murmurandshout

Gran Torino

2009-06-01T09:46:00.004-04:00

This film depicts a Clint Eastwood vision about a man, Walter Kowalski, that only Clint Eastwood the aged actor could portray.

The work is framed by two funerals, that of his wife at the opening, his own at the close. Kowalski’s has been the straight-shooting, no-nonsense life of the soldier, factory worker, husband and farther. He dominates the moment by force of will, does not know fear and is unfazed by the ravages of old age, which are gradually consuming his tobacco-filled alcoholic body. He embodies the ramrod straightness of the dutiful, self-reliant Midwestern psyche.

Playing against this basic character description is an underside dating back to military service in Korea. Walt is haunted by the memories of take no prisoner combat; specifically, he cannot expunge or depotentiate the image of killing a terrified teenager trying desperately to surrender. Pulling the trigger at that moment, though inevitable, was a kind of act against nature; it was simply wrong in a fundamental sense that admits neither of forgetting nor of atonement.

A kind of minor league antagonist to Walt is the earnest young cleric who pursues him with the justification that Walt’s wife, in her final days, asked the priest to give him some attention, presumably in the hope that his loss would direct him back to the Church. Walt’s hostility to and contempt for this unseasoned, cliché-spouting emissary of God has every justification. The one who dons the vestments as mediator to eternal life without even a passing acquaintance with darkness on this plane is a ridiculous figure. Come the end of the story, though, Walt will need him as a witness to his confession, in the service of completion, not the seeking of forgiveness.

In the changing Michigan neighborhood, Walt’s house has become surrounded by those of Hmong immigrants, a group that had been friendly to the American side during the Viet Nam War. Full of racial prejudice, he resents the impingement these people represent. At the core of the story is the relationship that develops between him and the teenage Asian boy Thao next door, who had been given as an initiatory task by the neighborhood thugs—his cousins—the job of stealing Walt’s vintage Gran Torino.

From their view of indebtedness, this family owes Walt doubly: for the disgrace of the boy’s intended theft and for the rescue of his older sister from a black street gang. As the boy becomes his protégé and as Sue will not let Walt’s gruff exterior impinge on her perception of his loneliness, a new familial configuration emerges.

Thao has three lessons to learn from Walt. The first is that for a man to make his place in the world he has to know how to sell his labor and develop his skills. Second, as imaged by Walt’s tool-rich workshop, he has to learn to discriminate the right tool for a particular challenge. Third, in the transition from boy to man, he must develop the patience to pick his battles, to choose those that inescapably belong to him, and to think through in each case what winning or losing would look like.

Opening the door to Thao’s entry into the work world and outfitting him with what he needs to have a proper toolbox come relatively easily; they pass via instruction. By contrast, the ability to stand back, weigh one’s options, and pick the right moment to act can only be taught by example.

Because of the urgency of a dying man’s desire (Walt has learned that he is terminally ill) to get this message across, the film in its later segments touches an unanticipated, yet thoroughly integrated, level of depth.

As a bridge to the conclusion, Walt seeks out the priest for confession. In doing so, his aim is not the absolution which confession promises but the being witnessed in an act of self-disclosure that defines who he is to himself. His confession has three parts; two are personal, while one is generational. Once at a party he kissed another woman in a room adjacent to where his wife was, an unforgivable gesture sullying an otherwise pure love. On a separate occasion, he made $900.00 in a transaction without ever reporting it as income on his taxes, which to him means nothing less than the rupture of the social contract between the individual and the government. Also, he knows by observing the men his two sons became that his unapproachable male ego left them profoundly deficient as adults. Though he was merely being the kind of man his world venerated, that excuse does not satisfy him.

He knows that his is not the path of passive dying from ravaging disease. Only by choosing the form and circumstances of his own death can he offer a final mentoring to Thao, his spiritual heir, and, of course, the heir to the Gran Torino. He must confront the gang that was on the brink of swallowing up the young man and that brutally raped his sister, Sue, in an assertion of territoriality and authority. Having undergone the transformation mediated throughout his life by the memory of Korea, Walt sees that he must offer himself as undefended soldier, surrendering in a public forum to the power of being witnessed.

To achieve that, Walt takes himself unarmed into the territory of the Asian thugs, cigarette in hand, lighter in pocket. Reaching in his ultimate gesture for that light, Walt is riddled by the gang’s bullets. As defenseless as the youth who had tried to surrender to him all those decades earlier, he is anointed with the aura of willing sacrifice.

The fearful neighbors have witnessed the slaughter as the gang reached beyond the limits of its power; its members will face long prison terms for murder. Tao has been given the exact gift he needs as the prelude to riding off in his new vehicle. As a man who has never strayed from the ethic of accountability, Walt is able to communicate that the choices made at each life moment are serious, lasting, and either right or wrong. His is the voice of a now vanished time in which what a man was to himself trumped what he could get away with in the world. Tao will have to drive on his own road, but without losing the gift of how to process experience.

The Changeling

2009-06-01T09:23:00.004-04:00

Using as its base the true story of a 1928 kidnapping in California, Clint Eastwood directs a complex morality tale. The film is so unconvincingly and one-dimensionally acted that it often becomes tortuous to watch. There is a rigorous mono-dimensionality to the acting that at first appears distracting, perhaps even unintentional, and then gives way to the emergence of the story on a level that is beyond "realism." By keeping representation witnin the boundary of surface, the film is freed to journey into depth that is both psychological and emotional.

A nine year old boy, Walter, is abducted during his mother’s workday (no father in the picture). Perhaps loved, he is clearly not adequately cared for. The plot is set in motion when—after a nation-wide police search—the boy has supposedly been found in the Midwest and returned home, except that he’s a very different same age child. The highly staged sentimental reunion receives wide press coverage as an instance of shining police work, a stellar triumph for an L.A. Police department known to be wildly corrupt and desperate for the slightest public relations boon. Clearly they know the boy is not her son and yet are confounded by her unwillingness to participate in the illusion.

