Auteurist Roundup Spring '13

I've slipped back into my worst habits in writing about film - that is, not writing about film. Been ages since I have managed as simple a thing as writing up notes on what I've seen lately. This despite seeing some pretty good films this spring. No answer for that put to write a post, so here goes. These are the films by important directors that have come out this spring. Most of them deserve more, but you have to take what you can get...

To the Wonder - 10/15 - good old Terrence Malick. He managed to get this one made in a year or so instead of the usual 8, but the results are basically the same - gorgeous looking, brilliantly edited, but still fluff. He has somehow acquired a reputation for depth and seriousness, though I can never see why. He makes films that look like advertisements - full of gorgeous photography, beautiful people twirling (my god, do they twirl) with their hair and clothes billowing around them, edited to music, the whole thing flowing along as a kind of image of Beauty and Wonder - all that's lacking is a clear product being sold. Though this time, the product seems a bit more obvious than usual - it seems to be the Catholic Church. Okay - for all the snark, the truth is, I rather liked this film - more than anything of his since Days of Heaven. There is a story of sorts - Ben Affleck in Paris meets a Ukrainian woman with a kid, takes them to Oklahoma (I guess it is), where they don't quite settle, she leaves and they scuffle while apart, then she comes back and marries him for the green card, followed by a marriage with its good and bad moments, etc. Javier Bardem, meanwhile, shuffles around visiting the poor and downtrodden, while afflicted by Malick's voiceovers. And somewhere in here, among the fluff, there are some very fine moments, not just the usual nature photography (which is as ravishing as ever), but some almost documentary looking footage of the town, houses and people, of parades and schools, trees and streets and walls. It is at its best in those moments of documentary detail. It is also, like Tree of Life, a bravura editing performance (as is Upstream Color) - how he puts this stuff together is always breathtaking.

Upstream Color - 11/15 - Shane Carruth comes back with another experimental science fiction film. This one has a clear enough plot: a thief raises worms that he feeds with some kind of hallucinagin that lets him form a psychic bond to people; he uses one on a girl, and steals all her money, and somewhat inadvertently ruins her life along the way. When he is done, she wanders off to a man who makes sound recordings, who extracts the worm from her and puts it into a pig - which allows him to have a psychic bond with both the pig and the girl. She gets on with some kind of life and meets another man who seems to share her memory - he's obviously been in the same situation she's in. They fall in love, somewhat uneasily - and in the end find the sampler.... Like To the Wonder, this is largely an exercise in editing - told in a similar elliptical style, with very little dialogue or conventional narrative - but the underlying story is much stronger, and more convincing, and the style fits the story and its themes, its hallucinatory qualities, its blurring of identities. And, I suppose, I just prefer the tone of this to the mysticism Malick deals in. This does not look like an ad.

Beyond the Hills - 13/15 - latest film from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu; in this one, a girl, Alina, comes back to Romania from Germany to join her friend, Viochita; the latter lives in a monastary. Alina's plan is to convince Voichita to go to Germany with her - Voichita does not want to go; she has turned religious. Alina stays, trying to convince her to leave, but she is a bit crazy, and madly in love with Voichita. She has an episode, they put her in the hospital, but she comes back, as everyone thinks she would be better off with friends - but things go from bad to worse. She tries to go to her foster parents, but like Alex' parents in a Clockwork Orange, they have taken in a boarder... so no matter what everyone wants, she keeps landing back at the monastery, where she cracks again, and they have no answers but to try to exorcize her, which goes very very badly.... It is a fairly magnificent film, really - the best by some margin that I have seen this year. It is very complex. I think you could say there are three stories running parallel: the first is the friendship, which is itself rather complicated - Alina loves Voichita, Voichita has changed, moved on - that creates tension, between love, change, loyalty, obsession, and the fact that both of them seem to need help - Alina seems to know this - they are both in trouble, one going crazy, one torturing herself with crackpot religion... Second is a fairly obvious and straightforward religious allegory: Alina comes to the church like Christ in the guise of one who is naked and hungry - she is a test; how will they react? The answer is clear enough - they treat her like Christ himself was treated, literally - rejected, scorned and finally crucified... And finally - there is a diffuse commentary on the world - the film is set in the modern day, but this is hidden at times, and at other, is clearly important in its ambiguity - the fact that things aren't noticeably different than in communist days is probably to the point. We see the poverty and trouble of society; we see hints of the abusive system the girls grew up in. The politics are subtle, and I can't pretend to know what is going on, but it's there....

