Light Sensitive

John Woo

 
(John Woo, on the set of Red Cliff. All images courtesy of Magnet.)

 

John Woo’s poetic and soulful movies are one of the highpoints of action cinema of the last two and a half decades. Introduced to Western audiences in the late eighties with his Better Tomorrow series and the astounding The Killer and A Bullet in the Head, Woo is a master choreographer of action and movement whose emotionally-driven themes of the loner, betrayal and solitude suggest a funky mélange of Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray and (especially) Jean-Pierre Melville.

 

Woo has spent much of the last decade and a half working in Hollywood, on both ambitious personal projects like Windtalkers to studio assignments such as Mission: Impossible II and Paycheck. His Hollywood period is highly uneven; my personal favorite is Face/Off, the most violent of his works, but also the one most reflective of his personality and view of human behavior and motivation. There remains in much of his Hollywood work a sense of compromise and withholding.

 

Red Cliff is Woo’s first narrative feature in six years. The most expensive film ever made in China, at some eighty million, the movie was shown there in a two-part, nearly five hour version. Woo’s “international version,” clocking in just under two and a half hours, debuted in New York last week and begins opening in other markets this week.

 

The story is based on a seminal period in Chinese history, the early third century battle of Red Cliffs, staged on the south bank of Yangtze River, during the crucial transition of the end of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms. Set during the particularly vicious and violent history of warlords and political operatives fighting to consolidate power and control, the movie is a large scale entwining of the political and personal. Chen Shou’s novel is the jumping off point, though Woo has said he has tried to rely more on the historical record.

 

 

 

The five-hour version, which I’ve not seen, is said to be a much more satisfying work. Even so, this is the Woo that I find the most exciting, an artist and warrior who never fears going too far. The action is grounded in a delirious emotionalism.

 

Woo’s American-cut played the Chicago Film festival last month, where I had a chance to talk with him.

 

Light sensitive: How did you arrive at making two versions?

 

John Woo: That was the plan before we started shooting. Since the Asian audience is very familiar with this history and all the characters, we can afford to have much time developing the characters and the relationships between them. For the Western audience, since they’re not as familiar with the history that made us focus more on the storyline and the key characters. That’s why we decided to make two versions. In many ways it’s still the same movie. It’s just that the international version is tighter and more focused.

 

Light sensitive: You have talked about this as a dream project. What makes this story so personally resonant?

 

John Woo: I grew up with this part of history. I grew up with the story, and there were so many heroes that I admire. I’ve been thinking of making this movie for more than thirty years. It’s a very challenging project. I was so fascinated by the theme of a smaller army defeating a much stronger and more powerful enemy through a combination of teamwork, courage, intelligence and love. The battle of Red Cliff was a very famous battle in Chinese history.

 

I must say it’s every director’s dream. I always wanted to make a movie like Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, Seven Samurai; for so many years we couldn’t get it budgeted or the technology, but now we have the money and the technology.

 

 

Light sensitive: In Hong Kong, you didn’t always have the resources. In Hollywood, you didn’t always have the freedom you needed. This seems like the best of both of your worlds.

 

John Woo: It just feels like I’m going back to the old days; everything is much more simple. I want to make a movie called Red Cliff. They said, Okay, let’s do it. I didn’t have to take any meetings or any advice. I just shut the door and did my own work. We had support from the government; we had 700-1,500 soldiers working on the set almost every day. I can really make a movie in my own vision.

 

Even though it is a historical based story, I had the intention of making it into a film. I realized there are so many frustrations in the world, quite a few young people in Asia, people giving up their lives, I could have the freedom to change it into an encouraging movie. What we need is to work together to solve all kinds of problems. The more positive tone was not from the book.

 

Light sensitive: Did you feel more liberated working this way?

 

John Woo: I think so. Since I couldn’t get any better scripts after Paycheck, I just decided I should try something else. I should try to make my dream project. But I still miss Hollywood. Everything is so well organized and professional.

 

Light sensitive: How has digital technology altered your way of working?

 

John Woo: Fortunately we were working [with very good technicians from the] United States. We worked with the action supervisor Craig Hayes. He was very involved, and he was studying this part of history. When we designed the battle sequence, he gave us ideas and I tried to make everything work. The Chinese and Korean crews were also deeply involved. The turtle formation, for instance, was my idea. We used [computer graphic imagery] to add more people, like adding more people to the burning ships. Audiences couldn’t really tell which was live action and which was CG. We combined them. We built twenty-five ships, and we used a combination of real ships and digital effects.

 

Light sensitive: This film is a strong example of your aesthetic, the idea of action as pure emotion.

 

John Woo: In my films it’s mostly about character and emotion driving the action. I’ve never been interested in action just for action. I try to find something that gets meaning from the action. In Red Cliff, we had three major battle scenes; but they all involved character and a very strong message. For the final battle, I tried to stress that in war, there are no winners. The human message [of the film], about the futility of war, an anti-war movie, is pretty clear. When we illustrate the turtle formation, it’s funny because it’s tied to the characters. It’s not just abstract.

 

Light sensitive: Is it true your next project is an American remake of Melville’s Le samurai?

 

John Woo: Hopefully it’s going to be one of my next projects. We’re working on the script and the copyright. I tried to remake this movie for years. It would be an American film, and we have financing from Japan. Now it’s just in the script process.

