35 rhums

Though it is not common to find anything much of value amidst the rambling and formless yayings and nayings that members of a seemingly endlessly broad film viewing web-public post beneath the “User Reviews” heading at the bottom of IMDB pages for pretty much any movie you can think of, it strikes me as unlikely that anybody is going to find a much better place to start assessing Claire Denis’s Pasrisian-banlieue-set Yasujiro Ozu homage 35 rhums than one Howard Schumann of Vancouver does by opening his evaluation of the film there quoting meditation guru Sharon Salzberg (the act of citation suggesting already that we are not exactly reading your typical autodidactic web commentary doggerel), saying that the world of the film is “transparent and illuminated, as though lit from within.” Indeed there are shots in the film – especially but in no way limited to those within the inviting and autumnal apartment that Alex Descas’s train engineer Lionel shares with his adult daughter Joséphine – almost suggesting that the actors themselves are the source of light within the frame, the hearths at the heart of the home. I can think of few films that exude such a keen, perspicacious sense of warmth. The only other films that come to mind are other films by Denis and the more fully realized later films of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Indeed the film that 35 rhums most reminded me of was Hou’s made-in-Japan Café Lumière (’03), not surprising considering it is the film that ultimately inspired Denis to make 35 rhums. In interviews Denis explains that she had always been deeply affected by Ozu’s Late Spring (’49), a film whose story of an extremely close widower father and his doting well-into-marrying-age daughter forced to come to terms with the fact that it is the daughter’s time to move on Denis always found mimetic of the relationship between her own mother and grandfather. She simply did not have the “courage” to embark upon constructing her own homage to Ozu’s masterpiece until seeing Hou’s likewise Ozu-dedicated Café Lumière. Both films begin with, and heavily showcase throughout, the gaze of the camera married to the movement of trains as they arrive and depart, negotiate intersecting latticework trajectories like those of their characters, demonstrating a sense of the manifold web of networks connecting spaces urban and beyond, and both are also heavily indebted to the work of their respective master cinematographers, Mark Lee Pin-Bing in the case of the Hou and Agnès Godard in the case of the Denis. It is no small accomplishment, considering the quality of Hou’s film, that the collaboration between Denis and Godard here is by a good measure the more triumphant. There are few films in existence with so palpable and intimate a sense of familial warmth as 35 rhums, all the more remarkable considering how much energy the film puts towards the service, in no way new to Denis, of deconstructing and recoding concepts of family. The trajectories of a handful of characters intertwine like train tracks bringing them into musical back-and-forth workaday dalliances as their private worlds intersect. These private worlds, never entirely private, are like boxes stacked in never-uniform rows, exemplified so beautifully by a shot of an array of warmly-lit apartment windows at night, not quite in perfect rectilinear alignment with one another, but a little off, like a slightly gnarly homemade quilt (an image that parallels a shot inside the Metro headquarters where various screens in ordered-chaos relation to one another detail the underground grid in all of its connected-disconnected complexity; a single shot that says so much more about this environment and its embodiment of disordered civic order than would any number of viewings of Tony Scott’s recent The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 remake). The way these close lives-at-odd-angles dance around one another is perfectly expressed in the film’s most bravo sequence: an automotive breakdown en route to a concert finds Lionel and Joséphine seeking out shelter with their two closest friends from the apartment complex – Gabrielle, played by Nicole Dogue, an old friend and possibly onetime lover of Lionel, and Noé, played by Grégoire Colin, a young man who has known Joséphine since they were both little and who yearns for her with the hardly-repressed blue-hot desire that Grégoire Colin is always yearning with in Claire Denis movies – in a bar run by the supremely gorgeous Adèle Ado. The characters by turns sit, stand, pace, watch each other, and dance, the trajectories intertwining, the participants both apprehensive and solicitous. Joséphine and Noé wordlessly negotiating unspoken and nebulous desire, disruptive intersticial micro-movements push-pulling them at close quarters, until he finally kisses her while her father watches uncomfortably, only to then himself start dancing with Adèle Ado’s hostess as Denis cuts to Gabrielle now watching this newly and querulously bonded duo, volumes of shared history and never-verbalized feelings writ upon her face. Each crossed trajectory creates ripples, the whole film swaying breathlessly with its characters, all to the accompaniment of The Commodores’ so aptly named “Night Shift.” It is one of the most exquisite scenes in all of Denis. Here as ever she is the contemporary filmmaker most willing to lead with her impressions, construct form as if from smoke, sculpt and elevate atmosphere to level of not just a poetry but a metaphysics, encapsulate physically felt, haptic spaces, and again and again say more about people with gestures than they could ever say about themselves in a thousand memoirs, while always leaving the viewer with just enough raw orientation so that part of the pleasure is putting what you are experiencing together for yourself. She continues to inspire and move me more than any other filmmaker. It is unfortunate that I had to experience the film projected digitally (thus robbing this gorgeous little masterpiece of much of its sharpness, shading, and contrast) with a bunch of sniveling rich WASPS who hated it. I have the fucking Palm Spring Desert Film Society to thank for that. As a final coup de grâce they told us that the filmmaker was in attendance for a Q&A after the screening when what they really meant – appallingly, unthinkably – was that some old dude from the Film Society was going to come out and, after some preliminary introductory piffle, put on a Film Society baseball cap that suddenly made him magically able to answer questions as though he were the filmmaker. It took me a couple of minutes, jaw agape, to process that what was actually happening was actually happening whilst my sponsor-cum-geocosmic-consultant, sitting to my right, who had been moved to tears by the film itself, now appearing completely drained of color, continually let’s-get-the-fuck-out-of-here elbow-nudged me until I finally got up and we loudly exited, making our displeasure at the fucking chutzpah of these swine demonstrably apparent. The nerve of these people. Anyway, we’re better now.

