What do you mean movies arent real?

THE NEW WORLD -extended cut- (2005)... 10/10

2009-09-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

“I thought it was dream... what we knew in the forest. It's the only truth.”
-Captain John Smith

Why didn't I sense it before? Why didn’t I see what is so plainly the lifeblood and success of THE NEW WORLD… that it is a story written on the truth of a dream, one that leaves the trace of soil and breath upon the acres of our skin, that wets with its rains, soaks into the heart, and then warms with beat of its rays, saying "I will find joy in all I see." Never has a film so entered into me as though through my fingertips, so subverted my orientation as though a transposition, by its wholeness and grace and movement. I am transformed by the wistful yet rejoicing remembrance, the poem of textures, of senses, of thoughts, and of conflicts that is THE NEW WORLD.

THE NEW WORLD is a history (more explicitly a history of the Jamestown settlement and the initial tenuous exchanges between Settlers and Indians) as told through the mechanism of remembrance, what one might call a multifarious sense-memory; that of John Smith (Farell), Pocahontas (Kilcher), and Rohn Rolfe (Bale), in their experiences of one another and of their lives during this irrevocable epoch, imbued with apt distraction and curiosity. THE NEW WORLD is a dream that addresses the amorphousness and poetry of its own nature, both in its spontaneous construction, visual juxtapositions, the constant interjections of natural imagery and landscape, as well as through monologue and through physical action that gain life in their overlapping. John Smith reflects upon the moments shared between himself and Pocahontas after living in her tribe for two seasons, saying “If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake…There is only this, all else is unreal.”

“I don't know where or when, just that it happened. I have tried all day to recapture the feeling. There was a scent of trees. I was the world, the world was me. A landscape is like a face.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-luc Godard)

A subjective and existential modality laced with historicity, Malick’s film is not stringently historical. This is not to say that THE NEW WORLD is not an exceptionally researched and accurately designed film, particularly on the account of the Algonquin Indian’s representations, of Jamestown’s construction and its squalid degeneration, and the lifestyles enacted by both groups. But what Mallick aspires to, what makes this film the exception and the work of art that it is, more than a text-book accuracy, is the existential and spiritual themes that brim and flourish in the world we are exposed to, in the alternate clashing and coalescing of cultural anatomies, and in the cascade of questions, conscience, and prose that snare the wind like spores inside the mind, setting fly a felt stream-of-consciousness with the voices of John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and on occasion others. And in this binary focus of a tactile history and its subjective experience, Mallick weds the polarities of the utmost external, with that of the utmost internal. History becomes diegesis, and emotion becomes something manifest.

“As the story is developed from something out of history; something that's been told over and over again, and told incorrectly in some peoples’ eyes, the most important thing…is to bring the body language of Indian people into this. To speak a language of memory… and remembering that we tell the story our own way, through our bodies.” Such is at the very core of ones experience of THE NEW WORLD, and also something embodied by settler and Indian alike, both steeped deeply in their circumstances. (Raul Trujillo; Tomocomo, Choreographer) Pocahontas varies this notion. She speaks to herself, “Come spirit, help us sing the story of our land.” And ‘sing’ she does, though not as the word commonly denotes. She sings on all levels; out loud but mostly inside her own heart, and through a private language of gestures, of natural evocations; pantomime that airs on the side of veneration and communion rather than mimic, of nature. She sings every time she touches her hand to a blade of wind, the roughness of a tree’s bark, or swims in cool waters. Even her analogies all sing a kinship with the natural world. “You flow through me, like a river,” she says of John Smith. “He is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade,” she relates of John Rolfe.

In its sensuously ponderous method, Malick’s film expresses thus: that the “new world” is in fact bifurcated, that beyond the discovery of a new land to settle by the English and the subsequent shock of alarm sent through Indian life, it is the mutual rediscovery of “home.” The frontier is also the process of ‘loss’ and ‘reclamation,’ within and without the body. It is the settlement of Jamestown, the fleeting integration of John Smith into Indian society, and the integration of Pocahontas into settler society, and then her journey to England itself. The “new world” is all these things, and it is also not. What it is, most profoundly, more than a mere adjustment of attitude, is Pocahontas’s rediscovery of her own sense of life, and a sense of how to once again “find joy in all she sees,” purely and fully. To be able to say, roaming a vast garden of unnatural design, chasing her sun and feeling the dew in the air, “mother [earth], now I know where you live.”

For some, for those who see not borders, who build not walls, this “frontier” is a constant condition, a state that exists at the intersection of soul and earth, of man and men, of tactility and ethereality. For them, such as the Algonquin people, there is no separation… that is to say, until one is explained what a ‘wall’ is, until someone stands behind one and touches it and knows their distinction from what is on the other side… and then once changed, they understand all things in terms of walls, and places them into the abstract so that they can proliferate the symbolical damage that is the worser side of their intentionality. John Smith says of the Algonquin, “They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.” These will be taught to them, as we know.

“We often try to analyze the meaning of words but are too easily led astray. One must admit that there's nothing simpler than taking things for granted.” (2 or 3 Things I know About Her: Godard)

More than anything else, we take for granted that we will be understood, or that our words, once spoken, gain some importance despite their innocuity, or the arbitrary basis of their make. “The phenomenon of ‘automatic pilot’ is universal, and a common feature of our experiences. The formulaic call and response of the salutations between human beings ("how are you" ... "I'm fine, and you?"), usually chanted out of some unspoken compunction, is but one example. When done many times over, it looses a potential connection to any real, inward emotion from which one might be motivated to utter this formula, and does not reveal or express any actual relationship between the two interlocutors; rather, this chant merely serves to further a simulacrum of human connection.” (Mike Cifone)

But some conditions breath life back into our discourses. In college I had a Japanese friend. She was an exchange student, and native of Japan. What was so exciting about our exchanges with one another, more than the exhilaration of a tactile cultural crossroads, is how her “handicap” with the English language inversely challenged my own aptitude towards it. With her own linguistic sidestepping, she offered me a reactivation of the spoken word. In our conversations, I began to reduce my expressions, sometimes to a kind of relational poetry, in order to communicate ideas, feelings, and concepts of art and culture and emotionality. And even in what might have been the most banal topics, there was a vitality, a newness, a spark in the manner of how aware I was of each word, and of its placement, and of the breadth of its potentiality. This is a reality addressed not only in the intimate communion between John Smith and Pocahontas in the wild, but also between settlers and coping with their shattered expectations of “The New World,” in John Rolfe’s acquiescence to Pocahontas’s quietude and trepidation, and between Pocahontas and the friction of life behind walls; the wall of a dress, of shoes that make walking difficult, the wall of an imposed faith, of all the things that impede her experience of nature, her mother. All of these confrontations present individuals and groups alike with a challenge against their prescribed modalities, make them question themselves as much as they question what newly surrounds them, and forces them, by degrees, into adaptation.

“What is language?” “The house that man lives in.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her)

“If all we have created up till now are mere words...” (Eros + Massacre: Yoshida Kiju)

War of Imitation

2009-08-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/ is a new blog that I've produced, dedicated to the analysis of a singular film, Bernardo Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS. I make a full-blooded case for its formal and ideological excellence, particularly on its constant intersection of those two fronts. Among many things discussed are THE DREAMER's powerful examination of imitation as a tool of not only communication but of identity building, as well as an in-depth discourse on the film's highly competent visual language.

MILLENIUM MAMBO (2001).. 9/10

2009-03-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

"THE BLINDNESS OF THE PRESENT"

Vicky smokes, drinks, dances, has no job, and no real prospects. The best that can be said, is that she passes the time. MILLENIUM MAMBO (Qian xi man po) is a chronicle of the floating year of her life, 2001, where she drifted farthest from herself. Ensconcing in the neon bath and anonymity of the Taipei nightclub scene to escape the claustrophobia of her relationship and apartment, Vicky divides her affections between two divergent men. The first is Hao-hao, her live-in boyfriend. He is a neurotic and jealous recluse, constantly suspecting Vicky of infidelity. He enacts absurd investigative rituals upon her everytime she returns home; including stripping her down to her underwear and smelling her body for the scents of other people, rooting through her purse and wallet, and even calling the numbers of suspect receipts. Vicky resolves to break from Hao-hao once she has spent the NT $500,000 from their bank account. As arbitrary a marker as that may be, it is definitive, and therefore becomes the single fixed point of gravity in Vicky's amorphous, vice-ruled complacency. Her constant return to Hao-hao is much less a response to gravity than it is, as suggested, a complacency, a reflex to her fear of "fully being," of actualizing within a broader scheme of uncertainties (this having somewhat to do with a country, Taiwan, that is experiencing its own existential limbo). The second man in Vicky's orbit is Jack, though he doesn't distinctly overlap Hoa-hao's timeline. Jack is a rather sensitive and modestly expressive gangster who meets Vicky in the bar in which she then plays hostess. Their relationship is chaste, and there is a resonant caring that Jack emanates for Vicky, who is left reeling after her break from Hao Hao. One might liken it, emotionally, to the kind of disruption one feels after spinning in circles repeatedly, and then suddenly halting. For a moment, it seems as if the only relief may be to start spinning again, but Vicky lets the tremors run their course instead, allows those detached floating landscapes to coalesce back into a single image of her world without Hao-hao (at least, she begins this process). Jack's mind and inclinations are clear, and he is patiently wades through Vicky’s process of self-reclamation, something he helps to mend with a parenting affection. There is a tangible potential between them, but it is up to Vicky to take hold of it, or even to see it. She is however, like most of us, blind in the present.

MILLENIUM MAMBO is driven by the same mechanisms of spontaneity, naturalism, and immediacy that all Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films are. However, MILLENIUM MAMBO, more than any of his earlier autobiographical extracts, has the distinct feeling of having been structured in its aftermath, and in no other case is this tactical retroaction more appropriate than in MILLENIUM MAMBO, as it is manifested through the refracted structuring of one woman, Vicky’s, memories of her 2001 year. The additional layer of Vicky’s active recollection through voice over narration channels a dimension of post-modernism heretofore untapped in Hou’s career, save for the emotionally-infused spatiotemporal complexity of GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN (1995) which scrambles itself with a deceptively simple vignetted formula. What Hou has done with these two films, particularly MILLENIUM MAMBO, is apply his early generalized thesis of building intimately framed, retroactive historical clarifications of the 20th Century Taiwanese experience, to a modern context via a solitary person. In MILLENIUM MAMBO he mirrors his repeated enaction of that thesis, shared of course by most filmmakers of the first Taiwan New Cinema movement, through the narrative device of Vicky's own self-remembrance.

Like a master storyteller, Hou establishes MILLENIUM MAMBO's meandering atemporal platform in the opening shot; We are the floating lens that follows behind Vicky, strolling through a long enclosed skywalk at night, smoking a cigarette, a dull neon-blue light bathing her from above. She looks at the city around her through the incremental arched openings of the walls. She looks behind, past us, to where she has come from, and eventually Vicky leaves us at the top of a flight of stairs as she continues onward. In this act of stopping, Hou intimates that Vicki's world is not confined by the frame, nor the by the duration of a scene, nor the parenthesis of the film itself. This long uninterrupted shot is a perfect microcosm of MILLENIUM MAMBO, made most evident by the back-logging voice-over narration of Vicky’s future self. A kind of self-reflexive self-reflection is manifested as Vicky looks through the openings of the skywalk concurrent with her future self, peering through an incremental threading of memories. And of course, in a few fleeting moments of this metonym, we see a Vicky that moves forward while looking back.

A sustaining rule of observation is that Hou’s films manifest in an accumulation, rather than by causality. They tend to mirror actuality, though perhaps differently than, say, Italian Neo Realism. A film like BICYCLE THEIVES, though equal to MILLENIUM MAMBO in its reflection of a specific time and place, occurs around a clear conflict. But as per the reality of our more affluent modern times, MILLENIUM MAMBO’s conflict is appropriately ambiguous and intangible, residing in the emotive and psycho-existential, rather than in the strata of pragmatic survival. So, it comes down to the fact that Hou and De Sica aren't divergent in their aim, merely that they differ in the nature their own personal contexts.

In MILLENIUM MAMBO, scenes are long, make very few cuts, and derive their dramaturgy from a language of minutia: hanging around in clubs, domestic quarreling, cleaning up an apartment, smoking, making a drink, all coupled with a natural un-manipulative sense of human sympathy and relatability. Hou's films carry the natural pulse and texture of their time and place, and he makes it clear in structure, by his aptitude for the peripheral world ( through diegetic sound, through absence, and through the acknowledgement by characters of places and moments outside of the immediate image), that the pulse extends beyond the formal confines of the narrative. For characters, like Vicky and Hao Hao, that are so lured, or lulled by the literal pulse of club music, they are completely out of sync with the pulse within their own lives and their relationship to the world. To an extent, they invent or adopt a kind of severity, a reaction to their claustrophobic floating lives, building conflict and suspicion upon vice and aimlessness. Hou is able to capture that feeling of emotional / biorhythmic divorce with a lingering but drifting camera, a visual distortion of characters by alternating shadow and neon, and by drowning out their words with the drone of diegetic techno music.

Because voice-over-narration is often a crutch, an escape, or a deliberate superfluity, one must be discerning of its functionality. In MILLENIUM MAMBO it is of a seemingly simple, but heavily compounded significance. The fact that future-Vicki is speaking of her past-self in third person suggests, first, that she no longer defines herself by her former standards or circumstances. She looks back on her actions of that year, 2001, and realizes what kind of spiral she caught herself in. She reflects on that year as a time that informed a transition. We don’t know how much she culled from those agonies, but we are aware of her self-awareness and of the distance that she required, as we all do, to gain any kind of inward objectivity. Vicky’s voice-over-narration touches on the idea that "hindsight is 20/20." She describes situations from her past before they happen on the screen, something that gently blindsides the audience on all its occasions. Future Vicky watches these events in stride with the audience. Her recollections are imbued, not with regret or judgment, but with an understanding and an earned clarity. Not only that, but under the insinuation that each scene is a “memory viewed from above,” v-o-n puts the film into a cerebral setting, as though we are witness to Vicky’s actual memory, as well as privy to her cognitive act of remembering.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, v-o-n is yet another way of showing, within the closed text opportunity of the film, that Vicki's world doesn't simply end in 2001 with the credits. It continues to exist outside of our ability to see it. She continues to have self doubt, to wander, and to seek the avenue back to herself. This lends an additional layer of realism to the film.

TIME TO LIVE, AND THE TIME TO DIE (1985)... (8/10)

2009-02-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

TIME TO LIVE, AND THE TIME TO DIE (Taiwanese) is a work of nostalgia in its most considered, sensitive, and articulate form. It is a semi-autobiographical extract on the part of director Hou Hsiao-hsien, concerning a family that has relocated to Taiwan from China (taking place during the mass exodus of roughly two-million Chinese to the island of Taiwan with their Nationalist leader Chiang-kai shek after Mao established the Communist “Peoples’s Republic of China.” Spanning the years of 1947-1960, the film follows the maturation of young Ah-ha, as he and his family cope with the shock of leaving their homeland. Ah-ha acclimates quickly to his new conditions, but the strain of the move and the subtle cultural alienations that plague his parents, marry to the angst of his coming-of-age and build a wedge between them. This condition of a growing generational divergence, reveals itself through Ah-ha’s siblings, such as his older sister who contends with her mother’s inclination towards “domesticity over education.” Across the film’s 138 minutes, we experience a medley of incremental moments in the life of this family; steeped in a somehow ravishing domestic innocuity, composed of family meals, children studying for their exams, Ah-ha and his gang inciting a ‘bored youth’ rebellion, etc.

Many subtle decisions on the part of filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, help to embody and express the retrospective dimension of the rather personal material that composes the film, which in context with the Taiwan New Cinema movement (1980’s-90’s), becomes a retroactive clarification of the 20th Century Taiwanese experience, void of any mainland Chinese media filter or mandate. In this sense, A TIME TO LIVE…, alternately personal and microcosmic, operates by tenants that are not necessarily narrative. Hou instead, allows the visual and aural faculties of the film to communicate a quality of recollection. “His film proceeds by accumulation rather than synthesis.” (Corrado Neri) For this reason, the film cannot be discussed in the ways of “A leading to B.” What comes to the fore, in films of this design, are tones and ideas expressed through a particular language of framing and pacing. Time and place supercede explicit narrative, and therefore it is more constructive to discuss the filmmaker’s language as it carries commentary and content by its devices, often rather than, or involving, what happens in the particular.

