Distant Thunder (Satyajit Ray, 1973)

 

Satyajit Ray’s 1973 Distant Thunder, set in 1943, is one of his most quietly incisive works, charting how a tiny rural village far removed from world events becomes physically and spiritually decimated by their effects. The film initially focuses on a young teacher, Chakravarti, newly-arrived with his wife; as the only Brahmin in the village he’s also called on to be doctor and spiritual leader, exploiting his privilege with quiet smugness (when called to treat a cholera outbreak in a nearby community, he sizes it up as an opportunity to buy his wife a new sari). But the price of rice starts to rise as the war (directly evidenced only by the planes that occasionally fly overhead, a sight that initially seems wondrous) messes with supply chains, food rapidly becoming virtually inaccessible, prompting chaos and despair. By the end of the film, the perceived superiority of caste has been eviscerated: we realize the teacher’s ignorance on matters of world events (peddling bad information on foreign countries and their role in the war), his status as local leader meaning nothing in the face of escalating hunger, rendering him an ineffectual onlooker, increasingly and symbolically absent from the film as matters deteriorate. The narrative encompasses violent assault both sexually and financially motivated, desperation-motivated prostitution, and even a covered-up murder, but even at its most despairing, the film finds pockets of compassion and empathy (even for characters who Ray makes convincingly hard to put up with), ending in a vision of remade and even expanded community. The final shot, of silhouetted masses shuffling toward the spectator, rather evokes a horror film, and for all its humanity and restraint, Distant Thunder almost invites such categorization, as an examination of sustainable (if imperfect) community devastated by events beyond its understanding or even vague capacity to resist.

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

 

Possibly Robert Altman’s most intricately complex and strangely beautiful work, 3 Women might also count among his strangest (although it has some competition), especially if one tries to take it at any kind of face value. The film starts as a strange chronicle of Pinkie (Sissy Spacek), a new employee at a health facility for seniors, latching onto another employee, Millie (Shelley Duvall); the third woman, Willie (Janice Rule) is an artist married to Millie’s landlord, for most of the movie’s duration seeming too marginal a character to be coherently grouped with the others, her significance ultimately stunningly evident (the film’s men are all either flagrantly flawed, like Willie’s drunken, unfaithful braggart of a husband, or else non-entities of one kind or another). The film has a pervasive sense of the fluid and ungraspable, of something in formation, hinted at even in the opening scenes of the old-timers on their guided water-walking, to a pivotal swimming pool “accident,” to the startling climactic juxtaposition of Millie overseeing Willie’s delivery while Pinkie, instead of fetching a doctor as instructed, stands and watches from a distance, the aftermath carrying the quasi-ritualistic, bloodied impact of a horror film. And although Willie’s child doesn’t survive, biological destiny is realized in strangely displaced form, the three women forming a new living environment (Willie’s husband, it’s suggested, having been violently dispatched) which appears at least momentarily stable, but seemingly at the cost of a surrender of self, a suspension of growth in one woman counter-balanced by an acceleration of it in another, the suppressed mother-daughter elements always visible in the Millie/Pinkie relationship now explicit. This might all seem somewhat schematic if not for the film’s extraordinarily detailed texture, minutely realized in matters of clothing and décor and food, and more dramatically in the strange, sexually ambiguous shapes that Willie generates (often on the walls of empty swimming pools); Duvall and Spacek are in mesmerizing form from start to end.

Three Times (Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2005)

 

Hou Hsiao Hsien’s haunting trilogy Three Times casts its leads Shu Qi and Chang Chen in three stories of imperfect connection, set in three different decades. The 1960’s sequence is primarily structured around a soldier’s search, during a brief leave, for May, who worked at a pool hall he formerly frequented. The 1910’s sequence somewhat reverses the dynamic, the woman now a courtesan, always there, the man an occasional customer who she sees as her primary hope of obtaining freedom, even in the absence of any promises or stated intentions on his part. The woman in the technology-heavy modern-day is the freest of the three by most measures, but her situation remains defined by challenge and dysfunction. Both the main actors are perfectly cast and deployed, with Qi especially engaging and wide-ranging: the way May beams with delight when he unexpectedly turns up in the first sequence is particularly irresistible. The film suggests that the barriers to mutual discovery are ever-present, but shifting, the three stories drawing in the country’s vulnerability to foreign powers, the machinations of wartime, the indentured courtesan system, and more recently the impact of a speeded-up, connected society. That last sequence ends with the most explicit assertion of female choice, her on the back of his motorcycle after she tells him to take her to his place: such freedom is far removed from the plight of the poor courtesan, but as presented here hardly represents a straightforward expression of female progress (in a way, May’s perpetual changing of jobs and locations in the first story suggests an existential lightness of being that the other two woman lack, even though, or indeed because, we don’t know what underlines it). The non-chronological ordering of the sequences is just one way in which Hou discourages a simpler reading of the film, even as the multiple use of the same actors, and the director’s matchless formal grace, provide a binding sense of transcendent persistence.

Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998)

 

Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine is an intricate, outre delight that leaves you feeling empty and dissatisfied, at least in part by design, reflecting the passing of the short-lived glamrock era it swims within. To say that Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Brian Slade is a “Bowie-like” figure hardly captures the extent of the correspondence, as the character appropriates the sound, the look, the cultural positioning, the fluid sexuality, and other big chunks of the biography: the big difference is that whereas Bowie renewed himself multiple times after retiring Ziggy Stardust, the more conventionally mortal Slade has to engineer a fake shooting before disappearing for years, eventually reappearing in such radically overhauled form that no one knows it’s him. The film is gorgeously and tangibly imagined, crammed with perfectly-judged costumes and videos and posters and album covers, and has some fantastically combustible sequences, all of this shoehorned though into a rather turgid (and pointlessly Citizen Kane-evoking) framework involving a journalist (Christian Bale) who ten years later tries to put the story together. There’s none of Bowie’s music in the film – apparently he refused permission – but we do hear instantly recognizable tracks from Lou Reed, T-Rex and others, giving the distractingly strange impression of a parallel universe in which music evolved in exactly the same way, with the same people (even Gilbert O’Sullivan!), minus that one vital figure. Another much-debatable point, the use of a different actor to play Slade in his new identity was criticized by Meyers, and perhaps too easily allows points of logistical quibbling (no plastic surgery was ever as successful…), but seems to me in a way to cement Bowie’s uniqueness, his near-supernatural capacity for renewal needing in his absence to be made literal (like Dr. Who, one might think). The film is brave, emotionally expansive, and galvanizingly slippery and unpredictable; little matter then if it’s often on the dull side too.