Long Pauses

Films of 2009

2009-12-31T23:56:00.001-05:00

Best of 2009

I've now seen about 40 of the point-earning films from the 2009 IndieWire Critics Survey, which seems a reasonable enough number. I'm not even sure how IndieWire qualifies a film as a 2009 release, although given the appearance of Sokurov's The Sun (which I saw in September 2005!), I assume they go by the one-week theatrical release rule. I've taken the coward's route and included eleven films because I just couldn't decide which one to leave off. All in all, I'd say it was a good but far-from-great year. As one guide, none of these films made my Favorite Films of the Decade list, and I can't imagine any of them will gain greatly in stature over time. (Although after a single recent viewing of The Headless Woman, I wouldn't be surprised if I later come to the realization that it's Martel's masterpiece. Still thinking on that one.)

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) [ more ]
Revanche (Gotz Spielmann) [ more ]
Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung) [ more ]
Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso) [ more ]
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
Birdsong (Albert Serra) [ more ]
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
Duplicity (Tony Gilroy)
Two Lovers (James Gray)
Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)

Favorite New Films I Saw in 2009

Distribution rules be damned! I saw about 80 films this year that qualify under this category, which is a catch-all: If I saw a recently-produced film in 2009, and it was my first opportunity to see it, then it qualifies. So I'm working from a deep pool here: shorts and feature-length films; narratives, essays, documentaries, and the avant-garde; DVDs, festival films, theatrical releases, museum installations, and, in one case, a pre-release screener. From this vantage, 2009 looks a hell of a lot better.

Phantoms of Nabua / A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul) [ more ]
Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat) [ more ]
Face (Tsai Ming-liang) [ more ]
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues)
Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)
Lucky Life (Lee Isaac Chung)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
In Comparison (Harun Farocki)

Favorite Discoveries of 2009

Were it not for my "one film per director" rule, this list would likely consist of nine John Ford films and Jeanne Dielman. Instituting the rule makes it more representative of my movie-watching year, though. Along with the thirteen Ford films I saw, I also went through a brief '80s phase last spring, when I made a couple great discoveries, and there were a couple hold-overs from last year's trip through the Borzage and Murnau DVD releases.

7th Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927)
City Girl (F. W. Murnau, 1930)
Emergency Kisses (Philippe Garrel, 1989)
Grown Ups (Mike Leigh, 1980) [ more ]
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940)
Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980) [ more ]
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)
Tren de Sombras (Jose Luis Guerin, 1997) [ more ]
Voyage en deuce (Michel Deville, 1980) [ more ]

Favorite Films of the Decade

2009-12-20T14:36:00.089-05:00

I'll follow Tom Hall's lead and call this my "Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade." Consider it a snapshot of my taste right now. Conspicuously absent are several filmmakers who made great films this decade but who, for whatever reasons -- my age? critical backlash? the weather? -- didn't make the final cut. Check back in another ten years and things will likely look much different.

The ground rules: Feature-length films of any genre. One film per director, although I don't think the list would look too much different without that qualification (Denis, Jia, and Costa would probably get in another film or two). I went by theatrical release date, mostly because there are quite a few 2009 festival releases I haven't yet seen, and that just doesn't seem quite fair.

Warning: A few of the clips below contain spoilers. Don't blame me if your curiosity gets the best of you.

1. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 2000)
Quite possibly my favorite film of any decade, Beau Travail constitutes a genre unto itself. Equal parts literary adaptation (Melville's Billy Budd), contemporary dance piece, psychological character study, formalist experiment, postcolonial analysis, and music video, it is also on my short list of Truly Beautiful Things.

2. The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002)
The format they established in The Promise and Rosetta -- hand-held cameras, natural lighting, the famous "back of the head" shot, and moral questioning along the lines of Dostoevsky and Bresson -- made the Dardenne brothers the most influential art-house filmmakers of the decade (judging by the slew of imitators that land in festival lineups, at least). The Son is the one I keep returning to, though. Olivier Gourmet as a wounded carpenter: the conceit is six feet thick with metaphorical implications, most of them valid and compelling, but it's his body -- the sheer, muscular physicality of it -- that drives the film's momentum.

3. Still Life / Dong (Jia Zhang-ke, 2006)
Jia is, for lack of a better word, the most "important" filmmaker of the decade, I think. Each of the seven features he made documents globalization by examining some small corner of China. Watching his movies is like watching helplessly as a museum is looted. There's an urgency to his project, as if he's reluctant to put his camera down for too long or risk losing his tenuous grasp on a nation's culture and history and humanity. I consider Still Life and Dong, made and released simultaneously, a diptych -- each benefits from the juxtaposition. Together, they're Jia's best, most complex, and most compelling work.

4. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
Any of the Vanda Trilogy films could fill this spot. But Colossal Youth was the first I saw and, so, it left the deepest impression. I remember thinking, only 30 minutes in, "Well, I didn't know the cinema could be this." Like several other directors on this list (Denis, Jia, Godard, Lynch, Varda, Zahedi), Costa is also significant for his contributions to the evolution of digital filmmaking, which is surely the real story of film in the first decade of the 21st century. More here.

5. What Time is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
My favorite Tsai films, What Time is it There? and Face, probably won't be the ones he's best remembered for (my money's on the more sexually transgressive The River and The Wayward Cloud), but his treatment of grief -- the strange tangle of pain and desire, shame and beauty -- is what he does best. I watched parts of Time over and over again in 2004, after my mother- and father-in-law died suddenly, and years later it still brings me great comfort. More here.

6. Syndromes and a Century (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
After being frustrated by a first screening of Claire Denis's L'Intrus, I was offered a useful insight by my friend Girish: "The line separating narrative film from the avant-garde is pretty arbitrary, really." Apitchatpong has erased the line completely, and God bless him for it. I mean, just watch this clip. Not for all tastes, obviously, but there's a magic and beauty in those few minutes that many great filmmakers will fail to achieve in a lifetime.

7. Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2004)
Hou's films were more groundbreaking in the '80s and more ambitious in the '90s, but he has perfected his craft and refined his taste to such a degree that I find him almost impossible to write about or discuss: he makes these perfect little objects full of soul and wonder. That Cafe Lumiere was inspired by Ozu never interested me much, except that it gave Hou an excuse to deal with a father/daughter relationship. The trailer I've linked to is almost ruined by the music, but it includes my favorite moment from the film: the shot of the father picking out the potatoes from his meal and giving them to Yoko.

8. In Praise of Love (Jean-luc Godard, 2001)
Suddenly it occurs to me that a good number of the films on my list are obsessed with history, memory, power, and image-making, which I'll blame, in part, on my having spent the first half of this decade in a graduate English program. But it's a reasonable obsession, right? Certainly it's nothing new for Godard, whose first feature of the 21st century borrows techniques from the films he made 40 years earlier (I love equally the first-person interviews in Masculine/Feminine and In Praise of Love). Also, this film ranks high on my list simply because I got to see it projected on 35mm at a multiplex in Knoxville, Tennessee.

9. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
For the longest time, Waking Life seemed destined to fill the Linklater spot on my list, but after rewatching it and Before Sunset recently, I realized that the latter does all of the things I most love about the former -- it delights in human curiosity, engages with life, and champions the creative imagination -- but it does so in a form (the romance, generally speaking) that tends to degrade those qualities in its characters. It's quite a feat.

10. RR (James Benning, 2007)
At the start of the decade I could have counted on one hand the number of avant-garde films I'd seen. Now, it would take, like, fifteen or twenty hands, which is a start, I guess. More here.

11. Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
There Will Be Blood is finding its way onto many Best of the 00s lists, but Glazer gets my vote for Kubrick Heir Apparent. More here.

12. In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin, 2007)
I can't decide if I should feel guilty for loving this film as much as I do. Formally, it's as perfectly controlled as any movie I can name. Guerin has made a little cinematic fugue here, discovering new rhythms and dissonances as he returns to and transforms images -- hair blowing in the wind, a hand sketching faces, a man with a limp trying to sell a lighter, two people walking. But, really, this movie is about the pleasures of watching, and parts of it (the cafe sequence, "Heart of Glass," the final five minutes) just make me smile like an idiot.

13. The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003)
I spent the majority of my spare time between 2001-2006: 1. researching and occasionally writing a doctoral dissertation about the American Left and the Cold War, 2. swallowing bile. I'm sympathetic to the complaints leveled at this film, but I have watched The Fog of War at least a dozen times, and it's the only Iraq/Bush-era documentary that comes close to representing my deeply-felt ambivalence about the "American Century" that came to an end ten years ago. I was pleased to find this clip on YouTube because it's my favorite section of the film. You see McNamara's prevarications, his pride and shame, but most of all you see the ironies contained in that poisoned word, "efficiency." Did Hannah Arendt ever write about spreadsheets?

14. Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
I wonder if other cinephiles of my generation have had this experience? After discovering Blue Velvet as an undergrad and declaring Lynch The Greatest Director Ever (cough, cough), I matured, turned my back on him, and declared him That Overrated Director Who Is Loved Only By Pot-Smoking Undergrads. So, in 2007 I rewatched all of his films, ending with Inland Empire, and concluded that he deserves neither title. Rather, he is just exceptionally gifted at making a particular type of film. I'll stand by my comments from two years ago: "My Damascus experience came midway through the first season of Twin Peaks, when I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed by the deep sorrow that pervades the Laura Palmer story. While watching Inland Empire again last night, it occurred to me that one reason I'm completely unconvinced by all of the critical praise being heaped on the Coens' treatment of evil and violence in No Country for Old Men is because violence -- real, non-metaphoric violence -- is always sorrowful and tragic. Lynch seems to have been born with a peculiar sensitivity to that fact, and has spent his career perfecting the formal means of articulating it."

15. When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, 2008)
It's easy to forget that, for the better part of a century, the experience of cinema was created by projected light, fast-moving gears, and strips of celluloid. And then you see something like When It Was Blue, and you hear two projectors running behind you, and you're occasionally blinded by the brightness of the bulbs, and you ask yourself, "What am I seeing? How did she get that image on that frame of film?" More here.

16. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
Last year I saw, within just a few days of each other, Agnes Varda and Terrence Davies introduce and discuss their latest films, The Beaches of Agnes and Of Time and the City, both of which are autobiographical essay films. And I'm still struck by the juxtaposition: Davies the bitter nostalgist versus Varda the curious anthropologist. Varda is my hero. At 80, she's as alive to the wonder and potential (and the sorrows and ironies) of the world now as she was 55 years ago, when she first picked up a camera. The Gleaners and I makes me want to be a better man.

17. In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi, 2001)
In 2000, Caveh shot at least a minute of video a day and then assembled it into this remarkable film. Ironically, there are no clips from this YouTube-anticipating project on YouTube, so, instead, I've embedded a clip from The World is a Classroom, his short contribution to the post-9/11 collection, Underground Zero. More here.

18. Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)
Life on Earth (1998) is my favorite of Sissako's films, but Bamako was the first I saw and it left me teary-eyed and speechless. The court scenes are didactic and on-the-nose -- deliberately so -- but it's all that life going on around the court that makes the film work. It all culminates in one of my favorite scenes of the decade, as an elderly man sing-speaks his testimony to the court, an act of astonishing beauty that also exposes the absurdity of the proceedings.

19. Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2007)
This is the only film by Klotz I've seen, and, frankly, I'm surprised to find it on my list. I'd anticipated including a Haneke film instead (Code Unknown, probably, or maybe Cache), but Heartbeat Detector is the film I found myself most eager to revisit. The first of two Mathieu Amalric performances to round out the top 20. More here.

20. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
I considered cheating here by naming two films, this one and Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach (2006). While their styles and ambitions are quite different, I've decided I like Desplechin and Hong for basically the same reason: their movies constantly surprise me in small but significant ways. On the Kings and Queen DVD, Desplechin recounts a story about Truffaut's frustration with a screenwriter. "How do you expect me to shoot a four-minute scene that expresses a single idea?" he asked. "I want every minute of film to express four ideas!" Desplechin has taken that as his motto, and you can see the results in each of his films, which are consistently messy, ambiguous, and haunted -- Kings and Queen especially so. I mean, just try to summarize Louis Jennsens's (Maurice Garrel) deathbed letter to Nora (Emmanuelle Devos). Watching a scene like that, I actively envy the imagination of its creators.

And ten more (alphabetized) that just missed the cut
Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005)
Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000) [ more ]
Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005)
Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina, 2006)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuaron, 2004) [ more ]
I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)
Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004)
Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)

TIFF '09 Wrap-Up

2009-09-28T15:06:00.003-04:00

To carry on the tradition from past years (2006, 2007, 2008), here's a breakdown of the feature-length films I saw at TIFF, more or less in order of preference.

Masterpieces

Will likely end up on my short list of favorite films of the decade:

none

Stand Outs

Will be among my favorite films of the year:

Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues)
Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnair)
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
In Comparison (Harun Farocki)

Strong Recommendations

Carcasses (Denis Côté)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
White Material (Claire Denis)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Independencia (Raya Martin)
Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras)
To the Sea (Pedro González-Rubio)

Solid Films

Le Père de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve)
Colony (Carter Gunn & Ross McDonnell)
Les Derniers Jours Du Monde (Arnaud Larrieu & Jean-Marie Larrieu)
Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani)
Karaoke (Chris Chong Chan Fui)
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog)
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel)
Women Without Men
Defendor (Peter Stebbings)
Antichrist (Tars von Trier)
L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot Inferno (Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea)
Petropolis (Peter Mettler)
Hiroshima (Pablo Stoll)
Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Duds and Misfires

At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)
Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton)
The Man Beyond the Bridge (Laxmikant Shetgaonkar)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
Moloch Tropical (Raoul Peck)
The Wind Journeys (Ciro Guerra)
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé)

TIFF Day 3

2009-09-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

Antichrist (Tars von Trier)

When asked at TIFF what I thought of Antichrist, I got in the habit of saying, "Well, it's a testament to von Trier's talent that he can make such an unremarkable film of such remarkable imagination and control." It's a genre film, right? A psychological horror movie with a few unexpected plot twists? I enjoyed it on that level, and I was amused, also, by its ostentatious wanderings into psychoanalysis-bashing, the history of gynocide, and bizarro-world astronomy, all of which beg pedantic interpretation. But I can't seem to muster much energy for it myself. The most compelling defense of the film I've read is from Victor Morton, who sees it as a "raw production of von Trier’s inner depressive state." There's a strange and irresistible grandeur to von Trier's images -- the way he warps nature with a slow pan of his camera, for example, or that signature shot of arms reaching through the knotted roots of a tree. The actual experience of watching the film is more interesting and complicated than any of its rabbit-hole provocations. Having never suffered through it myself, I can't speak to whether or not Antichrist accurately evokes, a la classic Surrealism, the true terrors and violence of depression (regrettably, I can vouch for Punch-Drunk Love's anxiety attacks), but the film certainly has an uncommon tenor that I found both exciting (as a cinephile) and despairing.

Independencia (Raya Martin)

Southeast Asian film programmer Raymond Phathanavirangoon dedicated the screening of Independencia to Alexis and Nika, which almost surely deepened my affection for it. Shot entirely on soundstages and with obviously-painted backdrops, the film alludes to a curious collection of precedents -- early cinema, melodrama, newsreels, popular theater, the avant-garde (particularly Brakhage's film scratching), and who knows how many Filipino influences that were lost on me. But I was most often reminded of wax figure museum displays of the sort one finds at national parks and tourist-friendly historic districts. Decades-old, dust-covered mannequins costumed as heroic leaders and noble savages, they recite, again and again and again, some story about our shared history, told from whatever enlightened perspective was en vogue at the moment of the display's dedication. I'm not sure how much credit to give the politics of Independencia's content, but its form strikes me as being something quite original and potent (despite the many idle comparisons to Guy Maddin I keep reading), as if the wax figures were suddenly coming to life and confronting museum patrons who are in search of simple and comforting self-justifications.

Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat)

There's much to like in Women Without Men, visual artist Shirin Neshat's first feature. Like another, better TIFF film, João Pedro Rodrigues's To Die Like a Man, it's a work of magical realism that imagines an Edenic space where oppressive social and political forces are kept at bay -- temporarily, at least. I have a weakness for stories like this one, which concerns four women: 30-something Munis, who lives at home with her domineering brother and spends her days crouched beside the console radio, hungry for news of the coup that would soon install the Shah; her friend Mahdokht, who lives in disgrace after being raped; Zarin, an anorexic-looking prostitute (played by Orsolya Tóth from Kornél Mundruczó's Delta); and Farrokhlaqa, the bored, cultured wife of a wealthy officer. Each is drawn to a small orchard outside of Tehran, an idealized sanctuary where they are allowed a brief respite from their suffering, and where, under Farrokhlaqa's influence, they have parties, discuss art, and sing secular songs. Neshat has a nice eye for composition, although much of the film feels familiar, like we've seen these shots and met these women in other Iranian films. The shock of what is new in Women Without Men, the female nudity and frank treatment of sexuality, seemed less radical when I learned afterwards that Neshat has spent her adult life in the States and that she had made her film outside of Iran and with some non-Iranian actresses.

