Season Of The Cat

Since Criterion have recently launched their own, here's the ORIGINAL Season Of The Cat, presented at SideShow Books Los Angeles in the late summer of 2021 (credit for the initial idea to Tony SideShow, programmed by me)

Seven Deaths In The Cat's Eye (It, Margheriti, 73) / Crimes Of The Black Cat (It, Pastore, 72)
The Cat From Outer Space (US, Tokar, 78) / Revenge Of The Black Cat (Jp, Ishii, 70)
I Am A Cat (Jp, Ichikawa, 75) / Darker Than Night (Mex, Taboada, 75)
Joseph Killian (Cz, Juràcek, 63) / Morgiana (Cz, Herz, 72) / Shadow Of The Cat (UK, Gilling, 61)
That Darned Cat (US, Stevenson, 65) / Le chat (Fr, Granier-Deferre, 71)
Shozo, A Cat, And Two Women (Jp, Toyoda, 56) / Eye Of The Cat (US, Rich, 69)
The Ghost-Cat Of Ouma Crossing (Jp, Kado, 54) / The Corpse Grinders (US, Mikels, 71)
When The Cat Comes (Cz, Jasný, 63) / Kuroneko (Jp, Shindô, 68)

Tyrannosaur

Actor Paddy Considine has been at his most powerful and frightening in the midlands dramas of Shane Meadows (A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes). His first film as director adopts the same tone of inchoate anger and ups the grimness, taking us a bit further north to Leeds and a world of drab cul-de-sacs, old pubs and a perfectly-rendered charity shop full of banal objects that barely register in the consciousness.

The greatest things about the film – and they are pretty great – are the performers. Peter Mullen is a really first-rate actor, his bullet head with an incredible spider’s web of lines around cold-water-blue eyes; he excels at giving life, self-knowledge, and just enough sensitivity to the hard-drinking, violent man he portrays, Joseph, and perfectly suggests a past of terrible mistakes and selfishness. Less widely-lauded (at the time of release) is Olivia Coleman whose turn in the excellent TV comedy Green Wing was the only one to suggest an actual person, and she gave her character in the likewise superb Peep Show a fine amount of modulation from daffy to hard-edged, with a superbly varied command of her chinless face and funny eyes. She plays Hannah here, a well-enough-to-do woman who works in the charity shop (hinted at, to fill her empty hours that have otherwise led to the bottle). 

Once again, she first appears be a harmless mousy thing, but the character fills out – in a somewhat more satisfactory way than Mullen, even – as details of domestic abuse, religious conflict, regret, and imprisonment reveal themselves: her husband is a smiling, vicious type whose actions, it is suggested, are perhaps not too different from those in Joseph’s past. Eddie Marsan quite stands up to the leads, always reliable and here excellent, his cartoon face turned into something grotesque by his cold and frightening eyes, also an icy blue, such that it’s a bit of a shame not to see more of him.

The film opens in declarative style, with fucking cunts and wankers and a can of lager in an alley. Joseph’s angry about something, beats the wall, then kicks his dog. Then he’s very sad about it. It’s genuinely moving, but the effectiveness of this cycle diminishes; these are the only two modes offered him by the script, and when he’s not being angry and beating people and things, he’s feeling sad that he wants to, or that he has done so in the past. There’s very little to be cheerful about in this film, save the tentative relationship that grows between Joseph and Hannah. It adheres in almost generic fashion to a familiar type of grim British film-making, as most notably practiced by Ken Loach; but if Mullen and the film evoke echoes of Loach’s My Name Is Joe, it is to Tyrannosaur’s disadvantage.

The framework is there, but Mullen is given disappointingly little to work with. Hints and suggestions are indeed all we get, of what he did to his dying best friend, or to his wife; Coleman is given the religious angle and the chance to pull off a tour-de-force eye-bawling confession of her husband’s insane cruelties, but Joseph bottles everything up. We never do quite understand, however, why it is she remains with her husband. And when a kid in Joseph’s choke-hold wails “I don’t know why you’re doing this” we cannot help but empathize.

So despite the hints, the film is not really about the past, but still wants to play with its ominous implications, in much the same way that Marsan’s fate is both signaled and then played as revelation. Likewise the title, which we find refers to Joseph’s ex-wife, also does double duty as an obvious label for Joseph himself, without addressing the distinction between the two metaphorical meanings. Much of what unfolds feels inevitable in a generic rather than organic way, with elements – religion, for example – that remain underdeveloped; admirably aiming to avoid over-explanation, the film, a little like Mullen’s character, ends up lacking any meat beyond the performances, with the same frequent, needless gleam in its eye for (emotional) brutality.

All that said, Considine directs with quiet efficiency, and allows some neat moments to DP Erik Wilson, the best of which is a striking portrait reveal of Coleman doing a terrific words-vs-meaning piece over her sobbing husband. One of those films that’s good enough for you to wish it were more substantial.

d/sc Paddy Considine p Diarmid Scrimshaw, Mark Herbert ph Erik Wilson ed Pia di Ciaula pd Simon Rogers m Dan Baker, Chris Baldwin cast Peter Mullen, Olicia Coleman, Eddie Marsan, Paul Popplewell, Sally Carman
(2011, UK, 92m)

Come Rain, Come Shine (Saranghanda, saranghaji anneunda)

South Korean extreme cinema was on a roll in the first couple of 21st-century decades, but it was not the sum of the nation’s output; in presumably deliberate contrast, Come Rain, Come Shine is an exaggeratedly quiet divorce drama.

A young unnamed couple are separating. We learn this in the long, long single hood-mounted shot that opens the film. She drops the news almost casually; his reaction is so non-existent that we wonder for a moment if we heard right. This sets us up for the film’s remarkably subdued tone. The rest plays out on rainy Sunday afternoon/evening, entirely in their handsome apartment, as they consider whether or not to go to dinner in the torrential rain, find a lost kitten, are visited by their neighbours looking for the same and, occasionally, discuss their impending break-up after five years of marriage.

He remains terminally okay about everything, carefully packing some china for her, suggesting she call her lover to arrange things. He admits to sharing blame for the end of their relationship; she calls that selfish. And that’s as pointed as it gets; they let it drop. For the rest, they wander slowly about their apartment, carefully make dinner, look out of windows, and suppress their emotions completely. One wonders why she is not mad that he is not mad, not trying to hold on to her. Apparently, he is used to her unwavering resolutions, so anger would change nothing; we learn little else about the past of their relationship, but it has clearly been a comfortable, possibly happy one, as they work together with the ease of habit in the kitchen, and converse with complete, intimate understanding.

The leads persuasively convey character and feeling with the minimal detail made available to them (Hyun was already a superhot star, and just about to start his marines conscription, Elvis-style). Their intimacy and peaceful interaction is itself enough to evoke the melancholy and mourning of a relationship’s end. When he finally cracks, it takes the form of complete inaction; downstairs she tells the kitten that everything will be alright, as though not just for the cat. We have no idea what her conception of alright may be in terms of her relationship, and from their comfort together we wonder if perhaps a divorce will not go ahead after all, but he has, apparently, been okay with her having a lover for some time, so no less probably not. Everything will be alright because it already has been.

