Long Pauses

Tag: Decade: 2000s

  • The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “Since its beginnings, many hundreds of thousands of Marines have prepared for war here, practicing their war-fighting skills in the challenging terrain and climate of the Mojave Desert. In the early days it was primarily seen as a place for artillery units to unmask devastating firepower in training. Subsequently, it has been home to numerous tenant commands, earning a reputation as the premier combined-arms training facility in the Marine Corps.”
    – History of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms (1)

    “The H1 and H2 were created to handle deep water, nasty side slopes, inclines and harrowing vertical ledges. So, that’s just what the AM General Test Track in South Bend, Indiana serves up. On the same course where the U.S. Army and Allied Forces have trained drivers, you’ll face twisted, muddy terrain and also learn recovery techniques. Unfortunately, after the training is over, you will in fact, [sic] have to return to civilization.”
    – The Hummer Driving Academy (2)

    Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003) begins amid the traffic of a congested Los Angeles freeway. David (David Wissak) is driving; Katia (Katia Golubeva), his girlfriend, rests in the back seat. They are leaving the city, headed east, deep into the Joshua Tree National Park, where David plans to scout locations for a film project. Once there, they settle quickly into routine: their days begin with a long trek into the desert, followed by a few hours of exploration and then the long drive back to Twentynine Palms, the small town where their motel is located. There they swim, have sex, shower, watch television, eat dinner, fight, and make up, in roughly that order. As in his previous films, La Vie de Jésus (1997) and L’Humanité (1999), here Dumont is interested in the mundane details of human experience. His camera lingers patiently on David and Katia’s bodies with a naturalist’s curiosity, capturing something of their boredom, their desire, their frustration, their jealousy, and their confused affection. (David, an American, and Katia, a Russian, converse in a mix of half-understood English and French.) Even in the final minutes of the film, when the Edenic isolation of the desert is ruptured by outside forces, Dumont refuses to quicken his pace. Audiences are forced to observe everything – the ordinary and the terrifying – unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylised photography. Dumont has once again given us “large and startling” figures and has left us to sort through the consequences (3).

    While Dumont’s “humanity under glass” approach to characters has carried through each of his films – Freddy and Marie, Pharaon and Domino, David and Katia are all similarly flayed under the director’s scalpel – his latest film marks something of a departure, as his move from the small French town, Bailleul, to the American southwest necessitates a new palette of cinematic iconography and, more significantly, a new socio-political context. Reviewers of Twentynine Palms have, almost without exception, called attention to the former, citing Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970) and Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) as a few of the film’s most obvious forebears (4). But while appropriating “American film imagery”, as Dumont admits to deliberately doing, he also comments on that imagery, deconstructing the culturally-coded messages that each image carries. “I can’t understand half of what you’re saying”, David tells Katia, but he could as easily be speaking to Hitchcock’s motel room, John Ford’s desert mountains, and the heart of Boorman’s darkness. Hollywood’s visions of violence, cowboy masculinity, and the never-ending battle between good and evil have long been mythological tropes of America’s political identity (and they have obviously gained currency in the 21st century); in Twentynine Palms, Dumont calls attention to the artificiality of those tropes and to the dehumanising effects they mask. The end result is a film equal parts high-minded allegory and kick-in-the-guts sensation. Dumont, perhaps more than any living filmmaker, deliberately challenges audiences to reconcile those tensions, or, if not reconcile, to at least experience, in all its fullness and complexity, the sudden disorientation such tensions inevitably inspire.

    When all is said and done – after the endless driving, the pain-faced orgasms, the countless miscommunications, and the brutal, brutal violence – Twentynine Palms is, I think, really a film about a red truck. Specifically, it’s about David’s red H2, a sports utility vehicle modelled after the US Army’s High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (pronounced Humvee). Loaded with high-end comforts, including a nine-speaker sound system, DVD navigation, and standard leather seating, the “Hummer” is capable of producing 325 horsepower and 365 pounds of torque. Its welded steel frame, ten inch ground clearance, and 40 degree approach angle give it the appearance of being one of the toughest, most agile off-road vehicles on the market. “In a world where SUVs have begun to look like their owners, complete with love handles and mushy seats,” Hummer’s website announces, “the H2 proves that there is still one out there that can drop and give you 20.” But the H2, despite its rugged appearance, is little more than a new face on an old idea – a significantly modified version of General Motors’ oldest line of SUVs, the Chevy Suburban (a name thick with allegoric potential). The H2′s base price is just over US$50,000.

    There is a danger, of course, in pushing this metaphor too far. A truck driven more often through upscale neighbourhoods than over rocky terrain, a truck with an American military pedigree and a soccer dad clientele, a truck whose name was inspired by a euphemism for fellatio – the Hummer is ripe for juvenile Freudian analysis and for simplistic pronouncements about the ethical problems of the postmodern simulacrum. Had Dumont been less patient with his material, had he treated it with too little grace or honesty, Twentynine Palms would likely have collapsed under the weight of such a symbol, becoming not a study of, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the banality of evil, but a banality itself. Dumont avoids that trap (for the most part) by calling little attention to the Hummer as symbol, with only a few notable exceptions. For instance, during their drives through the desert, David often stops to allow Katia to take the wheel. On one such drive, she scrapes paint from the side of the truck, then infantilises David by laughing at his anger. The brief conflict mirrors the gendered struggle that defines so much of their relationship, and it would not require too great a stretch to read David’s meticulous waxing of the Hummer as an attempt to reconstruct his masculine authority. (Welcome to Psychology 101, where “waxing a Hummer” is never just waxing a Hummer.)

    It’s the nature of that masculine authority, however, and the particularly American myths that determine it that seem of greatest import in the film. In the same California desert where novelist Frank Norris’s McTeague dies as a result of his greed and jealousy, where John Wayne eternally rides horses and fights “savages”, where the US Marines “unmask devastating firepower in training”, David adopts the appropriate pose, driving his army-like truck and fucking his beautiful girlfriend with a near-bestial desperation. “We can fuck and fuck, but we can’t merge”, Dumont says (somewhat disingenuously, I think) on the Blaq Out DVD release (R2), reducing David and Katia’s troubling relationship to a universal platitude. But David and Katia are not Adam and Eve, or Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina, or Freddy and Marie; they are characters trapped at the nexus of conflicted American types, old and new: rugged individuals and conspicuous consumers, democratic liberals and unilateral militarists, Western gunslingers and West Coast hipsters. Is it any wonder they’re both a touch schizophrenic?

    Unlike, say, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), with its satiric commingling of images of American military power, “Old West” masculinity and myths of redemptive violence, Twentynine Palms consigns many of its targets to spaces just beyond the edge of the screen. The most striking example is the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, which is alluded to only in the title of the film and in one key sequence. While eating ice cream, David notices Katia admiring a Marine in uniform. “You wouldn’t want me to shave my head like them?” he asks. She laughs, then tells him, “If you do, I’ll leave you”, but her answer offers David little comfort. Katia admits to finding Marines “really handsome”, and her laughter – to David, at least – is patronising. He sulks, then launches into a tirade about their conversations lacking a “logical progress”, before she interrupts him with the words, “I love you”. Tellingly, he responds, “I want you”. (The film’s dialogue, though cliched at times, does work a bit better on screen than when transcribed.)

