Light Sensitive

Fury

Many of the finest works at Cannes and subsequently launched at Telluride, Toronto and New York are now opening in commercial cinemas, demanding to be seen and occasioning new words of appraisal.

 An angry meditation on national identity, representation and the moral and personal consequences of the society’s transformative shift from Maoism to an unbridled capitalism, A Touch of Sin, the new work by China’s greatest contemporary director, Jia Zhang-ke, is the director's most impressive achievement since Still Life (2006) won the top prize at Venice.

It's suffused with a blistering, tragic intensity and palpable anger illustrating the moral rot and social despair resulting from the country’s willful and energetic Randian obedience to new wealth. It’s an annihilating, gut-wrenching work that offers little escape or solace. Not since Unknown Pleasures has Jia made a film so immediate.

Jia has collected four stories, each dealing with death and personal tumult, and drawn from recent fact-based incidents in China, to address the extreme social stratification, inequality and corruption caught in the country’s daily rituals and vast social fabric at once toxic and constant.

From the soul-crushing marginalization of the poor to the perverse and appalling greed, cynicism and avarice of the country’s new social elite, the historical analog is the West in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. Here it is accelerated though also strangely defamiliar, numbing in its exactness and crippling in its repercussions.

The ideas and concerns are familiar from the director’s previous work (Platform, The World), but the violent sense of loss and interruption contributes to a grave and wounding tone. Jia intertwines all manner of influences, of East and West (the movie’s English title is a play on King Hu’s iconic A Touch of Zen), cinema and literature grafted to new forms and idioms, capturing the nihilistic underpinnings of graphic novels and the open, anti-government impulses endemic to the Internet.

The extraordinary beginning opens like a Chinese Once Upon a Time in the West and by its chilling and brittle conclusion the movie feels like Crime and Punishment.

In the opening, set in the province of Shanxi, where Jia was born, a ruffian and agitate miner (Jiang Wu), dismissed by most of the community as a village idiot, takes extreme action in his violent protest of the graft, corruption and self-dealing of the business and social leaders.

It's as if Jia frames the narratives of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me to a Chinese vernacular, a man renouncing his own private failure and impotence to strike down those he holds responsible for his pronounced failure and dissatisfaction.

In Chongqing, a southwestern city on the Yangtze river, an enigmatic young man (Wang Baoqiang), the same one seen at the beginning administering his own brand of frontier justice, a thief and killer, reverses his own social marginalization through the transgressive power and authority conferred on him with a handgun. The first episode is annihilating and bleak. Here Jia uses blank, open spaces to such sinister and even kinetic effect, the violence turns enervating and appalling.

In the third piece, unfolding in Hubei, in central China, a receptionist (Zhao Tao), already flouting traditional values by carrying an illicit affair with a married man, strikes back at a man who arrogantly believes his wealth entitles him to unfettered sexual satisfaction. In the final chapter, a young man (Luo Lanshan), living on the southern coast and desperate for his own brand of social mobility, lights out from his provincial village but tragically finds just a continuation of his thwarted and circumscribed life.

This is not Intolerance; the stories never exactly interweave, but they definitely exist in relation to one another and Jia's fluid arrangement of the different parts is bracing and typically inventive. Taken separately, the individual chapters seemingly lack depth; strung together, the work carries a chilling cumulative impact (it must be said the third episode is the weakest and most problematic).

The great Yu Lik-wai, Jia’s regular cinematographer, working in in the unusual format ratio of 1:2.4, weaves together one dazzling, immersive image after another, to the point they collate and dance in the imagination. The use of color, especially red in the first chapter, is expressive and suggestive,  binding shape, action and movement to a corrosive arabesque.

Jia's last couple of projects have oscillated between forms and modes of expression, hybrid works that daringly if sometimes too elliptically shifted between fiction and nonfiction technique and stylistic approaches. The results were often beautiful but distant and opaque. Now you feel his engagement to the material. (Jia appears as an actor in the last chapter.)

