Kanal

“Kanal” is the Polish word for “sewer.” Andrzej Wajda’s 1957 film bearing that name documents the final desperate days of the Warsaw Uprising in World War II. The movie begins as a fairly conventional combat picture. We are introduced to a small battalion of ragged insurgents: the camera tracks along their company as a voice-over identifies some of the men. The soldiers are defending a Warsaw suburb against German attack and have been surrounded. They expect to die. The men are predictably handsome and gallant. Among their number are two attractive (and buxom) young women, each romantically attached to one of the troops. The insurgents are commanded by a tough-as-nails Lieutenant who looks like a character from a sixties’ era WW II comic book. The camera glides through horrific ruins (the film was shot in the actual debris of Warsaw in 1955-56) and there are some unconvincing battle scenes. All of this is competent stuff, but unimpressive. The men loiter in a ruined mansion and a musician tries to play the out-of-tune piano. The love affairs develop a little and there is lots of pessimistic talk and cigarette smoking. Some of the men get drunk on home-brew. Before the big German assault, the insurgents are ordered into a chaotic town-square that is under German bombardment. The square is packed with panicked civilians, hysterical women searching for lost children, and smoke drifts from burning buildings. The musician has called his home in downtown Warsaw and learns that the Germans are rounding people up and burning them alive with flamethrowers. “Where are you?” the man’s wife asks him on the telephone. “With the Resistance,” he says. The woman is incredulous: “there still is a Resistance?” she asks. The company of insurgents descends into the sewers via a small manhole and the rest of the movie takes place underground. This part of the film is extraordinarily gripping, a peculiar combination of expressionist chiaroscuro and nauseating realism that has the flavor of a Hammer horror film. The sewer tunnels are brilliantly lit but the imagery somehow suggests darkness -- this is accomplished by pouring chiaroscuro light at oblique angles onto black and glistening brick walls and vaults; the men carry flashlights which appear as bright spears of light in their hands and, when they light matches, these also flare convincingly, although as highlights against tunnels that have been flooded with movie light to make everything legible. The men and women, who strip to their chemises like the stars of a Hammer Dracula film, are smeared with filth and the water through which they crawl and trudge is turgid, syrupy with oatmeal-like feces. The effect is one of people trapped in Stygian darkness although, in point of fact, the sets are well-lit and the dirty, befouled water gleams like the streets of a film noir metropolis. The extended sequence in the sewer tunnels is convincingly nightmarish. The tunnels are a labyrinthine maze and the group of men gets split into small parties, all of them ultimately doomed. The musician goes mad and, after quoting Dante’s “Inferno” wanders the watery galleries, playing an ocarina like some perverse version of Orpheus. The lovers make it to the light but only to find their escape from the sewer blocked by bars through which they can not pass. People drown and are suffocated by methane fumes and the wounded bellow in the dark passageways like maimed bears or wolves. The lieutenant finally makes it to the surface. But he has lost his whole troop. (In a disturbing scene, we see most of the men squirming their way to the surface only to be captured by Germans who have been busily shooting civilians against a gore-stained wall, corpses heaped like garbage against the bloody masonry.) When the lieutenant finds that he is alone except for a subordinate who has lied to him about the troops following behind, he executes the sole survivor of his company and descends into the sewer again, his hand holding a revolver the last part of his body to disappear into the underground. The subject of the Warsaw Uprising was fraught with political complications when the film was made. Apparently, the Red Army stood by idly on the opposite side of the Vistula, allowing the Poles to be butchered so that they would be unable to resist the Soviet occupation of their country. For this reason, Wajda has to present the Uprising in a way that shows it to be wholly futile and degrading. The Polish patriots are like sewer rats, drowning in excrement, and their heroism is meaningless. Wajda could not depict the Uprising as courageous, nor could he provide any political context -- the result is a film that is mostly an expressionistic horror-show. But as a horror-film, some of the movie’s scenes are incomparably effective -- the tunnels gleam with malevolent eerie light and water foams with fog, misting the Gothic vaulted vistas so that the sewer looks like the moors in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. Faces leer and corpses dangle grotesquely from the grates of the manhole covers. We aren’t far from a Roger Corman production from the early sixties and, indeed, some of the performances include grimaces and staring eyes, quotes from “The Inferno” like something that Vincent Price might intone in “The Pit and the Pendulum” or “The Conqueror Worm”. It’s horrible enough but also magnificently beautiful with, perhaps, just the slightest element of kitsch thrown in for a good measure.