    David’s thin frame, shag haircut, and fashionably-dishevelled wardrobe put him in stark contrast to the “proud, fighting men of the US Marines” who surround the periphery of Twentynine Palms. Alone with Katia, however, he (over)compensates for any apparent lack. Dumont’s cinematographic style is never more clinical and his worldview more deterministic than in his stagings of sex. Not only do David and Katia never truly “merge”, but each appears barely cognisant of the other’s presence. Bodies become entangled; orgasms are loud, primal. Sex, for Dumont, is an act of self-gratifying violence predicated on domination. “The poor thing”, Katia says after David describes an episode of The Jerry Springer Show in which a father admits to sexually abusing his daughter. David’s casual response – “Who?” – is perhaps the film’s most chilling moment, for it portends something more base and destructive than the “desensitising effects of the media” against which cultural critics on both the left and the right rage (though that is certainly one element of Dumont’s critique). David’s nihilism puts him closer in line with the morally ambiguous heroes of Hollywood’s Old West: Ethan Edwards (John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956) and Bill Munny (Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, 1992), for example – men who kill because they can. In David’s case – and, again, at the risk of slipping headlong into bad Freud – sex and murder have become indistinguishable; the symbolic Colt revolver has been replaced quite literally by the signified, and David, to borrow from Bill Munny, has always been “lucky in the order”.

    Lucky, that is, until the final minutes of the film. Twentynine Palms ends with two acts of outrageous violence that, even upon first viewing, feel both genuinely shocking and strangely inevitable. During their final drive through the desert, David and Katia are chased and brought to a stop by three men who pull them from their truck, beat them, and sodomise David. After a three-minute, agonising shot of Katia crawling naked toward David, Dumont cuts to the motel room, where they have returned, alive but badly injured. David refuses to call the police, presumably because of his shame, and sends Katia to fetch dinner. When she returns, he emerges suddenly from the bathroom, pins her to the bed, and repeatedly stabs her. The final image is a long, high-angle shot of the desert. David is naked, facedown in the sand, dead, the Hummer parked beside him. A police officer wanders near the body, and we hear his voice as he calls for an ambulance.

    Were the film to end ten minutes earlier, with David and Katia still driving, still miscommunicating, still struggling to capture a glimpse of some impossible communion, Twentynine Palms would be another in a line of cinematic meditations on modern alienation, more L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) or Vive l’amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994) than Psycho. The seemingly random brutality of the violence, however, and the symbolically-charged manner in which it is staged, shift the film much closer to the realm of socio-political allegory. In that sense, the “attack” sequence is key. As in a classic Old West ambush, the savages appear from nowhere. Aside from a few early glimpses, David and Katia are unaware of their menacing white truck until it rear-ends them and forces them to a stop. The sequence might be boiled down to three shots. The first is a low-angle image of David’s face. He’s looking back over his right shoulder, screaming, helpless to stop the attackers’ truck from pushing their own. The look on David’s face is familiar to us by now, having already seen it on several occasions during his sexual climaxes. The second is a long shot of the two trucks coming to rest. Dumont films it from behind and to one side such that the perspective becomes slightly distorted. David’s H2 – the militaryish SUV designed to “handle deep water, nasty side slopes, inclines and harrowing vertical ledges” – suddenly resembles a toy beside the attackers’ massive pickup truck. The third is the image of David being raped, his bloodied face buried in the sand. Dumont positions the two men beside the back of the Hummer, which, metaphorically speaking, has also been sodomised. Not coincidentally, the attacker is also shot from a low-angle, and his face also contorts with a scream when he ejaculates.

    At a moment when depictions of American violence, both real and imagined, tend to be commodified (as in the Hummer) or hyperstylised (as in The Matrix [Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999]) or sanitised for our protection (as in television coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), Dumont’s treatment is relatively unfiltered and uncompromising. Audiences are subjected to long takes of “real” brutality; the director only subtly imposes his editorial voice to guide the viewing. In a film that plays so self-consciously with America’s mythologies, that experience is genuinely disconcerting, for it deconstructs those myths by accosting viewers with unfiltered sensation, the best remedy, Dumont implies, for intellectual distance and moral apathy. Twentynine Palms fits comfortably into the “art film” genre, and, as such, it will likely be appreciated by those most willing to rationally dissect its network of symbols and allusions. The textbook psychosexual connotations of the attack sequence, for example, are just too overt to be ignored. And yet, watching a Bruno Dumont film is, first and foremost, a visceral experience. We are forced to sit uncomfortably and observe the beating and rape of two people, fighting all the while the learned urge to avert our eyes. Thus, when David springs from the bathroom and savagely murders Katia, we might, in a somewhat detached manner, explain it away with allusions to Lacan and the dissolution of the fictional unity of David’s masculine subjectivity (and his failed attempt to reconstruct it through violence and the shaving of his head); but the more immediate sensation is horror – horror at the spectre of violence, horror at the depravity of its nihilism, horror at the sudden realisation that so many of America’s defining tropes have made of such violence a point of pride and national unity. In that sense, Twentynine Palms is timely and urgent in a way that Dumont’s earlier (and, in my opinion, better) films are not. His appeal to transcendence is now grounded in history, at a moment when America’s myths are being written on the world.

    Endnotes

    1. See MCAGCC/MAGTFTC History and Unit Information, accessed July 2004.
    2. http://www.hummer.com
    3. See my article, “Bruno Dumont’s Bodies”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, March–April 2002.
    4. I would add the “Dawn of Man” section of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) as well. Notice how David crouches ape-like in the desert, his knees above his waist, and how Dumont films the murder, the knife rising and falling like the bone in Kubrick’s film.
  • Fahrenheit 9/11

    Fahrenheit 9/11

    Like millions of others, I lined up this weekend to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Charles Pierce summarizes my opinion pretty closely:

    Frankly, as a movie qua movie, I thought the thing was kind of a hash. My eyes glazed at the endless Bush-Carlyle-Harken-Saudis-Hallburton segment at the beginning, and I’d heard most of it before. The “Bonanza” thing was really dumb — and I mean FILM-SCHOOL dumb — and it used the wrong theme music, besides. However, he does make up for that with a music cue during C-Plus Augustus’s aircraft-carrier stunt that put me on the floor.

    That having been said, the good stuff is really good. The American soldiers are strikingly eloquent, both here and Over There, and anybody who accuses Moore of undermining Our Troops has to argue that he does so partly by giving the grunts a voice. The Senate sellout of the outraged members of the Congressional Black Caucus in the wake of the 2000 election scam should make Tom Daschle and Al Gore lock themselves in a closet for a month. (Not one Democratic senator would stand with John Lewis?)

    I wish, in fact, that Moore had cut most of the cheap Bush jokes and focused his attention, instead, on only Iraq and the American military. The last hour of Fahrenheit 9/11 is fantastic; I just wish it were cut into a film that wouldn’t alienate so many Bush voters.