Some Seriously Reduced Thoughts Regarding an Onslaught of Recent Cinema

Over the last month and change I have foregone blogging on the image culture partially due to a need to pursue other things, but primarily, I must admit, due to frustration at the films I was seeing and the fact that I have been so profoundly uninspired in terms of generating a need or desire to toil with language adequate to their too-often-too-paltry demands. Part of my frustration is that the films themselves so often use the same visual language the way a speaker might use clichés (nothing really new there), and that in the wake of a new renaissance in American cable television feature films these days very often seem so utterly slight in comparison. I have nonetheless been confronting a steady volley of film texts, sinking into them to the best of my ability, or combing across their denuded surfaces when it serves me, whether at the theater or on my laptop, mulling them over, and certainly finding plenty to digest, assimilate, or otherwise reincorporate into an underlining personal metatext. It’s just that I’m not sure what I want to say. Along with this comes the ever-present voice of blogger doubt: why and for whom am I even bothering to say anything? The answer is of course that it helps to make what I am experiencing and where I am at intelligible to myself, while at once at least attempting to reach out and start a kind of conversation, if finally perhaps only a theoretical one. What is most affecting me right now in cinema is the rendering of private moments, oftentimes serving purposes for me independent of the texts in which they are contained. Perhaps because so much of my life is occupied by time with myself, much of my rebuilding of myself stemming from a post-ironic need to affirm that I even am a self to begin with. One of the moments in recent cinema that touched me the very most occurs near the beginning of Clint Eastwood’s Invictus; a scene depicting Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela making his barely ruffled bed after slipping obsequiously out of it in the morning, very much a man still habituated to the procedural protocol of day-to-day prison life, not unlike a kind of especially dehumanized barracks life (or my no-so-long-ago life in hospitals, psych wards, and rehabilitation centers, where the first things I would do each morning would be to pull the corners of two sheets back over the small lonely looking spot where I had just slept). That this seemingly inconsequential private moment speaks infinitely more to me, and in so much deeper a register, than the portentous scene that precedes it in which Madiba’s motorcade passes along a road between opposing fields with athletes lined up along a fence looking on – on one side white rugby players standing stolid and dismayed, the coach going so far as to foresee the end of civilization as they know it, as on the other black soccer players experience the event triumphantly, their expressivity and ecstatic collectivity of movement signifying that they are so much more alive – suggests why by the end of the film, when private moments of individuals alone with themselves or in dyads, triads, or relatively small groups give way entirely to national sporting spectacle, Invictus has lost me. The movies and I just haven't been comfortable in a crowd for a good long time. It is the same way I feel so close to Colin Firth when he is most utterly alone in A Single Man (though he is perhaps most alone wandering the campus where he teaches as opposed to in his home), a film that is so powerful to me because it shows how reaching a certain threshold of psychic trauma makes any kind of perception sting like hell. Firth’s George has organized and beautified his private world to such an overdetermined extent that he has made of his surroundings a narcotic, and like any junkie he winces when anybody or anything interposes, disrupts, or otherwise ruffles the sheets. He has lost his lover and has turned his whole world into a mausoleum of finery because he can hardly bear to see, hear, or smell anything anymore, repeated shots of a body’s slow motion immersement in water a repeating metaphor for the shutting off of his senses, the dying that has become his only reason for living in a world which he is already perceiving through a kind of protective integument. This perception-as-pain subtext also finds a home in Pedro Almodóvar’s brazen movie world melodrama Los abrazos rotos, a kind of ode to such Hollywood-on-Hollywood melodramatic kitsch as Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (’68), in which two movies-within-the-movie, one a frothy screwball comedy of the sort Mr. Almodóvar used to make in the 80s starring Penélope Cruz’s Lena, and the other a behind-the-scenes documentary-cum-act-of-investigative-jealousy, each bankrolled by her wealthy sugar daddy, demonstrate how cinema becomes a metaphor, like the orrery in the small beach community where the star and her director lover Mateo go to get away from her keeper, of how we try to mechanize the irrepressible chaos of desire at our own ultimate peril. The director Mateo is blinded in an accident that kills Lena, and as such serves his penance and is reborn with a new name (Harry Caine) and divested of the agony of having to see a world from which his glorious fetish object of a lover/star has been so unfeelingly subtracted. In the end Harry Lime finishes editing the principal film-within-a-film which Mateo has had taken away from him, consummating the relationship with Lena who is herself reborn as an image that he cannot see, becoming for him rather a new kind of tactile thing: a voice and a rhythm, fixed within the machinery of his film, perhaps also as a kind of narcotic. Other moments out of recent cinema that have reached me lately: how in Jennifer Lynch’s underrated Surveillance a surrealist logic of threes – not only is the story told in three-pronged parallax like Rashômon, but all kinds of things keep mirroring this structure (three cars lined up along the side of a highway, three video cameras in three rooms, etc.) – culminates in a subversively erotic, even pleasurable, ménage à trios sex murder that will remain in my head for a very long time; a series of wonderful scenes in Woody Allen’s otherwise pretty awful-if-awfully-harmless Whatever Works where characters come to accept things wincingly but with dignity, like we have to in real life, where other movies would have made a big deal of what a goddamn drama this all is, especially when Larry David’s chess teacher physicist Boris realizes that Evan Rachel Wood’s wizened hayseed Melody is dumping him and awkwardly-adorably tries to reframe the situation as him gruffly coaching her on the next chess move of her life after him, knowing that it is all perfectly reasonable but still fucking hurts; the moments in The Young Victoria where Emily Blunt, playing the child Queen with her eyes in the inverse way to how Anothony Hopkins played Hannibal Lecter with his, and Rupert Friend, playing Prince Albert, the man whose name became a euphemism for men's parts, express the give-and-take sparkle of emrgent coupledom between two intelligent and determined people, or the scenes in Orphan where Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard, conversely, explicate how a well-meaning marriage can become far nastier a monster than any murderous moppet of indeterminate origin ever could; or what about every scene in James Gray’s extraordinary Two Lovers where Joaquin Phoenix demonstrates in a way Ethan Hawke can only dream of how painful it can be to watch a lonely guy be charming especially when the precarious balance of the entire atomized dude lays so assailable in the balance? Though I may have seen and felt a lot by virtue of the cinema over the last month or so, this post nary scraping the scorched-earth surface, it is these films and moments within them that rise to the top right now. And I just wanted to share. The silence can get awfully deafening ...

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Final Four Days

Appropriately enough on the final day of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Monday where they show all of the award winner and audience favorites, the torrential rain started coming down hard and it hasn’t stopped since. I spent the final days of the festival in too far-gone a stupor of cinematized neural overload to make appropriate time to commit my musings to communicable e-friendly blog form. I then spent another full day or two napping and reading a mendaciously addictive true-crime book, Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel, ex L.A. homicide detective Steve Hodel’s follow-up to his Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he quite convincingly made the case that his father was responsible for the famous Black Dahlia murder as well as a series of related homicides in Los Angeles during the 40s and 50s. The new book finds Hodel expanding his investigation to include likewise convincing allegations against his father, accusing the old man of a spate of murders including the famous Zodiac murders in and around San Francisco in the late 60s and early 70s. I couldn’t put the fucking thing down. But with the book now finished it is high time I got my lazy ass around to having done with 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

It was a wonderful festival, all in all, even if it did take place in what a friend of mine calls the Necropolis of Palm Springs, with an audience principally composed of bitter old WASPS and mainstream Republican homosexual males. Most of the films I saw did not cater to the narcotic, aesthetics-as-anesthetic needs of these dour, pain-in-the-ass Necropolitans. There was a particular trio of cackling old Christians that, every time they saw me at a screening, became visibly crestfallen, immediately aware that the following screening was going to fuck with their nervous systems in ways for which they were ill-prepared. I was like the angel of cinematic death for these poor creatures, unsuited as they were for anything that exercised even the most perfunctory interest in defying convention. This was a festival that will always exist in my mind as the festival of walkouts and vociferously voiced distaste. Nothing could stop these fucking corpses from lining up an hour in advance for films they had no business seeing, one after the other in an endless succession of misplaced cultural yearnings, a bare mimesis of participation in global culture that was not unlike witnessing the zombies, dressed mimetically in the costumes that defined their singular sociocultural positions and affiliations before the shit went down, returning in a mnemonic, automatist reiteration of consumerist habituation to the mall in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Only this was the cinema instead, and by and large they no longer had any of their original teeth left with which to bite. Instead they bitched and moaned, tugging at the loose-fitting clothing of overwhelmed staff and volunteers, murmuring guttural disapproval like gay and/or gray Frankenstein monsters. As if to issue one final fuck you the festival gave the FIPRESCI prize for best foreign language film to … arguably the best foreign language film, the monumentally crowd-displeasing De ofrivilliga / Involantary, meaning that Ruben Östlund’s absolutely brilliant film was given one more opportunity to piss off fans between audience choice award winners on Best of the Festival Monday. My friend tells me he could hardly make his way to his car afterwards through the mob of incensed moviegoers wondering “what the fuck was that?”

A bevy of wonderful, fair to middling, and pretty wretched films kept me happily engaged between bouts of fastened-to-the-pavement zombie watching. The best performances by actresses were all by Korean women (one of them, Bae Doo-na, in a Japanese film), which is hardly a surprise anymore. I am thinking particularly of Kim Hye-Ja in Mother, Bae Doo-na as the wry and adorable Dostoevskian idiot of an Air Doll, and Kim Kot-bi as the shit-talking put-upon schoolgirl giving as good as she gets from Yang Ik-Joon in his own roughshod Ddongpari. The best actor award for me is an absolute no-brainer: Olivier Gourmet, know to even the most cursory of world cinema aficionados for his incredible performances for the Dardenne brothers, appeared in a total of three films that I saw at the festival and was brilliant in each. I especially liked him in Frédéric Dumont’s Un ange à la mer, which is also my vote for best debut feature (even though Dumont has been directing short films on a regular basis since 1986). Best cinematography I have to give to cinematographer Francisco Gózon for Altiplano, and this in a festival where two of the five greatest contemporary cinematographers, Agnès Godard and Mark Lee Ping-bin, were accounted for with new work. As for best film and best director, I have to give it a two-way tie for both: Marco Bellocchio for Vincere and Ruben Östlund for De ofrivilliga. Both of these films were sphere-splitting brain-dissectors.

I’ll put my top ten list at the bottom, following my roundup of the last seven films I saw this year in Palm Springs.

