Light Sensitive

Sundance: Apocryphal now

(The amazing Quvenzhané Wallis in the stunning title sequence of Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, the presumptive favorite for the grand jury prize in the dramatic competition. Image courtesy of Sundance Film festival.)

Festivals are measured in time but evaluation and assessment, especially critically, are typically rendered more instantaneously. 

It is natural, especially given the parochialism central to Sundance, to explicate all manner of connections and uncork the themes and patterns underlining the various programs. As a print “junkie,” or traditionalist about viewing formats, I am less than sanguine about the near disappearance of film formats. It is hardly coincidental the two best competition films, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild and Ira Sachs’ Keep the Lights On, were both photographed in Super 16-millimeter.

One of the defining (and very welcome) hallmarks of this year's festival, and another reason to like these two films, is their innate liberation from plot, or at the very least, the kind of cause and effect, conflict-driven tyranny of story that dominate narrative filmmaking. Each film possesses a visual wonder and daring about them, in wholly different registers, but they also have a freedom and excitement and an unpredictability.

Zeitlin’s Beasts is a fabulous and visually gorgeous mélange of Faulkner’s Wild Palms, Jean Renoir’s The Southerner, early Terrence Malick and the only Elia Kazan film, Wild River, still worth talking about. Adapted by Zeitlin with co-scenarist Lucy Alibar from her play, the movie is a magic realist fable unfolding off the southern coast of Louisiana, in a mysterious and evocatively drawn community known colloquially as "the Bathtub." 

The movie’s tough-minded, sharp young six-year old protagonist Hushpuppy (the extraordinary young performer Quvenzhané Wallis, like the rest of the cast a nonprofessional) lives with her drunken, sometimes abusive father, Wink (Dwight Henry).

The work is suffused with vivid and colorful characters, all manner of the dispossessed, sharecroppers, farmers and itinerant musicians that through landscape, history and imaginative fury suggest a apocryphal variant of Faulkner’s own Yoknapatawpha County. The story oscillates between the extremes of the harsh material world binding Hushpuppy and the rest of the inhabitants to the devastated landscape threatened by an impending storm and her wild and haunted imagination.

Her mother gone, having "floated away," and her father not always reliable (without hammer the point home, the father’s messy and angered state is revealed), Hushpuppy exists in a state of perpetual motion. The story is anecdotal and discursive and tethered by a succession of incidents and episodes that taken together achieve an impossibly beautiful and majestic purity and spontaneity.

The emotional involvement means disentangling the actual and the imagined; the movie is a dialectic that invites multiple ways of looking and thinking about it. Most impressively, Zeitlin (whom I learned from reading Manohla Dargis) studied with the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer) creates a distinct and unstable world visually.

The movie has two great echoing images, the extraordinary title sequence of Hushpuppy, holding roman candles in each hand as she sprints forward and the climatic transcendent image of the young girl and rest of her dispossessed community seeking their own sense of the divine.

The imagery and the child’s narration obviously invoke Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven. The recurrent use of water as a agent of re-birth and cleansing illustrates the dominant themes of freedom and escape (this place, the girl says of a detention facility, is less a prison than a “fish tank without any water”).  

The girl’s imagination passes through time and space, conjuring Stone Age beasts and most memorably, a floating bordello. Many of the finest moments are again small, private and beautiful, like the father’s stark instructions on how to capture a catfish barehanded. Ben Richardson’s cinematography is eerily beautiful and declarative.

I saw it twice, and look forward to another look. It is the kind of film you already can never get enough of.

Sundance: Into the breach

(Antonio Campos, writer and director of Sundance competition title, Simon Killer. Images courtesy of Sundance Film festival.)

Sundance is as much state of mind as festival, a ritual as much as an assignment. At roughly the halfway point, I am pretty bullish on this year’s edition.  Last year’s dramatic competition was the strongest and deepest collection of impressive young talents in memory, and this year was not likely to surpass that.

Sundance sets a tone, not just for the festival circuit, but the year. I caught up with this year’s breakout title, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, a couple of hours ago and I need time to sort out my feelings, but I certainly share the enthusiasm.

I have a great deal of respect for disparate titles such as Antonio Campos’ Simon Killer, Ira Sachs’ Keep the Lights On, Rick Alverson’s The Comedy, Mark Webber’s The End of Love, Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere and So Young Kim’s For Ellen. I’ll be filing dispatches and marking impressions of those titles in the coming days.

A good leaping off point is the most polarizing title. Campos’ second feature Simon Killer is another brazen and stylistically impressive study of disassociation and social disaffection. In a very convincing and commanding star turn, Brady Corbet holds the movie’s deliberately off-putting and abrasive manner.

Following a couple of highly regarded short films, Campos emerged as a leading American independent filmmaker with his remarkable 2008 feature debut Afterschool (notorious for being turned down by Sundance). Told with a hypnotic lyrical precision, the movie was a chilling and exact portrait of social and sexual pathology set inside a privileged boarding school.

A member of the deeply talented collective of filmmakers that constitute Borderline Films, Campos produced last year’s finest Sundance competition work, Sean Durkin’s extraordinary Martha Marcy May Marlene. In that film Corbet turned in a sinuously controlled performance as a handsome and laconic young man who proved eerily, even preternatural gifted at ensnaring bright and beautiful young women into a cult.

That interpretation proves a crucial rough draft in his snarling, believably vacant turn as a young American graduate drawn to the shadowy Paris sex underground around the Pigalle neighborhood. Campos said he was inspired by the lean and existential crime stories of French writer Georges Simenon. Campos takes a familiar theme, the extreme isolation and cultural dislocation of exile, and layers it with a barely suppressed sexual menace and behavioral oddity that gives it a thrashing and threatening intensity.

Fleeing from the painful beak up of his five-year relationship and uncertain about his professional prospects, Simon takes advantage of an available flat left to his keep by his French cousin. Possessing only rudimentary grasp of the language, Simon is a prototypical wild child, unable to make connections and drawn to solitary activity (illustrated very early in a darkly funny incident involving his comically inept interaction with some local Internet pornography).

