Light Sensitive

The Rapture

The third feature by the London-born filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin is a work of exacting strangeness. Like Gravity, the movie testifies to the power and hypnotic wonder of image and sound. The movie has some truly knockout images, a motorcycle cutting like a blade through the nocturnal landscapes, waves lashing against the coastal cliffs of the Highlands or most frightening, the fate of avid men seduced by the mysterious central character.

The movie is adapted, very loosely, from the 2001 novel by the Dutch-born Michael Faber, by the director and his writing partner Walter Campbell. (Glazer admitted that Campbell never even read the book.) The novel, closer in form and tone to Anthony Burgess, is more satirical, about consumerism and also more explicit in pointing out the rationale motivating the alien’s behavior.

Under the Skin is a meditation on the form and erotic wonder of Scarlett Johansson. She plays the alien seductress who falls to Earth and takes the shape of a carnal loner who navigates the streets of Glasgow in a white van. Adopting the persona of a Londoner who’s lost, she gains their confidence and slyly seduces them. It is utterly nerve-wracking and transfixing to watch of the men led into an inky-black pool of slit that issues an eerie transmogrification.

Johansson, who's so astounding beautiful, has never really received her just due as an actress. She is electric, especially in the movie's brilliant centerpiece, an extended pas a deux between her character and a virginal, severely deformed middle-aged man she offers a kind of erotic sanctuary. The emotional exchange alters her being, deepening her own humanity and, conversely, exposing her to a wholly different form of vulnerability and weakness.

Johansson avails herself emotionally and sexually in a way she has never really been demanded of. Under the Skin is a great many things, often contradictory, the exasperating and annihilating alternating side-by-side. As storytelling, the movie seems an acute failure, deprived of clarity, emotional insight or psychological intricacy. The tradeoffs are ample, Johansson's performance, the score (Mica Levi) and the voluptuous, sinister visual rhyming.

Now the film is available as a digital download, VOD at Amazon, and a forthcoming high-definition Blu-ray. During an interview, Glazer talked about art and matter and how the long-gestating project came to being.

The idea of subterfuge is central not only to the film but its making. The pick-up scenes were shot clandestinely, with hidden cameras and the performers, many of them nonprofessionals, had no idea it was Scarlett Johansson.

Jonathan Glazer: That hidden camera idea came from over a period of thinking about the story. You’re just looking for it and you don’t know yet what it is until you find it. I didn’t feel sated yet. I knew there was a big method, a methodology we hadn’t yet discovered.They don’t just come out of nowhere. They come out of being immersed in the problems and the issues and you continue to turn them over until things coalesce and you just understood how to do it.

I shot something once in Toronto with a woman running down the street and I had 57 hidden cameras, because I wanted to keep the street completely open and have the woman run through, having people coming into and out of shops, going onto buses and seeing her negotiate her own life. I guess that was a sketch. Alongside that it came about with trying to find a way of being able to cast this film with a familiar actress.

I had a real disquiet of how to shoot this film with somebody who was really familiar to us. We needed somebody to be alien, and this was a way of achieving that. The idea of surveillance, the idea of shooting the world as it is, felt so critical because if the film is about her observing human beings and what we are and how we behave, in order for us to have some kind of value to her, than it has to be real.

The film is punctuated with mystery and dread, but you have said the key to the film is the scene on the beach, with the child and the interaction of the alien and the Czech man she meets there.

Glazer: The baby on the beach, what’s interesting about that, is than when [the alien] is in the traffic jam after that and hears the sound of the baby crying and she looks around, as if it’s in the glove box or something, it’s a baby in the backseat of a car. It’s the first time in the film she looks away from her target. It’s the first time in the film there’s almost a curiosity, some residue of memory. She just turns her head. The whole beach scene is really to achieve that, that tiny shift in focus; that’s the beginning. It’s not just who she meets, but what she smells and what she sees. For all of us, it’s the sum of all of those experiences.

The movie’s couched in the mood and style of science fiction. The deeper we get into the film, the more it becomes a kind of inquiry into what it means to be human.

Glazer: I hope so. Those are the things we were interested in. Also the fact that there’s no way into it, there’s no salvation or redemption, there’s no completion. It’s evolving as we are. People go into the cinema and they want to come out with answers. The more this film would have made sense, the less it would have. It needed to be in charge of its ambiguities.

