O viveret Democritus!
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Off work for a bit. Got my neck adjusted today. First time since 2011. Better write something. So: so many factors. As in all things. Very shortly after The Calgary International Film Festival concluded I got brain-sick. Bad. A very heavy, grey thing. An interminable suspension in the grey, heavy present. Again. Beneath brick-heavy tidal pressure. Again. So many factors. Best not to anatomize. I am working this out elsewhere - another project, recently hatched. It is important to note, of course, that Chantal Akerman took her own life shortly after the festival concluded. This may have been the final straw. (Or perhaps I have no business whatsoever parsing straws.) Akerman meant so much to me as an artist and a human being. She was invested in play, seriously, serious play, in the manner of (and not the manner of) Derrida, and she has done far more for me than he. She routinely allowed me to invest in commitment to a kind of work that would, you know, keep me alive, keep me on my toes, keep me fresh and plasticine and escape-artist-flexible in the face of cultural concretion and the deadening illusion of alienation. I see Akerman as perhaps the one artist who best drew us a map out of modernist alienation. Alienation. That was where her art started, of course, and perhaps (I don’t presume to know) where her life ended. This is more than just another bipolar suicide (parallel to the one I have been flirting with in my mind since I was very young). And I had been binging on cinema. After a holiday in London, England and Ottawa, Ontario. A holiday of superhuman stimulation and perilous excitation. The twenty-six movies in rapid succession. Whilst working full time. There is this addict business. And the business of having spent so much of my life at the brink, where it progressively got more slippery, where I could not longer gain a purchase. I have no business going there. But life brings us there. We bring us there. Whatever. I get there. And so shall do. End of story. Equilibrium is itself pretty motherfucking slippery. We are all on a ride. What of the movies? Movies: savers and destroyers of lives? Narcotic distractions from the daily grind? Sure. All of the above. The church. The cinema remains my church. I am a sick man. I need my church. We get better there. That’s why we have churches. Honest to goodness churches and their doubles. To get better. And I carry the meter there with me. The nerve meter. The critical reflexes. The taste machine. So I want to write about some movies. The festival. The movie festival. I saw twenty-six. I intend to riff on a bit about the ten that most pleased me. And I am going to list them in reverse order of preference. Because it pleases me. First: let’s do some preliminary accounting. Of the first ten movies I saw, four prominently featured pigs. Honest to goodness hogs. The Lobster, Funny Bunny, Into the Forest, and August Winds. They all had pigs. Pigs are trapped. Fenced in. In The Lobster, people are presumably trapped inside pigs. There is nothing more absurd than a domesticated animal. And pigs, built to eat and sleep in shit - craven, filthy, known to go “hog wild” - are not exactly domesticated. And of course man is a domesticated animal. Though not exactly domesticated. It is all absurd. It was a lesson I recently learned from Borowczyk. We continue being taught this lesson. Movies with pigs will never be movies about glamor. And glamor is not life. Life is eating and sleeping in shit. I want more life, less glamor. Well, I want a little glamor. Tuned just right. It’s complicated. Aesthetics are a drug (aesthetics, as the Marxists say, are anesthetic). Glamor is a drug. And we go to the church to get well. So I do indeed want to be opiated a bit by aesthetics (big time) and glamor (a little bit). Get well? Without medicine? A lot of movies seemed to be mucking about with aspect ratio. The Jia especially. But the very impressive Krisha also. This is aesthetics as slap in the face. Self-reflexive. Estrangement of the suspended disbeliever. I like it and I don’t like it. It proved to be a major problem in Krisha. It was a wonderful, wonderful choice in the pretty goddamn wonderful Jia. I will be discussing those two. Cannes. Always at The Calgary International Film Festival the most palatable films from Cannes (and a couple surprises) show up. What was I hoping for? I was hoping for The Assassin, Cemetery of Splendour, and In the Shadow of Women. I got none of them. We got the Godard and the Dumont last year (jackpot!), so this year did not bode so well upon a cursory assessment of the lineup. What did we get? It would seem obvious. We got the Palme d’Or (Dheepan), the Grand Prix (Son of Saul) and the Jury Prize (The Lobster). We got the sublime Jia (Mountains May Depart). I do not hate any of these movies. I am in one sense or another ready to claim a fondness for each of them (though I am only barely fond of Son of Saul). I will riff on The Lobster and Mountains May Depart at greater length, as they are especially special. Dheepan. Jacques Audiard is at all times a commendable technical director and a canny caster of unknowns (and, you know, stars for that matter, though you can’t say there are any here). I can find little to complain about regarding Dheepan as a thing with which to spend an affable period of time. I would not have given it the Palme d’Or. I would have given it the honorary Clint Eastwood Award for Reactionary Inclusivity. It is kind of a spiritual cousin to Gran Torino, except that the Clint Eastwood justice-dispenser and the ethnic Other are united within one figure, the lead, as rendered by the totally wonderful (and sublimely laid-back) Jesuthasan Antonythasan. This is another out-of-nowhere fellow (like Tahar Rahim in Un prophète (2009)) who serves as a riveting locus of focus in a not-overly-belaboured sea of dramatic machinations. It is not accurate to call these guys non-actors. They are actors. Pupative movie actors who belong at the heart of an old-fashioned, professional movie spectacle (though, in this case, one deeply invested in not getting, until the final showdown, too “spectacular”). Obviously Audiard had the fortune to make a film about refugees in Europe (Sri Lankan, though, rather than Syrian) at a time that would be conducive to his finally winning a big, prestigious, international film award. It is a movie that will appeal to a great many people for whom the cinema is not a church, and they can presumably be counted upon to forget it pretty quickly. Son of Saul is engineered to win awards. It would seem a sure bet that László Nemes had a speech prepared. It’s a Pirates of the Caribbean-esque theme park ride called The Final Solution. Not much depth of field. Not much field. You find yourself looking away from the horror and staring at the guy positioned in front of you on the ride. Obviously the Dardenne brothers formal recipe has replaced the Rossellini as the de facto serious Euro-film (and beyond) template. Pretty much everybody who is anybody knows this. And it is certainly novel to come at the death camps in this manner. The tracking shots (Nemes has done his time setting them up for the master, Béla Tarr) are the meat of the matter. This is over-the-shoulder track as cosmogony. The 1.33/1 Academy Ratio frame is a brilliant choice. I cannot say enough about the sound