Some Came Running

NYFF 2010: "Another Year"

Mike Leigh's casts, all about the glamour, as usual; from left, Jim Broadbent, Leslie Manville, Oliver Maltman in Another Year

One of my favorite critical observations, one I go back to almost as frequently, if not more frequently, than Roberto Rossellini's pronouncement on late Chaplin, comes from the writer David Ilic, who remarked that the recordings by the British improvisational group AMM were "as alike and unalike as trees." As it happens, Ilic himself appears to have lifted that simile from Glen Sweeney, a founding member of the Third Ear Band (scorers of, among other films, Polanski's infamous MacBeth), who used the phrase to describe his outfit's output. There's a discussion of trees—cypresses, to be precise—in Abbas Kiarostami's new Certified Copy that goes into the implications of that simile in some depth, but...oh, my, where were we?

Ah, yes. As alike and unalike as trees. One could say the same about the films of British director Mike Leigh, and at this late stage of his career it seems that the alikeness is beginning to wear on certain critics. I'm not one of them, and I would (gently) counsel those who take him for granted that they ought not. Because nobody makes films that feel and play the way his do, for better or for worse, and after he's gone, it's doubtful that anybody else is going to. His deep-dish method of creation—involving intensive preparation with his actors and a huge amount of controlled and oft turned-over improvisation—has been much discussed in various venues; but as Leigh himself pointed out in the post-press-screening Q&A for the film the other day (during which various journalists donned all manner of metaphorical "kick me" signs which Leigh did not follow, but did acknowledge the existence of, let's say), it's the finished, polished product that finally counts. I found this particular product thoroughly engrossing, personally galvanizing, and a little problematic all at once. A thoroughly successful Leigh film, in other words, going by a certain yardstick.

The structure of the story is as simple and as obvious as life and/or death; it's right there in the title. Starting in the spring, it chronicles a year in the lives of thoroughly civilized old London couple Tom and Jerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), Jerri's troubled, over-drinking 50-something work colleague Mary (Leslie Manville), the couple's single, solid, slightly dull son Joe (Oliver Maltman), and a few others, most notably Tom's Hull-based pal Ken (Peter Wight), another hard drinker, if you will, and Tom's very quiet older brother Ronnie (David Bradley). Tom and Jerri are cheery, comfortable old lefties who've understood that they're not in a position to change the world anymore, and have gotten to be fine with that (there are times when I could see this film as an update on Leigh's 1988 High Hopes, in which a younger [obviously], punkier, leather-jacketed Sheen played one half of a more agitated couple). Mary's life, on the other hand, is one turmoil after another, and the couple's dealings with this frantic white-wine drunk eventually get one to wondering whether these nice settled folks are really all that nice. Because Mary is very clearly an alcoholic; not only is the A-word never once dropped in the film, Jerri, who's a therapist herself, never even suggests counseling or a support group to Mary until a hammer-dropping scene near the film's end. Then there's Ken, with his gigantic belly and his two cans of lager on the train up to London and his whinging monologues on how his local's now filling up with snotty awful young people. Physically, Wight comes off rather like conservative pundit Bill Bennett, but to tell you the God's honest truth, his character rather reminded me...of me, not much more than a year ago. (Awkward!) He's a mess, in any event, and Tom tries to tell him so...sort of. The couple are so damn polite, so damn indulgent, and all the while they're stifling their own feelings of put-upon-ness and resentment to the point that you understand they're passive-aggressively enabling Mary. It's a rather remarkable portrait of abnormal psych in the postmodern world. And it brims with little uncomfortably accurate touches. A more careless or inexperienced filmmaker would have brought the two drunks together for a romantic folly maybe, but Mary is vividly repelled by Ken in that exact way in which certain heterosexual drunks are with turned off by each other—call it "I may be a mess but I'm not that mess" syndrome. It is all rather terribly sad.

Lesley Manville's performance as Mary was recently described as a "hate-it-or-love-it turn" by Manohla Dargis in The New York Times; a friend with whom I saw the picture bristled a bit at the film's portrait entire of Mary, calling it cruel. I'm still taking that aspect of the film in, frankly; I was certainly incredibly impressed by the virtuosity of Manville's acting, particularly what she does with her face. Mary has a rather unhealthy romantic fixation on Tom and Jerri's son Joe, and when she ineptly flirts with him, she looks almost as coquettish as she wants to come off. When disappointment or rage hits, as it inevitably does, her face deflates, the lines on it seem to increase, she looks practically corpse-like. Like a corpse that's about to spit, to be exact. There is also sometimes a sense that Mary's drunken on-ness is a bit too vivid, approaching caricature-level; but for all I can tell at this moment, to perceive the performance that way may be some form of...denial? In any event, her work here makes me uncomfortable. As it is damn well meant to, I think.

