Light Sensitive

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.

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.

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.

Two lovers

(Bodies in motion: a gilded young couple in the ecstasy of love in Drake Doremus' third feature, Like Crazy. Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.)

The young filmmaker Drake Doremus makes a startling and tremendous forward leap technically and aesthetically with his third feature Like Crazy, a French New Wave-inflected mood piece charting the jagged and unpredictable emotional currents of a young couple.

The film marks the second consecutive year the 27-year-old Doremus has premiered a movie in the Sundance dramatic competition. The new work captured the grand jury prize.

Last year’s Douchebag featured some compelling parts, but the whole was damaged by the spectacularly ill-conceived central character whose extreme self-regard and neurosis made the work extremely difficult to make a useful or exciting connection.

Doremus worked on the script with Ben York Jones, who played the second lead in Douchebag. That second feature was fairly harsh and abrasive. The new work is elliptical and impressionistic, shot largely hand held, and like most of the touchstones it is indebted to, like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless or John Cassavetes’s Shadows, the movie has an impulsive and gliding quality that colors the mood and tone and yields a fresh and lovely texture.

At the same time the movie is likely to severely divide people. As storytelling the movie requires some fundamental leaps of logic and plausibility. At times the movie’s almost too much of a good thing. Doremus sacrifices character depth for style and form. In the second half he strains for some dramatic contrasts and symbolism that proves a little emphatic.

Even so, the imperfect parts never cancel out what is distinctive and interesting. The characters are wiling to plunge into difficult areas, and the movie has a limber, avid quality, a sense of quest, that propels the material constantly forward. The movie examines the intoxicating possibility of love and loss with both seriousness and tact.

The story details the tense, prickly and unconventional relationship between Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones). Their attraction seems inevitable. The two are introduced as they approach their graduation from a Los Angeles university. She’s a British exchange student studying journalism, beautiful, bright, and terrifically composed. He’s a ruggedly good looking charmer with a sensitive side who makes eclectic furniture.

She initiates matters with a deeply confessional note (“I hope you don’t think I’m a nutcase,” she writes). In one swoop, the two are feverishly drawn to each other, inseparable and intoxicated by the lyrical possibilities of love and solidarity. Doremus and his very talented cinematographer John Guleserian work in tight, compacted spaces and a narrow depth of field that annotates the sense of rupture and excitement between the two.

The filmmaking is mostly tactile and expressive and captured in a rush of often spellbinding imagery, like a reverse angle shot of Jacob riding a go-cart, overwhelmed by the speed and exhilaration of the moment. Like the romantic reveries of Wong Kar-Wai, the filmmakers keep the camera close to the actors bodies; it pivots, dances and swirls around their bodies in creating an ecstatic whirl.

If the opening movement has a liquid flow, the middle and closing passages are shaded by a darker and more pessimistic register. The nature of their relationship is forever changed by a seemingly unremarkable personal action when, in the heat of a passionate “last night,” Anna overstays the requirements of her student visa after the idea of separation from Jacob proves unbearable.

The decisions proves astonishingly reckless a couple of weeks later when Anna is detained by immigration authorities in Los Angeles and repatriated to London. Immediately the tone shifts from surrender and possibility to something far more difficult and complicated.

As the story shuttles between Los Angeles and London, careening between the fluid shifts in attitudes and feelings between the two, the inevitable confusion and uncertainty about the relationship erupts.

The two are suddenly forced apart, the difficulties of the relationship further complicated by their rising professional careers. Anna lands a job at a prominent London magazine and Jacob’s custom made furniture business flourishes. The separation naturally brings about stain and confusion. Jacob proves particularly aloof and distant, a sharp contrast to Anna’s persistent need for approval.

The writing is graceful and understated, the imagery succinct and movingly precise. If the opening movement was predicated on a dazzling speed, the middle and closing passages are much more mournful, delicate and haunting. Doremus and his excellent young actors are very good at illustrating the disrupted tempos. As the early excitement and deep attraction subsides, the two must negotiate a more difficult emotional terrain of shifting needs, control and independence.

Separated and confused, the two are suddenly drawn to others. Jacob enters into a relationship with Samantha (Jennifer Lawrence). Anna is more circumspect and probably feels guilty, though even she eventually surrenders to her own needs and takes up with her good looking neighbor, Simon (Charlie Bewley).

Like Crazy moves tentatively from there, the time passing quickly, but it sharply delineates the rancor, disappointment and jealousy of the central relationship. As the second half is related through a series of contrasts, the telling proves both unpredictable and cruel. It may not always make narrative sense but it never shrugs from pain and violation in exploring the consequences of tumult and excitement.

It also has two sharp and compelling performances that underline however volatile and moody the relationship, they seem permanently bound.

Hath no fury

(Sound the alarm: Zachary Quinto, as a Wall Street trader, who discovers something startling and unsavory about his profession, in J.C. Chandor's Margin Call. Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions.)