This is action-painting cinema in the best sense, thrilling, sad and terrifying.

Images courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Easy Riders

The persistent themes and trademark preoccupations of Sam Shepard’s art, wounded or damaged masculinity, the legacy of violence and haunted, absent fathers, is given an alternate, fascinating point of view in Treva Wurmfeld’s documentary Shepard and Dark.

The greatest playwright of his generation is seen from alternate angles, intimate, head on, flinty and not always flattering, as captured through his nearly fifty-year friendship (and sometimes contentious rivalry) with Johnny Dark. At first glance, there appears to be little that links the two. The film is about going deeper inside character and personality and finding how people connect. “You don’t need to be the same, you just need to find a way to connect,” Dark asserts at the start.

The movie, like a Shepard play, True West, especially, moves emphatically through time and space, dancing backward and forward, in charting the flow and shape of the friendship between the two. To her credit, Wurmfeld never privileges Shepard’s perspective over than of Dark. This powerfully recessive actor, who never appeared to be very comfortable talking about his art or the corresponding attention, opens up and out, offering a prickly, wounded and at times achingly vulnerable subject.

By contrast, Dark is the more animated and natural “character,” a literary gadfly, who like Woody Allen’s Zelig, had a profound and natural way of finding himself caught in the middle of very fertile artistic movements, like the explosion of the off Off-Broadway theater scene five decades ago. It was in Greenwich Village, in 1963, Dark chanced upon Shepard the day after seeing a play of his. The two struck up a conversation, and it radiated out from there.

Dark and Shepard are both outlaw, even radical, traditionalists. Shepard, who once explained in an interview his morbid fear of losing his entire play from working with a computer, is shown hammering out his current play on a manual typewriter. Dark is a kindred spirit, drawn to solitude and simple pleasures, caring for his books, taking a bath or smoking a joint.

Dark is also an obsessive archivist. The organizing shape of the documentary revolves around a book derived from their epic correspondence, part of Shepard’s deal of making his literary estate available to a university in Texas. Wurmfeld colors and deepens the material, providing context and point of view, through reams of private and personal material, home movies shot on Super-8, a trove of photographs, supplemented by other archival material, like an extract of a very young Shepard appearing with some other playwrights to talk about the craft on a New York talk show.

Their lives intersect in more primal ways, as well. Shepard’s first wife, O-lan Jones, is the daughter of Dark’s wife. Both men are also emotionally scarred by their bruising, difficult relationships to their fathers (Shepard’s, in particular, was a complex, furious man, a former combat bomber pilot and Fulbright scholar who was undone by his nasty and persistent alcoholism).

Shepard notoriously, by his own admission, abandoned his family, his wife and teenaged son, to take up with Jessica Lange, and Dark became a surrogate father to the young boy. (At the time the film was shot, the relationship with Lange, which also produced several children, is now over.)

The incongruent nature of (and financial means) of the two men bring about a not surprising rupture. The ambiguity is something worth considering. The movie’s organizing shape pivots on movement, with many of the interviews unfolding in cars or tracks that traverse the open spaces of the American West or the vast stretches of the Texas panhandle. Both men are attempting, not always successfully, to outrun their own demons.

This is a first documentary feature by the gifted Wurmfeld (pictured above, at left). Perhaps it took a woman to capture something essential and pure the loneliness of the American man. It’s a portrait, to be sure, but like the best of Shepard’s plays, it animates in subtle ways something dark and ferocious about loss and separation. Shepard has lost some of his cultural standing in the last couple of decades.

The movie’s ending, tense and sad, evokes Cassio’s notorious lament to Iago: “Reputation, reputation, reputation. Oh, I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.”

Images courtesy of Music Box Films.

Encore

Through circumstance and design, the first film I saw at Toronto was John Carney’s new film, Can a Song Save Your Life? It has been nearly seven years since Carney’s lyrical, transcendent Once detonated public consciousness at Sundance.

