Light Sensitive

The master

(Two or three things: the hypnotically beautiful Rin Takanashi as a woman of shifting identities in Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love. Below, the artist in action. Images courtesy of IFC Films and Sundance Selects.)

The most ravishing opening I’ve seen in recent movies occurs at the beguiling and elegant start of Abbas Kiarostami’s newest film, Like Someone in Love. Inside a Tokyo bar, the calm though insistently pressing voice of a young woman is heard, and Kiarostami masterfully sustains the rhythm, tone and almost quietly nervous desperation inherent in her soft vocal register.

The moment is graceful, poetic and above all, mysterious because of the complex ways Kiarostami disorientates the viewer, disguising or otherwise obfuscating the clean or coherent lines of the speaker from the corresponding images.

The spoken language, Japanese, also works to heighten the sense of evasiveness and furtive glances the camera records. Suddenly, sharply, Kiarostami identifies the speaker, the university student Akiko (the astonishingly beautiful Rin Takanashi), whom it becomes clear through the brusque business talk with an older man, works as an escort. The man orders her on an assignment, with an older client named Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), a retired professor, beginning the movie’s nocturnal though hard-edged journey from night to day.

Japanese female sexuality seems to exist, at least in the films I’ve seen, almost entirely in shadow and out of view. Direct representations of it or specific acknowledgement seems as taboo there as inside Tehran. It makes for an interesting corollary to the director’s own state of being, Iran’s greatest director who is caught between extremes, neither the outlaw dissident like Jafar Panahi nor a government collaborator, though a complex, original and unpredictable artist who’s now chosen to work outside his country on his last two films.

Kiarostami’s previous film, Certified Copy, I argued was his Sauve qui peut (la vie), that is, like Jean-Luc Godard, his “second first film,” after more than a decade working in a more experimental vein made possible by the advent of digital technology. This movie is the director’s Passion, concerned with different modes of address, a dialect on fluctuating identities, the director's own moral inquiries shaped from his position as a privileged outsider who’s dropped into an alien culture and becomes a witness to the customs, habits, beliefs and daily rituals of his subjects.

Yet, it is emphatically a Kiarostami movie, especially given the movie’s two key sequences that unfold inside the interior of cars, the first of Akiko being transported by taxi to the suburban home of her client; the second, the most beautiful image of the movie, of Takashi driving her to her university classes on the morning after their (enigmatic) night together. The use of light, like the mirrored shots of the sun-draped clouds refracted against the exterior car windshield, is absolutely extraordinary.

Some time ago, during one of the times I interviewed Kiarostami, he talked about the formal and narrative structures unfolding in cars.

“I insist on moving because-though I like the fixed frame-it helps me to see the moving frame as well. The second reason is the journey, moving from one point to the other. In our culture, journey doesn't necessarily mean moving from one place to the other. It could be a natural journey; any change of the ideas could constitute a journey.”

Kiarostami gracefully never burdens Akiko with the urge to empty her guilt or justify her reasons for working the sex trade. She is an individual, pensive and confused, perhaps, though also driven by the need to challenge the ruling orthodoxy. Kiarostami is more interested in documenting consequence than behavior.

He reveals action, movement, subtle inflections or behavioral details. Traces of her guilt, even personal embarrassment, are ever-present, especially a hypnotic sequence, during the first long movement inside the cab, where listening to the messages left on her cell phone from her grandmother, she has the driver drive by the train station where the old, frail woman nervously awaits word from her granddaughter, and the clipped, rushed exchange is heartbreaking.

Likewise, Takashi, an intellectual, a translator, a professor, betrays little shame or embarrassment at securing the services of a prostitute, but his loneliness, his sorrow, is implicit by his solitary movements and the rather extravagant means he undergoes to “impress,” her on his own terms. The uncertainty of narrative signaled at the start is the movie’s dominant leitmotif.

Like Certified Copy, the new work meditates on the very meaning and purpose of existence, the nature of “performance,” as people accept or deny their preferred social roles. Akiko’s work as an escort is possible to read as a critique of the extreme sexual subjugation of Japanese women, or simply a protest against the casual servitude manifest in most contemporary Japanese relationships.

The second possibility seems more than conjecture with the appearance of Noriaki (Ryo Kase), Akiko’s rather brutish boyfriend, in the movie’s final movement. His leering, palpable jealousy radically shakes the movie, and introduces a darker, even violent strain that ruptures the narrative.

The telling is elegant and hypnotic, but the results are typically knotty and elusive. Kiarostami’s cinema resists easy closure or resolution. The uncertainty of the beginning yields a discordant, abrasive space of unease and violation. The startlingly abrupt ending finalizes the abstract patterns and poetic surfaces, movingly suggesting as people glide through time and space, exchanging identities, feelings, point of view, they can run, but not hide.

Sundance: Next generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sundance: Catch twenty-two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are my rankings and grades:

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

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

The warriors

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

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

Kathryn Bigelow

                                                                                              

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

Force majeure

(Man in the mirror: Denzel Washington's damaged airline pilot, just before the awakening, in Robert Zemeckis' Flight. Images courtesy of Paramount.)