The first movies to examine the 2008 economic collapse were documentaries, most prominently Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s American Casino and Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning Inside Job. They combined an objective toughness with a righteous anger directed at the hubris, arrogance and predatory tactics of Wall Street culture the sparked the international meltdown. 

I first caught J.C. Chandor’s debut feature, Margin Call, at Sundance. The movie opens now at the very existence on an emerging countermovement, the Occupy Wall Street and its corollary actions in London, San Francisco and Chicago, gives rise to a wholly different brand of anger and collective fury.

 Chandor’s film is a brisk, 24-hour snapshot of the panic from inside the corridors of power and entitlement. Chandor has a background in the financial services private sector, and his familiarity has both advantages and an on occasional downside. 

Chandor is not a stylist or visually sophisticated, certainly not in the expressive and fluent way of other first-time Sundance directors were, like Maryam Keshavarz (Circumstance) or Braden King (HERE). Margin Call is persuasive in the details and sharply played by a fine ensemble cast that makes up for some of the protean qualities of the overall conception. What it has to say is not terribly original or groundbreaking, but it is a compelling story briskly told. 

Thankfully Chandor does not swamp the movie in the quotidian or arcane details off the derivative or complicated trading mechanisms of mortgage backed securities or credit default swaps at the heart of the crisis. The movie is set at the incipient stages of the financial collapse, and the early tone is one of fear and overwhelming anxiousness. 

Set inside a fictional Wall Street financial investment firm clearly modeled on the Lehman Brothers, the movie opens with a ritualistic “massacre,” like something out of Up in the Air, with a team of snipers, the human resources division, swooping in on the trading floor to inform the unlucky they are about to be terminated. 

Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the head of the firm’s risk management group, is the highest profile victim. As he is being escorted from the building, Dale hands over a flash drive containing highly sensitive company information and tells one of his lieutenants, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), to “be careful.” 

Sullivan, somewhat naïve and dutiful, is an MIT scholar and rocket scientist who rejected academia and joined the financial services sector, he freely admits, because of the money. Curious and intrigued by Dale’s closing remarks, he applies his own mathematical computations and projections. What he discovers is not a pretty picture.

The trading component is a very lucrative though volatile aspect of the company’s revenues. As such it comes with a very high asterisk, and what Sullivan learns is that the company’s positions are not just questionable though downright “toxic.”

A contraction of the market could effectively render the company worthless. Sullivan immediately notifies his superior Will (Paul Bettany), that sets in motion a series of backdoor meetings, beginning with the managing director, Sam (Kevin Spacey) to the founder and CEO (Jeremy Irons). Chandor delineates the power players, from the law division (represented by Simon Baker and Demi Moore) to the major board signatories. 

Margin Call turns on a series of maneuvers and counteractions, where fiduciary questions about their obligations to clients and bondholders and greater moral culpability is suddenly trumped by their own survivability. The movie’s strength is not necessarily how it all plays out, but rather the private dilemmas and personal demons enacted by the players.

The movie works best surveying that world and pointing out the social hierarchy, where the elite invariably find a way to survive and prosper and how those underneath are often sacrificed at the altar of the church of capitalism. Chandor is very good at elucidating the misogyny coursing through the Wall Street culture, from the cruel epithets and nasty invective betrayed by the higher ups.

If he cannot bring much visual excitement or inventiveness to the movie, he partially compensates with a sharply attuned feel for situations and performances, like a beautifully sustained monologue by Tucci about his character’s background as an engineer occasioned a resourceful solution to social progress and improved daily life. 

By implication, Wall Street is the opposite; it sucks out resources and wealth for the purposes of self-dealing without fully considering the larger implications. At least, that appears the message of Margin Call. It gets a bit muddled at times. It does not always help that some of the other characters are less well defined than say, the analyst Peter Sullivan, and very few of them are very sympathetically drawn.

 Spacey’s financier, a variation of his character from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, appears more interested in the rapidly declining health of his dog than the people that have just been summarily fired at his firm. In Margin Call, character is elastic and more subtle than first appearances imply. Bettany is very effective as a big player suddenly brought down. 

In the end, summarized by a speech Irons’s CEO gives to Spacey, the movie is about a certain kind of self-justification, that the recklessness of the firm is consistent with the operating culture and world they inhabit. 

It is dangerous and I think, not terribly, accurate to yoke together this film with the enveloping movement actually unfolding. It seems fairly clear, whatever your position, the protesters have a collective willingness to unsettle people, to make them uncomfortable. 

Unfortunately Margin Call never breaks the rules to truly become something vital and important. Quinto's Sullivan is a niche actor; Spacey's Sam Riley is the defeated, haunted man, resigned to the mortifying actions; Irons's CEO stands outside, leathery and impersonal, secure in his knowledge his money and power insulate from any kind of public or even private comeuppance.

Margin Call is full of observations, some very credible and sharp, but too often it has a restrained mood and tone that seems antithetical to the material. It sheds light on an elusive culture and with a documentary exactness suggests the source and origins of the profound troubles we now face.

