Light Sensitive

Speak, memory

(Man and his props: Spalding Gray, performing one of his singular monologues, in an extract from Steven Soderbergh's And Everthing is Going Fine. Image courtesy of IFC Films.)

I mentioned in my Sundance wrap recently about this year’s edition marked my twentieth time writing about the festival. The year was 1992, an epochal moment for the festival, because of some of the films and filmmakers (Reservoir Dogs and Quentin Tarantino, especially) that premiered that year.

It was also revelatory because of the people you had a chance to meet. Sundance was a much looser affair back then. You’d introduce yourself to a director or actor, and figure out a time to talk and it was done fairly easily and without having to move through the gauntlet of agents or publicists you have to go through now just to get ten minutes with somebody. You had time, which you never there have anymore.

(An old friend was handling a film and its breakout star this year, and he got so tired and exhausted by the process and what he had to do every time a journalist inquired about some time with her that he simply gave me a look, and I knew immediately what he meant.)

One artist I met then and had a great time with was Spalding Gray. He was at the festival that year with the premiere of Nick Broomfield’s movie adaptation of his monologue, Monster in a Box. Spalding was also the master of ceremonies of the closing night awards that year. I arrived at the festival late that year, and I was trying desperately to catch up with some of the buzz titles. I caught glimpses of his “turn,” and it was hilarious and biting.

When all is said and one, how many monologuists do you meet in your life? I’ve been thinking a lot about my time with Spalding Gray since recently catching up with Steven Soderbergh’s superb (and very disquieting) And Everything is Going Fine, his documentary essay about Spalding Gray (Soderbergh also directed Gray’s Anatomy, Spalding’s subsequent monologue.) The material is culled from a lot of different sources, the most riveting a series of interviews the great filmmaker Barbara Kopple shot.

Spalding and I met at Sundance’s central hangout back then, the space that is now known as Harry O’s. Then it was called the Z Place. The date was Jan. 26, Super Bowl Sunday, the game between Washington and Buffalo.

I had a little bit of an in with Spalding because Jonathan Demme, the director of his groundbreaking monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, I had been spending a lot of professional time with around the same period because of two long profiles I’d been working on about the actor Ted Levine (the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs) and the artist and actor Tony Fitzpatrick.

You find out right away how easy or hard an interview is going to be, how open and accessible they are. Spalding was about as easy an interview was possible. You point your tape recorder at him, and just let him go. One of the things I remembered him talking about was how influential he thought he was on the style of Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, especially given it was the first Demme film that drew extensively on the close up.

Monster in a Box was Spalding’s thirteenth monologue. It was a painfully funny and dead on satire of late twentieth century life, concerning Nicaragua fact-finding tours, California earthquakes, Hollywood, the difficulty of finding vodka in the crumbling former Soviet Union.

The title monster was neither metaphorical nor imagery; it was the nineteen-hundred page manuscript he’d been working on for more than four years, the autobiographical novel that evolved, rather painstakingly, into Impossible Vacation, which Knopf published.

The movie version of Monster in a Box and the publication of Impossible Vacation happened fairly simultaneous, as I remember. I ended up using the basis of our interview to write about Spalding and his art for a Chicago daily I contributed to at the time. I’ve tried repeatedly over the years to find the entire text of our interview or the original tape, especially during the time of Spalding‘s death. I never had any luck. I did, fortunately, come across a print copy of the original profile. I have been able to reconstruct large parts of our talk.

On that day, Spalding was generous and accommodating. “I am egocentric,” he began. “I’m very solipsistic. I work from mining myself, and I think that could be repulsive to people who can’t be above it. I’m only a person of action when I have a place of reflection to balance it.

“In the monologue, the stories go from the book to what took me away from the book, so you’re getting stories within stories. I’m being propelled out by the pain of that story. Basically what the text is really about, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, is the dizziness that comes from too much possibility.

“Swimming to Cambodia had just come out at the time I was trying to work on the book, and so many people proposed so many different projects and I just said yes to all of them. I collapsed under that and was unable to complete them.”

The new avatar

 

 

(Dreams, desires and transmigration of the soul: beastly glow in Uncle Boonmee. The actor Geerasak Kulhong. Images courtesy of Strand Releasing.)

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, known colloquially to his friends on the festival circuit as “Joe,” is one of those unclassifiable directors whose movies offer a continuously open, adventurous and exciting way of watching, thinking and dreaming about what the medium is capable of.

His astounding fifth feature (he also shared credit on another film), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the Palme d’Or last May at Cannes, in a jury presided over by Tim Burton, just opened theatrically in New York and moves around the rest of the country this spring.

Be prepared to be wowed or get in an argument about its worth and value.

