At the end of Part 2 of the HBO miniseries Show me a Hero, one of the characters berates the Mayor of Yonkers. The constituent is angry about the prospect of low-income housing being built in her neighborhood and, when she calls City Hall to protest, no one is around and so the Mayor himself answers. When the Mayor, a 28-year old hustler called Nick Wasicsko, tells her that he must implement the housing to comply with the desegregation order of a federal judge, the woman responds angrily: "Well you can, at least, say that you think it is wrong." The Mayor doesn't respond, because, perhaps, he's not sure that desegregating the city is wrong. Instead, he promises that he won't have the woman thrown out of the next council meeting -- when she previously insulted him using the name of his father, also a local politician but recently dead, Mayor Wasciko had the police evict her from the hall. This is exchange is remarkable for what it reveals about the radical structure of Show me a Hero and the series' extreme and rigorous commitment to its in media res narrative. Although the series is about desegregation and the lack of decent housing for people of color in 1987 in a New York city, no one in the film talks about the morality of the situation nor does anyone raise issues as to whether court-ordered desegregation is just or unjust. The legacy of racial discrimination that has compelled the Court to order desegregation is not shown or discussed -- there is no rhetoric about civil rights or oppression. Rather, the show is radical in that it simply assumes these things. Indeed, the assumption is so prevalent that the program doesn't have to dramatize issues of injustice. Similarly, the mobs of white middle-class people screaming bloody murder at the Court's desegregation order -- which consists of establishing 200 units of low-income housing in white flight portions of the city of 200,000 -- never mention race, don't use racial epithets, and simply refer to the denizens of low income housing as "those people." The ire of the mob is reserved, it seems, for the Jewish lawyers representing the Justice Department and the NAACP who have brought the suit from which the order mandating desegregation arises. The curious thing about Show me a Hero is that, like its characters, it seems completely unwilling to talk about race and injustice -- the show is about procedural maneuvering, politics, Court hearings in which the Judge, played with steely authority by Bob Balaban, ratchets up the pressure on the entirely white city council members, ultimately threatening them with personal fines and imprisonment unless they implement desegregation. The effect is a bit like the forensic films of the great Francesco Rosi -- particularly Salvatore Giuliano. In Salvatore Giuliano, we almost never see the title character when he is alive -- he is a shadowy emblem, but not really a character and the film employs the radical narrative stance of excluding from its central focus the figure for whom the movie is named. Similarly, the entire issue of race, oppression, and discrimination is concealed by the turbulent procedural events dramatized in Show me a Hero -- this context is implied as a fait accompli. For the first two hours, at least, no one mentions race at all and so the actual context of the clash between the citizens of Yonkers and the Federal Court remains implicit. This is a bold narrative gesture, enhanced by film's strategy of using the hapless Nick Wasicsko as the vehicle for the story. Wasicsko has exploited the dissatisfaction with the sitting mayor's failure to prosecute an appeal of the Court's desegregation order to get himself elected. However, even before he takes office, he learns that the appeal on which his election was based has been lost and that he will have no choice but to preside over implementation of the desegregation order. In effect, he has inherited an untenable political situation in which there is nothing he can do but comply with the Federal Judge's ruling, action that exposes him to the hysterical wrath of the townspeople, including threats of assassination -- he wears a service revolver around his ankle for protection.
Show me a Hero is based on real events and the characters have been cast to look like their actual counterparts. Like Salvatore Giuliano, the film was shot, when possible, in the actual locations where the events depicted occurred. David Simon produced the film; he is famous for creating The Wire, a similarly forensic-oriented series. Paul Haggis directs. In the opening two hours, the film flags a little on the basis of repetitiveness -- Yonkers' lawyers keep appearing in Court only to receive increasingly severe lectures by the Federal Judge. There are also repeated scenes of angry voters and tumult at the City Council meetings. The repetition of these sequences, which really don't develop the story, seems unnecessary, although this stalled narrative structure strongly enhances the sense of paralysis gripping the city. The political plot is intercut with scenes involving people of color, apparently, we surmise, those who will move into the housing required by the desegregation order. (Like Haggis' Crash, the show seems designed to gradually unify these narrative strands, ultimately bringing the White and Black characters into violent contact.) These scenes have no clear relationship with the narrative about the desegregation order -- Haggis and Simon's point is simple and devastating: the people who are at the center of the storm have no idea that there even is a desegregation order. This point is made dramatically twice in the early parts of the film. A Black couple strolling down the street in Yonkers is handed a political flyer by Nick Wasicsko -- they don't even look at it and the woman drops it in the gutter. (Wasicsko is campaigning on his promise to appeal the desegregation order.) Later some Black drug dealers glimpse the NAACP housing consultant, a white man with an Amish-style beard, hustling through the high-rise ghetto with some blueprints in his hands. The kids deride the man's appearance, calling him "an Abraham Lincoln-looking motherfucker". "He's not delivering no emancipation proclamation for me," one of the boys says.
Clearly, HBO didn't know how to market this series and has, essentially, decided to conceal it from the public. Although the show enjoys a 97% positive rating from those who have seen it, the series is now relegated to late night -- the first four episodes aired in prime-time; the last two programs aired after 10:00 pm. The title of the program is not promising. It's derived from a statement by F. Scott Fitzgerald -- something to the effect that "if you show me a hero, I will show you a tragedy." The program is built on an epic scale, with plots and subplots, dozens of characters, and a densely realistic, almost documentary mise-en-scene. The show isn't flawless -- an excursus to the Dominican Republic seems filler and doesn't contribute to the narrative -- but it's better than just about everything else on TV at the end of August and, for better or worse, will be a landmark in the history of TV. I recommend that you find this show on-demand and watch it.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Elena and her men
Jean Renoir's 1956 Elena and her Men is a minor film in the great director's oeuvre, difficult and challenging and, also, atypical. The movie's thesis is that the reason French politics is a disorderly shambles is that the French people are too readily distracted by appearance, by spectacles and parades, and that they prefer making love to casting votes in elections. Renoir makes these points aggressively, by emphatic speeches by his characters, but, of course, it remains his verdict that love-making is more important than the franchise and that politics is a silly, self-defeating venture -- the dismissive stance that his film takes toward political issues is itself the best illustration of its premise.
Elena, played by the ravishing Ingrid Bergman, is a Polish princess, although, really a kind of high-class courtesan. Elena's specialty is inspiring men to achieve greatness. She is the widow of a Polish anarchist, also a prince, whose hobby was making bombs to "throw at the Tsar" -- in the course of this avocation, the Prince blew himself and his palace to smithereens; presumably, Elena survived the blast because she was absent pursuing one of her love affairs. At the outset of the film, Elena, whose emblem is a daisy, inspires her lover to compose an opera. Once her inspiration as a muse has borne fruit, Elena loses all interest in her lover and dismisses him. During a frenetic Bastille Day celebration, Elena who has agreed to marry a wealthy shoe manufacturer for his money, meets a slender, witty fellow who squires her around Paris during the jubilant festivities. This man is her opposite -- he aspires to nothing at all and his idea of utopia would be sheer idleness. Of course, in the economy of the film, this man will be Elena's ideal lover, although their passion, which the heroine can't recognize at first, is not acknowledged until the last ten minutes of the movie. Renoir's ironic point is Elena, who's desire seems focused on driving men to greatness, will find her most congenial lover in a man who has no ambition of any kind at all. This is demonstrated rather schematically by the film's principle narrative -- the rise to political power of a soldier named General Rollan. Rollan is a cavalier, "almost damned with fair wife" in the form of a loyal, longsuffering and highly ambitious mistress. Rollan is not exactly interested in political power but his liaison with Elena leads him ultimately to something that seems suspiciously similar to a coup d'état. Of course. Rollan's seizure of power, that is, the success foisted upon him by the relentless Elena, renders him uninteresting in her eyes and she can move on to her next erotic adventure.
