Long Pauses

Tag: Decade: 2000s

  • Silence (and a New Mix)

    Silence (and a New Mix)

    The following is my first contribution to a mix CD swap that was organized by some friends. If you want a copy, send me your mailing address. I’d love to get a mix in return, but it’s not required.

    I had two main goals with this mix. First, I decided to divide it evenly between older and newer music. There’s always a jump of at least 15 years from tune to tune. But I also wanted the mix to be coherent, so I was looking for a tone that could maybe be described as “Songs that might actually sound better if they were played on an old, hissing record player.”

    Actually, I guess I also had a third goal: Like a Wes Anderson or Cameron Crowe soundtrack, I wanted to see if a good mix could help rediscover some kitsch-free relevance in “classic rock.” At one point, I gave myself the challenge of successfully integrating a Permanent Waves-era Rush song. No luck. The one song that didn’t make the final cut but that I really wanted to include is Hall and Oates’ “Sarah Smiles,” which, imo, is one of the most beautiful pop songs of the last thirty years.

    1. “Silence” by The Autumn Defense
    2. “Back of a Car” by Big Star
    3. “So It Goes” by Anders Parker
    4. “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” (S&G cover) by Aretha Franklin
    5. “The Eyes of Sarah Jane” by The Jayhawks
    6. “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” by David Bowie
    7. “I Will Internalize” by Martha Wainwright
    8. “Amelia” by Joni Mitchell
    9. “Nowhere Near” by Yo La Tengo
    10. “Ibiza Bar” by Pink Floyd
    11. “Bathtime” by Tindersticks
    12. “Generation Landslide” by Alice Cooper
    13. “Southern Belle” by Elliott Smith
    14. “Into White” by Cat Stevens
    15. “Great Waves” by Dirty Three with Cat Power
    16. “Ten Years Gone” by Led Zeppelin
    17. “Jesus Christ Was an Only Child” by Sun Kil Moon
    18. “Girl from the North Country” by Bob Dylan
    19. “The Shadowlands” by Ryan Adams

  • Beau Travail and Britten’s Billy Budd

    Some random thoughts inspired by another viewing of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail:

    I’m not sure how to characterize her use of Benjamin Britten’s opera, Billy Budd.  Because the film is so closely tied to Galoup’s subjectivity, my first tendency is to read the music with some irony, as if this were exactly the kind of soundtrack — one full of epic Drama and Meaning — that Galoup himself would choose to score his inner life. While not always the case, the Britten cues do appear at a few moments that are clearly subjective visions, most notably the moment after Galoup decides to destroy Sentain; the music climbs as Denis slowly tracks-in on the two men circling closer and closer to one another, a dance of sorts that serves metaphorically for their “real,” impending showdown. (Sentain’s punch is, by comparison, quite anti-climactic, I think.)

    But the emotional effect of the music — on me, at least — is anything but ironic. In true Melvillian fashion, this is an epic battle of Drama and Meaning, the most epic battle, in fact, if we recall our fuzzy memories of the Christian symbolism that permeates Billy Budd. Granted, Denis strips away most of those symbols (I wonder about the etymology of Sentain), but the central conflict of the film remains mostly unchanged. It’s still Good vs. Evil, and the sturm and drang of Britten’s opera seems appropriately scaled for the images and emotions it accompanies.

    I’ve written before about the music in Beau Travail and about Denis Lavant’s final dance, but until this most recent viewing, it had never occurred to me how closely the film as a whole resembles a ballet. What few words are spoken are necessary only to explain the most basic of plot points. Everything else — the emotions, the motivations, the conflicts — is expressed by bodies in motion. The training sequences here are categorically different from those in, say, Full Metal Jacket. (I’ve seen the comparison more than once in reviews.) I don’t seem to have the vocabulary to describe the exercise scenes in Beau Travail, but I suspect that I’d have to go to critics of modern dance to find it.

  • Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    This essay was presented at the 2005 conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

    – – –

    When asked recently about the trend toward reality programming on television, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi called it a “good thing,” arguing that, despite the inevitable and corrupting influences of advertising and profit margins, reality TV does satisfy, to a certain extent, the viewing public’s craving for the “genuine article.” “Reality is where it’s at,” Zahedi said. “It’s where people ‘live,’ it’s what’s deep and true.” “Genuine, “reality,” “live,” “deep,” and “true” are, of course, among the most loaded of terms in discussions of documentary filmmaking, a fact not lost on Zahedi, who has spent the majority of his career blurring the lines between fact and fiction in his own peculiar brand of autobiographical cinema.

    In his official filmography, Zahedi lists four features and three shorts. A Little Stiff, his 1991 feature debut, co-directed with Greg Watkins, re-enacts his failed attempt to win the affection of a fellow art student. Constructed almost entirely of static master shots, the film is quite different formally from his other work — he has described it as an “aesthetic reaction to the kind of by-the-numbers filmmaking that [he was] being taught in film school” — but it introduces many of what would become Zahedi’s signatures. He himself stars as “Caveh Zahedi,” a sincere and strangely charismatic filmmaker whose charm (or off-putting eccentricity, depending on one’s general opinion of him) stems from his refusal to mask what he considers his most basic human desires, opinions and, perhaps most notably, his faults behind the guise of socially-constructed, “acceptable” behavior.

    That’s not to say, though, that Zahedi is a hedonist. Far from it, in fact. When exploring the most shameful and transgressive aspects of his nature, as he does, for example, with unflinching candor in his most recent feature, I Am a Sex Addict, there is actually a conspicuous element of moral instruction in his work. Rather, what interests Zahedi is what he consistently refers to as the “ego” — that manifestation of self-image that each of us performs in the day-to-day narrative of our public life. For Zahedi, the problem of the ego touches upon the most fundamental questions of life, art, and (for lack of a better word) God, all of which, in his view, are inextricably intertwined. As man lost faith in the Divine, Zahedi argues, the artist grew in self-importance — no longer a humble servant of Creation but, instead, a new kind of hero: the artist/performer as celebrity. “This problem of the ego in art,” Zahedi writes:

    stems in part from the fact that our self-worth has been severely eroded. To compensate for this erosion, artists have tended to emphasize their specialness, and to attempt to make themselves appear better than those around them. This is a big problem for the arts because if all art is in fact “channeled,” then Art rests on a connection to the Source of all creation. The problem with the ego in art is that it destroys this connection to the source by positing itself as the source, much like the Satan figure in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    By virtue of its mechanical ability to capture and re-present photographed reality, or so the argument goes, film has a unique relationship with the ego. On the one hand, a camera establishes a power relationship not unlike Foucault’s panoptic gaze — and, indeed, Zahedi has cited Sartre’s policeman as a metaphor for the situation. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, there’s the sense that a camera — or an editor’s cut, for that matter — inevitably distorts “reality” by the very act of its observation. Under the scrutiny of a spotlight, the guilt and self-hatred we’ve internalized feel threatened with exposure, and so the ego blossoms, becoming large in order to protect its own integrity. On the other hand, film is also uniquely shaped by randomness, or by what Zahedi describes as “Fate or Reality or God.” It’s that peculiar aspect of the cinema that he calls a “Holy Moment” in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Because God is manifest in all of creation, and because film is able to capture and re-present those manifestations, the cinema, once loosened of ego, can reorient our perspectives not only toward the arts but also toward the beautifully varied and complex creation in which we live.

    In each of his films since A Little Stiff, Zahedi has attempted to create a “complex dialectic” between these two qualities of cinema, a dialectic, more or less, between “the will” and “chaos.” In order to do so, he’s employed very particular narrative and formal strategies, the most essential of which is his devotion to autobiography. Zahedi has jokingly referred to his on-screen persona as a “Mascot of Humanity,” as if he were somehow redeeming us all through his willing sacrifice to this artistic project. In I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he dispenses with his script entirely, trusting, instead, that God will become revealed in the chaos of filmed life. In both I Was Possessed by God and Tripping with Caveh, Zahedi ingests large doses of hallucinogenic mushrooms in an effort to completely obliterate, temporarily, his own ego. And in his latest work, I Am a Sex Addict, he has taken an almost-Brechtian turn, carefully balancing the intellectual distance of meta-narrative with the emotional immediacy of “real” human experience.

    Which brings me, finally, to In the Bathtub of the World. Zahedi has written of the film:

    [It] exploits the most democratic genre that exists, the home movie, in order to reveal the workings of the divine in all of our lives. I had no idea what would happen in the film, but I knew that only a subtle combination of will (demanding of myself that I shoot one minute everyday) and surrender (I would try to listen each day to “hear” what I was supposed to do that day) would lead to the result that I desired, namely a film that would also be a work of art, meaning a work that has in some way been channeled.

    To approach In the Bathtub of the World from Zahedi’s perspective, then, would see it as a document of a life — a representative life — freed of the fictions of ego. If we take him at his word, we must assume that the Caveh we “meet” on-screen is the “real” Caveh. When he looks into the camera and makes a frank confession like, “I had a wet dream this morning” or “I have a problem. I don’t know how to live,” we must trust that these statements — in combination with the unspoken language of his facial and body movements and the aesthetic effect of the cinematic reproduction — are as honest an articulation of his immediate experience as he is capable of expressing. “In that particularity” of his own experience, “there is universality,” he has said. “Your life is meaningful and unique. . . . It is the expression of creation happening.” As far as I can tell, it is Zahedi’s deeply sincere belief that the socially-constructed ego-masks we wear degrade human worth and human relationships, and In the Bathtub of the World is his purest and most egalitarian (if such a word is appropriate here) argument for the healing power of honesty.

    Okay, so two important points need to be made here.

    First, we’ve gathered here this morning to participate in a panel called “Reality Effects: Documentary in Film, TV, and Video.” And so I assume that, after watching the first few minutes of the film, and after listening to this overview of Zahedi’s career and guiding principles, at least a few of you are skeptical. If so, you’re certainly not alone. His work is routinely derided as “narcissistic and vain, in the pejorative sense” (to quote a great line from Bathtub). His intrusive use of the camera — for example, turning it on friends, family, and strangers against their expressed wishes — has been condemned as unethical. Popular critics often dismiss his films simply for being banal and boring. (In fact, on their DVD commentary, Zahedi and co-editor Thomas Logoreci recite by memory lines from Bathtub‘s original reviews: “There is no art here” and “The year 2000 couldn’t come soon enough.”) And then, of course, there are the theoretical problems of any post-Enlightenment aesthetic that calls upon transcendence or mystification for its epistemology.

    My second point is something of a confession. Despite my own reservations, I really like most of Zahedi’s films, and Bathtub, in particular. I’ve probably watched it fifteen times now, and I never fail to be moved by Caveh’s humor and sincerity. I suspect this speaks to my own peculiar and evolving ideas about art, democracy, humanism, and (again for lack of a better word) God, but it is also testament, I think, to Zahedi’s skill as a filmmaker. And so, with the remainder of my time, I want to begin to look more closely at the formal strategies he employs here in his effort to dig “deep” into reality.

    The first observation worth noting is that, despite Zahedi’s frequent calls to a kind of divine intervention, there is very little connecting his cinematographic style to that of the filmmakers most often associated with the term “transcendental.” Tarkovsky’s demand that images spring from the memories or “subjective impressions” of the author may have influenced Zahedi’s general approach to filmmaking — he has even cited, as a direct inspiration for Bathtub, Tarkovsky’s discussion of a theoretical film sculpted from the entirety of a single person’s filmed life — but little of the Russian’s uncanny, poetic logic is apparent here. Likewise, Bresson’s formal rigor, Ozu’s meticulous shot breakdowns, and Dreyer’s long tracking shots are all conspicuously absent.

