese terror plots shut down the US and UK embassies, Ugandan homocidal anti-gay laws advancing, the Bengals and Bearcats losing by a combined 88-24), but there remains, even in this pessimistic age, something about the beginning of each new year that beckons our natural human instinct toward optimism.

I've been active elsewhere in the past few weeks, so I thought I would provide some linkage. Just before the new year I wrote a piece looking back at the decade that was over at Filmmaker. It's a very personal piece, but it also contains a list of fifty cherished films from the decade that I think is as eclectic as any you'll find among the myriad decade in review lists flowing out of the mediasphere. Also, check out Filmmaker and Hammer to Nail's best indies of the decade roundups and my ballot for this year's indieWIRE critics poll.

On A Single Man

2009-12-07T16:10:00.000-05:00

Structured like a cruel, ironic joke, the multitudes of pathos and subtly observed pain contained within fashion designer Tom Ford’s sure handed directorial debut A Single Man is achieved in a mostly quiet, painterly mode. Depicting, in muted passages of drab colors and firm compositions spiked with lyrical flourishes of saturation and memory, the last day in the life of a gay English college professor, one overcome with sorrow following his younger partner’s untimely death, the film doesn’t trade in easy sentimentality but effectively opens up a rather potent range of emotions and deft ideological observances. It tugged at the heart strings of Toronto audiences just enough for the Weinsteins to gamble (very little) that it has Oscar horsepower. Without a doubt, it does contain an award worthy performance at its core, but unlike so much of what passes for good cinema in this part of the world, it never feels like that’s its reason for being. Directors rarely finance their own movies unless they’ve really got something to say.

Long cast as worrywarts, gentry codgers and fuddy duddies, Colin Firth is an electric current flowing all over this movie, its living, breathing pulse. He’s in nearly frame and his voiceover, beautifully rendered from Isherwood’s book by Ford and co-writer David Scearce, is one of the rare recent examples of literary voiceover being married to a rather conventional narrative film effectively His George is a literature professor, still living in the beautiful modern ranch designed by his dead boyfriend (Matthew Goode), formerly an American sailor he met immediately after the war. Flashbacks sketch their time together, although the narrative engine is fueled by our desire to know if George will kill himself in the film’s present (and our desire for him not too). A grin and bear it type who no longer has the will as the Cuban missile crisis looms and his unrelenting loneliness, he seems bent on beating the Cubans to annihilation, albeit for his decidedly more personal and less political reasons. While a young college student just coming to terms with his own homosexuality (Nicholas Hault) and a Spanish hustler (Jon Kortajarena) offer the prospect of new emotional connections, his only friend, the sassy and pathetic Charlotte (Julianne Moore, overdoing it), a fading British import like himself, divorced, moneyed and soaked in gin and indulgent style, represents a past yielding only to decay and hopelessness.

Adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of the same name, a book that Edmund White once called “one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement”, the story isn’t designed as a blistering critique of heterosexism, but a thorough investigation of a faltering man’s inability to cope with grief and his prospects for a future in the face of it. Without ever becoming overly dour, Ford gets right at the film’s dilemma in the very beginning (a jolting dream introduces us to George, his dead lover, an icy country rode and this film’s handsome and efficient aesthetic), but he takes his time introducing us to George, informing us about what his intentions are, how he grew to become who he is and just what being gay, upwardly mobile and effectively widowed (but without the legitimacy public displays of dignity that society confers on heterosexuals in the same circumstance) in 1962 Los Angeles must have been like. It’s a dynamite job of work by the ribald gay southerner and the stalwart English performer, as odd a couple as a Gucci bag and New Balance sneakers, but if this film is any indication, Mr. Ford has depths of talent and feeling that extend well beyond making bras. Here’s hoping he keeps sharing them with us.

Interview: Gustav Deutsch, FILM IST. a girl & a gun

2009-12-03T10:38:00.001-05:00

Completing a trilogy fifteen years in the making, FILM IST. a girl & a gun represents the most dynamic and accessible of Austrian Gustav Deutsch’s found footage film essays, a dizzying and lyrical recapitulation of silent continental erotica, nature docs and ribald melodramas from the earliest years of cinema into an ethereal narrative about the inextricably bound impulses of sexually and violence. Working in a tradition that is unfortunately one of the least appreciated forms of cinematic discourse among general audiences, Deutsch’s feature found receptive viewers upon its World Premiere at the most recent International Film Festival Rotterdam and wowed adventurous local audience at last May’s Tribeca Film Festival. The 57 year old, a trained architect who also provides the ethereal scores for his films, says he was first drawn to found footage filmmaking “because there are always films that are somehow neglected in film history, that are not in the canon” that can be resurrected. He’s currently at work on a film project revolving around representations of Edward Hopper paintings. With the film opening for a week long run at Anthology Film Archives (and New York’s top critics going to bat for it), we caught up with Deutsch to discuss his inspirations, extensive research process and reliance on intuition.

CEC: What is the relationship between FILM IST a girl & a gun and the previous two films in the FILM IST series?

Deutsch: It all started the year the whole world was celebrating one hundred years of cinema in 1995. I thought it maybe appropriate to start a film project on the phenomenology of film. I started to collect quotes by famous directors or producers or actors about film. I found that most of them were always trying to define film in one sentence. I started to make a list of those. Then I thought maybe titled the project FILM IST: 1st stop because anything you can add is just one aspect of the endless aspects of what film is and can be. I decided to focus in the first part of this project, 1-6, on the birthplace of cinematography, that is the scientific laboratory. Film was first developed as a tool for scientists. I decided to make the first six chapters only using material dealing with the laboratory. I’m not interested in the content of these scientific films. I am interested in the meaning that is given by the image. I wanted to detect the poetry and the power of the images of very straight-forward, rational, scientific movies.

The second part, 7-12, I dedicated to the second birthplace of cinematography, which is the fairground. It encompasses everything that has to do with posing, with exhibitionism, with the exotic. Film derives from the visual sensation of variety theatre so I decided to make six chapters on that aspect.

For the third part, FILM IST. a girl & a gun, I was looking for something that has both, the scientific aspect and the fairground aspect. I decided to deal with a subjects that have been the main subjects and themes of cinematography since it very beginning, these being pornography and violence. It was not just cinematography, it was every upcoming new optical, visual, acoustic medium, pornography and violence are always some of the first main aspects. I started to think about this. What is different from the other parts is it is a very delicate material I was dealing with. I didn’t want to make it as rational or analytical as the other twelve chapters, I wanted to make it more emotional. I wanted to put it into a context that was for me necessary in order to see these images in a cultural background. This cultural background, because most of the eleven archives I worked with are European archives, led me to have as the structure for this film the structure of Greek drama and have inter titles, not like the other parts which only have numbers, but acts, names from Greek mythology.

CEC: How do you go about culling the clips from the various archives? I know you used clips found in places like Britain’s Imperial War Museum and Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, traveling all over Europe and the world to find footage. At one point do you begin to shape the material? Is it after an exhaustive research period?

Deutsch: On this project I did two research tours. The first one was to see what the archives had. I didn’t visit all of the archives. I visited four of the archives to see what I can expect in terms of the materials. After this first overview, I wrote a script. Not a script in the sense that it determines exactly what will be pictured, but what I’m going to make a film about, how is the scene or subject divided into sub-chapters. So with this script, a list of key words and other things, I returned to the archives. My collaborators at these different archives now had an idea of what I was looking for. I have to make myself understandable for my collaborators at the archives. I cannot use a traditional archival system. I cannot use a catalogue system. What I am looking for has specific, smaller details. I have to make my collaborators understand what I want to see, what I want to find, and they have to work through there memory, they remember what kinds of films might be possible, what might be needed to find these images and they suggest those titles and I go from there.

