Light Sensitive

Tender loyalties

 

Kelly Reichardt is one of my favorite American directors. She makes beautiful, intelligent and glancing movies that are almost impossible to predict. Those are, obviously admirable and viable qualities in an artist, but not necessarily welcome by an audience.

I have sharp and distressing memories of seeing her previous film, the extraordinary Meek's Cutoff, with both a festival audience and a commercial one, and both times the crowd was left mystified, even angry, with how that film ended.

Her movies typically invite you in but then hold you off. Her films meditate on friendship and desire and are built on familiar movements that continually find ways to surprise. Her movies are after something almost impossible to develop dramatically—the ineffable, the unspoken—so the rhythms are deliberately off-kilter, or denied a forward kick.

That desire to work through complicated themes, in a muted or downbeat style, walls off any easy or readily available emotional connection. So even having recognizable actors (like Michelle Williams, the star of her two previous features), Reichardt has never had a following to match her achievements.

Her new movie, Night Moves, is her fifth feature, and it is playing around the country after premiering last fall at Venice and Toronto. The movie is the closest since her first-rate debut, River of Grass, made twenty years ago, of a conventional story. All of her movies are tethered to genre—the Western, the road movie, the couple on the run—and then spiked, or subverted from within.

Like its subject, Night Moves is marked by its own subterfuge and furtive qualities. The title is a conscious doubling of the identically named 1975 Arthur Penn film with Gene Hackman and Jennifer Warren. Like the Penn movie, the new film is suffused with an annihilating sense of entrapment and quickly escalating paranoia. With its echoes of Ernest Hemingway’s great For Whom the Bell Tolls, the plot is slippery, morally and otherwise, rejecting psychological realism in conveying an upbraided idealism gone berserk.

Three very different operatives, radical in belief and practice, make their disillusionment explicit in the meticulous plot to blow up a hydroelectric dam in Oregon. The first part tracks the planning, and the second studies its aftermath. Reichardt wrote the script with her talented collaborator Jon Raymond. The filmmakers largely eschew motivation and intent, shaping the story, especially visually, around process, behavior and action.

Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), who works at a farm collective, is the operational and command leader. Dena (Dakota Fanning), a young woman of privilege, subsidizes the intricate action. Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) is a former marine who is coveted for his expertise and facility with explosives.

In the opening movements, Reichardt deftly establishes a feeling of unease and disorientation, visually conveyed through weather and the rugged, pockmarked landscape, like a remarkable tracking shot following a young kid on a bicycle as the camera swings, floats and suddenly drops. Incrementally, the story, viewed through fragments and isolated actions, comes into sharper focus.

The planning is built around forms of acquisition as the three principal characters accumulate the necessary materials, such as a boat Josh and Dena buy off an unsuspecting private dealer. In the most riveting sequence, Dena is tasked with carrying out the negotiations to purchase a vast quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from a skeptical factory salesman (the great James Le Gros). The scene is a marvel of body language, Fanning’s expert mix of authority and flirtation countering each of the man’s pointed inquiries until she finally wears him down.

These movements build to the eerie and remarkably sustained centerpiece that climaxes with the appalling act of ecological sabotage. Reichardt brilliantly shifts between the players and their environment, the velvety dark night interrupted by bursts of light, as she lightens the tension with stabs of humor, like a garrulous backpacker who wanders into their mix. The operation, no matter how well planned, is fraught with complication and nearly scuttled after the occupants of a nearby car stop to change a flat tire (“That’s not a good place to be,” Dena says).

The result, dramatically and emotionally, is indirect and quietly unsettling, the brutal and messy denouement heard more than seen. The action signifies not the end but a heightened phase of profound uncertainty as the three participants experience different levels of guilt, remorse and desperation to cover up their involvement.

Visually, Reichardt and her superb cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, map out an intricate visual pattern of surveillance: the three seated, plaintively, at a restaurant, dwarfed by a large wall painting; a reverse angle shot from the perspective of the interior of a motor home capturing their entrance to the campgrounds; the recurring use of cameras and mirrors.

As the movie subtly turns from a study of action to one of character and emotional confusion, the actors color and accentuate that deepening panic. Sarsgaard projects a wounded toughness and messy bravado and Fanning leaves teasingly open her own confusion and conflicted loyalties. (One of the best, most mysterious scenes shows how a surprise sexual encounter strains the emotional dynamics and upsets the group hierarchy.) Fanning is less vibrant and beautiful than in her other performances; she limns a vulnerability and shame reflecting the split between her ideals and their actual deliverance.

Again, the movie is weakest at articulating a convincing rationale for their behavior. Reichardt is more alive to behavior than morality or judgement. Eisenberg is the movie’s center. Not since David Fincher in The Social Network has a director so sharply and expressively utilized the actor’s idiosyncratic gestures, hesitations and pauses. No actor so skillfully navigates extremes of likeability and the self-serving. His intelligence is formidable and threatening. He’s perfect for Reichardt, given his essential instinct is one of implication.

The movie ends with two remarkable passages, a chilling confrontation inside a sauna that in its visual abstraction recalls the ending of Joseph H. Lewis’ noir classic The Big Combo and a disquieting and ambiguous coda that conjures another great Hackman film from the time of the Arthur Penn movie, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. It chillingly begets the emotional costs of surveillance and the violation of being watched.

Night Moves is all of a piece about a rot and malaise that no matter how far you flee is always there.

Images courtesy of Cinedigm.

 

Year in review: best actor

With just a week left in the year, I thought it worthwhile, as a way to survey what has transpired in movies during that time, to focus on some of the best performances, writing, acting and cinematography in fiction and nonfiction cinema.

I just took a second look of Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, and I realized I seriously underestimated the movie when I first caught it in the competition at Cannes. Now, as then, one part is unchanged, and that is the magnificence of Toni Servillo’s lead performance.

This is the fourth film I have seen by Sorrentino (three in close collaboration with Servillo), and I think this is by far the best. The movie has verve and tenacity, like the opening shot, originating deep in the turret of a cannon and bursting out, announcing a dazzling and cool flair injected with just the right mixture of daring, aplomb and grace.