    Bathtub also does not sit comfortably beside the films of other prominent autobiographical filmmakers. Although it raises interesting questions about, say, the nature of addiction and the sacrifices of art-making, Bathtub does not craft a specific argument along the lines of the essay-like films of Ross McElwee or Agnes Varda, for example. If Bathtub can be described as documentary filmmaking, then it’s a strange hybrid of documentary, performance art (here, I’m thinking specifically of Tehching Hsieh’s Time Piece, in which Hsieh photographed himself punching a time card every hour for a year), and also experimental filmmaking. Certain shots in the film are reminiscent, for example, of Jim Jennings’ meditations on the beauty that is to be found in the everyday. I especially like Zahedi’s strangely affecting compositions of stickers affixed to his bathroom tile and the shots of sunlight pouring through his apartment windows.

    Like I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Bathtub is, in its final form, a deceptively conventional narrative. Granted, it originated from an unconventional conceit, but Zahedi has crafted from the raw footage a collection of compelling (if elliptical) stories. Assuming that he did, in fact, shoot at least one minute each day for a year, then his 80-minute film is cut and pasted together from approximately one-fifth of the available footage, allowing ample room to pick and choose which particular stories to develop. Among the narrative strands weaving through Bathtub, we see Zahedi’s battles with sex-, food-, celebrity-, and art addiction; we watch him struggle to survive as a poor independent filmmaker, teaching classes, applying for grants, and acting in others’ films in order to make a living; we experience the very real drama of his family life, particularly when his father suffers a massive heart attack, and Caveh, visibly shaken, fears for the man’s life; we get to share in the mundane details of an average routine — vacuuming, mailing letters, cooking dinner, traveling; and, most essential of all, we watch the evolution of Zahedi’s relationship with his live-in girlfriend (and now wife), Amanda Field. I’m tempted to call Bathtub a docu-romantic-dramedy (or something like that).

    Zahedi’s editing strategy is apparent from the opening moments of the film. The first shot is a medium-close-up of his almost-motionless face, a quiet, static image followed immediately by the more lively and kinetic scenes in which Amanda cuts his hair and Caveh discovers the contours of his own skull. His entry for January 4 th is an efficient narrative in miniature. He begins by echoing the opening shot in another direct confession to the camera (a recurring motif throughout the film), then cuts relatively-quickly to close-ups of a Frank Black CD and the front of a CD player, before pushing back to a medium-long shot of Caveh dancing. Another close-up, this time of a tape recorder, then a jump-cut confessional shot. January 6 th opens with a nicely-composed, still-life image of sunlight hitting shelves of books and fruit, followed by a shot of his kitchen window and the green wall on the other side.

    I mention the specific shot-pattern because, in the course of writing this paper, I’ve realized that there are two main reasons I find Bathtub so improbably watchable. The first is the complex rhythms of the piece — what Leo Charney calls the “peaks and valleys” of narrative. Even in that opening sequence I’ve just described, a sequence that lasts barely three-and-a-half minutes, Zahedi varies, quite deliberately, the shape and color of felt time. Juxtaposed against the quick pace of the earlier sequence’s efficient story-telling, those static images of light and shadow are made all the more strange and new. Likewise, the shot of Caveh’s body in motion, dancing ecstatically to a Frank Black song, is especially surprising after we’ve witnessed his first two, staid confessionals. Zahedi’s greatest talent, in fact, might be as an editor. I Am a Sex Addict is an even more impressive exercise in precise modulations of tone.

    Finally, though, I must concede that the greatest source of pleasure in this film is, for me, Caveh himself. In the Bathtub of the World seems to prove that a compelling narrative can be shaped from the “real” moments of “real” life, which shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, I suppose, to anyone who has read a decent autobiography or memoir. But what of the ego? And what of its relationship to cinema? Zahedi has said that a camera has the unique ability to capture “truth”: “You want to be accepted for the true self, not the false front. . . . . Love me despite all this.” Ultimately, despite my intellectual resistance as a critic, I find myself of the same mind as one of Zahedi’s film students, who, given a moment alone with his camera, looks it in the eye and says, “Caveh, I was touched by your sincerity.”

  • I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    After staring at a blinking cursor for better than an hour, trying — and failing — to compose the opening sentence of this “review,” I’ve finally abandoned all hopes of objectivity. I can’t seem to find the right tone of third-person voice to describe this film, which is only appropriate, I guess. Like each of Caveh Zahedi’s previous features and shorts, I Am a Sex Addict is a work of autobiography in which Zahedi himself plays the starring role. In the opening shot, he addresses the camera directly, introduces himself as Caveh, and tells us that for many years he was a sex addict. His film is a frank, neatly-plotted, and curiously moving recreation of those years. It’s also incredibly transgressive and very, very funny. Quite a balancing act.

    Hi, Caveh. I’m Darren, and this is my attempt to make sense of how and why I reacted to your film as I did.

    By way of plot summary, I’ll just mention the two marriages and the three other relationships that were affected by Zahedi’s addiction. We meet all of these women over the course of the film. A few are glimpsed only briefly in old footage; others are brought to life by actresses. “Brought to life” is actually a curious choice of words here, given the film’s meta qualities. In several cases, we meet the “real” woman (via home movies), the performed version of her (via the film proper), and the “real” actress who plays her (via behind-the-scenes, documentary-like footage). I say documentary-like because the film’s form questions the truthfulness of cinematic representation at every turn. I mean, after Zahedi interrupts one of the opening scenes to tell us that the Paris street we are looking at is actually in San Francisco because he couldn’t raise enough money to shoot in France, and after he interrupts a later scene in Paris to inform us that they made the trip after all, all epistemological ground is up for grabs, including some of our most basic interpretive strategies. Home movies and behind-the-scenes hand-held footage are more “real” or trustworthy than staged recreations? Who says?

    What most impresses me about I Am a Sex Addict, and what makes it, I think, Zahedi’s most accomplished film, is the care with which he (in cooperation with co-editor Thomas Logoreci) controls its tone. The film feels as though it could fall apart at any moment, and that it doesn’t is some kind of miracle. After writing that sentence, it occurs to me that I’m quoting almost verbatim Hal Ashby’s description of Being There: “This is the most delicate film I’ve ever worked with as an editor,” he told Aljean Harmetz. “The balance is just incredible. It could be ruined in a second if you allow it to become too broad.” It’s not a perfect analogy. Ashby’s challenge was to illuminate the absurdities of simulacrum politics while preventing his satire from slipping into banal parody. Zahedi’s task, I think, is even more difficult. For I Am a Sex Addict to really work, it must humanize the victims of sex addiction, expose the very real consequences of addictive behavior, and, despite all that, remain watchable, which is easier said than done given the particular nature of Zahedi’s fetishes.

    Zahedi’s addiction became manifest most often in a desire to have sex with prostitutes. To combat that desire, he instituted a series of progressively destructive strategies, beginning with a genuine desire to openly and honestly acknowledge the problem with the support of his partner; by the time he attends his first Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting years later, his “prostitute fetish” has taken a much darker and sadistic turn.

    Zahedi shapes the film’s tone through careful modulations in humor, self-reflexivity, and music. The image of a sound mixer comes to mind — raising and lowering the levels of each voice to create a kind of satisfying harmony. I’m thinking of two difficult scenes, in particular. In the first, Zahedi tells his wife about his desire to receive oral sex from a prostitute. She responds by offering to satisfy the craving herself. Which she does. Three times. In the second scene, Zahedi visits a prostitute with the intent of enacting his deepest, most humiliating desires. Warning: the following blockquote is verygraphic:

    In my fantasies, I will grab whoever it is by the hair, and I’ll make her say things like, “I want to suck your dick” and stuff, and maybe call her a bitch or a slut. And then I start fucking her really hard in the mouth and make her gag and stuff. . . . What I’m thinking is that, if I went to a prostitute one last time and just did everything that I always fantasize about doing, then I think maybe I could get it out of my system once and for all.

    If Zahedi’s story had been told by a more naturalistic filmmaker, it would, I imagine, have looked something like Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, and, in that case, my tendency as a critic would have been to describe — and to experience — the onscreen sex metaphorically. Zahedi, however, has a vested interest in exploring the psychological underpinnings of his own addiction, and so he constantly undermines our learned tendencies as “readers.” About Twentynine Palms, I wrote, “Audiences are forced to observe everything — the ordinary and the terrifying — unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylized photography.” Zahedi’s approach is the polar opposite, and, as a result, watching I Am a Sex Addict is, interestingly, a simultaneously intellectual and deeply personal or human experience.

    The passage of dialogue quoted above is from a conversation between Caveh and Greg Watkins, who was not only Caveh’s best friend at the time of his addiction but is also Sex Addict‘s cinematographer and co-producer. (Their conversation is also a nice echo of the opening scene in their first feature, A Little Stiff.) When we see Zahedi’s visit to a prostitute a few minutes later, his words — with all of their graphic detail and hopeless self-delusion — linger over the scene. The act portrayed in the scene is difficult to watch. It’s misogynist and sadistic. But the scene itself is fascinating. Zahedi interrupts the sequence several times with jokes and with his ubiquitous voice-over, both of which act, throughout the film, as Brechtian distancing devices. Whereas someone like Dumont dares you to keep looking (and assumes, probably, that many of us won’t), Zahedi needs you to look. It’s important. This is what he did to women, and not metaphorically speaking. A man who had once marched in an anti-pornography rally and who considers himself a feminist degraded himself and women, and did so recklessly. Asked recently about his approach to comedy in the film, Zahedi quoted Oscar Wilde: “If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.”

    Zahedi’s attention to the personal and human dimension of his story pays emotional dividends in the film’s final act. Each time I’ve watched Sex Addict, I’ve felt my relationship with the material shift categorically at exactly the same moment. Soon after the release of A Little Stiff, Zahedi began a relationship with a woman named Devin, who, as it turns out, was an alcoholic. The actress who plays Devin, Amanda Henderson, is also an alcoholic — or, at least, so claims Zahedi, who interrupts the film to show us backstage footage of Henderson pulling her bottle from a brown paper bag. (I have no idea if she actually has a drinking problem. It’s impossible to know given the film’s hall-of-mirrors relationship with “truth.”) Sex Addict is structured around such revelations. The woman who plays Zahedi’s first wife, as it turns out, is actually a porn star. The woman who plays Zahedi’s girlfriend Christa, as it turns out, is unwilling to simulate on-screen sex.

    But the scene with Devin/Amanda is different, and I think the difference is owing both to the quality of Henderson’s performance (which is much better and more natural than either of the other two female leads’) and to the deftness of Zahedi’s direction. For the first 75 minutes of the film, I feel at some remove from the material. It’s an intellectual distance, the ironic distance of, say, Annie Hall writ large. But when Zahedi cuts from Henderson and her bottle to Devin drunk and spewing slurred insults, that comforting distance vanishes, and the effect is potent. I’ve been on the verge of tears both times I watched the film. I’m reminded suddenly of the “Eternal City” chapter in Catch-22, when Heller steps out of his satiric voice just long enough to send Yossarian on a walk through the grotesque streets of war-torn Rome.

    For the remainder of the film, Zahedi exists, by and large, outside of his mensch-y persona. There are fewer jokes, and the voice-over and recurring musical motif become less obtrusive. Like the lines of dialogue I’ve quoted above, images of Zahedi’s transgressive sexual encounters linger over the final twenty minutes of the film, but they’re suddenly transformed by the tragic human consequences of his behavior. We in the audience, in effect, undergo an awakening similar to his own. He “hits rock bottom” (to borrow from the language of recovery) and is forced, finally, to abandon his intellectual justifications. The stakes are high. And real. In the opening scene, Zahedi informs us that he’s narrating the film on his wedding day — his third — and those of us familiar with his previous feature, In the Bathtub of the World, know that it’s Mandy who will soon be walking down the aisle toward him. I can’t seem to resist the urge to paraphrase that cheesy Jack Nicholson line: Mandy clearly makes Caveh want to be a better man.

