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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
The Daily Notebook's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, May 26th, 2012 | |
| 12:03 am | Cannes 2012. Films by Takashi Miike, Leos Carax, Jaime Rosales 
The festival really came alive for me for the first time since Omirbaev's Student—not including what's obviously the best film here, but playing in Cannes Classics: Andrey Konchalovskiy's Runaway Train (1985)—with another film about the anguished-to-bursting suffering of students. Only, this was a high school musical gang film by Takashi Miike, For Love's Sake. Set in 1972, cracking with vibrant colors (and one of the handful of films here show on 35mm), images densely cluttered with classroom-alleyway bric-a-brac and as appreciative (and full) of constant brawling as a Raoul Walsh picture, the film takes its source manga and brings high school drama to the level of emotional sincerity and endless violence of the director's time traveling samurai epic, Izo. Each character devotes their love and themselves to one who cannot return that love, setting in motion a series of songs (and fights) pitting bad boys against nerds, bourgeois against orphans, preppy kids against street thugs. Boisterously funny and silly but never less than respectful about the earnestness and self-seriousness with which teenagers act, the film does the most appropriate thing for making movies about this age group: treat their lives with the vivid extravagance and gratuitousness of violence (of emotion and of bodies) in which they believe they live. Why this great film is ghettoized to an Out of Competition midnight screening slot when, last year, Miike had the subpar but more ostensibly respectable Harakiri remake in Competition seems obvious: the main program can only tolerate “arty” takes on genre: Drive, Lawless, and Killing Them Softly. (Recall that the excellent Miike film of Cannes 2011 was Ninja Kids, shown in the Market.) Yet when the real thing appears, originating from and enmeshed in the popular cultural landscape, like last year's excellent Wu Xia, you need to show up at the witching hour in order to see it. 
Coming off of this onslaught of imagery and action, I was caught off-guard by the relatively tempered level of audacity from Leos Carax's otherwise totally bizarre first feature in over a decade, Holy Motors. Inspired by the digital freedom and prank-based plotting of the filmmaker's brilliant Denis Levant-starring short for the Tokyo! omnibus, Merde, his new feature is episodically structured as Levant travels around Paris in a gaudy white limo meeting several “appointments” which involve donning disguises, taking on elaborate impersonations and integrating himself into different social strata and activities. (Some of which are based on unrealized feature film ideas by the director.) These include several assassinations, re-living a past love, taking the place of a dying old man, bringing Merde in Paris (thankfully! Hopefully a tour is in the works...), fighting and fucking in a motion capture studio, and performing roles ranging from corporate banker to beggar woman. The premise is paranoid and suggested by a cameo by Michel Piccoli—not just an Alps-like use of performance as therapy or a necessary part of the social tapestry, but also that all of Levant's impersonations are being filmed by invisible microscopic cameras for someone's enjoyment, digital cinema ubiquitous, life, genre and performance blending imperceptibly. (Shot in high definition digital, the film brings continuous and varied broadsides against this very medium, as if Carax regretted his own use of it and integrated his fear into his creation.) Based on Merde, one would expect much madness from this scenario; and based on Carax's previous works, more romantic anguish. Instead, 13 years after Pola X, the conceptual richness of Carax's free-wheeling oddity is tamed by a calm, undramatic mise-en-scène in tune with the nocturnal melancholy suffusing the limousine—which is driven by a forlorn Edith Scob, as a direct Eyes without a Face reference—in which Levant constantly changes costumes, checks the files for his next performance, getting wearier, older, disappointed and unfulfilled. Perhaps this is why the strangest and most moving episode is one where he simply impersonates a father picking his daughter up from a party, and the argument that ensues over a lie of her's—a moment seemingly too intimate and human within a film of an unreal, prankish nature, but in fact a direct expression of the tone of vague foreboding and restrained tenderness. 
Despite operating under a new director of programming this year, I have not had the opportunity to explore the Directors' Fortnight outside of the requisite Raúl Ruiz. Almost at the tail end of the festival I finally caught another, Jaime Rosales' Sueño y silencio. Shot in a demandingly spare and spatially contained and compressed 35mm black and white 'scope, it counts the slivers of moments, both private and social, of a couple who lose one of their two daughters in the film's first act. The husband is involved in the accident too and loses his memory not only of the experience but of the girl's existence, which leaves the wife to experience her grief alone. Shot directly to face his actors or pin down his space, and usually keeping only one character in frame (or partially in frame) and others, even those in involved in long conversations, out of it, the film presents the family and their story as discreet fragments isolated both narratively—as there is no decoupage in scene, each shot is a scene unto itself—and spatially, as people are left alone in quietly suggestive but nevertheless separate environments. I am not sure this technique entirely works for the section of the film that precedes the girl's death, but once she does leave the film Rosales' approach movingly isolates direct and indirect moments in such an experience—unlike, for example, Joachim Lafosse's À perdre la raison in Un Certain Regard, whose crafty script writes itself around scenes where obvious communication between people would clear up narrative mysteries. Here those mysteries are addressed but admitted as unsolved by the unequal experiences related between the husband and wife, and between the couple and the family and friends around them. Brief, beautiful dream sequences mobilize the camera and release some of the film's energy of taut, highly specific but elliptical and unresolved sadness. |
| Friday, May 25th, 2012 | |
| 6:32 am | Cannes 2012. Days 8-9, Essential Reads 
Holy Motors, Léos Carax's first feature since 1999's largely misunderstood Pola X, has inspired the most entertaining critic responses at this year's festival. Mike D'Angelo labels it a "bugfuck masterpiece," and Michal Oleszczyk enthusiastically proclaims it to be "a mind-blowing absurdist vaudeville, an acting tour de force, a Franju-by-way-of-Feuillade cine-homage, a howl, a hoot, and a treat." The film could be a Palme d'Or contender, and, moreover, word is that the brilliant Denis Lavant could be rewarded with a Best Actor Award. Eugene Hernandez celebrates Carax's return and covers the film's press conference over at Cannes Daily. If you missed the astonishing trailer for Holy Motors, take a look. Other Take: Demetrios Matheou (Sight & Sound) Walter Salles' On the Road has mostly been greeted with negative attention or faint praise. Manohla Dargis writes on the film for The New York Times. The Paperboy, Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious sounds just as misguided and strange (not in a good way), if not more so. However, Todd McCarthy (The Hollywood Reporter) has one of the odd positive takes on the movie and its performances in particular. He writes that "In the spirit of the venture, the entire cast gets down and comes off all the better for it. Both Efron and McConaughey get very messed up physically, and both actors seem stimulated to be playing such flawed characters." 