I think Scarlett’s character is  fabulously complex and inscrutable. I find that all very human. Charting that drift from a very clear objective to this confusion and delusion that she has was a very difficult arc to create; it was constructed not just on the page, but in the editing and the music, and just finding the right curve. It was never about one event is going to be happen, and she’s going to turn left now or right. That was difficult to chart and calibrate.

This is probably the most extreme example of the dialectic in your films capturing a conflict between your need to innovate though also make something that conforms to the idea of commercial cinema.

Glazer: I think you’re right. I do find plot tyrannical. I want plot to be light-footed. I want it to follow emotional truths. What’s interesting is that sometimes when you shoot, what you write is emotional truth and what you shoot, what you think is the emotional truth, is not in the scene. You then look for the truth again when you look at the rushes.

When you look at the rushes, you’re looking at the things that feel most truthful and you begin to assemble that. You have to tell the plot in an unexpected way. You’re still aware that you have to tell the story, but you’re doing it less predictably. It’s about understanding the life and the footage you shot.

I’m still making my way through that. I feel like I’m moving further away from narrative. I appreciate a story, I love a great story, but I’m always looking for an idea that I could wrap around the back of a cigarette package and then investigate the form of that. I’m not the best person to go and shoot a story.

I don’t think it would challenge me in the way I want to challenge myself. I’m fascinated and preoccupied with the form. When you see those moments that transcend, they become something else, they take off and it’s very hard to go back from that, to identify that and not want more of it. Perhaps some of the music videos I’ve done has gotten me into that habit.

How did you shoot the film, and how, in a wider sense, has your work been impacted by the radical changes wrought by technology and digital.

Glazer: We invented cameras to shoot this film. Once we decided we’re going to shoot her in disguise and the world as it is, we started to ask how can we do that, or how can we achieve that. Testing the cameras that are out there didn’t give us the result that we needed. So we had to build on our own. We built these cameras because we needed a tool that wasn’t out there. We used a German camera that was used to shoot the inside of industrial machinery. 

I love the aesthetic of  [the camera]. It had the quality not of film, or even digital, the blacks bled and the colors rolled and it was beautiful. The aesthetic comes from the need of that tool. I think the idea of images and wanting your film to look a certain way, I’m less interested in that now. I think it’s about what suits the story you’re trying to tell.

You become more liberated in the process.

Glazer: Film’s gone now, but I think you have to look at that as an opportunity. I mourn the loss of film, but I’m not preoccupied by that. These aren’t the tools anymore. It’s not immersive. We invented a camera that ended up having an aesthetic that satisfied that. It was alchemy to the image somehow, which you never get from a digital camera. I like the way an iPhone camera image looks, but at the same time I can see an Eadweard Muybridge print of how San Francisco looks and be rocked backwards.

I think it’s important to look for the idea and what’s important for that.

Images courtesy of A24 Films.

 

Gun crazy

The movies of Terrence Malick are again front and center, in all of their ravishing, transfixing and maddeningly glorious beauty.

Criterion has published a stunning high-definition edition of Malick’s extraordinary debut, the 1973 Badlands. The director’s new feature, To the Wonder, is also now out in theaters and also available on other platforms. I first caught it at Toronto, and I saw it a second time, on 35mm, just recently. (More about it later.)

Malick’s career is unorthodox though hardly unprecedented. The other night in Chicago, following a screening in 35mm of his 1977 Sorcerer, the director William Friedkin, lamented he did not come of age during the studio-era, where he could have signed four or five films a year. One of the problems when you make six films in forty years is the pressure to constantly top yourself.

Criterion has also just published a deluxe version of Alex Cox’s Repo Man. Like Paul Brickman, who made Risky Business, Cox is a gifted director who had an auspicious start, but then grew disillusioned with the system, because of the money required to make movies, the artistic compromises necessary to sustain a career, and he took his work in a different and more personal direction. He forfeited his audience in the process.

Malick made two startling works, Badlands and Days of Heaven, five years apart and then promptly disappeared. His third feature, The Thin Red Line, is clearly the transitional work between his narrative and the increasingly abstracted, experimental vein his work is now aggressively moving.

Nowadays, films seems to exist in two modes of expression: hand-made or industrial. The hand-made, essayistic, personal, intransigent, unfold almost exclusively in the margins. (By the way, check out the very fine accompanying essay on the Criterion Badlands by the excellent Michael Almereyda, another gifted director whose work is regrettably out of fashion and too often out of view).

Malick put up a lot of his own money to make Badlands, and what’s interesting with the advantage of hindsight is how free and incautious much of the movie is.