Hou is a master of obliquity, both by virtue of his non-causal narrative style, but by his aesthetic language of acknowledging the “outside of the picture frame” and the gaps of recollection. Translating to a brand of “indirectness,” Hou enunciates the limited capacity of memories, which are bound by the constraints of the individual’s dated subjectivities, by allowing the unseen to carry weight. Many impending social references are kept off-screen, or mentioned in passing, just as their consequences are suggested peripherally by disruptive sounds and presences; the roll of thunder, tanks rumbling on the road at night and the tracks that remain in the dirt the next morning, a startling punctuation of men on horseback galloping through the town in midday. By this manner of “omission through indirectness,” A TIME TO LIVE… suggests a certain lurking, subversive quality about the continuance of sociopolitical strife; undisclosed but particular to this time period, Taiwan has been left in the wake of the cessation of Japanese occupation.

The film also expresses these veiled realities in the terms of a child, Ah-ha, with only vague conceptions of sociopolitical issues. At the core of the film is the challenge against personal identity inherent in being severed from ones home, as well as the varied adaptivity exhibited by the older and younger generation. The children, raised in Taiwan instead of China, are almost fully detached from the existential severity of that strain. Ah-ha and his siblings are more or less born into a broken frame of reference, a convoluted impression of feeling “at home” while their parents are floating in realm of “homelessness.” This psychological conflict carries a reticent but profound violence. Those who suffer most from the detachment complex succumb to it and die; the tender but disoriented grandmother who left her heart in China (wandering, sometimes even forgetting that she is in Taiwan, asking for directions to places in her old villiage), and the Father, who’s best but ultimately exhaustive efforts were to keep his family safe and taken care of.

Like all of Hou’s films, A TIME TO LIVE… unfolds in long, lingering shots and sequences, which is a great service to the viewer by placing them on the same experiential level as the characters, sometimes literally. For example, during the “mourning sequence,” in which Ah-ha and his entire immediate family are gathered together, weeping and wailing in the room with their Father’s dead body, the camera, at one point, rests on the floor as if to say, we too have collapsed to the ground in sadness. The scene is so humbling and effective in this regard because the camera refuses to leave, distract with movement, nor was it cut to accelerate or artificially enhance it’s pacing. We get the full visceral experience unraveling in its own time. A TIME TO LIVE…’s inclusive effect (which is constantly at play) also occurs much earlier in the film during a dinner sequence. The camera rests lowly, alongside the seated family members, suggesting that the viewer is seated among them. In adopting this role, one is offered a kind of naïve omniscience. We learn things as the characters do, but are uniquely privy to everything that DOES occur, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.

Things come slowly in this film. Everything seems to happen at a naturalistic pace, due to the extended takes which exploit how long it actually takes for any dance of actions to complete itself (though I often thought they could go even longer). The visual makeup of each scene is incredibly intimate, though with a sensitivity is neither saccharine nor overly sentimental. In fact, “Hou carries out his work through a de-personalization of the narration, putting his intimate feelings at a distance and choosing a detached perspective, as if he were merely a spectator of his own story and not the protagonist.” (Corrado Neri) In effect, Hou and the viewer become synonymous in their designation. The intimacy therefore lies in a concomitance of visual proximity to the characters, and the degree of revelation concerning them.

Since most of the film unravels indoors, the camera captures low, linear, interior shots and compositions, often framing the simultaneity of interior and exterior spaces (and by extension of metaphor, public and private realms). Cinematographer PIN BING LEE mostly employs progressive axial cuts, and moderate pans (generally to keep characters in the frame.) rather than any boisterous or self-conscious displays of stylistic movement. All the self-conscious implications are carried by the viewers’ unflinching awareness of each situation. LEE's restraint helps keep the camera within a human range of motion, relating to the viewers’ own. It is also a beautiful response to the architecture of the homes, which informs upon so much of the culture. Lee’s cinematography is evocative of the Japanese masters of the 1950’s and 60’s; Takao Saito (KAGEMUSHA), Yuuharu Atsuta (AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON), and is reflexive of the seeming simplicity of Ah-ha’s family’s lifestyle. The word “seeming” is important because the simple and gorgeous linear compositions by LEE are in fact a juxtaposition to the series of complex and affecting existential strains experienced by both the young and old; passing school, work, maintaining the household in the absence of a parent, illness, conflict of identity, adolescence.

Perhaps the most obvious visual tactic by Hou is the films palette. It is a collection of mostly desaturated greens, beiges, grays, and resonant whites (which effervesce a youthful, chaste ambiance inside the house.) Just as images degrade in time, so have these memories, the family structure, the sustainability of cultural maxims, ect. Hand-in-hand with the film’s piece-meal accrual, Hou’s muted palette evokes a sense of the passing of time by the vehicle of memory.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE (2007)….9.5/10

2008-09-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

Hiroshi Ando is a relative unknown, having had only one of his four feature films to date breach the Japanese border, and only in a small circuit of festivals. This is an unfortunate circumstance, because the evidence of his latest work, "Boku wa Imouto ni koi wo suru" (My Sister, My love), suggests a burgeoning and sensitive talent that is being overlooked. Or, having personally only seen this newest film, perhaps he has just entered a new stride.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE is both subtle and direct in all of it's capacities, relying on the clarity of the most moderate displays of emotion, the most ginger movement of the camera, and the most delicate probing of a controversial issue; that of highschool age fraternal twin siblings, Iku and Yori, who are in love with one another, and have been so (internally) all there lives. Iku and Yori are inseparable in the sense that they are together in mind always. They also happen to sleep in the same room together, walk to and from school with one another, eat side by side at dinner and breakfast, etc. A perfect example of Ando's subtle command over convincing us of the twins' connection is in his early focusing on their hands; once when the childhood Yori is tying a small flower stem into a ring, and then shortly after in a close up of Iku's teenage hand as she leans on a window sill, pondering Yori's seeming coldness to her. All things considered, Iku and Yori's bond isn't claustrophobic. They have their moments apart, certainly, but are always thinking of the other. They are best friends with a quiet understanding of one another and a quiet way of being with one another...a quietude, beneath which resides deep emotions. The opening scene depicts Yori (the boy) offering Iku (the girl) a ring he made from a small flower as they sit alone together in a vibrant green field. While they unabashedly smile to one another, Yori says with a child’s conviction, “Iku is my bride,” leaving no ambiguity about their irregular closeness. Though the twins had made such an innocent but honest declaration of love in their youth, it isn’t until their coming of age that they acquiesce to its true breadth. Despite saccharine overtones and a lilting guitar melody in the opening "proposal" scene, there is something innately impending and unfortunate at the core of it.

Writer / director Hiroshi Ando doesn't take any easy roads with this film, allowing himself no obvious gratuities concerning sexuality or youth, either in content or methodology. Scenes unfold in long effortless takes (ranging from 10 seconds to 3 min), with a camera that alternates between a rather steady handheld dynamic, to fixed shots, to almost imperceptible glides that slowly encroach on characters. That “glide” becomes a presence within the film, a vehicle for Ando’s soft (but not underdone) handling of confused emotions, as well as a reciprocation of the metered performances within each scene. The subsequent effect is a sense of the air, a patient and full awareness of each moment, no matter its banality, and a saturation in the ponderance of every word, no matter its seeming innocuity (most of what the characters say has resonance and importance, it’s just a matter of the words coming out slowly and in their simplest terms). Suffice it to say, if a scene is better served by silence and a glance, or by the most average exchange of words, Ando won’t hesitate to leave it stripped bare, and rightfully so. Nothing is forced in MY SISTER, MY LOVE.

Matsumoto Jun (most notable as a member of the J-Pop band ARASHI, and the childish, arrogant, polarized male lead, Tsukasa Domiyouji, in the hit J-Drama HANA YORI DANGO 1&2) delivers an uncharacteristically understated and solemn performance as Yori…a performance that is allowed to unfold because of the blank slate of long takes and subtle camera movements aforementioned; a case of form fitting function. Therefore, moderately-expressed but urgently-felt emotions, as well as simple but tumultuous self-questioning propel the film, not artificially / analytically heightened tensions, nor, as one might expect of the content in relation to Japanese societal conventions, by pure didactics.

For a non-Japanese viewer it is unapparent that names carry great bearing in MY SISTER MY LOVE, and, for those adept to their meanings, suggest certain things about the twins before we even get to know them. The name ‘Iku,’ for instance, means “to go, to continue.” It can mean “fear, reverence, or awe,” and in colloquial language it means “to come” or “to orgasm.” Considering these many meanings, it becomes clear that the name Iku is perfectly chosen to embody her characters emotional awe for Yori, and is a subtle way of injecting sexuality into a very chaste film. ‘Yori’ means “other than,” “more than,” “out of.” In the vain of preference, it can take the form of “over;” such as the saying ‘Hana yori dango’ (dumplings over flowers…meaning necessity over materiality). But Yori can also mean “having a tendency towards; being close to…” The multiple definitions of this name are likewise evidence of its deliberate choosing. If you combine the twins names, though non-sensical in Japanese, it becomes something like, “other than to go,” which could be molded to mean an unwillingness to leave, an alternative to fatalism or finality, as in the way that the twins never want to be apart from one another, even if they can’t love each other to the extent that they feel. “I never want to be apart from you” Yori says. (dictionary sources; http://www.freedict.com/onldict/onldict.php - http://jisho.org/words?jap=yori&eng=&dict=edict - http://jisho.org/words?jap=iku&eng=&dict=edict)

For comparison's sake, I would liken "MY SISTER, MY LOVE" to two films; firstly Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS (2003) for its specific content concerning twins, Isa and Theo, who are also in love. But note however that THE DREAMERS is inverse to MY SISTER MY LOVE in its use of graphic sexuality and persistent sensuality (though executed aptly and artfully by Bertolucci).

The character of Matthew in THE DREAMERS, the new friend that Theo and Isa invite into their peculiar tight orbit, is like Yori in that he has an insider’s view that is also detached and objective. Isa and Theo’s father responds to something that Matthew says at the dinner concerning objectivity. He says, “We look around us and what do we see?...Complete chaos. But, when viewed from above, viewed as it were, by god, everything fits together.” He unknowingly but accurately implies of Matthew that his role will be that of an observer, an haphazard undercover agent that lives with the twins over the next month of their parents’ absence.

Ando infers something similar upon Yori within MY SISTER MY LOVE’s visual language. Not only does Yori have the top bunk bed at home, but at school Yori often hangs out on the roof, and in a specific scene he gazes down upon Iku from an open second-story window (note an OPEN window, not through glass) as she leaves the schoolyard with her friends. Ando suggests that between Yori an Iku, Yori has the greater clarity of vision. He sees farther down the track of their uncommon union after it is brought to the fore, and perceives a dark cloud that vexes him openly. But perhaps the most obvious suggestion comes from Iku herself at the beginning of the film, when her and Yori, clad in their gym uniforms, are in the school nurse’s room. Iku says to the nurse, who is mending her and Yori’s identical schoolyard scrapes, “when mother was pregnant she lied on her side to sleep, so all the brains slid down to Yori.” And after that, Iku says even more explicitly to herslef, "Between Yori and me, he is the capable one." So, when Yori begins to build a distance between he and his sister, even though he is the one who initiated the opening of the emotional floodgate, it is because he understands the inevitability of disaster. He doesn’t reach this conclusion all on his own though. Tomoka (a girl who is infatuated with Yori and who caught him and his sister kissing) plants the seed of fear within him, using her knowledge as an implied, but not explicit leverage against him.

THE DREAMERS and MY SISTER, MY LOVE also relate in the way that close council to the twins in each story try to show them the "error" of their ways. For Isa and Theo, it is Matthew who has their best interests at heart. “You won’t grow like this. Not if you keep clinging to each other the way that you do” he tells them, among many other purely intentioned, subtle and/or direct pleas towards sensibility. “Why, why are you so cruel?” Isa replies to Matthew, afraid to see his truth. For Iku and Yori it is Tomoka, a meddlesome self-interested party that tries to lure Yori out of his kindred coupling via fear peddling. But the character of Yano is the other half of this binary role of council. Yano is Yori’s best friend who is unfaulteringly honest in both his feelings for Iku, and his eventual effacing of those feelings, though pure of heart, for Yori’s sake, as revealed in two key conversations between them. "You still like Iku?" Yori asks. "I like her." Yano replies without batting an eye. "Are you thinking of stealing her away from me?" "Thinking about it...do you want me to?" Yano asks back, understanding Yori's guilt and hesitation. And a later conversation reveals his true bond with Yori, something we have sensed all along in Yano's actions and tones: Yano says, "If you waver you're done for. Don't lie about your own feelings. Using one girl to forget another is useless. Isn't it right to tell the one you like 'I like you'...even if it is your sister?" Similarly to Matthew, Tomoka says to Yori as she holds him back from chasing after a distressed Iku, “If you go after her now, things will never change.” This is true, but her motivations are pretense to her fixation. “You are so cruel” Iku says to Yori before she runs, having just found out that Yori accepted Tomoka as his girlfriend (even though he made it clear Tomoka that he doesn’t love her and that their relationship is a pathetic front). “If we keep this up, you will only get hurt” Yori says to Iku. But obviously, the hurt has already been had, and it has come from Yori himself. Or as Yano says, "It cant be helped... BECAUSE you like her." Iku is justifiably broken and, like Isa, is not prepared to face the truth in her loves’ gesture.

Subsequently, one cant help but feel the same sting when in THE DREAMERS Isa pleads to Theo, “It will always be you and me, right?” And likewise in MY SISTER, MY LOVE, Iku says to Yori, “I...can only love you, Iku.”

The second film I drew upon when watching MY SISTER, MY LOVE was Ang Lee’s BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005). The manner in which these two sets of characters, (Jack Twist and Ennis Delmar equating Iku and Yori) who are interminably drawn to one another, allow the fear of that love's "wrongness" and the assumption of grave consequence to unravel it. Pain comes from within their binary orbits, not necessarily from without. Ennis and Yori emulate one another because they share in their consuming fear of reprimand (better describes as a complacency in fear tinged with genuine concern). Hiding away in an empty dark classroom Iku asks “why can’t we hold hands in front of other people? I really don't like that. What about you?” “For me, it's ok to remain like this, if it means we can be together," Yori responds. Ennis does the same thing to Jack, by relegating their love to camping retreats on Brokeback Mountain, and rejecting Jack’s open pleas for them to move somewhere, get a cattle farm together…to live and work together. Ennis always has an excuse,, but you can see the confliction and insecurity that riddles him.“This thing gets a hold of us in the wrong place, at the wrong time…” Alternately, Jack and Iku are full and at the mercy of their love, wanting nothing besides, despite it’s flaunting of convention.

The scene in which Yori admits his love to Iku , which occurs early in the first act, is strongly akin to first love scene between Jack and Ennis, but with a complete inversion of pacing. The pitch in the explosive scene from BOKEBACK MOUNTAIN undulates masterfully, offering a confusion of push and pull and the unprepared shattering of an invisible tension as Ennis, startled from sleep by an unconscious advance by Jack, half wrestle themselves into making love. In MY SISTER, MY LOVE, that same pitch, in that same kind of moment, is drawn out and slowed to a whisper. The push and pull is the same, but it’s the difference between a hammer swing and a pin-drop, both working perfectly in their respective contexts. Yori sits down next to a warmly lit slumbering Iku, holds her hand and gently kisses it, and then hovers his face above hers, awakening her as their lips almost touch. Even after she awakes, Yori holds in his hover, and the two look straightly at one another without a wisp of air between them. Yori admits his feelings to her slowly, and his inability to restrain them any longer. He gives her an ultimatim; “Decide now. Be with me or with other guys. If you want to be with me, you will show me with a kiss. I've lied to myself, ever since I was a child. I don't want to let go anymore." "So mean...you putting this all on me. So mean...that you decided this all by yourself" she softly accuses. But Iku, after her resistant sharpness, acquiesces, and she reciprocates Yori's openness with a kiss. What’s most interesting about these kindred scenes is that both of them unravel as one unbroken handheld shot, but utilize entirely different pacing and extents of disclosure, and still manage to approximate one another's meaning and urgency .

