Public Enemies (Michael Mann, US, 2009) - Not quite full-on art house fare, but definitely not your average shoot-em-up, Public Enemies is something of a conundrum. But it's to Mann's credit that it's an immensely watchable conundrum, one which permits (even encourages) the viewer to get his or her vicarious outlaw thrills while reserving a conspicuous detachment for the reservations of the super-ego. I've lately been interested in a personal retrospective of Mann's work, prompted in no small way by this release and also by the fascinating essay by Matt Zoller Zietz on Musuem of the Moving Image site, but for whatever reason haven't done any re-watching aside from Miami Vice, which is a different ball of wax entirely.
Anyway, I'm convinced that Mann is a serious filmmaker, a dedicated and highly capable auteur, albiet one of occasional lapses in taste. For my money, he errs just a bit too far on the side of commerce, but in these troubled times, we've got to take what we can get, right?
Yes and no. His latest functions almost as an excercise in re-fetishization of gangster-movie tropes - the added crispness of digital technology enhances practically everything, from tommy guns to muzzle flashes, big sleek automobiles, and dark felt. Depp's Dillinger is the quintessential man of action, with just enough charisma held in reserve to make for a damn fine performance. He's got the ratio of mystery to obviousness just right, and he's tons of fun to watch. The rest of the performances are top-notch as well, although Bale's portrayal of Purvis was just a little too mannered for me. Cotillard was near perfect, delivering a three-dimensional character from a bare-bones script that's too reliant on conventional dialogue.
But otherwise, (as has been duly noted elsewhere) the script is remarkably unconventional. It's episodic, with the scenes stacked together with an urgency that is rythmic far more than rational, giving the illusion of narrative propulsion without the substance to hang it on. Instead, we're kept interested entirely through Mann's careful maintenance of mood, and if you're willing to go along with it, it has plenty of rewards in store.
Getting to the question of what, if anything, the film is really about, I have to say I was initially perplexed. I've long felt that Mann's secret strength was the way he contrasted the thrill of the hunt with the loneliness of the kill. That is to say, his films are almost exclusively concerned with driven men, obsessives on a mission (and a very macho one at that), but they achieve an admirable balance by depicting the resultant isolation of such quests. In Mann's universe, the hero's are the stoic seekers, but there's a sense of loss, of regret, over the fact that even when they get what they're looking for, it's never quite what they expected. What begins as a swaggering indiffernce to the trappings of conventional, ordirary life becomes a dead-end in solitude and a longing for what might have been.
That same dynamic is at play here, even in a stripped-down, essentialized form. And this may be the master key to the larger thematic depths (if they are indeed there, I'm still not sure). Much is made of the forget tomorrow, living-for-today ethos that Dillinger espouses. He's almost completely unique in this respect, and ultimately, it's the engine that drives him. All of the other criminals are motivated by other forces - they have long term plans, escape routes, etc. Or, as in the case of Baby Face Nelson, stone cold psychos. The same is true of the law-enforcers, who have goals and ambitions. Dillinger is a Romantic, and in the end, a tragic one. He lives totally, viscerally, in the present. He lives by a code, honoring his friends and punishing those who step out of line, chivalrous to women, and respectful of his adversaries. But he has no regard for the past, expressing breezy indiffernce when Billie remarks that she doesn't even know him (I was raised on a farm...etc.) The point is, for Dillinger, the right now. Even when he expresses some consideration for the future ("The only thing that matters about a man is where he's going..." and "I'm going to die an old man in your arms"), there is a sense that these are just platitudes. Dillinger emphatically has no long-term plans, and his character achieves a necessary depth when some ambivalence about that fact surfaces. The inner conflict isn't really ever developed, but then, this is a film of suggestion and subtley when it comes to metaphysics and character. But it is there, seen when Dillinger is compelled to comfort Frechette and when he remarks, not long before his demise, that "where I'm going I'll have to go a lot farther than Cuba." It seems like maybe Dillinger is smartening up and getting ready to retire, but there's too much deliberate vagueness in such a pronouncement for it to be taken at face value. Dillinger has no interest in running away and living quietly, even for his lovely Billie, and his unwillingness to play it safe is his undoing. He's high on the moment, and for a little bit, so is the audience.
Mann could have gotten more mileage out of such ideas, but the fact that he came this far is impressive and encouraging. There's more work to be done in the hazy zone where big-budget Hollywood and Art meet, but it's nice to know that somebody is there toiling away.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Moaning in the Rain
Damnation - Bela Tarr, Hungary, 1988
There's an undeniable power to the film, and I'm glad I've finally gotten around to checking Tarr out. It had me hooked from the very first image, and I was with it for about 70% of the time. But...I don't know. Something about the unrelenting dreariness just kinda soured on me after a while. I'm not really even sure that Damnation is a pessimistic movie per se; there's such a focus on searching, a defiance of despair that seems simultaneous with an embrace of it...the film becomes a dark but oddly vital meditation on the madness of persisting in a world that seems utterly devoid of hope. But even so, even if one is willing to accept this, the film's oppressivness, the sheer severity of the vision, doesn't sit well with me. I'm willing to accept this as a tempermental thing on my part - I'm so much more impressed with flexibility, nuance, ambiguity, the occasion sprinkling of irony (and there is a bit of that here, a dash of the absurd, but it's a cold and a cruel absurdity, and that's a key difference.) It's a matter of taste, I suppose. Damnation might be a masterpiece, but I'll probably have to see more of Tarr, and revisit this one, before I'm willing to sign off on that idea.
There's a juicy digression waiting to happen about the frought nexus where philosophy and art meet...where cerebration and emotion are thrown together awkwardly, with each one vying for dominance - but that's for another time.
There's an undeniable power to the film, and I'm glad I've finally gotten around to checking Tarr out. It had me hooked from the very first image, and I was with it for about 70% of the time. But...I don't know. Something about the unrelenting dreariness just kinda soured on me after a while. I'm not really even sure that Damnation is a pessimistic movie per se; there's such a focus on searching, a defiance of despair that seems simultaneous with an embrace of it...the film becomes a dark but oddly vital meditation on the madness of persisting in a world that seems utterly devoid of hope. But even so, even if one is willing to accept this, the film's oppressivness, the sheer severity of the vision, doesn't sit well with me. I'm willing to accept this as a tempermental thing on my part - I'm so much more impressed with flexibility, nuance, ambiguity, the occasion sprinkling of irony (and there is a bit of that here, a dash of the absurd, but it's a cold and a cruel absurdity, and that's a key difference.) It's a matter of taste, I suppose. Damnation might be a masterpiece, but I'll probably have to see more of Tarr, and revisit this one, before I'm willing to sign off on that idea.
There's a juicy digression waiting to happen about the frought nexus where philosophy and art meet...where cerebration and emotion are thrown together awkwardly, with each one vying for dominance - but that's for another time.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Too Cool or Not Too Cool
The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, US, 2009)
Being a big fan of the 'Musch since way back, I'm going to hold off on my usual preamble; suffice it to say, hopefully, that when it comes to the still-developing area of my consciousness devoted to cinema, his work has been essential and indelible. If it wasn't for Jarmusch, I may never have become interested in thinking about or making movies.