Elena and her Men is shot by Renoir's brother, Claude, and it is antithetical to the director's works from the 1930's that channel the impressionism of Jean Renoir's father, August. This film is in gaudy, hyper-bright Technicolor, overlit and garish -- the movie is intentionally ugly: the interiors are full of all sorts of late Victorian frou-frous and chinoiserie -- everywhere the eye encounters lurid-colored Moroccan rugs, highlights of scarlet and orange, weird statues and mannequins, nasty-looking Academic portraits of gypsies and Arabs in the style of Bouguereau, the Victorian equivalent of paintings on velvet. The sole evidence of good taste in this carnival of the vulgar is Elena's garments -- they are exquisite and she is a beacon of refined beauty in all the squalid ugliness of these nouveaux-riche interiors. (The color scheme is like Matisse in his tropical phase but without any evidence of that artist's design or taste.) At the end of the movie, Renoir has everyone kissing -- the director is so erotically generous that even Rollan's ministers, a dour group of grotesques like the professors in Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire, end up with compliant and voluptuous younger women, mostly maids, it seems, and peasants. Rollan escapes into fame while the idle hero, who has unsuccessfully courted Elena, kisses her, pretending to be the great general who has fled through the mob outside the Inn dressed as a gypsy. The film slows down and its hectic, farcical action subsides for a moment -- a sad-eyed gypsy girl sings a song about love and says that the night is warm suddenly, and has paused so that the lovers can avail itself of its generosity. Renoir cuts to a long montage of people kissing in the darkness, foremost among them Elena and her new lover, a man completely unsuitable for her, and, then, with a final enigmatic shot of the lonely and pensive gypsy girl, the only person without a lover, the film ends.
My description of Elena and her Men makes the film sound better than it is. In fact, the movie is a bit tedious and the long stretches of frantic bedroom farce, upper-class brutes pawing and mauling semi-accommodating lower-class maids, are too grotesque and politically incorrect for comfort. Renoir's movie is partially about politics, although the film rejects politics in the end, and so it is crammed with the "people", visualized as crowds of colorfully dressed extras --Zouaves and beplumed guardsmen, acrobats and circus clowns out of Picasso, courtesans and generals. The crowds mob stairs and block doorways and fill the screen with super-abundant carousing -- there are songs and rowdy parades, attempted rapes, drunks staggering all over the screen, and hunting parties, elaborate war games with artillery and cavalry, duels and threatened duels, sumptuous feasts and fistfights throughout the picture, an elaborate, continuous excess. I think Elena and her Men is considerably more intelligent than it seems -- you tend to lose the thread of the films rather nihilistic argument in all the festivities and raucous partying. But you can think about the movie productively when all the sound and fury subsides, can consider the merits or demerits of its hierarchy of values (Liebe ueber Alles) and, indeed, the film is sophisticated and probably profound in its anti-profundity message: life is to be enjoyed and love is the most enjoyable of all human activities, a proposition startlingly embodied in the supernaturally beautiful and vivacious Ingrid Bergman.
Elena, played by the ravishing Ingrid Bergman, is a Polish princess, although, really a kind of high-class courtesan. Elena's specialty is inspiring men to achieve greatness. She is the widow of a Polish anarchist, also a prince, whose hobby was making bombs to "throw at the Tsar" -- in the course of this avocation, the Prince blew himself and his palace to smithereens; presumably, Elena survived the blast because she was absent pursuing one of her love affairs. At the outset of the film, Elena, whose emblem is a daisy, inspires her lover to compose an opera. Once her inspiration as a muse has borne fruit, Elena loses all interest in her lover and dismisses him. During a frenetic Bastille Day celebration, Elena who has agreed to marry a wealthy shoe manufacturer for his money, meets a slender, witty fellow who squires her around Paris during the jubilant festivities. This man is her opposite -- he aspires to nothing at all and his idea of utopia would be sheer idleness. Of course, in the economy of the film, this man will be Elena's ideal lover, although their passion, which the heroine can't recognize at first, is not acknowledged until the last ten minutes of the movie. Renoir's ironic point is Elena, who's desire seems focused on driving men to greatness, will find her most congenial lover in a man who has no ambition of any kind at all. This is demonstrated rather schematically by the film's principle narrative -- the rise to political power of a soldier named General Rollan. Rollan is a cavalier, "almost damned with fair wife" in the form of a loyal, longsuffering and highly ambitious mistress. Rollan is not exactly interested in political power but his liaison with Elena leads him ultimately to something that seems suspiciously similar to a coup d'état. Of course. Rollan's seizure of power, that is, the success foisted upon him by the relentless Elena, renders him uninteresting in her eyes and she can move on to her next erotic adventure.
Elena and her Men is shot by Renoir's brother, Claude, and it is antithetical to the director's works from the 1930's that channel the impressionism of Jean Renoir's father, August. This film is in gaudy, hyper-bright Technicolor, overlit and garish -- the movie is intentionally ugly: the interiors are full of all sorts of late Victorian frou-frous and chinoiserie -- everywhere the eye encounters lurid-colored Moroccan rugs, highlights of scarlet and orange, weird statues and mannequins, nasty-looking Academic portraits of gypsies and Arabs in the style of Bouguereau, the Victorian equivalent of paintings on velvet. The sole evidence of good taste in this carnival of the vulgar is Elena's garments -- they are exquisite and she is a beacon of refined beauty in all the squalid ugliness of these nouveaux-riche interiors. (The color scheme is like Matisse in his tropical phase but without any evidence of that artist's design or taste.) At the end of the movie, Renoir has everyone kissing -- the director is so erotically generous that even Rollan's ministers, a dour group of grotesques like the professors in Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire, end up with compliant and voluptuous younger women, mostly maids, it seems, and peasants. Rollan escapes into fame while the idle hero, who has unsuccessfully courted Elena, kisses her, pretending to be the great general who has fled through the mob outside the Inn dressed as a gypsy. The film slows down and its hectic, farcical action subsides for a moment -- a sad-eyed gypsy girl sings a song about love and says that the night is warm suddenly, and has paused so that the lovers can avail itself of its generosity. Renoir cuts to a long montage of people kissing in the darkness, foremost among them Elena and her new lover, a man completely unsuitable for her, and, then, with a final enigmatic shot of the lonely and pensive gypsy girl, the only person without a lover, the film ends.
My description of Elena and her Men makes the film sound better than it is. In fact, the movie is a bit tedious and the long stretches of frantic bedroom farce, upper-class brutes pawing and mauling semi-accommodating lower-class maids, are too grotesque and politically incorrect for comfort. Renoir's movie is partially about politics, although the film rejects politics in the end, and so it is crammed with the "people", visualized as crowds of colorfully dressed extras --Zouaves and beplumed guardsmen, acrobats and circus clowns out of Picasso, courtesans and generals. The crowds mob stairs and block doorways and fill the screen with super-abundant carousing -- there are songs and rowdy parades, attempted rapes, drunks staggering all over the screen, and hunting parties, elaborate war games with artillery and cavalry, duels and threatened duels, sumptuous feasts and fistfights throughout the picture, an elaborate, continuous excess. I think Elena and her Men is considerably more intelligent than it seems -- you tend to lose the thread of the films rather nihilistic argument in all the festivities and raucous partying. But you can think about the movie productively when all the sound and fury subsides, can consider the merits or demerits of its hierarchy of values (Liebe ueber Alles) and, indeed, the film is sophisticated and probably profound in its anti-profundity message: life is to be enjoyed and love is the most enjoyable of all human activities, a proposition startlingly embodied in the supernaturally beautiful and vivacious Ingrid Bergman.