design. It is really dense and supremely worked-out. But you know what? I don’t think Nemes can direct crowds. He mostly doesn’t let us see them, but when we do I just am not buying it for some reason. Everything is so calibrated and precise that the cattle pen of human monstrosity doesn’t come off. And the story is the exact story that an “important” Hollywood movie would tell. As a narrative, this thing would sit well alongside Edward Zwick’s Defiance (2008), which is about the meanest thing I can imagine myself saying about such a movie. I was impressed, I was unimpressed, which is maybe irritating, but doesn’t quite account for how irritated I was by Son of Saul (though impressed (or not entirely unimpressed)). Of course, the mandate of the Calgary International Film Festival is not necessarily built around dropping Cannes goodies in our lap. Is there a mandate? What is the mandate? I say there is a mandate, and that mandate is built around The Discovery Award. The Discovery Award is the award the festival gives to the best (which now means most popular) debut. This means our festival brings in a lot of movies by people about whose art and the merits thereof we know essentially nothing. One gambles a lot at The Calgary International Film Festival. It paid off for me this year. Two of the highlights were Discovery nominees about which nobody I know knew a goddamn thing. August Winds and, my oh my, Fig Fruit and the Wasps. I will be riffing on those. Naturally. What else? We got two films about addiction. Which is to say documentaries that relate in some way to addiction. We got one last year. At least I saw one last year. It was great. I forget its name, suggesting I should not stop writing on this stupid blog. (Perhaps the blog, above all else, is a memory tool, like a diary, or maybe a spouse.) The two this year were important to me also. Hurt was especially special. Guess what? I intend to riff on it. The other one was Finders Keepers. This thing is a real crowd-pleaser. People are gonna love it, because in one sense we are cruel redeemers of schadenfreude, and in another we are easily manipulated and sentimental little shills (neither of these things are bad in themselves, don’t be ashamed). The story goes like this: down-on-his-luck rich-kid-gone-astray drug addict John Wood loses the contents of a storage locker he has been unable or unwilling to keep up payments for. In the locker is the leg he had amputated after the plane crash that killed his dad. The leg is in a cooker. Like, you know, for BBQ. His actual severed leg. Shannon Whisnant acquires the contents of the locker during auction, and upon discovering the gnarly severed limb decides that he will have people pay (children at a discount!) to come see the leg and the cooker. An attraction. Of the Southern United States variety. A battle ensues, lasting many years, for rightful title to the now-seriously-dessicated leg. It all culminates in the form of a verdict on (I shit you not) the Judge Joe Brown show. This is a very American movie with a lot of gutbucket, belly-laugh American I-cannot-fucking-believe-this details. But you know what? Judge Brown not only gives John Wood his (fucking disgusting) leg back (though John has to pay Mr. Whisnat some money), he also, seeing that the poor man is in a bad way, sends him to rehab. So the syrupy pathos the film has been periodically milking comes on full-fathom-five with the sudden realization that we have navigated our way into an improbably powerful recovery narrative. This insane, comic, tragic, fucking gnarled business with the (gnarled) leg sets in motion a whole cause-and-effect confluence that delivers the sick and humbled Mr. John Wood on the path to grace and salvation (at least in this world), and the giant, blundering, huckster Mr. Whisnat to total psychospiritual bankruptcy and good-old-fashion southern-fried hubris. This is some Flannery O’Connor shit. What else? Okay. Let’s close this ambling preamble out. First: One Floor Below. I’m gonna forget for a moment that there was no reason for this movie to be shot in Scope. This is a new pet peeve of mine. If you are gonna shoot your movie in Scope, I am going to be picky. I am going to be spending more time than is useful thinking about whether or not you needed to do this. That aside: the Romanian New Wave has finely tapped directly into the spirit (if not an actual source text) or Georges Simenon (and in so doing Mr. Chabrol and Mr. Tavernier). The lead: Teodor Corban. Total everyman, total gravitas. I love these Romanian films for the way they deal so bemusedly in bureaucracy, post-communist institutionality, and authority flouting. I learn the same thing via films from these Eastern European nations about communism and post-communism that I learn from Iranian films (like the festival-screened Taxi, which dares to invoke Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), and which is all about face - the face, that is, Panahi wants to show the world (he spends the majority of the movie seeming utterly pleased w/ himself)), which is basically that implicit under the surface of even the most repressive State Apparatus is the fact that people are basically going to do whatever the hell they please, even if it becomes a needlessly complicated hassle. (When all is said and done, cultural and political authority are also ultimately about face.) I think I am getting around to the end of the festival. How did the festival end? It ended, in what seemed in advance to be absolute divine scheduling intervention. Miike. Yakuza Apocalypse. My last film of the 2015 Calgary International Film Festival. This movie is 100% engineered so people can have fun. But you know what? After my nervous-system slamming vacation, my twenty-five previous movies in just over a week, and my full-time fucking job, “fun” really wasn’t something I should have considered to be in the offing. I would have preferred to trance-out on a two hour shot of a tree in the wind or waves rolling unto the shore. Not that Yakuza Apocalypse isn’t impressive. Extremely fun. Pretty exhausting. Some Miike films are brilliant. There is, however, a difference between brilliant and just basically finding, over and over, ridiculous ways to be hilarious that have not quite hitherto been discovered. And I was not really able to find anything funny. Maybe funny in theory. I was heading, unbeknownst, for a hard crash. Like a great deal of Japanese comedy, Yakuza Apocalypse feels like it has been built around a brainstorming session that got way out of hand. Lots of laughs, often inspires awe based simply on the fact it pulls off stuff that would be funny in a brainstorming session (cannabis?) but that any sane person would not believe possible to pull off. It is definitely his stupidest and most blithely unnecessary movie (that I have seen) since the aggressively stupid and unnecessary (and fun) Sukiyaki Western Django (2007). But you know what? Art is glorious and totally unnecessary. Before I close. Before I close I am going to mention the worst movie. One of the very worst movies I have ever seen at a festival. I am going to say nothing more about Chad Archibald’s heinous genre plopper Bite other than that if you were to theoretically tell me that it fits into the dubious “so bad it’s good” category, I would theoretically hate your guts. That’s it. I’m gonna write a bit about ten movies. Done gonna riff. Okay? Ready?