Le Père de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve)

Hansen-Løve didn't make it to Toronto, but her producer introduced the film by saying it was loosely inspired by a once-prominent member of the French film industry. It was only at the midpoint of the film, after the main character Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) puts a bullet through his brain, that I realized he was standing in for Humbert Balsan, who committed suicide in 2005 after producing nearly 70 films, including Claire Denis's L'Intrus, Lars von Trier's Manderlay, and Bela Tarr's The Man from London. Generally, I enjoy films that break in two, but in the case of Le Père de mes enfants, the two halves are a bit out of balance, owing mostly to de Lencquesaing's charismatic performance. Perhaps it's inevitable that a film about the death of a good husband and father will feel his loss: there's a narrative and emotional void in the second act that Hansen-Løve can't quite overcome, despite another impressive turn from Alice de Lencquesaing (also memorable in a similar role in Assayas's Summer Hours). All the best parts of Le Père de mes enfants (and they're very good) are the small gestures -- the way Grégoire kisses his younger daughter's hand when she reaches for him from the back seat of the car or the scene in which he patiently explains the history of the ancient church they tour together. Liquidating the foundered production company, which is the main focus of the second half of the film, seems so irrelevant by comparison. And maybe that's the point.

Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)

I hope, eventually, to write at length about this film, one of the best I saw at the festival. In the meantime, read Michael Sicinski's essay, "The Unbroken Path: Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May." It's fantastic.

TIFF Day 2

2009-09-21T15:45:00.001-04:00

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)

Given the generally low opinion of Like You Know It All among many Hong fans, and given my enjoyment of it, I've concluded I just can't tell the good ones from the bad. This one has everything I enjoy about his work: a self-absorbed, unintentionally cruel, and likable protagonist; a complicated web of sexual entanglements; a calculated yet surprising structure built upon doublings and distorted echoes; and gallons of booze (and arm wrestling!). Here, Kim Tae-woo plays a young filmmaker who wanders through the scenes of his life with little concern for the often-significant consequences of his behavior. He's more of a catalyst than a person in the film, drifting into the isolated homes of friends only long enough to unsettle the happy chemistry of their lives. I like Hong's women. They're independent, sexually liberated, and as confused as the men, which is what makes the final scene in Like You Know It All (and its echo in A Woman on the Beach) so tender and melancholy. Hong's men expect the women in their lives to grant them access to some secret insight, answers to life's grand questions, and the film is structured in a way that portends epiphanies. But they never come. Not in so many words, at least.

Face (Tsai Ming-liang)

Those at Cannes who were lukewarm on Face were just plain wrong. Along with being a Tsai greatest hits package -- the busted pipes, musical numbers, and obsessive behaviors -- and a sequel of sorts to What Time is it There?, Face also includes five or six scenes that are among the most visually arresting and heartbreaking he's ever filmed. (Does the photo above make more sense if I tell you Laetitia Casta is Salome? How many artists have reimagined the beheading of John the Baptist over the centuries, and how many filmmakers in 2009 would be able to find new textures in the story?) Perhaps this is obvious, but while watching Face I was struck by how much of Tsai's cinema can be boiled down to simple action. Laetitia Casta taping a window dark or struggling to carry her cumbersome wardrobe up a ladder. Fanny Ardant moving a mounted deer head or applying makeup to Jean-Pierre Leaud's battered face. And, most moving of all, Chen Shiang-chyi and Yang Kuei-Mei loading and unloading a freezer. It's elemental. A rich human comedy. I watched Face again on the last day of the fest and am tempted to call it my new favorite Tsai film.

La Pivellina (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel)

La Pivellina fits a certain mold popular these days at international film festivals. At my most cynical, or when beaten down by a particularly thoughtless film, I think of it as "poverty tourism" -- an opportunity for upper- and middle-class liberals like myself to safely experience the "gripping, real lives" of those less fortunate. La Pivellina fits the mold, but much to its credit, it avoids a fatal flaw common in the genre: the crisis, which usually involves a rape (see below), a beating, or the theft of the hero's cherished something or other. (Oh, St. De Sica, look at what thou hath wraught.) Instead, Covi and Frimmel give us three characters who are genuinely kind and generous. In the opening moments of the film, Patty (Patrizia Gerardi), an aging carnie, finds an abandoned toddler with a note from its mother promising to return for the child as soon as possible. Patty walks home with the little girl, and the rest of the film follows her, her husband Walter (Walter Saabel), and their 13-year-old neighbor Tairo (Tairo Caroli) for a week, as they bond with baby Asia. La Pivellina is filled with nice little moments, wonderfully performed -- I especially like a scene in which Walter teaches Tairo how to box -- but I wish the film had stronger structural bones. The episodes begin by the second hour to feel too disconnected, which leads to a predictably unresolved and, in my opinion, somewhat unsatisfying conclusion. Still, a nice character study of grace.

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)

Fish Tank is from the more vicious school of poverty tourism that takes its cues from Hardy, Norris, and Crane (and Von Trier?), the sadists of Naturalism who aren't satisfied until their heroines have been suitably degraded, preferably under the shadows of Stonehenge. I saw Fish Tank despite my frustrations with Arnold's first film, Red Road, chalking up her lapses in taste there to her involvement with the "Advance Party concept," which put certain rules and restrictions on the production. The fact is, I'll see Arnold's next film, too, because I really like the way she shoots, especially night scenes, in which characters are back-lit with yellows and reds. Fish Tank is a portrait of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a 15-year-old with no friends (apparently), a drunken whore of a mother, and an adorably foul-mouthed little sister. Mia's lonely, horny, and mature beyond her years, so when her mother brings home a new man (Michael Fassbender, awesome as usual), they strike up a friendship. And then he drinks a little and rapes her, although the film is designed to make it all seem perfectly consensual. Lovely, even. (Cameron Bailey describes it as a "taboo-breaking love story.") The final act of the film features characters who barely resemble those we get to know in the first 90 minutes. Arnold has great promise as a director, but the writing needs work. Bonus points to her, though, for digging out Bobby Womack's cover of "California Dreaming."

TIFF Day 1

2009-09-10T15:43:00.003-04:00

L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot Inferno (Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea)

The YouTube clip above is tacked on like a coda to Bromberg and Medrea's documentary, and seeing it in that context is a slightly different experience. By that point we've learned the story of Clouzot's failed efforts to bring to the screen what was to be his masterpiece, L'Enfer, a revolutionary experiment in form inspired in part by Fellini's 8 1/2. The project was abandoned after endless months of camera tests; after millions of Hollywood dollars were spent; after the film's lead actor, Serge Reggiani, walked off the film, due either to depression, his exasperation with his director, or some combination of the two; and after, finally, Clouzot himself suffered a heart attack. By way of analogy, imagine if, after all that time in the jungle, Coppola had returned to the States with only 13 hours of exploding forests and Brando's improvisations. And imagine if that footage had been locked in a legal battle -- and locked in a vault -- for 45 years, unseen by anyone.

Bromberg and Maedrea tell the story behind the film through fairly dry and conventional means, interviewing members of the crew and filling in the blanks with a written, conversational voiceover. Much more interesting is their splicing together of whole scenes from L'Enfer, based on Clouzot's 300-page script and notes, the hours of dailies, the one surviving audio recording, and, in several instances, contemporary dramatizations of dialogue that was never filmed. Bromberg and Medrea film their actors (Bérénice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin) on a dark soundstage and elicit from them natural and compelling performances, which offers a stark contrast to what we see of Schneider and Reggiani. In principle, it's an odd device -- a kind of anti-Brechtian effect or something -- but I enjoyed the acted scenes, as they hint at the human drama on the page that is nowhere to be found in the eye-popping camera tests.

Watching the YouTube clip is also different, coming at the end of the film, because what begins as, quite simply, some of the most beautiful glamour shots ever photographed, becomes, through repetition, a slightly unsettling document of the director-starlet relationship. (It would make an interesting companion to Mark Rappaport's From the Journals of Jean Seberg, and to Vertigo and In The City of Sylvia as well.) L'Enfer was to be the story of a middle-aged man whose jealousies over his young wife send him into ecstatic, technicolor fantasies, which Clouzot then films, and we then watch. There's something -- and I hesitate to use this word -- pornographic about it all.

