Tag: Region: England

TIFF 2012 – Day 6

Dormant Beauty

Dir. by Marco Bellocchio
Inspired by the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who spent seventeen years in a vegetative state and ignited a national cause célèbre, Dormant Beauty tackles the subject of euthanasia by weaving together four stories. In the first, a Senator (Tony Servillo) with first-hand experience of the issue prepares to cast a vote that pits his conscience against his party. Meanwhile, his daughter (Alba Rohrwacher), while participating in pro-life demonstrations, falls for a man whose emotionally-troubled brother is arrested while protesting for the right to die. In the third story, a beautiful drug addict (Maya Sansa) with suicidal tendencies is nursed back to life — perhaps in more ways than one — by a handsome doctor (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio). And, finally, a famous actress (Isabelle Huppert) abandons her career, becomes a recluse, and dedicates her life to caring for her comatose daughter and praying to God for a miracle.

As that summary should suggest, Dormant Beauty is in many respects standard, made-for-TV fare. The script hits every predictable beat. When two characters argue, each actor waits patiently for the other to finish his or her line before responding. Huppert’s devout Catholic whispers on-the-nose lines like, “I can’t hope Rosa wakes up unless I have innocence — unless I have faith.” And yet Bellocchio makes it so much damn fun to watch, especially the story line involving the Senator, which he turns into a Juvenalian satire of politics in a media age. Nearly every shot catches a glimpse of a TV screen in the background that is tuned to coverage of the vote, including several scenes set in the bizarre underworld of the legislative baths, where naked Senators consult with a mephistophelean character known only as Lo psichiatra (The Psychiatrist), who offers political advice and anti-depressants by the handful. I especially like one shot near the end, when Senators come rushing through a door after a vote and by some trick of the camera (a really long lens that flattens depth?), the Senate chamber appears to have been replaced completely by a pixelated video monitor. Dormant Beauty is a bit of a disappointment after Bellocchio’s previous film, the excellent Vincere (2009) — it loses momentum each time Belocchio cuts away from the Senator and his daughter — but its best moments were some of the most exciting of the festival.

Something in the Air

Dir. by Olivier Assayas
Set three years after May ’68 and loosely inspired by Assayas’s own political and artistic coming-of-age, Something in the Air follows seventeen-year-old Gilles (Clement Metayer) from his first direct action in the student movement to a sojourn through Italy to his eventual return to Paris, where he studies art and apprentices under his father in the commercial movie business while attending programs of experimental films at night. Something in the Air offers an interesting point of comparison with Dormant Beauty. In both cases, the writer-directors produced fairly banal scripts, but whereas Belocchio frequently generates new and exciting images from the material, Assayas’s direction is strangely anonymous and unremarkable. For a film about beautiful young people discovering sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and revolution, Something in the Air is inert and humorless. Boring, even.

I did enjoy, however, some of the ironies built into Assayas’s backward glance. Something in the Air tackles a relatively un-sexy moment in the history of the Left and its heroes are refreshingly unheroic. More radicalism tourist than party soldier, Gilles is chastised in one scene by older revolutionaries for believing the reports of bodies washing up in Maoist China. And poor Christine (Lola Créton) abandons Gilles for a group of revolutionary filmmakers only to end up answering telephones and washing their dishes. Assayas’s version of the post-’68 Left is more than a bit sexist, and the concurrent rise of second-wave feminism is felt in the film — intentionally and ironically, I think — by its absence.

Berberian Sound Studio

Dir. by Peter Strickland
Apparently I should have written about Berbarian Sound Studio while I was still in Toronto, because two weeks later I can barely remember it. My notes aren’t very helpful, either. The film opens with extreme closeups of analog sound equipment. Instead of opening titles for Berbarian Sound Studio, we see a fun, throw-back, animated credit sequence for The Equestrian Vortex, the low-budget horror film whose soundtrack Gilderoy (Toby Jones) has traveled to Italy to mix. And there is a dream sequence that was apparently impressive in some way. Thus ends my notes. (I average three pages per film at TIFF.)