After a second act, in which Yori underhandedly distances himself from Iku, entering a shell of a relationship with Tomoka, MY SISTER MY LOVE ends where it began. In the final sequence of the film, a reunited Iku and Yori travel together by train to the field from their childhood. “Let’s go there. We can make rings for each other and say it again [the marriage proposal from the opening scene],” Yori suggests. But what the twins arrive at is not a lush sun-bathed field, but a bristled barren patch that holds no measure of its former glory. Yori says with a kind of sullen astonishment,“As expected... We really can’t go back…to that time, and that place.” Now, what could descend into a bout of sentimental melodrama is kept in check by Ando’s sensibilities of moderation. Ando doesn’t delude with an unlikely sense of hope, or a strained delusion that the twins can perpetuate their love affair without garnering future rebuke, or that that rebuke may not eventually sour their unity. He also inversely doesn’t saturate us in melancholia or pity. Instead Ando crafts a resolution that is, in a sense perfect because it doesn’t deviate too far from the emotional center of the film and break its crucial tonal consistency. By this I mean, that in the twins’ solemn acceptance of the impossibility of their love to actualize in the way that they desire, they devastate us but don’t let us hit the ground; a metaphor held beautifully in an incredible extended handheld shot of Iku and Yori playing a childhood game of piggy-back, in which a game of jan-ken-po (rock-paper-scissors) every 10 paces determines the mule. “I lied. For Iku to be my bride...I can't do it,” Yori says in muted sobs, with Iku on his back, her hair draped over her face and his shoulder, holding on to him with such apparent love.

Unlike Theo and Isa of THE DREAMERS and Jack and Ennis of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, who choose fatalism over a future, Iku and Yori choose to consider the facts and come to a pained but rational appreciation of the impossibility of their continued romance. They choose to spare themselves unremitting suffering in the future, and are able to make the decision on their own terms, rather than concede to an imposed mechanism (not that conventions of accepted love aren’t at fault here). Iku and Yori can still be together, share with each other, and even love one another…its now simply a matter of extent. Restraining love is a painful thing to endure, especially when it is for the person closest to you…but it CAN be endured. They’ve known that kind of denial all their lives. In a way, it is a return to form for both of them. And so Iku buries the small broken flower that Yori picked the night before in remembrance of his childhood marriage proposal, leaving the icon of their love precisely where it was born. “Having the memory of this flower being here…makes me feel better,” she says. And after playing a childhood game tinged with finality, they pull themselves together, wear a smile, and walk hand in hand through a dry open field, on with their lives.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE is a minor masterpiece of centered and confident storytelling, restrained and judicious editing, and beautiful but humble cinematography, all of which combine to best serve its tone, content, and performances. Sure, Ando employs a certain conventionality in the film’s overall arc and three-act structure, but the pacing, tact, and manner of simple non-affronting candor with which he navigates that arc is what sets it apart from any commonality.

Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008)......8.5/10

2008-08-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

“I affirm life despite everything.” -Juan Antonio (Bardem)

When I think on Vicky Christina Barcelona I do not wallow in the mire of a pointless existence, even though there are underpinnings of this attitude in the finale of the film, which brings each character, principle and peripheral, in spite of their actions, right back to where they started, stifling their actualization, slave to their old moralities, emotional trends, and life decisions. It’s a powerful note to end on, the futility of our efforts as emotional irrational individuals, but again, I don’t remain on it too long. This feeling, intentionally or not, isn’t made to resonate as deeply and lastingly as the films overarching elements of sensuality, complex love, the challenging of our moralized concepts of love (ie commitment, marriage, exclusivity, orientation, etc), and the vulnerability we experience in love being so close to the kind we experience in travel. However ironic, I felt affirmed of life after watching this film. And even though I sometimes have little sympathy for the woes of the wealthy, especially those that can summer in Spain without batting an eye, I'm continuously interested in Allen's dissection of the subject, and his career spanning reveal of the cross-class inevitability of emotional starvation.

Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), the empassioned, intrepid, and quite forward Spanish painter who boldly propositions single Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and engaged Christina (Scarlett Johansson), two friends on summer holiday in Spain, to join him for a weekend in his hometown, speaks of love and life as transient, and so this translates into the unfolding of the film itself. Things never feel constant. But no matter the brevity of experiences, they are still had, emotions are felt, and we are changed in accumulation, no matter how concealed we are about it. Vicky Christina Barcelona doesn’t follow a straight narrative path. Rather it deviates and accumulates, allowing things to fall in and out of sync with one another.

Vicky… keeps a curious softness throughout, despite the innate seriousness of its mingled ideas of expectation, love, and futility. This is due in part to Allen’s dynamic lightly incisive writing, and due also to having elected cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (Talk to Her), to shoot Vicky. The result is a sensuous and yet mildly stated series of softly moving, sunlight bathed, intimate sequences that showcase Spain as much as the tumult of characters discovering, breaking, and then rebuilding their personal boundaries. For a film so attentive to the Spanish setting and the intimate experience of two women within those borders, it was a perfect choice to utilize someone of cultural knowing and familiarity to capture their images. Helping this visual moderation along, Allen never saturates his film in any kind of situationally obvious gratuities, like depictions of explicit sexuality, and yet there is a constant weave of sensuality and eroticism, not unlike the heightened sensitivity of people about to make love.

The character of Vicky, the determined, intellectual, pragmatic, and generally unimpulsive brunette who is an emotional foil to Christina’s cavalier, is most certainly channeling Allen himself in her qualities and pentameter, as is the film as a whole. But the trinity of Vicky, Christina, and Juan Antonio are more so an equivalency to the moral trinity of Allen’s last effort, Cassandra’s Dream. If Ian (McGregor) stands for the one who can disagree with but stomach a grave immorality (murder) in concern for his ambition, and his brother Terry (Farrell) is the one who cannot cope and cripples with guilt and self-disgust after the transgression, and their uncle Howard (Wilkinson) is the completely unsentimental schemer who commissions the murder in pure self-interest, then Christina is Ian in her impulsiveness and wide-eyed self-concern, Vicky is Terry in her seduction into breaking her moral code and the resonance of her guilt and moderate psychological unraveling, and Juan Antonio is Howard. Juan Antonio is not at all the insistent, detached, and calculating man that Howard is, but he shares both in his directness and in his ability to move on unbroken by losses and experiential transience, never void of, but never crippled by nostalgia.

Some have put forth that Cruz’s character Maria Elena, Juan’s tempestuous ex-lover, is nothing more than an attractive distraction from the films moderate and less-than-causal unfolding, with her surprise arrival halfway into the film (which is only the continuation of her constant mention by Juan to Vicky and Christina). To consider that true is to be in neglect of her bountiful functionality within Vicky Christina Barcelona’s weave of self-defeatisms and imbalanced passions. Maria and Juan’s fervent but otherwise poison-spitting romance offers Christina, who moves in with Juan and is the better fit than the frank and focussed Vicky, a venue to be sensually, creatively, and emotionally actualized. Christina repeatedly iterates how she has so much love and so many ideas to offer, but doesn’t know how, or have the talent to, share them. She floats through life half-finishing things, bursting with new passions and then straying as they fizzle. The strength of this amorous intermediary capacity, with her own heart being the bond between two others as she enters into a triangular relationship, is what emphasizes how systemic what Maria Elena describes as “chronic dissatisfaction” truly is for Christina.

Maria Elena encourages Christina to follow her existing penchant for photography. And so it burgeons into a promising creative outlet for Christina. Maria Elena and Juan Antonio even build her a darkroom so that she can explore her craft. Maria Elena convinces Christina to take photographs with film rather than in digital so that there is no intermediary between her and the tactility of creating and making art, and in the end it is but another layer of sensuality added to the film’s texture. Not only do Maria and Juan help Christina actualize herself creatively, but also actualize sexually. And what’s more is that they offer Christina the opportunity to be a ‘facilitator.’ Christina is “the missing piece” of the Juan and Maria puzzle, that in its absence results in erratic and violently empassioned frustrations. Maria attempts suicide twice in fact, and almost accidentally kills Vicky, now married to her fiancé Doug who flew to Spain for an early ceremony, when she meets Juan for a final rondezvous.

“Maria Elena and I are meant for each other and not meant for each other. It’s a contradiction. Maybe you have to be a poet like my father to understand it, but I don’t.” With Christina, a balance is earned between Juan and Maria. It may be partly to do with her existential insecurities that create an avenue of focus for Juan and Maria, and maybe it is Christina’s passivity that radiates and softens them. In any case, she brings stability and an idealism along with these qualities.

Amidst all of this compounded positivity and direction lavished upon Christina, she still finds her commitments wavering and finally dissolving. Just as Juan describes his polarized romance with Maria as a contradiction, Vicky is also slave to her own contradiction. She fears complacency and yet is continuously complacent in her distancing from situations, places, and people. Juan Antonio understands this, so when Christina breaks up with him and Maria Elena, he is the calmest and most sensitive person in the room, pleading to an enraged and wounded Maria that Christina will find the right person one day, but that it simply is not them. He brings them together in an embrace and tells them to think upon and be thankful for the love and happiness that they had fleetingly created together.

After all that happens, of which there is MUCH I have not mentioned, everyone ends up at the starting line again, no matter what individual paths they took during the summer. Vicky is still looking for the elusive “something more,” Christina is married just like she always planned on being even though there is an irreparable splinter in her formal concept of commitment and stable love, and Maria and Juan are unable to be with each other despite their kindred nature. It seems dismaying, but if you get caught up in the “what’s the purpose of life if we all suffer and ultimately cease to exist” you wont see each moment for its own sake. I’m reminded of a line from the recent incarnation of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ in which the character of Charles Ryder says with such clarity “I want to look back on my life, and say…that I lived…” It is exactly the line I dwelt on as Vicky Christina Barcelona closed its curtain.

HELP ME EROS (2008)....7.5/10

2008-04-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

"New Blood Draws on Old Themes:
-Taiwan New Cinema' Seeks an Identity of Fearlessness"

Anyone familiar with the Taiwan New Cinema movement of the past 20 years, or comparatively the films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (TASTE OF CHERRY), or even select works of Michaelangelo Antonioni (L’AVVENTURA), will be better apprised of how to palate Lee Kang-Sheng’s sophomore effort, HELP ME EROS (2008), with it’s long uninterrupted shots (30sec-5min), navigation of peculiar but banal human experience, dire scarcity of dialogue, metered accumulation-based narrative arches, and social commentary mostly devoid of irony (reminiscent of Italian Neorealism). The addition of EROS’s more abhorrent sexual leanings seats it on the mantle of recent permutations of the Taiwan filmic movement (THE WAYWARD CLOUD, I DONT WANT TO SLEEP ALONE) that delve into the marginalized mire of modernity, and makes it very much of the modern generational context, a new floating socio-political context that garners old wounds. Those new to such labored undistracted tenets of filmmaking may be affronted by the patience required, but their design is such that each moment is held extensively and deliberately so that every detail within it can become accessible to the viewer, burgeoning an experiential and dimensional understanding almost by force.

HELP ME EROS is an ambitious and unrelentingly beautiful film, that is also unfortunately at odds with itself, suspended somewhere between prose and grit but uncomfortable in such tonal ambiguity. EROS unfolds in a world of too little or too much gravity; a stagnant orbit of emotionally starved semi-dimensional characters, fluorescent light, sexual escapism, and commerce, suffering incongruity alongside boldness and brilliance. While writer/director Lee Kang-Sheng mostly overstates his existential meanings with non-diegetic songs that spell out woes like a bludgeon, and falls short in terms of blending his content and aesthetics as a whole, he does succeed marvelously within visual moments, of which there is no shortage. It is these moments of perfectly framed peculiarity, poignancy, comedy, and loneliness in collage, rather than blending, that buoy HELP ME EROS to success. Lee Kang-Sheng’s visual language is his strongest asset, with notable thanks to Tsai Ming-Liang as production designer, and helps to enhance if not mask what is otherwise a rather conventional narrative arch.

The opening tracking shot introduces Shin; by all accounts a beautiful petit Taiwanese woman, who slowly emerges from a pitch black street, drawing her rolling suitcase behind her on the concrete into a swath of neon light emanating from a street-side bar. The bar hosts a cast of scantly clad women of similar descriptions to Shin. This haunting lateral shot, beginning with sounds and barely perceptible movement in a pitch-black frame and slowly graduating to a pocket of neon glow, implies rather strongly that this dwelling of commerce commingled with iniquity and fantasy is an oasis or a haven amidst urban anonymity…and in a way it is, but one that stagnates its population more than heals them. If nothing else it fatefully brings our main characters together.

Following this sequnce, we are introduced to Ah Jie, the newly destitute, casually suicidal protagonist played by writer/director Lee Kang-Sheng, in a long angular shot from within his apartment, watching him like a security camera as he embraces a large, coiled, snakelike pillow, staring at the plasma screen on his wall. Cinematographer Pen Jung-Liao uses this ‘security camera’ angle often, which tends to enhances the banality and detachment of moments, if not obscure them subtly, rather than suggest any type of voyeurism. Ah Jie is watching a cooking show in which the Chef, who actually becomes a peripheral character in the narrative, is preparing a dish in which a fish is clubbed, scaled, splayed, and served while still alive, its mouth gasping as it suffocates in open air. The sound of it flopping violently but feebly in the stainless steel sink is dismally memorable. This calls to mind a scene from Korean filmmaker Kim Ki Duk’s THE ISLE (2001) in which a man callously slices off the flanks of a fish for sushi, and then tosses it back in the water to creep out his girlfriend, revealing as it swims away, raw and razed, that it can indeed survive in such a wounded state. Ah Jie listens to the assistant who asks the chef, “What do you think its thinking?” “Help me” he replies. And so in one image and one line Lee Kang-Sheng sets up roughly the entirety of his character’s disposition. We switch to close-up and see Ah Jie is smoking a joint and coughing quietly, as he does through out the film, staring half frightened and disgusted at the sight of the gaping-mouthed fish…perhaps most frightened because it is a grisly mirror of himself, as suggested by its persistence to remain in the frame with him. Ah Jie is splayed economically if you will, and gasping in the vacuum of former wealth, which mutates into a kind of anaerobic materialism. It is noteworthy to consider a similarly natured scene from Tsai Ming-Liang’s WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (2001) in which Lee Kang-Sheng’s equivalently dispossessed character, Hsiao Kang, embraces a pillow while watching television in a state of discomfort, again keeping both himself and the tv screen framed. Hsiao Kang is in fact watching Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS (1959), which likewise informs heavily on his character’s literal and cognitive identity.

EROS’s other principle character is Chyi, a helpline operator whom Ah Jie calls exclusively to share his mumbled sorrows and his dispassionate notions of the futility of existence, while he secretly fantasizes about her beauty. Truthfully, Chyi is obese and desperately lonely within a vacant marriage, her own existential vacuum. Her husband is the Chef from the program Ah Jie was watching, and he uses Chyi as more of a beefeater for his bizarre culinary creations than a companion of any sort. He cooks for her constantly and is mostly responsible for her transformation into an overweight terminally depressed woman, whom he is physically revolted by (compounded by the fact that he is gay), but she propels her own misery as well by complacency.

In his destitution Ah Jie becomes almost singularly obsessed with growing and salvaging his small marijuana crop. He saturates the plants in florescent light and breathes on them to make sure they have enough CO2, “so they can get better, like I need to.” In the meantime, Ah Jie and Shin get together. They’re both detached and floating, and that mutual experience, coupled by convenience (Ah Jie lives above the bar where she works), brings them together. But basically, all they do is smoke and fuck. I say fuck not to be crass, but because they simply don’t “make love.” These are not sensitive experiences, per se. They are base and vigorous. Only once do they choose a sexual position that demands they look at one another. After the near comical standing sex montage in a glowing white room on top of which is played an ethereal buddhist-like chanting, Ah Ji is shown talking online with Chyi with a yet unaffected indifference to life. “No one would care if I was gone” he writes, after which he asks, “Who is the fat chick next to you?” in regards to her 'buddy icon,' not realizing,or course, that its her. “That’s my friend. She used to be skinny but her husband cooks for her every day.” Chyi lies to Ah Ji to keep her own fantasy alive, and subsequently feeds his, even as she holds a corn cob between her teeth in order to type her deceit. Ah Jie and Shin are lying down side by side naked in the now dim room. Shin distracts Ah Ji from his conversation, one fantasy to another, and begins to kiss and finger his anus, laying down on top of his back in the opposite direction. Shin’s adamant oral stimulation is transcendent in that it underscores the analogous nature of herself and Chyi (a chronic eater), as purveyors of base coping mechanisms under the gravity of the same character; Ah Jie.