Splitscreens

2009-09-06T12:39:00.001-04:00

Duplicity (Tony Gilroy)

Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc

2009-09-01T22:46:00.006-04:00

I was already choking back tears even before reading this Tweet from Raya Martin:

http://twitpic.com/g5qbk - i love you pards why did you leave me we're not yet done

Added: "The Letter I Would Love To Read To You In Person," from Alexis to Nika

Anticipating TIFF (2009)

2009-08-31T23:08:00.012-04:00

I just received my ticket order confirmation. I have a 50-ticket pass but will probably only -- only -- see 36-40, so I went ahead and double-booked several time slots and will make a last-minute decision about which tickets to use. The last day of the fest is especially tricky. As much as I'd like to see the new Kore-eda film, I'm guessing I'll probably begin the day with the crazy-awesome-looking David Lynch (!) and Werner Herzog (!!) collaboration, see the new Denis film again, and then collapse at my hotel room in front of some college football.

Thursday, 9/10
L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot Inferno (Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea)

Friday, 9/11
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel)
Wavelengths 1: Titans
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)

Saturday, 9/12
Antichrist (Tars von Trier) OR Vision (Margarethe von Trotta)
Independencia (Raya Martin)
Women Without Men
Le Père de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve)
Wavelengths 3: Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)

Sunday 13
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Petropolis (Peter Mettler)
Wavelengths 4: In Comparison
Wavelengths 5: Une Catastrophe
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)

Monday, 9/14
Moloch Tropical (Raoul Peck)
The Man Beyond the Bridge (Laxmikant Shetgaonkar) AND Wavelengths 6: Flash Point Camera
OR Mall Girls (Katarzyna Roslaniec) AND Colony (Carter Gunn & Ross McDonnell)

Tuesday, 9/15
Wild Grass (Alain Resnair)
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé)
White Material (Claire Denis)
Lourdes (Jessica Hausner)

Wednesday, 9/16
Scheherezade, Tell Me a Story (Yousry Nasrallah) OR Defendor (Peter Stebbings)
Karaoke (Chris Chong Chan Fui)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues)
The Wind Journeys (Ciro Guerra)

Thursday, 9/17
Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani)
Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton)
Hiroshima (Pablo Stoll) OR I, Don Giovani (Carlos Saura)
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira)
Carcasses (Denis Côté)

Friday, 9/18
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino) OR Les Derniers Jours Du Monde (Arnaud Larrieu & Jean-Marie Larrieu)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan)
At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)

Saturday, 9/19
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog)
Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda) OR White Material (Claire Denis) OR Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara)
AND MAYBE Once Upon a Time Proletarian (Guo Xiaolu)
Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras)

Wavelengths Preview 3

2009-08-30T11:11:00.027-04:00

Phantoms of Nabua (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul)

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul)

Mark Peranson's article at Moving Image Source, "Exquisite Corpus," is a useful introduction to Apitchatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's Primitive project, a collection of shorts, installations, and an in-the-works feature inspired by the director's new-found interest in reincarnation and, more specifically, by a short book he was given about the many lives of Uncle Boonmee, whose ghosts still haunt the village of Nabua in northeast Thailand. The project also reflects Apitchatpong's increasing political engagement. Peranson writes:

Beginning with the onset of a famous gun battle between farmer communists and the totalitarian government on August 7, 1965, Nabua was occupied by the Thai Army from the '60s into the '80s to suppress communist agitators. The only thing similar to the story of Boonmee is that, in Apichatpong’s words, "the village is also full of repressed memories. . . . It is a place where memories and ideologies are extinct." It is with the sons of those communists who were tortured or oppressed, or who died during the brutal period of the occupation, that Apichatpong made the works that constitute Primitive. Set in a place whose history has been forgotten by both the country and local inhabitants, the project reimagines Nabua by bringing light to the ghosts of the past through the lost generation of today, while also confronting the current political turmoil in Thailand.

Phantoms of Nabua, which will be installed at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art throughout the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Future Projections program, can be viewed online, but I'd recommend seeing it projected and (hopefully) with surround sound if possible. As has become Joe's trademark, the ten-minute film is first and foremost a sensory experience. Phantoms takes place at night in a field where a makeshift screen has been assembled, onto which is being projected flashes of lighting that erupt on impact with the ground. (According to Peranson, these are clips from Nabua, another of the shorts from Primitive.) In the foreground, a group of teenage boys, barely visible in the darkness, pass a flaming soccer ball back and forth until it ignites the screen, leaving only the projector, which continues to spray its images into the dark.

There are ways of "decoding" this film, I suppose -- the soccer ball as a synecdoche for military armaments, the cinema as documentarian, the hovering florescent light as ghost (or Ghost) -- but reducing Joe's films to points on a symbolic answer key seems beside the point. Watching Phantoms and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (playing in Wavelengths 5: Une Catastrophe), I was struck by the idea that Aptichatpong is one of the few true heirs to Tarkovsky. They share thematic obsessions, particularly the intersection of personal (autobiography) and national (History) memory, and they're certainly two of the cinema's great mystics. More than any of our other great filmmakers today, I see Apitchatpong consistently striving for -- and realizing, with breathtaking clarity -- Tarkovsky's ideal, "the film image," which, as opposed to the intellectually-reducible symbol, "gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings" (Sculpting in Time, 109).

An example: Another of Apitchatpong's short films, Mobile Men (2008), part of the Stories on Human Rights Project.

On the YouTube page a well-intentioned commenter offers a point-by-point analysis of what this film means, as if the experience of watching it, especially the last minute, could be so easily expressed in words.

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee is set at a home in the jungles of Nabua, through which Apitchatpong's camera tracks and pans -- floats, really -- observing photos of lost relatives on the walls and peering through open windows. On the soundtrack, we hear first one man then another recite Joe's desire to make a film about the reincarnated lives of Uncle Boonmee. (Later, we also hear one of the men rehearsing his lines and jokingly chastising Joe for screwing up their dialect, which recalls one of my favorite scenes in Syndromes and a Century, when we hear two actors discussing the minutes-long shot they're currently filming.) The penultimate shot in the film is particularly Tarkovskian. The camera tracks over the home's roofline, tilts up, looking into the tree tops, and then returns to ground level, where it sees an animal in the far distance -- another of Boonmee's ghosts and also, like Tarkovsky's horses, a multivalent, shape-shifting image.

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee feels a bit like a sketch for a feature-length film, but, especially in juxtaposition with Phantoms of Nabua, it's the best thing I've seen in 2009. I can't wait to see the rest of Primitive.

Wavelengths Preview 2

2009-08-27T22:14:00.015-04:00

Tamalpais (Chris Kennedy)

Toronto filmmaker Chris Kennedy is a familiar face at Wavelengths. His films Memo to Pic Desk (co-director, '06), the acrobat ('07), and Tape Film ('07) were all screened in the program, and my limited sense of him based on those projects was that he was still experimenting (pun intended) with the material of movie-making but hadn't yet successfully married form to an equally compelling concept. Tape Film, for example, is fascinating to look at -- it's a disorienting and super-saturated self-portrait -- but it feels scholastic, like an assigned exercise in the mechanics of handprocessing and stock manipulation.

Kennedy's latest contribution to Wavelengths, Tamalpais, represents a significant step forward for him, I think. About two-and-a-half minutes into the fourteen-minute film, we see in the distance a lovely composition of the green hills north of San Francisco; in the foreground, a handmade wooden frame in the classic movie ratio, 4:3, the same as the film itself. This shot puts all that comes before it in some much-needed perspective. The wooden frame is cross-sected by ten wire lines, six vertical, four horizontal, that divide the framed space into 35 smaller frames, and it's only in hindsight that we realize each of the opening shots in the film was inspired (probably the wrong word) by one of those smaller frames. Like the twelve-tone composers of the early 20th century, though, it's what one does with the given notes that determines whether a particular work is successful or pedantic or (insert your own evaluative adjective here), and Kennedy's real achievement is at the level of individual shots, which are often beautiful and demonstrate a curious deftness with focus and depth of field. Kennedy recycles the technique six or seven times, creating slight variations on his landscape theme and shepherding his audience through shifting relationships with the material, from the simple pleasure of the opening images to the puzzle-like gamesmanship of his structuralist conceit and back, finally, to the beauty of his shot-making.