Thus begins the mother’s quest to prove this boy is a changeling, delivered to her for an unknown reason. The maternal love she claims toward her own child now manifests as hate for this stranger; the hate, in turn, renders her an enemy to the police who—with the cooperation of the equally corrupt psychiatric establishment—have her committed to a mental hospital to silence her voice of protest.

Against this background appears the first detail calling her motives into question. All she need do is sign a statement confirming that her upset was a stress-related reaction to her anguish and she will be released from custodial detention to care for the boy. She refuses to tell this lie. What has happened is that her quest to find her biological child is trumped by the need to be truthful, not to her purpose but to literal reality. Her pseudo-heroic energy has shifted from the demand that her son be found to the defiance of authority. She has, in fact, gotten in her own way.

This moment in the film when who she is becomes suspect is the first clear signal that a parallel story is unfolding to that of a mother’s anguished search for her lost son. Will it be seen that her investment in the way she comes across is not that dissimilar to the police force’s focus on their role as public protectors?

Meanwhile, the diverse pieces related to the kidnapping begin to come clearly into view. Walter is one in a series of young boys picked up by a psychopathic, psychotic man and his terrorized young cousin. Perhaps some of the boys are sexually abused; certainly all are ultimately brutally murdered as the killer seeks momentary release from the inner voices of his own fear. The young cousin reveals what has transpired to an at first incredulous police lieutenant, substantiating his tale as he leads them to where he was forced to bury the dismembered body parts. We understand that Christina’s Walter is among the victims, learning later that his participation in a desperate escape attempt allowed another of the captive children to break free.

Fatherless Walter somehow had instinctive access to the heroic masculine, returning, after breaking free himself, to the aid of a fleeing comrade caught on a fence. In remarkable contrast to the stubborn pride of his mother, he acts fearlessly, decisively, self-sacrificially. Is the man he might have grown into someone his mother could have valued or would she have needed to devalue him as he matured?

When the moment comes for the identified and obviously guilty perpetrator of these grisly murders to come to trial (even as in an adjacent courtroom there is a disciplinary hearing about the attempted police cover-up), it is suddenly apparent that Gordon Northcott, the sadistic killer, and Christine Collins, the bereaved mother, are destined to meet and interact. Gordon, with the gram of accurate perception that often accompanies psychosis, grasps that Christine is the one person among the spectators who has experienced being cast aside, dehumanized as crazy—in her dealings with the police and her hospitalization. He intuitively grasps that the dark underbelly of daily reality always focuses on finding scapegoats so that the ordinary ‘righteous’ world can congratulate itself on the return of order.

Christine has no awareness of the piece of shared destiny Gordon describes. Two years later, on the eve of his execution, she is the one person he wants to see. But her decision to comply with the request is not in order to interact with him—to actually meet—but to get a definitive chapter-closing answer about her son’s death. As she fails to be present in good faith, he turns away and will give her nothing.

One is pulled back to the day of the kidnapping, when mother had promised her son a trip to the movies, only to go to work instead and schedule the outing for the next day. Had she looked in her son’s eyes, seen his disappointment and his dawning recognition that she would never perceive his hunger in the moment, the tragic sequence need not have occurred. Clint Eastwood, we marvel, has ever so subtly planted the seed of her inability to see the other, foreshadowing the film’s thrust.

Three years after Gordon is hanged, there is a coda. The boy who escaped that night with Walter’s help surfaces to complete the tale; he wants to be able to return to his mother. A final opportunity presents itself for Christine to see that in the life of this boy the survival of her son continues. Yet, as with the changeling child seven years before, she cannot transcend the limitations about what is or is not hers. A sad truth concerns her inability to love; at the end she is reduced to a false and unfeeling sense of hope, unable to stay with the present emotion.

In the film’s final shot, she crosses a heavily-trafficked street, oblivious to what is around her and to her own danger. Hers is a version of the plugged-in contemporary psyche, hearing only the music it has chosen and shutting out the outside. Eastwood has found a vehicle for displaying the contemporary psyche closed in on itself. By contrast to Kowalski in Eastwood’s Gran Torino who is transformed by experience, Christine is impenetrable to experience, as un-alive as the scorchingly 2-dimensional depiction Angelina Jolie embodies.

Moving from hopelessness to hope, she manages to convey that there is no difference between them. Both are mere fantasy substitutes for her unlived life.

A Christmas Tale

2008-12-11T12:03:00.009-05:00

Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale” (Un conte de Noel) is a three ring circus, triple-strand story woven around the holiday reunion of a bourgeois family in a smallish town in northern France. No Twilight of the Gods, even in all lower-case, it is more Danse Macabre, as the Vuillard clan acts out their long-ago agreed roles with the predictable familiarity of a Commedia dell’Arte troupe.

Junon, the beautiful and aging matriarch, has been recently diagnosed with a degenerative disease. A transplant may save her life or at least give her more time, but practically no one is compatible with her rare blood type. This plight mimics the family’s chosen myth that revolves around the death at six of the firstborn child, Joseph.

At that time, neither parent, nor Joseph’s younger sister Elizabeth, was compatible for the possible transplant that might have saved the boy’s life, so Abel and Junon conceived a third child, Henri, in the hope that he would be able to save Joseph’s life by providing the necessary genetic material for the desperate medical procedure. An early placental biopsy confirmed that Henri would be useless in the effort to save Joseph, a sorrowful fact for which the not yet born child would never be forgiven by his mother.

