Some Came Running

NYFF 2012: "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet"

In 2007 I had the great privilege of doing a telephone interview with Alain Resnais. It was a very genial conversation that alighted ona variety of topics, one of which, no surprise, was his still-contentious 1961 collaboration with the late writer/filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year At Marienbad. The movie still tends to be viewed by some through critic Pauline Kael's rather stubbornly dense reading of it—the gist of it being that it's one of the pictures that inspired her mot about "come dressed as the sick soul of Europe" costume parties—so I discussed it with Resnais with an emphasis on its more formally playful aspects, which include the appearance of a cardboard cutout of Alfred HItchcock and a pastiche of the Hollywood classic Gilda. He was not unreceptive to my perspective, but also gently cautioned against the notion of characterizing the whole thing as some kind of meta romp. As his interpreter put it, "Yes, there are some very funny jokes in Marienbad. But [...Resnais] hopes it doesn't take away from the tragedy."

And so. Resnais' latest picture, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, opens with some good jokes, beginning with its title, which heralds back to a different technological turning point in the history of film. The design of the title sequence, which does not but might as well incorporate the image of a flying unicorn, evokes a particular faux-grandiose Euro-cheesiness that's also quite amusing. Then there's the conceit of the movie itself. A flatbed-truck-load of great French actors, from Amalric to Wilson and with Arditi, Azema, Consigny, Girardot, and Piccoli and many others in between, are seen being summoned by phone to the chateau of a dear friend, a playwright named Antoine d'Anthac. Antoine's gone and died, and he wanted these friends to attend the reading of his will and testament. And so this amazing cast hies to an ornate CGI-rendered mountain retreat, where they are greeted by an unusually cheery Antoine via posthumous video. Turns out he wants to go over old times, particularly his play Eurydice, which various members of this cast, we learn, portrayed in various productions over the years. There's another theater company working up a version, Antoine tells the renowned thespians, and he wants their feedback on their version of the play. Which then begins on the big-screen display in Antoine's home theater. And the cast assembled for the reading of Antoine's will begins to interact with what's on screen, creating a mashup, if you will, wherein most of the entirety of Eurydice, a 20th-century gloss on the Orpheus myth, plays out for the viewer—that's you, and/or me. 

If you're somewhat familiar with 20th-century European drama, and/or have paid attention to the movie's opening credits, you'll comprehend that this Eurydice is a real thing—it's a play by Jean Anouilh that predated Jean Cocteau's cinematic gloss on the Orpheus myth by several years. The two have little in common, as it happens, aside from the ancient-to-modern transposition. The actors-called-to-a-playwright's-will-reading conceit is ALSO adopted from an Anouilh play: a later, and altogether more obscure work entitled Dear Antoine, or, Failed Love. So there's another set of mashup parentheses bracketing the opposition of the Resnais rep company and the lesser-known actors in the fictional theatrical company that they're running competing versions of Eurydice with.

All this sounds rather remarkably impenetrably knotty and maybe impossibly French, and there's a sense in which cultural specificity seems kind of crucial to "getting" what's going on here. (Because I'm a horrible person, I was highly amused to read a writeup by a VERY know-somethingish whippersnapper in which he cited Antoine D'Anthac as a real playwright, and Jean Anouilh as a fictional one. It's like you've never seen Waltz of the Toreadors or Becket or something!) However. Once the conceit is successfully realized and the Eurydice action moves forward while toggling in different modes, the movie's exploration of the art of acting and the fungible nature of what we call "tragedy" takes on a remarkable immediacy that's rendered more than slightly phantasmagorical by the 90-year-old Resnais' delight in the play of digital space. Most, if not all, of the setting inhabited by the actors transporting themselves (and the audience) in D'Anthac's lair are digital simulations, from great halls that look like video-game foyers to ratty pension bedrooms wherein various iterations of Orpheus and Eurydice enact their passion and domestic disputes. 

And while the viewer is taking in all of the various filters through which what is finally a very old and simple-as-Death story is being processed—and just to think, we ain't seen nothin' yet!—that story, its elemental themes of passion and mortality, comes through in a very direct way, via the performances and the way Resnais' camera views them. The formal innovations and sense of play aren't distractions from the emotion, rather, Resnais suggests, it is only through the rigorous exercise of the imagination that art is able to communicate anything even suggesting the Real. There'll be more to say when the picture gets a proper release and the rest of you are able to see it; I'm happy to report that Kino Lorber was not at all intimidated by its French-ness and will be releasing the film early next year. 

NYFF 2012: "Frances Ha"

I know what you might be thinking: "What, ANOTHER movie about the travails of young white women seeking fulfillment in challenging urban America, someone kill me now." That feeling will not necessarily go away for the first ten minutes of Frances Ha, wherein Frances (Greta Gerwig) and her best friend Sophie address each other in arguably offensive faux-Ebonics, share a bed, get drunk, go to a PARTY IN BROOKLYN, WILLIAMFUCKINGSBURG TO BE PRECISE, exchange confidences about the Men In Their Lives And How Lame They Are, and do a few other things that you might be under the impression that you've seen in a movie or on a television show something like ten or fifteen thousand times before in the last eight months. I can't lie to you about that, even if I wanted to. 