So what's the deal with his latest work? Much buzz has centered around it being magnificently and maddeningly cool - too cool, apparently, for the likes of many. If cool isn't being thrown around as a pejorative term, it's likely that hip is. These are not auspicious words in today's mainstream lexicon, usually connoting a naive, out-of-touch disposition; the assumption is that there's no better indicator of being un-with-it and lame than if you appear to be trying to be cool and/or hip. There's a good thesis waiting to be written about this current aversion to these terms, and an in-depth unpacking of the terms themselves, but that's quite a bit beyond the scope of this review.
But really, though: If you're complaining that Jarmusch is too hip or too cool, then you've probably been saying that since way back, and this latest one isn't going to change your mind. The Limits of Control is a very cool film indeed, even by Jarmuschian standards. So coolness is intrinsic to the film - to what end is it employed?
DeBankole's character, credited as Lone Man, is a hitman, and as hitmen go, he's about as cool as they come. As anyone who's ever seen a movie will tell you, that's saying something. No sex, no guns, no booze - at least not while he's working. He does permit himself expressos, music, and jaunts to the art museum, but these seem somehow connected to his quest, almost as if they were required steps in his meticulous process.
The level of precision is reflected in the filmmaking itself, which is exceptionally, consummately elegant. The music, cinematography, and editing are expertly orchestrated, and they tick along together Swiss-watch style. If there's one nigh-impossible to deny thing about Jarmusch, it's that he is a great lover of the cinematic image. Here, he's aided by the of Christopher Doyle's visual genius and the brilliant editing of Jay Rabinowitz, and someone of a cynical bent might even be tempted to assert that the credit belongs to J's partners in crime. But that's nonsense - anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Jarmusch's previous work would recognize the director's fingerprints all over the place: long(ish) steady takes, laconic characters, tongue-in-cheek humor, a vibrant and nuanced use of color, cross-cultural synergy and dissonance - it's all there.
But there are other things about it aren't quite the usual fare. For one thing, it's his least-funny movie in a long time. It isn't hard to view pretty much any Jarmusch film as a comedy, albeit one with a bone-dry sense of humor. Even what could arguably be deemed his darkest, Dead Man, has moments of comedy that range from wry to downright wacky. I don't think Control marks anything like a break with that tradition, but it's consistently more serious than his previous couple of films.
The seriousness only goes so far, though; it's much more of a tonal choice than a preoccupation with being on-the-level or direct. Jarmusch has always been a sort of playful filmmaker; his movies have always been most enjoyable when one approaches them in the spirit of fun and mystery, as if each one were it's own little excursion into a waking dream. The state of flux that his characters always seem to exist in is most appreciated if the veiwer is willing to be in that limbo herself - to not expect much in the ways of conclusions or definitions, but to be able to appreciate the sights and sounds for their own sake.
I don't mean that his films are bereft of more serious issues; in their own way, they touch on such heady stuff as loneliness, guilt, death, and the problem of connection in a world of cultural and individual differences. But they do so with subtlety, and they seem to be defiantly opposed to conclusions. The questions posed in Jarmusch's cinema are whispered, and they are never answered.
It's odd, then, that for all of the obliqueness of the film's surface appearance, it's upfront about its thematic concerns. You don't have to do much reading between the lines (or the gestures, as it were) to imagine Lone Man as being a soldier in a surprisingly dichotomous meta-conflict. The two sides of this symbolic war could be called, for lack of better terminology, Creative Culture vs. Square Anti-Culture. Each of the Lone Man's encounters with other operatives consists primarily of a one-sided bull session on a particular form of Art: movies, paintings, music, etc. When the bad guy is finally revealed, he turns out to be a walking, talking stereotype of the Ugly American Businessman - obnxious, condescending, and narrow-minded to the extreme.
Ideologically, then, The Limits of Control is uncomplicated and straightforward. For all of the interest in existentialism, it embraces an unambiguous configuration of the symbolic order of things: there are those in favor of the Imagination, and those against it, and both sides are locked in a perpetual battle with each other. This seems shallow, but only if you forget where Lone Man stands in this cosmology. He appears to be following orders, yes, but he asserts at one point that he's "among no one." One way to look at Lone Man's various encounters is as a series of lectures - to which he listens but doesn't respond. Ultimately, he occupies a kind of middle ground - it's clear he's of the Imaginative bent (when Murray's American demands to know how the fuck he got into the bunker, he responds "I used my imagination") but he also follows his own path, his own rules, his own little idiosyncrasies. This is a man who takes his sweet time.
This doesn't put the film in the realm of moral complexity, though - if it did, we'd have to think a little harder about the fact that Lone Man is, at the end of the day, a professional killer. (Morality is almost always skrited in Jarmusch's films, which doesn't mean they're impervious to moral readings and critiques - Ghost Dog comes to mind as ripe territory for such a discussion.) Choosing then to take it mostly on a symbolic level, I think The Limits of Control is a just-barely-qualified success. I like the fact that it celebrates the very virtues it expresses; aesthetic sophistication, elegance, wit, contemplation, and a measure of seriousness and discipline. That last part is crucial, because it's the world of difference that exists between actual creativity and exression and New Agey indulgence. In this sense, then, the film's unalloyed sincerity actually becomes kind of heroic. In this dark and gloomy world of postmodern skepticism, this film is clear about its sympathies and aspirations. Creativity, Imagination, Human Expressiveness - sense of humor notwithstanding, The Lone Man defends them with deadly seriousness. As should we.
Being a big fan of the 'Musch since way back, I'm going to hold off on my usual preamble; suffice it to say, hopefully, that when it comes to the still-developing area of my consciousness devoted to cinema, his work has been essential and indelible. If it wasn't for Jarmusch, I may never have become interested in thinking about or making movies.
So what's the deal with his latest work? Much buzz has centered around it being magnificently and maddeningly cool - too cool, apparently, for the likes of many. If cool isn't being thrown around as a pejorative term, it's likely that hip is. These are not auspicious words in today's mainstream lexicon, usually connoting a naive, out-of-touch disposition; the assumption is that there's no better indicator of being un-with-it and lame than if you appear to be trying to be cool and/or hip. There's a good thesis waiting to be written about this current aversion to these terms, and an in-depth unpacking of the terms themselves, but that's quite a bit beyond the scope of this review.
But really, though: If you're complaining that Jarmusch is too hip or too cool, then you've probably been saying that since way back, and this latest one isn't going to change your mind. The Limits of Control is a very cool film indeed, even by Jarmuschian standards. So coolness is intrinsic to the film - to what end is it employed?
DeBankole's character, credited as Lone Man, is a hitman, and as hitmen go, he's about as cool as they come. As anyone who's ever seen a movie will tell you, that's saying something. No sex, no guns, no booze - at least not while he's working. He does permit himself expressos, music, and jaunts to the art museum, but these seem somehow connected to his quest, almost as if they were required steps in his meticulous process.