Joseph dies and Elizabeth becomes the elder sibling. Her gaze inalterably fixated on her dead brother and the past, she barely tolerates Henri and eventually will blame him for everything wrong in her life. A last, late child, Ivan, is born into this brood. Innocent of the tragedy that has shaped the reality of the rest of his family, he is not so much free of their drama as untethered in general, a lightweight outsider of a different sort, about whom no one need bother too much.

Decades pass, each family member plays her/his part. Everyone has done their homework: an elaborate ornamental framework references the Bible, of course, but also Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Proust, Emerson, Wagner, Charlie Byrd, Charlton Heston, Ingmar Bergman and Greek and Roman mythology-- much of the structure of the three siblings relationships and identities is perhaps too neatly contained in the story of Juno, queen of the gods of Olympus, and her three children: Juventas, Mars and Vulcan.

The film culminates in the family’s unhappy Yuletide reunion, brought about and followed by Junon’s fateful operation which is not a success. Her body develops a violent rash in the process of rejecting Henri’s bone marrow-- a fitting end; she may die in a blaze of illumination like Medea’s princess victim, once again able to blame Henri for failure; the family myth comes full cycle. Ever practical, Junon has dressed in black for the transfusion, not to be caught unprepared.

Another story exists within the images of the film that describes how each character turns away from the face of life and the experience of the moment. What they seek to avoid is the humiliation—in this sense the “humanizing” element—of flawed, humble, unattractive, and precarious human existence. Siblings, father and mother all have their moments of acting out bad behavior, as if proof against the visible testimony that each has long ago given up on life itself and now only marks time and place in repetitive acts and minor divertissements that are comfortable from familiarity and the absence of challenge.

Elizabeth is a picture of obstinate juvenile spite and pride. Her father would have her believe that her constant sorrow is for the lost brother she cannot recall. She wants to believe that Henri is to blame for everything. Henri complies by endlessly providing the discordant note upon which all the others depend for focusing their contempt. Henri and Elizabeth are two sides of the same coin, locked in battle: she, underhanded and mopey, he, over-the-top and blustering.

Elizabeth’s true error is in being false to herself and one scene tells us that she knows herself more than she likes, not that it has had, will have, or, perhaps, can have any effect. Happily ensconced in misery, sorrow and spiteful retribution, her normal stance is momentarily interrupted when a gift arrives from Spatafora- a minor character and childhood friend and her siblings’ local drug dealer. She takes the pure and plain gold heart out of its box and dangles it gently as she smiles and is transported briefly out of her self-absorption.

Henri is forever blamed for the death of the brother he never knew. Junon claims to dislike Henri and the feelings are mutual, but nothing so severe that anyone need really be troubled by it. Henri is a pint-sized changeling of aggression, constant agitation and physical immediacy, unable to resist the temptation to fight and brawl.

His real crime is to be gauche, and invincible; he never wins, but he never gives up. His is the awkward irrepressibility of life, but put to no use. Henri can barely remember his wife who died early in their marriage in a car accident, her way, perhaps, of getting at least a tiny bit of his attention all to herself, and then freedom from the endless thorny enclosure of his self-regard.

Abel has conveniently--perhaps necessarily-- simplified the complexities of Nietzsche to enable himself to transform the mortal anguish of the loss of his son Joseph, turning it instead into the radiant glow of heavenly enlightenment: the little grave becomes an immense foundation of spiritual joy. He would have everyone believe, as he tells Elizabeth, that, simply, “one cannot know oneself,” and must therefore await the fullness of time for the mysteries to be revealed. This attitude allows him ample free time for music and quiet chores.

Junon decides to go ahead with the transplant, reversing her previous statement against the operation. Abel is seated in his study listening to a jazz recording and following along with the score in hand. Junon must bang on the door to get his attention. He turns down the volume and awaits her latest announcement. Ostensibly pleased with her choice, he asks if she wants him to inform Henri, the compatible donor for the operation. Yes. She hesitates a moment at the door and then leaves, as Abel, seated still, turns back to readjust up the volume on the stereo. Outside she slumps momentarily on the stairs, knowing something is amiss, but then catches her breath and moves on.

Every opportunity that life awards for an encounter with authenticity into the unexpected is finessed into a known form and thus sophisticated, neutered into convention, a minor-key cause célèbre of amusement or irritation. The Midnight Mass is little more than a quaint neighborhood fair or charity bake sale entertainment, pleasant overall. Ivan tells his two young sons that Jesus never existed, and certainly won’t appear after midnight in the grandchildren’s little toy crèche-- nothing “new” is coming into the world that night or any night chez Vuillard.

Every gesture and action is the enemy of lived life, of possibility; nothing leads anywhere too complicated or too unknown. At the film’s end Henri is alone with his mother in the cold, bright hospital room, a sterile plastic sheet divides them. He proffers up a gold coin to Junon—a chance for a toss of luck or payment to Charon? Either way, Henri shakes his head: you don’t want to know.

In another telling-- the third ring of this circus cycle, the real tension of the film is not within the family’s predictable antics, but whether any of it matters at all in light of the coming storm: the massive monoliths of anonymous housing projects and office buildings that encroach further and further into the Vuillard’s world. Far more dangerous than the degenerative disease that will kill Junon or the cancer that took little Joseph is this overwhelming, silent tide. It will not be satisfied with mere individuals, but hungers to consume an entire way of life.

In fact, life at the Vuillard’s is already a dream past its prime, past life itself; it is a testament to the old. The stylish and capacious family manse can no longer contain itself let alone all its members and the light of day reveals what the fireworks of Christmas Eve did not: that the house is a wounded and crumbling ghost, part of a faultline of forgotten old structures, surrounded, descending into an ever darker oblivion as the new and huge blocky towers of granite, glass and steel press in from all sides.