In a way, Berbarian Sound Studio is similar to Tower. Both are simple character studies that conform strictly to a set of internal rules. Here, Strickland limits his entire film to two locations, the studio and Gilderoy’s rented apartment, and likewise limits the camera’s perspective to Gilderoy’s increasingly unhinged point of view. The premise is enjoyable enough for forty minutes or so — I’m a sucker for films about filmmaking — but I was genuinely surprised when the closing titles started to run. I was still waiting for the plot to develop into . . . something. I suspect fans of Berbarian Sound Studio will enjoy debating which parts of the film actually happen and which parts exist only in Gilderoy’s mind. These types of questions are, I think, among the least interesting to ask of a film, and in this case I honestly don’t care.

Nights with Theodore

Dir. by Sébastien Betbeder
Nights with Theodore is one of several oddly shaped films I saw at TIFF. The folding of the Visions program into Wavelengths allowed for more double features that paired, say, a 55-minute “feature” with a 30-minute “short.” Their schedule-unfriendly running times make films like this difficult to program, so I was encouraged to see more of them in the lineup this year. Most of my favorite films at the fest fall somewhere in this category. One pleasure of a 67-minute film like Theodore is that it necessarily breaks convention in the most fundamental way. As seasoned film watchers, we’re familiar, deep in our muscle memory, with 85- to 120-minute run times and predictable act breaks. (Peter Watkins, of course, has a thing or two to say about this.) I feel time differently, more consciously, when I watch a film like this because the shape of the narrative is rare and peculiar.

In the case of Theodore, this unmoored-from-convention quality is essential to its success. A fragile nocturne of a film, it imagines the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris as a fairy-tale wonderland pulsing with occult power. Betbeder cuts throughout the film between the main storyline — Theodore (Pio Marmaï) and Anna (Agathe Bonitzer) are young lovers who leap the fence of the Buttes-Chaumont night after night, irresistibly — and documentary material about the park itself. The film opens with archival maps, photographs, and film clips and with a brief history of the park’s founding. We see video footage of the park during the day time when it’s teeming with joggers, tourists, and picnickers. And Betbeder also include a brief interview with an environmental psychiatrist who recounts the story (truth or fiction?) of a man whose bouts with depression corresponded directly with his proximity to the park. I’d like to see Theodore again before declaring whether all of the pieces fit together to offer anything more than an impressionistic portrait of a place transformed by history, imagination, and obsessive love. Regardless, I’m eager to see what Betbeder does next.

The Last Time I Saw Macao

Dir. by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata
Equal parts city symphony, essay, film noir, and home movie, The Last Time I Saw Macao is fascinating conceptually but a bit of a mess. Compiled from hours and hours of video shot over many months and on multiple trips to Macao, the film began as a documentary; it was only during editing that Rodriguez and Guerra da Mata stumbled upon the ultimate form of the project. Inspired by Joseph von Sternberg’s Macao (1952) and other Western, exoticized representations of the Orient, the co-directors scripted a B-movie intrigue involving an on-the-run beauty named Candy, a violent crime syndicate, and a much-sought-after, Kiss Me Deadly-like bird cage and then superimposed the drama onto the documentary footage by means of a voiceover and fiction-creating soundtrack. It’s a wonderful idea. Suddenly a random stranger pacing the street and talking on his cell phone becomes a side player waiting for a clandestine meeting. With the addition of gunshot sounds, a couple shutting down their storefront for the night become the latest victims in a gang war.

Guerra da Mata described The Last Time I Saw Macao as a “fiction contaminated by memory,” and, indeed, “fiction” and “memory” are almost interchangeable here. Guerra da Mata spent much of his childhood in Macao. We hear his voice. The unseen hero of the film has his name. We see him as a child in old family photos. And I wonder if that might account for the uneven tone and pacing of the film. It’s not by coincidence that Candy lives on Saudade Road. (Saudade might be imperfectly translated as a kind of a deep and pleasantly painful longing for something lost and never to return.)