    I’ll be damned if the last scene in Sex Addict wasn’t the first time I’ve ever cried at a wedding.

  • Fifteen for Fifteen

    Fifteen for Fifteen

    In celebration of its 15th anniversary, the IMDb has invited its editorial staff to submit their Top 15 Lists: 1990-2005. Never one to pass up an opportunity to obsess for a few days over such a challenge, I’ve put together a list of my own — a list joyfully free of editorial imposition, meaning that I can stretch and/or ignore even the most basic criteria/rules. For instance, my Top 15 includes close to 30 films. Got a problem with that? Fine. Go start your own website. Also, I’ve limited my list to only feature-length narrative films.

    So here they are. Alphabetized by the name of the director.

    Bottle Rocket / Magnolia (Wes Anderson and PT Anderson, respectively) — See? I warned you about the whole “rules” thing. These two films get to share a slot because they’re both by American writer/directors of roughly the same age, who seem to have been shot out of the womb with distinct cinematic voices. Also, they’re both refreshingly sympathetic to the flawed humanity of their characters. And they’re both named Anderson. So it makes perfect sense, really. Two years ago I would have put Rushmore on the list, but I now prefer Wes Anderson at his least precious. PT Anderson, it seems to me, is at his core a moralist, and Magnolia is his most unapologetically moralizing film. It’s also big and messy and ambitious in a way that brings me great pleasure.

    Saraband (Ingmar Bergman) — My favorite Bergman films are, almost without exception, the first of his that I saw. His voice is so clear, so penetrating, that one can’t help but be shaken a bit upon first hearing it. But that effect wanes with time — it has for me, at least. I was beginning to doubt my general enthusiasm for Bergman, in fact, until seeing Saraband, which joins Cries & Whispers, Winter Light, and Through a Glass Darkly on my very short list of favorites. Also, Saraband is a representative (of sorts) for the many filmmakers who, over the past decade-and-a-half, have made remarkable films in their later years. After catching up with the many, many films I haven’t yet seen, I can imagine adding works by Godard, Rohmer, Resnais, Chabrol, Rivette, etc. to future revisions of this list. Here’s my one-sentence review of Saraband: I’m so glad that Bergman’s film career faded-to-black accompanied by Bach.

    Beau Travail / L’Intrus (Claire Denis) — If marooned on an island with only the post-1990 films of a single director, I’d take Claire Denis’s. Beau Travail and L’Intrus are my favorites, I think, because they’re located in relatively “manly” worlds (the French foreign legion, the final days in the life of a regret-filled playboy), but it’s a masculine world transformed by Denis’s subjective camera. She and her cinematographer, Agnes Godard, have this uncanny ability to make nature strange and new just by looking at it, and I can’t get enough of that view. (L’Intrus, by the way, is finally coming to DVD on December 5th.)

    La Promesse / The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) — Speaking of moralists. I was raised with the stories of the Old Testament and the parables of Christ like most kids are raised with Disney (I had my share of Disney, too, of course). I love these two films because they defamiliarize Biblical ethics. Watch The Son, then let’s talk about grace and vengeance and pride and mercy.

    La Vie de Jesus / L’Humanite (Bruno Dumont) — I’ve written enough about these two films.

    Calendar / Exotica / The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan) — Is any contemporary filmmaker more frustrating that Atom Egoyan? I love these films, all three of which are dramatic, well-acted, formally inventive, intellectually rigorous, and, finally, human. Each of his other films fails on one or more of those counts — some disastrously so. I wonder if it’s fair to classify Egoyan as a post-colonial artist. I like him best when he’s preoccupied by questions of identity, memory, and trauma.

    Good Men, Good Women / Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-hsien) — When selecting a Hou film, I finally just settled on the two that I most connect with on a purely subjective, personal level. As with Denis, I’m drawn to Hou because of the unique way he looks at the world. Any number of directors could setup a medium-long shot of, say, a young woman drinking tea, but Hou’s will always be instantly identifiable. I swear it’s a kind of magic.

    Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch) — Over the past two months, I’ve watched all but two of Jarmusch’s films (Permanent Vacation and Night on Earth are the exceptions). I enjoyed all of them for more or less the same reasons: his preference for people over plot (you’ve gotta love a jailbreak film that elides the jailbreak), his casting of charismatic personas (Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Iggy Pop are just so cool), and his collaborations with high-callibre cinematographers like Robby Muller and Frederick Elmes. Dead Man is a different animal entirely, though. Along with being one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen — and its beauty alone would get it on this list — Dead Man is one of those fables that grows more rich and complex the more I think about it. Is this a vision of heaven or hell? And whose heaven? Whose hell?

    Close-Up / Ten (Abbas Kiarostami) — I like Kiarostami best when he’s playing with form. My favorite part of Taste of Cherry is the last five minutes, when he reminds us we’re watching a movie. My favorite part of The Wind Will Carry Us is that long shot of the engineer driving out of town to make a phone call — the shot that returns again and again throughout the film, each time making you think, “Surely he’ll cut this time. Surely he won’t make us watch this again.” Close-Up and Ten do things filmmakers are not supposed to do. You’re not supposed to blend documentary and fiction. You’re not supposed to set up a camera in a car and leave the actors to their own devices. Kiarostami breaks the rules and makes smart and emotionally-rich films anyway. So much for the rules.

    Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick) — Like everyone else, I had been waiting eagerly for nearly a decade to see what Kubrick was up to. And like everyone else, I wasn’t sure at first what to make of this film. I still don’t, really. It’s such a strange film, so full of mystery and consciously-suppressed emotion. I also think it’s incredibly sad — tragic, even.

    Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater) — If Denis’s films were unavailable, I’d probably take Linklater’s with me to the island. I’d never be lonely, for sure. Linklater’s the great egalitarian filmmaker, a humanist with a palpable respect for all of the characters who wonder in and out of his films. I could easily have gone with the Before Sunrise/Sunset films or Waking Life, but Dazed and Confused is my favorite. It’s funny and honest in a way that no other “teen comedy” can touch. And I never seem to tire of watching it.

    The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick) — Only Terrence Malick would take a James Jones novel and turn it into Walden. That a war is going on is important to the film, of course, but the battles seem almost insignificant compared to those shots of wind blowing through tall grass.

    What Time is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang) — This is my favorite of Tsai’s films simply because it’s the one that most moves me.

    In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi) — I stumbled into Zahedi’s films after being mesmerized by the “Holy Moments” sequence in Waking Life. If all goes as planned, I should have a better idea next week of why I like this particular film so much. I’ll post the essay when it’s finished.

    I can’t decide what to put in the 15th slot. Maybe Todd Haynes’s Safe or Kieslowski’s Blue or Haneke’s Code Unknown or Kore-eda’s After Life or Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Or maybe a guilty pleasure like The Usual Suspects or Dark City. I can’t decide. Too many choices.

  • Le Temps qui reste (2005)

    Le Temps qui reste (2005)

    Dir. by Francois Ozon

    I hadn’t planned to write about Le Temps qui reste. As has been the case with the few other Ozon films I’ve seen, it feels slight and undernourished, like a short story pushed to novella length. Melvin Poupaud plays Romain, a thirty-ish fashion photographer who, in the opening moments of the film, is diagnosed with cancer. Rather than suffer the side-effects of aggressive treatment, he decides, instead, to accept the three-month life expectancy given him. He decides, also, to keep his condition a secret — the first of several head-scratching choices that alienate him from everyone in his life. At a family dinner, he humiliates his sister with a barrage of savage insults. At home, he matter-of-factly breaks off his relationship with his boyfriend. By the time the film reaches its inevitable conclusion, Romain is quite literally alone. (Ozon’s final image is frustrating. I still haven’t decided how I feel about it.)

    I hadn’t planned to write about Le Temps qui reste, but then, while typing up notes this morning, I tripped over this line from E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel: “My sister and I can never inflict total damage — that is the saving grace. The right to offend irreparably is a blood right.” In Doctorow’s novel, Daniel and Susan Lewin are the son and daughter of characters modeled closely on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the young Jewish couple executed in the summer of 1953 for giving the secret of the A-bomb to the Soviets. Daniel’s line, I think, has a doubled meaning. As the child of traitors, he has inherited a particular ability to offend, to enlarge and extend personal grievances into a wider sphere of influence. But he and Susan have also inherited a particularly tragic history and, with it, the right to offend. “He’s such a bastard,” acquaintances must surely think, “but give him a break. Can you imagine all he’s been through?”

    In Le Temps qui reste, Romain tells only one member of the family about his illness, his grandmother, played by Jeanne Moreau. Their brief scene together is the most interesting in the film. He’s drawn to her by their shared relation to the world — both will be leaving it soon — and she is likewise alone, alienated from family and community. During a late-night conversation, she confesses to having had a string of lovers soon after her husband’s death. She is unapologetic, though, and refuses to judge the friends, family members, and neighbors who so callously judged her at the time. “They didn’t understand,” she tells Romain, his head resting on her shoulder. “I would have died otherwise. It was survival instinct.”

    When Ozon introduced Le Temps qui reste at TIFF, he called it a “personal and secret” film, and, while I have no interest in psychoanalyzing Ozon or presuming to extrapolate conclusions about his life, I do suspect the film’s “secret” is closely related to Romain’s and his grandmother’s “survival instincts.” For Doctorow, Daniel’s “right to offend” has political connotations. The Book of Daniel is, in Doctorow’s words, “the story of the American left in general and the generally sacrificial role it has played in our history.” Daniel is a walking, breathing reminder of an iconic and tragic past. He has, in a sense, earned his right to disrupt our complacent social mores.

    Ozon’s film is a smaller, more personal (and, ultimately, less successful) work of art, but it’s no less transgressive. I also like its ambitions. When Romain first learns of his prognosis, he immediately asks, “Is it AIDS?” I’m not gay, and I worry that I’m wading into dangerous critical waters here, but Le Temps qui reste works most effectively as a study of, for lack of a better word, gay psychology. Romain dies of cancer, but he’s haunted by the same specter of mortality that floats through the work of so many queer artists of the AIDS era. It’s important that we hear the word, I think. And it’s also important that we’re reminded of the difference between heterosexual and homosexual mortality — that is, the procreative aspect of sex, the ability to share DNA with one’s lover in the formation of a new life that will carry on beyond one’s own. A side plot involving Romain’s decision to impregnate a woman whose husband is impotent, though underdeveloped in the film, does touch upon some quality of gay psychology (again, excuse the poor choice of words) that I seldom see addressed in films. It’s another of Ozon’s “secrets,” I suspect. Another survival instinct.

  • Un Couple parfait (2005)

    Un Couple parfait (2005)

    Dir. by Nobuhiro Suwa

    Look closely at the image above. It’s Un Couple parfait in miniature — a story told in body language. The husband (Bruno Todeschini) is an arm’s length from the table, his shoulders turned perpendicular to his wife. His cup sits untouched, reminding us, even moreso than the expression on his face, just how unwelcome these daily rituals of marriage have become. The wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) has a Mona Lisa smile. At first glance, she appears perfectly content — a woman deeply in love and endlessly curious, perhaps? But look at her eyes. They’re staring past her husband, lost in thought, wandering. There’s something absolutely beautiful to me about the way her right arm rests against her leg. And the way her body leans forward, gesturing toward him despite the growing distance.