I've Loved You So Long

2008-12-04T08:34:00.002-05:00

It would be an act of critical generosity to describe this film as flawed. More accurately, “I’ve Loved You So Long” is a work in which the writer/director, Philippe Claudel, has avoided the tasks he set himself, choosing instead to engage the viewer at the lowest level of sentimentality, counting on the audience’s love affair with Kristin Scott Thomas to breathe oxygen into an airless piece. A slow and intentionally misleading storyline asks the viewer first to try to understand Scott Thomas’ character, Juliette, and then slaps the audience with a volte face that nonetheless could have been compelling if Claudel had used it as something more than a tear-jerker ending.

From the film’s opening image of Juliette—just out of prison after 15 years—waiting at the airport to be picked up by her sister, Lea, it is evident that a secret will ultimately be revealed. If this woman served a long jail sentence, it was obviously her choice. Why and for what would she have been wrongly condemned? Near the story’s end, a circumstantial occurrence reveals that Juliette’s murder of her terminally ill young son was a mercy killing done by her as a doctor to spare the boy the anguished final days of dying. Conveniently, the trial brought none of this to light—no autopsy, no mitigating circumstances, so that Juliette’s right to her martyrdom remained absolute and unchallenged, allowing her to return to society carrying the ultimate stigma of filicide.

This might have been a movie about a woman having found through the darkest secret her only way to cope with her child’s death. The work would then have had its life in the tension between an unrevealed truth and an unbearable agony. Her interactions with the world she has rejoined would offer her the redemptive opportunity to let go of the specialness of secrecy and face openly that even the greatest loss does not equal the end of life.

The time in prison which she engineered, however improbable as credible plot, would then have been a confinement for her unwarranted hubris in allowing a false narrative to dictate a conclusion. When and how would she see her untold tale as a running away from the challenges of life? That sequence might have been compelling.

Unfortunately, the film ignores the impossibility that no one else noticed the child’s disease and disfiguration. As a doctor Juliette processed her son’s blood tests herself and did not feel the need to verify the results or seek other opinions about treatment, nor did she feel the need or obligation to confide in her ex-husband, the boy’s father. No one was to have a hand in this but she.

A very different character could have emerged of a selfish woman struggling with her own inability to allow her child a separate existence, unwilling to grant him his place in the complexity of a mysterious larger world. In her act of mercy, Juliette retains the starring role. There are many ways besides the literal act of murder in which narcissistic and unfulfilled parents can burden, thwart and cripple their children as if they were merely props in a claustrophobic play and not beings with lives of their own.

The parole officer to whom Juliette must report weekly wants only to tell her about his own life and his yearning to go to the Orinoco river, a kind of image for him of journeying to the source, into expansiveness, away from the prosaic routine and disappointment about things not having worked out on a personal level—his divorce and separation from his young daughter. The ’trip to the Orinoco’ ends in his suicide by gunshot; he can find no actual way to enlarge his existence, to incorporate the painful facts of his life into the continuing journey. His is the active version of the symbolic passive suicide which has been Juliette’s fate in failing to confront her unfinished life.

For Juliette, the director conflates discovery with self-discovery; the vignettes of the film seem calculated only for their emotional effect on the audience, not as testament to the complexity of evolving from or evoking depth experience in response to the difficult and tragic realities of life. Since complexity has been absent from her return to society, Juliette’s voyage has had no thrust and the viewer feels tricked and patronized. If it is really only that she needed to tell someone else—or have someone else “know”, what is the point of all she has done and been through? How, after all this, can that make any difference to her? We are left knowing Juliette as little at the end as at the beginning, but with good reason not to trust her or the director.

Samson

2008-11-02T11:43:00.006-05:00

In Andrzej Wajda’s 1961 film, “Samson”, the story begins as Jakub goes off to his first day at the University in Warsaw. His skin, hair color and facial features mark him as unquestionably Jewish; within moments of his arrival in a lecture hall filled with rabidly anti-Semitic young Poles, there is evidence that his life is in danger. They hound and taunt the Jew, pushing him down to the ground as they menacingly toss a huge brick just barely above his head. In deflecting the attack, Jakub thrusts the brick away and it strikes and kills another student.

What was unmistakably self-defense brings him a long prison sentence for murder. Making no attempt to plead his innocence (futile though that may have been), his acceptance of guilt sets the stage for the story that follows. Given the chance to place blame elsewhere, only the one willing to pay the price for what he has done can mature into full adulthood as a complete human being.

Serving his sentence in prison, Jakub has two significant human encounters. One is with Pankrat, a political prisoner and dedicated communist in the adjacent cell who sees life as a constant battle to overthrow the tyranny of oppressive regimes. Pankrat’s secure male energy points to a life that does not recognize compromise in pursuit of its goal.

The other encounter is with his cellmate Malina whose decisions all exemplify adaptation. He embezzled funds to pay for his son’s medical care, knowing he was committing a crime and gladly accepting the punishment. He has no quarrel with society nor is he unhappy in prison. His message to the young Jakub is about paying your dues in the world, living without resentment, surviving to meet the tasks of the day.

Where Pankrat’s is the standpoint of the individual versus society, Malina’s embodies that of engagement with the world on terms that are never set but evolve moment to moment. “Samson” demonstrates that both these aspects live in Jakub; the tension that propels the story keeps returning to the question of which will be stronger, when and how.

When the Nazis bomb Warsaw the wardens unlock all the cells and the prisoners stream out into the streets already overcrowded with desperate evacuees. For Jakub this will not eventuate in any freedom- all Poland is now a prison and with the German invasion, Jakub’s new cell is the Ghetto.

As part of the work detail that collects dead bodies from the streets for burial, Jakub finally finds his beloved mother, just moments after she has died. Jakub is overwhelmed with grief and the inner realization of his now total alone-ness.

A man who hopes to escape the Ghetto joins into the burial procession. Unable to scale the high brick wall by himself, he begs for Jakub’s help and encourages him to escape too. Jakub has no desire to try and escape, but now separated from the burial group he is in danger as the armed guards close in with their growling dogs and he too climbs over the wall.