Friday, August 28, 2015
It Follows
Reviewed in The New Yorker, David Robert Mitchell's horror film It Follows (2014) has the reputation of being an intelligent and thought-provoking genre picture. In fact, the movie is poorly written, implausible, and strangely absent-minded about its own premise. It is also completely humorless, lacking the wit of meta-horror films like The Cabin in the Woods. Like Whedon's picture, the film makes explicit the underlying implications of a hundred other movies of its kind -- sex is deadly. In It Follows, the consequence of having sex is pursuit by zombie-like "followers." The "followers" are, apparently, both material and immaterial -- sometimes they can be killed by gunfire, other times, they resist bullets and walk right through fusillades. The "followers" seem to have super-human strength and malice aforethought -- if one of them kills a victim, then, the curse reverts to the preceding person in the sexual chain. The effect is like La Ronde only with zombies. No explanation is given for this phenomenon. Commentators on the film laud the movie's refusal to supply explanation as creating "mystery". But these commentators are pretty obviously fools and the lapses in the script are not explained by enigma but laziness.
The film is elaborately produced with languorous slow steadi-cam movements tracking characters or revolving in 360 degrees (and, then, back again) across landscapes or dimly lit interiors. Camera movements of this kind are always gripping and the film creates a false sense of doom and gravitas through these elaborately preordained tracking shots. The director is skilled in mobilizing off-screen space to create dread and the movie is shot in convincingly dingy middle-class homes and romantically desolate urban wastelands (It Follows takes place in Detroit.) But all of these effects are not only obvious, but painfully obvious -- an open door suggests the onslaught of a monster and the slow zoom toward that door with jangling-on-the-nerves music enhances that impression. Whether the monster appears or not is immaterial -- the effect is one of dread but produced by the most oppressively manipulative measures. None of this is rocket science, just production values applied to hackneyed material. In general, the comely threatened teens sulk and brood and act in ways that make no sense at all: in the opening scene a girl mostly naked but in what appears to be high-heels flees from a house. An unseen zombie is after her. So where does she go? To an isolated beach where she sits all alone in the darkness under picturesquely stormy skies until the inevitable happens. Similarly, the teens stalked by the monsters, of course, retreat to the familiar cabin in the woods for the show-down with the spooks. The climax of the film in a big rundown swimming pool invokes The Cat People book lacks any of that film's wit or intelligence -- for some reason, the kids think they can lure the monsters into the water and electrocute them. But the monster outsmarts them -- not hard to do since they are obviously idiots -- hurling the various appliances that the kids were using for sources of electricity at the heroine who stands in the middle of the swimming pool. This sequence has some showy shots of bullets ripping through the water and a big flamboyant swirl of blood in the monochrome darkness of the haunted natatorium but the entire scene makes no sense at all. Apparently, It Follows' whole budget was devoted to steadicam effects because the zombies are just naked people or kids in pajamas ambling along at a slow pace with a vacant look on their face -- the monsters would not be frightening at all except for the elaborate camera set-ups and portentous sound-cues that presage their arrival. Films involving extraordinary and monstrous events that require suspension of disbelief must be scrupulously logical and consistent within their premises. But It Follows doesn't make even elementary sense. It's a pretty, but completely vacuous film.
The film is elaborately produced with languorous slow steadi-cam movements tracking characters or revolving in 360 degrees (and, then, back again) across landscapes or dimly lit interiors. Camera movements of this kind are always gripping and the film creates a false sense of doom and gravitas through these elaborately preordained tracking shots. The director is skilled in mobilizing off-screen space to create dread and the movie is shot in convincingly dingy middle-class homes and romantically desolate urban wastelands (It Follows takes place in Detroit.) But all of these effects are not only obvious, but painfully obvious -- an open door suggests the onslaught of a monster and the slow zoom toward that door with jangling-on-the-nerves music enhances that impression. Whether the monster appears or not is immaterial -- the effect is one of dread but produced by the most oppressively manipulative measures. None of this is rocket science, just production values applied to hackneyed material. In general, the comely threatened teens sulk and brood and act in ways that make no sense at all: in the opening scene a girl mostly naked but in what appears to be high-heels flees from a house. An unseen zombie is after her. So where does she go? To an isolated beach where she sits all alone in the darkness under picturesquely stormy skies until the inevitable happens. Similarly, the teens stalked by the monsters, of course, retreat to the familiar cabin in the woods for the show-down with the spooks. The climax of the film in a big rundown swimming pool invokes The Cat People book lacks any of that film's wit or intelligence -- for some reason, the kids think they can lure the monsters into the water and electrocute them. But the monster outsmarts them -- not hard to do since they are obviously idiots -- hurling the various appliances that the kids were using for sources of electricity at the heroine who stands in the middle of the swimming pool. This sequence has some showy shots of bullets ripping through the water and a big flamboyant swirl of blood in the monochrome darkness of the haunted natatorium but the entire scene makes no sense at all. Apparently, It Follows' whole budget was devoted to steadicam effects because the zombies are just naked people or kids in pajamas ambling along at a slow pace with a vacant look on their face -- the monsters would not be frightening at all except for the elaborate camera set-ups and portentous sound-cues that presage their arrival. Films involving extraordinary and monstrous events that require suspension of disbelief must be scrupulously logical and consistent within their premises. But It Follows doesn't make even elementary sense. It's a pretty, but completely vacuous film.
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Winter Sleep
Shakespearian theater is about motivation. The characters discuss their motivations endlessly; at times, they turn to the audience to confide the reasons for their actions. For modern audiences, a play like Othello often seems overly explicit -- every nuance of the title character's suspicious actions is carefully disclosed and defined at great (and, if truth be told, sometimes tedious) length. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's new film, the much-lauded Winter Sleep (2014) involves a man of the theater, Mr. Aiden, apparently once a famous actor, who lives in his family's business, the Hotel Othello, in scenic Cappadocia. Ceylan's master is Chekhov, although Shakespeare and Dostoevsky are also named in the credits, somewhat comically, as inspirations for some of the dialogue and situations. Ceylan refuses to provide any clues as to motivation. We are forced to infer why the characters perform the actions dramatized. In Winter Sleep, Ceylan's strenuous absence of speeches defining motivation leaves the film a bit unfocused, blurry, not around the edges which are well-defined with interesting and vivid supporting characters, but, at its very center. An example must suffice for many: late in the film, someone points out that Mr. Aiden, after a devastating earthquake, opened his hotel to foreign relief organizations -- but he, also, refused to allow local victims to stay in the Othello. This is clearly crucial information and, certainly, illuminates Mr. Aiden's prickly and flawed character. But we are left to speculate as to whether this conduct partially explains his isolation and the evident distrust and, even, hatred that some local people feel for him. Was Aiden's arrogant and insensitive behavior after the earthquake a major cause for his dilemma or is it, merely, minor and incidental? Why did Aiden refuse to help local victims, letting foreigners stay in the hotel but not actual homeless victims? What was his motivation? We can certainly infer some of Aiden's reasons -- for instance, he clearly prefers cosmopolitan foreigners to the local peasants -- but the weight that we should give our inferences is unclear and ambiguous. Some ambiguity is good for an audience -- but with too much uncertainty, the viewer is likely to feel that the film is unresolved and, even, evasive, not good traits in a picture exceeding three and a quarter hours in length.
