Inner Journeys

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2004)

Bernardo Bertolucci’s classic works (The Conformist, Last Tango In Paris) can be rewatched almost endlessly without exhaustion. They’re all the more fascinating because of a slightly over-emphatic quality that speaks to his youth at the time (he was only 32 when Last Tango came out). Bertolucci is one of those directors whose complexity, as an almost tangible quality, seems to spill from his films. A published poet before he turned twenty, he’s associated with left-wing politics and scandal and blasphemy and agitation. After his rapid start, he entered a long phase of experimentation and slight underachievement – the movies were seldom outright successes (even his Oscar-winning The Last Emperor seems to have few passionate defenders), but always possessed a high degree of formal intelligence and a fluid sense of cinema. Still, the likes of Little Buddha and Stealing Beauty were clearly too enthralled by conventional beauty; too short on his piercing analytical facility.

Bernardo Bertolucci

His last full-length film was Besieged in 1998, which I liked very much. On a second viewing you realize how much it relies on artful surprises and small miracles of craft, but it’s still one of the best-looking and sounding films in memory. The lead actor David Thewlis always seems like someone who’s invented himself and might do so again, posing a clear echo of Brando in Last Tango. Despite its title, the movie feels far from oppressive, but the title captures the network (emotional; political; historical; circumstantial) that impacts on the characters. Since then, he made by far the best segment of a compilation film, Ten Minutes Older, but he clearly doesn’t make as many films as we need from him.

Recent articles on Bertolucci seem unsure what to make of him. A recent Globe And Mail profile titled “Bertolucci the bourgeois” described him in his New York hotel suite “regally waving in a room-service waiter who bears an espresso and warm milk”; the piece was peppered with references to his bad back, lack of “real passion” and apparent general fatigue. Bertolucci, concluded the article, is “no longer either enfant nor terrible.”

His new film, The Dreamers, seems to invite this kind of waffle; it’s explicitly predicated on a sense of loss and nostalgia. It’s 1968 in Paris, and a young American student falls in with a twin brother and sister whom he meets at the Cinematheque Francaise. The twins’ parents leave on vacation, and the American moves into their apartment. With the Cinematheque temporarily closed (in a famous real-life incident following the French government’s attempt to replace the founder, Henri Langlois), the three fill their movie-free time with sexual experimentation, hardly leaving the apartment even as Paris is seized by strikes and protests. The film’s sexual frankness earned it an NC-17 rating in the US, the first film in six years to go out on that basis.

Journey Of Discovery

At times, I found The Dreamers utterly vibrant and compelling. Early on, the movie pivots on Michael Pitt’s quiet delight as the American settling into Paris; he has a tentative, unformed kind of style that works well here, and for the first third at least it feels like a young man’s film. The trio acts out scenes from their favourite movies, at which Bertolucci cuts in brief glimpses of the originals – it’s a straightforward device, but presented with great panache.

As things get weirder, the film starts to resemble a warning on how easily excessive movie-watching could tip over into withdrawal and skewed perspective (the early scenes at the Cinematheque show the rows of young people staring up at the screen with open mouths, looking like victims of mind control). Cinema falls away for the three, and the movie becomes absorbed on the twins’ strange relationship and Pitt’s attempts to redefine it – it feels at times like Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, like something pushing the horror genre. In the end their activities finally become aligned with the upheaval outside – it makes for a visually arresting ending, but not one that’s very meaningful.

I generally didn’t find the nudity that arousing because it’s all so odd and abstract, and I think the emphasis on so much youthful beauty rather blurs the film’s thematic possibilities. In making a film that draws so explicitly on his own origins, Bertolucci almost seems to be acknowledging his need for rejuvenation. Pitt’s odd journey of discovery parallels the way the director exploded as a young man, touching almost every possible point of achievement. If you look at the film that way, it seems especially poignant when we last see Pitt, with the spell broken, turning and disappearing into the crowd.

Touching The Void

Back in 1983, I remember (don’t ask me why) Leonard Nimoy being interviewed on the release of the Star Trek movie The Search For Spock (which he directed), and acknowledging with a laugh that the movie’s outcome might not be in much doubt given the unlikelihood, with that title, of ending up not finding him. Kevin Macdonald’s new film struck me almost as following the path that Nimoy eschewed. It’s the true story of two young British adventurers, on a tough mountain climb in South America in 1985. They made it to the peak, but on the way down one of the two broke his leg; the other tried to lower him down, but then the injured man slipped and found himself hanging in space, with no hope of pulling himself back up, slowly dragging the other down with him. The other, seeing no alternative, eventually cut the rope and let his friend drop, presumably to his death. But both men survived – the injured man after an agonizing, edge-of-believability crawl back to the base camp.

The film is told through a combination of interviews with the surviving men, and a seemingly flawless reconstruction with actors. The actors barely get to speak, and the reconstruction appears intended almost as much as a marvel in itself as it is a way of illustrating what happened. The interviewees are prosaic and straightforward, barely venturing into complex analytical or spiritual territory. One of them is a goofy looking guy who says “really” every second word (a tic he might have been given some help with). The other, the man who was injured, recounts how he kept moving by setting a series of mundane targets for himself – reducing an unimaginable experience as close to ordinary as possible.

The “void” of the title might be the huge empty space in which the injured man dangled, or the vast crevasse into which he fell, or a way of expressing the imminence of death, and those readings are all fleetingly possible, but in the end the main void that played on my mind was the absence of a human response seemingly commensurate with the events that unfolded. I’m not saying that to criticize the men – it makes for a more interesting movie than an experience of endless “oohs” and “ahs.” But I’m not sure it’s what Macdonald intended, and it means the movie, for all its clear achievements, has a rather implosive, absent feeling to it. As if the search for Spock had failed.

Week Of The Dog

So I mentioned the other week that I wasn’t going to the film festival this year, largely because it coincided with the arrival of our new eight-week-old puppy Ozu. I’m not saying everyone should choose a puppy over the festival (if nothing else, such a policy would cause a problem on a cumulative basis) but it was certainly the right choice for me. Ozu, a Labrador retriever, burst into our lives with enormous determination and intuition, barely showing an iota of uncertainty about anything, deftly negotiating between our desires and his own, and of course looking startlingly cute at every stage. He grasped the geography of our home so effortlessly you might have thought it was embedded on his microchip, and in little more than a day was generally trotting off to the designated peeing spot (I just say generally); he also provides persuasive evidence that the perceived supremacy of lying on the owners’ bed is innate within the Labrador psyche (I’m not saying he’s a genius of course – he also spent a lot of time trotting off to stare at the other dog who lives in the mirror by the front door). After two days, we were already a family, in which if you’re doing anything of even vague interest, you’re no longer doing it alone. And when I work from home, as I do most of the time, I now often have a dog at my feet again (he’s there right now), although sometimes he’s biting my feet.

Hachi: A Dog’s Story

I wouldn’t have wanted to miss a moment of it more than I had to, so that’s how things had to be. Now of course I still watched movies. During the span of the festival I watched films by, among others, Spike Lee, Eric Rohmer, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman and Buster Keaton, so I don’t think I have too much to kick myself about. I stipulate this at the outset, to guard against the immediate credibility loss I might suffer when I say I also watched Hachi: A Dog’s Story. This was on Ozu’s first full day in our home, so it only made sense to watch a movie that might contribute to his spiritual development. No, who am I kidding, I would have watched it anyway.

Summarizing the plot inevitably entails spoilers, so this is my warning in that regard, although I don’t suppose it’s the same as giving away the ending of The Sixth Sense back in the day. It’s based on the real 1920’s story of Hachiko, an Akita dog who waited for his master at the railway station every day. When his master died suddenly at work, the dog was given away, but he kept escaping and returning to his old home, and then to his spot at the station. He kept it up for nine years, getting fed by people around the station, and becoming a national symbol of loyalty. When we were in Japan we saw the statue built in his memory. As a kid I knew of a similar story, of the Scottish terrier Greyfriars Bobby who guarded his master’s grave for some fourteen years. It doesn’t seem as cool a story of course because it’s (a) only Scotland and (b) only a terrier.

Richard Gere, Perfect Dog Owner!

The movie moves the story to small-town America in the recent past, but it’s still built around an Akita, called Hachi for short, who comes to the family in mysterious circumstances when he gets lost in transit. If you’re unfamiliar with the movie – and it was never really released in the US, although it’s readily available now on DVD and cable – it may come as a surprise that it has an Oscar-nominated director (Lasse Hallstrom, who made The Cider House Rules, Chocolat and the unconnected My Life As A Dog) and, as the music professor who takes him in, Richard Gere! And I will quite honestly say that Hallstrom, whose work has never meant much to me, does the best possible job of presenting Gere as the optimum dog owner, someone who might indeed inspire such devotion (on the other hand, the film presents the son in law, who along with the professor’s daughter takes the dog in after his death, as a pretty consistent boob, so maybe any half-competent ghost would have seemed superior.)