The amount of material I was working from was about twenty hours. With this twenty hours, I am working while I am editing. This is a very selective process, from the start to the end. One main part is to build up an image library that I can use and work with. The structure of this library is very important.

CEC: When working in the found footage format, how do you know when you’ve completed the work? It seems like you could have from the material made a film that is much longer or made a series of short films?

Deutsch: For this film, I knew that I would like to have five chapters. I had these chapters titles in mind because of the structure of Greek drama, so I was looking for these five main scenes. I was not looking for a sixth or seventh part of this film. [FILM IST. a girl & a gun] is different from the other parts in this way, because those parts are open, there are no limits. There could easily be another subject or chapter in 7-12 or 1-6. I found in the meantime a lot of material I didn’t have when I was editing 1-6, it might be that I go back one day and add a chapter. This is no possible with a girl & a gun, because of the structure of Greek drama.

As for when a chapter is finished, that’s only when I stop editing it. I don’t know how it will end. It is a very intuitive editing process. I don’t know if the subject will yield five minutes, or seven minutes, or ten. It’s all about feeling, like when you are composing music, knowing when something can come to an end. Its about improvising, making something complete.

CEC: In the title and the film itself you see a juxtaposition of female sensuality and violence and the ways early cinema (and cinema of today) are pulled to representing those two subjects. Could you talk a bit about that formulations and what about them resonate with you?

Deutsch: The title is referring to a quote by D.W. Griffith, which was then reused by Jean-Luc Godard in the 50s. I used it because this was my starting point for the whole project. I told you before I was collecting these quotes. So this title, FILM IST. a girl & a gun seemed to me to be a short way to reference to somebody who had thought about this. This film is not about the confrontation of man and woman, but it’s about the female and the male principle. Meaning that every human being has both principles in use. Whenever we have to decide how to react to other people, how to make decisions, we have different possibilities. I have the feeling that in the whole development of mankind, the male principle is too much used and the female principle is too much neglected. So when we learn as human beings to put more power and more energy into our female principles and in our female ways of living, then maybe something can change in the world.

I couldn’t make a film with a vision. I can’t find this vision in film footages, especially in the time of the footage with which I am working, the first four and half decades of filmmaking. The way scenes were dramatized, characters were developed, was male orientated. This shows. I couldn’t have for the end of the film a positive vision because I don’t see it.

CEC: At what point did you decide to impose the structure of Greek dramas onto those concerns? Was that part of the intuitive, instinctual editing process you referred to earlier or was that in the script you wrote initially?

Deutsch: This is when I started to write the script and made my first research tour together with my partner in life and art. We always work together in the research of the films. Especially for this film it was important for me to have a female partner. This was at the end of our first visit and I thought, I have to find a context, a structure, with which to work. I thought about cultural background, political and religious backgrounds of most of the films I saw in those European archives. The basis for them is Greek culture. We read Greek mythology and stories. Everything is there. There full of the confrontation of the male and the female principle.

At this time I encountered these tribes of philosophers. One symposium is all about Eros, what is Eros? I decided to use an excerpt from Aristophanes. Aristophanes was participating in this symposium as a comedian. He gave this absurd definition of Eros. In former times, there was not only male and female, there was something like both of them together. There were many sexes he said. I found that interesting.

Best Films Not Playing at a Theater Near You: at least they're at MoMA :)

2009-11-19T10:44:00.001-05:00

It's been quiet over here lately. My apologies. Regardless of how cheaply one lives, the recession is taking it toll. I've been fortunate enough this fall to land a teaching position at the New York Film Academy and recently took over, along with my colleague Damon Smith, Filmmaker's Director Interviews column. Between these responsibilities and a number of film projects (one of which you can donate to at the links to the right), I've been a bit preoccupied. However, as we move toward the end of the decade and toward the end of this momentous year in specialty cinema, expect to hear more from us at CEC.

Tonight the Museum of Modern Art will commence its yearly collaboration with Filmmaker Magazine and the IFP. Through Sunday, the venerable midtown museum will screen the Gotham Award nominees for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. Each year the editors of Filmmaker select the five finalists for the best American independent film currently without theatrical distribution in place. Our exhaustive process starts with a pool of sixty or so films that we cull from our own favorites at film festivals during the previous year and the recommendations of festival programmers. This is narrowed to a shortlist of about fifteen films, which is later narrowed to the five nominees that will screen starting this evening.

Reflecting on the process that led to the nominations of Everything Strange and New, Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench, October Country, You Won't Miss Me and Zero Bridge, I was astounded by, in this terrible economy, just how healthy and diverse American independent film appears to be. A small, high risk section of the entertainment industry that unlike its European peers has no public subsidization and is bound to the edifice of private equity (i.e. scamming rich people into believing a dream), our portion of the film industry has oversupplied for several years now, while demand for specialty film has remained flat or declined depending on whom you ask. The economic troubles of the past two years have led to the closing of most of the mini-majors, but those troubles have been equally if not more damaging to young, independent producers who are trying to get out into the marketplace for the first or second time. Sure the slate financing, hedge fund money has gone away, but so too has the "dumb money" (the dentist who wants to go to Park City, the real estate executive who liked the last Hollywood movie your indie level star had a small part in) that fuels the work of so many non trust fund wielding newcomers.

A good indicator of how the economy has affected indie film production should be the number of submissions Sundance receives in 2010. Will it drop significantly? If it does, is it actually good for the industry as a whole? If it doesn't, what does that mean? In a world where about ten or so of the films that get submitted to the festival make back their negative costs, does it prove once and for all that most indie film financiers see these investments as having a much more intangible value than dollars?

The films we have to choose from when selecting the prize get better every year. I doubt many of the finalists for the prize a couple years ago would have been in the conversation had they been made this year. Several incredibly strong films missed the cut. Most of these films, weather they were among our nominees or not, are being made with the barest of bones. Most of the docs we've selected the past few years are about subject matter that is readily available to the filmmaker (the filmmaker's family is the principle subject of both last year's nominee Meadowlark and this year's nominee October Country), while the narratives (especially Frownland, our 2007 winner, and this year's nominees Guy and Madeleine and You Won't Miss Me) tend to be straight from the gut, truly DIY productions. Yet, while we had a much better crop of films to choose from than we did in my first two years on the panel that selects the nominees, its interesting to note that not a single film we've selected in the past couple of years, included the ones that have screened at top shelf market festivals like Sundance and Toronto, has returned it's investors' principle contribution to my knowledge. In a for profit arts environment, this is surely an unsustainable course.

On That Evening Sun

2009-11-09T15:01:00.003-05:00

By Evan Louison

For those familiar with Hal Holbrook’s much revered “Mark Twain Tonight!,” where the veteran American actor seemingly exhorts and sneers in the same breath as Samuel Clemens with equal amounts respect and humour, it should come as no surprise to find some of that same poise and cunning in his most recent performance, as the southern stalwart Abner Meecham in Scott Teems' brilliant new film, That Evening Sun. An award winner in Sarasota, it is the type of small, quiet project that goes easily unnoticed. Lo and behold, it has opened in New York on another busy weekend for "specialty" films in new York. I can’t really recommend it highly enough.