The level of precision is reflected in the filmmaking itself, which is exceptionally, consummately elegant. The music, cinematography, and editing are expertly orchestrated, and they tick along together Swiss-watch style. If there's one nigh-impossible to deny thing about Jarmusch, it's that he is a great lover of the cinematic image. Here, he's aided by the of Christopher Doyle's visual genius and the brilliant editing of Jay Rabinowitz, and someone of a cynical bent might even be tempted to assert that the credit belongs to J's partners in crime. But that's nonsense - anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Jarmusch's previous work would recognize the director's fingerprints all over the place: long(ish) steady takes, laconic characters, tongue-in-cheek humor, a vibrant and nuanced use of color, cross-cultural synergy and dissonance - it's all there.
But there are other things about it aren't quite the usual fare. For one thing, it's his least-funny movie in a long time. It isn't hard to view pretty much any Jarmusch film as a comedy, albeit one with a bone-dry sense of humor. Even what could arguably be deemed his darkest, Dead Man, has moments of comedy that range from wry to downright wacky. I don't think Control marks anything like a break with that tradition, but it's consistently more serious than his previous couple of films.
The seriousness only goes so far, though; it's much more of a tonal choice than a preoccupation with being on-the-level or direct. Jarmusch has always been a sort of playful filmmaker; his movies have always been most enjoyable when one approaches them in the spirit of fun and mystery, as if each one were it's own little excursion into a waking dream. The state of flux that his characters always seem to exist in is most appreciated if the veiwer is willing to be in that limbo herself - to not expect much in the ways of conclusions or definitions, but to be able to appreciate the sights and sounds for their own sake.
I don't mean that his films are bereft of more serious issues; in their own way, they touch on such heady stuff as loneliness, guilt, death, and the problem of connection in a world of cultural and individual differences. But they do so with subtlety, and they seem to be defiantly opposed to conclusions. The questions posed in Jarmusch's cinema are whispered, and they are never answered.
It's odd, then, that for all of the obliqueness of the film's surface appearance, it's upfront about its thematic concerns. You don't have to do much reading between the lines (or the gestures, as it were) to imagine Lone Man as being a soldier in a surprisingly dichotomous meta-conflict. The two sides of this symbolic war could be called, for lack of better terminology, Creative Culture vs. Square Anti-Culture. Each of the Lone Man's encounters with other operatives consists primarily of a one-sided bull session on a particular form of Art: movies, paintings, music, etc. When the bad guy is finally revealed, he turns out to be a walking, talking stereotype of the Ugly American Businessman - obnxious, condescending, and narrow-minded to the extreme.
Ideologically, then, The Limits of Control is uncomplicated and straightforward. For all of the interest in existentialism, it embraces an unambiguous configuration of the symbolic order of things: there are those in favor of the Imagination, and those against it, and both sides are locked in a perpetual battle with each other. This seems shallow, but only if you forget where Lone Man stands in this cosmology. He appears to be following orders, yes, but he asserts at one point that he's "among no one." One way to look at Lone Man's various encounters is as a series of lectures - to which he listens but doesn't respond. Ultimately, he occupies a kind of middle ground - it's clear he's of the Imaginative bent (when Murray's American demands to know how the fuck he got into the bunker, he responds "I used my imagination") but he also follows his own path, his own rules, his own little idiosyncrasies. This is a man who takes his sweet time.
This doesn't put the film in the realm of moral complexity, though - if it did, we'd have to think a little harder about the fact that Lone Man is, at the end of the day, a professional killer. (Morality is almost always skrited in Jarmusch's films, which doesn't mean they're impervious to moral readings and critiques - Ghost Dog comes to mind as ripe territory for such a discussion.) Choosing then to take it mostly on a symbolic level, I think The Limits of Control is a just-barely-qualified success. I like the fact that it celebrates the very virtues it expresses; aesthetic sophistication, elegance, wit, contemplation, and a measure of seriousness and discipline. That last part is crucial, because it's the world of difference that exists between actual creativity and exression and New Agey indulgence. In this sense, then, the film's unalloyed sincerity actually becomes kind of heroic. In this dark and gloomy world of postmodern skepticism, this film is clear about its sympathies and aspirations. Creativity, Imagination, Human Expressiveness - sense of humor notwithstanding, The Lone Man defends them with deadly seriousness. As should we.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Dumont, Duality, and Other Conundrums
Flandres - (Bruno Dumont, France, 2006)
Is there any filmmaker working today as bewitching and befuddling and obstinately French as Bruno Dumont? On the one hand, his work is as unique and ambitious as any in contemporary cinema; on the other, his films seem to espouse a worldview so fatalistic and harsh that the viewer can't help but wonder if Dumont is a) borderline crazy, b) full blown crazy, or c)putting us on. It's a vision of reality in which sudden, lethal violence lurks around every corner; in which the human capacity for callousness and brutality is unlimited and just barely concealed beneath the surface.
This constant threat of menace isn't all there is to life, though - there is also, always, solitude. Dumont's characters are loners, and they are often inarticulate loners. When they do converse it doesn't go far beyond the usual quotidian patter. What they lack in speech they more than make up for in sex; a good portion of screen time in any Dumont film is devoted to the characters' scoring. Getting regularly laid, though, doesn't seem to make them much happier, leaving the American viewer more than a little deflated. If sex and violence don't get these people off, then what does?
So there you have the basic ingredients for the disaffected, cigarette smoking, black-sunglasses-and-beret brand of Continental pessimism. La vie, she is empty and meaningless, no? Except that with Dumont, it's not that simple, or it least doesn't appear to be. What makes Dumont a special case is the inclusion of a kind of furtive mysticism - at first glace, it's barely there, but when you pick up on the cues, you realize it's everywhere. It's almost transcendental - the way he hangs on a characters face, or highlights their posture or stride, the constant juxtaposition of figure and landscape. This alone isn't really new; Bresson, Dreyer, and several others have used the same kind of spooky gaze (of the camera and it's subjects), and there's a whole new generation of filmmakers carrying the torch (Pedro Costa, Carlos Reygadas, Lucretia Martel, et al.) But Dumont ups the spiritual ante by providing some details that can only be understood as supernatural. I'm thinking in particular of the shot of Pharoan (in Humanite) levitating - his feet floating a few inches off the ground, and there's a similar echo in Flandres, when Barbe stands on her tippy-toes and appears to be attempting a similar supra-terrestrial stunt. This is following a sequence in which she claims to have been with Andre, her simpleminded paramour and the co-protagonist of the film, as he raped and killed peasants and ultimately left his companion for dead.
This makes for confusing stuff, since the rest of the film appears to be so staunchly realist. But it's very carefully constructed, and one needn't re-watch the film to see how meticulously Dumont has set up some of these little reveals. All it really takes is a little post-screening reflection to realize how the cross-cutting served to construct a kind of extra-dimensional connection between the characters and their respective milieux. It's been there all along - the back and forth between the lush green of Flandres and the harsh browns and reds of the unnamed (but clearly Middle-Eastern, and likely Iraq) desert locale where Andre is serving, and the escalation of violence - for Andre, killings and a rape, for Barbe, a sudden nervous breakdown.