If the film is moving for people who don’t immediately succumb to its mega-dog content, it’s probably because of the glowing picture of small-town community. During the entirety of Hachi’s life, he crosses paths with the same stationmaster (Jason Alexander), the same station hog-dog vendor, the same friendly people at the nearby butcher, and so on. And despite some probably unintended hair-raising moments when I thought Hachi’s early insistence on heading off to the station every day might see him hit by a car (I know that didn’t happen to the real Hachi, but you never know how faithful they’re going to be to the original), it appears everyone in town observes a safe ten mile an hour speed limit. My wife, who watched it with me knowing nothing of the story, was wondering for a while whether Hachi might lose it and attack someone, which would have been a grimmer direction for sure.

Ultimate Loyalty

I mentioned that Gere plays a music professor, and his wife (played by Joan Allen – you see how classy this thing is?) is restoring the interior of an old movie theatre: that is, they’re people of culture. And so Hachi’s loyalty takes on the feel of a vigil not just for the professor, but for a way of life that’s essentially predictable, but also sustaining and sustainable. The movie pitches itself at too glossy a level for its depiction of community to be readily identifiable, which may be why it didn’t achieve anything commercially, and you could say the resort to mysticism, to a dog mysteriously imported from Japan, suggests a disillusionment with the capacity of America’s own resources. Maybe it’s just the wrong message at the wrong time.

Too much to read into a family-friendly dog story you say? You might be right. But since Ozu is our second dog, I realize much more this time how we’re not just “getting a dog,” we’re entering into a decade-plus story which will as rich and nurturing and as comic and tragic as all but the rarest of human relationships. So as I finish writing this, on his third day now, with him once again sleeping at (or really more on) my feet, you can’t blame me for being receptive to the higher possibilities of canine existence. Not that I intend ever not to come home, nor that I’d blame him for moving on if I didn’t. But if he had, say, just a trace of the Hachi stuff in him, that’d be pretty cool. And I guess he’d say it’d be pretty cool if I had a trace of it too.

Zabriskie Point

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2009)

I wrote a couple of years ago about Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger, one of my very favourite films. When I first saw it, as a teenager, I was enchanted by its sense of mysticism, encapsulated by a long final shot that seems to transcend physical laws (starting inside a hotel room, moving through the barred window, and then circling round the courtyard outside to observe from the other side of the bars). Over time though, I react as much to the film’s geographic and political specificity, and the more I see it as a particular reaction to a particular time, the more I marvel it remains so resonant.

Extraordinary Disaster

Every four or five years, the record shows, I also return to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, his last narrative film before The Passenger. Zabriskie Point was intended, broadly speaking, to illuminate something about late 60’s America in the same way that his Blow-Up seemed to encapsulate “swinging London.” David Fricke, in an article available online, sums up the story as well as anyone:

…”just about everything that could go wrong with the project did go wrong, and Antonioni's great dream would prove to be his worst nightmare. Released in March 1970 after nearly two arduous years in production -- a period that included long, exhausting shoots on location in the California desert, pitched battles between Antonioni and M-G-M executives, and a protracted, frustrating search for the perfect musical score -- Zabriskie Point was one of the most extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history. The arithmetic alone was astonishing. Reeling from severe management trauma yet eager to capitalize on the booming counterculture youth market, M-G-M…poured $7 million into the film, an extravagant figure for that time and nearly five times what Antonioni spent to make Blow-Up. But where Blow-Up…had taken in more than $20 million at the box office, Zabriskie Point made less than a tenth of that -- a mere $900,000 -- in its humiliatingly brief theatrical run.”

The plot, such as it is, brings two young people from LA, Mark and Daria, together in Death Valley – on the run from police after getting mixed up in violent strike activity, he’s stolen a small plane and flown out there; she’s a secretary driving out to meet her boss in Phoenix. They hang out in the desolate rocks, and make love, which we see extrapolated into an image of dozens of couples, peppering the valley in make-out sessions. They go their separate ways, he eventually to his death, and Daria to a spectacular vision of the Phoenix house exploding, one of the most astonishing spectacles of beautiful destruction ever put on film perhaps.

Cry Of Despair

The film is, no doubt, slow and overblown by almost any narrative standard, and can certainly be judged pretentions. Many writers on the film find it hard to get past the limited performances of the two leads (neither did much more acting - Mark Frechette died in prison a few years later; Daria Halprin married Dennis Hopper for a while). I’ve always been fascinated by it without necessarily knowing why. But watching it again recently, now that it’s out on DVD, it seemed more diagnostically precise than it has ever before.

It opens in the midst of a student meeting, the kind of fervent debating and strategizing that eternally comes to nothing in the big scheme of things: Mark gets up and walks out. Switching to Daria, Antonioni emphasizes the depersonalization of the corporate architecture around her (sure, it’s a cliché); we see her boss planning one of those land development deals that have come to symbolize the grandiose excess of the American middle-class; subsequent scenes study a city whose aesthetics rely increasingly on billboards and corporate logos; when Mark and his friends want a gun, they get one easily. Deliberately strung out and rather laborious, it’s like a cry of despair.

On her trip, Daria stops in a small town and finds herself in a Lord Of The Flies-tinged situation with some menacingly rambunctious children..so much for the next generation. With almost nothing left to salvage beyond the inherent possibility of beautiful youth, Mark and Daria meet in the desert, and Antonioni allows us the fantasy that the youth movement, and maybe the new world beyond, might find its roots here. But it can’t last. Mark returns to civilization with a defiant symbol of renewal, painting the plane like a psychedelic album cover, but his return flares out. Daria hears the news on the radio and for a while it seems she might just snap into place, but the movie has one astonishing coup ahead of it.

That makes it sound much more schematic and coherent than it really is – the movie (which has five credited screenwriters, including Sam Shepard) is often described as virtually plot-less, and the glue of it is much more intuitive and aesthetic than overtly thematic. You can still feel Antonioni’s excitement (albeit filtered through his immensely elegant psyche, and fighting the logistical challenges Fricke mentioned) at this messy society, in many ways still working out its basic rules of engagement; freer and more affluent than anywhere on earth, and yet already showing signs of devouring itself.

Sense Of Possibility

Taken just as a cinematic creation, Zabriskie Point is astonishingly rich – a feast of haunting images, bracing choices, the passing visual glories of the commercializing human project and the overwhelming wonders of the landscape outside it. It always makes me think of Hitchcock a bit: some of the business with the plane in the desert recalls North by Northwest and Rod Taylor from The Birds plays Daria’s boss, but more subliminally I’m thinking of Topaz, made around the same time, which also had a more diffuse plot, relatively anonymous performers, a somewhat self-conscious political relevance, and moments of intense visual stylization. Hitchcock didn’t really achieve his best work there, but Antonioni’s film still benefits from the echo, as if confirming how the establishment was crumbling within the cultural vortex he depicted.

Despite the gloomy subtext of Zabriskie Point, you still felt the sense of possibility, its desire that the human project surmount its worst instincts. But virtually every negative harbinger in the film just went on getting worse, and now California itself, debt-ridden and virtually ungovernable, seems increasingly like a lie or a delusion. At the end, there’s something almost supernaturally commanding in Daria’s stare as she conjures up that vision, as if proving there really was a way all along to unlock the dream of expanded consciousness and revolutionary action. Watching Antonioni’s film, even now, I still almost believe it myself.

Rising Flood

I’ve been wondering lately what the point is, ultimately, of a country, of what we loosely call society. In the US, unemployment is steadily creeping toward 10%. According to Bob Herbert in The New York Times, whose columns increasingly seem to shake with anguish, that’s “14.6 million people officially jobless, and 5.9 million who have stopped looking but say they want a job, and 8.5 million who are working part time but would like to work full time…nearly 30 million Americans who cannot find the work they want and desperately need.” Herbert says: “The politicians’ approach to the jobs crisis has been like passing out umbrellas in a hurricane. Millions are suffering and the entire economy is being undermined, and what are they doing? They’re appropriating more and more money for warfare while schizophrenically babbling about balancing the budget… The U.S. will not remain a stable society if this great employment crisis is not addressed head-on — and soon.”

What’s A Country For?

Herbert seems tragically correct to me. Policy-makers mention those millions of Americans, in an abstract kind of way, but not with real urgency or passion, and it’s true, nothing ever gets done. The ideological divide between spending and tax cuts might as well have an electric fence running along it; no one ever penetrates from one side to the other. The media, to the extent it addresses these issues at all, seems much more interested in interest rates and inflation risks and corporate sentiment than in the underlying human experience. The country sometimes seems to have become deranged, and Prime Minister Harper, you increasingly feel, would happily steer Canada the same way.