Hotel Roccalba (Josef Dabernig)

Until watching Hotel Roccalba and then immediately googling Dabernig to learn more about him, I'd forgotten about his previous film, Lancia Thema, which screened in Wavelengths three years ago. I remember wondering at the time why Andrea Picard was so enthusiastic about him -- the film struck me as slight and offbeat, like a Stella Artois ad -- but Hotel Roccalba may have made me a believer. The film opens on a shot of two women knitting outside. He then cuts to others in the courtyard -- an old man chopping wood, a bicyclist repairing his bike, a woman in a lawn chair. It's only after introducing his characters -- and make no mistake, these are staged tableau, this is a fiction -- that Dabernig situates them in space by planting his camera on a tripod and panning 180 degrees.

Hotel Roccalba is also relatively slight and offbeat, funny even, but the execution is so precise and Dabernig's cutting so angular and shocking that it feels right at home in Wavelengths. My favorite section of the film involves an elderly man and a put-upon bartender who wouldn't be out of place in Satantango. As in the opening sequence, Dabernig reveals their relationship gradually and in splintered fragments, cutting from a series of medium one-shots to a long-range, wide-angle shot that provides something like an objective perspective on them both. A note to cinema studies teachers: this would be a great piece for a unit on editing.

Wavelengths Preview 1

2009-08-26T21:52:00.004-04:00

Writing about avant-garde films cold -- that is, without the benefit of artist's statements or technical explanations of technique -- is a tricky business. I'm still new to it myself, but I believe that 90% of the critic's job in this situation is simply to describe, as accurately as possible, what he or she sees, and that is my single ambition for this series of previews of a handful of films that will play next month in the Wavelengths program at the Toronto International Film Festival. I've sworn to not read Michael Sicinski's responses until after I've written my own, but that shouldn't stop you.

Lumphini 2552 (Tomonari Nishikawa)

Tomonari Nishikawa's Lumphini 2552 is constructed from still black-and-white photos (2,552 of them?) of dense growths of plants and trees. The images fly by quickly -- 12 per second, I'd guess -- which turns them into high-contrast abstraction and allows Nishikawa to carefully modulate the rhythms of the film. In the opening seconds, he cuts repeatedly from long shots to close-ups, mimicking the effect of time-lapse photography. Later, he alternates between compositions of vertical and horizontal lines, which, like Muybridge's horses, creates the tense illusion of movement. Shots of shaded stems are a palette of blacks; low-angle views into the treetops are whites. And the whole thing resolves perfectly into darkness, like a breath. It's a sublime kaleidoscope, I'll tell you, and a damn fine way to spend three minutes.

My tendency when describing a film like Lumphini 2552 is to fall back on Modernist rallying cries like that old Ezra Pound chestnut, "Make it new!" Maybe a useful way to think of Nishikawa's film is as a beautifully defamiliarized -- and uniquely cinematic -- landscape. In that sense it reminds me of the few Brackhage collages I've seen -- films like The Garden of Earthly Delights and Mothlight.

Whatever happened to . . .

2009-06-25T19:51:00.008-04:00

Earlier this week the Toronto International Film Festival announced its first 26 titles, which got me thinking about several really good films I saw there last year that seem to have vanished into the ether. Blurbs are from my write-up at Senses of Cinema:

Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater)

Although I saw very few narrative films that had their world premiere at TIFF, my favourite among them was Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, which is earning much-deserved praise for Christian McKay’s genuinely uncanny performance in the title role. That anyone -- anyone -- could so closely resemble Welles and so effortlessly reproduce his barreling voice would have been unimaginable before this film, but McKay’s greater feat is his knack for the raised brow, the glimmering eye, and the sly smile -- or, in a word, the charisma -- that makes the young Orson Welles of Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai and The Third Man so electric. Linklater has consistently alternated between work-for-hire studio pictures like School of Rock (2003) and The Bad News Bears (2005) and smaller films developed in-house, such as Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). Me and Orson Welles falls somewhere in between. The adaptation of Robert Kaplow’s novel was shepherded for several years by Linklater’s longtime associates Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo and was financed independently. (As of this writing, the film has yet to secure American distribution). Linklater’s formal style is typically unassuming, but the central story of an idealistic teenage artist (Zac Efron) echoes his career-long concern with the creative life, particularly in the final scene, in which Efron and a young writer walk off into the future, determined to become engaged passionately with the world around them. Linklater has great fun with the material, inserting occasional allusions to Godard and Carol Reed, and his recreation of Welles’s production of Julius Caesar captures much of the transgressive excitement that made it such a sensation seventy years ago.

Salamandra (Pablo Aguero)

In the opening sequence of Salamandra, Pablo Aguero's remarkable debut feature, six year-old Inti (Joaquin Aguila) plays alone in the bathtub of his grandmother’s well-appointed apartment. His toys are an American tank and brightly-coloured magnetic letters with which he spells out, in an ironic moment recalling late-‘60s Godard, “U.S. Army”. His comfort and security is broken a moment later when his mother (Dolores Fonzi) returns unexpectedly from prison and whisks him away to El Bolson, an isolated hippy commune in Patagonia. Aguero, like Inti, was raised among the anarchy and recklessness of El Bolson. “When your life is endangered, you become more alive to the sensations around you,” he said after the screening, and it’s much to his credit that the dizzying cacophony he creates in Salamandra is downright overwhelming. While promoting For Ever Mozart (1996) Godard attacked Western governments for their exploitation of others’ suffering in order to promote political agendas: “We made images in the movies, when we began, in order to remember. TV is made to forget. We see Sarajevo, okay, we forget in two seconds. The same moment that we are looking, we forget.” Child in peril stories, like “Feed the Children” commercials, are typically designed to appeal to the simplest and most disposable of emotions, pity. While Inti and his mother are both deserving of our pity, Aguero precisely counterbalances that response, eliciting also our admiration, fear, disgust, respect, and curiosity. Salamandra is certainly difficult to forget.

Nuit de Chien (Werner Schroeter)

Disconcerting in a completely different way was Nuit de Chien (Tonight), the latest feature from Werner Schroeter. A film that can legitimately wear the cliched descriptor “Kafkaesque”, Tonight depicts the night-long journey of returned war hero Ossorio Vignale (Pascal Greggory), who hopes to find his lover and escape with her before their city crumbles in a vague and ever-shifting revolutionary struggle. Vignale wanders into bars, faces down tyrants, rescues a beautiful child, and encounters several femmes fatales -- in other words, he’s a kind of noir hero but one trapped in an absurdist wonderland. Unlike other films in this genre -- say, Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) -- there’s no easily-defined menace here, no corporate bureaucracy or sinister conspiracy pulling the strings. Instead, events in the film turn at random on base acts of human cruelty and irrational political ambition. It’s a senseless and violent world, and Schroeter renders it in a shocking Technicolor that harkens to the heydays of radical political cinema in the early-1970s. I’ve rarely been affected so viscerally by a film’s colour palette: in one overlit shot of two women who have been sexually assaulted, Schroeter’s use of high contrast red and white actually made me light-headed. His images are classically Surreal -- arresting, confrontational, and defamiliarizing.

Genova (Michael Winterbottom)

Like Nuit de Chien Michael Winterbottom’s Genova also alludes to cinema of the 1970s. A direct homage to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Genova is about a middle-aged professor (Colin Firth) who moves with his two young daughters to Italy after their mother’s tragic death. It’s another interesting experiment from Winterbottom, who over the past decade has averaged more than a film per year. Shifting the dynamic from the loss of a child in the original film to the death of a wife and mother here allows Winterbottom to explore the very different emotional tolls taken on those involved. Genova, like its predecessor, is particularly interested in the ways sexual desire presents itself -- almost against the sufferer’s will -- as a manifestation of the identity confusion and desperate loneliness that accompanies such a loss. The memorable sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now haunts this film as well, both in Firth’s flirtations with an attractive Italian student (Margherita Romoe) and, much more interestingly, in the bittersweet coming-of-age of his teenaged daughter (Willa Holland). Of Winterbottom’s previous films, Genova most resembles, stylistically, 9 Songs, particularly in its use of documentary-like handheld photography and jumpcutting, and both films, I think, share a sympathetic fascination with the pains and mysteries of human intimacy. The ghost in Genova isn’t scary or dangerous but the world it haunts certainly is.