  • Tombigbee

    Tombigbee

    Tori Amos’s new 2-disc set, Welcome to Sunny Florida, is a bargain at $14. Disc 1 is a two+ hour concert DVD featuring PCM stereo and 5.1 Dolby Digital tracks (and mediocre video); Disc 2 is a six-track music CD. I haven’t seen Tori in concert but have always wanted to, and this DVD is probably the next best thing. She performs 18 songs, which are cut together with interviews and comments from fans. Fun stuff.

    “Tombigbee” is one of the new songs included on the music CD, and it’s also her first encore. I wish I knew how to rip an mp3 from the DVD’s stereo track, because this amazing song is even more amazing live. I’m a pretty good pianist. Not great, but pretty good. I’d be great if I could play in front of John Evans and Matt Chamberlain, Tori’s rhythm section. The DVD is worth watching just for them.

    If you’re too hip to like Tori, do me a favor and tell me what you think of this song. It’s a nice change of pace for her. No acoustic piano. A bit of distortion. Borderline lo-fi.

  • Dogville (2003)

    Dogville (2003)

    Dir. by Lars von Trier

    Images: Digital video, much of it hand-held, on a spare soundstage. Day and night are represented by flat white light and darkness. The homes and businesses of Dogville are constructed from white chalklines on the floor and from synechdodal objects — a church bell tower, a shop window, a medicine cabinet. Favorite images: The warm light on Grace’s face after she throws open Jack’s window, the God’s-eye views of Dogville, Grace surrounded by crates of apples on the bed of Ben’s truck, every shot of Harriet Andersson.

    • • •

    There’s little sense in writing about Dogville without discussing its final sequence, and there’s little sense in watching Dogville if you know how it ends. That’s your warning. If you haven’t seen the film, and if there’s even the slightest chance that you will someday, stop reading. Seriously. Or risk ruining a fascinating encounter with a remarkable film.

    For the first two-and-a-half hours, Dogville is similar enough to Lars von Trier’s previous film, Dancer in the Dark, that it lulled me into a kind of detached resignation. Nicole Kidman’s Grace Mulligan wanders into the small, Depression-era town of Dogville, where she’s greeted at first with suspicion, then (with time) charity, then (with more time) abuse and scorn. Like Bjork’s Selma Jezkova in Dancer, Grace is too thick with allegorical weight to survive the inevitable tragedy, I was led to believe. She is a Flannery O’Connor character, I assumed, or a tall, blonde version of that donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar — grace offered, grace accepted, grace corrupted, and grace refused.

    Being so detached, I was free to marvel at the film’s clashing styles: part fairy tale, part corn pone Americana, part Brechtian materialist commentary, Dogville wears its influences on its sleeves and doesn’t give a shit if you notice. That’s part of its charm, actually. Dogville is like an episode of The Simpsons for the angsty, agnostic, anti-corporation set: a patchwork of cultural references and competing mythologies so dense as to suffocate any message beneath all of the damned media. I relished it, though, and just knew that I was one step ahead.

    But then, in the final act of the film, the gangster from whom Grace has been hiding out arrives in town and we learn that she’s one of them — a gangster, I mean. An ambivalent gangster, a gangster clinging desperately to the possibility of sacrifice and redemption, but a gangster nonetheless. After suffering quietly the countless lies and abuses heaped upon her by the townsfolk, Grace turns to her father and says, “If there is one town that the world would be better without, it’s Dogville.” And it’s done. Grace’s tormentors are Tommy-gunned in the most hyper-stylized sequence of an already hyper-stylized film, turning small town America into hell on earth.

    Now, I wish I were making this part up . . .

    I saw Dogville in a nearly empty theater last night. I say “nearly” empty because, other than myself, there were only two other people in the 1,000+ seat auditorium. They sat together, just two rows behind me, of course, and talked incessantly. When Grace sentenced Dogville to death, one of my tormentors cackled loudly and applauded. And here’s the thing: I shared his exhilaration. I did. As much as I love Dancer in the Dark, I can’t bring myself to watch it again — not all the way through, at least. It’s just too hard.

    Viewers of Dogville, however, are spared the painful purging of classical catharsis and are instead treated to its late-20th century (and, as some might argue, American) equivalent: Rambo/Braveheart/Gladiator-style ass-kicking. Ah, revenge is sweet. Critics of Dogville find in it evidence of von Trier’s growing cynicism or his adolescent anti-Americanism or, most interestingly, his abandoned faith in a theology of grace. I’m not so sure. For me, watching the last act of Dogville was a suitably uncomfortable Brechtian experience, as I was washed whole into the fantastic tide of redemptive violence, before coming — finally — to my senses. Suddenly, like so many of her neighbors, I was shamed by my behavior in the presence of Grace.

    A few random notes on Dogville:

    • How wonderful to see Harriet Andersson sharing scenes with Lauren Bacall — two still-beautiful actresses who have allowed their faces to age.
    • I don’t understand how von Trier’s screenplay failed to win more accolades.
    • Zeljko Ivanek needs more work. Damn, he’s a talented actor.
    • Dogville ranks pretty high in my “Films that make effective use of voice-over narration” list, falling in somewhere behind Badlands and Barry Lyndon. Bonus points for hiring John Hurt for the job.

  • Little Children

    I did something last night that I hadn’t been able to do for nearly three months: I stretched out on the sofa and read for two hours. After listening to Terry Gross’s interview with Tom Perrotta, I picked up a copy of Little Children, his latest, which I realized last night is the first book I’ve read about people my age. And by “my age” I don’t mean 31-year-olds — there are plenty of those books out there — I mean a book about people born in the early-1970s, people who listened to Nirvana in college and who are now married (happily or not) and starting families.

    One of the back jacket blurbs describes Perrotta as an “American Nick Hornby,” which seems about right to me, though I’m not sure yet if that’s a compliment or not. The last novel I read was High Fidelity, which, like Little Children, is filled with recognizable characters and recognizable situations. Both books are about relationships and the difficulties of maintaining them in this age of cynicism and irony. And both books are utterly devoid of inspiring prose.

    That’s not to say that Hornby and Perrotta aren’t talented writers. They craft fine stories and have a knack for making the reader care for characters who aren’t particularly likeable. They’ve also discovered a language of pop culture references — a kind of Gen X shorthand that must make their novels excruciating reads to anyone over the age of, say, 55. I just wish that their writing were capable of surprising me as readily as it charms. A few cherry-picked examples from the first 150 pages of Little Children:

    After Todd, a stay-at-home Dad, kisses a stay-at-home Mom whom he meets at the park:

    He had a feeling similar to the one he’d had right before kissing Sarah, like his world had cracked up to reveal a thrilling new possibility. (52)

    After Todd realizes that his marriage is in jeopardy:

    They were heading for trouble, Todd understood that, driving toward a high cliff at very slow speed in a car with no brakes. (99)

    So many of Perrotta’s observations of suburban life are so spot-on — I especially like the way that his lead characters absolutely adore their children while still resenting somewhat the life-changes they’ve caused — but the narrative voice never quite transcends the banality of the lives it is documenting. Maybe that’s the point. I doubt it.

  • Holland

    Holland

    I always keep an eye on Jeffrey Overstreet’s music suggestions (Jeffrey makes a wicked mix CD, by the way), and so I recently chased some links and ended up at InSound.com, where you can download a couple mp3s from Sufjan Stevens, including “Holland.” It’s a heckuva song from Greetings from Michigan. I’ve added it and Stevens’ latest, Seven Swans, to my Amazon Wish List. Can anyone make a strong case for one album being better than the other? Any other Sufjan fans?

