Leos Carax interview re Holy Motors

There are not many poets left in the cinema. Perhaps the poet is always something of a throwback, a reminder of former glories. “Now, I feel I make films for the dead, and you show them to people who are alive”. Leos Carax’s new film Holy Motors in part laments the passing of the mechanical age. It also evokes the Island of Cinema of which Carax speaks, a place where life is seen through the prism of cinema, but a prism that allows for all possible viewpoints, less to do with filmic reference and harking back than to do with finding new ways to look at the world and the human condition.

Carax has always stood deliberately apart, with his cigarette and sunglasses, as a lone voice seeking the ineffably romantic in cinema. A wave of teenage cinephilia flowed into his first two features – Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvaise sang (1986), but their evocations of the New Wave were joyful rather than derivative, the cool look worlds apart from the cool look of contemporaries Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix. Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991) was as grand a romantic gesture as could be, to Juliette Binoche, to Paris, to love. The personal and artistic torment of Pola X (1999) had it dismissed in some quarters as wonky at best; it now looks like one of the best films of the 1990s.

The boy-meets-girl theme bubbles under even in Pola X, but with Holy Motors Carax takes his eye from the petri dish of a relationship, to cast it as broadly as possible. Gone is the exhilaration of love but, with something of the spirit of Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju, there is a deep, nostalgic emotion running through the film, which has its own sweetness, encapsulated in the protagonist’s answer to why he continues: “pour la beauté du geste.”

The film follows M. Oscar (Denis Lavant) through a series of appointments in which he assumes a different role, from silver-haired businessman to old beggar-woman, and on. Part of the film’s project is a hymn to the actor, who lives so many experiences on our behalf. Another part is to recognize that this capability exists in us all, and that the sense of identity is fixed far less than we should assume. It’s the classic Man Without Qualities existential dilemma, and no wonder Oscar takes to the late-night bottle in the back of his stretch limo, desperate for some human contact.

As Carax put it when we met (AFI Festival 2013), Holy Motors “was born from the rage of not being able to make films for so long, so it was imagined very fast and shot very fast, without watching the dailies. It happens in one day, from dawn to moonlight. It gave me the possibility to show in one day a whole range of human experience. Of course there is a game with virtuality in the film, which we know about more and more, because when you talk about reality, one of the questions is, can we avoid it? Some people try through fame, or money, or entertainment, or these virtual worlds. What happens if more and more of us try to avoid it more and more? We’ll see.

“I’m not a cinephile, but people, critics, tend to see my films in terms of cinephilia. The language is cinema, I hope, but I don’t see Holy Motors as a film about cinema. People ask what is it about, and I say I don’t know, because I don’t really understand the word “about”. Is Hitchcock’s The Birds about birds? Films are metaphors, and in this case I tried to invent a science-fiction world, because science-fiction is great for that – it’s a metaphor for reality. So hopefully the film is about that, about the structure of reality: can we still face it, do we still want lived experiences, do we still want action? Action means responsibility, and this kind of science-fiction world that was invented for the film, with this strange job where you travel from life to life, I felt it was a good way to show the experience of being alive. He doesn’t have any present. He doesn’t have what people call a life, or at least you wonder if he does, or what is his life. In my mind it’s different movements inside any life, inside many lives, dealing with what we all deal with, which is ageing, dying, loving, losing etc. It’s a strange pitch for a film – what is your film about? It’s about the experience of being alive today.

“I started making films quite young, and I stopped making films quite young. I made three films from 20 to 30 years old, and then I couldn’t make films again until I was 38. And then again ten years. So I had a life within cinema, but I can hardly call myself a filmmaker. Probably in this film there is something like a jump, where suddenly I wake up and I’m not 20, I’m not 30 anymore, and this question of who am I becomes important.

“I changed my name when I was 13 years old. I wasn’t yet interested in cinema at that time. I don’t remember exactly who that boy was at 13 years old, who I was, but I guess I felt the need to reinvent myself. I think every child should be allowed to change his name. You should be allowed to say at 12 or 13, you had your father’s name for a while, or your mother’s name or whatever, now it’s your turn to invent your name and write your life. I have six nephews from aged 10 to 25, and sometimes I worry that they don’t see that, that it’s possible to write your life. Of course, you can’t write all of it, but you can try. It relates to what I was saying about experience – do we still want experience? I’m not against virtual worlds or connecting through computers or whatever. Connecting is the opposite of fighting, of resisting. All these possibilities that this virtuality offers are wonderful, and I hope I used them in Holy Motors, but as a lifestyle I don’t like it. I’m worried about the fact that young people are maybe not searching for experience so much anymore. Which always existed before: young men wanted to go to war, or take boats. They wanted to reinvent themselves. Whether young people still want that I don’t know.”

The fact that Holy Motors starts with Carax himself, waking in bed and passing through a magical portal into a cinema auditorium, has naturally enough prompted assumptions that this is a film about cinema. This is true only to the extent that it is about what cinema can show us of ourselves. There are few specific references, save Carax letting his hair down at the end, along with Edith Scob (as Oscar’s driver ), as though he had been restraining himself. The film cameras, he laments, are one part of a change, a shrinking from reality, that the talking limousine makes clear at the end with a call for silence: “men don’t want visible machines anymore.” It is a film not about cinema, but born of cinema. Carax’s Island of Cinema is a place we recognize. It is not a place of reference, or stealing, but a place for looking at ourselves in different ways. Thus the shadows of genre in Holy Motors, and the feel that when the camera swoops up to Kylie on a balcony, wailing a lament (by Neil Hannon) in the abandoned deco shopping mall that itself figured prominently in Les amants du Pont Neuf, this is some gushing musical in the Demy tradition. But it is not: the song is rather lovely and apt, the moment is perfectly judged, and this is a particularly potent way of conveying the emotion of nostalgia, as she sings “who were we?” The evocation here, as elsewhere, is less referential of cinema of the past than a rather convincing impression that they don’t make ’em like that anymore.

“It’s usual when people talk about my films that they don’t give the desire to people to go and see them because people think, oh it’s a film for specialists, it’s a film for cinephiles. This I mind. I’ve shown the film to 13-year old kids and they get it. They don’t know anything about my cinema, about cinema in general. When I started making films I used references a bit like the New Wave did, to be playful, to be fun, to say I love cinema, I love films, I love film history, but I stopped that after my second film. I felt I had paid my debt to my love for cinema. That’s why I don’t call them references any more. It was nothing very conscious. There were two conscious things. One was that Denis Lavant was going to run on the treadmill and re-enact in a way the scene from my second film, in the virtual world, but it doesn’t change anything if you haven’t seen Mauvaise sang. You still get it. And then at the end of the shoot, I decided to give Edith Scob the mask close to what she had in her earlier film when she was 20 [Les yeux sans visage, 1960]. I hesitated, but it felt absolutely right, and like a gift to her, because I loved her so much on the shoot and I think she loved the experience of the film. It was like a present, and I felt it went with the film, that she should put a mask on at the end. But it was not to say hello to the Franju. I don’t think in those terms, but of course I’ve read books and I’ve seen things and they appear in my films, for sure.

“It may be strange, but I see cinema as more than films. Obviously I loved films, and I’ve seen many films, when I was younger. When I call it an island, it’s because it’s a place, a place where you can see these things – life and death – from a different angle. So I’m grateful that I can go back to this island, but I don’t need to see films to love cinema. I’ve never seen my own films again. You have to fight so much. Making a film is one way of trying to stop the fight and trying to look, to see. That’s what I like about cinema.

“Sometimes I think I should see more films, especially when I travel, but then I see one or two that discourage me. When I was younger I didn’t mind seeing bad films at all. To see a bad film could be very inspiring to me. Now it’s not the case; it’s depressing. I don’t have the courage of discovering that I used to. Now I watch films because I want to see an actress in a film, or the work of a DP. Last year I saw a film I thought was good – it’s not a great film, but it does try to show something of the superhero discovering his powers – Chronicle (2012). It’s a small film, about three kids who discover they have super powers; a cheap film, for sure, compared to usual superhero films, but when they have the scene in the sky where they fly, it’s not like two shots that costs millions of dollars, it’s a long scene and they fly. It’s nice to see people in the sky flying, simply. I am always surprised when you see that kind of superhero that they don’t use that. He lands and it’s over. Flying is great – if a man can fly, keep him going for 20 minutes flying, go around the clouds. This film has a bit of that simple strength. If someone made a film where someone would fly for an hour and a half, people would go see it.

