In a cacophonous German-themed saloon in Japan, a gallery of well-fed, well-dressed businessmen and middle-aged professionals smoke cigarettes and sip beer from German steins. As the din of twisting small talk rises, a young psychiatrist leans across the table and muses to his patient: "Think about it: name, position, occupation -- such labels would no longer matter. We would all be perfect strangers to one another." The patient, a horribly disfigured man masquerading in a prosthetic face of the psychiatrist's design, quietly ruminates on these words and the implications of the two men's experiment, of a face easily removed. The potential dissolution of his identity seems too abstract a concept to bother the patient, and he asks to be left alone for a time, to experience the saloon, as he puts it, "without being observed" -- like a normal person. When the psychiatrist rises and removes himself from the frame, the patient and the camera remain unmoving and the viewer is left to find the action in the room around his quiet repose. The eye wanders to the corners of the frame, to the table behind him. A skinny man holding a cigarette laughs; a waitress's head obscures the bottom of the frame; and suddenly, only minutes into their experiment, the patient has vanished in plain sight!
Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another is saturated with imagery suggesting a struggle for and loss of identity, a subversion of the old by the new, and although his use of symbolism often assumes an obtrusive hand, it can at times be beautifully subtle. The saloon scene is one such instance where this conflict unfolds visually on a delicate, almost subliminal level: the German insignia on the beer steins, a physical proxy for the memory of war and defeat, sprout up discretely in a room of progress-minded individuals, representative of Japan's postwar economic flourish, while in the middle of it all sits our protagonist, the patient, Mr. Okuyama, a once humble man with a flashy new face on the verge of losing himself, though he believes he will not. The scene occurs roughly halfway through the film, and its sensibility of presentation, contrasted against the more obvious juxtapositions, dualisms and camera techniques employed both before and after, set it apart as the pivot point of the film, albeit an inconspicuous one. It is only fitting, however, that this shift of identity happens beneath our noses because of its insidious nature. All too often, without our recognizing it, the modern supplants the traditional.
Just as the saloon scene finds Mr. Okuyama at a crossroads of personal identity, a tipping point, so too does the film, produced in 1966, and the 1959 novel by Kobo Abe on which it is based, also titled The Face of Another, find Japan at a point of acute cultural shift. By the 1960s, Japan was well on its way to a complete economic recovery from the fallout of WWII, largely beneath the guiding hand of the American government, the induction of democratic processes, and a focus on private sector growth and individualist interests. As the country adjusted to a capitalist mindset, it seemed to some as though progress was carrying the Japanese people on a path perpendicular to their history -- quite simply, they were being cut loose from tradition. This sudden break from the past can be symbolically pinpointed to the equally sudden annihilations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bomb (a subject that haunts Teshigahara's film). The resulting ethos of these twin bombings and the subsequent rebuilding of Japan was a nationwide division of attitude, one that found the few holding tight to the scars of the past and the many choosing to whitewall them over.
Within the postwar art community to which Abe and Teshigahara belonged the most radical of the traditionalists was author Yukio Mishima, who believed so thoroughly in the erosion of Japan's moral and spiritual foundation by modern democracy that he committed ritualistic suicide inside a government building in an attempt to galvanize a return to imperial order. The act was ill-fated from the start, and proved to be more sideshow than soapbox to the general public, but it underscored the growing rift between traditional ideas of honor and modern feelings of dispassion.
Both dispositions are given a look in The Face of Another, in the form of the film's twin narratives. The main narrative, of Mr. Okuyama's new face, represents Japan's progress into modernity, his determination to replace his scars with a new facade mirroring the complete reconstruction of Japan's fallen cities. The parallel between the two becomes literal in a scene where Mr. Okuyama and his psychiatrist go window-shopping for a stranger whose skin they can use as a template for the mask. As the psychiatrist propositions a stranger with a bribe, Mr. Okuyama peers out a window onto a multiple construction site, cranes swinging, framework going up. His reflection in the window superimposes itself over the heavy machinery, and his pensive sigh of relief at being one step closer to his new face feels microcosmic of the anxious shift taking place in the Japanese landscape around him.
Complimentary though antagonistic in sentiment to Mr. Okuyama's story is that of a young hibakusha woman. The scar she bears, sullying her right cheek and neck, is the result of exposure to nuclear radiation during the bombing of Nagasaki. Yet, unlike Mr. Okuyama, who prior to acquiring his mask kept himself bandaged in seclusion, the young woman carries her scar around unabashedly, refusing to let it alter the course of her daily life. She presents the scar, her personal and cultural history, to the world without shame.
The introduction of this second narrative into the first, and the spatial and temporal relationship between the two, is, at best, vague. In Abe's novel, Mr. Okuyama goes to see a movie before his operation, the story of which is that of the hibakusha woman. In Teshigahara's film, however, the young woman's narrative overtakes Mr. Okuyama's with almost no prompting. (There is a brief shift in aspect ratio when we first see the young woman, covertly suggesting that Mr. Okuyama is recalling a film, but this shift is never echoed in any subsequent return to her narrative.) Rather, her story enters as a jarring dissolve that overpowers a close-up of Mr. Okuyama's bandaged face. The effect this has on the viewer is one of uncertainty: Does the hibakusha woman physically exist in Mr. Okuyama's world, does she exist as a memory of the disembodied image of a woman on a film strip, as the novel has it, or does she exist only in Mr. Okuyama's imagination? The first possibility has the least resonance, simple alternate editing in which neither character is aware of the other. Our entry point into her narrative seems to argue against this interpretation: the image of the bandaged face is physically dissolved, as though Mr. Okuyama's thoughts are seeping out, or the camera's eye is seeping in. This transition points to the second and third possible relationships between the two narratives, both of which have similar implications because they are seated in Mr. Okuyama's mind. Whether the hibakusha woman is a memory or an invention, the fact that his thoughts frequently circle back to her story, and more importantly to how she handles herself with grace and honor in situations that parallel his own, highlights an underlying sense of disgrace in Mr. Okuyama's actions.
The disgrace he feels, however, is short lived. Its existence in the film, as in the hearts of the Japanese people, although poignant, is ultimately inconsequential. The life of the mind must push ever forward through the cold and often confusing landscape of time, with no hope of stagnating progress. It is a condition that Teshigahara recognizes. The hibakusha woman's narrative acts as a eulogy of sorts to the honor and memory of prewar Japan, a small glimpse at an irrecoverable history that dies each time it is remembered. Her narrative concludes with a blinding flash of light, the chimerical detonation of yet another atomic bomb, one that continues to detonate in the mind of Mr. Okuyama, and, by extension, the minds of the Japanese people, forever impressing that moment of separation in August of 1945.
What we are left with when the brilliance of this explosion subsides is the fully modern man, Mr. Okuyama, in his chic, expensive clothes, with his false beard and false hair very finely arranged, and his immoderate leather gloves plunging a kitchen knife through his psychiatrist's lower back. As Mr. Okuyama releases the man gently to the sidewalk, it is as though he were severing himself from both his troubled mind and his troubled past, spreading them out as an offering at the steps of some towering office building. When he rises again the camera is close on his face, and we see a gleam in his mad eyes -- an atomic blast going off forever in the back of his mind, or the hard glare of a streetlight? A jagged, awkward smile spreads across his plastic mouth, and we see that he is both liberated and quite vacant. There is nothing cathartic about the murder, however, for he has already by this point of the film let go. He is no one, in name, position and occupation. He is free but he is empty. A perfect specimen of the modern illness, absorbed by the anonymous crowd as it washes in around him.
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"I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone." ---Sean Penn, on the passing of Proposition 8
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. It does not arrive silently nor is it met with acquiescence. It is a process of punctuation and repercussion. It is a fight. The man Harvey Milk understood this, and with a warm, genial temperament that palliated but never quenched the urgency of his agenda he assumed the fight for Gay Rights as his own, which it was. For the better part of a decade he galvanized the gay community in San Francisco, conducting its ragged antagonism into diplomatic reason. In 1977 the community's buoyant outcries carried him to a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as the first openly gay elected official in the United States. It was an achievement whose triumph is overshadowed by its necessity, a requisite step by a people toward the Declaration of Independence, but whose importance cannot be understated. The cost of the step gained, redeemed upon the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, was no mystery to the man himself. It was a sacrifice he marched toward knowingly. Fearful yet undissuaded by threats against his life, he never lost hope.
