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.