Prowling the nighthawk streets, Simon takes solace in one of the many sex bars that line Pigalle’s underground district. He is quickly drawn into a complicated relationship with the prostitute Victoria (Mati Diop, the terrific young French actress from Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum). An essentially straight if awkward young man who falls hard, Simon is turned inside out and unmoored by his social transgression.

After Victoria offers to extend their meetings outside the carefully observed milieu of the bar, Simon further disintegrates, using his peculiar combination of vulnerability and psychological acuity to slowly and imperceptibly take over Victoria’s life. He concocts a series of blackmail schemes against several of her regular customers as a way to finance their lifestyle.

Afterschool and Martha Marcy May Marlene were both photographed by the brilliant Jody Lee Lipes. Simon Killer was shot by Joe Anderson, Lipes’ protégé. Campos is a naturally gifted imagist blessed with a striking sense of composition. The movie’s color schemes, with Paris introduced in a dazzling off-blue contrasted with the hard red interiors of the bar, impose a slightly off-kilter sensibility.

Corbet’s Simon (and several secondary characters) are often captured with the camera trailing behind, the camera close to their bodies, as though attached to the back of their heads, a quick and sharp expression of the inner tumult and volatile social surroundings. I also like his expressive use of restricted space, playing off zooms and tracks within confined space.

In the hotel space the two young outlaw lovers share, Campos repeatedly plays with space and movement; there’s a dazzling and ecstatically beautiful moment of the two, their heads unseen, moving and pirouetting around each other. The camera is still and locked down, the bodies in ecstatic forms of release and surrender.

Corbet and Diop are credited, with Campos, of developing the story and they are both mesmerizing. Pasty, even incoherent, Simon acquires a deeply discomfiting menace that coheres in a way both frightening and wholly believable. Beautiful, tragic and emotionally scared, Diop is sensational as a broken angel of deliverance.

Perhaps because he is also dealing with a language he is not fully comfortable, Campos is sometimes more effective at tone and feeling than detail or emotional subtlety. Afterschool felt more organic and held together as storytelling. But the use of opposition, particularly as a second young woman, virginal and blonde, takes hold of Simon’s predatory behavior, the movie moves in other volatile directions.

In Simon Killer, the early ambiguity of Simon’s character study gives way to a slowly evolving though unmistakable portrait of a psychopath. In the movie, his character wrote his dissertation the relationship of the brain and the eye, and how information is processed and intuitively understood.

Simon Killer is designed to infuriate and unsettle, capturing through camera movement, editing and texture a dark and brutal descent. The mood, tone and sharp acting elevate it to something primal and unflinching.

Diary of a failed housewife

(The central couple, Swinton and Reilly, caught in a nightmare. Image courtesy of Oscilloscope Pictures.)

Lynne Ramsay’s bracing, mournful third feature We Need to Talk About Kevin is a psychologically inflected horror tale that lucidly taps into the inexplicable and wholly irrational.

A story of a woman’s grief and moral culpability to a monstrously horrible act, it's anchored by Tilda Swinton’s immaculate and searing performance, the result is intuitively fierce, abrasive and deeply uncomfortable in its implications. Most assertively, it expands on the promise previously shown by the very gifted Scottish filmmaker in her first work since the 2002 Morvern Caller.

Her 1999 debut, Ratcatcher, grounded her immersive and tactile brand of filmmaking and detailed a lyrical feeling for mood, color and emotion. Morvern Caller was couched in a more realistic vein; it also was strikingly accomplished and suggestive as a triumphant showcase of a director’s personality. 

The primary cause of her extended inactivity stemmed from her abortive involvement in the adaptation of Alice Sebolt’s novel The Lovely Bones, that collapsed when the company that owned the literary rights was bankrupted. The continuities of the two works are explicit. Like the Sebolt novel and Peter Jackson’s eventual translation, the new work pivots on a profound social and personal violation. Both are about how the past is superimposed over the present, its emotional concerns and preoccupations developed through the survivors who must survey the damage.

Ramsay has adapted (with the writer Rory Stewart Kinnear) the 2003 novel of the same name by American journalist and author Lionel Shiver. Ramsay has fundamentally altered the novel’s epistolary structure by intensely fracturing time and space, jutting back and forth, the equivalent of skipping the needle on an album. 

The story is related as a series of overlapping and connecting vignettes, gathered around two damaged figures, Eva (Swinton), a writer and publisher, and her teenaged son (Ezra Miller).

The movie is a reverse Oedipal tale of revenge, anger and neglect. From the opening image of a curtain fluttering from a door ajar, the movie is dominated by images of breakdown and turbulence. In the opening half hour, the style is highly impressionistic. Dreams and nightmares are freely entwined, the alternate sensations are of release and ecstasy, especially sexually, like the early courtship of Eva and her husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly) mixed with something far more disturbing and unsettling.

Ramsay’s adaptation hurtles on parallel tracks. In the present, Eva is an X-ray, gaunt, ravaged and wholly withdrawn. Her skin is the color of paste and she is catatonic, moving warily and indecisively. People of order and social privilege, like an older woman who accosts her in the street, pummel her or scream obscenities. She lives in a desultory bungalow in a clearly seedy part of town. One morning she awakes from one of her many benders to find it splattered and defaced with stark red paint.

The past is also unforgiving. From the start, Kevin displays problematic behavior, acting out, willful, stern and uncooperative with his mother. Her impatient, even imperial, manner only worsens the interaction between the two. Her self-involvement is no less off-putting, like a startling moment when negotiating the New York streets with the toddler in a carriage she strands him in close proximity to a construction crew, the sound of the jackhammer rattling and rattling, still unable to drown out the child’s cries.