    The image is also a capsule of Suwa’s cinematographic style. There are maybe thirty-five shots in the entire film, all but a few from the fixed, static perspective of a waist-high camera positioned some distance from the characters. Suwa has said that, while working as an assistant director, he came to distrust the artificiality of traditional blocking. He chooses, instead, to allow room for his actors to move freely, to breathe and embody emotions more complex than those expressed in their dialogue. Language is slippery in Un Couple parfait. Or, not slippery, but irrelevant, maybe. Suwa isn’t at all interested in offering some metacommentary on the entanglements of postmodern discourse. Rather, his style — allowing actors to improvise lines while the camera is running, for example, or admitting, even, that he often did not understand exactly what his French actors were saying — is more humanist and psychological. Like an analyst, he observes quietly and respectfully the unspoken, looking for clues in behavior and movement, ripples from the subconscious.

    Notice also the door that separates the characters from the camera. When asked why he so often underlights his actors, losing their faces in shadow, he said, “There are two ways to watch. One is to open your eyes and look closely; the other is to close your eyes and imagine.” Unlike so many filmmakers, Suwa clearly values the latter as much as the former, and his film is, on some level at least, a pedagogical instrument. At more than one point in Un Couple parfait, the husband and wife sit in adjoining hotel rooms. After one or the other shuts the door between them, Suwa lets his camera run, trapping our vision for a time. These, he claims, are his favorite moments in the film, for as we sit suspended, staring at the closed door, we’re also allowed room to move, to empathize or judge or imagine freely.

    What you can’t see in the image are all of the subtle touches that make Un Couple parfait such a satisfying film. The look of wonder on Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s face as she wanders through a museum. The brief interruption of “reality” when an actor sneezes, another says “God bless you,” and they continue on with the scene. The occasional hand-held close-ups that jar you back into close identification with the characters, preventing the film from becoming a formal, intellectual exercise. The late-night conversation between Bruno Todeschini and an old man he meets in a cafe. Or the final scene, which rediscovers a cinematic cliche by taking the “irrelevance of language” to its logical extreme. Un Couple parfait is a kind of collision between the visions of Ingmar Bergman and Hou Hsiao-hsien: brutally incisive but always fascinated and tender.

  • A Good Man is Hard to Find

    A Good Man is Hard to Find

    Sufjan Stevens’ recent performance on Morning Becomes Eclectic is now available in streaming video. It’s a fantastic set. Three of the songs, “Casimir Pulaski Day,” “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” are on my “please, Sufjan, please play these when I see you in September” list. They’re also on my short list of the greatest hymns of the last century.

    Lyrics:

    Update: Welcome to the Midwest has converted the Morning Becomes Eclectic show to mp3s. Is it odd that I started crying when I first heard this live version of “A Good Man is Hard to Find“? Consider it an unoffical Song of the Moment. Tomorrow morning I’m headed to Illinois, of all places.

  • Goodnight for Real

    Goodnight for Real

    Several weeks ago, a friend sent me an email and suggested that I check out Beauty Pill. After digging through their website and downloading some mp3s, I ordered The Unsustainable Lifestyle, their first full-length release, along with their two EPs, You Are Right to be Afraid and Cigarette Girl from the Future. All in all, a helluva a bargain for $22 shipped.

    Anyway, I’ve listened to almost nothing else since the discs arrived. In a relatively short time — five years or so — Beauty Pill has gone through a few members, and with a couple singers and songwriters in the band there is a surprising amount of variety on display. The Song of the Moment, “Goodnight For Real” is representative only in that it features clever lyrics, solid playing (including some fun synth parts), and a really catchy chorus. Enjoy.

  • Short Takes

    Short Takes

    I’m adjusting to a new schedule. Getting up early, driving to campus, setting up my laptop in the library, and forcing myself to sit there — to write — until late-afternoon. In other words, I’m finally turning my dissertation into a full-time job. By the end of the day, I have little energy left to write about films or anything else, really, so instead I’ve been relaxing each night with a DVD. Because GreenCine doesn’t carry the later seasons of The West Wing, I’ve re-upped with NetFlix as well, meaning that, until I cancel one of the subscriptions, I’ll have a steady stream of titles to choose from. Good times. Some recent viewings:

    Notre Musique (2004, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) — I won’t even attempt a reading of this film after only one viewing, and I’d be suspicious of any reviewer/critic who does so. Is it anti-American? Anti-Semitic? Anti-Intellectual? Maybe. I have no idea at this point. I’ve already mailed the disc back, but I think I’d like to buy copies of Notre Musique and In Praise of Love (which I loved, also after only one viewing) and give both films the time and attention they deserve.

    I can say without hesitation, though, that the opening ten minutes of Notre Musique, the “Hell” section, are absolutely compelling. A collage of violent images, some real (documentary), some imagined (fiction), “Hell” is disgusting and fascinating. Godard digitizes, distorts, and makes abstract a timeline of human sadism and suffering, and I’m beginning to suspect that the remainder of the film is an argument about the moral and political consequences of that very act.

    The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, dir. William Wyler) — The night before my grandmother’s funeral, my grandfather told me about a letter he wrote to her when he was in Europe. Actually, he dictated the letter to a nurse. And in it he told her that he would be returning “half the man” he was when he left. He’d been wounded badly by a German mortar somewhere in western Europe, and he was ashamed of the toll it took on his face. I wish now I’d had the chance to watch this film with them.

    If I hadn’t seen Best Years, I wouldn’t believe a film like it could exist. The story of three men returning from war to the same home town, it unsettles every expectation I had about Hollywood World War II films. The heroic Army Air Force captain is haunted by nightmares and unable to find his place in a booming postwar economy that places little value on the skills he learned as a bombardier. The gruff and hard-drinking ol’ Sarge’, a staple of service films, is a banker who discovers that words like “collateral” and “investment” are absurd when used back home. And Homer, who lost both hands to a fire, returns to a society better-equipped to accept a heroic death than a disfiguring wound.

    And along with that setup, you also get brilliant performances from Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael, and Teresa Wright (with whom I’ve fallen in love again); you get the patient, impeccably-human direction of William Wyler; and you get a stream of jaw-dropping images from Gregg Toland that rival his more famous work in Citizen Kane. Best Years might be my single favorite film of the classical Hollywood cinema. An absolute masterpiece.

    Sunrise (1927, dir. F. W. Murnau) — I first watched Sunrise several years ago on a 9″ viewing carrel* at the university library. Having now seen it projected at 100″ — thanks to the kind generosity of a friend — I finally get what all of the fuss is about. I’d seen Janet Gaynor a week or two earlier in Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, which was made the same year, and I’d become fascinated by her face. It’s the perfect silent film face — all round eyes and round cheeks, like Betty Boop. Her character is almost too perfect, too forgiving in Sunrise, and I wonder if the film would hold together if not for that face.

    The star of the film, though, is Murnau’s camera. Nearly every image is a knockout, but it’s the double-, triple-, quadruple-exposures that take your breath away. I’m not sure which film is the greater miracle, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, which was brash enough to toss away the old book of film grammar, or Sunrise, which displays many of the same feats of daring but in the service of a more traditional narrative.

    Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, dir. Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller) — I think I’ve watched too many great essay films over the past year. Too much Resnais, Marker, Varda, Jost. They’ve changed my expectations for non-fiction films. Unfairly, perhaps. I tuned in to Moving Train on IFC a few nights ago because I was curious about Zinn, and the film gave me all of the information I was looking for — a biographical sketch, interviews with him and those who have known him, archival footage of key moments from his career, and historical context. Moving Train is interesting because Zinn is interesting. I wish the film were more than just a Biography channel profile, though. I wish it had a voice of its own, a voice offering insight into why Zinn matters, if Zinn matters.

    * Note: Apparently, this is the first time I’ve ever typed the word “carrel.” Did you know that both “carrel” and “carrell” are acceptable spellings? English, really, is a ridiculous language.

  • Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

    Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

    Dir. by Xan Cassavetes

    Xan Cassavetes’s Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession tells the parallel, rise-and-fall stories of a Los Angeles pay-TV channel and Jerry Harvey, the man who acted as its chief programmer and svengali. Harvey, as the film informs us in the opening minutes, murdered his second wife in 1988 before turning the gun on himself, and the “tragedy” of his end is ostensibly at the heart of Cassavetes’s documentary. I say “ostensibly” and put scare quotes around “tragedy,” though, because in Z Channel the only real tragedy is the loss to film buffs of Harvey’s single-minded cinephilia. We’re reminded of this loss again and again, as talking head after talking head (Altman, Tarrantino, Payne, Jarmusch, Verhoeven, etc.) wax nostalgic for the days when any Los Angelino could turn on Z Channel and see Berlin Alexanderplatz, The 400 Blows, an Italian skin flick, or the premiere of Peckinpah’s cut of The Wild Bunch. Cassavetes includes a bounty of clips from Harvey’s favorite films and supplements her story with interviews of his co-workers and friends.

    I love many of the same films that Harvey loved. And I would pay quite a lot to have a station like Z Channel beamed into my home. Watching Cassavetes’s film, I was once again reminded — as I assume was Cassavetes’s intention — of how pedestrian and market-driven so much of current film programming is, both theatrically and on cable. But, so what? I knew that before the film began. When asked whether writing political theater is just “preaching to the choir,” Tony Kushner once responded:

    A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this “preaching to the converted” question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

    Z Channel is a crummy film. It’s poorly constructed from short segments that offer superficial observations about specific films (“the director’s cut is obviously better”), the film industry (“without studio support and marketing, a film doesn’t stand a chance”), and Harvey himself (“he was seeing a psychiatrist several afternoons a week”). As an aside, I was also annoyed by Cassavetes’s systematic use of only the most provocative film clips — for example, the hot tub scene from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the pagans in Andrei Rublev. Instead of rattling her audience’s smugness, Cassavetes relies upon it, offering up a paean to cinephilia that is audacious enough to equate metaphorically the death of a TV station (and the eclectic programming it represented) with a murder/suicide.

    Z Channel comes to life for only one brief moment during the very end. After describing the last few days of Harvey’s life, Cassavetes includes a brief snippet from one of his former friends and colleagues. Barely containing his emotion, he says something to the effect of, “There’s a danger of turning Jerry into a hero here, and I’ve got a real problem with that.” I sat upright in my chair. It was the sentiment I’d been waiting for more than an hour to hear expressed. Lest we take this warning too seriously, though, Cassavetes then cuts to Robert Altman, who, when asked the same question about Harvey, pronounces with little hesitation, “I like him.”

    I did a quick scan of other online reviews of Z Channel and was disappointed to find so many critics accepting this redemptive narrative of the inspiring soul who was taken from us, tragically, and whose work for the integrity of cinema we should take up in his stead. Such a reading is possible only because of Cassavetes’s decision to elide the violence of Harvey’s end. How would the tone of the film change, for example, had she included reports from the crime scene or interviews with his wife’s surviving family? Instead, we are offered only one quick glance at a photo of the woman who later would be brutally murdered, and a few fond remembrances of her from Harvey’s friends.

  • Missing

    Missing

    File this one away under “Too Much Information.” I just spent the last two hours in my basement, listening to Beck’s Guero, reading a book called Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction, and shaking my ass. I stopped dancing the day I stopped smoking pot, which was quite a while ago. Like, in the early-90s. Not that that thing I would do while standing next to 500 other people at a Widespread Panic show could properly be called “dancing.” It was more of close your eyes, shake your head, and rock on both knees kind of thing. But you get my point.