Adapted from the William Gay short story which in turn had its title lifted from a William Faulkner line “I hate to see that evening sun goes down…,” the film is at all points engrossing and halting. In a way, it disarms the viewer with the patience and temperate pace of its narrative, while at the same time, providing exhilarating work from its performers in plentiful doses. It reveals characters whose lives and fortunes are, quite literally, on the line in a taut and stirring manner.

The long and short of the film’s conceit is that Abner Meecham, relegated to a rest home after he suffers a fall on the farm he’s run with his wife of many years, recently deceased, is fed up. It is this experience, one of the world around him changing at a pace beyond his reasons and needs, his understandings, that compels him to flee the safety of his nursing home exile and return home, by hook or by crook. Defying all demands to return placed upon him by his son, whose decisions we find, are the ones that matter most in deciding Abner’s fate, he wants back what he can never have. Abner’s return to his lifelong home is one of misery and disappointment; he finds it undeniably changed, leased to a local ne’erdowell at his son’s bidding, someone Abner refers to not just in passing, as trash.

This controversy drives the various interested parties (Holbrook’s reactionary, stubborn old man, his son, a successful, legally justified malcontent, and the new tenants, a family of drunken father, doting mother, and rebellious, equally sexed and innocent daughter) into a web of dependence, annoyance, and antagonism. The war at hand at times seems overwrought with obstacles, rife with an insurmountable discontent, a land feud blown curiously out of proportion by Meecham’s refusal to change or compromise, and his decision to launch an all-out campaign against the new residents on his land. It is a wall of humid, impossible conflict, which can only end in frustrating, inevitable tragedy.

In a world of images, media, and expressions less than stunning, we can at times be handed with great ease many spoonfuls of shit in place of nurturing, challenging work. That which asks questions of us the viewer, which drives us to question our surroundings in tow, is what matters. This film is not of that lot. Instead it provides a rare offering of stark, fluid storytelling, and visceral, at times confounding performances. One for the ages. If this one doesn’t grant Holbrook the honor he deserves, the establishment has another thing coming. Go hence and discover for yourself.

On Stanley Bard @ Royal Flush Fest

2009-10-18T16:49:00.005-04:00

By Evan Louison

As a cultural landmark, the Hotel Chelsea remains as much an enigma as ever before, despite repeated attempts in the mainstream to vilify or demonize it. Its many hedonistic and occasionally famous former residents, most of them long forgotten by those who have continued to inhabit it either for residency or work, seem to still haunt it. In turn, more recent attempts at lionization and pedestal placement have done little to illuminate most of the mystery behind what makes the place so site specific and original. Of these, Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks has been the most intentionally aimed at discovery and treasure hunting, although in an obscure and at times elusive sense, while Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls stood as a newer, if faulty attempt at the type of historical fiction that Warhol & Morrissey once painted in minimal beauty. While Ferrara’s film portrayed the struggle between longtime residents of the Hotel with new management hell-bent on stripping the Hotel of any ties to the eccentric nature of its history, Stanley Bard, a new portrait both in the nominal sense and the literal, focuses solely on the Hotel’s longtime manager, his life, and memories.

As a film, Sam Bassett’s Stanley Bard merits equal parts praise and criticism. Questioning of an artist’s work and motives is unavoidable, and especially with Bassett, being someone who clearly identifies without hesitancy with such a title (and the inevitable responsibility that comes hand in hand with it). The rough sound and image quality, at times non-existent structure, editing that leaves a scattershot, possibly crazed and certainly frenetic feel, these are the marks of a creative mind working without regardless for the usual concerns of structural convention and audience comfort. While some may see these norms as a hindrance, formality and convention have there place. The picture, which Bassett referred to as “one of seven feature films completed in the last year,” is not a movie, not even really a documentary by any technical or traditional means. It is however a portrait, of a person and an idea of a place defined more by the ideas contained therein of the individuals who exist within it. Whether the ideas themselves are self-evident, or anymore valid than those of its detractors, the place itself remains self-reliant and justified to those who confirm themselves and the legitimacy of their lives with its concept.

If anything, the kinship between Bassett’s film and Ferrara’s film is glaring, the choppiness of both their styles or lack of style, the inherent weirdness of both seems to be their common ground, and perhaps exemplifies something in the place, something previously indescribable, something that just happens within its walls and the lives of those who pass through its doors. It is not always picture pretty, it is not by any means perfect or always interesting. In spite of the search for definition continuing, the one thing that is perfectly clear is that the place where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and where Samuel Clemens and Nikola Tesla once regularly lunched, while perfect in its flawed history, is no longer what it was, just as much of New York City appears to be. In this realization however belies the question, is there any reason why it should be? For Sam Bassett, and more importantly, for Stanley Bard, we must assume the answer is no, if not entirely unnecessary in the first place. The question and the answer for them both appears to be the work, the work, the work. And be it a series of portraits or a piece of masking tape stretched late at night across 23rd st, there may be little difference, if any. Either way, Bassett seems urgent and with endless enthusiasm determined to show off his creations, of both worlds, to anyone and everyone who will pay notice. For that, he is to be commended. And for the privilege and shelter such a setting provides for creativity, Stanley Bard is to be regarded fondly and lauded for years to come.

Afterschool finally gets its day in the sun

2009-10-03T10:58:00.003-04:00

Antonio Campos' Afterschool opened yesterday at the Cinema Village. Its been a long time coming for the film, which premiered in Cannes last year and screened locally at the forty-sixth New York Film Festival last fall. Nominated for a pair of Gotham Awards, this most astounding of American Independent debuts was finally picked up by IFC Films after a lengthy, rather passive-aggressive flirtation between the corporate indie giant and the film's duo of young producers, who surely didn't make their negative costs back on the IFC theatrical agreement. Over at Hammer to Nail I've written a review of the film that was first posted during the run up to last year's Gothams. Here too is an interview I conducted with Campos last fall.

On Chelsea on the Rocks

2009-10-02T15:37:00.002-04:00

By Evan Louison

There are a great number of stepping stones through the rapids of taste and cinematic trend that must be surpassed in order for a filmmaker to transcend his own legend, his verifiable brand. These stepping stones are evident in the aesthetic path to captivating an audience as well, to convincing more sophisticated, cinema literate audiences to reach beyond their accumulated assumptions about a filmmaker, the stories that filmmaker chooses to tell, and their own assumptions about themselves as people, which of course informs the way they watch movies. These are the challenges that each Abel Ferrara film now represents.

One of the last true unreformed gonzo geniuses from the now distant and distorted downtown era has painted something of a seamless yet confusing portrait of the Hotel Chelsea, one from which we can take and learn yet remain confused by. Baffled really. Depicting a vaguely defined cultural institution in Chelsea on the Rocks, the infamous and much maligned Chelsea Hotel, Mr. Ferrara's excesses and his singular vision are right their for us all to see. Subject to much debate and legend, the place itself has been through the ringer over the last few years as Stanley Bard, its longtime manager, part owner and symbol of its lifeblood, is now in a sideline position. Stanley watches with dismay for much of the story as his beloved Hotel, a home for creative and eccentric types from all walks of life, begins to shift and disintegrate in the hands of a new, profit driven management. It is no longer the mecca, a shelter for both the counterculture and the merely fronting, that it once supposedly was.