The real proof of this idiocy is in Herbert’s other point about the rationality exemption apparently attaching to war. When you listen to the supposed rationales about national security and potential threats, there’s really no way to make sense of it except to assume that every American life must be almost boundlessly precious, justifying any amount of defensive expenditure. A mature and self-aware society, surely, would focus on the real problems of its citizens, rather than fixating morbidly and grandiosely on largely theoretical dangers. No one seems willing to say that the risk of major terrorist attacks – which in any event doesn’t seem very high – might, beyond a certain point, just be one of those tolls society has to bear. We can fixate on it, sure, just like we could let our lives be constrained by the (much more tangible) likelihood of being hit by a bus, but it’s just not the recipe for an optimum collective existence. Which brings me back to my first question: if thirty million suffering people don’t prompt the sense of urgency and purpose that 9/11 fleetingly did, then what’s the country for?

If God Is Willing

It’s impossible not to keep returning to this question, and the endless sad variations on it, as you watch Spike Lee’s four-hour If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise, currently playing on HBO Canada. It’s a follow-up to his earlier documentary on Hurricane Katrina, When The Levees Broke, five years later, revisiting some of the same people and issues and examining what may have come of all the rebuilding promises made at the time. The movie starts off with the New Orleans Saints’ Super Bowl victory, but from there it finds many more lows than highs. What eats at you isn’t that there’s still so much devastation; even in the best of scenarios, the physical and psychic rebuilding would have taken decades. It’s how little collective weight the community still carries for decision makers, despite everything.

Perhaps unpredictably, the film is often most riveting when most immersed in purely local issues, such as the woes of the school system, the gutting of the mental healthcare infrastructure, or in the apparently copious evidence that development and property interests trump just about all other considerations (it has lots to say about the local police force too, but I guess that kind of corruption narrative is all too sadly familiar). Many of the points of light, sadly, involve the efforts of celebrities, in particular Brad Pitt’s astonishing project to build attractive, viable low-income housing in the most devastated area. Pitt’s work here probably serves to earn him the unwarranted deification he’s received for other reasons, but you wonder if this is what the country’s come to, relying on the instincts of privileged individuals, with government’s theoretically greater power for good now neutered or squandered.

Because Lee’s canvas is broader than in the first film, he sometimes seems to be barely in control of it – subjects like the local diet’s dismal nutritional virtues, or the legacy of Mayor Nagin, come and go in just a couple of minutes. He makes a detour to the devastation in Haiti, which someone says made Katrina look like a garden party, but the exact point he’s getting at there eluded me. The film later moves on to the BP oil spill, which in geographic terms may largely be a horrific coincidence (one of the speakers says that after so much bad luck he’s recently come to believe in voodoo), but which many people also believe would have attracted a more incisive government response if it had happened in the Hamptons. Or, I suppose, Lower Manhattan. The film leaves no doubt about the widespread vein of grievance running through the region, but it seems this only intermittently turns into rage or organized action.

Party Scene

It ends on a long rundown of all the on-camera participants, which seems to last almost as long as a normal movie. Lee stages a cast and crew party, at the end of which the participants all troop off the stage, almost like the end of a Fellini film. It’s unclear whether this marks Lee as a great optimist or rather, for all the seriousness of his intent, as something of a dabbler (as if encouraging us to take the latter view, he reminds us at the very end that he’s from Brooklyn). But then, for better or worse (and his filmography truly has ample evidence for both conclusions) he’s never been too worried about letting his movies drift off course now and then. Still, it does mean you don’t come away from If God Is Willing And The Creek Don’t Rise seething in the way you might have anticipated. On the other hand, in its perhaps messy but highly valuable laying-out of wrongs, in the emphasis throughout on community, and in that final assertion of his film as a collaboration, it certainly suggests a better vision for America than the one currently holding sway.

At War

Samuel Maoz’ debut film Lebanon came out of nowhere to win the top prize at last year’s Venice film festival, which as an instance of over-rewarding promise and innovation seems to me a bit like giving Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. The film is indeed set in Lebanon, in 1982, although there’s a bleak irony in that title, because as far as its participants are concerned, it could be anywhere. They’re an Israeli tank crew, and except for the first and last shot, the entire film takes place in the tank’s interior – we see the outside only through the crosshairs of the scope. With no autonomy, taking all orders from the commander outside – who occasionally comes inside to berate them for various errors – the men encounter a Syrian prisoner, and a couple of Christian Arabs, one of them from Turkey. The view outside is sometimes pure horror-of-war – a chicken farmer bleeding to death from his severed limbs, a hysterical woman whose daughter has just been killed, running around naked after her dress catches fire – and sometimes just chaotic abstraction.

Bad For Morale

This sounds like an exercise in intense, distilled realism, and partly plays like that, but the overall effect for me was closer to a cinematic concept piece like last year’s Paranormal Activity, in which the entire narrative was seen through a video camera existing within the world of the film. Of course the tank is claustrophobic by its nature, but the film doesn’t feel as intense as you might imagine, despite the repeated shots of the dirty water on the floor and the general sense of sweat and grime. There’s a lot of conflict between the men, often expressed I’d say in rather stagy terms: an early exchange in which one of them questions why he’s been chosen to stand guard could easily play like a whining Woody Allen monologue, if delivered somewhat differently. And the scenes of the exterior have a shifting impact. They don’t all seem to be pure point of view shots, because Maoz frequently cuts to tighter close-ups. Compared to the dirty colour scheme inside the tank, the outside frequently looks pristine and glowing, giving even the more horrible sights a sharpness that blunts their pure horror a bit, sometimes even evoking a sense of very black comedy. The tank spends a big patch of time parked at the site of some kind of travel agency, where the camera gazes at images of the Eiffel Tower and the World Trade Center; the safe location they’re headed towards is known as San Tropez.

This bewildering confusion of coordinates, along with the fact that the tank crew barely seems to have any grasp of the underlying politics, connects the film to a long series of works that, if they’re not explicitly anti-war, certainly see a vast gulf between the human experience and the rhetorical one. The tank crew, a representation of Israel’s conscript army, is a pretty dismal example of military efficiency, with no governing coherence and failing several times to carry out their basic orders. J. Hoberman in The Village Voice reported that the movie had a mixed reaction in Israel itself: “Conservative commentators saw the movie as bad for morale; on the left, Lebanon has been criticized for identifying with Israeli soldiers and objectifying their Arab victims.” Both perspectives seem plausible, but then “morale” in the context of war has often depended on maintaining blindness and ignorance, and the second criticism is inherent in the film’s very concept, where we only see what the tank crew sees. Lebanon doesn’t have any parallel to the scenes in American movies where the half-crazed soldiers get high on mowing down the Vietnamese; the soldiers barely seem sufficiently integrated into the war effort to register killing as a duty.

Sam Fuller

Lebanon runs a very tight 90 minutes, and you can see it’s an engrossing experience. I find myself though tending to describe the film rather than productively react to it – it doesn’t prompt any particular thoughts about Israel, or combat, or cinema, which I didn’t have before. Maybe that sounds like imposing a high hurdle, and yet if art doesn’t move us forward in some way, what’s the point? Hoberman calls the film “at once political allegory and existential combat movie—Sartre's No Exit as directed by Sam Fuller” and sums up the allegory like this: “Lebanon may be the movie's title, but, blindly plowing through everything in its path, the beleaguered tank is Israel.” Well, maybe, but as allegories go, that’s not much of one – and actually the tank spends as much time sputtering and almost breaking down as it does blindly plowing through everything in its path.

The Sam Fuller reference is interesting though, especially since a few weeks previously I’d watched his 1958 film Verboten! Set in occupied Germany immediately after the end of World War Two, the film is even more concise than Lebanon, lasting just 80 minutes, but explores an astonishing canvas, encompassing a GI’s marriage to a German woman (for him it’s love, but she admits later in the film that she did it for the stability and the money), her brother who’s flirting with the Nazi revival movement, and the Nuremburg trials. It’s obviously a film of strained means, drawing heavily on stock footage, but ultimately carrying a staggering scope and impact. Fuller marshals a great range of perspectives on the war and the reconstruction, but starkly setting out the central chasm between unambiguous Nazi evil, and the lack of glory attaching to even a “just” war against such evil. Set against this hopelessness at the centre of civilization, tolerance toward the calculations of a desperate woman ought to come easy.

Verboten!