“Movies started with motion, motion pictures. That’s why I showed these images from [Étienne-Jules] Marey, these 19th-century images. It’s the human body – we still love to watch the human body. We love to watch other things, landscapes or things we invented, the cigarettes, the guns, the cars, but basically what we all love is to watch a face, or a human body in motion, running, fucking, exploding. This is what motion capture is. You still need the holy motor of a human body to create it, and in that sense it’s exciting.

“My films are not always light, but with each film I’ve felt the need to try to reach joy, through speed, through dance, through music. In this film I tried through the intermission scene with the accordions, because I think joy is important. I don’t know much about happiness but I know I need joy.

“Each film has really felt like the first one and the last one. I feel like an imposter in a way because I didn’t study film. I was never on a shoot before I made my first film. The fact is that to make a film you need people, and I’ve had lots of trouble to find people. It’s not so much the money. I don’t think I’ve ever not made a film because of money. It’s always people; whether it’s not finding an actress, a producer, someone I trust, it’s people. The hard thing with cinema is people. The other reason I haven’t made many films, apart from all the problems, is probably that once you make a new film, all the past projects are dead. When I make a new film I have to feel that I’m not the same person as the one who made the film before.

“Albert Prévost is the one who made Holy Motors possible. We met on Lovers on the Bridge. Money is very abstract in cinema. You can have, let’s say, $1,000,000, which is nothing to certain producers, and worth a lot to other producers. This man had a kind of genius that I think is pretty rare. It worked for me, but it doesn’t mean it would work with any film-maker. To know how to make a dollar into $10, or when I wanted something, really he understood that that was important for the film, that some money had to go there. And he was able to transmit that to the crew. People trusted him. They knew that he wasn’t spending money behind their backs. When I started making films, I always worked with people who were like crooks, but good crooks. Well, not always good, but the ones I liked were good. To be a producer of a film you have to have a kind of craziness. I think it’s always been true with cinema, and that makes it kind of exciting. The first big producers, in the silent days, were crazy. They were capitalists, they loved money, but they were crazy. If you don’t have that craziness you make bad films, or you make boring films, or you just don’t make films, and I think it’s really that craziness that we miss. It’s rare to find. Cinema from the beginning was something crazy. It’s the only art that’s been invented. Other arts didn’t need to be invented. It’s a miracle it exists.”

As one might expect, Carax is a lover of celluloid, but embraces digital technology in Holy Motors both to rejoice in the movement of the human body in the motion-capture studio, and to create degenerating, subjective visions of Paris as Oscar gazes from his womb-like limo.

“Everything has changed with digital. When I was 20, I met the DP I was to work with for ten years, [Jean-Yves Escoffier], and he became my best friend, like a brother. Then after Lovers on the Bridge, we didn’t talk for ten years. He moved to Hollywood, and he died out here. After that, working with light, working on celluloid, was not the same for me with other people. That was one thing that helped me go to digital because I felt that if I don’t have that kind of relationship with a DP, I might as well shoot digitally.

“I have a bad reaction to digital, mainly because it’s been imposed on us, and I hate that. It’s been an issue since the beginning. Cinema was a very powerful invention, but obviously this power of cinema – it’s like a holy power – you have to reinvent it all the time. Nobody’s scared of seeing a train coming into a station any more. So every generation has to reinvent cinema, the power of cinema. If you see a man walking in an F.W. Murnau film, and the camera is following him, you feel like he is being watched by a god. If a kid does the same shot today and shows it on YouTube, you don’t have this feeling at all. So cinema has to reinvent its power all the time, and that’s what I feel has to be done nowadays more than ever, to reinvent the power of cinema, because if not, it’s lost, it’s not there. People think it’s still there, because they’re entertained by cinema still, but truly if it’s not reinvented, it’s stale. The power has also been devalued by images – images are not only in cinema today, they’re all over the place. You go in the streets and there are screens all over the place, images all over the place. To reinvent the experience of watching something is getting harder and harder. It always seems strange to me that most films are only references, like a photocopy of each other. Hopefully I’m trying to invent something.”

Holy Motors was greeted at Cannes with surprise, as a new sort of thing, and a bolt from the blue. It is a new sort of thing, but it’s also an old sort of thing. The opening specifically evokes Cocteau and a brand of poeticism that is not seen so much any more, perhaps because the idea of a grand aesthetic gesture, the aiming for something greater than literal truth, is not so much in fashion these days. It is a unique, personal gesture. One of the finest things about Holy Motors is that it does not feel definitive. Tomorrow will be completely different, as it should be.

Felicitas

A commercial and critical success in its native Argentina, this is the true mid-19th-century story of (ironically-named) Felicitas Guerrerro de Álzaga (Sabrina Garciarena), whose happiness is constantly defined by the men around her, and even by her apparently loving sister, as what they consider to be best for her and her family’s estate. A valuable asset, at age 15 she is plucked from the arms of her lover Enrique (Gonzalo Heredia) and married off to the richest man in Argentina, forty years her senior (Luis Brandoni). The grotesquery of the white-haired husband caressing his porcelain-skinned child bride aside, Álzaga is hardly an ogre, but a life in which she could conceivably find happiness and mutual respect is threatened by plague, a secret from his past (undeveloped beyond a cog in the plot mechanics to get him briefly out of the way), and the reappearance of Enrique.

This latter gets short shrift, required simply to look pretty or brooding, but he does transform unexpectedly from the idealised partner of the opening rural idyll into a war-brutalized ogre and, finally, bogeyman; his attitude towards women-as-property is eventually no more enlightened than that of Felicitas’s father. When their rupture comes, it is so sketchily explained as to be almost bewildering, but his contribution to the tragic ending – presented with admirable restraint in a short sharp shock – tearing her from the bosom of real, grown-up happiness, finally strips the film of all romanticism, exemplifying the impossibility of Felicitas’s finding happiness on her own terms in the society of the times.


The film starts out like a “they’ll never let us be together” story (yes, those words are spoken), but is as much concerned with depicting the oppression of women in this time and place. One of the film’s problems is that it cannot quite decide to be one or the other and ends up superficially straddling both camps: it’s only a matter of time before the frogs Felicitas collects and keeps in jars are explicitly granted metaphor status, and the brief mention of her (male) cousin’s proto-feminist thesis is given no context regarding the wider struggle for women’s rights outside the narrow compass of the story, or even in terms of his character.
Likewise, Enrique’s role is muddled, and by the end one can no longer quite understand his power over Felicitas, for whom the torch had apparently burned out some time ago. But at the centre of it all, Garciarena gives a full-hearted performance, delightful as the laughing child-woman, and luminous as the strong and beautiful young widow ready to take on the responsibilities of her estancia, Barbara Stanwyck style. The passions are not quite as swoon-inducing as they might be, and the film, though full of incident, rarely (before the end) touches on excitement, but its deficiencies of emotion and incisiveness are amply compensated for by consistently lovely photography, a lush but restrained Nico Muhly score, and the marvelous frocks, furniture, and sets of the gorgeous production design.

d María Teresa Costantini p Daniel Pueyrredón sc María Teresa Correa Ávila, María Teresa Costantini, Sabrina Farji, Quadros Felix, Graciela Maglie ph Lula Cavalho ed Laura Bua ad Cristina Nigro m Nico Muhly cast Sabrina Garciarena, Gonzalo Heredia, Alejandro Awada, Ana Celentano, Luis Brandoni, Nicolás Mateo, Antonella Costa, José Luis Alfonzo
(2009, Arg, 128m)

The Merry Widow

For almost a century, there’s been debate over the best way to watch silent films. Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française insisted on no accompaniment at all in the '50s, but modern times have seen a trend of making musical events out of these screenings, from the London Philharmonic playing along to Napoléon (1927), to some local, knob-twiddling synth-lord bleeping along to something ill-suited to his "art". I caught Eric von Stroheim’s 1925 comedy The Merry Widow at the TCM Festival in Hollywood a few years ago, introduced by the incomparable Kevin Brownlow and a wealth of anecdotes, and accompanied by a splendid new score, a North American premiere no less, by Maud Nelissen, conducting the Von Stroheim Virtuosi, a small and largely competent ensemble of strings, woodwind, percussion, and a very useful accordion.

In the almost non-fictional kingdom of Monteblanco there are two cousin princes, malicious stiffneck Mirko and goodnatured Danilo. The latter falls hard for visiting American chorus girl Sally, but Mirko’s mischief and his own princely duty dissuade him from marriage. When Sally marries a wealthy capitalist who dies, she becomes an eligible match, and Danilo has to contend with Mirko as a now-serious rival, as well as the unresolved misunderstanding of his previous rupture with Sally.

