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 ...