Spring Breakers - 7/15 - Harmony Korine is back - I don;t know. 4 college girls decide to go on spring break. Having no money they rob a chicken shack. In Florida they are arrested at a party and bailed out by a skeezy rapper played by James Franco who pulls them into crimes - his war against Gucci Mane, a gangster. A couple of the girls go home, starting with Selena Gomez, who's only willing to go so far in sullying her image after all... Two of them stay and go over completely to the rapper's life of crime. After reenacting Wild Things in the pool, they go to kill his rival - Franco goes down, but the girls wipe out Mane's gang and drive away in his convertable. The American Dream! Despite the exploitation story, it's just Korine - fake outrageousness, moralizing, pop culture references, colors, and artsty talkiness, repetitive voiceovers and forced partying. Dumb, pointless, amusing - Franco is fantastic, the girls are indistinguishable (they're all playing Britney Spears one of the actresses says - sounds right - this is Mr. Lonely Part II). It's got a couple scenes - "look at my shit!" - that almost justify its existence, but that's not really enough.

Like Someone In Love - 12/15 - Kiarostami in Japan. Starts with a girl at a bar arguing with someone on the phone, a man who doesn't believe her. Meanwhile she has to go on a date - she is a prostitute - she argues with her boss, saying her grandmother is in town, but it doesn't help. She goes, though she drives by the station looking at the poor old woman standing by a statue waiting to see her.... So she goes to her date, which is with an old man, a translator, who tries to entertain her, but she falls asleep. The next day he gives her a ride to school and there she runs into her boyfriend - who starts talking to the old man... he assumes the old man is her grandfather, and the old man does not deny it. The boy talks about the girl - when she comes back, he offers to fix the man's car (he's a mechanic) - but they run into an old student of the professor. Later -t he girl calls the old man, panicky - he takes her home, and the boyfriend shows up, ranting and raving - it ends with a brick through a window. That's a lot of plot, I suppose, for Kiarostami - though he moves through it in his customary way. It's the details - he's kind of the opposite of Malick and Carruth and their elliptical rush from image to image - he stays put, letting long scenes play out - some dialogue, but some not; some dialogue with two people on screen, sometimes just one side of the conversation - or one side of a confrontation at the end. These are never static - the scenes evolve, characters evolve, relationships are changed and recreated, worlds are filled in behind the scenes. Something like the boyfriend's conversation with the old man - the boy seems threatening at first, but as he talks, seems increasingly harmless. He loves her - he wants to marry her - but he also says, he wants to marry her to control her, so she can't ignore him. This kind of endlessly shifting understanding of the situation is Kiarostami's bread and butter - this might not be as exhilarating as Certified Copy or some fo the Iranian films, but it's still first rank work.

Night Across the Street - 11/15 - the last film by Raul Ruiz, set in Chile. An old man about to retire seems to be living in his head - taking classes with Jean Giono; remembering childhood adventures; politics (Ibanez, a dictator in the 1920s); walking around with Beethoven - or images of talks with Long John Silver... Along with this, there is a kind of radio show, about his memories, and scenes in a boarding house, where a man turns up to kill him, or to be killed by someone else. Everyone ends up shot, I guess, though - the central images - marbles of time - keeps coming back, and certainly animates the events. Lovely little film in any case.

Stoker - 10/15 - Here is Park Chan-wook working in English, with somewhat underwhelming results. It's somewhere between Shadow of a Doubt and a ghost story - a man dies - his brother turns up at his funeral, and soon moves in. The women of the house are Nocole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska, both more than a little mad. In any case, people start dying - Park plays with the idea of the supernatural without committing to it - then, at the end, switching away to a simple serial killer plot, at which point the eyes roll.... Indeed - the script is crap, but Park gets about as much out of it as is humanly possible - and the actors are very entertaining.