Carlos Reygadas' Post Tenebras Lux is dividing critics, baffling many and wooing others. Screen Daily's Jonathan Romney carefully describes the film, and in doing so makes it sound rather beautiful. He closes his review by remarking that "you never feel that Reygadas is out to impose his unorthodox outlook, to impress himself on you as a visionary. There is a vision here, certainly, but the film feels genuinely, bracingly experimental in that it seems to be searching for its own meaning and form, rather than asserting them ready-made." More of Fernando Ganzo's great coverage at Lumière has been translated into English: firstly, a piece on Michael Haneke's Amour and Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love, and, secondly, one on Alain Resnais' You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! Another Cannes interview from Dennis Lim (The New York Times), this time with Abbas Kiarostami. Here in the Notebook we have more from Daniel Kasman, as well as a refreshing alternative perspective on Amour from Boris Nelepo. |
| Thursday, May 24th, 2012 | |
| 6:30 pm | Cannes 2012. Alain Resnais' "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" 
Liberated into the unexplored wilderness of the outside world–genre-bending, free-wheeling—with Wild Grass, Alain Resnais now turns inward, back to the studio, back to adapting theater, back to pleating life onto itself to resemble memories and the cinema. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet sees a cast of the directors' regulars “playing themselves” and being mysteriously called to the mansion of a deceased playwright, their longtime collaborator. They are asked to evaluate a recorded rehearsal performance of a new edition of a classic play by the deceased, “Eurydice” (in fact a combination of two real plays by Jean Anouilh), and as they watch young French actors taking on the roles they once played, the older generation begins wistfully recalling lines, then, growing more enamored by the memories and the material, become entranced by the recitation, take it over, and begin to perform the play themselves. Some characters are played by multiple actors—the romantic leads, in older form, are Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi, and in younger form, Anne Consigny and Lambert Wilson—and Resnais cuts between multiple levels of stagings: the footage of the rehearsal (directed by filmmaking Bruno Podalydès), the actors in the screening room reciting to themselves or those next to them, and the actors carried away to a barely-complete set of the play, Resnais using green screen projections to dynamically alter and artificialize the settings (quite reminiscent of Ruiz's experiments in La Noche de enfrente). Last time in Cannes, with Wild Grass, the director remarked that he is often mistaken to be a filmmaker of memory when in fact he believes he is one of imagination. Indeed, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet isn't so much about the process of these actors recalling a past performance, but rather the process of them projecting themselves imaginatively into their young selves, into memories of performing with the others, into the fiction of the plays. Azéma is credited as Azéma, but that role as herself is no different than the recollection, playacting, or the consuming absorption into a role from her youth that she is too old and distant from to play, seemingly, yet is able to make her own. This fluid meta-acting enables the film to quickly move from being about a gathering of actors to being about a performance of the play cinematically, one that constantly weaves between the integrity of the play itself and our reflection on its splintered creation through the bodies of actors, psychologies and dreams. The context is of a wake or funeral but one that calls up new life through recollection and reliving. The incantatory appeal of this morbid but warm ceremony, of the cinema taking theater players into an imaginative realm between the actual play and themselves, between movies and plays, reminiscences and sincere embodiment, sees itself through the end to a conjuration that blends these things inextricably into a fabric so densely woven it is impossible to separate the shading between watching, performing, recollecting, imagining, loving, dying and living. |
| 4:01 pm | The Forgotten: Domestic Disturbance 
My passing familiarity with the work of Walerian Borowczyk (or "Boro" as he calls himself in the film I'm about to mention) did not extend to Theater of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal (1967), which stands as a sort of missing link between the early short animations and the later erotic live action feature films. This animated feature (with live-action bits dropped in as POV shots for the flat cut-out characters), self-described as "A Film Drawn for Adults," is a perfect bridge, making sense of Boro's unusual career arc while resolutely refusing to make sense in and of itself. Though the overt erotic content is minimal (live action: a few frames of a fleeing nude, some 60s dolly birds posing), it could be argued that the film is entirely about sex, and that would make as much sense as anything. It might also be about the threat of nuclear annihilation, or art, or ecology... We begin with the origin of Mrs. Kabal, a recalcitrant creation who continually rejects the features prescribed by the artist, until both settle on her final, intimidating design: head like an artillery shell, nose like a meathook (in a film where both shells and hooks feature prominently) clad in a kind of cast iron bustier. After a brief dialogue with her nervous progenitor, she begins her adventures, accompanied by her diminutive husband, who seems to emerge into the film fully-formed. Borowczyk was always a man who liked his narrative to be of the "non" variety. Even when distinguishable cause-and-effect type events are going on in his films, his palpable disinterest in the logic or otherwise of said events guides the viewer to focus instead upon rhythm, sensation, texture, sound-and-image juxtapositions, and all the other filmic elements which really interest him. And in Kabal, those elements are really all that exist. 
If the film sounds worryingly abstract, for sure, "stuff gets done"—unidentifiable wee animals scurry about, butterflies make a nuisance of themselves, Mrs. K watches wrestling matches and atom bombs on a kind of upright Mutoscope device, then stockpiles weapons of her own—it's also reassuringly funny, at least in places. The humor certainly comes and goes, with long stretches of hypnotically repetitive action which could be typed as running gags, but with the comedy syphoned off. But some of it is very funny indeed: when Mr. Kabal prepares to photograph his terrifying spouse with an old-fashioned hooded camera, we cut to the expected upside-down POV showing his subject, and her head, always rather loose, falls off, upwards, and clunks against the top of the frame. The variety of surreal visual logic crammed into that one gag is breathtaking. 
For all its darkness and dissonance, the movie has a reassuringly familiar air: the resemblance is to American cartooning, from the Fleischer Brothers to Loony Toons, though Boro might decry such an influence. The endless, barren and abstract landscapes at times evoke Chuck Jones' Nevada hellscapes from his Road runner series, while otherwise the flatness and desolation suggests minimalist cartooning from Krazy Kat in the newspaper funnies to cinema shorts like Out of the Inkwell: it's a world of empty space, inexplicable eruptions of violence, intrusions from beyond the frame by the artist himself, sundry violations of space-time (in such worlds, the law of gravity is really more of a guideline) and a tendency towards disintegration, although everything always recovers from whatever outrage is perpetrated upon it (a bird is shot with an arrow and fed to Mrs. K, who eats the internal organs, bones, and even the arrow—then the bird flies happily away, intact and healthy). This lends a patina of harmlessness to what is otherwise an unsettling experience, with elements of Gilliam and Švankmajer (though Borowczyk predates both and certainly influenced the former). The movie extends playful tendrils into the future: a squiggly caterpillar traversing Kabal's scratchy-ink mesas will later return as the Claymation maggot worming merrily through Eraserhead, and one of those annoying butterflies—poetic pests!—will flap into Boro's final film, Love Rites (1987), to alight upon a voluminous pubic bush. Which seems a fitting encapsulation of Boro's career arc, in a way. *** The Forgotten is a regular Thursday column by David Cairns, author of Shadowplay. |
| 12:00 pm | Cannes 2012. Michael Haneke's "Amour" 