Katia's Sister (Mijke de Jong)

Finally, Mijke de Jong’s Het Zusje van Katia (Katia’s Sister), though far from perfect, is certainly deserving of some critical attention. The film revolves around the performance of Betty Qizmolli, who plays a socially awkward and emotionally impaired teenager. She, her mother (Olga Louzgina), and her older sister Katia (Julia Seijkens) are Russian immigrants living in Amsterdam and surviving on the mother’s earnings as a prostitute. Andrés Barba, the author of the novel on which the film is based, has been commended for his ability to adopt the perspective, if not the actual voice (it’s written in the third person), of a young girl whose innocence and naivete are debilitating. She is a Holy Fool so far removed from the moral complexities of the world that she is literally nameless: when asked in the opening moments of the film what she wants to be when she grows up, the girl can only answer “Katia’s sister”. A friend complained near the end of the festival that he’d seen too many films with “their hearts in the right place”, and this was, for me, a curious exception to the rule. De Jong is working with what is, essentially, a parable, yet her solution to the problem of adaptation is to commit completely to an aesthetic we’ve come to equate, post-Dardennes, with “realism” -- natural lighting, handheld photography with a shallow depth of field, and a slightly overexposed and desaturated image. De Jong’s camera rarely leaves the girl’s side or shoots her from a distance of greater than a medium shot. We don’t watch the world in this film, we watch her watching the world, and it’s that formal discipline that keeps Katia’s Sister from falling apart under the weight of its premise.

SFIFF Diary 4

2009-05-12T10:25:00.013-04:00

Rembrandt's J'Accuse (Peter Greenaway)

The last Greenaway film I saw was Prospero's Books, so I have no idea if Rembrandt's J'Accuse is a return to form, as programmer Rod Armstrong claimed when he introduced it at SFIFF. A companion to Greenaway's recent Rembrandt biopic, Nightwatching (2007), Rembrandt's J'Accuse is an art history lecture disguised as an essay film. In his meticulous dissection of Rembrandt's "The Night Watch," Greenaway alludes to the painter's biography, to the political life of 17th century Amsterdam, to the aesthetic tastes of the day, to romantic intrigues, to the history of technology, and to various schools of relevant academic criticism, but the film seems less intent on uncovering the mysteries of a great painting than on modeling for a contemporary audience the fine and fading art of looking. Really looking. Though drowning in a whirl of images, we are sorely lacking in visual literacy, the film implies. Or, that's certainly what I found most interesting about it, at least. Formally, Rembrandt's J'Accuse is an odd bird. Each of Greenaway's arguments is presented logically and in sequence (such is the burden of a linear medium), but it has something of the quality of a Flash presentation or a late-'90s CD-Rom. I can imagine it being spliced into hyperlinked elements and finding a home as an interactive museum kiosk. (I almost certainly would have preferred to explore it that way.) Greenaway's talking head even appears throughout the film like a pop-up window, reading from the script in a resounding, pedantic tone that rivals Terrence Davies's.

The Other One (Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic)

My expectations for The Other One skyrocketed during the opening title sequence, which is a beautiful montage of high-angle, nighttime shots of a mostly-empty, twelve-lane highway. It reminded me of a Claire Denis film -- the helicopter ride that opens I Can't Sleep or the rooftops of Paris in Friday Night. The wide highway leads eventually to a toll station. Then, as I recall, Bernard and Tridivic cut to their heroine, Anne-Marie (Dominique Blanc), who proceeds to drive a hammer into the side of her skull. Anne-Marie, we learn, has recently ended her relationship with a much younger man, freeing him to meet someone more appropriate. When she later learns that his new partner is also d'un certain age, she comes unhinged. She fails, embarrassingly, to seduce him, she cyberstalks, she begins to hallucinate. With The Other One, Bernard and Tridivic are positioning themselves somewhere in that line from Sirk to Cassavetes to Almodovar, all of them male directors preoccupied by strong women of fading beauty and sexual power. Blanc's performance is impressive, and the style of the film is often suitably claustrophobic and disorienting, but something has gone awry in the structuring of this film. That cut from the toll station to Anne-Marie's bathroom is the first of countless ellipses, most of them chronological jumps, both forward and backward in time. It's not confusing -- I never struggled to understand what was happening, or when -- but the cutting creates a flatness or stasis in the main character, a woman who is presumably becoming transformed through a moment of crisis. Particularly during the last half hour, as my patience waned, I thought often of Fien Troch's disappointing recent film, Unspoken, which also seems to assume that fixing a camera long enough on an actress will necessarily reveal the complexity of her character (exactly the wrong lesson to be learned from the best practitioners of contemplative cinema). Sirk, Cassavetes, and Almodovar (at his best) empathize with, are curious about, and have an essential understanding of their heroines. I don't doubt Bernard and Tridivic's commitment to Anne-Marie but the film lacks a trustworthy guide behind the camera.

Why I don't read (or write) music reviews

2009-05-08T23:15:00.009-04:00

"It's music inspired by Disney films." -- Annie Clark on her new album, Actor (recorded as St. Vincent)

"One would hardly expect the phrase 'Technicolor Disney nightmare' to become an overused idiom anytime soon, but it's a good bet you'll see some iteration of it, written or otherwise, in just about every reference to this album." -- No Ripcord

"if it sounds a bit like the kind of dark, violent fairy tale Disney might have made had they not strayed so far from their Grimm roots, well, that’s a pretty fair take on the album as a whole." -- The Hurst Review

"imagine Trent Reznor scoring an old Disney movie—princesses and demons battling in a swirl of distorted synth noises, orchestral strings and pianos." -- Culture Bully

"Marrow is the perfect mix of Disney musical meets rock n' roll." -- Sputnik Music

"The sophomore album from St. Vincent employs a cacaphony of sounds to create its Grimms brothers atmosphere. And indeed, Clark even looks like a Disney heroine." -- AOL Music

"The way that Clark’s trilling voice delivers melodies that skip and soars overtop richly-appointed arrangements, you could imagine these songs soundtracking any animated Disney film" -- Chromewaves

"Estas canciones nacen como un score imaginario para escenas de cintas como Badlands, Picnic at Hanging Rock y algunos clásicos de Disney como La Bella Durmiente y La Dama y el Vagabundo." -- Flaming Milk

"And like a Disney flick, the tune has a happy ending, with a soothing mix of accordion, acoustic guitar, and skyward vocals. However, Michey Mouse [sic] probably won't approve of Clark's lyrics about 'painting the black hole blacker,' quarreling with a lover, and keeping secrets in a relationship. Oh, well." -- Spin

"Clark’s sweet vocals carry a tinge of malice, and set against the fanciful, dreamy arrangements, they often recall a golden-era Disney-villain." -- Tiny Mix Tapes

"Annie Clark may look like an animated Disney heroine sprung to life, and the influence of willowy, ethereal singers and songwriters such as Feist and Tori Amos is obvious." -- STNG

"The whole project at times seems Disney-ish in its aims, soaring with its whimsical orchestral arrangements and painting scenes that you really want to see brought to life in animation." -- Express Night Out

"‘The Stranger’, the ambulatory opening track of Actor, is indicative of St Vincent’s efforts: kitsch strings, reminiscent of 60’s easy listening or a mournful Disney soundtrack, give way to a storm of fuzzed-up guitar." -- Wireless Bollinger

"Even when the music is at its most dramatic, as when songs slip out of placid, Disney-esque string accompaniment into jagged, distorted guitar passages, Clark consistently understates her characters' angst, and buries their negative emotions under layers of denial, stoicism, and subservience to the desire of others." -- Pitchfork

Okay, I like this one: "The fantasy of Disney is juxtaposed with the sweep of Morricone, David Mamet’s unsettling dramatic form and the alienation of Philip Roth." -- Music Remedy

SFIFF Diary 3: 575 Castro St.

2009-05-07T09:57:00.033-04:00

Dir. by Jenni Olson

Rather than write about the "Voices Carry" shorts program, which was a jarring and poorly curated combination of Roy Andersson/Terry Gilliam wannabes and thoughtful documentaries, I want to focus, instead, on 575 Castro St., Jenni Olson's cleverly conceived piece about Harvey Milk. The film is seven minutes long and consists of only four static shots, along with an opening title that contextualizes what we're seeing:

In February 1977, the San Francisco Gay Film Festival was born when a self-described “ragtag bunch of hippie fag” filmmakers got together and projected their Super 8 short films on a bed sheet. Many of these films explored gay themes, but (like many other experimental films of the era) many were simple light and motion studies. Most of these films passed through Harvey Milk's Castro Camera Store at 575 Castro St. for processing.
In 2008, the Castro Camera Store was recreated at that address for Gus Van Sant's film MILK. This film was shot on that set.