Stroheim claimed the film was butchered by the studio, of course (“The man who cut my movie had nothing on his mind but a hat” – turns out Brownlow does a pretty neat Stroheim impression). He also claimed the ending was a spurious addition, despite his having written and shot it himself. The film’s very inception – a commercial project accepted on the grounds that he had to include two specific scenes (including the waltz), but could otherwise do what he liked – betrays the lack of personal investment. The legendary obsession with realism is present, naturally, as is the discretely specific mise-en-scène, but in service of what? A flippant tale of two princes, comically dissimilar, and the dancehall girl who inflames the passion of one and the malignancy of the other. Roy D’Arcy is hilarious as the cartoonishly villainous Mirko, all toothy rictus and monocle, but he’s pure caricature. All the better for him, as the leads are not even granted that dignity – the real prince Danilo of Montenegro sued MGM for defamation, with some justification, as Gilbert’s prince is little more than a carousing, good-natured simpleton (imagine the reaction to his screen counterpart’s first appearance, chuckling in all too worldly a fashion at pornographic photographs his chum got from his barber). Mae Murray fares little better, her character confined to the standard-issue '20s thatch of a hairstyle, bowtie lipstick, and petulance, and most of the scenes between the two descend into (hard-fought!) eye-goggling contests.

There’s plenty of amusing incident and splendidly bizarre touches: the final wedding takes place beneath a monstrously large crucifix; the capitalist is a drooling foot fetishist; and snippets of Stroheim’s outlandish orgies remain in tantalisingly brief glimpses. Certainly some amusement comes from character, but the comedy is generally broad enough to overwhelm the human content (this is a film made by someone who finds a prince in military uniform kicking his servant in the rear deeply hilarious). The separation of Danilov and Sally is a sequence of some desolate power, and the misunderstanding that prompts the climax would be genuinely moving if the rest of the film weren’t so trivial. Plenty of amusement, moments of startling oddness, but little of substance: a charming if rather disappointing frippery.

d Erich von Stroheim p Irving Thalberg sc Erich von Stroheim, Benjamin Glazer ph Oliver T. Marsh ed Frank E. Hull, Margaret Booth pd Cedric Gibbons, Richard Day cast Mae Murray, John Gilbert, Roy D'Arcy, Josephine Crowell, George Fawcett, Tully Marshall, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Xavier Cugat
(1925, US, 137m, b/w)

Potiche

One of the most enjoyable branches of François Ozon’s film-making is his fondness for theatrical farce and borderline hysterical camp. It may come off a bit wonky in 8 Women (2002), but that film did at least introduce him to Catherine Deneuve; together they have whipped up the delightful fondant that is Potiche, loosely adapted from the stage and set in the provinces in a semi-fantastical 1977.

“Potiche” means trophy wife in French. That’s wealthy bourgeoise Suzanne Pujol, coiffed, poised and, we are lead to believe, terminally airheaded. In fact, she’s just terribly sweet and polite, and writes not-quite-awful little poems about squirrels and roses, and when her abrasively self-satisfied husband (Fabrice Luchini – hyper-controlled but effectively developed) is kidnapped by the striking workers of his umbrella factory, surprisingly, it is she who she knows just what to do. A late-night visit to the mayor secures his intervention. This is Gérard Depardieu, an old flame with a smoldering torch; but he’s also the only one in the film who is not really funny, striking instead a note of melancholy, with the subdued desperation of an aging communist (20% of the French vote in 1977) looking to hang up the hammer and scythe, and settle down to family life. Ozon take us out of the narrative for a moment to pay homage, when Deneuve and Depardieu lock eyes on the dance floor of the splendidly divey boîte Badaboum!, together once again. In her newly-found independence, however, Suzanne has no time for that sort of thing, and before long the men are reduced to hanging around her like puppy dogs.

Further musical interludes, perfectly deployed sunny '70s pop froth, are as inconsequential, apparently, as Suzanne’s opinion. Yet it is part of the farce that such a bright and determined spirit would break out only now, after so many years of subservient marriage. She’s a perfectly-mannered Billie from Born Yesterday, with the same sweet surprise of self-realisation, but the education here is her unexpectedly successful transformation of the factory while Pujol recovers from a heart-attack. Under Suzanne’s gentle yoke, the hairy unionists are subdued, the workers are harmonious, and her children are by her side. Jérémie Renier is charmingly open-natured as her son the artist, his character revealed with delightful understatement, albeit the vessel of an incestuously homosexual subplot; daughter Joëlle (Judith Godrèche) and secretary Nadège (pert Karin Viard) complete with Deneuve a triumvirate of self-liberating women whose path – in an extension of the original play and evocative of more recent political events – takes her all the way to the National Assembly.

Despite boardroom shenanigans, heart attacks, liberal promiscuity, and family betrayal several times over, nothing ever seems too serious. There are issues inherent to the plot – the position of women in society, business, and family; the rights of the workers; maternalistic management vs rampant profit motive – that provide a solid emotional bedrock which needs little exploitation to prop up the jolly goings-on. Ozon directs briskly, with touches of sitcom style and great fondness for his characters and setting (the umbrellas are as much Tati as Demy). Best of all, it’s a worthy vehicle for the wonderful Deneuve. She is radiant, of course, regally elegant (she honors the workers by wearing the jewels their labour bought her), and deliciously funny. The instinctive intelligence and thoughtfulness of her character balance the farce, and that link to a real emotional world is all Ozon needs to affirm that, whilst things may have changed a great deal in 33 years, in some ugly respects they look remarkably similar. It is to his credit therefore, that the high-pitched candy coating makes such consistently amusing fun of it.

d/sc François Ozon p Eric Altmayer, Nicolas Altmayer ph Yorick Le Saux ed Laure Gardette pd Katia Wyszkop m Philippe Rombi cast Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard, Judith Godrèche, Jérémie Renier
(2010, Fr, 103m)

Cargo

As with Johnson’s walking dog, the surprise of Cargo, Switzerland’s first science-fiction film, is that it was done at all. An immensely ambitious undertaking, set almost entirely in deep space, on a long-haul cargo ship, the film took nine years to make; but the time and care lavished on it show right there up on the screen, in the incredibly impressive digital environment and highly-detailed production design. Occasionally an effect doesn’t come off (usually the deep space green screen when human figures are involved) but for the most part, the intricacy of the giant space stations and vessels, their movement, and the hard light of deep space are rendered in an astonishingly accomplished and well-imagined manner that bears valid comparison with similar features in 2001. Would that the substance of the film were so sophisticated.

Young medic Laura is on a four-year cargo flight; the crew are in cryo-sleep; but maybe she’s not alone.. The labyrinthine space ship offers several dramatic settings, from the giant cargo-container hold, to the pretty cool cryo-baths, and even a basement-type area dripping with water (why?). Alien and Bladerunner loom large in the look of lived-in-future interiors and synthy score; Aliens contributes a (barely used) girl-child ; and a Matrix set-up underpins the whole plot, such as it is, with a dash of intergalactic eco-terrorism.
Even if not so original, it’s still an interesting concept, the choice between grubby reality and a perfect, if artificial world, but this is so little explored that Laura’s final decision is borderline incomprehensible. And, for all the excellence of the space-ship’s design, the geography between different areas is almost completely ignored, and even in a single location frequently muddled. Occasionally this creates a useful sense of disorientation, but more frequently it is distractingly vague.

Likewise, bursts of action are continually undermined by mistimed edits and spatial confusion, and tension is consistently cut short in the same way: there turns out not to be some monster hiding in the ship, and when the stowaway is discovered, a hugely fertile possible direction for the film to explore is immediately cut off, as though a sub-plot had been brutally excised at the last moment. Smothering it all is the overbearing, heard-it-before synth score, part of a careful but over-emphatic sound design of standard-issue metallic clanks and rumbles. Mediocrity of script, direction, editing, and sound are pretty fatal to any movie, but the remarkable backdrop in Cargo maintains enough good faith to see the viewer through to the (ridiculous) ending, and the immense hard work that went into the incredibly impressive digital design of the film incline one to a certain leniency of judgment. But basically, as the sort of entertaining yet thoughtful sci-fi film it would like to be, it’s just not very good.

d Ivan Engler, Ralph Etter p Marcel Wolfisberg sc Arnold Bucher, Ivan Engler, Patrik Steinmann, Thilo Röscheisen ph Ralph Baetschmann ed Bastien Ahrens, Ivan Engler, Timo Fritsche pd Matthias Noger m Fredrik Strömberg cast Anna Katherina Schwabroh, Martin Rapold, Regula Grauwiller, Yangzom Brauen
(2009, Swi, 112m)

S&S flick lit aug18

not written by me, but worth reading (since Sight & Sound have not made it available online unless one is a subscriber) - an interesting list

**see it all here**

also, somewhere online - DM for credit - i found the above-cited Tanizaki's "Tumour With a Human Face" - a terrific read - as well as "The Present and Future of the Moving Pictures"

Thirteen Most Beautiful

The programme is made up of 13 of Warhol’s 500+ screen tests (shot between 1964 and 1966, with subjects ranging from random passers-by to Dali and Dylan), accompanied by live music from Dean & Britta. When I saw it presented at the LA Film Festival (in 2010, perhaps), it was introduced by the totally charming Mary Woronov. The story of her own test was apparently typical: she was sat on a stool at one end of the factory, while Warhol and coterie retreated to the other, talking amongst themselves, leaving her unsure of what to do faced with the staring camera for an interminable five minutes.

