Exhilarating Misery at the Movies

I've gone a bit off the grid here lately - holidays, things like that - I tried my hand at NaNoWriMo, sort of - and not written about films in a while. I picked a bad time to stop writing about films - I've done some complaining this year about the quality of the new releases, but the last month or so has seen a very strong run of films. Maybe better than that - I've liked every film I've seen since the middle of October or so, and most of them I've liked very much.

I do have to say - it has been a harrowing stretch of films. The apocalypse seems much on the minds of our best filmmakers. It's been that way all year - Meeks Cutoff might have been the best film before this stretch; Contagion, Page One, even Rango might be considered end of the world films as well. But this fall - a run of films have come out that are quite relentless in their sense of dread. Or, in the case of the Almodovar - that accumulate dread in the corners, shielded by the bright colors and glamourous actors and high melodrama. But it is every inch a horror film as well... Now - there have been some cheerier films this fall - but I am going to put them off for now, stick with the misery...

Melancholia - 13/15 - Antichrist, I thought, made it halfway back for old Lars - this one, though, seems to me to be among his best. You have a simple enough story - 2 parts - first, "Justine" - Kirsten Dunst getting married, a huge party, she and her husband turn up late, and after that the tensions simmer and stew and everything goes to shit. Her boss harangues her about work; her father clowns and snipes at her mother, who interrupts and snipes right back; sister warns her, husband tries to ne nice, brother in law reminds her how much money he's spending, and it all gets worse and worse and poor Justine reacts predictably. In the end, all is lost, as everyone fails her, most abandon her, and she gives as good as she gets.... Part 2, "Claire", is about her sister and the end of the world. Poor Justine is back, catatonic with depression now, and there is a new planet that is going to either circle the earth harmlessly or crash into it and kill everyone - Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, tries to keep it all together, but her sister's madness seems a bit contagious, or maybe she is just the only sane one in the lot, and thus reacts to the end of the world with perfectly rational hysteria.

All this is done in a mix of LVT's trademark nausea inducing camera work and the kind of hyperslow aestheticism of Antichrist. It begins with nearly frozen tableaux of the end of the world as a bad dream - Dunst in her wedding dress in a pond, or walking with huge vines of yarn hanging from her limbs; Gainsbourg carrying her son across a golf course, sinking halfway to her knees with every step. This gives way to the shaky cam of the wedding reception, interrupting this mode from time to time with more of the dreamy tableaux. The shaky cam is particularly shaky - I have to admit, the first time I saw it, I was not in peak form going in, and probably sat too close, and "nausea-inducing" was not a figure of speech... That stuff doesn't usually bother me (It didn't the second time I saw it...), but a larger point might be that it didn't seem particularly well done - I can't imagine Breaking the Waves looking any different - I mentioned the way Antichrist makes you feel the presence of the cameraman - this time, it felt a bit more affected, almost like it was expected in a Lars Von Trier film. But that can't detract from the film's other virtues. The cast is excellent - the second half is a chamber piece, 4 characters in a huge house; the first half a teeming mess, full of first rate performers chewing on their corner of the scenery. John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan and Alexander Skarsgard, Udo Kier, Brady Corbett, etc., all stealing the bits they are in.... In the second part, Dunst, Gainsbourg and Kiefer Sutherland play off one another as the world ends, all remarkable. And, shaky cam or not, the imagery is superb - the jumbled chaos of the first half with faces and bodies suddenly picked out of the mess; the dazzling shots of the house and grounds, and the strange new planet in the sky... A lovely and disturbing film.

All of this is, rather obviously, a huge allegory about depression. You could almost say, the first half shows the onset of depression realistically, in a woman's collapse - the second half, allegorically, as the end of the world. Like Antichrist, it makes its metaphors extremely literal - and here seems to be explicitly autobiographical as well. Thinking about it tends to recast von Trier's earlier films - retrospectively, they all seem to be like this one. About a woman who is beset by troubles - the cruelty of the world, an abstraction that is usually manifested in an arbitrary but real external force - a pipe, a dead child, an accident, America... Oddly, maybe because this one is less generically melodramatic, it strikes me as being a bit more self-pitying - the way everyone blames Justine for her breakdown, while they all contribute to it... But that doesn't really diminish it. It is a thrilling piece of filmmaking, which is an odd thing to say about a film about this kind of crushing despair - but there it is.