The idea for a film on Milk's political career had been around for nearly two decades, probably since the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk took down the Academy Award in 1984. Over the years a number of directors and actors have been attached to various scripts, but it wasn't until a recent flat race between Gus Van Sant and Bryan Singer, approaching the 30-year anniversary of Milk's death, that the film finally went. Let us all be thankful that Van Sant's project won out by a nose because his talent as a storyteller and an artist wins by eight or ten lengths, easily.
Throughout his career Van Sant has concerned himself with the unreality of the American dream, the discordance between the way things are and the way we are told they should be, and his films have focused on an intimate number of alienated outliers to the status quo. Homelessness, figurative and occasionally literal, has been his motif. His style, flowing and balletic, and his affinity for slow-motion sequences, having reached their poetic but absurd apex in his last film, Paranoid Park, are tempered in Milk for the sake of accessibility, as is his use of the hiccupping storyline. He maintains, however, an eye for grace in his direction and a belief in the power of an immobile or irregular shot to engage the viewers' imagination more dynamically than leading them around by the nose. I was stunned by the simple, unusual beauty of a conversation between Milk and a San Francisco police officer after the beating of a gay man unfolding in the blood-flecked reflection of the victim's discarded safety whistle. Touches like these for the unobserved make viewing Milk, or any Van Sant film, a process of discovery.
The great difficulty of realizing Milk, a biopic with a predetermined outcome, was making the film more than a procession toward the grave, allowing the vitality of a man and a movement to shine in the shadow of impending tragedy. Much of the film's ability to do so can be attributed to its high degree of intimacy. The nakedness of the performances coupled with the bare gaze of the camera reveal an irrepressible hope. Even though we are confronted with Milk's assassination almost immediately, the body bag being dollied away in a blip of archival news footage during the first minutes of the film, the following scene, which introduces the character Milk, is so arresting in its portrayal of the man's vulnerability and optimism that we cannot help but be carried off by it. The fatalism that ultimately tugs at the story's coattail is dissolved by the truth in that moment. It is held at a distance by hope, and by the magnetic and impossibly compassionate performance Milk's star, Sean Penn. In my mind, the Academy Award was his by the conclusion of his first scene on the subway stairwell. Penn creates a man transparent of ill will yet charismatic and of tenacious purpose, and over the course of the film he reasserts himself as an actor of the highest caliber, belonging to the fraternity of Daniel Day-Lewis and Philip Seymour Hoffman as one of the greatest working actors today.
The timing of Milk's theatrical release, little more than a week before the November election that saw Proposition 8 strip same-sex couples in California of the right to marry, was no coincidence. It was film as political activism, and it showed that some people still believe in the power of art to affect, and not simply comment on, the world in which it is created. That the film failed to sway public opinion is regrettable and underscores both a continued strain of human ignorance and the impotent role of art in the modern world. Milk's release to DVD, however, coming little less than a week after the California Supreme Court began hearing arguments for a repeal on Proposition 8, represents a chance for one or both of those things to change. It is a chance for a film, a movement, the memory of a man, to push back with their collective will against repression and regain the step that was lost, a chance for hope. Without it, Harvey Milk rightfully said, life is not worth living.
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The more I consider the tragedy of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler the more I can't help picturing Willy Loman and a scene from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In the scene, a flashback, Willy is lecturing his eldest son on how to handle himself and the crowds at what he considers an important football game in the boy's career. "Hit low and hit hard, because it's important," he reminisces. "There's all kinds of important people in the stands." As Willy reaches further back in memory toward his own triumphs on the field, he has a sudden disconnect from the illusion of the story he is recounting and realizes that he is alone, and indeed he is, his son having left the stage. While the break between his present and past realities is shattering, the allure of returning to that bottled moment, the trimmed grass and swirling cheers of his youth, makes the rift more bearable, makes crossing it more essential. Because of this, Willy Loman, like Robin "Randy The Ram" Ramsinski, the protagonist of The Wrestler, is a man trapped, willingly indulging the illusion of life as it was in the past, and dying slowly in a memory.
The memory to which Ramsinski recoils, top billing at a Wrestlemania-like event, April 6, 1989, burns with a more consistent intensity for all the ways he encounters that moment in his daily routine. News clippings collage the walls of his van. A twenty-year-old action figure of him rides on the dashboard. He dusts off an old Nintendo to virtually relive, again and again, the match that was his high-water mark. Even his hearing aide is anachronistic. His hair, a long, fleetingly Herculean mess of peroxide blonde, looks much as it did in the photographs we see of his rise to fame. And it is through this hair that we first encounter Randy. During the opening sequences we follow him at his back, the camera never moving from beyond his shoulders and up, and the darkness of the rooms and people he passes through makes his bright hair the dominant visual by contrast. In these early scenes, and throughout much of the movie, Randy is constantly stereotyped and self-stereotyped, reduced to his costumed exterior, and it becomes apparent that his self and his persona are hugely divided. When this persona is removed, and Randy is sidelined from the ring, a crisis of identity sets the drama of The Wrestler into motion.
Aronofsky's three previous films have all considered obsession and addiction in one form or another: knowledge (Pi), drugs (Requiem for a Dream), and love (The Fountain). And whether it is an elusive formula or a tight red dress, Aronofsky has been ceaselessly bleak in his belief in the weakness of the human spirit to turn away from the golden carrot that it dangles just beyond its own reach. The Wrestler is no less concerned with addiction, Randy's obsession with that moment in 1989, but the film does more than just present an image of self-destruction. When the object sought after is fame, the audience is necessarily drawn into the film as the antagonist to Randy's desire. Contrary to our half-hearted investment in his life outside the ring, his stabs at romance and compassion, it is squarely within the cult of celebrity that we find ourselves on the screen while watching The Wrestler. We are the savages at the coliseum, the maddening crowd. We are the amputee who offers up his prosthetic leg as a weapon in one of Ramsinski's bouts. We are the family that both embraces and cannibalizes Randy. Aronofsky implicates us in his destruction, and the confluence of emotions is fascinating. An opponent staples a five-dollar bill to his own forehead. We laugh out one side of our mouths because the act is absurd, but we cringe out the other side because the thought of rent flesh is disturbing, and at the same time we are struck with the realization that were we not here to witness it, this spectacle would not be taking place at all.
These contradictions make viewing The Wrestler a muddled affair for the heart. We empathize with Randy's situation, his confusion and desperation, and yet we cheer him toward the edge knowing that it may well kill him. We push him to that place on the top rope twenty years ago where his heart is not yet broken, and his daughter is not yet abandoned, and his future lies somewhere beyond the mat. We see the scar on his chest and the joy in his face, and we smile because we share that too. "Ram Jam!" the crowd demands his signature move. "Ram Jam! Ram Jam!" We join in. "Ram Jam! Ram Jam!" At what cost, fame? The old warrior rises. The coliseum erupts.
And then he jumps.
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"Without bloodshed, there is no pardon."
Often it has been the course of critics to write Salo off as extreme self-indulgence on the director's part, a wallowing in Sadean violence and pornography to appease his own lurid tastes. This approach to the film is not without merit. From his earliest lines as a poet, throughout his film career, and until his murder, Pier Paolo Pasolini had disposed himself to the taboos of Italian society, and society as a whole, embracing in his gaze matters of prostitution, homosexuality, and general sacrilege. However, to disregard the film as pure self-indulgence is narrow-minded at best. More rightly, this is a blind approach, a revulsion and wholesale rejection of the horrors of Salo, and thereby a denial of the symbolism and implications of these acts. This is wrong. If one commits the time and nerve to sit through two hours of the perversion of sexuality, religion, and the human vessel, one owes it oneself, and certainly to the filmmaker, to carry something away from the experience more serviceable than broad condemnation. In the rawest action we often find the rawest truth.
Salo is a heavily textual film. Predominantly, Pasolini works from Marquis de Sade's unfinished libertine epic, The 120 Days of Sodom. Already touching on 800 pages, and that only a quarter of the fleshed-out length he envisioned, Sade's ultimate manuscript reaches points that exceed both what we know of depravity and what Pasolini chose to include in his adaptation: incest, rape, murder, coprophagia, sacrilege, often inexplicably forced into one violent, ecstatic act. The movement of the book, like that of the film, concerns a quartet of libertines who dictate over their own personal brothel of local children, with whom they enact their increasingly debase fantasies until eventually they transgress sexuality in favor of torture and murder. In Salo, the framework of Dante's Inferno is interposed with Sade's original story, giving the escalation of horrors a second, more classic and deeply rooted context. Like Dante, the viewer passes ethereally through scenes of intense, graphic suffering, both unable to slow their turning and unable to turn away. Behind this ineluctable progression, and most controversial at the time of the film's release, Pasolini placed the backdrop of Salo, Italy, in 1944, stronghold to the last consolidated faction of Mussolini's National Fascist Party.