 

Touch of evil

(Olsen and Hawkes in a startling extract from Sean Durkin's superb debut. Image courtesy of Fox Searchlight.)

In the oblique and terrifying Martha Marcy May Marlene, a young woman’s physical and emotional recovery following her flight from a terrifying cult marks a formally audacious and visually sophisticated debut from the very gifted young filmmaker Sean Durkin. 

Produced by Josh Mond and Antonio Campos, the collaborators of Campos’s superb 2009 debut Afterschool, Durkin has adroitly expanded his short film Mary Last Seen, into a disquieting and frightening portrait of surrender and coercion.  

Durkin’s intricate and involving two-part structure unfolds largely through flashbacks, eschewing background and circumstance to depict the story of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, truly stunning), a directionless and susceptible young woman recruited by a handsome stranger, Watts (Brady Corbet) into a collective hiding out in a large farmhouse in the Catskills. 

From the eerie opening, Durkin creates a insinuating and creepy texture of disassociation and entrapment. Martha is introduced with a group of women, identically dressed, who must await their turn while the men finish their evening meal. Moments later, Martha is seen lighting out through the woods, the camera trailing her, as she uses the cover of darkness to aid her escape. Watts confronts her at a local diner, though surprisingly grants her freedom. 

She makes contact with her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), her only surviving relative, and we learn that Martha has been absent two years. Lucy lives with her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), a New York developer. Lucy and her husband provide Martha with the necessary sanctuary in Connecticut three hours from where Lucy made contact with her wayward sister. 

Durkin and his brilliant cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (who also shot Afterschool) fracture time and space, fluidly shifting between the past and present as the torment and sexual subjugation Martha experiences at the farmhouse is contrasted against her overwhelming task of reclaiming her humanity and emotional bearings.  

The filmmakers are especially adept at the startling use of water imagery. Normally a symbol of cleansing and re-birth, in Martha’s distracted and angry condition, it marks a particularly grungy form of violation. With its recurring use of recovered memories, water provides a propulsive sense of plunge and downward movement. 

If Watts is Martha’s conduit into the cult, the leader is the suave and chillingly exact Patrick (John Hawkes). He carries a magnetic hold, personally and sexually, over many of the women. The wiry Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) assigns Martha her new identity, “Marcy May,” and presents a moment both enthralling and unsettling, serenading her with a number, “Marcy’s Song,” that underlines his charisma and magnetism. 

The flashbacks also reveal Patrick’s darker and more vengeful side, a Manson manqué, like a moment involving shooting firearms and a violent home invasion that affirms his pathological skills at convincing his followers to commit the most egregious of crimes.  

Water also marks Martha’s acute reminder of distress and dislocation and indicates her own moral imbalance, like a startling and revealing moment Martha suddenly disrobes and dives into the water near her sister’s vacation home naked. Her own rebirth is met with increasingly disturbing signs of breakdown and perhaps encroaching madness, demonstrated by anxiousness, violent mood swings and aberrant behavior, like the night she coiled up to Lucy in her bed during sex with Ted. 

Like Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter, the movie uneasily moves between the imagination unbound and the nightmarish implications. “Do you ever get that feeling where you can’t tell if something is a memory or something you dreamed,” Martha inquires of her sister.  

In her first significant part, Olsen imbues the work a jolting ferocity and damning insecurity, her body aquiver and arms twisted and bent. The mask of pain and discomfort during Patrick’s forced sexual actions against her leaves you shaken and wiped out. 

Durkin’s spare script teases out information but never overburdens Martha, Lucy or the other primary characters. The strategy is sometimes frustrating but it coolly draws you in. Martha Marcy May Marlene is a mood piece but also a throwback. Durkin and Lipes eliminate primary colors, working almost exclusively in a muted palette that sustains the pervasively menacing tones and uncomfortable rhythms.  

In the most radical notion, the filmmakers and Olsen’s performance suggest no matter the scenario, the cult or her sister’s hideaway, Martha is a prisoner of her own consciousness. Some have complained about the ending, but I find it a knock out closing, a conjuring act that involves the reappearance of one kind of monster, again linked to water, contrasted against an ambiguously uncomfortable and frightening harbinger of unease. 

Martha Marcy May Marlene is one very fine movie.

 

Shadow of a dream

(The actors Léa Seydoux and Julien Alluguette in the entrancing Mysteries of Lisbon. Image courtesy of Music Box Films.)

I am still in shock and mourning over the death of Raul Ruiz, the brilliant Chilean-born, Paris-based filmmaker, who died from complications of a pulmonary infection late last week. The filmmaker had been coping, rather heroically, with the discovery of cancer, though even he suggested to the New York Times’ A.O. Scott in a fantastic recent Magazine profile that he was optimistic about his chances of a recovery.