Elements of Verboten! may well seem cheesy now, such as the theme song that croons about their love being verboten, but when you watch it you find your sensibility in overdrive, whipped up by Fuller’s untiring kineticism and the density of his interests. If we’re ever to transcend our primitivism on this topic, it will only be by blowing open the heavy, distorted calculus of threats and obligations, and the neutering language of patriotism and “supporting the troops,” and Fuller’s movie still seems to me a more productive contribution than Lebanon, or just about any other recent film about war, to developing that ideology. Closing where I began, my enthusiasm for Obama largely evaporated with his Nobel acceptance speech, blathering about necessary wars; his failure to reshape America’s disgusting adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan wipes out any sense that he might even be a more progressive brand of warrior, let alone a peacemaker. Lebanon isn’t a pro-war film by any means, but I’m willing to mark it down for not being anti-war enough.

Landfill/Soaring

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2008)

This is Rex Reed in a recent New York Observer: “no matter how bad you think the worst movie ever made ever was, you have not seen Synecdoche, New York. It sinks to the ultimate bottom of the landfill, and the smell threatens to linger from here to infinity.” Having a field day, Reed aimed a cannon at the Toronto festival’s description of the film as “part dream, part puzzle, part brainteaser,” calling it “the most overblown, hyperbolic stretch since Lassie played a war veteran with amnesia.” And so on. Game over, it seems. Except that the somewhat more plugged-in Manohla Dargis in The New York Times wrote this: “to say (the film) is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.”

Bottom Of The Landfill

Can such diverting views possibly be reconciled? I’ve not always shared the general enthusiasm for the work of Charlie Kaufman, making his directing debut here after writing Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. The films are extraordinarily clever, structured to allow any number of ensuing impressions and bafflements, but my pleasure in them has never have gone beyond the academic. Synecdoche, New York focuses on Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a New York state theatre director going nowhere much artistically (stuck trying to put a fresh gloss on Death Of A Salesman) nor personally (laden down with physical ailments and fears; married to an artist who can’t wait to get away from him, and doesn’t).

After receiving a major grant, he embarks on a project of immense ambition, renting an abandoned warehouse in which he starts creating a fictional world of immense complexity, employing hundreds of actors improvising scenes in response to such written instructions as “You were raped last night” or “You lost your job today.” As time goes on, the project endlessly evolves, focusing increasingly on recreating his own life, with an actor playing his own role in orchestrating all of this; and then as that actor becomes increasingly enmeshed in the master-plan, taking on another actor to play him (except by then it barely matters if the casting is true to gender or other considerations, nor even whether it’s the actor seeking to replicate the subject, rather than vice versa).

Confused already? I used the phrase “as time goes on” – but it’s not so clear what that means here. The film seems to span twenty, thirty years or even more; despite no apparent income, Caden’s still maintaining a huge infrastructure, long after the originating grant would have run out. At one early stage, before the project kicks off, it’s seriously unclear whether his wife has been gone for five years or merely for a week or two. The movie is clearly not “realistic” – apart from the logistical absurdities, it features such whimsies as a perpetually burning house. What portion of it takes place in Caden’s mind, or the mind of others, is impossible to divine.

The Biggest Masochist

The structure’s “puzzle” aspect was prominent in Kaufman’s other films too of course. The reason I liked Synecdoche, New York more than those others is that Kaufman seems here to have reached a rueful maturity, spawning immense narrative and thematic complexity without seeming trapped by it (and without betraying the slightest hint of virtuoso pleasure). Reed’s evocation of a “landfill” isn’t entirely off base - the film’s opening stretch is suffused in bodily functions, maladies, general malaise; but also in a formative-feeling curiosity, about articles in the newspaper, the meaning of words, the building blocks of everything. Hoffman – “the biggest masochist in the Screen Actors Guild” as Reed has it – transmits almost utter despair and pain: seemingly consecrated to a career as an “artist,” but devoid of any particular theory or inspiration. For a while the movie is suspended in agonizing indecision – how can (or why should) such a man possibly go on living? Then he gets his big idea…why crap into the toilet, when you can do it directly into your art?

That might sound crude, but as Reed points out, at one point Caden goes to his ex-wife’s apartment and scrubs her toilets, in the guise of a woman named Ellen. “Don’t ask,” Reed adds. Well, maybe you should. Why would the master orchestrator of such a grand sprawling creation invest himself in such a meaningless, uncreative pilgrimage? Because, I think, he finds it doesn’t matter. The more he hones his art, the greater the impossibility of ever lifting it to any kind of transcendence; certain failure might be its only badge of authenticity. As such, the movie’s twisted gloom surely relates very well to its content. But, of course, at the cost of withholding almost all the easier pleasures of Kaufman’s earlier work.

That’s not quite true I suppose – there’s much diversion in the performers, including a wonderful line-up of notable actresses (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and many others). But as it goes on, the film clenches up. Death and loss come in a relentless march. Dargis calls the film “as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies.”

Futility Of Art

I guess that’s right, in the sense that the film sees the futility of excessive immersion in art. But on the other hand, it’s too deliberately unrealistic a construct to yield much of a discovery about the merits of the real world. To me, for all his suffering, Caden might still be the lucky fulfilled one, relative to the masses lining up to toil almost facelessly in his project’s inner layers, or to the other screwed up people passing through the film. The film offers only a thin endorsement of art’s redemptive powers, that’s for sure, but it still might be the best available. Either way, Kaufman manages here to inch onto the territory of the great directors; those from whom we accept irritation and incoherence and perhaps occasional repulsiveness, because we come out of their films richer than when we went in. Even if that richness has to be measured in a new kind of sadness.

Veterans Getting Low

I don’t usually spend a lot of this space talking about actors, because I think too many movie reviewers do little more than that, and often in hopelessly subjective terms (basically they like him, they don’t like her). But Aaron Schneider’s Get Low doesn’t allow you much opportunity to do anything else. Anyway, the topic was in my mind because when I saw the film, the trailers were unusually irritating, mostly for the people in them. First was Philip Seymour Hoffman in Jack Goes Boating, which looks like scene after scene of look-at-me showboating. Then came Carey Mulligan and others in Never Let Me Go, which looks like scene after scene of being haunted and wistful. Then Paul Giamatti in Barney’s Version, which looks like scene after scene of irritating attitudinizing (and yes, I’m completely aware it’s based on a classic Canadian novel). Then something else equally off-putting, which I’ve mercifully already forgotten. Of course, trailers frequently make movies seem less subtle than they actually are. But honestly, it was like a ten-minute film essay on the sledgehammer crassness of current cinema and its supposed standard bearers.

Get Low

So then I watched Get Low. Set in the 1930’s, it depicts Felix Bush, a small-town hermit (Robert Duvall) who’s been holed up on his farm for some forty years (the first thirty-eight are the hardest, he says), spawning all kinds of local legends. Sensing time running out, he suddenly decides to organize a “funeral” for himself, at which he’ll give away the posthumous rights to his land in a lottery, hear what people say about him, and most importantly deliver the story behind his long self-confinement. Local undertaker Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) needs the work, despite the assignment’s unique challenges. Sissy Spacek plays a widow who knew Bush decades earlier, and is linked in some way to his life’s big secret.

The film’s getting lots of positive reviews, mainly for the actors, and indeed that’s its only facet of even modest distinction. Any dramatic impact depends on anticipating what Bush is going to reveal about himself, but the film drops so many hints along the way (including in the very first shot) that it’s entirely predictable in general if not specific terms. There’s really no thematic or other strength there to override these narrative shortcomings – the film doesn’t have more at its centre than the generalized redemptive, humanizing notions of every other TV drama. And Schneider’s direction, which frequently seems overly fussy, doesn’t evoke any kind of period flavor – people dress in old-time clothing and drive vintage cars, but that’s about it.

Duvall and Spacek

So to the actors then. Duvall, who may well be a major Oscar contender for this (he previously won for Tender Mercies), is of course an esteemed professional, but I have to admit he’s never been a personal favourite of mine. There’s an authoritarian quality to his approach that in low-grade material (and he’s been involved with a lot of it) frequently brings out a strutting, self-righteous vein. Get Low flirts with this problem in its early stretches, allowing him to have a field day with the taciturn, rifle-wielding, get-off-my-property thing. The performance becomes significantly more interesting as he loosens up a bit – he’s very amusing and touching in a scene where he tries to impress and entertain Spacek – but this only shows up the earlier lack of subtlety. Duvall really is astonishing though in his climactic moment, where the old man strains his inner resources to evoke the pivotal event in his life, seasoning the story with eccentric sound effects and asides. Unfortunately and bizarrely, Schneider undermines his efforts by repeatedly cutting away to Spacek’s reactions as she listens.

Spacek was surely most interesting in her career’s first decade, when her quirky, deceptively reticent persona added astonishing texture to a potentially hollow creation like Carrie and to more naturalistic material like Coal Miner’s Daughter (note that both she and Duvall, like Jeff Bridges this year and Reese Witherspoon a while back, won their Oscars for playing country singers, so wow, those awards really do capture the diversity of the world we live in). Since then though, she’s mainly delivered plain contributions to trivial pictures, with only In The Bedroom perhaps tapping those earlier chills. In Get Low she plays, basically, a nice old widow; the part itself, and the film’s handling of her, doesn’t encourage any great depth (the film, in general, idealizes women, which may be quaint, but isn’t the same as doing them a favour).