Much of Winter Sleep is brilliantly realized. The Cappadocian landscapes are astounding, pale, ghostly badlands against an infinite barren plain, and the acting is uniformly superb. There are spectacularly conceived sequences and much of the dialogue is fascinating. The film is sprawling in its ambition, a variant on Chekhov's Uncle Vanya with elements of Dostoevsky, speeches recited from Shakespeare, and, even, echoes of Ibsen's Doll House. A local grandee, Mr. Aiden is a famous actor who has returned to his home village in Cappadocia to run his family's hotel. Aiden's embittered sister, Necla, seems to have tended to their aging parents and the family enterprises (they own much property and are hated as landlords). Aiden was apparently estranged from his parents; at one point, his sister accuses him of not going to their graves for "even a minute." Aiden has a much younger wife, Nihel, the Desdemona/Nora figure in the plot. Shakepearian in its scope, the story has three principal strands: one plot, primary to the film, involves Aiden's conflict with a shabby, ingratiating local imam, Hamdi Hodja. Hodja is the brother of local hothead, Ismail, who has been in conflict with Aiden over rent (Aiden has hired a brutish collection agency to repossess the family's TV set and refrigerator and air-conditioner.) The hotheaded brother's small son hurls a rock through the window of a Land Rover that Aiden uses to patrol his properties setting up a tense confrontation between the peasant family and landlord that the smarmy Imam attempts to mediate. At the climax of the film, Aiden's wife, Nihel, is drawn into this dispute. The second plot strand involves Nihel's operation of a non-profit corporation from the hotel. Nihel is raising money for impoverished local schools. Aiden thinks his wife naïve and idealistic, and, further, believes the non-profit will be a vehicle for authorities to attack him and his family -- the film has long sections in which Aiden berates his wife citing tax exemption, record-keeping, and deductibility laws applicable to non-profits. The message is clear enough -- Nihel has been infantilized; she is a trophy wife like Nora in The Doll House, and any independent action on her part is intensely threatening to her domineering husband. The third element in the plot involves Aiden's internet ad for the hotel that suggests that the place owns horses. Of course, there are no horses but when a guest draws this to Aiden's attention, his vanity is wounded and he engages a local man to capture and tame one of the mustangs apparently roaming the badlands. Scenes involving the capture of the wild horse are disturbing and memorable -- the horse, it seems, would rather die than be captured. This part of the film involves wild-west panoramas and looks like something out of John Huston's 1960 The Misfits. Aiden is trying to write a history of Turkish theater, a book that the film suggests may not be worth writing. The three plots don't exactly coalesce at any point and the story about the horse is embarrassingly emblematic -- near the end, Mr. Aiden lets the poor horse free. The problem with the film is that it has three or four extended dialogue sequences -- two of them involving Aiden quarreling bitterly with his sister. These scenes drag the movie to a complete stop and are conspicuously over-written and theatrical: the scenes aren't sufficiently interesting to carry their length and the audience loses the thread of the argument in any event. The plot involving the insulted and injured Imam and his dysfunctional family -- his brother is violent drunk, a wife-beater, who has served six months in prison -- is the most interesting part of the film; Winter Sleep comes fully alive when this narrative is underway. But this plot accounts for only a quarter of the film -- the equally long story about Nihel's non-profit corporation is tedious and Aiden's objections, which are really about his wife's attempt at independence, are in such bad faith and so ludicrous that the viewers loses all respect for the character. The last quarter of the film involves Aiden's failed attempt to leave Cappadocia for Istanbul (in a blizzard) and Nihel's equally doomed effort to effect a reconciliation with the local Imam and his family. (Aiden writes for a local newspaper and in his column has attacked the Imam in a patronizing and cruel way.) At the end of the film, Aiden has got drunk to the point of explosive vomiting, gone hunting, and shot a rabbit. The rabbit provides him with an excuse to return home, presumably so that the poor beast can be prepared and cooked -- Nihel gazes down at Aiden as he stands shivering in the snowy courtyard of the Hotel Othello with his pathetic trophy, the great white hunter returned from his exertions.
Much of Winter Sleep is brilliantly realized. The Cappadocian landscapes are astounding, pale, ghostly badlands against an infinite barren plain, and the acting is uniformly superb. There are spectacularly conceived sequences and much of the dialogue is fascinating. The film is sprawling in its ambition, a variant on Chekhov's Uncle Vanya with elements of Dostoevsky, speeches recited from Shakespeare, and, even, echoes of Ibsen's Doll House. A local grandee, Mr. Aiden is a famous actor who has returned to his home village in Cappadocia to run his family's hotel. Aiden's embittered sister, Necla, seems to have tended to their aging parents and the family enterprises (they own much property and are hated as landlords). Aiden was apparently estranged from his parents; at one point, his sister accuses him of not going to their graves for "even a minute." Aiden has a much younger wife, Nihel, the Desdemona/Nora figure in the plot. Shakepearian in its scope, the story has three principal strands: one plot, primary to the film, involves Aiden's conflict with a shabby, ingratiating local imam, Hamdi Hodja. Hodja is the brother of local hothead, Ismail, who has been in conflict with Aiden over rent (Aiden has hired a brutish collection agency to repossess the family's TV set and refrigerator and air-conditioner.) The hotheaded brother's small son hurls a rock through the window of a Land Rover that Aiden uses to patrol his properties setting up a tense confrontation between the peasant family and landlord that the smarmy Imam attempts to mediate. At the climax of the film, Aiden's wife, Nihel, is drawn into this dispute. The second plot strand involves Nihel's operation of a non-profit corporation from the hotel. Nihel is raising money for impoverished local schools. Aiden thinks his wife naïve and idealistic, and, further, believes the non-profit will be a vehicle for authorities to attack him and his family -- the film has long sections in which Aiden berates his wife citing tax exemption, record-keeping, and deductibility laws applicable to non-profits. The message is clear enough -- Nihel has been infantilized; she is a trophy wife like Nora in The Doll House, and any independent action on her part is intensely threatening to her domineering husband. The third element in the plot involves Aiden's internet ad for the hotel that suggests that the place owns horses. Of course, there are no horses but when a guest draws this to Aiden's attention, his vanity is wounded and he engages a local man to capture and tame one of the mustangs apparently roaming the badlands. Scenes involving the capture of the wild horse are disturbing and memorable -- the horse, it seems, would rather die than be captured. This part of the film involves wild-west panoramas and looks like something out of John Huston's 1960 The Misfits. Aiden is trying to write a history of Turkish theater, a book that the film suggests may not be worth writing. The three plots don't exactly coalesce at any point and the story about the horse is embarrassingly emblematic -- near the end, Mr. Aiden lets the poor horse free. The problem with the film is that it has three or four extended dialogue sequences -- two of them involving Aiden quarreling bitterly with his sister. These scenes drag the movie to a complete stop and are conspicuously over-written and theatrical: the scenes aren't sufficiently interesting to carry their length and the audience loses the thread of the argument in any event. The plot involving the insulted and injured Imam and his dysfunctional family -- his brother is violent drunk, a wife-beater, who has served six months in prison -- is the most interesting part of the film; Winter Sleep comes fully alive when this narrative is underway. But this plot accounts for only a quarter of the film -- the equally long story about Nihel's non-profit corporation is tedious and Aiden's objections, which are really about his wife's attempt at independence, are in such bad faith and so ludicrous that the viewers loses all respect for the character. The last quarter of the film involves Aiden's failed attempt to leave Cappadocia for Istanbul (in a blizzard) and Nihel's equally doomed effort to effect a reconciliation with the local Imam and his family. (Aiden writes for a local newspaper and in his column has attacked the Imam in a patronizing and cruel way.) At the end of the film, Aiden has got drunk to the point of explosive vomiting, gone hunting, and shot a rabbit. The rabbit provides him with an excuse to return home, presumably so that the poor beast can be prepared and cooked -- Nihel gazes down at Aiden as he stands shivering in the snowy courtyard of the Hotel Othello with his pathetic trophy, the great white hunter returned from his exertions.
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Da Vinci codex at MIA
Security is tight at the Minneapolis Institute of Art where patrons enter an exhibition devoted to pages from the Leicester Codex, a notebook made by Leonardo Da Vinci. Burly thugs strip-search customers and conduct body cavity inspections, a generally degrading experience that dampens the art lover's enthusiasm for the rather dour and arcane specimens of late 15th century calligraphy on display in the darkened galleries. I didn't mind the rectal probe or the urethral sounds, but was quite upset when my pens, mechanical pencils, and highlighting magic marker were unceremoniously snatched from me, put in a sealed plastic bag and deposited with a receptionist for later retrieval.