So we’re presented with head and shoulders portraits of, amongst others, the defiant Woronov; blank-faced Edie Sedgwick; Dennis Hopper, his eyes closed for much of the test over an occasional wry smile; slyly mugging Ingrid Superstar; and shade-wearing Billy Name who lived in the Factory closet and did most of the attractively stark but varied lighting for the tests. Warhol made these films like living portraits; he was fascinated with simply looking (as in his long, incident-less movies) and wanted to look at people without the uncomfortable distraction of their seeing him look. Woronov related that it was only Warhol who watched all the films; the rest of the gang would look at them from time to time for the amusement of spotting when the subject cracked, unable to keep up their pose or poise in front of the implacable camera for the hyper-extended duration. And that’s why the screen tests work so well: after a length of time almost anyone is going to break down and show something truthful of themselves, whatever that may be (unless, like the haughty but tolerant Nico, you just don’t care from the off).

Accompanying this, the music has moments of greatness. After an electro-soundscape opening (for Richard Rheem) the band creep on below proud Anne Buchanan and build up a wordless number that wonderfully recaptures the yearning melancholy of Dean (Wareham)’s Galaxie 500, so simple yet imbued with that ineffable something, while tears start to roll down Buchanan’s immobile face. It’s a mighty impressive start, but then, for grinning, gum-chewing Paul America, the songs begin. Wareham has never matched his first band, and with Luna he started to overstretch his song-writing skills further than an excuse for a three-chord jam, and his weak lyrical skills further than they could bear; none of the original songs here is worth its place, particularly beside a cover of the lovely “I’ll Keep It With Mine” for Nico’s test (it was written for her by Dylan). A little obviousness in the marrying of sound and image is no bad thing, and approaching the halfway point we get what we’ve been waiting for as the band break into a chugging Velvety workout for Dennis Hopper. A little later they’re just getting into a nice Galaxie-esque wig-out below chiseled Freddie Hirko when the flashing dots of the reel-end pull them up short; all the tests chosen are of roughly the same five-minute duration (though some others approach up to an hour) which never allows the band to stretch out and develop a groove to match the mounting tension of watching the pinned-down subjects. And that tension in itself is dissipated by the overlit stage, which unfailingly draws the eye even when clumsy lyrics are not jarring the aesthetic mood.

But the show builds to a great climax: Lou Reed’s test (the penultimate) takes the musical honours – there he is, in Raybans of course, fuck-you swigging on a coke bottle while the band launches into a raucous (if rickety) cover of the great “lost” Velvets blues “I’m Not A Young Man Any More”. And then finally we get Baby Jane Holzer, all hair and eye make-up, brushing her teeth. The slightly lame accompaniment becomes irrelevant; she’s the only one to rivet the camera rather than the other way round, vivacious without being salacious (quite a feat, as the toothpaste oozes from her mouth) and glorious proof that a screen test can indeed find you a star.

d/p Andy Warhol m Dean & Britta cast Paul America, Susan Bottomly, Ann Buchanan, Freddy Herko, Jane Holzer, Dennis Hopper, Billy Name, Nico, Richard Rheem, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgewick, Ingrid Superstar, Mary Woronov
(US, 1964-69/2009, 59m, b/w)

Carancho

About ten years ago, there were exciting things going on in the cinema of Argentina. The international resurgence around the turn of the millennium (with Nine Queens et al) resulted in a healthy state-funded production system, which in turn spawned a reactive and fertile counter-cinema (centred round Mario Llinás). Both thrived, and whilst the independent arm explored various interesting questions of narrrative and representation, the mainstream concentrated on making good, solid, as-it-were Hollywood far, of the type one bemoans Hollywood for making no longer.

Carancho means “vulture” and like the previous year’s Darín-starrer The Secret In Their Eyes is a slick, well-made, and exciting drama/thriller with an emotional thrust, handled in a thoughtful and adult fashion: that is to say, exactly what a popular movie should be. Ricardo Darín is a mainstay of this cinema, effortlessly rumpled, effortlessly ambiguous, and effortlessly charismatic. Here he’s an ambulance-chaser with a shady outfit that won’t let him go; he wants to straighten out as much for himself as for his handsome, somewhat surly, young doctor girlfriend, co-producer Martina Gusman, fine and understated, who turns out to be less held-together than she seems.

Director Pablo Trapero conjures a spot-on grubby night-time world as Darin hustles his way around crash sites, morgues, and hospitals, and he has a fine way with a chaotic action sequence. The film opens with an effectively sustained bang and closes with a double bang, preceded by some nice old-fashioned tension. He’s rather heavy on the close-up and jiggly handheld, but that’s just part of the lexicon, I suppose; elsewhere he gives the actors plenty of scope to play well with one another, in long, often locked-down takes and consistently well-composed two-shots. There’s nothing frightfully profound here – the state of healthcare is briefly bemoaned and there’s some tension between whether Darin is a vulture or can actually help the poor and uninsured who are his clients – but these are efficiently dispensed-with serious-theme-as-backdrop elements. Primarily the film tells of two people near the bottom of the barrel, trying to claw their way up and doing it together, and fitted out in a punchy and efficient urban action style, it works perfectly well.

d/p Pablo Trapero sc Trapero, Alejandro Fadel, Martín Maregui, Santiago Mitre ph Julián Apezteguia ed Ezequiel Borovinsky, Trapero ad Mercedes Alfonsín cast Ricardo Darín, Martina Gusman, Carlos Weber, José Luis Arias, Fabio Ronzano, Gabriel Almirón, José Manuel Espeche
(2010, Arg/Chil/Fr/SKor, 107m)

Sawdust City

 

A few years ago, when I was attending festivals a more often, I would go through phases of really making an effort with contemporary American independent cinema. So, I saw a lot of lousy movies, partly the reason this went in phases. This one remains the most impressive, albeit it sounded from the LA Film Festival programme like another tired midwestern masculinity/small-town-probing indie. It’s debatable whether it’d have seemed more or less attractive if the programme had mentioned the film was inspired specifically by Cassavetes’ terrific Husbands, and by him and Peter Falk in Mikey and Nicky. First-time director David Nordstrom was on hand and dedicated the screening to the mere days late Falk, who would have liked it a lot, I believe.

Nordstrom was not slavish in his inspiration, and nor did he confine himself, channeling a load of wintery '70s vibe with a sailor and a knapsack. A first-rate opening montage introduces us in very natural fashion to two brothers, who’ll see each again after some years, with closeness and caginess. On the soundtrack, Pete the sailor calls brother Bob from a bar, chews the fat, lets on he’s in town and says he’s got to find Dad. They spend the night, and the rest of the film, on a bar crawl. Some stuff comes out, of course, but mostly the film lets them just be together, spar, drink, annoy, and generally fit.

The whole premise allows Nordstrom to hit obvious notes, but he nails almost all of them, dispensing the secrets of family and absence with care, and creating a couple of central characters whom one would be happy to watch doing almost anything together. He takes Bob himself, opposite Carl McLaughlin, a quiet, stolid presence who perfectly registers restrained annoyance, and makes his shell almost visible. Bob is a remarkable creation and a selfless performance – he can be such a dick at times that strangers want to beat him up; but he’s always ready to forget and raise another beer, and his obligatory toilet confessional is properly great.

Just that film would be pretty fine, but this one has a killer touch: the brothers are joined by Gene (Lee Lynch), a free-flowing barfly and practiced freeloader, who injects a great deal of amusement into the proceedings, supposedly guiding them to their dad. The kicker is that it’s like late 60s Dennis Hopper is in the movie: his first shot is an instant classic, sitting at the bar, telling a hilarious story, with cowboy hat, shaggy beard. But it’s not an imitation: in speech he has echoes of Hopper, but his own voice. Lynch is brilliant, in a really unusual move pulled off to a tee.