Drama is removed: the film is a mood piece, concentrating on the actors’ baleful miens, fetishising their smart apartment, juxtaposing the gloom of the indrawing, rain-drenched evening with occasional (and more-or-less superfluous) shots of the same in bright morning sunlight. It’s a dangerous game to play; indie productions the world over founder everyday on an unexamined awe before slow-cinema. The understatement is almost fatal here, but the leads are quietly captivating (plus, both are gorgeous). Rhythm and pacing are seductive rather than soporific; and the camera is occasionally sinuous, but most importantly, beautifully captures the dim, bathetic light of a long wet Sunday afternoon, to imbue everything with a real feeling of melancholy and sad acceptance. Not quite satisfying, but improbably gripping.

d/sc Lee Yoon-ki p Oh Jung-Wan ph Jang Hyeong-wook ed Kim Hyeong-ju cast Hyun Bin, Lim Soo-jung

(2011, SKo, 105m)

Hot Rods To Hell

 

“These kids have nowhere to go and they want to get there at 150 miles an hour”: a familiar plaint, hardly reworked, but given some cult appeal by occasionally-interesting director Brahm and ditto veteran Andrews, as a father laid up by a Christmas-time car smash. Thus, he spends much of the film pathetically clutching his back, stiff-lipped in self-loathing at the loss of manhood, as he relocates his family from Boston to the desert to take over running a remote motel.

Wouldn’t you know, on the way they’re buzzed by punk-kid hot-rodders out for kicks, and the motel coffee shop turns out to be a hopping roadhouse for underage booze and boobs. The kids ain’t gonna let no old square spoil their fun and besides, their leader sure likes the look of Andrews’ ripe and wide-eyed daughter, this much to the annoyance of his own trampy girlfriend (Farmer), all twitching mouth and crazy eyes, apparently on the perpetual verge of climax.

A lot of the movie falls short: once poised and lovely, Jeanne Crain defaults to overwrought at every opportunity as the wife; there’s a dour traffic cop who spouts road safety homilies; and neither Andrews’ accent nor eyeliner can really be explained. There’s also from a sad lack hot rod fetish shots, but otherwise all the predictable notes are struck. The film-making is perfunctory, and it’s at least a half hour too long. This is a movie made by the squares, but they're old pros at least, and intentional or not, there’s enough kitsch, hysteria, and ridiculous lines to ensure a highly enjoyable time.

d John Brahm p Sam Katzman sc Robert E. Kent ph Lloyd Ahern Sr. ed Ben Lewis ad George W. Davis, Merrill Pye m Fred Karger cast Dana Andrews, Jeanne Crain, Mimsy Farmer, Laurie Mock, Paul Bertoya, Gene Kirkwood, Mickey Rooney Jr.
(USA 1967, 92m)

Geu-rim-ja sal-in (Private Eye)

It was obvious halfway through that South Korea was walking away with the2010 Santa Barbara Film Festival: funny, sweet Castaway on the Moon followed Bong Joon-Ho’s marvelous Mother, and then there was a remarkably assured debut from Park Dae-min, the rollicking Private Eye. A detective story set in early twentieth-century Seoul, it opens in good atmospheric style with the removal of a body from a wooded clearing, and maintains fine form throughout.

Gutter PI Hong, who chases errant wives and is so recklessly fond of disguises that he usually gets found out, finds himself via an entirely organic chain of events teamed up with a clever young medical student, in order to track down the killer of a minister’s son. The kid proves pretty useful, as does Hong’s friend, a high-class lady inventor with a secret mechanical lair-cum-Q-lab, providing Hong with intricate optical devices beautifully fashioned from wood and brass.

There’s bumbling police, a brief but terrific old-school newspaper editor, and a marvelous circus, as well as plenty of action, from a rollicking punch-up in an opium den to the tense final showdown in the dark. It can get a bit silly, but in an endearing, old-fashioned way – after dispatching a load of goons Hong sighs “not another one” and takes more beatings than Marlowe. Less forgivable is a nauseating camera effect applied to mar an extended and otherwise finely choreographed chase through splendid street sets. 

Overall, performance, pacing, structure, music, and production design are exemplary. No detail is wasted, the release of information is judged perfectly to keep the audience half a step ahead of the twisty plot but rarely more, and just enough backstory is revealed about Hong and his lady friend at just the right time. Skillful, supremely good-humored, and with an unusually fine balance of character with/through action, it is so purely enjoyable, and winds up with such a shameless but stylish sequel set-up, that one is happy at the prospect of more. (it didn't happen)

d Park Dae-min p Lee Sang-yong, Han Seon-kyu sc Park Dae-min, Lee Yeong-jong, Yoon Seon-hui ph Choi Chan-min ed Nam Na-yeoung pd Choi Hyeon-syok, Jo Hwa-seong cast Hwang Jun-min, Ryu Deok-han, Uhm Ji-won, Oh Dal-su, Yun Je-mun, Ju Da-yeong, Jeong Gyu-su

(2009, SK, 111m) 

Chloe

  

Cribbed from Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie (2003) and star-studded with Depardieu, Ardent, Béart, Chloe is Atom Egoyan’s brush with the mainstream, in cast and ancient narrative, a glossy, engaging-enough sexual drama with aspirations to irony and wisdom, but shot through with cliché and bad faith.

We know it can’t be tawdry sexploitation (can it?), because the protagonists are so sophisticated: gynecologist Moore is married to classical music professor Neeson, who is seen first lecturing on Don Giovanni and his conquests. They live in a chic, boxy, modernist house, all exotic hardwood trimmings and giant windows looking like a Mondrian from the outside. She thinks he’s cheating, and through a chance encounter (sparing a square, no less) hires Seyfried’s eponymous hooker (high-class) to see what husband does when approached by an attractive young woman. Obviously this is not a good idea. 

The classy, net-diffused montage of said hooker that opens the film is out of time, as she languorously, ideally, dons lingerie whilst musing in voiceover on the power of words and her ability (professional duty, indeed) to use them to become whatever her client desires. Likewise, her body must be used, we hear, to create an illusion of intimacy. An interesting exploration of the mind/body dichotomy is sadly unforthcoming. Words do indeed prove important, but even for one such as I, normally slow to spot a twist, the lying does not convince for long. 

 

Red herring or window dressing, a lovingly- lit shot of Chloe’s unbelievably obvious track marks performs the same vague function; poor Seyfried’s cuckoo in the nest is treated as a cipher throughout. Her unknowableness produces ignorance and inconsistency rather than ambiguity, never mind complexity. A similar decoration, more effectively jarring, is lighting that frequently shadows Seyfried’s upper lip to give her a John Waters mustache; her large eyes are as disconcerting as ever (she also has great hair throughout). Julianne Moore, on the other hand, is one of the rare performers who can act even solely with her upper lip, so she is great as usual, even if her central part is somewhat underwritten. Neeson is staggeringly uninteresting as usual, but is mercifully mostly sidelined.

Films that come immediately to mind: Fatal Attraction, Theorema, even The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Chloe is not even that good. Bonding over some ghastly indie rock band and how she “hates the internet,” Chloe seduces son Michael, for whom the climax should be a royal head-fuck. Could her final shot reveal her to be an angel sent to teach this family something about itself? If so, it is too late for all concerned, us included. 

