Light Sensitive

Cannes aura

(Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, negotiating the landscape and each other, in Wes Anderson's graceful, pungent Moonrise Kingdom. Images courtesy of Cannes Film festival and Focus Features.)

CANNES
 

The festival’s sixty-fifth edition hit the mid-point today.

 The competition has been erratic, but here are the highlights: Michael Haneke’s formidable, stern Amour; Cristian Mungiu’s Bressonian parable of religious totalitarianism, Beyond the Hills; Wes Anderson’s swooning fest opener Moonrise Kingdom; Abbas Kiarostami’s intricate, gorgeous Japanese-language Like Somebody in Love; Alain Resnais’ incandescent You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet and Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s lyrical, screwball triptych, In Another Country.

Moonrise Kingdom, which opens Stateside this week, is a lyrical and effervescent piece about dark and difficult subjects. It is probably the director’s sharpest exploration yet of his outsider theme, and is marked by a plaintive quality that reaches a more mournful and apprehensive emotional register.

The title, if I heard Anderson correctly during his opening press conference, is a tribute, of sorts, to Frank Borzage’s 1948 masterpiece, Moonrise. It’s certainly not a surprise, given the eclectic movie references the dot the work, from Jacques Tati to the idyllic interpolated story Monica Vitti relates to her child in Red Desert. The same privileged romantic aura that defined much of Borzage is echoed in Anderson’s story of two forlorn, quietly desperate 12-year olds living, or more accurately, trapped, on a New England island in the mid-sixties.

Anderson has a great knack for appropriating and refracting those references through his own peculiar sensibility, making it intuitive and organic to the material. I know, for a lot of people, Anderson’s films feel too machine tooled and art directed in a fussy, plastic perfection. I don’t care, quite frankly, if Anderson doesn’t adequately elevate or alter his art to suit the taste of some.

My own conflicted feelings about the director and his previous work make me something of an agnostic. Ever since his breakthrough second feature Rushmore, I’ve been both excited and cool. My resistance started to dissipate with his last work, Fantastic Mr. Fox. Anderson’s very good with received forms, in that case, stop motion photography and animation and appending his style to the format.

There was a verve and openness I found breathtaking. I know his films are still too hidebound and precious for many, but his talent for imagery and production design helped crystallize a loose, rich emotional interplay in the energized, complicated inner-world of his characters.

Anderson’s milieu is as mythic and realized as a great children’s illustrator. At its most elemental, the new movie’s has a classic chase and pursuit structure. The story follows the furtive adventures of the two kids, Suzy (Kara Hayward), deadpan and endearing and the young Khaki Scout, Sam (Jared Gilman), persistent and eager, as they cross deeper into the island’s knotty interior for their carefully planned rendezvous.

The director wrote the script with his friend and occasional collaborator, Roman Coppola. The willful eccentricity and idiomatic stylization is still there, but I think what emerges most forcefully, in the glancing touches and precocious imagery, is a kind of persistent melancholy and sadness, explicit in the solitude and quiet disappointment linking the two adult male leads, Bruce Willis’s local sheriff and Edward Norton’s educator and scout leader.

Moonrise Kingdom is an adolescent romantic adventure story graced with deeply adult concerns. The writers take the time to animate the interior world of the two kids, best illustrated in the lovely flashback that shows their first meeting, when he invades the basement church of a local production and finds himself absolutely transfixed by her slightly off-center, ephemeral qualities. Maligned and picked upon by their peers, the two youngsters establish an immediate connection; with their shared sense of being ostracized, they are fairly resourceful and cunning on their own terms.

Still, as easy as it is to be caught up and astonished by Anderson’s formidable imagery (and the vivid, tactile work of cinematographer Robert Yeoman), Moonrise Kingdom is finally bracing and forthright in granting serious ideas and desperate longing to its young kids, most memorably in a frank and funny moment of sexual experimentation between the two on their inlet paradise.

Anderson’s genius for casting and personality invokes Preston Sturges, and the regulars, like Bill Murray, function as his Charles Coburn or Eugene Palette, eccentric, sharply drawn miniatures who imbue their funny and brusque figures with a bracing, devilish wit, clever, underplayed reactions and egalitarian temperaments. Anderson's generosity in treating them with substance and ideas, taking seriously what they think and showing the way home.

The formal invention is not just visual, but aural (please stay through the whole credits, and you immediately understand). Yeoman’s work is also a marvel, from the lyrical pans of the opening to the strangely beautiful and scary climax, his palette subtly moving from deep blues to a monochromatic and steely black and white. Anderson’s anecdotal, anarchic forms are both fleeting and grounded, observant and lush.