    So, tonight I spent two hours reading . . . while dancing . . . kind of. Which is a pretty odd thing to find oneself doing, I can promise you. And quite unexpected. Which says something for the ass-shakingness of Guero. There are some nice Sea Change-like melodies here, but this album is all about the beats. So much so, in fact, that it feels like the Dust Brothers are due for a co-credit or something. Anyway, “Missing” won Song of the Moment honors in a close race with “Black Tambourine” and “Hell Yes,” both of which, it must be said, are even more ass-shaking than “Missing” but not quite as perfect. All three sound even better in multi-channel.

  • Evening on the Ground

    Evening on the Ground

    Joanna and I just made what we hope will be the last of many recent trips to southern Alabama. It was another rough one — the type of experience that is supposed to give us “closure.” Everytime someone says that to me (and always with the best intentions, I know), I think of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. I never got around to seeing the film, so I’m not sure if this made it into the screenplay, but Coleman Silk’s rant about the language of Monicagate-era America has stuck with me longer than anything else from the novel:

    Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There’s one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end — every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliche. Any kid who says “closure” I flunk. They want closure, there’s their closure.

    Of course, none of that has anything to do with “Evening on the Ground,” the Song of the Moment, except that, on the way out of town, I picked up Woman King, the new Iron and Wine EP, and Joanna and I listened to it over and over again during the drive. Jo has this habit of replaying and replaying songs that hit her. Usually, I get annoyed in no time, but “Evening on the Ground” — the sound of it more than the lyrics, and that unexpected distorted guitar most of all — seemed to suit our mood.

  • The Skywalk is Gone (2002)

    The Skywalk is Gone (2002)

    Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang

    When I wrote an overview of Tsai’s career two years ago, I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to see The Skywalk is Gone. So I cheated. I stole a great line from Chuck Stephens’s review and turned it into my conclusion. Here’s what I wrote then:

    If Tsai’s most recent work is any indication, it is safe to assume that he will continue to poke and prod into the bodies and souls of his loyal collaborators for some time. Along with his choreographic adaptation of a play by Brecht, The Good Woman of Sezuan (1998), and a short film about religious ritual, A Conversation with God (2001), Tsai has also written and directed a 25-minute film, The Skywalk Is Gone (2002), that picks up where What Time Is It There? left off. The short film’s title refers to the actual location, now demolished, where Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi first meet. Noting that the short concludes with a long shot of bright blue skies, Chuck Stephens writes that the skywalk is “gone but not forgotten, even if, in its absence, heaven seems a little bit easier to see.” (11) Those blue skies—along with the rumors that Tsai will continue this story in his next feature—suggest that grace, once only a whisper in Tsai’s world, might yet take shape and become as excruciatingly real as the pain it is meant to relieve.

    That last line is a bit too precious, and “grace,” in particular, seems too lazy a word to describe the workings of Tsai’s world, but those blue skies do have a peculiarly joyful effect. That there are blue skies at all in Tsai’s Taiwan is, of course, a major development. Skywalk pokes fun at Tsai’s trademark mise-en-scene (water-logged streets and apartments) by replacing it with a draught, and the director gets some nice gags out of the premise: Hsiao-kang trying to wash his hands, Shiang-chyi trying to order a cup of coffee.

    Such change, it seems to me, is the central concern of Skywalk. In the film’s opening image, Shiang-chyi stares up at the spot where the overpass once hung; Tsai floods the soundtrack with the drone of jumbotron advertising and passing crowds. The tilt of her head says it all. “Progress” is a mixed bag, improving our lives at times but also destroying old bonds and reshaping our memories in the process. Those of us who have seen What Time Is It There? know this location, but it’s suddenly unrecognizable, and like Shiang-chyi, we are forced to recontextualize the scene. Doing so demands some work of the viewer, and Tsai allows us plenty of time to do it, leaving his camera fixed for several minutes at a time.

    The Skywalk is Gone is like a little gift to all of us who have followed Tsai’s career, and I’m thrilled that Wellspring included it on the DVD release of Goodbye, Dragon Inn. (Unfortunately, Wellspring has unloaded on us a couple more horrible transfers.) I especially enjoyed the escalator scene, which alludes directly to The River, and, by doing so, sets up our expectations for an encounter that isn’t resolved until later in the film. Great stuff. More on Goodbye, Dragon Inn in the coming days.

  • Tarnation (2004)

    Tarnation (2004)

    Dir. by Jonathan Caouette

    The theater where I saw Tarnation subjects early arrivals to “The Twenty,” an obnoxious barrage of advertisements that I tolerate for two reasons: first, because it helps to subsidize Knoxville’s only venue for foreign and independent cinema (and given the small crowds that typically greet me there, it would appear that those subsidies are essential); and, second, because I relish the moment immediately following “The Twenty.” The digital projector is quieted, the house lights dim, and the film projector comes to life. In those few seconds of silence before the first trailer begins, you can hear actual film spooling through a gate—a mechanical process with gears and a bulb and celluloid.

    I mention all that because when the projector kicked into motion yesterday, I wondered how much longer the sound would last. Jonathan Caouette, as we all know by now, constructed Tarnation on his Mac for a couple hundred bucks. It’s composed largely of still photos and home videos. Little film was exposed in the making of his movie, and the quality of its presentation would have suffered little had it been projected digitally. As most films will be. Soon enough. That’s what was I thinking, at least, as trailers for Kinsey and The Sea Inside streamed by. Two biopics of extraordinary men who led extraordinary lives. Two films I haven’t the slightest interest in seeing. I’m just not interested in extraordinary lives, apparently. Give me the ordinary. The mundane. But present them to me with a touch a grace, and do it honestly and artfully. That’s what I was thinking, at least, when the ads finally ended and Tarnation finally began—in darkness and to the diegetic rumblings of Caouette’s camera.

    A quick synopsis. When she was twelve years old, Renee LeBlanc, a strikingly beautiful child, fell from the roof of her home and suffered temporary paralysis. Her parents, convinced that Renee’s troubles were psychological, approved aggressive treatment, and over the next two years she was subjected to more than two hundred rounds of shock therapy. Whether her mental illness existed prior to the treatments or was, in fact, a result of them Tarnation does not make clear (and cannot make clear, given the vagaries of memory and denial). Caouette, Renee’s only child, suspects the latter, however, and his film is a blinding, visceral document of the anger, sorrow, desire, and hope (despite it all) that have forever colored his perceptions of art, family, and love.

    Drawn from nearly 160 hours of home movies, tape recordings, and clips from Caouette’s amateur narrative films, and complimented by odes to pop culture and by an aggressive soundtrack, Tarnation has been described by its executive producers Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell as a “movie of the home” and an “autobiographical documentary.” In the case of Tarnation, classification is no exercise in pedantry, for evaluating its success or its artfulness (for lack of better words) demands discussion of its aims and methods. The film is compelling, to be sure—always interesting and, at times, deeply moving. Only the most jaded could emerge from the experience of Tarnation without respect for its subjects, a mother and son who have somehow managed to emerge from the circumstances of their lives with a hard-fought love for one another and for the sacred moments of beauty in life. It’s worth seeing for that reason alone.

    But, finally, I think, the film’s formal problems—its haphazard construction, conflicted voice, and questionable representations of life—become too great to sustain the weight of Caouette’s noble ambitions. (Because this is a blog and not a formal essay, and because I really should be working on other projects, I’m going to make it easier for myself by tackling each of these critiques in turn. The best compliment I can give Tarnation is to say that it’s the first film I’ve seen in weeks that compelled me to write.)

    Construction. The first of my complaints with Tarnation is also perhaps the most petty, and it’s simply this: After the opening titles, I don’t recall a single moment of silence. The film moves from one montage to the next, each accompanied by music culled from Caouette’s personal collection of CDs and LPs. Occasionally the songs are manipulated for effect—tailored to enhance the images on screen—but much more frequently, the picture is cut to sound. Caouette’s much-discussed exploitation of iMovie’s editing features explodes his home movies into stunningly beautiful abstraction, but they find their rhythms too easily in the music. This, it seems to me, creates an aesthetic dissonance. I could too clearly imagine the filmmaker, exhausted by the endless decisions of editing, pulling an album from his shelf and allowing the song to determine the cuts. “Rhymed abstraction” (or some such makeshift term) might be employed to justify the technique. Perhaps it’s a fitting description of schizophrenia. I don’t know. I just felt that the form too often co-opted the content, which is most regrettable because when Tarnation does find its voice, it’s stunning. Which leads me to . . .

    Voice. Following a trip to visit his mother, the teenaged Jonathan smoked two joints that he later learned had been laced with PCP and dipped in formaldehyde. The resulting psychotic episode left him with depersonalization disorder, “a feeling of disconnection from the body and a constant sense of unreality.” Caouette writes:

    They don’t really have a cure for this disorder, so it’s something I have learned to live with. Tarnation is designed to mimic my thought processes so the audience can also feel like they’re in a living dream, which can be scary and intense, but also beautiful and glorious. Tarnation is a documentary in the sense that it’s a true story but it’s also a happening, an encounter, and a way for you to meet me and for me to meet you.

    Caouette mimics his thought processes through formal means, beginning with the narration, which is textual, rather than the expected voice-over, and which refers in the third person to the Jonathan we meet on screen. This is a Jonathan Caouette, the film implies, one of many that we will eventually meet. There is the young Jonathan with his first camera, acting the role of an abused woman “givin’ testimony” to her sins. There is the teenaged Jonathan, openly gay and directing his musical adaptation of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (brilliant!). There is the 20-something Jonathan, living (happily?) and acting in New York City. We are asked, in a sense, to read each of these personae as characters in a film about a boy’s search for the love of his mother. It’s all happening to them, the film implies, to those people.

    But the step into third person is a conceit, and, in my opinion, it’s an unnecessary and misguided one. In the final act of Tarnation, when Caouette is living in a long-term relationship and is choosing to take on the responsibility of caring for his mother, we meet the Jonathan whose voice has been, by turns, whispering, screaming, and crying in our ears. Caouette’s effort to dramatize the “disconnection from his body” is a posture: Tarnation is no less self-aware than one of Caveh Zahedi’s autobiographical films and it lacks Zahedi’s formal rigor. I like the idea of a film such as this deliberately fracturing the narrative voice, but the execution in this case is poor. A symptom of Caouette’s relative inexperience, I would guess. Which leads me to . . .

    Representing a Life. Look closely at the image I’ve posted above. Mother and son. Finally at rest. Finally at peace. It’s one of Tarnation‘s closing images and also one of its most poignant. A glimmer of hope. Love among the ruins. But here’s the thing: the scene is staged. Renee is, as far as we know, really asleep, but Jonathan is not. He and David (Jonathan’s boyfriend) found her there on the couch and apparently couldn’t resist the precious, pieta-like beauty of the moment. The film begins with a similar trick: the camera is fixed on television static when David returns home to their apartment and wakes Caouette from a nightmare. He’s been dreaming about Renee, we are told. He’s worried. Cut to the next morning. Jonathan and David wake to the sound of an alarm clock. Try to ignore the tripod. Try to ignore the fact that you’re now suddenly watching a narrative film.

    I was anticipating Tarnation with some excitement because I had assumed that, unlike the larger-budget biopics filling the multiplexes right now, it would, without compromise, elevate truth above affect. But it does feel compromised. Caouette betrays the integrity of his film by focusing again and again on images that seem to float outside of the film as aesthetic objects. Like his mother, Caouette is a striking beauty (as is David, actually), and portions of the film play like a love song to their remarkable faces. (Notice the slow zoom-ins on Jonathan’s and David’s dark eyes.) Perhaps it’s another symptom of depersonalization disorder to reduce people to two-dimensional characters, but, regardless, it doesn’t make for great filmmaking. Ultimately, Tarnation is a compelling film about extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives, and that, regrettably, is its greatest asset.