But Frances Ha starts to take shape in a somewhat more possibly amiable way after this introduction. As a somewhat slightly qualified admirer of the HBO series Girls I can report that the agenda of Frances Ha is not, like that of the series, to contrive a sort of "look from the inside" at the situations of particular young women in the circumstance of seeking fulfillment in challenging urban America and from therein to perform some sort of inversion of traditional audience expectation. No, Frances Ha is a somewhat more conventional contrivance, a specific sort-of adult coming-of-age comedy. Directed by Noah Baumbach from a script by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, who also plays the title character, Frances Ha brings a reasonably fresh perspective to material that people who go to a lot of film festivals and follow a lot of non-audience-connecting film-festival-dubbed "movements" or genres might consider overexposed to the point of losing-the-will-to-live over.

I'll try not to be so trite as to assert that what Baumbach brings to the table is a kind of artistic detachment. But, first, and most strikingly obvious, thing first, he does put this material through his own particular sensibility, shooting it in black-and-white and scoring it with a bunch of old Georges Delerue music, and hence attaching his own wistful notion of how this particular material (which I'm going to assume at least originated with Gerwig, as she is, or was, an authentic representative of the class portrayed herein) should be cinematically rendered. And he and Gerwig go through the trouble of constructing something of an actual narrative. The movie begins with Frances declining to move in with her boyfriend on account of having promised aforementioned best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) that they'd stick to cohabitating until at least their lease ran out, and OF COURSE Sophie's the one who then turns around and bails into a new roommate situation. Leaving Frances to "crash" at the big apartment of a guy with whom she MIGHT have been able to at least hook up (the movie's structured around a series of addresses Frances roosts in, which come up in nice white-on-black title cards). Again, I cannot tell a lie: this guy is played by Adam Driver, the big white lug of Girls, and here his character is actually rather charming and goofy in a mild 20-something-semi-cad sort of way. Frances Ha is pretty kind to its male characters, and it's not particularly harsh on Frances herself, although the movie doesn't stint on depicting her as something of a fuck up. But as it is in fact a pure comedy—Baumbach never overreaches here in the ways that made parts of Margot At The Wedding the wrong kind of uncomfortable—the viewer is pretty sure things will pick up before Frances has to go rooting around dumpsters. On the way we are treated to some very awkward and funny and engaging scenes that often ring quite true. I was particularly taken with a dinner party sequence in which Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips are cast against type as aging snooty one-time yuppies who turn out to be not entirely unsympathetic to Frances; it's just that, with pretty much very nearly a generation separating them, they do in fact turn out to speak entirely different languages. The dialogue is fresh and sharp throughout: little offhand quirked-out observations like "Transportation's his thing" get some of the movie's biggest laughs. 

Unlike Joe Swanberg's opportunistic and quasi-voyeuristic Hannah Takes The Stairs—a similarly-themed picture starring Gerwig for which its director tacked a new name on the actress and then sat her in front of, say, Kent Osborne, who's apparently Swanberg's idea of Brice Parain, and then switched the camera on—Frances Ha gives Gerwig the performer some tasks, in the form of a character who eventually repairs herself, somewhat, off-screen. I'm a Baumbach fan, but it's been some time since he's made a film this...I think the word is "winning." But there you have it. Nevertheless, if I read one more piece about the movie referring to it as a "valentine" or "love letter" to its star, with whom Baumbach reportedly has some kind of personal involvement, I may barf even more prodigiously than Mickey Sumner's character does at a crucial point in the film. 

NYFF 2012: "Passion"

Rachel McAdams going about as far as she's going to for her director.

My initial attempted aperçu about this romp was: "Passion purports to be a Brian De Palma remake of Love Crime but is in fact a Radley Metzger remake of demonlover." As we all know Twitter isn't so great with nuance and while the above is thereby wracked with small but not entirely insignificant innaccuracies I'll still stand by it. In any event Passion is, by De Palma standards, as compellingly watchable as his 2007 Redacted was aesthetically and by extension morally repellent. The problems with Redacted were many, but the main—formal—one casts a useful light on what helps makes Passion work. That is, the various visual platforms from which De Palma told Redacted's story were so haphazardly contrived/executed as to very nearly scotch De Palma's rep as a visual "master." The "surveillance video" didn't look like surveillance video, the computer screen chats didn't look like computer screen chats, etc. "Brechtian" or not, this created the wrong kind of alienation effect. Someone or something must have made DePalma understand this since that time, because Passion shows he's done some homework. While I daresay a very sharp dissector could point out ways in which total accuracy eludes him, the phone-camera advertising spot and hotel sex file look convincingly and compellingly authentic, as does all the multi-screen Skypeing in the picture, and more. That these screens all appear in frames put on real celluloid film by longtime Almodóvar cinematographer José Luis Alcaine. Long a top player in the realm of split-screen and multi-bifurcated compositions, De Palma really makes his frames within frames within frames work for him here. 

