Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Brazil

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 5

    TIFF 2012 – Day 5

    The Master

    Dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson
    Because I’ve waited until September 21, the day of The Master‘s theatrical release, to write this capsule, and because hundreds of thousands of words have already been spilled on this film (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s review at MUBI nails my response almost exactly), I’ll just add two quick thoughts.

    First, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is truly a strange thing, and not just by Hollywood standards. The way he collapses his chest and distorts his face reminded me of Emmanuel Schotte in L’Humanite (Dumont, 1999) and also of Antonin Artaud’s disintegration from the striking beauty of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) to the toothless madman of his final years. Phoenix’s histrionic showdowns with Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t impress me nearly as much as his moment-to-moment embodiment of inarticulate panic. I’d like to see a Douglas Gordon-like version of this film built from nothing but long-distance shots of Phoenix walking.

    Second, like nearly everyone else I think the final hour or so of The Master is muddled and frustrating, but I love the final scene, when Freddie: a. finally gets laid, and b. uses the language of “The Cause” as a means of seduction. My main complaint with PT Anderson’s previous film, There Will Be Blood (2007), is that the meticulous period detail is window dressing rather than anything like a real historical context, which is why I’ve never been convinced by readings of it as an analysis of a particular development in capitalism (or religion, for that matter).

    The Master, I’d argue, is about post-WWII America in a way that Blood is not about the early-20th century oil boom. Because it defeated a black-and-white evil in Hitler, we like to pretend the “greatest generation” wasn’t devastated — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, sexually — by the trauma of war. While hardly a perfect film, The Master is, I think, a curious study of the anxiety and desperation that characterized the lives of so many returning veterans and the loved ones they’d left behind. (I never would have guessed a PT Anderson movie would remind me of The Best Years of Our Lives [Wyler, 1946].) That final sex scene makes explicit what has been implied throughout the film. Cults, modern marketing and advertising, talk therapy, family, religion, sex, love — especially love — are all a kind of maddening seduction.

    Prediction: Someone is already writing an academic conference paper on The Master and jouissance.

    Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

    Dir. by Marcelo Gomes
    First, a quick game of Six Degrees of Brazilian Cinema. Hermila Guedes, who plays Veronica here, also starred in Gomes’s first feature, Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures (2005), which was co-written by Karim Ainouz. Guedes also starred in Ainouz’s breakthrough film, Love for Sale (2006). Ainouz was at TIFF last year with The Silver Cliff, a character study of an attractive, 30-something dentist who suffers an identity crisis after her husband, without warning, leaves her. Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is a character study of an attractive, 30-something doctor who suffers an identity crisis after her father is diagnosed with a vague critical condition. I mention all of that because Veronica is familiar in the worst ways. The Silver Cliff was one of my favorite undistributed films of 2011; Veronica, inevitably, suffers by comparison.

    Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is book-ended by what we eventually learn is Veronica’s vision of ecstasy (or something like that), a strangely prudish orgy on a sun-drenched beach. The opening image is interesting simply because it lacks any context: What’s not to like about beautiful, co-mingled naked bodies rolling in the sand and floating in shallow waters? When the vision returns at the end of the film, immediately after an unnecessarily long, faux-dramatic shot of Veronica being baptized by sea spray and a standard-issue “making a new start” montage, it’s reduced to a banality. Perhaps this is Gomes’s stab at transcendence? There’s just no magic in his mise-en-scene, and certainly nothing approaching the rapturous image of Alessandra Negrini dancing her ass off in The Silver Cliff. Even Gomes’s documentary-like footage of carnival is boring. Seeing this film 24 hours after Far from Vietnam made me wonder what Chris Marker could have made of those crowd scenes. Talk about paling in comparison.

    Birds

    Dir. by Gabriel Abrantes
    I saw the double bill of Birds and Viola because so many friends — really, everyone I spoke to who had seen any of Piñeiro’s work — told me to. So I went into the screening without having even read the program description, which in hindsight I regret. Birds is a lo-fi, 16mm mash-up of ideas, most of which flew by me (no pun intended) on a first viewing. Told in Greek and Creole, it adapts Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, turning it into an ironic commentary on the legacies of colonialism in Haiti. I hope to see Birds again before writing more about it. I suspect it will reward the effort.

    Viola

    Dir. by Matías Piñeiro
    The great discovery of TIFF 2012, Viola is a fantasia on love that dances between dreams, theatrical performances, and a kind of hyper-sensual reality. “When he was singing, I thought I truly loved him,” the title character says in the film’s closing line. It’s typical of Piñeiro’s fluid perspective — a wistful, past-tense comment on a joyful present. Had I not known Piñeiro is barely 30 years old, I might have guessed this was an “old man” movie. His acute attention to potential love (or infatuation) is almost nostalgic, as if that surplus of feeling is so profound because it was always so fleeting. There are three kisses in the entire film, each significant in its own way, but like the particular scenes from Shakespeare that he cuts and pastes into his dialog, all of Viola is charged with barely-suppressed desire. I don’t know how else to put it: this is a really horny movie.