  • Friday Night (2002)

    Friday Night (2002)

    Dir. by Claire Denis

    Joanna tells me — and she’s told me this many times over the years — that she fell in love the first time we held hands. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. Men, in my experience at least, seldom consider hands. Or, we consider them only when they’re noticeable — scarred, chewed, ornamented by loudly painted nails. Even then, though, we offer only a passing glance and a quick, rarely-conscious judgment. To really consider a hand demands a certain intimacy, I think. We’re allowed to stare at faces, encouraged even to maintain eye contact during public conversations, but to really look at a hand (or the place where a neck meets a shoulder or the back of a knee) is taboo outside of a bedroom (metaphorically speaking).

    In After Life, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s brilliant 1998 film about a heaven in which the new-dead film the happiest moment of their lives that they might relive it eternally, one woman restages her first taste of love — a perfectly innocent encounter on a public bench — and when we finally see the finished film, it culminates in a slow zoom onto her lover’s hands. That sequence, like nearly every frame of Claire Denis’s Friday Night, reminded me of Joanna’s words and sent me off wondering about “the female gaze.” (The quotation marks allow me to allude casually to feminist film theory, though I’m not sure yet if that is what I’m really after here.)

    Denis seems to have discovered a cinematographic grammar entirely of her own. I say that having seen only three of her films — Beau Trevail, which I love in part because I never would have imagined such an adaptation of Billy Budd possible; L’Intrus, which is the most beautifully frustrating film I’ve seen this year; and now Friday Night, a film about a woman (Valérie Lemercier) who has an affair the night before she is to move in with her boyfriend. I would like to read a formal analysis of one of Denis’s films because I simply don’t understand how they work. She and cinematographer Agnès Godard are able, somehow, to create a world that is both recognizably real and mythic; the camera remains objective (showing us things that no character could have seen), but it also becomes so intimately involved with the action that the entire film is covered by a sheen of subjective emotion. Magic is possible.

    When we were discussing L’Intrus, Girish kept reminding me that the line separating narrative- from experimental filmmaking has been arbitrarily drawn and that Denis’s films prove the point. While more neatly-plotted than her latest feature, Friday Night also slips easily across those borders. The lovemaking scenes, for example, are constructed from a collage of extreme close-ups that slip in and out of focus to the point of abstraction. Sex, which is so often reduced by most films to little more than genital stimulation, becomes alien. And familiar. A patchwork of fingers and necks and ankles. And hands. If I were asked to summarize Friday Night, I would say it is a film about hands and about the impossible fact that my wife decided to love me the moment she first held mine.

  • 9 Songs (2004)

    9 Songs (2004)

    Dir. by Michael Winterbottom

    “It’s claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place, like two people in a bed.” Matt (Kieran O’Brien) delivers this line in voice-over after the fact — after his ex-girlfriend Lisa (Margot Stilley) has returned home to America and after he has returned to Antarctica, where he is researching glaciers. The threatening isolation of Antarctica, like Matt’s simile, feels forced in 9 Songs, a small film about intimacy, in its various shapes and guises. Winterbottom’s framing metaphor, complete with flyover shots of stark, white landscapes, is too heavy and the only false note in what is otherwise a fascinating and successful, I think, cinematic experiment.

    Intercutting scenes of the couple’s private moments (revealed in graphic detail) with their trips to live concerts, 9 Songs explores that juxtaposition and discovers in it something of the human struggle to balance one’s needs for protection and individuality, on the one hand, and self-surrender and love, on the other. Anyone who has ever closed her eyes and moved in perfect unison with those around her at a packed music venue will recognize in 9 Songs the almost tribal spirit of its live concert footage. Brought together with shared interests and with a desire for shared transcendence (or whatever you want to call it), concert-goers are often offered a glimpse, however brief, of ideal community. We lose ourselves to the music, lose ourselves to the rhythms of the crowd — a respite from the monotony and narcissism of our private preoccupations. And, best of all, with no long-term commitment required.

    Likewise, anyone who has ever stared across the table at a lover, aware of unacknowledged tensions but unwilling or unable to address them, will recognize 9 Songs‘ portrait of a failing relationship: infatuation, disillusionment, and escape. Like a contemporary Breathless — and O’Brien’s resemblance to Jean-Paul Belmondo makes such a comparison impossible to ignore — 9 Songs describes a relationship by exposing its most casual, least self-conscious moments. (I’m reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s desire for Eyes Wide Shut to be about “the naked woman at the refrigerator door as she remembers to put the chicken away before she goes to bed.”) My favorite moments in 9 Songs take place just before and after sex, when Matt and Lisa are at their most unguarded — laughing at a bathroom mirror, relaxing in the tub, fixing breakfast. I can’t think of another film that gets those moments just right.

    Which leads me to believe that 9 Songs succeeds where so many other films have failed, in part, because of its graphic sex scenes. Unlike, say, Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus, which features a brief penetration shot to emphasize the base desires that drive so much of human behavior, 9 Songs includes several extended sequences that reveal the complexities of any sexual relationship: the pleasures and insecurities, the playfulness, the self-gratification (at times) and the selflessness (at others), the awkwardness and the beauty and the joy — or, in a word, the intimacy. Friends and I who saw 9 Songs all agreed that, at only 65 minutes, we would have liked for it to be even longer, especially if we could spend more time with Matt and Lisa behind closed doors. Recommended (with obvious warnings, of course).

    Your reward for reading the entire response: “Suddenly” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, one of the bands featured in 9 Songs.

  • Little Sky (2004)

    Little Sky (2004)

    Dir. by María Victoria Menis

    Félix (Leonardo Ramírez) is a young drifter who, in the opening act of Little Sky, jumps from a train, stumbles into conversation at a local bar, and finds himself working for room and board at a small farm. Its owners, Roberto (Dario Levy) and Mercedes (Mónica Lairana), seem content on first glance, but Félix soon discovers that Roberto’s drunken violence is the source of Mercedes’s quiet reserve and depression. When Mercedes finally leaves her husband, Félix takes her infant son Chango, with whom he has developed a close bond, and flees for the economic promise of Bueno Aires.

    Like a Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser novel, Little Sky drives steadily toward its inevitable, and inevitably dark, conclusion. Despite his genuinely good intentions, Félix’s dreams of providing the stable family for Chango that he, also an orphan, lacked are romantic lies, and we in the audience can see it coming for miles. But Menis’s direction makes it a fairly compelling story, nonetheless. I quite liked the first half of the film and particularly enjoyed her handling of Félix’s and Mercedes’s relationship, which manages to avoid the most obvious of narrative cliches: the stud drifter bedding the sexually repressed, kept woman (see Schizo). Levy also gives what at times is a nicely sympathetic performance as the abusive husband.

    Soon after Félix and Chango arrived in Buenos Aires, however, I lost interest in the film and began waiting for it to end. Films of the type that play at film festivals typically resist narrative closure; they delight, instead, in ambiguity, allowing viewers to draw conclusions of their own. I’ll admit to a strong preference for this type myself, but I’m beginning to wonder how often “ambiguity” is, in fact, a cheap excuse for sloppy writing. Little Sky is clearly intended to be a social film with political ends, and so I recognize Menis’s need to carry her story through to its predetermined, tragic finale. But I think it would be a much better film if she spent even more time developing her three main characters at the farmhouse and ended it on the train to the city. Ambiguity. Just how I like it. So can this desire for ambiguity be a political or intellectual cop-out? That question, to be honest, interests me more than this film did.

  • Moolaade (2004)

    Moolaade (2004)

    Dir. by Ousmane Sembene

    Sembene introduced his film by reminding his mostly white, mostly Western audience that Africa — the entire continent, its nations, its governments, and its people — is experiencing a period of unprecedented transition. There was no moralizing or condemnation in his tone, not even a suggestion of the catastrophic crises and genocides that fill the back pages of our newspapers. Africa is in transition, he told us, and this film is about that transition.

    By the time it reached Toronto, Moolaadé was already the talk of the festival, having garnered much acclaim at Cannes from such influential voices as Roger Ebert, who is actively campaigning on its behalf. I knew only that it was a film about the traditional practice of salinde, or female circumcision, that Sembene was generally known as the “grandfather of African cinema,” and that several of my friends were jealous of my getting a ticket to the sold-out screening. In fact, genital mutilation is but one of the film’s many concerns. The salinde serves more generally as a site of contention between the women who, newly empowered by the creeping influence of Western humanism and technology, begin to rebel against the patriarchal structures of their society — salinde is a site of contention between these strong, young women and the men who wish to maintain their patriarchal hold on power.

    Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly) is a second wife who, still scarred from her own circumcision, had refused years earlier to have her only daughter “cleansed.” In the opening moments of the film, four young girls come to Collé for similar protection, and she obliges, instituting a moolaadé, or a ceremonial zone of refuge. Her decision sets in motion the principle conflicts in the film: the older generation of women (particularly those who perform the ritual) vs. those women who oppose it; the men of the village whose identity is founded on traditional notions of masculinity vs. those who offer an alternate model (the Western-educated son or the big city mercenary); and, more simply, the old (including a particular interpretation of Islam) vs. the new (symbolized by the ubiquitous radios that blare from all corners of the village).

    By the standards with which I typically judge a film, Moolaadé is too sentimental and predictable, and its performances are uneven, at best. (The notable exception being Coulibaly, who delivers my favorite performance of the year.) And yet watching Moolaadé is a gut-churning experience, in part, I suspect, because of its close proximity to “reality.” Sembene told us that he shot on location in a typical West African village and that he cast untrained locals in many of the speaking parts. These particular young women that we watch on screen represent thousands of others just like them, and their very real investment in the “transition” is apparent.

    I hope this is a fair comparison — I always worry about applying Western models to non-Western stories, imperializing them, so to speak — but as I watched Moolaadé I was reminded of certain American literatures of the late-19th century, another significant period of transition. If Moolaadé is didactic, then its didacticism might be forgiven: What value, after all, can be found in the other side of the genital mutilation (or slavery or suffrage) debate? And, a question of even greater value, I think: When is unbridled emotionalism (which I often too casually dismiss as “sentiment”) a perfectly appropriate and even politically resonant response to particular conditions? The emotional trajectory of Moolaadé reaches its climax when Collé is punished for her transgressions. It’s a brutal scene, but I found myself more deeply moved by a more quiet moment that followed. It’s the sound of a crying mother. That’s it. A crying mother. And it worked, breaking through my cynicism and emotional distance. Highly recommended.

  • Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004)

    Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004)

    Dir. by Theo Angelopoulos

    Angelopoulos introduced his latest with very few words. It is to be the first of three films about the life of a Greek woman who manages to survive the 20th century, and its concern is “the human condition.” What more would you expect?

    The Weeping Meadow opens with its first of many meticulously composed, extreme long shots. It is 1919, and a group of refugees have made land near Thessaloniki. At the center of the frame are Spyros (Vasilis Kolovos), his wife and son (Nikos Poursanidis), and Eleni (Alexandra Aidini), the young orphan he has adopted. The Trilogy will be Eleni’s story, and in The Weeping Meadow we are given the first 40 years of it — her love of Spyros’s son, her giving birth to twins, and the tragedy of her many losses during World War II and the Greek civil war that followed.