Looking for Eric

A new Ken Loach film is always a safe bet, and such is the case with the fine but decidedly underwhelming Looking for Eric. Nothing particularly special here but nothing to excite the gag reflexes of Palm Springs audiences either, Looking for Eric is a nice film that goes down easy. In a festival full of films that seemed too often like modern urban fairy tales, Loach and his regular writer Paul Laverty produced one of the most metaphysically kooky but uncharacteristically (for them) easy-going of the bunch. The film tells the story of at-least-twice-divorced Manchester postman Eric Bishop (played with sweetness and flustered enervation by the very winning Steve Evets), who at the start of the film is seen in full nervous breakdown driving his car repeatedly the wrong way around a roundabout until the inevitable accident finds him recovering in hospital. Back home we see the stressful working class circumstances that precipitated his collapse. Living with two stepsons, one black and one white, Eric’s home life is a chaotic madhouse run (and being run into the ground), in spite of his baffled and occasionally brusque attempts at fathering, by his two teenage children who have littered the place with numerous plasma screen televisions and all sorts of other dubiously procured bric-a-brac. It turns out that the final straw that precipitated his breakdown came in the form of an unwanted reminder of the past, established in flashbacks, when the grown daughter from his first marriage asked him to babysit his granddaughter, first picking the kid up from grandma, his first wife, with whom he bungled things terribly and the sight of whom drives him over the edge. Having been unable to approach her he sped off only to drive himself into the hospital in the scene in which we first met up with him. Eric still loves his first wife and knows that she probably hasn’t forgiven him, as he sure as shit hasn’t forgiven himself, for running out on her many years ago, unable to face up to the pressures of fatherhood. At an impasse, not knowing how to face up to his past or to cope with the hectic and dissatisfying present, Eric raids his son’s hidden-beneath-a-loose-floorboard marijuana stash, and smoking a joint of what is apparently really good shit, discovers that his French Manchester United football star hero Eric Cantona (playing himself), a near-life-sized poster of whom bedecks his bedroom wall, has suddenly materialized before him to offer sage wisdom in the form of bizarre-if-workable philosophical epigraphs and to goad the man into facing the demons of his past and moving forward like a champion. At first we might be liable to think that Cantona is the psychological projection of a troubled mind, a fact not made any less probable by the fact that he seems to appear at first only when the lesser Eric is smoking grass (the smoking of which Mr. Cantona obligingly assists in). As the film progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the predominating explanatory methodology of these appearances is not psychological but rather metaphysical. What we are witnessing is not the hallucinations of a man whose psyche has been cracked by broken bonds and tough living, but rather a sort of mystical opening up of the laws of matter. We are first made aware of this by the fact that Cantona keeps doing and saying things (occasionally in perfect French) that it is not credible to believe Eric Bishop would be capable of projecting. Our suspicions are confirmed late in the movie when Eric Cantona, participating in a group dispensation of justice by videotaped humiliation and intimidation-though-vandalism of a psychotic thug who has turned the world of Eric Bishop and his sons upside down by forcing his son Ryan, through intimidation and extortion, to hide a gun under the same loose board where he keeps his weed, momentarily interacts with Meatballs, Bishop’s best friend from work and the pub, whilst wearing, along with everybody else in the mob, an Eric Cantona mask. This image of Eric Cantona, somehow metaphysically transported into the life of a fan who needs him, wearing an Eric Cantona mask says a lot about what the film is telling us. Perhaps our tendency to forget that those who inspire us are not just images on posters. Perhaps they are not merely masks of themselves. Perhaps they are real flesh and blood people who can teach us real things about strength, determination, teamwork, and faith. Perhaps the false distance we place between our heroes and ourselves, by putting them up on a pedestal, too often excuses us from carrying the flame ourselves, causing us to fail to see that we, by surviving, by retaining some semblance of sanity no matter what the world throws at us, by managing to raise children who have even a semblance of respect for us no matter what kind of front they put up, are equally heroic, or at the very least have it in us. Looking for Eric, then, is a sweet and compassionate film about degrees of heroism and the efficacy of faith in real-world magic. Kitchen-sink magic realism. It’s a perfectly nice film. I’m glad I saw it. Once.

B

Daniel & Ana

Michel Franco’s Daniel & Ana has the distinction of being the second worst film of the festival, and not by much at that. It starts out immediately on the wrong foot with a title card that makes an absurdly obnoxious truth-claim, stating that not only is the film based on a true story, but that it is in actual fact an exact detailing of the real events as they actually went down. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that a film that begins by making such an overblown claim of verisimilitude immediately starts depicting shit that would never go down in real life the way it goes down in the film’s fucked-up counterintuitive universe. It’s hard not to understand why I wanted to see this film about a brother and sister forced to fuck on camera and the brother’s subsequent development of sexual feelings for his older sibling. It’s dirty, salacious stuff, and in the right hands could make for one hell of an uncomfortable exploitation film. And it is an exploitation film after all. The genre developed when crafty and unscrupulous, amoral producers realized that the best way to attract audiences to low budget movies that couldn’t provide stars or studio production values was to cram them full of shit that studios couldn’t get away with and market the films exclusively around this, promising more than they could actually deliver. This is exactly what Daniel & Ana is essentially doing for all its faux earnestness concerning its prospective status as important expose of Latin America’s gunpoint incest porn market. This whole things boggles the mind. With this material one would think a filmmaker would find something a little more shocking to dish-out than a wretched Mexican soap opera full of pouting rich people gazing at their various respective navels. When the central spoiled rich Mexican teenagers (not the world’s most sympathetic demographic to begin with) are kidnapped by three sort-of-mean lowlifes, escorted blindfolded to a not-very-secluded urban domicile, and made to stand next to one another in a stark white room with lights and a video camera, at no point up until this one have they even seemed mildly inconvenienced. When the head baddy starts giving them ineffectual orders and threatening to rape and kill them if they don’t do as they are told, the kids do start to look uncomfortable, admittedly. About as uncomfortable as the kids in those kiddie-porn-chic wood-paneled Calvin Kline adds years ago, only with significantly less art direction to buffer them. You almost feel like you are watching a documentary about the making of the actual film you are watching, focusing on how difficult a time the director (the head baddy) is having making these kids emote even a little. When they actually do fuck, with the assistance of a little blue pill plied upon the boy while his sister is in the other room essentially renegotiating her contract through forced sobs, there is a very polite placement of hands and bodies so that genitals are politely blocked, she avoiding eye contact and he, looking like a skinny Mexican Dustin Diamond, allowing his bangs to hide his face. This could be any couple loosing their virginity awkwardly to each other. A scene that should easily disgust and arouse uncomfortably at the same time does neither. They are later dropped off at home and told to keep mum. Which they do. Considering that the baddies know who their victims are before they kidnap them, demonstrating this fact as part of their process of intimidation, you would think that they would also realize that these kids’ parents would rank among the world’s most likely to be willing and able to pay a hefty ransom for their safe return. Apparently this never crosses the criminals’ minds, despite the fact that ransom kidnappings are a fucking industry in Latin America. Upon being returned home, Ana starts putting the trauma behind her as best she can by postponing her engagement and seeing a psychologist (who upon being told of the girl’s unpleasant sexual ordeal sits next to her on a couch and places a consoling hand on her thigh which seems pretty fucking unprofessional), whereas Daniel skips school and goes to the movies, acting only slightly more sullen than usual. When his girlfriend calls his mom hands him the phone and he just hangs up on her. She doesn’t call back – apparently ever. Ana tries to talk him into seeing her therapist too. He goes there but doesn’t have the stomach to go through with the session. Instead he enters her bedroom the next night, having failed to find the footage of he and his sister in flagrante delicto online to jerk off to, and rather effortlessly rapes her. He’s pretty quick about it. After being raped by her brother in her own bed, and not wanting to tell anybody except her conspicuously incompetent therapist what has happened, she quite understandably decides she is suddenly very eager to get married to her fiancé after all and would just love it if he would take that job in Spain she was previously so skittish about. Problem solved. At the wedding Daniel gets in one last lick by jerking off into his new brother-in-law’s drink before bringing it to him which, if this is indeed really a true story told as it really went down, was a pretty strange thing to cop to after having spent such a long time hiding even the basic facts of this story from everyone in his life. The final indignity is being told, again with those title cards, that this film was made so that the apparently huge underground market in gunpoint incest porn would be exposed. Really? It struck me that if Daniel & Ana is in reality a message movie that message is about really bad movies that want you to think they will be titillating but that just really, really suck. Look out for those. I should have known better. It’s my Achilles heel. If the basic plotline of a movie suggests taboo-smashery I will probably be there with bells on. Serves me right.