 The setting is transposed, from Dublin to New York, but the new film is very much of a piece, thematically and stylistically. It feels very much like a remake, or at least, a cover of Once; Carney’s working with a larger budget, a bigger crew and better-known actors, though the approach is a risky formal strategy. Once was a jewel with its own idiom, tone and emotional undercurrents. It was elusive, beautiful and fragile, and it captured moments and feelings, unmediated, heartbreaking, between people, artists, who were vulnerable, lonely, even avid for each other.

 Once had a spontaneity, verve and openness that is captured rather than re-created; the danger was not in the repetition of ideas but in damaging the precise and lyrical emotional rhythms. In retrospect, the casting proved miraculous. Whatever they lacked technically, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová conveyed something direct and pure, emotionally unvarnished that Carney very intuitively played off.

In both films now, Carney has woven in an interesting idea of where the central relationship is not consummated sexually but musically. The story here is closer to pastiche, redolent of forties desperation and romantic redemption about the emotional interaction of two solitary, haunted individuals.

Like Once, the new film is predicated on a palpable romantic attraction that remains sublimated because of larger emotional complications. Keira Knightley plays Greta, an emotionally bruised singer and songwriter whose  impromptu number at an East Village hangout captures the fancy of formerly prominent independent music label executive turned wastrel, Dan (Mark Ruffalo).

Interestingly, the film has certain formal and structural affinities with the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Carney elliptically narrows his concerns and delves inside his two principals through an adroit and inventive use of flashbacks. Like Hansard’s volatile street musician, her abandon and sexual betrayal is triggered by the memory of a video, captured from an iPhone. (In Once, framed by the song “Lies,” the video is viewed through a laptop.)

Song has a screwball, musically inflected rhythm (one of the films I thought of was Lewis Milestone’s great Depression-era fantasia, Hallelujah I'm a Bum, especially the most stylized moment of the film of him imagining her being accompanied by a full-piece band) about loss and recovery. Like Once, it’s about the emotional primacy of music, about how the underlying feelings and buried emotions are colored and deepened through nuance and feeling.

Ruffalo’s shambling and disheveled work denotes a man out of time, unable or unwilling to adapt to the rapid technological and commercial vicissitudes of the business and left on the outside looking in. She is his salvation. The film turns on the believability of Knightley as a capable singer-songwriter, and she delivers the goods. The plot turns on his ability to produce, on the fly, using actual street locations and professional musicians, an album that reaffirms her ability.

It is a movie that comments on its own making, and the autobiographical connections are palpable (Carney dedicates the film to his brother, Jim). The film also seems to meditate on Carney’s own life and career in the aftermath of Once, where he got on the radar of Hollywood. In fact, after what was originally announced as his American debut fell apart, Carney wrote and directed two small, genre-defying films that he made in Ireland.

Carney was a former musician who played in Hansard’s seminal Irish band The Frames. During one fantastic rooftop jam, Ruffalo’s producer jumps and performs a few riffs of his own. Carney privileges the form’s innate individualism. Again the best thing about the musical numbers is the freedom and generosity he allows his performers, playing songs in their duration and shooting them in a watery, fluid style.

It’s not as bitter and melancholy, like Once, capturing the divide between what one longs for and what is realistically available. It is a happier, more optimistic piece that radiates a joy and pleasure.

Image courtesy of the Toronto International Film festival

 

The bad and the beautiful

My Toronto experience this year was a brisk one, over before it seemingly began, though it was a deeply satisfying one for the most part. More to come on this titles, and the directors, but for now, these are my personal rankings.

My only regret is that I did not see more movies.

Plus ça change.