NYFF 2010: "The Strange Case of Angelica"

One aspect of the recent films of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira I get the biggest charge from is their discursiveness. The nearly 102-year-old filmmaker has been working at near-Fassbinder levels of productivity since about the turn of the century (and wasn't exactly slouching in the '90s and '80s), and I haven't been able to keep up entirely, but I always enjoy the loose expansiveness he applies to the forms of even his shortest features (and two of my favorites, 2006's Belle Toujours, a droll and unexpectedly delightful homage to Buñuel, and 2009's shaggy-dog romance Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl, each clocked in somewhere under 80 minutes each). The narratives, such as they are, are generally crisp, clear, cogent, albeit sometimes on the slight side (as if I ever cared about that sort of thing, right?); but while the courses of his films of the past few years never jar the viewer right off of their paths, the journey from beginning to end is gracefully strewn with engaging side trips, as it were. They're often in the form of ostensibly "off-topic" conversations, as in the observations on modern manners in Belle Toujours or the bits involving the nature of the male protagonist's business dealings in Eccentricities. One of the most charming such bits in Oliveira's latest picture, The Strange Case of Angelica, involves a conversation about anti-matter during a breakfast scene in a little Régua pension where Isaac, the picture's ostensible hero, lives. The fellow hasn't even come down from his room yet, and two older gentlemen and the pension's keeper and two elderly gentlemen discuss the nature of the universe. 

As for the young man Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), his universe is mutating, thanks to his potential discovery of, as he says to himself, "that place of absolute love I've heard about...which banishes all the anguish I feel." Said love residing, as it happens, with a recently dead young woman whom Isaac was roused from his bed to document in her beauteous unanimated state. Except that through his viewfinder, as he snapped away at her placid visage, she seemed to smile at him. And now, as he looks at the photographs of her that he's hung to dry, her face again comes to life, and smiles at him. And her black-and-white ghost comes to his balcony, and takes him flying over the Tagus river by night. Isaac is a Sephardic Jew, something of a stranger in this land—although the film doesn't place too much emphasis on that. The family of Isaac's new love Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) is old, and rich, and Catholic, and their maid looks at Isaac with a gimlet, to say the least, eye. Will these obstacles—not to mention the fact that Angelica has, you know, joined the choir invisible and all—keep the lovers apart? As you might expect, it's not so much the question's answer that's of interest as the getting to it, and the peculiar juxtapositions Oliviera throws in along with his discourses—Isaac's photographic fascination with some manual laborers who, in his photos, come off like garden-implement-wielding killers out of early '60s Hammer films—keep the atmosphere engaging, intoxicating. The special effects are attractive but also have an old-school feel that keeps you in the continuity of Melies, Feiullade, and finally Franju; indeed, Angelica often struck me as a differently-hued variation on Philippe Garrel's 2008 ghost/amour fou story La frontiere de l'aube, which also wears its stylistic debt to those filmmakers with stolid, trend-resistant pride. Angelica is not necessarily "lighter" than Garrel's film, but it is a bit cozier. And, like Garrel's vision, it is not in the least bit coy about being its own strange thing. I've taken the quote from Rossellini about Chaplin's A King In New York out of my bag quite a few times, and I'm going to do it again, because it completely applies here: "It is the film of a free man."

NYFF 2010: "Oki's Movie"

Just as Hong-Sang Soo had gotten into a groove of making his films so funny that I began expecting each successive one to be a little funnier than the last, than the inventive, prolific Korean writer-director switches up on me. That's not to say that Oki's Movie doesn't have its share of laughs, but on the whole it's more poignant and puzzling than the two prior recent pictures of his that I've seen, the film-festival romp Like You Know It All (Hong's answer to Stardust Memories, and quite a bit funnier and more humane, I thought, than Woody Allen's oft-admirable but equally oft-problematic original), and the near epic Paris-set romantic shamble Night and Day, which I reviewed for the site then known as The Auteurs a couple years back. (I have not yet caught up with another new feature, Hahaha. This guy's got a real work ethic!)