Lawless

A pretty, if dim-witted, gangster picture, John Hillcoat’s “Lawless” concerns three hillbilly moonshiners, the Bondurant brothers in Franklin County, Virginia. The film purports to be extracted from real life, a “true story”, but the narrative, at least, is implausible -- the hillbillies act as if they are cunning tough-guys but they are forever falling into ambushes that every dullard in the audience can see coming. Nick Cave wrote the script and it consists of guttural threats and whispers so that nothing much is intelligible -- it doesn’t much matter because the film is nothing but reprisal and counter-reprisal with a little mild romance intervening between castrations and throat-slittings. The film has too many close-ups and the action sequences are gory without being interesting. As is the case with most Hollywood productions, the scenery and the incidental details are atmospheric, rich, and fascinating. We see tattered-looking cabins and moonshining stills out of a Walker Evans’ photograph, lush hollows, and a mountain all lit up with the stars of little independent moonshine distilleries hidden in the Yucatan-like jungles on its slopes. There is a fine shape-singing scene in a church and some interesting interiors of an old road-house that the Bondurant brothers operate 20 miles from town. Jessica Chastain shows her breasts and plays the role of the gun moll to the oldest brother, Forest Bondurant acted by Tom Hardy, a sort of dull-eyed and brutish Kevin Costner lookalike. Shia Laboeuf, if that’s his name, is annoying as the youngest brother, too kind and gentle before the massacres begin to even butcher a hog -- of course, Michael Corleone-style he will take up the gun and murder people before the film is over. Guy Pearce plays a variant on the Jack Palance character in “Shane” -- the fearsome dandy in black, an assassin who is also, apparently, some kind of sexual pervert. The gun battles and atrocities are, more or less, realistically staged but this is the kind of film in which gangsters engaged in a vicious gang war pause, now and then, to pursue their romantic interest, something that usually leads to more killings and hostage-taking. It’s also the kind of film in which the good guys engage in harangues when they have their evil enemies at their mercy allowing them to escape so that the film can proceed to more killings and rapes. When we meet a character named “Cricket” it’s pretty obvious that this hapless fellow will be a victim of the gang war -- he’s a character actor and, more or less, expendable. The film looks realistic and is fairly gripping until it isn’t -- and this is most of the overwrought, operatic, and poorly written second half of the movie The picture is pointless and a waste of time with one exception -- a couple times we hear Lou Reed’s “White Light/White Heat” and it sounds like an ancient Appalachian tune; in one instance, the great Ralph Stanley keens the song and it has a primeval authenticity better than anything else in the film.

Sarah Silverman: We are Miracles

Sarah Silverman’s HBO special,"We are Miracles," a comedy show performed for 39 embarrassed-looking patrons of a small dimly-lit club, isn’t a whole lot of fun. Silverman’s schtick is making outrageous and offensive statements, daring the audience to laugh, and, then, abusing the audience for indulging her with its laughter. This strategy would be effective if the audience were laughing spontaneously. But the audience understands how the gig is structured, grasps that laughter will be met with Silverman’s derisory scorn and so, we sense, that the audience is indulging her even before she draws attention to that fact -- the audience laughs because Sarah is cute and her pouting little-girl features don’t fit with her potty-mouth and the contrast between her pampered Jewish princess appearance and her vulgarity carries enough shock-value to make the crowd giggle a little regardless of whether what she says is actually funny. The audience laughs because it understands that its laughter is part of the joke: see, they are dumb and crass enough even to laugh at something that’s cruel and unfunny and that’s supposed to be funny in itself. Some of her stuff is well-observed and, like many successful stand-up comedians, there is a curious philosophical dimension to her material -- we laugh because the alternative would be something far more terrible and painful. As an example, Silverman blurts out that “9'-11 widows are famous for giving the best hand-jobs.” She pouts, looks earnest, and says that this has been proven by a study conducted by the University of North Carolina. The audience is uneasy and people laugh uncertainly. Then, Silverman denounces her spectators saying that they should be ashamed of themselves for believing her slander against the “9-11 widows” merely because she “attributed that finding to the University of North Carolina.” Shrugging her shoulders, she asks her LA audience if they’ve ever even been to North Carolina. In this way, Silverman says something terrible (although the incessant whining of 9-11 victims certainly has caused some of us to think bad things about them that we would never dare say), then, takes the offensive statement back, and, then, bizarrely enough imputes it to the audience. She does variations on this strategy for about forty minutes. But the HBO special has to fill an hour and so Silverman has a prologue before the show in which she exchanges racial slurs with a group of Mexican low-rider gangster-types (racial invective is always good as a time-filler) and, then, ends her show with a humorless song about being a diva, the lyrics consisting of the word “cunt” sung over and over again with various inflections. Once again, Silverman’s comic strategy is obvious -- she works the contrast between her pretty, well-trained church- choir-girl voice (she sounds like someone who would sing in the Xmas concert put on by St. Olaf College) and the raunchy material in her lyrics -- in this case, reduced to a single dirty word that she just repeats ad nauseum until she has wasted enough time to end her show. It’s stupidly effective. I like Sarah Silverman because I think she’s cute and I think her dirty mouth makes her even more cute. This isn’t Wittgenstein, I’m afraid, but more a matter of a perverse personal predilection.