An elderly couple, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant, on-screen for the first time in years) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), is introduced to us at their routine family outing to The Théâtre des Champs Elysées. Both retired music teachers, they lead a comfortable lifestyle in a magnificent Paris apartment, among the shelves full of books on their apparent favorite, Franz Schubert, until one day, Anne stops reacting to her husband’s comments, and spills her breakfast tea. From that moment on, they have to share their home with affliction. Those of you who have seen at least a couple of features from the unequivocally great Michael Haneke should be able to envision his latest, Amour, shot by shot before even laying eyes on it. It is detached, cerebral filmmaking at its finest: without skipping a beat, the director soberly captures the psychological and physiological landscape as it undergoes severe changes. Distilling Haneke’s habitual realism of the most austere variety are dream sequences of George being strangled and his delirious hallucinations. The “love” in the title alludes to the distance between humans closing in, while death is presented as the ultimate intimacy. Haneke details Anne’s physical demise as she is being gradually reduced to mere flesh, the last spark of life bottled up in her eyes. The ailing woman wets her bed and babbles and bellows; Georges, in the meantime, tends to her to the best of his ability: he gives her foot massages, changes her diapers, and feeds her oatmeal that trickles down her face. And then, at last, he slaps her. The agonies of senility are commonly hushed up as taboo and thus rarely committed to film. The titular “love” could have been replaced with any other abstract concept: life, death, religion, art. All these notions, previously––and seemingly––packed with importance, are stripped of their meaning by the slow act of dying, which is essentially an act of losing one’s self. Over the years, Adorno’s famous quote about “poetry after Auschwitz [being] barbaric” has been time and again tweaked and elaborated on; we wonder, in fact, whether faith in humanity, culture, much less God is even possible in the wake of Alzheimer’s, dementia, brain damage, or any kind of illness that entails deterioration of the mind. Religion normally condemns fault-finding, and grants a peaceful afterlife in exchange for humility. But is there peace for body, irrespective of soul? Romeo Castelucci’s iconoclast On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God, in striving to answer this question, plainly out-brutals and out-grims Haneke’s endeavor by a mile, when torrents of real feces, soundtracked by the helpless son sobbing for his disabled father, flood the stage. Afterward, the darkness falls, and the image of Christ emerges. Can there be a Christ, though, after the flood of shit? It might easily be the most painful subject to dwell on. No matter how shielded from our mortality by numerous defense mechanisms, even the serenest of us struggle to come to terms with the inevitable prospect of no longer being ourselves someday. The issue just cannot be dealt with the way Haneke does it––in a matter-of-fact, cold-blooded fashion, so that each frame screams art and invokes appreciation. His audience is not for a moment allowed to forget they are watching nothing short of a masterpiece. It is an ultimatum, really: either you acknowledge that, or you admit to your own insensitivity. In Amour, one of the first shots is that of a corpse––it is brief but unmistakable; long enough for us to peruse the decomposing flesh, it is then, for a calculated effect, interrupted by the title card: Love. For a filmmaker as unapologetically brainy as Haneke, cinema remains but an equation, a mathematical problem to solve. Take, for instance, the couple’s last evening of peace before the slap: Georges tells his wife how beautiful she is, as if he had to spell it out rather than just think to himself. The line comes out all too convenient as it foreshadows what is bound to happen in due course, with absolute disregard for subtlety. The supporting cast, too, enter on obvious cues only, it seems, to fulfill their name-checking obligation; the whole effort feels clockwork-precise, yet oppressively labored. I will not spoil the ending for you, but I cannot help but note how literal and brazen a conclusion Haneke brings us to. In view of his characters’ occupation, the filmmaker indulges in music-related subtext. Anne, so far only half-paralyzed, meets her former pupil, now an accomplished pianist (Alexandre Tharaud, a real-life musician); it is one of her last, fading moments of clarity. She asks him to play Beethoven’s Bagatelles, Op. 126, his final piano piece (the word bagatelle literally means a “trifle”). Beethoven, already deaf by that time, composed it two years before he died, and it fits the milieu like a glove. Upon finding out his illness was beyond treatment, Beethoven refused to leave home for the rest of his life. Amour, accordingly, is Haneke’s most claustrophobic affair: out of fourteen credited actors, we get to know properly but two, both largely confined to their apartment. The rest, including Isabelle Huppert as George and Anne’s daughter, simply flash by. The film makes use of Beethoven’s music, but, sadly, contradicts its very spirit. Despite his dire condition, the composer never failed to find room for hope and elation, whereas Haneke denies his characters either, and chooses to portray them––with rigor and finesse––growing apart: emphatically polite at the outset, they slowly but steadily slip into altercations, soreness, and mutual guilt. Haneke is an unrivaled pro when it comes to these aspects of human nature; he is, however, tragically unreceptive to devotion, affection, and nurturance––those are hinted at, never fully realized. The narrative is steered by Georges’ promise not to send Anne to a home, which he, of course, keeps, since the promise is the backbone to Haneke’s script. The inscription on Schubert’s tombstone reads, “The art of music here entombed a rich possession, but even fairer hopes.” Although a self-proclaimed admirer of Schubert (see The Piano Teahcer), Haneke would hardly bother to mine people for “rich possessions,” or bestow “fair hopes” upon them. So all he is left with are human remains to be buried. Translated by Anton Svynarenko. Boris Nelepo is a film critic based in Moscow. He is Editor-in-Chief of Kinote online film as well as Contributing Editor to the film magazine Séance. |
| Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012 | |
| 5:03 pm | Cannes 2012. Abbas Kiarostami's "Like Someone in Love" 
I must admit I don't know how to write about, or make sense of, Abbas Kiarostami's new fiction film shot in Japan, Like Someone in Love. It is far and away the most bizarre and unexpected film in Cannes; luckily having read nothing about it before the screening, it has become the first film here and indeed for quite some time that, as I watched it proceed, I never knew moment to moment where it would go. It is a rare experience indeed to have cinema blindside you, hold you in vague anticipation, be ambushed and mis (or re-) directed. Beginning with one of the most fascinating and quietly disconcerting of opening shots—a view of a loud, crowded bar with a voice coming from the image that we cannot find the source of, speaking midway through a story we don't know about people we don't see, the frame at an angle so subtly oblique that the very geometry of the image seems a puzzling confusion of lines—the film quickly moves to the more simply composed images common to the director, but never gives up this introductory sense of mystery, a kind of muffled but acute vagueness. It is a tone where the surprising narrative seems not so much spontaneously developed as slowly drawn out, enigmatically evoked, as if slowly feeling its way forward, blindly. (What I called the “gluey” sense in Certified Copy's cinematic unity of time and space continues here in a more elliptical form, the movement and revelations of the film proceeding at a slow, viscous drip.) Like Someone in Love begins with the movement of a young girl, whose background and profession are at once completely introduced and yet seem entirely tenuous and suspect, sent from the bar as an escort to the apartment of an old man. Brought in between them is the girl's fiercely jealous and questioning young boyfriend, and we have what seems a typical and indeed melodramatic scenario. Yet how the film gets from place to place, the strangeness, silences and unanswered questions between old man and young girl—especially notable in the face of the boyfriend's verbose rants—express a profound gap in the film, a large, miasmic emptiness where a normal movie would be found filling in the inner psychology and exterior motivations of the two, as well as expanding the world around them. Instead, like the many driving scenes in the film, everyone seems to be circulating in a bubble or cocoon, cut off from the world, a sense of extracted artifice very much like that of Certified Copy. Brief suggestions of resemblances of the girl to other people—a famous 1900 Japanese painting, the old man's wife and daughter, a sleazy postcard found at a train station—suggest a blankness of identity for her that people are projecting desires and narratives on, and yet the few other characters in the film each contain their own odd, insular state of being withholding, tentative about presenting themselves. A long driving scene at night in Tokyo has the girl in the backseat of a cab listening to message after phone message left her visiting grandmother, who she is avoiding to instead go to the old man, and we watch her face as she gives indistinct reactions to this sequence of emotional appeals, being an inactive body and already distant presence listening to the outside world from afar. By the end, I was almost reminded of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, how at that film's end the main character, despite motivating the cacophony of activity around him, has faded away as a human and psychological presence, becoming a mere physical form moved here and there. The old man and young girl in the Kiarostami always seem on the verge of being mobile automatons, moved by forces we don't see or understand, motivated inside by a cryptic presence. After the film's opening third—the film seems divided into sections centering on, in order, the girl, old man, and boyfriend—the girl nearly fades away from the story as a psychological-melodramatic being and subtly changes into a form shuttling between spaces and people. How to put it all together? I will have to revisit after the festival... |
| 11:31 am | Cannes 2012. Days 6-7, Essential Reads 
Day 6 of the festival may have been the most packed with revered auteurs, but it was not the day graced with the most abundant praise. For starters, Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love—his second film in a row made outside of Iran—has confounded many a critic. This doesn't make it any less intriguing though, quite the opposite, and Craig Keller's cryptic notes on the film only adds fuel to that fire. Other Take: Michal Oleszczyk (Hammer to Nail) As with the debut of each new Hong Sang-soo film, the consensus is that it's the same—but different—and whether that's positive or negative depends on who you talk to. The differences are a little more obvious this time around, with the presence of Isabelle Huppert. Neil Young (The Hollywood Reporter) likes In Another Country and writes that "Hong slyly provides enough structural intricacy and interconnectedness to keep semiologists and deconstructionists in business for weeks, while more general audiences may be happy to enjoy the picture's more straightforward pleasures." Other Take: Daniel Kasman (Notebook) 