Roman Polanski once remarked that he didn't think there was ever such a thing as a love triangle, that such stories only ever had to do with two people, with the third acting as a sort of pretext to launch the narrative. If I recall correctly, he said this in reference, of course, to his own film Knife In The Water, and in that case he definitely had a point, but I'm not sure the generalization always holds. In any case, in the sort-of love triangle that gives Oki's Movie what can finally be called its core, it's definitely about either more than two people, or it's about just one person, but it's never about only the two. Oki's Movie has an unusual shape. It kicks of with hand-written opening credits designed and shot in the manner of amateur video, with Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" as the theme music. This credit motif is repeated for each of the film's four discrete sections. But are they sections or in fact individual short films?  It's difficult to say. We understand we're in an academic environment in which films are made; there's festival competition, a director's Q&A (one of the most awkward director's Q&A's ever committed to a screen, in fact, and one of the film's funniest scenes) rumors of tenure-mongering, and more. With the exception of the final section, the narration of which makes clear that it's a film-within-a-film—or, more accurately, a film within the film-world of the characters involved, those being two student filmmakers, male and female, and a married professor—I wasn't always on the surest footing as to the particular reality of each of the sections, at how far a remove from Hong the storyteller himself each particular section was set. Which is an entirely different proposition from being "hard to follow" but which also means I'm going to need to see the thing again before I "get" it. 

Which isn't to say that they're aren't a myriad of pleasures and perplexes to be enjoyed in the picture's knotty 80 minutes. As in so many of Hong's pictures, an alarming amount of alcohol is consumed, kissing and sex are impulsive and sloppy, melancholy observations on the state of modern filmmaking and modern romance are delivered in oft-irresistable quasi-hangdog deadpan, and so on. While Hong's film's are for the most part uncomfortably acute portraits of the emotional, intellectual, and sexual inadequacy of its male protagonists, here the filmmaker takes an interesting step forward and ends things by explicitly identifying with/taking on his female lead's point of view—hence the title. It's a bold move that pays off with an emotional impact of a sort that's new to Hong's work. Good stuff.

The public screenings of Oki's Movie are preceded with the short All Flowers In Time, by Tarnation director Jonathan Caouette, a film which prompted me to remark to my companion, "David Lynch called. He wants David Lynch back."

Good "Gods," y'all

A personal-anecdote-and-snark-free consideration of Xavier Beauvois' Of Gods And Men, an official entry in the New York Film Festival and coming soon to theaters from Sony Pictures Classics, is up over at The Daily Notebook.

NYFF 2010: A couple things about "The Social Network"

You're going to be reading/hearing a lot of things about this picture; hell, you've most likely already read and heard a lot of things about this picture; I'm actually going to be writing about it at some length for an online venue to be introduced/discussed here at a slightly later date; and you can imagine my existential agonies as I try to conceive some sort of vaguely new "angle" from which I may examine it that will actually pertinent and maybe even interesting when the time, which is short, comes. In the meanwhile, it seems perhaps unfair to this blog and its readers that I should let my first viewing of the film go unnoted here. So, a couple of things.

First off, it really is a fantastically entertaining film that places a good deal of trust in its audience and then pays it off in enjoyment. It is not, of course, difficult in the way that other New York Film Festival pictures I've discussed here, such as Certified Copy and Film Socialisme, are difficult. But it does throw you into the insular but seminal Ivy League world of its characters pretty much head-first and then zooms along, and if you don't get into the swim of it right away, you may get lost. I went to a state school in Passaic County in the late '70s/early '80s. I didn't know what a "final club" was then and I really don't much know now. You may think that the film is asking you to know what a "final club" is. It isn't. It's just asking you on for the ride. Once you're in and you stop worrying, it doesn't matter. And then, once you understand what screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher are doing with the structure—it's not as straightforward as it initially seems, chronology-wise—you're ready for it, and it's a pleasure to get it. And to switch metaphors, and worse yet, to resort to a really hoary one, it's like being in a supercharged Lamborghini on a clear road with an expert driver who just opens the thing up, and the shift to the high gear is the smoothest rush ever. Nice. 