I've quoted the text in full because it's as essential to Olson's project as any of the shots are. It's as essential as the soundtrack, which is an edited recording of the "In Case I'm Assassinated" tape that Milk made while seated alone at the desk in his store. The film works wonderfully on the most basic level -- that is, as a haunted image. When I spoke to Olson after the screening, she told me how overwhelming it was to visit the set, to listen to Milk's voice, and to know that it was here -- right here -- that he contemplated his imminent murder. She's translated that experience well to her film, which is ghostly and deeply moving. But, of course, it wasn't right here that Milk made his tape. This is a meticulously dressed set. That's Sean Penn in the top-left corner (see the image above). It's artifice. Make-believe. Harvey's been gone for more than thirty years now.

Borrowing an idea I used last September when writing about James Benning's RR, here are a few more ways of looking at 575 Castro St.:

As a history of film technology -- I'd forgotten that Milk owned a camera shop, and didn't realize he processed Super 8 there and played a role in the making (literally) of gay cinema. That made the experience of watching 575 Castro St. interesting in two ways: first, Olson's film was projected not onto a bedsheet but onto a large screen in a stadium-seated multiplex; second, shot digitally, projected digitally, this "film" required no physical processing whatsoever. Olson didn't need a shop like Harvey's. Her medium is ones and zeroes rather than celluloid. You can even watch 575 Castro St. online.

As a "simple light and motion" study -- I wish I were familiar with the specific films Olson is alluding to in the text of the film's opening title. A longtime collector, archivist, and critic of LGBT cinema, she is presumably offering her film as an homage to those who came before her and claiming her place in their line. Each of the four shots lasts a bit longer than the one that precedes it, and the final shot lasts for nearly three minutes, or just under half of the film's total run time. It's a beautiful image. Sunlight reflecting off of passing cars illuminates the wall and gives a curious movement to the static shot. I would have happily watched it for several minutes more.

As tragedy tourism -- One consequence of the extended shot lengths is that viewers are allowed the time to thoroughly and freely explore each image. As a result, we become consciously aware of the artificiality of it all. The opening shot could be from 1977, until we spot two late-model cars pass outside the storefront windows. The last shot could be vintage as well, until we recognize Mr. Penn. I have a theory that, because 21st-century Americans' lives are marked by such comfort and politeness (generally speaking), we have a strange desire to associate ourselves, personally, with other people's tragedy, as if doing so will grant us access to some hidden, distant experience and wisdom. Hence the Martin Luther King, Jr. museum at the Memphis hotel where he was gunned down and, more recently, our commitments to "never forget" the victims of 9/11, the Virigina Tech shootings, the Minnesota bridge collapse (remember that one?), and on and on. When the Harvey Milk museum is eventually built, somewhere in the Castro, Olson's film will likely play on a constant loop there. Which isn't to say it's not genuinely moving. It is. But it's also one step removed from the genuine. It's a tourist destination.

As a comment on the Hollywood biopic -- I've bumped Milk to the top of my Netflix queue, although, truthfully, even as a great fan of Gus Van Sant, I don't have high expectations for it. Traditional biopics -- and especially Hollywood productions about recent historical figures -- are hamstrung, I think, by a wealth of extratextual pressures. Large budgets demand large returns, and that economic pressure necessitates the transformation of a complex, messy life into a coherent and familiar narrative. (Steve McQueen's Hunger is a recent and remarkable exception that proves the rule.) Hollywood biopics also tend to be marketed as acting showcases and "prestige" pictures, which forces audiences to view the film through a thin veil of celebrity. Plus, there's always that nagging problem of verisimilitude. (I've always liked E. L. Doctorow's response to critics of his "inaccurate" depiction of real historical figures in Ragtime: "I don't know if these events actually happened, but I'm absolutely confident they're true.") Again, that photo of Sean Penn is key here. 575 Castro St. challenges every formal tendency of the Hollywood biopic -- it's short, slow, contemplative -- but, in a way, it is a Hollywood biopic. On a practical level, an independent filmmaker like Olson would rarely have the resources to access and dress a location like this. And, presumably, those of us who are interested in a film like 575 Castro St. approach it with those same preconceptions about Penn's performance and celebrity, even if we haven't seen Milk. (Such is the nature of contemporary media saturation.) It's a clever interrogation of the form, I think.

As a document of progress -- Finally, as uncanny and heartbreaking as it is to hear Harvey Milk confess his fears, there's something celebratory (not quite the right word) about 575 Castro St., too. This is not a nostalgia piece or maudlin reveille. Even down to its digital form, it is very much a document of the present moment. When Milk mentions that, rather than rioting on news of his death, he would rather see "five, ten, a hundred, a thousand rise" and come out, we know that his dream is slowly but steadily becoming realized.

Anticipating the Limits of Control

2009-05-05T16:36:00.004-04:00

"Another thing: Tilda Swinton (identified as “Blonde,” and lightly suggesting to me Bulle Ogier in Rivette’s Duelle) observes to the Lone Man at one point that she likes films even when people are just sitting around in them and not saying anything — a declaration followed by a long pause."

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control

SFIFF Diary 2

2009-04-30T14:05:00.011-04:00

Oblivion (Heddy Honigmann)

Four years ago, on my first trip to the San Francisco International Film Festival, a couple friends and I had our liveliest debate after a screening of Ellen Perry's The Fall of Fujimori, a documentary about Peru's recent political history told mostly in the first person by Fujimori himself. On one side of the debate were those of us who felt the strength of the film was its subtle ironies, particularly its use of the contemporary context (the early days of Bush's war on terror) to undermine the elected dictator's self-aggrandizing justifications of his anti-democratic domestic policies. On the other side were those who argued that people in power are afforded ample opportunity to speak for themselves and that the filmmaker was morally obligated to condemn Fujimori outright. It was a fun -- and heated -- exchange. Heddy Honigmann's latest film is a fascinating answer to that discussion. Oblivion is also told in the first person, though this time mostly by aging, blue-collar workers who, in several cases, literally served (whether food or drink or services) several past presidents and dictators, including Fujimori. I've only seen two Honigmann films, but in both I've been startled by the candor she elicits from her interview subjects. Here, her camera lingers awkwardly on a man who admits with some shame that after working for more than 30 years in one of Lima's finest restaurants, he had never had an opportunity to take his wife there. A 60-year-old leather worker hides his face when he's overcome by emotion while remembering all he lost during the days of runaway inflation. An adolescent shoeshine boy stares blankly into the camera and tells Honigmann, “No, I don't have any dreams. No, I don't have any happy memories.” She intercuts these stories with footage of young, self-taught jugglers and acrobats -- homeless kids -- who perform in busy intersections during red lights. They're graceful and full of life, their performances have a startling and kinetic beauty. The juxtaposition is complex and loaded with ambiguities -- a reflection, I suspect, of Honigmann's personal relationship with her home country.

Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

To recycle a line I've used before, I'm often more interested in what a film does than what it's about, and Bradshaw's first narrative feature, Everything Strange and New, does quite a lot. The opening shot (pictured above) is a long, static take accompanied by an explosion of percussive, dissonant music -- a self-conscious announcement that this is not another of those suburban stories about disaffected fathers and husbands. As it turns out, it is one of those films, but I'll credit Bradshaw for his experiments with the genre, particularly his working-class lead character, Wayne, and for his often fascinating photography. One or two shots approach Bela Tarr territory (if Tarr shot a low-budget dv movie). Had the film ended 20 minutes sooner, I would have even applauded Bradshaw's success at blending avant-garde techniques with more naturalistic storytelling. But a plot turn in the final act -- and, more importantly, Bradshaw's cynical handling of it -- caused me to reevaluate everything that came before. Everything Strange and New is cruel to its characters in a way that comes off as smug rather than searching.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)

I've already written a bit about this film, but I want to quickly mention a scene that, to me, encapsulates all that distinguishes Denis's take on the small, family drama from most other films in the genre. The morning after the “Nightshift,” Noé (Grégoire Colin) announces to Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Joséphine (Mati Diop) that he's leaving for a job in Gabon. Rather than dealing explicitly with the fallout from his decision, Denis cuts, instead, to a closeup of Lionel (Alex Descas), who's walking home, presumably after a one-night-stand. She then cuts on an eyeline match to Joséphine climbing precariously out of their top-story window with a bottle of cleaner and towels in her hand. We are given, cinematically, the perspective of a father watching his child in danger. Or, at least that's how I read the image the first time. On repeat viewings, there's something much more interesting in Lionel's expression: his intimate and hard-won understanding of his daughter's behavior, his realization that she's cleaning, which means that she's upset, which means that it's his job to go soothe and protect her. This plays out in the next few minutes in a wonderful scene in which their history is revealed through gestures. There's text -- Joséphine shaking out the bedsheets, looking through family photos, and arguing with her father -- and there's subtext -- not only the loss of their mother/wife but also their deep familiarity with each other and with moments like this. (We can immediately imagine them having a hundred other similar confrontations -- her cleaning, him stoic, with arms folded.) Characters in movies expertly express their feelings; real people, in my experience, typically don't. Yet those of us in successful, long-term relationships manage to communicate anyway. 35 Shots of Rum is rare for managing to capture that peculiar kind of intimacy on screen. Ozu would approve.