 

Light sensitive: The dominant manner that our film past is preserved or looked at now is on DVD. Many of your key Hong Kong films are either not available here or are circulate in very poor transfers. What is the status of so many of those films?

 

John Woo: I don’t know much about that. Once in a while I try to get my original version of A Bullet in the Head out and do my director’s cut. After I checked, the Hong Kong lab never saved any of the extra negatives or scenes. They just threw it away like garbage. That’s what they did for all the Hong Kong films, so there’s no way to do the director’s cut. It’s one of my favorite movies. I really wish people could see the original version, two hours and forty minutes long of A Bullet in the Head. So many people love that movie.

 

 

 

 

Two Bad

 

(Nicolas Cage in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Image courtesy of Toronto International Film festival.)

 

Film festivals are often time machines. You stand in line, at a theater, walk down a street, and you’re transported to that same space, theater, you found yourself years before. That was certainly the sensation I felt at Toronto’s Cumberland seeing a press screening of Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

 

I saw Abel Ferrara’s original at the same festival seventeen years earlier, at the now vanished Uptown. Through my connection to the original film’s distributor, Paul Cohen, I was introduced to Ferrara that night. Abel was then, as now, pure id; just like his moviemaking, everything was about his own pleasure and sensation. Everybody else that night talked about having a celebratory dinner, Abel only talked about haunting the notorious strip club across the street.

 

It was also my introduction to Edward R. Pressman, a key figure in seventies independent cinema (the first significant producer of De Palma and Malick). He made an odd pairing with Ferrara. He was everything Abel wasn’t: refined, self-contained and emotionally detached. They made several other films together. Their paths diverted, and now Pressman’s the connecting thread of the two films. He’s also a producer on the Herzog version.

 

After the new version was announced in production, Abel promptly wished eternal damnation on Herzog, Pressman, star Nicolas Cage (whom Abel unsuccessfully sought for his own movie The Funeral, made a couple of years after his Bad Lieutenant). Herzog upped the ante, trashing Ferrara and claiming (rather unconvincingly) he’d never seen the original.

 

Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is his masterpiece, the most daring and fascinating work from his most exciting period. I was looking recently at the high definition transfer of King of New York, the crime thriller Ferrara made just before Bad Lieutenant. The night poetry and verve of the moviemaking is absolutely breathtaking. Ferrara’s instinctive, intuitive play of light and texture, of camera movement and action, was so dead on and vibrant.

 

A meditation of sex, death and guilt, Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant centers on Harvey Keitel’s dangerous, uninhibited performance of a damaged, tortured “artist,” a New York detective assigned to a horrifying crime, the rape of a nun that occasions his own loss and faith and eventual ruin. His belief shattered by the ruthlessness of the crime, he surrenders to his weakest impulses, addiction, gambling, and squanders his own moral authority. Ferrara’s movie is a kind of annihilating work that rejects the lieutenant’s search for deliverance, offering instead the worst kind of comeuppance.

 

The original was rated NC-17, and one largely unknown casualty was my friend Paul Cohen’s boutique company, Aries Releasing. The aristocratic investors that had staked Paul’s company were so personally offended by the material and Paul’s association with the work, they withdrew their capital support and Paul was eventually forced to close the concern.  Paul distributed some interesting movies back then, and he remains in the business in various capacities (another former concern, Manhattan Pictures, distributed Godard’s In Praise of Love). That was his finest hour. Ferrara’s also made some interesting movies since, but nothing approaching the concentration and intensity of feeling of his Bad Lieutenant.

 

I approached the new film with trepidation. I was put off by Herzog’s remarks about the first film. Guilt by association or not, I was also not terribly encouraged given the involvement of the movie’s financial partners, Nu Image Films and Millennium Films. What I also heard out of Venice was also not terribly assuring.

 

Nonetheless I have to admit I was hooked by this iteration pretty much from the start. With the exception of Lessons of Darkness, Herzog’s documentaries are not visually distinctive. His narrative features tend to be over composed and studied. The nocturnal beauty and off-handed atmospheric color and sinuous mood established in the texture and imagery of Czech cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger is rather striking.

 

It sharply establishes a sense of place and time that credibly evolves into the more hallucinatory and perverse visual strategies of the movie’s middle and closing parts. It’s been rather disconcerting to see Cage waste his considerable gifts on so many artistically worthless projects the last decade. It doesn’t exactly make up for what he’s done, but it is certainly a potent reminder of how good he can be. Unlike Keitel’s, the cop played by Cage has a name, Terence McDonagh.

 

Both films are grounded in moral outrage, the rape of the nun in the original and the senseless mass killing of an African émigré family connected to local drug traffickers in the new version. Terence’s addiction to pain killers is brought about by an act of valor, diving into the flooding waters to save a man from drowning. Some of the best writing (and speaking, like Manhola Dargis’s audio and print essay) about the two films is about the two quite different physical performances. Both are fundamentally about the primacy of the flesh. Keitel is raw, open and aggressive. By contrast, Cage’s work is about a different kind of physical repression, the corkscrew, tortured way he tries to hold himself together.