It's hard to know why this heightened level of security is necessary. The exhibit consists of three darkened rooms each containing about ten pages of Da Vinci's notebook. The pages are covered with tiny reverse handwriting -- Da Vinci used "mirror writing" to encrypt his observations. In the first room, the pages enclosed front and back (recto and verso) are entirely covered with microscopic inscriptions -- some vaguely worded labels explain in very general terms what Da Vinci wrote on the page. A page covered with writing, probably about eight-hundred words is summarized in three or four sentences. In the second two rooms, the pages in their plexiglass cases have minuscule drawings on them -- the drawings are elegant depictions of swirling water, intersecting river currents, angled excavation and earth-ramming equipment, little scaffolds, and pulley and lever mechanisms. The images are very small, sketched with a spidery precise line, and fairly interesting -- but the notes don't provide enough context to understand exactly what we are seeing and the sketches are marginal to long columns of handwriting. There's no reason to travel to see these things. Images that you can summon to your computer will show you these codex pages more clearly than you can see them in the darkened rooms with crowds of people. Furthermore, the sketches are not particularly interesting -- they have the artistic qualities of extra-lucid illustrations in an old Victorian science book or a nineteen-fifties Scientific American. The rest of the exhibition, ostensibly something about creativity, with one exception is devoid of any interest, artistically or otherwise. This part of the show consists of engineering sketches for automobiles, some eccentric inventions, and drawings mapping the evolution of such important developments in world culture as "in-line skates." A gallery full of crocheted facsimiles of coral reefs is particularly pointless. It's obviously intended to be a sop to women viewers since the rest of the show seems to pretty much adamantly imply that creativity and inventiveness is a male characteristic -- but it seems condescending and dimwitted to suggest that female contribution to the world of imaginative creation is limited to textile work, colorfully, if inaccurately, simulating coral reefs and their creatures. One great work is on display in the galleries annexed to the Da Vinci codex pages -- this is Bill Viola's The Raft. This high-definition digital video shows 11 people of various races and ages standing together, apparently waiting for a bus or train. In super slow-motion, the people look down at their shoes, congregate more tightly together, mostly ignoring one another while reading books or checking on their cell-phones. Seven people join the group. Then, great jets of water are blasted into the crowd, horizontal waterfalls smashing against the people from both sides. The water cannons continue to inundate the people, knocking them onto the ground, for about three minutes. Then, the flood gradually subsides and we see the people, bedraggled and disoriented, several of them embracing as they attempt to help fallen, and, possibly, unconscious members of the group. The video raises many thought-provoking questions and is spectacularly gorgeous -- the actors stand against a black background and the torrents of water look like jets of quartz; a woman shaking her head and long hair after the assault casts strings of glittering diamonds into the air in graceful slow-motion arcs; the drapery of wet clothing is, itself, very beautiful. Some material introducing the "creative process" that engendered the work show references to Gericault's great and terrible painting The Raft of the Medusa. Although Viola's video is wonderful on its own merits -- both beautiful and disturbing (do people really only interact meaningfully in the face of calamity?) -- the work is only tangentially related to the Da Vinci codex pages (like them, it features swirls of water) and not connected at all to the embarrassing coral reef simulacrum or the wacky (and not-so-wacky) inventions in the room with the engineering diagrams. In general, the theme of the exhibition seems questionable: if you buy yourself a notebook and write down your observations, you will be a creative person.
Prodigious, if disturbing, creativity is on display in the adjacent galleries, a big exhibit devoted to work by Mark Mothersbaugh, the founder of the indy rock band DEVO, and a composer of some note. Mothersbaugh seems to have to made postcards his preferred métier and the results are astounding -- for more than 40 years, he has made one postcard-sized work of art a day: the post cards are bound into photo albums and off-loaded onto pallets so that viewers can bend down to inspect them by flipping through the pages of the albums. Mothersbaugh's post cards are all different and all wildly, if grotesquely, inventive -- he favors parodies of 1950's educational and scientific images, modified in monstrous ways. In his music, Mothersbaugh adopted the persona of a masked figure called "Booji Boy" and videos show him prancing about in that guise. There is a horrifying image of oozing bandages being unwound from the head of an insectoid creature that, then, takes up an electric guitar or keyboard to play DEVO rock and roll. A sort of improvised pipe organ periodically plays herky-jerky calliope tunes -- the Rube Goldberg style machine is far larger than the music that it produces, an amusing disproportion. Another gallery is devoted to images that Mothersbaugh made as parodies of daguerrotypes -- the pictures use the simple, if alarming, effect of mirroring right and left, creating eerily symmetrical faces either too wide or narrowed to the point of heads looking like hairy vulvas with ears. In another room, armies of kewpie dolls splashed with paint stand on carpets of artificial grass. Mothersbaugh's mutant-geek aesthetic has an authentic counter-cultural edge -- we are taught to regard artists as hip, cool seers, but, in fact, the show discloses an unhealthy, half-crazed wallowing in the deformed and desperately uncool and unhip. Perhaps, this sort of stuff is best experienced in small doses, but the exhibition has a real power and is far more fascinating, and disquieting, than most of the stuff in the prestigious, adjacent Da Vinci show. If Mothersbaugh illustrates unfettered creativity, it's clear that this faculty is closely related to unwholesome obsession -- maybe, a little creativity goes a long way.
Also on display is a small but beautiful show of paintings collected by a Twin Cities businessman, Myron Kunin. The show is comprised of "American Modernist" canvases, an unhelpful title for a variety of ingeniously painted pictures including a powerful New Mexico landscape by Marsden Hartley, some Bowery-style "ash-can" realism by Paul Cadmus and Reginald Marsh (in particular a Goya-esque painting of a line at a soup kitchen called "Holy Name Mission.") Kunin liked to collect erotic images and I wonder what his private stash looked like -- the show features three ripe nudes of the kind that used to grace the wall behind old-time saloons. These are unashamedly pornographic (or verging on the pornographic) works by Robert Henri and John Steuert Curry.
The MIA's greatest painting, Bonnard's paradisical and uncanny "Dining Room in the Country" is on loan. An interesting small show on the 2nd floor features anatomical engravings and a frontispiece to a folio-sized treatise by Vesalius reminds us in a startling way that during the 17th century dissection was like grand opera, a form of decadent entertainment.
It's hard to know why this heightened level of security is necessary. The exhibit consists of three darkened rooms each containing about ten pages of Da Vinci's notebook. The pages are covered with tiny reverse handwriting -- Da Vinci used "mirror writing" to encrypt his observations. In the first room, the pages enclosed front and back (recto and verso) are entirely covered with microscopic inscriptions -- some vaguely worded labels explain in very general terms what Da Vinci wrote on the page. A page covered with writing, probably about eight-hundred words is summarized in three or four sentences. In the second two rooms, the pages in their plexiglass cases have minuscule drawings on them -- the drawings are elegant depictions of swirling water, intersecting river currents, angled excavation and earth-ramming equipment, little scaffolds, and pulley and lever mechanisms. The images are very small, sketched with a spidery precise line, and fairly interesting -- but the notes don't provide enough context to understand exactly what we are seeing and the sketches are marginal to long columns of handwriting. There's no reason to travel to see these things. Images that you can summon to your computer will show you these codex pages more clearly than you can see them in the darkened rooms with crowds of people. Furthermore, the sketches are not particularly interesting -- they have the artistic qualities of extra-lucid illustrations in an old Victorian science book or a nineteen-fifties Scientific American. The rest of the exhibition, ostensibly something about creativity, with one exception is devoid of any interest, artistically or otherwise. This part of the show consists of engineering sketches for automobiles, some eccentric inventions, and drawings mapping the evolution of such important developments in world culture as "in-line skates." A gallery full of crocheted facsimiles of coral reefs is particularly pointless. It's obviously intended to be a sop to women viewers since the rest of the show seems to pretty much adamantly imply that creativity and inventiveness is a male characteristic -- but it seems condescending and dimwitted to suggest that female contribution to the world of imaginative creation is limited to textile work, colorfully, if inaccurately, simulating coral reefs and their creatures. One great work is on display in the galleries annexed to the Da Vinci codex pages -- this is Bill Viola's The Raft. This high-definition digital video shows 11 people of various races and ages standing together, apparently waiting for a bus or train. In super slow-motion, the people look down at their shoes, congregate more tightly together, mostly ignoring one another while reading books or checking on their cell-phones. Seven people join the group. Then, great jets of water are blasted into the crowd, horizontal waterfalls smashing against the people from both sides. The water cannons continue to inundate the people, knocking them onto the ground, for about three minutes. Then, the flood gradually subsides and we see the people, bedraggled and disoriented, several of them embracing as they attempt to help fallen, and, possibly, unconscious members of the group. The video raises many thought-provoking questions and is spectacularly gorgeous -- the actors stand against a black background and the torrents of water look like jets of quartz; a woman shaking her head and long hair after the assault casts strings of glittering diamonds into the air in graceful slow-motion arcs; the drapery of wet clothing is, itself, very beautiful. Some material introducing the "creative process" that engendered the work show references to Gericault's great and terrible painting The Raft of the Medusa. Although Viola's video is wonderful on its own merits -- both beautiful and disturbing (do people really only interact meaningfully in the face of calamity?) -- the work is only tangentially related to the Da Vinci codex pages (like them, it features swirls of water) and not connected at all to the embarrassing coral reef simulacrum or the wacky (and not-so-wacky) inventions in the room with the engineering diagrams. In general, the theme of the exhibition seems questionable: if you buy yourself a notebook and write down your observations, you will be a creative person.