Thus the electrifyingly banal stage of desperation and escapism has been set, leading, in a series of crafted but utterly simple moments, to a particularly acute self-reflexive flourish of a climax, and the last of the explicitly sexual scenes (which punctuate the film, if not precede and outlive it). After a failed kidnapping of one of Shin’s coworkers, all the girls retreat to Ah Jie’s apartment to smoke themselves into solace. Ah Jie inhales deep full breaths of smoke, and blows them into the lungs of others at the near closeness of a kiss. This is something he came up with on his first night with Shin. It reflects his method of breathing on the marijuana plants, an ironic gesture of life-giving with an injurious vehicle. The apex of this sequence is a nocturnal rooftop ménage-a-trois in which Ah Jie and two of the girls form a pyramid of oral copulation, while Shin smilingly observes the hedonism, the same haunting and tonally serious chanting from the standing sex montage is played over top and lends an urgency or impending anxiety to the moment. While the sex in this scene is rather intense, spilling into yet another montage of near absurdist positions, it is heightened into the more dimensional language of HELP ME EROS by a swathing of the three naked writhing bodies in designer patterns, projected in light, as though it were their very skin. I was immediately reminded of the scene in JURASSIC PARK (1993) in which the GAACATTGA sequencing of DNA amino acids is projected onto the skin of a Velociraptor, as though it were the ceiling grating just above it that held the patter within its mesh.

This visual event makes resonant sense within HELP ME EROS’s filmic dialect, even though it takes on a seemingly new dimension. In reality, this phenomenon has occurred before, on multiple occasions, in multiple capacities, from very early on, however by more naturally occurring means. For example, early in the film, Ah Jie sits on a sill in his apartment with the window open, smoking a joint, lulled by the quiet city murmur. He is talking to Chyi on his cell phone, mumbling his discontent once again. The blinking neon sign of the bar downstairs is reflected in the open windowpane, which is subsequently superimposed, projected if you will, on Ah Jie’s face, for it lies between him and the picture plane. What gives the scene most of its consequence is the fact that it’s shot on a fixed diagonal, a small decision that removes the moment marginally from reality. Compound the diagonal angle with the contextual reality of the scene; not only is the reflected blinking neon sign superimposed upon his face coming from an establishment that unabashedly sells the male fantasy of scantly clad women of ideal beauty and frail femininity, but Ah Jie is simultaneously projecting his own cerebral fantasy about Chyi. He imagines her as the thin, soft-skinned woman next to Chyi in her buddy icon, but barely clad in a in a red plaid schoolgirl uniform, twisted about and writhing on her cubicle desk amidst all the other focused workers. Ah Ji blows smoke into his phone and it travels to her lungs on the other end, an arousing transcendent gesture. Here we have driven home the core ideas behind the film; that desire shapes both our content as human beings, and our perception of the world and its tenets. Cognitive fantasy and tactile reality seem to occupy a similar space within the film, constantly overlapping one another. In the key of ‘projections,’ the characters and mise-en-scene of HELP ME EROS are constantly bathed in the projected neon glow of urbanity and commerce, neon lights are reflected deliberately in mirrors and windows alongside characters, compounded by, if not informing, the constant attitudinal/behavioral projection of ‘materialism through fantasy’ that all the characters externalize, not just the three leads.

During the rooftop ménage-a-trois we encounter a critical and final shifting in the nature of materialisms, which drive the film. EROS’s “materialism” adapts from a branded and possessive type, to a sensual escapist materialism of sex and smoke. Ah Ji repeatedly tries to sell his possessions at a pawn-shop to supplement cash, such as, aptly enough, his wallet, and increasingly retreats to his desolate realm of smoking, sexuality, and the externalization of cognitive fantasy. The designer patterns that are projected onto the entangled bodies precisely embodies this notion of sexual escape as a “sensual materialism,” and is placed at the apex of this transitional arch.

Tangential communication, another of the films critiques, reigns in HELP ME EROS, and calls to mind the devices, sheen, and censure of the third act of Hou-Hisao Hsien’s THREE TIMES (2005) entitled “A Time For Youth,” which is marvelously successful in being both labored and concise in its vision. Not only does EROS have people displaced in or victim to their own surroundings, but they extend themselves indirectly and incompletely to others. E-mail, text-messaging, phone calls, sex, cooking, television; all these modalities are used paramount over actual conversation. In fact, Ah Jie, at his most desperate, wishing he could make amends with Shin who has left him and returned to the country after his selfish outburst, asks one of the girls at the bar to “help me text her.” To recapture the woman he finds he actually cares about, and who actually exists as he experiences her, he chooses an even more removed gesture of communication. Ah Jie was curt and explosive to Shin after finally discovering that Chyi is in fact not the beautiful woman he had mistaken her as. Shin is literally the only person to speak the truth of the moment in this film, lashing back at Ah Jie’s childish behavior, but not knowing the reason behind it. By demolishing Ah Jie’s marijuana plants, kicking the dirt around in her silver miniskirt and absurd yellow pleather heals, she tries to break him out of his pathetic spiral of self-loathing self-delusion. “I can’t live without it” he says.

Tangentiality extends to the visual realm of HELP ME EROS as well. Sexual participants never look at one another; faces are almost always burrowed, eating out orifices in a way of relating to the obese helpline woman who is given food instead of love, scenes captured entirely in reflections or partly in security cameras, etc. Again, the visual dimension of HELP ME EROS is chiefly its most successful, if not sometimes obvious.

Along the way of this beautiful but incongruous film, Lee Kang-Sheng hints at a broader social context; that of the suspended cultural identity of Taiwan, through diegetic news bulletins about the ‘Opposition Party’ and demonstrations at the National Day Celebrations, but these sidenotes are far too late in their mention and feel tacked on to a film that doesn’t have enough confidence in its own strictly existential substance. Tsai-Ming Liang (executive producer, production designer) is a far greater artist in that capacity because he weaves social contexts into his work more subliminally and thoroughly. In this vein, however, Hou-Hisao Hsien (THREE TIMES, CAFÉ LUMIERE) may be the greatest of the Taiwan New Cinema filmmakers because he is able to utilize socio-political references even more thoroughly and diegetically than even Liang. Hou Hsiao Hsien’s narratives unfold in normal, virtually unstylized social realms, where the public and private constantly breath into one another, and where social contexts arise as seemingly haphazard realities of the moment even though they are actually meticulously woven in.

The final act of HELP ME EROS holds its most jarring and affecting sensory moment, which ironically has nothing to do with sexuality. After spending almost 90 minutes steeped in the dim and dank urbanity of Kaohsiung, with its nocturnal interplay of neon glow and shadows, we are thrust into the lushness of a beetlenut forest in clean even daylight. The transition is so sudden and striking that it makes your head spin for a moment. We spend only a short while in this place, but in its presence we gather a truly sensitive and soft feeling for the first time in the film. We observe Shin helping collect beetlenut branches, and working presumably with her father. We wonder why she would leave this lush serenity for the city, but after some thought, it appears that the same kind of dull anonymity exists out there as well.

Now that Shin has left, and Ah Jie is unable to contact her, he tries to take his own life, something he’s been pondering and putting off for the entire film. He closes all the windows, opens the valve of the CO2 tank in his claustrophobic kitchen, and lays prostrate on the floor. It’s either ironic or perfect that he should choose this method of all methods to kill himself because throughout the film he is trying to offer life and calm with respiration; breathing his CO2 to sustain the marijuana plants, and smoke into peoples lungs to make them forget their woes. In a slightly comic twist, he runs out of gas, failing in his first suicide attempt. This calls to memory a scene very early in the film. Ah Ji is talking on the phone to Chyi while the teakettle whistles at a scream. He allows the flame to burn for the duration of the scene, which lasts roughly 5 minutes in a single take. He is, therefore, to blame for his own incapacity to commit suicide. Not realizing that Shin has just returned, heeding his urgent calls perhaps, Ah Jie decides to jump out of his apartment building window, from three stories up. Choosing to jump out the window is ironic as well because it was Chyi who suggested in their first conversation, the very same scene in which he lets the tea-kettle boil too long, to open his windows in order to lift his depression.

As he opens the window the sounds of the bustling city below swell into the apartment, and we get a sense of life rather than death. But Ah Jie is resolute, and we are rewarded by a gorgeous if not overly sentimental metaphoric ending, in which we see not his bloodied fallen corpse, but an endless rain of lottery tickets covering the swatch asphalt and concrete on which he and Shin ahd met. Shin stands in the elegant storm of paper, wearing little angle wings that catch the tickets on their curves like new feathers, looking up with tears of understanding. If not for the melodramatic and simplistic song of love lamented played over top, this moment might have been totally palatable, but alas, Lee Kang Sheng is still purging his more youthful or sophomoric approaches to cinema. All things considered though, his is certainly a name to look out for in the realm of new filmmaking, with bold ideas that I feel will become less and less derivative and more and more congruous and confident as he progresses.

PARIS (2008)..........8.5/10

2008-03-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

The strength of PARIS lies in being steeped in its own disjointed nature. Cedric Klapisch, who’s last two films L’aberge Espagnol and Russian Dolls, were more or less about the thrusting together of people or the recapturing of those friendships, whereas PARIS hinges more on a despairing and inherent note of separation, and the reigning faculty of chaos, albeit with the undercurrent of people pulling towards one another. PARIS is thusly inclined, both in story and structure, from the first frame to the last. Particularly telling of the films philosophy were the beautiful opening shots through a rain-beaten car windshield. It produces blurred images of urbanity, becoming clear with the swipe of the blade, only to again be obscured.

PARIS is an interweaving tiered narrative of human fragmentation told through structural fragmentation and shades of coincidence, however not one which is unnatural or imposed. (For my own purposes, this review will be as equally fragmented). Though ultimately each of the characters are together in geography, and therefore encounter each other to varying degrees, they are more or less just swimming in a fishbowl of concrete and glass. The editing of the film is to be commended for the levity and subtlety it affords us in swaying each narrative thread into the other, if only to have one character ride past another on a bicycle, enter the bakery in which another character has just been hired, order produce from them regularly at the open air market, or to see them unknowingly from a passing taxi while making a perfectly apt judgment about them.

Not surprisingly, PARIS has a distinct global sensibility because of the diversity of peoples and places exposed within the film. Ranging from the center of Paris to its scaffolded outskirts, from the wealthy to the working class, to immigrants risking reprimand and exhaustion to get to the ‘city of lights’ from north Africa. Again, this isn’t an imposed quality. It is one that arises as a natural observable element of the city and the manner in which the world is indeed getting smaller. Within this diversity is a common root, and in afflicting each person with the same emotional forces, shows both an external and an internal universality.

Based on this observation it seems apt to mention that through out PARIS’ course, I was reminded of the Vietnamese film THREE SEASONS (1999), which quite gracefully (almost to a fault) follows four characters that are swimming in the marginalized malaise of modern Ho Chi Minh City, and is a tonal match to PARIS, if not a few shades less humorous. It too bears ‘the city’ in all its pervasive grit and glory, holds to the same mentality of disillusionment amidst modernity, broadens its scope with diversity (a white American is one of the main characters), and forgives its own sentimentality with strokes of harsh emotional complexity.

Paris, the living, breathing, aching city is so palpable and ubiquitous a presence that the title of the film is unmistakably appropriate. The capturing of the city to such a degree was not merely haphazard, but is a careful and artful testament to the visual dynamic of a Klapisch film. Kudos to Christophe Beaucarne for his photographic economy and fluidity.

PARIS purports that there may be a kind of perspective above all of that weaves convolutedly in the streets. I’ll borrow a quote from THE DREAMERS (2004). “We look around us…complete chaos. But when viewed from above, viewed as it were, by god, everything fits together.” This notion is a jumping-off point, if you will, for a number of thread intersections, and is instilled in the omniscience of the character of Pierre (Duris), a former dancer and now a recluse in his fifth story apartment, who overlooks the chaos of urbanity and humanity in a state of his own ever impending death. I don’t think he sees the world “fitting together” as the quote suggests so cleanly, but he certainly attains a kind of uniformity in his observations and judgments. His sentimentality and intrigue, if not his disdain for those who reject theirs, arises mostly from what potential is taken from him by this chance heart condition. In this state of suspended life, as is often the case, Pierre acquires a kind of unpretentious wisdom and fervor in awakening others (particularly his sister) to their own stifling self-loathing.

One of the bridging ideas in PARIS, and for that matter THREE SEASONS, is the warring simultaneity of “the traditional and the modern.” The character of Roland Verneui (Luchini), a Sorbonne history professor afeared of his vintage and eccentricity, says to his class that the idea of a ‘rooted traditional culture, oppressed and struggling against the waves of modernity is a myth in a sense, because modernity itself is defined by or built upon the mingling of all that came before and all that is strived for afterward. Modernity doesn’t exist without its predecessors.

Beyond this kind of talk, Klapisch brings the issue of generational conflict into the concrete realm. The character Roland, a historian of the city’s past, has an architect for a brother, Francois, building the proverbial future of Paris. Furthermore, Roland, who feels he has mutated into a vessel of ineptitude and verbosity, seeks the affections, via anonymous text messages, of a vibrant and generously featured female student named Laetitia (Laurent). The fact that he is using text messaging in his tactic is perfectly beneath his demographic, and therefore is well suited to holding the tension between ‘modern and traditional.’ Though maybe it isn’t so beneath a character who describes himself as still feeling like he’s 15, and so burgeons the topical complexity of PARIS. Among the other threads, Pierre’s sister Elise (Binoche), brings herself and her children to live with him in his dying days. Elise is a divorced mother of age 40, and is sadly discouraged by the prospect of ever meeting someone again romantically, at her age. So in this pocket of the film, we have the brimming lives of Elise’s children that have just begun to live, and that of Pierre which is standing on the mortal threshold.

There are nuances abounding in this sprawling film that are caught only by the net of a city grid. There is much more teaming in its moments, threads I haven’t mentioned, and ranges in emotion than I have neither time or inclination to discuss. In the end however, PARIS is a near masterpiece of disjointed continuity, if I might coin a term. What ultimately ties these threads of humanity together is not tactile per se (beyond the city as a vessel of their malaise), but ideological or thematic. Each character or group of characters are united in their experiences of death, in their clumsily striving for connection or rebuilding, and in their simply being confoundingly imperfect and simply driven creatures. And like so many films about disconnection in the modern era; BABEL, NORIKO'S DINNER TABLE, the result of the narrative is a proof by contradiction. It seems to be inevitable that they will reveal that which connects, in spite of the prevalence what separates us.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2007)...10/10

2008-02-28T23:01:00.001-08:00

It is perhaps ironic that a film which concerns itself with the rebuilding of a man's capacity for speech, has left me without words of my own.

CASANDRA’S DREAM (2007)…..8.5/10

2008-01-29T14:16:00.000-08:00

Woody Allen has certainly still got game. His most recent effort CASANDRA”S DREAM, which effectively erased SCOOP from my pained memory, is a film in step with MATCHPOINT (2005) and CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (1989), but it unfolds in an even plainer fashion than either. It’s unlikely savagely humorous at times…if your adept to that brand, but is otherwise an acute and dismal affair. Even in the first hopeful rustlings, with brothers Ian and Terry musing over purchasing a small boat as a bright escape from their lives of stifling mediocrity, there lies the seed of an unraveling, perhaps merely for the coupling of the brothers’ aspirations with a dim overcast sky. What truly turns the tide is their rather wealthy uncle who is willing to help them in their considerable financial goals (Ian wants to invest in Hotels, and Terry has a severe gambling debt) if they agree to do a terrible deed for him in return.