    Except for a brief interlude in which we see Viola riding her bicycle through town, delivering packages for her and her boyfriend’s music and film bootlegging business, Piñeiro and cinematographer Fernando Lockett adhere to a unique visual strategy throughout the film. Each scene is built from only a handful of shots. Characters are typically framed in close-ups, usually from slightly above and with a very shallow, always-shifting depth of field. The camera moves often but in small and smooth gestures. And, most importantly, nearly all character movement happens along the z-axis.

    That’s all worth mentioning, I think, because the form of the film — or, more precisely, the video; Viola is the new standard by which I’ll judge other indie DV projects — is so integrated with its content. Piñeiro often builds scenes around three characters. In some cases all three participate in the conversation (my two favorites take place in a theater dressing room and in the back of a mini-van); at other times, two characters talk while a third remains just outside of the frame, either literally or metaphorically. Viola is a talky movie, and its eroticism (for lack of a better word) is in its language and in its shifting compositions of faces. Piñeiro seems to have found a new form to express the the classic love triangle. The best comparison I can think of is the cafe and tram scenes in Jose Luis Guerin‘s In the City of Sylvia (2007).

    According to Andrea Picard’s excellent program note, Viola is the second film (after 2010’s Rosalinda) in a proposed series “inspired by Gérard de Nerval’s Girls of Fire, an 1854 collection of short stories and sonnets each named for its eponymous heroine.” I can’t wait to see the rest.

    Wavelengths 4

    More to come in my full write-up for Senses of Cinema.

  • 2007 TIFF Days 1 and 2

    2007 TIFF Days 1 and 2

    My favorite scene in Persepolis takes place at a small kitchen table in the childhood home of writer/illustrator/co-director Marjane Satrapi. An anxious neighbor has dropped in to tell them that her 14-year-old son has been recruited to join the fight against Iraq. Satrapi’s mother — fearless, kind, intractable — comforts her friend, promising, “We’ll talk to him.” The scene ends with a simple voice-over: “Because of my parents, the boy did not go to war.” It’s the kind of moment that could very easily have been cut from the film for the sake of pacing. (And Persepolis does, I think, have some minor pacing problems.) But it’s the level of specificity in the scene, and in the film at large, that makes it so compelling. That moment at the kitchen table so radically transformed Satrapi’s understanding of her parents that now, more than two decades later, she’s still meditating on its significance from the vantage of adulthood. I should also add that the film’s animation is a real pleasure to watch — witty, surprising, and beautiful.

    All of Fengming, A Chinese Memoir is summed up in the opening minutes of the first interview. He Fengming takes her seat in front of the camera, where she will remain for nearly all of the next 180 minutes, and begins to tell the story of how her life was forever changed in 1949, when at the age of 17 she left the university to join the staff of a newspaper. “And that,” she laughs, “was the start of my revolutionary career.” Her laugh is sarcastic and a little bitter. “We were so naive back then,” she later tells director Wang Bing. “Back then,” she and her husband were branded as “Rightists” by the Party and were separated from each other and from their two young sons in order to undergo rehabilitation at labor camps. Her husband died in his; she returned briefly to her family before being detained again during the Cultural Revolution. We learn relatively late in the film that Fengming wrote a book-length account of her life in the late-1980s, which proves to be an important detail in understanding the form of Wang’s remarkable film. Shot entirely in long static takes, with only a handful of cuts and quick dissolves, it seems to present an unedited account of Fengming’s story. But her story has been edited — over the course of nearly sixty years, changing slightly with each of the tellings and each of the hours spent hunched over a typewriter and notepad. So, for example, when she describes the night when she discovered her husband had died, her language takes on an uncharacteristic literariness, with extended metaphors and hand-picked symbols. Recounting this most “rehearsed” of her memories, she remains composed and calm, despite the horror and sorrow. When she describes a more recent event, however — one that occurred after she’d written her book and that she’s yet to fully integrate into her life’s narrative — she chokes and sobs. I have two pages of hand-written notes on Fengming, one of my favorite films of the fest, and hope to return to it later.

    Hou Hsiao-hsien might be my favorite living director, so I had assumed that the lukewarm reviews of Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge coming out of Cannes weren’t to be trusted. I was right. At this point, midway through the festival, Voyage is among my two or three favorites. I’m hopeless when it comes to writing about Hou, whose films are visceral and emotional experiences for me. A friend asked after the screening if I thought the red balloon was integral to the film — if it was necessary at all — and I realized in answering that, for me, the balloon had acted as a kind of emotional locus: a splash of color and beauty, less symbol than catalyst or accelerant.