The list

12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)

Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt)

Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)

Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie)

Can a Song Save Your Life? (John Carney)

Prisoners (Denis Villenueve)

Child of God (James Franco)

Our Sunhi (Hong Sang-soo)

Le week-end (Roger Michell)

Omar (Hany Abu-Assad)

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)

Palo Alto (Gia Coppola)

Fading Gigolo (John Turturro)

The Square (Jehane Noujaim)

La última película (Raya Martin and Mark Peranson)

Joe (David Gordon Green)

Starred Up (David McKenzie)

The Double (Richard Ayoade)

Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener)

Moebius (Kim Ki-duk)

Labor Day (Jason Reitman)

Devil's Knot (Atom Egoyan)

Philomena (Stephen Frears)

Image courtesy of Toronto International Film festival

On and off

James Mangold has directed nine features, but my most privileged, even exalted, moment occurred with his debut, Heavy. It premiered eighteen years ago in the competition at Sundance. The movie’s central character, a painfully introverted older man (well played by Pruitt Taylor Vince), in love with a dazzlingly innocent, beautiful young woman (Liv Tyler), delivers on his one chance to make an impression, treating her to a magnificent point of view inside a car as planes blast off from close range.

The resulting sensation is tactile, beautiful, even, I think, transportive. I’m not sure he has ever again achieved such a dramatic epiphany, a precisely calibrated stitching together of incident, mood and tone that toggles between the subtle and the majestic. He has certainly staked out a career. (“He still has to answer for Identity,” a friend and colleague said after watching his newest film, and largely liking it.)

Like a lot of contemporary directors trying to find their way in a hostile, impersonal system, Mangold reveals his most striking talent for appropriation, ruminating on a cultural past, poaching ideas and themes already present. As a result, he creates perfectly fine, representative even works, but never truly exciting or liberating or fully justifying, like his remake of Delmer Daves’ greatest film, 3:10 to Yuma, of why it needed to exist.

Until it goes soft and paint by numbers brain-dead in the last reel, I was pretty much taken with his new film, The Wolverine. Fortunately the movie is more inventive than the title, this sixth iteration of Hugh Jackman’s tortured, self-annihilating X-Man “mutant,” adapted primarily by Christopher McQuarrie and Scott Frank from a four-part Marvel series conceived by Chris Claremont and designed by Frank Miller.

All the films have trafficked in self-persecution, of people whose freakish, inexplicable talent, genius even, marked them for all manner of social outcasts and political refugees. Logan, the mutant’s doppelganger, is a classic nowhere man, benumbed and solitary. (Are you a hunter, he’s asked at the start. “Not any more,” is the terse response. Logan is immobilized, emotionally, physically, by a past he struggles to justify, expiating his own sins of commission, as his need for violence marks its own peculiar order and civilization.

Interestingly, the story of the new film, mostly set in Japan, intersects with that of Takashi Miike’s Cannes-competition title Shield of Straw. The new film opens with the atomic annihilation of Nagasaki, that Logan, as an Allied POW, bears witness, and also protector who saves the life of a Japanese officer, Shingen Yashida (played by Hiroyuki Sanada). Summoned to contemporary Japan through a striking emissary (Rila Fukushima), Logan is reunited with the now aging warrior, a powerful industrialist and technology magnate who is deeply covetous of Logan's immortality and desperate to tap into it for his own purposes.

Logan is drawn into the internecine corporate and family succession, and the protection of the man’s granddaughter, Mariko (the striking Tao Okamoto). Mangold is very cine-literate, and he's already, on record, as saying one of the influences of the film is Yasijuro Ozu's own color remake of Floating Weeds. He goes to great lengths to paint the cultural and social particulars of Japanese culture, especially the importance of family and tradition.

As such, the movie is steeped in ritual and observance, and the first of the movie's great action set pieces has Logan shielding Mariko from a horde of Yakuza gangsters at a public ceremony of mourning. The press screening I saw the movie was in 3-D; that’s not usually my preferred method of seeing something, but Mangold and his cinematographer, Ross Emery, create some highly visceral and very effective images that are varied, precise and stylized and almost always spatially coherent, so that as it moves through horizontal and vertical planes, the action is accessible and thrilling.