The family’s move to a suburban paradise, likewise, does not lessen his outbursts. Mother and child remain locked in a series of nasty, brutish fights over power and control. The boy (played in these sections by a frighteningly skilled young actor named Japer Newell) is indolent, untrustworthy and downright cruel, the most unsparing moment when he destroys the carefully arranged patterns and interior work she has labored over intensely. The movie’s subject is not love but its inverse. 

“Just because you’re used to something doesn’t mean you like it,” he snarls at her. “You’re used to me.” 

In the aftermath of Eva’s most inexplicable act, a moment of stupidity and anger that leads to her own form of brutality and abuse, the boy’s chilling response is the first evidence of his own innate pathology.

Ramsay is a collage artist, aided greatly through the eerie and compelling scope imagery of cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and elliptical editing of Joe Bini. It’s also a very confrontational brand of filmmaking; it is heavy and sometimes solemn, awash in symbolism, especially the Christ-like suffering and fall. Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead, composed the score. No less than his work with Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will Be Blood, the soundtrack is dense, allusive and annihilating.

Ramsay’s aesthetic emphasizes a kind of dramatic determinism. The foreboding and sense of doom is a constant. As such, the movie is less interesting for what it reveals than the how. She draws on the horizontal space not to underline the possibility but point out something dangerously amiss. Some of the most evocative imagery builds from the sense of enclosure, like a still shot from the rear perspective of a car’s interior, the windshield hammered by rain.

The stabs at humor are not always successful, though jarring all the same, like Eva’s exchange with a couple of proselytizers who turn up at her door to talk about the afterlife. “I’m going straight to hell,” she responds. Ramsay’s emphatic style is certainly bold, but it’s not always satisfying as narrative.

The weakest part of the film is the relationship of the couple. Reilly’s playing is less freewheeling and persuasive than normal. He’s a terrific actor, but the part is underwritten, there’s little, psychologically, sexually or emotionally, that binds them.

Miller gave a similarly bravura turn in Antonio Campos’ superb Afterschool. His Kevin is more elusive and heartbreaking. He’s a Nietzschean psychopath who makes manifest and ugly Kevin’s contempt. The extent and barbarity of his crime is not very surprising when it is finally revealed. It is no less appalling. 

Swinton’s turn has its own Method flourishes. It’s exhaustive sometimes, but also eerie and fluid. Swinton is especially good at refusing to make Eva either personal or likeable. It’s a great inside-out performance, captured in mood and tone, the physical exhaustion, and goes from there. 

Ramsay has a recurring image, of mother and son, shot in a reverse angle from the point of view of a water tap, the two drawing the beads of water to cleanse their faces. It is the most explicit awareness of the ties that bind the two. Like the movie itself, the two performers get inside you and never let up.

 

Object of desire

(On view: Emily Browning, slippery, opaque, expressive, as a young woman sucked down the rabbit hole of sexual c0mmerce. Image courtesy of IFC and Sundance Selects.)

Australian novelist Julia Leigh makes a curious and fascinating transition to moviemaking with her flawed though suggestive and visually accomplished Sleeping Beauty.

Part of what makes the film unusual is that Leigh shows far greater facility visually and formally than she does with the idiom of moviemaking. The talk is heightened and stylized in a manner that does not always feel right or on. Fortunately she compensates with some lovely directorial flourishes. 

The story of a beautiful though damaged young woman caught in the slippery world of high-end sex worker, it makes for a compelling linkage with French director Catherine Breillat’s The Sleeping Beauty. Both are about power, sexuality and mythmaking. The critical difference is Leigh’s version is deliberately anti-erotic. 

Despite a fearless and impressive performance by young actress Emily Browning, the sex here is anything but fun, glamorous, sensual or liberating. It’s brutish and debasing. The conception and power of the performance strikes the right chords of frailty, skittishness and brazen empowerment.

It’s sex as a purely transactional endeavor. When Lucy (Browning), the young college student whose brought to the attention of the madam (Rachael Blake) that operates the high-end bordello, the older woman sternly cautions her: “Whatever you do, don’t think of this as a career.” Make your money, pay off your debts and get out fast, she admonishes her.

Given her background, the writer of two acclaimed works of fiction, most prominently The Hunter (which has subsequently been made into a film opening here sometime next year), Leigh has talked about various literary influences of her first movie: Yasunari Kawabata’s “House of the Sleeping Beauties” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Memories of My Melancholy Whores.”

It seems also very clear the film is shaped by two masterpieces of movie modernism: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman and Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour. Like the Akerman film, the movie is shaped around process and routine. Leigh hammers the monotony of the interior life of her off-center, inchoate college student. 

Rigorously framed and shot by the excellent cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson, Leigh rarely moves the camera. She prefers long takes from a fixed perspective. In the rare times she does move the camera, the effect is devastating, like a moment midway through the film where the camera pulls back from the nighthawk skyline, where Lucy is naked, asleep in bed, newly living in a sleek and posh high rise. The angle and movement are a piercing reminder of the unusual remunerative benefits of her job.

The camera is present, but never distracted. It’s also never passive. Leigh is studying behavior and action, and underlining the cause and effect of her plunge to a strange otherworld. Estranged from her alcoholic mother, Lucy is taking classes at a local university. She works a couple of dead-end jobs, an assistant at a weirdly unpopulated corporate office and a hostess at a coffee bar and restaurant.

She apprentices for the big job by appearing, in an elaborate performance of a make believe virgin decked out in naughty lingerie, who backs up a chorus line of dark-eyed beauties who serve a group of wealthy elderly men fancy French dishes and expensive wines in topless outré uniforms. For good measure, the women also avail themselves in sexually debased positions, making the similar orgies from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut appear fairly liberating and progressive.

With Lucy now living in the expensive apartment and needed to jack up her income, she agrees to the more lucrative stake of high end prostitution, with a twist. She is drugged, placed in bed by her female handler and the older, clearly damaged clients are repeatedly told they are strictly prohibited from vaginal sex.