 

The most notorious scene of the first, Keitel’s cop forcing two young women to simulate oral sex as he masturbates in front of them is riffed on twice in the new version, where Cage shakes down affluent casual drug users and humiliates them sexually by lording it over their girlfriends. The bleakness of the first is now replaced by a pitch-black irony in which pretty much everybody gets what they deserve.

 

Interestingly, Spike Lee ostensibly appropriated the ending of Ferrara’s film for his own adaptation of Clockers (explicitly acknowledged in the casting of Keitel as a cop). The final forty minutes or so of the Herzog feels like the brilliant counter narrative that ended Lee’s The 25^th Hour. I kept waiting for the dream to evaporate. I’m not sure that either Herzog or the screenwriter William Finkelstein really knows what they’re trying to say.

 

 

The pleasure is in the telling, the privileged moments with the secondary characters. The criminally underused Fairuza Balk turns up in a brief part as a highway patrol cop; her pas a deux with Cage is one of the most sexually charged moments of recent cinema (the voluptuous way the camera swirls and pivots around her exposed, angled leg is something else). If Balk had been cast as the love interest rather than Eva Mendes, the new work might have actually approached the brilliance of the original. Mendes is not bad, but she’s fairly blank and inexpressive

 

The rhythms of both films are not just reflected in the personalities of the directors, but the styles of the lead actors. Because of Keitel, the first one is interior, brutish, self-lacerating; the new work is loopy, half-cocked, fun and clever but not terribly deep or provocative. Ferrara and Keitel’s version is one of those unimproved upon pieces, very much a work of its time and making. The new one catches a different kind of redemption that translates a meaningful career recovery for its director and star.

 

 

 

Polish Film Festival in America

 

(Ania, one of the three protagonists of Warsaw Available. Images courtesy of the Polish Film Festival in America.)

 

Chicago’s Eastern European émigré community is one of the largest in the country. It makes

for some lively cultural activities.

 

The Polish Film Festival in America is one of the highlights. I’ve been doing some lecturing and director interviews for the festival. It connects, in a way, to the recent post about 1989. The moral authority registered by the Polish-born Pope John Paul II and the birth of the Polish Solidarity movement augured the end of the Soviet totalitarianism.  The transition to open market has been no less complicated, particularly following the closing of the state’s collective farms in 1991.

 

One film that caught my eye is Warsaw Available. It’s a very impressive, visually assured and emotionally open hour-long documentary about the intersecting lives of three young Polish girls—Gosia, Ania and Ilona—who were recruited by a state social service agency from the poverty stricken rural countryside and villages to come to Poland’s largest city and learn job skills.

 

The movie had its international premiere at the PFFA and is set to have its Polish broadcast premiere on Jan. 3^rd. I spoke to the movie’s accomplished young directors, Karolina Bielawska and Julia Ruszkiewicz. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

 

Light sensitive: How did you decide on these three girls?

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: We traveled all throughout Poland to find the most interesting characters for our movie. We would like to find the most determined person who knew what they wanted to achieve in Warsaw. We wanted girls who had some goals to reach and really wanted to change their lives. In our opinion, these three girls were the most determined ones we found.

 

Karolina Bielawska:  These are girls from very poor societies. These people have the problem of not knowing what they want. This area the girls are from, these villages were these state-owned collective farms; people lived there as if time had stopped, and that way of thinking is still the same. They don’t think they’re responsible for themselves. They are socially handicapped.

 

Light sensitive: What brought you together for this work?

 

Karolina Bielawska: We found at a similar time the subject in the newspapers, and we had a small conversation. I knew she wanted to do it, and I already had some contacts. I knew that one character was not enough. We agreed that she would take one character and I would take one character and we’d work together. Julia had Ania, I had Gosia and we split Ilona.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: We knew each other from the same film school in Katowice. We were studying there.

 

Karolina Bielawska: We appreciated the work each had done before so we knew that would not be fighting too much. There is something she could give me and I could give her, and it would be something.

 

(Julia Ruszkiewicz)

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz:  We already knew at the same time many things would happen to each character, so it would be possible for one person to be with three characters. That’s why we decided to collaborate.

 

Light sensitive: The movie’s a documentary, but the formal structure at times feels closer to a fiction work. At the very least, it feels like a hybrid of forms.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz:  The way we did this movie was the Polish traditional documentary school, where the directors were the watchers. We were following with the camera through the characters. We didn’t create anything; we didn’t direct the characters. The way we made the movie was similar to the fiction way of making movies.

 

Karolina Bielawska: The view was very important. We are talking and showing these girls through pictures. The power is in the picture, like a drama or fiction film. I like very much this way of working, so did Julia.

 

Light sensitive: The Polish documentaries I know, like those by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrzej Munk, were kind of seriocomic looks at Polish life and cultural institutions.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: We believed the picture would show so much it wasn’t necessary to comment. The viewer can go on the same trip with the girls, like we did.

 

Karolina Bielawska: I think for Kieslowski and the same as us we are thinking about one individual person. We didn’t know where the film would go. We were just following these girls and went after them. I think Kieslowski was doing that as well. The meaning comes out. When you’re working, it’s important to be conscious of the characters.