Side Effects - 10/15 - A Steven Soderbergh thriller, slickly made, a bit soulless. A woman's husband gets out of jail (for insider trading) - she is depressed and drives her car into a wall. The psychiatrist evaluates her, sends her home, puts her on drugs - she reacts badly, and continues to be erratic and depressed at home - she finally gets to a drug she likes (recommended by her former doctor, Catherine Zeta Jones channeling a bit of Barbara Bel Geddes) - it makes her alert and healthy, but also makes her sleepwalk - but she wants to stay on it... then - she stabs her husband... while sleepwalking. Much trouble for the shrink, fears of malpractice, he loses everything - then he starts to suspect - something is wrong: the old shrink wrote a story about the drug - things happen - names don't match up, the crazy woman quotes Styron, everyone quotes Styron - everyone tries to stop him, but he finally gets her with a placebo truth serum, and slowly traps her, by convincing her that the shrink/lover sold her out. And so - she turns state's witness - then gets arrested herself, and all is well. It is all very slick, but that's about all. I kept trying to remember if this was the plot of that Raul Ruiz film a few years ago - Isn't this the plot of that Raul Ruiz film a few years ago? (Shattered Image) Is it? I don't know. Either way, it's a Hitchcock pastiche that works well enough, is very nicely made, but is a bit flat...

First in from Cannes

The first two films from this year's Cannes festival have made it to Boston, Midnight in Paris and Tree of Life. They may not seem to have much more than playing at Cannes in common, but to me, they are linked - films by auteurs I don't much like. I've written about my troubles with Woody Allen - I could say more. That I was once a fan; that I still love the early, funny ones; that I truly admire his work ethic - making a film a year is an achievement... I wish more of his films were better - though one of the advantages of knocking them out all the time is that you increase your chances of making something good. And so it happened, that breaking my one-every-seven-year pattern, I saw it, and was almost shocked to be rewarded with a perfectly enjoyable film. You've got Owen Wilson in Paris, with Rachel McAdams as his fiance, and her insufferable rich parents, and Michael Sheen in the person of an appalling pedant, and... so poor Gil (that's Wilson) starts wandering the streets alone and night and before long is pulled off into the 1920s to hobnob with his idols and romance imaginary art groupies. Lessons are learned and such (partly through the expedient of going even further back in time), decisions are made, work might be done... The lessons (You Can't Live in the Past, or some such) aren't particularly convincing - the Allen films I've seen lately all seem to be about some kind of renunciation of some kind of pleasure, and getting on with the life you have - but this time, the whole affair is light and off-hand enough to go down without any sourness... It is funny - the caricatures are great - Hemingway talking in Hemingway sentences about Love, and Death, and Honor, and Boxing; Bunuel looking confused and Dali acting the fool.... The modern parts are almost as good, at least when Paul (the pedant) is on screen - the character is very funny and Michael Sheen nails him... And Wilson is his usual enjoyable presence. It's not a great film, in any sense, but it's perfectly fine - funny, handsome looking, sharply performed across the board, a loose, clever, entertainment... I liked it without reservations.

That's not quite the case for Tree of Life. If Woody Allen is a problem (an established auteur with a certain ongoing reputation in some corners of the cinephilic world, who I find almost unwatchable at times), Malick - is a bigger problem. Allen is a bit past his prime - all those films, so many of them mediocre - a lot of people have given up on him. But Malick, knocking out a film every half decade or so (after taking almost 2 decades off), still seems to be the critics' darling. People I like and respect consider his films among the best of the decade! how does that happen?

I do not share that opinion, you may have guessed. And this film - I have been dreading for a long time. I dread it because of his last couple films, neither of which I find particularly good; but I know what he is capable of - and have no intention of risking missing another Badlands (or Days of Heaven, for that matter) - so I would see it, no matter what. And I dread it because it will inspire gushing reports all around the internet, and I was all too sure they would get under my skin - and maybe poison me against the film, more than it deserves. All that came before the film did - now that the film is out - well - no surprises anywhere. The reception, at least among the blogs and writers I tend to follow, is (mostly) rapturous - there are nay-sayers, though more than one of them seem to be aiming at targets beyond Mr. Malick... And the film itself? kind of a bore, really, though the middle part is quite good....