With Badlands, Malick announced a particular narrative architecture that would yoke together his thematic and dramatic concerns: period settings, voiceover as narrative contrapuntal, lyrical, tangible sense of physical beauty that meditates on the form and grammar of silent cinema, with an emphasis on landscape, physical gesture and the beauty of the human face.

Thematically, Malick circles on the theme of doomed love, the death of nature, a restrictive social order, or a world marked by a lost or violated Eden.

Malick’s script for Badlands was clearly modeled on the story of Charles Starkweather, the psychopathic spree killer who murdered eleven people in the late fifties, with his frightened teenaged accomplice and girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in tow. The director’s first two features, shaped by an Old Testament vengeance, are dominated by imagery rooted in fire and water, and colored by a willful innocence violated.

They are also linked by the tremulous voices of its young female narrators, Holly (Sissy Spacek), in Badlands, and Linda Manz, in Days of Heaven. Badlands is also part of a wondrous and cherished movie American past (You Only Live Once, They Live by Night, Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde).

However mythological the movie, it is filled with pain and torment. The filmmaking is exciting, the acting revealing, but the movie is staggering and awful because of what we see and feel. The violence in Badlands is frightening, eruptive and appalling. In the movie, the Starkweather figure is called Kit, a laconic, disturbed psychopath played by Martin Sheen.

Perfectly cast, Sheen laces every move, feeling and action with a stripped down, blank amorality. After the first murder, of Holly’s father (Warren Oates), a sign painter, the young fugitives light out to the outback while retaining as much as possible their childlike accoutrements, a deranged fantasy life of tree-houses, face paint and peculiar make-believe.

As their victims accumulate, the road is desultory, alienating and self-annihilating. The vast stretches of open spaces are not just empty, but withholding, evoking a continual state of dread and nothingness. In the extraordinary tactile and velvety night imagery, Holly says, they exist in an in-between world that goes beyond loneliness. Before he kills, Kit barely exists, a nowhere man hardly anybody would be capable of noticing.

The discontinuous arrangement of shots boldly compresses time and space and creates a hallucinatory visual texture whose effect draws you deeper and deeper into the storytelling rhythm. Watching it again, Badlands reminded me of just how natural and formidably gifted an imagemaker Malick is. How thrilling, as Friedkin said after the Sorcerer screening, to watch films made in the era before the image was consistenly perverted by digital and computer manipulation.

I know for some other writers, critics and observers who have followed Malick since the beginning, they have a different kind of lament, not at how few films he has made since Badlands but a profound and sharp disappointment at the direction his work has taken. Malick has now made as many films (three) in the last  seven or eight years as he made in the previous thirty-two.

I disagree with those ideas but I certainly understand them. I can think of no other director who has inspired such volatile debate. Personally, I just want the films to continue.

The more, the better.

 

Images courtesy of Criterion.

Retrospective: the year in cinema

(Into the darkness: searching for a body in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's grave and beautiful, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Image courtesy of Cinema Guild.)

According to a personal log I maintain, I saw just under three-hundred films last year.That includes press screenings, festival screenings, retrospectives and public viewings.

It was a strong, distinctive year, but again, I think it worth pointing out, how the lag time, especially with key art films, plays a crucial part in the formulation of my list. Six of the movies on my personal top ten actually premiered, at festivals, in 2011.

In all those cases, I saw the films a second, third or even fourth time. Some films, like the superb new Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers, I saw after the deadline for publishing my ballot in the Village Voice and Indiewire polls. Just to maintain consistency, I have kept my personal list unchanged.

As in past years, I indicate its international premiere and where I first encountered the film.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey): Cannes competition, 2011; Toronto, September 2011.

I’m not sure what else I have to say about Ceylan’s masterpiece. First of all, bravo to the discerning folks at Cinema Guild for sticking their necks out, financially and otherwise, for releasing this film (and also publishing the most ravishing Blu-ray of the year). Ceylan’s inquiry into the nature of man, structured around the search for a corpse, has a mournful, devastating cumulative power. The story’s elusive and mysterious power is located in the taciturn and expressive faces of the forensic specialists assigned to locate the body.

Some of the most memorable are the peripheral figures, especially an incandescently beautiful young daughter of a village leader whose face is illuminated only by candle. As I wrote, “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.”

Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, USA): Press screening, December 2012.