In each of the three major texts that inform Salo, Dante's Inferno, Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, and Mussolini's fascist regime, the common agent is power, the suffocating pressure and inescapable corruption of absolute power. It is a power of dominance that seems timeless, boundless, preprogrammed into the 14th century religious mythology of an eternal Hell, reveled in by 17th century libertines, reigned and throated forward by 20th century fascists. With Salo, Pasolini suggests the unbrokenness of this corrupted power both visually and contextually. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of distance in the establishing and closing sequences of the film, both concerning the villa in which his fascists indulge their Sadean impulses.
The building is first presented from a space of actual distance, across a broad field. There is a feeling of peacefulness in observing the villa's bucolic facade, and Pasolini lingers on these long exterior shots initially so that he might instill in the viewer's mind an image and feeling of safe disinvolvement, one that will be pined for as the horrors of Salo commence and intensify, and one that will never be regained. In fact, Pasolini is able to completely pervert that image and sense of distance with a single sequence: At the close of the film, as the fascists' tastes reach their most foul level of debasement, in a courtyard of medieval torture set against the ominous dirge of monophonic chant music, one of the fascists trains a pair of binoculars on the victims and looks through the apparatus backwards, creating the bent image of apparent distance; while this image plays its horrible irony, two of the many young men complicit in the fascists' debauchery turn the dial on a radio, disrupting the chant music and replacing it with modern (to 1944) big band music; they then casually dance together as though they were in their own home, with an innocence and genuine obliviousness to the cries of pain just beyond earshot of their music.
What makes this sequence so striking, and what makes the film as a whole so disturbing, is its juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern. As the corruption of the fascists' power and whims degenerate, becoming more outlandish, more Gothic, more primitive, the viewer is inclined to relegate their crude, basal acts to a far distant past. Yet just when the violence becomes so frenzied that it seems unbelievable, Pasolini snaps the frame back into the present day and denies the convenience of regaining, if even through desensitization, a feeling of safe disinvolvement. It is only the image of this disinvolvement that returns, the two young men dancing, but it returns as an image of dis-ease, divested of its peacefulness, its innocence. Through this sequence, the fascists and their behavior, though evoking the rabid, calculating violence of the Spanish Inquisition, become something more familiar to the viewer. They are outmoded horrors manifested in fine Italian suits, with a propensity toward the bourgeois. They crack jokes, appreciate fine music, and attempt to follow high art. They are the latest extension of mindless omnipotence, but they seem, from the outside at least, as banal as any person one might find walking the streets today. Like the villa in which they commit their sadism, from a distance these men are commonplace. They are no one specifically but everyone generally.
If there is pardon for Salo, it lies in a challenge. It is a challenge Pasolini draws up for his audience by highlighting the insidiousness of absolute power in the film's closing sequence. He points to its continuity and covertness, its inescapability, and demands that the viewers search it out in themselves and the world around them, that the viewers identify what, like the bodies of the fascists' victims in Salo, this debased power is stifling and destroying with its suffocating pressure in their modern world. The effect of this challenge, both immediate and lingering, is extremely unsettling, but it is not one that I would wish to absolve myself of. Pasolini's indictment of insensate power is a necessary one. It brings concentrated focus to the many ways that we as a society have become desensitized through overexposure to the horrors present in our own world. It reminds us that corruption, vice, abuse, and murder, though belonging as words to common parlance are much more weighted than the vacant buzz of an evening news brief. It humanizes through the most inhumane means imaginable. And for this, Salo is defensible.
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MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY
from A Horse Stall Named Desire
All action occurs behind a broad white curtain, as a recovery room partition or portiere for privacy. The curtain is backlit and projects the silhouettes of the characters in distorted, larger-than-life proportions. As the lights come up we hear Queen's "You're My Best Friend" playing quietly through the house speakers---this music continues throughout. We see the silhouette of a large man, MR. HANDS, who holds a block-like object in his right hand. There are also several smaller silhouettes huddled together, the ZOOPHILES. Also, we see a four-legged body, the HORSE, to be represented by a high-standing table or ironing board. MR. HANDS stands between the ZOOPHILES and the HORSE.
MR. HANDS: Hey guys! Who wants to ride the pony?
ZOOPHILES: YAY! (They wave their arms exhultantly in the air.)
MR. HANDS: And who wants to have the pony ride you?
ZOOPHILES: YAY?! (They wave their arms exhultantly in the air.)
(One of the ZOOPHILES crawls beneath the HORSE. He writhes throughout MR. HANDS' following lines.)
MR. HANDS: Hold still. No, no, that's okay; he's just communing with you. Yeah. Here, feed him this carrot. I know, I know. He's a big pony, isn't he? Isn't he? Yes he is. Yes he is. He is such a big pony. Someone hold the camera for a second. This is great, isn't it? This is both great and legal in the state of Washington. Frosty chocolate milkshakes for everyone!
ZOOPHILES: YAY! (They wave their arms exhultantly in the air, except for the one beneath the HORSE.)
(Lights down. Music stops. Neighing is heard in the wings.)
CURTAIN
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Zoo is a documentary as peculiar in style as it is in content. A Frankenstein's monster composed of bizarre reenactments, voice-over testimonials, found footage, some actors acting, some people who took part in the events being reenacted attempting to act, actors being interviewed about acting in the reenactments---plenty of cut-and-paste layers to have the viewer asking, "What is this?"
All the different parts then conglomerate, lurch forward, and confront the viewer with a series of messages: we are all human; we are all different and alike; it's okay to have sex with animals; we are all hiding something; it's okay to have sex with animals; we should be more accepting; especially horses. Especially horses? As one of the men---one of the zoophiles, who oddly enough are all men---puts it so delicately, "So what if I want to grab a horse's balls and see if they're warm?"
So what? Maybe. But it's statements such as this one, as well as some extremely graphic found footage, which draw the line that the film is attempting to blur back into sharp focus. More often than not, I was lulled into a false sense of security by the film's insights on the human condition and the desire we have to commune with nature. There is a positive message here, but I kept losing touch with it because of the constant, explicit reminders that, oh yes, these men are talking about having sex with animals.
Maybe I'm just an unaccepting person. Maybe it's all beautiful. Maybe I'm focusing on the wrong things. But when the footage these men shot of themselves "communing" with horses appears on your television, maybe you'll be right there with me.
If you've ever loved a horse, proceed with caution. If you've ever loved a horse, you many have just found your flagship.
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"It is not my job to give explanations," he says with brusque finality, cutting the interviewer's question off at the head. The man stands beside a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror, his well-tailored reflection pronouncing the same answer. He smiles then, Alain Resnais, at the simplicity of his maneuver, the truth that it holds. He continues, stating that no explanation can be made for his film that is absolutely correct or absolutely incorrect. Ambiguity, it would seem, is his choice sleight of hand. Perhaps it is the way that he carries himself when he says this, with decidedly academic certainty, or perhaps it is the confidence he stakes in this murky unknowing, but many are those who have tagged the director and his film with such cold-hearted words as "self-important" and "pretentious." The interviewer, rather than volley the matter back, chuckles off Resnais' response, abandoning the hope of a clean answer to the riddle of Last Year at Marienbad, and the interview turns another corner. The year is 1961.
The greatest wonder and compliment, I feel, to the brilliance of Resnais' second feature-length narrative---and here we must use the term "narrative" loosely---is that nearly half a century after the above interview with Cinepanorama was conducted, we can still do nothing better than throw our hands into the air and chuckle when asked about its meaning. Many people find this elusiveness frustrating, and the refusal of the film's director, now bitten with the frost of his winter years, to submit any clues of authorial intent (not surprising, the film was penned by Alain Robbe-Grillet) only adds to its mystique. However, I submit that this mystery is not a thing to be glowered at, a bad thing. Quite the opposite: this uncertainty is a thing to be reveled in, a good thing. For you see, reader, all joy is lost in explanation.