The closing scene is such a Hallmark happy ending of smiling family with party guests and their precious house, that the sense of satire tips from mostly imperceptible to blunt instrument. Egoyan signs off with hatred, for his characters’ callous self-absorption and social veneer. This is likewise too little too late, and rather akin to a jab at the audience for having (assumably) enjoyed what has gone before. That it all played like an extended  excuse to bathe a classy hotel room in warm golden light, and have Seyfried and Moore make out naked on the bed, rather undercuts the point.  

d Atom Egoyan p Jeffrey Clifford, Joe Medjuck sc Erin Cressida Wilson ph Paul Sarossy ed Susan Shipton pd Phillip Barker m Mychael Danna cast Amanda Seyfried, Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Max Thieriot, R.H. Thomson, Nina Dobrev
(2009, US/Can/Fr, 96m)

The Outlaw Josey Wales

It was with some alarm that I heard Ben Mankiewicz declare at a TCM Festival screening, “there’s no better Western than this.” He proceeded to read some amusingly negative contemporaneous reviews, which were closer to my own distant memory of the film, and related the bizarre story of the right-wing nutjob, Asa Earl Carter, who had written the source novel under a pseudonym. Eastwood was entirely unaware of the author’s racist past and a certain tension between his own curious politics, Carter’s background as a staunch segregationist, and the latter’s new emphasis on his fractional Native American roots, may perhaps have contributed to the unfocused nature of the film’s fundamental themes.

His homestead razed by Union raiders, Josey Wales joins the rebel guerrillas in vengeance, gaining a fearsome reputation, and continues solo even after peace is declared. Stalked by the army and by bounty hunters, he heads for safety in the Indian Nations. With the ragtag bunch of companions with whom he finds himself saddled, a return to idyllic rural existence seems possible, once he has pacified the local Comanche chief. But Death stalks him still.

The fundamental problem with this movie is one of tone. It asks to be taken seriously, which sits awkward with its familiar tropes. Aside from the fact that Eastwood is improbably too handsome to be a field-tilling farmer at the start, his awesome reputation trades 100% on persona rather than character, established as fact entirely offscreen before we first see him in action on anything but a fence post. He spends much of the movie fleeing and having guns drawn on him – which he can then dispatch with supernatural ease – but the revenge drama is less turned on its head than casually dropped. An increasingly comedic tone sits ill with the body count (high), and the disparity between the cold-blooded killer Wales is taken to be, and the apparently sensitive man who is given a chance to return to a quiet life, is handled with as little sophistication as the liberal strand of “governments don’t live together; people live together”.

It is true that a warm sense of what should be right and good emanates from the film, as it looks as though Wales will be able to find bucolic peace once again, but this is as much due to the spirited playing of the supporting cast. Chief Dan George is an old, solitary Cherokee, something of a classical fool, and retains the ironic dignity of that role, providing a foil for cloudy conversations about the dispossessed. Trueman, Dano, and others sparkle with good humour. Locke is as drippy as ever. But Eastwood’s character is a mess. It is an undeniably invigorating sight to see him narrow his eyes and gallop across the plains, a gun in every hand, but despite his best efforts the more human, sensitive characteristics are as awkwardly grafted onto the persona as the changeable prosthetic scar on his cheek. The laconic underplaying is decidedly unhelpful; the relationship with kid outlaw Bottoms is unremarkably reluctant-paternal, and there’s not the least spark to his eventual splendour in the grass with Locke.

So he’s respectful of women, fine, but why is it okay for him to spit on the dog all the time? His laconic one-liners are almost 007 flip, and other comic intrusions (a bothersome carpetbagger is particularly unwelcome, but does give Clint his best quip) undermine rather than counterpoint the serious moods elsewhere. The revenge element remains mostly implied; Wales is in no particular hurry to confront his nemesis, who in any case is little more than a ginger beard and a grubby face. Likewise, behind the piercing blue eyes of John Vernon, the motivations of the erstwhile friend coerced into helping track him down flip-flop with vagueness rather than ambiguity, then back again for a dismissably self-conscious finale.

Bruce Surtees photographs the dappled woods and wide plains in a nice array of styles, with a decent rein on over-prettification, and Jerry Fielding provides a robust score. Eastwood’s direction is never less than efficient, sometimes more than that, and even if the film seems overlong, it at least maintains a brisk enough pace from set piece to set piece. The various conflicting elements of tone and motivation feel like banal conceits rather than movements born of character, pseudo-familial ties are worn like so much subtextual window dressing, and the socio-political philosophy is no more sophisticated than “why can’t we all just get along?”.

d Clint Eastwood p Robert Daley sc Philip Kaufman, Sonia Chernus ph Robert Surtees ed Ferris Webster pd Tambi Larsen m Jerry Fielding cast Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sonia Locke, Bill McKinney, John Vernon, Paula Trueman, Sam Bottoms, Royal Dano, Will Sampson
(1976, US, 235m)

United Red Army (Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun: Asama sanso e no michi)

The film divides roughly into three sections across its 3-hour running time and culminates in the infamous 1972 mountain lodge siege, the last stand refuge of five members of the radical leftist student group the United Red Army. A title announces at the start that the film is factual, with fictional elements interposed, and it begins with a dizzying documentary recap of radical student action from 1960 to 1971, comprised of newsreel footage, statistics of actions and arrests, and a frankly bewildering number of name and age captions for the actors and actresses who gradually pop up. From the humble beginnings of objections to raised tuition fees the various student groups combine, divide, get bitten by the bug of communism, fight amongst themselves, hijack aeroplanes, train in Palestine, and eventually two of the paramilitary factions join forces to become the United Red Army.

The group retreated to a base in the mountains at the start of 1971 ostensibly for military training. But here in the second part of the film, in an isolated, claustrophobic cabin, we are witness to the terrible face of ideological fanaticism as the standard practice of self-critique is taken to extremes. Rather than fighting the war on the outside, the Army’s attention turns itself inward as the intimidating and unflinching leader Mori Tsuneo and his homunculus 2IC Nagata Hiroko pick on one member after another, and the quest for ideological purity becomes a purge: the first individuals are tied, beaten, and left outside to die of exposure, and the later ones simply executed. So powerful is the sway of the leadership and the intensity of the revolutionary ideal that one young woman is induced to beat her own face to a bloody pulp. There’s no doubt that Mori’s demented zeal is in part due to shame over his desertion of a group operation in the late ’60s, before begging to be readmitted; and evil-eyed Nagata seems to relish her power no more than when jealously needling one of the attractive young women and effectively sentencing her to death. We see all of the twelve victims meet their end, each commemorated with a caption of name and age (all in their early twenties) and the whole extended sequence is frightful; and if the fundamental roots of how the striving for ideological purity can become so twisted are not investigated, the path it takes to this sort of insanity is at least laid clearly and horribly before us.

With the police closing in, the remainder of the group splits and disperses. The leaders are picked up and most of the others arrested, but five pursued men make their way through the snowy mountains to a ski-ing lodge, where they hole up with the inn-keeper’s wife while the police surround them. It has the tragic air of a last stand, as they prepare to fight and die for the memory their murdered comrades. As in the secret retreat, we are kept entirely inside the lodge, hearing only voices from outside, and experiencing the impressively disorienting water and smoke attacks with the subjectivity of the radicals. As it turned out, after ten days the five were taken alive and the film closes with a textual wrap-up of Japanese radical activity since then, beginning with Mori’s suicide in jail and culminating in the self-immolation of a former member in 2001 in protestation over the treatment of Palestine. It is an incisive reminder that if what we have just seen is history, the commitment of the protagonists has a directly traceable relevance and importance to present-day international politics.