The movie has been shortlisted as one of the nine finalists for the best foreign language Academy award. After his fascinating though artistically failed English-language debut, This Must Be the Place, Sorrentino works in a more comfortable and fluid register; he and Servillo paint a lavish, colorful and also despairing portrait of Rome's decadent and gilded upper class.

From the Celine quotation from Journey to the End of the Night ("Our journey is entirely imaginary") that opens the film to the ravishing ending, the new work is existential in the best sense, concerned with the way people live, foolishly, hypnotically, but also tenderly and filled with sorrow and heartbreak.

The movie has a serpentine quality in the way it snakes around, at times seemingly amorphous, with little connecting the picaresque episodes, but it all holds together. The primary reason for that is Servillo. In a variation of Marcello Mastroianni's world-weary journalist from Federico Fellini's La dolce vita, Servillo is Jep Gambardella, a formerly promising novelist who now administers to Rome's privileged elite, going to parties, museum openings, theater and political gatherings.

Years removed from his novel that made him a literary star, he is older though razor sharp in his observations and pronunciations. His voice, commanding and authoritorial, has just the right timbre, jaundiced, questioning and fleet, like his perfectly captured exasperation at a sexually brazen performance artist whose tendency to reference herself in the third person benumbs him.

Interestingly enough, one advantage of seeing the film again allowed another connection to Mastroianni take flight, the artist and writer from Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte, the middle piece of his remarkable loose trilogy.

Having also just watched the Antonioni film in the beautiful new high-definition video edition from Criterion, I was struck by the parallels, of character, fate and temperament binding both characters. The period of the Antonioni film, the early nineteen-sixties, coincides with Jep’s arrival in Rome, where as the author of a short novel, The Human Apparatus, he set the literary scene ablaze.

The powerful and the aspiring class all congregate around Jep. In its searching, probing introspection, Jep must return to the question of why he never followed up his novel with anything more substantial and ambitious. He says, walking pensively along a riverbank at dusk after one of his typical nights out, that the whirlpool of the life consumed him and he could not liberate himself from the temptation.

The movie, interestingly, has no real plot to speak. It is really constructed as an arabesque, or mosaic, like a Robert Altman film, filtered through mood, style and the speaking rhythms of the different player. The governing shape is provided by Servillo, who is quite simply, one of great actors working in cinema anywhere in the world.

Jep is rarely appealing emotionally, yet Servillo's line readings, body language and aristocratic bearing make him compulsively watchable. He is the kind of actor you listen closely and attentively, just to make sure you catch everything. It's a marvelously assured and penetrating part, like the way he responds, having gently scolded a female colleague who accuses him of being a misogynist, he corrects her: “I’m a misanthropist.”

Like the director's previous Italian-language Il divo, which depended on an insider's knowledge of Italian political history to fully appreciate, The Great Beauty is about rebuking attitudes and ideas. Sorrentino's movies are all political on some level, and this is probably the most biting and ferocious in getting at the peculiar sterility and emptiness of Berlusconi's Italy.

The movie’s dominant mood is one of sorrow, like the beautiful though vulnerable woman, a companion of Jep’s, still working in the local sex industry, and admitting all of her earnings go toward healing herself, or the quietly debilitating recurring putdown of a friend, an aspiring writer, whose sadness is reflected in his desperate pursuit of a young actress wholly ill-suited to his own needs.

The movie is literary in the best sense, shaped by a Proustian regret about lost time and an Eden irretrievably lost, reflected in the melancholy way Jep negotiates his own past to remember the beautiful young woman whose love he neither appreciated nor fully understood.

The lush visual style smoothes over some of the rough or indifferently plotted parts. Pretty much every frame of the movie bursts with activity, of color and style. The cinematography of Luca Bigazzi is vibrant and alive and always particular to the moment. The images and sounds pop off, providing a perfectly immersive and entrancing experience.

It’s the bravura and spellbinding Toni Servillo who gives it all meaning and value.

Image courtesy of Janus Films.

Two women

(The young and the damned: Alina [Cristina Flutur], in white, and her closest friend, Voichita [Cosmita Stratan] trying to make sense of it all. Below, the artist, Cristian Mungiu, in action. Images courtesy of IFC Films.)

The five-year wait for a new feature by the Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu is over. His harrowing and emotionally devastating new work, Beyond the Hills, winner of two prizes at Cannes a year ago, shows a young artist in full bloom.

The notes are dark, the sensations are anything but. It is the director’s third feature and the first since 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days revealed him as a young star on the make.

Interestingly, the new work was made in collaboration with the Dardenne Brothers (Rosetta, L’enfant), and the influence is explicit. The movie’s rendered in the exacting and rigorous neo-Bressonian manner of the Dardennes: the stripped down, direct style perfectly catching the in-between world, light and dark, East and West, that is a hallmark of the Romanian New Wave.

The new work echoes and deepens many of the themes and ideas of the previous work. The previous movie explored the moral rot and blinding legacy of a dictatorship. The new film examines another brand of institutional totalitarianism, the restrictive and intolerant practices of the Orthodox church.

Mungiu’s script, influenced by two nonfiction novels of former BBC producer Tatiana Niculescu Bran, is also inspired by actual events that happened in the middle of the last decade. Like 4 Months, Mungiu’s new film turns on the complicated and emotionally intricate relationship of two women.

Alina (Cristina Flutur) has returned from Germany to the dank and remote Romanian village where she grew up with her closet friend, Voichita (Cosmita Stratan). Rejected by their birth parents, the two grew up in an orphanage, another cruel reminder of the abject Stalinist conditions of the Ceausescu regime.

Alina’s sojourn in the West has granted her some economic independence and provided incentive to escape her bleak origins. She is ready and quick to pass these qualities onto her friend. Unfortunately Voichita has gone the opposite path, seeking comfort and emotional sanctuary as a novice in the rigorous Orthodox monastery overseen by a kind of monastic supreme leader, the priest known as Papa (Valeriu Andriuta).

It is clear the needy, almost discomforting Alina remains fixated, especially sexually, on Voichita. “I love you, but not like before,” the suddenly chaste Voichita replies. The drama increasingly plays out the clash between the two figures warring over possession of Voichita, the indomitable priest for whom she carries an almost paternal devotion and the fragile interloper she remains linked with.