Zift (Javor Gardev)

A Bulgarian film noir? Yes, please. Although a bit too stylized (in the Tarantino sense) for my tastes, Zift is a hell of a lot of fun and could probably find a decent audience in the States if a distributor packaged it properly. (First-time director Gardev must surely be taking studio offers for his next film as we speak.) The movie borrows liberally from classic Hollywood noirs, most notably a reenactment of Rita Hayworth's iconic number in Gilda, and the black-and-white cinematography honors that legacy while updating the camera movements for contemporary audiences accustomed to a more frenetic pace. The two lead actors are fun discoveries, too, particularly Tanya Ilieva, who, frankly, is one of the sexiest women I've ever seen on screen. Zift was on my radar last September at TIFF, so I'm glad to have finally had a chance to catch up with it.

Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

Wild Field belongs to a class of films I'm drawn to at festivals. I rarely expect them to be great (and they rarely are), but I see them less for their stories or formal innovations than for the opportunity they provide to watch people in a part of the world I would never have a chance to see otherwise. (Tulpan is another recent example.) Wild Field is set in a remote region of the Kazakh steppes, where a young doctor lives Thoreau-like, tends to a handful of locals, and pines for his girlfriend back in civilization. Although I can't find confirmation for this, I suspect this is an adaptation of a novel. I can imagine the protagonist's inner life being a playhouse of ideas for a gifted writer, and the moments of magical realism that pockmark the film could flower beautifully in prose, but Kalatozishvili fails to find a cinematographic analogue, and the pacing of the film suffers for it. Still, I was perfectly content to study the landscape and faces for 90 minutes or so.

SFIFF Diary 1

2009-04-26T14:32:00.002-04:00

Adoration (Atom Egoyan)

There's certainly no mistaking an Atom Egoyan film -- the non-linear narrative, the technology fetish, the intertwined obsessions with history, identity, and trauma, and all of those secrets and lies. Closest in spirit and form to Ararat, Adoration is another interesting jumble of ideas from Egoyan that, to my surprise, works more often than other critics had led me to expect. I especially like the scenes between Scott Speedman and Arsinee Khanjian, who are the only two actors in the film who consistently make Egoyan's dialog sound like words an actual human being might speak. (In Egoyan's defense, the performance of language and identity is a central concern -- and plot point -- of the film, so some of the awkwardly-heightened language is clearly by design. Egoyan alerts the attentive viewer to this fact by formal means, though I'm not sure if that defense justifies the unfortunate shifts in tone he creates.) Egoyan's at his best when he manages to balance his wealth of ideas with drama, when his characters transcend the intellectual and psychological conceits they are intended to embody. That happens often enough in Adoration, particularly in the final act, to make it my favorite of his films of the last decade. (I'm still eager to see Citadel.) One final note: Mychael Danna's original score is fantastic, but I'd prefer to hear it alone on a soundtrack album. I suspect I would have liked Adoration a good deal more if Egoyan had trimmed 75% of the music cues.

Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)

God bless you, Catherine Breillat. When Bluebeard started last night around 9:40, San Francisco time, I'd already been awake for 19 hours. Who else under those circumstances could put me at the edge of my seat, giggling and gasping at the nerve of a film? A playful and stylized period piece in the (formal) vein of Rohmer's Astrea and Celadon, Bluebeard is a wicked dismantling of a fairy tale that, although lacking Breillat's trademark nudity and explicit sexual content, is no less obsessed with bodies. Mary-Catherine (Lola Creton), Bluebeard's young bride, is one more Breillat heroine, tempted by, curious about, and fearful of both sexual desire and by sex itself -- by the physical, biological realness of it. I can't think of a better image to represent Breillat's cinema en toto than a shot of the massive, shirtless Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) being watched unnoticed by his waif, virgin wife. Brilliant film.

General Orders

2009-04-24T16:08:00.004-04:00

"This documentary was original and captivating. At first I was thrown off by the long pauses, but then I came to understand that they were intentional and added to the meditative, prayerful motif."

-- from a review of General Orders No. 9 (dir. Robert Persons)

A preview of things to come?

2009-04-22T16:51:00.004-04:00

My contributions to the fake Criterion thread at The Auteurs.

Anticipating SFIFF

2009-04-20T20:51:00.010-04:00

I'm going to be in San Francisco next week for a technology conference and decided to stick around for a couple extra days to catch some films at the festival. I've order twelve tickets but am excited about fewer than half of them, partly because the lineup is a bit underwhelming, partly because my schedule prevents me from seeing some of the more interesting selections. But it's April in San Francisco and the university is covering most of my expenses, so I ain't complaining. Well, maybe I'm complaining a little. I'm fated to never see the new Assayas and Martel films, apparently.

I'm getting in early Saturday afternoon and will be around for a week, so drop me a line if you want to meet up.

April 25
Adoration (Egoyan)
Bluebeard (Breillat)

April 26
Oblivion (Honnigman)
Everything Strange and New (Bradshaw)

April 28
Wild Field (Kalatozishvili)
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (Greenaway)

April 29
Voices Carry (shorts program)
Our Beloved Month of August (Gomes)
Good Cats (Liang)

April 30
Zift (Gardev)

May 1
The Other One (Bernard and Tridivic)
35 Shots of Rum (Denis)

Films of the '80s (part 1)

2009-04-17T14:15:00.001-04:00

Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)

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

Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)

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

Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

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

American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

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

Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

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

Grown Ups (Mike Leigh, 1980)

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

Voyage en douce (Michel Deville, 1980)

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

Senses of Cinema Issue 50

2009-04-14T11:09:00.003-04:00

I have three interviews and a brief essay in the new issue of Senses of cinema:

My favorite brief exchange was edited out of the Denis interview:

Hughes: One of my favorite moments in any of your films is Gregoire Colin’s dance scene in U.S. Go Home, so it was great fun to see him dancing again. As soon as that scene began, I thought, “Now this is a Claire Denis film.”
Denis: {laughs}
Hughes: I also had the biggest smile on my face when “Nightshift” kicked in.
Denis: {laughs} Me too! Such a great song.
Hughes: I imagine you having a huge record collection.
Denis: Yes! {laughs} Yes, yes.

A Death in the Family (1957)

2009-03-31T22:20:00.001-04:00

By James Agee

Note: I just found this intro to an essay I never wrote and thought the quotes were worth posting.

Throughout A Death in the Family, Agee's prose alternates between moments of simple and startlingly evocative description, as here, near the beginning of the novel . . .

He took his shoes, a tie, a collar and collar buttons, and started from the room. He saw the rumpled bed. Well, he thought, I can do something for her. He put his things on the floor, smoothed the sheets, and punched the pillows. The sheets were still warm on her side. He drew the covers up to keep the warmth, then laid them open a few inches, so it would look inviting to get into. She'll be glad of that, he thought, very well pleased with the looks of it. He gathered up his shoes, collar, tie and buttons, and made for the kitchen, taking special care as he passed the children's door, which was slightly ajar.

. . . and moments of unadorned psychology, as here, near the end:

I am aware of what has happened, I am meeting it face to face, I am living through it. There had been, even, a kind of pride, a desolate kind of pleasure, in the feeling: I am carrying a heavier weight than I could have dreamed it possible for a human being to carry, yet I am living through it. It had of course occurred to her that this happens to many people, that it is very common, and she humbled and comforted herself in this thought. She thought: this is simply what living is; I never realized before what it is. She thought: now I am more nearly a grown member of the human race; bearing children, which had seemed so much, was just so much apprenticeship. She thought she had never before had a chance to realize the strength that human beings have, to endure; she loved and revered all those who had ever suffered, even those who had failed to endure. She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the might, grimness and tenderness of God.

I suppose this would put Agee's novel somewhere in that line from modernists like Stein, Hemingway, and W.C. Williams ("No ideas but in things") to the mid-century The New Yorker school of Raymond Carver and his minimalist disciples. What distinguishes A Death in the Family from those others, though, is the directness of Agee's analysis and the complexity of his renderings.