 

Light sensitive: Do you think because you’re women it was easier to gain the trust of the different girls.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: Maybe somehow, but I think the most important thing is that we spent a lot of time with them. It was the most important thing we did because we worked with them for two and a half years. We weren’t necessarily shooting all the time, but we were spending a lot of time together so the girls trusted us.  That’s why you can be so close with the camera. Some people asked us how did the girls know we were shooting. They were always aware. We didn’t do hidden cameras or anything surreptitious like that. We didn’t hide the crew.

 

Karolina Bielawska: I had this experience before in doing a film about prisons in Saint Petersburg. I had time to listen to what they had to say. You have to be a person. You have to be your character. You don’t watch them like you are better than them; you have to understand. You have to always be very curious about your characters.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: We’re describing a social phenomenon. It’s not only a problem with these three girls. There are a lot of characters like our girls in Poland. It’s a global problem. For us the best way of describing the social phenomenon is to be focused on the individuals.

 

(Karolina Bielawska) 

 

Karolina Bielawska: The main problem with our girls is that they don’t have any mental tools to change their life. It’s not a matter of poverty, that they don’t have money.  They’re just not informed. They’ve never been to a cinema; for Gosia it was the first time on a train.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: The reason they cannot change their lives is that they are not educated at all.  They’ve only gone to primary school. That’s why these girls give up, not because they didn’t want to change their lives but they didn’t know how. It’s too much for them to start everything at the beginning when they are nineteen years old.

 

Light sensitive: Were you fearful at all of the girls, knowing they were filmed, that it changed or altered their behavior.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: At the beginning it was like that, but when you spend a lot of time with your characters and you know them, you can feel and you know when they behave in a natural way or when they try to be someone else.

 

I think the fact that they’re in a movie helped them somehow. Because for the first time they start to ask themselves the question of what they want or what they need. It was the first time they were really asked to think about things like that. Somehow this movie changed them. They saw a different way of living and thinking.

 

Karolina Bielawska: This is not a problem of how to help the people who are very poor; it’s not that you just give them money because it doesn’t solve the deeper problem. They could talk with us and they could think about their lives and maybe something could change in their lives.

 

Light sensitive: Are you in contact now with any of the girls?

 

Karolina Bielawska: One of the characters was the premiere two weeks ago in Poland and we’re still in contact with the other two.

 

Light sensitive: Your movie is powerful, but there’s an underlying sadness. The story of each girl ends with a question mark. We don’t know exactly how their lives are going to turn out, it’s difficult to feel anything but pessimistic.

 

Karolina Bielawska: That was the reality. We don’t want to show people what to do. We didn’t want to make an education movie.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: At the same time we don’t feel we can tell anyone how to live. It’s a bit irresponsible to tell people what to do or how to change.  We wanted to ask why is it some people can change, can do something with their life and some don’t.

 

Light sensitive: How did you each discover you wanted to be a filmmaker?

 

Karolina Bielawska:  I always knew I wanted to be a director. I had a sister and she lives in Los Angeles. She’s much older. I was in love with her, and I thought she was a director. As a small child I wanted to be just like her, so I said I wanted to be a director. When I was a teenager, I found out she was a producer. It stayed with me. I had this focus on that. It’s incredible in that it came to me, I didn’t choose.

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: My story was different. I was eighteen years old and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life or who I wanted to be. I was watching movies all the time. Then it just came to me, one day I was in the cinemas, I don’t even remember what I was watching, and I realized this is what I wanted to do. I completely fell in love with the movies; I went to the cinemas and tried to meet some people in the industry to see how they work. I decided to go to the film school. I tried three times.

 

I was very curious about people’s different relations, and how they lived, what did they think. I was a very calm child. When I finished high school, I told people I was starting my directing study and they were surprised of how it’s possible such a calm and quiet person could be a director.

 

Light sensitive: The artistic direction of your futures: are you likely to move into narrative fiction films or stay in documentaries?

 

Julia Ruszkiewicz: I think we are going to do both. For me making the documentary movie prepared me the best for making the drama. I think the best stories are the ones based on actual stories.

 

You get the experience, and you couldn’t write it because life is more irrational and full of surprises than our imagination.

 

Karolina Bielawska: Our documentaries are like fiction and our fiction films are like documentary.

 

Nineteen eighty-nine: plus twenty

 

 

New York movie lovers are celebrating the glory, strangeness and richness of 1962. Historians and cultural journalists are studying the year 1989, which as it happens, for me, is the far more personally relevant year.

 

I was not yet born in sixty-two, but nineteen eighty-nine was something. That was the first time I attended a significant international festival—Toronto. It was almost impossible to grasp the historical dynamics at the time, but perched as it was between Tiananmen and the fall of the Berlin wall, Toronto was an exceptionally heady time.

 

But also the movies I saw that year, a partial list I’m drawing from memory: Hou’s A City of Sadness, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, John Woo’s The Killer, Bertrand Blier’s Trop belle pour toi, Arthur Penn’s Penn & Teller Get Killed, Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, Jane Campion’s Sweetie, Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome, Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy, David Hare’s Strapless, Denys Arcand’s Jesus de Montreal and Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But.

 

Perhaps most significantly, the festival put together an impressive sidebar on the history of Polish cinema, focusing on Kieslowski, where I saw four or five episodes of Kieslowski’s magisterial The Decalogue, and films by Agnieszka Holland and Jerzy Skowlimowski.