Ruiz (1941-2011) was one of the giants of modern European art-cinema. His ouevre, almost impossible to summarize, was alternately fantastic, intransigent and wildly inventive. Ruiz’s penultimate Mysteries of Lisbon is a masterpiece. It is his finest work since his magisterial Proust adaptation Time Regained, knocked me out at Cannes twelve years ago.

I met Raul a couple of times, the first time probably eighteen or nineteen years ago when he came to Chicago for a retrospective of his work. We spent probably an hour or so together, and he kept gracefully extending the previously allotted time because he had more he wanted to talk about, especially Orson Welles and John Ford. 

My experience mirrored that of many others. I found him alternately charming, lovely, graceful and deeply humane. He was self-deprecating and very accessible emotionally. One of my last and most cherished memories is watching him hold, in three different languages, simultaneous conversations at a reception in Venice.

(My only regret today is my lack of foresight in holding onto to our original interview.) My professional home town, Chicago, as instrumental to Ruiz’s reputation in America because Richard Pena, during his eight-year stint as director of the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, was, I believe, the first programmer to regularly screen his works, beginning in the late seventies.

His output was truly staggering. Reading one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s masterful studies of Ruiz, I learned that he had set out to write one hundred plays. His complete film output, including television, is probably impossible to fully catalogue, though I imagine we are talking about one-hundred and thirty or one-hundred and fifty titles.

The question of political exile, mandated by his voluntary departure from his native Chile following the CIA-backed Pinochet coup in 1973, is one of the defining themes of his work. It accounts for the instability of the image, of drama as labyrinth, of puzzles and allusions.  

Speaking of Chicago, my professional friends and colleagues at Music Box Films, are the distributors of his great Mysteries of Lisbon. They opened the film in New York and Los Angeles in early August. Brian Andreotti, who programs the calendar for the company’s trademark Music Box Theatre, commissioned me to write a piece about the film. The published version will appear in its fall calendar, out this week.

The following is an extension of that piece. 

A two-part, two-hundred, fifty-seven minute epic distilled from a six-hour television work, Ruiz’s dazzling and daunting meditation on history, honor and destiny is suffused with a tragic grandeur and novelistic density. The work is adapted from the serialized novel of Camilo Castelo Branco, the nineteenth-century Portuguese author who also produced the source material for arguably the greatest Portuguese movie ever made, Manoel de Oliveira’s Doomed Love.

Despite the literary and television origins, Mysteries of Lisbon is emphatically a work of the cinema. Ruiz has long acknowledged the impact of two modernist giants: Orson Welles and Jorge Luis Borges. 

Ruiz’s adaptation, aided greatly by a very smart script by Carlos Saboga, is narrative as labyrinth, an arabesque that continually twists and turns on itself and angling in strange and surreal spaces. The director’s surrealist streak and Welles-derived visual influence is everywhere, especially the baroque and vertiginous imagery, the delirious off-center framing and almost blindingly beguiling pictures, like a man’s reflection caught in the swirling surface of a cup of coffee.

Ruiz luxuriates in his Wellesian love of artifice, the conjurer’s art, but also finding pictorial solutions, like a supple moment where he installs some kind of glass surface for his actors to walk on, so that as the ripped shreds of a amorous note are torn and dispersed to the floor at a baronial estate during a magnificent ball, we see the shreds float to the ground from a reverse floor perspective.

The movie is filled with images of watching and looking. Like many Ruiz films, it is marked by a splendor and curiosity of the world. Set amid the Portuguese aristocracy during the convulsive civil wars, Napoleon’s military campaigns and country’s colonial decline, the movie is fundamentally an origins tale. The first part, set in motion by the striking inquiry of a young orphan named João (João Luis Arrais) to comprehend his provenance. 

Ruiz documents with visual flair the social privilege and paralyzing noble conventions of an epoch by relating the tragic story of the boy’s parents, a countess and her young suitor. João narrates the first part, as a collection of recovered memories and associations, as an adult, now called Pedro (and nicely played by Afonso Pimentel).

The story’s linking characters are Dinis (Adriano Luz), the priest who operates the orphanage where the boy lives, and Alberto (Ricardo Pereira), a flamboyant Brazilian mercenary. As the movie explicitly notes, character is fluid and few people are quite what they seem. The movie’s expansive second part draws on each man’s strange, even contradictory past in animating a strange, violent and unaccountable world.

The fluidity of the narrative is absolutely spellbinding; it entwines flashbacks within flashbacks, and the structure creates a musical and novelistic range through the multiplicity of voices that provides not only a shading and moral depth. The characters and stories illustrate in all their manifestations, folly, madness and passion.

As such the second part has a Tolstoyan sweep. Where the first part is largely self-contained, the second part moves through various outposts and corners of western Europe. About three hours in, the soundtrack imperceptibly shifts from Portuguese to French with the arrival of a French officer (Ruiz regular Melvil Poupaud) and two ravishing women (Léa Seydoux and Clotilde Hesme). 