And this, some will intuit, is in the service of saying something about The Way We Live Now. In a way the real world has caught up with a vision that De Palma has always been putting forward, one that he and his fellow movie brats intuited from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom perhaps: that we are always looking, and we are always looking not at what is, or more to the point, ought to be, in front of us, but at something we're putting in front of us, some screen containing some contrivance of what we would like to think is our desire. This vision has become, for DePalma, so distilled (some would say rarified) that his best work of the past twenty years or maybe even more (hey, I really LIKE Femme Fatale!) has almost everything to do with that idea and nothing to do with the way actual human beings behave or speak. So the ridiculously flat dialogue and almost pantomime performance styles on display in Passion will not come as any surprise to a longtime De Palma watcher, although they are likely to elicit some sort of "That was stupid" reflex in non-adepts. No matter—does this thing even have a U.S. distributor yet? In any event, in adapting the tonally straightforward but full-of-myriad-plot-twists 2010 Alain Corneau thriller Love Crime (a far more conventional picture than his still brain-melting 1979 Serie Noire, the seediest of Jim Thompson adaptations, and that's really saying something), De Palma insists of course on reconfiguring it into a movie not about the duplicity of cinematic subjectivity and then cranking the volume of that subjectivity up to eleven once a strong prescription sleep aid enters the scenario of ruthless corporate one-upswomanship. 

it's a hoot, all right, but it isn't quite Radley Metzger, which is to say in a sense that it isn't quite Brian De Palma either. It doesn't have enough sex, is the thing. At 72 hardly an enfant terrible any longer, De Palma is nonetheless palpably constrained. American female stars of the bankability caliber necessary to obtain foreign funding (if I read my credits correctly there's not one American dollar in this movie, so to speak) simply won't do the kind of thngs De Palma leading ladies of the '80s had little if any trouble with. Hence, the ostensible sapphic tensions between the characters played by Rachel McAdams (American Canadian [see comments], appears in her underwear) and Noomi Rapace (European, appears topless) don't really get all that much traction and the most explicit stuff here is in the reveal of sex toys. Being an old master doesn't cut certain kinds of ice these days, I guess. I almost feel sorry for the guy. 

Nine films at the New York Film Festival

1) The Loneliest Planet

My reactions to this film are unavoidably colored by the fact that it's based on a short story by Tom Bissell, who aside from being in my estimation an unimpeachable great writer is also a very dear friend of long standing. (Back in 2002, Tom and another pal who shall remain nameless were kind enough to stage The World's Smallest Intervention on my behalf, which didn't take at the time but for which I've become grateful.) So I just walk in to the screening feeling chuffed that a talented and distinctive screenwriter/director, Julia Loktev, decided to adapt Tom's story, "Expensive Trips Nowhere" (featured in his wonderful collection God Lives In St. Petersburg) in he first place. 

The tale is not a complicated one; it's an account of a young Western couple's hiking trek across a part of Kazakhstan, and an incident that sheds a glaring light on their characters and their relationship. And then there's their relationship to the guide. Lotkev takes Tom's story and makes it her own; she mostly jettisons the elements of social critique (Tom lays out a lot of the couple's First-World-Problems meticulously throughout; in his story, they're also married, while in the film, they're engaged to be) and, most crucially, renders indeterminate the result of the event that in the story pretty much sunders...well, I don't want to give away too much. 

My friend The Self Styled Siren isn't the first person to weigh in on the film with some frustration over the fact that the film's couple, played by the very appealing Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg (seen above with Bidzina Gujabidze, who plays their guide), never verbally address the elephant in the room after it shows up. "The movie explodes if one character turns to the other on one of the many arduous hikes and says 'What the hell...?'" If I may be allowed to play devil's advocate and represent what Hitchcock might be gratified to note as an anti-Plausible position, the fact that neither of the characters does utter any such thing might just be precisely the point. I'm only saying. In any case, what works like crazy here is both Loktev's pictorial sense and ability to ratchet up tension in distinctly unshowy ways; while dunderheads and the eyeless might be under the impression that nothing is happening when she cuts away to a ravishing long shot of the scenery and lets Richard Skelton's gorgeous, otherworldy ethnological not-quite-forgery music have its way with the movie, the rest of us will get the feeling, for sure. (And how's that for a Kael-like lunge at SPEAKING FOR THE "RIGHT" PEOPLE, huh? Um, maybe not.) Its narrative open-endedness seeks, I think, to engage the intuition of the viewer, which is something that I'm noticing certain viewers are coming to resent. But that's another issue for another piece. 

2) You Are Not I

Sarah Driver's long-kind-of-lost 45-minute 1981 adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story, shot in Vampyr-inflected black-and-white by Driver's frequent collaborator Jim Jarmusch, and featuring a deliberately bugging-the-hell-out-of-the-back-of-your-brain-like-an-alarm-clock-you-can't-shut-off electronic score by Phil Kline, often plays like the New York Underground answer to Carnival of Souls, which I mean entirely as a compliment. 