Murray and Cobbs

And then you have Bill Murray, to me one of the most intriguing resources in American cinema, although seldom optimally deployed (his artistic highpoints include Groundhog Day, Lost In Translation and Broken Flowers). Murray’s most interesting recent work - other than cultivating a considerable personal legend – may have come on the Letterman show, where he dived into a water-filled dumpster, hitting his head in the process (perhaps on a piece of floating garbage) and then dried himself off during the ensuing interview, during which he seemed unusually reflective and, actually, serious. Murray is obviously extremely wayward, constantly reacting against the norms of pop culture, and yet – one guesses – too diffident about everything else not to be happiest at least somewhere inside the tent. Perhaps the archetypal recent story is his claim that he took on the task of voicing Garfield the cat in Garfield: A Tail Of Two Kitties because he mistook the film’s co-writer Joel Cohen to be one of the esteemed Coen brothers.

He does well with Frank Quinn, but it’s a pretty simple character as written – an individual of possibly shady origins, possibly susceptible to the temptation of so much lottery money stuffed under the mattress (or in this case, hidden in the casket). Similar to the way he approaches his career, Murray plays some elements of the character straight down the middle, and others with eccentric, dry abstraction. It’s always great to watch, not a waste of his capacities like some of his roles, but hardly a full deployment of them either.

Along with these three, the film also has the less-heralded veteran presence of Bill Cobbs, one of those guys whose name you might not place even though you’ve seen him fifty times. In his late seventies now, his scenes with Duvall convey a very satisfying sense of mutual delight in the encounter, only lightly camouflaged by grumpy old man exteriors. Even there though you feel a missed opportunity – Bush’s choice of a black man as his prime spiritual confessor seems to demand a bit more from the film than politically correct colour-blindedness. Anyway, on the whole, you wish Get Low tried more often to get high on its amazing resources, but there’s just about enough there to send you home quietly content. You might want to skip the trailers though. Get late!

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2009)

I wrote a year or so ago about Paul Mazursky’s Blume In Love, one of my favourite films of the 1970’s. Who, you say? It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time (around the period of An Unmarried Woman) where Mazursky was often viewed as a leading American filmmaker (along with Cassavetes, Altman, Coppola, Woody Allen, and Michael Ritchie, also mostly overlooked now). For a decade or so, he seemed almost uniquely equipped to explore the era’s contradictory middle-class experience: unprecedented affluence, stylishness and sense of self, running ahead of the human capacity to handle it all. He belongs to the age where every film seemed to feature a psychoanalyst (Mazursky sometimes cast his own); where terms like “hostility” and “impotence” get a healthy airing. In the age of Reagan, the prevailing social narrative hardened, and Mazursky’s films became first more contrived (modern versions of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and of The Tempest) and then coarser, if fleetingly more popular (Down And Out In Beverly Hills). In the last decade, now in his mid-70’s, he’s made a little-seen documentary about his Jewish roots, but otherwise worked more as an actor than a director.

The Way We Are

I recently watched again Mazursky’s first film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Made in 1969, it’s perhaps best remembered for the shot of (reading left to right) Ted, Carol, Bob and Alice lined up in bed, with the expression of a group of vacationers trying to figure out a confounding road sign. Of all Mazursky’s films, you might think this is the one we could most leave in the time capsule now, rooted as it is in a particular Californian vogue for self-discovery. The film immediately heralds the era’s presumed possibilities, with a chorus of hallelujahs on the soundtrack as Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie Wood) drive up to a self-styled “institute,” to a 24-hour group exploration session. Mazursky spends a fair bit of time illustrating this process, and although most of us would likely find elements of it inherently funny (the swings from laughing to crying; the group hugs as one of their number reaches an epiphany), there’s not a hint of condescension or overt mockery in the presentation. His films are comedies in the almost now vanished sense – that if you pragmatically and affectionately examine some aspect of life not affected by inescapable tragedy or deprivation, or by deranged melodrama, then it’s probably going to be inherently pretty funny. That’s just the way we are.

Inspired by this experience, Bob and Carol spill out to their uninitiated friends Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon) about their new emphasis on feelings rather than thoughts, their new appreciation of love and beauty. But you can only change so much so fast. Bob admits to Carol he slept with another woman, but can’t handle it when she accepts it with equanimity. He then comes home to find Carol with another guy, and reacts just as any jealous husband would. Ted gets inspired by the idea of the affair, but can’t see the virtue of telling your wife about it. Alice is torn between thinking herself modern and just not liking the contours of this new world, but ultimately she’s the one who proposes (while they’re together in a Las Vegas hotel suite, half an hour before a Tony Bennett concert) that they swap partners. It’s the logical extension of what they’ve been doing, which isn’t to say it’s the right one.

What The World Needs Now..

The film ends in the hotel parking lot, the triumphant opening music now replaced on the soundtrack by Dionne Warwick’s much more prosaic “What the world needs now, is love sweet love…” The four are caught up in an almost strenuously diverse crowd, ethereally mingling and looking deeply into the eyes of strangers, as Bob and Carol did during one of the exercises at the institute. It’s a carefully ambiguous ending, but clearly not one that rejects the new age teachings; it suggests, it seems to me, that ambitions for greater self-awareness and connection are entirely valid and attainable, but that they’re going to need a more specific inner diagnosis and action plan. There’s some compromise and even cheapening in this of course – that choice of song must have been a little obvious even in 1969 – but also possibilities beyond those offered by mechanized professional therapies.

Of course, attaining the velocity for that kind of take-off isn’t easy. One of the best scenes has Alice at her analyst, where it may or may not be significant that she referred to “liking” her husband as opposed to “loving” her child, that she accidentally refers to making love with Bob rather than Ted, and that she still refers to her private parts using a term from her childhood (and then of course, just when she might be getting somewhere, time’s up). How do you find yourself within that? Honest intuitive reactions to infidelity or other things are to be encouraged, as long as properly examined for what they reveal - a talk process hopelessly intermingling unburying facts and spinning fictions. Before they all go to bed together, Ted goes into the bathroom, seemingly going through his usual routine, perhaps stalling, perhaps merely exercising habits and a personal sense of standards more pressing than any looming, possibly life-changing erotic possibilities. Maybe he kills the moment; maybe it helps all of them find the right one.

Fruitful Ground

It’s disappointing how seldom we get films now like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. For one thing, sexuality has virtually disappeared as a serious subject in American cinema. But more broadly, I miss the sense of mainstream cinema actually taking on emotional mysteries, rather than trafficking in bland certainties. It’s worth remembering that Bob & Carol.. received several Oscar nominations, for Gould and Carroll and for the script; could that happen now, when the consensus view of serious cinema has become so soggy at one end (The Reader), so degraded at the other (No Country For Old Men)?

Among the many things we’re not adequately addressing about the economic crisis: its implications for “relationships” as we’ve come to view them in an age of debt-inflated, media-stroked, materialistic inanity. Oh, we’re getting all the stories about how dating is tougher when the purse strings tighten, and about people living longer with their parents and suchlike, but we all have to know- if we examine it at all – that this is merely the tip of the reinvention iceberg. We hear about “sacrifice” and “living within our means” on the one hand, but meanwhile we collectively hope for some “stimulus” back to a state of arrested development. It’s dire, and yet for an engaged artist, what a time it should be to find real stories and people. But for now, a few honorable exceptions like Wendy And Lucy aside, most of what’s being released isn’t worth the time of day. However distant the preoccupations of Bob & Carol… might be, they’re still more useful to us in the here and now than anything at the multiplex. Or, sadly, even the arthouse.

2010 Toronto Film Festival Preview (Yours, Not Mine!)

For the first time since I moved to Toronto in 1994, I’m skipping the film festival entirely this year. This might seem crazy to you given my obvious cinephile status, especially because this year’s edition, with the opening of the new Bell Lightbox festival centre, should be one for the ages. But as I’ve occasionally written here, I’ve grown fonder of having things my own way, cinematically speaking, and while the festival never ceases to generate great films, it seldom constitutes the optimum way of seeing them. There used to be a sense of needing to grab opportunities while you could – I saw Jacques Rivette’s Haut bas fragile at the festival in one of those early years and loved it, but I’ve never been able since then to see it again. That’s less common now in an expanded-access world though, and to the extent it’s still sometimes true, you’ll never catch up anyway (even the most self-destructively dedicated festivalgoer can only see 15 or 20% of what’s on offer during the week and a half).