I said it on Twitter and I'll say it here: proclaiming "I'm not interested in this movie because I couldn't care less about Facebook" is like announcing "I'm not interested in All About Eve because self-absorbed theater people really turn me off." I mean, we're all grown-ups here, we've been around, we've seen a bunch of films, we all kind of know...what I'm trying to say here is, isn't it pretty elemental...that a film isn't really necessarily "about" what it's about; no? This being the sort of observation that allows the very gifted Mr. Sorkin to invoke Aeschylus at press conferences, because of the whole grand-human-themes bit. It may be pompous on his part, but it's not entirely wrong. (For all that, there are some who believe that the film's themes aren't Sufficiently Something to make it a Really Significant something; see, if you must, David Poland's silly "Doesn't say Big Theme to me" "review," which gave me a bracing reminder of why I found the guy such an inviting figure of fun and/or rabid, insane contempt back when I was having my own angry-man-in-the-dark [that's a line from the movie!] relationship with the film blogosphere.) Anyway, you might be wondering what my larger point is, e.g., do I actually think this film is as good as All About Eve, and, yeah, I do, maybe. Most likely, even. And it's got snazzier visuals that are going to wear better than 95% of the other Snazzy Visuals of Our Time, too. (Godard, writing on Joseph Mankiewicz in 1958, provides a presage of why a Sorkin/Fincher teamup is close to ideal, and why Sorkin is probably smart not to try his hand at directing: "[T]he complaint one might make about Mankiewicz: [...] he is too perfect a writer to be a perfect director as well. Basically, what is missing from The Quiet American is cinema. It has everything—brilliant actors, sparkling dialogue—but no cinema." Fincher brings cinema to The Social Network in a way that Rob Reiner absolutely could not for A Few Good Men.)

Let me move the bar on this question, just for the hell of it: why wouldn't you be interested in Facebook, anyway, except for the opportunity to place yourself above it. There's a commenter over at Wells' place who's yammering on about how Social Network is about "an essentially trivial social phenomenon," and in order for it to be really important is should really be about "about Britain's war for survival" (everybody genuflect!) or something else that's really elevating. Not only is this bleat classic dumb faux-middlebrow breast-beating, it could also be wrong. Yes, Facebook is a "social phenomenon," but we don't know that it's necessarily trivial. The internet has, in its various permutations, been redefining the concept of privacy, which concept I suspect—I'm not entirely sure, mind you, I only suspect—is a central one in certain corners of Western culture. That, in itself, is potentially a very big deal for Civilization Itself, and Facebook is an interesting and apt cynosure from/at which to consider this cultural shift, I think. 

And that shall have to do for here and now. But, okay, I'll relate an anecdote that reveals what an awful person I am, because I know some of you kind of like that. So at the press screening, there's this guy in maybe his late twenties sitting in a row in front of me, and he's huge. Like, I mean, enormous...and I know, that as somebody who weighed 300 pounds last Christmas, it's way too soon for me to go all Wells and start looking down on the heftier folks among us...but honestly, this guy was gigantic. It was like you took three of me and stood them side by side and tied them together with bungee cords. But he was cheerful, and peppy, peppy like, (as per my perfervid imagination) if you put him in front of a buffet table, he'd turn into Pac-Man. And anyway, because I'm an awful person, before the screening I would nudge several of my row mates, good and kind and wonderful people all, who are all very indulgent of me, and who I won't name, because I don't want to embarrass them, and I would say, indicating this fellow, "Please. Don't eat me. Please." Which I thought was hilarious, and only in part because I was so overly caffeinated. ("You need to eat something right now," My Lovely Wife said immediately upon hearing my voice when I phoned her after the screening.) Anyway, this fellow got quite a bit of enjoyment out of the movie, but I couldn't help notice that the line he laughed hardest at, actually clapped with delight at...was the line that dropped a Karate Kid reference. And I thought, "Of course..."

NYFF 2010: "Film Socialisme"

"Enjoy the the Navajo and the anti-semitism!" an impish friend commented on Facebook at my mention that I was seeing the new Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme, this morning. Well, as one might have predicted, I enjoyed one but not the other. Let's deal with the "Navajo" first. For the English-language distribution versions of this film, Godard has put on the film subtitles that he's referred to as "Navajo" English. Instead of providing whole literal translations of entire patches of dialogue—and the dialogue is, in descending order of prevalence, in French, German, Russian, and English and maybe one or two other tongues I'm not remembering, and the soundtrack is layered in such a way that will not be unfamiliar to lovers of Nouvelle Vague and King Lear, which means in effect a very deliberate effect of artfully contrived Babel—he'll put up a series of key words, mostly nouns, sometimes invented compound words such as "nocrime" followed by "noblood" with, as seen here, nocaps. It doesn't take very long for the effect to stop feeling like subtitles at all and to play like a sort of running discrete text of its own, one made up in large part of what could be Twitter hashtags. In a sense this makes the film even more social-media-up-to-the-minute than the feature that preceded it at today's New York Film Festival press screenings, David Fincher's superb and engrossing comedic drama of the invention of Facebook, The Social Network. Not bad for a nearly 80-year-old crank largely sequestered in Switzerland, not exactly a finger-on-the-pulse of anything much spot these days. Certainly adds more than just a particular flavor to the experience, and made me feel a little proud that my overall grasp of spoken French is better than I thought it would be.