Take Shelter - 13/15 - Jeff Nichols' second film, starring Michael Shannon as Curtis, who has bad dreams - when they start leading him to dangerous behavior (hallucinating about his dog and his friends attacking him; building an elaborate storm shelter to survive a gas attack), he also checks on his mental health. His mother was afflicted by paranoid szchophrenia from her 30s, just like him.... Nichols plays out the tension to the end, between Curtis's hallucinations as premonitions and as madness - is the end of the world at hand, or is he going mad? It's a fantastic film - Shannon is great - a decent man, tortured, fighting himself, fighting the voices in his head, fighting everyone around him (and trying not to fight them, at the same time). The supporting cast has less to do, but they (Jessica Chastain, Shea Wigham, Kathy Baker, etc.) are excellent as well. All this does play as a kind of allegory of the world as it is, the anxieties of contemporary America - the collapsing economy, leaving all of us on the edge (much of the angst is about money, work, not to mention health care and the environment - it works in all the things we have to be terrified about these days) - but that level of allegory is grounded in a careful and detailed consideration of Curtis's mental breakdown, played with conviction and realism. Complicated, of course, by the fact that his private demons, the terrible storm he foresees, is just about dead right in terms of the catastrophe that is coming for all these people. He may be mad in the literal sense but dead on about the metaphors. All this, I could add, is not very far from what von Trier gave us in Melancholia - a character whose breakdown takes on a kind of universal sign - storm - planet - which consumes the people around them. Both films end in a very similar way - the threat seems to come - it is averted - then, it comes back - and this time, the "sane" characters see it to. It's as if their madness was contagious.... In any case - this is a remarkable and heartbreaking film, every bit as devastating as the von Trier.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - 12/15 - this, while avoiding the end of the world imagery of those other two films, is, like them, a careful examination of the inner world of someone whose inner world is coming apart. Starts with a girl in a farmhouse somewhere in upstate NY, who runs away and lands with her sister and brother in law in a cottage by a lake in Connecticut. Fomr that point on, the film flashes back and forth between the cottage and the girl's life on the farm - we learn, soon enough, that she was part of some kind of cult. At first, a relatively benign looking cult, though with intimations of extreme patriarchy (men eating first), plus mystical/self-sustaining platitudes - as the film goes on, the horrors of the cult escalate - to rape, intimidation, robbery and murder. Cult behaviors are explored - changing names, breaking down identities, creating new ones in the family. Hints of Manson begin benignly (through music, say) but become literal in the end. This is contrasted with the girl's experiences after fleeing, her relationship with her sister and her husband (a soulless and horrible yuppy), and hints of their past, a difficult past. For a long time, the film actually holds these world's in a kind of balance - you can see what drew her to the cult, its sense of real family, its anti-materialism. We see what she is running away from - her brother-in-law's snottinesss, or the way they push her back into drinking, which seems pretty clearly to have been a big part of her problem. When she starts drinking again, she gulps it down like an old friend. The film maintains for a while the notion of these two worlds as equally cruel and bad - though, interestingly, as things get worse with her sister, we see the flashbacks to the things that were truly evil at the cult. All this builds to a masterful final shot that is positively devastating.

The more I think about it, too, the better I think it is. Watching it, it seemed to drag a few times - but in retrospect, I think that is part of the design. It works through her experiences, from the escape, to something else - it is notable that she gets more and more crazy as time goes by - and that the flashbacks get more and more intense. It is as though she starts disassociated (after escaping), and over time, she comes out of her trance - the more she escapes the horrors of the cult, the more she remembers the horrors of the cult, and the more horrifying they become. This film has much the same tone as Take Shelter - a kind of deadly dread, knowing there is nothing you can do, no way for this to end well... Finally - once again, this is a superbly acted movie - Elizabeth Olsen is first rate - John Hawkes is on hand, bringing his sense of homespun decency to a role that has no decency in it - but that strange, emaciated charisma makes the role that much more powerful. Sarah Paulson too is very good.