D-

Darbareye Elly / About Elly

About Elly is a pretty good pressure cooker from Iran that plays like an American or Western European play, notable for the presence of a number of supremely classically beautiful Persian women I would very much like to marry and have large broods of lovely mixed-race children with, that has a plot which very much plays like a long riff on Lea Massari’s disappearance about a third of the way through Antonioni’s L'avventura (’60), likewise suggesting that the dematerialization of one of its principal female characters involves some kind of unwitnessed death by acute ennui. Starting like a rather promising Iranian Eric Rohmer film (appropriate considering that the 89-year-old French master died during the festival) involving a group of Iranian friends retreating to a beach for the weekend to dance around love, desire, foreboding, humility, sex, communication or the energy of exclusion that often defines it, and the general age-old discreet battle of the sexes, the film takes a sharp left turn into theatrical where-did-she-go-and-why? chamber piece revolving around the disappearance of Elly, a shy, sullen-though-enigmatic (and bone-marrow chillingly comely) schoolteacher who has been brought along by one of her students’ mothers, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani, with eyes that pierce your soul and hang you to the wall), in the hope that she may get over the fiancé that she cannot stand and maybe make a good match with recently-returned-from-Germany and recently single Ahmad. When they first have a few moments alone Ahmad at one point shares a German saying with Elly: “better a bitter end than an endless bitterness.” Elly takes a moment to think it over, sighs, and comes to the premonitory realization that she entirely agrees. When one of the kids of one of the couples at the beach nearly drowns in the ocean while the bulk of the adults are playing volleyball, the exited retrieval and revival of the child leads to the sudden realization that Elly has disappeared. Has she drowned as the first prospective rescuer on the scene? Did she just fuck off as she previously has threatened to, uncomfortable with the whole situation and anxious to return home, despite the fact that Sepideh has hidden her handbag and cell phone to prevent just that? Nobody is sure and everybody is panicking. It makes for edgy cinema, everyone perusing every angle, the ever-suspicious authorities brought in, possible courses of action hatched, worked over, and argued into submission. Lies are told and exposed with escalating consequences as the confused and stressed-out group of adults uses the missing woman’s cell phone to contact her mother (who Elly has told to act like her daughter hasn’t even left town if anyone asks) and the last person she called, her fiancé who, for the sake of appearances, pretends to be her brother (though Elly has no brother). As the characters try to feel their way around the proper course of action, trying to keep the escalating web of lies, half-truths, and momentarily useful bluffs in orbit, wondering how much they can afford to disclose without exposing any breaches of decorum, outright transgressions of Islamic law, or without the late-on-the-scene fiancé killing Ahmad or Sepideh. This nearly comic juggling of truth and lies is clearly endemic to the repressive culture in which these characters navigate, and all the headaches and stockpiled deceits that come as its baggage, going a long way towards suggesting why Elly was fucking sick of it all to begin with and why, when her drowned body finally is recovered, it probably didn’t get that way trying to save no goddamned kid. A bitter end indeed.

B

Altiplano

Altiplano is a predictably gorgeous film from the same directing duo of Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth whose first fiction feature after years of making documentaries together, the equally-visually-resplendent Khadak (’06), bowled me over at the Calgary International Film Festival a couple years ago. Altiplano – as I have said: the best photographed film of the festival – is just as tranced-out and Edenically calm-lake-surface-pristine pretty as Khadak, but is significantly more narratologically and humanly engaged, its directors putting pictorial splendor to even more satisfying use this time around. The film begins with two bravo sequences: in the first we witness a breathtakingly captured religious ceremony in the remote Peruvian Andes, wherein pagan native traditions are merged with Christian iconography in the form of a statue of the virgin Mary being hoisted and carried out into the sun, where it falls to the earth and shatters as the attention of some of the ceremony’s participants is distracted by shimmering pools of mercury foreshadowing the community’s imminent and catastrophic contamination by cavalier Western mining practices (the film was inspired by the real mercury spill in the Peruvian village of Choropampa in 2000); this is followed by the first of the film’s many mind-blowing 360-degree sequence shots showing a female photojournalist named Grace (the stoic Jasmin Tabatabai, exuding a rare screen intelligence), in the middle of war torn Iraq, as she is forced to photograph the brutal matter-of-fact point-blank murder of her Iraqi translator/guide. The rest of the film, a stark and powerful film about death, mourning, and the power of images (full of appropriately powerful images), details the way that these two worlds become spiritually and narrativistically intertwined. Grace is married to Max (the de rigeur Olivier Gourmet), a Belgian doctor who runs a remote clinic in the Andes. When we first meet them back in Europe, she has given up on images, forsaking photography because of its inability to change a reality which is harsh and unforgiving, he chiding her, insisting that events will never be real to people unless they can witness them vicariously through images like those Grace has made her reputation capturing. She remains unswayed, locked in despair and disconsolation after the tragedy she witnessed in Iraq. Back in the Andes we follow a beautiful young woman named Saturnina from the village of Turbamba whose young fiancé Orlando is the first villager to die of mercury poisoning. It is at the precise moment that Orlando’s body is returned to the village and the grief of Saturnina and the other members of the community is in full bloom that a group of doctors, of whom Max is the most unfortunate member, happen upon the scene, having just become aware that some sort of contamination is present in Turbamba, and because they are seen as members of the civilization responsible for this fresh trauma are met with a volley of rocks one of which strikes and kills Max, a fact which only becomes known to us when, in the next scene, the most remarkable in the film, another sequence shot, this one, in the style of Greek master Theo Angelopoulos, encompasses in its roving pan a mind-boggling temporal elasticity, passing over Max and Grace’s son hiding despondently behind a tall pillar, then over a group of people including Grace mourning his death, then back around the pillar emerging once again around the other side now showing empty space once occupied by the mourners, the shot finally terminating with Grace leaning solemnly up against the other side of the pillar from where her son was at the beginning of the shot. Now that both of the central women in Altiplano have lost the men that they love, Grace decides to visit the scene of her husband’s death in the Andes just as Saturnina decides to kill herself, filming her own death on the camera recovered from Max at the scene of his death by her brother, a camera Max once used to record video letters to his wife back home, by consuming a vial of mercury after stating directly to the camera that this is her last act of resistance against the West, the only one she has left at her disposal, and that it will not go unnoticed because of the camera, so that it will live forever. Grace, upon discovering Turbamba, joined en route by masked figures of local folklore who stalk the landscape and line her path, awakens in a hut to discover that her husband’s camera has been placed there for her to discover, turning it on she witnesses the suicide of Saturnina and her insistence that her death-as-act-of-resistance will live forever, captured as it is on video. At this moment, Grace, graphically and spiritually conjoined with Saturnina, comes face to face with a powerful personal revelation concerning the epistemological, metaphysical, and social power of images. There is a powerful circularity to Altiplano, analogically paralleled as it is by the circular pans of DOP Francisco Gózon’s unusually versatile camera. Beautiful and extremely powerful.