As for the anti-semitism, of course not so much. Although as usual with late Godard anti-semitism, the stuff is more by insinuation than anything else; what happens here, mostly, is that he cocks and eyebrow and you think he's gonna drop a definitively offensive and/or indefensible characterization, and then he veers off from it. It's almost as if he's toying with us, why would he want to do that. As in the film's first section, which is set on a cruise ship, which could here be some allegorical vessel representing late late capitalism, or not, and there's this old guy dressed kind of like a gangster hanging out on deck and the narrator, such as he is, informs us that his name is "Goldberg" which translates into "Gold mountain," yeah, Jean-Luc, we get it; did you know, in fact that the music industry bigwig Danny Goldberg once had a management company that he himself called "Gold Mountain?" Kind of outsmarted you, eh, little chum? There's another bit later with a reflection that Hollywood was "started by Jews" but this point too, drifts off, as the focus turns more anti-Zionist (I do believe there is a difference, and also, it should go without saying, that these are not two stances that work well together) and it doesn't matter because we're all kind of irritated now anyway. Helas. I'm beginning to think with late-period Godard it's not really a full experience without at least a little serious irritation. People talk admiringly sometimes of flies in the ointment, but a real fly in the ointment isn't particularly ingratiating. For all the moments of quicksilver wit and genuine playfulness in this picture, there's a certain pissy maliciousness as well. To consider this all morally, or even to make a moral judgment on it, even a negative moral judgment, does not oblige us to out-and-out condemn it. But before we cross that bridge—and we're not gonna do it here—first we have to make some sense of the piece.

Or do we? The more this film went on, the more I was reminded of Jaspar Johns' "target" paintings. Repetitions of the same thing—that is, an archery target. Always the same, only the dimensions, the colors, the thickness of the paint on the board, and so on, would vary. In Film Socialisme what's crucial is less the words—printed, spoken, sung—and the images themselves, but the way they're layered and delivered. The images that appear to be in ultra-bright 35 mm, and the images in smeary digital video, and the images in pixelated digital, or analog, video. The freezes, the glitches. The gorgeousness of the light and the light's inevitable technological distortion. There's the usual Godardian polemics and punning, the obsessive sifting through the ash heap of 20th century (and further back than that) history, the attitudinizing, the cameos by philosophers and artists (nice to see Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye pitching in), but then there are the various textures of conveyance, which go back to, and take in, imagery and grain from Eisenstein's Potemkin and Ford's Cheyenne Autumn, among others. (You know how Art Ensemble of Chicago had this tagline for its project, "Great Black Music: Ancient To The Future?" This film could well be subtitled Cinema: Ancient To The Future.) It is this quality, finally, for me, that makes the film remarkable and beautiful and challenging, rather than, in the classically funny Nabokovian formulation, "what [...] the guy [is] trying to say."

NYFF 2010: "Certified Copy"

About a third of the way through this new film by Iranian director Abba Kiarostami, the character played by Juliette Binoche is sitting in a cafe in a tourist-laden Tuscan village when her male companion has to take a phone call, and he goes outside to talk on his cell. The proprieter of the cafe, one of the handful of businesses open on this late Sunday afternoon, remarks to Binoche that the handsome British gentleman looks as if he's a good husband, but wonders why he seems to speak neither Italian or French, and why he hasn't shaved that day. Binoche's character, who's never given a name of her own in the film, defends the fellow, who's called James, on both the linguistic and grooming fronts, and testifies to his other virtues, with anecdotes from the marriage. 

Only problem is, James is not her husband. At least we don't think he's her husband, at least not yet. As far as the viewer is concerned, James and the woman only really met a little while ago, in the dark basement of the antique store that this single mother of a very difficult young boy runs. James is a cultural critic whose most recent book, about the importance or lack thereof of originality in art, gives this film its title, and which Binoche's character has apparently purchased at least a half-dozen titles of. James—beautifully played by the devastatingly handsome William Schimmel, a British opera singer with a fantastically mellifluous speaking voice who's done almost no prior film acting—has shown up on this Sunday at the mysterious request of the Binoche character, and we are under the impression that he's acquiescing to the desire of a quasi-fan who has some expertise in an area his book touches on. In any case, he sees this date as a casual one; he's happy enough to spend some time with this strange woman (and as she's incarnated by the beguiling Binoche, we can hardly blame him), as long as she can get him to the train station to get a 9 p.m. ride out of the country. 