What I guess nags at me the most is the idea that this is some kind of masterpiece, some kind of experimental film - that's the gist of a lot of the praise and complaints. (It's worth noting just how many of the reviewers and commentators mention that Malick once lectured on philosophy (see? I did it too!), as if proving his intellectual bona fides.) But I don't see it - there's nothing experimental about the film, unless making a feature length movie that looks sounds and feels like a mashup of Levis, Louis Vuitton and Latter Day Saints ads is experimental. (And the sad fact is - the Levi's ad had freaking Walt Whitman himself doing the voiceovers! instead of Malick's banalities... it's an ad that couldn't exist without Terence Malick, and at this point, is - except for the quality of the poetry - almost indistinguishable from him.) That complaint, I will say, applies mostly to the frame story - the opening 20 minutes, the end, etc. - the Creation of the Universe stuff isn't quite so bad (it has its own problems, though, especially the nonsense with the dinosaurs) - and the middle part is quite good. It's nicely set up - after another montage of babies being born and growing up (an insurance ad?), Malick lands us at the dinner table one evening, and the plot kicks in and suddenly, you have something worth watching. Better than that, maybe.

It's still montage heavy, still occasionally marred by voiceover (and always stupid voiceover) - but this part is much more engaged - the people resemble human beings, the dialogue, though on the nose, feels closer to true - it feels like memory. The sequence plays as a kind of memory/dream, and is very effective at it. Does some interesting things - the Pitt character is something of a tyrant - or rather, the kids see him as a tyrant - he is strict, he occasionally gets mean (and he plays Bach on a pipe organ like a monster movie villain) - but it’s still odd; he never quite does anything wrong - he seems more sad than cruel. You wonder if Malick is deliberately undercutting the emotional core of the film - this is Jack’s movie - we see his reactions to his father the monster - but don’t see father quite as a monster. Even if it’s not meant quite to undercut the narrator (the implied POV), it certainly seems aimed at giving us a complicated view of the father. The grown son remembering, doubting himself, his memories, his emotions as a kid, and so on. The father emerges as the richest and most interesting character - I suspect that is intentional. (The flip side of this is that the mother never emerges as anything - she is a wet dream, there’s nothing else. She wafts around with no personality or self, just being ethereal and interacting with nature and such. She is more imaginary than the rest of the family.) Anyway - things happen - fights at home, playing with the brothers and other kids, kids die, kids get hurt... There are some key moments - the father going away and freeing the rest of the family for a day or so... Jack's sexual awakening (breaking into a lady's house to - well - masturbate onto her nightgown, right? Malick makes this look as ethereal as the rest - the kid looking to hide the nightgown, then throwing it into the river - but it shouldn't take too much imagination to figure out why he had to hide it....) Not surprisingly, Jack immediately transfers this business onto his mom... (About the only real complaint I have with this section is that it's basically acting out the monologue from "The End" - which Jim Morrison got through in a minute and a half, and it takes Malick an hour...) And then - Dad loses his job and the family has to move - and somewhere in the future, one of the boys dies, and the others suffer.... And Malick cuts away from this memoir to Sean Penn wandering around in deserts and beaches and salt flats to no good end.

So - I'm left with a very split opinion of the film. I wish it were all like the middle part; I found the opening and closing sections inane and dull. The creation stuff - nothing NatGeo doesn't go better... But the middle - isn't stylistically that different from the rest. It's elliptical, it's impressionistic, it's as aestheticized as the beginning and end - but hooking into the story, and into the subjectivity of its originating intelligence, and exploring the washes of memory and impression as it does - is fascinating, engaging, the seeds of a good film.

Movies of the Week

Return to habit, I hope.... Some good ones showing around town this week.