Ruiz flouts the connection of character, story and incident. What makes the movie so enthralling is the brilliant way Ruiz negotiates these interlocking stories, granting them a musical flow and feverish intensity. Ruiz shares with Oliveira a feverish sense of space and light, and a fondness for theatrical interpolation, like the theater diorama João studiously peers through in an attempt to grasp the fullness and ecstatic nature of life and events swirling around him.

It’s easy, I guess, to mock those who cherish and privilege a director like Ruiz, somebody all but unknown to those who don’t frequent film festivals or art house cinemas. The only letter I ever wrote the New Yorker was in response to a churlish and uncharacteristically parochial piece by the usually great Adam Gopnik implying Ruiz was irrelevant because of his anonymity here.

One of the best writers on Ruiz, the excellent J. Hoberman, in his lovely tribute, pointed out the occasional scorn that came his way for his consistent challenging of this great director. “More than a few Voice readers (and even some writers) complained about the praise that I lavished on this esoteric figure and several years later I made a tongue-in-cheek attempt to pigeonhole him: ‘Now that the Film Forum has opened two Raul Ruiz films in a single month, it may be that 1988 will be the year one no longer needs to explain just who the double-hey huh? is this dude with B-movie monicker--e.g. the Godard of the '80s, Mister early-Borges-plus-middle-period Welles, a Barthesian Bunuel, the Edgar G. Ulmer of the European art film, a Third World H. Rider Haggard, the Garcia Marquez of French TV.'"

My friend Gabe Klinger pointed out on his Twitter feed that, having counted, he has seen probably thirteen Ruiz titles, amounting to just about eleven percent of the director’s output. 

No more Raul Ruiz. And, with apparently just one final work to come our way, no more Raul Ruiz movies. They are not exactly easy to find. But his movies are out there, in different forms, styles and formats. We are all the better for their existence.

Further reading suggestions:

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Adrian Martin

Outside the box

(Future is now: July and Linklater, in the calm before the storm. Image by Todd Cole, courtesy of Roadside Attractions. Don Cheadle and Brendan Gleeson, in The Guard. Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.)

Two films, Jon Michael McDonagh’s The Guard and Miranda July’s second feature, The Future, premiered at Sundance and are now expanding in national markets. I prefer July’s brand of detached precociousness to McDonagh’s cynical bluster, though both are fairly compelling examples of idiosyncratic filmmaking.

 The Guard, a first feature, playfully stitches and recombines various styles and forms to impudent and stylized ends. It luxuriates in the sordid sleaze of certain late sixties British crime thrillers. 

 The parts are more successful than the whole. Very little of the movie has a moment of truth or realistic detail, but the movie's lusty manner is sharply developed out of the characterization, local color, thrilling situations and especially pungent dialogue.

The filmmaker is the younger brother of Martin McDonagh (In Bruges). The Guard is somewhat problematically a copy of a copy. The younger McDonagh also traffics in the same mixture of profane, verbose and slangy dialogue with an astringent edge and scabrous flair for violence and macabre wit. 

That’s the good; the bad is he shares his brother’s weakness for self-reflexive threads that are cleverly self-defeating, creating a stylistic remove that prevents the director from ever truly engaging the moral ramifications of the material.

The movie is a bravura showcase for the great Brendan Gleeson. He plays the eponymous sergeant of a stunningly beautiful Irish coastal village in the largely Gaelic-influenced western isles. He’s introduced in exaggerated close up, surveying the wreckage of a car accident and the young victims, pill popping thrill seekers who failed to negotiate a sharp curve. Their bodies strewn about, their flesh disgorged and caked on the streets and sidewalks, he looks about and says, for exclamation, “What a great fucking day.”

Gleeson’s character, Gerry Boyle, is a shambling and flamboyant role that is equal parts Falstaff and Quixote. He’s an inveterate hedonist with outsized vices and predilections, like a fondness for recreational drugs and prostitutes. Openly insubordinate of his superiors he holds attitudes that are charitably less than progressive or cultural enlightening (“I thought only blacks, or Mexicans, were drug dealers,” is one characteristic outburst).  

He’s also one of those outrageously contradictory figures of Irish lore, a littérateur with little patience for Russian novelists and a cinephile (he’s caught one night watching Polish director Jerzy Skolimowsky’s great English film, The Shout).

The plot’s a mélange of familiar ideas and genre staples tossed about. McDonagh is far less interested in traditional story structure than incident, form and style. He yokes together everything from the guard’s new partner, the big city naïf (Rory Keenan) with a personal secret and his beautiful, fragile Romanian wife (Katarina Cas) to the cross cultural buddy cop standard, here represented by the inscrutable and uptight American FBI agent, Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), who’s turned up in Boyle’s village to intercept an international drug smuggling ring.

I like Cheadle, he’s open and funny, but he’s a little too enamored with accents. It floats all over the place in this movie. He intuitively understands his place in the dramatic firmament and never tries to rebel his secondary standing.