Sleeping Beauty is not a feminist tract or a subversive piece of pop art. It is an intelligent and thoughtful consideration of the anarchic and combustible intermingling of sex and control. The older men are largely pathetic and detestable, but Leigh allows one sharp and compelling act of confession from a prized client (Peter Carroll) that’s a bit of a showstopper though effective all the same. 

Unlike Zach Snyder in the risible Sucker Punch, Leigh actually demands a performance out of the gifted Browning. I was impressed. It’s a startling performance, capturing torrents of tragedy and a wistful self-recognition of who and what she has become. 
Browning responds with some remarkable work, dancing on the edge of desire, voyeurism and complicity. She’s beautiful, and fearless in what shows about herself.

The movie works because of its refusal to provide easy answers. Lucy is deliberately unmoored; the movie Sleeping Beauty is sharp and compelling at navigating that inner and outer space.

The formal style constantly invites us to watch and look over Lucy until the movie’s chilling denouement. Sleeping Beauty is a curious work, both cold and intuitive about human nature and primal needs. Most important, it sets the stage for two gifted new creative talents, the filmmaker Leigh and the bold Browning.

A mother's revenge

(Ellen Barkin as the still attractive, viper-like mother of the groom in the outrageously drawn though trainwreck like fascination that is Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day. Image courtesy of Phase 4 Films.)

I’m not sure I’ve seen a movie this year I am as conflicted about as Sam Levinson’s debut feature, Another Happy Day. It was the last competition title I saw at Sundance this year. The son of the Hollywood filmmaker Barry Levinson, the twenty-five year Sam won the Waldo Scott award for his elaborately, outlandishly carpentered script.

Every time I was ready to give up on it, something happened, an actor’s gesture, a sharp exchange, kept me in my seat. The good moments are swallowed in the inchoate mess the movie is. It has a blistering speed and frenetic momentum that is alternately wired, entertaining and exhausting.

It was finally too much of too much.

The story is centered around a family wedding, a form so pervasive in American movies they threaten to constitute a subcategory all their own. It makes sense on a story level given the particular manner the ritual allows a riot of possibilities involving class, money, race and above all, sex.

The form reached its zenith during the Depression, when great artists like George Cukor turned out sublime, radical masterpieces like Holiday. In Father of the Bride, Vincente Minnelli introduced a wistful, mourning quality for a time and innocence vanquished.

In the modern era, Robert Altman opened up a new direction with his A Wedding, the roundelay and interwoven story that attacks social mores and lays to waste the hypocrisy, absurdity and epic family dysfunction prevalent in the occasion.

Another Happy Day differs substantially from recent entries like Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married and Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, by paying little if any significant attention to the actual couple. (The actress that plays the bride does not, to the best of my knowledge, utter a line of dialogue.)

In Barry Levinson’s sparkling and sharp debut Diner, a lot of impressive young actors, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, (even Mickey Rourke) and Ellen Barkin made their name in that terrific feature. Now, some three decades later, Barkin is the galvanizing force in her layered, flamboyant lead as the outrageously aggrieved mother trying to come to terms with her past and hold together her almost demonically splintered family. 

That’s not to say there is not some fun to be had. The young filmmaker certainly knows how to start the conversation. The movie is spiky and outré, obvious from the opening line as the participants of the conversation are heard though not seen: 

“Do you think Mom is hot?” 

Barkin plays Lynn, a viper with a sharp tongue who’s defensive, on edge and never one to back down from a confrontation. At the start of the film, she’s driving her two youngest sons, 17-year-old Elliot (Ezra Miller) and Ben (Daniel Yelsky), the conversationalists of the opening, to the upper-class estate of her parents (George Kennedy and Ellen Burstyn) in Annapolis on the occasion of the marriage of her oldest son.

The fireworks are just getting started, especially since the wedding returns Lynn not just to her roots but the source of past pain and recrimination, embodied in the shape of her ex-husband (Thomas Hayden Church) and his trophy wife (Demi Moore). As if that were not enough to deal with, Elliot, a ruthless charmer with a sharp tongue and dangerously quick wit, has done four stints in drug rehab and has a knack for getting kicked out of all the best schools. The youngest son has been diagnosed with a low level grade of autism.

Tonally, Another Happy Day is exaggerated and aggressively over the top. Lynn is brusque with her two other sisters. Her father, a decorated Navy officer, is bedeviled by heart ailments aggravated by a faulty pacemaker. Meanwhile, Lynn’s mother is the kind of patrician Southern belle (“You’re twice as old as civil rights,” says the younger grandchild) who’d rather ignore or pretend problems don’t exist rather than actually confront them. 

“Don’t you have something you want to say to me,” Lynn constantly implores her.

Levinson certainly has a facility for one-liners. To his credit he knows how to juggle a lot of loose ends. The movie’s catalyst for drama and action is Elliot. He lives dangerously off-kilter and knows how to drop the bomb at precisely the right moment.

His addiction is nearly doing him in. In a funny gag that turns dark, he riffles through his grandfather’s drug stash to find a pharmaceutical that turns his lips a shade so dark, he has to apply lipstick to cover up his transgression.

Into this combustible mixture comes Alice (Kate Bosworth), Lynn’s daughter. She plays the kind of fragile and emotionally confused young woman that is a prerequisite for this kind of story. She also underlines some of Levinson’s limitations. She has a history of self-mutilation (a storyline that has become such a staple of American independent first features and Sundance titles it should be permanently banned as a plot device).

The tension becomes a little too predictable and overwrought, predicated on the natural rivalry between Lynn and her ex-husband’s controlling wife. (Levinson reveals which side he’s on by giving the second wife, a word, “irregardless,” that doesn’t exist.)

As the plot careens from one explosive confrontation to another, the movie never settles into a comfortable enough groove to allow the characterization and stories to develop either a livable interior space or real emotional tract. At those moments when it does try to get serious, dealing with Elliot’s addiction and depression, it seems fatally underdeveloped.