Nostalgia for its past and uncertainty for its future are illustrated, with much reminiscing from such luminaries as R. Crumb, Rockets Redglare, Milos Forman & Dennis Hopper (who mercifully seems to not hold his experience on the set of The Blackout against the director any). Notable, more reent Chelsea Hotel figures like Lola Schnabel and Ethan Hawke (who made a regrettable narrative feature in its hallowed halls) also turn up. Quentin Crisp shows up for a second if you can spot him, and the memorable footage of William S. Burroughs personally defacing one of his books for a giddy and childlike Warhol also makes an appearance. The picture itself is bound to appear dizzying more than likely to most viewers. Yet thankfully Ferrera avoids many of the cliches of the contemporary reverential documentary, with their easily digestible, Phillip Glassesque codas.

The film traffics in three modes; beautiful, richly hazy archival footage of the Hotel’s hayday, contemporaneous interviews with B roll footage of the Hotel, and chaotic, often unfortunate, sometimes just barely audible recreations of notorious moments in its past that have become part and parcel to its legendary status. These moments include a bizare glimpse of a drugged out Janis Joplin in a bathroom arguing with an unnamed man and the infamous night that the most well-known hanger-on in the history of rock stars, Nancy Spungen, died of a stab wound that was attributed to her boyfriend/benefactor, Sid Vicious. Jamie Burke as Vicious isn’t nearly as bad as some have said. In fact, in terms of quality (or more accurately, a lack of quality) he doesn’t hold a candle to Bijou Phillips, who when not demonstrating how nice her singing voice is, should probably not speak; this suggestion stands also for the incredibly miscast Adam Goldberg as a venomous drug dealer and Giancarlo Esposito, who barely gets to speak here, as his lackey. Esposito , an incredible actor, somehow still steals the scene as the only compelling face of the bunch (Burke’s model perfect mug is unseen as Sid was, in Abel’s theory, unconscious at the time of the assault).

Regardless, these often silly recreations create an easy path through which to attack the film, if also a less than fair one. There is a fascinating, almost magical moment that occurs at the phi point, about two thirds of the way through this often difficult documentary, that has incredible power. It is also one which caught me off guard, startled me completely, and for a reason I did not realize until much later, completely threw me. There are many moments in cinema like this one, ones where we lose ourselves within them, and our ideas dissolve and drip away. They don’t always come out of nowhere in the way that they do here however.

A Vietnam veteran speaks directly to the camera, telling all manner of memories from battle, ones that might stand to chill even the most hardened listener, and certainly to pull even the most disinterested to the edge of their seats, desperately straining to hear and understand a truly mysterious inclusion in this much larger, and densely packed series of ruminations on the iconic 23rd Street Inn. It is his tone, his caged eyes and his words that demands attention, not just for the gravity of his narrative, one which Abel would recall to me during the course of an evening last fall, which we documented in the run-up to his 2006 film Mary’s US release, but for its place in the larger structure of this quickly disappearing cultural institution. This was a place that would house movie stars and Statesmen, but also people like this. He is a beam in the rafters, set in place long after the stones are laid upon the foundation. He'll be long forgotten once the furniture is moved in and out again.

NYFF09 - Dispatch #1: On Wild Grass and many others

2009-09-28T12:09:00.009-04:00

In these uncertain times, it’s impossible to talk about this year’s New York Film Festival in a vacuum that only considers its usual lineup of stalwart international auteurs. While the forty-seventh annual fest, one which has the reputation as the most self-aggrandizing, high falutin’ (and yet well respected) film event on New York’s cinema calendar, kicked off with octogenarian Alain Resnais delightfully absurd Wild Grass and a party in the renovated Alice Tully Hall’s brand new reception space (one which was much harder to penetrate uninvited than the opening night party’s previous home at Tavern on the Green), the doomsday predictions continued as insiders fret endlessly about the health of the independent film industry here in the States. As Scott Macaulay reported over at Filmmaker Magazine's blog, an unprecedented gathering of the indie film establishment’s most vaunted names took place at MoMA to discuss the problem on Friday. With everyone all gussied up for the veritable specialty film prom that is the NYFF’s opening night party, what better time to ruminate on the bad news that their standard of living, if not indie cinema itself, might be unsustainable.

Mr. Resnais probably couldn’t care less. His films are paid for in large part with government subsidies in European countries that prioritize cinema far more than we do in the States. His producers will happily take a low-ball offer from IFC; the US is just another territory to them. Fortunately for filmgoers, his new film is a definite improvement over his last outing with favorite late career star Andre Dussollier, the dreadfully baroque, slackly paced Private Fears in Public Places. He’s not growing any more refined as a filmmaker at 87, but he’s shirked off his trademark austerity for an accessible, vividly expressive melodramatic cinema that doesn’t take itself seriously at all and is, as Resnais’ films have always been, delirious with the possibilities of the medium to suggest varied states of consciousness.

As fun as it is, with a resolution largely borrowed from Jules et Jim and sizzling, colorful work from France’s greatest DP Eric Gautier, Wild Grass’ curiously familiar roster of French stars (Emmanuelle Devos, Matthew Amalric and Anne Consigny) and mad cap sensibility is Resnais’ attempt not to bite Trauffaut so much as it is to bite Desplechin, who he named checked in a stellar post screening Q&A. Of course Desplechin is often biting techniques and brash tonal changes from Trauffaut’s bag of tricks, albeit with panache that makes it all his own. Still, employing half the cast of A Christmas Tale, as fun as they are, only makes sense if you’re going to give them roles that satisfy our desire for their company. Amalric and Devos are largely on the sidelines, while Consigny’s character doesn’t have an emotional logic that makes a thread of sense. Dussollier and co-star Sabine Azema do their best with characters that feel half thought through.

Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere finds the talented Italian director, long overshadowed by his countrymen Bertolucci, Olmi and Moretti, in solid if unremarkable form. Recounting in a slightly overstuffed yet tremendously acted biopic how Mussolini’s seduction and post World War I abandonment of his first wife mirrored the fascist dictators’ love affair and betrayal of his homeland, Bellocchio tells the story too briskly, undercutting the emotional weigh of the narrative, and relies too much on stock archival footage that contrasts the real Mussolini with the both more and less remarkable fictional incarnation.

Encompassing over twenty-years of fairly complicated history in a two hour, twenty-minute movie is tricky and Vincere clearly suffers from trying to cover so much ground that the elements which would have allowed the story to register as tragedy just don’t congeal in the rush to explore all the story threads. With an at times needlessly elliptical editing style, Bellocchio so quickly stages the courtship, sex life and marriage of Mussolini and Ida Dalser (played by the luminous Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno), that we don’t get settled in our protagonist’s affection and trust of the man. Why was Dalser, whom Mussolini impregnated before leaving for war, willing to subject herself and her child to such abuse and torture from a man she still claimed to love after he abandoned and imprisoned her? Why Il Duce’s wartime love affair and subsequent marriage to the woman who nursed him back to health not given some dramatic heft and allowed to play more fully into a dramatized decision making process? Suddenly he just hates Dalser and decides to jettison her. There isn’t enough pre War set up for us to see Mussolini as a genuinely tragic figure. Likewise, its impossible to grasp their relationship as something that she would be so willing to fight for and metaphorically as symbolic of Mussolini’s betrayal of Italy. Bellocchio's gifts seems to work better in kammerspiel pieces like Good Morning, Night than on epic canvasses such as this.