When I say "strange" woman, I mean really strange. No sooner are the she and James in her car, off to see a village she's particularly keen on showing him, than she begins behaving in a thoroughly vexatious fashion, aggressively going after James on intellectual points, regaling him with peculiar stories about her family members, jumping down his throat when he reacts to some story about her obstreperous son (who is almost as obnoxious, in fact, as that damn kid in the beginning of Kiarostami's Ten) with a more intellectually vigorous variant of a "kids will be kids" defense, and so on. So when the woman, unbenownst to James, starts talking to this cafe owner as if James is in fact her husband, the viewer would not be blamed for beginning to wonder if we're wandering into crazy-broad-thriller territory, Fatal Attraction art cinema style, or some such thing. Which would be weird territory for Kiarostami. 

As it happens, Certified Copy does see the director staking out some new territory, but not of that kind—thankfully. There's a bit when the characters are driving to the village and talking about the cypresses that line the sides of the roads, and talking about how they're all different and yet all the same—that is, they're all cypresses, and this reminded me of a critic's remark about the performances and recordings of the avant-garde musical conglomeration AMM, how they were as alike and as different as trees, and made me think how Certified Copy felt nothing like any prior Kiarostami film I had seen and yet entirely like a Kiarostami film. I remind myself that this is a film by the director of the is-it-fact-or-fiction classic Close Up and I say "Oh, really?" and "Of course" simultaneously.

"This movie is nuts" is another thing that occurred to me as I was watching, because at a certain point I decided to drop the notion that what was happening between the characters had some rational explanation. I've read some review of the film that state that the whole husband-and-wife exchanges between the characters, complete with recollections and visits to hotel rooms and such, are part of a game that the two have tacitly decided to play. I don't think that's what's happening, at all. I think the ostensible objective reality of the movie is constantly shifting and mutating, in accordance with the theme of originality and authenticity that James' work is all about. The village where the woman and James enact their ever-changing romantic drama is not just a popular tourist spot, it's big for weddings, too, and there's a splendid recurring visual joke in which the various young brides look like clones of each other. There are little bits that appear to be allusions to Antonioni's La Notte and Rossellini's Voyage in Italy, but a big clue to what the film's really about, or what I think it's really about, comes when Binoche's character approaches a couple of French tourists to consult on an aesthetic question (in one of her many attempts to show up James' theories). This is the occasion for one of the film's best jokes, which I won't spoil. The germane point is that the male of the couple is played (with terrific bearish drollery and sympathy) by Jean-Claude Carriere, the great screenwriter who collaborated with Luis Buñuel on all of his films from Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964 to Buñuel's last, 1977's That Obscure Object of Desire. In Desire, two actresses, Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet, played the same woman, Conchita. Here, Binoche and Schimmel, while never changing their bearings or appearances (except that Binoche's character does put on lipstick and earrings in a restaurant bathroom before one exchange), seem to be incarnating different characters at different times, from relative strangers to estranged husband and wife to tentative lovers to...what, exactly? The film never answers the question, which means, I suppose, it's not really a puzzle film. But between its intellectual matter and its emotional content and its weird, unsettled senses of both actuality and identity, the film strikes me less as in the tradition of the Rossellini and Antonioni pictures and more like a more anguished cross between Ruiz's The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting and Buñuel's Obscure Object. Surrealist with a capital "s," to be sure, and a real curveball from Kiarostami. Seeing this and Uncle Boonmee the same afternoon put me, and a bunch of my fellow NYFF press screening attendees, into a cinephilic swoon we'll be luxuriating in for some time.

NYFF 2010: Some brief notes toward constructing a user's manual for "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"

1) A couple of night before the New York Film Festival press screening of this picture, I was trying to prep a friend who would also be attending, and whose first Apichatong Weerasethakul this was to be. Bearing my impressions of Weerasethakul's great, but resistant-to-standard-film-critical-thought-and-vocabulary prior feature Syndromes and a Century in mind, I advised her: "Okay, so dip into a little early to middle-period John Ashbery. Then subtract the self-conscious intellectualism. Then add Thailand. Then drop the resting heart rate. Then, think film.Then subtract linearity, again." After the screening, my friend told me that, despite this picture being more linear than expected, my prep work had in fact been useful, and that the film was even greater than that!