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!, made by the 89-year old Alain Resnais, may have had an even more unstable set of responses, but Amy Taubin (Sight & Sound) finds it to, at times, be a "poignant" and "exhilarating" work in which "film space and theatrical space merge and separate and merge again until who knows which is which." Not everyone is on the same page but one thing is for sure: it's not getting any less sweet seeing Resnais show up to the festival, sunglasses-clad, and as eloquent as ever. The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy delivers some restrained praise in his review of Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly. He writes that "the film is terribly smart in every respect, with ne’er-a-false note performances and superb craft work from top to bottom, but it never lets you forget it." McCarthy's accusation that Killing Them Softly's subtext is too overtly the subject of the film rings true based off of the Cannes press conference wherein Dominik was all-too-eager to to divulge the meaning(s) of his film. Ken Loach's The Angels' Share just might be guilty of receiving the most underwhelming array of responses out of the films to have played in competition so far. The title of Simon Abrams' (The Playlist) review says it all: "The Angels' Share Is Slight, Sitcom-y & Suspense-Free", adding within the piece that the film "is totally lightweight and distractingly underdone." Also writing for The Playlist, Kevin Jagernauth reviews Me and You, the latest film from Bernardo Bertolucci. Eugene Hernandez, at Cannes Daily, has posted a podcast featuring Gavin Smith and Scout Foundas of Film Comment exchanging thoughts on the festival at the halfway mark. Also in summation of this year's festival so far, Kong Rithdee, writing for Bangkok Post, looks for links in the lineup: "Cannes didn't plan this for sure, but the spectrum of love is so diverse and unpredictable at least during the first half of the 12-days festival that ends on Sunday...In the second half of Cannes, it seems that romance will have to give way to something else, like violence and apocalypse." Lastly, Dennis Lim has written a couple Cannes-related pieces for The New York Times this week. His most recent features a nice exchange with Apichatpong Weerasethakul about, among other things, why he likes hotels. |
| 6:00 am | Cannes 2012. Hong Sang-soo's "In Another Country" 
Contre the majority of films at Cannes—prestigious, important, calculated—are films like Apichatpong's Mekong Hotel and, in competition, Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country: modest, lo-fi, open works made congenially with small groups of friends and collaborators in short periods of time, asking nothing more than that the people on camera have engage in interesting—and often unexpected—ways with their material. For these movies, the pleasures come organically with this direct yet casual, almost intimate or private kind of interaction complicity between performers and the camera. They are open invitations. After the more considered, poised and tender The Day He Arrives, Hong's latest seems spontaneous, looser and more wandering, taking on the form and feeling of its heroine's uneasy, limbo-like state. Opening with a framing device whose plot is never returned to, In Another Country is the visualization of a young female filmmaker's idle screenplay ideas, written while she herself is waiting in limbo at the small seaside town of Mohjang having run away with her mother from their debts. The ideas are all centered around a visiting female foreigner, played by Isabelle Huppert, who in each story finds herself in Mohjang and interacts with a mostly recurring cast of locals and fellow visitors. In the first story, she is a filmmaker who is being courted by a married Korean colleague; in the second, she is the one married and travels to Mohjang to wait for her Korean lover to arrive; and in the final story she is visiting the town to try to forget her failed marriage. Throughout, she navigates a series of very funny and very awkward semi-fluent conversations, not so much full of misunderstandings as askew communications filled with halting intentions and unexpected results. Like all Hong heroes, Huppert's character is a social flaneur who, whether she knows it or not, searches for guidance in others, the world around her and ultimately in herself in order to find a response, an intentional act taken in conscious responsibility. This act tends to signal to them a new step or path in life. Unlike The Day He Arrives' attention to creating an aesthetic atmosphere, In Another Country is mostly interested in the tone of communication—friendly but awkward, flirty, frustrated, limited but telling—in English between Huppert and the Korean cast, as well as the reaction of the Koreans to the appearance of a beautiful, single female foreigner. It is by continually stumbling around these exchanges, getting flustered or getting pleasure from them, that Huppert tests the world around her and herself. The highlight are the exchanges between the actress and Yun Junsang as the brash, handsome, barely fluent lifeguard of the town, part guiding post that shows up in all three stories and part sex interest, whose exaggerated, forward friendliness nearly moves the film unexpectedly towards farce. Befitting the riff-like idea of these sketches as well as the film's own nonchalant spontaneity, as if shot over a weekend whenever it wasn't poring rain, the place, situations and structural ideas here are subservient to a greater emphasis on ungainly on-camera interactions. This is a common enough trait in Hong's work but here the focus, creating a casual portrait of the possibilities engendered through the interaction between Hong's script and the bumpy, variable chemistry within the cast. Ultimately, Huppert's character is moved by the tenor of this funny, ill-fitting mix, especially in the successfully unconvincing middle episode, where she is meeting her similarly aged Korean lover—the discomfit produced by the slightly out of sync drama becomes the subject and an awkward pleasure in its modest self-reflexivity. The on-camera problems become problems of the characters, the source of its comedy and its melancholy; it's no surprise then that this section is rife with dream sequences, as if even the woman's dreams in a foreign country falter and only sometimes flow smoothly, “naturally.” The nature of the one character shown three different ways—or, put another way, three different characters shown one way—gives the woman and the film a feeling of introspective freedom, an atmosphere of being inadvertently out of place, and therefore always casually searching for the place to be. The Hong structuralism—events repeating with variations, characters re-appearing to challenge the hero in different ways—seems less imposed by the filmmaker and more a product of the French woman's unconscious look for a catching impression in the world upon which to act, a world shifting under her feet—or in her head. The serenity of the ending is very beautiful and suggests a spur of the moment decision taken, stumbling (literally, drunk) on one particular, ambling path, which may not be a solution to her life, but, for this moment, in this version of her life, is something that rings true and good. |
| Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 | |
| 5:01 am | Video of the day. Teaser Trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" Trailers don't get more strange or more enticing than this one for The Master, the long awaited follow-up to There Will Be Blood from Paul Thomas Anderson, who cut this himself. |
| Monday, May 21st, 2012 | |
| 7:02 pm | Cannes 2012. Raúl Ruiz's "La Noche de enfrente" 
Sometimes I think Raúl Ruiz purposefully makes in-between-masterpieces, inconsistent but immensely interesting films engrossed in both the details and the big picture of elaborating with variations and digressions books, histories, myths and the director's own films; that masterpieces are a calculated anomaly, unusually vivid and vivacious crescendos of the on-going dream that is the master's body of work. La Noche de enfrente, presented in the Directors' Fortnight, is said to be Ruiz's last film, but I have a suspicion that more dreams will show up unexpectedly, like Bolaño novels. Coming after Ruiz's popular triumph Mysteries of Lisbon this new work may be bound for disappointment, as it resembles so many of the director's films of the 2000s that seem to exist as part of an elongated continuum of recollections, farces, reveries and skewed realities instead of works of punctuation, unexpectedly shouting out. (Mysteries inadvertently seems to be punctuated, like Mulholland Dr., as a kind of accessible encapsulation of an auteur's interests and appeal.) Then again, Ruiz's films have always seemed of a piece, one long tracking shot through rooms within rooms, each room a film or a possible film. Maybe it's these 2000s films that seem, like much of later Rivette, to linger in spacious, well-lit interiors letting their actors convince themselves and us that they are (or think they are) in a normal story. In fact, Ruiz's actors exist as fluid, mobile figures who transmute and reform themselves, collapse into beings as thin as paper or rearing up as irrepressible presences in a film, these even going so far as to show up in different guises, absorbed into and then returning from the mise-en-scène. The consistent sense is of movement, even if lugubrious, viscously dreamy, a camera passing around a space, one image leading mysteriously to another. One of the most startling sequences in La Noche, which is one of Ruiz's infrequent Chilean productions, has its actors taking a stroll around the city with the camera tracking along next to them. Only, the tracking shot is faked—the actors are walking in front of a greenscreen showing this moving shot, they are actually on what must be a treadmill, walking in place, and, hilariously and almost imperceptibly, walking slower than the camera's “movement” through the city suggests. Shot digitally, like Mysteries, the film presents a