10. Experimenter
The Almereyda. Michael Almereyda is in his mid-fifties. The guy who made Another Girl Another Planet (1992) on Fisher Price Pixelvision is going to be sixty in the blink of an eye. God have mercy on our souls. Mr. Almereyda is a hero of mine. I love him. He hasn’t been making a lot of feature narrative movies. The last perfect one was the Hamlet (2000) with Ethan Hawke in what we Canadians like to call a toque. There was Happy Here and Now (2002), the New Orleans rhythm and blues VR movie. Now that is a strange movie. Recently the return to Shakespeare. Cymbeline (2014). Okay, now that is an absolutely fucking bonkers movie. An unbelievable amount of brain power is thrown at concepts and their enactment in the bizarre Cymbeline. As such, as one might expect, and appropriate to the source text, we are hit with total genius and utterly embarrassing ridiculousness in equal measure. Experimenter is a near-perfect little confection of what is ultimately admirably low ambition. It doesn’t exactly lay it all out there to be scoffed at. I dare you to find substantive fault with it. Okay. Some will scoff at it. Some may even call it, ugh, twee. They may also compare it to bad community theatre. So what? Even good community theatre is bad community theatre, and we need community theatre. Doesn’t community theatre tell us something about community? Experimenter tells the story of Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard). Or part of the story. The public part. And the private part inside the public part. No real origin story. If you made it to junior high then some teacher has presumably told you about Milgram’s most famous experiment. He had people believing they were following a scientist’s directives to electrocute a dude in an adjoining room even though nobody was actually being electrocuted. The test subjects kept on believing themselves to be electrocuting somebody, because they were so instructed by an authority figure, well beyond the point where the voltage levels they believed themselves to be dealing in were way crazy high. Is this sleight of hand? Is the film about sleight of hand, so-called magic? Yes, peripherally. But all movies are. The experiment suggests (and Milgram pleads po-faced that he wasn’t sure they would prove this at all) that people are willing to follow orders to the point of monstrosity. Hence, then, perhaps the insanity of the Holocaust, for example, was a kind of workaday insanity. Business as usual for we human beings. So the movie is chilling? The study is chilling. We are aware of the study and its implications. Readers of this blog have been to junior high. The movie is not chilling. Experimenter maintains something of the same tone as Peter Sarsgaard's performance: clear-eyed and forlorn with an edge of bemusement. It’s even a bit jaunty. It is possible to know the whole sordid truth about people and still enjoy being a pithily sardonic li’l sprite in their company. Is the movie pithy? Maybe a little. Sarsgaard definitely can be. Inside the movie is the story of Milgram’s seducing of, and eventual cultivation of a basically workable marriage to Sasha (Winona Ryder (I love you Winona Ryder)), whence offspring (more humans!) are produced. I thought of Hitchcok’s Spellbound a bunch, and not just because of the rear projection (although, yes, also because of the rear projection). Why? Because there is a love story, a complicated and ultimately satisfying (for everybody) pas de deux built on psychosexual tumult and increasingly few illusions whatsoever about the messy parts of things. Also: just, you know, the human sciences. You will also be reminded of Kinsey. Obviously. If you have seen Kinsey (2004). The last such biopic of which I remember being this fond. They share more than Peter Sarsgaard in common. A troubled yet curiously pleased investigator, investigating the venal business of people being people. I picked up on two moments that struck me as total genius. It involves the one-way mirror. Or the two-way mirror. (I just Googled it - the one-way mirror and the two-way mirror are the same thing.) When the not-actually-electrocution experiments are occurring, Milgram watches them through the window that is a mirror on the other side, cop-style. Sasha of course gets filled in. She even asks for a jolt of current. She’s a game dame. There are two moments, however, where I remember Winona Ryder having an uncomfortable moment with the glass. Brilliant. Fucking spooky.
9. Krisha
This is a feature narrative movie. The third movie about (relating to) addiction. But not, of course, a documentary. And a debut feature. Presumably a contender for the aforementioned Discovery Award. It starts with a shout-out to Altman’s 3 Women (1977). There are also shades of his Images (1972) in the early going. Promising. But it’s more than that. This thing really comes on like gangbusters. My jaw was pretty much on the floor pretty quick and stayed there for the duration of the first act. There is a de-naturing going on. A de-naturalization. We are thrown into the queasy fray of the ol’ family reunion. This is an uncomfortable and strange environment as rendered by director Trey Edward Shults. This is expressionism. How so? In the sense that the film enters this overloaded domestic hellscape in the company of Krisha (Krisha Fairchild … yes … Krisha) who is clearly very, very uncomfortable. Her debased psychic condition and raw-nerved trembling are immediately ours as well. We are in a home. Lots of bustling people. In middle America. But it feels like some nightmarish carnival in another world. Not a pleasant world. At all. Some American artists are good at looking at regular American life as though it had never been looked at before. I thought of Jon Jost and Rob Tregenza. It is also partially scored early on with some insane contrapuntal nightmare music. There is a presiding filter of dis-ease. We pretty quickly come to realize that Krisha has been rocked pretty hard by life. She is barely able to hold herself together. Facing her family so obviously torments her in the worst way. Oh, she’s missing part of a finger. Life has been hard on Krisha. She is coping poorly. She is only here so she can connect with her son. She has not seen her son in many years. Her son cannot look her in the eyes. One senses that he is totally praying for her to just plain evaporate. From the bottom of his hurt heart. Krisha is an alcoholic. Tentatively recovering. But she picks up a drink. And the drink takes a drink. Hark! The bottle is empty. Act two. It’s brief. Mr. Shults gets Krisha drunk and then … he jumps from 1.85/1 to Scope. Drunk-o-cam! She moves through the house with a brief, syrupy ease, accompanied by a smooth jazz swing. There is a problem with the switch to Scope, besides the fact that it is clearly gimmicky. The movie was projected in such a way that the Scope was letterboxed, instead of having the image cleanly expand horizontally. So instead of getting more when Krisha gets drunk, which is presumably the intention, we get less. I know the world used to seem bigger and better for a little bit when I got loaded. Krisha has found some tranquility. It does not last long. She drunkenly drops the turkey (and all of its attendant fluids) on the floor, slow-mo. Suddenly Krisha, the prodigal pariah, is the focus of immoderate, scolding attention. Everybody converges on her to shame her. She totally falls apart. She goes to bed on a couch. She wakes up and realizes it was not a dream. Oh shit. Ohhhhhhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiit. The morning after. Guess what? 1.33/1 Academy ratio. So yeah. We’re doing all the ratios. We are basically in a shame melodrama now. And the shame is fucking thick. As a recovering alcoholic I can steadfastly attest to how much this movie resembles these actual dreams I have where I pick up a drink, get wasted, and fuck me life up totally and completely in front of the enraged and/or aghast people who love me. I thought of Fassbinder. I thought, especially, of Volker Spengler in In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978). Krisha Fairchild has me convinced that she is actually a woman, but in the same way a transexual might perform his or her way into a gender, Krisha (played by Krisha) is helplessly and hopelessly trying to play her way into Krisha. She is met with disgust. Total, unfeeling, unthinking disgust. But you know what? She disgusts herself. We bring this shit upon ourselves. Close to home. Way, way close. I am afraid what will happen, even sober, if I start to rave the way Krisha raves, drunk … and then coming down. Oh, and Krisha reminds me, even more than myself, of a close relative. A relative about whom we worry. So, yeah: family reunions, as ever, are fucking odious.