The ideas at play in this film are almost too numerous to count: the political and economic consequences of China’s takeover of Macao in 1999, the complex legacies of Portuguese colonialism, the queering of glamor and a critique of Western notions of Asian sexuality (I haven’t even mentioned the opening sequence, which turns the classic femme fatale song and dance number, like Jane Russell’s from the original Macao, into a beautiful, campy drag show). But The Last Time I Saw Macao fails, finally, to shape them into anything satisfyingly coherent. It was telling, I think, that Rodriguez and Guerra da Mata invited their editor on stage for the Q&A. The noir idea could sustain an hour. The documentary images of Macao could as well. But Guerra de Mata’s saudade — what should be at the heart of the film — is described but too seldom felt.

September 11, 2012
TIFF 2012 – Day 2

Barbara

Dir. by Christian Petzold
Every other contemporary director of traditional narrative films would do well to study Petzold. From shot to shot, cut to cut, Barbara is smart, precise, classical filmmaking at its best. There are no radical or self-conscious gestures in his style — most sequences boil down to some variation on establishing shot / medium shot / closeup / point of view — which here drops us into the secretive perspective of the title character, a doctor (Nina Hoss) who has been relocated by East German authorities to a provincial seaside town. Barbara conforms to all the plot conventions of the “beautiful stranger” genre, which makes the final act — and the final shot, in particular — a bit too neat for my tastes, but the pleasures are all in the filmmaking. There are no clues given about the location of the town, but in the recurring, fairy-tale-like images of Nina Hoss bicycling through the woods, the trees are always being blown by strong gusts, and seagulls can be heard around her; there’s no actual mention of the sea until the film is almost over. A colleague who visits Barbara’s apartment asks if she plays the piano, but, again, we don’t actually see the instrument in her room until a scene late in the film. Petzold’s precision allows him to create a world with suggestions.

Mekong Hotel

Dir. by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul
Mekong Hotel is a small film. It feels homemade, even by Apitchatpong’s small-scale standards. But I found it really moving, especially the final few minutes, when the ghosts that have haunted so much of Apitchatpong’s recent work are embodied by a mother and daughter, who mourn for all of the mothers and daughters who have been lost in Thailand’s tragic past. “Daughter, I miss you,” she says. “I hate that my life has become this,” she says. Apitchatpong has a kind of super-human sensitivity and attentiveness to beauty and sorrow. I’m beginning to think of him as the other side of the David Lynch coin.

Big in Vietnam

Dir. by Mati Diop
It’s a stupid comparison, I know, but this is the messy, ambitious, visually inventive film I wanted Tabu to be. When an actor disappears into the woods while filming a low-budget adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, the Vietnamese director walks off the shoot and goes wandering through the city (Marseille?) until she finds a karaoke bar and meets a man, also Vietnamese, of her generation. Diop then crosscuts between the film shoot, now being directed by the woman’s son, and images of the woman and man as they talk and walk among French sunbathers. When writing about Big in Vietnam, I feel obligated to preface every statement with “presumably.” The 25-minute film is elliptical to the extreme, and the thematic connections are never made explicit. Diop has apparently received funding to expand this idea into feature length. I can’t wait to see it. Big in Vietnam is my favorite film of the festival so far, and by a fairly wide margin.

Sightseers

Dir. by Ben Wheatley
I suspect I’ll end up writing at length about Sightseers in a few weeks, when I have more time. It’s an interesting and well-made film that I might have liked more had I not seen it with an audience that laughed loudly at every brutal killing. I don’t blame them for laughing. The film is designed for laughs. But if I’d watched it alone, it would have been a straight-up horror film, and if I can convince myself that it’s all in the service of a coherent allegory — working-class anger is the best bet — then I might also convince myself it’s a very good film. This is the first Ben Wheatley film I’ve seen, and I really like his visual style. I’m eager to see what he does next.