flattening of worlds, that of the characters' actions, the actors' existence, a beautiful record of a passing city, all has been made one single, flat image, legible but uncanny, at once united and discreet, times and places, fictions and reality pressed unto inextricably in the pixels. The film itself is quintessential Ruiz, and it will be, and I suppose must be said, a thematically “appropriate” final film—an old man, becoming increasingly distracted at work and prone to visions of his youth, is forced into retirement and, later, his own death. Though how could this be a picture of Ruiz? The director is probably still working beyond the grave. (In a moving and bizarre introduction, one of the film's producers claimed to have called Ruiz before the screening and took dictation of the filmmaker's remarks.) A strong political element in La Noche is lost on me not recognizing several eras in Chilean history; I believe the film takes place around 1970 but the near total integration of scenes of the man's youth with the supposed present muddy the costumes and personages so really someone in the “now” could be a vision of the past and viceversa. Fantastic stories of his youth—an obsession with Beethoven, who the man as a child escorts to a local cinema, a cinema projecting pixelated scenes from DVDs, long conversations with Long John Silver, the mystery of the possible deaths of his entire family—blend with his present, a secretary in love with him who may in fact be loving him in a different era, his boarding house containing characters who, later, appear as the dead family of his youth. Through it all he is stalked by retirement and death, but in a lucidly oneric calmness, as he clearly is already living the world as a place where boundaries like death, the past, or the imagination are not just permeable but whose undefinable but unignorable artifice is a defining aspect of human life. Thus when they said this was Ruiz's last film, and when, after the credits are nearly done, you realize you're hearing the sound of a take after the action is completed, and finally the director's voice sharply says “cut,” I don't believe at all that this is the end for Ruiz. Even now, while I write this, down in the Cannes Market, there is a poster advertising a little something called The Lines of Wellington... |
| 1:32 pm | Cannes 2012. Days 4-5, Essential Reads 
Romanian New Wave director Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills is his first feature since taking home the Palme d'Or in 2007 with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and it's eliciting differing opinions amongst critics. The Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Dalton calls it "an engrossingly serious work, and confirms Mungiu as a maturing talent with more universal stories to tell than those defined by Romania’s recent political past." The articulate Mungiu discusses the themes of his film rather frankly in the press conference, which is recommended viewing. Other take: Karina Longworth (LA Weekly) John Hillcoat's new film boasts an impressive cast, featuring the likes of Guy Pearce, Tom Hardy and Jessica "throw-a-rock-at-Cannes-and-you'll-hit-h 
Here we go again. One has to wonder: if Michael Haneke submitted his laundry for competition at Cannes would it still draw award buzz? Amour is the first film this year to provoke utterances of "masterpiece," and "Palme d'Or!" The film sounds like a departure for Haneke as critics are hailing it, among other things, for its "tenderness." The Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth writes that "Amour is a tough, harrowing picture but also one that, curiously, remains optimistic and full of heart." It also sounds like Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva could be contenders for the best actor prizes. Other Take: Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) Mike D'Angelo (The AV Club) didn't think too highly of Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, but Robert Koehler tweeted that it is the biggest surprise in competition thus far and is, "for once, a good film from this highly erratic director." Like father, like son...The first feature, Antiviral, from Brandon Cronenberg—son of David—is an exercise in "body horror." It received a pan from Indiewire's Eric Kohn, who writes that it "never lifts off from its one-note focus on the genre elements defining every moment." We would have hoped that Dario Argento and 3D would be a match made in heaven (or hell) but the trailer for Dracula 3D was less than promising. Sadly, David Rooney (The Hollywood Reporter) has affirmed such suspicions, claiming that it is subject to "unintentional laughs" and is "utterly lacking in imagination." Fernando Ganzo is providing some excellent coverage at Lumière, so far having written on Moonrise Kingdom, Mekong Hotel, Reality, and Pablo Larraín's No. We'll be following his work from here on out. Finally, Sasha Stone (Women and Hollywood) takes a look at the roles of female characters in Beasts of the Southern Wild and Beyond the Hills in the midst of the "sexist" programming controversy at Cannes. |
| Sunday, May 20th, 2012 | |
| 2:02 pm | Notebook Reviews: Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom" 
Dollhouses within dollhouses: the island of New Penzance, the setting of Wes Anderson's new movie, which opened Cannes this year and will be released in the US this Friday, is a miniature of the director's whole body of work—isolated, insular, steeped in mid-century nostalgia, populated by kids who do adult things and adults who behave like children. The place names—"Yeoman Lane," "Roman's Ruins"—reference the names of Anderson's collaborators. Middle-school-age girls are hip to Françoise Hardy and everyone is impeccably dressed. Anderson, it seems, has finally and thoroughly gone up his own ass—and yet the film happens to be one of his best and most inviting works. Moonrise Kingdom—deftly orchestrated but deliberately uncomplicated—is easily Anderson's sweetest, most sincere movie, and the only one, aside from Rushmore, where the director's stylistic and thematic conceits are perfectly in sync. It may be the twee-est, archest film of a director frequently accused of tweeness and archness, and it may veer closer than any of Anderson's other films to outright kitsch (e.g. the brownish, Jean-Pierre Jeunet-style color grading)—but there is a grace and a beauty to the way all of its fussed-over parts click together. Set mostly from September 2nd to September 5th, 1965—with a few skips back to the preceding year and an epilogue—Moonrise Kingdom begins by laying out the set-up: two troubled, friendless kids (Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward) have run away, prompting the people of New Penzance to band together. Anderson establishes the situation in brisk, efficient, funny ways, beginning with the befuddled adults, then going back to the kids' first meeting. Visually, the film is knick-knack-drawer-compact; working in Super 16mm and the 1.85 aspect ratio, instead of his usual anamorphic 35mm, Anderson keeps the action and blocking simple. The spaces (tents, narrow churches and chapels, cramped rooms) are smaller, and the close-ups seem bigger. The film moves like a creation myth: the kids fight off hostiles in a forest, create a private Utopia on a pebbly inlet, are married in a "non-legally-binding" ceremony by a scout troop quartermaster (Jason Schwartzman), overcome a nameless blue-clad evil (Tilda Swinton), and are finally able to start anew in a world swept clean by a massive thunderstorm. Like The Life Aquatic's big open sea, New Penzance seems like a dangerous, primitive world of infinite possibility; there are no paved roads, only one long-distance phone, and children roam the woods armed with bows and spiked clubs. But the island is also sealed off, physically and thematically—a little bottled universe where everything is inevitable. In lieu of the usual Anderson pop gem soundtrack, Moonrise Kingdom is set mostly to the music of Benjamin Britten, which serves as a tone-setter, plot point (the kids meet during performance of the composer's "opera for amateurs" Noye's Fludde, the plot of which foreshadows Moonrise's ending), and perhaps even a statement of intent. Lateral camera movements, color-coded production design, a keen sense of comic and dramatic timing predicated on measured pauses—nothing in Anderson's work is accidental. It can't be by chance, then, that the film opens with a recording of Britten's "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," which uses a catchy Henry Purcell rondeau to explain how the different sections of a classical orchestra work together. The piece matches not only Moonrise Kingdom's plot—which inverts Anderson's usual family-members-being-dicks-to-each-other routine in favor of a community trying to behave decently to achieve a common goal—but also its structure. Interpolated throughout the film are maps, cutaway sets, and a nattily-dressed narrator (Bob Balaban) that, like the narration in "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," explain how the movie's fictional geography, character dynamics, and timeframe all figure in the story. Anderson's movie is a musical, composed work about how all of the instruments—character, plot, setting—play together; what it achieves is a rare harmony of form, tone, and subject. |
| Saturday, May 19th, 2012 | |
| 8:31 pm | Cannes 2012. Days 1-3, Essential Reads 
This year at the Notebook, we're not going to be rounding up everything being said about Cannes—an "old" friend is doing a great job of that elsewhere—but we're still following the festival closely, and will be posting updates on some of the pieces we've enjoyed reading. The 65th Cannes Film Festival kicked off with the latest work in symmetrical, dollhouse-cinema from Wes Anderson—his first to play there. In most corners of cinephilia, the debate over his merits as an auteur persist, but the word on Moonrise Kingdom has thus far been decidedly positive. Robert Koehler, covering Cannes for Film Journey, sees the film as an "ideal opening night vehicle", stating "there’s a kind of absolute auteurism, a hyper-aggressive formalism, an insistence on the camera’s view as a proscenium arch inside of which an entirely theatrical universe is created, alongside a lightness, a preference for melancholy swathed in the scent of vanilla, sadness as a weekend romp, the melodramas of parents and the children they don’t understand as storybook fantasies." It's not all good, however, according to Koehler, "Anderson doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone, and piles it on in the second half, until Moonrise Kingdom loses much of its mirthful charm. Its storybook pages get gummed and marked with a pile-on of business, rivalries within rivalries within rivalries". Other take: Mike D'Angelo (The AV Club) 