The best director of action currently at work in the cinema, Kathryn Bigelow has subtly changed from the painterly and kinetic nature of her earlier films to something more immersive and chilling. The story of the CIA’s decade-long search for Osama bin Laden, the movie comfortably fits Bigelow’s recurring concern of tortured, obsessive individuals (Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel, Keanu Reeves in Point Break) who infiltrate closed-off, ritualistic social structures and destroy them.

I will have more to say about this film in the coming days as it approaches wide-release. Jessica Chastain gives the year’s finest performance, precise, tough and unassailable.

Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal): Berlin competition 2012; Cannes market, May 2012.

The third feature of the very gifted Gomes is another phantasmagorical movie experience, riffing on movies and history, especially F.W. Murnau’s similarly-titled final work, that like Ceylan explores the nature of being, related in a novelistic two-part structure that ruminates, poetically, on sex, love and erotic recklessness as a larger exploration of the country’s colonial past. My one viewing experience, in a cramped Cannes market screening space, was less than ideal. Even so, its power and suggestiveness resonates in any format. It’s blindingly beautiful.

Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico): Cannes, Un Certain Regard, May 2011.

With The Master, this constituted the year’s most bewildering and botched release. For reasons unknown, Fox acquired the film and then predicated its release on the film securing an Academy award nomination for best foreign language film.

When the perpetually inept branch of the Academy failed to shortlist the film, Fox dumped the movie. Sober and electrifying, Gerardo Naranjo’s superb feature superbly draws on the splintered consciousness of a young beauty pageant contestant as a tragically stark emblem of Mexico’s all-enveloping drug wars. Loosely based on real events, the movie features the poised and beautiful Stephanie Sigman as a beauty contest aspirant who’s trapped in a world of unknown loyalties and fluidly shifting identities.

Sigman's Laura is a pawn trapped between a charismatic cartel leader, cops and the military. Naranjo employs a bracing and lyrical tone that creates a sinister sense of unease and violence. Even the landscapes are imbued with something otherworldly.

Loaded with references to Orson Welles’s great border town classic Touch of Evil and Jean-Luc Godard’s apocalyptic Weekend, Naranjo finds his own idiom. From the cartel’s nighttime raid on a nightclub to the closing shootout in a hotel, Naranjo ensnares the viewer in the mayhem and provides no easy escape. Sigman’s tremulous, vivid performance anchors the movie emotionally.

The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr, Hungary): Berlin competition 2011; Cannes market, May 2011.

Bela Tarr has said this is his final film, and if it be so, it proves a regretful and fitting conclusion to a majestic career too little-known in this country. Interestingly, the first time I saw it was the day before seeing The Tree of Life for the first time, at Cannes.

The films have nearly identical running times and both tell variations of the Genesis story, though in Tarr’s case, he inverts it, becoming instead a tale about the end of civilization. It’s composed in fewer than forty shots, and nearly twenty-minutes pass before the first line of dialogue. Of those who saw it, even those inclined to like Tarr’s work, found it either impenetrable or unwatchable; for me, it distills everything harsh, beautiful and wondrous about his work, his use of time, space and camera movement charged with feeling, emotion and intensity, drawn from the faces and bodies of his characters. (Another Cinema Guild Release, and a fantastic Blu-ray transfer, by the way.)

Many people prefer a cinema that moves and breathes, and I understand, even appreciate that, but the corollary is something else, a cinema that exists beyond our immediate hold that unbound by time and floats and coheres in our consciousness, and nobody does that better than the great Bela Tarr.

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France): Cannes competition, May 2012.

His first feature in the thirteen years since POLA X, the Franco-American filmmaker Leos Carax has always trafficked in film’s fragile, even disabused history, in creating his own original and startling works. I’ve seen this feature three times now, and what I love, apart from the eerie, provocative, set pieces are the more haunting and fragile moments, like the image of a young girl forlornly captured in the bay window of her parents’ suburban Paris home, or cinematographer Caroline Champetier’s expressive use of the Eiffel Tower, indicative of a wounding vulnerability and serene melancholy.

As the mysterious chameleon at its center, Monsieur Oscar, the fantastic Denis Lavant, with his lithe frame and lined and suggestive face that goes either way, moves between a light touch and something far more sinister and unsettling. Holy Motors is a singular blend of macabre and the transgressive that achieves a true poetry of terror that looks forward and backward, combining science fiction with an upended, funhouse mirror history riffing on Georges Franju, Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel, Beauty and the Beast, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and M.