So what, then, is really going on with this vision? Typically, Dumont is tight-lipped about personal interpretations of his films, but I think he lets his hand show more than he's aware. There's something covertly humane about his pictures, a suggestion that while violence and despair are never far, neither then is hope and redemption. This balancing act, when properly considered, can be seen as either deft or brazenly pedantic, and I'm still not sure where I stand on the matter.
The central dynamic is the resonance of human traits - they are inescapable, but largely hidden from view. War is petty rivalry writ large. Casual sex is the square root of brutal rape. Loneliness the only universal constant; it's in the hollow eyes of the characters and it reverberates through every landscape. We don't see tenderness in Dumont's films, really, but we do see the beginnings of tenderness - and in those beginnings lie the hope that sustains life.
This, at least, works in Humanite. To a large extent, that film's success had to do with it being possibly the most perfectly-cast film of the decade. But ultimately it was more than that - the Dumontian signature mood of dread was somehow leavened by the frequently ecastatic compostions and surefooted rythmn - its mystery seemed to gently suggest an underlying sacredness, even in the most awful things. You could question Dumont's apprent philosophy and still appreciate the nuance in his craft.
Likewise, in Flanders, casting proves to be a make-or-break condition. Here it doesn't fly; Samuel Boidin doesn't have nearly the same kind of arresting countenance as Emmanuelle Schotte. But here again, that doesn't get to the heart of the problem. Too often, it appears that Dumont's method is exposing the limits of his ideas. A filmmaker can only present us with shots of brutality, sex, and hollow eyes for so long before we begin to recognize a paucity of ideas. The insistence on certain tropes begins to resemble harping, and Dumont's obsession with the duality of humanity is reaching the limits of his cinematic inventiveness. His previously dextrous probing of the yin-and-yang is becoming clumsy and slipshod. Andre is a brute, but also a gentle, contemplative man. Barbe's outward behavior is that of an unbalanced hussy, but she's also saintlike in her sensitivity to suffering (she even seems capable of percieving it from across a continent.)
Here I could digress into an examination of the creepy class-bias and condescension evident in Flandres, but that's a stickier and less-pressing issue at the moment. This would also probably be a good opportunity to discuss my own feelings about the problematic friction between the pretensions to realism and the utter lack of naturalistic plausibility - in behavior, events, and so forth - but that's a whole other wheel of cheese and a bit beyond the current case at hand, and anyway, that has more to do with my own aesthetic tastes than it does with objection to this film. I will note, however, that this was pitfall largely avoided in Humanite, and even somewhat in Twentynine Palms.
So it's not the end of the world - Dumont has been mired in the muck of Flanders - worse things could happen. In the spirit of his films, I'm willing to keep an unblinking eye trained on his future efforts. It remains to be seen if Dumont can wring new life from his exacting methods and obsessions, and I eagerly await his next film.
Is there any filmmaker working today as bewitching and befuddling and obstinately French as Bruno Dumont? On the one hand, his work is as unique and ambitious as any in contemporary cinema; on the other, his films seem to espouse a worldview so fatalistic and harsh that the viewer can't help but wonder if Dumont is a) borderline crazy, b) full blown crazy, or c)putting us on. It's a vision of reality in which sudden, lethal violence lurks around every corner; in which the human capacity for callousness and brutality is unlimited and just barely concealed beneath the surface.
This constant threat of menace isn't all there is to life, though - there is also, always, solitude. Dumont's characters are loners, and they are often inarticulate loners. When they do converse it doesn't go far beyond the usual quotidian patter. What they lack in speech they more than make up for in sex; a good portion of screen time in any Dumont film is devoted to the characters' scoring. Getting regularly laid, though, doesn't seem to make them much happier, leaving the American viewer more than a little deflated. If sex and violence don't get these people off, then what does?
So there you have the basic ingredients for the disaffected, cigarette smoking, black-sunglasses-and-beret brand of Continental pessimism. La vie, she is empty and meaningless, no? Except that with Dumont, it's not that simple, or it least doesn't appear to be. What makes Dumont a special case is the inclusion of a kind of furtive mysticism - at first glace, it's barely there, but when you pick up on the cues, you realize it's everywhere. It's almost transcendental - the way he hangs on a characters face, or highlights their posture or stride, the constant juxtaposition of figure and landscape. This alone isn't really new; Bresson, Dreyer, and several others have used the same kind of spooky gaze (of the camera and it's subjects), and there's a whole new generation of filmmakers carrying the torch (Pedro Costa, Carlos Reygadas, Lucretia Martel, et al.) But Dumont ups the spiritual ante by providing some details that can only be understood as supernatural. I'm thinking in particular of the shot of Pharoan (in Humanite) levitating - his feet floating a few inches off the ground, and there's a similar echo in Flandres, when Barbe stands on her tippy-toes and appears to be attempting a similar supra-terrestrial stunt. This is following a sequence in which she claims to have been with Andre, her simpleminded paramour and the co-protagonist of the film, as he raped and killed peasants and ultimately left his companion for dead.
This makes for confusing stuff, since the rest of the film appears to be so staunchly realist. But it's very carefully constructed, and one needn't re-watch the film to see how meticulously Dumont has set up some of these little reveals. All it really takes is a little post-screening reflection to realize how the cross-cutting served to construct a kind of extra-dimensional connection between the characters and their respective milieux. It's been there all along - the back and forth between the lush green of Flandres and the harsh browns and reds of the unnamed (but clearly Middle-Eastern, and likely Iraq) desert locale where Andre is serving, and the escalation of violence - for Andre, killings and a rape, for Barbe, a sudden nervous breakdown.
So what, then, is really going on with this vision? Typically, Dumont is tight-lipped about personal interpretations of his films, but I think he lets his hand show more than he's aware. There's something covertly humane about his pictures, a suggestion that while violence and despair are never far, neither then is hope and redemption. This balancing act, when properly considered, can be seen as either deft or brazenly pedantic, and I'm still not sure where I stand on the matter.
The central dynamic is the resonance of human traits - they are inescapable, but largely hidden from view. War is petty rivalry writ large. Casual sex is the square root of brutal rape. Loneliness the only universal constant; it's in the hollow eyes of the characters and it reverberates through every landscape. We don't see tenderness in Dumont's films, really, but we do see the beginnings of tenderness - and in those beginnings lie the hope that sustains life.
This, at least, works in Humanite. To a large extent, that film's success had to do with it being possibly the most perfectly-cast film of the decade. But ultimately it was more than that - the Dumontian signature mood of dread was somehow leavened by the frequently ecastatic compostions and surefooted rythmn - its mystery seemed to gently suggest an underlying sacredness, even in the most awful things. You could question Dumont's apprent philosophy and still appreciate the nuance in his craft.