McGregor and Farrell are magnificently anonymous in their roles. Not that they're void of detail, but that they embody the kind of nearsighted, everyman desperation of the working class, which the film deftly hinges on. What CASANDRA thrives on however is the inevitability of ambition, the persistence of choice, and the absence of justice as an empirical ideal.

Vilmos Zsigmond, who famously worked on THE DEER HUNTER (1978) is at the top of his understated game as cinematographer in CASANDRA’S DREAM, having the camera often seem light and afloat, but still (an apt quality considering where the films namesake derives), avoiding any tight close-ups or shots from afar. The camera stays low and within the plane of action, appropriately for a film that would surely suffer from any loss of groundedness. As for the resulting visual experience, we don’t become complicit in the drama or morality per se, but are certainly made to reside within it, unable to effect the outcome, watching all the same. The story is all the more interesting because of this inclusive groundedness.

THE ORPHANAGE (2007)….8/10

2008-01-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

Relative newcomer J.A. Bayona has fashioned an unexpected sense of sanity about the peculiarities of this tense psychological horror film. I hesitate to use the maxim of ‘horror’ to describe THE ORPHANAGE because of all the unfortunate resonance of mediocrity the term has. But rest assured, Bayona is, here, a confident and sensitive helmsman of precarious material.

Belen Rueda plays Laura, a mother suffering through the disappearance of her child from their new home; the very orphanage in which she lived as a child, that she has now purchased and renovated. Rather than simply and typically descending into a state of exponential madness, Laura retains a shade of self awareness about the stress, absurdity, and peculiarity of her increasing spectral encounters, encounters that hold clues to her sons whereabouts, even as she seems to actively deteriorate. I was surprised at the mostly rational mind she kept while suffering and mentally spiraling; thinking things through in the terms of the ghosts' own playful dogma, keeping a cautioned openness during the session with the medium (Geraldine Chaplin), etc.

The unfolding of the narrative is tactful, never relying on cheap, manipulative, or arbitrary tactics to frighten. All anxiety and tension arises from within the narratives construction, rather than, as in most horror films, from without. The gravity of the film arises from the wholly convincing emotional weight of the characters amidst their plight, and the subdued but eerie goings on. I’d be remiss to neglect that THE ORPHANAGE not only well written, but is also beautifully and hauntingly photographed. Cinematographer Oscar Faura avoids the cliché of overly personifying the house, turning it into a character of evil. The orphanage, as a structure, is simply the place in which something terrible happened (though it is not especially the focus of the drama). The austere of those unseemly events is palpably present, but doesn’t turn the house into some unlikely deviant structure. The characters are almost always present over the architecture anyway. For that, and many other tonal decisions, THE ORPHANAGE is quite reasonable in terms of what it expects the audience to believe or to swallow as far as the supernatural is concerned, making the finale and the 'medium' sequence resound that much more.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS (2007)……10/10

2008-01-29T14:13:00.001-08:00

Absolutly brave filmmaking. 4 MONTHS is an uncommon, unsparing, texturally unsentimental film that never “suffices to say” anything. It never cuts from a scene, complacent that the audience “gets it.” If it did cut, it would shatter the trenchant pillar of realism and well drawn anxiety on which it stands. I'm citing the agonizing dinner scene specifically because of what is going on simultaneously outside of the scene, and also inside Otilla's (the protagonist) churning thoughts. Not only are we steeped in the narrative tension almost by force, with long uninterrupted handheld shots, but we are made keenly aware, by that regard, from the very start, how difficult and pervasive the repression is that weighs upon Romanians at this time (late 80’s) and how it informs each characters attitude, regardless of the nature of ones goals. Just getting a pack of cigarettes, or booking a hotel room becomes an arduous task. The same kind of unmitigated attention is given to the entire spectrum of details within the film, and by this stroke avoids any hampering narrative singularity, considering the severity of its core subject. I find that in films of this stylistic nature (anything by Tsai Ming-liang), one can detect the greatest prevalence of and opportunity for nuance, whether deliberate or arbitrary. The longer you look, the more you see and can draw from. It builds a more experiential and much less passive medium.

Fortunately, the film does not placate us with a simplistic ‘victimizer/victim’ conventionality, and offers the unfolding of authentic, frail, confused, and at times pathetic characters that surprise at with their alternating fortitude and naivety, and a scenario that takes all the time it needs to accumulate its details.

As the credits roll, we retain the ability to form our own opinions about the issue concerned; a woman named Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) assisting her friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) in an illegal abortion, because 4 MONTHS doesn’t berate us with agenda or propaganda, nor does it stoop to any academic exposition. All we need to understand in order to appreciate this film is offered in its own language of editing and mood. What I sensed from the manner of Mongiu’s film is that these types of things [abortion] will be inevitable, no matter the hazard, and that as a solution, it bears great consequence no matter what the outcome. 'Pro-choice' or 'Pro-life' doesn't really enter into it except from the viewer's own position. That is what makes 4 MONTHS such a brimming success: its willingness to peer unabated, and its refusal to judge.

LUST, CAUTION (2007)….9.5/10

2008-01-29T14:11:00.000-08:00

Ang Lee’s latest feature, taking place in Japanese occupied Shanghai, is a film lavished with classical aesthetic sensibilities and period detail, heightened by a bold streak of dimensional sexuality. LUST, CAUTION dips and sways between shades of noir, espionage, rending emotional portraiture, a story of youth and ignorance, and political period drama, never settling as but one of them. It’s a solution, not a mixture. A near perfect amalgam, helmed by two wealthily talented leads (Tony Leung, Wei Tang), a director in peak performance, and a warmly convincing family of idealistic friends daring to change their world.

Youthful and beautiful Wong Chia Chi (Tang) is a college girl that gets swept up into a novice resistance scheme by the ambition of her fellow theater group. After their promising start as patriotic performers, and realizing Wong Chia Chi's immersive capacity as a performer, they attempt to elevate their goals to ensnare and eliminate a local high ranking officer of the collaborationist government (Chinese that are aiding the Japanese occupation) named Mr. Lee, using Wong Chia Chi as sexual bait, so to speak, though not as such at first. The sexual nature of her mission arises as an unplanned but vital opportunity. Her cosmopolitan alias is Mrs. Mak, and her companions all have their own roles etched out from a false history. The scheme drags on and dredges her soul, getting ever more consuming and precarious, especially as it resumes after a long postponement.

The most effective, and least disguised tactic of the film is strictly narrative. LUST, CAUTION builds the catalyst and model of the young groups subversion agenda from their preexisting involvement in theater. No better tactile element threads the body of the film together, for it stems from their ambitious beginnings, to their subversion methodology, to their fatal and final curtain call. The groups last scene together,and the second to last scene in the film, is especially powerful because in it they kneel defeated at the stage of their execution; a stage without any audience but the night, completely stripped of their invented roles. As this unfolds, and the camera lifts above their heads to reveal the blackness of the quarry into which their bodies will fall, one can only recall the triumphant ovation and resounding cries by the audience, “China will not fall!” at the end of their first play together years before. “China will not fall!”

LUST, CAUTION builds a significant bridge to Lee’s previous film BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, by exploring the emotional degradation that occurs in subverting ones own identity and inventing passions, which the young activists must do in order to, in turn, subvert the collaborationists. The irony continues further when we discover that, not only was Wong Chia Chi and her group watched unknowingly by actual resistance outfits eager to use them, but the collaborationist govt itself, was watching them as well, using Mr. Yee (Leung) as a convenient bait in order to gain information about the resistance cell. LUST, CAUTION rounds out as an elegant mobius strip of espionage, charade, and broken hearts that is so beautiful to behold.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)…..8.5/10

2008-01-29T14:08:00.001-08:00

Marjane Satrapi’s film, which impressionistically trails her own experiences as an outspoken child from the Islamic Revolution in Iran, to her emotionally taxing years apart in Europe, is brimming with honesty, humor, and harsh history, with all the resonant capacities of a live action film…perhaps ironically even more so, for at moments it seems to extract the heart of an experience so purely, it comes across distilled to an essence.

PERSEPOLIS is structured and styled much in the manner of the director’s original graphic novel of the same title; incremental, sectional, flowing generally by virtue of chronology, but jumping from moment to moment. It was also animated purely by hand, with felt-tip tracing. This makes a tactile link between the two manifestations of this wonderful story; film and graphic novel. It’s uncommonly rich in its utter simplicity, and ever inventive for the same reason. What makes it even more appreciable is just how starkly different it is compared to the daunting prevalence of over-manufactured computer animated films being pumped out of Pixar and the like. PERSEPOLIS comes across as a retreat to basics, and yet speaks volumes more by its modest innovations.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)…....10/10

2008-01-29T13:49:00.000-08:00

The Coen brothers offer up an utterly flawless display of craft, pacing, and mood. NO COUNTRY dwells in a similar moral territory to Allen’s MATCH POINT (2005), in that it exists in a world that operates firstly on chance and secondly on causality. It is a world in which “justice” is a lofty imposition of man without gravity. Also like MATCH POINT, the only character explicitly aware of the tenets of chance is a man with a gun. The man is Anton Chigur (Bardem), a grim and soulless specter of heedless violence, who is after a rather unfortunately fortuitous but resilient man named Llewelyn Moss (Brolin). Moss, a hunter from the Rio Grande, stumbles upon what looks like a slaughter, finding a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash. He takes the money, and sets the next two hours of atmosphere and tension in motion; a cat and mouse game between him and Chigur, only it’s more like a panther and mouse game. The back and forth of the film is punctuated by scenes involving the investigating Sheriff , Ed Tom Bell (Jones). He’s an oldtimer ready to be set out to pasture, and the barbarism of this ensuing match is proof enough to him, even though he deals merely in the aftermaths of its passing. "I feel overmatched" he explains. "I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. You can say it's my job to fight it, but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know." Ed Tom Bell sees the world as a place thats grown inexorably harsh under his watch, but an old friend evens out the keel for him. "Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming" relating a rather cruel story of many years past.

The preponderance of "what's coming" is a constant hanging question in NO COUNTRY, and is the crux of the films existential framework. Or rather, its that you "can't see what's comin' that propels the story, despite its rather fatalistic certainty. "Watcha doin?" a flirtatious woman asks Llewelyn poolside, just before his death. "Waitin for what's comin" he says back with a smirk and a lean. "You never see it" she says rather plainly. Or even earlier, Bell's deputy, at the sight of the drug deal slaughter says, "This sure is a mess, aint it?" "If it aint, it'll do till the mess gets here" Bell replies with a mix of nonchalance and concern.

The pacing is moderate and perfect, flowing no faster than the dust blown in the Texas breeze, but all the more gripping for it. The pacing roots NO COUNTRY on a scale we can appreciate without having to suspend our disbelief too far. Each character is so immediately rich and secretly complex, playing just beneath an archetype. The three leads (Jones, Bardem, Brolin) stand as a kind of attitudinal or moral ‘past, present, and future’ vehicle, which works as brilliantly as the trinity of moralities in Allen’s recent murder drama CASANDRA’S DREAM. In that sense the story is quite existential, with a manner that says as much in its measured language as it does in its likewise unfolding, recalling Antonioni’s masterwork THE PASSENGER (1975).

The greatest match that Chigur meets is neither Llewelyn, nor the hired contract killer Carson Wells (Harrelson), but little Carla Jean Moss, Llewelyn's wife. She challenges him in a manner no one else had through out the film because she refuses his entire ideological model, and does so without bullets or braun. "Call it [the coin toss]. Its the best I can do." In refusing to call the coin toss on which her life was staked, saying to him "That coin 'aint got no say. It's just you" she rattles Chigur's idea that we are fixed in our design and convictions or that the best any of us can do in this desolate world is weigh our lives against something vastly arbitrary. She says like so many others, "You don't have to do this." What she gets across more than others however, at least to the audience, is that we needn't slave ourselves to ideologies and refuse to break the chains simply because of our seeming design. But as Chigur checks his boots on the way out of her mother's house, its clear he didn't absorb her meaning. He's the heedless soulless future...or is he past, present, and future. Chigur's curious nature reminds me of a despairing passage from the novel THE SORROW OF WAR by Bao Ninh. "Like the dead, one felt no fear, no enthusiasm, no joy, no sadness, no feelings for anything. No concerns and no hopes....and no regard for the clever or the stupid, the brave or the cowardly, friend or foe, life or death, happiness or sadness. It was all the same; it amounted to nothing."

The film, sparse but viciously taut, holds onto no one, and the body count rolls off the celluloid like so much water from a rain-beaten windshield, not stopping to sympathize, moralize, or heighten their passing. In fact, several significant deaths occur off-screen. This is a world that believes in no cannon of pure justice and understands that causality is but a pretense for the truth of chance, and NO COUNTRY refuses to satiate an audience with expectations of how a story should unfold.

Despite the preceding parade of ruthlessness, the final words of the film have an almost hopeful tinge to them. In the scene Tom Bell, now retired but just as amiss in respite as he was in the worlds violence, relates a dream to his wife, concerning him and his father. "When he [his father] rode past, I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do and I, I could see the horn from the light inside of it, about the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead, and he was fixing to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold... And I knew that whenever I got there he'd be there... Then I woke up." One might read into this sentiment that for every expanse of darkness or hazard in this forsaken world, there will be a soul prepared to bring a light into it. It suggests that both eventualities are inevitable.

ATONEMENT (2007).......8/10

2008-01-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

"The Clarity of Passion"

*contains many spoilers
In the first few minutes of the film, aspiring playwrite Broiny (Ronan) remarks to her older sister Cecilia (Knightley) that “in a book all you have to do is write the word ‘castle’ and you can imagine the steeple and walls…but in a play it’s difficult…it all depends on other people.” Indeed ATONEMENT proves how much of each persons life, each persons happiness, “depends on other people.” God help you if your architect is nearsighted. The fact that Broiny mentions this just before she next remarks of Cecelia's broken relation with Robbie (McAvoy); son of the groundskeeper and friend of the family, seals the two notions together and sets all the calamity in motion.

ATONEMENT, a suspenseful and incisive mood piece, a perfectly placed period drama that isn’t stifled by insularity, and a tale of hapless love torn asunder by lies, is more than the sum of its faculties because of the levity with which it navigates through them, and the broadness of its accessibility. Director Joe Wright, with reputedly faithful consideration to his source material, engages what might otherwise be a rather straightforward fatalistic unfolding of events and irrevocable consequences, with all the amenities that film allows. Sound, framing, montage, juxtapositions, and structure are all utilized to a rich and poetic extent, never wavering in, but perhaps flaunting, their functionality

The reason the film is so successful in dramaturgy, though it owes grand favor to all its aesthetics and impeccable composition, is because we are utterly and rather swiftly convinced of the gravity between Cecelia (Knightly) and Robbie (McAvoy), the very crux of the story itself. This is where Atonement succeeds over, say, Jeunet’s lush but grim A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT (2004), a film that bears certain emotional and circumstantial likeness. Jeunet’s film seems to have to tell us explicitly that the principle characters are “soulmates” rather than allow it to be implicitly and therefore more authentically understood. The subsequent convoluted yarn that unravels is just slightly less compelling without anchor and urgency, though still beautiful. Not only are we convinced of Celia and Robbie’s internalized penchant for one another, it is an understanding that is accomplished in mere glances and gestures, viewed if not obscured from a distance through a window; a quiet quarrel of expressions and mannerism speaks volumes. Beyond the brilliance of the two leads in ushering these simmering complex emotions, we have a telling structure of visual juxtapositions in montage, which reveal in the abstract, the very same connection; Cecelia diving into the water as Robbie surfaces in his bath, Cecelia wiping lipstick from her face to reveal a kind of physical honesty to herself in the mirror as Robbie attempts his own version of honesty in a letter meant for her with mirrors at his face level, both smoking and pondering their words, both (ironically at this moment of self-honesty) putting on costume and façade for the impending dinner later that evening. This contradictory moment is embodied in the nature of mirrors themselves (a substantial motif). Mirrors are a contradiction because they are both the truth and deception, a reflection is accurate but also inverse.