Likewise, some of the other formal elements Levinson introduces, like using a movie camera to tell part of the story, seems imported from too many other movies to register with any effectiveness on  its own.  

He needs more faith in his own characters and situations. He has a good eye (and ear) for casting. Miller, who is brilliant in Antonio Campos’s Afterschool and Lynn Ramsay’s forthcoming We Need to Talk about Kevin, is electrifying and compulsively watchable. I just wish the material were to his level. 

Another Happy Day is a bit of a train wreck, weirdly compelling though never truly edifying or revealing enough to justify spending more time than necessary with the characters. 

Ceremony

(Dust in the wind: Kirsten Dunst's bride moving across the nighthawk landscape. Image courtesy of Magnolia.)

The moment I saw Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, at Cannes, I felt it superb and breathtaking, the director’s best film since Breaking the Waves. I’ve certainly been drawn to his other work in the decade and a half between those two films, especially Dancer in the Dark and Dogville. 

There’s always a lot to look at and consider in a von Trier film, though too often I found them more formally admirable than emotionally satisfying. I thought Antichrist ravishing to look at and I loved the fearlessness of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s performance. The self-laceration, a constant in the director’s work, I found so off-putting and punishing that much of the bruising second half, I largely turned my head away in disgust.

Of course, the new movie (or more accurately, von Trier) has been notorious since its Cannes premiere. Though von Trier cannot quite, or more defiantly, will not disengage himself from the fallout of his appalling utterances at his Cannes press conference, enough time has passed so the discourse has by necessity shifted to the work itself (unlike Europe, where the film opened in most markets immediately after the festival).

Interestingly, von Trier’s early career (especially Europa) was marked by a Wellesian visual bravado. His movies were not meant just to provoke but change cinema. (When the Cannes jury led by Roman Polanski the year Europa played there failed to see it that way, von Trier naturally denounced Polanski). 

Maybe, von Trier’s comments at Cannes were the logical conclusion. Befitting a movie postulating the end of existence, Melancholia is an annihilating text. It’s fundamentally a work concerned with its own demise. At Cannes, von Trier said the film constituted a working out of his own crippling bouts of depression. 

Breaking the Waves took von Trier's career into a new direction, especially in its pioneering, even experimental uses of the digital format (I especially loved those exquisite chapter headings he framed each part of the story). 

The new title, about a small planet hurtling toward Earth, is composed in three movements: an overture and two long “chapters,” named after the movie’s two leads, sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Gainsbourg).

Melancholia is filled with some abstractly beautiful, overpowering moments: in the somber overture, the first images of surrender and apocalypse are of birds dropping from the sky, electrical bolts discharged from Justin’s fingertips, Claire carrying her son across a golf course, her heavy footprints ominous and foreboding, with the harsh strains of Tristan und Isolde on the soundtrack.

“Justine,” is a volatile, heady mixture of private anguish, public ritual and social embarrassment. The chapter details Justine’s extravagant wedding, a bacchanal of abandon, pain and celebration, to the good-looking though astoundingly naïve groom Michael (Alexander Skarsgård).  It starts disastrously, the couple trapped in a ridiculously oversized limo that proves unable, regardless of who's at the wheel, to negotiate the curves of the baronial landscape where the ceremony unfolds.

Von Trier’s Brechtian stylization has always functioned simultaneously as political theater and narrative ploy, situating his work in a strange and surreal physical space, an “America,” that exists purely in the realm of myth and received ideas. Realism, like the planet, is under constant attack. 

It also lays bare the profound cultural and social differences of the two sisters, their different accents, Justine’s colloquial, slangy and very “American,” and Claire’s tight, brittle and French-accented. The distancing is established from the start, moving bit by bit toward a wholly different rapture and judgment.

The movie has some absolutely stunning imagery, given a poignancy and depth because of the angle and point of view contained within. For instance, the most intoxicating moment of the wedding ceremony occurs when the guests congregate outside and create their hand-made balloons, marked with special insignia and well wishes, and they release into the ink-drawn night sky.

Or in the second chapter, when the point of view shifts to Claire, the camera floats above the clouds and looks down on a riding party moving across a charged landscape.  

The central two-part structure, with each section closing just over an hour long, connecting to the frayed consciousness of the two sisters, internalizes and makes palpable the unrest, confusion and mounting dread of the impending destruction. Melancholia majestically moves between inner and outer space. Unlike Antichrist, which I often thought grotesque, von Trier’s linking of sexuality and freedom registers more forcefully.

For a film whose ending is known at the start, Melancholia is never less than unpredictable, tough and even riotously funny (thanks to John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling as the sisters’ parents and Udo Kier as a deranged wedding planner.)

The director has given Dunst a role no other filmmaker has ever claimed her capable of, and she delivers with a readiness, impulsiveness and daring that proves revealing, sad and powerful.

Just like the movie.

Two lovers

(Bodies in motion: a gilded young couple in the ecstasy of love in Drake Doremus' third feature, Like Crazy. Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.)

The young filmmaker Drake Doremus makes a startling and tremendous forward leap technically and aesthetically with his third feature Like Crazy, a French New Wave-inflected mood piece charting the jagged and unpredictable emotional currents of a young couple.

The film marks the second consecutive year the 27-year-old Doremus has premiered a movie in the Sundance dramatic competition. The new work captured the grand jury prize.

Last year’s Douchebag featured some compelling parts, but the whole was damaged by the spectacularly ill-conceived central character whose extreme self-regard and neurosis made the work extremely difficult to make a useful or exciting connection.

Doremus worked on the script with Ben York Jones, who played the second lead in Douchebag. That second feature was fairly harsh and abrasive. The new work is elliptical and impressionistic, shot largely hand held, and like most of the touchstones it is indebted to, like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless or John Cassavetes’s Shadows, the movie has an impulsive and gliding quality that colors the mood and tone and yields a fresh and lovely texture.