Likewise, in Flanders, casting proves to be a make-or-break condition. Here it doesn't fly; Samuel Boidin doesn't have nearly the same kind of arresting countenance as Emmanuelle Schotte. But here again, that doesn't get to the heart of the problem. Too often, it appears that Dumont's method is exposing the limits of his ideas. A filmmaker can only present us with shots of brutality, sex, and hollow eyes for so long before we begin to recognize a paucity of ideas. The insistence on certain tropes begins to resemble harping, and Dumont's obsession with the duality of humanity is reaching the limits of his cinematic inventiveness. His previously dextrous probing of the yin-and-yang is becoming clumsy and slipshod. Andre is a brute, but also a gentle, contemplative man. Barbe's outward behavior is that of an unbalanced hussy, but she's also saintlike in her sensitivity to suffering (she even seems capable of percieving it from across a continent.)
Here I could digress into an examination of the creepy class-bias and condescension evident in Flandres, but that's a stickier and less-pressing issue at the moment. This would also probably be a good opportunity to discuss my own feelings about the problematic friction between the pretensions to realism and the utter lack of naturalistic plausibility - in behavior, events, and so forth - but that's a whole other wheel of cheese and a bit beyond the current case at hand, and anyway, that has more to do with my own aesthetic tastes than it does with objection to this film. I will note, however, that this was pitfall largely avoided in Humanite, and even somewhat in Twentynine Palms.
So it's not the end of the world - Dumont has been mired in the muck of Flanders - worse things could happen. In the spirit of his films, I'm willing to keep an unblinking eye trained on his future efforts. It remains to be seen if Dumont can wring new life from his exacting methods and obsessions, and I eagerly await his next film.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Stains and Other Things Human
l'Humanite (Bruno Dumont, France, 1999)
I'm still collecting my thoughts from the recent viewing of Bruno Dumont's l'Humanite, as excellent and as unsettling a film as I've seen since the calendar rolled over.
That unsettling part seems to be something of a trademark of Dumont's, whose Twentynine Palms also managed to induce no small amount of squirming, and even a couple of big jumps, which is much more than I can say for any putative horror film I've seen in a great while. TP was genuinely shocking in the truest sense of the word - I did not see the film's final events coming, and when they did I was suddenly bewildered and, well - completely unsettled.
In and of itself, this is an accomplishment for a contemporary filmmaker. I should state here that I'm not, nor have I ever been, a serious fan of the horror genre, domestic or otherwise, but I get the sense that I don't really need to see films like, say, the Saw franchise to understand exactly what they're on about, and what is contained therein. The label that's often applied is "torture porn," and really - what more could one want or need to know?
This is something of a not-entirely fair and dismissive argument, but I don't mind making it about films that are as blatantly mass-produced and cynically manipulative as The Hills Have Eyes and its ilk.
That being said, my mini-point is that Dumont, with Twentynine Palms, managed to make something that was truly scary in that it compelled its viewer to ask some unpleasant questions about the world, and maybe himself. It's a further accomplishment that the film also manages to be clever and atmospheric and occasionally beautiful, that is: it's an existential horror flick that is ultimately about more than just arbitrary violence and underlying emptiness - there's quite a bit of humanity (carefully observed human behavior, if you will) - in a film that could easily come across as overly dry and didactic.
I consider this to be difficult to do, since I have a fairly low tolerance for films featuring a cool, detached, existential dread, which seem to be a specialty of the French. My main counterpoint would be Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, which was too overdetermined and heavy on the audience-brutalizing for my tastes.
But I digress. l'Humanite is a much richer and deeper film than TP, and is undeniably a masterful work. It's sequence of events (it would be a stretch to call it a story) follows one Pharaon De Winter, a provincial police superintendent who is both profoundly empathic and none too bright. An eleven year old girl has been found raped and murdered in Pharaon's bucolic country town, and he's charged with finding the responsible party. Rather than focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of most police procedurals, we are instead treated to a tour of Pharaon's gloomy little corner of existence. He lives with his mother. He used to have a woman and a kid, but they're gone, possibly dead. He spends most of his free time tagging along with his sultry neighbor Domino and her boyfriend, and when he's not with them or lying in bed awake and staring at the wallpaper, he's over at the allotment, tending to his flowers. Domino, who's pretty in a sort of rough-hewn way and has an earthy sex appeal, seems to have a thing for Pharaon, and he clearly is in love with her. It's not obvious why he continues to torture himself by accompanying the couple on their various jaunts and listless exploits, but then, nothing about these characters is obvious other than their sweaty, rumpled, searching humanity.
Right away it's implied that Pharaon himself is guilty of the crime. The movie never tells us for sure, and the final shots are limit-pushing in their ambiguity, but of course it's of the essence that we're left with a feeling of uncertainty in a film like this. See, Pharaon is that special kind of hero - mysterious, a little creepy, but also childlike and teeming with barely-contained emotion. It's been said that acting is all in the eyes, and that a performance is all in the casting, and Emmanual Schotte, a nonprofessional actor, would seem here to provide irrefutable proof of those two maxims. He's got a face that seems to be capable of conveying the kind of boundlessly pure feeling that you usually only find on the mugs of dogs, and Dumont fully exploits it.
The other actors are almost as equally sublime in their ability to speak volumes through simple facial expression - the kind of reality that "real" actors spend their whole lives attempting to master. In a parallel universe, this technique of casting based upon look would be too elementary to question, but here it flies directly in the face of the theatrical tradition of acting craft, which cinema has on loan and may never decide to return. Bresson is perhaps the most famous employer of such a method - find a person who looks right, and then ask them to do very little, and forbid them to act, while the camera soaks up there pure unvarnished realness.
Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't - it's by no means axiomatic that using a nonactor will make a character any more real than using a seasoned professional. A nonactor's performance, or lack thereof, can make for beautifully observed cinema, but it can also be just as stagy and artificial and false as a hyperbolic scenery-chewer from an accomplished Actor. Bresson got away with more than he probably should have with this technique, but he understood its intricacies well and frequently used them to great effect. Here, it pays off in spades - the behavior is believable and feels right more often than not, even when the focus is clearly not on psychology or character, which is most of the time.
So what's it all about, then, in the end? Is Pharaon, who at times borders on saintliness, a rapist and a murderer? Or is Joseph, Domino's lout of a boyfriend, the guilty party? Maybe neither? If Dumont is interested in having a point, it might be that the assignment of guilt is an illusory crutch in the face of the world's evil. For all of the naturalism in this movie, it has the feel of a cinematic parable, with the camera giving special attention to specific images and motifs - genitals, sweat, trees, hills, mud, grass, flowers in bloom, and a profusion of faces and eyes. I appreciate this perhaps most of all about Dumont's aesthetic - it has gravitas and elegant beauty - at times, an almost minimalistic lyricism, but it's also accurate (if oblique) in its depiction of human behavior. Somehow he's managed to bridge the gap between being too laboriously symbolic and capturing believable human behavior - I would very much appreciate access to the formula he's using, thank you very much.