Reception hasn't been quite as warm for Jacques Audiard's Rust & Bone, his follow-up to his Grand Prix-winning A Prophet. Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips' convincing piece is borderline scathing, claiming that "cowriter and director Audiard hits his theme over and over, like a punch-drunk middleweight: All of us are damaged. We're all animals under the skin. We all need love. And the entire picture feels like a poetic-grunge generality, with a penchant for jacked-up tension that feels applied to the situation, not pulled from within the people on screen." Our own Daniel Kasman is covering Cannes here in the Notebook, so make sure to follow along. His first piece is on Yousry Nasrallah's After the Battle, which he concedes "may not all work or work smoothly", but that "Nasrallah is positing a very dynamic, challenging but accessible form of mainstream political cinematic storytelling—a goal intrinsically experimental. The film is thus an admirably active, thinking film, energetic and versatile, and altogether working on a level of intelligent, agile and unafraid engagement that is a terrific way to start the 2012 festival." Other Take: Robert Koehler (Film Journey) Michal Oleszczyk, writing for Hammer to Nail, finds Paradise: Love to be "very accomplished", but takes umbrage with how "[Ulrich] Seidl piles on unflattering shots of his plump female cast and lets his characters to go on a rampage of nasty, unwittingly racist behavior, only to chastise their moral blindness and false sense of cultural entitlement (rightly, but too easily)." 
Reality, the new film from Matteo Garrone, is being greeted with some mixed reactions, but maybe one thing that can be agreed upon is that the story behind the lead actor is fascinating. Visit Film Comment's Cannes Daily Blog and Eugene Hernandez will fill you in. Two years after receiving the Palme d'Or from a very confused looking Tim Burton, Apichatpong Weerasethakul returns to Cannes with an out-of-competition "Special Screening" of his moyen-métrage, Mekong Hotel. It sounds like the Thai master of cinema is in somewhat familiar territory, but Press Play's Simon Abrams doesn't think that's such a bad thing, noting that "Mekong Hotel is nothing new from Weerasethakul. In his Thailand, hungry ghosts, reincarnated animals and frank but casual discussions of sex and violence just . . . happen, unobtrusively," adding that "Thailand is Weerasethakul’s foremost concern, being the locus for Mekong Hotel’s impressionistic portrait of longing, both fulfilled and unrequited, and its most refreshingly beguiling protagonist." That brings us up to the five films that have screened in competition, and one out-of-competition—more have screened, of course. If you want to stay on top of press conferences and interviews, follow along at the Cannes website. There are no Lars von Trier face-palm-prompting incidents to look forward to/dread this year (that we know of), but Bill Murray's multicolor blazer and cute quips have been a pleasant alternative. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times writes on Murray and delivers some exposition on what's going on at this year's festival, for those interested. And if you're looking for anecdotes from the Croisette, they don't come more heartwarming than the child cast of Moonrise Kingdom playing hide-and-seek at an after party followed by some more Murray shenanigans. It's not part of the official selection, but the curious may want to know that Kanye West is screening a short film at Cannes described as an "immersive seven-screen experience", titled Good Summer. Lastly, if the business side of things tickles your fancy, Deadline New York has a list of "Hot Film Titles" up for grabs in the market. |
| 6:01 pm | Cannes 2012. Darezhan Omirbaev's "Student" 
You cannot look away from Darezhan Omirbaev's Student, as you can't look away from any of the Kazakh director's films, for each and every shot is quietly but powerfully charged. It always seems a minute charge until a simple shot's condensation of narrative expression and emotional nuance sneaks up on you. In this new film, liberally yet efficiently adapted from Crime and Punishment, the titular student, very poor, very dejected, rides a bus through town; later that afternoon he spontaneously gives away money to the family of an unemployed poet; finally, we see him walking through the rain, and suddenly: ah! he is so poor that he gave away even his bus fare. It is not a chain of this-and-then-that, but a quiet movement, elliptical and quotidean, asking the audience to read how a nominally unimportant action or insert is, in fact, crucially telling to what's going on in someone's mind, in their life, in the connection between scenes. Like how 2009's Shuga adapted Anna Karinina down to ninety minutes, Student pares away its source and the world until all that's left is the everyday that speaks volumes, volumes materially, narratively and emotionally. As with Kaïrat, Killer, The Road and Shuga, Omirbayev sees how contemporary social, political and economic life in Kazakhstan “calls up” stories of profound universality which, when stripped to their potent core, become absolutely of their new, specific place and time. His recent move to adapting Tolstoy, Chekhov (for a Jeonju digital short) and here Dostoyevsky sees him move from genre to literature, taking the central conflicts of these stories and rooting them directly in the now of Kazakhstan, a strange and almost surreal (if not dream-like, as the director's films always are fully integrated with his characters' dreams) way of charting on-going progress by calling back to the past for stories of classic, age-old construct. While Killer saw its hero's downward spiral towards violence as the result of new applications of capitalization in the post-Soviet country—a narrative of the individual losing control in a new world—Student charts the opposite. Its hero isn't finding his way in a new society, he's lamentably stuck in his way, an improverished and seemingly ineffectual youth who begins to feel the new need to act as an individual in what has become an unfair world of gross class-wealth disparity between individuals. In response to the bankers and playboys roaming the streets in Range Rovers adorned with gorgeous female passengers and pumping club music while he sleeps in a cramped basement apartment, cannot afford the rent and is lectured to on social Darwinism at school, the student decides to act upon the world violently. There is no policeman in this adaptation; the stone-faced student is the film's center and renders it the most desolate and anguished of Omirbaev's works, intent on the anguish of the young man who sees action against the world as the only valid response to social, material impotence. Yet, in a typically surprising revelation from the director, after the boy's mother appears in a dream she actually shows up at his apartment, friendly and warm, and we see, for a moment, that the clouded view of his life up til now was but a small picture, subjectively honed down from a more complex reality. These surprises are common in Student, in which nominally incidental elements in another film, like a head laid on a pillow, a bus ride past office buildings, or the reaching into a purse, tremble with longing, suspense and mystery. For the first time in Omirbaev's films dissolves separate scenes, which, along with his characteristic dream sequences—which are dream-like but not dreamy, so they resemble the look and feel of the rest of the film, until a detail gives away the irreality—subjectivize the film's rich but shy emotional core, which seems to count grievances fit to burst, only to tread a path, uphill, collecting more everyday actions and appearances—like the poet's daughter, and the student's mother—that shine a light from the world outside the student's head. This "outside" is perhaps triumphant over all, as it is what contains the poetry, pith and surprises of the narrative's clean path following the student. The world of the film is not limited to his vision, only interpreted and impaired by it; this materialist filmmaker, whose cinema is always rooted in the reality of the filming, objects and locations, the importance of where people live, work, drive, grow up, nevertheless makes his films so much about perception of this same world, and perception's limits, expanses and reveries. For a long time, Student is nearly a nightmare, sometimes dryly funny (everyone's television seems either to be playing popular garbage or images of conflict, including the assassination of JFK; when a Kazakh documentary comes on television, no one is watching it) before the hero inadvertently realizes there's a difference between acting upon and acting for, taking something on himself instead of putting it to others. And here, marvelously, at the end, dream and the reality of the narrative overlap and never are clarified, creating a profoundly moving ending of questioning, at once hopeful and despairing, one that sees a tremendous significant even in small dreams, if that is all one has for now. *** Two of Omirbaev's features are playing worldwide on MUBI and are highly recommended: Killer (1998) and The Road (2001). |
| 12:30 pm | Presenting LomoKino MUBI Edition & New Apichatpong Short "Ashes" 
We're tremendously excited to bring to you a new short film by Palme d'Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Ashes. The short is part of a collaboration between the filmmaker, LomoKino and MUBI resulting in the LomoKino MUBI Edition, a simple-to-use 35mm camera. Each special edition camera comes with a scene from Apichatpong's film. 