The film plays out to a spot-on soundtrack of 70s bar rock, and the feeling for that kind of small-town bar existence is note perfect (filmed in Nordstrom’s home town in Wisconsin); photography is handsomely appropriate; there’s a great deal of humour; the emotional stuff is almost all handled well; and one of its most endearing features, it entirely avoids modishness and irony. If the final dialogue is cliché-ridden, the characters have earned it – and would they not be likely to talk that way? Thing is, Cassavetes and Falk wouldn’t have, and one misses the first-rate naturalism of the rest of the script. But overall, terrific.

d/sc/ed David Nordstrom p Mike Ott, Frederick Thornton ph James Laxton cast David Nordstrom, Carl Bird McLaughlin, Lee Lynch, John Brotherton, Julie Carlson
(2011, USA, 97m)

Los Bastardos

Jesús and his younger friend Fausto (estimable first-timers Jesus Moises Rodriguez and Rubén Sosa) are Mexican day labourers in LA. They wait with others outside the downtown Home Depot, go on a job, drink beer in the park. So far so usual. Except they’ve a sawn-off shotgun in their backpack, and they were picked up already that morning for a “quick and easy” job about which they’ve agree not to blab. Something is afoot.

We know from the off that something cinematic is afoot as well: an interminable, static shot shows two tiny figures advancing down the early morning concrete of the LA river. We wait a long time for them to pass the panning camera and clamber up the embankment. Frames are carefully composed; shots are held; gradually, as the pair prove themselves to be the most unhurried house-breakers in the world, tension builds. The Chekovian law of guns is obeyed, and the finale is shocking, although so meticulously (and startlingly) well-executed that the ultra-restrained build-up can’t help but smack of simply servicing a single-shot tour de force – some of those long takes might more effectively have been used on the day’s ditch-digging, for example. The impact is thus slightly tainted with gimmickry (director Escalante has continued to show a penchant for shock).

Race plays its part, of course: the white folks at Home Depot are gently mocked, but their condescension is primarily class-based; the pair encounter a far more unpleasant form of cowardly aggression in the park, but their resentment is implied to stop short of anything more than vindictive intimidation, if only in the name of staying out of (unpaid) trouble. The sense of otherness is reinforced, and the absurd futility of having undergone hellish hardships to attain the very bottom of a socio-economic ladder, when they could be getting drunk to celebrate El Grito the following day.

So, the formalism is slightly forced, the “unexpected” developments are pat, the characters are under-drawn to the point of being generic, and the affluent white mom (Nina Zavarin), despite a game display of middle-age spread, is not a good enough actress to transcend the poor English-language scripting. But moments of humour hit home; the labourers’ camaraderie is as believable as the wretchedness of their situation is palpable; and following the remarkable finale, a strawberry-field coda unexpectedly merges the human and the political in an outbreak of emotion at a secret all the more terrible for the certainty that it will never be exorcised by judicial punishment. Ambitious, and in the end, quite admirable and affecting.

d Amat Escalante p Amat Escalante, Jaime Romandia, Carlos Reygadas sc Amat Escalante, Martín Escalante ph Matthew Uhry ed Ayhan Ergürsel, Amat Escalante pd Gabriel Abraham cast Jesus Moises Rodriguez, Rubén Sosa, Nina Zavarin, Kenny Johnston
(2008, Mex/Fr/USA, 90m)

Jalsaghar (The Music Room)

Satyajit Ray feared that this would be his last film, following the box office squib of Aparijito (The Unvanquished, 1956). Perhaps as a result, it is infused through and through with a sense of melancholy, the passing of an order, and the supreme importance of art above all else. And it is a quiet masterpiece. Ageing zamindar Huzur Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas, soon to be seen in to equally good effect in Ray's Devi) sits languidly around his decaying palace, watching his barren lands be eroded by the river, and irritated to the core of his being by his nouveau riche neighbour, Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Basu), the son of a usurer.

The sound of Mahim’s sacred thread ceremony for his son prompts Huzur to hold the ceremony for his own son, in the crumbling grandeur of his jalsaghar, albeit is a celebration he can scarcely afford. Men sit on the carpet, recline on pillows, smoke and drink, while musicians play, and Huzur’s “dangerous passion” for music is reignited. One can see the foolish fondness in the eyes of his puffy face, but also the hard pettiness that has him hold another jalsa, further whittling down his meagre remaining resources, simply so as to refuse an invitation from Mahim; his grand gestures are motivated as much by social jealousy and inchoate disgust at the changing of the social order as they are by the transportative power of the music. Still, as he lolls around his ancient mansion, the music is all that can restore him to life.

It’s a simple story, told in plain enough terms to incorporate a family tragedy that seems a mite excessive in the context of an already perfect melancholy and helplessness at the passing of time, palpable and moving. This is represented in large part by the heart-breaking, faded glory of the palace, and in particular the jalsaghar, dominated by ancestral portraits, chandeliers, and a giant mirror, gorgeous in its prime, desperately magnificent even in decay in a spell-binding sequence in which Huzar wanders in semi-delirium from fading candle to fading candle . But at the heart of it all, of course, is the wonderful music, presented in three separate jalsas, eternal, transportative, and fully justifying its position as the most important thing in the world.

d/p/sc Satyajit Ray ph Subrata Mitra ed Dulal Dutta pd Bansi Chandragupta m Ustad Vilayat Kahn, Robin Majumdar cast Chhabi Biswas, Gangapada Basu, Padmadevi, Pinaki Sengupta, Sardar Akhtar, Bismillah Kahn, Salamat Ali Khan, Waheed Kahn
(1958, Ind, 95m, b/w)

Death Wears A Yellow Jacket

What with Luca Guadagnino's new Suspiria, homage, and last month’s Argento retrospective at Metrograph, ‘giallo’ would seem to be the genre della giornata. Yet with its supernatural core and hyperbolic stylization, Argento's original Suspiria (1977) barely qualifies as giallo at all, and as for Guadagnino's version – pointedly not a remake – it seems to bear as much relation to the genre as the faux perfume-ad gialli tributes of Forzani and Cattet.

That said, to pin down the precise nature of the filmic giallo is notoriously difficult. The definition provided by prolific genre screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi – ‘a difficult-to-explain event and its rigorously logical explanation based on the evidence and details provided in the story’ – is as opaque as many of his plots. Yet just as the spaghetti western can be identified by time and place, the giallo can be pegged to early 1970s Europe, and while motivation and behaviour may often beggar belief, apparently supernatural elements will always be a killer’s ruse, or a dream...

Read more at frieze.com

 

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Improbable: Edward Pressman, producer of Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant, owned the rights to the title and decided the time was right to reuse it with an eye to kick-starting a franchise (other plans of his have included Wall Street 2 and a reboot of The Crow.) Pressman wanted someone unexpected to direct, and eyebrows were certainly raised when news filtered out that it was to be crazy German arthouse-favourite Werner Herzog; and in star Nicolas Cage, Herzog may just have found a worthy replacement for his erstwhile muse, the late, great, and certifiably insane Klaus Kinski.

Cage is back on terrifically loony form after years of pedestrian films and perfunctory performances, as the eponymous drug-addicted, procedure-ignoring cop. It’s not a remake of the Ferrara film which, like Harvey Keitel’s protagonaist, was dark, intense and tortured, but it does depict a man teetering on the edge of chaos and collapse in a borderline-anarchic post-Katrina New Orleans. Cage lurches across the city with a lopsided bad-back gait in search of crime lord Xzibit, but mainly just more drugs, and the setting is used to full advantage, from the ramshackle outskirting neighbourhoods towered over by gleaming skyscrapers, to the French quarter trellising, and the upscale casinos and hotels frequented by Cage’s prostitute girlfriend, Eva Mendes (given little to do save look hot, but that she’s very good at).

He cheerfully robs her johns of cash and blow until one turns out to have mob connections (a very funny Shea Wigham). Simultaneously, his gambling debts are mounting, he loses his crime scene witness, and an old woman he manically threatened in a nursing home sics the IA on him. That the resolving of all these problems is eventually whisked through in amusingly perfunctory fashion could in fact indicate that the film has finally slipped fully into a drug-addled dream state.