After a momentary interruption of near constant action, the movie's best scene uncannily recalls a movement from Shield of Straw, a flurry of movement, in very tight spaces, aboard a bullet train. In the first big set piece, Mangold is very good at differentiating between open and closed spaces, alternating the two with purpose and some élan. Shield of Straw aspired toward the credibly realistic; rules of science and fiction need not apply in the Wolverine universe.

The action moves abruptly from the contained space of the train's interior to the space beyond as Logan and a skilled and very resourceful Yakuza warrior, using a knife as a corollary to the Wolverine's retracted steel claws, meditate their own version of chase and pursuit. The verve and bracing action of those two moments created a level of expectation the rest of the film never again matches.

Like most of the these movies, the film has no idea how to treat sexuality or its implications, and neither of the two striking Japanese women are able to liberate Logan from the tragedy of his surrendered object of desire. Even more dismaying, the movie's villain, her very name (Viper) giving away the secrets, is a castrating figure of vengeance. (Mangold compounds the error by casting a towering Russian actress, Svetlana Khodchenkova who's far more graceful and lovely to watch than trying to disentangle what she's saying.)

The Wolverine meditates on the meaning and purpose of what it means to be a samurai without ever truly examining the moral or emotional costs of being an emissary of death. Rather than build on landscape, faces or shapes to assess that particular legacy, The Wolverine tracks an opposite path, moving deeper and deeper into inflated comic book exaggeration that dulls the nerves and senses.

It’s unfortunate, though wholly emblematic of the times. The Wolverine is just good enough to italicize its limitations.

Image courtesy of Fox

The Pleasure Principle

Since returning from Cannes, I have been in catch up mode with the important summer releases. Often I like the theory of the summer blockbuster. I prefer the range, formal experimentation and more open ended styles of address of the sort of movie more naturally found at Cannes.

Still I am open to all forms. Also, I certainly understand people feeling a little suffocated by seeing, over and over, a particular kind of "festival film," grinding, even self-annihilating. Yet the alternative seems too bleak and worrisome to even fully contemplate.

Last week, seeing Israeli filmmaker Roma Burshtein’s superb debut feature, Fill the Void, and finding everything about it pretty much perfect, in the tone, the blocking, the visual construction, I thought to myself, I’d rather see this movie twenty times than have to endure Man of Steel again.

Watching films made and marked for the industrial consumer base, it’s natural to question what has become of the commercial cinema, and why is it so devoid of not just personality but pleasure and sensual wonder.

Justin Lin's preposterous though engaging and rather soulful Fast & Furious 6 is the only one I've sampled that carries any kind of impudent, anarchic wit and style. (Shane Black’s Iron Man Three also has some off-key, subversively funny moments, especially those involving the unveiling of the criminal mastermind.)

Even Lin's work is marked by limitations he instinctively acknowledges without ever truly transcending. I loved the two big set pieces in the film, the chase moving through the coastal Spanish highway that eventually turns into an even more elaborately choreographed pursuit on a runway, the scenarios and complications getting exponentially more imposing and daring, with each block of movement giving full range to a director's design, execution and follow through.

The spectacle is the supreme object of beauty in the films because, it has been painfully obvious since the debut work, the actors and their stories, are prosaic and stitched together rather than dramatically conceived. The cars have always been more expressive than the performers (even the women, though beautiful, are often just another form of decoration).

The Hawksian sensibility at play, the fact the women are almost always presented on an equal plane in their daring, physical courage and supreme style, is certainly welcome; still, I wish Jordana Brewster was not sidelined for much of the film. (Michelle Rodriguez improves just about any movie.) Nothing with a six in its title ought to be this entertaining, though one's excitement is tempered by the realization, by its end, all the film really achieves is satisfying expectations.