Night Across the Street

An old man is sitting in an office at his desk. The office is a suite of rooms and the high-def video image lets us see through a doorway into another space where a secretary sits, sometimes laughing and sometimes weeping loudly. The colors are chalky pastel lit by diffuse light that seems to proceed from a sunset concealed behind layers and layers of watery dun-colored mist. The old man's boss says: "You have been utterly incoherent recently." The old man, Don Celso, the protagonist in Raul Ruiz' 2012 posthumously released film, says: "I have no ideas. I'm like a port without sea-gulls. The sea gulls have left me." Ruiz filmed "Night Across the Street" in Chile, the nation to which he returned to die of liver cancer after 40 years exile in Paris. The movie is valedictory, Ruiz' attempt to capture his life's great themes in a film structured like a complex, modernist poem, allusions and citations all held together by the picture's obsessively consistent color scheme and decor. Ruiz came from a family of seafarers and his hero, Don Celso, builds ships in bottles and walks with his friend, the French novelist, Jean Giono, through the harbor of his native Santiago. The sun is always setting and the streets are mostly empty and the high-def videography gives an objective, detached, scientific clarity to everything we see -- even though what we are shown is often dream-like and surreal. The camera glides like a ghost through empty rooms; fragments of old movies flicker on a screen. People whisper to one another like voices in your head, soft, insinuating, and motion is pinned against rear-projections that are impossibly clear and luminous --like paintings by Claude Lorrain with the urban landscape illumined by a great, empty glowing void. At the film's beginning, someone reads Proust on the soundtrack (Ruiz is the director of "Time Regained," the famous film version of the last volume of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"), and Celso tells Giono that "time is stumbling along -- time is like marbles," that is, discrete colliding moments of recollection that don't quite cohere into a narrative. As a little boy, Celso named himself "Rhododendron," apparently, because he loved the sound of the word, and because he wasn't sure what it meant, and in his imagination he consorted with Long John Silver from "Treasure Island" (also a film made by Ruiz) and Ludwig von Beethoven. The camera stands like an old friend beside Celso as he encounters these figures and walks for a time beside them through funereal landscapes, the eroded and desolate coastline of Chile battered by the cold-looking green sea always underlying these episodes as a kind of "basso profundo" or counterpoint. "Night across the Street" is a great film and one that repays repeated viewings but it is also very slow, recollections congealed into a glacial mass of memory that scarcely moves and, like all great films, it contailns sequences of stupefying boredom, ennui that mirrors that an aspect of life that must also be allowed into the picture if a film is to be a truly encyclopediac representation of existence, the ambition, I think, of Ruiz' last movie. In this film, there is a hoax-plot involving a femme fatale and her lover's plan to murder the inhabitants of a boarding house where Celso lives, apparently to recover on Celso's insurance coverage -- this story is developed elliptically, like a slow-motion version of "Double Indemnity". Clearly, this sort of plotting is uninteresting to Ruiz, but he dutifully develops this aspect of the film, although so perfunctorily that this part of "Night across the Street" put me to sleep each time that I tried to watch the film -- as a result, I've seen this film four times, but only in fragments. Much of Ruiz' creative life was involved with transmuting the base stuff of popular novels and scandal-sheets into gold -- his great picture, "The Mysteries of Lisbon" is a 4 1/2 hour film of a best-selling Portuguese novel from the 19th century, dusty melodrama converted into something sublime and moving -- and the dull parts of "Night across the Street" seem to me intentionally dimwitted, stalled, even, paralyzed, an incursion of film noir into the most noir of subjects, a man's individual mortality. There is a massacre in the boarding house, a mysterious woman in tight pink pants on a bicycle, a seance, and a sequence set inside the barrel of the murder weapon, the characters moving slowly upward toward a light at the end of the gun-muzzle, radiance that Ruiz rejects when his hero retraces his steps sadly, like Dante or Orpheus without Eurydice, a melancholy pilgrim turning away from heaven to return to the gloomy sepia world of the boarding house, the airless offices where Celso spends his last week awaiting his retirement party, the dim chambers of the hero's memory that are filmed in ancient light stretched across the screen like parchment, The film is noteworthy for its visual aspect: mirrors in corners doubling the space of rooms that seem simultaneously vast, even epic, and confined, burnished interiors with women providing the only color in dim, crepuscular chambers, the movie's twilight color scheme increasingly strange as the film progresses, ending with bronze-tinted pinkish sepia, hues that don't exist in the real world and that become essentially indescribeable as the film draws toward its conclusion. Don Celso has the sense that the end is near. He is losing his grip on reality and living increasingly within memories and those memories, oddly enough for a film, are less pictorial than they are about words -- certain things that were spoken to him, phrases from poetry ineptly translated from Mallarme into Spanish, a seminar in diction, the voice of a crime muttering imprecations from within an unseen drain-pipe, the film ending not with an anticipated extravaganza of light and color -- perhaps,those besieged loess-yellow beaches crumbling under the blows of the sea -- but, instead, a dying note: the retirement party with its lame speeches and false emotion conducted in a 19th century room bathed in eerie metallic light, like reflections cast from old brass instruments.