Student

Dir. by Darezhan Omirbayev
Several critics I admire and whose tastes are similar to my own are big fans of Student, a concentrated, mostly-silent adaptation of Crime and Punishment (or Pickpocket or American Gigolo or L’Enfant, depending on your point of reference) from Kazakhstan. For now, I’m content to sit on any judgment of the film until I’ve had time to read their reviews. The title character is a brooding, non-verbal Raskolnikov, even by comparison to Bresson’s Michel, and for the first hour of the film, Omirbayev’s visual strategy — watching the student walk, zombie-like, stoop-shouldered, through town — left too much unsaid. But after the murder, as the accumulating guilt begins to spawn fantasies, the slow buildup pays dividends. More to come on this one . . .

Wavelengths 1

I’ll cover the Wavelengths shorts programs later, after I’ve had time to watch them again.

September 7, 2012
2009 SFIFF Diary 3

Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (Peter Greenaway)

The last Greenaway film I saw was Prospero’s Books, so I have no idea if Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is a return to form, as programmer Rod Armstrong claimed when he introduced it at SFIFF. A companion to Greenaway’s recent Rembrandt biopic, Nightwatching (2007), Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is an art history lecture disguised as an essay film. In his meticulous dissection of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” Greenaway alludes to the painter’s biography, to the political life of 17th century Amsterdam, to the aesthetic tastes of the day, to romantic intrigues, to the history of technology, and to various schools of relevant academic criticism, but the film seems less intent on uncovering the mysteries of a great painting than on modeling for a contemporary audience the fine and fading art of looking. Really looking.

Though drowning in a whirl of images, we are sorely lacking in visual literacy, the film implies. Or, that’s certainly what I found most interesting about it, at least. Formally, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is an odd bird. Each of Greenaway’s arguments is presented logically and in sequence (such is the burden of a linear medium), but it has something of the quality of a Flash presentation or a late-’90s CD-Rom. I can imagine it being spliced into hyperlinked elements and finding a home as an interactive museum kiosk. (I almost certainly would have preferred to explore it that way.) Greenaway’s talking head even appears throughout the film like a pop-up window, reading from the script in a resounding, pedantic tone that rivals Terrence Davies’s.

The Other One (Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic)

My expectations for The Other One skyrocketed during the opening title sequence, which is a beautiful montage of high-angle, nighttime shots of a mostly-empty, twelve-lane highway. It reminded me of a Claire Denis film — the helicopter ride that opens I Can’t Sleep or the rooftops of Paris in Friday Night. The wide highway leads eventually to a toll station. Then, as I recall, Bernard and Tridivic cut to their heroine, Anne-Marie (Dominique Blanc), who proceeds to drive a hammer into the side of her skull. Anne-Marie, we learn, has recently ended her relationship with a much younger man, freeing him to meet someone more appropriate. When she later learns that his new partner is also d’un certain age, she comes unhinged. She fails, embarrassingly, to seduce him, she cyberstalks, she begins to hallucinate.

With The Other One, Bernard and Tridivic are positioning themselves somewhere in that line from Sirk to Cassavetes to Almodovar, all of them male directors preoccupied by strong women of fading beauty and sexual power. Blanc’s performance is impressive, and the style of the film is often suitably claustrophobic and disorienting, but something has gone awry in the structuring of this film. That cut from the toll station to Anne-Marie’s bathroom is the first of countless ellipses, most of them chronological jumps, both forward and backward in time. It’s not confusing — I never struggled to understand what was happening, or when — but the cutting creates a flatness or stasis in the main character, a woman who is presumably becoming transformed through a moment of crisis. Particularly during the last half hour, as my patience waned, I thought often of Fien Troch’s disappointing recent film, Unspoken, which also seems to assume that fixing a camera long enough on an actress will necessarily reveal the complexity of her character (exactly the wrong lesson to be learned from the best practitioners of contemplative cinema). Sirk, Cassavetes, and Almodovar (at his best) empathize with, are curious about, and have an essential understanding of their heroines. I don’t doubt Bernard and Tridivic’s commitment to Anne-Marie but the film lacks a trustworthy guide behind the camera.