2) Another useful antecedent to cite relative to what this picture's about is Tarkovsky's The Mirror. Only because this is Weerasethakul, the quietude of its forest scenes, which correspond in their poetry to the dacha scenes in Mirror, is more gentle and also eerie in a different way. The world-historical is broached in a more indirect way than in Tarkovsky's film; here the dying title character wonders aloud about his karma being affected by all the "Communists [he's] killed." But that weight does continue to bear, ever so subtly, on Uncle Boonmee's vision, coming to a peculiar fruition near the end.

3) The aforementioned gentleness, the matter-of-fact depiction of ghosts, the near-anesthetizing sound design of the first forty-five minutes or so, really do cast a spell that may zonk an unsuspecting viewer. This is a film about which it will likely be quite frequently said, "Things really perk up around the time the talking catfish shows." Which is true. But don't let that fool you: it's not really all about the talking catfish.

4) What's the point at which the you-know-what-word-that-starts-with-an-"m" started popping into my head? Possibly when the transition to clunky handheld camerawork went down, during the compelled-cave-exploration scene. The mixing of myth, mysticism, and a very direct confrontation of mortality came together in a visually breathtaking, intellectually provocative, altogether head-spinning sequence that hardly announced itself as such; indeed, the entirety of the genius of this film sort of sneaks up on you, which is, again, typical of Weerasthakul's modesty and gentleness.

5) Yes, the monkey-man suit is below 2001: A Space Odyssey par. I believe that's deliberate.

5) So, yes, I think this likely absolutely deserved to win the Palme d'or at Cannes, and much as I don't necessarily like to do this, I shall have to recall that this decision was pooh-poohed in the Toronto Star by Peter Howell, who said "as a cinema experience, Uncle Boonmee is about as gripping as watching a variety store security video." Howell is entitled to his opinion, except it's wrong, and the whole tenor of this piece is kind of, well, horrifying in its reactionary patronizing; it's saying, well, this "art cinema" thing is all well and good, but if you start giving awards to it you'll set a bad precedent, so you ought to get with the program and honor stuff that's normal. Howell's a nice guy, but there comes a point where being a nice guy doesn't do much to absolve your sins. Such anti-intellectual, anti-art bilge isn't covered under the "nice guy" provision, I'm afraid. (UPDATE: A commenter points out that Howell just this very moment, more or less, did an about-face on the picture, and the fact that it won the Palme d'or, without even mentioning his Cannes notice; see here.)

6) I hope it's not a spoiler to say this: How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?

New York Film Festival 2010: "Pale Flower"

Admitting that I don't know much about the work of the still-living Japanese director Masahiro Shinoda leads me to make a larger admission to myself, which is that I don't really know a hell of a lot about Japanese cinema in general. I know, I know, some of you are going to be wanting to pat me on the back and say, "Oh, come now, Glenn, don't be so hard on yourself, it's got to be a mathematical certainty that you know more about Japanese cinema than critic X or critic Y or some other person you don't like," and I'll give you that much, yes; I have, after all, seen hundreds of Japanese films, which is not a small amount. And yet. Looking at the small amount of Shinoda's work I've seen, I find I can only define him in terms of what he's not, compared to other Japanese directors who've made an impression on myself and the world. He's not as epic and sweeping and emotional as Kurosawa, not as stately and droll and profound as Ozu, not as tragedy-acute and beauty-generating as Mizoguchi, not as perverse as Imamura, as radical as Oshima, as frantic as Fukusuku, as out-and-out lunatic as Suzuki. And so on. 

But he is, by any number of estimations, a major Japanese director, sometimes referred to as a member of the "Japanese New Wave." I look at that phrase, which tends to pop up a lot more since the discussion of film found such fecund ground in the online fields, and I ask, "what the hell does that even mean?" Shinoda's 1964 Kawaita hana, a.k.a. Pale Flower, one of the twelve Shinoda films that will play as part of the 48th New York Film Festival's tribute to the directors, "Elegant Elegies" , features some stylistic inflections and tech change-ups that indicate a debt to Godard, and which certainly add notes of distinction to what is, at core—like Breathless, in fact—a cultural transposition of an American film noir motif. But there's clearly more to what's going on here that I don't have the cultural context or critical vocabulary to nail down.