At the same time the movie is likely to severely divide people. As storytelling the movie requires some fundamental leaps of logic and plausibility. At times the movie’s almost too much of a good thing. Doremus sacrifices character depth for style and form. In the second half he strains for some dramatic contrasts and symbolism that proves a little emphatic.

Even so, the imperfect parts never cancel out what is distinctive and interesting. The characters are wiling to plunge into difficult areas, and the movie has a limber, avid quality, a sense of quest, that propels the material constantly forward. The movie examines the intoxicating possibility of love and loss with both seriousness and tact.

The story details the tense, prickly and unconventional relationship between Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones). Their attraction seems inevitable. The two are introduced as they approach their graduation from a Los Angeles university. She’s a British exchange student studying journalism, beautiful, bright, and terrifically composed. He’s a ruggedly good looking charmer with a sensitive side who makes eclectic furniture.

She initiates matters with a deeply confessional note (“I hope you don’t think I’m a nutcase,” she writes). In one swoop, the two are feverishly drawn to each other, inseparable and intoxicated by the lyrical possibilities of love and solidarity. Doremus and his very talented cinematographer John Guleserian work in tight, compacted spaces and a narrow depth of field that annotates the sense of rupture and excitement between the two.

The filmmaking is mostly tactile and expressive and captured in a rush of often spellbinding imagery, like a reverse angle shot of Jacob riding a go-cart, overwhelmed by the speed and exhilaration of the moment. Like the romantic reveries of Wong Kar-Wai, the filmmakers keep the camera close to the actors bodies; it pivots, dances and swirls around their bodies in creating an ecstatic whirl.

If the opening movement has a liquid flow, the middle and closing passages are shaded by a darker and more pessimistic register. The nature of their relationship is forever changed by a seemingly unremarkable personal action when, in the heat of a passionate “last night,” Anna overstays the requirements of her student visa after the idea of separation from Jacob proves unbearable.

The decisions proves astonishingly reckless a couple of weeks later when Anna is detained by immigration authorities in Los Angeles and repatriated to London. Immediately the tone shifts from surrender and possibility to something far more difficult and complicated.

As the story shuttles between Los Angeles and London, careening between the fluid shifts in attitudes and feelings between the two, the inevitable confusion and uncertainty about the relationship erupts.

The two are suddenly forced apart, the difficulties of the relationship further complicated by their rising professional careers. Anna lands a job at a prominent London magazine and Jacob’s custom made furniture business flourishes. The separation naturally brings about stain and confusion. Jacob proves particularly aloof and distant, a sharp contrast to Anna’s persistent need for approval.

The writing is graceful and understated, the imagery succinct and movingly precise. If the opening movement was predicated on a dazzling speed, the middle and closing passages are much more mournful, delicate and haunting. Doremus and his excellent young actors are very good at illustrating the disrupted tempos. As the early excitement and deep attraction subsides, the two must negotiate a more difficult emotional terrain of shifting needs, control and independence.

Separated and confused, the two are suddenly drawn to others. Jacob enters into a relationship with Samantha (Jennifer Lawrence). Anna is more circumspect and probably feels guilty, though even she eventually surrenders to her own needs and takes up with her good looking neighbor, Simon (Charlie Bewley).

Like Crazy moves tentatively from there, the time passing quickly, but it sharply delineates the rancor, disappointment and jealousy of the central relationship. As the second half is related through a series of contrasts, the telling proves both unpredictable and cruel. It may not always make narrative sense but it never shrugs from pain and violation in exploring the consequences of tumult and excitement.

It also has two sharp and compelling performances that underline however volatile and moody the relationship, they seem permanently bound.

Hath no fury

(Sound the alarm: Zachary Quinto, as a Wall Street trader, who discovers something startling and unsavory about his profession, in J.C. Chandor's Margin Call. Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions.)

The first movies to examine the 2008 economic collapse were documentaries, most prominently Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s American Casino and Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning Inside Job. They combined an objective toughness with a righteous anger directed at the hubris, arrogance and predatory tactics of Wall Street culture the sparked the international meltdown. 

I first caught J.C. Chandor’s debut feature, Margin Call, at Sundance. The movie opens now at the very existence on an emerging countermovement, the Occupy Wall Street and its corollary actions in London, San Francisco and Chicago, gives rise to a wholly different brand of anger and collective fury.

 Chandor’s film is a brisk, 24-hour snapshot of the panic from inside the corridors of power and entitlement. Chandor has a background in the financial services private sector, and his familiarity has both advantages and an on occasional downside. 

Chandor is not a stylist or visually sophisticated, certainly not in the expressive and fluent way of other first-time Sundance directors were, like Maryam Keshavarz (Circumstance) or Braden King (HERE). Margin Call is persuasive in the details and sharply played by a fine ensemble cast that makes up for some of the protean qualities of the overall conception. What it has to say is not terribly original or groundbreaking, but it is a compelling story briskly told. 

Thankfully Chandor does not swamp the movie in the quotidian or arcane details off the derivative or complicated trading mechanisms of mortgage backed securities or credit default swaps at the heart of the crisis. The movie is set at the incipient stages of the financial collapse, and the early tone is one of fear and overwhelming anxiousness. 

Set inside a fictional Wall Street financial investment firm clearly modeled on the Lehman Brothers, the movie opens with a ritualistic “massacre,” like something out of Up in the Air, with a team of snipers, the human resources division, swooping in on the trading floor to inform the unlucky they are about to be terminated. 

Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the head of the firm’s risk management group, is the highest profile victim. As he is being escorted from the building, Dale hands over a flash drive containing highly sensitive company information and tells one of his lieutenants, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), to “be careful.” 

Sullivan, somewhat naïve and dutiful, is an MIT scholar and rocket scientist who rejected academia and joined the financial services sector, he freely admits, because of the money. Curious and intrigued by Dale’s closing remarks, he applies his own mathematical computations and projections. What he discovers is not a pretty picture.