Last Year at Marienbad, like Resnais' first feature-length film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), an existential love affair set against post-atomic angst, has as one of its primary concerns the intersubjective experience of reality, how objective reality is created, or not, by a triangulation of many individuals' subjective perceptions. For events occurring on a massive scale, such as the bombing of Hiroshima, this reality is created quite easily and its features are, by so many points of reference, undeniable. However, events on a smaller scale, for instance in Hiroshima, Mon Amour the female protagonist's recalling that her first love died in her arms on a deserted riverwalk, or the trist that informs the narrative of Last Year at Marienbad, suffer from a lack of intersubjective credibility. For these events, there is no consensus. There is only the wandering of a single mind, which has nothing to use but its own refracted image as a point of cross-reference. The result is a corruption of intersubjective certainty, and the individual memory begins to run away with itself. In both films, these personal recollections, though dubious, are presented to the viewer as genuine to the films' cinematic reality. There is no visual cue, no change in tone or presentation for the audience to differentiate between what is factual and what is not. In the same way, it is not possible for the character whose memory we enter to differentiate between the emotional impacts of a true recollection versus a false one; both are felt with the same degree of intensity and conviction. Objective and subjective realities are here impossibly confused, and the audience is in no small way to blame. By the logic of intersubjective construction, Resnais has made the viewer, simply through the act of viewing his film, the second point of reference by which these faulty memories gain validity and burst into objective reality! We are, in Last Year at Marienbad, all parties to the murder.
Of course none of this play between reality and unreality would be possible without Resnais' shattering treatment of time, which can be attributed to the collision between the director's own documentarian background and Marienbad co-creator Alain Robbe-Grillet's position within the Nouveau Roman literary movement. From his fifteen years working as a documentarian, Resnais gained a sense of the mechanics of history and developed an eye for the patterns that compose its seemingly linear progression. What he saw, and he certainly was not the first, was that history moves in cycles. But more than this he came to evince a sense of the omnipresence of history, that in the human mind all of history is condensed within the present moment, like an infinite series of transparencies (or strips of celluloid) stacked atop one another. This theory presents itself most startlingly in Resnais' award-winning documentary Night and Fog (1955), where black-and-white footage of Holocaust concentration camps is cut with modern color footage of the bucolic Polish countryside, the effect being a potent sense of dread and an obliteration of the comfortable distance we place between the past and ourselves. This method of condensing time functions in Last Year at Marienbad in similar fashion, where though we experience the disjointed narrative across a runtime of 94 minutes, for the protagonist immersed in the double exposure of past and present, the story might take only a few seconds to tell, or a few minutes, a few hours, a few months, an eternity. We cannot know, and the film refuses to provide an answer. It only gives us the sensation of time rising slowly above our heads like an uncontrollable flood.
This flood, however, would merely be standing water if deprived of novel movement and direction, and Resnais' sense of the immense depth of history in the present moment might otherwise be subjugated by a linear narrative. Such is the case with Hiroshima, Mon Amour, where the past is waded through along a straight path of narrative progression, however open-ended. This is not to fault that film, but merely to recognize it as an intermediate step between traditional treatments of cinematic time and the afocal fugue of time achieved in Last Year at Marienbad, where neither the past nor the present is favored as the viewer's jumping off point.
The temporal volleying in Marienbad is, by Alain Robbe-Grillet's design, endlessly beguiling. His aim, like that of all Nouveau Roman authors, is to disrupt the A to B of traditional narrative and create a story whose meaning is pointed not in a single direction but in every direction. As Resnais remarks in the aforementioned Cinepanorama interview, no answer to this type of story is correct, and no answer is incorrect. If the effect of Robbe-Gillet's narrative technique could translate to the art of painting it would most likely resemble a work by Jackson Pollock, whose lines constantly evolve, swooping and doubling across one another, running in every direction off the canvas and into eternity. And yet, though both men seek to arrest a glimpse of chaos, Robbe-Gillet's design is more precise, his lines more straightly drawn. What he achieves, and what Resnais accentuates with his direction, is a deceptive unbalance, one where the viewer does everything he can to assert traditional ideas of space and time onto the vacillating narrative only to have the plush rug pulled out from underneath him, again and again, just as he is about to gain perspective. Costume and location shift, dialogue stutters, repeats, memory and action deform one another, both with and against the protagonist's will, and the audience is kept afloat, never knowing if the next step taken will be made of marble or paper-mache.
If there is only one element of Last Year at Marienbad by which the audience can gain a sense of stability, one constant, it is the infinite geometry of the Marienbad chateaux. Before we achieve character, those loose allegorical molds, X, A and M, we are introduced to the space in which their shadows will be cast. Both the grounds of the chateaux and the halls of the building itself are composed of soberingly clean lines. In these hallways Resnais' camera wanders constantly, using breathtakingly long tracking shots that examine both the baroque details of the architecture, like memories intricately crafted and instantly forgotten, and the great voids of space that lie between them. In the French garden he favors a stationary shot, one that allows the viewer's eye to make its own progression down the main approach, wandering the hedgerows and sharply cut promenade, as both design and vision are drawn into the horizon and beyond. Such shots are frequent throughout Marienbad, in fact they bookend the film. Their immediate result is a calming effect on the viewer: a single, fluidly observed tracking shot through a hallway serves as temperance to the volatile and elusive narrative, where meaning is forcefully skewed. In their simplicity there is room for reflection, in their regularity and uniformity, a meditative pause. It is here perhaps that meaning can be found, or lack of meaning reconciled with.
Ultimately, there is no arrival in Marienbad's geometry. No point exists where the eye may come to rest along its lines; there is only constant departure. In this perpetual motion we see reflected an endless searching, one that perfectly compliments the mechanics of the film. "Perspective," Resnais later says in his Cinepanorama interview, "is only gained from the next point." But it is a point that we never reach in Last Year at Marienbad. Without it, the film eschews concrete meaning, and the audience is reduced to the position of the confused, heartsick protagonist, whose simple task of remembering proves to be anything but simple.
At first glance this all seems impossible, the viewer lost in the film, caught in the progression of its straight lines, between its immutable statues and granite slabs. But this is precisely where we find ourselves. And some forty-eight years into the life of Last Year at Marienbad, no audience has been able to escape its impeccable design. Watching the film for the first time is no different than watching it for the tenth time, or, if I may extrapolate, the hundredth time. We are all still left simply wandering, tracing its lines, listening to its echoes, and losing ourselves in its night. Alone and suspended with Alain Resnais.
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As the title sequence of Roman Polanski's Repulsion suggests, with its violation of the human eye in closeup by thin striations of text, the film we are about to watch is one concerned with altered perceptions. Like the infamous razoring scene from Luis Bunuel's surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1929) to which it harkens, where a woman's eye is bisected with a blade, a visceral call to arms by the director that we abandon old habits of viewing, this opening credit roll acts as an immediate declamation of Polanski's concurrent aim at a new type of filmic experience. Although his departure will not be as radical as that of the surrealists, whose preoccupation with the disinterested play of thought leads to an often plotless scattering of associations, Polanski does share with the likes of Bunuel, Cocteau and Dali, a sense of the omnipotence of dream, but with a key difference: where surrealism considers the marriage of waking-reality and dream-reality to be the road to truth, Polanski treats this union as the road to madness (Though Andre Breton does pine for the freedom of the insane in his seminal text, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), however facetiously).
The eye Polanski draws his name and title across belongs to the very beautiful and quietly disturbed Carol Ledoux (played here with startling vacuity by a twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve), and the cleaving text acts as much as a departure point from the audience's traditional modes of filmic experience as it does an entry point into Carol's troubled world. It does not serve, however, as an invitation into Carol's mind, for she is very much, despite her sexually aggressive hallucinations, an impenetrable character. This resistant quality can be partially attributed to Deneuve's playing Carol as a blank slate, someone whose past circumstances and present thoughts are almost entirely vacant, left bare to be furnished by the audience's own needs and inclinations---our imaginations make monstrous the smallest sound in the night, and by this principle Polanski lets us create our own undoing. More than by Deneuve's acting, though, this impenetrability exists as a limitation of the medium itself. When it comes to achieving interiority, film, compared to literature, is decidedly lacking. One cannot simply present stream-of-consciousness in narrative film without it assuming the clunky form of voiceover (Janet Leigh's character in Psycho (1960), for example) or, conversely, presenting itself as a disjointed montage of fleeting images, a la the surrealists. This conventional wisdom does not affect Polanski's ambition, however, and he does everything within his technical ability to rebel against it, achieving an ultimate proximity to his subject's interiority that is closer than the cinema has ever come before.