To really succeed and flourish, the movie needed a human dimension to push through, and Lavant is the connecting thread. It is a vision, and Carax and Lavant make sure it all connects spectacularly.

The Loneliest Planet (Julia Lokev, USA): Locarno 2011. Toronto, September 2011. The second narrative feature of Lokev, the Russian-born, New York-based filmmaker moves her to the front rank of American independents. With Holy Motors, it was the most liberating work I saw, in the open and fluid rhythms of the opening, connected to feeling and consciousness, especially Hani Furstenberg’s face, body and the gorgeous red hair, the grouping of shapes and objects, people riding on the back of a motorbike, an orb that floats back and forth between the two young travelers and the unknown pranksters on the other side. Like her great first film, Moment of Impact, Lokev turns the work into her own personal reflection, and it proves as mysterious, strange and beguiling as the movie’s lunar landscapes.

Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany): Berlin competition 2012; Toronto, September 2012.

The first Petzold film I ever saw was his eerie ghost story, Yella (with his favorite actress, Nina Hoss), the year it played Berlin. I liked the follow up Jerichow, but his new film, Barbara, bracing and taut, is a revelation and a major advance. It clarifies his fascination with Hitchcock and pushes it to new levels of achievement and power, about a politically suspicious doctor (the fantastic Hoss) stranded in the provinces and the state surveillance system of the Stasi that turns every act of hers into a moment of reflection, caution and submission. It was the most frightening film I saw last year.

Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve, France): Locarno 2011; Toronto, September 2011. The autobiographically-inflected third feature of French director Mia Hansen-Løve (Father of My Children) limns the ecstasy and tumult of youthful, sometimes crazily self-destructive passion. The story, told in three movements covering about twelve years, charts the bruising and prickly emotional consequences of infatuation as Camille (Lola Créton) oscillates between the dark and handsome young man (Sebastian Urzendowsky) she cannot break free of and the Norwegian architect (Magne-Håvard Brekke) who becomes her mentor. Hansen-Løve illustrates the interior consciousness of female desire as something blinding and all-encompassing.

Cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine’s limpid photography and the director’s elliptical passage of time constantly comment on and counterpoint Camille’s fractured state. The water imagery is especially evocative. Incarnating a young woman navigating the frankness and terrifying confusion of adulthood, the stunning, remarkable Créton summons an emphatic mixture of audacity, naïveté and sexual abandon. The one-time protégé (and now romantic partner ) of contemporary master Olivier Assayas (Carlos), the 31-year-old Hansen-Løve coolly justifies the hype.

 

(The exquisite Lola Créton in Mia Hansen-Løve's terrific third feature, Goodbye First Love. Image courtesy of IFC Films.)

Bernie (Richard Linklater, USA): Chicago, August 2012. Watching Dazed and Confused recently, I realized I am not aware of a director anywhere who’s given me more a pleasure and joy than Linklater. Belatedly, I caught Bernie and was just knocked out, by the suppleness of the structure, the depth of characterization, the cascade of voices is tonally perfect. Jack Black proved again, in the hands of the right director (Linklater with School of Rock, Noah Baumbach in Margot at the Wedding), he is a terrific actor, evoking just the right balance of pathos and regret.

These are the other films I considered for my top ten, alphabetically listed:

Amour (Michael Haneke)

Argo (Ben Affleck)

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin)

A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel)

The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry)

Compliance (Craig Zobel)

Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo)

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)

Detropia (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady)

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev)

Farewell, My Queen (Benoit Jacquot)

Flight (Robert Zemeckis)

Footnote (Joseph Cedar)

The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh)

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh)

Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs)

The Kid with a Bike (Dardenne Brothers)

Looper (Rian Johnson)

Oki’s Movie (Hong Sang-soo)

Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh)

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Middle of Nowhere (Ava DuVernay)

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)

Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)

Starlet (Sean Baker)

Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley)

This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold)

They live by night

(Tender is the night: two forlorn souls grapple with their feelings in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love. Images courtesy of Criterion.)

Wong Kar-wai’s greatest film, In the Mood for Love, premiered at the end of Cannes, in the new century, and for that reason, has always felt very epochal. Rarely, it seems, does much time pass without some part of it, a moment, an image, dart in and out of my own consciousness.

Nowadays we are most likely to encounter older works again and again on either computer screens, tablets or high end monitors. Criterion has issued a new high-definition upgrade of the film. That alone justifies getting lost in the movie’s cool and insinuating visual textures, the dark and velvety blacks, the piercing reds and diaphanous blues that Wong weaves into a musical and heartbreaking lyrical rhythm.