3) Le Havre

2006's Lights in the Dusk was a real rut in Aki Kaurismaki's path to sweet-and-quirkily-warmhearted-old-fogeydom, but this very satisfying quasi-caper is an exhilarating rebound that places him squarely and touchingly in that territory. The story of a fairytale community in the title burg that rallies round to help a delightfully taciturn and well-mannered young undocumented African immigrant reach his destination across the channel, its sure pace and consistent comic understatement nicely set up some of the director's most casually daring absurdist tropes in years. Filtering a genuine contemporary European social concern through his wry and slightly addled (by what I have no idea, I'm sure) sensibility seems to have charged Aki's batteries up a bit. Nice going. 

4) We Can’t Go Home Again

What's that guy in back of Woody Allen say about the new Fellini, that it's "very indulgent?"  Yeah, that's what he says. One would not, honestly, need to be forgiven if those very words, and with the exact same inflection yet, flashed through one's own mind at various points at this film signed by "Us," supervised by Nicholas Ray when he was a filmmaking instructor at SUNY Binghamton in the early 1970s. I mean, how IS one to characterize a film in which the one-time Hollywood director is depicted ineptly attempting suicide? (Although admittedly the attempt does produce one of the film's biggest laughs, when the magesterial white-haired wreck Ray, fumbling with some rope, grumbles "I've made thirteen Westerns and I still have no idea how to tie a noose.") But again, I think the indulgence is the point. A multi-frame expectoration of footage of himself and his students interrogating themselves and him and each other mixed with ruminations on the political upheavals of the prior years mixed with reflections on the increasingly bitter reality that home/America/a sense of belonging/what have you is dissolving into the corrosive acid of ever-mounting cultural and sexual and political fragmentation, Home is both an effort to find coherence/community and an avowal of the possible impossibility of doing so. So of course it's going to be indulgent. It is also frequently kind of tedious, and frequently kind of dazzling, and frequently kind of infuriatingly self-pitying. It's quite a few provocative things, but many of its qualities won't be immediately discernable to anybody who's not already a Ray-head, so consider this a warning. 

5) Tahrir

One of those pictures that one could look at and say, "Well, sure, of course, with the time, the place, and the people, anybody could go in and make a good film." Of course, if you've seen enough docs that had the time, the place, and the people, and the filmmakers STILL managed to fuck things up, you know that's a glib assessment. So all praise to director Stefano Savona, who's assembled an incredibly engaging and provocative moving snapshot of a Cairo's square's chanting, rock-throwing, cell-phone-and-computer-checking, social-media-enabled contribution to Arab spring, featuring conversations between young firebrands and monologues from old blowhards who are still hugely touching for all their blow-hardedness. Not a comprehensive survey of political perspectives and tensions nor a prospectus on what's ahead for Egypt or what the West is in store for, but rather the vital story of some people gathered together, and their crucial passions, and how they united under those passions. 

6) The Turin Horse

I've always looked at the anecdote about Nietsche and that poor horse as an exemplary paradoxical parable about how once/if you reach total consciousness/compassion over all the overwhelming pointless suffering in this world, the only possible reaction is not that you become a better/nicer person, but that you fall into the grip of an absolutely paralyzing madness (which can sometimes be helped even further along by dementia courtesy of [maybe] tertiary syphilis). And those are the breaks. Aiiee. In any event, my biggest problem with Bela Tarr's apparent cinematic swan song is that its perspective doesn't quite jibe with my own above interpretation of the whole equine kerfuffle. Still and all, I found this cinematically virtuosic, narratively minimal, and genuinely, albeit peculiarly, gripping almost-two-and-a-half-hour black-and-white account of the end of the world as disaffected father and daughter and horse know it, absolutely superb. Even though it didn't galvanize me as much as some prior Tarr films, even including the rather more overtly problematic The Man From London, have. I think maybe it wasn't meant to; there's a peculiar serenity at the center of all its considerable dread. I should like to see it again soon. 

7) Carnage

See a bit below. I think it's worth reiterating that this is a satiric farce, and deserves to be considered as such. I think it's also worth reiterating that People Are Fucking Stupid. I read somewhere (I can't find it now...does the fact that I can't link mean that I'm Doing That Thing Again) someone complaining that the piece makes no sense because the one couple could just LEAVE and they don't and it's always the lamest pretext compelling them to re-enter the apartment. Yeah, The Return Of The Plausibles. Someday I'd like to see somebody make a film in which all of the action unfolds in the most absolutely plausible and true-to-life fashion possible. Oh, yeah, they already made that film and it's fucking called Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and I bet The Plausibles won't like that picture much either, albeit maybe for different reasons. What is worth noting, although not having seen the play I can only speculate rather than accurately cite stuff, is that Polanksi seems to have some fun coming up with little bits of business to nudge that characters back into the apartment where the main action (such as it is) is largely set, including a sly couple of shots involving a fellow tenant, or Tenant, that will evoke a chuckle in some and perhaps outrage in others. 