Beau Travail

A baffling oddity, Claire Denis' "Beau Travail" (1999) translates Melville's "Billy Budd" to the French Foreign Legion. The movie enjoys considerable critical prestige; this is also baffling to me. Certainly, the film is audacious and unusual, but seems so willfully bizarre and perverse that I think it is hard to take this experiment seriously. Denis seems to have set about to make a campy, homosexual joke. But the film's beautiful photography and otherworldly settings conpsire to impart gravitas to the picture and, somewhere in the process, Denis began to take her project seriously; what started out as a SNL skit, it seems, evolved into something lavish, strange, and febrile. The result is a movie that is better in theory than actual practice, a picture that is more interesting to discuss, probably, than to watch since the experience of viewing the film is bewildering. There is something characteristically French, I think, about this adaptation of the Melville novella -- Denis creates a film that misreads Melville's text on every possible level, gets the plot wrong as to who kills whom, and omits the ethical, moral, and metaphysical dimensions of the great writer's parable about rebellion and justice. What's left is fashion, style, a glittering and strange surface, the movie equivalent of outrageous garments displayed as a cubist haute couture parade, gestures and landscapes presented to an audience swift to detect allusion, "hommage," and, of course, irony. It's very beautiful and immensely compelling and completely shallow -- intensely (profoundly) shallow: Melville's fable of the beautiful sailor sacrificed to Empire converted to conflict between the ugly, stubby Master Sergeant Galoup (played by the extraordinary Denis Lavant) and the half-nude beautiful soldier boy, Gilles Sentain. Melville's dimension of goodness and innocence assaulted by perverse Iago-inflected evil is transformed into the story of a rivalry between a handsome man and an ugly one. Denis invokes Melville's queasy homo-eroticism and the film shares the American writer's interest in the group dynamics of warrior males isolated and far from women. From time to time, we see the Foreign Legionaires performing dance-like calisthenics, entranced by the African sunlight, and periodically engaged in duel-like "pas de deux" ballet sequences on the edge of a malevolent-looking sea. Often these antics are choreographed to music sampled from Britten's opera of "Billy Budd." (Denis also scores the film to Neil Young's "Safeway Cart" and bubbly, sweet-sounding Afro-pop music.) Levant's Sergeant Galoup seems less a soldier than some kind of demented scout-master -- he leads his troops on dance-excursions into the lava wasteland around the men's remote camp where they are building a road through immense fields of scarcely congealed magma. Denis' point seems to be that the men's activities are heavily feminine -- they are constantly ironing their clothes, doing laundry, making their cots, and, instead of practicing for combat, their exercises increasingly seem to be preparations for some kind of ballet -- the men bump into one another repeatedly like performers in a Pina Bausch dance and, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that the incessant training is not for battle but for performance with Alvin Ailey or an all-male version of Swan Lake. There is no enemy. The commander chews khat leaves and is intoxicated most of the time. The men have girlfriends, apparently prostitutes in a Djibouti bar, and there are many shots of the women, bored and languorous, half-dancing in the big city discoteque -- in fact, the film begins with a dance sequence in a disco that is indelibly scored and cut, a dream-like montage of fantastically beautiful and exotic women swaying back and forth with stoned, mask-like faces on a glittering and dark dance-floor. Mostly, the women dance alone although sometimes the Legionaires in their funny, tall hats join them Once the film departs the city and the blandishments of the somnambulent prostitutes, the movie retreats into a spectacularly barren hermitage, the little legionaire's encampment on a barren plateau above a sea studded with carbuncle-like volcanoes in glistening turquoise water, wind roaring off the basalt cliffs and the men engaged in Sisyphean activity of chopping and cutting and sorting and painting boulders. We see fire burning on the emerald-turquoise water after a helicopter crashes and the beautiful soldier is sent to his death carrying a bad compass, perishing on a gleaming expanse of salt crystals like shards of broken glass. Afflicted by guilt over his role in murdering the beautiful soldier, Galoup who has fled to Marseilles, writes his memoirs in balcony shaded by a strangely scabrous tree, and, at last, commits suicide, baring his torso on which is tattooed the words "Serve the Good Cause and Die." In the famous final shot, Galoup is alone in a discoteque: music plays and he dances a serpentine, fantastically swift and athletic dance. Denis seems to have wanted to make a "queer-inflected" version of old French Foreign Legion chestnuts like "Beau Geste" -- and she seems also to have been influenced by Leos Carax operatically romantic films (and it is interesting that Carax "Pola X", also an adaptation of a Melville novel was also releaed in the same year). Denis' picture in turn seems to have influenced the deliriously homo-erotic imagery in Sokurov's 2003 "Father and Son" -- also a picture about warrior males with little or no access to women. But, to a skeptical eye, the film, however, suggests nothing more than "Footloose", the Kevin Bacon picture about a kid exiled to a rural community where dancing is forbidden...I mean the dude just has to dance!