  • Cucurrucucu Paloma

    Cucurrucucu Paloma

    I’ve been meaning to post this one for some time now. I’m not sure how well “Cucurrucucu Paloma” will work for those of you who haven’t seen Almodovar’s Talk to Her, but I had to buy the soundtrack for this song alone. (Alberto Iglesias’s original score is also quite beautiful.) I just can’t imagine being able to sing like Caetano Veloso. I’d never talk again.

  • Glenn Tipton

    Glenn Tipton

    I’m pretty sure that this will be the last time I post a Song of the Moment that is named for one of Judas Priest’s guitarists. “Glenn Tipton” by Sun Kil Moon has been in constant rotation since I first heard it Saturday night. I was drawn to the album, Ghosts of the Great Highway, by its striking cover art; it wasn’t until 30 seconds into the first track that I realized that Sun Kil Moon is the new band from Mark Kozelek, formerly of Red House Painters (and Sweetwater, if you’re an Almost Famous fan). This song is what the inside of my head sounds like these days.

    Cassius Clay was hated more than Sonny Liston
    Some like KK Downing more than Glenn Tipton
    Some like Jim Neighbors, some Bobby Vinton
    I like ‘em all

    I put my feet up on the coffee table
    I stay up late watching cable
    I like old movies with Clarke Gable
    Just like my dad does

    Just like my dad did when he was home
    Staying up late, staying up alone
    Just like my dad did when he was thinking
    Oh, how fast the years fly

    I know an old woman ran a doughnut shop
    She worked late serving cops
    But then one morning, baby, her heart stopped
    Place ain’t the same no more

    Place ain’t the same no more
    Not without my friend, Eleanor
    Place ain’t the same no more
    Man, how things change

    I buried my first victim when I was nineteen
    Went through her bedroom and the pockets of her jeans
    And found her letters that said so many things
    That really hurt me bad

    I never breathed her name again
    But I liked to dream about what could have been
    I never heard her calls again
    But I like to dream

  • Chain

    Chain

    “Chain” by The Fire Theft. Why? Because the world needs a good emo waltz, that’s why.

    Jeremy Enigk seems to be taking a good bit of crap for his lyrics on this album — perhaps justifiably so. ButI like this song, and especially this bit: “I’m amazed / I see the world in revolution / Within the darkness a solution”. Too simple for most tastes, I know. Too straight-forward, too lacking in ironic distance. But I like it. Of course, I’m also glad that Enigk found God, so what do I know.

    Chain, I feel the words falling in a rhythm
    I see the world bearing its decision to never give in
    I’m amazed
    I hear the words form some kind of silence
    When the world falls into violence
    We’ll never give in

    Chain, I see the world falling in a rhythm
    I feel the wind bearing its decision to never give in
    I’m afraid
    I hear the words form some kind of silence
    When the world falls into violence
    They’ll never give in

    Chained in silence
    The rhythm of violence
    Change all around us
    Change in everything you see

    I’m amazed
    I see the world in revolution
    Within the darkness a solution
    We’ll never give in

    Chained in silence
    The rhythm of violence
    Change all around us
    Change in everything you see

    According to Grandaddy’s Website, The Fire Theft, Saves the Day, and Grandaddy will be playing a show in Phoenix when I’m there in March. Anyone have an opinion about Saves the Day or Grandaddy? I’m not familiar with either.

  • Quartet

    Quartet

    My wife surprised me yesterday afternoon with the Angels in America soundtrack. “Quartet” accompanies the scene that holds the rare honor of having made me cry two nights in a row. What can I say? Art is my refuge from a life of hardened cynicism. I can only imagine what condition I’ll be in on Sunday night when Louis delivers the Kaddish.

    But back to “Quartet” . . .

    Angels is so powerful in performance because Kushner understands juxtapositions. The best example is when Louis unleashes upon Belize a rambling diatribe about “the limits of liberal tolerance,” while, on the other side of the stage, Prior undresses for a medical examination, revealing his emaciated, lesion-pocked body to the audience. Or when Louis tells Prior that he’s leaving, while, on the other side of the stage, Joe finally owns up to the truth, reducing Harper to a broken shell. (And have I mentioned how good Mary-Louise Parker is?) That is the scene that got me both times I watched Millennium Approaches — Harper’s cry for Mr. Lies to take her away and Prior’s desperate scream from his hospital bed. I have minor complaints with the film, but Nichols got that scene just right.

    Thomas Newman’s score mines familiar ground, and “Quartet,” in particular, harkens to his work on American Beauty. But, all in all, the music serves the film quite well. I particularly like the main theme, which is carried by the strings and often placed in tension with a solo oboe line — a nice musical motif that echoes the ambiguous battle of angels and man.

  • Big Dipper

    Big Dipper

    “Big Dipper” is one more track from a mix CD that I received recently. I’ve never been a big fan of Cracker, but this song really works for me. I love the spare arrangement, especially the acoustic piano and steel guitar, but mostly I like this song because of the lyrics and because of David Lowery’s delivery of them.

    Cigarette and carrot juice
    And get yourself a new tattoo
    for those sleeveless days of June
    I’m sitting on the Cafe Xeno’s steps
    with a book I haven’t started yet
    watching all the girls walk by

    Could I take you out
    I’ll be yours without a doubt
    on that big dipper
    And if the sound of this it frightens you
    we could play it real cool
    and act somewhat indifferent

    And hey June why did you have to come,
    why did you have to come around so soon
    I wasn’t ready for all this nature
    The terrible green green grass,
    and violent blooms of flowered dresses
    and afternoons that make me sleepy

    But we could wait awhile
    before we push that dull turnstile
    into the passage
    The thousands they had tread
    and others sometimes fled
    before the turn came

    And we could wait our lives
    before a chance arrives
    before the passage
    From the top you can see Monterey
    or think about San Jose
    though I know it’s not that pleasant

    And hey Jim Kerouac
    brother of the famous Jack
    or so he likes to say “lucky bastard”
    He’s sitting on the cafe Xeno’s steps
    with a girl I’m not over yet
    watching all the world go by

    Boy you are looking bad
    Did I make you feel that sad
    I’m honestly flattered
    But if she asks me out
    I’ll be hers without a doubt
    on that big dipper

    Cigarettes and carrot juice
    and get yourself a new tattoo
    for those sleeveless days of June
    I’m sitting on the cafe Xeno’s steps
    I haven’t got the courage yet,
    I haven’t got the courage yet,
    I haven’t got the courage yet

  • Wayfaring Stranger

    Wayfaring Stranger

    16 Horsepower is a Gothic country-rock quartet from Denver, but their version of “Wayfaring Stranger” feels so fated, so instinctual, it spreads the South all over the American map, a dusting of damnation on wherever you might be as you listen. Edwards is a brilliant banjo player: His sense of rhythm is as irresistible as it is elusive. On “Wayfaring Stranger,” brilliance means the ability to play as if the player is learning the strings as he makes the notes. You can imagine the singer as the hero of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, the soldier on his trek back to his North Carolina home as the Confederate Army falls apart at the end of the Civil War, stumbling over an abandoned, half-busted banjo on the road, picking it up and discovering it comes with a song, this one.