May 12, 2009
Films of the ’80s (part 1)

Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)

Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) leaves her controlling, bourgeois husband André (Guy Marchand) for Loulou (Gérard Depardieu), a petty criminal and top-notch lay, and all hell breaks loose. In my tweet about Loulou I described it as “the missing link (for me) between early New Wave & contemporary naturalism,” which, like so much of what goes on in the twitterverse, is pithy and imprecise. Like Jules and Jim and a number of films from Godard’s first phase — and also like so many of the classic genre films they’re riffing on — the love triangle here is a site of class conflict and shifting sexual and gender dynamics. Who’s the Whore here? Who’s the John? Pialat’s style allows plenty of room for the performers (is Huppert ever not amazing?) and ratchets up the cruelty and emotional suffering. My favorite scene takes place at a family reunion of sorts for Loulou and his kin, which plays like something from a Bruno Dumont film.

Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)

Given Cruising‘s checkered reputation, I was disappointed to discover that it’s little more than an uninventive serial killer movie. That a film set in New York leather bars was financed and widely distributed in 1980 is fairly interesting in its own right (note to self: learn more about Lorimar, who also produced Being There the previous year), but the only aspect of Cruising that really piqued my curiosity was Al Pacino. I’m not refering to his performance, which is refreshingly low-key and out-of-balance, I guess. I’m talking about Pacino himself. He’s bulkier and more muscular in this role, which has the incongruous effect of making him seem smaller. That and his wardrobe made me consciously aware of his body for the first time. Cruising is structured as sensationalized tourism (“And on your right you’ll see that this breed of American Homosexual signals his fetishes with a brightly-colored bandana in his back pocket”), but its real transgression is its foregrounding of the gay male body, which, regrettably, remains a charged political act even now, three decades later. I guess it deserves some credit for that.

Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

My only memory of Atlantic City, which I saw one other time nearly twenty years ago, was, of course, the lemon scenes. I had no idea it was such a strange film. Populated with quirky, two-dimensional characters and structured around over-written and weirdly implausible plot turns, it’s closer in spirit to Sundance-approved American indie cinema of the last decade than the continental drama I was expecting. But, really, it’s impossible to not love Burt Lancaster here. Lou Pascal, the aging and never-too-important gangster he plays, is quietly dignified and kind, which makes him pitiful in the best sense of the word. The final shot of Lou and Grace walking off together after one last score is as sweet and joyful an image as you’re likely to find.

American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

Another loose adaptation of Crime and Punishment, this time by way of Robert Bresson and Jerry Bruckheimer (there’s a pairing!), Paul Schrader’s third film as director is never less than watchable, thanks largely to Richard Gere’s performance, which is appropriately charismatic, pathetic, and vacuous. Schrader now admits he’s unsure whether the moral transformation Gere’s gigolo experiences in the final scene is authentic or “one that was simply imposed on him by his maker.” I share his ambivalence. That American Gigolo places a distant third in a race with Bresson’s Pickpocket and the Dardennes’ L’Enfant isn’t a surprise, but given their radically different modes of production, I find it hard to fault Schrader. It’s an interesting narrative experiment from a Hollywood release of 1980.

Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

Amidst the formal fireworks on display here — the mesmerizingly elliptical cutting, the fast zooms, the unexpected music cues — what I found most shocking was Theresa Russell’s performance, which gives life to a role that, on paper, is little more than a misogynist fantasy. But, damn, she’s good. The image I captured above is from a scene on a bridge, where her reunion with Alex (Art Garfunkel) is spoiled by his pettiness, and her response is so natural and solicitous that, for a second or two, she breaks the movie. All of Roeg’s machinations are undone by the sudden intrusion of uncalculated emotion.