By contrast, Marc Forster's World War Z, the new zombie movie with Brad Pitt as a retired UN operative who's tasked with locating the source of an apocalyptic scourge that has wiped out seemingly half the planet, feels creatively exhausted and emotionally played out. It has some harshly evocative imagery, a backlit military transport plane on a frighteningly desolate runway, a red-streaked interior of a Newark tenement, but it's all disassociated and arbitrary.

The extreme digital manipulation of the image has been the worst technological development on movie composition and shape over the last two decades. The whole point of cinema is that it moves, and the best directors draw on the expressive possibilities of angle, color, camera movement and off-screen space that colors and shapes a state of being, a feeling of consciousness visualized and made palpably real.

World War Z has some sharp set pieces, the most impressive for me happens aboard a plane, because the restricted space is one of the few times the danger and fear is actually humanized. The most talked about sequences, the first full-scale eruption of the undead in Philadelphia and a terrifying breaching of a massed wall in Jerusalem, I found fairly cold given the way the imagery, accelerated and manic, is digitized rather than creatively rendered and deployed. Rather than being implicated in the horror, you witness the spastic movement and resulting mass slaughter at a strange remove. It’s all so passive.

Most of the time I pay little attention to production budgets (or box office figures), because there is rarely a chance to adjudicate the numbers. To the extent I follow the numbers, I find them only partially interesting for what people are reacting to and paying to see. The near pornographic emphasis on numbers and figures prevents, I think, a fuller consideration of the work itself. The movie's final third, set inside a special government research facility in Wales, is lean and suitably tense, but like most of the film, also amorphous and detached.

Great horror films, like Eyes without a Face or Rosemarie's Baby, have a cumulative power of dread and unease. World War Z has the pace and impersonal grace of a video game.  The surface is lively and immersive, but it has no power or longevity; it recedes right in front of you.

I have not looked at it in the six years since I first saw it, but Bryan Singer's Superman Returns struck me as a serious, square and fairly pleasing variation of his perennial outsider theme. Singer's imaginative visual rhyming of flight and freedom had moments of true poetry. He could not sustain it whenever the material was closer to the ground. His fatal mistake, and the reason the film failed to make a deeper impression was the astoundingly poor casting, most unfortunately his dull choice in the lead, Brandon Routh.

Now, Zack Snyder, in concert with Christopher Nolan, has made another iteration of the Superman tale, called Man of Steel, with the British actor Henry Cavill, in the lead. I liked Snyder's early work, but ever since the bravura title sequence in Watchmen, his work has been pretty much unwatchable. His best talent, as he proved with his very fine remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, is with appropriation.

Man of Steel is a rather ungainly mélange of styles and sensibilities, Snyder's talent for mimicry never quite meshing with the self-seriousness and reach of Nolan (and the screenwriter, David S. Goyer, the writer of Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy). The movie's moral inquiry and ambition, the allusions to Hamlet and the life of Jesus, bear the unmistakable smug imprint of Nolan; the more visceral and kinetic material suggesting Snyder's influence. The parts never truly cohere.

The very notion of the reboot suggests a radical or at least previously unconsidered approach to recognizable material. The filmmakers (Snyder, Nolan, Goyer) explicitly acknowledge the inherent difficulty of an origins tale, the necessary propulsive movement and fleet tempo choked by the tyranny of plot and exposition. The script has some inventive parts, from the Krypton prologue where the star child is born, to the fairly inventive use of flashbacks. Apart from Amy Adams, a brave, almost feral Lois, to the grace and subtlety of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane, as the adoptive parents, the movie is loud and ungainly.

I liked the German actress Antje Traue (pictured below), as the devastatingly effective commando under Michael Shannon's General Zod. (Shannon's a great actor, a great presence, but the moment he started impersonating Nick Nolte, his contempt for the material could not have been greater.)

The whole technical apparatus required to put these behemoths together invariably leads to a cold, imperious void and the personality, ideas, preoccupations, spatial coherence, of the filmmaker are obliterated in the process. Once it is gone, you never get it back.