The Skin I Live In - 12-15 - Almodovar film, starring Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya as a mad scientist and the woman whose skin he has made... the tale is told all out of order - starts with a woman in a kind of suit, working with fabrics, locked in a room - we meet the doctor who keeps her there - get pieces of the outside of the story - false skin, stronger than real skin, hints of his madness, hints of the woman's resistance to the treatment. Then the maid's son turns up - a crook in a tiger suit - he attacks the woman, rapes her, and the doctor shoots him... That touches off 3 sets of flashbacks - the maid's story about the brothers and the doctor's wife; the doctor's flashback to his daughter's misfortunes; then - another set of flashbacks, to the boy who picked up the daughter at a party, and led to all her troubles - and then to his own. BY this time, the woman with the skin has slept with the doctor - and now we get the whole plot - who the woman is, why she looks like the doctor's wife, why she has been trying to kill herself - the whole shebang. It is, shall we say, a particularly extravagantly absurd plot - but one that bites deep..... It is certainly a first rate bit of filmmaking - Almodovar is a master of the form. It is, in the end, a pure horror film - quintessential horror film - by my pet definition - "the instability of the self - how the self is threatened by forces outside it, that turn out to be somehow inside it - the themes of the Other who is a Double; themes of invasion, especially - loss of bodily integrity, loss of self" - it's about as pure an example as you could ask for. Mad scientists, loss of identity, ghosts in the machine - sexual dysphoria indeed. A very fine film, and one that probably matches all those above in its sense of complete devastation....

Film Festival Follies

I haven't been following the news from Cannes too closely this year - I was on vacation last week, up in the Northeast Kingdom and Upstate NY, with better things to use my spotty network reception for than reading about new Terence Malick films... But it's good to see that some auteurs can be counted on to deliver the goods. I mean of course, Lars von Trier - who made a fool of himself at a press conference (I like Emerson's post - he has video and some context) - though from a man who once cast himself as the "Schmuck of Ages", making a fool of himself seems pretty much standard operating procedure. Unfortunately, the Festival organizers proceeded to top him, making complete asses of themselves by banning him - my, my.

I'm not going to go into much depth on this, but - I'm not sure what of von Trier's remarks could be fairly called "unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity" (as the festival's statement put it.) He used inflammatory words and images - you're always on thin ice cracking wise about Nazis and the holocaust [unless you're making shitty, anti-historical movies about it - fucking Life is Beautiful won a prize!] - but the actual content of what he said doesn't seem all that offensive. Something about discovering that his ancestors were Germans instead of Jews, and referring to Germans as Nazis... something about understanding what Hitler must have felt like in the bunker (related, I imagine, to the fact Von Trier's Melancholia is about the end of the world) - hardly offensive, a bit banal even - we all know Hitler loved dogs and kids!... By that time, (going by the video you can find at Scanners) he seems to have realized he was digging himself in a hole - you get some generalities about the evils of the holocaust, his support for Jews (though not for Israel), an aside on Albert Speer, and finally - well - probably the dumbest punch line you can come up with - "OK, I'm a Nazi." But still - it's a punch line, and bad taste, I'm afraid, isn't quite what I'd call "unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity"....

It's not like he's alone in playing around with Nazi imagery - is there a punk rocker alive who didn't? There's just nothing there in what he said - provocation and posturing at most.... And on that note, I'll leave you with these nice American boys, doing a happy ditty about- something... about as seriously fascist as von Trier, to tell the truth...

Antichrist

It's hard to know exactly what to say about Lars von Trier - people seem to have been writing him off lately. I've been writing him off lately - his 00's films have been generally disappointing - he seems to have been wandering in a wilderness this decade, making films that sound terrible clever, and play like pure cleverness. Antichrist has all the makings of a "provocation" - and delivers, as provocation, I admit it. But also, delivers - something - as a film. It looks fantastic - as all his films do - and it has a decided power.... It has the power to make you want to argue about it, try to come to grips with it - make me argue about it anyway. So here goes...