My Festival Days

Of course, there’s the spectacle and the celebrity sightings and so on, which was definitely exciting to me in the early years. I think the first festival film I saw - selected more or less randomly at the last minute – was Somebody To Love, by the subsequently underachieving Alexandre Rockwell: I hadn’t realized someone like Rosie Perez (and I guess she meant more at the time too) would actually be there. A couple of years after that I saw Al Pacino introducing Looking For Richard; later again, Jean-Luc Godard carrying out a gorgeously impenetrable Q&A. But more often than not, I sat through lots of boring, unrevealing chatter and somewhat misplaced adulation and fawning, so I eventually just started ignoring that aspect altogether. I guess, at the end of the day, movies really aren’t a social activity for me. They’re vitally important to me, but because of that very fact, I need my own relationship with them. The festival, for all its unquestioned importance and achievement, eventually became a bit of an interloper.

There’s more to it than that though. The first full day of this year’s festival is the same day we bring home our new eight week-old Labrador retriever puppy. He will be named Ozu, in honor of Yasujiro Ozu, and is the successor to Pasolini, who died on March 2nd. Ozu’s arrival is a major event in our household, and I realize now – after welcoming Paso at the same age and seeing him through eleven years of comedy and tragedy – that it’s the start of a decade-plus chapter that, on a nuts and bolts day-to-day level, will be defined much more by the dog than by the so-called owners. In other words, it’s a big deal. So it’s pretty obvious where I have to spend my spare time during that initial period, and it ain’t pushing for a glimpse of David Schwimmer.

Jean-Luc Godard

So that’s my story. But as a public service, I’ll record here the movies that would have been high on my list if I had been going, and then if you bump into me at any time in the near future, you can laugh in my face and tell me what I missed (nah, I know you’re not like that). Well, talking of Jean-Luc Godard, he has a new film after several years, Film Socialism. It’s supposedly, to continue a theme, gorgeously impenetrable. The Oscars are really showing some imagination this year by giving a special lifetime achievement award to Godard, although it’s a bit like putting out a cookie as an offering to God. They had trouble even locating JLG to let him know about this, and there doesn’t seem to be much chance he’ll bother showing up to pick up the prize (although if he does, it should be quite the speech). If I were just going to see one film, this would almost certainly be it.

The other overwhelming attraction is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by (and this is where I need to apologize to my spell check software) Apichatpong Weerasethakul. After just a handful of films, AW is already in the top tier of filmmakers: I saw his Tropical Malady on DVD for the first time this year, and was so intrigued by it that I watched it again almost immediately. His new one won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and is reportedly a magical, impressionistic masterpiece. Happily for those of us who miss it, it’s already been scheduled for a longer run at the Lightbox this fall.

Always Buy Brand Names

You can see I’m a big devotee of the “always buy brand names” philosophy when it comes to movies – another reason why the festival’s potluck aspect doesn’t really chime with my own approach (I realize I’m probably making myself sound really dour and chilly, but if you saw how well I’m gonna treat Ozu, you’d reconsider). Jerzy Skolimowski made some very appealing, spiky, whizzkid films in the 60’s and 70’s (Deep End may be the best known) but more recently generated nothing for almost twenty years - now in his 70’s he’s back with his second movie in three years, Essential Killing. And then there’s Raul Ruiz, also touching 70 now. Ruiz has made over 100 films (many of them truly hard to find), and 2009 was the first year since 1966 not to have any new entries alongside his name in the Internet Movie Database’s listing. But he’s making up for it with three new titles in 2010, including the festival’s Mysteries of Lisbon.

If I were taking a chance on directors I know nothing about, I might be drawn to The Autobiography Of Nicolae Ceausescu by Andrei Ujica, which I’ve read some dazzling things about. The most interesting of the mainstream selections may be Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky (who last made The Wrestler), supposedly a dazzling psychological thriller with Natalie Portman (and Barbara Hershey! and Winona Ryder!) And it’s appealing to think John Carpenter’s return, with John Carpenter’s The Ward, might be a major return to form, although Carpenter’s work started going downhill around the time he started inserting his own name in the titles. And that was in 1978 folks!

But the fact is, since I’m not going, I haven’t even spent much time looking at the line-up – it’s also the first time in fifteen years I didn’t buy myself the big program book. So that’s all I’ve got for you. While I’m messing round with house training and getting my fingers chewed, please have the time of your lives!

May Movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2008)

Five films that should have been better, and one that could hardly be better at all.

My Blueberry Nights is the first American movie by the fine and inventive Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, with singer Norah Jones in her first acting role. She plays a bit of a lost soul who bonds with New York café owner Jude Law and then goes on a road trip, limited here to mini narratives in Tennessee (with David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz) and Arizona (Natalie Portman). Jones’ tentative performance seems well in tune with the director’s own approach; both reticent here, touching some conventional notes and some quirkier ones, but never coming in for an emotional or thematic kill. Wong reportedly spent some time feeling out real American locations, but for the most part the film could have been shot overseas on sound stages – it’s a road movie with no apparent taste for the road or the detritus on its borders. This isn’t necessarily a criticism though if you can succumb to the gauzy mood; I just about could, but you get the overwhelming sense of a rather bemused director, camouflaging and filigreeing an essentially inert piece of work.

The Visitor

The Visitor, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, is a nicely crafted but definitely overpraised film. Richard Jenkins plays Walter Vale, a bored, recessive college professor who finds an illegal immigrant couple living in his New York apartment; he initially throws them out but then tells them they can stay. When the male, Tarek, is arrested and taken to a detention centre, Walter finds something to care about for the first time in years. McCarthy’s film moves deliberately and pristinely, with not a cinematic hair out of place. The thesis seems somewhat obvious – how America’s post 9-11 heavy-handedness toward immigrants turns the country away from its better nature and denies it a richer cultural fabric. But the film would be a more challenging liberal text if Tarek wasn’t the happiest, most inspiring soul imaginable, and one who comes with a hot widowed mother. Jenkins is getting a lot of attention for his performance, but there too McCarthy eschews much complexity, pushing the actor into a rather clichéd minimalism. The nicest touch is Walter’s fascination with Tarek’s drum playing, but this too mostly seems like only-in-the-movies stuff.

David Mamet’s Redbelt is the latest in the director’s odd apparent project to prove himself much plainer a filmmaker than a playwright – another smart but limited creation with good tricky plotting, dollops of patented exchanges, and a spareness that’s intriguing for a while but ultimately underwhelming. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a jujitsu teacher, highly capable and noble but struggling to keep his studio afloat, drawn into a complicated series of events involving a Hollywood action star (Tim Allen), a troubled lawyer (Emily Mortimer) who accidentally shoots a bullet through his window, a stolen watch, and in the background to all this, the sport’s escalating commercialism. It’s only when you try to recount the plot afterwards that you fully realize how good Mamet is at spinning it all out, until that is it’s time to start steering toward home and then the big bus doesn’t seem so nimble on the curves (the last ten minutes almost feel as if someone else was drafted to pull all the strands into some kind of ending). Even at its most successful it never seems like more than a B-movie, and of course that’s an honorable place on the spectrum, except that the time when such genre exercises could seem truly subversive and instructive has generally passed.

Son Of Rambow

Son Of Rambow is set in the early 80’s; pre-DV cameras and of course long pre-YouTube, when cinema was still a citadel and video a dream around the edges. In the UK, a BBC kids show called Screen Test held an annual competition for narrative home movies; I remember watching the show, but in my circumstances (financial constraints; parental skepticism, general cluelessness) I could never have imagined it meaning anything tangible to me. Now I wish I’d had more wherewithal, and Garth Jennings’ movie hit me as a slight rebuke. It’s built around two unfulfilled boys who collaborate on a Screen Test entry - a sequel to Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood – marked by cheesy home-made stunts and of course mounds of heart and quirky artistic integrity (the movie is a transatlantic cousin to the recent Be Kind Rewind, although it cheats a bit more). One of the boys belongs to a religious group that’s kept him from watching TV or movies; he loses his cinematic virginity when he accidentally views a pirated Rambo video, and his imagination runs wild. It’s a cute idea, and has a highly honorable resonance; the esteemed and austere director Robert Bresson raved late in life about (presumably) his first viewing of a Bond movie, praising the “cinematic writing” of For Your Eyes Only.

Son Of Rambow doesn’t evoke Bresson in any other sense, being ultimately a bit too formulaic (and having a silly view of the French), but the idea and good humour takes it a long way. It’s a nice tribute to the pleasure of creation, and to the perilous relationship between expanded resources and creative control, depicted here via the tension between the two boys when the project takes off and too many other kids want to get on board.