    Though nothing could be more prosaically American — a believer who has wandered through this land as a witness is ready to “cross over Jordan” — the uncertainty of the player’s touch makes you feel the man isn’t telling all he knows. Singing from inside the folk character, Edwards doesn’t tell you what he’s seen, but you can guess: “I’ll drop this cross of self-denial,” he says, and suddenly a mystical groaning, now pressed by guitar as well as banjo, comes out of the ground. . . . But after only one verse, in less than a minute, the old song stops. It seems to break down into a modern void, into abstract, disembodied sounds that don’t connect to each other; you wonder what happened. Then out of that suspension, the man returns, his scratchy, everyday voice insistent that death is the last promise he will keep: He will die with this song on his lips. He’ll sing it over and over for as long as it takes.

    — Greil Marcus, Interview magazine

  • Are You Awake?

    Are You Awake?

    “Are You Awake?” by Kevin Shields is almost literally a song of the moment. At 1 minute, 35 seconds, it’s my shortest selection yet. I grabbed it from the Lost in Translation soundtrack, which I’ve been listening to all day at work. There’s something beautifully hypnotic about it.

  • The Gloaming

    The Gloaming

    Radiohead broke with routine on Monday night by opening with “The Gloaming.” (The complete setlist can be found here.) “The Gloaming,” like so much of the material from Hail to the Thief, played better live than on the album. I especially like Colin Greenwood’s new walking bassline. The show was broadcast live on Atlanta’s 99X and will be re-aired on Sunday night from 10 – midnight. Because of the FM broadcast there are already some great bootlegs floating around. (Not that I would support such a thing. I mean, the Song of the Moment just happened to appear on my hard drive. Like magic. One of those happy coincidences, I guess.)

  • Mary

    Mary

    I just discovered that Supergrass will be opening for Radiohead Monday night. Very nice! I know that this opinion is terribly unhip, but I’ll say it anyway: More bands need keyboard players, and more songs need keyboard riffs like the one in “Mary.”

  • Lost in Translation (2003)

    Lost in Translation (2003)

    Jonathon Rosenbaum on Lost in Translation:

    Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I’m not sure she accomplishes anything else.

    I like that Rosenbaum threw “not sure” into that last sentence, as if he’s still mulling over his reaction. I feel the same way.  It’s that rarest of finds: an American film that is invested enough in its characters to reveal them slowly, patiently to the audience. For instance, in the third act of the film, when most writer/directors would send their leads into an impassioned and cliche-ridden argument, Coppola sits Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson on opposite sides of a table and films them from a distance. It’s an awkward moment — uncomfortable and tense and recognizably real. I loved it. Their final embrace is also brilliantly staged.

    But, as I watched Lost in Translation, I kept thinking of two other films, and it suffered for the (admittedly unfair) comparison. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women also depicts the modern Asian metropolis as a storehouse of stuff — of manufactured goods marketed, packaged, and photographed with the glossy hipness of a five-page spread in Architectural Digest — but Hou’s film grounds that critique in a particular cultural and historic context. Like a few others, I was annoyed by the outsider-looking-in-and-laughing easy jokes that give Lost in Translation‘s American audiences something to mock but too little to admire. Charlotte’s solitary walks through a temple and a flower-arranging class do offer something of a counter-balance. I guess I’m just ultra-sensitive to anything that smacks of American xenophobia these days.

    More often, though, I was thinking of Tsai Ming-Liang, and of his film, The Hole, in particular. Like Lost in Translation, The Hole is about the desperate desire for communion in an alienating environment, told as an unlikely “love” story. Tsai and Coppola share an interest in elliptical editing, but their styles are quite different. Lost in Translation is composed of brief episodes — short takes of beautifully composed images — while Tsai tends to leave his camera running for minutes at a time. What can I say? I prefer the latter, and at times I sensed that Coppola does to. We often see Charlotte and Bob alone in their rooms, bored and lonely, but we aren’t forced to experience it with them. The most impressive shots, I thought, were of Charlotte pressed against her hotel window, looking over the Tokyo sprawl. It’s a familiar image to Tsai’s fans (is Coppola one?). At times, I wish we could have stayed there longer with her and come to know her better.

    Think I’m going to have to pick up the soundtrack next time I’m out. Great stuff from Air, Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, and The Jesus & Mary Chain.

  • Blinded by the Stars

    Blinded by the Stars

    If there were any justice in this world, Joe Pernice would be on the cover of Rolling Stone and John Mayer would be cleaning Jan Wenner’s pool. The Pernice Brothers made a quick stop at the Pilot Light last night, where they were greeted by a packed and enthusiastic house of Knoxville hipsters. And on a Monday night, no less. Joe is the quintessential reluctant rock star, a guy whose downward glances between songs betray something like embarrassment. When he thanked the crowd, he seemed genuinely surprised that we were there to see him and that we were having such a damn good time.

    Yours, Mine & Ours, the latest release from The Pernice Brothers, is a nearly perfect collection of pop songs, impeccably produced and just dripping with melodic melancholy. “Blinded by the Stars” earned Song of the Moment honors by winning a tight, three horse race, with “Water Ban” and “Baby in Two” tying for second. “Blinded” won thanks in large part to this particular lyric:

    I would tell the world that I love you,
    But the waiting game is as serious as statue.

  • Exit Music (For a Film)

    Exit Music (For a Film)

    Brad Mehldau is such a ridiculously talented pianist, composer, and arranger. His cover of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” isn’t particularly representative of his work, which is often more improvisatory and freeform (check out his Elegiac Cycle album), but it seemed a timely choice. Mehldau’s also been known to cover Neil Young, Nick Drake, Van Morrison, and The Beatles. The liner notes of his album, Progressions, features an original essay on music and the discourse of democracy that floats fluently through Foucault and Faust, Kant and Kubrick. It’s well worth a read.

  • There There

    There There

    Yeah, so like everyone else of my general demographic, I’m listening to the new Radiohead. I mean, it’s, like, required, right? So far, “There There” is my favorite track. Especially at high volumes.

  • Bomb the World

    Bomb the World

    Given my general musical tastes, one of the oddest birds in my CD collection is Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Ten years later it still gets a good bit of play in my house, mainly because of Michael Franti’s voice and his witty, literate, progressive lyrics. “Television” and the title track are both classics. And “Satanic Reverses” (can’t find the lyrics online) is more appropriate now than in ’92. (How many hip-hop artists can say that?) In ’94, Franti formed Spearhead, one hell of a roots-based band, and has remained politically engaged. “Bomb the World” is his response to recent events.

  • Beau Travail (2000)

    Claire Denis’s Beau Travail is a remarkable film. A loose adaptation of Billy Budd, it transposes Melville’s sea voyage to a French foreign legion outpost in East Africa, where the Claggart character (Sergeant Galoup, played brilliantly by Denis Lavant) plots the inevitable destruction of Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), who stands in for Billy. Melville’s novella provides only a rough narrative framework, though. Denis seems less concerned with that epic, allegorical showdown between good and evil — although in one remarkable image, her camera looks down on the men as they circle one another, spiraling closer and closer until they are face to face in a tight close-up — and less concerned, also, with the Christian iconography that punctuates Melville’s prose.