Moonrise Kingdom is unmistakably the work of its author; it doesn’t revolutionize his art, but it goes off in lovely tangents that form and congeal into a radical and lovely whole.

Small change

(Two great young actors, Sophie Nélisse and Émilien Néron, bring an almost supernatural poise, tenderness and wonder to Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar. Images courtesy of Music Box Films.)

(This piece originally appeared, in different form, in the spring calendar of Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, the art-house exhibition wing of the film’s distributor, Music Box Films.)

At first glance, Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar belongs to that deeply recognizable strain of Western narrative culture about teachers and their students. Going deeper into the movie, that proves an accurate though far too limited characterization.

The movie, the Canadian submission, was a finalist for the foreign-language Academy Award (it lost, of course, to A Separation). This fourth feature by the talented Québécois filmmaker Falardeau surprises, in both the hardness of its underlying concerns, and the unpredictability of the storytelling. In exploring the complex emotional interactions of a mysterious new teacher and his children newly marked by tragedy, Falardeau never sentimentalizes the material.

Framed by a mournful quality and a severe sense of loss and disruption, the movie is alternately tough, tender and revealing. The title character, an Algerian émigré wonderfully played by Mohammed Fellag, turns up as an unorthodox replacement at a Montreal primary school following an inexplicably incident. 

Falardeau, who also wrote the film, deftly draws on the contrasting personalities of bright, curious Alice (Sophie Nélisse) and the sullen, withdrawn Simon (Émilien Néron) to shape the action and study the severe and harsh emotional complications of sadness and regret. Falardeau intertwines two stories of the children and the private trauma of the teacher that we learn through his petition for permanent residency status as a political refugee.

The underlying melancholia is sharply expressed, visually, by the movie’s white-on-white compositions of the largely snow-bound Montreal landscapes (the talented Ronald Plante did the wonderfully restrained cinematography). Without saying too much about the rupture of the movie’s opening, it is startling and disquieting moment, the boy discovering something devastating and the young girl becoming his sort of accomplice to the horrible deed. 

The relationship of these two remarkable young actors is one of the film’s great achievements. In small, private ways, the two negotiate their shared pain and loneliness, both trapped in less than ideal family arrangements of missing or absent parents. Acutely demonstrated by the boy’s almost fetishistic devotion to a photograph, Simon loved his former teacher and her act is perceived by him as a naked and brutal form of rejection and betrayal.

The movie, like a Pirandello work, is all about masks and sheathed identities. Upset that his students are learning English when they have yet to master the subtleties and arrangements of their native language, Lazhar tacitly acknowledges his own precarious status as a émigré trapped, by law and rules, to try and assimilate his own alien space. 

Monsieur Lazhar is intimate and hand-made in the best sense. The movie is animated by the subtle interplay between Lazhar and his students that is funny, revealing and full of observational subtlety. 

My only real complaint is the abruptness of the movie’s closing section. The narrative revelations are a bit too haphazardly overlaid for my taste. It recovers with a beautiful and extraordinary closing emotional exchange of the teacher and young Alice that floored me. 

Philippe Falardeau is a director new to me, and I am eager to look at and discovery his other work. The filmmaker and his eponymous teacher take these young students and their lives very seriously, granting them a fullness of character that registers finally as a deeply humane and generous piece of work.


 

Being and nothingness

(The accused, inscrutable and mysterious in the great Turkish procedural by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Image courtesy of Cinema Guild.)

The sensuous and grave rhythms of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia have a peculiar and dazzling cumulative impact. Through its serpentine hold, the movie violates narrative expectation to probe something fare more mysterious, knotty and entrancing.

From its visual precision to the emotional believability of the characters and their sad, beautiful and emphatic faces, I was knocked out at how original and astonishing is the movie’s visual syntax. The movie needs time to breathe and seep in. 

The fifth feature by Turkey’s most important contemporary director and one of the most consistently fascinating filmmakers in international art-filmmaking, Anatolia is a brave and dazzling work that uses genre material as a meditation on the most serious moral and existential concerns. 

The story is fairly plainspoken. A man has been murdered and a disparate group is tasked to find his hidden corpse. The police procedural, lined by routine, repetition and frustration, suggests an unmistakable elusiveness, regarding motivation, circumstance, history and behavior. Like the greatest filmmakers, Ceylan is both elliptical and lapidary. The work is beautifully made and constructed, but information is parceled out with great care and discretion. Ceylan’s cryptic though elastic style casually hooks you, implicating those in its mysteries and wonder.