8) A Separation

A very nifty piece of cinematic sleight-of-hand from writer-director Asghar Fahadi, this Iranian domestic drama takes a home trauma and ratchets it up to a kind of judicial thriller. If Michael Haneke were filming this scenario, he'd hold his shots in such a way as to goad the viewer into looking deeper into them. (See certain of the views in Caché.) If the director were Hitchcock, he'd foreground certain objects in such a way as to set off the audience's intrigue about them. (See the telephone in Dial "M" For Murder.) Fahadi's seemingly naturalistic shooting and editing style is deceptively simple; he gives, or seems to give, no particular weight to any given object or action, and all the while he's stowing away things that will be vitally important later on. If the film's second half is a very tense round of "Find What The Sailor Has Hidden," the first half shows the, um, sailor hiding everything in plain sight. Mongo impressed. Fuckin' A, you definitely need to see this. 

9) Living in the Material World

As it was for my friend Tony Dayoub, this picture was an easy sell for me, whose first LP was Beatles '65, gifted to me at Christmas 1964 when I was all of five years old. A satisfyingly lengthy musical and social and cultural history as well as a biography, it's suitably empathetic—if anyone can reveal George Harrison's Jake LaMotta side, it's the film's organizational intelligence/spirit Martin Scorsese—and a little more plastically and conceptually clever/resourceful than its goes-down-easy narrative initially indicates. Not strictly linear by any means, it gets to the many places it wants to go via dovetails that are simultaneously thematic and chronological, and it accomplishes an awful lot via implication/example, c.f. the frankly horrific live concert footage the film cuts to right after Klaus Voorman brings up the subject of cocaine for the first time. The picture is sometimes unusually candid and finally very moving, and the sound mix is spectacular. As a bonus, Jackie Stewart as you've never seen him before. No, really.

What is "cinematic?" part deux

So, I am WAY behind on my New York Film Festival blog coverage, and I do hope to get up to speed soon, and I do recommend in the meanwhile that you check out my Close Personal Friend The Self-Styled Siren's ruminations on the fare she's seen thus far, as her notes are as trenchant and acute and delightful and well-mannered as she herself is. I dowant to report that I did get a rather big kick out of Carnage, the film Roman Polanski has directed from an adaptation of Yasmina Reza's international hit play thingie. It seemed to go over very well with much of the rest of the Festival press and industry audience too. The piece as filmed is a pretty good satire that, in and of itself and perhaps necessarily, underscores the limitations of pretty good satire as a form. Which is to say that its various reversals are a little, well, telegraphed. There's a little bit of a paradox inherent in a piece that aspires to aggressively twist the nipples of its target audience's collective sense of propriety and/or social grace while at the same time satisfying said audience's expectations of entertainment. Which may in fact be precisely the point...only the film doesn't take things that far. It's modernist, not post! 

But I did enjoy it, and after the film, I happened to run into a colleague who out-and-out hated it. And who said, and I quote, "There was nothing cinematic about it." Which I kind of couldn't believe, in the first place because more than anything else, Carnage is an absolutely virtuoso piece of cinema craft. As many of you likely know, the whole film, save for a brief prologue and epilogue, is set in a single Brooklyn apartment and its hallway. Polanski treats this space and its varied subspaces absolutely cinematically; the film is a potential masterclass in staging, blocking, camera angle, shot selection, shot length, pacing in terms of both rhythm of actual cutting and duration of shot, and so on. One could write a 1,200 word piece alone on how Kate Winslet's physical stature mutates over the course of the film's hour and twenty minutes. (We should note that Polanski's actual frame—film, that is—is wider than the image posted above.) It's all kind of amazing even if you're not crazy about the content of the picture. So, yes, I would say, entirely cinematic. 

And yet my friend, who hated it...and who, and this is really the beauty ironic part, I rebonded with a couple of weeks back on account of our shared conviction that David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is both really great and, yes, entirely "cinematic," found it to be not. And of course I wonder why, and I do look forward to having a longer conversation with her about that. And I post this now not to make fun of my pal or call her out or any such thing but because it struck me as kind of odd and funny, the language we  adopt when we're kind of affronted. My friend also found Carnage "misogynist," (in case you're wondering what road one of the drama's predictable turnarounds goes up, there's a clue for you) and it was pretty clear that the whole experience had touched her in a way that was a little more irritating than an average bad-movie experience. In a sense maybe the point was that calling it uncinematic was the deepest insult she could give it, and an insult she felt it deserved. But I strongly believe that the film is, well, frankly, not that thing. And, of course, conversation about movies is rather different than writing about movies, although what with this kind of comment-friendly format, and with Twitter, and with and so on, writing about movies and movie criticism and talking about movies is becoming a big ball of virtual wax and a different one from what it was. But I think that while conversation about movies can absolutely be about the vagaries of taste, criticism has to go beyond that. This conviction is really at the core of my whole quarrel with that ridiculous "cultural vegetables" conceit/debate. 