The monastery (called, without irony, New Hill), without electrify, running water or modernist trappings, is governed by a medieval despair outlined by the severity of the landscapes and the stark and forbidding architecture. Naturally suspicious of Alina, the priest decries the moral bankruptcy of the West and justifies his unbending orthodoxy and reactionary beliefs. He even asserts any believer who enters a non-Orthodox church has committed a grave sin.

Shot by the incomparable cinematographer Oleg Mutu in widescreen, the movie’s almost hyper-naturalism is further heightened by the incredibly photorealistic imagery yielded by the digital photography. Every act, no matter how insignificant, is captured and sustained with an intense physicality. Mungiu is particularly drawn to faces and gestures, Voichita’s dark, open features indicating her own submission; by contrast, Alina’s jumpy, nervous aggression signals her rebellion and denial.

One of the true revelations after I first caught the movie at Cannes was learning that neither actress was a trained professional (one had a background in news broadcast journalism). Mungiu’s talent for casting is electric. Their work is raw, unflinching, and direct; everything is felt rather than learned.

Alina is initially buoyed at the prospect of Voichita leaving the church and accompanying her return to Germany after she applies for a travel visa, with the belief the two are about to begin work on a cruise ship. It produces the first of several uncomfortable encounters with state authorities and bureaucratic officials. Voichita proves an unstable alliance as far as insisting on her own individuality. Already sexually rejected, Alina slowly and irrevocably falls apart.

Failing to convince Voichita to break from the church though also refusing to give up her deep attachment to her, Alina goes for broke and tries something wholly risky. she subordinates herself to the dictates of the church, with the idea of subverting it from within. She proves extremely industrious, through her provocative and steely individuality, in undermining Papa’s authority and privilege. It produces one of the film’s most riveting sequences as a cluster of nuns form around her, reading and cajoling her on the commission of her sins and her need to absolve.

Beyond the Hills becomes a fascinating and haunting meditation on warring ideologies, the liberator subtly ridiculing and rejecting the absurdity of the church’s faith and practices. Alina’s noncompliance takes several striking acts of willful disobedience, even acts of arson and supposed suicide attempts.

Except, all the while, your heart’s in your throat, because you know Alina’s dissident actions carry a horrifying price. The movie’s extraordinary final forty-five minutes are brutish, disquieting and absolutely devastating at documenting the consequences of her intransigence.

The movie is also a foundation work that in its moral inquiries, seriousness and need to pose valid and necessary questions about what it means to be free and alive in the present world makes it a natural successor, artistically and politically, to such indispensable works of the New Wave as Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Aurora, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective and Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylon’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

The movie is undoubtedly uncomfortable in its implications and the wholly different brutality it brilliantly illustrates. “I’d rather go to hell than have you pray for me,” a secular doctor asserts at the end. The work is not in any manner easy, fun or enjoyable in the strictest sense. With a running time of more than one-hundred and fifty minutes, it is long though rewarding.

The film’s bleak and unaccommodating. By the moment of its remarkable closing passage, every image feels absolutely necessary.

Sundance: Next generation

(Crime and punishment: the fierce, physical Lindsay Burdge as a fallen protagonist in Hannah Fidell's A Teacher. Unless noted, images courtesy of Sundance Film festival.)

Wrapping Sundance, I saw six of the ten titles in the insurgent section, Next. (Every festival is tinged with regret and missed chances, and my biggest was foolishly passing up a chance to see Blue Caprice.)

With Ryan Coogler’s prize-winning Fruitvale, probably the most talked about film in the festival was Randy Moore’s sometimes scabrous debut, Escape from Tomorrow. As most people know, he surreptitiously shot his film at Disney World, with small, mobile cameras. It’s a searing, dark fantasia about a suburban Everyman (nicely played by the actor Roy Abramsohn), a somewhat unprepossessing married father of two good-looking young kids, who’s plunged down his own rabbit hole.

The movie opens with the man standing on his balcony on the outskirts of the theme-park resort and being informed that he’s been fired from his job. His young son playfully locks him out of the room, the first of a string of emasculating, humiliating acts he must endure. The man, with family in tow, spends his final day of vacation at this idealized American representation of escape and elaborate make-believe.

Transformed through the black and white cinematography and sinister disorientation into a cautionary, soulless Mecca of cultural conformity, mind-numbing consumerism and lethargy, Moore intensifies all manner of free-floating anxiety and helplessness. In a touch redolent of Vladimir Nabokov, by way of Stanley Kubrick, the man is further unhinged by his deepening and criminal fixation on two lascivious French teenage girls.

The movie occasioned all manner of wild speculation that Disney would seek legal injunctions to prevent the movie from ever being seen. I overheard one woman insist that Disney would buy the film and then suppress it. Tim Wu, a journalist who specializes in law and copyright issues, wrote in the New Yorker the film fell under the legal doctrine of “fair use,” and said Disney would have no legal recourse to ban the film. Not all the movie’s ideas are that original (much of it seems inspired by John Carpenter’s great They Live).

The best performance I saw at Sundance was by a fearless and remarkable young actress named Lindsay Burdge (above). She’s the star and eponymous figure in Hannah Fidell’s debut, A Teacher, about an English teacher at a suburban Texas high school who’s carrying out an affair with one of her students. As a study of dislocation, this stripped down, neo-Bressonian work is pretty entrancing, anchored by the tremulous and wound up Burdge.

Fidell has a striking compositional eye, and the movie is rigorously framed, like a terrific and sexually charged moment captured from a fixed perspective from the interior of an SUV. The clipped, paired down style, removing background and psychological realism, is very welcome. The affair’s in full bloom at the start, and the most riveting parts are the transgressive acts, like Burdge momentarily frozen by the sight of her semen-stained blouse, or her steady and inevitable unraveling, that she makes hypnotic and all-too real.

Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love is another trenchant and disturbing study of young female sexual consciousness, centered on a fourteen-year-old Brooklyn girl’s growing obsession with an older guy. (Disclosure: a friend of mine, Gill Holland, is an executive producer.) Like A Teacher, the writing’s not always as assured and enveloping as the visual construction, but Gina Piersanti, the teenager, is somebody to watch.