Bruno Dumont was a middle-aged man when he began to make films, but given that Hadewijch is just his fifth film, he still feels like something of a l’enfant terrible. He certainly styles himelf as one, doing his best to infuriate audiences at every turn. His most confounding effort yet, Hadewijch centers on a wealthy French girl named Celine, who when we meet her is living in a convent and starving herself because of her unquenchable love of the lord. Kicked out of the convent by a duo of concerned Nuns who think her faith needs to be tested in the real world, she’s distraught to return to her government minister father’s Parisian palace. Placed within this spiritual void, she spends her days praying and rebuffing the advances of boys. Ultimately however, if we are to belive the incredible cynical logic of this exercise in nihilism, her love for Jesus is so profound that she chooses (spoiler ahead) to join a pair of dusky Muslim who live in the Parisian slums on a suicide bombing of the Parisian subway system complete with bad CGI.

Huh? Wha? Really? French Catholic Girls for Jihad! I can see the t-shirts now. To say that Dumont doesn’t earn this plot twist through the emotional mechanics of his characterizations is an understatement. Handsomely mounted, with the director’s trademark hints of lyricism, his heady mix of the profane and the profound, his subversion of Robert Bresson’s career project continues unabated and unchallenged. Dumont’s is a spiritual cinema that is so divorced from the actual practices of rank and file religious people that when he finally attempts to depict one, he has no idea what to do with her. After a marvelous first hour, Dumont’s misbegotten instincts ruin what could have developed into classic.

Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is a film that I admire more than I like. It doesn’t really want to be liked. I’m rooting for it in a way. I think people should see it, if just so witness how terrific an actress Charlotte Gainsbourg is Yes, it’s a despairing as Roger Ebert has claimed, although it’s not quite riveting enough for over two-thirds of its running time to truly be midnight movie material. It’s basically Von Trier deciding to make a Takashi Miike film. That’s fine. I still don’t know what all the fuss is about. Yes, Charlotte drills a hole through Bill Dafoe’s leg and attaches what looks to be a weight set to it. Yes, there is an explicitly glimpsed female castration late in the third act. So what? This film feels like a throwaway for its immensely talented director, as he’s readily admitted in several interviews. The notoriously travel averse auteur won’t be journeying to Lincoln Center, so you’ll just have to catch him on Skype (live, from his basement, in his underwear, Lars!) or check out the next issue of Filmmaker if you’re looking for some sort of explanation.

The most satisfying film of the festival thus far has to be Cornelieu Poromboiu’s absurd anti-policier Police, Adjective. This droll and highly comic movie, centering on a cop charged with the thankless task of doing surveillance on high school kids smoking pot near a local kindergarten, it slows the dynamics of the Police Procedural to a crawl, showing how such a small and pointless task can grow into an administrative nightmare in which local law enforcement will ruin lives just to save face. A worthy follow up to his equally troubling and amusing 12:08 East of Bucharest, it continues Romania’s rapid emergence on the world cinema scene. Just as capable of being infuriating as it is laugh out loud funny, it suggests the ways Totalitarianism is an ethic informed mainly by an abuse of language and procedure.

Quicktakes: On Disgrace, Fatal Promises, Harmony and Me

2009-09-18T10:11:00.007-04:00

Despite being a prize winner at Toronto last year and its impressive literary pedigree (J.M. Coetzee’s Booker prize winning novel is the source), I wasn’t expecting much from Disgrace. Maybe John Malkovich’s last top lining foray into a smallish “indie”, the morbidly unfunny and demeaning The Great Buck Howard, left a bad taste in my mouth. Or maybe, having not read the novel but being quite familiar with its story and themes, I was expecting the film to cop out, to not reach for the difficult truths Coetzee is trying to grapple with in South Africa’s dark and damaged heart.

At once provincial and accessible, it's a look into post-Apartheid psychosexual dynamics that threaten to swallow whole a white Afrikaner, a literature professor (Malkovich in top form) living in Johannesburg, who loses his job after a clandestine affair with a largely disinterested black student. First timer Steve Jacobs, while certainly no budding visual maestro, has given us a film that doesn’t shy away from presenting a country where white men like our protagonist, used to wielding their power over women and minorities both, have ceded control of the means of governance and production and must now deal with chickens that are coming home to roost sooner and in more morally troubling ways than they ever imagined. I won’t say more, but this is a film worth seeing and thinking about late into the night.

Fatal Promises, a new documentary about human trafficking from director Kat Rohrer, isn’t going to tell you anything the Dateline NBCs, Nightlines and 20/20s won’t. Dotting around the globe interviewing the formerly enslaved, those who have worked in this treacherous industry and the various individuals who are trying to stop this dastardly practice, Rohrer sticks to the issued oriented doc playbook pretty closely. Yes, talking heads galore. Although it's not breaking much new ground from a news standpoint and the aesthetics are simply pedestrian, the film does have its place in the dialogue and serves as a good primer for the uninitiated.

We trot out to conferences, listening to academics, NGO presidents and celebrities (Emma Thompson and Gloria Steinem among them) site statistics and invite us to ponder the human toll. We do, but as Susan Sontag once so elegantly pointed out, the suffering of others, especially as rendered in photography, will always seem remote to even the most empathetic viewer. It’s the responsibility of art that tackles matters of this gravity to make us care. While Fatal Promises doesn’t aspire to the level of artwork, it would need the same type of bracing impact to reach the level of affective advocacy. It doesn’t, but it was worth a try.

Don’t confuse Harmony and Me for a real movie, one with identifiable human beings pursuing recognizable goals. It is a cartoon. Nothing is at stake in its characters lives. No one has anything resembling values informed by experience and intuitive moral instinct. This cousin of mumblecore, featuring several of that already dead subgenres leading lights, it's a poorly executed attempt at free wheeling, low budget comedy. If only it were funny or insightful or a bit less mean spirited. If only the camera where not on auto-focus. Does the term, cinematography mean anything you, Mr. Byington? The film includes scores of performers I’ve found interesting a variety of different contexts (Kevin Corrigan, Pat Healy, Justin Rice, Alex Karpovsky), which only lends a greater sense of betrayal to the whole enterprise. Calling this filmmaking stretches the already malleable limits of that term even further.

On The Informant!

2009-09-18T01:12:00.005-04:00

A small movie writ large on billboards and bus ads, The Informant! is no Erin Brockovich and that’s meant as a compliment. As confounding as any Soderbergh film since Schizopolis, it’s not even risky for a studio to drop it, with the nationwide roll out and the bought and paid for fanfare, late in September, like its Bourne 7. Of course, Archer-Daniels-Midland are scum. Not like Warners really cares, which is why this oddly topical movie given our impending food crisis doesn’t mention a whiff of what it's really about in its beautifully constructed marketing campaign. Who would have ever thought big agribusiness/biotech price fixing would make for high end postmodern deconstruction of the Corporate Espionage Thriller bankrolled and P&A’d with studio checks?

This is the release you earn by making enough smart, semi-bankable high-end studio product in between your arty clunkers and genuine successes. Of course, it must have Matt Damon. A savvy casting move in both the commercial and aesthetic realms (not a thrown away beat the whole film, a whole, satisfying performance, every bit as good as his continents apart but oddly similar Tom Ripley), Soderbergh’s real coups are his deft 80s TV pastiche (Scott Bakula and music right out of Magnum P.I.), his feel for Midwestern mores (a place where sweetheart sociopaths bloom and the protestant work ethic lives on) and his this is real life or simply a Zodiac/Sexybeast mash up place and time inter titles, thrown at us in a zany pink that’s tackier that Mark Whitacre’s ties.