I’ve interviewed Wong a couple of times and the quotations for this essay are drawn from our conversations. “It was a restive moment,” the title card reads, at the start of the film, a Hong Kong of the early nineteen-sixties, when the city was altered by the rising number of Chinese émigrés flooding the city. Wong colors the movie with some of his own private history.

He was born in Shanghai, in 1958, and moved to the city with his family. Wong is the most Proustian of directors whose recurring theme is the irretrievability of a lost Eden. Like Jim Jarmusch, Wong is a romantic pessimist whose movies circle around ideas of solitude, loneliness and cultural dislocation. It’s a great theme, but also a potentially off-putting one because it is all predicated on what is felt rather than expressed.

Wong explained his own assimilation into Hong Kong culture was that of an outsider. As a young kid, his sanctuary came in the form of novels and the cinema. He read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Balzac. "I would spend every night in the cinemas because they showed old American films,” he told me.

"My films are about a Hong Kong of my own impressions," he said. "I like the night, because it is quiet. The only thing you hear are the radios. The other reason is very practical because Hong Kong is so crowded. If, like us, you work without permits, normally you work at night, very late."

Wong made his reputation with films like Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express, expressive and flamboyant movies that created excitement with their speed and kinetic verve. In the Mood for Love radically shifted inward, brooding, romantic, sorrowful, about an affair that never quite ignites. In the Mood for Love marked a vital and necessary move away from Wong’s signature aesthetic that made his reputation, extending his art in new and invigorating directions.

This virtuoso moviemaker withholds the very impulses that have defined his movies—their flamboyance, movement and intensity—in favor of an emotionally complicated moral and emotional interplay of two lost dreamers. The story is constructed as a fugue and grounded in recurring patterns and repeated motifs structured around images and elliptical camera movements.

Wong’s classical, even conservative work becomes his most liberating, a work composed almost entirely in precise and haunting imagery. Thwarted desire or love that cannot be consummated is the critical theme of Wong's work. Here it takes on an intoxicating, poetic poignancy, the story detailing the deep friendship that develops between Su (Maggie Cheung), a secretary for an export firm and Chow (Tony Leung), a journalist, who meet when they both vie for the same apartment. Su and her husband, who works for a Japanese company, and Chow and his wife, move into their new apartments, opposite each other, on the same day.

Though she works at an export company, Su is deeply unhappy and desperately lonely because of her husband's prolonged absences. Chow’s wife is also largely absent given the demands of her profession working at a hotel. Su's sanctuary from her grief and escalating loneliness is the cinema. The two strangers establish a wary, tentative friendship, complicated by her fear at what might result if their respective landlords discover the two are spending so much time together.

In Wong’s oblique visual design, the characters are almost constantly splintered, captured from distance, with key or visually distinctive parts obfuscated by the nearly abstract imagery. In the Mood for Love unfolds almost exclusively at night, in the shadowy, brooding spaces of rain covered streets, the darkened interiors of cabs, and the small, tight spaces of their apartments. This only further heightens their longing for love and makes palpable the absence and incompleteness of their lives.

In the movie's key scene, set in a restaurant, the elliptical script suddenly makes explicit what Wong has only previously hinted at. Su and Chow finally acknowledge their partners are engaged in an affair. Wong's indirect underplaying heightens the feeling of hopelessness and pain. The nature of their relationship suddenly changes as well; the two carry out their own form of illicit or furtive connection, but not as an act of revenge but an attempt to understand what drove their partners to turn away.

In this Brechtian arrangement, Wong explores not the freedom and excitement of transgression but the sadness and abandonment occasioned by their betrayal. The camera work, by the master Christopher Doyle and Mark Lin Bing Ping, captures a reverie, a meditation on desire and attraction evoked in the physical contrasts of their bodies. Cheung is sinewy and angular, projecting a feral intensity; the shots of her restricted in the dress of sixties middle-class Hong Kong woman is acutely revealing. (This movie proves, after Stanley Kwan’s extraordinary Actress and Olivier Assayas’ pop masterpiece Irma Vep, Maggie Cheung was the actress of the decade.) The immaculately and impossibly handsome Leung is possessed with a liquid sensuality that perfectly serves the quietly sad and introverted Chow.