Grown Ups (Mike Leigh, 1980)

Made for BBC2 Playhouse, Grown Ups is about Dick (Philip Davis) and Mandy (Lesley Manville), a working-class Canterbury couple who are settling awkwardly into adulthood and their first home. Next door live one of their former teachers, Mr. Butcher (Sam Kelly), and his wife Christine (Lindsay Duncan), who, at first glance, seem the very models of middle-class civility. And that, of course, is the joke. Leigh has great fun contrasting the cold pedantry of Mr. Butcher with Dick and Mandy’s crass and loud-mouthed affection. The star of the film, though, is a nearly unrecognizable Brenda Blethyn, who plays Mandy’s older sister Gloria — a kind of spinstery, 30-something cross between Vickie Pollard and MadTV’s Lorraine. (Here’s a nice clip of Gloria in action. The entire film is available on YouTube.) Grown Ups reminds me that I need to spend more time with Mike Leigh.

Voyage en douce (Michel Deville, 1980)

Thanks to Dan Sallitt for making several mentions of Deville, the first great discovery of my little jaunt through the ’80s. I’m rarely caught off guard by a film these days, but Voyage en douce, a film I’d never heard of by a filmmaker I’d never heard of, offered one surprise after another. On paper, it sounds like late-night Cinemax fare: two women spend a weekend in the south of France, ostensibly in search of a vacation home, but devoting much of their time, instead, to remembrances of their sexual awakenings, casual flirtations, and, in the words of that old Monty Python sketch, “candid photography” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). From the opening sequence, though, Deville establishes his authorship and makes obvious that titillation is not his chief concern. About À cause, à cause d’une femme (1963), one of Deville’s collaborations with Nina Companéez, Dan writes: “[They] are interested, not in the mechanics of their commonplace plots, but in an affectionate and profuse evocation of the feminine principle, and in giving a deadly serious account of romantic love. . . . To give full play to their concerns while remaining faithful to their narrative task, Deville and Companéez direct us to the important stuff largely through cinematic form.” The same can be said of Voyage en deuce, particularly in its final act, when Bunuel-like moments of surreality disrupt the women’s stories by blurring the divide between fantasy and memory. A stunning film, and one certainly worthy of more than a capsule-length response.

April 17, 2009
Birth (2004)

Dir. by Jonathan Glazer

The first image in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth is a nearly two-minute, uninterrupted high-angle shot of a jogger making his way through snow-covered Central Park. The camera follows a few steps behind him, floating dreamily twenty or thirty feet over his head. It trails the runner for several hundred meters, over hills, around bends, and, finally, under a quiet overpass before momentarily losing sight of him in the darkness. The first cut is to the opening title: Birth, rendered in an ornate, story-book script.

Like most film viewers, apparently, I paid little attention to Birth during its theatrical run. What I remember of its marketing campaign cast the film as another Nicole Kidman prestige picture, one of the countless many that have appeared, with assembly line-like regularity, in recent years. My expectations, though, were completely undone by that first shot. While watching Birth‘s opening sequence I was struck by a feeling I’ve experienced again and again in the months since, as I’ve caught up with Glazer’s first feature film, Sexy Beast, and with his many television advertisements and music videos: I was watching a filmmaker whose mise-en-scene was purposeful, controlled, surprising, and stylized (in the sense that “stylized” is now commonly used to describe films by Quentin Tarrantino and Wes Anderson, for example) but always in the service of story and character. I trusted Glazer immediately and completely.

I’m harping on this one shot because, having now seen Birth three or four times, and having watched the opening moments of the film more times still, I’m fascinated by the durability of its effect. The high angle perspective makes the jogger a small, dark (he’s dressed in all black), and indefinable mark against the white snow. It’s barely color photography at all, in fact — the palette is all shades of gray and beige. This, combined with Alexandre Desplat’s “Prelude,” puts us in a world that isn’t quite real. It’s more Chris Van Allsburg than Martin Scorsese. Central Park is recast as the Grimm Brothers’ forest; I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find the Billy Goats’ troll or a Frog Prince hiding in the shadows beneath that bridge.

Like all good fairy tales, Birth is a dreamscape, really. Fantasy and suppressed desire are manifest in symbol-heavy ghosts and magic. Reason surrenders its claims to knowledge. Emotion reigns. The two films I think of most often when watching Birth are Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, both sublime and uncanny horror stories in their own right. Glazer’s debt to Kubrick is all over Birth — from the slow tracking shots and symmetrical compositions to the spanking scene, which is lifted, whole hog, from Barry Lyndon — but it’s their shared interest in the psychology of sex, death, and human subjectivity that links Glazer’s film most closely with that other Kidman-as-impossibly-wealthy-Manhattanite movie.