Moving cautiously in the darkening shadows, Jakub is trapped inside a large apartment building when the porter locks the doors for curfew. Jakub goes up to the roof to hide and through a skylight sees a party in progress. Discovered, he is unexpectedly invited to join in the drinking and card games; exhausted, he falls asleep in a chair.

After all the others have gone, Lucyna, the hostess, informs Jakub that unbeknownst to her Aryan guests she, too, is a Jew. She dispels his illusion that everything outside the ghetto is light and reveals the constant anxiety in which she lives, ever fearful that her dissembling will be found out. She rejects his desire to return to the ghetto, insisting valiantly for a vision of freedom and life that their moment in time cannot support.

Lucyna is determined to make Jakub her lover and to find a way to save them both; already at the end of her own resolve, she finds new energy and inspiration through her fantasy of the young man and their imagined life. She cuts and bleaches her hair, creating an even more perfect persona emblem of non-Jewishness. Dressed in white, she goes out to secure the means and arrange for their escape to a friend’s country estate, where she believes they can wait out the war, safe from harm.

This brief experience with a woman questing to survive the war is his first major post-prison test, the initial opportunity to outrun his own race. Lucyna pits the temptation of warm flesh against the pull of solidarity with his branded fellows. For Jakub personal freedom carries no transfiguring image. In prison for murder, he knew he was innocent and how little that actually mattered. He knows that he cannot be free while the ghetto exists. Jakub does not wait for Lucyna’s return.

Down in the street his life is saved again by a band of Yuletide performers who cover Jakub’s face with one of their masks as a German patrol rounds the corner. He says he wants to return to the ghetto, and they explain he cannot do it there like that: they will all suffer. They lead him to a house on the boundary of the ghetto’s wall. There the man who cautiously and, no doubt, profitably helps a few of the ghetto’s captives to escape and smuggles in food and contraband convinces Jakub of the futility of returning. Life itself, so apparently absent, will not let Jakub meet the fate he is willing to face.

Now he has nowhere to go but to Malina’s, accepting a long-ago offer of shelter and hospitality meant for circumstances less dire. Somehow, he manages to get to the apartment undetected, where he is welcomed warmly and without hesitation by the old man and his adolescent niece, Kazia, who instantly develops a crush on the young stranger. It is Christmas Eve and Kazia imagines that Jakub is her gift, solace against the loneliness of the entrapping apartment she is not allowed to leave. The next day Jakub is seen when Kazia opens the door while Malina is out. Jakub insists he must leave but Malina convinces him to hide in cellar, an underground prison where he will hopefully be secure. Trapped in the basement, through long days and nights equally dark, outside time, awake and asleep at once, jakub gathers resolve for some as yet unknown purpose

Both Lucyna and Kazia seek to enclose Jakub in the confines of personal emotion; they want to build a life of coupled fulfillment, separated from the incalculable disaster of what is going on outside. Lucyna finds her way to Malina’s where Kazia denies any knowledge of Jakub or his whereabouts. Kazia’s sorrow at separation from Jakub is instantly transformed into blind happiness when she realizes that Lucyna believes her and departs. Kazia is still too young to understand the limits of personal story.

Lucyna has the revelation that in this atmosphere flight cannot lead anywhere and gives herself up to the Gestapo, reveling her identity as a Jew, meaning, of course, certain death. Meanwhile, Kazia, scheming ever more to keep Jakub with her (while concealing from him the news of Malina’s accidental death) trims his hair, thinking she can tidy him up and bring him into the lonely apartment, but is finally herself locked in the basement as Jakub flees to witness the last embers of the ghetto that has been burned to the ground after the uprising.

Wandering the streets with now no literal ghetto to return to, Jakub makes his way to the railroad tracks but cannot bring himself to jump into the path of the oncoming train. He is not afraid to die, but does not want to die just for having the face of a Jew.

Hounded by a gang of children, Jakub is recognized by a former fellow prisoner and taken to the hideout of the communists, headed by Pankrat. There he is brought face to face with what Pankrat had adumbrated in their brief prison dialog. These are men prepared at any moment to give their lives in the service of a cause. Wanting above all to live while being unqualifiedly willing to die is what endows these committed ideologues with strength.

Before leaving to distribute their illegal pamphlets, Pankrat, unrecognized by Jakub, shows him the grenades that are to be detonated should the Nazis discover this hiding place; no one is to come out alive. When the Nazis do appear and discover the banned presses, Jakub realizes that this is the moment all his imprisonment has readied him for, his instant to incarnate as the Samson bringing the godless down. He detonates the grenades, killing all the Nazis while he is crushed under a falling beam as the entire building caves in.

In no way does Wajda diminish the genuineness of personal life and private encounter. However, his vision supports the understanding that- when there is a battle to the death under way- preserving one’s individual earthly existence is not the primary value. Yes, Jakub was a Jew during the Holocaust, meaning that he was condemned to perish in a ghetto or concentration camp. Intended to die a passive, victimized death, his journey has taught him that, with sufficient boldness and alertness, he can choose the circumstances of his death. He will die because of the Nazis, but not without exacting his revenge.

Thus, he purposefully concludes his journey by accomplishing through deliberate action what in killing the student at the University was a mere extension of self-protection. He has learned that being a man has little to do with winning under untenable circumstances, but everything to do with finding the right moment to act. He has become the mythic figure that gives the film its name.

Japon

2008-10-22T09:22:00.001-04:00

In Carlos Reygadas’ magical 2002 film, Japon, a crippled man lurches awkwardly on his walking stick across an arid plateau randomly studded with huge agave plants, each succulent a cluster of pointy fingers, each finger laced in rows of sharp threatening thorns.