Damon’s voice over proves Mr. Whitacre to be the most amusing and thoroughly American unreliable narrator in recent cinematic memory. I’ll take him as my whistle blower over Jeffery Wigand any day, even if it’s harder to buy Damon with a gut than it is Russell Crowe. The respectively Corporate and Legal thrillers of Michael Crichton and John Grisham prove to be our unselfconscious protag’s self-imposed framework for the proceedings he blunders and lies his way through. Midwestern corn syrup hawks are bound to have lousy taste in fiction.

This is not a comedy to laugh at so much as its one to grin and scoff at, resting ultimately in the satisfying if melancholy tinged knowledge that the world is as grim and cruel and yet somehow still worth fighting for as you often imagine it to be. Left to wonder what Soderbergh would have done with the baseball wonks of Moneyball, having twice rebuilt another fragile subgenre for our age of cynicism and absurdity I now call for Amy Pascal’s resignation, but I suppose we have a better shot at The Public Option clearing the retirement home for millionaires otherwise known as the US Senate.

Screenings About Town, 9/11-9/13

2009-09-11T09:09:00.004-04:00

Having recently returned from an end of the summer sojourn to the provinces, I've found that the first weekend of fall offers too many cinematic choices to make any sort of informed and rational decision about what to go see (again). While many in this city will understandably spend much of this rainy Friday ruminating on the eighth anniversary of our countries' violent, headfirst plunge into the 21th century, ponder attending some of the terrific, little seen films on display in New York all weekend. Among the highlights:

Margarita Jimeno's electrifying portrait of the NYC based, Eastern-Euro flavored, rock act act Gogol Bordello opens at the Cinema Village today. In Gogol Bordello Non-Stop, she follows Eugene Hutz (star of Madonna's Filth and Wisdom) and his wacky, multi-ethnic band of Gypsy Punks to venues around the globe. While the doc doesn't push the envelope aesthetically, her subjects are never less than entertaining. Here's an interview with Jimeno I conducted last year for Spout.

Rooftop Films closes its 2009 season with a pair of shorts blocks, narratives on Friday and New York non-fiction on Saturday. Having fallen short of their 2009 fund raising goals, this indelible non-profit screening series and granting institution could certainly use your support, but the real reason to go tonight is to see a bevy of fantastic shorts, including two of my favorites from this year. Don Hertzfeldt's I Am So Proud of You, his award winning follow up to the Sundance winning short Everything Will Be Ok was made with financial support from the Rooftop Filmmakers Fund and is every bit as impressive as his previous effort. Meanwhile, 25 New Face Dustin Cretton's heartbreaking 2009 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Short Term 12 will close the block.

MoMA opens Edwin's Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly for a week long run tonight. Check out the interview I conducted with the IFFR FIPRESCI Prize winner when the film had its US premiere at Rooftop Films in July.

On Saturday night the venerable Williamsburg based collaborative center for "non-fiction media research and group production" UnionDocs will screen the still undistributed 2008 Best Film Not Playing a Theater Near You winner Sita Sings the Blues. Nina Paley's delightful DIY animated musical hasn't been able to find many audiences outside of the festival circuit because of rights issues concerning the Annette Hanshaw songs used on its soundtrack. Trust that it is a one of a kind movie, buoyant and uplifting, so see it when and wherever you can. Here's an interview I conducted for Spout with Paley last year.

On Unmade Beds

2009-09-02T10:29:00.005-04:00

Expanding on the clear promise of his debut feature Glue (2006), Argentine Alexis Dos Santos cements his place as a young auteur to watch with Unmade Beds, a startlingly energetic film whose HD visual elegance and studied grammatical anarchy breaths new life into its old hat tale of youthful ennui amongst London hipsters.

Working in an autobiographical vein is something few narrative filmmakers own up to and even fewer are able to do successfully. Dos Santos, who spent much time in London during his formative years as a filmmaker, gives us a pair of protagonists who's dislocation and joie de vivre bare the filmmakers social preoccupations. That one of them is a scruffy headed young man of Spanish origins who's shrewder than he looks should come as no surprise. He seeks a father he’s never truly known while squatting in a giant Artist space in some posh part of London where all the attractive youngsters live in, well, to quote David Denby, "moderately hip poverty" (not that Denby had any idea what that actually looks like, but I digress).

With style to burn and never a drop of sentimentality, Dos Santos interweaves the story of this young man with an equally adrift young woman, both of whom are undergoing the trials of being young and confused in a big, foreign city. Although they don’t meet until the final reel, both dressed in animal costumes after a music video shoot turns into a loft party, the Spaniard Axel and the Frenchwoman Vera share a loft with probably a half dozen others. She works at a bookstore, but spends the days in distraction and reverie, thinking about a broken love left in Paris and the fleeting nature of mutual interconnection. He plays at looking for an apartment under an assumed name, if only to spy on the realtor, who he’s deduced is the father who left him twenty years before.

A narrative thread that in lesser hands may have been played for melodrama is given a little weight but a large dose of comedic playfulness. It keeps the forward progress of the narrative tethered to some tension and some desire to find out, in the David Mamet sense of the phrase, “what happens next”, but still allows the film heady leaps into lateral stylistics. Dos Santos ultimately pays off the thread with panache, honestly displaying the way a young man bathed in a world of zero authenticity would actually respond to the dismaying revelation that his father is an average man in an average time who never thought to say goodbye not out of malice, but out of simple respect for the perceived meaninglessness of his condition he dare not broach.

Memory, especially its ephemeral, fleeting quality, is a strong factor in Dos Santos' vision. Axel ends every night drunk, often finding himself into the bed of a woman (or man, or both), the circumstances under which these events occurred escaping him the next morning. Vera can’t seems to escape her own, so much so that she threatens the prospect of a new relationship with a Londoner whose name she can never seem to remember. If this is all seeming a bit Gondry, it is.

Yet the film’s delicate formal touches, which include still sequences as flashbacks, the use of disruptive sound flourishes and saturated Super 8mm as an indicator of intensified experience, first person narration, in Spanish or French depending on the thinker, who may slip into omniscient at the storyteller’s playful discretion, recalls not just the French New Wave, but more recent work by filmmakers as varied as Lynn Ramsay and Arnaud Desplechin, Andrea Arnold and Oliver Assayas. Even Claire Denis might deserve a shout out. Yet what makes Dos Santos' work truly sing is just how much he makes these techniques his own. The milieu and concerns he shows us, which can seem so stale in lesser hands, seems fresh and alive in his.

On Big Fan

2009-08-27T19:09:00.003-04:00

Say you have a dead end job, not a terrible amount of education, but you’re savvy and you know what you like. You like football. Discussing it, watching it. You probably played organized ball, pee wee and the like, all the way through the early years of high school, but you weren’t very good. You were always better at talking about it, just like you were always better at imagining you were having sex with girls than actually having sex with girls. You’re not really that analytical (especially about yourself), or good looking, or have a suave, Vin Scully like voice, so broadcasting ain’t for you. It’s just that, being a parking lot attendent isn’t either. What makes it bearable is listening to sports talk radio well into the darkness of another boring night under the buzzing underground fluorescents. The comraderie of fandom, weather you’re calling to extol your winning teams virtues or sing the song of desperately needed change for a miserable, struggling franchise, the slapdash, overheated rhetoric of the call in sports talk show throwdown is what you live and die for.