8. Hurt
I, Curmudgeon (2004) was the last Alan Zweig I saw. The only other one I had seen before that was Vinyl (2000). I, Curmudgeon was just like Vinyl except that it was about curmudgeons instead of record collectors (though they are very often the same thing). Hurt is a significant advance in every respect, both for Mr. Zweig and for the documentary form, especially the Canadian documentary. We are Canadians. We are documentary people. Our national cinema, pathetic little outlier though we are, going way back to the degree zero, is all about them documentaries and them animated shorts. That is what we are known for. We have John Grierson to thank for the legacy of the Canadian documentary. You know what’s funny about John Grierson? Dude’s not Canadian. Scotsman. Alan Zweig? Jew. Grumpy. Stout. But he can tell a joke. Hurt, however, is compassionate (though the subject, Steve Fonyo, is maddeningly frustrating), dead serious, and totally important. It also has a complicated and extremely compelling relationship with discourses on documentary practices. The primary question: what is the role of the filmmaker in terms of the ethics of investment (and even participation (or insistent non-participation)) in the lives he or she records? Zweig is not a vérité guy, or a direct cinema guy, or an Allan King-style “actuality drama” guy, or whatever you want to call it. However, he is coming way closer here than he has in those two earlier docs. Those movies were made up almost entirely of talking heads. Including Alan’s. Talking to himself. And his camera. In the mirror. Back before the ubiquity of the selfie. He was literally an untucked and hiked-up shirt away from staring at his own navel. Mr. Zweig has gotten further outside of himself in Hurt, but has made the exceedingly wise decision (which is who he is, he couldn’t help but make it, nor should he) not to attempt (what filmmaker actually can?) to remove himself from the equation. (He may get way outside himself in a bunch of other movies, I don’t know, I believe I have only seen those two I already mentioned.) Steve Fonyo. Oh Christ. So this is one of the two documentaries I saw at the festival, in addition to the aforementioned Finders Keepers, that relate to an addict who happens to have had a leg amputated. Steve Fonyo contracted bone cancer as a boy and had to have a leg amputated. Quite a blow. But at one point he appeared to have made the most of it. Like Terry Fox before him, Fonyo went on the road, running to make money for cancer research. The run was called "Journey for Lives” and it made Steve a national hero. However, one of my parents tells me that back then a lot of people already knew that Steve was one messed-up cat. One way or another, he was given the Order of Canada. That’s a pretty bid deal. Then the slide. Dude slid. Slid like a motherfucker. Slid into debauch and ignominy. Off the fucking rails. Enter Alan Zweig. A few decades later. Alan paid intermittent visits to Steve over a relatively short period of time and filmed these encounters. Steve was not in good shape. His life was a disaster. We watch it get worse in a kind of time-lapse. Every time Alan comes calling, things appear even worse. Steve had his Order of Canada revoked many years ago. It appears to still sting. And Steve is totally and completely incapable of seeing his part in this. There is a powerful scene where the filmmakers take Steve to a beach that was named after him. Steve pouts and swears and doesn’t want to see the beach. You go see the beach. I’m gonna go sit in the car. I sympathized a little with him there, as I would sympathize with a child who was nonetheless irritating the heck out of me. Drugs, crime, and poverty. Plus kamikaze decision-making in general. We watch him make bad, bad decisions. Again and again. Alan watches. Alan chimes in occasionally. He talks to Steve. He talks to Steve’s girlfriend. Can this continue? Can this go on? There are many ways in which Alan stands back. This is best demonstrated in a crazy-amazing scene in which Steve gets into a ridiculous physical altercation with his girlfriend's nefarious ex. We watch. Alan watches. Alan stands back. And films. But at other times Alan asks a lot of questions. These are often questions that almost plead. But you can only say so much to someone who refuses to hear. Alan makes a radical decision. A deeply uncommon decision for this kind of movie. He finally gets Steve a little help. He sets up an appointment with Vancouver addiction guru Gabor Maté. Mr. Maté is a national treasure. He is one of my very favourite Canadians. Right up there with Nardwuar the Human Serviette and Peaches. Zweig makes the interesting choice of not identifying Mr. Maté. He lets the man speak (and hear) for himself. What is the crux of Mr. Maté’s message? He asks Steve if he is a victims. Steve is grateful. Yes, exactly. Finally somebody gets it. You are not a victim, counters Mr. Maté. You are produced by your circumstances, by and unsatisfiable need that will never be alleviated by anything outside of yourself, and you have never, despite protestations to the contrary, been a happy person. I suspect that Steve is mostly angry about having the Order of Canada taken away from him because he believes himself unworthy. Not only of the Order of Canada. Like so many addicts, Steve will put up a big front, will carry on and build himself up, because deep down he is convinced that he is just plain unworthy. It is easy to turn your life to shit when you are convinced that this is what you deserve. All fans of Canadian-TV-comedy-institution The Trailer Park Boys should see Hurt, just so they have a clearer sense of what it is really like to be getting paralytically high and stealing car parts way out on the Canadian margins. A day or two after I saw the film I was taking the escalator up to the theatres at Eu Claire Market and Alan Zweig was coming down the opposite escalator. “Hey Alan,” I enthused, “I loved your movie.” He looked at me in such a bewildered manner that I found myself wondering if this was the first time a Canadian documentarian had ever been recognized in a shopping complex.
7. Mountains May Depart
You will gain no traction with me by attempting to reckon with the character and concerns of contemporary cinema without going headlong into a reckoning with Jia. Jia Zhangke. He is our #1 man(darin) on the ground. He is in China. Mainland. At the heart of the heart of the New New World. He is there gleaning for art and truth. He is not in the war-of-blockbuster-attrition business that is the Chinese film industry’s raison d’etre. There are a hell of a lot of people in China. That’s a lots of asses (attached to wallets) to put in seats. Increasing disposable income. Increasing production of big, brash motion pictures. Jia also makes big movies. Little big movies. He makes movies I need. I crave the new ones, be they documentary, fiction, or hybrid. I have had the luxury of seeing a bunch up on the big screen where they belong, which is a luxury available to exceedingly few of his countrymen. Truth? Yes. But beauty. The form and tone. We are talking about an artist. A master of form and tone, who happens to be working in a fresh way and with clarity about a world that the authorities have done their best for a very long time to prevent us from seeing at all. China is a dissident-manufacturing behemoth. You don’t get to make art there without becoming a dissident. You become a dissident just by telling the truth. Or the wrong lie. Jia’s last feature was A Touch of Sin (2013). I was one of the few who was pretty seriously disappointed. Why? Formally it struck me as lazy. Tonally it struck me as kind of blah. I think the fact that he was clearly making some concessions to the asses-in-seats mandate that is always going to dog the expensive art of feature-narrative-movie making (not in and of itself necessarily always a bad thing), caused Jia to kinda not fully invest himself. It is wrong to say think. I can only say I suspect. He is more profound when he is less obvious. A Touch of Sin, particularly toward the end, started to really hit on the obvious. The poetic, sure, but obvious about it, dig? It was not remotely terrible. Just a disappointment. To me. And who the hell am I? Mountains May Depart is just so completely not formally lazy that I cannot presume to do its fastidious construction justice. We are used to the three act structure. Here we have essentially three movies. The literary equivalent would be a book containing three novellas about characters (and characters connected to those characters) at three different disparate points over the course of their lives. And they are three different movies, told in different ways, working in different registers. Remember the talk of aspect ratios? Yes, all three of the predominant aspect ratios are employed, one for each section, with increasingly widening horizontality. The first movie is absolutely stunning. 