Prodigious, if disturbing, creativity is on display in the adjacent galleries, a big exhibit devoted to work by Mark Mothersbaugh, the founder of the indy rock band DEVO, and a composer of some note. Mothersbaugh seems to have to made postcards his preferred métier and the results are astounding -- for more than 40 years, he has made one postcard-sized work of art a day: the post cards are bound into photo albums and off-loaded onto pallets so that viewers can bend down to inspect them by flipping through the pages of the albums. Mothersbaugh's post cards are all different and all wildly, if grotesquely, inventive -- he favors parodies of 1950's educational and scientific images, modified in monstrous ways. In his music, Mothersbaugh adopted the persona of a masked figure called "Booji Boy" and videos show him prancing about in that guise. There is a horrifying image of oozing bandages being unwound from the head of an insectoid creature that, then, takes up an electric guitar or keyboard to play DEVO rock and roll. A sort of improvised pipe organ periodically plays herky-jerky calliope tunes -- the Rube Goldberg style machine is far larger than the music that it produces, an amusing disproportion. Another gallery is devoted to images that Mothersbaugh made as parodies of daguerrotypes -- the pictures use the simple, if alarming, effect of mirroring right and left, creating eerily symmetrical faces either too wide or narrowed to the point of heads looking like hairy vulvas with ears. In another room, armies of kewpie dolls splashed with paint stand on carpets of artificial grass. Mothersbaugh's mutant-geek aesthetic has an authentic counter-cultural edge -- we are taught to regard artists as hip, cool seers, but, in fact, the show discloses an unhealthy, half-crazed wallowing in the deformed and desperately uncool and unhip. Perhaps, this sort of stuff is best experienced in small doses, but the exhibition has a real power and is far more fascinating, and disquieting, than most of the stuff in the prestigious, adjacent Da Vinci show. If Mothersbaugh illustrates unfettered creativity, it's clear that this faculty is closely related to unwholesome obsession -- maybe, a little creativity goes a long way.
Also on display is a small but beautiful show of paintings collected by a Twin Cities businessman, Myron Kunin. The show is comprised of "American Modernist" canvases, an unhelpful title for a variety of ingeniously painted pictures including a powerful New Mexico landscape by Marsden Hartley, some Bowery-style "ash-can" realism by Paul Cadmus and Reginald Marsh (in particular a Goya-esque painting of a line at a soup kitchen called "Holy Name Mission.") Kunin liked to collect erotic images and I wonder what his private stash looked like -- the show features three ripe nudes of the kind that used to grace the wall behind old-time saloons. These are unashamedly pornographic (or verging on the pornographic) works by Robert Henri and John Steuert Curry.
The MIA's greatest painting, Bonnard's paradisical and uncanny "Dining Room in the Country" is on loan. An interesting small show on the 2nd floor features anatomical engravings and a frontispiece to a folio-sized treatise by Vesalius reminds us in a startling way that during the 17th century dissection was like grand opera, a form of decadent entertainment.
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Jauja
Once I was hiking in a western National Park, a place with desert and mountains. The trail began on a nondescript salt flat and, then, wandered to some low, parched boulders. Although the guide-book promised all kinds of marvels, I didn't see much of anything but sun and the baked carapace of "desert concrete" and, then, a furnace-like trough in the outcropping where the path led upward over barren boulders. Emerging from a slit in the stone, I suddenly found myself among pinnacles and minarets of wind-sculpted rock, a whole army of stone chess-men strewn across a basin drifting with multi-colored sands. The walk to what appeared to be just another burnt rock formation led to a wonderful, hidden landscape.
The 2014 Argentine film, Jauja, attempts a similar effect. (The film is Lisandro Alonso's fifth feature -- apparently, all of his movies are similar to this picture.) Although there are people in the movie, they exist only as cursors dragged across vast empty landscapes. The idea is to transport the people that we see dwarfed in these landscapes into the space of the sublime and wonderful. If there is a plot of Jaujau, it is about a man's incursion into a strange landscape and the things that he beholds in that place. As the film opens, we see a man and his daughter dressed in Victorian clothing sitting on a rocky beach among terraces of rock eroded into bath-tub-shaped tidepools. The girl asks her father to get her a dog that "will follow me wherever I go." Her father says he will do this -- but only when they return to Denmark. It's a strange landscape with living things in the remote distance, perhaps, small seals although we can't see the creatures distinctly. A man bathes in a pool rhythmically masturbating. Later, this man dons bright red trousers and asks the hero, played by Viggo Mortenson for his daughter -- the man says he will buy her for a horse since the person who rides in these wild parts "rides like a King." There is talk of a military ball at a nearby fort -- we never see the fort or the ball -- and a renegade named Zalauga who may be leading the local Indians in an uprising. The men call the Indians "cocoa-nut heads" and vow to exterminate them. In one of the tidal pools, someone finds a six-inch tall toy soldier with a red coat and musket. In the night, the hero's daughter elopes with a young soldier who seems to be half-Indian, a man named Corto. The guy in the red pants offers to hunt Corto down, but Viggo Mortenson's character (significantly, he is called Colonel Dinesen) says that this is his duty. He departs on horseback across the desert. The lovers embrace at a stream surrounded by flamboyantly tall and exuberant grasses. Dinesen encounters a crew digging a ditch, possibly for a railroad, and, then, finds a man tortured to death among strange totem poles on a hilltop. After more traveling, he finds Corto dying with his throat slit -- the girl, Ingeborg, is nowhere to be seen. While Dinesen is trying to saw-off Corto's head with his sword, a dark hand enters the frame and steals the European's rifle and, later, his horse. On foot, Dinesen wanders through the wilderness. A Norwegian wolfhound with a raw sore on its side appears in the desert and Dinesen follows the animal through the wasteland. He comes to a volcanic caldera where there is a spring and a weird woman living like a troll in a rocky fissure. The woman tells Dinesen that "One man is not all men" -- reversing the Borgesian formula -- she also asks "what is it that makes a life go forward and function?" Dinesen continues his quest and falls asleep under a sky full of smeared stars. Without any advance warning, the film cuts to elegant-looking European chateau with stone towers and immense gardens. The young woman played by the actress in the role of the vanished daughter, Ingeborg, wakes up. She has breakfast (the house has modern appliances) and, then, goes outside to tend her pack of Norwegian wolf hounds. One of the dogs has a sore on its side, but her father, who is grooming the animals, says that with antibiotic and lotion the dog will soon be better. The father says that dogs obsessively scratch and lick themselves when something bothers them that they can't figure out. The girl leads the dog away from the estate, passing through a symbolic-looking gate that could furnish a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. With the dog, the girl explores a lush forest where there is a tiny lake. The girl finds a six-inch tall wooden soldier. She tosses the wooden soldier into the pond and, then, the landscape blurs into an image of the stony beach where the film began, the inscrutable living creatures wriggling a little on horizon.