Of the five senses that account for human experience, film is bound, and privileged, to convey only sight and sound, and contrary to the implication of the film's credit sequence, that it is the eye which will carry us through, Repulsion actually achieves a mimesis of Carol's reality by way of the viewer's ear. Take for example the auditory clues during the scene in which Carol murders her would-be suitor, Colin (John Fraser). The film as a whole is frighteningly silent, with the exception of a small handful of recurring sound bites. Some of these are presented rather frankly, the funereal march of a tympani drum that opens the film and accompanies Carol on her aimless walks, or Carol's Theme, a dulcet though melancholy flute refrain that seems to announce Carol's solitude as though it was a character in Sergei Prokofiev's classic composition Peter and the Wolf (a broken bird, perhaps). Others of these sounds are given greater subtlety, existing at muted levels, both arriving and departing without direction. In the murder scene two such recurrent sounds conspire to give the audience an auditory impression of Carol's imbalance. These are the sound of a child's fingers clumsily inching up and down the C-scale on a piano, and that of an airplane passing far overhead. Both appear independently at other points within the film, yet they arrive together here at the moment after Colin barges through Carol's front door and before he closes it for the last time. The aural montage created between the two is one of immense space, the very local, personal sound of fumbling through basic scales on a piano contrasted against the distant and anonymous noise of jet traffic. The source of these sounds, though potentially belonging simply to the ambience of a London flat, seems too specific and aligned to have arisen from anywhere else but Carol's own memory, which leaves her and the audience, in a moment where rationality could right the situation with Colin, reeling instead in the telescopic distance between the local and the remote. The murder itself then becomes a silent byproduct of her auditory wandering, as Carol's blank face while blunting Colin with the candlestick similarly reflects her nonpresence in the act.
Despite Polanski's directorial eye and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor's deft manipulation of the apparatus, producing some dizzying, confounding distortions of space, these acoustic pings are somehow more amenable to our experience of Carol's psychosis. It is through auditory hallucination that we first suspect Carol's madness. "We must get this crack mended," she says early in the film, looking fixedly out of frame. The sound of broken concrete crumbles into and out of existence, and then the camera cuts to the shot of a crack in the kitchen wall, preformed and unmoving. Even when the theme of cracked walls returns later, with the visual hallucination of the walls physically cracking catching up to her auditory hallucination, it is the sound of their destruction, like the crash of a thunderbolt, which has the more potent effect.
The logic behind this sonic preeminence can be found in the way that we relate to sight versus sound in Repulsion. When we watch the film, the visual component has set dimensions that are informed by the size and shape the screen. The image occupies a certain small percentage of our field of vision and, more importantly, though the film itself is of a three-dimensional space, its projected visual exists in only two dimensions; the image is framed by the edges of the screen and exists separately from the noncinematic world from which we view it. We see Carol as her dementia mounts pacing circles through an Expressionist iteration of her apartment, but with a clear ability to mark the distinction between her space and our own. This sense of delineation between the cinematic and noncinematic is considerably blurred by the film's sound, where even though the source of cinematic auditory stimuli is apparent, its separation from noncinematic auditory stimuli often is not, as both types of sound occupy the same liminal space. This phenomenon is most quickly demonstrated by a telephone ringing in a film (as they so regularly do in Repulsion) and the viewer turning to see if his own phone has rung. Of course a full-fledged confusion of the cinematic and noncinematic is rare, and thus a kind of added bonus to the sound department's exquisite design, but the fact remains that because acoustics extend beyond the flatness of the screen and penetrate us, percuss us, actively violate our sense of hearing, where image, grotesque or beautiful (with Deneuve beneath Taylor's lens, sometimes both), lies docile in two-dimensional space on the screen, the film's audio component elicits an exponentially greater degree of empathy for Carol than does its visual counterpart.
Certainly this is not the case with most films. It is a rarity necessitated by Polanski's aim to show us a woman who is insane but whose insanity is not recognized by those around her; we are the ones who must recognize it. He forces the audience into Carol's ear, and we are synchronously attacked by the same stringent doorbells and phones, haunted by the same distant shuffling of feet, the same auditory echoes of memory that occupy such a large portion of Carol's perceptions. Polanski strangles our acoustic space because he cannot constrict the physical walls around us, and the hearing of Repulsion thereby becomes something experiential. This technique is mimicked to similar effect in more modern films such as Darren Aronofsky's Pi (1998) and Lodge Kerrigan's phenomenal Clean, Shaven (1993), both of which, like Repulsion, attempt to approach the interiority of a schizophrenic main character.
Ultimately, though, we cannot breach the internal workings of Carol Ledoux, as no method exists, filmic or otherwise, to fully immerse one person into the sensorial reality of another, but the film does come startlingly close at times. What we come away from Repulsion with then is a lingering openness of perception, not exactly paranoid but not accepting either. Sounds are intensified, their origins dubious. As with the other two films in his Apartment Trilogy (Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976)), Polanski excels at presenting us with the banal only then to turn it over in his directorial hand and show us its rotting underbelly. He finds corruption in the seemingly uncorrupt, repulsion in the beautiful, and his surgical eye and ear brings the analytical scalpel down across the cornea of our own world, leaving us humming quietly to ourselves and searching the walls for cracks.
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Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience is an idea pushed forth to its logical conclusion. It is the film of a person completely reduced. Its method, of carrying an idea to its apex, is one that Jean-Luc Godard often praised in his writings as a film critic, and one that he evinces in his own work as a director. Indeed, Mr. Soderbergh's film has even been referred to as "Godardian," which to most who use the comparison means "the filmmaker JLG who died in 1968," not "the director of 2009's Socialisme." The idea here, taken perhaps from Godard's own preoccupation with prostitution in Vivre Sa Vie (1962), or his keen observation of consumer politics in Masculin, Feminin (1964), or the collision of the two in Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), is one of commodity fetishism and what Foucault identifies as the modern problem of representation. Namely, that we increasingly relate to the signs of language and commerce (symbols, letters, images) less for the content that they signify than for the signifiers themselves. Logos assume value in and of themselves. Personal branding becomes not only the norm but a necessity.
Godard anticipated Mr. Soderbergh's present aim as early as the mid-60s (earlier, probably) in a scene from Two or Three Things I Know About Her, where Marina Vlady and a fellow prostitute pace around in their underwear with TWA duffle bags over their heads, to the delight of an especially wealthy John. It was around this time that Godard's cinema became disenchanted with American consumer culture, and the Children of Marx and Coca-Cola smashed their pop bottles in the street and fled to the East. Capitalism and the American hegemony will, in time, make dancing shapes of us all.
Unlike in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, however, Mr. Soderbergh is not speculating at some distant point along the horizon, a point where human lives are reduced to corporate emblems for the sake of streamline capitalism. That point has already been passed. He is merely putting his camera to the ground to catch a glimpse of Godard's nightmare, manifest, as it is today, in the torpid shape of porn star Sasha Grey (her face, one of the most marketable commodities in the adult entertainment industry) and the present machinations of global commerce. The film's narrative, about an upwardly striving, fiscally irresponsible call girl in the personal branding age, is the logical end of Vlady's TWA scene in Two or Three Things. Grey's character, escort Chelsea/Christine, spends her time between clients worrying about SEO (search-engine optimization), finding the perfect photograph with which to advertise her services online, and constructing the persona of a "high class" call girl. She measures out her days in brand-name lingerie and 5-star restaurants. She is affectless, wooden, a porcelain sex doll trading hands across Manhattan. Her interior life is almost entirely ignored; with the exception of her fondness for Personology books, we know nothing about her. This is exactly how Mr. Soderbergh would have it, how Chelsea/Christine would have it, how personal branding has it---an almost glib impersonality.
Where The Girlfriend Experience fails is in its casual approach to this criticism. We live in a time so overly commodified and humanly cold that it is difficult to differentiate between an attempt at social realism and one of deriding social commentary. Certainly they coexist (a McDonalds advertisement is practically a satire of itself), but the line Mr. Soderbergh draws between the two is so consistently thin that I wonder if most people won't miss the point. Primarily, that when we jeer at Chelsea/Christine's lifestyle, her naivety and petty preoccupations, we are jeering at a reflection of ourselves.