Color makes its own statements in ATONEMENT, but in small ways; not as vibrantly instructive as in a film like RAN (1985), or as strictly aesthetic as in a film like ROMEO + JULIET (1997). It exists in a middle ground. Broiny, blond-haired, blue-eyed, naïve little wordsmith, wears white as a child, but as a young adult coming to terms with her transgression by working as a nurse for the red cross, the purity of her white uniform is marred by the violence of a bright red cape (I mean bright), and the red “x” that its straps make across her chest (not unlike the small jagged war wound across Robbie’s own chest). The "x" carries the guilt across her heart of having spun the falsehood that tore the two new lovers apart, sending Robbie to jail and then war, and Celia to the exile of urban disillusionment. For the fateful dinner party Cecelia puts on a shimmering leaf-green dress, and because of the inter-splicing in this sequence we can’t help but notice the connective theme of green in Robbie’s house as he leaves for the same dinner, nor can we help but draw Cecelia’s colorful elemetal connection to Robbie’s practice as a gardener. The nuances in ATONEMENT abound so much so that from the very beginning we feel the bond between Cecelia and Robbie…the rest is aftermath. We follow in tow because we are given the legs to stand on. It is because of these nuances that when the two say “I love you” in the library, partly removing each others costume and breaking their silences, we believe it. It is also one of the most brilliant love scenes I’ve seen on film because of how much it communicates beyond mere sexuality. I’d compare it, only in recent cinema, to the gestural complexity of the first love scene in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005), which undulates its pitch masterfully.

Like in all truly great love stories, love is a palpable but distant ideal for Cecelia and Robbie, though within their grasp for but a moment. “We just travel in different circles,” Cecelia explains as pretext to her affections for him. CASABLANCA, the most romantic movie ever made as some say, has only two kisses in it, and Bogart doesn’t even get the girl in the end! What’s “romantic” is the yearning, the aching, the struggle for or towards love. These are the more tangible qualities of love (or at least the more cathartic), and ironically they are the greatest proof of the enduring and prolific stain that love can leave on us, even when distilled by tragedy, time, distance, war, class, etc. ATONEMENT is testament to the inevitability and boundlessness of attraction and love, as well as the inevitability of its forfeit and difficulty. Maybe Robbie and Cecelia would wind up hating each other, break up over some petty quarrel, but the tragedy lies in the ‘not knowing,’ the ‘never got the chance.’ This emotional thievery is what makes the very last scene such a contradiction to its nature. It’s blissful and pure on the surface, which belies the devastating truth that it is but an impossible and imagined joy, as Broiny (played in later life by Vanessa Redgrave) explains as author of her autobiographical final novel in tight inescapable close-ups. .

The most effective decision in ATONEMENT may be that it waits until its final breaths to rip the carpet from under the narrative and riddle the audience with a kind of half-doubt about everything they have just watched and been swept up in. It is the kind of film that demands by this twist, and its own infectious emotion, for the viewer to reconsider and reconstruct and to revisit. This decision is not arbitrary or manipulative because the entire narrative is spun by the 'imprecision of truth,' the shades of perspective and speculation, which bear grim consequence. It drives the point home completely, that we now question everything we just saw as Broiny had to do. ATONEMENT opens with the sound of a typewriter striking away, the title banged out stroke by stroke. We will come to recognize this sound not only as a structural marker, but also as a constant echo of fabrication, and as Broiny’s musical theme to a degree. From this moment we should have an inkling of how speculative many elements of the story are, especially because the first shot is of Broiny typing, but we don’t. She’s the architect of the whole story and the catalyst of its entire drama…but we don’t know as much as we think until the very end. We learn subliminally that truth follows her, but never walks with her, as told by a particularly excellent shot in the hospital. The camera tracks backward through a dim hallway in pace with Broiny who's walking toward us. As she takes her steps, the ceiling lights behind her turn on one by one...always following behind her, never the one above her.

The early rustlings of the narrative have much to say in their details about an impending discord, and none are better than the buzzing of the bee. Broiny looks to her window when she hears the buzzing of a frantic bee, clawing at the glass. This image already resonates as a note of violence when shown in close-up, and because of what Broiny sees unfolding outside at this very moment between Celia and Robbie, it speaks to the hazard of trying to understand things with an obscured perspective. It is through this window that Broiny makes her first grave misconception, just as the bee, not understanding that glass is clear but solid, writhes its body against it ceaselessly. For Cecelia, it is her proclivity towards water that foretells disharmony. It’s not so much that she’s drawn to water, but more like she can’t escape it. First she jumps into the fountain to retrieve the shard of broken vase, she dives into the pond to escape the raised issue of Robbie, and she sits on the shore of a violent sea to ponder her distant lover. These are all part of a foreshadowing because they all couple water with a negative ideal. Cecelia’s fate lies within her proclivity. Her demise is drowning in a tunnel during the bombing of London. Its one of the more haunting images in cinema history; her body trails away from us suspended in the dim water like a grim marionette, arms extended. The scene in which she retrieves the shard of vase is, in its own way, an impressionistic foretelling of her death. Her scuffle with Robbie at fountains edge fractures the vase. She goes in after to retrieve it, only to fix an image in our minds to be recalled when her fragile body is floating amongst the tunnel’s debris. One might also recall the scene in which Cecelia lays prostrate on the diving board above the pond, wearing the purest white bathing suit and cap. Her body hovers like a still spirit over the water while her reflection in the pond ripples with a quiet intensity; the reflection serving well enough as both her body trapped underwater, and the simmering of her hidden emotions. The great irony of her fate is that Robbie’s final experience on the beaches of Dunkirk is that of insatiable thirst. It’s befitting though, that they should both die underground in the dark, together at least in circumstance.

ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE (2007)......7/10

2007-12-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

ELIZABETH:THE GOLDEN AGE, sequel to the more strictly situational ELIZABETH (1998), functions best as a period-piece via an impressionistic mood-piece, with the certain air of speculation about its history. Its cinematography bows rather elegantly and severely to nature of retrospection; a peering through the veil of history, as it were. In many instances we observe scenes obscured by textured glass, from a harsh angle, swathed in saturated colors, or through a hazy reflection in polished metal. The entire film has a kind of poetic severity; virtuosic score, stunning compositions and design. Ultimately though, this does put a rather theatrical and abstract wall between the viewer and the film, which might have sustained better by a more subtle existential language, considering its focus on the queen's taxing solitude, and indeed its acuteness of character abroad. We are swept up in pageantry and spectacle, but not compelled by authenticity or humanity per se, even though Blanchette’s performance is beguiling in its dance between vulnerability and command. The only real mar against the film are those many moments in which characters wax their prose-like introspections, moments that undermine their own depth and weigh as a self-conscious. But in the end I wonder, what else did people have to do back then but talk of their experience? For that matter, one might as well draw their words with particular zeal. It merely buoys the poetics of the rest of the films verbous construction.

Historical inaccuracy is certainly rampant in Kapur’s film, but I concede to it for I’ve never seen a historical drama that is built entirely on incontrovertible unmodified fact, just as adaptation from reputed fiction is never translated pure. I forgive it because I expect it. I understand that materials and words and facts will be manipulated for a filmmaker’s own “truth-telling.” THE GOLDEN AGE shuffles a number of milemarkers in the later life of the queen, and mixes them with some speculative if not fictional elements, but to no significant detriment of the film itself. The reason I say this is because, like a good period film, its very nature and display made me question its bearings and authenticity. It inspired me to actively research the period on my own terms. I know exactly what was changed, added, trimmed, cropped, highlighted and crammed in terms of actual fact, and all the better for myself and the film. This is a sentiment shared by Blanchette, who is weary of a growing uneducated populace complacent with illusion-as-truth.

Shekar Kapur (the director) explains that his film operates under the maxim of “all history is but an interpretation.” His paramount concern is to make ELIZABETH resonate, through mood and consequence of action, the crucial attitude of religious tolerance in a world that has begotten so many vehemently singular religions convinced of their authority. This is wholly relevant to our own world stage.

Vagabond (1985) DVD................8/10

2007-10-31T21:30:00.000-07:00

NO PLANS, NO GOALS, NO WISHES, NO WANTS

“You chose total freedom and but you got total loneliness. The time comes when, if you go on you destroy yourself. You head for destruction. If you want to live you stop. My friends who stayed on the road are dead now, or else they fell apart: alcoholics or junkies, because the loneliness ate them up in the end.” –Farmer speaking to Mona

This critical conversation extends itself into the visual language of the film, as do several. "If you want to live, you stop." VAGABOND (1985) is in fact punctuated by moments where Mona, our detached and wandering loner, forges past stop signs, but not before pausing for a hanging moment. She is recurrently given explicit warnings, both tactile and in conversation, but falls deaf to them, as if impelled to her own end by indifference. Mona’s arrogant fatalism is what differs her most from, say, the altruistic driven character of Alex Supertramp of INTO THE WILD (2007). In fact, it seems apt to be discussing Agnes Varda's VAGABOND in lieu of the recent release of Sean Penn’s film. Both share an uncompromising spirit of refusal and follow an usher who has arguably no roots in this ‘world of reason’ on their rebellious migrations. While the commonalities of these films are striking (structure, premise), their differences are stark and mostly attitudinal. Mona of VAGABOND is virtually the opposite of Alex of INTO THE WILD though they make roughly the same larger decisions, affect those they encounter by their intensity, and meet with a solemn and solitary finality. Where Alex is aimed (reasonably so), Mona is aimless. He seeks a means, and she seeks an end (whether or not she understands it). Mona has no interest in building loyalties or to be changed by her encounters, nor does she strive to offer any returns of thanks or wisdom, while Alex is explicitly seeking a kind of purity, a truth that he desires to share. “Maybe I’ll write a book when I get back, about my experiences.” He rejects the tenets of man and law with knowledgeable discretion, not bitter totality. To be fair though, Mona makes a curious gesture of selflessness by giving blood, and not for food or for money. She pawns it off as "killing time," but in a way it might be the best way for her to lend herself, because it is done from a distance, detached completely from those who will take benefit. In a sense, it could be taken as her own obscure manner of "living on," in the way that an artists work is their own vying for posterity. I'm reminded of Francois Ozon's unsympathetic and complex LE TEMPS QUI RESTE (2005), in which the young, rather insensitive, and bitter Romain, dying of cancer, makes a final gesture of amends by helping a family conceive, naming the child the sole recipient of all his wealth. Its a small moment that doesnt swell or turn saccarine, just as Mona's moment remains as passing as any other in her downfall.

Mona is a base individual, whose ambitions are wholly selfish and sensual (that’s not to infer that she is simplistic). She seeks no attachment and boasts a harsh ambivalence towards those she encounters (though some evoke a brief sensitivity from her, such as Assoun, “the man with the kind eyes.”). We never really get wind of her motives or of her heart. VAGABOND is insular to a brief period of her wandering, as revealed and anchored by scenes of those scorned individuals interviewed in the police investigation of her death. What we do get, in terms of motives, is a latent superficial remark that explains a part of her disdain, but it comes across as more of a shallow pretense to a deeper concealed impulse we’ll never know. “I hated being a secretary. I quit those bosses, but not to find another boss on the road,” she says to the farmer’s accusation of her laziness and inadequacy. “You don’t want anything. We give you land, you don’t do anything with it. Your heads empty….You’re no drop-out, you’re just out. You don’t exist.” “Fuck your philosophy!” she exclaims.

The film floats on a motif of stark but elegant lateral panning shots, calling a likeness to Mizoguchi and the more unsparing moments of his etherial but realist masterwork UGETSU (1953), with the camera held back, hung in observation by detachment. Unique to VAGABOND is that these shots convey, not only the attitude of Mona, who sidesteps responsibility and repercussion (save for her demise), but also function as microcosms of the film itself. Several of these lateral shots start before Mona, catch up to her and then rest at a point ahead of her, alluding to her transitory nature and the parenthetical narrative. One of these shots is particularly telling. The camera begins at the top of a stone wall, it pans left somewhat swiftly and imperfectly, passing Mona who is seated and looking at photographs, resting well ahead of her on a tangle of winter-worn branches. The photographs that we are shown shortly after, lean to the form of the narrative, being itself a composite of flashbacks and fractured recollections, mere snapshots in the lives of those who encountered Mona, and but a snapshot of her own.

This much is certain; Mona meets her end, falling waerily headfirst into a ditch covered in wine dregs. It is a meager affair as pitiful and solitary as her life on the road, seeming more like a pained resignation as it unravels. It’s not a surprising result, mostly because it is the first thing we come to know of her existence, but also because the film constantly breeds an impending finality, (another quality it bears in common with INTO THE WILD), as if it could end at any moment. Although INTO THE WILD conceals Alex’s death till its final moment, and all the while you hang upon his volition, VAGABOND folds its hand on Mona within the first five minutes. Even if Varda held back till the end like Penn did, it would be evident that Mona was at a dire threshold. The most direct implication of her character and demise is that of the dialogue between Mona and the woman tree specialist, who drives her around half delightedly, half curiously, for presumably 24 hours. The woman is explaining the work that she does; seeking a cure for diseased plane trees. Mona boasts an obvious disinterest. “It invades the tree and kills it. We can’t stop it. All plane trees are doomed. The epidemic began, we understood too late.” “How dumb,” Mona replies. “Not to stop the plague is even dumber,” the woman recants. “Anyway…” says Mona, rolling her eyes. After this conversation, the woman drives them onward, but the camera turns from them to the heart of the withering infected tree she had cited, set upon its final days. This is a perfect illustration of how Mona is herself infected. Her sickness is that of constant refusal and a debilitating velocity. These qualities are as much a cancer as the fungus killing the tree, a sickness that is all too late understood and has no “resistant strain” to stave its course. Remember what the farmer said of his wayward friends, “the loneliness ate them up in the end.” Neither kindness, nor company, nor security, nor warning can lull Mona to stillness, though ironically in all her travels she never really gets anywhere and in fact collects a loose orbiting family of members unaware of each other’s proximity and relation. A number of those whom she affects, are drawn into passing encounters with one another, like bodies caught in the tail of a comet, drawn to bitter realizations or reflections of themselves. If nothing else then, Mona was a wandering mirror covered by a filthy scrim.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED (2007)............8.5/10

2007-10-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

"Emotional Baggage"

It seems that the best approach in discussing a Wes Anderson film is to compare or considerate within the spectrum of all his work (by now a body 5 deep), for he has developed such a characteristic dialect that each film is a landmark in the process of a language. Lets face it, nobody compares Kurosawa to anyone but Kurosawa, or Fellini to anyone but Fellini. Every film I see by Anderson is a mile marker in modern popular cinema (not to say that they are each a masterpiece), emphatically and confidently engaging the medium on all fronts as those other masters had. He is a complete filmmaker, not just a director. His films are plainly evident of this unmitigated saturation of personal efforts and vision. With DARJEELING Anderson has made a considerable effort to ensure himself as a filmmaker with longevity. Its a new coctail of familiar elements. Not to mention this is easily one of the funniest films i've seen in years, despite its somber undercurrent.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED is great step forward for Wes Anderson and also a welcome step backwards. Though still imbued with his usual modes; saturated colors, crafted sets, often centered framing, theatrical timing, arial detail shots, and above all, quirky characters trying to relocate and recapture themselves after great trauma, this film is a new leaner amalgam. THE DARJEELING LIMITED is Anderson’s most mature work, being that it is the result of an instructive and deliberate retrospection, extracting the most functional and creative elements of his practice rather than simply carrying on with the same exponential timeline of reissued tendencies (even though we love those tendencies). As was said of Mizoguchi's SANSHO THE BAILIFF (1954) by critic Tadao Sato, "after an artist has delved deeply into his work, he often arrives at his simplest style of expression. In this film (SANSHO), needless drama and imbellishment are eliminated." I think this is true of DARJEELING as well, or at least that it is a notable step in a similar and effective process of distillation by Anderson.