In some ways, it's a programmatic horror film, though one with the subtexts laid out on the surface. Fear of sex - of birth, of children - death - time, nature - fear of women, of men, the cruelty of men (and women), the ravages of implacable nature, etc. The horror film elements are themselves almost all surface - the cabin in the woods, where the educated folks from the city are assaulted by monsters - the explicit externalization of a theme of the conscious, rational world (self, civilization) under attack by fears, anxieties, the id, all given concrete form. Here, the monster is nature itself - which launches an immediate attack on the characters and never relents. Acorns dropping on the roof like bombs, rain, the grass swallowing them up, animals, dying and rotting, threatening, invading... Of course, the monsters outside soon prove to be inside. The inside/outside dichotomy (which is played out in both the plot itself, in the cabin and out of it, and symbolically) is broken - barriers are permeable - the Other becomes a Double, turns into us. (No one has to sell their soul - it’s already in them, most assuredly.) Of course that - the breaking of barriers between what we are and what we fear, the invasion of our selves, our bodies, minds, everything, by outside forces - and the discovery that what we fear outside is, in fact, already in us - that is another of the horror movie's great themes.... You can add to this great dollops of Tarkovsky’s nature - the elements, water, air, fire, earth - plants and animals, the sky, you name it.... I don’t find the dedication unjustified - the film's absolute reliance on natural imagery, combined with its dedication to the use of nature as a sign of inner states of mind - seems right.

But what really makes the film fascinating is something else. The story itself is, after all, silly - way too obvious, too overdetermined... But it’s Lars von Trier - and he is always thinking about more than the story - not just the inside, but the outside, the form, the way it’s told - and the mechanics of telling - and he makes these things integral to the thematics of the piece. Take the shots of the actors looking directly at the camera - and how often these are linked to reverse shots of those totemic animals. We, the audience - and LVT and crew, the camera, the filmmakers - are in the story - we are like the animals: silent observers, who seem passive but end up driving the story. The characters look out of the screen at us - we are cut back in to the shots, as the animals - who, like us and like Von Trier, are outside the story, outside the world - but somehow drive it.

So - the story is nonsense - though I think that’s quite intentional too. The obviousness of the story, as well as its incoherence, the self-conscious appropriation of every standard horror movie trope, is integral to how it works. None of the story (“real” or even symbolic) really grabs you - but that’s not what von Trier is after. Horror films proper do depend on identification - you are pulled in, to sympathize with someone - though they then manipulate it, the best ones. Indeed, the fluidity of sympathy in horror films is usually central to the best horror films - that permeability of inside and outside, Others and Doubles, that makes the best ones great. Here, that stuff is laid out with the emotional investment of a blog post - the film is completely critical, identification is beside the point.

What it does, though, is invest rather intense energy in its form, as form. What grabs you isn’t the characters or their situations, or even exactly their symbolic significance, their pain, the themes - what grabs you are the images, what you see - the specific details of the actors, their bodies, faces, their voices, the way they move... what you hear... and maybe most of all, how all this is seen, how the film sees it, shows it. The camera work, the angles, the effects - the editing, which as always in von Trier's films is strange, surprising, utterly intriguing.... It’s in the moving camera, say, how von Trier makes sense of it. The wobbly, hand-held style, the look, clearly means to show us a wobbly, indistinct, unstable world - and not exactly in a “metaphorical” way - it gives you the impression that this is what the world looks like. It’s heightened by the effects used - the distorted images, the color manipulation and so on. It creates a world, the world of this film, that is unstable, distorted, unformed, chaotic. It is like a subjective POV (and you can call it that), but it’s separated from the characters - it is invested in the camera, not the characters. It's Von Trier's world - or our world - not the character's world: they are part of the world, they move in it - but they don't generate it, the way characters seem to generate the world in most subjective films...

Another thing I like about Von Trier's use of the moving camera is how he makes you feel the presence of the camera itself - of the camera operator as a person, carrying this thing, moving with it, pointing it at things, taking up space. It makes the physical presence of the camera, the camera crew, etc. part of the content of the film. This is true in almost all his films - even when the camera is put in odd, impersonal places (as in Boss of It All). It is hard to forget about the physical presence of the machines, and the people who operate them, or put them there...

In the end - that interest in the act of telling stories, even in their mechanics, is one of the things that makes von Trier such a compelling figure. He still is, really - not just for the shock value, either. His films are, I suppose, more like critical essays about themselves, than real films - I don't know if that's really a good thing. At his best - Breaking the Waves, the Kingdom - he makes the surface, the story, characters and so on, as interesting and engaging as the critical ideas behind the films (and those films are also very critical.) But everything he does explores the process of making films, telling stories, making sense of the world.... Antichrist, I think, might be his best film in a decade...