Images

Fast & Furious 6 (Universal)

World War Z (Paramount)

Man of Steel (Warner Bros.)

 

Grading Cannes

 

My Cannes started this year with the cooly suggestive image of a beautiful young woman under surveillance, as captured in the viewfinder of a pair of binoculars, in French director Francois Ozon's Young & Beautiful, and ended with probably the most famous fall in the history of cinema, that one that concludes Alfred Hitchcock's magisterial Vertigo.

The Ozon was part of the official competition selection, the Hitchcock, preceded by a terrific introduction from Kim Novak, the concluding work of the Cannes Classics program. All told, I saw thirty-seven films: twenty in the official competition, two in official selection, out of competition, seven in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, three in the Directors' Fortnight and five in the Cannes Classics.

Every festival is an object lesson in frustration and thwarted ambition. I especially regret not being able to see more of the Un Certain Regard program, because I was largely impressed by what I did sample. I also heard or read about especially encouraging reports of Lav Diaz's reportedly extraordinary 250-minute long Norte, the End of History, Rithy Panh's prize-winner The Missing Picture, Hany Abu-Assad's Omar, Mohammad Rasoulof's Manuscripts Don't Burn, Diego Quemada-Diez's La Jaula de Oro and Hiner Saleem's My Sweet Pepper Land.

The competition is what excites and infuriates the critics, writers and assembled press. These are the also titles most likely to dominate the art-house release schedule and also turn up at other festivals, like Telluride, Toronto and New York, in the fall. Many of the key works have already been acquired for American distribution, and new deals are still being announced.

What follows are my own rankings, if you will, with corresponding grades, of the films of this year's competition.

Now that enough time has passed, it is possible to start putting this year's edition in the proper context. Just as I began to express my own internal doubts about the quality roughly halfway through the festival, Cannes accelerated to another gear and many. A friend remarked in the opening weekend that the competition was dominated by filmmakers who tended toward the erratic.

Yet, several major directors delivered their strongest works in years: I'm thinking of the Jarmusch, with his best film since Dead Man; the Jia, his strongest since Still Life; James Gray's The Immigrant is, I think, his best film, period. I've been pretty cool about the works of Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, but his The Great Beauty had a pop and vitality that proved rather gorgeous.

Even the weakest films were not entirely without moments of isolated pleasure. The Miike has some brilliantly designed set pieces in the first third, like a shootout on a train; Arnaud des Pallieres' Michael Kolhaas does interesting things with landscape.

In the coming days, I'll be offering other ideas and thoughts on the festival. It's over, but much of what I saw and experienced is still dancing around in my head.

1. Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color (A)

2. Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin (A-)

3. Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive (A-)

4. James Gray's The Immigrant (A-)

5. Arnaud Desplechin's Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) [A-]

6. The Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis (A-)

7. Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur (B+)

8. Asghar Farhadi's The Past (B+)

9. Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra (B)

10. Alexander Payne's Nebraska (B)

11. Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (B)

12. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's A Castle in Italy (B-)

13. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Grigris (B-)

14. Kore-Eda Hirokazu's Like Father, Like Son (B-)

15. Francois Ozon's Young & Beautiful (C+)

16. Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman (C+)

17. Arnaud des Pallieres' Michael Kolhaas (C)

18. Amat Escalante's Heli (C)

19. Takashi Miike's Shield of Straw (C)

20. Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives (D)

(Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Abdellatif Keciche's Palme d'Or-winner, La vie d'Adèle - Chapitre 1 & 2)

Image courtesy of Cannes Film festival

Southern man

The third feature of the singular Southern independent Jeff Nichols, Mud is an engrossing and sharply made work that inventively combines a boys’ adventure story, mystery and an elegiac portrait of a remembered past.