"The product of a culture with nothing whatsoever to say"

Those are not the words of Mr. Shane Danielsen himself, but of a documentary filmmaker from Norway that Mr. Danielsen encountered after the screening of un film de Joe Swanberg at the Berlinale. Mr. Danielsen's excellent indieWIRE piece, "Swanberg America's One Last Auteur Hope?" really ought to be the very last word on this vexed subject. As for Danielsen's puzzlement over why a particular critic is so smitten with the work of the man Danielsen so beautifully and aptly describes as "a soft-spoken lug with a George W. Bush smirk" who makes "some of the most patently solipsistic movies" ever, well, there's also a book-in-progress involved, I believe. Not that said critic would hold different views if there wasn't, mind you. Just mentioning. Which means, of course, that we haven't heard the last about said lug. I'm not in any hurry to see the picture that Danielsen applies some faint praise to, but if and when I do, I swear it will be the last time I sully my consciousness with such work. As Danielsen notes, deprivation of oxygen is not an imprudent policy in this case. 

UPDATE: Against my better judgment, which I really ought to heed more often, I checked out Mr. Richard Brody's Twitter feed, and saw his multiple responses to Danielsen's article: the usual goalpost-shifting sophistry, self-and-Swanberg-pitying predictions of "shrieks," and scrambling to find errors in Danielsen's past work, which has a nice whiff of Roy-Cohn-style shenanigans to it. In any event, while I hold fast that from now on I'm just gonna watch as Mr. Brody claps for Joe with however many hands, I do have to note the irony inherent in the fact that a great deal of Mr. Brody's beef has to do with what he calls "cinephilia," or, when he's feeling clever, "cinecrophilia." The funny thing about this is that WITHOUT cinephilia, there would be no debate on Swanberg at all. Because normal people, when exposed to Swanbergian cinema, tend to get a little itchy after a few minutes, and say things like, "What is this shit? I've got home videos that look better, and are more interesting." In a way, you've got to feel bad for Brody; there are a lot of hurdles, both practical and theoretical, for the Swanberg champion to get over. I wish him the best of luck. As for Swanberg, well, Joe, just stop dropping David Foster Wallace's name and, honest, you won't hear any more from me. 

"Secret Sunshine"

While we're on the subject of films one sees at festivals, some of which do and some of which don't, necessarily, fall under the category, such as it is, of "festival films:" One bad habit of mine is lack of due diligence in keeping track of films I see at festivals and admire and don't get a quick theatrical release in the U.S. following their festival bows. Of course, this habit becomes less irksome as time goes on and I attend fewer festivals, but it will still bite me in the ass now and again.

For instance. Yesterday I was waiting for a bus when I ran into the great writer and critic Phillip Lopate, who lives in my neighborhood. We have been friendly acquaintances for a while now, and it's always a pleasure to run into him and catch up. During our chat, he mentioned his enthusiasm for the Korean film Secret Sunshine. Which I myself had seen, and greatly admired, at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. I wrote up a brief appreciation of it on the Premiere/In The Company of Glenn blog, articulated my approval when Do-yeon Jon, the film's lead player (shown above), got an acting award at the festival, and then filed the film away for potential future reference. Filed it away to the extent that the very limited theatrical release it got from IFC in late December of last year just did a complete end-run around my consciousness, such as it is. Phillip's great feeling for the film, as expressed in our chat, of course made me kick myself, after having gone on the record with my various "best" lists in various venues and not having even brought up the damn thing. I'm not quite ready to write up a unified field theory or any such thing, but one feature of the New Cinephilia, which relates in certain respects to the whole notion of the "festival film" as well as to a certain "Long Tail" idea of markets, is something that for the time being I'll call consumption fragmentation. To wit, an item such as Secret Sunshine does, like Harmony Korine's aforementioned Trash Humpers, have something resembling a built in (albeit small) audience; there's a Western bloc of Korean film aficionados who are just going to check this thing out reflexively, as it were. At some point, though, one critic, or reviewer, or another, is going to decide that picture X is something that deserves, and should get, the attention of a wider audience. In my case, well, I think that Secret Sunshine is such a picture, and I suppose were I to put it that way to a critic such as Phillip, he might concur. In any event, we agreed that in certain respect the picture is a tough sell; by certain conventional standards, it's both lengthy and slow, and the tragedy that occurs about 40 minutes into its running time and puts the narrative on a different track than had been expected is a very, very upsetting one. Almost generically so, as it happens. But it's better (in a sense) experienced than described; seeing the film cold, with almost no expectations, was quite a galvanic thing, and I see I said so when I first wrote up my thoughts from Cannes:

Not a frame is wasted in this 142-minute Korean drama from director Lee Chang-Dong, which begins with a mother and son stranded on the road to Miryang, the Korean town whose Chinese characters translate as the film's title. The mother and son are rescued by The Host's Kang-Ho Song, here with another bad haircut, playing a friendly auto mechanic who falls hard for the woman, a piano teacher settling in the town of her late husband's birth.