The trading component is a very lucrative though volatile aspect of the company’s revenues. As such it comes with a very high asterisk, and what Sullivan learns is that the company’s positions are not just questionable though downright “toxic.”

A contraction of the market could effectively render the company worthless. Sullivan immediately notifies his superior Will (Paul Bettany), that sets in motion a series of backdoor meetings, beginning with the managing director, Sam (Kevin Spacey) to the founder and CEO (Jeremy Irons). Chandor delineates the power players, from the law division (represented by Simon Baker and Demi Moore) to the major board signatories. 

Margin Call turns on a series of maneuvers and counteractions, where fiduciary questions about their obligations to clients and bondholders and greater moral culpability is suddenly trumped by their own survivability. The movie’s strength is not necessarily how it all plays out, but rather the private dilemmas and personal demons enacted by the players.

The movie works best surveying that world and pointing out the social hierarchy, where the elite invariably find a way to survive and prosper and how those underneath are often sacrificed at the altar of the church of capitalism. Chandor is very good at elucidating the misogyny coursing through the Wall Street culture, from the cruel epithets and nasty invective betrayed by the higher ups.

If he cannot bring much visual excitement or inventiveness to the movie, he partially compensates with a sharply attuned feel for situations and performances, like a beautifully sustained monologue by Tucci about his character’s background as an engineer occasioned a resourceful solution to social progress and improved daily life. 

By implication, Wall Street is the opposite; it sucks out resources and wealth for the purposes of self-dealing without fully considering the larger implications. At least, that appears the message of Margin Call. It gets a bit muddled at times. It does not always help that some of the other characters are less well defined than say, the analyst Peter Sullivan, and very few of them are very sympathetically drawn.

 Spacey’s financier, a variation of his character from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, appears more interested in the rapidly declining health of his dog than the people that have just been summarily fired at his firm. In Margin Call, character is elastic and more subtle than first appearances imply. Bettany is very effective as a big player suddenly brought down. 

In the end, summarized by a speech Irons’s CEO gives to Spacey, the movie is about a certain kind of self-justification, that the recklessness of the firm is consistent with the operating culture and world they inhabit. 

It is dangerous and I think, not terribly, accurate to yoke together this film with the enveloping movement actually unfolding. It seems fairly clear, whatever your position, the protesters have a collective willingness to unsettle people, to make them uncomfortable. 

Unfortunately Margin Call never breaks the rules to truly become something vital and important. Quinto's Sullivan is a niche actor; Spacey's Sam Riley is the defeated, haunted man, resigned to the mortifying actions; Irons's CEO stands outside, leathery and impersonal, secure in his knowledge his money and power insulate from any kind of public or even private comeuppance.

Margin Call is full of observations, some very credible and sharp, but too often it has a restrained mood and tone that seems antithetical to the material. It sheds light on an elusive culture and with a documentary exactness suggests the source and origins of the profound troubles we now face.

 

Touch of evil

(Olsen and Hawkes in a startling extract from Sean Durkin's superb debut. Image courtesy of Fox Searchlight.)

In the oblique and terrifying Martha Marcy May Marlene, a young woman’s physical and emotional recovery following her flight from a terrifying cult marks a formally audacious and visually sophisticated debut from the very gifted young filmmaker Sean Durkin. 

Produced by Josh Mond and Antonio Campos, the collaborators of Campos’s superb 2009 debut Afterschool, Durkin has adroitly expanded his short film Mary Last Seen, into a disquieting and frightening portrait of surrender and coercion.  

Durkin’s intricate and involving two-part structure unfolds largely through flashbacks, eschewing background and circumstance to depict the story of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, truly stunning), a directionless and susceptible young woman recruited by a handsome stranger, Watts (Brady Corbet) into a collective hiding out in a large farmhouse in the Catskills. 

From the eerie opening, Durkin creates a insinuating and creepy texture of disassociation and entrapment. Martha is introduced with a group of women, identically dressed, who must await their turn while the men finish their evening meal. Moments later, Martha is seen lighting out through the woods, the camera trailing her, as she uses the cover of darkness to aid her escape. Watts confronts her at a local diner, though surprisingly grants her freedom. 

She makes contact with her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), her only surviving relative, and we learn that Martha has been absent two years. Lucy lives with her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), a New York developer. Lucy and her husband provide Martha with the necessary sanctuary in Connecticut three hours from where Lucy made contact with her wayward sister. 

Durkin and his brilliant cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (who also shot Afterschool) fracture time and space, fluidly shifting between the past and present as the torment and sexual subjugation Martha experiences at the farmhouse is contrasted against her overwhelming task of reclaiming her humanity and emotional bearings.  

The filmmakers are especially adept at the startling use of water imagery. Normally a symbol of cleansing and re-birth, in Martha’s distracted and angry condition, it marks a particularly grungy form of violation. With its recurring use of recovered memories, water provides a propulsive sense of plunge and downward movement. 

If Watts is Martha’s conduit into the cult, the leader is the suave and chillingly exact Patrick (John Hawkes). He carries a magnetic hold, personally and sexually, over many of the women. The wiry Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) assigns Martha her new identity, “Marcy May,” and presents a moment both enthralling and unsettling, serenading her with a number, “Marcy’s Song,” that underlines his charisma and magnetism. 

The flashbacks also reveal Patrick’s darker and more vengeful side, a Manson manqué, like a moment involving shooting firearms and a violent home invasion that affirms his pathological skills at convincing his followers to commit the most egregious of crimes.  

Water also marks Martha’s acute reminder of distress and dislocation and indicates her own moral imbalance, like a startling and revealing moment Martha suddenly disrobes and dives into the water near her sister’s vacation home naked. Her own rebirth is met with increasingly disturbing signs of breakdown and perhaps encroaching madness, demonstrated by anxiousness, violent mood swings and aberrant behavior, like the night she coiled up to Lucy in her bed during sex with Ted. 