The movie’s gangsters are an unholy trinity (Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong and David Wilmot) impressively drawn in miniature. The problem is they are never given the necessary dimension or fullness each seems capable of. They're arrogant and self-regarding, colorfully rendered in small and sharp glances, like their fondness for quotations (from Bertrand Russell to Nietzsche), given to freewheeling rants about the unsavory nature of their business or the considerable difficulty of making distinction between a psychopath or sociopath.

The plot moves fairly haphazardly and indirectly. The gangsters project the necessary menace. The fun and pleasure develops more in the asides and off-color touches that say a lot about Ireland (though very little about the country’s current economic meltdown). Gleeson is fantastic in the private exchanges and back and forth, like his conversation with a local IRA operative (Pat Shortt) who’s trying to return a cache of found weapons. You have gay lads in the IRA, Boyle inquires, a tad surprised.

 

“It’s the only way to infiltrate MI5," is the nonplussed answer.

McDonagh has some visual flair and talent as well. Working with a very good cinematographer in Larry Smith, he shoots impressively in widescreen format, drawing on the textures and scraggly formations of the landscapes and water with a verve and thrill. If the movie never quite becomes anything other than a lark, the material lacks any depth of feeling or nuance.

(The death of one of the film’s most appealing characters is particularly cruel in how easily it is disposed of.)

The movie‘s tone is sometimes a bit too awkward. One subplot, the cop‘s dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), seems imported from another work. The women, in general, are given exceedingly little to do. Fortunately, the actors certainly grab your attention and infuse the movie with a sometimes jolting lift and buoyancy. It has a moment to moment color and style that floats along easily. 

The Guard is smart and shrewd enough to acknowledge its limitations without ever trying to truly transcend them. It’s pleasurable without being deep.  

Five years after her delicate and gracefully observed debut film Me and You and Everyone We Know revealed a thoughtfully engaging new voice, Miranda July expands her range and emotional subtlety with the intriguing and sharply realized follow up.

The new film collates her different talents and sensibilities in interesting ways. In the interim between her two films, July has worked in video installation and most significantly, writing short fiction. Her story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You refined her sensibility and help sharpen her trenchant and colorful feel for mood, tone and indirection. 

Like the title suggests, the movie is coolly ambiguous and colored by different impulses and references encompassing science fiction, magic realism, time travel and the transmogrification of the soul. 

“Have you ever been outside,” is the opening line of the movie, spoken by the film’s unorthodox narrator, a feline called Paw Paw (voiced by July). The cat is the connective tissue of the loose limbed story reflecting the quiet desperation of the movie’s central couple, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater). They live in a cramped Los Angeles apartment. He’s a computer tech specialist; she’s a dance instructor for young children. Together for four years, the relationship is not exactly in a free fall though deadened by a sideways inertia. 

Both are torpid and cut off emotionally and given to petty jealousies (in a sharp and telling note, July’s character is obsessed by the viral popularity of a colleague’s video clip). Their adoption of the cat is meant as a signal of their increased responsibilities and selflessness. Medical complications require the cat remain in specialized care, and the couple are tasked to return in a month’s time.

July is especially convincing at the personal impasses and acute disappointment of lingering failure. The subtlety emerges in the forlorn and sidelong passages, like the way a fallen portrait on the wall reveals a phone number. She is drawn to the ineffable, the slippery and uncontrollable. One such moment leads to a very impulsive act, a phone call that ignites an affair with Marshall (David Warshofsky), an older single father of a precocious adolescent daughter (Isabelle Acres). 

He’s an entrepreneur and Sophie is drawn to his strength and quiet competence. July intriguingly and quixotically fractures all of that. Rather than sharpen the question of the romantic triangle, July spins the work further and further out of balance. 

The remainder of the story shifts between alternate realities that are possibly dreams, imaginings or most intriguingly, Jason’s projection of her new life that beautifully suggests Jacques Rivette’s modernist classic, Celine and Julie Go Boating. (Given July’s anti-compile pronouncements, that’s probably a leap on my part.) The Rivette reference seems especially apt in the peculiar and gorgeous way July suggests Jason and Sophie have merged and exchanged identities.

As a format, video tends personalize the most intimate of details. Even more so than her first feature, The Future is an uncanny self-portrait. July mocks her own inability to think or create conventional art (like Sophie’s stunningly unsuccessful attempt to produce her own video clip). Her fearlessness is inseparable from her tender awkwardness. 

The resonance of the first film developed out of the terrific ensemble (July showed an especially strong touch with teenagers). The new film marks a tremendous improvement stylistically and visually. Shot by Nikolai von Graevenitz, the movie is both supple and nimble. The imagery is filled with suggestions of entrapment and defeat.