Giuseppe Tornatore is best remembered for his own work of mushy cinematic nostalgia, Cinema Paradiso, which the Internet informs me is a lot of people’s favourite foreign language film. Since then he’s seemed to have trouble hitting his stride, but his new film The Unknown Woman cleaned up at last year’s Italian Oscars. Hard to see why – it’s an entertaining melodrama, but really all about the cheap thrills. A young Ukrainian woman sets her mind on working for a particular Italian family, managing to get in as nanny to their young daughter (in part by tripping up her predecessor at the top of a long flight of stairs); her relationship with the young girl clearly has something behind it, and the flashbacks of her past are unremittingly lurid. Tornatore holds it all together, but isn’t aiming real high.

Flight Of The Red Balloon

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight Of The Red Balloon was my favourite film of last year’s film festival, at which time I raved about it here, and it will likely be my favourite release of this year. I haven’t been able to find confirmation for this, but I’m almost certain that the film festival version contained several scenes missing from the print now playing at the Royal – when I say the film could have been just barely better, I’m wishing to get that material back. But the 98% that remains is almost uniquely graceful and complex, a stunning, counter-intuitive tribute to the 1956 French film The Red Balloon and more generally to art in a globalized world. If you didn’t see it, it’s surely the year’s most necessary pending DVD release…but I hope they add back the missing stuff.

Hello Sweden!

We spent a week in Sweden earlier this year, including four nights in Stockholm. It’s not quite on the tourism A-list; everyone assumed we must be going because of family connections or suchlike, but actually we just wanted to see Sweden. Stockholm’s old city, built on a series of linked islands, is quite beautiful, with a waterfront that exhausts your field of vision, and for the most part looking much the same as it might have looked a century ago – the contrast with Toronto’s squandered ambitions is a bit depressing. It’s very easy to walk in – the bridges and paths lead you naturally along, and traffic volume isn’t very high. We had great food, and of course everyone speaks English. If you’ve never been to Europe at all then sure, I’d go to London or Paris or Rome first, but if you have the luck to expand your travel history a bit, it’s well worth a visit.

Visiting Sweden

Compared to our own city or to those others I mentioned, Sweden’s relative lack of diversity is hard to miss. It’s not quite the stuff of stereotypes - everyone isn’t actually blond and tanned and good-looking, but if you picked people at random in the street, there’s a fair chance they might be that. We often got the impression the Swedes weren’t particularly interested in us. I’m not saying at all that they should be, but on many other trips we’ve detected a greater interest in us as visitors, whether because people were genuinely interested, or because they work more consciously at faking it, or because they wanted to scam us. The Swedes were generally polite, but distant. We came away with the impression (which, sure, may just be our own construction) of a country perhaps aware of its limitations, but collectively very clear about what it wants to remain, and of the difficulties attached to that in the age of globalism, and thus drawn toward internal discipline. The fact of retaining its own currency adds to that too.

Some people would put a darker connotation on what I just said, detecting in Sweden a profound malignancy – racism, perversion, corruption. The UK Observer newspaper recently explored the roots of this, theorizing that a “disenchantment” entered the Swedish psyche over the last few decades, and concluding rather startlingly: “the Swedes who worry about the subterranean darkness might actually be on to something. It's just that they're looking in the wrong place. It's not necessarily in the system, or the state, or the police, or under the sea. It may just be in themselves.” Yikes!

The Summer Of Stieg

The Swedish darkness is in vogue now of course, because of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, kicking off with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (I should state categorically that our trip to Sweden was in no way a reflection of jumping on a Larsson bandwagon, and it had nothing to do with ABBA nostalgia either). Larsson died in 2004, and the books (along with the movies based on them) ran their course in Sweden a while ago, but they seem to be everywhere else in the world right now. That includes here in our house, where my wife got through the first in near-record time. She’s obviously more restrained than the archetypal Millennium reader though, because instead of moving right on to the second book, she started on Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter and more or less simultaneously on a book about Nelson Mandela. See, this ain’t a house of chimps.

Anyway, it works unusually well, for the world beyond Sweden, that the movies are all lined up and ready to go just as the books become a certified phenomenon (as The Globe and Mail put it, it’s “The Summer of Stieg”!). Of course, you can’t really expect people to deal with those ridiculous subtitles, so Hollywood is already lining up a remake, reportedly to be directed by David Fincher and to star Daniel Craig. I don’t have much interest in reading the books, but I did recently watch the first film, which is now on DVD (the second – The Girl Who Played With Fire – is now winding down in theatres). Several people had told us we’d enjoy it if only because of the pleasure of recognizing bits of Stockholm, but given that this accounts for maybe five seconds of screen time, I’m glad we didn’t put too much weight on that pay-off.

The trilogy revolves around a crusading journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, and a younger computer hacker with a murky past, Lisbeth Salander. In the first story, Blomkvist accepts a private commission to investigate a 40-year-old mystery – what happened to a teenage girl who disappeared without a trace? The job comes from her uncle, a wealthy industrialist in his eighties, and perhaps the only decent individual in the extended family (his three brothers, for instance, were all Nazis). Blomkvist makes only modest progress before stalling; Salander – who’s been hacking into his computer and monitoring his progress – emails him an assist; they end up working and sometimes sleeping together.

What’s The Fuss?

The movie is a solid viewing experience, but if you actually can cope with subtitles, it’s already much more like watching Hollywood than like watching something, you know, new. The family is conceived in such melodramatic terms – the key members all live in close proximity on a bleakly beautiful island – that nothing about it carries much broader resonance. The broader indictment of endemic corruption comes through a subplot involving Salander’s sleazy probation officer, but this strand merely consists of a series of easy revulsions and cheap thrills. Salander is already an iconic character, but I couldn’t really see what all the fuss is about – she’s a tough cookie with a distinctive look and a damaged psyche…it’s not really new, and at least as it plays out in the movie, it’s a pretty cartoonish conception. Some reviewers noted the chemistry between the two lead actors, which I frankly couldn’t detect at all. The core plot, once revealed, is a grotesque invention, but one that takes its place alongside a long filmic line of them.

I offer this, of course, solely as my response to the film in isolation, and not to any other aspects of Larsson’s achievement, of which I know nothing. But if indeed there’s more to be learned about the darkness within Sweden, I’m not that confident the other two films in the trilogy (if indeed I bother to watch them) will provide it. And as for the Hollywood remake, enough already. Anyway, it’s a big world, I’ve probably spent as much time on Sweden as it warrants. But I’ll truly savour my vacation memories. And my stash of Ingmar Bergman films.

Nicolas Roeg

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2007)

For a brief time in the late 70’s and early 80’s, Nicolas Roeg embodied a very particular notion of a glamorous modern director. As a very properly spoken Englishman, born in 1928, the man was always an interesting counterpoint to the myth. But the coolness factor was overwhelming. After a respected career as a cinematographer (including on Lawrence Of Arabia) he made Performance with Mick Jagger (co-directed with Donald Cammell, who deserves his own article one day), and then a series of strange but sexy works in glamorous settings. Don’t Look Now is still cited for having one of the best movie sex scenes between an on-screen married couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie). The Man Who Fell To Earth had David Bowie, and lots more sex.

Right at the time I was seriously getting into movies, it was widely reported that Roeg would direct Flash Gordon; I seem to remember Debbie Harry was going to be in it. In the end Mike Hodges directed it, very unmemorably, instead, but then Roeg met Theresa Russell, who at the time (Roeg’s career, more than most, seems very much a matter of how things were at the time) was one of the hottest actresses, with a wanton quasi-cultish aura about her. They made Bad Timing and several other films, and despite their 29-year age gap, they got married (and later split up).

Humbling Years

In the early 80’s, Roeg made Eureka, my favourite of his films, but a big flop, and his work never had the same prominence again. For a while he continued working in his familiar style, but with declining material, and then he started to go where the work took him, all the way down to a TV version of Samson And Delilah, starring Elizabeth Hurley. His profiler on the Senses of Cinema website puts it as follows: “As someone for whom Nicolas Roeg was and remains a favourite director, the last few years have been humbling.” Roeg’s last credit was a mysterious 13-minute work, unenticingly titled The Sound Of Claudia Schiffer, but he apparently has a new film in post-production, a thriller called Puffball.

I watched four of his films again recently – Don’t Look Now, Bad Timing, Eureka and the later Cold Heaven – and generally found them as fascinating as ever. Even when you know they’re basically silly and crummy – like Cold Heaven in particular – they’re alluring. But what does it all amount to? The Senses Of Cinema writer says Roeg is one of his favourite directors, but remains vague on the rationale: “When I first became enamoured of Roeg's work as an overenthusiastic teen cinephile in the '70s, I called him a ‘romantic nihilist.’ I think the label still applies and I think this combination of overreaching expressionism and elegant despair is what makes him such a fascinating director.”