The first 40 minutes or so comprise fish-out-of-water comedy/drama of the sort that might have Hollywood pursuing remake rights, but an awful tragedy sends the movie and its heroine into another direction altogether—a direction I think is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, hence my skimpy plot description from here. The story's component involving religion evokes Bunuel without adopting his barbed irony; the theme of a woman losing control of her life recalls Cassavettes, but Lee doesn't go for the burn-rubber emotionalism of the American director. What makes this movie so hard to pin down critically, especially in blog-time, is how little Lee's style recalls other directors'[...]

I stand by all that, but note that since I wrote that, I've learned how to put the tilde over the "n" in Buñuel's name, so yay me. If you're in New York, Secret Sunshine is still screening at the IFC Center as of this writing. It's tough, yes, but well worth checking out.

Some words with Bruno Dumont and Julie Sokolowski on "Hadewijch"

Julie Sokolowski in Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch.

Hadewijch, the new feature from the...what's the word? "interesting?" "problematic?" depends on who you talk to, I guess, I myself think both or either quite a lot of the time...French director Bruno Dumont, opens theatrically in New York on Christmas Eve, and never let it be said that IFC, the concern responsible for this U.S. engagement, doesn't have a sense of humor. For this film is a story of a young woman of privilege who feels herself consumed by her love of God, and for her troubles in this resepct is kicked out of the convent in which she seems so happy. After which she takes up with some young Muslim jihadists. What ensues largely eschews the oft-graphic content of some of Dumont's prior films, which include L'humanite, Twenty-Nine Palms, and Flandres.I was impressed with the film and impressed with the performance of lead actress Julie Sokolowski, who plays the sort-of title role; her character also goes by her given name, Céline. 

As the film approaches its U.S. opening, there has been some debate in various social media as to what actually happens in the picture, and some of this debate has been heated, and some of the heat has been emanating from my own self, as I see the film as being pretty unambiguous with respect to what "actually" happens...in that it, you know, actually shows what happens on the screen, within its frames, and so on. Others feel that events as  depicted, or "depicted" in Hadewijch are more open to interpretation, such as it is. If I seem to be dancing around the issue, it's because I want to spare any spoilers from readers who have yet to see the film, which I believe is a noteworthy one and well worth seeing. These questions or matters of interpretation go straight to the heart of what kind of movie Hadewijch is. Or perhaps they go straight to the heart of a statement made by a friend who doesn't share my admiration for the director's work, that is, "I don't think he knows how to make a movie."

As for the interview that runs below, it could be said to constitute one long spoiler in and of itself, in a sense, particularly so after the jump, and so I want to emphasize that I am offering it here, earlier than I might have, as a kind of "service" to readers who've already seen the film and want to get back on Twitter and get into a virtual screaming match with people who think...well, never mind. What the reader who hasn't seen the picture yet might want to do is bookmark this and come back later if he or she is interested. 

In the interest of not looking like I'm cheating or anything, I reproduce the interview straight from the transcript (complete with occasional "[unclear]"s), my long-winded questions included. The interview was conducted in early October of 2009 in New York City. 

    Q: I want to talk about the impetus for this particular film.  Flandres, I think, can be looked at as a film about war and about love.  And this can be looked at as a film about love and war, or a certain form of war, or the war within the heart, the war without.  And I wonder if there was a specific bridge between your conception of Flandres and your conception of this film, or if they're totally discrete objects.

     BD:  (through interpreter) Just the fact of being inside someone who's so passionate and how that can then go over and veer off into something that's totally different, the opposite of love.  And that's very disturbing for me and that's what I want to explore.  When does the door open?  That fact is very disturbing metaphysically. 

Things that don't suck, and yet also do (Updated)

(...and pushed, too)

My friend Gary Lucas, one of the most dazzlingly inventive guitarists working today, will perform his original solo-guitar score for the 1931 Spanish-language mutation of Dracula this Saturday, October 9, at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of this year's New York Film Festival. If you are in the vicinity, you absolutely should go, and I say that as someone who will in fact there, and not even via the guest list, at that. (I suppose I could have asked, but it's the principle!) Much more information and a variety of scintillating links can be found on the Dracula page of Gary's own fantastic website, which deserves the bookmark of any self-respecting music lover. 