Birth is, I think, a curious reimagining of the ideas that propel The Brood, the 1979 splatterfest in which an experimental form of self-actualization therapy gives birth, quite literally, to the anger and self-hatred that, until that point, had been safely repressed by each analysand’s super-ego. Always part satirist, Cronenberg treats 1970s psychotherapy with suspicion (if not downright contempt), but, as has become his trademark, the real horror of The Brood is his qrotesque rendering of deep-seated human anxiety — and, more specifically, anxiety about death, bound as it is to the corporeal, “flesh”-iness of our always-decaying bodies. (Forgive me if that all sounds obnoxiously pedantic. This notorious image from The Brood is more to-the-point.)

The basic premise of Birth is simple enough: a decade after her husband’s death, a young woman meets a ten-year-old who claims to be his reincarnation. Although the boy is certainly a more rounded character than the knife-wielding homunculi of The Brood, he shares their function as a materialization of repressed trauma. (He doesn’t just serve this function, of course. It’s to the film’s credit that, while remaining largely within Anna’s subjectivity — at least from that amazing opera scene on — Glazer and his cowriters have built nice parallels into the story in order to emphasize the similarities between Anna and the young Sean. Their visits to Clara and Clifford’s apartment is one good example.)

Entering spoilers territory . . .

That the central mystery of Birth — is the boy her dead husband or isn’t he? — can be explained away by an important plot point is, impressively, both utterly beside the point and exactly what makes the entire premise of the film so damn interesting. Had Birth ended without revealing the dead Sean’s betrayal of Anna — had the mystery simply been left unresolved or resigned to the realm of the supernatural — Glazer’s portrait of mourning and grief would have been no less impressive or terrifying. (It likely would have become even more dreamlike, veering closer to the territory of a film like Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s À travers la forêt.) As it is, the secret ultimately remains hidden from Anna, so her character, at least when viewed from within the film’s world, is unaffected by any alterations to this particular plot point. Or think of it this way: Kidman would perform Anna exactly the same way, regardless of whether or not those letters existed.

But the letters do exist. And although we never get a significant peek into them, we can make certain safe assumptions about their contents. They’re written by a woman desperately in love with her husband. They touch on the mundane details of the couple’s domestic life together. (“This is my desk. This is where I worked.”) They’re frank enough and intimate enough to include details about a secret romp on their brother-in-law’s couch. They express her regret over the amount of time they are forced to spend apart and her desire to be with him more often. (I wonder, even, if the very act of writing those letters could be a sublimation of Anna’s insecurities and suspicions about Sean’s fidelity.)

I’ve always read Eyes Wide Shut as a hopeless attempt by a man to regain the fictional unity of his own identity after having it exploded by a wife who, as is always the case, turns out to be not at all the woman he had imagined her to be. Birth, I think, is essentially the same story. By way of comparison to another “trick” film, at the end of Birth the “real” Sean remains as much a mystery to us as Keyser Soze. Anna so quickly and so easily falls in love with the young Sean not because he’s a manifestation of her dead husband but because he so effortlessly performs a role that is wholly the work of Anna’s imagination. She has conjured an idealized version of Sean through the magical incantation of her love letters. “I can’t be him because I’m in love with Anna,” the boy tells a police officer, adrift in his own impressive whirl of identity confusion.

My only complaint with Birth is its relatively clunky ending. The final image of Anna wailing in the surf is like a mash-up of The Awakening and The 400 Blows but without the inevitability or rightness of either. I wish it ended, instead, like Eyes Wide Shut, at the precise moment when all the horrors exposed in the film are once again safely repressed by a single word. In Kubrick’s film, the tension is superficially resolved in a toy shop, where Alice restores Bill’s sense of himself by simply telling him they should “fuck.” In Birth, Anna and her future husband negotiate in a corporate boardroom, where she surrenders all of her desires to more acceptable cultural norms. “I want to have a good life, and I want to be happy,” she says. “That’s all I want. Peace.”