The film presents an enigma organized around certain images: the toy soldier, the compass in its wooden box that the girl takes from the encampment when she elopes, the dog with its wounded side. All shots are static and last from 30 seconds to a couple minutes in length -- generally, the shot simply shows someone approaching the camera or departing toward the Patagonian horizon, crossing an immense, silent, and motionless landscape. There is very little dialogue and the speech that we hear doesn't clarify anything -- in the first twenty minutes there is lots of talk about a ball at the fort that is completely meaningless and leads nowhere. After the girl elopes, the film is distilled to its essence -- a pure chase or pursuit across impassive and, increasingly, hostile landscapes. The film suggests archetypes -- the image of a lone wanderer chasing a woman who can not be seen and who leaves increasingly few traces seems integral to the movie: in some ways, the picture is a meditation on John Ford's The Searchers. The toy soldier that appears mysteriously in the desert, on the seashore, and, then, in the lush Danish woods seems to symbolize the lone searcher -- a figure with which the woman plays, but, then, discards. The film is full of startling images but paced slowly that it is difficult to stay awake if you are watching this picture alone in a warm room before going to bed -- sleeping during the film doesn't harm the experience: in fact, it makes the movie seem even more hallucinatory and visionary: I fell asleep as the man was entering a cleft in a rock, woke briefly to see him sitting with a strange older woman, a kind of Norn, in a grotto that looked like it was made of black mirrors, and, then, opened my eyes again to see a castle in Denmark and a dock extending over dark water -- the membrane of the water seems to flex and repel reflections when the girl walks out onto the dock to throw away the toy soldier. The picture is shot in a curious aspect ratio -- it is pillar-boxed and this gives the viewer the effect of seeming the images as if projected by some kind of ancient magic lantern system or a toy viewmaster (the images are shot 4:3 in what is called Academy ratio with the edges of the frame elegantly curved.) It's an uncanny film that requires more research -- it's also slim and enigmatic to the point of vanishing, the distillation of Antonioni's L'Aventurra to its quintessence. When asked at a film festival Q & A, Alonso said he didn't know himself what the movie meant.
The 2014 Argentine film, Jauja, attempts a similar effect. (The film is Lisandro Alonso's fifth feature -- apparently, all of his movies are similar to this picture.) Although there are people in the movie, they exist only as cursors dragged across vast empty landscapes. The idea is to transport the people that we see dwarfed in these landscapes into the space of the sublime and wonderful. If there is a plot of Jaujau, it is about a man's incursion into a strange landscape and the things that he beholds in that place. As the film opens, we see a man and his daughter dressed in Victorian clothing sitting on a rocky beach among terraces of rock eroded into bath-tub-shaped tidepools. The girl asks her father to get her a dog that "will follow me wherever I go." Her father says he will do this -- but only when they return to Denmark. It's a strange landscape with living things in the remote distance, perhaps, small seals although we can't see the creatures distinctly. A man bathes in a pool rhythmically masturbating. Later, this man dons bright red trousers and asks the hero, played by Viggo Mortenson for his daughter -- the man says he will buy her for a horse since the person who rides in these wild parts "rides like a King." There is talk of a military ball at a nearby fort -- we never see the fort or the ball -- and a renegade named Zalauga who may be leading the local Indians in an uprising. The men call the Indians "cocoa-nut heads" and vow to exterminate them. In one of the tidal pools, someone finds a six-inch tall toy soldier with a red coat and musket. In the night, the hero's daughter elopes with a young soldier who seems to be half-Indian, a man named Corto. The guy in the red pants offers to hunt Corto down, but Viggo Mortenson's character (significantly, he is called Colonel Dinesen) says that this is his duty. He departs on horseback across the desert. The lovers embrace at a stream surrounded by flamboyantly tall and exuberant grasses. Dinesen encounters a crew digging a ditch, possibly for a railroad, and, then, finds a man tortured to death among strange totem poles on a hilltop. After more traveling, he finds Corto dying with his throat slit -- the girl, Ingeborg, is nowhere to be seen. While Dinesen is trying to saw-off Corto's head with his sword, a dark hand enters the frame and steals the European's rifle and, later, his horse. On foot, Dinesen wanders through the wilderness. A Norwegian wolfhound with a raw sore on its side appears in the desert and Dinesen follows the animal through the wasteland. He comes to a volcanic caldera where there is a spring and a weird woman living like a troll in a rocky fissure. The woman tells Dinesen that "One man is not all men" -- reversing the Borgesian formula -- she also asks "what is it that makes a life go forward and function?" Dinesen continues his quest and falls asleep under a sky full of smeared stars. Without any advance warning, the film cuts to elegant-looking European chateau with stone towers and immense gardens. The young woman played by the actress in the role of the vanished daughter, Ingeborg, wakes up. She has breakfast (the house has modern appliances) and, then, goes outside to tend her pack of Norwegian wolf hounds. One of the dogs has a sore on its side, but her father, who is grooming the animals, says that with antibiotic and lotion the dog will soon be better. The father says that dogs obsessively scratch and lick themselves when something bothers them that they can't figure out. The girl leads the dog away from the estate, passing through a symbolic-looking gate that could furnish a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. With the dog, the girl explores a lush forest where there is a tiny lake. The girl finds a six-inch tall wooden soldier. She tosses the wooden soldier into the pond and, then, the landscape blurs into an image of the stony beach where the film began, the inscrutable living creatures wriggling a little on horizon.
The film presents an enigma organized around certain images: the toy soldier, the compass in its wooden box that the girl takes from the encampment when she elopes, the dog with its wounded side. All shots are static and last from 30 seconds to a couple minutes in length -- generally, the shot simply shows someone approaching the camera or departing toward the Patagonian horizon, crossing an immense, silent, and motionless landscape. There is very little dialogue and the speech that we hear doesn't clarify anything -- in the first twenty minutes there is lots of talk about a ball at the fort that is completely meaningless and leads nowhere. After the girl elopes, the film is distilled to its essence -- a pure chase or pursuit across impassive and, increasingly, hostile landscapes. The film suggests archetypes -- the image of a lone wanderer chasing a woman who can not be seen and who leaves increasingly few traces seems integral to the movie: in some ways, the picture is a meditation on John Ford's The Searchers. The toy soldier that appears mysteriously in the desert, on the seashore, and, then, in the lush Danish woods seems to symbolize the lone searcher -- a figure with which the woman plays, but, then, discards. The film is full of startling images but paced slowly that it is difficult to stay awake if you are watching this picture alone in a warm room before going to bed -- sleeping during the film doesn't harm the experience: in fact, it makes the movie seem even more hallucinatory and visionary: I fell asleep as the man was entering a cleft in a rock, woke briefly to see him sitting with a strange older woman, a kind of Norn, in a grotto that looked like it was made of black mirrors, and, then, opened my eyes again to see a castle in Denmark and a dock extending over dark water -- the membrane of the water seems to flex and repel reflections when the girl walks out onto the dock to throw away the toy soldier. The picture is shot in a curious aspect ratio -- it is pillar-boxed and this gives the viewer the effect of seeming the images as if projected by some kind of ancient magic lantern system or a toy viewmaster (the images are shot 4:3 in what is called Academy ratio with the edges of the frame elegantly curved.) It's an uncanny film that requires more research -- it's also slim and enigmatic to the point of vanishing, the distillation of Antonioni's L'Aventurra to its quintessence. When asked at a film festival Q & A, Alonso said he didn't know himself what the movie meant.