 

Right after I got back from Cannes this year, I saw a gorgeous, newly struck print of Hou’s A City of Sadness at DOC Films at the University of Chicago. (I suspect BAM used the same print for their screening the other day.) Up until that time, in Toronto of eighty-nine, I was certainly aware of Hou Hsiao-hsien, though I don’t believe I’d actually seen any of his films. The five or six times I’ve seen A City of Sadness subsequently have done nothing to temper or measure my unqualified praise. It was of course the first part of Hou’s amazing trilogy about the formation of modern Taiwan (the other works were the no less astounding The Puppetmaster and Good Men, Good Women)

 

The other historically significant development was quite sad: Sergio Leone (Jan. 3) and John Cassavetes (Feb. 2) died a month apart. In between those deaths Steven Soderbergh showed an unfinished cut of sex, lies and videotape at the U.S. Film Festival (renamed Sundance two years later). The movie’s importance was not really conferred until a couple of months later when the Wim Wenders’ jury at Cannes gave it the Palme d’Or. At the same festival, Spike Lee premiered Do the Right Thing.

 

 

I remember interviewing Soderbergh and Lee about a month apart that summer. The Soderbergh interview was published in the Chicago-based national alternative paper, In These Times, and it became the first piece I ever wrote for them. In These Times became a steady outlet for my writing and festival coverage for the next couple of years.

 

 

Lee’s galvanic third feature I found mostly mesmerizing. A couple of years earlier Lee’s feature debut She’s Gotta Have It and Jarmusch’s second film Stranger Than Paradise helped detonate a new “New American Cinema.” I was compelled after the screening of A City of Sadness to go back and start at looking at some of the films from that year.

 

The other night, I looked at the high-definition DVD of Do the Right Thing. Lee has certainly made some interesting and adventurous movies in the last two decades, but I was struck by a prominent absence in Lee’s work, the cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. He shot every Lee film from student works to Malcolm X. Dickerson gave Lee’s work a visual concentration and precision that has been much more hit and miss in the intervening years (with the exception of the recent films shot by the very gifted Matthew Libatique).

 

Dickerson’s visual mastery also helps smooth over some of the more didactic aspects of the script. Watching it today, I really love the egalitarianism of the movie: the Preston Sturges-like love of the secondary player and how beautifully, even rhapsodically Lee weaves them into a mosaic of local color, complicated characterizations and tightly constructed narrative. The movie unfolds over a jam-packed twelve or fourteen hours on the “hottest day of the year.”

 

Some of the strongest and most evocative material is when Lee liberates his camera and simply stops the proper narrative to isolate feeling and action, drawing on the rhythms, textures and attitudes of his characters: Rosie Perez dunking her head in a fish tank to escape the heat; Lee’s Mookie sensually running an ice cube over Perez’s pulchritudinous body; a group of kids opening up the spigot on a fire hydrant, letting the water cascade violently, hilariously in every direction.

 

I also think those critics and commentators who criticized the movie at the time (or even today) for the casualness of its construction, the feeling it’s somewhat inchoate and lacks a strong point of view, are denying one of the movie’s central pleasures. It’s the very rambling, discursive nature of the work that gives it such a throbbing, compelling interior life. One thing I remember quite clearly from my interview with Lee is that he was very insistent on not viewing black culture as monolithic. Even when some of the characters feel crudely drawn (especially John Turturro’s racist lout), Lee returns to a critical point that the characters are “complicated,” self-negating, exasperating, contradictory, but almost always vividly played and developed.

 

Lee saves his harshest treatment and most penetrating critiques for the black characters, especially the men. “Why you hate me so much,” Ossie Davis’ gloriously downbeat Da Mayor asks of the neighborhood scold, the righteous Mother Sister (the equally divine Ruby Dee). “’Cause you a drunk fool.”

 

“’Sides that.”

 

The fact that Lee gives so much space to the marginalized and politically dispossessed (the unholy trinity of Radio Raheem, Bugging Out and Smiley), the movie makes explicit that no matter how uncomfortable or abrasive their actions and attitudes are, the underlying rationale is one of connection, humanity and the desire to be seen as individuals.

 

So much of the movie makes no narrative sense (Bugging Out, we’re told, is a frequent visitor to the Sal’s pizza joint, but he just now realized on the day in question about the absence of “brothers on the wall”).  Others are still bothered by what they believe is Lee’s sanitizing lower middle-class black existence by omitting any reference or dramatic incidents of vice and illegality.  It’s a fair point, no doubt; the whole movie, I think, is never intended as naturalistic. That’s obvious from the intense stylization of the material, the stunning title sequence with Perez dancing on what is clearly a soundstage or the racist montage or Samuel Jackson’s disruption of the narrative line.

 

And the humor cuts like a scalpel, especially the stuff with the incomparable Robin Harris, Sweet Dick Willie, the nerviest of the three idlers that sit permanently perched in front of the blazing red brick wall. “If Mike Tyson even dreams of whipping my ass, he better wake up and apologize,” he says. The entire movie is a marvel of casting.

 

By its conclusion it is funny, sad, overwrought, a little pretentious perhaps, but also exhilarating and quite devastating. It’s of its time, but also very about the time, as Lee said, of the social and racial antagonisms of living in New York at the end of the eighties. Compared to what was happening in Prague, Warsaw, Beijing or Berlin, the movie might seem unduly parochial. Even so, Do the Right Thing created a world, however stylized, fanciful or gloriously imagined, that remains vitally important and worth our time.