Which is not to suggest, before I scare anyone away, that Pale Flower is a particularly difficult film. It's a boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl tale, yakuza style, something that anyone with even a vestigial fondness for such genre fare ought to be able to hook into with zero effort. Taciturn Muraki (Ryô Ikebe) emerges from stir after three years to express confusion over the sardine cans in Tokyo's mass-transit system, and quickly re-acclimate himself to the lonely but sometimes exciting gangster lifestyle. He desultorily advises the good girl who waited for him that she should marry that other guy. He sits in his drab room, its back wall decorated by a painting mishap that looks like a depiction of a spinal curvature. He talks tough to the young punk who tried to take him out. And he falls hard and weird for she-who-we-should-assume-to-be the title character, Saeko (Mariko Kaga), a sweet-faced young thing who's burning through what looks like a fortune in the gang-run gambling dens that are a second home to him. Saeko's quiet, but pretty clearly bad news—she likes fast cars, and has got a nagging attraction to Yoh, a killer from Hong Kong who's a bad junkie. One thinks one sees where this is going, but, as it happens, one doesn't. 

There are many points where the film seems to brag about its thorough grasp of the obvious, as when Shinoda cuts to a very big shot of Leonardo's La Giaconda, a reproduction of which just happens to hang in the house of one of the Yakuza bosses. And its little breaks from ostensible traditional cinematic storytelling—the use of a handheld camera during a bowling-alley brawl, the '60s-cool solarization of a dream sequence, a crucial zoom—do not, and of course, can not, galvanize viewers the way they did back in the day. But the picture still packs an interesting sting in its tail, and delivers it well, before reverting to some fake-misterioso portent for the capper. Aside from its immediate entertainment value, it should be of crucial interest to those looking to pin down Shinoda in their index of Japanese directors. I'd consider taking it on as a project myself, but I've got other priorities at the moment. What's the saying? "Had we but world enough, and time?" My problem right now is too much world, not enough time. (And let's not even mention money.) But this was the firt NYFF press screening I was able to make, so figured I'd check in on it. More soon, I hope. 

 

Woody one-note

The writer/director and now only-sometime actor Woody Allen brought his new film, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, to Cannes last week. I'm not there, so I didn't see it, but I did read about the film and its press conference, at which the reliably droll former standup comic amused the crowd with his complaints about aging, and re-reiterated his philosophy of life. To wit: " I do feel that it's a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and the only way you can be happy is if you . . . deceive yourself."

As the filmmaker admits, this undergrad existential/solipsist notion has been his hard line for years. And I know that a lot of my fellow critics have taken Allen to task, particularly with regard to his more recent films, for being rather out of touch with the way life is lived now, and for the transparent disingenuousness of the topical references he'll occasionally throw into a film believing it will ameliorate something that in fact permeates the very atmosphere of his work. All that is true and valid, but the problem goes deeper than that. The problem has to do with Allen's crabbed, cramped philosophy. While what he's saying about life may well be true, one gets the impression that he's never bothered to step back and reexamine his perspective as an a priori perspective, let alone that perspective as it relates to what's happening in the world today. It may be true that every great artist tells the same story over and over, but what said artist also does is try to tell that story in new ways. Which is what made a movie like Zelig and even parts of Sweet and Lowdown so thrilling. And, by the same token, made a movie like Shadows and Fog rather embarrassing. But at least there was an effort there. 

I just finished the new Martin Amis novel, The Pregnant Widow, which I enjoyed a great deal. It is, in a sense, an older/wiser visit to the scenes and moods of early Amis fils works such as The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies—it's a story of "sexual trauma" within a group of young people in the summer of 1970. It also contains some characters and story threads that speak to Amis' current concerns about the rise of extremist Islam, or just plain Islam, in world culture/civilization. Concerns that Amis has expressed in a fashion that some might well consider retrograde, or if you wanna be even nicer about it, ill-articulated, in interviews. Said concerns, I'm glad to note, are addressed with quite a bit more consideration and nuance here. Nevertheless, the theme is an awkward fit—one of the salient points about the Islam situation today is that, back in the final flowering of the counterculture, it really was the last thing that almost anybody saw coming. But I give Amis credit for, you know, trying. 

You just don't find that kind of effort in Allen's work any more; maybe it was never there to begin with, and the stuff outside of its monotonous core was so entertaining and engaging that one didn't notice or care. But the fact is, for a very long time, both philosophically and epistemically, his films have played out in a world after the end, not just of history itself, but of the history of thought. A world in which all philosophical questions have been well and truly settled, and where nothing is up for grabs. Whereas in the world in which we actually exist, pretty much everything's up for grabs. Just ask Slavoj Zizek.