July also remains alert to new ideas, such as a terrific the lives of her two best female friends fast forward directly in front of her, their settled and accomplished lives a stark contrast to her own wanderings and confusion. Even though she is very much in control of the film, July does not monopolize the movie. She is generous with the other actors, especially some beautiful vignettes about Jason’s developing friendship with an older widower (played by a nonprofessional named Joe Putterlik who died after the filming was completed).

As accomplished as The Future is, it is not to all tastes. The precociousness gets a bit thick at times. Even so, this is often breathless and quietly wonderful. I certainly hope the separation between her second and third feature is not nearly so as the first and second.

 

Doppelgänger

(The lady by the lake: Brit Marling, taking it all in, in Another Earth, the movie she wrote with director Mike Cahill. Images courtesy of Fox Searchlight.)

The end of July is a key counter-programming zone, or at least it appears that way given several major Sundance titles are either debuting or expanding into other markets this weekend. Miranda July’s The Future and Jon Michael McDonagh’s The Guard both opened in New York today. 

Another Earth, the collaboration of Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, was certainly a buzz title, where it was awarded the Alfred P. Sloane prize and acquired by Fox Searchlight. The two exciting talents construct a fascinating science fiction-inflected fantasia backdrop that elevates and complicates an otherwise familiar story of redemption, hope and sacrifice.

Cahill directed, photographed and edited the movie, his debut feature. He also developed the scenario and wrote the script with Marling, a beautiful and expressive actress who anchors the work emotionally. She captures the perfect note between vulnerability and sorrow in her star making turn of an uncommonly bright young woman emotionally destroyed by her complicity in a tragedy.

Paradoxically, the very quality that separates it from the pack also prevents it from being a more fully realized work. The fantastical origins of the story create an in-between void the movie never quite satisfactorily resolves. In leaping between a work of forgiveness and the poetically imaginary, Another Earth is a film of parts. 

It’s also hurt by the fact that since Sundance, Lars von Trier’s extraordinary Melancholia detonated Cannes and the two films’ formal and topical similarities put it on very unequal ground. At its best Another Earth is haunting and atmospheric in the manner it gathers and takes hold in the imagination. Those sharper, intuitive qualities help makes up for some of the underdeveloped aspects of the storytelling.

The story pivots on doubles, or doppelgangers. Rhoda Williams (Starling), a vivacious and academically gifted high school senior preparing to study astrophysics at MIT, is driving in her Connecticut  town following a party. Her opposite is John Burroughs (William Mapother), a renowned composer and professor of music at Yale University.

Transfixed by a radio report that confirms the existence of a new planet in the solar system four times the size of the Moon, Rhoda loses control of her car, crosses into the lane and smashes into the vehicle driven by Burroughs.  His wife and son are killed, and he is seriously injured. Rhoda survives the crash largely injury free. 

The powerful and shocking moment immediately seizes on Cahill’s visual skill. Preceded by a high angle shot looking down on Burroughs, the camera slowly and sinuously plunges until the horrifying moment of impact. After serving a four-year jail sentence, Rhoda is released and repatriated to her family. 

This accomplished and skilled young woman is a shadow of her former self. Sullen and largely uncommunicative, she is crippled by guilt and self-doubt. Cut off from her former group of friends, many of them now successful college graduates, Rhoda sinks into a different kind of oblivion and anonymity. She  takes a menial job cleaning at the high school where she once starred.

Learning that Burroughs has emerged from his coma, Rhoda contrives a meeting to apologize for her actions. Confronting him at his house, Rhoda loses her nerve and presents herself as a worker at a local cleaning company offering free trial demonstrations. Not knowing her actual identity (she was a minor at the time of the accident), Burroughs agrees to her offer of help. (The two lead actors pictured above, at left.)

 

Against her intentions, Rhoda remains unable to reveal her actual identity. Not unexpectedly, the two dance and circle around each other warily. Rhoda is friendly though distant. John is obviously drawn to her solitude and mysteriousness. 

If the plot is dominated by her very recognizable need for closure and absolution, the scientific implications of the early revelation hang over the emotional terrain in a strange and peculiar manner. The planet discovered by scientists is ostensibly a “duplicate,” or second Earth, called simply Earth 2, with early evidence confirming the necessary atmospheric conditions to sustain human existence. 

In a stunning moment, glimpsed by Rhoda while watching television, government scientists trying to make contact with the other planet discover the mysterious new planet mirrors the precise activity of their own. The meanings and significance remain to sort out, but the consequences of time and space suggest the it houses an exact double. 

Despite the film’s low budget, Cahill demonstrates a breathtaking eye that draws on old fashioned effects, like an awesome shot of a surreal cloud formation where the opposite planet is observable. The movie has some spare though involving and beautiful imagery rendered through a deft combination of matte, visual, computer and animation effects. 

The narrative suspense is accelerated by the interconnected movements of whether Rhoda is going to finally reveal her part in John’s tragedy and what that means to their evolving and increasingly tender emotional interaction. Consistent with the rest of the film, Rhoda’s redemption also takes two forms, whether she is going to confess to John and whether her participation in a national essay contest will enable her to take part in an inaugural interplanetary travel between the two spheres.