The film moves at a different meter than his past works, still moderate but more kinetic in ways (mostly the camera), and more insular in timeframe and structure. It functionally meanders with a loose agenda and no specific gravity or loyalties, moving along with the trains stacatto clank. The principal characters, three American brothers hampered by the death of their father and scarce mother, obscurely seeking reconnection after a year of separation on a trip to India, are left physically and vocally bouncing around in tight spaces, and precious few; mostly a train with the films namesake, in which they still manage to keep secrets (items they comically, compulsively, and connivingly forfeit to one another). Even when they are outside of the train their emotional and geographical exile keeps them in a fixed interaction, therefore the energy of the film comes ironically from its systemic confinement. Not to mention the baggage, virtually a character itself! It should be said that while the brothers stay in close orbit of one another, their greatest developments occur when they don’t have walls to impact...when something happens beyond their narcisism and scope to which they must measure themselves spontaneously (something that manages to boast itself quietly). Confinement works for pacing, but openness works for variety and character development. DARJEELING utilizes both quite well. In keeping with this maxim of moderation, all else follows. Anderson curbs his often compulsive quirky flashbacks and exchanges them for fragmented recollections spoken in passing (sometimes written in short stories by Jack's character), which are linked and flourished in one perfectly placed, lengthy, latent flashback. DARJEELING also minimalizes its musical score into a small selection of themes and breaks the trend of being a crafted vehicle for various songs of a bygone era.

A note of real artistic growth by Anderson is that he decides to mostly ‘work with what is there,’ while making what’s there work for him (which is his usual predilection), for many forces were beyond his will (where the train would be/or stop at particular times, commotion on the streets, conflict of local taboo, interior decoration, etc). It seems that, like the brothers in DARJEELING, Anderson was seeking to recapture a quality he had lost. DARJEELING boasts the kind of sparsity and vocal profuseness of his first feature BOTTLE ROCKET, but offers more variety and vibrancy in its pulse and picture, lessons learned from his subsequent projects. That fractional forfeit of control and adoption of a slightly more reactive process in writing and filming results in a strange authenticity in situation and character, balancing DARJEELING’s hard lean towards quirky absurdism. Its not a perfect equation but its scarcely done better. His characters, like those in BOTTLE ROCKET, seem less like they are filling inventive archetypes, and are more defined by their interactions, what we don't know about them respectively, and their almost abscent personalities. Where in TENENBAUMS or AQUATIC, each character can stand relatively on its own because of their inherent specificity and eccentricity, these demand interaction by their bareness. Do we really need to know any more than we come understand of each brother? No. We have as much as we need, little as it may be, revealed in nuance and fleeting moments of profundity. This is a film about three people who are rendered vacant by loose ends and questions, not about who they were and who they will be afterwards. Its simply about the force that finally breaks them from their glazed over lives so that they can move on and engage all that is happening to them presently. Recall what Jack says of his final short story (which is part of the script for Hotel Chevalier). "It sjust an ending, i dont have the beginning yet." DARJEELING is just an ending, not a beginning, not a deep revealing of its characters' back-stories. Its merely the fog lifting.

Another measure of maturity in DARJEELING’s rather random but calculated unfolding (though I prefer to call it a tumble) is that it isn’t terribly romantic (bear with me), that is to say in the sense of having the characters break down to honestly embrace the culture whereby they wholly change. They don't, in fact they fight it for the most part, engaging it shallowly and cynically, something they don’t significantly shake. While to some degree they are each changed, they are much the same in the end, continuing their base neurosis and tendencies, but with a lightness gained. All three, though sharing a singular impetus of suffering, grow on their own terms and to the extent that they need, being honest and reflexive for the first time in a long time. They change simply because no one who went through what they did wouldnt. Like in all Anderson’s films the characters seek to reclaim vestiges of their former lives and must do so by ultimately letting them go (a quality carried throughout the films passing layers), and never painted so aptly than by the brothers tossing their father’s luggage, items they’ve carried with great inconvenience, individually and together, literally and emotionally, from the beginning in order to catch their last train home. Anderson apparently has the ability to lace an entire film with, and make you relish, an obvious metaphor because it is utterly simlple and perfect, and I'm all the more impressed.

INTO THE WILD (2007).........9/10

2007-10-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

"Exile to Exile: no man who loves is free."

There are films that can ensnare you from their first moments, perhaps by a solemn note, a mood, or a stirring image. ‘INTO THE WILD’ is not one of those films per se, but only because it is so actively about having no roots, something that carries into its entire structure. Even its most resplendant or revealing moments are kept momentary so as to avoid a hampering or irresponsible romanticism (not that its void of it). Chris McCandless, self called Alex Supertramp and sublimely portrayed by Emile Hirsch, is 23 years old and decides to rightly abandon his upper middle class cacoon as part of a "walden-esqu' rebellion after graduating from college. He wanders westward, organically migrating from place to place, never staying too long, and never losing sight of his prevailing goal…"a great Alaskan adventure," despite the beckoning of human relationships wherever he goes. What's important about Alex is that his transience never translates to a ‘non-presence’ but rather an impending impermanence in everything but our observation of him. He has a notable, lasting, and authentic effect on every life he touches and the weight of that impact is emotionally palpable. Jan, the wayward ex-hippie he deeply befriends, says to him with a wounded but loving affection, “Just get your bag and go on. I don’t think I can handle a hug,” as he leaves her company for the last time on his journey north. Perhaps people see in him an old spirit recapturing its boundlessness, and it indeed intoxicates. Its a curious thing that this boy of 23 is the bearer of wisdom and soul to a host of seasoned bodies. He almost makes them seem like children, but by harmless default.

INTO THE WILD is a progressively entrenching story, brilliantly weaving two, forward linear threads that reveal ever more of themselves and each other, leading to an appreciation of the inevitability and necessity of Alex's initial departure (something that endures but also grows as his travels bear fruit). Structure is a key element to the story, but mostly in terms of how we've come to know Alex's exploits historically. In terms of the research done for the book and subsequent film, the first comprehensive information attained was Alex's journal of Alaska, so this is where we begin. For the author, the rest of the process was a hopscotch search for significant people mentioned in Alex's earlier documentation. Like the author and perhaps Alex's meandering memory while in the wild, we periodically jump between threads, appreciating ever more his honesty and aspiration, and the toll it took on his family. As each moment passed to the next, I was swept more swiftly along (too gentle a term), all the while feeling a kind of subtly wrenching impending loss even as Alex was ever present to me, as though in every encounter I took upon myself both Alex’s insatiable drive and the sadness of those scorned by his transience. The sweeping sensation I speak of is less the elegant breed, and more like the scene in which Alex stumbles into the raging Alaskan river that has widened its neck and sharpened its bite since last he crossed, threatening to rush him downstream and cutting him off from any escape. "I am literally trapped in the wild," he writes in his jornal. Its strange, but I was so uniquley moved by the exponential quality of my experience of this film; its nakedness, its naivety, its romanticism, its fairness, its splendor, its simplicity, and its unsparingness, that I can’t really come to criticize it, for if I did, it would be like spitting in the face of one of the most genuine human ambitions…to be free in truth, and to understand that freedom has its own tenacity, for in many ways it grinds against the arch of law and convention that welds our society together. INTO THE WILD, beyond schema and splendor, is an earnest embodiment of Alex's singular drive, and it is utterly convincing and above-board in its manner.

The pertinence and power of Sean Penn's film is helped greatly in terms of timing, for now it would be exceedingly more difficult, if not impossible for Alex to make the affecting journey he did without being arrested, detained, fined, or reprimanded in some way, particularly as a result of most post 9/11 security measures. He serendipitously made his pilgrimage on that all too shallow precipice between the fear bred by the cold war and the fear bred by the war on terror. In a way Alex was fighting his own war during this "peacetime", a primordial war that is both genuine and borrowed (He's never shy about his influences and often quotes Tolstoy and Thoreau to articulate his attitudes. "Jack London is king" he declares once). Alex's is an existential war with tactics ruled by passivity, not inaction mind you. His weapons are books, a rabid intellect, an unfailing sincerity, and the resilient feet that carry him from the exile of loveless privilege and obligation to an exile of self-discovery and broken borders. In that sense, Alex is perched upon yet another precipice between two polarities, one he rejected and one he aspired too (even though both leave him quite alone).

In Indian /Hindu culture reincarnation is a staple belief. It is understood that each incarnation of physical life is a process of learning, suffering, and purification until the individual is ultimately delivered to enlightenment, at which point the soul is free of the exhaustive cylcle. While watching Alex strive in his objections and survive in solemnity, I couldn't help but think of those individuals who choose to live outside of Indian society as posessionless beggars or "untouchables," so that they might suffer or endure enough to be finally released from cyclical captivity in life. Alex sees the looming cage around himself, but has an equal eye for the resplendent beauty beneath and beyond the superstructure, something he's "doesn't mind calling God." What he seeks "rather than love, money, faith, fame, or fairness...is truth." Every step he takes is toward truth, both in the moment and aggregate. At every opportunity, he forfeits his wisdoms (sometimes words forfeited to him by other wise men) in an effort to reduce and relinquish whatever holds him to this world of reason. "If we admit that life can be ruled by reason, then we destroy the possibilities of existence."

Not to divulge too much, but Alex finds his truth, and it is a somber chord struck to the core. Like the tortured composer who plays a sharp note and smiles on its perspective and healing asperity, Alex writes his epiphany in the margins of Doctor Zhivago with a heartbreaking lag and concision and resigns to its finality bathed in cold and light. For this reason, there is nothing of failure in his journey, though "some blunders and absurdities had crept in," for his greatest goal is met with wide open eyes and a smile.

PRINCESAS (2005) dvd............8.5/10

2007-09-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

PRINCESAS (2005), by Spanish filmmaker Fernando Leon de Aranoa takes a raw humanistic approach to a lifestyle that can and has been easily overstated and shallowly probed by lesser directors. However it is a misapprehension to think that PRINCESAS is ‘about prostitution’ when it is more so a film whose characters happen to be prostitutes, and by default reveals much about their world. PRINCESAS casts its “whores” in an even and unvarnished light without being either entirely pessimistic or propagandistic, lending it dexterity and credibility. The film’s dilemmas are universal, its character relationships genuine, and its rhythm is in pulse with the bustle of traffic in the streets.

The main character Caye, whose street name is Lima (headway into her identity subversion), is a beautiful but guarded woman, with competing qualities of sadness, fortitude, and a brimming spirit withheld. Candela Pena deserves all the accolades she received and more for her dynamism and quietly heartrending performance. Caye works as a prostitute, intently saving all her earnings (for what we don’t know, and neither does she). Instead of tricking on the streets she works out of a tiny hair salon with a band of likeminded, if not elitist, working girls. This seems like a peculiar life decision considering her upper middle class background. She never elucidates her motivation explicitly, but she needn’t for our purposes. Along with an unwanted influx of foreign prostitutes comes Zulema, a Dominican woman whom Caye befriends in spite of being her lower caste competition. They forge a tender bond amidst dramatic circumstances, which becomes a kind of active inspiration for Caye. Something to think about for a person who has “never had anything happen to her worth remembering.”

Caye reveals in her expressions, and sometimes in words, her subverted attitudes, her existential curiosities, and desires without realizing from how deep a place they come. She tells Zulema about how princesses get homesick for their kingdom and cant stay away for too long. “Remember, princesses are so sensitive they can die of nostalgia.” Caye’s kingdom is her unabridged identity, and she has been at its compromise for too long. She restrains her desires, which makes her cry at their mention, but she restrains the tears too. Zulema’s kingdom is her son. Though the film offers much of its concerns to Zulema, (saving money for her child back home, caught in the grips of a dead end abusive situation over her ‘papers,’ all the while writhing in separation anxiety), she always feels a bit transitory, almost ethereal. Therefore our mind gravitates to Caye, for it seems that even Zulema’s suffering exists so that Caye can heal within, in part, by healing without. I think that history has proven beyond doubt that mutual suffering unites with far greater strengths than mutual rejoice, and that wartime heralds an immediacy and authenticity like no other time. For this reason, the abruptness of Zulema and Caye’s friendship is not surprising. But in all fairness, one can find a kindred spirit even on a battlefield.

From its opening frames PRINCESAS boasts a gritty but sensitive story which delves into the pains of self-deceit and the relegating of ones petitions. In this broader context, Caye is so much like her mother (the other important woman in her life), who sends herself flowers and pretends with an uneasy ambiguity that they might be from her husband who “has been buried three years.” They both reveal their pain with their eyes. Like the adage, “what you hate in others is invariably something you hate about yourself,” Caye projects her frustration at her mother, perhaps because she acts as a kind of attitudinal mirror, and because it is easier to criticize than to take criticism. The terse and laborious dinners that she shares with her family, of which she isthe youngest, are so because of all that is concealed and left seething beneath the surface…or calling incessantly on Caye’s phone, to be apt. In the one place she should be able to best actualize herself; her home, her kingdom, Caye is again an actress, surrounded by actors. In every role of her life she is covert, denying her passions at work, and her work in her passions (even though she tells new her love interest Manuel at the beginning of their courtship, he thinks she’s joking and she allows him the misapprehension). This kind of active self denial can only endure for so long, for there may be no greater agony than an individual hidden within themselves.

By its prevailing strokes of mitigated pathos and existential leanings, the entire film is a bastion of hope for cinema that dwells in severe territory. Our sympathies arise from its pure humanism and a dire minimum of manipulation (I suppose even framing is a form of manipulation). In keeping with Aranoa’s proven sensitivity and intuition, we are not appeased with a clean resolution, but offered a hanging expression that promises both turmoil and respite in its aftermath…but we may only infer, like cutting away before the last thread of a twig has broken and having to imagine the snap! In a way, it resonates more. What my mind reverts to is an early scene in the film. Caye turns from the pharmacists counter and sees a little blonde girl playing on a scale. The scale reads zero. “You’re so light,” she says to the girl. “That means you’re an angel.” Her mother looks at Caye smartly and says, “you have to put money in it for it work.” To this remark Caye’s face speaks of a heart that is trying so hard to love, but is stamped out at the smallest outpouring. But after going through the wars with Zulema, she’s grown brave enough to want to shatter her shell and let her heart bleed. No kingdom is reclaimed without blood.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.......8/10

2007-09-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

“Fixed in time and timeless.”

Critics are too often compelled to make the remark of “mere spectacle” whenever a film is so boisterously visual, but beyond and within the splendor of ‘ACROSS THE UNIVERSE’ lives a beating heart with genuine feeling. Taymor artfully unravels a story of inverwoven lives in which characters and places sway with the passage of time in a buoyant and compelling way. Jude leaves liverpool to locate his american father. He meets restless Max, falls in love with Max's sister, moves to NY with him, meets some more people all displaced one way or another, and all of whom are formatively tumbling forward.

Like a wanderer to the tune of a siren’s song (never a more apt analogy), you will follow enraptured, at least i did. ‘Universe’ captures the broad essence of a tumultuous and vibrant time in history; the changing landscape of american youth in the wake of Vietnam and civil rights, with equal parts grace, tenacity, theatricality, and colorful groundedness. That's no small accomplishment. Sure, it rests on a predominant and stylized visual punch, but one that is wielded with ingenuity and relevance, and that is not so much a crutch as it is joyously respondent to the time and each moment. To those who racant with words like "overstated" and "over the top" I say, yes indeed and all for the better. Once people break into spontaneous song and dance, I say anything goes. What’s more is that 90% of the songs were recorded live on set without overdubbing in post-production, a testament to the richness of talent that is overflowing in this film that reinvigorates timeless music (almost all Beatles songs) in a timeless tale.

Let me contradict my praise by saying that ACROSS THE UNIVERSE was not my favorite film of the year. While vibrant and powerful, it was mostly so when songs were in swing (which they were a remarkable amout of the time). In its "regular moments" we are left with pretty people and slightly less in the pail of rather familiar material. Despite this hinderance, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE stands tall as an enlivening experience that I have little to compare to over these summer months. Dismiss the dismay of those who say it’s a just a "pretty nostalgic romp." I’m just glad that a Hollywood film can still have a lively spirit that is both convincing and contagious. “This is a movie that fires its songs like flowers at the way we live now. It's the kind of movie you watch again, like listening to a favorite album” (Ebert)

DANS PARIS...............7.5/10

2007-09-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

"Together Alone"

-Anna has just left Paul who, annihilated by the separation, moves back with his father in Paris. His younger brother Jonathan, a casual student, still lives in his father's apartment and spends most of his time womanizing and fooling around. But what this apparent lightness conceals is a deep wound. Jonathan, in fact, has never been able to overcome the death of his beloved sister. Meanwhile Paul sinks into depression.-

DANS PARIS, the fifth film in as many years by writer/director Christophe Honore (Ma Mere), is through and through a constant collapsing and building of the fourth wall, both attitudinally and structurally. It is at once a Brechtian display of self-awareness and reflexion (Jonathon talking to the audience), and with its counter cannon of bare intimacy (insular moments between quarrelling lovers, Paul singing along to music in his underwear) it is a film that is equally, if not more so, a work of inclusion.