Where is the Friend's House?

Abbas Kiastorami directed this Iranian film in 1987, apparently producing the picture with government money from Ministry of Children's Affairs. The film may have had a didactic "pitch" -- the Ministry would invest money in a picture demonstrating, in a quietly inoffensive way, the routine mistreatment that children suffer. Perhaps, the film has a subtext on another issue: the movie is set in two rural communities in northern Iran and the children are subject to the whimsical cruelty of their elders and their education, as is the case for all farm kids, is compromised by labor in the fields and with animals -- agricultural chores; presumably, kids in Tehran don't suffer this sort of abuse and, maybe, the picture was promoted under auspices that urban folks are more enlightened than their country cousins. Whatever the Iranian Ministry of Children's Affairs thought it was purchasing, the government sponsors ended up with an unassuming cinema masterpieces, a picture that established Kiastorami's reputation world-wide and that became the launching pad for two other film by the director set in the same region and featuring the same people -- the devastating chronicle of a deadly earthquake that occurred three years later, "And Life goes on" and a love story, "Through the Olive Trees." "Where is the Friend's House?" is an example of ostensibly minimalist, scrupulously realistic cinema that expands in the imagination and, in fact,does what only movies can accomplish -- that is, the film embeds complex metaphysical and ethical ideas in landscapes, faces, and images made by a camera moving with subtle penetration through a series of environments that manage to be both hyper-real and, also, dreamlike and symbolic. An eight-year old boy. Achmad, sits in a shabby schoolroom next to a hapless tow-headed kid named Nematzedah. Nematzedah can't seem to bring his homework notebook to class and is mercilessly bullied by the exhausted-looking and harried school-teacher. The little kid cries and Achmad is obviously close to tears himself with sympathy for his friend. After school, when the kids are playing with chickens, donkeys and goats tethered near the school, Nematzedah falls down, hurts his knee, and, somehow, Achmad ends up with the other little boy's notebook. Discovering this back at home -- where he is bossed around by his pregnant mother and a nasty old grandmother -- Achmad decides that he has to find Netmatzedah's home and deliver the notebook to him so that the kid will not suffer the consequences of yet another day reporting to school without his notebook and homework (the teacher has made the threat to expell Nematzedah if he comes to school again unprepared, a threat casually made that doesn't seem plausible, but which terrorizes the small boys in the class. (This being Iran, there are no girls anywhere in sight -- in fact, this is true of the whole film: we see some old ladies and the ungainly pregnant mother, but no other women or girls are in the film.) The movie captures brilliantly the way that small children take adult threats literally and the way that grown-ups simply ignore little kids if they are engaged in some other activity -- throughout the film, Achmad tries to explain himself to adults who pay no attention to him at all. Achmad knows that Nematzedah lives in the next valley, across a barren mountain ridge, probably about ten minutes walk away -- the action in the film shifts between two little villages, Koker and Poshteh. So on the pretence that he is going to buy bread for the family, Achmad runs as fast as he can over the ridge, through a valley with ancient olive trees around a dry river-bed to the other village. But he can't find his friend's house. The film has no action other than the little boy searching for Nematzedah's house. There are no professional actors in the movie and