1.33/1 Academy ratio. I love Jia working in Academy. These frames are exquisite. He sculpts action in real time magnificently, and uses the frame with total wisdom. His cutting is like perfect silken arrangements. The film begins in 1999 with a group of young Chinese dancing pretty ecstatically to the tune of The Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West.” Let’s call it foreshadowing. We arrive into the midst of a love triangle. Jia’s ever-present perhaps-muse Zhao Tao is the female lead. She is torn between the wealthy, arrogant, and bitterly insecure character played by Zhang Yi on the one hand, and the benevolent, kindly, and generally kinda humble character played by Liang Jin Dong, who essentially works for the Zhang Yi character, on the other. While Liang Jin Dong is clearly the better fit, Zhao Tao opts for Zhang Yi for reasons related above all to money and security, and the fact that he will presumably be able to offer same for any prospective offspring. There is a standoff. The moment where Liang Jin Dong slaps Zhang Yi is so skillfully shot and cut that I shuddered. A terrible, decisive moment, decisively rendered. The second section leaps forward to 2014 and the 1.85/1 ratio. We are in another movie. The tone is more elegiac. It is a sad movie. Adult sad. Earned sad. Zhang Yi’s character has left Zhao Tao’s character and taken their young son with him. (The movie perhaps overplays its hand having materialistic father name his son Dollar.) We also meet up with Liang Jin Dong’s character. He is sick. Dying, even. All those years in the mines take their toll. This is an old, pervasive story conjoined to industrial modernization. But heartbreak. Heartbreak takes its toll, too. But this is heartache brought to us by progress, no? Everybody is off in search of happiness-by-way-of-progress and a whole hell of a lot of people have to be ground to dust. Dollar comes for one last visit to see his mother. This is one of the saddest and most deftly understated sequences in all of Jia. The final section (in Scope) takes place in Australia in 2025. Be careful what you wish for. A great many people have “gone west” and not liked what they found. And so it goes. Father (Zhang Yi) and Dollar, now a young man, live in a minimalist mini-mansion, the type somebody might live in in an HBO series or a Michael Mann movie. But in Australia. Here we find Dollar and Daddy totally at odds. They don’t even speak the same language anymore. Literally. A level of disconnection and dislocation and no-fucking-real-intimacy-whatsoever has taken root in a way that weirdly invoked for me the (mostly quite terrible) films of Atom Egoyan (apparently one of those played at the festival! I believe it won the Audience Choice Award! Yikes!). Many complain about the actors in section three. Especially Zijian Dong, who plays Dollar. This young man was supposed to have been raised in the west, right? So how come he can barely speak English? And he can no longer speak Mandarin at all? What gives? The nature of the performances strikes me as a metaphor for dislocation and confusion, foregrounding the significant gulf between the Chinese and the Western experience of the world, whilst also foregrounding just how anchored we are to our origins, no matter how vigorously we try to liberate ourselves. It’s not actually something I had to “get over.” It actually worked for me in a deeper place. In a place where I feel people. It doesn’t look like Dollar will every see his mother again. We end with her, swaying to “Go West” in a post-industrial greyscale purgatory. Her swaying reminds me of Kim Hye-ja in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009). Alas, these poor, wearied mothers, barely propped up by the music.
6. The Lobster
So basically I am telling you that I like The Lobster a little more than Mountains May Depart. What is wrong with me? Lots. Lots is wrong with lots of us. The Lobster will be loved by many. For a very, very long time. This thing is here to stay. This should in no way be taken to denigrate Mountains. But The Lobster. I love The Lobster. I have given myself to it in this kind of wretched, sodden, consummate capitulation. And God bless me, sir. I don’t get the impression that critics are particularly won over by Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film. People really don’t care. I mean people do not care about critics. Rotten Tomatoes. There are people who take that stuff seriously. I don’t take those people seriously. In fact, you will never even convince me that critics care about critics. Not for the most part. This totally whacked-out and endearing parable, with its delectable screenplay and fastidious direction, enters my life at the exact right moment. It has helped demystify for me the crisis of coupling in which I currently find myself (crisis? oh please). The takeaway is that the insidious directive to hook up and the militant assertion of lone-wolf status are equally harebrained. There is laughter, here, and the upending of the stakes. I want to emphasize the screenplay. It is busily brilliant. So many ideas, gags, slips, and reversals. This is a movie that is thinking and scurrying and laying waste. David is our, ahem, hero. He is rendered by a flaccid, paunchy, schmo-version Colin Farrell. David is shortsighted and has just been cuckolded by his wife. She and her goddamned wandering shortsighted eyes. Yes, they are both shortsighted. This is important. Being cuckolded is an issue in The Lobster’s alternative universe. You see, people who are single have an issue. The issue is that they are not allowed to be single. And one isn’t exactly given much of a post breakup grace period. Single people, it turns out, are routinely rounded up and dumped at an altogether-pretty-nice hotel where they are forced to couple-up with another single person (they are on the clock) or risk being transformed into the animal of their choice. WTF, right? Exactly. David has decided he wants to be, if he has to be, a lobster. They are blue-blooded “like aristocrats,” they live a long time, and David likes the water. Everything at the hotel is zany, uncomfortable, bluntforce comedy. Blood is shed. A lot of blood is self-shed. Autobleeding. Lanthimos likes this sort of thing. Have you seen Dogtooth (2009)? Remember the bit about shortsightedness? Right. The things is that in the world of The Lobster, people can only hook up with somebody with whom they share in common a defining characteristic. Isn’t that ridiculous? Yes. This is also ridiculous. But you know what? We ourselves hook up stupidly, for stupid reasons. We do this all the time. As though it were a fucking competition. To save his soon-to-be-lobster ass, David hooks up with a sociopathic woman who feels nothing. David pretends to feel nothing. This works for a while. Until she kills his dog. His dog also happens to be his onetime-unfortunately-single brother. Oh boy. David escapes (conveniently) into the woods. In the woods he finds a group of single-people drop-out insurrectionists ruthlessly run by the humourless Léa Seydoux. God, Léa Seydoux is always a drag. Bless her heart. These people mean business. They are not only single, they are rabidly anti-coupling. Those that are not rabidly anti-coupling have to pretend to be. Just like David had to pretend to be a guy with no feelings. And obviously he falls in love. With a shortsighted woman. Rachel Weisz. IMDB says her character’s name is “Short Sighted Woman.” Léa Seydoux’s Leader of the Neuters (my appellation) finds out. You know what she does? I’m not going to tell you. It’s grim. It’s merciless. It’s funny. Be a couple? Don’t be a couple? We are totally fucked. Either way: fucked. Great screenplay. And Lanthimos is a crafty, very smart director. He sets things up and lets them fall into place. Sequences, scenes, and shots repeatedly avoid telling you what they are doing at the outset. We are being led by the collar into all kinds of little surprises. Obviously this film will appeal most to single people and the people who identify with their previously single selves far more than the mutants that they have become by virtue of hitching their gear to someone else’s wagon. I’m single, baby. I’m Walt fucking Whitman. Alone in my urban crawlspace, connected to absolutely everything. But you know what? You never know ....