    Instead, Beau Travail foregrounds the concerns of much contemporary Melville scholarship and would probably make a wonderful teaching tool because of it. So, whereas post-colonial critics have, in turn, criticized/praised Melville for his appropriation of racist stereotypes (or his subversion of those stereotypes, depending on which side of the debate each critic stands), Denis situates Melville’s moral dilemma in an explicitly post-colonial situation, complicating further the relationships between European and African, Christian and Muslim, and calling into question the political value and motivations underlying those relationships. In several memorable scenes, the legionnaires exhaust themselves in senseless and utterly futile chores — digging holes, moving stones, repairing unused roads — all the while Africans look on, curious and silent but unmistakably present.

    Likewise, the homoeroticism of Melville’s texts is displayed in beautiful shot after beautiful shot of the legionnaires in training. At one point, they perform a training exercise in which each man throws his body at a partner, ending in an embrace that is both menacing and welcomed. Appropriating the tropes of stereotypical “basic training” sequences (see Full Metal Jacket), Denis brings to the fore those odd narratives that write gender onto our fighting men. She makes particularly good use of Galoup, whose voice and memories narrate the film. Galoup is not an embodiment of pure evil and jealousy like Claggart. Instead, he seems to be motivated by repressed desire — desire for authority and acceptance, but also, the film suggests, homosexual desire. Lavant is just a marvel throughout Beau Travail. As I recall, we hear him speak only in a stylized voice-over (there might be a few exceptions of diegetic speech), but he communicates with perfect clarity through his body language. The film’s final sequence might be impossible to explain, but it felt to me like another of those moments of grace that I’m constantly seeking.

    Beau Travail is also just a beautiful film to look at — stunning images cut together using a poetic logic that is part Eisenstein montage, part neo-realism, part Tarkovsky mysticism. The directors who most often came to mind were Kiarostami, Dumont, and Malick, though I never would have guessed beforehand that those three would ever be found sitting around the same table. A couple useful links:

  • Adaptation (2002)

    Adaptation (2002)

    Last night my wife made some kind of sarcastic comment — a not unusual occurrence around our home — and I responded with, “Oh, honey, irony is so 2001.” After two or three seconds of silence we both laughed.

    The problems of irony, particularly when of the postmodern bent, are on mind-numbing display in Adaptation, a film that collapses under its own self-referential weight so many times that, at some point — and I think it was right about the time that Meryl Streep started humping Chris Cooper — I stopped watching the film and began waiting for it to end. Which is a shame because there are moments in it that are quite good, especially those few scenes when we get to listen to Susan Orlean’s beautiful prose in voice over. If we are to believe anything in the script — a big if, I realize — we can assume that it was that prose that inspired Charlie Kaufman to begin his adaptation in the first place. Or maybe it was the beauty, that most mysterious and troublesome of encounters for the postmodern ironist. I feel about Adaptation like I did the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There a little over a year ago: I’d be much more willing to accept their cynicism if they hadn’t given me glimpses of something more.

    But as the Coens, Kaufman, and Spike Jonze would surely tell me, “That is precisely our point, man.” (Well, I don’t know if they’d add the “man,” but most apologists for these films probably would.) There’s even a nice little bit in Adaptation when Donald Kaufman tells his brother that he’s decided to add to his screenplay a “snake eating its own tail.” “Ouroboros,” Charlie tells him. “He’s called Ouroboros, and that’s me.” Get it? Kaufman (the real Kaufman) has covered all the bases, predicted and undercut our arguments, sealed off any avenue of epistemological escape. And you know what? I just don’t care.

    Adaptation may have felt fresh to me if it had been released thirty-five years ago, or if I had never watched a Godard film or read The French Lieutenant’s Woman (and seen the adaptation, also starring Streep), or if I were oblivious to Sam Shepard, whose True West casts a formidable shadow here. But it’s not fresh and, aside from several amazing performances, it’s not even that interesting. I can’t decide if that opinion leaves me resigned to the realm of the unhip or if I’ve somehow transcended the unhip and circled back around to hip again. But, again, who really cares?

    On a side note, before Adaptation I was subjected to the trailer for Bruce Willis’s next film, Tears of the Sun. Based on this trailer alone, I’m going to pray that this film not only fails miserably at the box office, but that it takes down the careers of everyone involved, too. Imagine a jingoistic and imperialist version of Rambo. (See? There remains the proper time and place for effective irony.)

  • Time Out (2001)

    Time Out (2001)

    What separates Time Out from the recent spate of “disillusioned upper-middle-class white guy has a breakdown” movies is writer/director Laurent Cantet’s interest in the specific economic forces that lead — some would say inevitably — to such discontent. Aurélien Recoing plays Vincent, recently fired from a position he had held unhappily for more than a decade. Ashamed of his failure and unable to escape nagging anxieties, Vincent reinvents himself as an imagined UN employee, while bilking friends out of investment capital that will, he assures them, return steep profits in Africa’s “emerging markets.”

    American treatments of this theme tend to elide the messy problems of multinational capitalism — the massive systems of exploitation and profit that reify workers at every stage. Cantet refuses to let us off so easily. Employing an odd mixture of Hitchcockian logic and late-Bressonian critique, he drops us instantly into a world of systematic victimization where the conflation of financial and humanitarian interests, now indistinguishable from one another in our contemporary public discourse, is exposed as fraudulent and disastrous. Unlike, say, American Beauty, which (satire or not) encourages us to take delight in Lester’s impotent rebellion, Time Out forces us to suffer alongside our representative hero. Whereas Lester gets to experience something like grace (or so the film’s defenders would argue), Vincent’s fate is determined, once again, by market forces. As his wealthy and influential father tells him in the penultimate scene, “Money problems can always be solved.”

  • Already Dead

    Already Dead

    Further (anecdotal) evidence that the record companies are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction: Sea Change is the first Beck album I have purchased, and I never would have done so had I not first listened to it via a file-sharing service. (By the way, Tom Petty also has a beef or two with the major labels.) Sea Change is a fantastic disc — right now it’s running a close second to Beth Orton’s Daybreaker for my Best of 2002. Beck has simplified both his songwriting and production, creating some odd mix of Graham Parsons and ELO. At the moment “Already Dead” is my favorite track, but there really isn’t a weak spot here.

  • Frida (2002)

    Frida (2002)

    Dir. by Julie Taymor

    Images: I’m tempted to compare the cinematographic style of Frida to “magical realism” of the Borges and Marquez bent, but Taymor’s visual flair is more often mannered than magic. The worst example is a strange sequence involving Nelson Rockefeller that alludes, both visually and through the score, to Hollywood gangster pictures of the 30s but comes off as campy instead of expressionistic. Still, though, there are a few stunning images. My favorites: Frida and Diego as painted cut-outs at their wedding reception, a low-angle shot of one of Diego’s mural-covered ceilings, Frida and The Broken Column.