From nowhere, a young boy scuttles from plant to plant, yelling at the man to duck down. Guns fire. A bird falls to the ground mortally wounded but not yet dead. The boy runs to retrieve the small trophy. Frustrated and ashamed that his young hands cannot wring the animal’s neck- as hunters do to end the now pointless and painful struggle for life- the boy hands the bird to the unknown man admitting his weakness. The man tears off the bird’s head and tosses it, still blinking, onto the ground.

The boy’s father, the hunter, arrives with his group and offers a ride, asking where the stranger is going and why- family? No family; to kill myself, he replies. The noisy carload of mostly younger men takes him half way to his goal. He must walk the last leg of this journey down into the valley through baking sun to a remote village where, once he has centered himself, his final act can be accomplished. The intention is to achieve disappearance without a trace.

There is ample evidence as the tale unfolds that he has been led to this particular spot to encounter a specific woman, Ascen, who provides him a makeshift room. She wonders what has brought him here, but quickly accepts his presence, for whatever reason. Her willingness to house him gradually widens into those rituals of shared daily life as of an old married couple: his tea awaits him after the daily walk; his clothes are handed over to be laundered; a dish of fruit is simply present, as if it were manna.

The man has brought farewell tokens of culture: an illustrated history of modern art, a portrait, music and a gun. Purpose and focus seem present enough. Will he jump from a precipice, shoot himself or both? Though he has talked himself into believing that living on holds no interest for him, this is pure rationalization. As he familiarizes himself with this strange environment, he cannot deny that life continues and he remains a willing participant.

From the moment that he takes out his gun maneuvering it to point at his heart and then putting it away, it grows apparent that he is still wedded to this plane of existence. He comes face to face with the difference between the desire to be dead and the ability to act. The word ’cowardice’ partly describes his dilemma but, more importantly, he continues to recognize an inner pull toward new experience and an inexorable attraction to the mysteries of life and the living.

Ascen, because she wants nothing for self beyond her utterly humble life, reveals in her character a form of action that contrasts with, and is clearly superior to, his imagined resolve. She meets the moment with whatever decision corresponds to an appropriate human response. The culminating example of her potency comes to fruition when she accepts his proposal (old and long widowed as she is) that they once have sexual intercourse before he proceeds on his way somewhere, never to return.

The intercourse scene is a moment of pure poetry, totally not about lust, passion, or anything ordinarily thought of as relationship. She accepts him because of an expressed need that she has no reason to reject. Like all her little actions, this most personal one remains, in essence, impersonal. Her power is as incontrovertible as it is quiet, fully selfless, awesomely present.

Ascen’s nephew, released from jail, wants to claim his supposed patrimony by dismantling stone by stone the one solid structure in her physical world. She knows that her shambling shack cannot survive the fierce April winds without the shelter of the stone barn. Her only reaction to this aggressive demand is to see it as proof that he must need them more than she does. Ascen assents.

After the men have destroyed the entire structure, extracting the huge chiseled stones and placing them onto the double beds attached to a tractor, the nephew’s young son tells his father that the driver says they must make two trips; the stones are too heavy. All the men, and Ascen too, have been drinking, celebrating the event and the end of their intense labor. “I pay, I command- one trip only” the father roars and the tractor starts the slow downhill progress on the narrow winding dirt road. The men are lounging on top of the stones as if on a hayride, singing and shouting.

The film ends by showing the inter-connected resolution of these stories. Ascen knows her future cannot exist in the humble home that will be torn to shreds in the spring storms and she moves toward the only open place there is. Cloaked in the much too large jacket of the man she has sheltered, Ascen joins the merry group, climbing onto the already over-loaded vehicle transporting the stones to their new home. Predictably, it overturns. The stones tumble every which way and the passengers are strewn all over, crushed and dead.

For Ascen, it is totally natural to allow her life to find an appropriate ending. She has not chosen suicide; rather, she accepts impartially that her earthly story has been completed. Meanwhile, the man who ostensibly came to end his life stands in the doorway of her hovel, which has been as though willed to him as a home. Ascen has shown him the way into death, by giving herself fully into life. As never before, he has gained the strength and viewpoint to stand exactly where he is, ready to respond to the diurnal tasks without judgment or fear. He is the new Ascen.

The Pool

2008-09-12T19:27:00.008-04:00

“The Pool” is a magical and wry cinematic meditation by director Chris Smith on the differences between the Western notion of transformation and the Eastern idea of destiny. Based on a story by his long-time collaborator Randy Russell, “The Pool” was relocated by Smith to Goa, in southern India, from its original setting in the American Midwest. The transposition not only ornaments this tale externally with the imagery and customs of a fabled place half a world away, but also reshapes the story’s internal dimensions by juxtaposing and interweaving Western and Eastern cultural sensibilities.

In the overgrown garden of a seemingly uninhabited house, the pool is the potent center of the film to which each character relates in his or her own way.

Venkatesh seeks out the pool in the moments when he is not on duty cleaning rooms at a small hotel. Every day he climbs a tree outside the property wall that overlooks the tranquil water of the pool, wondering if anyone ever swims in it and what it would be like to go in. He knows what he is looking at, but not what he is looking for.

Jhangir is an 11 year old orphan street urchin who does menial work in a café near the hotel where Venkatesh works. Though Venkatesh necessarily functions as an older brother figure to Jhangir, theirs is a bond of circumstance more than love. The two have become sidekicks and share a side-business reselling plastic bags at the local market.

Jhangir’s aim in the world is being constantly aware of how each moment might yield him an advantage. Sentiment and sentimentality are luxuries he cannot afford. To him, the pool is just one other place in the world, whatever stories or imaginings may accompany it offer no help with the needs of the moment; he is amused by his friend’s wasted time spent staring at the pool.