Wakamatsu’s film was a project close to his own heart. He had affiliations with the radical left in the sixties, even joining the Red Army for training in Palestine, which resulted in his making a film about them and the PFLP in 1971 (his 100-strong filmography consists mostly, however, of strange, perverse, yet always engaged “pink” movies ie underground soft-core porn, including some of the best films, of any kind made anywhere, in the 1960s). After several years' doldrums, he mortgaged his home to make this one, and used and destroyed his own mountian lodge for the finale. But the viewpoint here for the most part is detached and objective: the first third is almost pure documentary, with brief re-stagings of meetings, and the second third is unflinchingly detached, a cold eye the only way to try and comprehend the insane spiral of zealotry, with no excuses made. Allowing us no view of the outside, the third section encourages closer identification with the radicals, but on a more humanistic than political level as, isolated in the lodge, their political ideals become more abstract than ever: Nixon is shaking hands in China; fear and futility reign; the eating of a cookie can become anti-revolutionary; and the only remaining action in which meaning can be found is resistance on principle. It’s on this more subjective ground that Wakamatsu makes his only false move, as a pleadingly plaintive song lyric plays under a moment of emotional desperation; otherwise the score by Jim O’Rourke is impressively low-key, chugging urgently along to the first section’s barrage of information and elsewhere underscoring with a distant guitar reminiscent of Neil Young’s Dead Man. For the rest, the film is note perfect: long and involved to be sure, harrowing in places and too dense for a casual viewer, but an important and heartfelt bearing of witness.

d/ed Kôji Wakamatsu p Noriko Ozaki sc Kôji Wakamatsu, Masayuki Kakegawa ph Yoshihisa Toda, Tomohiko Tsuji m Jim O'Rourke cast Maki Sakai, Arata Iura, Akie Namiki, Gô Jibik, Shima Ohnis
(2007, Jp, 190m)

Castaway On The Moon (Kimssi pyoryugi)

When I saw this at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, it was introduced to as “crowd-pleasing”, and it was. Kim (Jae-Yeong Jeong) is an indebted salary man who starts the film by jumping off a bridge over the Han River in Seoul. He finds himself washed up on an island beneath the bridge, but unable to swim or attract attention, he is stuck there. From that point on, he must learn to feed and shelter himself in strange isolation beneath the tower blocks and myriad night-time lights of the city. Good play is made of the assorted city flotsam that he puts to use, and when he finds an empty noodle packet, his mission becomes to grow corn to make noodles, achieved in quite an ingenious fashion.

Unbeknownst to Kim, however, his presence on the island has not gone entirely unnoticed. Once he has settled in a bit, he changes his ‘HELP’ scratched on the beach to ‘HELLO’ and catches the attention of a strange young woman (also called Kim) who has lived in her cluttered bedroom for three years, presumably on account of a half-hidden mass of scar tissue on one side of her forehead. She lives a false life through the internet (briefly explored) and takes photos of the moon with the same long-lensed camera that allows her to see all that Kim is up to on his island.

The pair begins a tentative and amusingly polite communication via words in the sand and the conventional message in a bottle delivered in nicely unconventional fashion, and suffice to say that the ending is rather sweet and lovely. This is not a film that aims for any great significance, but (male) Kim is consistently engaging and endearing in his attempts to adapt to the island and his growing content with life there.

The whole process provided a good number of humorous moments and witty offhand details. Emotion is not shirked, as when he finally eats his noodles (they look so good!), when he feels abandoned by his unseen pen pal, or when he must inevitably leave his new home. But with very little pandering, snappy pacing, and charming oddness, the film fully earns, and avoids the derogatory connotations of, the label ‘crowd-pleasing’.

d/sc Hae-jun Lee p Moo-Ryoung Kim ph Byung-seo Kim ed Na-young Nam pd Gonjakso Hwasung m Hong-jip Kim cast Jae-yeong Jeong, Ryeowon Jung, Yeong-seo Park, Mi-kyeong Yang
(2009, SKo, 116m)

Encarnação do Demônio

For those unacquainted with the legend of Zé de Caixão - Coffin Joe, loosely - Encarnação do Demônio may prove something of a bafflement. Longterm fans will be well used to that. Briefly, José Mojica Marins was once the most famous man in Brazil thanks to his creation and alter ego Zé de Caixão, star of film, comic books and even a limited edition Volkswagen. Clad in top hat, black cloak, and wicked 4-inch fingernails (Mojica’s own), Joe is beyond good, evil, God, and the Devil (though he tends to the last), the embodiment of amoral existentialism, with a strong streak of sadism, railing against the oppressions of society (chiefly drugs and the police), whilst merrily beating, raping, and murdering in pursuit of a suitable mate to perpetuate his singular bloodline.

Brazilian cinema had known no horror films before the Mojica/Joe explosion in the mid-sixties, and 50 years later, even in the age of torture porn, he could still conjure the transgressive. Released from prison after 40 years, Joe sets up a torture dungeon where police and women are subjected to ever more horrific ordeals (the worst being reserved for policewomen). Not even the most extreme is the sight of a woman being blindfolded with the back of her own scalp pulled over her skull (though that did prompt spontaneous applause in some quarters).

Meanwhile, Joe’s haunted by flashbacks and visions of his past victims, a device previously used to pad out micro-budget features, but now given extra weight by Mojica’s palpable agedness (72 at the time of shooting), and a more-than-ever believable sense of mental disturbance. Add to this a pair of blind, gurning witches, plenty of blood-covered naked women, a deranged one-eyed cop (from the end of At Midnight I Will Posess Your Corpse, 1967), an even more deranged priest (son a victim from At Midnight I Will Possess Your Soul, 1964), and a blood-soaked copulation that leaves Angel Heart standing and results in a hallucinatory trip to some Pasolini-esque purgatory, and you’ve got a barrel of lunacy.

With sharp photography, fluid camera movement, and exemplary special effects (smartly aided by various body-modifying performers), much of the charm of the low-budget '60s offerings has worn off; the social commentary is as broadly drawn as ever (Joe objects to the police and poverty, though is no avenging angel beyond the service of his own desires and whims); and a certain amount of business about images and watching remains superficial. The ontology is still muddy, but its great to hear Mojica’s stentorian voiceover intoning the tenets of his idiosyncratic worldview: a welcome return, as committedly amoral and startlingly individual as ever, and if it is now rather more nasty than fun, one is tempted to assume that Mojica would have had it so in the first place, particularly if given back in the 60s today’s technological resources and jaded viewers.


d José Mojica Marins p Caio Gullane, Fabiano Gullane, Débora Ivanov, Patrick Siaretta sc José Mojica Marins, Dennison Ramalho ph José Roberto Eliezer ed Paulo Sacramento ad Cassio Amarante m André Abujamra, Marcio Nigro cast José Mojica Marins, Jece Valadão, Adriano Stuart, Milhem Cortaz, Rui Resende, José Celso Martinez, Cristina Aché, Helena Ignez
(2008, Bra, 94m)

Silence, sounds, and Tabu

For all its glib meretriciousness, The Artist prompted thoughts about how silent cinema works, and how and why its techniques might be related to modern technology and film-making custom. Nostalgia and wonder increase along with distance in time, as silent cinema ascends to the status of a lost art. It’s in the air: for all its gross faults, Hugo’s ecstatic cinematic evangelism reached many; the 2013 Goya nominations are mostly dedicated to a (less than successful but handsomely-mounted) silent retelling of Snow White, Blancanieves; and a slick and expensive Valentino biopic starring Isabella Rossellini (not as Valentino, sadly) is due to wind up its years-long production within months [eventually Silent Life, 2020].