I wish the film ended here. “Okay,” he says. Cut to black. And like magic, the monsters disappear.

June 2, 2006
Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)

Dir. by Michael Winterbottom

I had planned to write a longish post today about Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo. I’ve queued up a bunch of his films and hope to watch as many of them as possible in the coming weeks. I was really moved by the film, but I knew, even as I was watching, that I would have been as moved (if not moreso) by a mediocre documentary on the subject. It was the images of the bombed-out city and its dying and hopeless citizens that created the film’s dramatic urgency. When I was aware of Winterbottom’s mise-en-scene at all, I was frustrated by its haphazardness — odd cuts are scotchtaped together by forced music cues, the camera jumps too often into the subjective perspective of unimportant characters (an after-the-fact narrative justification for Winterbottom’s use of a hand-held, I suspect), and the central story gets lost in the noise of several side-plots that, to be frank, are more compelling than the Schindler-like story of a journalist’s decision to save an orphan. A longer response isn’t really necessary, though, because Matt Roth’s piece in The Chicago Reader says it all so well. It’s really a fantastic piece of writing:

Even more than the Western literary tradition, steeped in Conrad, Milton, Dante, and the Bible, the ideology of filmmaking is what ultimately explains Winterbottom’s portrayal of Sarajevo as simply a place of the damned, a position that lets us off the hook entirely. Narratives that take the human-interest approach and center on individuals always valorize personal, direct, unself-conscious action–and always implicitly derogate indirect, bureaucratic action. As it turns out, however, the opportunities for most of us to take pure, direct action–to look into the eyes of a child and determine to save her–are extremely limited.

Even if someone did drop everything to go to Bosnia tomorrow to, I don’t know, nurse war casualties, no one can be in all of the world’s trouble spots at once. So it’s either take highly indirect action through vast, impersonal bureaucracies or take no action at all. Our unromantic reliance on such vast bureaucracies is what makes democracy important–and rigorous policy debates, much more than teary-eyed tales of individual heroics, vital. By advocating an unrealistic course of action, Welcome to Sarajevo ultimately reconciles us to doing nothing at all.

December 20, 2005
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.

September 14, 2004
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.

September 11, 2004
Patrick Marber

I spent last evening — which, like tonight, was cold and rainy — wrapped up on our living room love seat, reading two fantastic plays by a young British writer named Patrick Marber. My dissertation director recommended them after listening to me ramble on and on about how I was now utterly convinced that Angels in America is actually about grace, whatever that means.

I began with Howard Katz (2001), the more recent work. It’s the story of a middle-aged talent agent whose life suddenly collapses around him. I’m tempted to describe it as “Death of a Salesman with a happy ending,” but that seems awfully glib. Like Angels, this play forces its characters and its audience to “wrestle with the Almighty” (still my favorite line from Perestroika), and I’m beginning to wonder if this spiritual (if not explicitly Christian) concern can be called a trend. Marber and Kushner are essentially of the same generation. Both should be deeply cynical and ironic, impervious to the barbs of genuine emotion and longing. But here they are, both of them longing for substance. Howard Katz ends with a moment of redemption that, to be honest, doesn’t read particularly well. Successfully staging the scene must require real care, or I imagine that it would slip quickly into melodrama. But the lines themselves are quite beautiful:

To live.
I want to live.
Tell me how to live.

With Closer (1997) I began to make sense of the frequent comparisons between Marber and Pinter, though the play that most often came to mind was actually Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Closer is likewise built from a cast of four characters, two men, two women, who torment one another with their particular brands of sadism. Like Albee’s masterpiece, Closer creates a brutal, palpable tension by forcing the audience to identify personally with these characters whose actions we often loathe. It’s quite a balancing act. Marber describes it:

The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure — the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play — and inelegant emotion.

November 6, 2002