I had zero personal use for Robert Zemeckis’ quixotic experiments in motion capture over the last decade. Beowulf was the only one of those three films I caught, and I found it pretty cold and dreary.

Zemeckis is probably the most technically skilled of the Spielberg acolytes and protégés. Joe Dante had more flair and an antic side that was truly liberating. For Zemeckis, it was probably disheartening that his most personal projects, the wondrous script he wrote with Bob Gale for Spielberg’s 1941 and his second feature, Used Cars, were commercial failures.

Back to the Future is a marvelous work of pop art, funny, graceful and beautifully observed. (If only Zemeckis had the sense and good taste to stop there.) Careers must be paid attention, and he has negotiated that path fairly well. For better or worse, Zemeckis made the films he imagined the public would respond.

The exciting news is Zemeckis’ new film Flight, his first live-action work in the twelve years since Cast Away, is a bracing and welcome return to mature ideas. It draws on his formidable technical abilities to explore states of vulnerability, longing and human frailties. Just as important, it has an intuitive grasp for behavior and action that I was beginning to think eluded him.

The script, by John Gatins, reportedly drawn from his own struggles with addiction, is a revelation. It is obvious from the opening moments, with the blurry outlines of a young woman’s naked body, that Zemeckis has returned to adult concerns.

In the movie, Denzel Washington is the haunted Whip Whitaker, a preternaturally gifted airline pilot who wakes up on a desultory, charcoal grey morning in Tampa. The beautiful and compliant young woman with him, Katerina (Nadine Valezquez), is a flight attendant and part of Whip’s crew scheduled for a morning flight to Atlanta.

This messy, lived-in fussiness is an immediate and direct way to start out. Washington’s Whip is aggrieved and perturbed, clear by the nasty edge in his voice during a cell phone conversation with his former wife concerning a tuition payment to a private school for their teenage son. Katerina is more ornamental, but she illustrates Whip’s avidity and almost naked hunger for sensation, activity, anything that blots out the dark edges of his existence.

The opening concludes on a brash and wild note, the camera makes a dolly in on Whip as he does a line of coke. The script turns on the conflict when his cool and nerve are punctured. The movie’s centerpiece is a bravura twenty-minute sequence about what happens inside the cockpit and the plane during the flight to Atlanta.

Zemeckis foreshadows the impending catastrophe with a parallel story of a young woman’s own descent. Nicole (Kelly Reilly) is another beautiful wastrel trying to score. Zemeckis sharply links the two stories visually, rhyming Nicole’s tawdry apartment building with the same eerie and forlorn desperation of the motel where Whip is introduced.

Whip is almost blithely cool in the manner he steers the plane clear of the ferocious turbulence after the take off. The real drama follows when, awakened from his drug and drink-induced stupor, the plane goes into a violent tailspin and he loses all mechanical control during its terrifying and rapid descent. Like the plane crash sequence in Cast Away, Zemeckis again proves himself a master of confined space and spatial rupture.

It’s not just an abstract lesson in fate and horror, but rather a sharp consideration of personal loss, his camera sharply moving between the cockpit to the interior of the plane, where we follow a boy and several of the crew violently thrashed about, their bodies subject to violent laws of physics.

In contemporary cinema the digital manipulation of the image has become so prevalent is has often paradoxically lessened the visual excitement. Zemeckis’ interests in digital technology is probably appropriate, given how today, most action sequences feel animated more than directed.

To his credit Zemeckis groups the technical to the personal in a fluid and inventive way. Whip’s instincts and daring, abetted by the drugs and alcohol, miraculously finds a way to land the damaged jet, with minimal human costs, the point of view marking the profound sense of breakdown and suffering.

The crash sequence in Cast Away proved so vivid and realistic, the balance of the movie suffered by comparison. This story, though far more recognizable than the one in Cast Away, is more satisfying. Whip’s bravery and extreme competence inoculate him, stripping clean the carefully constructed layers of vanity and self-deceit and his steadfast denial of his all-consuming alcoholism.

Within the context of a recovery movie, Flight is colored and shaped by a haunting and realistic self-preservation. Whip’s world, already tenuous and on the verge of breaking, fissures when the details of the toxicology report are learned and he becomes the subject of a criminal inquiry. The always dependable Don Cheadle turns up as a canny lawyer assigned to help cover up his misdeeds. The byplay between the two is certainly colorful and vivid; it is also largely secondary.

Just as Zemeckis intertwined the fates of the two addicts at the start, the movie turns on their conflicting responses of deceit and self-denial. The outer mechanism of the story, the legal proceedings occasioned by the investigation launched by the National Transportation Safety Board, is echoed by the far more elusive, unpredictable interior conflict.

Washington’s performance, compelling, jittery, always watchable, is wholly remarkable to the extend he refuses to invite any kind of real sympathy. His cold calculations are hardly worth savoring, but they are realistic and colored by raw, vivid believability.

Evidence of Zemeckis’ cultural conservatism, much discussed with Forrest Gump, is present here, and it’s a problem, especially the punitive sexual attitudes about Katerina, the flight attendant whose plight proves a particularly unfortunate one (echoing the ugly treatment of Robin Wright in the earlier film). The specter of faith, played out in the particulars of the crash site, is also too ever-present, for my taste.