The spectacle of Méliès’ silent magic has never really left the cinema: the dumbest, dialogue-free, digitally-created action sequence of today (anytime, really) could easily, probably preferably, have its stock movie score and library explosions replaced by a vigorous organ player. The point is to excite through adventure and fantasy. As such, cinema remains cinema, with or without synch sound. Vast swathes of experimental film-makers have felt no need for a soundtrack. It is a formal consideration like any other. Plenty of so-to-speak arthouse film-makers pare their dialogue to a minimum or, like Marguerite Duras (India Song) divorce sound and image entirely. The earliest semi-mainstream experiment along these lines had Ray Milland suffer torments as a secret-selling nuclear physicist, whilst footfall, phone bells, and whatnot are heard, but not a line of dialogue, in the intermittently effective but largely off-putting 1952 independent The Thief.

Mostly, though, it’s comedians who embrace the absence of dialogue. Tati’s bubbling soundtracks are the appropriately banal white noise of the quotidien, but he’d be no less funny with an out-of-tune upright accompaniment. The association of silent cinema with comedy, however, has mostly been because of a widespread discrepancy in frame rates. In anything as low as 16fps, uniformly projected at 24, people just scurry. No wonder then that Silent Movie (1976) was the first high-profile sound-era silent feature, nor that the sped-up parts actually made Mel Brooks funny.

No dialogue is one thing, but no synch sound at all is another. It’s interesting as Silent Movie opens with a complete lack of sound how disconcerting it is – it plays like a spoof of the avant-garde. That’s in part because it’s in color. For the ghostly visual aura of silent cinema, one need look no further than Guy Maddin, but there have been others who’ve gone the whole homage hog. Most intriguingly, there’s Jérôme Savary’s 1975 semi-pornographic circus movie, La fille du garde-barrière, in look and sound if not quite in content, a recreation of silent cinema; Aki Kaurismaki made his typically downplayed Juha (1999) as a traditional silent, more to evoke an era than to throw shadows over everything; and the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s Call of Cthulhu (2005) is a largely successful exercise in both. These films, as with The Artist and Blancanieves, do capture some of the beauty of silent cinema, the seeming magic of wordless communication, and the transport to another time. But the straight recreations, even the more satisfying examples, seem designed to amaze that they have even stood on their hindlegs at all – silent cinema as a fetish.

There’s room for more interrogation of silent cinema’s sound and image disjunction, and the different significances of direct and synch sound, or lack thereof. Some synching of music and sound effects in Blancanieves, for example, feels like flashy cheating rather than as a considered device. On the other hand, Hsiao-hsien Hou uses intertitles and soundless, moving lips in the 1911-set section of his Three Times (2005), but shoots in rich, deep color and natural light to avoid the straitjacket of stylistic recreation. The conceit is persuasive in conjuring a bygone time, but Hou also bends the rules in a highly effective fashion, by privileging his main character with synch sound, as she sings to her own melancholy lute accompaniment, inevitably drawing us closer.

The most intriguing recent experiment with the form and effectiveness of silent cinema occupies the whole second half of Miguel Gomes’ strange and beautiful Tabu (2012). A voiceover relates the events of 50 years previous, in the shadow of (the fictitious) Mount Tabu, in an unnamed Portuguese colony in Africa. Black and white 16mm photography provides a silvery sheen of agedness; the story of forbidden love evokes the Tabu of Murnau (1931); and grasses rustle, cicadas cheep, but the characters’ lips move soundlessly. The project is not one of recreation, nor a nostalgic evocation of silent cinema, but an attempt to use characteristics of silent cinema to evoke nostalgia itself, the bittersweet mourning for a lost time (in this instance, labeled “Paradise”). This is pretty much a case of saudade, as Portuguese as can be, an emotion to feel but not describe, just as one cannot quite describe how the distance of years, and the absence of sound, makes silent cinema feel like a dream.

Direct and synch sound make us feel present; their noticeable absence is an immediate distancing device; and more complex relationships to the film before us can be conjured by a mixture of the two. Withholding of dialogue aside, Tabu is free from an over-strict schema, either literal or symbolic. It is as though Gomes is feeling his way in each scene, deciding which sounds, dialogue aside, will best bolster the images. It’s disarming enough when, half way through the film, words cease to emerge from the characters’ mouths; more so even, when the splashes of a swimming pool suddenly go unheard. In fact, Gomes might have benefitted from further erasures of direct sound; the more we hear of the world around them, the less comfortable the characters’ silence becomes.

But this is an experiment – there is no correct formal approach. In straight recreations of silent cinema one can point out cheats, but here the cheats are the point. No self-regarding replication, the wonder of Tabu is how it investigates the formal properties of pre-sound film in an attempt to channel its particular emotional power. The sense of distance in time comes easily, of course, but less so the emotional relationship between audience and characters whom they cannot hear. In Blancanieves, for example, that step of removal is a barrier; in Tabu, as in the best silent films, it is wonderland looking glass – we can both see though it, and see ourselves reflected in it.

Gomes’ smartest move, in fact, is relating his formal decisions as much to silent cinema as to home movies. His characters’ 16mm footage is made to look distinct from the story around it, but there’s no incontrovertible reason why it should. There is a built-in nostalgia to this too, for most people’s experience of home movies is direct-sound video; but the form of the home movie, from mid-century to mid-eighties, is recognizable and familiar – a less pristine image than that which we expect on a cinema screen, and an absence of sound. There’s a sense of intimacy, and a sense of loss – the faces can straddle the distance of years, but where have the voices gone? They were so sweet once, but they remain beyond our reach, locked away in the past. It sounds a lot like silent cinema.

d Miguel Gomes p Sandro Aguilar, Luís Urbano sc Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo ph Rui Poças ed Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes pd Bruno Duarte cast Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira, Teresa Madruga, Henrique Espírito Santo, Carloto Cotta, Ivo Müller
(2012, port/ger/bra/fr/sp, 118m, b/w)

Road To Nowhere: conversation with Monte Hellman (2011)

When the Venice Film Festival awarded Monte Hellman a richly-deserved career achievement Lion last year [2010], it was on the occasion of his triumphant return to the screen with the rich and personal Road to Nowhere. In the twenty one years since his last feature, Hellman’s name has passed before more filmgoers’ vision as executive producer of Reservoir Dogs than as the director of Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), the epitome of that lonely American cinema of the ‘70s; never mind his pair of eerie metaphysical westerns, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting (shot back-to-back in 1965); or the oft-suppressed Cockfighter (1974). He is the secret auteur of American cinema, too infrequently spoken of, his films even less frequently seen.

 “I don’t think a lot about the movies that I’m making and I kind of take the script at face value and deal with it”.

Hellman rolled into Hollywood at the tail end of the studio period, a climate that had discouraged a view of director-as-artist. Most seemed happy that way, professionals at work. He got a thorough apprenticeship in Corman’s back room, re-editing and re-shooting, and remained a film-maker for hire ever since, with a hand in everything from Head to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (he even directed second unit on Robocop). For his most significant outings as director, he enjoyed remarkable latitude: Corman trusted him with the westerns and Cockfighter; and whilst Two-Lane Blacktop may be the refined Easy Rider, the freedom afforded Hellman would not have been permissible without the latter’s success. He prefers to take an anti-intellectual approach to his own film-making, but his Laurel Canyon home is lined with books and movies, and the craftsmanship is mingled with the instinct and emotion of a poet. He may not be the director to run around declaring that his vision must be seen, yet a personal vision is exactly what has emerged in his films, through one of the clearest and most consistent authorial voices in anything like mainstream American cinema.