Like Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter, the movie uneasily moves between the imagination unbound and the nightmarish implications. “Do you ever get that feeling where you can’t tell if something is a memory or something you dreamed,” Martha inquires of her sister.  

In her first significant part, Olsen imbues the work a jolting ferocity and damning insecurity, her body aquiver and arms twisted and bent. The mask of pain and discomfort during Patrick’s forced sexual actions against her leaves you shaken and wiped out. 

Durkin’s spare script teases out information but never overburdens Martha, Lucy or the other primary characters. The strategy is sometimes frustrating but it coolly draws you in. Martha Marcy May Marlene is a mood piece but also a throwback. Durkin and Lipes eliminate primary colors, working almost exclusively in a muted palette that sustains the pervasively menacing tones and uncomfortable rhythms.  

In the most radical notion, the filmmakers and Olsen’s performance suggest no matter the scenario, the cult or her sister’s hideaway, Martha is a prisoner of her own consciousness. Some have complained about the ending, but I find it a knock out closing, a conjuring act that involves the reappearance of one kind of monster, again linked to water, contrasted against an ambiguously uncomfortable and frightening harbinger of unease. 

Martha Marcy May Marlene is one very fine movie.

 

On the waterfront

(Utopia: two world-weary adversaries struggling for the soul of a new Europe, in the lovely and unadorned Le Havre. Image courtesy of Janus Films.)

A new Aki Kaurismäki film is always welcome, especially since his recent output has been more leisurely than the frenetic mode he used to work in when I first got into his movies. 

Character is destiny with him. In his Le Havre, the sardonic gallery of wastrels and solitary dreamers adroitly deploy words as weapons. They strip language to its purest form, to the point it is their primary survival mechanism negotiating the peculiar travails and absurdities of modern life. 

The superb Andre Wilms beautifully incarnates the director’s craggy and unsentimental benchmark, a poet of the lower depths. Wilms works in the tradition of many Kaurismäki’s protagonists. He is a glorious anti-hero and weary romantic who proudly wears his anti-bourgeois sentiment as a rebuke of popular tastes and mass fashions. 

The new film, the director’s first French-language feature since La vie de boheme nearly two decades ago, synthesizes disparate forms and styles. It gloriously luxuriates in the director’s funhouse of rock and roll, formal beauty and deadpan humor. It’s not isolated or set apart but attuned to a collective experience. Kaurismäki shapes it within a larger political context. 

The plot, suggesting an updating of the Howard Hawks’s 1944 film To Have and Have Not, relates a typical Hawksian thread of the reluctant hero drawn into service by his developing conscience to right a grievous wrong. 

One of the film’s marvels is how shrewdly and self-effacingly it pays tribute to the characters, made explicit here by the eccentric presence and outsized characterizations of the various dock workers, merchants, nurses and bar tenders that hover around the proceedings. They imbue the work with a layered, almost musical sense of voices (like all of Kaurismäki’s films, the faces are remarkable, both weathered and evocative, suggesting a wealth of experience, heartbreak and pain). 

Wilms goes by the improbable, fantastic name of Marcel Marx; he’s a writer of local repute known for his extravagant and expensive drinking tastes (“Your bill is as long as the Nile,” says one local merchant). He carefully plots out his days of casual refinement. He now lives in exile in the eponymous French seaport as a bawdy teller of tales who derives a fanciful income as a shoe shiner. 

The tone and humor is set right at the start, the camera catching Wilms and his associate from a tilted angle in the midst of trying to scare up some customers. A group of mysterious figures enters the frame, their motives probably not terribly pure. Just as Marcel completes his work on one of the dapper man in his trench coat, we hear a series of gunshots. “What a poor devil,” Marcel’s friend remarks. It’s good he already paid, Marcel remarks. 

Marcel is raffish and clever, but he’s clearly in love with his long-suffering and willing-to-put-up with anything wife, Arletty (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen). When illness necessitates Arletty’s hospitalization (she cannily withholds from him just how grave her condition is), Marcel suddenly becomes a man of action.

The catalyst is his chance encounter with Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), an illegal African émigré desperate to meet up with his mother in London. Marcel’s opposite number is Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), the taciturn, world weary cop who’s been assigned to locate the boy after the kid escaped from custody after the police discovered a group of African migrants stashed away in a shipping container. Marcel’s own detective work helps him locate the boy’s grandfather, who informs him about the boy’s mother. 

To the extent that Le Havre is concerned with plot, Marcel uses his underworld connections to find a willing transport for the boy provided he could raise the $3,000 euros. He convinces a local rock legend, Robert Piazza (the sublime “Little Bob”) to do a charity gig. Le Havre is beguiling, tough, free work.

Kaurismäki is working in his preferred form, but the tone is elastic and deeply humane, evidenced by the sharp and emotionally buoyant secondary characters, like the luminous local barmaid Yvette (Evelyne Didi). She deepens the movie’s grace and texture, giving it a particular glow. 

The movie sharply melds old and new, classic Hollywood with groundbreaking French works (nouvelle vague icon Jean-Pierre Leaud turns up as a “denouncer,” or rat). The details emerge through the director’s meticulous, beautifully upholstered creation.

Kaurismäki alternates between studio-bound sets that deploy gorgeous, stylized lighting with open air and location work that creates a pungent and distinctive atmosphere. The jokes have a great sting, sly, funny and alert, like a local businessman, who confronted by the cops and asked to explain his own motivation, simply replies: “I love my country.”

The jokes are not just aural though visual, the most spectacular set piece an extended visual riff involving a seemingly shopworn gag, Marcel toting around a pineapple that in the elaborately choreographed camerawork achieves a moment worthy of Keaton. 

Kaurismäki has always mined a very Scandinavian brand of humor that freely mixes laughter and self-recognition with a lacerating pain. The colors here are razor-sharp (the great cinematography is by Timo Salminen), but the mood is playful and optimistic, teasing out the possibility of hope and wonder. 

Le Havre celebrates the past, but just as important, its maker finds a glorious reason to be alive and kicking.