The movie opens with an enigmatic prologue where we see three associates strikingly framed and arranged in a desultory room adjoining a service station. The scene is marked also by abundantly discordant sounds, the source either the electronic buzz of the television or the contentious banter (the dialogue here is not subtitled) of the three men. 

The proper story follows a small convoy, two cars and a Jeep, containing a battery of forensic specialists (a doctor, a district attorney, police officers, a couple of soldiers) moving through the darkened, enveloping and majestic steppes and twisted roads of Anatoli. The formal search unit is tasked with discovering exact location where the accused have disposed of the corpse.

At the start, Ceylan beautifully modulates the tension and discomfort through class, social distinction and physical contrasts of the sharply individuated characters. The men are uncomfortably wedged together in the claustrophobic interior of the car. The camera, largely mounted in a reverse-angle and presenting mostly unvarnished images of the men, is direct and enveloping. 

The earthy humor and small talk of the cops gives way to the more serious intellectual and moral inquiries of the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) and the district attorney (Taner Birsel). The police officials are bulky and stout, with their craggy, lined faces. The professionals more circumspect. The primary suspect (Firat Tanis) is a haunted, ghost-like, his gaunt, inexpressive face the most unkind of masks.

The movie is tactile and lived in. The images of beauty and sadness pop off the screen. Like his equally brilliant Distant and Climates, Ceylan demonstrates again an extraordinary ability to ground his protagonists against telling and evocative landscapes. He has a great feel not just for painterly objects and tableau imagery, but for movement, like an absolutely electric moment in the first hour. 

In the daunting landscapes of the Turkish outback, a man hungry and tired of all the standing around and anxious for something to happen pulls at an apple tree. Ceylan tracks the stray fruit roll down the embankment and falling into the water, the soundtrack humming with contrapuntal sounds and the hectic, busy talk of the assorted group. 

The stray, beautiful moment is echoed later when the group seeks sanctuary in a local village. The mukhtar (Ercan Kesal), or leader, regaling his exalted guests with own ghost stories is dismayed by an electrical outage that plunges the room into darkness.

He orders his daughter, the youngest of his four children, “an afterthought,” he almost cruelly observes, to bring drinks and the young woman, beautiful and aglow, enters, her gorgeous face lit by candle. In a glancing moment, Ceylan gives weight and meaning to the unaccountable.

Just as elliptically, the movie’s dark and lustrous palette shifts to a murky light of the next day, signaled by another reverse angle shot of the car’s windshield moving through the windswept terrain. Ceylan is an artist who justifies digital. I still prefer film, but Ceylan’s photorealistic use of the format breaks down my own resistance. The opening draws on the darkness and nighthawk as a kind of annihilation, emblematic of the movie’s futile quest and dead ends. 

The light gives way to certain tangible benefits. The glory of the movie is that as Ceylan satisfies certain narrative threads poised by the start, he opens up new doubts and peculiarities. The certainties of law and science represented by the film’s two professionals proves starkly insufficient. 

Ceylan’s previous movie, Three Monkeys, was fairly harshly (unfairly, I thought) reviewed at Cannes a couple of years ago. I consent the movie was not at the level of the director’s strongest work but it shifted his milieu and point of view to a less savory, animalistic kind of character. In retrospect, it was necessary transitional piece.

Women, like the beautiful young girl in the village, are spectral, even fragmentary beings, glimpsed on a computer screen, or hovering and barely seen, like the victim’s widow, their destinies and circumstances unduly tragic and heartfelt. Explicitly acknowledged by the title, Ceylan’s movie is fundamentally concerned with telling stories. The movie’s narrative subversions are all the more pronounced and devastating.

What makes the journey extraordinary is not finding answers through submitting to the ride.

Point blank

(Naked prey: David Rauchenberger and Michael Fuith in the eerie, discomforting Michael. Image courtesy of Strand Releasing.) 

Of all the disciples of a well-known international filmmaker, I’d be least inclined to watch one by a descendant of Michael Haneke, the Austrian provocateur best-known for his visually precise and controlling studies of aberrant social behavior like Benny’s Video and Funny Games.

Having said that, I found Michael, the debut of Markus Schleinzer about the psychological warfare played out between a pederast and his ten-year-old captive,  creepily absorbing as opposed to annihilating and self-negating, the way I do much of Haneke (with some exceptions, mostly notably his debut feature, The Seventh Continent and his previous work, the Palme laureate The White Ribbon).