A

J'ai tué ma mere

Written, directed, co-produced, and starring twenty-year-old Xavier Dolan, J'ai tué ma mere is a ridiculously accomplished debut about a volatile love-hate relationship between mother and son, taking its title from a scene, echoing a not dissimilar scene is the ultimate French language debut film of all, Les quatre cents coups ('59), in which the son claims at school that his very-much-alive mother is dead. An occasionally very funny film, it actually runs on a kind of deeply entrenched sadness, getting most of its emotional gas from the pain of having to grow up, lose ones illusions, stuck in the place between total symbiotic dependence on ones mother and an adult place of accepting her as human and imperfect but still necessary. The film is about the landscape of late adolescence and how its fidgety, capricious, going-four-directions-at-once inconstancy creates tremors within the mother-son bond and threatens to destroy the bond that the son’s conception of self still depends upon to exist in the first place. The film fastidiously captures a feeling that is universal: a relationship with a parent defined by love and hate mixed into a confused cocktail of emotion wherein the two components cannot be cleanly uncoupled. Though Dolan’s Hubert is queer, it would be wrong to suggest that this type of relationship with a mother is somehow quintessential of the gay experience, rather his sexuality simply adds another layer of distance and dissonance between mother and son, creating another zone of uncomfortable exposure for a young man already in the late part of a supremely awkward stage of development. The film begins with a close-up of the mother Chantale (played by the note-perfect Anne Dorval) as she eats an orange and then a bagel smothered in cream cheese. Dolan cuts to a two-shot of the woman and her son, she involved in eating, he staring at her with self-evident disgust. Immediately the film captures the deep-seated pent-up disgust we often feel at the most simple everyday actions of people with whom we are forced to spend a great deal of time in confined spaces. The simplest thing, like cream cheese carelessly smeared on someone’s face as they are eating, can begin to drive us around the bend. Hubert finds a lot of his mother’s mannerisms, absurdly girlish-feminine outfits, and habits nauseating to an extent that drives him to endless distraction. She in turn grows alternatively defensive and aggressive with him, irritated by his dependency and simultaneous rejection, often losing her temper just as easily as he does. Though his mother drives him nuts, it is the relationship most central to Hubert’s life, even more so than that with his boyfriend Antonin or the teacher, Julie, who understands and respects him. Certainly more than his father who is an absent figure and only comes into the picture later as a ruse to bring him back into contact with his mother after he runs away, and then to ultimately send him to boarding school. From the beginning of the film we see Hubert directly addressing the camera in b&w asides, in which he talks about the distance he feels from his mother, about how he doesn’t or cannot really love her, about how much he wants to escape her clutches. During these asides it becomes clear that the opposite of each proclamation holds equally true: that he needs his mother, that he cannot help but love her despite himself, that no matter how much he wants to despise her he admires her strength and independence from patriarchal expectations. We find out that these b&w direct addresses are not interior monologues stylized to betray their Freudian “other scene” quality, but rather videos that Hubert has shot of himself talking to his camera. We discover this at the same time Chantale does when she stumbles upon the tapes in Hubert’s room and watches them. These strident monologues suddenly attain the status of messages left for Chantale to discover, the product of a yearning to communicate with a loved one that one no longer knows how to communicate with. In addition to this, Dolan’s film takes strides to undercut his protagonist’s combustive contempt for his mother by giving her space in which to come into her own as a subject within the film. There are two key scenes that reveal Chantale’s strength and determination in standing up to the imposition of male authority or control. First when she confidently takes charge of the situation when she and Hubert are reconnected at his father’s, and later, after Hubert has run away from boarding school having been beaten up by virtue of his sexuality, in the most pleasurable scene in the whole film she goes over-the-phone ape-shit when the school principal suggests that maybe the boy needs more of a male presence in his life. Her tirade is both funny, empowering, and made to remind us of how cruel Hubert was in an earlier scene when he tells her it is no small wonder she cannot find another man. The conclusion of the film finds mother and son reunited at the rural home in which the boy was raised, which he calls his “Kingdom,” intercut with Super-8 footage of happier times we are seeing for the first time, suggesting that it is not our mothers that we are angry with but rather that things cannot be as simple and wonderful as they were when we were young, before life got messy and complicated, our families broken up, and the joy and connection so much more fleeting.

A-

Un ange à la mer

Un ange à la mer, advertised online and in the catalogue with a cute still of a young boy in angel wings, was another big festival surprise and the last of many films here in Palm Springs to instigate monumental walkouts, going to show once again that you can do whatever you want to people in your movies but if you start killings cats, even pretend killing them, you can expect serious reprisals. The film begins with a Belgian family setting up house in picturesque Morocco, immediately planting us in the subjective point-of-view of the younger of two sons, Louis, as he becomes a tragic victim of his father’s bipolar disorder and its monstrous manifestations. In the opening sequence they are driving through the North African desert, young Louis hanging out the window of the car playing a game wherein father and son emphatically pronounce whether the occupants of oncoming vehicles are happy or unhappy, the father manically declaiming that pretty much everybody is unhappy, the son being more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. As the son continues to play the game his father suddenly becomes remote and morose, suggesting that this car too is occupied by at least one very unhappy camper indeed. We don’t know the half of it. Early in the film the father (Olivier Gourmet of course), working (or not really working) for a farmer’s rights activist group and almost permanently camped out depressed in his underwear in the upstairs bedroom of their home, calls his son upstairs to confide a secret that the boy cannot share with anybody, especially not his mother: that dad intends to kill himself that very night. Obviously the unthinkably cruel secret shatters the traumatized boy. Though dad doesn’t go through with the suicide, Louis is henceforth held captive by the secret. He spends most of his time playing guardian angel, high up in a tree adjacent to the house, keeping an eye on the bedroom window behind which his depressed father sits alone, perhaps biding his time. The mother (the always amazing if strangely cold Anne Consigny), meanwhile, is carrying on an affair with another man, one with whom she swims competitively, and is unable to connect with her unraveling son or her distanced, too-far-gone husband. In one heartbreaking scene she brings the son and father together upstairs to confront them on their strange behavior, demanding that Louis tell her why he is spending all of his time up in the tree peering in on his father. Looking uncomfortably between his father and his mother, knowing he cannot betray his father’s trust, the boy replies that he is building a tree house, plainly not the case and simply one of the saddest things I have ever heard in my life. The father’s depression is only occasionally usurped by outbursts of rage and extreme hypomanic cruelty, he and Louis only bonding over acts of animal cruelty, such as when the old man, crazed and lumbering about like Mr. Hyde, races downstairs and gleefully tries to drown a cat with a garden hose - whilst repeatedly chanting "el pueblo unido jamás será vencido," in parody of the Chilean cry of solidarity - after talking his son (from the upstairs window) through the process of catching it with a simple trap baited with food taken from the fridge, or when, after Louis sneaks into the trunk of the car and narrowly escapes suffocating in there because he is afraid to let his father out of his sight, the old man drives him home and has Louis keep score of the number of stray cats the old man manages to run down en route. The film is mostly shot in excruciatingly sad close-ups, particularly of young Louis as his too-young-to-cope-with-this-shit psyche bleeds out through his imperious eyes. When at the end of the film the mother finally gathers her two sons into the car and decamps without father, we may be forgiven for being momentarily relieved that they have escaped the clutches of this unfeeling madman, but this relief is cut short when Louis suddenly throws himself out of the moving vehicle and into the arms of the desert night as on the soundtrack the voices of father and son play a game of word association, one of the pathetically insufficient ways in which they have traditionally bonded. The title of the film comes from a poem that the boy is made to memorize for a school recital, also repeatedly spoken like a non-diegetic refrain on the soundtrack, in which an angel is asked if it can understand the full scope of human suffering. Un ange à la mer is an amazingly disconsolate and grim film about an all-together-unpleasant species. And it will fuck you up. It is the opposite of J'ai tué ma mere in that the deeper you dig the more it is finally just about the catastrophe of being born into the world of adults who deform and corrupt us to the point where everything is irredeemably stained. I loved it.

A

Sergio

A first rate exemplar of the HBO-produced talking head documentary, Frontline veteran Greg Barker’s Sergio, about the life and tragic death of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was the only film the screened on Best of the Festival Monday that I figured I ought to see, having heard good things from a friend. I am glad I did. It’s a ridiculously powerful story told with a graceful elliptical structure meant to involve the viewer in the escalating tension of the man’s final hours during the ridiculously under-equipped rescue effort to remove him from the rubble after a truck bomb exploded beneath his office at the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August of 2003 whilst at the same time allowing for periodic digressions that fill in more of the man’s amazing backstory as the film progresses. Sergio de Mello went from being a young philosophy student at the Sorbonne where he was a post-Marxist radical who joined in the student riots of May ’68, throwing stones at police and being hit in the head by a police baton, causing a permanent disfigurement above his right eye. From there he moved to Geneva, crashing on a friend’s couch, and decided that thought on its own was nothing without action, a realization that saw him seek employment with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. He participated in fieldwork in Bangladesh during its war of independence in 1971 and Cyprus after the Turkish invasion in 1974. He later became the first and only UN Representative to hold talks with the Khmer Rouge, ultimately allowing for the return of incredible numbers of Cambodian refugees to their homes. He was also the main figure in the process that led East Timor to independence from Indonesia between 1999 and 2002. Though he did not support the invasions of Iraq and at first claimed he would never accept the position of Special Representative of the UN Secretary General to Iraq, he ultimately did accept it at the direct behest of his friend Kofi Annan as well as George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Sergio was an incredibly charming man with movie star good looks and womanizing tendencies, but at the end of his life was anxious to marry the love of his life and move back to his native Brazil. In Sergio, the backstory is dealt with tactfully and is used to provide a basic sense of the man, his contradictions, his extraordinary interpersonal skills, extreme pride, and his habitual selflessness, all of which factor into the story of his death in the rubble of Baghdad’s Canal hotel (where the UN was stationed). It turns out that part of the reason there was no security around the perimeter of the building was that Sergio himself had not wanted any coalition forces there to suggest the UN’s complicity in the American-led occupation. While he was still alive in the wreckage, upside-down and being crushed by debris, his only spoken concerns remained for others, especially those in his employ. When one of the rescuers, a black New York fireman and paramedic, suggested that they pray together, Sergio responded by saying, essentially, “fuck that.” He remained a steadfast and determined secular humanist even in death. The ultimate tragedy is that the rescue effort to remove him and another man buried next to him from the rubble was so ill-prepared that they were literally using a woman’s handbag and string to haul rocks from out of the hole in what was left in the building, a perfect metaphor for how ill-prepared the occupying forces were in every facet of the Iraq theater of operations. The film is well put together, incredibly rousing at time – with subject matter like this it is hardly any surprise.