    The Weeping Meadow takes its shape from Classical Tragedy, but the Fates, in this case, are not so deterministic as to run trod over the complexities of life. While bathed in a sheen of melancholia and mourning, the film still takes great delight in the intensity of young love, the vitality of community, and the simple pleasures of music. Eleni’s young husband is a gifted accordionist whose original composition is developed first on-screen and is then folded into the film’s score, returning occasionally in the final act to comfort Eleni like a Greek chorus.

    This was my first Angelopoulos film, and so, perhaps, others who are more familiar with his work and who are accustomed to seeing it projected in 35mm will be less overwhelmed by the film than I was. I sat there in a stupor, to be honest, constantly in awe of the immensity of his imagination. The still image posted above is just one of thirty or forty that could be stripped from its context and hung on a gallery wall. And equally impressive were the choreographed camera movements that lasted for minutes at a time, exploring landscapes and interiors with the detailed eye of a great novelist. I actually gasped at the end of one shot, which like Russian Ark in miniature, captures an entire drama in a single take. Angelopoulos’s camera follows his young lovers through a noisy dance hall where they are confronted by a threat from their past. Setup, conflict, resolution — all in a single movement. Unbelievable.

    One week and nearly twenty films later, my imagination is still alive with memories of The Weeping Meadow. There are images in this film — sheep hanging from a tree, water rising around an ancient village, a floating funeral procession, a field of billowing white sheets — that I would not have imagined possible. Like the first time I saw Tarkovsky and Cassavetes, seeing Angelopoulos has forced me to reconsider the potential of cinema. Highly recommended.

  • Schizo (2004)

    Schizo (2004)

    Dir. by Guka Omarova

    Omarova’s debut takes its title from a nickname given to the main character. Schizo (Olzhas Nusuppaev) is 15 years old and a bit slow; his classmates abuse him and exploit his gullibility. He is soon hired by his mother’s thug boyfriend (Eduard Tabyschev) to recruit unemployed laborers for illegal boxing matches. However, when the first man he recruits dies after the fight, Schizo is drawn into a new life. Like Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes’s La Promesse, Schizo tells the coming-of-age story of a young man who commits to helping a woman and her young child, first out of obligation and, later, out of love. As I told a friend after the screening, Schizo is the most heart-warming bare-knuckle boxing movie I’ve ever seen.

    Told in minimalist style, with long takes, little nondiegetic sound, and a cast that includes several nonprofessional actors, Schizo is always compelling to watch, even if the story is, at times, too predictable. Fifteen minutes in, I was concerned that it would all collapse into either Of Mice and Men tragedy or Forrest Gump sentiment, so I was impressed with Omarova’s handling of Schizo, who, as it turns out, isn’t terribly slow after all and whose decisions constantly surprised me. I also really enjoyed Olga Landina’s performance as the young mother whom Schizo befriends. Like Natalie Press in My Summer of Love, Landina has a compelling face of a type that I see too seldom on the screen. Both actresses reminded me a bit of Badlands-era Sissy Spacek.

    Schizo is not a film that I am anxious to revisit, but it does exemplify one aspect of the festival that I greatly enjoyed: the opportunity to encounter a new voice in cinema, and one from a place that I will likely never visit. A woman from Kazakhstan recently began attending my English as a Second Language course, and I was surprised to find this person whom I had assumed was Chinese speaking Russian. On several occasions during the screening of Schizo, when the narrative was losing hold of my interest, I just sat and studied the people who populate the film. Kazakhstan has been called the “crossroads of Europe and Asia,” and that history is written into its faces.

  • Tell Them Who You Are (2004)

    Tell Them Who You Are (2004)

    Dir. by Mark S. Wexler

    Tell Them Who You Are has the best opening scene of any film I saw at this year’s festival. Haskell Wexler is standing in his camera equipment room, taking stock of his inventory for an upcoming sale. When his son Mark, who is shooting the documentary that we are watching, asks his dad to explain where they are standing, Haskell shakes his head, twists his face with exasperation, and says (I’m paraphrasing from memory here): “No, Mark. You’re holding the fucking camera. Just shoot the room, and you’re audience will figure it out. If this is what your fucking movie is going to be like, if you’re planning to just shoot a bunch of talking heads, then the hell with it. I want nothing to do with it.”

    It would be nearly impossible to make a dull documentary about Haskell Wexler. Now in his mid-80s, Wexler is as sharp and as full of piss as ever — still decrying injustice wherever he finds it, still ridiculing the mistakes of other filmmakers whenever he encounters them. Having shot nearly fifty features over the past five decades (including John Sayles’s Silver City, which also played at the festival), Wexler is justified in thinking himself an authority on the subject of filmmaking, which is why Tell Them Who You Are is such a fascinating movie. Being on the other side of the camera forces Wexler to revisit the aesthetic decisions that guided him through the making of his own documentaries forty years earlier, groundbreaking social films such as The Bus (1965), Medium Cool (1969), and Introduction to the Enemy (1974). He can barely tolerate his son’s direction at times, and that tension is at the heart of the film.

    Mark Wexler is quite good with a camera himself, however, and his film is remarkably well-constructed. What begins as a standard Biography-style portrait, complete with childhood photos, juicy gossip, and celebrity testimonials, slowly evolves into, first, a self-reflexive commentary on the ethics of documentary filmmaking and, finally, a touching story of forgiveness and reconciliation. One of the final images is of Haskell sitting at a monitor, watching his son’s completed film. Mark doesn’t linger too long on the shot or allow it to become sentimental, but the emotion is evident on his father’s face and it speaks volumes. Mark seemed reticent to speak too candidly after the screening but did acknowledge that having a camera fixed between them offered both men a much-appreciated filter and that their relationship has, in many ways, been healed by the process.

    I hope that Tell Them Who You Are finds decent distribution, and given the recent critical and popular success of so many documentaries, perhaps it will. It was one of my favorites of the festival, largely because of Haskell Wexler himself. His bottomless hatred of corporate interests and political conservatives (like his son) is inspiring and laugh-out-loud funny. But the film also exposes his pain and, though he would be loathe to admit it, his regret, particularly in a moving scene with his ex-wife, Mark’s mother. Another high recommendation.

  • Earth and Ashes (2004)

    Earth and Ashes (2004)

    Dir. by Atiq Rahimi

    Days after his village is destroyed in a bombing raid, Dastaguir (Abdul Ghani) and his five-year-old grandson Yacine (Jawan Mard Homayoun) jump from the back of a pickup truck and take their seats at a desert crossroads, where they wait and wait for a ride to a nearby mine. Dastaguir is charged with the horrifying task of notifying his son that the young man’s wife and mother are dead and that his son, Yacine, is now deaf. Dastaguir is worried for his son’s sanity and is plagued by memories of his daughter-in-law’s shaming, which he was unable to prevent.

    As I stepped out of the theater, a woman beside me dismissed Earth and Ashes as an “Afghani Waiting for Godot“; I agree with the description but not the dismissal. Here, unlike Beckett’s play, the absurdity of the situation is grounded in a real historical moment. Earth and Ashes is not only an allegory for some vague existential crisis (though it is certainly also that); instead, the film reveals the human cost of a particular tragedy. By the time Dastaguir recounted the story of his village’s destruction to the fourth stranger, and after hearing yet one more weary soul beg God’s blessings for the dead, I began to experience something of the old man’s exhaustion and helplessness. To be frank, I was embarrassed by it — embarrassed to be sitting in an air conditioned movie theater while on vacation, taking “pleasure” from the suffering depicted on screen. (Doug and I had a great discussion afterwards about film tastes and political sensibilities, but I’ll save that one for another day.)

    Earth and Ashes is a jaw-droppingly beautiful film as well, shot on location in wide-angle 35mm (Scope?) and featuring countless elegant crane and tracking shots. In his introduction of the film, Rahimi recounted the risks he and his crew faced by shooting in Afghanistan, particularly because the film features female nudity. The landscape, he claimed, is critical to the story, and I would agree, even extending the concept to the landscapes of Afghani faces, young and old.

    Existentialism — to borrow momentarily from my acquaintance’s allusion to Godot — demands that we find some measure of hope in our suffering, that in our acceptance of life’s absurdity we are making some heroic gesture toward freedom. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes. Rahimi seems driven by a similar conviction. I’m going to cheat and borrow from Doug’s review:

    the final sequence of the film is comprised of a gradual focus: a man leaves a conversation, walks through the desert, becomes isolated, begins to sing. The image fades but his singing continues in darkness, a tribute to human dignity and its perseverance through time.

    Despite the hectic pace of the film festival, the audience sat quietly for two or three minutes in complete darkness, listening to the old man’s song. It plays like a benediction. Highly Recommended.

  • 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (2004)

    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (2004)

    Dir. by Raymond Depardon

    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences is 105 minutes of documentary footage shot within a French District courtroom. We watch as Madame Justice Michèle Bernard-Requin hears the cases brought against twelve defendants (culled from the 169 that Depardon originally shot). Most are there on misdemeanor offenses: drunk driving, petty theft, possession of a weapon, selling marijuana. And in nearly every case we watch the process from start to finish, from plea to verdict.

    During the screening of 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences, I was quite disappointed by the film, but even then I knew that my disappointment was with the audience rather than with the film itself. At the Sunday screening — and friends who saw it on Tuesday report a very different experience — 10e Chambre played as pure comedy. (One friend, a TIFF veteran, argues that crowds are different during the opening weekend, when more people dress up and come out to experience the festival itself rather than to see the films, and I think he might be right.)

    The idea of 10e Chambre as “comedy” is quite disturbing to me. And I’ve come to realize that that is partly Depardon’s point. He crafts the film so that our allegiances immediately fall to the side of the witty and cynical Judge, whose clever retorts to the first few defendants are, at times, well justified. But by the time we are laughing at a young man who is clearly under the influence of a narcotic while in the courtroom, the joke has gone on too long. We are now no longer well-heeled sophisticates at an international film festival; we are Middle Americans, smoking pot, watching Jerry Springer, and laughing at the poor clods who are too poorly educated, too economically burdened, too mentally incapacitated, or ( perhaps most damning of all) too dark-skinned to know any better.

    10e Chambre began to open up for me when my friend Girish described that laughter as a Rorschach Test. What do we laugh at? How do we choose where to direct our derision? And why do we often side with those in authority? Depardon shoots each of the defendants from the same static, low-angle position, giving us a perspective of the criminal that is similar (metaphorically speaking) to the Judge’s: he or she is a disembodied head, divorced from context or backstory, who is offered only a few moments to justify his or her behavior. The opportunity to judge them is impossibly seductive, as my audience proved, and Depardon invites us to do so by not revealing the verdicts of the final cases. I have no doubt how most in that theater would have ruled.

    As a side note, one of my friends who attended the Tuesday screening reports that one or two members of that audience also felt the need to laugh throughout much of the film. Not surprisingly, the social pressure of being the lone voice laughing in a hushed room led them to suppress that urge during the last half hour. The analogy to being a lone voice of dissent, whether in an important public discourse or, say, a jury room, is fascinating. This will be a wonderful film to teach.

  • 3-Iron (2004)

    3-Iron (2004)

    Dir. by Kim Ki-duk

    Jae Hee plays Tae-suk, a young man who breaks into homes, prepares meals, bathes and naps, then repays the homeowner’s generosity by performing small acts of kindness: washing clothes, repairing broken electronics, and the like. While squatting in the most opulent of his many homes, Tae-suk discovers that he is not alone. Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yun), a former model, is trapped there by her husband, bruised and beaten. Tae-suk rescues her, and the two become accomplices and lovers, moving from house to house in complete silence, never speaking even a word to one another.

    The description of 3-Iron in the TIFF catalog begins with the following quote from Kim:

    All of us are empty houses, waiting anxiously for somebody to unlock and liberate us….