This is the type of person Robert Siegel has in store for you in his nearly excellent debut feature Big Fan, an altogether more credible and rewarding experience than Darren Aronofsky take on his similar sports themed script The Wrestler. In the process of revealing the delicate nature of such a man’s existence, it suggests a whole American sub-current of men like this, the jerseyed hordes who flock (when they can) to publicly subsidized sports arenas, tricked out corporate welfare palaces, ATMs for billion dollar sports outfits that largely price out there most die hard fans from frequent attendance. The season ticket holders at most major pro sports events are gentry, but trust that Patton Oswalt’s Paul Aufiero will be sitting outside Giant Stadium with his TV watching the game as the other, more luxurious tailgaters actually enter the stadium. Best buddy Kevin Corrigan in tow, Quantrell Bishop jersey on his back, if the Giants win, he couldn’t be happier and you’ll certainly hear all about it WFAN. How wonderful it is to love big blue so much when the good times roll.

But what happens when Quantrell Bishop kicks your ass in a midtown club because you and your oh so unhip homie accidently reveal to him, in your star struck foolishness, that you followed him and his posse from a Staten Island gas station to his late night, first borough destination? When all that holds together your fragile masculine identity, the success of the Giants, wilts because of how you provoked your now suspended “hero” into behaving? When a rival Eagles fan (a well cast Michael Rapport) reveals to your call in audience that you, Mr. late night sports talk prodigy, are in fact the very person Bishop beat up? These are questions the film explores with a good deal of humor and something approaching pathos. That it pulls back from the Taxi Driveresque buttons it starts to push in the third act is a shame for sure, but Mr. Siegel, added by the ever nimble low budget technician Michael Simmonds, has an eye for how to stage this very dark and intimate comedy with stripped down style.

The real reason to see this film is Mr. Oswalt. Dim but not dumb, lacking in self esteem but not without a gentle toughness, just shy of fat but almost handsome if you look at him right, Oswalt has an All-American dough boy authenticity that goes a long way toward making his portrait of this troubled Staten Island super fan work, even when he’s acting so irrationally as to stretch the limits of credibility for what die hard sports fans are capable of sacrificing for the ephemeral glory of there favorite teams.

On Taking Woodstock

2009-08-26T13:08:00.003-04:00

Without having made a single film that one could unequivocally call a masterpiece, Ang Lee has hammered out a niche for himself as one of the world’s most easily recognizable narrative filmmakers. You have to applaud the breadth of his filmography, but is he an auteur?

He’s certainly not interested in singing the same aesthetic and thematic notes for an adoring fan base like most directors who earn that moniker. Perhaps Lee, like Steven Soderbergh, isn’t equipped to. He doesn’t write his own films, frequently works with different cinematographers (Eric Gautier does fine work this time out) and seems to have a primary interest in subverting genre codes within some of the most well established modes Hollywood and off Hollywood cinema have to offer. The results have been nothing if not solid. He delves into ambitious project after project in workmanlike fashion and his hits outweigh his misses. Yet, despite all of this, I’m never left with the impression when watching one of his films that I’m in the hands of a master, a personally expressive film artist with something urgent to say. His latest effort, Taking Woodstock, does little to quell that suspicion.

I guess it goes without saying that this one is "based on a true story". I couldn’t help but feel a bit duped by Lee’s look at the run up to the cultural phenomenon through the eyes of a few rural Jewish town folk who helped make this countercultural throw down a reality in a fairly conservative area of upstate New York. Like the worst of Mr. Lee’s collaborations with Focus Features honcho and his personal screenwriter James Schamus, I was left with the impression that, although there’s a lot of handsome filmmaking on display and some pretty nimble thesping (how about Liev Schreiber as a Tranny whose a Korean War vet), very little is at stake in the story for the filmmakers. Other than dreams of Oscars maybe.

Theirs is fortunately not a gauzy, romanticized 1969 summer of love, but Lee and Schamus are unable to imbue the film with tension and a sense of purpose. Demetri Martin’s character, struggling to keep his family’s roadside inn afloat, decides that welcoming the hippies/concert promoters who have been cast off by nearby Woodstock is smart business. He partners with his sympathetic and Jewish neighbor, played by a restrained Eugene Levy, and helps the groovy youngsters and their very ungroovy team of lawyers stage the concert, while this interaction with the counterculture allows our milquetoast protag to drop some acid with Paul Dano and embrace his homosexuality (props to my boy Darren Pettie, who is nothing if not fun as his construction working loverman). Meanwhile the comedy engine is kept afloat by the stereotypically combative Jewish mother attempt at retaining order. Let it be know, the definitive narrative film about Woodstock has yet to be made and probably, if Taking Woodstock is any indication, shouldn’t be attempted.

The trials of auteurdom: On The Headless Woman, Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-17T22:14:00.008-04:00

Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman is built to confound. Its filmmaker is in complete control and clearly never quite wants it to add up, but be wary of its enforced peculiarity. If its defense is its stubborn formal originality, it can’t quite be billed as building cinema from the group up; it most closely resembles the bourgeois women goes all wonky because of class guilt/environmental insanity genre (I’m thinking Safe and Red Desert right at the top here, but there are other entries) and I don’t think it’s a particularly distinguished entry.

I can’t wholeheartedly hold its willful flirtation with boredom against the film – that’s part of the raison d’etre of exercises like this, to fool the citizens of Cannesistan into thinking they’re seeing something profound by making them stare at it a long time. Sometimes it actually works. Boring isn’t a pejorative in all cases and yes, the underlying argument of these films, which all dabble in the metaphysical and the formally disorienting, is that satisfaction can, in fact, be quite boring. Or at least, to have all the trappings of satisfaction can. Fuckable, relatively unburdening husbands (even if they philander), nice shit everywhere; a particularly fetching woman foisted into these circumstances probably won’t have to work (Martel shows us so off handedly that Vera's a dentist, that I didn't catch it until glancing at the press notes). So one must find something to go crazy about for these films to begin their larger ruminations on completely untenable social and technological arrangements. In this case, it can all be traced back to hitting a dog on a sunny country road and being unwilling to look back. Industrial pollution and empty Eros (poor Monica Vitti) or late eighties LA dread and suburban excess (poor Julianne Moore) seemed to grip me more.

The Headless Woman’s intentions and execution don’t entirely make up for it’s at times needless and shopworn affectation. I’ll admit it right up front; this is a eight-seven minute film that made me want to check my blackberry to see how much longer I had in its chamber of existential malaise, which, as frequent readers may know, isn’t something I’m inclined to shy away from. Rendered with a great deal of skill and thoughtfulness by Martel, who stormed onto the largest stages of international Art cinema with her 2001 feature La Cienaga and the 2004 sophomore effort The Holy Girl, the film is less than the sum of its parts. Despite Maria Onetto’s fascinating performance and the obliquely pleasant artistry on display here (Ms. Martel is sure handed and inventive with every frame, she has an instinct for visual poetry and unnerving editing), the film’s fragile, overly implicit critique of contemporary Argentina’s very visible caste system and its gentle patriarchy never takes off.

Everything I wanted it to be and not a thing I didn’t. Although its burlesque (and very slimmed down) alternative history vision of the Great War was presaged somewhat by Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, also about a European (and European looking) Jewish girl who survives a massacre, changes her identity and stumbles into a plot for some small measure of comeuppance against the genocidal Huns, this week brings us perhaps the most broadly irreverent, almost but clearly not serious World War II film on record. With inventiveness to spare, Quentin Tarantino hasn’t quite made a masterpiece again, but its easily his best film in over a decade. If there were any haters left who aren’t sure Tarantino is a real auteur (you know you’re out there), all you have to do is watch Inglorious Bastards and think alittle.