A-

Top Ten Films of the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival

1. Vincere
2. De ofrivilliga / Involuntary
3. Madeo / Mother
4. Politist, adj. / Police, Adjective
5. Les Regrets
6. Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte / The White Ribbon
7. Un ange à la mer
8. Altiplano
9. Kynodontas / Dogtooth
10. Ddongpari / Breathless




Cheers!

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 7

A much more restrained day. Made my early meeting. Second such brush with celebrity in as many days as there was a famous rock and roll singer there today. This celebrity, however, seemed like more than a bit of an ass. Both of my screenings today were at The Camelot. One in each of its two theaters. The Camelot theaters are not nearly as good as the ones at the Regal 9 (where most of the films I have previously seen have been shown, excluding the back to back screenings of Fish Tank and Das weisse Band), but they are still pretty great. So no big deal.

A real disparity in quality today. The first film I saw was easily one of the worst that I have ever seen at any film festival anywhere. Which would go a long way towards making it the worst film I have ever seen on the big screen. It was supremely awful in ways that simply beggar belief. The second film was, for me, one of the highlights of the festival. As with most of this festival’s highlights, it was not a crowd pleaser in the least. Folks hated it. Such, my friends, its Palm Springs, that intractable little cunt that she is.

Pokrajina St.2 / Landscape No. 2

Landscape No. 2 is something else, man. This is some seriously awful filmmaking from the word go. Everything about it stinks to high heaven. I have never seen a Slovenian film before and was curious, being a huge fan of Slovenian philosopher-celebrity Slavoj Žižek and generally interested in the nation’s fascinating history. My curiosity was rejoined with Landscape No. 2, an utterly bizarre and in every way incompetent apologia for dormant fascist sympathies suffused within the national character presented in league with an aesthetic and worldview so skuzzy and deranged that the mind can merely boggle at its garrulous, insipid wretchedness. It is apparent that aside from the many other things that capitalism and democracy have brought to bear in Slovenian culture, the nation can also thank the West for exporting a particularly execrable form of the fanatical rightwing made-for-cable thrillers of the 1980s. The film is about two extortionist thieves, the older, wiser Polde, and his young, idiotic pussyhound lackey Sergej, who make money by stealing and holding for ransom illegally-obtained artworks from wealthy and powerful benefactors of the nation’s onetime communist elite. At the beginning of the film Polde and Sergej break into an ex-general’s opulent home, without much effort at all, to steal the titular landscape painting, which the general appropriated from Nazi-sympathizers who were summarily executed shortly after the end of the second world war. Instead of being happy with fulfilling this basic criminal task, Sergej also breaks into the general’s safe, without telling Polde, pocketing some cash and a set of documents the significance of which will only come to be known to the young man well after it is far too late to stop the wave of atypically sloppy murders precipitated by the efforts made to recover them. These documents, as it turns out, betray the general’s central involvement in those post-war executions that have heretofore gone unpunished. The general brings in a ridiculous heavy played by the glowering and seriously fucking humorless Slobodan Custic as one-quarter Terminator, one-quarter Boris Karloff, one-quarter Michael Ironside in Scanners, and one-quarter No Country for Old Men’s sociopath-for-hire Chigurh, to go retrieve the documents whatever the cost in human lives. Effortlessly tracking the painting through one of the two unreliable people in the whole world who knew of its existence (the general’s cleaning lady who is also friends with Polde’s family), the assassin doesn’t take long in disposing of Polde, who doesn’t know a damn thing about any documents and whose made-to-look-like-a-suicide death is witnessed by his Down syndrome-suffering son Igor (seriously), who somehow escapes unscathed despite the tendency of Custic’s ridiculous villain to really messily murder everybody in his path whether it is necessary or not, especially if they are women or fags. Finally tracking Sergej to a cabin in the woods owned by the family of one of the two women the young criminal has irresponsibly impregnated – which happens to be directly adjacent to a surrounded-by-candles-of-mourning hole in the ground from which the remains of the dead Nazi-sympathizers that the general is responsible for having executed just happen to be in the process of being excavated – the assassin chases Sergej to the precipice of the mass grave and then, because during all his killing and following of leads the general who has dispatched him to do the dirty work has died of old age, himself jumps out of nowhere to his death, leaving Sergej standing there looking dumbfounded, just as the cops show up ready to pin the trail of dead on the poor young thief, the documents that explain everything having just been incinerated by the candles aligning the really big, and apparently deep, hole in the ground. The acting is abysmal, with everyone genuflecting and mugging like they’re in a silent movie. To show how happy Sergej is about the money he just stole from the safe he takes the money out off his pockets in the middle of the street and starts exuberantly sniffing it. When his fiancé finds out that she is about to be murdered, impossibly slowly so that the choreography works just right, she goes about methodically running directly into every piece of furniture in the room. This is almost one of those movies that fits into the SOBIG (so-bad-its-good) sub-genre, pace Ed Wood or Menahem Golan’s The Apple (’78). There are indeed moments here of unintentional hilarity that are as funny as anything in your average decent comedy. It is almost a triumph viewed from the standpoint of parody. Besides that the film had two moments that really struck me as awesome in the same way early Paul Verhoeven is awesome: in the first such scene we see Sergej, as he waits for his hot redheaded pregnant-girlfriend-on-the-side Jasna to return to bed from another room, manually keeping himself hard whilst watching the remains of bodies being recovered from a mass grave on television (something I can see myself putting in a film); the second awesome scene, shortly after the first, finds Sergej giving nude-under-her-coat Jasna Larry Clarke-realistic head in the middle of a well stocked grocery store, up against a grocery cart, in what must be the most tantalizing and spirited celebration of the joys of consumer-capitalist consumption I have ever seen.

D-

De ofrivilliga / Involuntary

Involuntary, Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s second feature proper, is easily the most pleasant surprise of the festival so far. It was a film I knew nothing about until I did some cursory reading-up after the festival announced its lineup, and was made sufficiently curious about what I found to purchase a ticket and check it out. Am I ever happy I did. It is an exceptionally deft portrait of contemporary Sweden telling five interconnected-but-narratologically-unrelated stories in a style that superficially resembles Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (’94), but is even more experimental and profound. Instead of an exploration of violence, causation, and contingency, which define the Haneke and have served as the core thematic concerns of a myriad of other films before and since, Östlund’s masterpiece is about something I have never seen encapsulated by the cinema so directly: the element of human nature, running parallel to our ethics and informed by drives bound up in our apperception of mortality, which manifests itself in the things we do that we know we shouldn’t do but that we do anyway as if we cannot help ourselves; as if we are doing these things involuntarily. Östlund’s film does not only approach this theme from five different angles, it does so in such a way as to legitimately lay claim to something like the status of a quintessential national portrait: particularly in its depiction of Sweden’s drinking culture and the domination of forces of repression that define it as a famously polite society built atop unsaid things. Four of the stories are about unsaid things or actions not taken: in one story a man attending a party at his home in his honor gets drunk and sets off a firecracker in his face and nobody will force the issue of his getting medical attention, with disastrous results, knowing that he is intractably stubborn; in another story a semi-famous stage actress accidentally breaks a curtain rod in the bathroom of a bus and will not cop to responsibility when the driver, assuming that roughhousing kids are responsible, refuses to continue driving until somebody fesses up; in a third story a pair of rambunctious young girls get incredibly drunk and when one passes out in a park whilst they party with a group of young people, the other fails to do anything about it, putting her friend at serious risk; in a fourth story a group of young men retreat to a cottage for a weekend’s drunken getaway and unspoken sexual patterns, behaviors that normally get repressed, cause one of the young men confusion when he cannot decide whether he wants to leave or to stay after an uncomfortable sexual humiliation takes place. The fifth story looks at the other side of things: a young schoolteacher, who does speak up when she believes that a student has been reprimanded by the woodshop teacher in a manner that “crossed the line,” faces ostracization from the rest of the staff. In each of these fragmented, interlocked vignettes we see how uncomfortable situations cause people to do things that they know they should not, to keep mum when they know they should speak up, and to participate in the acknowledged perpetuation of unhealthy illusions so that they do not incur reprisal or risk complete alienation in a society built on false illusions that refuses to allow for its members to be human and imperfect. Early on the teacher who is later ostracized leads her class in an exercise in conditioning by having one girl wait in the hall and telling the rest of the class to contradict her every time she chooses the longer of two lines in a series of graphics until the girl finally picks the line which she empirically knows is the wrong one. This scene is Involuntary in microcosm. It is a brilliant film about falling into line against our better judgment, told in fragmented long takes that place the viewer in a position of ontoepistemological estrangement. The camera consistently remains in discomfiting counterintuitive relation to the actions of its characters, retaining, along with its dense and extraordinary soundtrack, a profoundly immanent character as our heightened senses are excited by the oddness and destratified concretion of what we are experiencing and how we are experiencing it. There is a demanding, hyper-involved quality to Involuntary that is remarkably unique and experientially rich. It is extremely minimal yet of an ever-growing moment-to-moment intensity. A fascinating and penetrating work of art almost alien in its alacrity and formal audacity. Momentous!