5. August Winds
August Winds is the debut feature film by erstwhile documentarian Gabriel Mascaro. Despite the fact that August Winds is consequently not Mr. Mascaro’s first movie, it was nonetheless a Discovery Award nominee. There is a strong ethnographic bent to August Winds. I love the right kind of ethnography done the right kind of way. The movie revolves around a small coastal community in Brazil. For much of the film we are essentially hanging out there, picking up on little details of day to day life, ensconced in the seasonal fluctuations of the weather and the tides. The tides become central. This is the first truly exceptional fictional movie I have seen where the filmmakers have made a commitment to look at what rising sea levels mean on the ground. There is an ecological investment here. The weather is also important, hence the titular “winds.” Mr. Mascaro even himself shows up as some mysterious interloper who comes to the community with his rig to record the wind and other ambient sounds. This speaks to me. Deep down I believe I am the kind of fellow who goes to the movies to dig on stuff like ambient sound more than I go there for narratives (though this might not be immediately clear to readers of this blog). This is conducive to the medicinal opiation of which I am so fond. Sound is a tonic. The ears are always so much more free than the eyes, all the better to build sensory landscapes from the ground up. All the better to wander off unhindered into dreamy inchoate incandescence. The movie is dominated by non-actors. Any reader of my blog knows of my predilection for well-utilized non-actors. Those who have not been trained, especially if they have also not been bombarded to excess with movie stimuli (as most of the “performers” in August Winds have presumably not been), are less likely to have assimilated endless cliche modalities as part of their working repertoire. Drama will never trump life. This is the cinema, after all, not the theatre. Our way into the world of August Winds is Shirley. Shirley is rendered by Dandara de Morais, the only “performer” in the movie who has any previous acting experience (she appeared in a single episode of a Brazilian television program called Young Hearts). Shirley has come from the big city to tend to her grandmother. She knows the place. She is half insider, half outsider. Her fondness for sunbathing nude, slathered in Coca-Cola, whilst listening to punk rock seems particularly outsiderish in this world she currently (and presumably temporarily) inhabits. She drives a tractor with a flatbed from a coconut plantation to the place where the coconuts are unloaded. She has a boyfriend named Jeison whom she will occasionally fuck on a mountain of coconuts, pulled off to the side of the road. She is a carnal woman. She is a compelling woman. She is a woman at once of the city and of the land, of the sea. This is not a hurried community, nor is the movie hurried. We spend a lot of time basically hanging out. This is definitely an approach to people and places that I can get behind. And so have traditionally done. I was reminded at times of the cinema of Filipino master Lav Diaz. But whereas Diaz makes films that are traditionally many, many hours long (all the better to immerse us in a sense of being in a slow-moving place in time), August Winds runs slightly less than eighty minutes. We are still in a slow-moving place. It’s just that we are made to feel the time only moderately. Then comes the skull. Not long after comes a corpse. When the bones and bodies enter the picture, August Winds locks into focus. Forensic questions come up when we find a skull. Whose skull is this? How long has this skull been out in the world independent of a living body upon which to be sentiently perched? Then the corpse. A corpse is a reminder that we are a bundle of bones, and that between the time we are a living person and the time that we are a bundle of bones, we go through a messy process of decay - a process that may happen after we are dead, but which is just absolutely and fundamentally a process related to organic life. What are all of our collective bones but a kind of library? They are what everybody who is not incinerated leaves behind. But what if there is no one around to take notice of our bones? August Winds ends with a wall being built around a cemetery to protect it from rising sea waters. First we turned on the planet, and then the planet turned on us. This is a nice poetic encapsulation. In fairly short order, my friends, there will be nothing on earth with a consciousness as elevated as our own to take notice of the fact that we once were. August Winds may not have a lot of meat on its bones, but I hope that I have made it clear that the bones themselves are what matter.
4. Sea Fog
Leading in to my discussion of Mountains May Depart, I mentioned that the Chinese film industry has spent the bulk of our young century engineering ways to dominate the Asian film market by producing wildly expensive movie spectacles that tow the company line and attempt to please as many people as possible so as to bring in serious box office. Hollywood, obviously, has established the template. Unfortunately for the Chinese, the Koreans continue their entrenched, all-bets-are-off campaign to make the best mass-entertainment in the world. And certainly the Asian markets establish their tenacity in the regards. Korea is not just producing big movies for Korea. They are producing big movies for Asia. They are doing a commendable job of it. Korean filmmakers benefit from a freedom to dabble in sin, sexual politics, naked cruelty, debauch, and subversive agitation that the Chinese do not possess. Censorship and good taste are a serious hindrance for the Chinese in terms of their being able to make the kinds of films upon which adult human beings might be interested in getting off. Enter Sea Fog. Sea Fog is expertly honed, and deeply politically problematic, mass-entertainment. It is a real coup. The director is Shim Sung-bo. Shim was a co-writer on Bong Joon-ho’s already-a-classic Memories of Murder (2003). That movie is a personal favourite in terms of subversive Korean mass-entertainments. Bong Joon-ho has gone on to make increasingly-large and widely-seen movies, culminating in Snowpiercer (2013), an honest-to-goodness English-language super-spectacle filled to the brim with a whole bunch of white folks, some pretty goddamn famous. Apparently Bong doesn’t forget the people who helped to get him to where he is today. Here he is co-writing the debut feature of his Memories co-writer, an undertaking which on the face of it would appear to be below his current station. Like Memories, Sea Fog is calibrated to entertain, which is not to say that it will not piss people off or turn them off. Some people. People being people. This stuff is not built to go down easy. It is violent, blunt, and eager to remind us how rotten we can be. One way to suggest what Sea Fog is doing would be to ask you to imagine a film produced in something of the style and with the production values of a contemporary Hollywood movie, but with the devil-may-care no-bones-about-it chutzpah of the more subversive testosterone-infused New Hollywood movies on the 1970s (think Friedkin and maybe Cimino). It is also, of course, very Korean. And super timely. This is maybe the best peril-at-sea spectacle ever. A little bit of Steamboat Bill Jr., some of that Greengrass pirate-movie shtick, and, of course, spectres of Ahab and William Bligh. The added element is the hot-button issue of China-to-Korea human trafficking. Kim Yoon-seok plays Cheol-joo, the epically insidious captain of the Jeonjinho, a fishing vessel that has seen better days. Cheol-joo, hard up for cash, conscripts his ship and his crewmen into a gambit to smuggle a passel of desperate Chinese migrants into Korea. It all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Park Yoochun plays Dong-sik, a kindly crewman (and a kid basically), who is unable to countenance the inhuman cruelty that begins to overtake his captain and fellow crewman in the wake of a number of fairly catastrophic complications. That the whole thing is based loosely on real events is extremely chilling. But this is obviously a movie. Big time. Proudly so. This is a movie intoxicated by the possibility of movies. That this is a debut feature is almost sort of baffling. It reeks of old-fashioned seen-it-all professionalism. Taking all this into account, you will probably not be surprised to hear that Sea Fog inveigles itself of something not unlike a love story. Indeed, Dong-sik falls for Hong-Mea (played by Han Ye-ri), a young woman who finds herself amidst the human cargo. When everything goes horribly wrong, Dong-sik hides Hong-mae in the engine room, protecting her from the ever-overhanging threat of sexual violence and certain death. This is a ruthlessly nasty movie. The violence is matter-of-fact and … ruthless. There were people near me in the theatre who were clearly (and audibly) having a bit of a problem with that. By and large, however, the people of Planet Earth have spoken, and they have voted for violence. It has become something of a lingua franca for us. This is not cartoonish violence, being as it is too close to that which exists in our world every day. However, the violence here is disproportionately theatricalized. It would be perhaps reasonable to call the violence orgiastic. Or close. I might be giving you the wrong idea. God, people love their screen violence orgiastic. Still: this is, to risk getting repetitive, violence grounded in our experience of real violence, and this is where the discomfort of some of the folks in my vicinity was stemming from. Though these are nightmares we encounter in the movies, they are also the nightmares we encounter in the news. Unfortunately, of course, we are each of us somewhat complicit in these nightmares. Dong-sik’s heroism is admirable, and there is no mass-entertainment-style movie without it, but it is inarguably also married to a kind of always-eventually-fatal naiveté. His fellow crewman are not so much monsters as products of their circumstances. The same could be said of Captain Cheol-joo, if not for the fact that circumstance transfigure him into a truly mythic beast. He is one of those captains. Long after he has sealed his own doom, Cheol-joo rages against the dying of the light until he, of course, is forced to go down as absurdly as possible with the ship, his little private apocalypse mirroring so many larger ones already well in the works.
