Double Bills to Double Your Fun!

There's a lot of talk going around about double features. Diablo Cody's week at the New Beverly Cinema set off a swarm of posts - a meme, red in tooth and claw, circling the internet in the usual manner... And Sight and Sound, probably not inspired by Diablo or Piper, though who can say, offers up their own set of double features (that's PDF, I'll have you know), chosen by a host of critics and film people. Girish expands, and the comment section buzzes with suggestions and, lately, math.

There's nothing for it but to combine these - or, really, to do the meme, though taking off from the Sight and Sound list. Specifically, Brad Stevens' suggestion of a pairing of Celine and Julie Go Boating and Inland Empire. Ryland Walker Knight is also moved by the matchup. It's good. I was surprised to find I hadn't brought up the comparison in any of my Rivette posts last year - nor my Inland Empire "explanation"*. I knew I wrote about them - turns out, it was part of a draft for those Rivette posts linked above, and left on the cutting room floor. Or blogger's abandoned drafts. It's not all that profound - in fact, I think there are more overt references to Celine and Julie in Mulholland Drive than Inland Empire - the way one woman finds another sleeping on her doorstep (so to speak), the girl detective plot, etc... But there are plenty of parallels between any of these films - the way they combines multiple stories, sometimes at the same level, sometimes splitting the levels - the way they moves in and out of these stories stylistically, and so on. Though in some ways they are inverted, Rivette and Lynch: with Lynch, everything that gets into the film is given the weight of “reality” (within the fiction) - that is, Laura Dern’s journeys through god knows how many plots and ontological orders in Inland Empire are all played as if what you see, what she sees, at any given moment, is completely and inescapably real. With Rivette, you get the exact opposite - the sense instead that everything you see, everything the characters see, do, experience is always a game, a play, a joke - though Rivette is quite flexible about this.

Anyway: the point of all that is that you can, sort of, look at Lynch's films as a kind of disguised remake of the Rivette film. And that suggests a film festival! So - a dozen films, arranged in pairs - linked pairs: twisted (or not) remakes, or separated twins...

1. So start right there: Celine and Julie Go Boating and Mulholland Drive.

2. The Wizard of Oz & Stalker - that's what Stalker is, right? three men go into a zone looking to be granted wishes. This moves from black and white to color. They hallucinate, pass through various threats... find out it's all a bit of a joke, though whatever changes changes inside them. Right? (It's been ages since I've seen Stalker: I think the parallels are better than that even.) So there.

3. Vanda's Room & En Construccion - two films shot more or less simultaneously in Lisbon and Barcelona with similar ambitions and technical conditions (Costa shooting more or less alone with digital video; Guerin shooting on film, but as part of a film school project, that made it possible to shoot for free, with a minimal crew, and to spend a long time in the place they were shooting, as Costa did.) And coming out with similar stories, about the destruction of old neighborhoods and their replacement with new - all of it (both films) anchored by charismatic tough drug addicted women...

4. Play Time & Alphaville - day and night in 60s new Paris.

5. Cat People & Tropical Malady - it's as though Weerasthukal combines Cat People with I Walked With a Zombie, combining the inner divisions of the first with the spatial divisions of the second - the divided character and the two places, house and jungle... why not? A film that masters the Lewton/Tourneur use of suggestion, and deep ambiguity...

6. California Dreamin' (Endless) and Darjeeling Limited - not remakes of course since they were made about the same time - but two films about Americans on trains in strange countries - they become almost mirrors: Anderson’s Americans see everything around them as a means to their own salvation - while Nemescu's lot sees the Americans as their salvation, a chance to work out something of their own. Though there's a bit of that in Darjeeling Limited as well - both films, for example, have local women using American men to get out of something, while letting the American think he's using her... Anyway - a double bill I'd love to see, and that's the real point...

I suppose there are plenty more like this - but this is a week of films I would love to see. So - that's all anyone can ask, right? And as I mentioned in Girish's comments, there are so many ways to approach something like this - like - real double features I've seen, whether intentional (programmed by someone) or accidental - like the day I saw Letters from Iwo Jima and Jeanne La Poucelle (all 6 plus hours of it) more or less back to back...

* Take THAT, Parallel Universe Film Guide! They haven't actually added Inland Empire, but when they do, if they don't call it, "You Think You're So Smart Explaining the Last One, Try Explaining This!" they could call it, "I Love Lamps!" I would.