Sadly, the art of reading subtext is a dying one, poorly tended in this age of signs and symbols. And because of this, Mr. Soderbergh's film falls victim to the very system it is rebelling against. Just as Chelsea/Christine fails to become anything more than the symbol of her sex trade, to her clients, to the audience of The Girlfriend Experience, so too is the film itself absorbed at face value. The cluttered shot of a sporting goods store or boutique is processed solely as an establishing shot, which is its immediate function, yet that which it signifies, the wolfish culmination of overproduction and capitalist greed, is elided in our minds because of a widening perceptual disconnect between signifier and signified, between the image of a thing and the thing itself. An entire lifetime of exposure to flickering adverts and disembodied symbology has rendered us fundamentally incapable of realigning the two. We see the shapes of the film dancing but we fail to ask why they dance. Might it have been better for Mr. Soderbergh to blanket The Girlfriend Experience in expository voiceover, as Godard was so fond of doing? Possibly. But there is an equal danger in forced ideologies as there is in latent ideological tendencies. In the latter scenario the message is missed completely, in the former it is heard but not questioned. Which is worse?
All of this is to say that perhaps I misspoke earlier. Perhaps it is not a case of The Girlfriend Experience failing the audience, but of the audience failing The Girlfriend Experience. Or, more apropos, like a man trying to tell a rock that it's a rock, of each failing the other in turn.
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The idea of an objective documentary seems in this age of sensationalist news and politics to be a foreign one. Be invisible, let your subject come naked and unprejudiced, are such methods even taught in film programs anymore? Abandoned is the clinical eye, embraced the bleeding heart. The modern viewer demands the artifice of narrative film, the grand arc, the good and the bad, the message and the moral in everything he views. More than this, though, the modern viewer wants to be let down gently. At least in this regard The Cove avoids the foregone conclusion set up by many of its contemporaries. It closes instead in its own way with the screaming and bloody punctuation of its explicit message. While I admire director and local Boulderite Louie Psihoyos' passion, and even more so the passion of people like Ric O'Berry, I have to find fault in that passion as it translates to documentary filmmaking, pushing as it does toward a clearly delineated end. There is no discovery in The Cove. There is nothing untainted by prejudice. The whole experience is similar to an old Japanese proverb that Mr. Psihoyos digs out halfway through the film to illustrate Japan's conformist history: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Turning that aphorism back on his film, I would say that the documentarist's motive that sticks out most ardently gets hammered into the viewer.
Mr. Psihoyos' agenda is not quite as affronting as one might find in a Michael Moore film, but his passion drags his efforts down the same path of one-sidedness found on FoxNews. Fortunately, nearly all of his audience---most of the Western world and the fine people at the AMPAS---will fall in line behind him. My upbringing and pliable compassion abandons me to his camp, but eyes I do have. While his film spends most of its duration establishing broadly the humanity of dolphins, it lacks any scientific substantiation for this claim. At one point we are shown a clip of a dolphin depressing what appears to be a lever in the observing window of a holding tank. Is this the mouse pressing the green button for a treat to be dispensed, avoiding the red button, which would only produce a shock? Any explanation is elided, replaced with testimony by well-intentioned surfers-turned-activists and freedivers about their personal communions with the creature. The heart, we are made to accept, has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. By this it is established that the dolphin is self-aware and, for the purpose of the film, humanized, thus its life deemed more valuable than that of the lowly cow or pestilent chicken.
Through equally patchy logic and broad stroke, the film denies the Japanese people the same humanity and sense of compassion that it fights so hard to bestow upon the dolphin. The Japanese representative in the IWC is presented as a real-life iteration of George Lucas' Emperor Palpatine, malevolent and unfeeling. The fishermen of Taiji are depicted as savages, spitting and threatening, not because a camera crew has invaded their personal affairs but because they are culturally crude and pugnacious. The streets of some unnamed megacity swell with Japanese people, darting wherever it is that they go like impulses along a circuit board. They are unsympathetic, they are legion, and they hate dolphins.
Disregarding, for a moment, the inevitable slant of a film made under the guidance of nearsighted passion, I think it is important to consider the ramifications of a film made politically. The Cove is foremost a political film. It strives to affect change. And in sailing headlong into political waters, it has surrendered any consideration of itself as art, politics being a means to an end, and art being an end in itself. This is not to say that art cannot be political, but rather when it is treated in a purely didactic manner art becomes effete, circumscribed. Treating The Cove as the tool that it designed itself to be, I then have to wonder at its potency in the political spectrum. Can this film stop the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji? For that matter, can any film affect social change? Stop the earth from warming? End the holocaust in Darfur? Prevent Columbine from recurring? The answer is an unequivocal No. Films like The Cove are merely the first step. They raise awareness. And what a chimerical thing is awareness. It is a pat on the back to the modern, inactivist audience, and the flaw of all politically motivated cinema. Though it tries to incite, the film ultimately acts as an abatement of guilt because the viewer sees not only that someone else is taking action, but also feels through the vicariousness of the medium that he too has taken part in the preservation of the majestic dolphin. Films so pointed toward awareness, despite their best intentions, encourage passivity. There are only so many Ric O'berrys in the world, we are told. However, watching The Cove is unlikely to make you one.
The worst thing this film could do now would be to win the Academy Award, for two reasons. First, it would be further vindication to the people who've seen it that something positive is happening in the lives of the 20,000 dolphins slaughtered annually in Taiji. Second, it would effectively end the film's life, sending The Cove off with a golden statuette and a false sense of accomplishment, when the real work in fighting to reform the dolphin harvest hasn't even begun.
A fist and a film are both degrees of persuasion.
Sink ships if you want to save dolphins.
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Before I dole out my selections for the ten best films of 2009, I feel I should begin with a series of disclaimers, some necessary for the reader's comprehension of the list, others for the reader's comprehension of me.
Disclaimer One: I hate lists. They are tedious, arbitrary, reductive and ultimately meaningless. No one cares to know what my favorite films of the year are. Only a few hundred more people than no one care to know what someone as poppy and iconic as Quentin Tarantino's thinks of the films this year. No one is asking Jorgen Leth. No one even knows who he is. I swore to myself that I would never compile such a list. However, as 2009 prepares to tick itself off into the void, I find more and more people---at least two, coworkers---wondering how I'd rank the films of the year if I drew them out of a hat. And who's to say I haven't?
Disclaimer Two: Because I work on the glamorous retail side of the film industry, the prerequisite for inclusion on The List is that the film hit retail outlets (Ugh . . . hit The Video Station) for the first time in the 2009 calendar year. That means in-house DVD product, packaging and pamphlets. No downloads. No bootlegs. And, unfortunately, no theaters either. This excludes films like Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, Lars von Trier's Antichrist, and Michael Haneke's White Ribbon from contention, all of which will most certainly find themselves in my top ten films of 2010, assuming I decide to repeat this offense.
Disclaimer Three (or, an amendment to Disclaimer One): Since I hate ordering things---cards in a deck, days in a week, films in a year---I've decided to present my top films as a sort of group or impartial collection, ordered by their initial US DVD release. The resemblance between this group and a list is due only to the present constraints of virtual formatting. Were I able to place these films into a digital hat, I would, but I haven't the patience to learn how. My mind has already wandered somewhere else.
Apologies to no one . . .
(03-04-09) Vals im Bashir / Waltz with Bashir (2008) dir. Ari Folman
(03-31-09) Ne le dis a personne / Tell No One (2006) dir. Guillaume Canet
(05-05-09) Wendy and Lucy (2008) dir. Kelly Reichardt
(07-21-09) 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle / 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
(08-03-09) Lat den ratte komma in / Let the Right One In (2008) dir. Tomas Alfredson
(09-01-09) Hunger (2008) dir. Steve McQueen
(10-06-09) Not Quite Hollywood (2008) dir. Mark Hartley
(11-24-09) Gomorra (2008) dir. Matteo Garrone
(12-01-09) Un conte de Noel / A Christmas Tale (2008) dir. Arnaud Desplechin
(12-15-09) Inglourious Basterds (2009) dir. Quentin Tarentino
The first animated film to ever be nominated for Best Foreign film at the Academy Awards, Waltz with Bashir is an investigation into the suppressed memories of director and former Israeli Army private Ari Folman. Suffering regular nightmares and seeing cryptic flashes of his time spent serving during the Lebanon occupation of 1982, Folman sets out to reconnect with old friends from the service in an attempt to triangulate the meaning of his fractal recollections. The film uses a style of Flash animation, deceptively similar to the Rotoscoping found in Linklater's Waking Life (2001) and Scanner Darkly (2006), that acts as the perfect medium for questioning the validity of subjective memory.