But I'm not sure that the point of this film is that it has a point - it's invested in a search first and foremost: an honest confrontation with the real world, and a meditation on all of its aching beauty and horrifying ugliness. There are times at which Pharaon comes to resemble a religious archetype - the spiritual seeker - a pure soul, hopelessly innocent and yet damaged, casting an imploring stare in the face of existence. All the same, it is entirely possible to read the character as one wrestling with his conscience over a very real and very terrible crime that he committed - even as he attempts to fantasize away his guilt.
To pack all of this into a single film, and to make the finish product work at all, is a major accomplishment indeed, and my hat is off to Dumont for doing so. If it's perhaps a touch too ambiguous or enigmatic, I'm willing to forgive the trespass in the name of ambition. We need more movies that set their aim so high.
I'm still collecting my thoughts from the recent viewing of Bruno Dumont's l'Humanite, as excellent and as unsettling a film as I've seen since the calendar rolled over.
That unsettling part seems to be something of a trademark of Dumont's, whose Twentynine Palms also managed to induce no small amount of squirming, and even a couple of big jumps, which is much more than I can say for any putative horror film I've seen in a great while. TP was genuinely shocking in the truest sense of the word - I did not see the film's final events coming, and when they did I was suddenly bewildered and, well - completely unsettled.
In and of itself, this is an accomplishment for a contemporary filmmaker. I should state here that I'm not, nor have I ever been, a serious fan of the horror genre, domestic or otherwise, but I get the sense that I don't really need to see films like, say, the Saw franchise to understand exactly what they're on about, and what is contained therein. The label that's often applied is "torture porn," and really - what more could one want or need to know?
This is something of a not-entirely fair and dismissive argument, but I don't mind making it about films that are as blatantly mass-produced and cynically manipulative as The Hills Have Eyes and its ilk.
That being said, my mini-point is that Dumont, with Twentynine Palms, managed to make something that was truly scary in that it compelled its viewer to ask some unpleasant questions about the world, and maybe himself. It's a further accomplishment that the film also manages to be clever and atmospheric and occasionally beautiful, that is: it's an existential horror flick that is ultimately about more than just arbitrary violence and underlying emptiness - there's quite a bit of humanity (carefully observed human behavior, if you will) - in a film that could easily come across as overly dry and didactic.
I consider this to be difficult to do, since I have a fairly low tolerance for films featuring a cool, detached, existential dread, which seem to be a specialty of the French. My main counterpoint would be Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, which was too overdetermined and heavy on the audience-brutalizing for my tastes.
But I digress. l'Humanite is a much richer and deeper film than TP, and is undeniably a masterful work. It's sequence of events (it would be a stretch to call it a story) follows one Pharaon De Winter, a provincial police superintendent who is both profoundly empathic and none too bright. An eleven year old girl has been found raped and murdered in Pharaon's bucolic country town, and he's charged with finding the responsible party. Rather than focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of most police procedurals, we are instead treated to a tour of Pharaon's gloomy little corner of existence. He lives with his mother. He used to have a woman and a kid, but they're gone, possibly dead. He spends most of his free time tagging along with his sultry neighbor Domino and her boyfriend, and when he's not with them or lying in bed awake and staring at the wallpaper, he's over at the allotment, tending to his flowers. Domino, who's pretty in a sort of rough-hewn way and has an earthy sex appeal, seems to have a thing for Pharaon, and he clearly is in love with her. It's not obvious why he continues to torture himself by accompanying the couple on their various jaunts and listless exploits, but then, nothing about these characters is obvious other than their sweaty, rumpled, searching humanity.
Right away it's implied that Pharaon himself is guilty of the crime. The movie never tells us for sure, and the final shots are limit-pushing in their ambiguity, but of course it's of the essence that we're left with a feeling of uncertainty in a film like this. See, Pharaon is that special kind of hero - mysterious, a little creepy, but also childlike and teeming with barely-contained emotion. It's been said that acting is all in the eyes, and that a performance is all in the casting, and Emmanual Schotte, a nonprofessional actor, would seem here to provide irrefutable proof of those two maxims. He's got a face that seems to be capable of conveying the kind of boundlessly pure feeling that you usually only find on the mugs of dogs, and Dumont fully exploits it.
The other actors are almost as equally sublime in their ability to speak volumes through simple facial expression - the kind of reality that "real" actors spend their whole lives attempting to master. In a parallel universe, this technique of casting based upon look would be too elementary to question, but here it flies directly in the face of the theatrical tradition of acting craft, which cinema has on loan and may never decide to return. Bresson is perhaps the most famous employer of such a method - find a person who looks right, and then ask them to do very little, and forbid them to act, while the camera soaks up there pure unvarnished realness.
Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't - it's by no means axiomatic that using a nonactor will make a character any more real than using a seasoned professional. A nonactor's performance, or lack thereof, can make for beautifully observed cinema, but it can also be just as stagy and artificial and false as a hyperbolic scenery-chewer from an accomplished Actor. Bresson got away with more than he probably should have with this technique, but he understood its intricacies well and frequently used them to great effect. Here, it pays off in spades - the behavior is believable and feels right more often than not, even when the focus is clearly not on psychology or character, which is most of the time.
So what's it all about, then, in the end? Is Pharaon, who at times borders on saintliness, a rapist and a murderer? Or is Joseph, Domino's lout of a boyfriend, the guilty party? Maybe neither? If Dumont is interested in having a point, it might be that the assignment of guilt is an illusory crutch in the face of the world's evil. For all of the naturalism in this movie, it has the feel of a cinematic parable, with the camera giving special attention to specific images and motifs - genitals, sweat, trees, hills, mud, grass, flowers in bloom, and a profusion of faces and eyes. I appreciate this perhaps most of all about Dumont's aesthetic - it has gravitas and elegant beauty - at times, an almost minimalistic lyricism, but it's also accurate (if oblique) in its depiction of human behavior. Somehow he's managed to bridge the gap between being too laboriously symbolic and capturing believable human behavior - I would very much appreciate access to the formula he's using, thank you very much.
But I'm not sure that the point of this film is that it has a point - it's invested in a search first and foremost: an honest confrontation with the real world, and a meditation on all of its aching beauty and horrifying ugliness. There are times at which Pharaon comes to resemble a religious archetype - the spiritual seeker - a pure soul, hopelessly innocent and yet damaged, casting an imploring stare in the face of existence. All the same, it is entirely possible to read the character as one wrestling with his conscience over a very real and very terrible crime that he committed - even as he attempts to fantasize away his guilt.
To pack all of this into a single film, and to make the finish product work at all, is a major accomplishment indeed, and my hat is off to Dumont for doing so. If it's perhaps a touch too ambiguous or enigmatic, I'm willing to forgive the trespass in the name of ambition. We need more movies that set their aim so high.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Hating on Main Street
Now that I've said a bunch of nice things about some of the movies I've seen this year, I thought for balance's sake that I'd put a some hurting on one that I thought was a real stinker:
Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, US, 2008)
A lot of stuff and nonsense. I ended up lending all of my available empathy to the actors, who toiled admirably in spite of a bogus script and seriously inept direction. (In plenty of scenes, Kate was still a joy to watch despite the cringe-worthiness of the material; Leo fared worse, with his proclivity for easy tics and stock gestures abetted by Mendes.)