3. Fig Fruit and the Wasps
The second really spectacular film about which I knew next to nothing, following August Winds, and the second one to floor me. It really, totally, holy shit floored me. It’s rare that one of these unheard of international dispatches enters my life and illuminates the interiors so … luminously. Magnificent. Truly magnificent. This is one of the most special things about taking chances at festivals (and the Calgary International Film Festival is admirable in its routinely encouraging us to take such chances (though I may occasionally grumble when I see the lineup)). We get to see things very few will see, that we will presumably never get to see again ourselves, and we get to see them projected on screens up at which we gaze in wonder. Always better than a TV or a monitor. It was Godard who reminded us that we look up at movies and look down at TV. How below-the-radar is Fig Fruit and the Wasps? It doesn’t even have an IMDB entry. How’s that for indie cred? This is the debut feature of M.S. Prakash Babu. It is not the kind of movie one follows. It is the kind of movie one gets inside and lives in, like a warm coat, for a brief time. It is the kind of movie inside which one luxuriates. Shot in Scope. I’ve been grumbling about Scope. This is kinda my new thing. Even when I am not grumbling about Scope in my written ruminations, I am often grumbling about Scope in the echo chamber of my skull. Fig Fruit and the Wasp needed to be shot in Scope. It is the only film I saw at the festival about which I can absolutely say 100% this is the case. It earns is lavish wide frames. We are talking about a place the same way we were talking about a place in regard to August Winds. Fig Fruit finds us in the company of two individuals, a female documentary filmmaker (Bhavani Prakash) and her cameraman (Ranjit Bhaskaran), who visit a removed outpost (this time in Southern India) where they (and we) primarily just hang out. The movie is composed primarily of long takes, shot from a distance, of people suspended in landscapes. I suspect that the two leads were cast because they each have a face and a manner that suggests something more than wisdom or certainly intelligence. They suggest an ineluctable sense of having lived. These people have seen more than their age might suggest they have. They are not anxious to do much of anything other than inhabit the world with their bodies and all their attention. They are forlorn observers, long since having outgrown the youthful indignity of being prone to surprise. There is an ennui in this. There is a sapience as well. Sapience, as elaborated upon in Eugène Green’s recent La Sapienza (2014), being all about the kind of knowledge (not necessarily quantitative) that is useful for those in search of something like genuine wisdom. So yes, wisdom. Here wisdom is something that is worn on the person, like an expression or a piece of ornate jewelry, more than it is something the person demonstrates. The documentarian and her cameraman, who have developed the kind of relationship that doesn’t require them to say much of anything to one another, have come to this outpost as part of a project whereby they intend to explore how different kinds of music and different kinds of musical instruments (right down to the shape of the instruments) emerge from different regions. What they do not do in the movie is make much headway in terms of gleaning much information that would serve them in this endeavour. (A villager, improbably, reminds the cameraman that Adorno got there first.) Rather, they merely inhabit the region. The mysterious hereness of a here. As do we. That is what we have entered this movie in order to do. To be, with the full weight of what is meant by “to be,” in a here that would to us have otherwise been an elsewhere. International cinema has always been bequeathing this gift unto us. It is art. It is also a kind of circumscribed, modulated travel. I love movies like Fig Fruit and the Wasp that have few ancillary interests beyond dropping us off somewhere we have never been to primarily look, listen, listen to our listening (as Heidegger would have us do), and feel our feelings along with the humming of our distanced thoughts. The idea here, however, is that a specific region will pick up different frequencies of universal spirit than will other regions, hence the different forms of music that emerge from different places. It is spirit. Geist. There is spirit and music coming out of a place. To be in a place is to always be in proximity to a particular variation of intensive cosmic elements. Spiritual elements, hence musical ones. The onus is on us. To be. Here. Any here. But to really be here. I was compelled to go see Fig Fruit because the festival program compared it to works by Satyajit Ray, Yasujirō Ozu, and Robert Bresson. Great. Bresson is my God. Those other two guys are great. I love them. Well, no. This is all very misleading. If you want a sense of what M.S. Prakash Babu is doing with form and tone, you would be better off looking at the bits in Antonioni or in Nuri Bilge Ceylan (I thought especially of the wonderful Uzak (2002)) where not much of anything is going on. People call this stuff “slow cinema.” I don’t really want to be the “slow cinema” guy. Nonetheless: long live “slow cinema”!
2. The Forbidden Room
Ah, dreary, windy Winnipeg’s finest export: the inimitable Guy Maddin. You love Guy Maddin. Obviously. I know I am always ready to hand my grey neural spheres over to him so that he can prod at them with his malevolent screwdrivers and such. The Forbidden Room is a brain (and attendant networks), fit to be endlessly prodded. And guess what? There is honest to goodness neurosurgery in The Forbidden Room. What would you expect? Udo Kier plays a bunch of characters, one of whom is this crazed guy who cannot leave the behinds of ladies alone (Udo? oh please). Increasingly invasive brain surgery is employed to alleviate him of his compulsion to reach out and touch someone. Each increasingly invasive surgery is more debilitating than the last. But the asses. Oh, unceasing, profligate asses with your siren songs. It is a musical number. It is called “The Final Derrier.” With music by Sparks. Are you beginning to get the picture? You have not even fucking begun to begin to get the picture. Does something come after postmodernity? If anything does then Maddin does. I have previously called Maddin cinema’s greatest DJ. He continues to prove me right. I also remember suggesting that the experience of watching Miike’s Izo was like being a needle constantly jumping back and forth between phonograph grooves. Well, Maddin is the master. Samples, sampling, total multivalence, and that jumping back and forth, pinwheel, between phonograph grooves. The way his movies have been edited since the immortal Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)(still his best), it were as though he were bent on amphetamines and trying haphazardly to land each short on a blurry aircraft carrier. The DJ thing really started with his masterful short film The Heart of the World (2000). Cinema: Year Y2K. That was when the montage went into overdrive. He has not come back to earth. Earth? What earth? Whatever comes after postmodernity does not exactly happen on earth. I am beginning to think that he has started to speed things up to such an extent so that he can pull off some Hadron Collider shit and start to bi-locate like in Pynchon’s Against the Day. I would call The Forbidden Room high concept, except you really need to pluralize concept. The temptation in describing it is to start a whole bunch of places at once. I am already kind of doing that, aren’t I? A couple basic concepts: 1) Maddin wanted to film little movies based on films that have been lost - as have been the bulk of silent films, seeing as back in the day nobody could see a future in this stuff - and he took a bunch of names of such films and quasi-free-associatively started making little movies based (sort of) on lost movies; 2) Maddin found himself invited to make little movies (or movie-happenings) at the Pompidou in Paris and the Phi Centre in Montreal, and large groups of spectators converged in these places to watched him shoot some of the fragments that would be incorporated into The Forbidden Room, with some pretty game movie faces such as those belonging to Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, and Maria de Medeiros; 3) Related to the previous two undertakings (and The Forbidden Room), Mr. Maddin has embarked on an experimental journey to bring all of this madness together on a complicated, immersive website to be called Seances (I am assuming that a lot of stuff that is in The Forbidden Room will also be reworked into the universe of Seances). What Maddin has ultimately concocted here is concentric movie-world asteroid belts through which the audience is trafficked in something entirely unlike a straight line. So basically there are a lot of movies inside this movie, revolving around no central body. They are all emphatically Guy Maddin movies. Though George Toles is no longer writing scripts for Maddin, we are still basically getting George Toles. Praise the Lord. We also get Maddin’s new collaborator, co-director Evan Johnson. It seems that Johnson’s primary job is to build the world of the surface of the movie in postproduction. He takes the shot footage and digitally reworks it in such a way that is all suffused with the patina of different kinds of film-film worlds going to pot. We are getting something like the decaying film stock of Decasia (2002) built exclusively with a digital toolbox. There is some real entropy at work here, and the sense that, with no central body, the movies we are watching are sliding out of orbit. Submarine movies, woodsmen rescuing damsels from wolfmen movies, virgins fed to volcanoes movies, Indonesian vampire movies, crime movies, a movie about a guy who forgets his wife’s birthday and so gives her all of his stuff and says he got her duplicates but when she asks where the original stuff is the world caves in. There are a lot of movies here. They are diverting. They are fun. Some of it is pretty close to sketch comedy territory. But the cinematic machinery in place is the stuff of pure demonic magik-with-a-k. So bring on Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton. I want more!