Eventually a man appears in the garden. Pretending to work, he mostly wanders, moving chairs and picking at dead leaves, always circling back to sit for long hours gazing into the pool. His sullen and bristling late-teenage daughter, Ayesha, spends long hours poolside, reading.

For the father, owner and occasional resident of the property, the pool is an accusatory center for self-recrimination, the constant reminder of a moment a decade earlier when his young son drowned. Frozen at this window into the past, he has neglected and abused his living family.

Ayesha has dutifully, if resentfully, accompanied her father to this property. However improbable, she was, as a 7 year old, briefly responsible for her 4 year old brother in the water the day he died. Unable to prevent the tragedy, the girl’s fault was to survive. Her father has nothing to offer her beside financial support; they barely tolerate each others’ existence.

For her, the pool is a place to while away the boring hours. Once she is interrupted there, she goes off to the anonymity of a small public park. The pool offers her neither magic nor memory, only the certainty that she can never matter enough to her father to be loved or even to be seen apart from the obliterating specter of her dead sibling. She exists but cannot live.

Venkatesh is as fascinated by the new arrivals as he is by the pool itself and soon insinuates himself into the garden, gradually becoming a de-facto assistant to the father in his labors to rejuvenate the long-abandoned garden.

Meanwhile, impervious to the girl’s rebuffs and always with Jhangir in tow, Venkatesh goes to great effort to befriend Ayesha. Any idea that the young man is operating from a sly scheme toward worldly gain is finally and utterly dashed when he tells Ayesha that he is betrothed to a girl now only 10 years old in a marriage arranged by his mother. Ayesha coyly suggests that he may not like her once she is old enough to marry and he eclipses her suggestion and viewpoint by explaining that their romance will begin after the marriage.

In realizing that she is of no interest to Venkatesh as an imagined or potential mate or conquest, Ayesha slowly warms to the odd pair, basking in, if not truly understanding, the glow of being seen for herself, neither as a means to an end, a blank screen or the insignificant part of a bad memory.

In the course of their work together in the garden, the father tests Venkatesh in various ways and gradually comes to see him as a potential replacement son. One day the father tells a parable about generosity as prelude to his offer for the young man to accompany him back to Bombay where he will receive an education. Suddenly, Venkatesh has a completely unanticipated opportunity: choice- he can stay where he is, return to his village, or go to Bombay. In confronting the question of what he actually wants for himself, he discovers his true relationship to the pool, that of gaining perspective.

At first he decides to accept the unexpected offer of Bombay, but later alters his choice into an amalgam that is both all and none of the above; he will stay behind, go to a local school and continue as caretaker of the garden, house and pool. The father regrets but accepts his final decision, asking what made him change his mind? It was the story about generosity. Then I should not have told it, the father laments, thinking his lesson had gone misunderstood.

The difference between West and East is beautifully described in a simple scene between Ayesha and Venkatesh in the small park where he first befriended the lonely girl. He offers her the parting gift of a kitten. Surprised and dismayed, Ayesha rejects the offer, seeing only the unwanted burden of a needy, vulnerable creature. Alright; he casually pushes the animal aside. You can’t just leave it here, she accuses, though she has no intention of changing her mind. He disagrees; it is life. He found the kitten alone in a dark and filthy alley- at least here it is better off than before.

She does not understand that his friendship to her was a free, generous and genuine response to her neediness- nothing she deserved or was owed- and that in offering her the kitten, he offers her herself. In rejecting the cat she rejects life, unable to feel or see that first she needs someplace to begin the slow movement toward connection. Life, like the kitten, is always the opportunity at hand, not necessarily the one imagined or desired, and it must always be paid for in some kind of coin. Here, now, is the only place to live; how she responds to the moment is her choice.

Father and daughter depart and, surprisingly, Venkatesh returns to working at the hotel. He takes the father’s offer to subsidize his education and passes it on to Jhangir, whom he sends to the local school in his own place, even with his own name. Jhangir, who carries no familial identity, can go on with the ruse of the name change to ultimately enter society as someone. The trick has every chance of working in the world. Even the father, once he finds out, will not only be amused, but will come to see that he was the one who did not fully understand his own parable and that Venkatesh has rightly chosen the better vessel in which to plant the father’s generosity.

Venkatesh never approaches the moment from a place of desire. He knows that he will go through with his long-ago arranged marriage. He takes for granted his performance of all traditional duties toward his mother. He has seen from what has just transpired that, simply by being alive, experiences occur and that following them where they lead is his task. When he extends himself outward, as with the father, Ayesha and Jhangir, it is neither for reward nor gratification of desire, but entirely in the service of being on the ground which he is overlooking. For him, every encounter in the world is a way of deepening the feeling of being alive. It is thus no surprise that the end of the film finds him sitting alone beside the pool, looking deep into its depth, searching the mirror of its surface. He is on a spiritual journey and carries on his slender frame the ancient wisdom that life is about understanding, the soul’s journey, not the ego’s.

Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie)

2008-09-07T13:29:00.005-04:00

Jacques Nolot’s “Before I Forget” begins with an arresting and compelling visual prologue: upon a brilliant, stark white screen a small black dot suddenly appears and slowly begins to enlarge.

Is the black dot an oculus into an infinite star-less future on the other side of all this whiteness- the round opening increasing in size as we approach and the view beyond the portal broadens? Or is it, rather, a small hard-edged dark planet aimed and headed straight toward us, gaining girth as it hurtles smoothly, effortlessly through an utterly empty atmosphere?

The absolute lack of articulation within each extreme- white and black- becomes entirely unnerving as the speed and size suddenly increase out of proportion, until the entire screen is filled with blackness.