The script seems intended for a far more conventional picture, but with Cage and Herzog that was never on the cards. Alongside Cage’s wonderfully manic yet textured performance, the best moments are the hallucinatory Herzog touches: alligator-cam, a lovely surreal sun-streaked vision of iguanas, and the already infamous “Shoot him again, his soul’s still dancing” scene, which is wonderful and perfect and something David Lynch could wish he’d dreamed up. It’s not all perfect: in a film of such deadpanned exaggeration it’s a shame that past-master Jennifer Coolidge doesn’t get to join in the fun (though she does cut a touchingly tragic figure without much script assistance); Val Kilmer is largely sidelined (no great loss); ditto Fairuza Balk as a foxy little traffic cop; and Brad Dourif plays disappointingly if appealingly straight. This may be no great searching probe of a tortured man’s psyche – the closest we get is a visit to his childhood haven, a ramshackle shed full of clutter and imaginary pirates and a lost silver spoon – but it’s a very funny, manic, amoral romp, and hugely enjoyable. My fingers are still crossed for the sequel.

d Werner Herzog p Edward R. Pressman, Stephen Belafonte, Randall Emmett, Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky, John Thompson sc William M. Finkelstein ph Peter Zeitlinger ed Joe Bini pd Toby Corbett m Mark Isham cast Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Xzibit, Fairuza Balk, Shawn Hatosy, Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dourif, Shea Wigham, Michael Shannon
(USA, 2009, 122m)

Unmade Beds

Twenty-something East London: we’re introduced first to footloose Axl (Fernando Tielve), looking like a younger, sweeter Jack White under a mop of unruly black hair, who’s come from Madrid to seek out the father he never knew. In between drunken evenings he cannot remember, he thinks he finds dad in an estate agent’s (a finely relaxed performance from Richard Lintern) and builds a cautiously friendly relationship whilst remaining ambivalent about revealing his identity. Meanwhile, Vera from Belgium (Déborah François) and a young Dutchman (Michiel Huisman) start a hesitant relationship in which they retreat to hotel rooms and fix their meetings time by time, without exchanging phone numbers or even names.

All this is set against the backdrop of the art school-inflected East London scene, revolving around a live music venue and a warehouse squat where Axl and Vera both live, without being aware of one another until the end. It’s the kind of place where you can wake up one morning to find a music video being shot with people in giant woodland creature outfits; someone will pick up a polaroid and say “hey, this’d make a great image for a poster” (and then actually do it); and no-one knows quite who else is living there until they get drunk together.

It is a carefree existence, and the film settles into a rhythm of drinking, dancing, and coupling that risks becoming a little tiresome, even if an accurate reflection of the way of life; similarly, dos Santos rather over-indulges his aspirations to fleetingly glimpsed mundane-abstract beauty (Nan Goldin and In The Mood For Love are confessed inspirations), and the surrounding material is not incisive enough to support such whimsy. That said, he is greatly helped by solid photography from Jakob Ihre and, particularly when François is involved, achieves some moments of real intimacy between characters.

Unfortunately, this is quite dissipated when Vera’s relationship is diverted to voiceover, even if Huisman nicely pulls off their happy ending. The finale to Axl’s strand on the other hand is rather lame, but the whole live-for-the-moment mid-twenties feeling and the vibrant freewheeling milieu are so accurately evoked that bursts of self-indulgence, lack of momentum, and occasional gauchery seem entirely appropriate.

d Alexis Dos Santos p Peter Ettedgui, Bertrand Faivre, Soledad Gatti-Pascual sc Alexis Dos Santos, Marianela Maldonado ph Jakob Ihre ed Olivier Bugge Coutté pd Kristian Milsted cast Fernando Tielve, Déborah François, Michiel Huisman, Iddo Goldberg, Richard Lintern, Katia Winter, Alexis Dos Santos
(UK, 2009, 97m)

Ashkan, or The Charmed Ring and other stories

One of the pleasures of the smaller regional festivals (in this case, Santa Barbara 2010) is that the programme can throw up films that seem to have come from nowhere and vanish without trace, but which are a real pleasure to catch on their brief appearance. The Iranian Ashkan (Ashkan, angoshta-e motebarek va dastan-haye digar) is a fine example, a US premiere from debutant Shahram Mokri that through no fault of its own has proven hard to find again. Which is a shame, since its fuzzy black and white video photography, jittery camera, and obviously tiny budget are fully balanced by an inventiveness, small-scale intimacy, and dry humour all too lacking in more widely-seen cinema.

The charmed ring proves to be a somewhat irrelevant and under-developed macguffin, and the eponymous hero appears only some time into the picture, a sweet and dumb-looking boy whose psychiatrist is giving him the sack on account of his fourteen suicide attempts. The fifteenth brings him into contact with two blind men en route to a jewelry heist, in a replay of a scene we’ve seen earlier in the film from a different perspective. This is part of the subtitle “and other stories”, though the designation is not quite true: it’s basically a set of incidents entwined by a deft system of chronological slippage to show how the actions of the small group of characters affect one another, from the jewelry fence’s secretary eloping with the former's son, and the pair of goons who trail them; to the lovelorn police sergeant and his equally-so subordinate; a pair of medical students each courted by one of the other characters; and pair of artists whose bookend appearances provide a satisfying circularity to the film.

The influence of Pulp Fiction is clear but worn without affect; likewise the opacity of Le samourai, evoked through dialogue if not tone – as one of the goons says “the theme has got to affect you” – far more than the narrative events. Although touching on a universal search/need for love, the theme of Ashkan is more simply the fundamental interconnectedness of human existence: not a world-shattering concept to be sure, but finely executed on a well-judged scale, enough to be persuasive (there’s has none of Babel’s globalised portentousness, for example).

The neat structure affords some perspective-pulling fun and a touch of mutable memory, aided by a perky, jazzy score (Ashkan even gets his own lilting, melancholy theme song; the characters have a fine deadpan humour; and a brief digression in the medical school dissection room sees a dead man rise in split screen to re-enact an amusingly bizarre kitchen accident. After its opening dissertation on the power and longevity of art, it touches on serious themes without taking itself too seriously.

d/sc Shahram Mokri p Mehdi Karimi ph Payam Azizi ed Arash Rasafi pd Ladan Kanani m Abuzar Saffarian cast Saeed Ebrahimifar, Sina Razani, Hutan Mokri, Ali Sarabi, Baharan BaniAhmadi, Siamak Safari, Reza Behbudi
(2008, Ir, 92m, b/w)

La mano en la trampa (The Hand in the Trap)

Sometimes referred to as his masterpiece, winner of the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 1961, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s La mano en la trampa (1961) continued the close collaboration with his novelist/screenwriter wife Beatriz Guido, a sexual horror story that centers on a convent schoolgirl home for the holidays. She becomes fascinated by her reputedly freakish half-brother who’s kept locked upstairs. But it turns out to be something altogether different…

Elsa Daniel once again takes the lead as Laura, this time more cunning and ready to use her allure on men, but still retaining a fresh and virginal air. This is literally the case with the film’s opening, which presents her as an iconic Mary in the school play. Why she should suddenly be seized with the desire to see the freak who’s been upstairs all her life may not be explicable, but it coincides with her growth into young womanhood. She had been a different, younger girl the previous summer, and although still remonstrated that she is too young to see it, she knows perfectly well that she is growing up.

The open secret of the freak, however hides another, stranger (though not quite convincing) secret. A desperately clung-to lie, a self-punishment for sexual transgression: if this represents an old-fashioned moral to the film – unmarried sex will be punished (as will curiosity) – one senses in the horror of the punishment that for Nilsson it is a cruel and ironical one (taken from St Augustine’s claim that he who puts his hand in a trap must carry it around forever).

But as ever, the heady atmosphere is the thing, even if the canted angles are played down and the score is a disappointingly bland-jazzy affair. Laura’s seamstress mother and aunt allow for plenty of good use of lace and veils, and there’s a fetid air of rottenness to the provincial town founded on the blood of aborigines. This is embodied by the handsome, unthinking playboy scion of one of the two founding families (Laura’s is the other, now fallen from wealth), who has the bullish animalism of young Ben Gazzara and a daughter who is delighted that the mayor thinks they look like lovers. It is he who enacts the warning that men will uncaringly take what they want, ushering in the horribly bleak ending in which a sense of inevitable repetition, punishment, and imprisonment is perfectly encapsulated in the slow, careful ritual of removing his cuff-links.

d/p Leopoldo Torre Nilsson p Néstor R. Gaffet, Juan Sires, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson sc Beatriz Guido ph Juan Julio Baena ed Jacinto Cascales, Pablo G. del Amo, Jorge Gárate pd Óscar Lagomarsino m Cristóbal Halffter, Atilio Stampone cast Elsa Daniel, Francisco Rabal, Leonardo Favio, María Rosa Gallo, Berta Ortegosa, Hilda Suárez, Enrique Vilches
(1961, Sp/Arg, 91m, b/w)

La casa del angel (House of the Angel)

The fact that Argentinean director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson is barely spoken of these days is cause for outcry. Happily, the LA Film Festival a few years ago programmed a mini retrospective of four of his 30-plus features from the fifties to the mid-seventies (these, and most of his other films, remain frustratingly obscure to locate) In his day, his was a name was one to watch at the European film festivals, a world cinema auteur ranked with Welles, Bergman, and Buñuel. The first of the festival’s programme, La casa del angel (House of the Angel, 1957) is remarkably worthy of the comparison.