Wong has long been fascinated by and drawn to characters defined by solitude and social estrangement, people whose solipsism and extreme individuality push them to the margins of society. The emotional register here is part of that continuum, coursing through Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express and Happy Together; these are works ravishing to look at though devastating in their emotional implications, linked by their lost opportunities of emotional and physical engagement.

I said at the time, Wong breaks our hearts with images, songs and Maggie Cheung's face. As we await Wong’s long-gestating The Grandmasters, I am thrilled at the chance to go back in my own time.

(That face, vulnerable, open and wounding. Maggie Cheung's Su, in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.)

Being and nothingness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Point blank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Men at work

(Two sides of the coin: manipulating space and time in Kurosawa's masterly High and Low. Images courtesy of Criterion Collection and Orange Media.)

Akira Kurosawa’s best-known films are period and costume epics, but with Seven Samurai and Ran, my two personal favorites are Ikiru and High and Low. They’re by far the most emotionally engrossing of his work.

Criterion has recently published a high-definition upgrade of the latter. Pretty much everything about the new transfer is sensational. It’s another strong example of the company’s fastidiousness in marrying the best possible technologies to produce the best possible video (the first iteration was one of the first titles the company released, and the difference is pronounced).

Adapted from Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom, Kurosawa’s movie has a bifurcated structure, the first part detailing the confusion and anxiety of a young boy who’s kidnapped. The tyke is mistakenly thought the son of a wealthy industrialist but he’s actually the boy’s playmate, the son of the wealthy man’s chauffeur.

The second part is about the search for the assailant following the paying out of the ransom. The movie is built on dissonances and sharp contrasts. The Japanese title is “heaven and hell,” indicative of the sharp differences in class, cultural differences and social standing. Kurosawa visualizes that profound divide in shuttling the action between the elevated, detached world of the privileged and the knat-like swarming of the masses. 

The Western title is more indicative of the movie’s grammar and shape. It better reconciles the dual parts, of both the story and Kurosawa’s sharp, trenchant critique of the hierarchal patterns and institutional structure of Japanese society.

The movie acknowledges the country’s extraordinary post-war economic recovery, just one generation removed from the cataclysmic ruin and catastrophe of fallen empire. Toshiro Mifune strikes a lot of the right chords as the industrialist, playing a man who at the start has leveraged all of his holdings in order to secure a controlling interest in the shoe concern that accounts for his elevated social position.

A terrific book I read this summer was Hampton Sides’s Hellhound on His Trail, about the extraordinary two-month manhunt for James Earl Ray after he shot Martin Luther King in April, 1968. Sides does some superb forensic work of his own, painstakingly documenting the breadth of the investigation, one that moved throughout the United States, Mexico, Canada and Britain.

The book has some fascinating parallels with Kurosawa’s film, concerned with the same intuition, the grunt work, the painstakingly small, seemingly unrelated parts that contribute mightily to the details of the police procedural. In the Kurosawa film, there’s a wonderfully tense and telling moment when one of the police specialists, listening to a recording of the assailant during a ransom demand, divines a specific background noise that proves crucial in narrowing the man’s location.

High and Low is one of Kurosawa’s best directed films; it satisfies the genre requirements but also finds a lot of digressive and colorful in-between parts. It’s plot-heavy, but it never feels especially episodic or overly structured. Kurosawa plays off time and space (the movie’s nearly two and a half hours long, but it never feels slow or too ungainly), and he’s willing to push the work away from Mifune and privilege the grubby, meticulous work of the cops and detectives. 

Despite the corrosive sheen, the movie‘s very hopeful in other ways, believing that the tradition-bound Japan will give way to something more elemental and direct, reflective in the unequivocal friendship between the two young boys.

The black and white widescreen framing of cinematographer Asakazu Nakai is absolutely breathtaking, as is the movie‘s one supremely imaginative use of color (which Speilberg ripped off in Schindler’s List). Two other key collaborators, art director Yoshiro Muraki and lighting director Ichiro Inohara, do precise and lyrical work, especially at the start, so important in establishing the claustrophobic tone of the movie’s opening third, where almost all the action is confined to the lavishly appointed home of the industrialist. 

The ending, without giving too much away, is also a very interesting inversion of Bresson’s preferred ending, especially Pickpocket, of rather than a criminal seeking absolution and redemption finds the man seeking a wholly different form of self-justification.

Back in the early nineties, when they were working a lot together, Martin Scorsese and Richard Price talked often about doing an American remake. Fortunately, for all sides, that never came to account. Kurosawa’s critical reputation has always been volatile, to say the least. 