Friday, August 14, 2015
Maps to the Stars
In the first twenty minutes of David Cronenberg's film, Maps to the Stars (2015), lawyers, a psychologist, and the parents of a child star meet to discuss the 13-year old boy's substance abuse. The kid, apparently modeled on Macauley Culkin, feels that he is a has-been at 13; he acts like an aging diva from a movie like A Star is Born. The sequence is filmed in shots showing each interlocutor facing the camera, only one person in each frame with the editor cutting between the people as they speak -- in other words, the effect of the sequence is spatially disorienting with nervous jump-cuts to shots that otherwise match except for the identity of the person speaking. The sequence is abstract, alienating, and designed to emphasize the isolation of the people involved in the meeting -- each man or woman or child occupies his (or her) own space discontinuous with the space of others. Cronenberg's icy technique highlights the film's themes -- everyone in the movie is radically isolated from everyone else by their self-absorption, narcissism, and cruelty. One of the only two-shots in the entire film is the last image, showing two doomed characters together on the front step of a burned-out house: the characters are allowed a brief communion because they have embarked on a mutual suicide pact.
Cronenberg is fundamentally a horror film director and Maps to the Stars draws on tropes from that genre -- the characters are haunted by apparitions of the dead who appear from time to time. People die by fire and water -- death is elemental. The protagonist is said to be "disfigured" by burn injuries and her scars are emblematic of the secret deformities afflicting the other characters. Horror is generally a morally unambiguous genre -- physical monstrosity reflects moral evil and Cronenberg metes out brutal, gory justice to the various villains inhabiting the film. Of course, the problem with post-modern horror is that there are no redeeming characters in sight -- everyone in Maps to the Stars deserves their awful fate and, of course, there is no virtuous heroine to be saved (and no brave hero to rescue her). The premise of the film is that a 13-year old child star lives with his parents, a famous psychiatrist with highly idiosyncratic modes of treatment, and his wife, a hysterical stage-mother. For reasons that are completely unclear to me, the child-star's parents are incestuous, a brother and sister -- this incest will mirror the relationship between the 13-year old actor and his mentally ill (and disfigured) sister. It seems that this sister, Agatha, burned down the family's house seven years earlier, suffering injuries in the course of that fire. Agatha has taken a bus to Hollywood where she intends to confront her brother and parents. In Hollywood, Agatha finds a boyfriend, a limousine driver played by the callow and annoying Robert Pattinson. Agatha is friends with Carrie Fisher who finds her a job working as a personal assistant for a famous actress played by Julianne Moore. Moore is on the verge of a crack-up -- she is desperate to be cast in the main role of a remake of a famous Hollywood picture in which her mother starred (and for which her mother received a Golden Globe). Cronenberg and his screenwriter like dubious symmetries -- Julianne Moore's mother died in a fire. Before the film ends, people will be burned to death or drown in swimming pools or be bludgeoned beyond recognition -- a shaggy dog even gets gratuitously gunned-down. Agatha's arrival destabilizes the fragile equilibrium. Julianne Moore decides to have sex with Agatha's boyfriend, probably to reassure herself that she remains young and desirable. Agatha witnesses this betrayal precipitating the various calamities that comprise the film's denoument.
Everyone in the movie is on the edge of hysteria. Dead children haunt the boy-star and drive him to viciously assault his co-star, a little kid who is about seven years old, but already a scorpion who seems motivated to displace the actor as star of the Bad Babysitter franchise. Julianne Moore is filmed in a way contrived to humiliate this actress -- she appears in a three-way sex scene with another woman, flees the bedroom, and, then, admits that "I am a bad dyke." She has to masturbate to excite Pattinson's character and, then, has to wriggle around in a degrading sex scene with the actor. At one point, Cronenberg puts her on the toilet, showing her flatulently defecating -- the picture makes you wish that Cronenberg was willing to show this actress a bit more chivalry and cut her a little slack. (I don't know who Cronenberg is revenging himself on, the film after all is a sort of roman a clef -- but his revenge is not a pretty picture.) Moore's character is so repugnant that when she is beaten to death the audience is supposed to cheer her bloody demise, a scene that channels Carrie since the burn victim's menstruation triggers the assault. Cronenberg's cold, analytical style and resolute refusal to employ any melodramatic methods to emphasize this material is at odds with the film's lurid themes and garish emotional overtones. (I suppose a more robustly melodramatic mise-en-scene would simply ladle additional hysteria on a narrative that is already hysterical enough). The prudish Canadian sensibility moralizing the material also makes the film's prurient subject matter vaguely risible. (The movie is a Canadian-German co-production.) As you watch the picture, you think to yourself -- this must be an adaptation of some ancient Greek tragedy to modern Hollywood. But you can't think of the tragedy and, after a while, the proceedings with their auto-da-fes and other brutalities comes to seem just a wee bit ridiculous.
Cronenberg is fundamentally a horror film director and Maps to the Stars draws on tropes from that genre -- the characters are haunted by apparitions of the dead who appear from time to time. People die by fire and water -- death is elemental. The protagonist is said to be "disfigured" by burn injuries and her scars are emblematic of the secret deformities afflicting the other characters. Horror is generally a morally unambiguous genre -- physical monstrosity reflects moral evil and Cronenberg metes out brutal, gory justice to the various villains inhabiting the film. Of course, the problem with post-modern horror is that there are no redeeming characters in sight -- everyone in Maps to the Stars deserves their awful fate and, of course, there is no virtuous heroine to be saved (and no brave hero to rescue her). The premise of the film is that a 13-year old child star lives with his parents, a famous psychiatrist with highly idiosyncratic modes of treatment, and his wife, a hysterical stage-mother. For reasons that are completely unclear to me, the child-star's parents are incestuous, a brother and sister -- this incest will mirror the relationship between the 13-year old actor and his mentally ill (and disfigured) sister. It seems that this sister, Agatha, burned down the family's house seven years earlier, suffering injuries in the course of that fire. Agatha has taken a bus to Hollywood where she intends to confront her brother and parents. In Hollywood, Agatha finds a boyfriend, a limousine driver played by the callow and annoying Robert Pattinson. Agatha is friends with Carrie Fisher who finds her a job working as a personal assistant for a famous actress played by Julianne Moore. Moore is on the verge of a crack-up -- she is desperate to be cast in the main role of a remake of a famous Hollywood picture in which her mother starred (and for which her mother received a Golden Globe). Cronenberg and his screenwriter like dubious symmetries -- Julianne Moore's mother died in a fire. Before the film ends, people will be burned to death or drown in swimming pools or be bludgeoned beyond recognition -- a shaggy dog even gets gratuitously gunned-down. Agatha's arrival destabilizes the fragile equilibrium. Julianne Moore decides to have sex with Agatha's boyfriend, probably to reassure herself that she remains young and desirable. Agatha witnesses this betrayal precipitating the various calamities that comprise the film's denoument.
Everyone in the movie is on the edge of hysteria. Dead children haunt the boy-star and drive him to viciously assault his co-star, a little kid who is about seven years old, but already a scorpion who seems motivated to displace the actor as star of the Bad Babysitter franchise. Julianne Moore is filmed in a way contrived to humiliate this actress -- she appears in a three-way sex scene with another woman, flees the bedroom, and, then, admits that "I am a bad dyke." She has to masturbate to excite Pattinson's character and, then, has to wriggle around in a degrading sex scene with the actor. At one point, Cronenberg puts her on the toilet, showing her flatulently defecating -- the picture makes you wish that Cronenberg was willing to show this actress a bit more chivalry and cut her a little slack. (I don't know who Cronenberg is revenging himself on, the film after all is a sort of roman a clef -- but his revenge is not a pretty picture.) Moore's character is so repugnant that when she is beaten to death the audience is supposed to cheer her bloody demise, a scene that channels Carrie since the burn victim's menstruation triggers the assault. Cronenberg's cold, analytical style and resolute refusal to employ any melodramatic methods to emphasize this material is at odds with the film's lurid themes and garish emotional overtones. (I suppose a more robustly melodramatic mise-en-scene would simply ladle additional hysteria on a narrative that is already hysterical enough). The prudish Canadian sensibility moralizing the material also makes the film's prurient subject matter vaguely risible. (The movie is a Canadian-German co-production.) As you watch the picture, you think to yourself -- this must be an adaptation of some ancient Greek tragedy to modern Hollywood. But you can't think of the tragedy and, after a while, the proceedings with their auto-da-fes and other brutalities comes to seem just a wee bit ridiculous.
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