 

 

Swoon

 

I’ve had a lot of electrifying experiences, personal and professional, in the twenty years I’ve been writing about the international film festivals. One of my favorite occurred at the Egyptian Theatre, at Sundance in Park City, Utah on the morning of January 20, 2007.

 

That was the first time I saw Once, John Carney’s beautiful low-budget Irish musical he made in collaboration with the musicians and actors Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová.

 

I ended up reviewing it here (Download Once review) and I put the film on my top ten list in what was admittedly an exceptionally strong year for cinema.  I looked at the film again recently for a piece I’m considering about contemporary musicals, and it holds up exceptionally well. The story of a complicated and unorthodox friendship that develops between an Irish street musician and a beautiful Czech émigré Once I thought both lyrical and substantial.

 

Shot in Dublin over a period of two weeks for the equivalent of around $140,000 the movie was made in the free, improvisational manner of the French New Wave. It achieved a loose and spontaneous style that intertwined the immediacy of film with the rapturous first person expression of the musical.  I was hooked from the moment of Hansard and Irglová’s first impromptu playing session, inside the Dublin piano store on their incandescent interpretation of their signature work, “Falling Slowly.”

 

That protean, direct quality is why people have responded so emphatically, not only their work but also their lives.  Hansard and Irglová suggested something elusive and ephemeral. The critic Michael Atkinson perceptively compared the movie’s muted sexual dynamics to Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. 

 

In Once, the consummation of the relationship was not sexual though musical.  It transmuted a different kind of love affair, one that if it never ignited in the conventional sense, there is no ambiguity about the intensity of their feelings for each other.

 

Sundance proved not an isolated act though the beginning of a phenomenon. Once played in major markets for seven months through the summer and fall of 2007 and grossed some $10 million.  Hansard and Irglová won the Academy award for best song for “Falling Slowly.” The soundtrack album sold some three-quarters of a million copies.

 

Begun as a side act, the duet eclipsed Hansard’s own estimable Irish rock act, The Frames. Performing as The Swell Season, the title also of their debut CD named for a novel by the Czech novelist and screenwriter Josef Skvorecky, Hansard and Irglová have been on a touring blitzkrieg that has them playing larger venues such as New York’s Radio City Music Hall.  Four of the songs on debut CD were reconfigured and used on the Once soundtrack.

 

No city illustrates their rise like Chicago.  In the weeks before Sundance, the two played in intimate bars like the Hideout or as secondary acts at the Metro. In the aftermath of Once, the two played progressively larger public rooms, like the Old Town School of Folk Music, the Vic Theater and during the late summer and fall of 2008, three sold out shows at the Chicago Theatre. In the fall of 2007, I did a follow up interview with Hansard and Irglová for an awards piece in Screen. Hansard told me:  “Mar and I played gigs in front of nobody here in Chicago, something like 70 people.  I thought 70 people was really good.  Our record [The Swell Season] with these same songs [Once soundtrack] sold 300 copies, and now it’s selling a great deal more and it’s all because of how it was presented.”

 

The nakedly confessional songs with their bruising lyrics of pain, dishonesty and regret are palpably autobiographical (“I think Glen writes about me because it teaches him something,” Markéta said in the interview).  It makes even more visceral the connection between performer and audience. On The Set List, the Frames’ live set disc, one of my favorite cuts is “Your Face.” Toward the end, the band momentarily stops and Hansard continues hammering the haunting refrain: “And I’m going to wait for you.” 

 

 

In the movie’s key scene, where she reveals she is married, Irglová’s character says in unsubtitled Czech “I love you,” to his query of whether she loved her husband. The ending of Once is exceptionally bittersweet—the swooping crane shot pulling back from her face cut with him leaving for London acknowledges their quite separate fates. Their success was mitigated, I think, on the unusual terms of their own private narrative.  By falling in love off screen, they provided the very ending people desperately clamored from the movie. 

 

Now, the love affair is, by all accounts over though the music continues. The Swell Season have released their terrific new album, Strict Joy. (The new title is named after a poem by the Irish writer James Stephens. I think one reason I like their work so much is the Skvorecky connection, one of the truly great and unfairly neglected figures of the Czech New Wave.) I ordered the deluxe version of the disc that includes a live track and a DVD. NPR streamed the new work in advance of its new release. I’ve listened to it several times, and I really like “The Rain,” “The Verb,” and “Two Tongues.”

 

Part of what Once a terrific film is their private history and lack of technique yielded something quite raw and emotionally revealing. The movie and their music circles and returns to a devastating theme, the Proustian realization that love is finally not just irreconcilable, but this sense that the only paradise we experience is the one that either has been taken away or lost.

 

The band also starts this weekend, in Milwaukee, a very ambitious world tour in support of the new disc. I saw them perform live the first time at Sundance. Since then I’ve seen them in small, intimate settings, like a movie theater during the bus tour for the release of Once to the now much bigger venues. The crowds for The Swell Season are quite different than that of The Frames.  The Swell Season intermix Frames songs in their playlist, especially “Fitzcarraldo” and “Your Face,” but bigger rock anthems like “Revelate,” “The Stars are Underground,” or “Perfect Opening Line” are not a really a part of the repertoire. 