    It’s the perfect synopsis of 3-Iron, a fable for our times. Each house that Tae-suk enters acts as an embodiment of its absent owner, and with time and repetition we in the audience begin to anticipate the sameness of it all — the conventions, the status symbols, the stuff. Even Sun-hwa, when we first meet her, is property, and the joy of watching 3-Iron comes from seeing her beauty emerge along with her individualized identity. The bruises on her face fade as she gains confidence and as her fate becomes more tightly bound to Tae-suk’s.

    3-Iron is one of the films that I saw at TIFF that I feel could benefit from some trimming, and I’ll be curious to see if the cut that showed at Toronto is the same version released in the West. (3-Iron was picked up for distribution soon after its first screening.) The film gets its title from the golf club that Tae-suk and several other characters use to enact vengeance upon one another, and while it makes for a nice metaphor (what better symbol to show the divide between the haves and have-nots?), several of the more violent sequences created frustrating tonal shifts and pacing problems, particularly an odd scene that takes place in an underground parking garage, which could be cut completely.

    Otherwise, though, I quite liked 3-Iron. The final act of the film shows Tae-suk alone in a prison cell, where he seems to transform slowly into a ghost. The sequences are just stunning to look at, and they’re cut together with a real grace. Again, like a fable, there’s something almost magical about the prison scenes, and they contain some of the images that have lingered longest in my imagination. Not a perfect film, but one that I will look forward to revisiting.

  • Childstar (2004)

    Childstar (2004)

    Dir. by Don McKellar

    My first and only five-film day of the festival began early Sunday morning with Don McKellar’s latest, Childstar. McKellar stars as Rick Schiller, a cinema studies professor and experimental filmmaker who finds himself working as a chauffeur to Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall), an adolescent heartthrob whose latest film, The American Son, is shooting in Toronto. Schiller soon hooks up with Burns’ mother (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), becomes Burns’ legal guardian, and guides the young actor through his inevitable and by-the-numbers coming of age.

    During the post-screening Q&A, McKellar told the story of the film’s inspiration. (Here’s another version of the same story, as reported in the Toronto Sun.)

    It was the Dreamworks party for American Beauty, and I met Haley Joel Osment at the bar. . . . I don’t know what he was drinking, but I’m sure it wasn’t scandalous. Anyway, I talked to him for quite awhile before I realized he was 12 or whatever. He was so mature, there were no adults around him, he was just talking. And I thought what a potent symbol he was of something — of my experience of Hollywood. He was an unnaturally precocious kid in a culture where kids act too old and adults act too young.

    Part family drama, part satire of Hollywood, Childstar allows McKellar plenty of room to poke fun at the film “industry,” with its gangster-like agents, manipulative and cost-conscious producers, and exploitive parents. And for the most part, it works. I laughed out loud several times and enjoyed the relationship between Schiller and Burns. McKellar has the perfect face for the role; he always looks vaguely exasperated by the waste and ego of celebrity, and his intelligence and wit make him an entertaining guide through it all.

    I decided to see Childstar mostly for the opportunity to hear McKellar introduce it — I’ve been a big fan since first seeing him in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica — and his introduction set up the best laugh of the morning. His microphone was positioned at the bottom right corner of the screen, and he began by saying that he had promised himself that he would never be “one of those directors who goes on and on about the film, sucking the life out of the room, but that he wanted to take a minute or two to explain why he felt that he must make this particular film.” Remember that if you get a chance to see Childstar. (McKellar held little hope for American distribution, by the way, but said that it will be shown widely in Canada, beginning in October.)

  • My Summer of Love

    My Summer of Love

    Dir. by Pawel Pawlikowski

    Mona (Natalie Press), a working-class girl who runs the local pub with her brother, meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt), a wealthy trouble-maker who has returned home to the family estate after being expelled from boarding school. Bored and lonely, they find comfort in their relationship, though, as becomes increasingly obvious, that relationship is built from lies and games. In the final act, those lies unravel, and Mona, we are led to believe, finds new strength and independence from having survived the experience.

    My Summer of Love received a lot of “buzz,” as they say, in Toronto, and I would guess that most of it was generated by Press’s performance, which is a lot of fun to watch. I can’t recall another character quite like Mona. She has the potential to become that loathsome stereotype, the “blue collar girl with a heart of gold who will teach the rich people how to really experience life,” but Mona is too world-weary and cynical to buy into such a lie. She’s learned to protect herself with sarcasm and irony, so when she does drop her guard, when she does allow some vulnerability, the betrayals by Tasmin and her brother wound all the more deeply.

    During his Q&A, Pawlikowski said that he was drawn to this story because he is interested in characters who are seeking transcendence, whether through love or sex or religion. His response points to my great frustration with the film, which is that he seems to equate the three and is deeply suspicious of the real value to be found in any of them. As J. Robert Parks told me after the screening, it’s terribly annoying when a filmmaker expects us to find victory and personal triumph in a cliche.

    I was also frustrated because My Summer of Love has the potential to offer an insightful portrait of a Christian struggling with the consequences of his new-found faith, but, again, the film instead reduces him to cliche. Mona’s brother Phil (Paddy Considine) has become an evangelical while in prison and has exercised his faith by closing the family pub and turning it into a meeting hall for Bible studies and prayer. I was especially touched by one scene in which Mona comes to Phil, needing comfort, needing to talk to the brother who is now her only family. He hugs her, rocks her in his arms, then begins to pray over her. It’s a moment I’ve experienced too many times in my own life — a Christian, acting with the very best intentions, falls back on old routines, praying for God’s help instead of looking that person in the eye, speaking directly to them, and doing something to meet their needs.

    Considine was also there for the Q&A, and he mentioned how much he valued and respected the friendships he had made with evangelicals while researching the role, and it shows in his performance, which is quite good. But Pawlikowski’s script is bound too tightly to a banal narrative arc that demands Phil’s faith be superficial. He will inevitably be seduced by Tasmin, inevitably revert to his violent ways, inevitably forsake his Bible study friends. We get one final glimpse of him near the end of the film, his face in his hands, which, I suppose, is intended to suggest his “struggle” and the possibility of redemption, but it’s too little, too late. I quite liked the film for the first hour because the characters continually surprised me, which made the by-the-numbers finale all the more disappointing.

  • Nobody Knows (2004)

    Nobody Knows (2004)

    Dir. by Hirokazu Kore-eda

    After Life is one of my favorite films of the past five years, so for that reason alone, I was very much looking forward to Kore-eda’s latest, Nobody Knows, the story of four young siblings whose mother abandons them to find work in another city. Unfortunately, because of a few wrong turns and some confusion regarding the location of my tickets, I missed the first hour of the film and will, therefore, keep my comments brief.

    I entered the theater just as the oldest child, Chunan (played by Yuya Yagira, winner of the best actor prize at Cannes), comes to realize that their mother will not be returning. We watch as they adapt to life alone: washing their clothes in the park, collecting day-old food from the back doors of neighborhood stores, searching for discarded change in pay phones and vending machines.

    Kore-eda shoots the exteriors from a great distance, using long lenses that flatten the depth of field. Doing so allows his young actors to move naturally, freed from the close presence of camera and crew. There is nothing self-conscious or “actorly” in their performances, which lends added weight to the inevitable tragedy of their situation.

    Nobody Knows ends, not surprisingly, in a freeze frame, the most obvious but certainly not only allusion to The 400 Blows. Like Truffaut’s film, Kore-eda’s demands that we sympathize with its young protagonist and judge the adults and the systems that have failed them. I have some problems with the film but will reserve judgment until after seeing it in its entirety. I would imagine that it will find relatively wide distribution.

  • The Shadowlands

    The Shadowlands

    I would like to play piano/keyboards in a rock band, and I would like that band to sound as much as possible like Ryan Adams’ “The Shadowlands.” I would also be perfectly content if it sounded like “Political Scientist” or “English Girls Approximately” or almost any other track from Love is Hell.

  • Random Musings . . .

    Random Musings . . .

    On some recent viewings . . .

    Shame (Bergman, 1968) — Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow star as Eva and Jan Rosenberg, cultured musicians who escape to a rural island when their orchestra is shut down during a war. Their new, more simple life as farmers is soon interrupted when their home is invaded, and they are forced to confront the violence that they had so meticulously avoided. Shame is typically described as a psychological portrait of the dehumanizing consequences of war. The splintering of Eva and Jan’s relationship, then, becomes representative of savage self-interest and alienation, and the interruption of their careers (captured most obviously in an image of Jan’s broken violin) serves as a metaphor for war’s denial of Art, beauty, and culture.

    Shame is my least favorite of the Bergman films I’ve seen. By setting the action amid some unspecific, fairy tale-like war, Bergman (who obviously knows a thing or two about the proper uses of symbolism) invests too much “Meaning” in his characters and in their actions. Shame is an Allegory with a capital A, trapped uncomfortably somewhere between absurd, dystopian satire and the real here and now. I think I would have preferred the film had it jumped completely to one of those extremes. As with all collaborations between Bergman, Ullman, von Sydow, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Shame is packed with remarkable performances and jaw-dropping photography, and it’s well worth seeing for those reasons alone. I was only disappointed because it fails to reach Bergman’s own ridiculously high bar.

    I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Zahedi, 1994) — Zahedi, his father and half-brother, and a small film crew spend Christmas in Vegas, where Zahedi hopes, among other things, to heal his familial relationships and to prove the existence of God. With this film alone as evidence, I would say that he accomplishes neither, but the attempt is fascinating to watch. Caveh is a polarizing figure, to be sure, and Las Vegas shows him at his most obnoxious and manipulative, particularly during an extended sequence in which he attempts to talk his 62-year-old father and 16-year-old brother into taking Ecstasy. I’m still not sure whether or not he succeeded.

    To me, the appeal of Caveh Zahedi is his willingness to emote unapologetically, to subject those emotions to close scrutiny, and to do so all under the watchful eye of a camera in which he places an almost naive faith. In his more recent film, In the Bathtub of the World (2001), and in this interview with Film Threat, Caveh talks about his disappointment with an experience (reading a great book, attending a film festival) that failed to be “salvational,” and I think that word is the key to his project. There’s something beautiful about watching someone search so desperately for that salvational experience, particularly in a mostly Christian nation like America, where we are so comfortable with the language of grace and forgiveness. Caveh’s films remind me of a concept that I seem to come back to again and again: negative transcendence — “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.”

    Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) and Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004) — I had planned to write up a full-length response to these films, which, when taken together, are something of a minor miracle. Sunset is my favorite film of the year so far. Told in real time, it captures an eighty minute conversation between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), a couple who spent “one magical night together in Vienna” nine years earlier, then never spoke again. When they finally reunite in Paris, they are older (their early-30s) and somewhat hardened by experience, and their reunion unravels the comfortable lies upon which their lives are founded. I can’t seem to write or talk about this film without rambling on about my wife, about how we met ten years ago, and about how our ideas of love and romance have evolved since, which is why I’m cutting this short. I’ll just say that Before Sunset is a remarkably well-crafted film that ends at precisely the right moment and that treats its characters and its audience with great tenderness and respect. Like I said: a minor miracle.

    The School of Rock (Linklater, 2003) — A film that doesn’t for a minute divert from its by-the-numbers plot but that is a hell of a lot of fun to watch anyway. In other words, I laughed when Jack Black tried to be funny and I got goose bumps when the band played their big show. Plus, any film that mentions Rick Wakeman’s keyboard solo in “Roundabout” get bonus points. The School of Rock‘s biggest surprise: Who knew Joan Cusack was so hot?