The ending, whether it constitutes a failure a nerve, an egregious loss of faith or an honest form of deliverance, fits with the movie’s shifting and fluid moral plane. It is not hard and fast, but uncertain and understandable.

Coming home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank goodness for that.

Magnificent obsession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Cannes aura

(Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, negotiating the landscape and each other, in Wes Anderson's graceful, pungent Moonrise Kingdom. Images courtesy of Cannes Film festival and Focus Features.)

CANNES
 

The festival’s sixty-fifth edition hit the mid-point today.

 The competition has been erratic, but here are the highlights: Michael Haneke’s formidable, stern Amour; Cristian Mungiu’s Bressonian parable of religious totalitarianism, Beyond the Hills; Wes Anderson’s swooning fest opener Moonrise Kingdom; Abbas Kiarostami’s intricate, gorgeous Japanese-language Like Somebody in Love; Alain Resnais’ incandescent You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet and Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s lyrical, screwball triptych, In Another Country.

Moonrise Kingdom, which opens Stateside this week, is a lyrical and effervescent piece about dark and difficult subjects. It is probably the director’s sharpest exploration yet of his outsider theme, and is marked by a plaintive quality that reaches a more mournful and apprehensive emotional register.

The title, if I heard Anderson correctly during his opening press conference, is a tribute, of sorts, to Frank Borzage’s 1948 masterpiece, Moonrise. It’s certainly not a surprise, given the eclectic movie references the dot the work, from Jacques Tati to the idyllic interpolated story Monica Vitti relates to her child in Red Desert. The same privileged romantic aura that defined much of Borzage is echoed in Anderson’s story of two forlorn, quietly desperate 12-year olds living, or more accurately, trapped, on a New England island in the mid-sixties.

Anderson has a great knack for appropriating and refracting those references through his own peculiar sensibility, making it intuitive and organic to the material. I know, for a lot of people, Anderson’s films feel too machine tooled and art directed in a fussy, plastic perfection. I don’t care, quite frankly, if Anderson doesn’t adequately elevate or alter his art to suit the taste of some.

My own conflicted feelings about the director and his previous work make me something of an agnostic. Ever since his breakthrough second feature Rushmore, I’ve been both excited and cool. My resistance started to dissipate with his last work, Fantastic Mr. Fox. Anderson’s very good with received forms, in that case, stop motion photography and animation and appending his style to the format.

There was a verve and openness I found breathtaking. I know his films are still too hidebound and precious for many, but his talent for imagery and production design helped crystallize a loose, rich emotional interplay in the energized, complicated inner-world of his characters.

Anderson’s milieu is as mythic and realized as a great children’s illustrator. At its most elemental, the new movie’s has a classic chase and pursuit structure. The story follows the furtive adventures of the two kids, Suzy (Kara Hayward), deadpan and endearing and the young Khaki Scout, Sam (Jared Gilman), persistent and eager, as they cross deeper into the island’s knotty interior for their carefully planned rendezvous.

The director wrote the script with his friend and occasional collaborator, Roman Coppola. The willful eccentricity and idiomatic stylization is still there, but I think what emerges most forcefully, in the glancing touches and precocious imagery, is a kind of persistent melancholy and sadness, explicit in the solitude and quiet disappointment linking the two adult male leads, Bruce Willis’s local sheriff and Edward Norton’s educator and scout leader.

Moonrise Kingdom is an adolescent romantic adventure story graced with deeply adult concerns. The writers take the time to animate the interior world of the two kids, best illustrated in the lovely flashback that shows their first meeting, when he invades the basement church of a local production and finds himself absolutely transfixed by her slightly off-center, ephemeral qualities. Maligned and picked upon by their peers, the two youngsters establish an immediate connection; with their shared sense of being ostracized, they are fairly resourceful and cunning on their own terms.

Still, as easy as it is to be caught up and astonished by Anderson’s formidable imagery (and the vivid, tactile work of cinematographer Robert Yeoman), Moonrise Kingdom is finally bracing and forthright in granting serious ideas and desperate longing to its young kids, most memorably in a frank and funny moment of sexual experimentation between the two on their inlet paradise.

Anderson’s genius for casting and personality invokes Preston Sturges, and the regulars, like Bill Murray, function as his Charles Coburn or Eugene Palette, eccentric, sharply drawn miniatures who imbue their funny and brusque figures with a bracing, devilish wit, clever, underplayed reactions and egalitarian temperaments. Anderson's generosity in treating them with substance and ideas, taking seriously what they think and showing the way home.

The formal invention is not just visual, but aural (please stay through the whole credits, and you immediately understand). Yeoman’s work is also a marvel, from the lyrical pans of the opening to the strangely beautiful and scary climax, his palette subtly moving from deep blues to a monochromatic and steely black and white. Anderson’s anecdotal, anarchic forms are both fleeting and grounded, observant and lush.

Moonrise Kingdom is unmistakably the work of its author; it doesn’t revolutionize his art, but it goes off in lovely tangents that form and congeal into a radical and lovely whole.