Even in the most grim and maudlin of circumstances, he’ll make a comedy out of the bloodiest details. He’ll quote genres and celebrate the plasticity of cinema whenever he can. At his best, the words are almost always some kind of rhythmic, darting poetry and he creates tension without even trying. Smart, efficient film syntax is evident everywhere in this, his fourth episodic feature to cross the two hour twenty minute threshold and perhaps his most briskly paced. If anything, and perhaps like all good movies, Inglorious Bastards, which abounds with the most gruesome deaths, is filled with what come to feel like living, breathing beings whose experiences encourage you to see the world afresh. Bob Richardson’s rich, contrast heavy photography has a nimble quality here, but the often classical restraint on display in his second collaboration with the director makes it a much more visually pleasing experience then Kill Bill and of a piece with his best work (he’s an auteur too).

What Tarantino has given us is revenge porn for the descendents of European Jewry and anyone else willing to get in on the fun (Samuel L. Jackson for instance). Of course it was bound to be our most famous scholar of blaxploitation that had the toolbox to pull it off with panache, but revenge porn is a tricky thing. Especially when you also have the burdens of being a serious filmmaker who makes unserious movies, as the Cannes laureate surely does as he settles into the middle of his career. He allows us to watch a version of history in which Goebbels and Hitler get a Tommie gun to the dome courtesy of Hostel director Eli Roth (the cast’s weakest link, as he was in Deathproof), in which cinema is the key to ending the most epic of wars, but leavens the proceedings with an internal logic that never fails and dramatizations that both ramble and soar.

Despite being placed on enough magazines to clear the forests of the Amazon, Brad Pitt somehow doesn’t get credit for how consistently good of an actor he is --- he’s got echoes of John Wayne and Patton and a few of his other crazies here, but this is bravura comedic work that never feels false despite the rampant absurdity or derivative despite its moviedom forbearers. Nothing short of sublime, perhaps the real reason to see the movie, Cannes best actor winner Christoph Waltz won’t leave your head for a while. This is one Nazi I couldn’t help but want to like, even while I didn’t mind watching him (spoiler ahead) get a swastika cut into his head. Mission accomplished.

On Bad Lieutenant

2009-08-15T20:42:00.002-04:00

(Bad Lieutenant screens tonight at 10pm at Anthology Film Archives as part of a pair of benefit screenings to help Cinema Nolita pay its back rent)

“No one can kill me. I’m blessed. I’m a fucking Catholic.”
- Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant

Some films become emblematic of the times in which they were made. Other films become emblematic of the times in which you watched them. Few embody both. For me, such a rare film Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is, as it meets both roles. A hard and unrelentingly lurid policier, one that doubles as a tale of spiritual confusion and longing, of desire for Christian love lost, it contains long time Ferrara muse Zoe Lund’s last film role and Harvey Keitel’s best, but its value is more than anthropological or thematic. Sure, it stands as a testament to the New York I never got to see (I moved to the city just after Giuliani’s era of crime busting and Disneyfication had come to an end), and yes, its as spiritually engaged as anything by Bresson, Ozu or Tarkovsky, but more than that, it speaks to the era in which I began to take the movies seriously, to see them as more than just facile entertainments.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Bad Lieutenant, but its more than any reasonable person would ever admit to. It became sort of a rite of passage while I was in film school (and afterwards), the movie you would hijack a perfectly civil gathering with, a litmus test for those new to your cinematic circle --- if you can appreciate this movie, if you can go all the way with it, then you can be part of our gang. Although I was never Catholic, going to all boys Parochial school has a way of inundating you with that particular Christian denominations’ at times peculiar and sublime preoccupations. Rarely has any filmmaker delved into the manifestations of the unattainable that Catholicism wraps its purveyors in with such potent and lurid energy as Abel Ferrara who, on the eve of the Venice unveiling of Werner Herzog’s less than Abel sanctioned “remake”, will present his masterpiece to an audience willing to pay fifteen dollars to see it on a DVD, all to save our beloved last lower Manhattan video store standing, Cinema Nolita.

I initially saw Bad Lieutenant it in an R rated, pan and scan copy I rented from a since closed Blockbuster Video store in the late 90s. I was too young to see NC-17 movies in the theaters and certainly had been far two young to see Bad Lieutenant when it would have played at Cincinnati’s Esquire in 1992 (yes, the Midwest does have arthouses that aren’t in Chicago. My hometown has two), so it wasn’t until a few years later, while watching a scene from the film in a directing class at film school, the scene where Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant humiliates the two under-aged Jersey girls by masturbating on the side of their car after threatening to bust them for driving stoned, without a license, that I realized I had only seen a bogus, corporate video store version of the film that surely had been altered against its creators original intentions. And what original intentions they are.

Ferrara is out to depict a man apart and at the bottom, a shake down artist, alienated from his family, doing bumps of coke while dropping his boys at school, largely too lazy (or drugged out) to satisfy his sex addiction, stealing drugs from crime scenes, spiraling into insurmountable debt as the Mets (the team this Queens based cop ought to be rooting for) are upending the Dodgers (whom he’s betting for, even as he tells his fellow cops to bet on the Mets) seemingly insurmountable three games to none lead in the National League Championship series. Indeed, “Strawberry is killing us”. (quick aside: two sports related oddities in this film - Evander Holyfield’s visage awkwardly dominates the final shot, one which would be at home in the oeuvre of Michael Haneke, and the shot of the Mets winning the NLCS is clearly stock footage of a Dodgers/Mets regular season game, but you only discover that if you’ve watched the film twelve times and happen to be a baseball nerd.)

The films narrative hinges on the rap of a redheaded Nun by a duo of nihilistic Latin crack smokers. The film depicts it as if some kind of disorienting, drug fueled rave has taken over a Church; bathed in red light, the beautiful young clergywoman’s screams echoing across jagged, shaky hand held shots, rosaries and candle sticks being used for all sorts of unholy purposes, it’s a sequence that stands apart from the rest of the movie by way of its manic amateurishness, as if through slipshod aesthetics Ferrara is preparing you for the thematic abandon the rest of this relatively handsome dip into the grime has in store for you.

How can she turn the other cheek and forgive? Keitel’s cop can’t figure it out. She doesn’t want to press charges. The young nun speaks of the boys as children in need. He’s been given the task of investigating the crime and as his fortunes turn for the worst, he begins to wonder in earnest what Jesus would have him do?

It’s the end of the era in which New York hosted 2,200 murders a year, in which the city’s reputation as a playground for criminals, punks and oligarchs was soon to fade, but was currently holding steady. How does one so thoroughly corrupted by this place find solace in the symbols of piety that give this woman strength, resolve, certainty? For Keitel’s cop, they are more than just mere symbols --- the film takes on the notion of the Christian God and his son’s divinity with the utmost seriousness, which comes to a head when Keitel (who invented his late, quivering, whiny pathos acting style with the film) literally imposes the image of Jesus on the cross onto a black parishioner while the cop cries and angrily asks Jesus, “where were you!?” We never get to know if Keitel’s oh so bad cop has earned God’s forgiveness, if his final act of crack smoking kindness to the worst of the worst is penance enough, if but for the grace of God go I will prove relevant, but how can the question not haunt you after this trip through the fallen world Mr. Ferrara, a lapsed Catholic (and junkie) has invited you along for. This is a movie I’ll never stop pondering.