It’s a very pretty film; the cinematography, editing, and music are mostly excellent, but that’s about as much goodwill as I’m willing to expend on this turkey. The central, overriding and positively indefensible flaw is this: the thematic conceit is a bunch of bullshit. The film posits itself as being wise, insightful and maybe even subversive, but it ends up supporting the same ridiculous dichotomies embraced by the characters - namely, that in America, one can (and must) choose between the mindless, sterile existence of mainstream suburbia, or flee the bourgeois sham and thrive, "y'know, really feel things" in the Utopia of Europe (specifically Paris). I don’t think the filmmakers believe this, but that’s the reality the film presents, and it's as bogus and simplistic as a chest-thumping Michael Bay pageant.
RR is so unselfconsciously enamored of its own tragic weight that it ends up feeling, more than anything else, bizarre. Lines are uttered with a stagy crispness that feels almost Brechtian, except here it's meant to be dramatic, not distancing. (Eg: the line "I felt that way once. pregnant pause The first time I made love to you" is delivered with a kind of trance-like conviction.) There are occasional bits of coherence that emerge from the script, and a couple flashes of realistic human behavior - such as when DiCaprio and the underutilized Zoe Kazan share a boozy afternoon tryst - but mostly the clunkers and head-scratchers keep piling up, with incresingly strange results.
The weirdness reaches its apogee with ultimate pseudo-canonization of the Wheelers, suggesting the audience take them as tragic unsung heroes/dreamers, and who were at least less hypocritical than all the other pathetic suburbanites. This is confirmed by the last couple of scenes, where the still-shaken neighbors agree to forget the Wheelers and the uncomfortable truth they represented, and the bizarre final shot where the old codger tunes out his wife as she drones on about how the Wheelers were really just odd troublemakers.
Finally, although finely acted, the Michael Shannon part was perhaps the biggest bucket of hogwash slung in the entire film. It further endorses the notion that all mainstream life is intrinsically vapid, empty, hopeless, etc. – and that the only way to really see and understand this truth is to be bulging- eyeball insane. We're meant to understand that Frank and Susan don’t really see the depths of the Dark Truth about bourgeois life in the fifties; if they did, they would also be getting multiple rounds of electroshock therapy. Do Mendes and Co. really not think that audiences are going to see through this condescension and, justifiably so, get pissed off?
Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, US, 2008)
A lot of stuff and nonsense. I ended up lending all of my available empathy to the actors, who toiled admirably in spite of a bogus script and seriously inept direction. (In plenty of scenes, Kate was still a joy to watch despite the cringe-worthiness of the material; Leo fared worse, with his proclivity for easy tics and stock gestures abetted by Mendes.)
It’s a very pretty film; the cinematography, editing, and music are mostly excellent, but that’s about as much goodwill as I’m willing to expend on this turkey. The central, overriding and positively indefensible flaw is this: the thematic conceit is a bunch of bullshit. The film posits itself as being wise, insightful and maybe even subversive, but it ends up supporting the same ridiculous dichotomies embraced by the characters - namely, that in America, one can (and must) choose between the mindless, sterile existence of mainstream suburbia, or flee the bourgeois sham and thrive, "y'know, really feel things" in the Utopia of Europe (specifically Paris). I don’t think the filmmakers believe this, but that’s the reality the film presents, and it's as bogus and simplistic as a chest-thumping Michael Bay pageant.
RR is so unselfconsciously enamored of its own tragic weight that it ends up feeling, more than anything else, bizarre. Lines are uttered with a stagy crispness that feels almost Brechtian, except here it's meant to be dramatic, not distancing. (Eg: the line "I felt that way once. pregnant pause The first time I made love to you" is delivered with a kind of trance-like conviction.) There are occasional bits of coherence that emerge from the script, and a couple flashes of realistic human behavior - such as when DiCaprio and the underutilized Zoe Kazan share a boozy afternoon tryst - but mostly the clunkers and head-scratchers keep piling up, with incresingly strange results.
The weirdness reaches its apogee with ultimate pseudo-canonization of the Wheelers, suggesting the audience take them as tragic unsung heroes/dreamers, and who were at least less hypocritical than all the other pathetic suburbanites. This is confirmed by the last couple of scenes, where the still-shaken neighbors agree to forget the Wheelers and the uncomfortable truth they represented, and the bizarre final shot where the old codger tunes out his wife as she drones on about how the Wheelers were really just odd troublemakers.
Finally, although finely acted, the Michael Shannon part was perhaps the biggest bucket of hogwash slung in the entire film. It further endorses the notion that all mainstream life is intrinsically vapid, empty, hopeless, etc. – and that the only way to really see and understand this truth is to be bulging- eyeball insane. We're meant to understand that Frank and Susan don’t really see the depths of the Dark Truth about bourgeois life in the fifties; if they did, they would also be getting multiple rounds of electroshock therapy. Do Mendes and Co. really not think that audiences are going to see through this condescension and, justifiably so, get pissed off?
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Inaugural Post: Best Films of 2008
Disclaimer: I don't much like doing year-end favorite lists, but I'm gradually warming up to the idea. Part of my resistance to this practice has to do with an uneasiness about ranking, and this uneasiness largely stems from a neurotic obsessiveness over the intricacies of stratification.
That said, it's also kind of fun, and it seems to be a good way to get writing and thinking.
What I mean, then, when referring to these films as being the "best of" the year, is that they are simply that; though they are ranked from one to five, there may be considerable flux between their relative merit. There is no definite reason why one is ranked above another, unless whims and gut-feelings count as definite reasons. This isn't to say that I feel like my justifications are overly arbitrary or slapdash; I understand that there's a delicate balance in criticism between inarticulable, personal sensation and good, reasoned positing and backing-up of concrete ideas and assertions.
Also, and this may sound so obvious as to be inane: This is a highly subjective ranking, comprising the films of the year that most touched and inspired me and provoked me to think. I risk such inanity because I think the assumption of subjectivity, which is supposed to be implicit in criticism, is actually not so implicit, or not nearly as implicit as it should be. Largely, this is a question of tone more than of content: a lot of the criticism that I read contains a veneer of authority that I find distracting, silly, irritating, and thoroughly unfounded. (Here's where I should lay out, in detail, the particularities of my own meta-critical framework; the fact of the matter is that such a framework doesn't yet exist, and part of my project with this blog is to suss out the details of such a framework and hopefully achieve something coherent and workable.)
So, then: Five Of The Best Films of 2008:
1. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)
- A masterful, delicately observed work that's equal parts character study and philosophical rumination on the nature and pursuit of happiness. Besides expertly dealing with a fairly universal topic, the film also resonated with me for deeply personal reasons. Like pretty much all of Leigh's stuff, it feels quietly profound. Although it's not his best film by a long shot, and it shows its hand a bit more than I would prefer, it has enough nuanced humanity and tenderness, enough formal clarity, and enough generous humor and beauty to place it squarely at the top of my list.