High and Low justifies the hype.

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

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.

Harry the eighth

(Action and adventure: the three heroes assuming their dramatic fate in the final installment of the Harry Potter franchise: the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)

It’s just past the midpoint of the year, a time of necessary reflection and pause, about the state of the art. Style, art and aesthetics are harder to quantify, and they’re typically distrusted by the masses. I went to take another look at Kelly Reichardt’s extraordinary Meek’s Cutoff recently, and the people next to me sneered at it much of it and were openly hostile by the movie’s enigmatic ending.

People are more comfortable responding to numbers, raw data. And so, the almost sexually-tinged response to the unprecedented box office of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 affirms once again the only time people truly get excited about the movies is as a business. I’ve said before, but it’s worth repeating, I care about films and directors (and actors and writers and cinematographers) and not the business. I’m not an investor in the original product and I don’t own stock in any of the major conglomerates that dominate the industry.

Harry Potter has been a phenomenon since the moment J.K. Rowling published the first book. The movies have been pretty good, for the most part. I have to admit, I’ve never seen the first two films, the ones directed by Chris Columbus, in their entirety (probably about eighty percent). All of the films are pretty much auteur (and critic) proof. Still, that doesn’t mean they’re not a great deal of fun to write about.

One might begrudge Rowling her insane wealth and great fortune; I applaud anybody with the smarts, nerve and brains to engender entire generations of kids to yield their video games and take up reading, even if it only proves temporary. 

Rowling’s not a great writer by any stretch, but she has a near supernatural gift for plugging into an alternately soothing, frightening emotional simulacrum of childhood and adolescence played out as a series of daring games and riffs on identity and youthful competence.

For better or worse, the Potter films cannily suggest a classic studio era product updated to the technologically sped up present. By that, I mean, the movies feel less directed than assembled, with each film boasting the best in production designers, art directors, composers, technicians and specialists money can buy. We’re not talking William Cameron Menzies, but they’re awful good. 

The series conjures the best of mid-thirties Warners in other ways, studio bound, ersatz  and impersonal in many respects but also carried through with a delightful emphasis on the bit player (played by some of the greatest English actors of their era). Any series that throws at you pretty much the entire Mike Leigh company is worth taking seriously.

The producers are the real powerbrokers on the franchise. The directors are more typically hired hands, though I agree with most people that Alfonso Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban is the strongest entry, not just because it is the best directed work, but it is the only one where you sense the authority and command of a director shaping the material visually and taking it into unexpected and lyrical heights. (Mike Newell’s Goblet of Fire is by far the second best.) Steve Kloves, writer of seven of the eight titles, is also the main reason films play as well as they do.

David Yates directed the final four works; before Order of the Phoenix, he’d never directed a theatrical feature, all of his credits were BBC films. The movies are all really marvels of casting, particularly the three leads: Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), best mate Ron (Rupert Grint) and the luminous and dashing Hermione (Emma Watson). 

They bridge the work, emotionally, and allow a human connection to the technical architecture, offering a sense of lived in experiences that encompass a range of feelings, actions, behavior about envy, ambition, pretentiousness, longing and awkwardness. They get at something very particular about the interior consciousness of youth, the precariousness of it all. It is also why all the movies are overstuffed and familiar and episodically drawn because the plotting is the weakest element of the stories, all variations of good and bad fathers and sorting through Harry’s Oedipal conflicts.

To his credit, Yates finds a resonant way to conclude the series while conceding dramatically how inherently anticlimactic Deathly Hallows is given there was no other way to end it other than the preordained showdown between Harry and his archnemesis Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), the monomaniacal despot who murdered Harry’s parents. 

Sensing the massive machinery coming to an end, Yates is finally able to exert a more dynamic shape and rhythm here than the previous entries. Yates and his great cinematographer Eduardo Serra, Claude Chabrol’s key collaborator for much of the last decade and a half, create some thrilling imagery and dazzling uses of light and shadow. The 3-D doesn’t do much for me; I look forward to seeing the movie conventionally projected.

I prefer the smaller, quieter moments; Yates becomes a bit too enamored with the digital technology and he overuses it during the big clash Hogwarts’ clash between Harry’s partisans and Voldemort’s armies.The series is over. I was taken and tenderly caught up in the moment. The movies didn’t change my life, but their messiness, volatility and size cast a considerable shadow.