The title of Hellman’s new film is as neat a summation of his philosophical outlook as any, and returns once again to man’s powerlessness in a world of dubious purpose. Even in his debut, the likeable, low-rent Beast From Haunted Cave (1959), Hellman allowed the two young leads to discuss whether we humans make our own luck, or if our luck makes us. In his next two pictures, shot back-to-back in the Philippines, he has one of the soldiers offers his observation of human beings that “they get born, they stumble around in life for a bit, and then they die”; Hellman then illustrates this perfectly in the second film, the shaggy-dog chase Flight to Fury (1964). Ever-wary of over-intellectualizing, he rejects the significance of the lines however: “They might sound like (authorial statements) but I didn’t write those lines. I didn’t cut them out, but I think a lot of that stuff is really sophomoric: it’s what we talk about late at night when we’ve finished cramming our books in college, you know. And I don’t think you can take any of it too seriously apart from the fact that everybody thinks that stuff, it’s out there. I could take any writer at random and he’s going to write me a line like that.” 

The lines become less explicit than in those early films, but the philosophy persists, in part because Hellman has always sought out like-minded writers. Rudolph Wurlitzer was hired for Two-Lane Blacktop on the basis of a passage in his strange novel Nog that has human interaction break down, with the individual left to plough on alone. That is more or less how the film concludes, but the killer touch was Hellman’s. He’s something of an ending specialist, in fact, repeatedly crystallizing an existential worldview, from the dead man’s shoes of Flight to Fury right up to the voyage into the unknown of Road to Nowhere’s final slow zoom. The last shot of Ride in the Whirlwind has cowhand Jack Nicholson in silhouette on the skyline, frozen in an eternal flight from blind injustice; all his friends have been killed, and he has lost control of his destiny: “The intent was really to tell the story of the making of an outlaw, the making of a gunfighter, and how circumstances take somebody who was an ordinary man and force him into this position.” So Nicholson’s Wes turns perhaps into someone like his cold-blooded gunman Billy in The Shooting. His fate is to end as a small speck in a vast expanse of nothingness in Hellman’s most abstracted absurdist nightmare. “I think that The Shooting is kind of a surreal movie, but I don’t treat it as surreal, I treat it as realistic. I was hoping to do The Trial at one time. My idea was to do it super-realistically and shoot it in Chicago. Once Welles did it I gave up on that.”

The affinity with Kafka is clear, but the stronger one is with Godot, which Hellman has kept close to his heart since staging the first LA performances in 1957. “I think it’s the idea that God is laughing and that our only defense is to laugh back. I don’t know if I believe that the universe has it in for man but I think that I agree with the lines from the Santayana poem [quoted in Road to Nowhere]: ‘in this great disaster of our birth we can be happy and forget our doom’ ”. The doom is never quite forgotten in his films, but happiness can be found in snatches, and the ideal of love, though rarely attained, is held to be worth the disappointments. Cockfighter  even boasts a (possibly) happy ending, one of Hellman’s best for its joyful affirmation of optimism in Warren Oates’ cracking grin. It’s a corrective to the tragedy of his previous film, Two-Lane Blacktop: Hellman fell for Laurie Bird on that movie and the catatonic attempts by James Taylor (The Driver) to connect with her character, The Girl, must echo something of the director’s own. The stunning conclusion holds many meanings, from “end-of-the-road” filmstrip ribbon as asphalt highway, to a logical conclusion of how far film can capture and examine human experience, stripping away the unnecessary until it destroys even itself. But it is also a frozen, cosmic howl of pain, a conviction – momentary in life perhaps, but not here – that even love cannot succeed.

Road to Nowhere is dedicated to Laurie Bird and reaches the same conclusion as that earlier film, with the prison of lovelorn Taylor’s Chevy literalized. Neither wallows in pessimism, however. These are merely the natural conclusions of an artist who, despite doubt as to its point, has sought to render life with honesty and integrity. His commitment to realism is less of the Stroheim school of correct underwear, than simply to tell it how it is. But only a little less. Production design is meticulous and discreet. “It’s just the idea that whatever you’re doing, that it be honest. I think the details are important. Not just for the audience but to stimulate the actors to give their best as well. The more real it is for them the more real it will become for the audience“. Although Hellman was a photographer in early years (a coffee table book has been long gestating), the cinematography is likewise invisible, landscapes fade into the background, and the images flow by as records rather than pictures. “I’m very concerned with the composition of the shots, which is not exactly naturalistic or realistic, and so to that extent my movies have a pictorial quality to them. But hopefully not to the point of taking the audience out of the movie. I don’t want people to notice any particular thing. I don’t want people to say “oh, what a pretty shot”. The backgrounds are very important but they’re all presented in a way so as to be unobtrusive. I don’t want anything to interfere. I don’t want them to think about what I’m doing. I don’t want them to think about what the actors are doing. If somebody says, God it was really well directed, I think maybe I’ve failed, because I don’t want them to notice the direction.”

If the ending of Two-Lane Blacktop was the most startling instance of a Hellman film recognizing its own self, he manages an equally jaw-dropping moment of real-life revelation near the close of Road to Nowhere. This is in itself an achievement in a film that is riddled with ambiguity as to the “reality” of what we are watching. From the off, Hellman dares to waive his own rule of unobtrusive film-making: a disc marked “Road to Nowhere” is slipped into a laptop, we zoom right into the screen, and the credits play out for a Mitchell Haven picture. The time had come for Hellman to declare his love for cinema, for the life-affirming pleasure of both watching and making it. So his own film follows the shooting of the Haven film, which is itself a reconstruction of events that conclude with an apparently bogus double suicide and missing state funds. An insurance investigator and the blogger who logged the story provide additional viewpoints. Variations on the same scene may be reality or fiction played out more than one way. Facts are elusive. And the suspicion that Haven’s lead actress may not be who she seems (twice over!) makes matters yet more complicated. Haven’s film, Hellman’s film of his filming, and events that predate the present action are intermingled to the point where confusion hovers close at hand if Haven himself is not onscreen. “It’s like these things happened almost against my will because certainly that amount of taking the audience out of the story is absolutely against everything that I believe, but here I was stuck with this thing. I had to deal with it in some way and I did the best I could. What amazes me was that we keep taking the audience and saying, OK you’re just watching a movie, stop your trance and come back to actual reality, sitting in a theatre watching a movie, and in spite of that fact they go right back into it. And how quickly they go back into it is amazing. It just demonstrates to me the power of this medium, no matter what we do.  All this instant media and all this mass of information to which that the audience is exposed to, if anything it desensitizes them. And what is amazing today as opposed to thirty years ago is that the audience can still be caught up in this medium. You’d think that they’d be immune by now but they’re not – everything we do is to immunize them. But even the worst of our breed – the directors’ breed – who really don’t know how to engage an audience, they really can’t help it because the medium engages the audience.”

The porous line between filmed fiction and reality has been a constant in Hellman’s career, even if this is a new, dream-like test of its limits. Verité elements of the cockfighting circuit or Laurie Bird panhandling are the most visible, but elsewhere dialogue has been derived from cowboy diaries and idle conversations; unexplained details have been allowed to linger that refer to unused or even unfilmed parts of script; the late 70s western China 9 Liberty 37 was virtually made up as it went along; and Two-Lane Blacktop was filmed in sequence, as the non-acting leads and company travelled the protagonists’ route cross-country, and script pages were dispensed the night before their filming. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson don’t play themselves in Two-Lane Blacktop, but then again they don’t play anyone else in particular (“Driver”, “Mechanic”): Hellman’s direction for actors is not that they should become their character, but that the character should become them. Wilson’s natural insouciance is if anything a little underused, but Taylor’s self-assurance perfectly carries his dealings with other drag racers, and his discomfort at the filming process, along with those hurt, wary eyes, dovetails perfectly with the character’s inability to make a connection. The incomparable Warren Oates gives a remarkably touching performance of insecurity, but for Taylor it’s real.