the film is shot entirely on location in the two ancient-looking mud and brick villages, both of them vertical with narrow alleyways full of crumbling steps, fissures between houses where you might encounter an oxen stumbling down the terraces toward you, barren walls and tiny eroded courtyards, these places inhabited by strange adults doing inscrutable things -- one wizened old man is throwing big boulders from inside a house into the narrow alley; an old woman with a masked face who says she is sick terrorizes Achmad with her slow Mummy-like gait, her midsection and belly wrapped in some sort of ribbon-like garment. One man pesters a group of elderly guys sitting on a stoop and drinking tea about buying new doors and windows. We are like the child -- we can't figure out exactly what the men are talking about although it seems weirdly consequential and, yet, trivial at the same time. When the door salesman departs, Achmad follows him, running as fast as he can behind the man's donkey. The sequence of shots showing Achmad hurling himself down the slopes and through the valleys is repeated in exact reverse order. The door salesman turns out to be a different Nematzaeh -- it's apparently a common name -- and Achmad ends up in the alien village after dark, the wind howling in a fearsome way on the mountaintops, and dogs threatening him. With a kindly old man, they look for the friend's house, but the old fellow can barely walk and the endless up and down flights of irregular stairs confounds him so that time seems to move in slow motion and, as the clock ticks, the little boy is becoming increasingly panicked since it is now dark and the lights are lit in the houses and he still has to cross the night-time valley and the barren ridge to get to his home. Kiarostami uses no establishing shots -- in the alien village, everything seems strange and threatening, although objectively both Poshteh and Koker are identical in appearance. The soundtrack is a melange of howling dogs, clucking chickens, bleating sheep and strange pounding and knocking noises. The film's color-scheme is an austere, institutional blue and green, the color of an old elementary school cafeteria, and Kiastorami uses the bizarre technique (a method that David Bordwell has called "parametric film-making) of unifying the film's pictorial aspect by focusing his camera on doors and thresholds and window frames -- the only adult we see is a door salesman and the film begins with an extended shot of a closed door and there are innumerable images in the picture that foreground doors and windows. We see the world through the eyes of the small boy, but without any condescension -- there are no low-angle shots, nothing to make the adults loom over the little kids, no pictorial devices emphazing a child's point of view. The adults aren't giants; they aren't even people; they're just obstacles to be evaded, as stony as the mountain villages, like a kind of harsh meteorology that must be endured. (At the end of the film, the teacher's whose bullying has triggered all the film's action doesn't seem to even know the names of the two kids who are the principals in the story.) The camera never departs from the child's viewpoint -- hence, we simply don't see beyond the Achmad's horizon: for this reason the film's pictorial grammar is, at once, radically impoverished -- no establishing shots, no camera arias, no ethnography (we don't really have a sense for how these village look or how they fit into the landscape) and the scenes of the boy traversing the landscape always follow the same shot-for-shot pattern -- and, yet, simultaneously, we get a miraculous sense of how the child perceives this world, how it is dangerous and casually cruel to him, how he manages to survive in the face of the great and howling indifference that all of us experience when we go out alone into the world.