Present are enough chiaroscuro and Dutch angles to make Welles look restrained (low angles with rather splendid ceilings, and occasional striking deep focus compositions also contribute); a hothouse atmosphere of stultifying and retributive religion to match Bergman’s psychological intensity; and a wry eye for social satire that if anything is even more bleak and piercing than Buñuel’s (though the hypocrisy is used less as a target for mockery than, in the end, a vessel for tragedy).

It’s accompanied by a terrifically atmospheric (if occasionally overbearing) modernist score by Juan Carlos Paz, all horror movie flute, strings, and percussion, and told from the point of view (loosely) of wide-eyed Elsa Daniel, Torre Nilsson’s muse, whose young, open face seems to embody constant sadness, confusion, and fear all at once.

The film opens like an eerie old dark house picture but turns, with shades of Amberson’s time-rotted melancholy, into a regretful meditation on ritual and restrained emotion, before becoming a flashback in the brief meeting of eyes of a young woman and an older man. Daniel is Anna, who lives in the house of the angel, so-called for the statue keeping watch outside her bedroom window; elsewhere the nude statues are wrapped tightly in sheets to protect her modesty – she’s too young to understand and too old not to notice (going on 14). At this stage in her life there’s much to fear, from the puritanical strictures of her mother, to the fire and brimstone visions of her nanny, and the always-cruel attentions of her cousin (who even reads from the Book of Solomon to make Anna feel self-conscious about her small breasts).

She has less to fear (than perhaps she should) from her burgeoning sexuality, transfixed by a Valentino movie and immediately enamored of her politico father’s colleague, progressive legislator Pablo Aguirre (Lautaro Murúa). The film is as much his story as hers, as he makes a stand for freedom of expression in the chamber of deputies; allegations as to his father’s corruption (apparently true) lead inevitably to his challenging an opposing deputy to a duel. That he comes to question (rightly) his own integrity and the worth of that for which he is prepared to kill or be killed, makes the wealthy upper-class nostalgia for the “good old days” of duels and honor ring hollow.

We know these two stories will converge but are not prepared for the perfectly-executed burst of moonlit violence, nor the horrible meaning to the opening scene that it reveals. Aguirre’s fate is worse than death, reduced by the realization of his self-doubt to a creeping ghost. And all this in 74 minutes: not a line, gesture, or expressionistic shot is wasted in the establishment of atmosphere, psychology, and socio-political bitterness. Too expansive to be likened to a short story, yet too small and exquisitely crafted to compare to a novel, it is a perfect little jewel of a movie that glitters with a hard, bitter light.

d/p Leopoldo Torre Nilsson sc Beatriz Guido, Martín Rodríguez Mentasti, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson ph Aníbal González Paz ed Jorge Gárate pd Emilio Rodríguez M m Juan Carlos Paz cast Elsa Daniel, Lautaro Murúa, Guillermo Battaglia, Berta Ortegosa, Yordana Fain, Bárbara Mujica, Alejandro Rey, Lili Gace
(1957, Arg, 76m, b/w)

Postcard from the AFI Festival 2015

 

There is a stirring quote from LBJ that recurred in the preshow slides at last year’s AFI Festival: “We will create an American Film Institute, bringing together leading artists of the film industry, outstanding educators, and young men and women who wish to pursue the 20th century art form as their life's work.” I wasn’t previously aware of this (limey go home), but it was among his remarks at the signing of the Arts and Humanities Bill in September 1965. It’s heartening to know that the furtherance of the seventh art is sanctioned by the state, in theory at any rate, and that 48 years later (it took a couple to materialize) the AFI is still going strong, taking its mission and responsibilities seriously. The year-round endeavours, lists, and educational thrust may sport an inevitably nationalist skew, but come the annual festival, their net has a truly international cast.

World Cinema is the festival’s largest section. One finds old friends, breakouts, and micro-budget debris, from Bulgaria to Iceland. One of the dearest old friends is Hong Sang-soo, a fixture for years. For the unsympathetic, and those who’ve only been half paying attention, his filmography can seem enervatingly homogenous, like Rohmer’s drying paint of legend. Indeed, the natural way into discussing his latest, Right Now, Wrong Then (Jigeumeun matgo geuttaeneun tteullida) is to describe it as a riposte to those critics who feel he just makes the same film over and again. Indeed he does, literally, but they’re always different, and bear repeating.

 

Another riposte that hints at the bland he puts in a character’s mouth: “What is hidden in the surface of our lives helps us overcome our fears”, which is a fairly persuasive film-making philosophy, depending on one’s fears. Ham Chun-su (Jung Jae-young) is a film director with an afternoon to kill in an unfamiliar town; he prompts conversation with a young artist, Yoon Hee-jung (Kim Min-hee), and spends the rest of the day and evening with her (drinking, mostly, of course). The opening title is Wrong Now, Right Then; on its reappearance halfway through, it has switched to the film’s official title. There are other apparently slight but significant changes to bear this out: in the first telling, Jung is all grins and ingratiation whilst in the second he is far more self-contained and thoughtful (and noticeably more handsome as a result). In the opposite way, Kim has at first an irresistible vivacity that her apparent loneliness cannot quench, but in the second half it appears to have succumbed, though she too is sharper (the weather is both colder and sunnier).

This is partly because Jung’s more sincere characterisation leads to more interesting conversations, and a closer relationship, even while the story hits the same beats and scenes, for the most part. The pair of titles suggests that the film’s simple lesson is to be oneself rather than trying too hard to please (or to be enamoured of a pretty girl) but, as ever, it is also about the eternal conversation between men and women (and soju): eternal because new missteps are made for every old one repeated, and because the trophy of connectedness, if even for a moment, will never tarnish. Hong finds both, in both halves, and is on fine form, not least because his double self-commentary of form and content is so charmingly and lightly worn. Also quite nicely, it could literally be a recurring dream, since Ham falls asleep about five minutes in.

The only other Asian film I caught (I fell asleep in the Zhangke Jia, not entirely from festival fatigue) was from another old hand, Koreeda Hirokazu’s Our Little Sister (Umimachi [Seaside Town] diary). He is a favourite of my youth for the exquisite After Life (Wandafuru raifu, 1998), though I’ve skipped several of his more recent ones, suspecting that he’s drifted into terminal gentleness and heartstring-tugging, as indeed he has, to an extent, but his latest is a reminder that he is a film-maker who can handle the emotional realm with both great clarity and nuance. It recalls, most recently for me, nothing so much as Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters (Samsameyuki [Light Snow], 1943-48), albeit in a markedly different era; one of the pleasures of this tale of three adult sisters and their high-school half-sister who comes to live with them in their big old house, is the warm fondness for much that is traditional, from the cherry blossom to the Sunday kimonos. Much pleasure comes too from the girls’-dorm atmosphere of that lovely old house, the interplay of the four leads, and their neatly distinct characterisations (even if the angelic 15-year-old Suzu remains a rather unknowable centre).

Koreeda is not one to downplay the life lesson/confession moments (this movie does contain the line “I want to get serious about terminal care”) and happily ladles on the (quite decent) score-syrup, but the restraint and texture elsewhere are more interesting, as almost everyone struggles with considerations of (dis)respect. Here as usual (from his master Ozu), Koreeda reveals the multi-layered dynamics and concerns of family life with patience, taste, and simplicity (and tatami-level eating scenes). He may not be a master on that level (who is?) but his work is inspired rather than derivative, and certainly has an air of mastery about it.

Matteo Garrone’s breakout Gomorra (2008) impressed by being quite the opposite of tired and derivative in the organised crime genre. His follow-up Reality (2012) found little favour, and now Tale of Tales has understandably drawn a pretty full complement of downed thumbs on the European circuit, not solely because of its change of tack into the world of traditional fairy tales. This is a shame because, as a fan of the (live-action) fairy tale genre, I found much endearment in it, but the opening scene is a warning: the camera takes its sweet time meandering through a street and square with llamas, wooden wagons, some fine doublets, and hefty stone buildings, and then some nattily decked-out mountebanks are doing their thing for king John C. Reilly and queen Salma Hayek. The art department (as well as location scouts and CGI team) are on top of their game, and it’s not even that Garrone seems overly obsessed with filming these creations; it’s just that he is content simply to stroll through the three tales, traditional to Italy but otherwise unconnected, except that they appear to occur in neighboring kingdoms. There’s lots of good stuff, from a magical sea monster to albino twins, a giant flea, a randy king (that would be Vincent Cassel), an ogre, a trumpet-playing bear, and a flayed woman, but Garrone for some reason chooses to ignore basic fairy tale precepts of resolution and moral order (the ogre, really just a large, brutish, but not mean man, is particularly hard done by). It’s a rather elaborate dress-up (Salma has great jewels, of course), filmed with little inspiration, to no particular purpose.