Next to Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, the best film at I saw at Sundance was Matthew Porterfield’s superb I Used to Be Darker. Taryn (Deragh Campbell, pictured left), a Belfast émigré, turns up at the Baltimore home of her aunt and uncle (played by the musicians Kim Taylor and Ned Oldham) unexpectedly, seeking sanctuary after a summer love affair gone sour, only to find out their marriage is also dissolving. Taryn’s cousin, Abby (Hannah Gross), a theater student, is on edge with her mother, whom she apparently blames for the breakup.

Unlike Hamilton and Putty Hill, Porterfield’s third feature is fully scripted. It’s like a John Cassavetes film (Porterfield told me Opening Night was a major influence), a meditation on acting and performance about private tumult, anger and breakdown. Abby performs Gertrude’s soliloquy about the death of Ophelia and the movie is shaped by several knockout musical performances that give a palpable and electric emotional shading.

Andrew Bujalski’s omission from Sundance has long been one of the most galling oversights of its programming. His funky and idiosyncratic fourth feature, Computer Chess, is strange, beguiling and mostly fantastic. It relates the early days of computer programming, set in the late seventies and early eighties, at the dawn of the revolutionary shifts in personal computing and programming. The movie is even shot on splotchy, low-grade black and white video that perfectly meshes with the peculiarity of the narrative, about a weekend competition to master each other in chess.

Bujalski inventively pairs one subculture with another, in this case, a couples’ retreat, at the hotel where the chess competition is going on, and the interplay of wounded narcissism, self-invention and comic befuddlement produces some very funny and stylized shocks of recognition. (Furthermore, another old friend, Gerald Peary, turns up in a crucial role, completing an impressive career of having written intelligently about films as a critic and scholar, made a documentary about the history of film criticism and now acted in a first-rate movie.)

The audience prize in the section went to Chad Hartigan’s This is Martin Bonner, another subdued and sometimes penetrating exploration of loneliness and regret, played  out in the contrasting stories of the title figure (very well played by Paul Eenhoorn) and the friendship he develops with a former convict (Richmond Arquette) just released into the general population.

Hartigan finds inventive and sharp ways to link the two, especially visually. The performance strike the right balance of empathy and sadness, and the evocation of freedom and open space, captured in the forlorn Reno landscapes and quietly desperate sounds of an empty stretch of road, makes an impression.

(Masks and doubles: Gina Piersanti as a young girl coming of age in Eliza Hittman's It Felt Like Love. Photo by Sean Porter, courtesy of Sundance Film festival.)

Sundance: Catch twenty-two

(Two lovers: filmmaker and actor Shane Carruth with lead Amy Seitz from his second feature, Upstream Color. Images courtesy of Sundance Film festival.)

Sundance is over now (except for the satellite festivals happening around the country tomorrow night). This year was the twenty-second festival I’ve covered. Because of one great film and a number of impressive, demanding and intriguing possibilities, this year’s edition was a largely satisfying one.

My first year, the moment of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and the crystallization of the New Queer Movement, augured a giddy and propulsive time. The genie was never going back in that bottle. In the early nineties, just a few years after Steven Soderberg’s sex, lies and videotape made acute the market possibilities of the festival, Sundance both drove and was the beneficiary of telling historical, cultural and technological changes in how new movies and more importantly, emerging directors, entered the marketplace.

Ever since John Cooper and Trevor Groth took over the running of the programming, the focus has been sharper and interestingly I think, more eclectic. The festival has used its institutional cache to open new avenues for women and gay filmmakers; it is still struggling with improving access for black, Latino or simply unconnected filmmakers.

Whether they have made changes to their review and application process that previously occasioned some egregious oversights, passing on David Gordon Green’s George Washington or Antonio Campos’s Afterschool, that now appears far less likely to happen. The advent of the insurgent sidebar Next, like the original Directors’ Fortnight, at Cannes, sharply illustrated the imbalance and artistic reach between this and the Dramatic Competition.

This year’s main competition was better than average, though it was also fairly safe and predictable. Had Cooper and Groth slotted some of the Next titles, especially Matthew Porterfield’s superb third feature, I Used to Be Darker there, the competition takes on a more electrifying, even destabilizing feel that brazenly breaks open the festival’s innate caution.

With my work and personal needs, I focused on the following sections: dramatic competition, premieres and Next. I saw only two documentaries and couple of other miscellany titles.

I saw eleven of the sixteen titles in the main competition (Lynn Shelton’s Touchy Feely screens tomorrow night in Chicago). Ryan Coogler’s bracing, mournful and exceptionally well-acted Fruitvale, drawn from a harrowing and deeply unnecessary incident of four years ago, won the dramatic grand prize and the audience award. In an alert, cagey and sharply expressive lead turn, Michael B. Jordan is the charismatic and deeply conflicted twenty-two year old named Oscar Grant. Coogler’s great virtue, cinematically and emotionally, is not turning him into a martyr or sentimentalizing him.

Jordan’s Grant is a multidimensional man, smart, willful and occasionally foolish, chastened by his experiences and desperate to reach a common decency and do right for his girlfriend (an excellent Melonie Diaz) and magnetic young daughter. Fruitvale is a sharp and sorrowful work about race, class and social inequality. Coogler’s great talent is for subverting expectation and cultural presuppositions (especially about young black men), coloring feeling and emotion in an unforced and natural manner that only intensifies the unspeakable anguish and loss by the movie’s powerful and wounding climax.

Upstream Color is the long-awaited second feature of uncompromising independent Shane Carruth. His low-budget science-fiction Primer won the festival’s top prize nine years ago. The new film is a brazen and formidable work of the imagination that combines a Cronenberg-like horror dread of the body with something far more difficult and elusive to capture, a soulful and sometimes strikingly poetic moral discovery in the contrasted fates of two lost souls.

I admired the film more than I liked it, in part because the first third, though ravishing to look at, is often exceptionally difficult to watch as Carruth outlines an elaborate swindle perpetuated against Chris (a wonderful Amy Seitz), involving a biologically contaminated worm that in its psychological implications becomes a horrifying form of sexual violation.

Like early Alain Resnais, Upstream Color is deliberately confounding, filled with oblique, terrifying characters, explained behavior and mystifying action that refuses to cohere in the traditional sense. It is explicitly not a film to defend but one to luxuriate in, the better to disentangle its meanings and find its internal rhythm. I still don’t understand it. As a succession of splintered and hypnotic images, the movie stands alone.