A+

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 6

One of the more fucked up days so far. Weird shit prevailing. I met Udo Kier at the screening of the Norwegian film Nord. When he walked into the theater I couldn’t believe my eyes. It’s fucking Dracula! Then he, a dude from the film festival, and Home director Ursula Meier sat right behind me in the near-empty theater. So I offered my hand and said hello Mr. Kier. We talked for a while before and after the film. He seems like a really nice guy. He kept asking me questions about myself. He didn’t really seem to think I belonged in Palm Springs until I finally told him that I had originally moved down to quit drinking and drugging. At this point I’m pretty sure he figured fucking me was probably not a very likely prospect and politely begged off. It was a nice chat.

The evening screening of Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere was an absolute clusterfuck of the highest order. I don’t know how the theater got as packed as it was but I know sure as the fucking nose on my face that the vast majority of the cunts and assholes seated in that theater were never at any point standing in either the ticket holder or pass holder lineups. Something is seriously fucking wrong with this picture. Fuckers. And you know none of these entitled bourgeois shits is in any way going to enjoy the new film by a Marxist filmmaker they have never heard of whose tactics they are going to find boring, tedious, and not a little discomfiting. I was barely able to get into the theater. I was literally the first person behind the admission cut-off point until I begged them to let me in. I told them I would happily sit in the front row. They let in ten of us. The theater was full except the front row. My A.A. buddy had tried to save me a seat but some false-haired old SoCal bitch with a face full of Botox nearly clawed him to death before he finally relinquished control of it. People were all pissed off that they didn’t have decent seats and were once again threatening to break into some kind of give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death riot. The poor fucking volunteers. I can only imagine the shit they’ve been taking all week from these country club swine. At least I got in. It was, after all, the film of the festival. A total, straight-up A #1 masterpiece to beat the band.

Nord

Norwegian director Rune Denstad Langlo’s bittersweet Nord is sadly not, as it turns out, a Louis-Ferdinand Céline adaptation. It is rather a not-exactly-a-road movie involving one man’s journey via skidoo and skis to visit the four-year-old son he’s just found out he has. It is one of those Northern European movies with dry-as-fuck humor, quirky-ass characters met en easy-does-it route, and so-unhip-that-it-is-in-fact-hip oompah music and big-band-variety bluegrass. It’s basically what would happen if you combined the aesthetic and temperament of filmmakers like either Kaurismäki brother or Fridrik Thor Fridriksson at his most whimsical and threw it half-assed at the basic storyline of David Lynch’s The Straight Story (’99) relocated to the snowbound hinterlands of mountainous northern Norway. The protagonist is Jomar, a booze-hound and nervous wreck, beset by anxiety attacks and not particularly inclined to get out of bed if he can help it. He is apparently the only employee of an out-of-the-way third rate ski lodge, though if it were up to him he’d still be back in the psych ward playing ping pong. Unfortunately for him the doctor in charge is steadfast in her conviction that it is about time that Jomar tried to get on with his life. An unexpected visit from an old friend – the dude who some years ago (I’m assuming four) took off with Jomar’s ex when she was finally fed up with his loafing – alerts our prospective hero to the existence of his son following some fisticuffs and consolatory hugs. Deciding that it is about time he shook things up a bit, Jomar burns down the ski lodge and heads off on a predictable if intermittently amusing picaresque adventure in search of booze, bonds, and redemption. Along the way he meets an assortment of loveable oddballs: a lonely girl in need of a friend who persuades her grandmother to let the husky interloper recuperate from snowblindness in a crawl space adjacent to her bedroom; a handsome and outspokenly homophobic young man (who perhaps doth protest too much if you catch my drift), left behind to tend to the homestead by parents who have left for Thailand in search of cures for their offsetting ailments (“cancer of the dick” in the father’s case), who has a nifty trick for an efficient drunk, learned from a Polish dude, involving shaving a patch off your head and taping an alcohol-saturated tampon to the bare spot (“it’s more like being stoned,” muses our hero re: the resultant buzz); and finally an old man ice-fishing on a frozen lake who has no intention of ever leaving the spot and probably should have thought twice before chaining himself to his snowmobile. Finally, the arduous final leg of the journey leads Jomar to the top of a mountain down which he skies in a beautiful shot in which the sky and the snow gauzily merge and the sense of release is palpable, this being a guy who has told us he used to love skiing but that it has long since quit doing it for him. Perhaps his journey has awoken in him a newfound appreciation for these small human pleasures. And perhaps that’s his son at the bottom of the mountain. Whatever. That’s it. That’s the whole movie. It’s 78 minutes long. I never would have guessed that it broke an hour. There’s not much to it and you’ve seen it all before. But it’s sweet. I laughed out loud a couple of times. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, a prize traditionally given to fun-but-not-dumb crowd pleasers like, well, Nord. And Udo Kier seemed to like it. If you chuckle at the phrase “cancer of the dick,” then by all means! track this motherfucker down!

C+

Vincere

It turns out that crammed like a sardine into the middle of the front row directly at the base of the towering screen is a pretty kick-ass way to experience Bellocchio’s masterpiece. It were as though the film were straddling my chest and repeatedly pistol-whipping me with its exclamatory genius. Like a Straub-Huillet historical cine-tableau on crystal meth merged with an artillery shower of intertextual newsreel footage and fragments of other films (like Chaplin’s The Kid (’21) and Eisenstein’s Oktyabr (’28)), Vincere is a multivalent barrage serving to undermine the play of shadows and games of strategic omission that inform the way dominant history gets written and especially how it gets imaged, assimilating strategies from opera, fascist-futurist art, tabloids, costume drama, Soviet montage, and the aforementioned cinémathèque newsreels, in order to directly undercut the strategies of self-mythologizing, power-consolidating history-making of one prospective-media-baron-turned-intractable-imperial-despot (Mussolini), and to implicitly inform on another (why Mr. Berlusconi, bien sur). Vincere is a ruthlessly subversive-seditious film that not only frames a fascinating historical narrative but which simultaneously interrogates how the cinema and other cultural forms become accessories to crimes before, during, and after the fact. By putting the audience in a position of identification with Ida Dalser, the woman who loved and helped to make Benito Mussolini, who may have been his first wife and was certainly the mother of his firstborn son, and whose legacy is that of an individual not safely intelligible within the history-as-process-and-reproduction-of-its-own-limit, which she helps to set in motion, so is thus buried in a loony hatch, the film both forces us to identify with complicity in the manufacture of autocratic models and then with the helplessness of being crushed, muted, redacted by the draconian forces that we have helped to set in motion. This is a historical film that is unflappably told in the future-perfect tense. It is right now! And it is an absolute masterpiece. One which nobody saw coming from late-period Bellocchio or from contemporary cinema in general. We have so little to compare it to. There is the aforementioned connection to Straub and Huillet. Occasionally it looks somewhat like the most beautiful sections of Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (’06). The acerbic appropriation of Soviet montage set to pounding, insistent silent cinema piano music on a few occasions brought to my mind Guy Maddin’s brilliant short The Heart of the World ('00). The guttersnipe pummeling also invokes the rat-a-tat-tat raised-fist journalismo of Sam Fuller. But nothing I have seen comes close to paralleling Vincere’s incendiary polyphony. It’s totally radical and out of this world. The title says it all: the fascist orthodoxy demands that the voice of power WIN. Bellocchio’s film doesn't just speak truth to power in its detailing of a buried treasure tale that the powers that be would rather we didn't know about. It undermines the whole semiotic apparatus and explodes the network from within. It's like a bomb. A bomb in the house of power!