A terse suspense film through and through, Tell No One is my favorite mystery since Michael Haneke's Cache (2005). The film unfolds with all the last-minute twists and underworld ties of an old Howard Hawkes noir, and sprints along with the kineticism of Tom Twyker's Run Lola Run (1998). Director Guillaume Canet, thirty-two at the time of production, should be applauded for his restraint. Rather than corrupt the machinations of the genre with ostentatious sleight of hand, as many young directors do out of unassuredness, Canet worked straight and true, and the final product displays a control far beyond his years.
Kelly Reichardt's third feature, of a drifting jobless twenty-something and her dog, is extremely timely. The narrative follows the title characters as they travel north on a shoestring to Alaska, in hopes of rooting out some vague prospect for employment. I consider the film on par with director Ramin Bahrani's recent output as the best example of what A.O. Scott hurriedly branded the "American Neo-Realist" or "Neo-Neo-Realist" movement, the films of which tend to feature minimal plot, lower-class characters, and naturalistic almost verite-styled aesthetics. Wendy and Lucy tracks closely to the ethos of a generation of young diasporic Americans who, like Michelle William's Wendy, have turned to a life of transition out of economic necessity. There is little room for the romanticism of cross-country travel when one hasn't enough money to make it around the block.
Like so many of Godard's films, 2 or 3 Things . . . is a love song to Paris. More than this, though, it is a prime example of Godard's practice of using narrative film self-reflexively as a loose framework on which to hang personal philosophies. The camera is in constant flux, finding itself caught between Parisian rooftop panoramas and swirling arabesques in a coffee mug. The meditations contained therein are equally omnibus, fracturing somewhere between corporate symbology and pinball repartee. Marina Vlady is the glamorous glue that keeps this satire on the prostitution of modern life from stretching too thin, though the director's Marxist disdain is not far hidden.
In a year that saw cartoon vampirism become as ubiquitous to middle-American households as Hannah Montana and Snuggies, this eerie little Swedish flick that treats a child vampire and its curse as a metaphor for existential loneliness flies a quiet mile above the rest. As ambient as Dreyer's Vampyr (1931) and the most poignant coming-of-age story this side of My Life as a Dog (1985), Let the Right One In is the best Scandinavian film of the decade and deserves a watch simply for the fact that it is a vampire film that eschews the pageantry of vampire films. Please, god, see this before you see its American remake, Let Me In, due out sometime in 2010.
When sound bytes from Margaret Thatcher's speech on the nature of political violence versus criminal violence play throughout Steve McQueen's Hunger, it is easy to forget that the film is set twenty-seven years in the past. Look closer at the blood and shit stained corridors of Maze Prison and see if they don't recall photographs of Abu Ghraib. The narrative follows the inception and implementation of IRA member Bobby Sands' 1981 hunger strike, and it is easily the most visceral film experience I've had this year. Director Steve McQueen, previously heralded for his installation art, gives one of the most promising debuts of the decade. The texture and economy he achieves---the film is nearly without dialogue, save for a sobering twenty-minute two-shot at its heart---is a thing to behold.
The other documentary to make my list and, defying conventional wisdom, the most entertaining film I've seen all year, Not Quite Hollywood is a celebration of Australian genre cinema from the early-1970s into the late-1980s. Spanning from soft-core sexual liberation (Libido (1973)) to kung-fu capers (The Man from Hong Kong (1975)) to monster masques (Razorbacks (1984)) to post-apocalyptic highway-gang warfare (Dead-End Drive-In (1986)), Ozploitation was a do-it-yourself revolt against the starchiness of Australian period-dramas like Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and, above all else, never dull. The giddiness of fanboy commentators like Quentin Tarantino (who betrays the origins of some of his most famous sequences) is contagious. You'll cheer the fucking roof down as the cinema burns.
Gomorrah is at once both intensely aware and highly negating of its mafia film patrilineage. Visual quotations of De Palma, Scorsese and Coppola abound (though the overall style is more indebted to Antonioni's minimalism), but they are echoed in such a way as to make their source material seem as glossily artificial as a Versace advertisement. Based on Roberto Saviano's nonfiction expose on the Camorra organization, Gomorrah demystifies and deglamourizes the world of organized crime, presenting it instead as a world of almost futuristic decay where vineyards sprout above illegal landfills and everyone's life, regardless of where it may fall in the pecking order, is buried as indifferently as toxic waste.
I've tried again and again to articulate why I love this film, but the words never come. So, let me instead ramble on for the requisite blurb length. A Christmas Tale is a film filled with narrative devices---chapter titles, soliloquies, shadow puppets, voiceovers, etc---and yet for all the ways it seems trapped in its own storybook conventions, the film is wonderfully airy and free. The characters are able to move laterally in their prescribed roles, jimmying enough to gain three-dimensional depth. The film is hyper-literate, dropping snippets of Shakespeare and Voltaire. The family dynamics are unlike anything I've ever seen in American cinema, and their novelty gives them truth. Whatever Catherine Deneuve may have surrender (supposedly) of her physical beauty over the years she has gained back threefold in charm. Mathieu Amalric is fantastic. See this film.
The most linear act in Tarantino's oeuvre, Basterds is a veritable film history course and will have the cinephile's mind teeming with name-drop references to Riefenstahl, Pabst and Antonio Margheriti, and stylistic nods to Fuller, Truffaut and sundry. Though hardly the Nazi-scalping mess its previews made it out to be, the film is, like so much of Tarantino's output, a female-revenge flick, and thus both violent and vindicating enough to recoup the price of admission. Newcomer Melanie Laurent excels coolly as the femme de vengeance, and Austrian actor Christopher Waltz gives the performance of the film as the Jew-hunting polyglot Col. Hans Landa. The best film Tarantino has put out since Pulp Fiction. Some say his best ever.
(Top Banner: Images clockwise from top left: Inglourious Basterds, Waltz with Bashir, Gomorrah, Hunger, A Christmas Tale.)
(Bottom Banner: Images from left: Wendy and Lucy, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Not Quite Hollywood.)
Remake is a dirty word. For me it conjures images of Adam Sandler jabbering his way into a Gary Cooper role (Mr. Deeds [2002] and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town [1936]), Gwyneth Paltrow as Grace Kelly (A Perfect Murder [1998] and Dial M for Murder [1954]), Richard Gere as Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless [1983] and [1960]), etc. The list of ill-conceived remakes is long indeed, and grows longer each weekend that movies like Clash of the Titans and The Crazies open to eight-digit returns. And yet a number of great films have been born of the twice-baked potato: The Maltese Falcon (1941 nee 1931), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 nee 1934), Ben Hur (1959 nee 1925 nee 1907). This list on the whole is decidedly shorter and, I must admit, far more difficult to enumerate. Still, it proves that the right film reconsidered in the right light can buck the trend of incompetence that plagues the remake-happy film industry.
Werner Herzog has been here before. His 1979 remake of Nosferatu, while not superior to the original, was an artistic success. It grabbed hold of the classic Stoker tale, aped in occasional homage the framing of Murnau, but generally set off in its own creaking and shadowy direction, aided by the grainy authenticity of 1970s German cinema and the frightening performance of Herzog's best fiend, Klaus Kinski. For Herzog to remake Murnau seems in retrospect perfectly logical. The breadth of Herzog's work could fall under the umbrella of Man and His Impossible Endeavor. What greater challenge exists for a German filmmaker than to remake one of the most famous German films of all time?
Now we find Herzog, thirty years later and none the wiser (this is not a slight---the man popped out of the womb quoting Schopenhauer, I'm sure of it), remaking another classic, Bad Lieutenant (1992). The original film is a blistering Scorsese-esque portrayal of a drug-addled cop dangling far beyond the end of his rope. It took Harvey Keitel's career up several notches and is without question his best performance. Period. Haven't seen it? Well, neither has Werner Herzog. In fact, he'd never even heard of it before production began for his Lieutenant. Nor had he heard of Abel Ferrara, the original film's director. Still, this naivety didn't stop Ferrara from remarking of Herzog and company: "I wish those people die in Hell. I hope they're all in the same streetcar, and it blows up." He should have been more specific in directing his Bronxian rage. While the film's script---not written by Herzog---does borrow strongly from the original, and both films share the same producer, Herzog himself is a sort of innocent. Upon learning of Ferrara's existence and fury, not only did Herzog petition (unsuccessfully) to have the Bad Lieutenant moniker dropped from his film, but he also invited Ferrara out for a bottle of whiskey. Abel has yet to accept.