 

The music Hansard and Irglová play is more interior and circumspect.  Those poetic reveries give it a kick.  As terrific as Hansard and Irglová are on camera, they are even better on stage.  Their contrasts beautifully mesh. Hansard’s nakedly out front, rough-hewn volubility plays off her fragility and beauty. She’s also begun to assert her own presence and authority.  Her self-possession makes her appear far older than her age. (She was a ridiculous 17 during the time of the movie shoot.) “Mar’s much more sober than me.  I have a tendency to go off on me head about things.  Mar will always be much more grounded,” he says.

 

In the past she was the skilled virtuoso content to accede to Hansard’s front man persona.  The last time I saw them play, at the Chicago Theatre, she played four solo pieces, including the absolutely stunning piano piece, “The Hill.”  “You sound amazing,” a woman screamed out after “I Have Loved You Wrong.”

 

 

 

Her two lead vocal tracks on the new CD feature that song and “Fantasy Man,” a deeply resonant and heartbreaking piece she started playing in concerts more than two years ago. (By the way, this is Markéta and her sister Zuzana performing that number. Talent and beauty obviously run in that family.) My own interests are much more aligned to film, but I’ve developed a real affinity of late for the actress/musician such as Irglová, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Zooey Deschanel.

 

Hansard suggested in a recent interview the future of the band is very much an open question. Even so I’m curious to see how their music evolves, and what becomes of the Frames. I’d also like to see them work in film more (Irglová was offered the female lead in a Czech/French film a year or so ago but had to turn it down because of her touring obligations.) I’m much more confident in my opinions about film, but I rely on the Justice Paul Stevens’ aesthetic on music: I can’t always define it but I know good music when I hear it. 

 

Whatever permutations or variations, in film, concerts, the Swell Season, the Frames or Hansard and Irglová apart, this is beautiful and magnetic stuff.

 

(Thanks to Howard Greynolds, Susan Norget and Mike Goodridge.)

Carey Mulligan

 
British actress Carey Mulligan is this year’s festival sensation. She’s a poised, fearless and inventive 23-year-old performer that lights up Danish director Lone Scherfig’s An Education.

 

In the movie, set in 1961 London, Mulligan plays Jenny, a sophisticated, poised if somewhat dreamy sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who finds herself irrevocably succumbing to the mysterious charms and breathlessly alluring charms of a Jewish aesthete (sharply played by Peter Sarsgaard).

 

It’s a bravura performance that manages to be both emotionally detailed and sharply unsentimental. Mulligan’s quickness, emotional alertness and sexual precocity is staggering. Novelist Nick Hornby adapted the memoir of journalist Lynn Barber. Mulligan’s schoolgirl is a Francophile, and the movie has the free, spontaneous momentum of early French New Wave films.

 

She has also done significant work in the theater, most prominently her work as Nina in the Royal Court Theatre production of Chekhov’s The Seagull with Kristin Scott Thomas. After a small part in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Mulligan is currently cast as the female lead in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel. 

 

Mulligan has a tremendous presence in front of the camera — sexy and transfixing at the beginning before moving to something more emotionally difficult and knotty. During a conversation, she spoke of her art and style.

Light sensitive: Are you this enthralling in your own life. Do you have the power to really shake people up like Jenny in the film?

 

Carey Mulligan: No, I’m really boring in my daily life. I’ve actually discovered how uncool I am by being at Sundance. The whole time there was crazy, a bit surreal, like out of body. Even the photographers and how they react to you before the screening. They cajole you into “performing,” and being yourself is the trickiest thing to do.

 

Light sensitive: In the movie, Jenny’s a real Francophile. Because the movie’s set in 1961 and French New Wave movies are a dominant reference point, did you look at a lot of French films from the period?

 

Carey Mulligan: We looked at a couple of things together, Lone and I. She gave me some DVDs, of Breathless and things like that. It was really more about Jenny getting into the age of things and being sixteen at that time and [determining] who she would have been aware of politically or who would have been the people that she would have been listening to. I listened to French music pretty much all the way throughout the shoot. Even when I wasn’t in a scene, I had my earphones in.

 

I tried to stay in that world. Andrew McAlpine, the set designer, built a really interesting bedroom set that you didn’t really see in the film. But I walked into it before we started shooting and he just captured her world so brilliantly. The room was exactly how I would have made it if I’d designed it myself. It was really accurate and detailed. It had that weird mixture of having a couple of cigarettes on the desk but also having the teddy bear on the bed. There was so much of that in the film, the dichotomy between the tiny girl and the woman.

Hong Sang-soo

 
(Hong Sang-soo. Portrait courtesy of Toronto film festival. Stills courtesy of IFC Films.)

Night and Day, by the great South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, debuted in the competition at Berlin last year and I thought it an instant classic. It played the New York Film festival last fall, and I was afraid it would disappear.

 

Hong’s already made another terrific film, Like You Know It All. Fortunately, Night and Day has not gone anywhere. It opens today at the Anthology in New York and is becoming available here through the various distribution platforms of IFC Films.

 

Hong studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and also spent a year living in Paris in 1991. His rueful and melancholy restoration comedies like Turning Gate, Woman is the Future of Man and Woman on the Beach are among the most beautiful works of the last decade. 