The Texas-independent filmmaker David Lowery worked with Carruth as an editor. He is a very good director in his own right. His third film as director, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, is a lyrical sixties-set outlaw movie that, having sufficiently established its influences (Badlands, Thieves Like Us and Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night) at the start creates a haunting and realistic idiom that proves both impressionistic and exhilarating.

The young lovers, Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara, pictured above), are separated after a failed robbery results in a police shootout, the death of his accomplice and the solitary young dreamer sentenced to prison and tremulous young woman living with their young daughter on the property of a local merchant and benefactor (Robert Altman regular Keith Carradine). The wildcard is a young deputy (Ben Foster) who shadows her.

Suffused with a dark romantic pessimism, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a mood piece punctuated with flares of violence and pungent soloquies. Affleck’s low-burn, laconic delivery is both his most relaxed and involving performance since his great work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The feline, angular Mara continues to astonishing with a raptness that is quick and revealing. Lowery is not always able to capable transcend the limitations of the form. What a look.

The movie is shot by Bradford Young, and what is most striking is not just how supple and tactile the movie looks, though more impressively, how fluidly the director and cinematographer connect color and light to character and behavior. I especially liked how they shifted from landscape to interiors, and the gorgeous palette, the way a juke joint is lit up or the shadowy terrain of an open killing field. It is lucid and beguiling moviemaking.

Young was awarded a special jury prize for his work on Saints and Andrew Dosunmu’s second feature Mother of George. If Saints worked in a heightened though fairly naturalistic vein, Dosunmu’s film belongs to the otherworldly, like the dazzling and free-form ethnographic works of the Armenian master Sergei Parajanov. Shot in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the movie is at once immersive and strange, captured from the inside-out though sharply refusing to offer an easy point of access.

The story has personal meaning and resonance by exploring the particular difficulties and confusions that ensue, when eighteen months after their wedding, the beautiful and vibrant Adenike (Danai Gurira) remains unable to conceive. Isaach De Bankole, the charismatic regular in the films of Jim Jarmusch and Claire Denis, plays her husband.

What’s breathtaking is the shooting style supports the movie’s inner dynamics. Young’s deep color saturation and off-center compositions ground the material, continuously reinforcing the idea of estrangement from landscape and communities. Strikingly movie is emphatically not a fable of assimilation about the difficulties of Yoruba Nigerians living in New York, but a sure and gripping dissection of the ethnic and sexual stratification ensnaring its central characters.

The visually astounding wedding ceremony that opens the film underlines the beauty and wonder while sharply commenting on the same restrictions and enclosures. Those discrepancies make Mother of George strange, unsettling and real.

John Krokidas’s debut feature Kill Your Darlings is the most successful of the recent Beat films at animating the literary aspirations, inner conflict and peculiar emotional needs of the holy trinity that was Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William Burroughs (Foster, again). Krokidas very shrewdly narrows his area of interest to their earliest time together at Columbia University, during the Second World War, his story orbiting around the romantic obsession the older David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) developed for the beautiful though frail and deeply vulnerable Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan).

Reed Morano’s cinematography is bracing and jaunty, and is steadfastly observational and sardonic rather than judgmental and puritanical. The movie’s theme is betrayal, witnessed in the rather cavalier and cruel manner young Allen watched his father treat his emotionally damaged mother.

Stacie Passon’s Concussion is steeped in movie history, especially the great European standards of the late sixties and early seventies, like Belle de jour, Daisies and Celine and Julie Go Boating. In a great and lively performance, Robin Weigert is jolted out of her upper-middle class complacency by a traumatic episode and quickly adopts a transgressive, empowering alternate personae as a high-end prostitute who exclusively services women. (The reversal here is the bored suburban housewife is part of a lesbian power couple.)

I could have done without all the near pornographic accumulation of personal wealth. Despite that, Passon has a terrific compositional eye with a sharp feel for point of view. Putting a woman of pure id at the center is fresh and exciting, granting the material a charged and intense feeling of both escape and surrender. Concussion is less a story of sexual awakening than the corresponding instruments of power and control. Beautiful and formidable, the commanding Weigert is tough, emphatic and melancholy.

For the second straight year, James Ponsoldt had a film in the main competition. I didn’t much care for Smashed last year, other than the performances of the two leads. The Spectacular Now is very much of a piece with that film, presenting another harsh and unbending analysis of a young man’s alcohol addiction. The difference is the director refuses to sentimentalize Sutter (Miles Teller), the preposterously gilded, affable high school senior who becomes smitten with a straight arrow classmate (Shailene Woodley).

The story inverts that of Smashed, where rather than document the necessary break up of the central couple shows how the charming, self-deprecating Sutter thoroughly corrupts the vulnerable and introverted Aimee. As the bulk of teen films go soft in the head. The Spectacular Now floats away in its own giddy cynicism. It is harsh but far closer to actual behavior than most films of its kind are ever willing to admit.

The other films I saw in the competition verged from the agreeable (Lake Bell’s script-winning In a World...) to the deplorably awful (Jerusha Hess’s tone-deaf Austenland, the “Mormon Midnight in Paris,” a critic associate remarked).

These are my rankings and grades:

1. Fruitvale (A-)
2. Upstream Color (A-)
3. Kill Your Darlings (A-)
4. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (B+)
5. Mother of George (B+)
6. Concussion (B+)
7. The Spectacular Now (B+)
8. In a World (C+)
9. Toy’s House (C)
10. The Lifeguard (C-)
11. Austenland (D)

(Color and form: Danai Gurira as a young bride caught in a strange place, out of time, in Andrew Dosunmu's Mother of George.)

The warriors

(Jessica Chastain plays a Central Intelligence operative tracking Osama bin Laden in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty. Images courtesy of Sony.)

 "I think what is most important is to treat the material as truthfully and honestly as possible. We don't learn anything by closing our eyes off to it. We learn only by the very nature of watching, seeing and looking at something that isn't handled in an exploitational way or in any manner in which it could be treated as anything other than what it is."

Kathryn Bigelow

                                                                                              

The remarks of filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow date not a week ago or last month though rather some seventeen years ago to an interview I conducted with her at the New York Film festival for her 1995 feature, Strange Days. I pointed out, in that film, about the characters’ deep need or longing for sensory or sexual gratification is attained without the corresponding emotional or psychological complications.