The two actors are quietly sensational, his combination of calm and torment sharply conveyed against her need for forgiveness. Cahill and Marling are both natural writers. Perhaps because she played so central a role in the script’s development, Marling emerges as a more complex and fully rounded character. Her monologue about a cosmonaut is particularly impressive.

Visually, consistent with the sorrowful undercurrents, the movie is drained of primary colors. Cahill works almost exclusively in shades of white, black and metallic grays. It is really a more a mediation on what lies beyond our grasp. The final passages are so quickly patched together, they are a bit confusing, and the movie ends very opaquely, allowing for a number of different interpretations.

What remains unquestioned is the talent and drive of the two principals, Mike Cahill and Brit Marling. Another Earth is an imperfect though vibrant illustration of their gifts.

Summer rock

(The man in the big white suit: David Byrne, in Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense. Imagery courtesy of Music Box Theatre's Summer Music Festival.)

Summer is a time of endless possibility: one of the most primal and basic the chance to listen to great music. The greatest concert I ever saw was the Rolling Stones the summer before my sophomore year of high school at Soldier Field during their iconic Some Girls tour.

The astute and capability folks at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, having just completed a three-day festival devoted to new French cinema, offer another sideways though imaginable act with its debut edition of a Summer Music Festival.

The program’s fairly eclectic, six features, several directed by the country’s greatest filmmakers, incorporating a mélange of forms and styles that encompass essay films, concert films and works that resist outright categorization. Sure, many of the titles are not new, and they are readily available, even in high-definition video formats; but just as the outdoor concert experience is impossible to conjure indoors, so is the chance to relive these works in a large (and stereophonic) setting.

If you live in Chicago, check it out. Here’s the full list and schedule.

The rock critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogotis, long-time hosts of the wonderful “Sound Opinions,” radio show, are introducing Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s sublime and unsurpassable concert film of the Talking Heads.

Demme’s great skill, not just his vaunted humanism, is his ability to individualize performers and their different playing styles. The concert film was culled together from two different shows by Talking Heads. The music is not just kinetic and audacious; it’s great cinema, not surprising given it was shot by the great Jordan Cronenweth (Blade Runner). David Byrne’s staging is Brechtian, spare and beautiful, and assigns a certain verve and beauty to each of the performers. I can’t wait to see it again.

Like Demme, Martin Scorsese has pirouetted through a lot of different forms, styles and formats. His superb 1978 The Last Waltz, about the final concert of The Band, is glorious, eccentric and deeply moving. Scorsese (and Demme) have gloriously and fluidly moved back and forth, making other works on music, Demme about Robyn Hitchcock and several terrific Neil Young pieces.

Scorsese, it’s worth remember, was a key collaborator on Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock. Just like his love of cinema, Scorsese has rummaged through music’s past, creating poetic and beautiful works about Bob Dylan and (forthcoming) George Harrison. Michael Chapman was the principal photographer, and gives the work the same charged immediacy he brought to the swirling, hypnotic textures of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. 

I’d be thrilled to see Grant Gee’s Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy projected. Previewing it on DVD, I was knocked out by the formal energy and inventiveness, the switch in formats, the vague, slippery beauty of Super 8 and the harder edged, more impressionistic early digital video. The 1998 work is structured around the (mostly) European tour connected to the band’s breakthrough third release, OK Computer. Gee is apparently a music video director of note, but the dominant influence appears to be Wim Wenders. It’s close to an essay film, merging a discordant, even lonely sense of the road (and the profound disappointment of not being able to enjoy it) with the routine and monotony inherent in touring. 

As far as immediate relevance, the most important title is The Swell Season, given the two screenings constitute the movie’s Midwestern premiere. I’ve written before what a fan I am of John Carney’s Once. The new documentary premiered at Tribeca, and I caught up with it at the market in Cannes. (Since this is the one title awaiting a formal theatrical release, the distributor has requested there be no formal reviews.) 

The Swell Season, a beautifully shot documentary made by the team of Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins and Carlo Mirabella-Davis, is suffused with an understated melancholy about the emotional costs of success. Once’s surprisingly potent commercial success (and the Academy award they won for their beautiful ballad, “Falling Slowly”) catapulted the careers and commercial viability of the stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová.

The band, which originated as a side project of Hansard’s estimable rock group The Frames, got very big; as I’ve said before, I think a big reason is that the documented personal relationship of the two leads provided the more emotionally satisfying ending many wanted of Carney’s film. The Swell Season, the documentary, has a great theme, the impossibility of reconciling love and art.

It’s summed up in echoing imagery of water. In the first, in a startling frank and revealing moment near the beginning, the two strip naked and run heedlessly toward the water. In the second, Irglová is shown pensive and alone, tentatively trying to negotiate the small waves that float around her. It’s a beguiling image of an interesting movie ripened in sadness and rupture.