 

His theme is a great one: the emotional and sexual geography staked out between men and women.

 

His sophisticated comedies of manners cut like a knife, and stick in the mind. Almost all of the director’s protagonists are filmmakers, writers or artists. Night and Day is about the romantic travails of a celebrated painter named Seong-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) who flees to Paris to avoid being arrested on a possession charge. A chance encounter with a former lover initiates an elaborate and dense roundelay among a group of stunningly beautiful and defiantly individualistic women.

 

The most elusive and captivating is a young art student (Park Eun-hye). She’s put off by the fact he’s married and considerably older. Her mixture of insouciance and vulnerability makes each of their encounters tense and highly suggestive. Their banter, often predicated on formal uses of language, has a wounding precision. Hong evokes attitudes and complex feelings about identity, isolation and assimilation found in the story’s darker vein of death and loss. Like Tale of Cinema, he annotates feeling and desire through a judicious, rigorous use of the zoom.

 

 

“I am so unlucky,” a major character says at the film’s crucial scene. The moment crystallizes the power and tenacity of this director’s work, where the seemingly throwaway — the digressive — reveal the sharpest truths. The film’s erotic tangles, built on ideas of duration and disruption, turned off some viewers, though I was mesmerized.

Very few directors, men or women, could transform the sight of a young women’s bare feet jutting from underneath a blanket into such an ecstatically beautiful moment.

 

I was fortunate to spend some time with Hong in Berlin last year. Here’s the man himself on his art, love and magic.

Light sensitive: I guess on some level it’s entirely appropriate you making a film in Paris, because you’ve been called the director most influenced by New Wave directors, particularly Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer.

 

Hong Sang-soo: The reason I like their work and also Ozu is that they’re exceptional films. I like those French filmmakers, but it’s also somewhat coincidental, people see the similarities and the connections people make between our films, because I already have this inside me.

 

LS: The title Woman on the Beach, was that a homage to the Jean Renoir film?

 

Hong: I only found out about that later when somebody mentioned it to me. In Korea there’s an old popular song with the same expression. Originally I had a different title, and I was drinking with the producer one night and I just said, how about this title. Also I like English translations.

 

Toronto and New York

 
(Isabelle Huppert in Claire Denis' White Material. Images courtesy of Toronto International Film festival)

 

Toronto’s over but New York’s reached the middle. The two festivals, though much different beasts, share a lot of titles.

 

No festival is able to entirely synthesize the moods and currents of international cinema, though Toronto certainly gives it a whirl. Toronto is also something of a reactive festival: a movie makes a bang in Venice or Telluride suddenly hot property.

 

That was certainly the case with Lebanon, the remarkable debut feature by Samuel Maoz, the Israeli cinematographer, documentary filmmaker and theater director. It’s a structural war movie about a four-man tank command with the action restricted to a taut, tense 24-hour stretch of the first day of the June 1982 Israeli Lebanon incursion.

 

The mistake is thinking, in the aftermath of Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir, that this devastating piece is somehow redundant. “No one knew the color of the sky,” Stephen Crane wrote at the start of his harrowing short story The Open Boat. Maoz sustains an identical mood of disorientation, rage and defeat. He largely refuses to individuate the four soldiers, preferring a spellbinding layering of image and sound that evokes an impressionistic, terrifying sense of the mounting dread and confusion both the inside and out.

 

Maoz inverts the received idea of moviemaking as war, suggesting that war is an outsized, horrendous brand of filmmaking that offers no cathartic release. The point of view is crucial, and much of the action is rendered through the subjective perspective of the gunner’s viewfinder.

 

An acute stand in for the movie camera, the device is equipped with a kind of zoom lens that enables the gunner to acquire a tight close up of his intended targets. The clicking sound made by the zoom is the most anguished heard on the soundtrack, a kind of heart tearing thwack that registers sonically like a dead tennis ball hitting a loose string racket. Every time you hear that sound, your heart just deflates. The point is not the obviousness of war’s hell but the horrifying cumulative emotional and physical wounds incurred by every side.

 

Toronto post

Stop Smiling  has posted the first of a two-part wrap up of Toronto.

I write about Tom Ford's A Single Man and Jason Reitman's Up in the Air.

More to follow.

Toronto grades

Samuel Maoz's Lebanon. Image courtesy of Toronto International Film festival.

 

 

The festival is over, and in lieu of some final analysis and recollections of my time there, I offer the following assessments on the films I saw.

 

I’m leaving one very important film out, only because it was not part of the official program but the sales agent very graciously allowed me entrance to a buyers’ screening. I’ll have something longer to report on that work very soon.

 

 

The Men who Stare at Goats B-

Henri Georges-Clouzot’s Inferno B+

 

A Serious Man A-

Up in the Air B-

Hadewijch A

Daybreakers C

 

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers B

Accident A-

The Road C-

Making Plans for Lena B

 

Farewell B

Lebanon A-

Independencia B+

The Loved Ones C

 

Chloe C-

Warrior and the Wolf C

 

Life During Wartime B+

White Materials A

[Rec] 2 B-

 

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans B

A Single Man D

Bitch Slap D

My son my son what have ye done B-

 

Whip It B

Slovenian Girl B

Ondine B-

Trash Humpers B-

The Unloved A-