Born in Vienna, Schleinzer has worked as a casting director on many significant Austrian and German titles, including key Haneke works The Piano Teacher and The White Ribbon. Schleinzer wrote and directed the chilling, anti-humanist parable about the thin veneer between normalcy and depravity. The entire work is expertly held together by a monstrously cool and disturbing performance by the talented Michael Fuith as the eponymous lead.

The story has been distilled to its nasty particulars. Schleinzer is especially effective at creating mood and a profound sense of disturbance by cannily withholding critical details and in some cases, rupturing expositional detail completely in conjuring a sinister atmosphere seeped in a dead-eye calm and numbing amorality. (The man knows how to work a soundtrack of industrial noise.)

Schleinzer locates a sinister charge in the most quotidian of movements, like the eerie opening of a car garage door jutting upward, leading into a dispassionate, sterile suburban coach house. Incarnated by Fuith, Michael is defined by a certain blankness. In his mid-thirties, Michael is physically unprepossessing man of no apparent distinction, prematurely balding, thick in the middle. He leads an apparently desultory, sad-eyed existence that consists primarily of eating in his darkened home in front of the evening news.

The dynamics change moments later when Michael, having slipped down into his basement, or “dungeon,” if you prefer, carefully slides back the lock of a heavily fortified cellar door that once cracked, reveals a darkened interior. Seconds later, Michael barks out a command and stunningly out walks a dazed and confused young boy, the child Wolfgang (David Rauchenberger).

The boy, shell shocked, meekly submits to the older man’s instructions, the first indication of a deranged master and slave relationship that Michael carries out with a clinical resolve. Possessing a quality that only intensifies the film’s unease, Schleinzer shows how the bland and apparently unthreatening Michael insinuates himself on his prey, with dexterity and skill, during a disturbing sequence set further into the film.

Like Peter Lorre’s deranged child killer in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece M, Michael deploys a combination of tenderness and empathy, striking up a conversation with a young boy at a go-kart track, showing just the right amount of interest and affection before swinging his trap.

Fuith’s performance is not only emotionally credible though striking and unsettling in his willful refusal to humanize this monster. The movie’s subtitle might very well read, “Anatomy of a Psychopath,” because Michael trades on his very blankness and social invisibility to camouflage his intent and build a strange rapport with his young prey. Michael draws out the boy’s isolation, promising a visit by another young friend, in order to break down his resolve. 

Michael is pathetic and controlling, but Schleinzer is smart and discreet enough (unlike Haneke at his most egregious) to not wallow in the horrible deeds perpetrated against the boy. At the same time, the director suggests a highly persuasive account of how Michael, through his cajoling and manipulation, is able to gain the boy’s sympathy and trust, like a surreal interlude where he takes the boy on a walk and the two encounter other fathers accompanying their own children.

At times, Schleinzer withholds too much, or suspends the emotional plausibility in a manner that weakens the material, like the hard difficulty in believing that neither his mother (Christine Kain) nor sister (Ursula Strauss) are unaware or wholly indifferent to his developing pathology. 

Michael is socially inept and incapable of carrying out a healthy interpersonal relationships, points carried out during a ski holiday with a couple of buddies where he somewhat improbably picks up an attractive waitress. “Any problems,” she wonders, during his fumbling about in trying to satisfy her sexually. 

Michael progresses coolly and dispassionately from the shock of the original dramatic revelation to the seemingly implacable way the protagonist carries out his brutal behavior, unfazed by a serious incident or an awkward discovery by a colleague at the insurance firm where his steady competence has suddenly accelerated his own corporate climb.

The movie turns on a Hitchcockian twist in which the most vulnerable find a way to counterattack through their own intelligence, resilience and finely-honed survival skills. The most chilling moment in the film occurs when Michael, who’s so unoriginal he poses a question to his captive he learned from a violent movie, the boy disarmingly and quickly announces he’d rather be knifed than sodomized. 

 In Michael, the banal and the terrifying exist side by side.

Haneke offered a disarming and unfortunate illustration of how talent is nullified without a corresponding discerning or open sensibility. Whether Schleinzer has more than one idea up his sleeve remains to be seen. Michael is rarely easy to watch in the traditional sense. The movie demonstrates a lean and purposeful talent. Michael poses a lot of disturbing questions and gains a disturbing power by simply being. What it has to say is not easily forgotten. Neither is this challenging and disturbing work.

 

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.