Honore’s pervasive dance of oppositions begins as the film itself does, for even within the gesture of Jonathon’s opening address to the audience and recognition of the medium of film itself by which he is present, the viewer is simultaneously broken from and unified with the narrative. Certainly not the first time something to this effect has been done. I’m thinking on Jodorowski’s allegorical opus THE HOLY MOUNTAIN in which the final lines of dialogue are roughly, “this is just a film, and we are just actors. The ideas are what will live after it’s over,” spoken straightly to the audience. But in ways, this frankness is more a throwback to the modes of the nouvelle vague (which DANS PARIS is in spades). In Jean-Luc Godard’s film MASCULIN FEMININ (1966) there are two scenes in which actors, who are not in character, are being candidly, if not awkwardly interviewed by the director from behind the camera, himself posing as another character in the film. These unscripted scenes, notably divergent from the rest of the films tone were included as moments of human authenticity, simultaneously shaking the viewer from their cathartic rapture and placing them within its grips. While Jonathon of DANS PARIS doesn’t take an interplanetary journey to climb a holy mountain in order to share his halting sentiment, he does make a small pilgrimage from his tiny bedroom out onto the airy porch, from the warm dimness of the apartment to the cool sterilizing light of the morning’s first moments, an important action that compounds the disconnection his monologue will spurn. Not only does he admit that he is in a film acting as storyteller with an unlikely omniscience, he even engages the audience with questions and advice in concern of their experience of the film. This is as brash and direct as a film can become, and yet because of its apperent lightness and comedy, it becomes an invitation rather than a push.

What we learn very quickly through character interactions is that Jon and Paul are rather different people (seemingly) and share little in their attitudes on love, despite their tender sibling chemistry. Light-spirited Jon thrives in a diverting playworld of spontaneous couplings that masks a more subtle and withheld sadness, while Paul steeps himself in his romances and wears his emotions loudly. Paul has become a disciple of, “Men prefer sorrow over joy... suffering over peace (Kurosawa)."
His heart-withering woes stem from an impulsive life decision to move out to the country as some sort of medicating quarantine with his then girlfriend Ana, even though from this moment we are well aware of their discord. The subsequent singularity of their environment (the relationship) turned Paul into a polarized individual, much in the way that the construction of the film is polarized; being at once so small and authentic and at other times so self consciously poetic, overtly cinematic, bouncing from small still rooms to the open kinetic air of the city. During thair stay of execution in the county, Paul and Ana (mostly Paul) lived in a wartime of the heart, going through the exercise of “silence to mayhem with nothing in between.” It is a desperate kind of sickness that drags, and though Ana never fractures quite like Paul does, it leaves them both withered.

With his quickness to laughter, deceptively juvenile demeanor, and youthful spontaneity, Jon is almost a foil to Paul, though not realizing his transience causes its own thread of woes (scorned lovers, an underappreciated father left in the lurch all too often). Probably like every other day of the week, Jonathon bounces from encounter to encounter on his epic race to the Bon Marche shopping windows, which turns out to be more of a distraction for himself than for Paul, whom he contacts at regular intervals on the phone. Jon is adept to his brothers suffering and is keen to the idea that he should be left alone. For the most part, this is what Paul wants, even though he has chosen to be surrounded by people in these dire straits. What good Jon is able to do, when he’s around to do it, is bring the exuberance of the city air into the vacuum of his father’s apartment, a quality he shares with his mother (who gets Paul to laugh histerically). Inversely Paul, with his palpable bitterness and introversion, brings the weight of four walls to the outside world when he takes the occasion in flashbacks. Jon and Paul, foils and yet friends, are by example equal parts architect and destroyer of the polarity in DANS PARIS.

Overall, DANS PARIS is something of a harmonious schism; a mostly nonlinear structure that is accomplice to the idea of the polarity inherent in close relationships. It is both parenthetical (in that it is a caption of time which continues before and after the film), and is also a closed circuit narrative (in that the film ends right where it begins…in the bedroom). The film, essentially an interlaced flashback, ends the only way it could have, at a point no farther than its moment of retrospection (even though it will catch you off guard). But instead of just looping, it also expands in our imagination as we draw on our own memories of healing and project upon the inevitability of respite. Thinking on the opening frames of DANS PARIS as connected to the last, I’m reminded of the final shot in Tsai Ming-Liang’s meandering existential romance I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE (2006), in which the three conflicted leads are sleeping on a bed that’s floating on an industrial pond, as if a concrete poem on the nature of our existence (we get to choose who we float with, but not the fact that we float, or necessarily where). Therefore Paul, Jon, and Alice (just like Hsiao-Kang, Rawang, and Chyi) are floating on the potential for a kind of resolution rather than the resolution itself, on the stillness and ambiguity of healing rather than the clarity of action and retrospection. For me DANS PARIS ends on an ever-satisfying, unpresumptuous, and understated upward swell.

THE BRAVE ONE (2007)............6.5/10

2007-09-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

"An apple not far enough from the tree."

THE BRAVE ONE shifts between being pointedly brilliant and being a mere caricature of brilliance. To begin with flattery, the cinematography is a head above the rest. Rousellot has the camera deftly swaying as though on the deck of a ship in deep swells, capturing a severity and psychology without being oppressively analytical when cast on its existentially wounded vigilante Erica Bain. And the crowning achievement in editing is the early montage in which passionate detail shots of Bain and her lover David are juxtaposed with moments of a likewise vulnerability with her brutalized body being stripped by doctors after the assault in the Park. It’s a stroke of genius that passes all too soon and is never repeated.

In terms of performance Jodi Foster (Bain) and Terence Howard (Mercer) make a masterful pair, each sustained by their own particular grace and enhanced by the other’s. Though they have just met, they appear to know each other with a subtle intimacy. Despite this honest connection they are equal in their manner of concealment and restraint, which is a credit to the film overall. Even the most intense moments of vigilantism are carried out with a brand of relative quietude and brevity. Unfortunately the manner in which these scenes are aesthetically and tonally constructed is marred by the simplistic if not tactless nature of their specific content; terrible situations falling into Erica’s lap, bad guys filling archetypes to the brim and saying memorably embarrassing lines like “you ever been fucked by a knife before?” It is these moments, though they get their point across, which nearly destroy THE BRAVE ONE’s dexterity, as though there are two apparent attitudes at the helm of the film, one distinctly more artful and nuanced than the other. Personally, I’m going to side with mind responsible for such greatness as THE CRYING GAME (1992) and MONA LISA (1986).

Ultimately and much to my dismay the film fails, but not before it threads a few strong ideas and performances along its descent. Though brimming with potential (which is why I afford it such a measure of leniency), it comes across as a few drafts short of excellence. Considering its title, THE BRAVE ONE doesn’t go far enough in its deviation from the source. It is notably more intelligent in design and sensitive in psyche and morality than most vigilante films but still trails some of the muck of its predecessors onto the celluloid, anchoring a work of nuance with Hollywood contrivances, least of which is THE BRAVE ONE’s ungainly conclusion, satisfying as it may be emotionally. For the most part Jordan navigates well by the films internal compass, but in its final throws denies its own logic. Instead of an ending that leaves room to breathe or resonates in action rather than narration with Bain’s wayward disposition, the Roderick brothers (I’ll chalk it up to the writers for this one) construct an “all bases are covered” kind of finality, leaving any moral or existential conflicts dead with the body count…and apparently my scathed regard.

I played the fools game with THE BRAVE ONE by which I mean I was driven by high expectation. I wanted a great film and got an OK one. Stellar cinematography, superb acting by the leads, the ever welcome ambivalent sarcasm from Detective Vitale (“Christ on a cracker!”), and the obvious notes of delicate complexity from the hand of Neil Jordan are what buoy what could have been wholly saved by a simple rewrite.

SUNSHINE (2007) ......9/10

2007-09-01T17:42:00.000-07:00

“A MISSION OF OMISSION”

“Our sun is dying. Mankind faces extinction. Seven years ago the Icarus project sent a mission to restart the sun but that mission was lost before it reached the star. Sixteen months ago, I, Robert Capa, and a crew of seven left earth frozen in a solar winter. Our payload; a stellar bomb with a mass equivalent to Manhattan Island. Our purpose; to create a star within a star. Eight astronauts strapped to the back of a bomb. My bomb. Welcome to the Icarus Two.”

Boyle’s key decision in SUNSHINE, among its many welcome genre deviations, is omission. After its brief but explicative opening narration, SUNSHINE thrusts the mostly ignorant audience into a mission in progress. We are without any grounding scenes of life on earth or the launching of the mission, suspending us in a telling isolation. In its beginning seconds Boyle, with economical brevity, gives you all you really need to know in order to appreciably enter this film, which is precious little. Hitchcock, master of so many things, executed the tactic of omission beautifully, and none better than in his cold war thriller TOPAZ (1969). There are two standout scenes in TOPAZ during which key characters concoct espionage scenarios in plain view of the audience but vocally cut off; one time they are behind a glass door, the other from across the street. This decision iterates three basic points. The first is to remind the audience that the imagination is a central component of the filmic experience. Secondly it is a means to avoid narrative redundancy (to be told what will happen and then have it happen). Lastly it shows how little information we need in order to connect dots, how few stars we need in order to recognize a constellation. Those things discussed in muted fashion in TOPAZ are extraneous. It is understood that we will inevitably be shown, in action, what they are concocting in silence through the natural situational unfolding. Likewise and throughout, SUNSHINE avoids the typical, weighted scenes of scientific jargon justifying all the technology and processes used within the universe of the film as well as minimizing coverage of actions based on technology (such as the docking of Icarus I to Icarus II being captured in two or three brief shots) in favor of more authentically occurring dialogue and a maximizing of the linchpin of human attitudes, action, and interaction. If and when things are explained, it occurs as a natural product of each situation and is done so to an appropriate extent with unpretentious delicacy, often diegetically visually (as with the oxygen garden) rather than expositionally. We learn a considerable amount of information simply in the process of SUNSHINE’s fatalistic unfolding. Notably, while the arch of the film is distinctly causal (all subsequent dilemmas and failures stemming from the initial receiving of Icarus I's distress beakon and the decision, after a risk assessment, to rondezvous with the ship and salvage its payload), SUNSHINE is alternately sustained by an equivalent arch of ideas, quietude, and human spontaneity.

SUNSHINE offers such faith in intuition as a credit to the audience and as a measure of confidence in storytelling. In lue of excessive expositional dialogue, the films chief concerns are (separately and relationally) psychological, existential, spiritual, environmental (space, the ship), and sensual (light, dark, sound, movement) all of which are articulated through the authenticity of human experiences and reactions, heightened moral and practical dilemmas, analytical editing/cinematography, and a brilliantly empathic musical score (which manages to be as delicate, solemn, and explosive as the sun itself).

Though unlike anything he’s done before (that is to say, as different as every film Boyle has ever made is from the other) there is a quirk in storytelling that threads a number of his works together; Tainspotting, 28 Days Later, Millions. He has a tendency to execute a third act that seems marginally detached from the preceding. A second viewing always seems to sew them back together for me, but never seamlessly. The third act dilemma of SUNSHINE is seen by many critics as especially problematic. At least it draws the most fire. Unlike the popular criticism, I found SUNSHINE’s third act, though self-confused of its tenets, is as much a twist as it is a matter of the films logical progression, mostly in terms of the polarization of didactics within the narrative (leaving physicist Capa the pragmatist and Pinbecker the dogmatist as two ideological stand-ins at war).

Pinbecker is the captain of the first Icarus. He has survived seven years in orbit of the sun after murdering his entire crew and sabotaging the original mission based on an existential/theological fugue. Pinbecker slips onboard Icarus II and continues his ‘latter days’ agenda with the new crew after they dock with the dormant Icarus I in order to assess and possibly utilize its payload as a back-up. Pinbecker is a vehicle, in one sense, for the idea of fanaticism, and the dangerous reversion of the mind towards narrow fundamentalism in a world that beacons, if not demands broadness of scope (an all too timely topic). All of this resulted from the original Icarus missions’ year and a half staring contest with the Sun (God itself for countless cultures, the source of life energy, the primordial origin, etc). The ensuing seven years of quietism Pinbecker spent “talking to god” on a dead ship didn’t act as remedy either. His ideological reversion serves as the counterpoint to Capa's prevailing scientific pragmatism (that is not to say that he is without a personal kind of spirituality). Capa invented the bomb...a bomb made by man that will be used to "fix god" and disrupt the perfect primordial order as Pinbecker sees it. In broader terms it is the greatest ultimatum btw/ science and religion, between the apex of 'the natural' (the source energy for life on earth) and the apex of the 'unnatural' (technology designed by man), and between the openness of spirituality and the confinement of dogmatism. SUSHINE tells the story of the absolute summit of man’s science and industry, coupled with the unity of man’s societies’ efforts based on desperate survivalism (noted as the international cast) reaching out to touch god (the sun).

The culminating frenetic texture of the third act, contrasted with the more moderate pacing of the first two, manages to equate itself with the increasingly psychotic reality of flying into the sun on a Manhattan sized bomb. We are visually arrested by erratic movement, heightened claustrophobia, blurred vision, disorientation of characters and location, and a tactile quality of separation (crewmembers are dispersed or dead, and Icarus II is at the furthest distance yet traveled from earth). Granted, the shift towards a reputed “horror genre” dynamic, with Pinbecker stalking the crew in darkness is jarring, and feels at first like the filmmakers might have fumbled the reins of the narrative, or that it is an aside seeking justification through severity. But it is forgivable in lue of its resultant flaring of style, tension, creative sensory disruption, and its philosophical implication. SUNSHINE doesn’t merely degenerate into a “slasher film,” but effectively transplants a horror schema (which Boyle has shown he excels in) for its own devices, distinguishing itself by being neither arbitrary in its action nor self-egrandizing in its gratuity. Rather than merely a "reason to show blood" it stands as message of universality, a reminder to the audience, on a small scale, of the price of the missions failure. Blood becomes a simple and effective element to emphasize our humanity and fragility in such a far removed and fantastical situation.

In the end it seems more that SUNSHINE’s perogative is that of ideas, textures, and sensations taking the precedence over explicative science, and doing so with stellar results. The film even admits to an extent that the spoken science is going to take a back seat (though the tactile products of science and technology within/without the ship are their own evidence). Remember, Icarus says to Capa in the Earth Room, "…any further calculations beyond this point are not useful for speculation"..."because everything about the payload delivery is completely theoretical. Between the boosters and the gravity of the sun the velocity of the payload will get so great that space and time will become smeared together and everything will distort. Everything will be unquantifiable…" . For me this dialogue is a resonant truth of the film and a matter to consider in its experience. It rung also as a gesture to put science and religion on a similar plane, if you will. The existence of God is not something that can be empirically proven or discussed, therefor much of the driving science of the film, which is itself theoretical, is given an equivalent conjectural and undiscussed nature. If anything it inspired me, and apparently Roger Ebert, to conduct research independently, finding out anything I could about the theoretical science used for the film and related material. If SUNSHINE had divulged everything on its own, or made the typical plea for approval by flaunting its science like a diploma in a doctors office, the learning curve would have ended with the credits, and the audience would have left a complacent mass, pretending they understand solar physics and quantum mechanics. Personally, I’d rather a film instill the desire to discover than do the discovering for me. To lead me to water and let me drink of my own accord.

As a sentimental aside, the next morning after seeing SUNSHINE, I awoke to catch the sun just as it was cresting the horizon. It was an impossible red and hung in a baffling clarity. I could look right at it without a wince. I smiled and realized that I hadn't even thought about the sun in ages. I took it for granted as one does the ground or air. Since then I stop and give it a moment once in a while. Just a few seconds of attention or thought. I don't know what consequence it all has, but it took a film to remind me that the reason I exist at all is because of that big bright spot in the sky that blinds me when I'm driving to work. It almost has an identity for me now.

SUNSHINE, a genre cluster, an existential hotbed, and a platform for some of the most affecting and revelational imagery in recent cinema, stands as a milestone for its filmmakers, for mindful but accesible science fiction, and for film in 2007.