"This is a film about the consequences of watching," Bigelow said. The same could be said of much of her work.

Bigelow’s extraordinary new feature Zero Dark Thirty, a dark and anguished procedural structured around the decade long search for Osama bin Laden, has become a Rorschach test, about perspective, morality and interpretation on the brutish and morally reprehensible enhanced interrogation techniques deployed by CIA-operatives to gain crucial intelligence against al-Qaeda terror suspects and detainees.

I have no problems about the relevance or validity of that discussion, but it has obfuscated and distorted a great deal of what’s compelling and valuable about the film. The writers (Mark Bowden, Jane Meyer) most qualified to write about the movie’s historical accuracy are, rather incongruously, least adept as discussing the movie as cinema or in the context of the director’s work. Bowden’s Atlantic essay is certainly persuasive arguing the film does not condone torture, though when he quotes Pauline Kael on Sam Peckinpah wholly out of context, it magnifies the unholy shotgun marriage and rather irreconcilable parts.

The writer who called Bigelow a “fetishist and sadist,” is beneath contempt, and the feminist cultural critic who likened her to Leni Riefenstahl is again, somebody plainly ignorant of film history and culture. (I am more interested in writing about the movie. I think it worth noting, the “torture works,” argument was immediately appropriated by the right-wing who were determined to deflect the judgment, bravery and toughness of Obama in order to undermine the political capital he acquired in the aftermath of bin Laden’s killing.)

As I wrote last week, told largely from the perspective of the tenacious, obsessive CIA-operative Maya (Jessica Chastain), Zero Dark Thirty is part of the director’s recurring concern focused on a brave, obsessive and often willfully naive innocent (Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel, Keanu Reeves in Point Break) who infiltrates closed-off, ritualistic social structures in order to destroy them. Many of her friends died in the process, she says.

“I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.”

Bigelow's films continually comment on the medium and, by extension, play off the concerns and attitudes of the person who makes them. It is why, many of them, are pervaded by a sense of failure and loss. It also explains, I think, why none of her films have ever reached a wide audience (they are too self-questioning and marked by doubt and failure).

Bigelow has long worked closely with strong male collaborators, her co-director Monty Montgomery on her debut, The Loveless; the very gifted Eric Red on the scripts for Near Dark and Blue Steel; James Cameron and Jay Cocks on Strange Days; and now Mark Boal, the journalist whose forensically detailed fact-based reporting are the terrific starting points of The Hurt Locker and the new film.

Bigelow’s style has also shifted and mutated over time. The early works, especially Near Dark, are suffused with a doomed romantic pessimism and poetic fatalism, most memorably the hotel shootout where the shafts of light sear the flesh of the vampires. Point Break is her most liberating and abstracted piece, cut by light and movement in an arabesque.

Bigelow started out as a painter, but she grew impatient and frustrated by the solitude and inert nature of that type of image making. The early and mid-period films marked her restless and innovative mixed-art uses of space, time and movement. "If you don't push the envelope a bit, you're always going to stay in the same place," she told me in that first interview.

More recently, her imagery has become distilled, pure and stripped down. In our last interview, during the time of The Hurt Locker, Bigelow told me, aesthetically, she was observant to the material. Arguably, the most devastating moment of the film comes at the start, the screen dark and the sounds of fear and panic and acute loss, from somebody aboard one of the hijacked planes and another trapped atop one of the towers of the World Trade Center. “I’m going to die, aren’t I,” she says.

The dominant theme of Bigelow’s films is infiltration, or initiation, and Maya fits the continuum of the outsider who draws on a steely mixture of competence, training, guile and street smarts. Reportedly based on a Central Intelligence operative exclusively tasked with tracking bin Laden, Maya relates late in the film she was recruited into the agency out of high school.

Otherwise, emotionally she’s a blank slate. “Washington says she’s a killer,” her superior and mentor, Dan (Jason Clarke), asserts at the start. Boal’s script is like contemporary war the film is fixated on, asymmetrical and amorphous, darting from a continuously unfixed state and “black sites,” in Pakistan or the former Iron Curtain (Bigelow helps ground us with the use of occasional title cards).

The movie’s power, energy and sweep is generated from the tangle of observation and the explosive collision of personality, necessity and historical urgency. The CIA is a hierarchal structure operated like a major corporation, the lines of authority clearly delineated. In a film with more than one-hundred speaking parts, Maya is the centerpiece, the organizing shape Bigelow and Boal rely on to provide a solidity and physical grounding.

Maya is introduced with her face sheathed in camouflaged, a witness to the harsh techniques Dan carries out against a terror suspect named Ammar (Reda Kateb). Her initial reaction of revulsion mirrored my own. Chastain’s performance is a marvel of withholding, even interiorizing feelings. Her preternatural cool is also a mask, concealing a drive and determination, like her risking insubordination by threatening to expose her superiors’ cautious or self-regarding inaction.

Character is action. Zero Dark Thirty negotiates the pain, desperation and enormity of the profound challenges inherent in Maya’s mission; death is a constant, especially through bombings or in one of the film’s many razor-sharp and chilling action sequences, Maya being ambushed outside her work by machine-gun wielding assassins.

No longer flamboyant, Bigelow’s style approaches the plaintive and immersive that in its documentary photorealism not only intensifies the action, it snares and unsettles you (at least it did me).  Even when you know the tragic outcome, like a rendezvous involving a Jordanian doctor (and ruthless double agent) at a remote CIA station in Afghanistan, Bigelow is such a master of cutting, movement and camera placement, like a brilliant musician, fine-tuned and never sentimentalizing or exploitive but chillingly, horrifying documenting the consequences.

My friend Michael Phillips pointed out the presence of the terrific actor Édgar Ramírez as a technical specialist naturally evokes Olivier Assayas’s Carlos. Like Assayas, Bigelow has a propulsive and uncanny feel for speed and momentum and the incidents congeal and collide, especially in the second half as Maya pursues her theory of tracking bin Laden’s location by identifying and locating his courier.