2. Still Life (Jia Zhang Ke, China)
- It's been a while since I've seen this one, but I can still recall the feeling it gave me: a giddiness and enthusiasm borne of inspiration. Still Life is the kind of film that gets you excited about the possibilities of cinema. Like Hou Hsaio Hsien, Jia Zhang Ke has a wonderful knack for meticulous observation, creating a lucidity that makes shifting between documentary and fiction seem effortless and natural. Unlike Hou, Jia has a pronounced funny bone, able to deftly tinker with the absurdly comic and mysterious without compromising his sense of gravity. (Hou does have a funny bone, but he tends to keep it pretty well in check most of the time, and it resides more in the characters than in the concept.) Still Life excels in multiple dimensions - it has political, cultural and aesthetic significance - but it also has an acute sense of mystery, and that makes it a very fun film to watch.
3. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao Hsien, Taiwan)
- I'd really have to sweat if I wanted to come up with something that hasn't already been said about this gem. It's Hou at the height of his powers. It has Juliette Binoche. It carefully, expertly, wisely (and I mean really wise, the kind of wisdom that is woefully absent from so much of contemporary cinema) explores the fraught path that connects the ever-enigmatic worlds of childhood and adulthood.
4. Milk (Gus Van Sant, US)
- A feel-good movie that you can really, unguiltily feel good about. Well told with minimum fuss, and featuring a field-dominating performance by Sean Penn (I have to wonder what goes through the heads of other male actors of his generation when they watch his films), Milk is a mainstream humdinger of the highest order (let's see that blurb on a poster!) And the fact that it manages this while also being a bio-pic means extra bonus points.
5. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, US)
- Really solid stuff. I'm not totally won over by Reichardt; there's something about her films that still seems vaguely undercooked, but they are the products of a singular vision that's vital to current American cinema. Success for Reichardt is important for all serious up-and-coming filmmakers, because it means there is an audience for quiet, small, slow, and intricate films in a market dominated with formulaic pandering, both in the so-called "independent" sphere and in the mainstream. There's not all that much going on in this film, but there are some crazy-good moments, and its adherence to its formal convictions is worth noting and praising (this wouldn't be true if those convictions were bogus, but they're definitely not.) It also helps that Michelle Williams is lovely and awesome.
Another problem with such a list: I haven't seen a lot of films that I wanted to see, such as Wall-E, A Christmas Tale, Let the Right One In, Silent Light, and Waltz With Bashir. I do plan on seeing all of these films, but until I do, this is how the list stands. It should go without saying that this is totally open to revision.
That said, it's also kind of fun, and it seems to be a good way to get writing and thinking.
What I mean, then, when referring to these films as being the "best of" the year, is that they are simply that; though they are ranked from one to five, there may be considerable flux between their relative merit. There is no definite reason why one is ranked above another, unless whims and gut-feelings count as definite reasons. This isn't to say that I feel like my justifications are overly arbitrary or slapdash; I understand that there's a delicate balance in criticism between inarticulable, personal sensation and good, reasoned positing and backing-up of concrete ideas and assertions.
Also, and this may sound so obvious as to be inane: This is a highly subjective ranking, comprising the films of the year that most touched and inspired me and provoked me to think. I risk such inanity because I think the assumption of subjectivity, which is supposed to be implicit in criticism, is actually not so implicit, or not nearly as implicit as it should be. Largely, this is a question of tone more than of content: a lot of the criticism that I read contains a veneer of authority that I find distracting, silly, irritating, and thoroughly unfounded. (Here's where I should lay out, in detail, the particularities of my own meta-critical framework; the fact of the matter is that such a framework doesn't yet exist, and part of my project with this blog is to suss out the details of such a framework and hopefully achieve something coherent and workable.)
So, then: Five Of The Best Films of 2008:
1. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)
- A masterful, delicately observed work that's equal parts character study and philosophical rumination on the nature and pursuit of happiness. Besides expertly dealing with a fairly universal topic, the film also resonated with me for deeply personal reasons. Like pretty much all of Leigh's stuff, it feels quietly profound. Although it's not his best film by a long shot, and it shows its hand a bit more than I would prefer, it has enough nuanced humanity and tenderness, enough formal clarity, and enough generous humor and beauty to place it squarely at the top of my list.
2. Still Life (Jia Zhang Ke, China)
- It's been a while since I've seen this one, but I can still recall the feeling it gave me: a giddiness and enthusiasm borne of inspiration. Still Life is the kind of film that gets you excited about the possibilities of cinema. Like Hou Hsaio Hsien, Jia Zhang Ke has a wonderful knack for meticulous observation, creating a lucidity that makes shifting between documentary and fiction seem effortless and natural. Unlike Hou, Jia has a pronounced funny bone, able to deftly tinker with the absurdly comic and mysterious without compromising his sense of gravity. (Hou does have a funny bone, but he tends to keep it pretty well in check most of the time, and it resides more in the characters than in the concept.) Still Life excels in multiple dimensions - it has political, cultural and aesthetic significance - but it also has an acute sense of mystery, and that makes it a very fun film to watch.
3. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao Hsien, Taiwan)
- I'd really have to sweat if I wanted to come up with something that hasn't already been said about this gem. It's Hou at the height of his powers. It has Juliette Binoche. It carefully, expertly, wisely (and I mean really wise, the kind of wisdom that is woefully absent from so much of contemporary cinema) explores the fraught path that connects the ever-enigmatic worlds of childhood and adulthood.
4. Milk (Gus Van Sant, US)
- A feel-good movie that you can really, unguiltily feel good about. Well told with minimum fuss, and featuring a field-dominating performance by Sean Penn (I have to wonder what goes through the heads of other male actors of his generation when they watch his films), Milk is a mainstream humdinger of the highest order (let's see that blurb on a poster!) And the fact that it manages this while also being a bio-pic means extra bonus points.
5. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, US)
- Really solid stuff. I'm not totally won over by Reichardt; there's something about her films that still seems vaguely undercooked, but they are the products of a singular vision that's vital to current American cinema. Success for Reichardt is important for all serious up-and-coming filmmakers, because it means there is an audience for quiet, small, slow, and intricate films in a market dominated with formulaic pandering, both in the so-called "independent" sphere and in the mainstream. There's not all that much going on in this film, but there are some crazy-good moments, and its adherence to its formal convictions is worth noting and praising (this wouldn't be true if those convictions were bogus, but they're definitely not.) It also helps that Michelle Williams is lovely and awesome.
Another problem with such a list: I haven't seen a lot of films that I wanted to see, such as Wall-E, A Christmas Tale, Let the Right One In, Silent Light, and Waltz With Bashir. I do plan on seeing all of these films, but until I do, this is how the list stands. It should go without saying that this is totally open to revision.
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