My take is that of an enthusiast. I was restrained though indeed quite thrilled, watching a live feed of the Cannes closing awards from the Debussy, when Burton made his announcement. The Palme d’Or is arguably the most artistically significant prize in movie culture, but I’m not sure how much if any cachet it carries here.

(New York magazine critic David Edelstein is probably dead on when he says:  “Uncle Boonmee is entrancing—and also, if you’re not sufficiently steeped in its rhythms, narcotizing. Truth to tell, I wouldn’t be surprised if a good percentage of its audience, even at the Film Forum, finds it excruciatingly boring.”)

Strand is releasing the movie, the third consecutive feature of Joe’s the company has handled. As patrons of a very particular brand of art cinema (so specialized it’s not even niche), I salute them.

Weerasethakul exists in a world of his own, drawing on experimental and abstract theories to make haunting movies about the most primal, direct and accessible emotions. His two previous movies, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century, were spellbinding, beautiful and enigmatic films that brilliantly utilized allusive two-part structures to tell stories about thwarted relationships, love and regret.

Joe also draws on folk tales, anecdotes, oral histories and ethnography in devising his highly original and beguiling movies that negotiate the spiritual and the material domains. (Syndromes and a Century was quite autobiographical, drawing on the background of how his parents met.)

The new entrancing and strange new film echoes the second section of Tropical Malady. In that earlier film, the first part tracks the playful relationship that develops between a provincial ice cream truck driver and a good-looking soldier. The second part is about the truck driver pursuing the soldier deep into the Thai jungle, believing he has transmogrified into a ghost tiger. “The movie is an homage to my home, and to a certain kind of cinema I grew up with,” Joe said.

Like all of the director’s films, Uncle resists simple classification in narrative terms. It is best just to submit to the dreamy, slow and sensual rhythms that simply take hold.

The movie is roughly divided into three parts. Joe adopted the Western counter identity during the time he studied painting and filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He opens the new tale deep in the jungle in northeast Thailand. Suffering from advanced, incurable stage of acute liver failure, the title character (Thanapat Saisaymar, a nonprofessional) is preparing emotionally and spiritually for his death.

He is tended over by an illegal Lao worker (Sakda Kaesbuadee) and a friend Jen (Jenjira Pongpas). As he recounts stories about his past, he is jolted by two startling visions: the ghost of his dead wife Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk) who materializes at his side and even more unaccountably, the altered though unmistakable form of his son Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong). The son disappeared trying to learn the provenance of a strange human and animal hybrid species called “ghost monkeys,” human shaped beasts outfitted in thick, dark hair and distinguished by their piercing red eyes.

As he is administered dialysis, Uncle Boonmee is naturally curious about the source of his illness and wonders what past calamity, outrage or violation he committed might account for the particularly brutal and painful sentence visited on his present life.

That inquiry yields the movie’s second movement with Boonmee taking his family deeper into the jungle to locate a strange and eerily beautiful hilltop cave that he believes marks the birthplace of his first life. He recounts fantastic and exotic stories about the curious sexual plight of a princess (Wallapa Mongkolprasert) captured beneath an incandescent waterfall. In the mesmerizing visual sequence, she is tricked into believing she’s been transformed into a younger, pristine version of herself.

What exactly it all means and how it exists within the larger framework is not wholly clear. But that is also spectacularly beside the point, as it is never necessary to understand in the conventional sense how the pieces exactly fit. Weerasethakul simply invites the spectator to take in the gorgeous imagery. Weerasethakul draws on the water and light that imbues the moment with a hypnotic, painterly image of extraordinary beauty. 

That moment is followed by an equally strange sexual encounter between the princess and a catfish, and the sexual trickery that ensues, the princess opening her legs and allowing the catfish access to her own private realm, opens up and questions whether it is the princess or the catfish who constitutes one of the title character’s previous lives. Weerasethakul is drawn to the fantastic, but he is concerned with the particular, almost hand-made style of filmmaking. He privileges emotion, freedom, imagination and spontaneity.

The open and highly associative imagery is balanced by serious emotional connection to the material. The effect is haunting, graceful and profound, like a succession of still images and photographs he deploys to advance the story further, telling of a strange group of future travels returning to the present (shades of Chris Marker’s La jetee).

This kind of storytelling is bound to frustrate some people because it leave so much unanswered.At the same time, it turns cinema into music in the sense it violates rules of order and segmented, linear storytelling in favor of a mélange of moods, feelings and actions. That leads to the third section where a life is examined and talked about, leading to yet another ghost-like appearance.

Those familiar with the director’s output are likely to understand the mood and rhythms a little easier than most. Those who encounter his work for the first time might feel like people did at the start of the twentieth century coming to terms with an enthralling, provocative and highly original new art form.

Uncle Boonmee is art cinema of a very high order. It is also a great movie.

(A man called Joe. In his natural habitat, in the thick and evocative Thai forests on the set of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.)