1. Love
Love, otherwise known as Love 3D. You may be excused if you think I am putting this at the top of my list to be needlessly contrarian or provocative. I am not. I can see how you might think that this is something I might do. Not because I might do something like this, but rather because I am canny enough to see how I may be perceived, incorrectly, to be the kind of person who might do something like this. I am not immoderately political about what I like. I know what I like is good. I know what I say is cogent and well-reasoned (if sometimes slightly scattershot in execution). I also fully expect to meet opposition in regards to the efficacy of these two assertions. That’s how it goes. I believe that there were critics who liked Gaspar Noé after his first two films. I get the impression that they have almost uniformly washed their hands of him at this point. Sure, he was asking for it. Does that make it just? Not in this case, no. I do notice, however, that I often come into contact with intelligent artists, working in all the various domains, most of them fairly young, for whom Noé’s work means a lot. (I will also mention that my sister once told me he was the worst person she ever met.) I was somewhat ambivalent about Enter the Void (2009). Ambivalent is not the right word. I greatly admired the filmmaking. This guy is an absolutely peerless visual artist. I hated, hated, hated the concept. This dunderheaded, embarrassingly literal-minded idea about reincarnation as explored in the Tibetan Book of the Dead made me blush it was so stupid. That’s some ludicrous Christopher Nolan shit (ouch!). It also struck me that some of the criticism about the way he deals with sordid things is apt. He cheapens the sordid in Enter the Void, which I don’t believe he did in Irreversible (2002). I really loved Irreversible. A woman at a party almost slit my throat because I said I love Irreversible. And Love. Love is almost completely not sordid (unless you are a total prude). Almost. There is the abrasive 3D cum shot, after all. There is the POV from inside the vagina as it is pounded. Two extremely sordid moments. Almost there because they unfortunately have to be there. I am prepared to accept them and move on. The movie was famous in its way from the word go. 3D sex. Unsimulated sex. Graphic sex. 3D porn. Let me make this extremely clear: this is an erotic movie, not a pornographic one. A lot of these tableau reminded me of Catholic paintings. If the walls of Italian churches featured hardcore sex, I can assure you it would look a lot like this movie (though there would doubtlessly be more Renaissance-appropriate clothes on the floors beside the beds). And nothing meant to excite or titillate for the mere sake of exciting or titillating could conceivably move a person, touch a person, or make a person as sad as I was made by Love. And the sex is utterly glorious. Some people have complained that the sex is unremarkable. Not enough fancy positions and stuff. Some people have claimed that you can get this stuff online. I have a pretty good working knowledge of what you can get online. You can absolutely not get anything like Love (especially as seen 3D in a movie theatre) online. And you want fancy sex calisthenics? The film is about how sex and love haunt us, and I’m a meat and potatoes guy for the most part, so I was happy that we were dealing with the exact kinds of sex I can remember myself having had. I have become something of a monk, vaguely chaste, mostly alone, remembering. Sex is primarily for me something I remember. I am coming clean. Is this making you queasy? I apologize. And romantic love primarily exists in my life as something that is abstract or theoretical except, of course, when its real-life (my real life) iterations are haunting me, driving me mad, totally threatening to upend me. I have to remember the most important thing about romantic love: when mortal beings find one another, the most fundamental underlying reality is that we are dealing in some serious fucking impermanence. We meet up with the people we love. This is the first step in letting them go. Noé is famous for making films that are unpleasant. The implication often seems to be that only a sick person could enjoy them. Right. Show me a person who is not a set of symptoms. Still, there is something deeply unpleasant about Love. Our protagonist (Karl Glusman, playing a character with the Beckett-invoking name of Murphy) is extremely unlikeable. Early on it the movie I was troubled a bit, convinced it would be easier to like Love if the main character were not so objectionable. But then it would tell us men less of the truth about ourselves. If we grieve the past embrace, if the best sex we ever had haunts us and threatens to destroy us, it is because we are selfish. And we are. We are selfish in the face of God's gifts. As for the sex (God's best gift?): I can find almost nothing profane about it. It is intimate and real for the most part. There is serenity. There is also drunk sex, sad sex, and angry sex. A litany of our personal sex experiences is always going to parallel a difficult litany of moods, instabilities, failings, yearnings, embarrassments, and feelings that are often too much to entirely feel. We spend a lot of time fucking the pain away. And when the fucking is over? I don’t know about you, but both Murphy and I have had to spend a lot of time grieving. So pretty much all of the sex in Love is remembered sex, sex from the past. The power of 3D, however, is that it brings us right into the sex in a haptic and immersive way. When we remember sex, of course, we are remembering it, whether we give into this or not, with our whole bodies. The sex scenes in Love (oh my, there are so many) bring us headlong into a past present. The 3D immersion is amniotic. We are inside an act, inside a room, inside the past, but Noé’s great gift here is to make everything exceedingly present - very here, very now. An act in a narcotic bubble, suspended there. This is why Murphy is in such grief. He can feel a living in the past from which he is endlessly jostled by the insistent intrusion of reality. He has lost his love (her name, oh boy, is Electra) who is dead or had might as well be. If you love properly you will grieve. If you grieve properly you will let go. Murphy cannot let go. Sigh. I’ve traditionally had a hell of a time of it myself.