Frances Ha

In the middle of Noah Baumbach's "Frances Ha," the title character, a 27-year old mostly unemployed dancer, is down on her luck. It's not that things are going badly for her -- the film is far too even-tempered and mild for anything approaching hardship or tragedy or, even, conflict; she's just at loose ends and doesn't know what to do with herself. At a dinner party, a man boasts about having an apartment in Paris and, on a whim, Frances flies there for the weekend, staying alone in his house. She also goes to Sacramento, her home-town, and we see her walking the family dog, a small white ball of fur, a generic suburban pet: you've seen a thousand dogs like this and really never noticed them. The film is presented in black and white and the little dog is rim-lit like Jean Harlow or Veronica Lake -- the light behind the small pooch outlines the dog with a luminous halo. This is a point of interest, a "punctum" and the dog features in the next several scenes, held against someone's chest at center frame or occupying a corner of the picture, a graceful editing effect that ties the sequence together. The image of the radiant dog epitomizes the film: Baumbach's movie is fantastically realistic and precise -- I didn't detect anything approaching a false note at any point in the picture. "Frances Ha" concerns mundane events in a young woman's life -- meetings with friends, minor disappointments, dance rehearsels, difficulty paying the rent and problems with roommates. These things are shown with complete fidelity. Everything seems magically true and believable. But Baumbach films this quotidian subject matter in luminous, high contrast black and white, the metier of film noir and Hollywood glamor and the contrast between the velvety beauty of the movie's imagery and the common place events depicted accounts for much of the film's charm. (The film is already on a Criterion disk and, from some supplemental material, I understand that the picture was shot with digital camcorder that recorded everything in color and, then, printed in black and white.) The things that we see are not dramatic -- there's no sex, no drug use or bad behavior although in once scene a girl gets sick from drinking, people act in a decent way and don't abuse one another, conflict is muted, no one is angry at anyone: scometimes,people are just mildly disappointed with each other, travels don't result in any sort of epiphany and there are no grand emotions and no operatic love affairs. It's just every day life -- but isn't every day life worthy of being shown as beautiful, edited with precision and care, back-lit so that a woman's hair (or a dog's fur) gleams with supernatural radiance? Greta Gerwig, who plays Frances, gives one of the greatest performances that I have ever seen -- she has a fantastically expressive face, although Frances also is like the little dog: she seems completely average, the girl next door, someone you might not even notice on a busy street. But we can see her think. This is very rare in films -- sometimes in Ozu, you glimpse people thinking, deliberating on something, making a decision before they act. Greta Gerwig has the placid serenity of an Ozu heroine even when she is a little bit sad or agitated and we can see the way her mind works -- she is an open book to us and, as is the case in great acting, seems more real and present than some people that we have known all of our lives. Baumbach's trust in the truth, his uncompromising realism, is evident in the sequence in which Frances goes to Paris. We see her uncomfortable ride on the airplane to the City of Light. We see her on the bus departing the airport. In the man's apartment, we are shown a montage of Frances sleeping or not sleeping -- she is jet-lagged and the digital clock seems to be persecuting her: first she can't sleep and, then, she can do nothing but sleep, and since we know she can only stay in Paris for the weekend, we fear that she will spend the whole time in bed. But she does go out and wanders around aimlessly and we see the Eifel Tower, of course, with its rotating beam of light in the background: she sits alone in a cafe and, then, we see her at the airport in New York again. Nothing has happened. She hasn't met anyone new. There is no love affair with a romantic stranger and the trip to Paris hasn't changed her in the slightest. Isn't this a model for real life, the way that life happens to us unawares, the way that something happens without really making an point on us although in retrospect, we might regard the event as decisive. Frances has to return to Vassar where she went to college and works as a Resident Assistant. She comes in one night and finds a disconsolate girl sitting on the floor next to the door to her bedroom. Frances looks tired, but she knows her duty so she sits down on the floor across from the girl. At that point, Baumbach cuts away from the scene -- presumably, the girl has suffered something that she thinks is tragic and, probably, is about to shed tears and bemoan her plight. But this would be too dramatic for the film and it would be a tactless invasion of this minor character's privacy to show the conversatin so Baumbach doesn't depict any more of the encounter. "Frances Ha" sometimes invokes Woody Allen's great "Manhattan", also a film shot in lustrous black and white -- but "Manhattan" was about love and the fear of death, about the middle-aged hero's anxieties and about the beautiful, mask-like face of Mariel Hemingway, the hero's great love. The film was resplendent with the music of Gershwin and melodramatic. "Francis Ha," also a great film but of a different sort, doesn't have these qualities -- it's about a young woman's day-to-day life and dares you to find her mild adventures inconsequential. The art work that it most reminds me of is Flaubert's "A Sentimental Education" in which we are shown the exact texture of an every day life in which nothing much seems to be happening -- but, of course, everything is happening and a whole world is presented to us for our analysis and contemplation.