    • • •

    Julie Taymor’s Frida is a better-than-average 2-hour biopic, evidencing many of the typical strengths and weaknesses of the genre — a fascinating life told too quickly that borders, uncomfortably at times, on hagiography. Beginning in 1953, on the day of Frida Kahlo’s first formal exhibition in Mexico, the film then jumps to 1922, when the artist was a precocious 15-year-old, shocking her family with her outrageous behavior and rogering* her boyfriend in a bedroom closet. The remainder of the film weaves chronologically through her life, ending with a remarkable image of her deathbed in 1954. In between, we watch as she develops a complex, lifelong relationship with fellow Mexican artist, Diego Rivera — played to perfection by Alfred Molina — and as she flirts with political radicalism, artistic inspiration, and an assortment of lovers.

    Frida is a film about a significant Modernist art movement; it’s about love and loyalty and marriage; it’s about Communism, Leon Trotsky, Josephine Baker, and Nelson Rockefeller; it’s about the struggle for personal, political, and artistic integrity; but mostly Frida is about Salma Hayek’s body. It’s about her washboard midriff, her flawless skin, and, perhaps inevitably, her bombshell breasts. It’s about her lips (in a lock with Ashley Judd’s). It’s about her 5′ 2″ frame (dwarfed by Alfred Molina’s). It’s about her eyebrows, her legs and feet, her vagina, and the small of her back. It’s about her brown eyes and her brown skin and her black hair. And I wonder now if a biopic of Frida Kahlo could be shot in any other way.

    While still a student, Kahlo was involved in a bus accident that left her back and legs broken and her abdomen impaled. The emergency procedures intended to save her life launched a decades-long struggle through corrective operations, chronic pain, and, significantly, several miscarriages, all of which are chronicled in brutal and explicit detail in her often autobiographical work. In a move that is at times remarkable, at others painfully self-conscious, Taymor brings several of Kahlo’s self-portraits to life. Doing so offers us something that is lacking, I think, in Hayek’s performance: access to the artist’s troubled, fearless, and (in the first-wave sense) “feminine” subjectivity. The most effective instance comes near the end when, after watching Kahlo be lashed by her doctor into a back brace, we are transported into her painting, The Broken Column (1944). The tears in the portrait meld in the film with the tears of the artist and with the drips of her brush, joining in a single image a recurring message of the film: as Diego tells his wife, “I paint what I see; you paint what you feel.”

    And what Kahlo feels is always inextricably bound — psychologically, politically, and quite literally — to her body, which is one of the many reasons that she has been appropriated in recent decades as an icon of sorts by feminist scholars. A painter who might be compared to, say, Kate Chopin or Virginia Woolf, she approaches her medium from (excuse the jargon) a gynocentric perspective: documenting the particularly female experience from a particularly feminine subjectivity. Which is exactly why I find myself, a day later, still struggling to reconcile my ambivalence over Taymor’s treatment of her star.

    It would be dishonest, of course, to elide the details of Kahlo’s physical condition or those of her sex life — both of which are absolutely key to understanding Kahlo, the artist — but somewhere in the process (and it’s quite possible that Hayek’s much publicized struggle to “get this film made” is a factor) Taymor chose to charge much of the film with an often dissonant eroticism. The effect is created by a host of smaller decisions: the omission of Kahlo’s facial hair in all but a few shots, the framing of close-ups so as to include what could only be described as Hayek’s “heaving bosom,” the deliberate effort of the camera to show what had already been more effectively implied. I’m afraid that, in this age when images are inevitably captured from films, stripped of their context, and posted on the Internet, Frida will only become more and more about Hayek’s body in time and that much of the artist’s message will be distorted in the process.

    * I’ve been looking for an excuse to use “roger” as a verb ever since discovering it a few years ago in William Byrd’s The Secret History of the Dividing Line (1729). What a strange, strange book.

  • Punch-Drunk Love

    Punch-Drunk Love

    Dir. by P. T. Anderson

    Yesterday afternoon, I had the strange pleasure of watching PT Anderson’s latest film, Punch-Drunk Love. Anderson is one of only two contemporary American filmmakers who are able to genuinely surprise me each time out (the other is also named Anderson). Anderson makes Hitchcock proud in a few scenes, cranking up the dramatic tension to almost unimaginable heights. I am so impressed. Apparently a few others weren’t, though, including the six or eight people who got up and left midway through. Stuart Klawans’s review is now up at The Nation. I love these two paragraphs, which come closer, I think, to explaining the magic of the film than any other review I’ve found:

    Which brings me to the shot: the climactic moment you may have seen excerpted in TV commercials or frozen in newspaper ads. As the song approaches its high point, Lena flings herself onto Barry. The two are silhouetted, in medium long-shot, against a doorway that opens onto a beach. For a second, they’re alone: two black outlines against a blue rectangle, in the middle of the CinemaScope frame. Then, from the left and right, other silhouettes begin to cross the screen, as Lena and Barry go on embracing. Barry finally knows, a little, how another person is; and now that he does, multitudes of people come rushing in — people of every description — as if Barry were being released into the world.

    Or maybe the audience in the movie theater — a multitude of figures in the dark — is released into the movie. As the shot filled up, I felt as if I, too, might walk right through this movie, which had abruptly opened into gregariousness. Here was a moment of pure happiness, discovered at the violent, innocent heart of Punch-drunk Love. Whether it’s delirium or sanity I can’t say, but I’m very glad to have been included.

  • What Time Is It There? (2001)

    What Time Is It There? (2001)

    Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang

    Images: This is a beautiful film. Tsai and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme combine warmly saturated interiors with cold, stark, exteriors (particularly in the Paris scenes). The film is composed almost entirely of static, medium shots, each typically lasting more than a minute. Favorite images: Hsiao Kang drying his hands in a movie theater lobby, the mother sharing her misery with a fish, and the beautiful close-up of Chen Shiang-chyi in the final moments. Actually, the entire final sequence is one of the most stunning I’ve ever seen (so stunning, in fact, that I decided to not spoil it with a screen capture).

    • • •

    Charles Taylor opens his fine review of What Time is It There? with the question, “How do you praise the films of Tsai Ming-Liang without making people dread the prospect of going to see them?” The temptation when writing about a film such as this is to lose oneself in an intellectual dissection of its most explicit and admittedly somber concerns: alienation, sorrow, mourning, loss. Hardly the stuff of a Saturday matinee. Tsai has certainly invited such thoughtful analysis throughout his career — I even took him up on the offer after watching Vive L’Amour — but doing so with What Time is It There?, which I’ve now watched on each of the last three days, seems almost dishonest. I’m reluctant to reduce this film to just another Antonioni-like lament (though those echoes surely remain) because doing so would require that I neglect the joy and humor of the film and would force me to too casually equate sadness with irreparable decay, loneliness with nihilism. The film, I think, carefully avoids this trap, so I’ll try to do the same.

    Tsai’s favorite everyman, Lee Kang-sheng, returns as Hsiao Kang, a Taipei watch vendor mourning the sudden death of his father. In an early scene, Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi), a beautiful young woman preparing for a trip to Paris, convinces Hsiao Kang to sell his own watch to her. Their brief encounter inspires in him a sense of longing, which he acts upon by systematically resetting clocks to Paris time and by watching, again and again, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. While Hsiao Kang pines away in Taiwan, Shiang-chyi wanders through Parisian cafes and Metro stations, adrift in the rituals of loneliness: listening silently to the late-night sounds of an upstairs neighbor, longing for contact with random strangers. To this strange pairing, Tsai adds Hsiao Kang’s mother (Lu Yi-ching), a woman paralyzed by grief who also seems to find relief only through ritual, both religious and domestic. The images of her preparing her dead husband’s meals are complex and contradictory, beautiful and devastating.