Haven was called Hellman for a while (as Hellman had been called Haven one summer way back) and he shares not only initials but also Hellman’s definition of the director’s job: 90% casting, and he can’t remember the other 10%. Haven is struck by almost-non-actress Laurel Graham and casts her as his lead. His eye is good: it seems she was already cast in the real-life story, replacement for a mysterious Velma Duran. The part is played by Shannyn Sossamon with a luminosity that carries the film – it has to, because much of the time we really cannot be sure whether we are watching Graham pretend to be herself, Duran, or herself pretending to be Duran, who we are watching beyond this woman doing and saying these things. A couple of times it’s Sossamon herself, talking to her director. The various identities have merged to the extent that it is no longer possible to distinguish between them. Haven is so bewitched that he seems not to care for the truth beyond the immediate here-and-now of being with her, directing her, watching late night movies with her. Hellman weaves a similar spell on the audience through the confusion of plot, chronology and character, forcing us to go with the flow. To introduce his actress, there is an uncharacteristically long empty sequence of Sossaman and a hair dryer at the start. “The intent was twofold. First of all I was just fascinated by the action itself; I just thought it was beautiful. And secondly I used that much of it because I felt it was just a way to get the audience to understand that this was not going to be a music video and they better get used to it now, and then we gradually build up the pace.” We are never much more sure of who she really is than in this opening scene, but neither, does it turn out, do we really need to be.

If the structure of Road to Nowhere makes it sound like a tortuous Marienbad puzzle, it is much more akin to the story games of Rivette (L‘amour par terre in particular). The mystery plot and the permeability of the film’s “reality” are structures to entice the audience, not to frustrate them. “The script was much more complicated than the movie, in the sense that the scenes were more randomly placed. We tried to give at least an identifiable chronology to the framework, which is the making of the movie. So we put that literally in chronological order. And everything else that’s out of sequence is either because it’s a memory or it’s a variation; it’s the director playing with different possibilities of a scene; or it’s just to represent the way things are shot as opposed to the way they are in the final movie, because they don’t shoot the scenes in order. But it’s such a simple story – it’s not that complicated! There was a whole backstory that we did not shoot just because we didn’t feel it was necessary and that’s the one that people have the hardest time with, where the real Velma Duran ostensibly dies in Cuba. In the script we had scenes where we see her being captured by the police and so forth, and trying to escape and getting killed. We just felt that was way too much information – rather than clarifying things it would have just made it more confusing.”

 “I was consciously aware of the fact that some things may be difficult to follow in the theatrical experience of it. But just like when we’re reading a detective story we can go back and check some fact that happened thirty pages earlier, in viewing it on video or DVD or Blu-Ray or whatever we do, people will be doing that, and I realized that then everything that was difficult would be made much easier. Again I tried to make sure that we didn’t use tricks, like in a movie like The Usual Suspects where you’re actually given false information. I made sure that all the information was accurate and true and that nothing would fall apart upon that kind of examination. It’s not a trick movie at all.”

It’s not a trick movie, but if you want to play, it can be a fiendish puzzle. Or it’s a dream of reality, past and present, of stories less important than the people who enact them. But best of all, it is a love poem to cinema, a deeply personal project of Hellman themes exploded, his own exhilarated antidote to the woes of the human condition. “I think I stole that line ‘love poem to cinema’ from somebody’s review of the movie, but it struck me as something I wish I’d thought of myself. I don’t think there’s any better advice given about the work that we do than the advice that Hamlet gives to the players in Hamlet, ‘to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’. That’s something I kind of paste on my mirror every morning and try to live up to it. But it ain’t easy.”

A Three-Level Monster: Denis Côté on Que ta joie demeure and documentary practice (frieze, 2014)

Heads were scratched, a couple of years ago, over what to make of Denis Côté's semi/non-documentary Bestiaire (2012). The bulk of the film was concerned with looking at animals in an off-season Quebec safari park, clattering around their stalls, or simply standing and staring. No context was offered, no invitation to identify with the animals or, heaven forbid, anthropomorphise; instead, Côté's project was to find a fresh way of looking at what conventionally might be treated as either a ‘cute’ subject, or one on which to hang tired bugbears about zoos, and man's relationship to animals in general. The result was strange and hypnotic, and the fact that it is so hard to pin down, both in its effect, and in what kind of a film it actually is, suggested that there was interesting further work to be done along these lines.

With the disarming narrative of Vic + Flo ont vu un ours (2013) coming in between, Côté has returned to the practice of Bestiaire for his latest film, Que ta joie demeure (Joy Of Man's Desiring, 2014). The subject this time is a sliver of the workforce, operating large Dr. Seuss-like machines in a series of factories (the different locations are never specifically delineated, beyond implication by the various products turned out – several critics assume it is one massive plant, producing mattresses, cutting metal, and packaging coffee). The approach is, initially, rigorously hands-off; was this intended therefore as an extension of Bestiaire?

‘The various audiences for Bestiaire wanted to talk mainly about the animals, whereas my starting point had been an obsession with looking and observing. I felt therefore that some abstract questions had been left unanswered, so I decided to look at something that is less obviously appealing than animals: the act of working. This is why in the end the films look like some sort of diptych.

‘I think that with every new film, I try to find ways to approach and twist the realities I’m filming. I am also looking for new ways to approach people who don’t share much with my reality. I like those human adventures. A lot of documentary filmmakers are content with finding a reality and filming it for what it is. This is not enough for me. I find a reality, and I twist it to make it my own. You can’t put a label on a hybrid object like Que ta joie demeure. It’s not really an account of what factory work is; it’s not a reflection on life; it’s staged and real at the same time. It doesn’t fit any reality. It’s mine. It’s very artificial, and it’s far away from any social doc we usually see. At least, I hope so.

‘So, just as Bestiaire is not really a film about animals, neither is Que ta joie demeure really a film about workers – such a film would have demanded things like interviews, or a more obviously humanist approach. As in Bestiaire, the intention was more cerebral, abstract. I’m interested in the act of working, the idea of work; thus one must make austere choices, leading to an abstract result. Both films are dehumanized, or de-animalized – some people will obviously say that I missed an occasion of making warmer films but I disagree.’

Certainly there is little joy present in Joy Of Man's Desiring, but neither is there an exaggerated sense of gloom, or even monotony – we observe the strict regularity of the machines and their operation, and listen to the clanging symphony of rhythms they produce, but measured editing denies the easy effects of hypnotism. However, whilst the similarly studied avoidance of easy anthropomorphism in Bestiaire creates for the animals a certain self-contained dignity, the humans here are (initially) treated in a similar manner, at the risk of casting them simply as automated extensions of the machines they operate. Côté's strategy to combat this diverges from that of Bestiaire, using actors instead of filming real workers, and gradually introducing scripted scenes and careful staging:

‘I felt that Bestiaire did what it had to do, and that there was no point in making the same film in another environment. My observational style had to go somewhere else. There is observation in Que ta joie demeure, but also some humour, and I question some clichés about life. The last “act” of the film is filled with these things: the sorts of banal ways in which we discuss our work (being depressed, being tired, the need to change job). I thought the film needed to morph from being simply observational, to a somehow twisted narrative, so the dialogues were written. Some things in the film are accidental, some are staged. Hopefully the audience is trying to guess.’