    Last year at the festival, I assumed I had missed something when I came away ambivalent from Manufactured Landscapes. I discovered Friday night that what I had wanted from Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary was, in fact, something closer in spirit to Peter Hutton’s At Sea, a 60-minute, silent triptych about the birth, life, and death of a modern ship. Hutton’s film begins at a massive boatyard in Korea — one of several aspects of At Sea that reminded me of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus — where we watch, in a series of strange and awesome compositions, the workings of modern technology at its most forceful and elegant. In the middle act, Hutton turns his camera to the sea itself. He booked passage on a trans-Atlantic freighter and filmed the water as it churned beneath him and as it turned the moon’s reflection into abstraction. And the final twenty minutes take place on the shores of Bangladesh, where poor men and boys participate in a growing and dangerous trade: breaking ships with their bare hands and the simplest of tools. The structure of the film makes a compelling (if obvious) argument: “The developing world is our dumping ground,” as Hutton said during the Q&A. But that was less interesting to me than the form of his shot selection and cutting. When a member of the audience challenged Hutton, suggesting that his film would be as effective as a series of still photos, Hutton, non-plussed, responded with a phrase I’ll be regurgitating for years. (I’m paraphrasing.) “It’s very difficult for us to watch a silent film today. Cell phones ring. We’re easily distracted. I’m interested in countering the emotional velocity and the visual velocity of contemporary films.” The film’s form, then, which deliberately challenges our “emotional velocity,” offers a more radical political position than its content, I think.

    At the very end of Mutum, a middle-class, urban doctor rides into the isolated Brazilian village where the film takes place and offers a young boy a pair of glasses, opening his eyes to the world around him. I was relieved during the post-screening Q&A to hear director Sandra Kogut acknowledge the similarities between herself and that doctor. I’m deeply ambivalent about films like Mutum. They’re a kind of genre, really — stories of the poor in the developing world, shot by well-educated, middle- to upper-class filmmakers, that are then taken to film festivals, where they’re easily digested by well-educated, middle- to upper-class audiences. A surefire cure for those annoying bouts of liberal guilt that plague folks like me. When children are the focus of the story, it’s even easier. Kogut seems to be aware of all of this and has crafted a solid film from the source material, a classic Brazilian novel by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. The key to the film’s success, I think, is Kogut’s camera, which never escapes the subjective perspective of her protagonist, a ten-year-old boy who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him. Because of that p.o.v., the film is full of ambiguities and, occasionally, oversized emotion. This is Kogut’s first feature, and I look forward to seeing whatever comes next from her.

  • The End and the Beginning (2006)

    The End and the Beginning (2006)

    Dir. Eduardo Coutinho

    “We want to hear stories,” director Eduardo Coutinho says early in this film, which is built almost entirely from interviews he conducted over a two-week period in Paraiba, a backlands town in in the northeast of Brazil. Specific stories. Intimate, personal stories. Ten minutes or so into the film, as a man in medium close-up describes the hard circumstances of his life, Coutinho drowns him out with his own voice-over narration, informing us that this story won’t do, that it lacks the “closeness” he’s seeking. And so, with the help of Rosa, his young guide, he focuses instead on the community where she lives, a small network of aged kin who’ve given their lives to the hard land they live on.

    Many of the people Coutinho interviews inhabit the same homes where they were born six, seven decades earlier. Their skin is hard and deep-lined, and their stories are similar: each began a life of labor during childhood, only a few received a formal education; there were marriages (most of them successful, or so they say) and many, many pregnancies. We learn about all of this from their lively, impassioned, and occasionally bitter remembrances. Coutinho, we discover in a surprising two-shot near the very end of the film, sits quite close to his interviewees (typically, they’re framed in tight close-ups), earning their trust and fondness.

    Very much like a film I saw here at SFIFF two years ago, Raymond Depardon’s Profiles of Farmers: Daily Life, The End and the Beginning is, in Coutinho’s words, “a tale of a life that is rapidly disappearing.” Frankly, I remember almost nothing of Depardon’s film, but I suspect Coutinho’s will linger with me for quite a while, partly due to the charm of his subjects, but also because, in acknowledging its position as a work of documentary — the first words of the voice over tell us that the film “began from scratch”; the crew simply drove out of Rio de Janeiro and showed up in Paraiba — The End and the Beginning also serves as a kind of test case, giving a media(ted) voice to people who have never had one before but never pretending that such mediation is without moral and political consequence.

    When Coutinha returns to each of his interviewees to say a final goodbye, there is genuine sadness in their faces (or at least in the faces that made the final cut). Earlier, one man in particular had expressed misgivings about appearing on camera, saying that he felt his words would be spoken “in vain.” When Coutinha asks him what he means, he says, “a word in vain is a word with no future.” The line resonates throughout his final on-camera appearance. In the intervening days he’s apparently thought a great deal about filmmaking. He suggests, even, that Coutinho shoot him from a different angle, then he laughs, and instantly we imagine him alone in front of a mirror, turning and looking through the corners of his eyes at his right profile then the left and back again. Given an opportunity, finally, finally, to tell his story, he regrets that the chance has passed so quickly. “You’re a smart and interesting man,” Coutinho tells him. “I have more to tell,” he says.