The same is true of most entries in the eerie-atmosphere-and-explanations-be-damned genre, of which I caught more than I intended. Lucille Hadzihalilovic struck a satisfyingly unsettling tone in her debut Innocence (2004) and only now does she follow it up with Evolution, in which the weird girls’ boarding school of the former is swapped for a volcanic island populated by pre-adolescent boys and their identically-dressed “mothers”. The atmosphere is again taut and impressively conjured (not least in much sublime underwater photography), but the mothers’ sinister nocturnal writhings, and hints of what the boys are being used for, feel like weirdness window-dressing, such that by the time that purpose is revealed, one’s emotional investment (and credulity) are likely to have been exhausted.

Another title long on atmosphere but short on substance was the notably well put-together H, commissioned by the Venice Biennale as the third feature from Daniel Garcia and Rania Attieh (I realised only later that I’d tired after ten minutes of their previous last year, Recommended by Enrique, else I would have skipped something that was not without interest). Garcia as DP shoots a nicely desaturated and wintery Troy, NY where we follow two unconnected women named Helen, old and young, as strange things start happening around an unexplained explosion in the sky. Time and again these unnerving moments are very nicely handled, discreet and effective; the same is true of the acting, particularly by the older couple (Robin Bartlett and Julian Gamble), with a natural litany of the exhalations and moans of physical movement in advanced age, and the disinterest yet unquestioning commitment of a still-solid relationship long past its prime. The younger couple (Rebecca Dayan and Will Janowitz) are slightly disserved by a tastefully hip, catalogue-impeccable lifestyle as successful artist-collaborators (even the old couple’s house is a bit too distractingly dark wood and afternoon sunlight). The film itself is disserviced by a plonky piano score (the Reichean gestures are nice, but the string piece chapter marker is not strong enough to bear repetition ) and, more than anything, the Homeric allusions which, as the film proceeds, drift further from significance into spurious suggestiveness. The same is true of the pregnant parallels between expectant young Helen and the older woman’s lifestyle of caring for an uncannily realistic baby doll (her baby-party guests are spot-on casting). It becomes clear that none of these things, nor the film itself, will resolve in any way, atmosphere being all, nicely handled as it may be. Bonus points for use of a Mysterious Horse, however.

The third such entry in this grouping, although its miniature scale and attendant formal approach (next-to-no dialogue) make it seem more like an experiment than its slicker counterparts, was The Mysterious Death of Pérola (A misteriosa morte de Pérola) from Brazilian partners Ticiana Augusto Lima and Guto Parente. They each take the (almost) sole role in the film’s first and second half respectively, set (almost) entirely in an apartment where the eponymous demise occurs halfway through. And mysterious it is, foreshadowed by a general sense of unease, suggestive sound design and lighting, and a sinister silhouette at the door. Mysterious too is what Parente is then doing there, videotaping empty space until a revenant reveals itself. The how and why seem unimportant, however, and as much of a homemade achievement as it may be, the portentous pace, dragged out rather than measured, fails to compensate(nice poster, though).

I thought for much of its running time the same might be true of Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente). Again, I didn’t realise I was revisiting a film-maker, Ciro Guerra, whose Wind Journeys (Los viajes del viento, 2010) was not without interest (both films were chosen as Columbia’s submission for the Academy’s foreign film consideration). The earlier film was somewhat second-hand in its old-man-young-man road movie beats, but the new one is more of a journey into the unknown, benefitting from nice handling of relationships between Caucasian ethnobotanists (Jan Bijvoet and Brionne Davis) in 1909 and 1940 respectively, traveling down the Amazon in search of a rare and sacred medicinal plant, and their shared guide Karamakate (Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolívar), the last survivor of his tribe massacred in the turn-of-the-century rubber wars. The journeys proceed without haste, and I did wonder quite where the film was taking us, until I settled into the upriver journey, with shades of Apocalypse Now (not least in a 1940 Kurtz-type god-compound) and realised I had been seduced by attractive performances and fine black and white photography (interesting to wonder how the film would work in color, and tempting to say simply that one would take it less seriously). We eventually land on an impressive mountain where spirituality and ontology inevitably take over (along with a simple but very nice trip sequence), but I did not realise until the end credits that this was all derived from the diaries of the actual scientists (Theodor Kock-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes), the only accounts of a vanished people, which adds no little interest to a film that already earns respect.

As screenwriter and co-director (with Duke Johnson) of Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman is on point more even than usual, from phenomenological heavy-hitters (Who are other people? Who am I?) to subtle relationship textures, both fleeting and long-ingrained, amidst piquant cultural/environmental observation (most of the film is a note-perfect hotel solo sojourn). Bored Michael Stone, a celebrity of sorts, is in Cincinnati for one night to give a guru’s lecture on customer service, experiencing, only at first with blithe disinterest, a procession of bland, uniform customer services himself. One reason he can shrug off these interactions is that everyone else in the movie has the same face and the same voice (Tom Noonan’s, killing it). This film is animated, part stop motion, part CGI, with numerous photo-realistic elements, and thus a rather distinctive aesthetic. Stone is marked out not only by the laconic Yorkshire accent of David Thewlis, but by a notably realistic visage and expressiveness (remarkably so), compared to almost everyone else’s identical waxy mask. Until, that is, he meets (Anoma)Lisa: we know she’s made an impression by her own individuality in face and voice (Jennifer Jason Leigh, terrific of course). The blatant component divisions of the characters’ noggins are even neatly disguised by the hairline of each of this inevitable couple, while the homogeneity of everyone else, and the unmistakable artificiality, are recognisable Kaufman anxiety tropes of an individual mind unable to make sense of, relate to, or even distinguish between those around him. The tale is slight, but the human experience encompasses a world of existential angst. I just wish it hadn’t been animated. I have some kind of ingrained animation prejudice (born of what I know not, periodically tested, and still in place), but aside from the special alienating quality of those distracting head-seams, a strange disproportion to Stone’s body, and unnatural jerky body movements, I couldn’t help but feel the whole thing would have been far more powerful if conveyed through actual real people, because the material, tone, and vision are so very strong.

Another regular, Corneliu Porumboiu, in his fifth AFI appearance, sent The Treasure (Comoara). After the exhilarating understatement of Police, Adjective (Politist, adjectiv, 2009) I was nonplussed, to say the least, by When Evening Falls On Bucharest or Metabolism (Când se lasa seara peste Bucuresti sau metabolism, 2013), which I’d have to term a failure. The Treasure falls closer to the former, although with something less of the single-minded steeliness. Costi (Toma Cuzin) helps a down-on-his-luck neighbour metal detect for a grandfather’s treasure, with a certain amount of doubt over where it might be in the rural plot, on whose land they’re digging, and whether the treasure even exists. A pointedly absurd (and hard-to-pull-off) ending follows much reference to Romania’s post WWII political past, and makes clear an attitude of satire towards eastern European capitalism today; but also perhaps, the pipedreams of the forebears. The film is perfectly enjoyable without these wider ponderables however, thanks not least to the appealing Cuzin, even if his decisions are more than once unfathomable.

My hands-down favourite of the week was another (well-) known quantity, though with The Forbidden Room Guy Maddin has notably hit a new stride. Having been a teenaged fan, I found myself jaded for several years by what one could justifiably call extreme camp affectation, but which by now looks more like a visionary style and commitment, in which emotional experience is primary. Quite perfectly, The Forbidden Room is an imagining of something like ten lost silent films, presented in fragments, as stories within stories, each more or less distinguished by the shooting style, and all very feverish in tone. One reason, I suspect, that Maddin is looking more impressive these days is because with Brand Upon The Brain (2006) he used digital editing for the first time, and fell in love. One of the most jaw-dropping things about the latest is the sheer variety of transitions and effects involved, an almost incessantly broiling soup of “celluloid” – as much as I love film itself, and as dedicated as Maddin was for years, the scope for creating the impression of decasia and exhumation is, as with so many other things, that much greater and easier in the digital realm, and the overall tone and effect which he has always sought becomes expanded to an almost infinite degree. The result is exhilirating, full of fond, familiar faces, and frequently funny but, and it’s a problem inherent to most of Maddin’s films, barely gives itself (or us) a moment to breath. So the result, particularly here, with the interwoven stories and styles, is rich and delirious, demanding of further viewing, but also somewhat exhausting.