The climatic special forces raid on the Abbottabad compound fortress is hypnotic and transfixing and the climatic death and loss that results from the operation is marked by sorrow and violation rater than something emotionally satisfying, much less a form of jingoism. From those horrifying sounds that open the movie to the devastatingly ambivalent final image, Zero Dark Thirty explores the personal and emotional costs of duty. 

“Anger as soon as awake is dead,” Emily Dickinson said. In Zero Dark Thirty, it stings.

(Cineastes: director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal, on the set of Zero Dark Thirty.)

Coming home

(The dreamers: Clément Métayer and Lola Créton mediate political and personal art in Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air. Images courtesy of Toronto International Film festival.)

Olivier Assayas’s new feature, Something in the Air, opens with a spectacular clash between student protesters and riot police captured with a rending volatility and tactile immediacy that is electrifying though jolting and terrifying in a sad, even mournful way.

The movie (I prefer the more evocative French title, Après mai) is the concluding piece in a loose trilogy of autobiographically-shaped features starting with the superb Cold Water and the more introspective and subdued Late August, Early September.

The film that made his international reputation, the 1994 Cold Water developed out of the excellent French television series, All the Boys and Girls of Their Time (the same series yielded Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds, Chantal Akerman's Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the Sixties and Claire Denis’ US Go Home).

Set in 1972 on the outskirts of Paris, the story concerns the mysterious love affair of two criminally beautiful sixteen-year-olds, Christine (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet). It was the first significant part for the unforgettable Ledoyen, and she lends the material a startling, feral quality.

Their rendezvous in the countryside sets in motion the movie's astounding final forty minutes set around a party at an abandoned chateau. The bacchanal, anarchic and impulsive, is enthralling and majestically captured (like the bonfire, abetted by the teenagers that use the broken down furniture as kindle), attuned to the freedom and energy of the music (Janis Joplin's version of “Me and Bobby McGee”) and the gloriously unpredictable and beautiful movements of the actors' bodies and faces.

Working with his early collaborator, Denis Lenoir, Assayas achieved a remarkable stylistic fluency in his bracing and startling capture of character, movement and situation that achieve a lyrical and privileged sensation. The movie's ending, charged, grave and wounding in its implications, is the most ambiguous of the director's career. One always sensed Assayas was never fully finished with the ideas, themes or characters.

Now, thankfully, Assayas has gone home, as it were, remixing, rethinking, some of the same material, from a different perspective, and the incandescent and thrilling result is his new feature. I’ve seen it twice now, and the second viewing helped clarify what I really like about it.

Cold Water was rough, messy and unfinished. Something in the Air has a rare and vital tone, a tough, honest and scrupulous reconstruction of the past, its youthful ardor mixed with a romantic verve, and how consideration of artistic choices and personal commitment spun on a dime, fleeting and often out of control and rapidly changing moment to moment.

Assayas is very acute of the personal ramifications of the “long decade,” that marked the nineteen-sixties, and what the carryover for the next generation of student radicals entailed. The self-portrait is wounding, even deflating, in what it unmasks. As a more doctrinaire friend observes, Gilles’s personal tension is naturally exacerbated between the solitary nature of his art and his obedience to the movement.

“I live in my fantasies,” Gilles says. He is naturally a man that stands outside, observing, coloring and reacting to events.

In this version, Gilles (Clément Métayer) is a talented young painter and somewhat reluctant participant in the social and political fervor that exists in the aftermath of May 1968. He is member of a cell composed of high school students who are involved with all manner of street theater provocations, distributing leaflets and committing small, isolated acts of political sabotage.

His dismay, even dissatisfaction, with the movement, is a constant. His uncertainty about the intellectual legitimacy of his actions and the necessity of his art is echoed emotionally, in the two women he oscillates between, the willowy and dramatic Laure (Carole Combes) and the smart, fearless and committed Christine (Lola Créton). As Laure recedes from his life and Christine assumes a more important role, Gilles slowly, irrevocably, begins to assert his own independence, regardless of the consequences.

After a security guard is seriously injured during one of the political demonstrations, Gilles, Christine and another friend, Alain (Félix Armand) flee to Italy and begin their own unsentimental education on art, sex and personal discovery. These passages are the most buoyant and transfixing in the film.

The camera, wielded by the great Eric Gautier, is fleeting and observational. Assayas’s liquid and relaxed style has moved from the nervous exhilaration of Cold Water to something pure, free and elastic, like the landscape rushing by as a train darts through the Italian countryside, a light that Gilles shines on Christine’s face, the charged, precise line renderings Gilles draws from the naked form of Christine, or the camera floating above and trailing Laure following her painful break up with Gilles.

The last time I interviewed Assayas, he said: “I think in time the influence of [Jean] Renoir has been growing. He's always been a filmmaker who was very dear to me. You have other filmmakers that really strike you. When I started making films, I had this big influence of the work of [Robert] Bresson, who for me was the most important thing in cinema. I kind of drifted toward Renoir.”

The Bresson connection is also relevant. The new feature, explicitly, acknowledges the influence of Bresson’s 1977 penultimate feature, The Devil, Probably. The class and period milieu is very similar. It’s worth noting, Assayas wrote a piece in Film Comment, where he talked about his friendship with Antoine Monnier, the great-grandson of Henri Matisse who played the ill-fated Charles in the Bresson film.

In the movie, like life, the hero privileged image-making to agitprop, luxuriating in a vivid and sometime contradictory kaleidoscope of movie history to locate his own voice. Rueful, observant and beautiful, Something in the Air is about how that vital and discerning consciousness came to be.

Thank goodness for that.

Magnificent obsession

(Joaquin Phoenix as the tormented young man and drifter ensnared in the divine realm of a magnetic huckster (Philip Seymour Hoffman, below) in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. Images courtesy of the Weinstein Company.)

Every Paul Thomas Anderson movie since his second feature Boogie Nights has been crucial and necessary. Still, The Master has no corollary in his career.

 The director’s first film in the five years since There Will Be Blood was shot largely in the wide-gauge format 65mm and features the first performance by the talented Joaquin Phoenix in some four years and concerns a deeply contentious subject matter, a supposed origins inquiry into the controversial Church of Scientology.