So is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans a remake, or isn't it? Yes and no. Reenvisioning is a more suitable term. Certain parties (see above) wanted to do a remake, only when the project passed through Werner's own brand of madness what came out the other side was something absurdly original, essentially Herzogian.
The differences between the two films are myriad, the most glaring of these being the tone. Port of Call abandons the boilerplate tragedy of its predecessor for an asylum farce, and is in the director's eyes a black comedy. Where Harvey Keitel's lieutenant is a man you want to see redeem himself, Nic Cage's lieutenant is a man you would happily nudge over the edge of a cliff, if only to see how high he would bounce. And bounce he does. The manic energy spiking in Cage's performance cannot be overstated. Arms flail, pills fly, accents change with the irregularity of Vampire's Kiss (1988), acts of violence erupt with the intensity of Wild at Heart (1990). This is vintage, erratic Cage, certainly not his strongest work but easily his most entertaining role of the last decade. Yet chew as he may on various bits of scenery, paraphernalia and fellow cast members, his performance is never able to hijack Herzog's vision. Under a saner man such a performance might trash a film, but with Herzog, who has made a career of working with the clinically unbalanced (Kinski, Bruno S., Brad Dourif), Cage's hysteria takes the film to new heights. To borrow from Val Kilmer, who appears in full form as the titular lieutenant's partner, it's all a bit like watching a tempest in a teacup.
Things work best for Port of Call when Herzog follows his leading man down, when he shakes off the conventions of a cop procedural and does something disastrous. He goes so far as to pull the film apart at the seams when Cage's character becomes unglued, at one point using a POV shot from an alligator that may or may not exist, at another point interrupting a key stakeout scene with a full minute of close-ups of imaginary iguanas to the tune of Johnny Adams' "Release Me." It's disgusting. It's brilliant. In such moments I see a distillation of Herzog's oeuvre. But more than this, I find both that which makes true art a thing to admire and that which is most admirable in life itself: commitment. It is with the absolute commitment of a captain who goes down with his ship that Herzog punctuates his narrative so completely. It's the same commitment that drives Aguirre into the Amazon, Stroszek to America, and Timothy Treadwell to Alaska. It is the solitary penguin in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) that, rather than return to its flock, chooses to flee from the ocean into a thousand miles of barren ice and almost certain death. It is Nic Cage pulling a gun on a pair of geriatrics. Whether right or wrong, remake or not, it is resolute.
And who can argue with that?
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For a filmmaker who has fashioned a career out of dissecting the savage torpor of modern existence, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon comes as something of an oddity. A story of strange occurrences in a tiny German hamlet on the eve of WWI, the film carries with it a bundle of theatrical firsts for the Austrian-born director: first film presented in black and white; first film constructed around a romance; first film done in period (I'm excusing 1997's adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Castle (1997), as it was made for television (soft leg to stand on, I'll admit), and was itself anomalous to Haneke's obsession with more modern afflictions. However, the argument can be made that Haneke is Kafka's spiritual successor, when the obligations to society and law are synonymous.).
It is a surprise to this viewer that the director carries off these new challenges rather effortlessly. The decision to use black and white has a number of implications and visually connects the film to the pastorals of Ingmar Bergman. Going beyond mere facade, The White Ribbon owes a debt to the philosophical struggles of The Seventh Seal (1957) and the narrative construction of Wild Strawberries (1957). One can easily imagine Haneke's schoolteacher protagonist growing up to become Bergman's backward-glancing Dr. Isak Borg, and the whole of The White Ribbon's mystery falling somewhere between remembrances of a young Bibi Andersson and the reception of an honorary degree. That Haneke's film was actually shot in color and then desaturated to its present starkness befits the cloistered lives of the characters who populate his little German hamlet, who have had their vivacity chaffed from them by various powers that be. More likely, though, since this technical sleight of hand is only occasionally noticeable in the film itself, the choice of using black and white was made to emphasize the extreme polarity of the world in which the story unfolds. It is the black and white of the feudal system, of lord and land, the black and white of the Protestant church, as hammered down by the village pastor. It is the culmination of generations of rigid ideology that will lead a German people faithfully, thoughtlessly to this story's ultimate conclusion, twenty-five years beyond the final frame.
Yet somehow within the stockades of this obdurate world, there is space for romance to grow, however furtively. The courtship between the schoolteacher, played by Christian Friedel, and the Baroness's nanny, Eva, blushingly portrayed by Leonie Benesch, is one of the more touching and genuine relationships I've ever come across in a film. That this love, which blooms quietly amid a rash of barn burnings, suicides and ritualistic shamings, was written and directed by the same man responsible for The Piano Teacher (2001) is nearly unthinkable. It is only when taken alongside the tragedies composing the film's central mystery that this relationship assumes the bittersweet tinge familiar to Haneke's work. As with Juliette Binoche and Thierry Neuvic in the masterful Code Unknown (2000), their embrace is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Still, when stripped of everything else, the swirling image of Eva and the schoolteacher waltzing clumsily at the harvest celebration---eins, zwei, drei, eins, zwei, drei---remains an indelible one, containing both the ballet of Ophuls and the charmed nostalgia of early Truffaut. For narrator and audience alike, it is one of only a handful of moments in The White Ribbon of whose truth we can be certain.
Technically speaking, the film is quite breathless, and might be the crown jewel of any other director's career. The composition is precise, the period met head on. It is easily the most accessible and palatable of Haneke's works (Please, start here and not with something like Funny Games (1997), lest you be completely put off.). It won the Palm d'Or at Cannes last year and was nominated as best foreign-language film at the Academy Awards, and deservedly so. But Michael Haneke, more than most, does not make films to win awards; he would sooner twist a boutonniere through your heart. Michael Haneke makes films to challenge his audience. He has an inimitable knack for finding a raw nerve and latching hold of it for two hours at a time, and when he lets go, an ache you never knew was there before lingers on for days. This is not to say that The White Ribbon is devoid of challenge, that it is easy. Far from it. But I do feel that its crisp veneer, its exaction of time and place, are a detriment to its overall impact.
Since seeing the film in the theater this past winter I've wrestled with Haneke's decision to present his story under such well-worn historical circumstances, and I've come to understand it as an attempt at the elemental. Whereas the majority of his films deal with the ways in which we have been alienated from others and ourselves by media (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance [1994]), technology (Cache [2005]), and patterns of cowed repetition (The Seventh Continent [1989]), The White Ribbon tries to move beyond the symptoms to the sickness itself. What that sickness is exactly is difficult to say. In the present film it lies somewhere between idea and ideology, the point at which rationality gives way to fundamentalism. It is the tendency for people in meager moral, spiritual or financial situations to grasp hold of something absolutely as a means of righting themselves. "In the name of a beautiful idea," Haneke said in a New Yorker article last fall, "you can become a murderer." Where fortitude flags, ideology bolsters. Nowhere does this seem truer than with the small German community in The White Ribbon. Especially susceptible to this reasoning are the town's children, whose wide watchful eyes are a common motif, and whose hands, it can be inferred, orchestrate the majority of the film's violence.
It is with these children, however, that Haneke loses what he is working toward. By rooting his examination of why we do wrong in the generation that would grow into the Third Reich, the universality of what he discovers can be brushed off as a uniquely German problem. Audiences are able to step back from the events of the film, point an obvious finger at nascent Nazism, and walk out of the theater relatively unscathed. This disconnect is only amplified by the historical aesthetic. Whether a similar distillation of human nature could have been reached under more modern circumstances remains, like the film itself, a mystery. Perhaps our lives are simply too cluttered in the twenty-first century to exist in high-contrast black and white. But as it stands now, when subtext to an audience is ninety percent context, The White Ribbon exists as a finely chiseled headstone beneath a century of glass: curious, morbid, oddly familiar, but ultimately the designation of someone else's bones.
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Trouble Every Day (2001)
The cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.