In Ashes, which was shot almost entirely on the LomoKino with a digital finale, Apichatpong contemplates love, pleasure, and the destruction of memory. The surroundings of everyday life are shared with extreme intimacy. For Apichatpong, Thailand, while full of beauty, is slowly collapsing into darkness. 
 
The LomoKino MUBI Edition is available here. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film Ashes is playing for free on MUBI here. |
| Friday, May 18th, 2012 | |
| 8:32 pm | Cannes 2012. Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise: Love" 
In Paradise: Love, the first part of a trilogy of films by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, the camera is entirely presentational. It says: here is this! The story is of a female tourist (Margarethe Tiesel) who travels to Kenya and very quickly, whether by original intent or not, begins to look not for a quick lay but for something like “love” among the readily available population of male prostitutes. What is before the camera is like documentary: all real locals, real spaces, practices—all research. The rest, of course, is fiction, and it is the fiction which addresses us like so: let me show you this! It is an excitable filmmaking, one suffuse with its enjoyment of delivering discovery. Nearly every shot exists with an originator: we see how we get to a place, and that place is always a something. Of the story itself—of, basically, a sex tourist, of what the local population hounds tourists for and asks of them (seen, of course, from the tourist's point of view), and what a tourist asks of them, of the ironies, hypocrisies and blindnesses of the trade—little is surprising or risky, and indeed the revelations proceed as if practically a genre itself, films of 21st century sex tourism. The initial surprise of the offerings, the laughing dismissal yet growing curiosity of the tourist, the transactional nature of everything, even of the shot, where nearly no shot exists without a point of view dialog between the tourist and a local (even if the audience, observant to ironies, stands in for that local), all is what one would imagine of such a story. This mix between the expected or conventional and continual discoveries lends for a remarkably discomfiting film, an awkwardness or conflict presented often scene by scene, a kind of clash not just of the drama but even of the staging of the drama, this kind of story shot where it is with these people, on "location" and "real." It makes the very idea of tourism and even of filming tourism as something awkward, unnatural, compromised and conflicted. It is Seidl's filmmaking, not the story, that constitutes the discovery, the presentation of spaces, real but framed wholly, with geometric precision, as if parceled out, each an element unto itself with its own key observations: the symmetry of sunbathers, the line in the sand dividing a resort from the local population, an apartment into rooms, the intrusion of live monkeys into a staged shot, the deep purple of Kenyan twilight (captured in 35mm), the image of a sleeping odalisque, seen above, of the supposedly ugly, overweight and old Austrian tourist instead a thing of extreme beauty. All is as if the world is a whole and contiguous (as we see how one parcel leads to another) but each also a thing, discoverable, containable, remarkable and fact-filled, situation and location based, textured by color, geometry, light. One shot of Hofstätter at her hotel uses the black and white painting of a leopard above her bed to pull out the black and white grid of the bed's wicker headboard; a later shot from the same angle has taken a step back and instead pulls the pink the bed's curtains by revealing, quietly, the pink in wallpaper unseen in the previous shot. Here, each shot tells a story, silent cinema style, and Seidl's cinema resembles the railroad-like cinema construction of the silents. Yet he is not just presentational; this presentation confronts, each room is almost like an accusation, hovering between a declaration and a challenge. Kept in check by Tiesel's marvelous performance, by turns purposefully naïve as a tourist yet funnily canny and clever when flirtatious, when she attempts to get past the prostitution and force a human relationship from the exchange—especially in a terrific sequence where she teachers her “beach boy” subtleties of German grammar and how to softly stroke not two breasts but one—the confrontations of Paradise: Love are never attacks, stunts or gimmicks. All seem rooted in a reality fairly intruded upon, packaged, connected, opened up but intentionally directed, assembled and delivered. Strangely, it all seems fair, a middle ground between things, like with Herzog, pushing for a more immediate, brutal truth, uncomfortable but grounded. This duality is also what Herzog gets at, compromising reality for a purpose, rooting fiction in facts, making you aware of a blended line between two worlds; that is Herzog's synthesis. Paradise: Love is not after synthesis: Seidl's story is smooth but the intrusion on the world he has chosen to explore (or burden his film with) does nothing less than confront that difficult line, a formal strategy that pulses out into the surrounding story material as this sense of discovery and confrontation, re-activating the expected and electrifying it. |
| 3:01 pm | Cannes 2012. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Mekong Hotel" 
Mekong Hotel, like Uncle Boonmee Recalls His Past Lives before it, absorbs and re-interprets past projects realized (or not) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. A short feature which bridges the imaginary gap between an unrealized screenplay, meagre means, digital cinema, and a roundabout collection of seemingly unrelated interests, the Thai director once again comes up with something unexpected and something hybrid. Part multi-generational ghost-vampire story (an as-yet unrealized script...here's hoping), part documentary of a hotel on the Mekong river, part (fake?) behind the scenes of a production of...something (the documentary? the genre film?), part excuse to play a wash of relaxing, improvised guitar music across the nearly hour long runtime, the film takes slivers of ideas of high fiction, documentary, actuality and the regional-historic and not so much pares those ideas down as creates with the most limited means suggestions of that which could be and now, paradoxically, is, at a slant. The river floats by in the background of most shots—including the dynamically relaxing, entrancing final shot, reminiscent of recent Ernie Gehr New York harbor films, of the digitally-pulsating river motion and circulating vessels—each bare strand of the film is introduced and then, as if forgotten, left, and traces later recalled. Intestines are eaten by possessed ghosts in one section; Apichatpong's regular actress Jenjira Pongas recalls, in a staged interview while crocheting a pink object in front of the river lit by the setting sun, her days as an eighteen year old girl being trained by the Thai government to shoot an M16; the film's actor discusses with an off-camera director which graphic t-shirt to wear as a costume; and, placed behind it all and sometimes in front of the camera, is Chai Bhatana's warming, soothing guitar playing. The opening guitar tune—later subtitled as a rehearsal, then deemed “awful” by the player, who asks “where was I?”—proceeds to play over all these types of images, as if gathering, drawing together. His playing in fact synthesizes the stories and images much as the river, the hotel setting (similar to the dream-genre synthesis of the other Asian hotel film of 2012, Wakamatsu's Petrel Blue Hotel), and the film itself does, casually uniting the disparate, the false and the “facts,” old stories of ghosts and new ones of royal visits and local floods, all filmed in an identical mise-en-scène. It is a small film of disparate parts in flux but held in a fragile, wispy unity. |
| Thursday, May 17th, 2012 | |
| 12:02 pm | Cannes 2012. Yousry Nasrallah's "After the Battle" 