The movie screened, covertly and otherwise, for about a month leading to its formal premieres at Venice and Toronto. These nearly underground screenings suggested something furtive, sensational and magnificent igniting a broader discussion of whether The Master constitutes a transcendent work of art, a takedown of Scientology or perhaps something in between, a flawed and incomplete work alternately ecstatic and gorgeous and grounded in the director’s trademark stylistic and formal preoccupations.

The Master is audacious and problematic, never less than captivating and brilliant though somewhat unformed and emotionally cool. The opening half hour is so jaw-dropping I expected the film to match or possibly exceed that. Despite my reluctance to declare the movie great, I am thrilled by its existence. Current film culture is all the more vital because the movie stands before us, and Anderson’s eccentric and bravura individualism marks the kind of ambition that needs to be encouraged and facilitated.

Visually, the movie is extraordinary, packed with a vivid and sensual detail that is absolutely intoxicating. Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., working with Anderson for the first time, finds a glint-eyed solidity and strangeness. The images pop, annotating the haunting, melancholy late nineteen-forties and early fifties production design of Jack Fisk and David Crank with a thrilling verisimilitude and documentary exactness.

Anderson’s theme is his typical one, the damaged and strangely symbiotic relationship of two peculiar men. Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the charismatic leader of an unorthodox religion known as the Cause whose self-declared “guinea pig,” is the psychologically damaged former naval officer Freddie (played by Phoenix, in his first lead performance since James Gray’s Two Lovers) who falls prey to his intoxicating tutelage.

The opening passages, set in the waning stages of the Second World War in the Pacific theater, are probably the most sustained and brilliant of its director‘s career, documenting with verve and visual acuity Freddie’s alarming sexual pathology and moral emptiness. The sailor is clearly traumatized by his war experiences and unable to assimilate to civilian life.

Water is the dominant image of the movie, suggestive of re-birth and transcendence. Like the astounding opening twenty minutes of There Will Be Blood, Anderson creates a heightened lyricism through a series of linking images and the strikingly layered soundtrack. Plot has never been the director’s primary interest, and he seems much more engaged experimenting with the dynamic and expressive qualities of the medium to create a state of being lacerating in its implications, especially socially and sexually.

The movie’s opening image (which he repeats twice), the foreboding and dark trails of ocean water emitted in the wake of a Navy vessel’s propulsion is the first of several stark and rhyming images suggestive of flight, movement and transience. The others are a stunning dissolve that moves from Freddie’s Navy psychiatric evaluation to the close-up of a beautiful blonde that introduces his work as a studio photographer at a department store; a ravishing and musically sustained tracking shot following a young woman model a fur jacket inside the same store; or the opening of the door, like John Ford’s opening and closing shots of The Searchers, of Freddie’s panic stricken flight from a Salinas cabbage field.

The movie is very Wellesian; the opening owes a great deal to Orson Welles’s great 1946 noir The Lady from Shanghai. In The Master, the fates of the two men intersect after Freddie seeks shelter on the yacht, lent by a wealthy New York benefactress, Dodd has commanded to carry out his unorthodox religious practices. In The Lady from Shanghai, the yacht party moves from New York to San Francisco. Anderson reverses that movement. Hoffman, imperial, baroque and charming, has the Wellesian bravado just right.

“Don’t apologize,” he says to Freddie. “You’re a scoundrel.”

Just as Daniel Day-Lewis’s Blood performance appropriated the cadence and sounds of John Huston, Hoffman adopts Welles’s volatile combination of whispery solicitude and outrageous bombast. Hoffman’s “master,” at once puppeteer and huckster, identifies himself as variously “a scientist, a connoisseur, a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher but, above all else, a hopelessly inquisitive man.”

In the first of several tense encounters between the two men that function as Lancaster’s inquisition over the tremulous Freddie, Anderson holds the camera tight to their faces, never flinching, in a long unbroken take, and the effect is hypnotic and galvanizing, punctuated with an elegant dolly of Freddie's recovered memory of the beautiful and innocent young girl he still fixates on.

Anderson cannot sustain that virtuosity. (I am not sure who could.) The images are never less than potent, suggestive and dreamy, especially a sexually hallucinatory moment where Freddie imagines all the women surrounding Lancaster during a musical number naked. In the second half, the storytelling becomes more elliptical and fragmented, the rhythms more discontinuous, the story suddenly lurching from place to place, Philadelphia, Arizona and England and the movie slowly, unambiguously, turns inward and static.

For better or worse, the movie belongs to Phoenix. It’s a big Method performance, and Phoenix (who often suggests a more muscular Montgomery Clift) is certainly compelling though also limited and repetitive, especially his inflections and physical gestures, particularly how he continually suggests a man wholly uncomfortable inside his own skin.

Like Mark Wahlberg’s debased porn actor in Boogie Nights, the young interloper constructs an elaborate alternative family that unleashes all manner of unintended conflict when the other members of the insular and tight-knit group, especially Amy Adams, playing Lancaster’s wife, consider him too willful, naive and insufficiently faithful to the dictates of the new religion.

Anderson’s Oedipal-inflected stories are his go-to position, but he never takes the material in a truly revolutionary direction that deepens it psychologically or emotionally. Anderson makes explicit the homoerotic connection of the two men during a reconciliation following Freddie’s release from jail, Dodd pulling and tackling the young man so severely he splits the seam of his pants. Freddie’s a torrent of contradictions and his capacity for violence, his homicidal need to legitimize Dodd’s convictions, is insufficiently explored dramatically or emotionally, especially when the inevitable rupture between the two occurs. (It echoes the estrangement of Prince Hal and Falstaff in Welles’s greatest film, Chimes at Midnight.)

The movie’s circular structure, ending where it began, invokes a kind of reverie for a lost Eden, linking it with such essential and iconic works as In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses and Citizen Kane (a final Welles acknowledgement Anderson alludes to when Freddie meets Dodd at his office in England). The ending magnifies the movie’s polar state, and it leaves you dazed though anxious.

Having just returned from Toronto, I am prepared to admit The Master puts to shame almost everything in its wake. Conversely, the too subdued ending underscored the nagging and unmistakable sense of missed opportunities.

I doubt seeing another movie this year that leaves me so exhilarated and unfulfilled.

(Artist in residence: Paul Thomas Anderson, talking about his film at the Toronto press conference. Photo by Sarjoun Faour, courtesy of Toronto International Film Festival.)

 

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.