Human Complacency

He also lists the raw materials of this project: “the intricate use of flashback, the unapologetic use of jump cuts and zooms, the far-flung settings, and the obsessive characters.” Roeg’s films can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s – they feel dense and tightly packed, disrupting the progress of their own narratives in myriad ways. BFI Screen Online says they operate like “experimental visual machines, bent on puncturing human complacency.” Roeg’s stories are often explicitly or implicitly supernatural, or at least based on behaviour lying outside normal parameters, and the films’ intense montage seems to reflect their extremity.

But in looking through various appraisals of Roeg, even the positive ones, it seemed to me that other writers too found it hard to pin down their enthusiasm for his films. If Don’t Look Now is the most fondly remembered overall, it’s probably because of the strong emotional pull of its central couple – a couple grieving for a lost child – against the lush Venetian settings. As well as that iconic sex scene, and its effectiveness as a creepy mood piece. But nothing about that, to cite the BFI again, “(shakes) our preconceptions about civilization and cinema.” I've read some committed analyses of Bad Timing, but none that overcomes the sense that (as the song under the closing credits put it) it’s the same old story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl (although with distinctive kinkiness, and a heightened sense of the wretchedness of it all).

The only Roeg film that seems to me truly paradigm-defying is Eureka, and I suppose the real point of this article is to point a few people to that generally unknown and unappreciated film (available on DVD). Generally regarded as marking the end of Roeg’s classic run, it stars Gene Hackman as Jack McCann, who strikes gold in the Yukon after half a lifetime of trying, and becomes rich beyond his wildest dreams. Years later, in the 1940’s, he lives in splendour in the Caribbean, but with no real pleasure beyond his daughter (Russell again), and he becomes embroiled with mobsters determined on extracting a piece of his land.

Eureka

The theme is clear enough, that Jack McCann’s life was over as soon as he found what he thought what he wanted, and everything that followed was a mere extended death spiral. This “odd drama, even for Roeg,” as Leonard Maltin puts it, works its way to a courtroom conclusion that feels needlessly melodramatic and protracted, as well as being unusually conventionally presented for him. By this time McCann is gone from the movie, obliterated with the mobsters with a glee that goes way beyond practicality, and the courtroom scenes seem to me like a wiping clean, a recourse to the institution where “truth” is identified, a new beginning that parallels the finding of the gold. Except of course that McCann’s discovery was substantial and real – shot by Roeg as a truly cosmic event – whereas the outcome of the trial is presented as laborious and little better than arbitrary (and, as the verdict is announced, overshadowed by news of the war).

This is followed by an epilogue that further establishes the theme of ongoing restlessness, and then there’s a return to Hackman years earlier, and a touching recital from Robert Service’s Spell Of The Yukon: “..it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting so much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ‘way up yonder, It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.”

Eureka indeed exposes human complacency and punctures it, but also has the vision to present a dream of something finer, however fleeting. It’s the only major Roeg film I think that closes on a note of genuine happiness, even if from a dead man, as such suggesting the director may been limited by his attraction to elegant despair. I’m sure Roeg found the life he wanted, at least for a while, but if he found joy in it, he excluded that from his art. When you’re a moody teenager this seems rather cool, but later on – if you’re lucky - you realize the limits of nihilism, however romantic.

Celine and Julie Go Boating

Jacques Rivette is one of my favourite film directors. I’ve been saying that for maybe two decades now, but I have to admit it was based for a long time on faith as much as knowledge, because his work has been awfully difficult to see. Even now, half his films - most Rivette specialists would say the best half - remain unavailable on DVD. Still, even this is streets ahead of where things used to be, and at least it leaves us something to look forward to.

Jacques Rivette

I was originally enraptured by the idea of Rivette because of the first edition of David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary Of The Cinema, which I bought when I was around 16 years old. Thomson is an establishment figure now, and his writing has become mundane, but the original volume was a revelation (it was recently voted by a Sight and Sound poll as one of the best five books about cinema, with which I certainly agree): it shimmered with the possibility (perhaps the necessity) of becoming a pure creature of cinema, one for whom the achievement of engaging with Orson Welles and Fritz Lang would neutralize mundane needs (fortunately, I just about kept enough perspective to find a workable career for myself). Part of Thomson’s appeal was his immunity to the prevailing consensus; he was largely resistant to Ford and Fellini for instance. I obviously lack his independence of mind, because even now I find it hard to forge a thought on those directors that isn’t influenced by Thomson (on the bright side, I’ve always liked Cassavetes much more than he does).

On Jacques Rivette, he started off like this: “The informed filmgoer might not leap to support the contention that Rivette is the most important film-maker at work today.” This was in 1975, when a solid chunk of the all-time greats were still operating. To emphasize the point, Thomson called Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating “the most important film made since Citizen Kane.” Labeling it “the first film in which everything is invented,” he said it “pursues humour, idiosyncrasy and exhilaration and provides a way of seeing how old-fashioned such concepts as comedy and melodrama have become.”

Intuitive Connection

Rivette was one of the core French “New Wave” directors, moving from writing for Cahiers du Cinema to making his first film in the late 50’s. It’s virtually obligatory to point out, and so I won’t resist, that he’s never achieved the status of Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer. But then you could argue – even for the restless, unprecedented Godard – that status imposes limitations. Rivette is reportedly a recluse with few or no conventional friends, which we might fancifully imagine has been the price of his immense artistic sensitivity.

I recently saw Celine and Julie again, and it generates as much delight as ever (I actually saw it the day after I saw Inception, which helped underline that film’s laborious literal-mindedness, not that I needed help). The two women meet in Paris and forge an intuitive connection, marked by playfulness and collaborative creativity. Their interest converges on a boarded-up house, where an ornate narrative of desire and death concerning a widower, his young daughter, two women and a nurse – embodied at different times by Celine or by Julie - seems constantly to repeat itself. With the help of a magical candy, they acquire the ability to view the narrative from outside, like a movie jointly projected directly into their consciousnesses, and then they set out to change the story’s grim arrival point.

I don’t know if it’s strictly correct to call it the first film in which everything is invented – many avant garde works or animations surely fall into that category in some sense at least. And more importantly, it wouldn’t be as vibrant if it wasn’t anchored in a recognizable early 70’s Paris and a particular kind of intelligent but under-utilized young woman: Julie has a dull library job and a seemingly boring boyfriend, and although Celine is more overtly creative – she has a magician act in a low-grade nightclub – her boss seems to pull all the important strings. In other words, their project seems to specifically reflect feminist politics; the melodrama they triumph over draws heavily from old style creations where women cut each other to pieces for the sake of a man.

The Essential 100

Against that backdrop though, almost everything in the film embodies a desire to overcome these strictures. Rivette has frequently rejected normal assumptions about a film’s duration, most famously with Out One, which runs twelve and a half hours, and was long considered to be essentially lost. Celine and Julie lasts around three hours, peanuts by comparison although still a challenge to normal expectations. Certain elements, like the opening sequence where Julie chases after Celine, go on much longer than they would for any other director; at other times we’re locked in repetition. Throughout, it critiques the conventions that restrict cinema, and that therefore restrict all of us who value it.

Rivette’s films have frequently referred to theatre as a source of relative freedom – a good few hours of Out One consists of rehearsal scenes from two different productions. Celine and Julie, at least temporarily, manage to craft a liberating fusion of both arts. But of course, it’s a fantasy, a story of ghosts and magical candies. In the film’s closing stretch, the women’s invention reaches its zenith, hinting for a while at unambiguous victory. But in the end it’s unclear whether they’ve accomplished anything at all. In the decades since then, Rivette’s occasionally returned to related mythologies – the beautiful Story Of Marie and Julien sets out a whole set of rules for the afterlife. Even more often, he’s experimented with notions of conspiracies and mysteries, seldom providing traditional closure. And he’s continued to meditate on the creative process, most famously in La Belle Noiseuse, around two hours of which consists of a nude Emmanuelle Beart posing for a painting.

Another problem, sadly, with Thomson’s assessment of Celine and Julie Go Boating’s relative importance is perhaps an empirical one – if it’s the most important film since Citizen Kane, why don’t more people know it? Unfortunately though, cinematic greatness is a declining kingdom nowadays (I wonder how many of the TIFF Cinematheque staff are fuming about being associated with a list of “the essential 100” films that includes Slumdog Millionaire and Life is Beautiful, but nothing by Rivette). Now in his eighties and reportedly in poor health, he receives a bit more attention than he used to, although it’s obvious from the reviews that many of those writing up his later work lack much feel for what came before. If one views his most recent (and most easily accessible) works in isolation, I hope they’d be rewarding, but I’d imagine they’d have to seem – to say the least – a little quirky. But if your aspirations for cinema amount to something greater than a series of sugar highs, spending some time on investigating Jacques Rivette might just about change your views of everything.