 Nichols burst on the scene with his stunning debut, Shotgun Stories, made six years ago, that was notoriously and appallingly rejected by Sundance. His follow-up, Take Shelter, of two years ago, was more ambitious and maddeningly uneven, but the parts that worked, the eruptions and hallucinations visited upon its protagonist (superbly played by Michael Shannon) suggested a director eerily and capably moving between realist and irrational mode of expression.

Nichols is a talented storyteller, especially visually. His movies play off the discord and fractious relationships of individuals to meditate on what it means to be alive. Nichols returns to his Arkansas roots with the movie. The movie was shot, by Nichols’ regular cinematographer, the superb Adam Stone, in thirty-five millimeter widescreen. The imagery is pellucid and diamond sharp, summoning a vanished frontier, a mythic South redolent of Mark Twain, Larry Brown and Mark Crews.

The story is a adventure tale, with a contemporary Huck and Tom Sawyer variation, about the avid and colorful sojourn of two fourteen-year old kids whose search for excitement plunges them into devilish and difficult story way over their heads. Shotgun Stories was a Old Testament story of blood lust and bitter rivalries among two warring sets of brothers who had the same father. Take Shelter played off a dialectical tension of a fractured consciousness.

The new movie opens with a startling sight on an island redoubt, in the Mississippi, of the boys discovering a boat held aloft in the trees, the fallout of a massive flood. The enterprising and relentless Ellis (Tye Sherman) and his best friend, Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), undertake one of their reconnaissance missions to seize possession of the boat and transform into a hideout.

Instead, they encounter a mysterious man, Mud (Matthew McConaughey),  living a precarious daily existence. Nichols, who wrote the script, creates a very credible emotional world of the two kids, their solidarity and closeness forged through a shared status as outsiders. Ellis lives with his parents, Mary Lee (Sarah Paulson) and Senior (Ray McKinnon), on a boathouse. His need for adventure and discovery helps mitigate the clear strain of his parents’ tense marriage. Neckbone has never known his parents, and his lives with his uncle, Galen (Shannon).

The boys are shrewd and street-smart enough to realize something amiss about the mysterious man, and they soon discover he is a fugitive wanted for murder. He acted to protect his girlfriend, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), he says. 

Establishing a rapport with mysterious man, Ellis agrees to help him evade the authorities and some nasty bounty hunters dispatched from Texas. The two kids become his couriers, foraging the hard materials, like an outboard motor, Mud requires to outfit the boat to leave the island. Crucially, Ellis becomes the man’s link to the outside world, from the dangerously beautiful and fragile Juniper to the hard-edged loner (Sam Shepard) also connected to Mud’s past.

Nichols intertwines several plots and stories, forming a kind of arabesque, that certainly complicates the action, weaving in the slowly disintegrating marriage of Ellis’ parents and his own confusion of his first crush on an older classmate (Bonnie Sturdivant). The emotional parallel, of Ellis understanding Mud’s attraction and faith in a woman, is nicely echoed in his own infatuation with his classmate.

The first hour is so strong and compelling, to the point I was ready to concede this was at the level of Nichols’ best work. Mud has a great deal plot to digest and weave together; if the rhythm and pace are consistently textured and shaped, the increasingly incident-driven story dangles and splatters rather than take hold.

The film’s theme exerts a haunting and powerful grip on the material, namely the nature of violence, its origins and what it is heir to. Like many Southern stories, the past is superimposed over the present, and the conflict develops out of the need for its characters to create their own moral order.

McConaughey brings a tremendous physical presence to the part, but also a damaged intensity. He has submitted himself to a talented director and let go of some of his more eccentric stylization (like The Paperboy). The two kids are revelatory, imaginative, daring and wholly unafraid. Witherspoon, who’s also a native Southerner, gives a sharp, modulated turn in a small though penetrating part.

At times the ambition and scope sometimes undermine the tender, even volatile story construction. The violent shootout that climaxes the movie feels borrowed from a less rigorous and imaginative mind. Nichols redeems himself with two stunning images of transcendence and freedom. Once more, this is a director going places.

Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

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.

Two women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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