My first film of the Festival de Cannes was After the Battle by Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah—whose last feature, Scheherazade Tell Me a Story, I reported on from the Middle East International Film Festival in 2009—and its stable heft of construction and deep understanding of genre conventions and a digital, realist mise-en-scène allows it to move unexpectedly and considerable complexity between engagement with mainstream melodramatic storytelling and integrating, sometimes fluidly, often abruptly, poetic observations and dubiously dramatic, but forceful, socio-political discussions. Nasrallah centers his story on the historic-nationalist, uncanny figure of an impoverished horseman in Cairo who made his living by tourism until the Egyptian revolution took away his business and his involvement in an anti-revolution, horse-and-camel based riot took away his reputation. The melodrama comes from After the Battle sharing its fascination and attraction with the man with a beautiful, wealthy Egyptian NGO worker—continually taken for a foreigner—who clearly falls in love with the married horseman and begins personally acting as a social worker to help keep his family together while continually flirting with both infidelity and an attraction to their poverty. The polemics come from the woman's formal discussions with the family, the poorer classes in their neighborhood and her co-workers on the ambiguous state of mid-revolution democracy. The poetry flows from the strange evocations of the horseman and his horses, images of dancing horses, a corridor of hungry tourist steeds waiting in line to be fed by the NGO, a thoroughbread being trained in the yard seen through the floor to ceiling windows of a local gangster's mansion, horses standing unused under the pyramids. It is no mistake that several sequences that clearly exist in the story's reality—the NGO woman and the horseman sharing a ride, and, suddenly, a kiss, in the night, the man's sons taking his horse for a midnight "dance"—take on a the qualities of a dream. Nasrallah introduces his figures as elements of his melodrama but allows their imagery to move beyond its dramatic function into a more suggestive and mysterious realm. All three of these elements of melodrama, didactics, and poetry, pivot off and around one another to varying degrees of ungainly bluntness and sharp, suggestive cutting, but Nasrallah's real talent is to have identified a mid-point in his nation's current, contemporaneous history to set these things in motion. He transmutes the romanticism of filming a story of underclass revolution or underclass enlightenment into the troubling melodrama between the NGO woman and her magnetism towards the horseman, his wife and children, and he puts this personal drama on the same playing field as nearly documentary-like, forthright group talks about political enlightenment. More importantly, After the Battle's mise-en-scène allows for this proximity, and its occasional fluid integration. A shot will follow the horseman's boy leaving his bedroom, follow him until it finds his mother, who turns and lets the camera catch her husband before following his eye to the beautiful NGO woman until, finally, the group comes together in the same movement and enters the family's house—multiple storylines and observations collected, integrated in one natural motion. Nasrallah gives unexpected images of expected things, working well with doorways, entrances and exits. An argument between a teacher and the NGO woman moves out of the classroom and onto the school's roof, where the teacher suddenly sneaks a smoke and the whole tone of the argument changes. The film's edits take you into YouTube footage or a feminist discussion group; Nasrallah integrates his actors into a real protest and then abstracts them out to a high-rise apartment to temper the reality with the temptations of melodrama. It may not all work or work smoothly but that, to a degree, is the point—with a generosity of spirit and an eager ambition, After the Battle collects things, collects images and stories, buzzwords, conflicted emotions and viral images. It has no problem mixing, juggling, acknowledging. It throws together a combination in a manner of here's what we're thinking about and how can this all work together or why does it not all fit. It tracks something in-progress and it's certainly fitting that the form stretches itself out to be in-progress as well, a discussion point, not a solution. In a way, Nasrallah is positing a very dynamic, challenging but accessible form of mainstream political cinematic storytelling—a goal intrinsically experimental. The film is thus an admirably active, thinking film, energetic and versatile, and altogether working on a level of intelligent, agile and unafraid engagement that is a terrific way to start the 2012 festival. |
| 12:02 pm | The Forgotten: Murder by Depth 
It's irksome that Dial M For Murder, surely the most prestigious film of the fifties 3D cycle, has never been made available in that format on home video. With a couple of pairs of red-cyan glasses thrown in, it would surely shift a good many copies. And I don't think it's part of some smart game plan by the rights holders, waiting for 3D TV to take off; I think it's sheer indolence. And now, with 3D back in the cinemas, a theatrical re-release would also be a sure-fire moneymaker. As a result of this sluggishness in the commercial sector, and also because I've never been able to catch a cinema revival of the film, it was only recently that I managed to see the film in 3D. Albeit via a fuzzy bootleg, colors muddied by the anaglyph specs, Japanese subtitles hovering between me and the actors... but it was a start. Anyhow, Hitchcock's subtle spatial games were appreciated—as was the film's odd resemblance to Ozu, of all people: the foregrounding of bottles and lamps to act as pivots for angle changes, a careful mapping of the rooms, Vermeer compositions peering through doorways, and even occasional use of flat angles, especially in those otherwise awkward rear-projected exteriors, which do look a lot better in three dimensions—foreground fences or quaysides running parallel to the frame. Hitchcock never gets into the full mondrian effect of Ozu's grids, but he sets his camera just as low.  
It's not absolutely impossible, I suppose, that Hitchcock had seen some Ozu—he always had a lively interest in cinematic happenings. I'm cheating in this frame comparison by using colour Ozu movies which hadn't been made yet, of course. But Ozu had already developed most of the compositional and editing strategies which Dial M dimly reflects.  
Seen "deep," Dial M abruptly shifts from being a stagebound warhorse of a thriller to something else—a culmination of Hitch's interest in filmed theater, taking cinema a small step closer to the stage, where the physical presence of the actors is all-important; a near-abstract study of space, between walls, characters and things; an experiment in the third dimension as an element of showmanship and dramatic suspense. The long expositional opening, which can seem rather slow and pedantic viewed "flat," afford the Master the opportunity to peruse the action from behind every available lampshade, assembling in the process a kind of cardboard puppet playhouse in the audience's mind, through which his figures move.  
This article, on a film not exactly forgotten, but almost impossible for most people to see as its makers intended, is a contribution to the Film preservation Blogathon. Donate here to a worthy Hitchcockian cause. *** The Forgotten is a regular Thursday column by David Cairns, author of Shadowplay. |
| Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 | |
| 3:31 pm | Movie Poster of the Week: The Posters of the 2012 Cannes Competition 
Hong Sang-soo’s In Another Country (S. Korea) Movie Poster of the Week is a couple of days early because this Friday I myself will also be on the beach and in another country, scoping out the billboards on the Croisette at the Cannes Film Festival. As I did last year, I’ve gathered together as many posters as I could find for the twenty-two films in the official competition. Some films, like Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (two of the films I’m most eagerly anticipating) don’t have any keyart yet, and some films have a press kit cover at best (I’ve included those at the end). Meanwhile here are the posters in no particular order, though top loaded with the ones I find most interesting. 
Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux (Mexico) 
Alain Resnais’ You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (France) 
Ken Loach’s The Angel’s Share (UK) 
Im Sang-soo’s The Taste of Money (S. Korea) 
Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone (France) 
The French poster for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (USA) 
The French poster for David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (Canada) 
Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy (USA) 
The French poster for Sergei Loznitsa’s In the Fog (Russia) 
Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (Denmark) 
The French poster for Matteo Garrone’s Reality (Italy)
Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love (Austria) 
Walter Salles’s On the Road (USA) 
A French poster for Beyond the Hills (Christian Mungiu, Romania) 
A teaser poster for John Hillcoat’s Lawless (USA) 
The press kit cover for Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love (Japan) 
The press kit cover for Yousry Nasrallah’s After the Battle (Egypt) 
The press kit cover for Michael Haneke’s Amour (France) Also in competition: Léos Carax’s Holy Motors (France) |