    And it is precisely that tension between beauty and sorrow, a hallmark of great drama at least ever since Aristotle defined “catharsis,” that I would offer in response to Taylor’s opening question. Implicit in Tsai’s critique of an increasingly disjointed, impersonal modern world — and, really, hasn’t this position lost some of its novelty over the last century and a half? — there exists ample evidence of the possibility of honest human communion. What Time is It There?, more than any of the other Tsai films I’ve seen, takes delight in that possibility, marking avenues of escape from alienation by way of the film’s style if not necessarily by its content.

    The mother is as good a starting point as any. In one of the film’s most touching scenes, she dresses formally for a private dinner, accompanied only by her husband’s empty chair at the table. Like Hitchcock’s “Miss Lonelyhearts,” she raises a toast to her imagined companion before breaking into tears. It’s a trademark Tsai moment: his camera remains static throughout the long take, framing his subject in a medium long shot; the actress works alone in silence, her movements measured and deliberate. The tendency of most critics, myself included, has been to reduce these signature scenes to meditations on Modernist dismay, but doing so too easily dismisses the honor and wonder of mourning. Hsiao Kang’s mother is not a desperate individual adrift in an irrational, alienating world (or some such cliché); instead, she is like the rest of us, one who has obviously known love and companionship and now, suddenly, must make sense of loss. Tsai’s style, which is often rightfully compared to the silent cinema, frees us to experience the full brunt of attendant emotions: agony, nostalgia, despair, desire, hope.

    The wonderful paradox at the heart of this film is that, while exposing the dehumanizing conditions of contemporary life, it simultaneously celebrates the breadth and value of all emotional experience. Shiang-chyi, for instance, certainly suffers profound loneliness and longing in Paris, but those perfectly legitimate feelings are accompanied also by a joyful freedom and curiosity. The first time I watched What Times is It There? I was confused by an enigmatic scene in which she climbs a flight of stairs to investigate her noisy neighbors and becomes distracted by a hallway window. By the third viewing, I was anticipating the moment because it so perfectly characterizes her recognizably conflicted nature. She desires contact with others, of course, but she is also surprisingly content to explore the world on her own. Hsiao Kang is likewise a young man like so many of us, marked at times by deep despair — the image of him crying in his sleep rings more true to me than any other in the film — and at others by absurd humor. As I recall, I also didn’t laugh out loud until that third viewing, when the frequent critical comparisons of Tsai and Buster Keaton began to finally make sense. All three characters in What Time is It There? represent Tarkovsky’s ideal — those who are “outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion” — and that passion alone is reason enough to watch.

  • Thinking About Tomorrow

    Thinking About Tomorrow

    I just spent the last hour in nirvana, listening to Beth Orton’s new album, Daybreaker. Soooooo good. 51 minutes of music without a single weak spot. Emmylou even shows up on a track, so you know it’s good. I think this is her official site, which, by the way, is so well designed that even dial-up folks like myself can listen to the audio samples. Check out “Thinking About Tomorrow,” which is some kind of beautiful blend of Lou Reed and Sarah McLachlan that manages to improve on them both.

  • The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

    The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

    Dir. by Joel and Ethan Coen

    Images: Another beautifully shot film from Roger Deakins. They obviously enjoyed taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by shooting in B&W: Crane smokes constantly, lighting is often in stark contrast, all trademarks of noir. Favorite images: Crane sitting alone in exact middle of couch, Birdy backlit at the piano, and lawyer Riedenschneider bathed in light streaming in from prison window (a scene straight out of citizen Kane).

    • • •

    Joel and Ethan Coen have carved out an enviable niche for themselves. Working for nearly two decades now in relative independence from studio interference, they have written, directed, and produced a series of interesting, if not always successful (either commercially or artistically), films. In doing so, they have somehow managed to garner the affection of both the popular press and the Hollywood community, while simultaneously fostering a rabid, cult-like fan following: those who can quote Raising Arizona for any occasion and who laugh a bit too loud at theatrical showings. On more than one occasion I’ve heard the Coens described as the “saviors” of American film, a moniker that would, I’m sure, inspire quiet, ironic laughter from the men themselves.

    In a word, the Coens have become critic-proof: to criticize one of their films is to resign oneself to a place among the “unhip.” Which brings me to The Man Who Wasn’t There, a film I’m hesitant to describe as a disappointment, if only because, by doing so, I’m setting myself up to the inevitable and tired rebuttals: “The jokes on you. The Coens love to break the rules. They set you up, and you fell for it.” Actually, I do get it. I’m just beginning to lose interest. Or, more precisely, the Coens are failing to hold my interest. But more on that later . . .

    I’m also hesitant to label The Man a disappointment because so much of it is so good. Billy Bob Thornton is impressive in the title role, playing a barber named Ed Crane whose life is lived in futile routine — a mindless job, a loveless marriage. When he becomes embroiled in a messy murder, involving his wife (Frances McDormand), her lover (James Gandolfini), and a traveling businessman (Jon Polito), it appears that, with the excitement, he might also find some meaning in his life. But in typical noir fashion, the exact opposite occurs. In that sense, the conceit of the film is an interesting one: “Modern Man” (as his lawyer refers to him) fights back, becoming active for the first time in his life. But his action leads only to the destruction of everything he holds dear (if anyone is, in fact, capable of holding anything “dear” in a Coen film). Frank Norris would have loved it.

    The problem with The Man is that, perhaps for the first time, the Coens have invested a character with genuine pathos, but seem to have done so (much to my own personal annoyance) only in the interest of later undercutting it with their typical brand of cynical Nihilism. As a pure character study of Ed Crane, the film flirts with honesty and sincerity, which gives certain scenes a quiet grace unlike anything seen in earlier Coen films. For instance, at a Christmas party, Ed discovers a teen-age girl playing Beethoven at the piano. It’s a beautiful scene. Ed is obviously drawn to both the girl — her potential and innocence — and to the music, which seems to offer him some glimpse of beauty.

    But such things — truth, beauty, innocence — don’t exist in the Coen’s world, and any sad sap who believes that they do (like Ed Crane or me, for instance) is just being set up for ridicule. The relationship between Ed and the girl eventually becomes another Coen punchline: the two end up in a car accident after the “innocent” girl leans over to give Ed a blow job. I guess the joke worked. Several others in the theater laughed (a few too loudly).

    The Coens seem to have stepped into an interesting trap here. Never before have any of their films tried so hard to be about something — and, honestly, by the time Tony Shaloub’s lawyer began his speech about “the more you look at something the less chance there is of it making sense” I was just shaking my head — but, ultimately, The Man Who Wasn’t There is only about meaninglessness: the meaninglessness of our lives, the meaninglessness of our loves, and the meaninglessness of this film. I might be willing to buy it all if the Coens hadn’t offered glimpses of something much greater. But, in the end, their cynicism and this film just feel hollow.