UPDATE: The Saturday evening event was terrific, an intoxicating blend of music and imagery. NYFF programmer Scott Foundas introduced, and Gary talked a little about the 1931 film, produced in tandem with the Bela Lugosi classic, before getting down to business with two guitars, one electric, one acoustic. Like the Todd Browning picture, the Spanish-language Dracula has very little music, incidental or otherwise; a theme from Swan Lake at the outset (also used, some might argue even more memorably, in The Mummy) and not a whole lot after that. Gary's new score does some extrapolating off of the Tchaikovsky, and builds a nice, eerie mood; switching off from the reverb-and-delay laden electric, he waxed more lyrical on the acoustic guitar, although even there he would reach for the cosmic, or even kosmiche, with an effect or two. Gary's also known for playing out with his score for Paul Leni's Paul Wegener's and Curt Boese's silent The Golem, and that's a much different bit of business than this one. Replete with musical allusions from "Adon Olom" to "Ride of the Valkyries," the Golem score is more a piece of commentary on the film. What Gary goes for—and gets—with his Dracula score is more an immersion in an atmosphere of perdition and romantic longing. Helping him out immeasurably with respect to both is the film's luscious lead actress Lupita Tovar, whose costumes become more an more revealing the further she sinks under the title vampire's spell. There's talk of an enhanced CD, but there really should be a DVD of the film with this score. I'll keep you posted on future performances until that becomes the case (which doesn't seem immediately likely, alas).

NYFF 2010: "Mysteries of Lisbon"

When I'm on Twitter—which I have to say I don't recommend, now that I'm in it more or less for keeps I'm almost entirely convinced it's the devil, although I haven't pinned down quite why yet (that is, I absolutely know the reasons, but am not sure which of them is paramount), and may report back further when I do—I sometimes like to do this hashtag I call dub "cinemaequations" in which I try to describe a film according to the way it manipulates certain of its antecedents. For the new picture by the estimable and prolific Raul Ruiz, a four-and-a-half-hour epic (which has its origins as a television mini-series) adapted from a three-volume 19th-century Portuguese novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, my summation was "The Saragossa Manuscript + Great Expectations x Judex=Mysteries of Lisbon." As in Dickens, this tale begins with a rather poor orphan (although it's worth noting that while this particular tale is full of characters of low fortune, or who are about to be deprived of what fortunes they may have, there is not much in the way of depictions of privation here) of obscure origins; like the ever mind-blowing Manuscript, it has a story-within-a-story-and-look!-over-there-another-story structure that creates a sometimes vertiginously "reality, what does it mean?" effect on the viewer. As for Judex, that's a little harder to quantify. There's no real nefarious-crime element to the narrative, but once a black-clad young noblewoman played by the estimably beautiful Clotilde Hesme turns up, the intimations are palpable. I was reminded of Elie Faure's description of Vigo's L'Atalante, the memorable phrase "fugitive shadows of Rembrandt;" fugitive shadows of Feuillade are cast throughout here. It's not just the costumes or the moods but aspects of the framing and lighting (and I do love the way that Ruiz uses actual objects—not just the usual door frames but the edges of parted curtains and such—to narrow the frame and often create simulated iris-in views), and the distorted-lens effects, but also the simple elegance of the frequent long takes. This stylization is a huge part of the picture's often intoxicating atmosphere. A friend used the word "romantic," and I agree, but the picture is not overtly concerned with sweeping emotion as such—the various narratives provide it with a near-constant momentum that leaves little room for contemplative rich-in-feeling pauses. Rather it's the relentless aggregation of situational details relating to a romantic mode—legacies, scandals, gossip, matters of honor, swooning—combined with the stylistic inflections, which of course end up constituting a kind of cinematic gothic, that sweep you away. Kinda like Gone With The Wind, if you think about it! (Or maybe not.) In any event, a real good one.

I found the below, from an appreciation Ruiz wrote of Ulmer's The Black Cat for Positif (reprinted in the English-language collection Projections 4 1/2) about a decade and a half ago, of some pertinence here. He takes off from describing an animated discussion he had with the actor Martin Landau (who appears in Ruiz's thoroughly amazing 1985 Treasure Island) and goes from there:

 "...I drew on the books I had with me, and especially on an article by Jakko Hintikka [...] who, on the subject of theories of language, or rather of general semantic constructs, makes fun of Noam Chomsky (his sworn enemy) by making a distinction between the recursive paradigm which states that 'language must be considered as a process governed by rules' and the strategic paradigm that 'language brings into operation strategic rules that govern a process analagous to a game.'

It seemed to me evident that some films—Rossellini, Cassavetes—develop out of certain situations which are connected together according to the rules created by the situations themselves, while other films (the majority) present themselves as a completed game, with variations provided for by the rules that the game makes explicit (if they aren't so already)—films made in Hollywood, both now and in the past.

I've always believed that the two paradigms overlap: in a set of fragments of a game, each one potentially contains a film to be completed by the audience; also the fragments behave from game to game in a generative sequence (according to the recursive paradigm). 

In general, my films try to integrate both paradigms. They are made up of fragments of incomplete stories which, in an unpredictable manner, engender other stories about daily life, and lead to temporary conclusions. Each fragment wishes on the one hand to find its conclusion far away from the sequence we are watching, and on the other hand to 'beget' and link itself with other fragments, affiliating itself to them like a son is linked to his sires.

I've found very few examples of commercial films that illustrate my theory, apart from The Black Cat, which in its way is the best, the most drastic and irrefutable. It was what epistemologists call (but here I use the term in a mocking sense) a 'crucial experience.'"