Here is where the exaggeration comes in – art, if you will – prompting us to consider the implications of complaining about the work one continues to do, for a living wage, to support a child; to state blithely that one does indeed feel concern for the business as a whole, for the management, which in this environment at least, seems a thousand miles away; to be depressed about this low-level monotony when the option is... what? Côté's title is just as exaggerated in the opposite direction:

‘The Bach sonata is called ‘Jesu, Que ma joie demeure’. I twisted this sort of very poetic title (we would never normally use such an elegant expression in French) into something a little misleading, but no less poetic in the end. I see the title as some sort of word of encouragement to the worker. The film is not supposed to be depressive or bleak; it’s not supposed to be a condemnation or an anti-capitalist manifesto. It is not a social film with a message. Yet work is undeniably at the center of our lives. Sometimes it’s rewarding, sometimes it’s debilitating, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it hurts. The film is one long prayer to the worker, saying ‘keep up, my friend’. I think that those people who think the film is depressing or dark are those who are inclined to make an unthinking, instinctive judgment about the type of work we see in the film.’

It should be noted that the type of work we do see is particularly restricted in scope. Apart from the various factory workers at their machines, we see occasionally a woodshop, the only hint of anything like artisanal work (although the woodworker is engaged mostly in the banalities of melamine-trimming). Certainly the scope of the film is so confined to factory interiors that we wonder about the differences in outlook and environment that might have been illustrated by the manual work of, say, fruit pickers, either mechanised or even by hand, and whether or not the mostly dour outlook of the characters here presented is not linked directly to their enclosed, airless environment.

‘At first I wanted to film all kinds of works and activities, but at some point, you need to find an aesthetic focus. Filming a lawyer or a receptionist would potentially not have given me very much, cinematically speaking. I went for industrial environments where the body is explicitly solicited; where repetition becomes poetic; where machines are noisy and expressive. Then I imagined interiors only. Going out becomes a goal or a dream. There’s certainly something out there – liberty? fun? danger? – but the film denies that ‘outside’ world.’

In fact, this is like any other Côté film, disguised as a film about work and workers: its real focus is, once again, a small community of people and their restricted, out-of-the-way environment. That we are being privileged – Côté, too – with a glimpse into that world, is indicated by the opening monologue. A female worker speaks over her shoulder to an unseen listener who, judging by the words addressed, may be a new colleague; yet the tone is intimate, almost as one would address a lover. That she stresses the need for trust, and that one may find good things here in this place, remind us too that her words are also directed of course to the film-maker behind the camera and, by extension, to the viewer-visitor.

‘I like the opening. It sets the tone, and at the same time the viewer is completely at a loss. It has that “what am I going to watch” edge, I think. [Actress Emilie Sigouin] is addressing a co-worker as if she were some sort of boss. She also embodies the idea of talking smoothly to workers, keeping them happy, promising things. But she is “the film” itself as well, talking to the audience, saying something like “if you’re open-minded, I’ll bring you somewhere special.” Even if we don’t completely get it, the film introduces itself as a three-level monster.’

One of the pleasures of Côté's oeuvre is the way his films wriggle out from easy categorisation, existing simultaneously on these different planes. The documentary element has always been present, particularly in the form of exploring sequestered communities – the curious, careful gaze from a distance seems to catch something singular and mysterious beneath the surface of these tucked-away realities. Yet it was with Carcasses (2009) that Côté really started to push his way towards a new form, rupturing the observational (the solitary life of a junkyard guardian) with unexpected narrative intrusions. It was also around this time that he started to concentrate more on framing, locking down the previously jittery camera to create the increasingly precise tableaux (most beautifully in the Josée Deshaies-shot Curling, 2010) that in much of Que ta joie demeure achieve a science-fictional strangeness in their choice of detail.

‘Mini DV was the trend around 2004-2005, and the Dogme films were still influencing a significant number of new filmmakers. There was this obvious handheld camerawork choice going on. At some point I thought, there’s no way the films are more dynamic or true just because the camera has a nervous style. So I slowly changed. I like the tableau-style approach. The viewer has to enter a very still shot that is not telling him on what he should focus. He must do the job. I like an active audience. A moving camera usually guides your eye, your emotion, your conscience.

‘I think that with Carcasses, Bestiaire and Que ta joie demeure I found what I was looking for, meaning observing a reality and making it my own, using a fixed frontal camera in the vein of directors like Ulrich Seidl or Nikolaus Geyrhalter. You look at something in a very dry and static way. You don’t want to editorialize, or make a social comment about what you film, and in the end, the audience is going to give you their own reading; the film takes its own revenge on you by “saying things” that were not consciously in your head (the bleak colors and the cages of Bestiaire are “talking” in this way, as is the repetitive nature of manual work in Que ta joie demeure and so on). That said, for all their similarities, these films certainly do not form a coherent trilogy, and I don’t feel the urge to make another one.

‘But as far as documentaries, loosely-speaking, are concerned, I also like to watch those impossible, hybrid films. I find them fragile and beautiful in their weaknesses. I was totally hypnotized by Two Years at Sea by Ben Rivers. It was unconscious for sure, but coming directly out from the womb of Carcasses! I also like to follow the Sensory Ethnography Lab filmmakers; of course my style or name have been connected to a film like Leviathan, which I love.’

Another pleasure of this work is that, despite superficial similarities to the new observational furrows being ploughed by the HESL filmmakers, Côté is resolutely going his own way, mixing larger narrative productions with smaller, three-man-crew operations like his latest, fearlessly trusting that his audience will look at these objects with the same attention and inquisitiveness as that with which he films. This is due, in part, to his having come of age as exactly that sort of audience-member, whilst simultaneously parlaying his love of cinema into a long stint as a critic with ici magazine. Despite this, however, it is remarkable how little in debt to other filmmakers his work seems to be, how few influences are readily discernible – the cinema of Denis Côté is his own.

‘I briefly studied film and always wanted to be a director. But I was also a grade-A cinephile. Meeting other cinephiles under various circumstances and at various events got me in touch with the worlds and people of radio and newspaper film criticism. I became a film critic by accident, for nearly a decade, until 2005.

‘So of course I carry a long cinephile heritage. I was obsessed with it for a long time, until my third or fourth feature maybe. Then, instead of watching everything just to have an opinion, I started watching only films that could really bring me something. I don’t remember copying a scene from a favorite film or imitating a director’s style. But people know I’ve been a film critic, so they love to say silly things like “oh Elle veut le chaos is in black and white, so it’s an homage to Bela Tarr”. All I’m sure of is that my cinephilia was really sparked by the turn-of-the-century kind of postmodernist masters like Abbas Kiarostami, Jia Zhang-Ke, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Romanian wave, Dogme films, and so on. If you add to that an admiration for very different filmmakers and signatures, like John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Dario Argento, Maurice Pialat, and Robert Bresson… it makes quite a cocktail in the end. There are tons of them, yet no clear influences at the same time.

‘Nowadays, I’m just busy with my own shit. I go to festivals and it’s all about me, me, me – interviews, Q&As, and stuff. The cinephile in me is slowly losing the battle, but maybe it’s a good thing for future projects. I don’t overthink everything anymore. My films are made fast and instinctively. I’m not an intellectual. I’m very down to earth and pragmatic in real life. I talk a lot, I contradict myself, and I collect paradoxes. I’m not living the arty poet life. But when I sit down to write a story, it feels like I need introspection, silence, slowness. I need to ‘get serious’. Every film is a therapy, I’d say, but I don’t think about it too much – it’s dangerous.’