A+

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 5

Day five. On she goes. Pretty easy-going day today. Tuesday (I’m writing this Wednesday, things remaining fuzzy). Got all my final tickets lined up and have it set so that I will be doing two films a day for the duration, which as I said earlier suits me just fine. One tends to get what one deserves when one angles for quantity over quality. In terms both of overload and shitty film-going experiences. I’m basically getting older and it doesn’t take much for both my body and my brain to say uncle when pushed to over-commit themselves. It just ain’t worth it, compañero. Twenty-two films in nine days is still a pretty good rate of consumption if you ask me.

I had the pleasure of getting some positive feedback on the blog today from and A.A. buddy whose been hitting a lot of the same screenings that I have. We sat together for the Cédric Kahn. Aside from noting my brilliance (a sentiment with which, it should go without saying, I am entirely in agreement), he suggested that it might behoove me to stop writing “with” as “w/” and “your” or “you are” as “yr.” He also suggested I put up a photo in which, as per my new recovery-based lifestyle, I am shown not quite so stoned. I am taking all of these suggestions under advisement. I think I will most likely go with “with” from now on. I’m still happy with “yr.” And the photo fucking stays. For now. It’s the only remaining copy I have of that image and I have feelings of partiality towards it. Not long after it was taken I was wandering the streets in full psychotic collapse, invisible, Sanskrit catechisms materializing on every surface I touched, shooting down airplanes with my watch, and being chased by international media and the military, plants and bugs spilling from me. A cure for environmental degradation fused with my DNA by virtue of a potion I had taken at the hands of a guerilla dance troupe. I must not forget where I come from (a place I can return to very easily for the price of a drink).

As far as the films go, it seems that the dominant idiom this year is the post-millennial fable. They just keep coming. On one level I am enjoying it. On another it makes for films that are occasionally too cute by half. We’ll see if the theme persists. Part of me is hungry for something a little more blunt. Too much feyness makes me hungry for raw meat.

Kûki ningyô / Air Doll

Kore-eda has tended to work pretty slow. All of a sudden he has brought in one feature each for two Cannes Film Festivals in a row. I’m afraid the rushed pace sort of shows. My feelings for Air Doll while it was playing out before me were of a considerably more amenable-to-its-charms character than they are now after a little cursory distance from its expertly cast spell. A somnambulist fable about a blow-up sex doll that has “found a heart,” as the doll herself has it, and come to life, Air Doll shouldn’t work at all. And it wouldn’t in the hands of any director other than Hirokazu Kore-eda, possibly the only living filmmaker capable of executing with heart-limning panache such a ridiculous concept. (Which is not to say that I was not entirely won over by Cherry 2000 (‘87) as a pre-adolescent boy). The doll (named Nozomi after her owner’s lost love) is played as an animate sentient creature by impassive and wry one-hell-of-an-animate-sentient-creature-herself Korean starlet Bae Du-na, who smiles with one side of her face with girlish bemusement at the new wondrous-if-sad world she robotically traverses during the day whilst her sad-sack owner is busy waiting tables (though he is so ashamed of his lowly position that he even lies to a blow-up doll about his professional status). She even gets a job herself working in a video store. (Ah, the video store: that substitute for the cinema, that place of worship for we lonesome urban souls yearning for connection. As such, a video store is to the cinema what a blow-up doll is to a sex partner. No?). Though it is a heart that Nozomi claims to have found, it is her lungs which first betray that something is stirring within, as following a few deep breathes she gets up, crosses the room (her seams still showing on her newly humanized skin) and sticks her hand out the window to allow a few drops of water to sensually drip upon it. It turns out that air is not just what fills the doll up but is also the principal subject of this Aristotelian film (which might just as easily have been called De Anima in homage to the Greek philosopher). Air, aether, the breath of life, whatever you want to call it. Negative space, the gentle breeze, the space in-between. It is not negative space, the film insists, but the connective tissue that conjoins us in our lonesome corporeal solitude. Air is the subject of Air Doll (and this is why Blow-Up Doll would be the wrong title in case you were wondering). The cure for urban loneliness, then, is the admission that we are all one. It is to emerge from out of our illusion of solitude for just long enough to bask in the gratitude and wonder demonstrated, for we the viewers as for the characters she impacts, by wise-because-innocent Nozomi. That the same forces that bring, as one of her poetic mediations reminds us, pistil and stamen together on the whim of a tremulous gust breeze through our lives as well, elevating us above the sad solitary plight of the living (as when Nozomi, filled with helium, in perhaps the film’s most beautiful scene, floats in a room surrounded by blow-up planets and constellations), filling our lives with buoyant-making substance invisible to the eye. Air Doll itself is a roving zephyr, sweeping together its various structural elements au hazard, and it works extremely well while you are watching it, blowing softly over you and its own pretty surfaces (shot by Mark Lee Ping-bing, Asia’s finest photographer). Unfortunately the film is handicapped by too many elements for it to do anything other than give most of them short shrift. Kore-eda seems to be inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in his structuring of the film’s story around an innocent who unknowingly and without intending to inextricably alters the lives of the people with whom she comes into contact. Unlike Dostoevsky, however, Kore-eda is not able to provide enough space for these tangential lives to breathe, so that we are left with blithe shorthand characterizations of figures on the margins who are all brought together in what is supposed to be a touching operatic apotheosis at the end of the film but instead becomes the movie’s flattest section because we are all of a sudden realizing how little we know or care about any of these people. It would have been a good way to end a miniseries but not a feature film. At least not this one. What Air Doll does well it does remarkably. Some passages here are as great as any you will ever see. Sadly its fundamental airiness means it can only go so far towards attaining the lofty broadly-encompassing goals it sets unreachably before itself.

B+

Les regrets

Cédric Kahn’s new dry-ice comedy is another of his dark battle-of-the-sexes two-handers w/ a clever sense of humor, palpable sexual energy, a title which pretty much tells you, like his L'ennui (’98) before it, exactly what the film is a philosophical rumination on, and two actors so perfectly cast (Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi are the movie) that the motherfucker pretty much directs itself. Throw on a score by Philip Glass and it’s a no-brainer that yr gonna have a pretty good night at the movies. The screenplay is actually pretty ingenious too. It uses structuring narrative elisions and fill-in-the-blank backstory to cunning effect, keeping the audience in a position of having to do more leg work than is often the case with such films. Attal and Tedeschi play onetime lovers who bump into one another when he returns to his childhood home to see to the last days of his dying mother, and to set about making the resultant funeral preparations with no help from a deadbeat brother, years after a not-so-amicable separation in which too much remained unsaid and explanations were not proffered. He has gone on to a fairly successful career as an architect working in concert with an attractive wife unable to bear children, she has returned from a life in Africa with a mulatto child and is currently living with a backwoodsy drunk named Franck. There reintroduction to one another spawns a whirlwind affair, he promising to drop everything for her and she in turn being fearful that their relationship is doomed to fail as it did the first time. Regrets that eat away at them from within beset them each. But it are his regrets that threaten to fuck up life for both of them. His pride will no allow him to let her off the hook this time. Overwhelmed at the speed at which things are progressing, the two of them communicating (or strategically failing to fully communicate) their reactivated feelings through increasingly terse text-messages, she developing cold feet and, instead of picking up with her onetime beau where they left off, deciding to flee with Franck to Chile, thus driving Attal’s Mathieu into paroxysms of possessive mania and explosive, hilarious jealousy. Things come to a head in a mad scene of l'amour fou turned loose in the streets. Kahn plays fast-and-loose with audience expectations, leading us to believe that we are watching a prospective Chabrol-style crime film in which nobody seems sufficiently amped to actually commit any acts finally explicitly criminal in nature, though the edge is briefly and amusedly flirted with. Kahn seems to be always at his strongest when teasing his audience. Romantic regrets remain the subject of the film, and seem to serve as an anarchic energy force within bourgeoisie society that works expeditiously and unchecked in order to keep bland and suffocatingly banal lives interesting. An epilogue finds our two characters reunited once again three years after the shit goes down. This time it is her regrets as opposed to his that may be set to throw the whole frenetic roundelay into play once again, he with a new wife and now a child to add to the mix. As with many of Kahn’s previous films, Les regrets works as a what-not-to-do portrait of contemporary masculinity, and Attal brilliantly personifies the kind of world class cad that they only make in France. Fucking hilarious. And unlike Air Doll, this is a film that works better and better the more that you think about it. A real pleasure.

A