Bubble - *** - most of the buzz about this film is related to its distribution: released into theaters, the internet, and DVD all at the same time. It's an interesting experiment, though this film is not likely to prove much about it. Bubble is a small art film, following three characters who work at a doll factory on the West Virginia/Ohio border, until something happens... It's fiction, but it's barely fiction - it's shot where it's set; the actors are all local residents, playing characters not far from who they are - there's a policeman in the story, played by the local police detective, say. It's slow, attentive to the world it's set in, and when a Plot appears, it comes matter of factly and is resolved matter of factly... It's not going to make a lot of money, however it is distributed - but it is an excellent film. It's ambitious, for all its minimalism - it was shot on DV, but looks magnificent - and might sound better than it looks. There are sequences, for instance at one of the factories where the characters work, where Soderburgh uses ambient sound, tied tot he visuals - every cut is a cut in the sound, the room sound - it gives weight and specificity to the world, the world of work. It is a bit reminiscent of films like Bruno Dumont's L'Humanite, with it's amateur actors, its working class milieu, its emphasis on places - or recent American indie films like The Talent Given Us, or Andrew Bujalski's films. It's been interesting looking at the reviews - Roger Ebert gushes, but other writers (say, Andrew O'Hehir, in Salon) resist, and whine about the miserablism of the film, worry about it's condescension to the poor and beaten down. But how is this film more condescending than Wagner or Bujalski? Sure, the plot, when it gets going, is generic and feels forced - as does some of the symbolism (the doll factory, notably.) But the rest - having people play characters very close to themselves, though not necessarily themselves - in a story - but in a way that looks and feels almost like a documentary - isn't all that different from those urban hipster films. I will say - I think the plot sort of warps the film away from what it might have been. It makes it a genre film, and a less common or believable genre film than if it had turned into a romantic comedy. But that's about the only thing I can find to complain about.

L'Intrus - **** - Claire Denis film that appears to be a masterpiece. Michel Subor lives on the France/Switzerland border with his dogs and guns and an Asian girlfriend. He has a bad heart though, and an estranged son, and he sets out to buy a new heart, and after that, to find another (?) son he left behind in the South Seas. There - he suffers a setback with his health, which seems to have dire consequences. I am not sure, in fact, one can piece together a literal, logical story - one can, however, piece together a very strong, and very logical emotional story. It works on a kind of dream logic - using substitution of characters, situations, images to move the narrative forward - a strategy made more confusing, perhaps (though also more moving) by the style - elliptical, dialogue, driven by images of nature - mountains and trees and the southern oceans.... There is imagery of intrusion throughout - the heart plot (the idea of the transplanted heart as an intruder in Subor's body), Subor's own trek to Tahiti, where he is an intruder; smugglers crossing the border; people breaking into other people's houses, interfering in their lives; the mix of nationalities - French, Swiss, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Tahitian, etc.... Plus imagery of man in nature (and sometimes nature in man's world), and things like burials, swimming, boats in water, lovemaking, all given a decided sense of penetration. It adds up, in the end, to a complete aesthetic experience - where narrative causality is replaced by analogical causality - a flow of related imagery, that carries the story forward.... I have to apologize for the coolness of these remarks, they do no justice to the power of this film. It is, I suppose, a cold film, one that keeps a distance from its characters, freezing them (and us) out - but it is an overwhelming film, strange and haunting.

The New World - ** - So last week, I took some shots at old Terrence - but this week... well, sooner or later I'd have to see it.... The results? It actually started out very well. It comes off like low rent, rather syrupy Werner Herzog - man in nature and meaning it no good, with Wagner on the soundtrack, but prettier and less severe than Herzog. But intriguing. And, again at the beginning, Malick even gets the story told, efficiently, with an effective balance between story and the visuals, the new world, the magnificence of nature and all. Then, John Smith heads up the Chickahominy and is captured by the Indians and Pocahontas saves his life - well. Here, it seems, imagination fails - and all Malick can come up with is a montage of Happy Days Among the Savages, soon further marred by the intrusion of voiceovers, the absolute bane of a Terrence Malick film. And it never quite recovers - it sometimes seems to come into focus for a moment or two, like when Smith returns to the English and sorts things out, or some of the fighting scenes - but mostly, from this point on, it is one long montage sequence, more or less watchable, though with plenty of voiceover. What's probably worst about it is that it is, in the end, pure schlock - doomed love, then the Husband, a kinder, less mythic man... It's not without its heavy handed symbolism, the contrasts between white men and Indians, the way they move, dress, act, and the contrasts between the wild, beautiful untamed world of Virginia, and the grubby words of English cities and the rigid, manicured lawns of the old English manor houses. All of it whacking you in the head.... what can you do?