The prologue imitates and is a 2-dimensional diagram of the experience of life. The initial uniformly smooth and slow pacing of the increase in size of the black dot is easily comprehended and magically- though logically- creates an assumption that this rate and ratio will naturally continue until darkness prevails and the light is entirely gone- nothing shocking, almost a pre-nostalgic response to the inevitable. The sudden change in tempo alters the point of view, destroying the complacency of presumed understanding, creating an anxiety that reverses the previous perception of outcome: what was inevitable in its time now comes frighteningly too soon. What is also entirely absent from both prologue and film is the notion of transformation- alternate possibility.

The prologue also describes the trajectory of the story “Before I Forget” which follows Pierre, a 60ish HIV+ gay man, his small circle of contemporaries and the young hustlers they ardently seek out and support with repetitive rounds of sexual episodes more reminiscent of Sisyphus’ labors than spontaneous journeys of desire.

The story that unfolds is a captivating amalgam of unrelenting banality and touching humanity, describing a world in which nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo. Both the young and old characters are stuck in patterns so predictable their lives come to look more like the orbits of celestial clusters of inorganic matter, each distinctly different, yet carelessly and powerlessly caught in a magnetic pull, circling the Big Cock.

Really, this world is a binary solar system revolving around two opposite stars that each appear in the form of a literary statement. The Dark Star is a long cerebral quote about stupidity and man’s propensity for making wrong choices because of choosing form over content, marvelously conveyed over Pierre’s car-radio as he is about to set off for an afternoon’s saunter through the local porn theater. The Bright Star is a glorious re-found love-letter from the youthful Pierre’s old sugar daddy, Toutounne, crammed with the scrappy and radiant overflow of exacting particulars that leave no doubt about the real-life love and desire still pouring off the page fifteen years after the fact.

Pierre’s circle includes a claustrophobic and vain colleague whose only interest in Pierre is comparing the price of hustlers- his fantasies of vibrancy revolve around forbidden blow-jobs with armed policemen; George, the married lawyer whose slim, occasional chances for sexual tidbits on the side seem always to be thwarted by chance; and Paul, a former convict with a much darker past and more practical tastes. Paul was the heir of his sugar daddy Gaston and Paul, unlike Pierre, achieved the means to live as he wanted. Paul exemplifies in purist form life lived moment to moment solely with the aim of advantage. He stands for the aspect of rampant capitalism under which there is nothing not for sale and someone is always going to benefit. The challenge for economic man is never to lose sight of how the game is played; a winner will always hit the jackpot. Being the winner is not just all that counts, it is all there is.

Money and time are inextricably linked and honored above all else. At one extreme, the aim is automatic prolongation of life, lived or unlived; at the other extreme lies the unrelenting and unforgiving finitude of the pay-per-view “professional hour”- whether with the hustler or the psychologist- always commanding: ”Now/NotNow” and equally unable to conform to life as experience rather than schedule.

When Pierre climbs- with surprising alacrity- over an ivy-covered wall in the deep dark of a moonless night, we imagine that he is out for another round of half-hearted sexual encounters. It is rather a memory of the Bright Star now absent from his world that draws Pierre like a pilgrim into the shadows of the cemetery for a brief visit at Toutounne’s grave.

Perhaps this gives an idea for the film’s title; the cluster of preening and self-regarding, aging narcissists is more like a gaggle of old house pets, exotic spoiled cats, running after each delectably cute mouse, dangling the captured creature but no longer in the game for blood or potency. They have forgotten what it was they were after, what deep inner needs jumpstarted the pattern of desire while being unable to see it through. Pattern and aging have taken the place of encounter. They cannot move on. What unites them all is a narrowness of vision. Will they ever meet life with an openness to widening the spectrum of observation? The opportunity afforded Pierre by Toutounne’s letter may have been his last chance to remember- or be led into an appreciation- that a moment of real meeting has the unique capacity to alter the ultimate trajectory of the Sisyphean boulder’s path. Once the ability to be affected by felt experience disappears, repetition alone remains, along with the entrapment of pointless searches and yearned for degradations.

Pierre is infantile and obvious, with a matter-of-fact and contradictory presence that belies someone who has been loved for nothing more than being himself; he is quick to point out that he will not be so generous with the next generation.

Pierre can always be relied upon to do exactly what he says he won’t, so the film ends with a scene as slow as the prologue of the black dot. Dressed in drag, like an old suburban mall beer hall waitress out for a fancy dinner in the city, complete with a long and merciless raven-black wig and simple shift with lace trim, Pierre goes off to the sex club/porn theater with one of his regular hustlers. At last he turns and enters the theater, slowly swallowed into the pitch black that describes the future, both literally and figuratively, near and far.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

2008-09-01T09:37:00.003-04:00

The narrator alone would have us believe that “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a comedy- and the first twenty minutes appear to be a glorious send-up of Woody Allen by Woody Allen. But something does not connect, even in these first scenes, between the dead stares of the two beautiful, youthful heroines and the unrelenting overflow of chatty and comical soundbites. Allen plays both sides of the cinematic/dramatic coin- not trusting us to simply watch the screen without micro-managing our observations and response, and tipping his hat that, perhaps, the narrator doth protest too much. The all-too-familiar too-true-to-life stereotypes that haunt all of Allen’s films must be constantly re-packaged with a barker’s sleight of tongue.

Vicky and Cristina, collegiate buddies with two months to kill set their sights on Barcelona, staying at the home of a distant relative, Judy, and her hedge fund husband, Mark. Vicky, the dark, serious scholarly one- engaged to be married- turns out (surprise!) to fall for the suave native artist. Mums the word as Cristina, the capricious blond- uninformed on all levels, including her best friend’s outré caprice- beds and eventually moves in with same suave native artist, Juan Antonio. Soon his ex-wife, Maria Elena, shows up as a caricature of creativity and danger.

A totally unexpected and creatively productive ménage a trois ensues at the artist’s very artistic abode until, predictably, Cristina’s inner alarm goes off, unilaterally signaling the end of their joint artistic harmony- her tank is full, time to drive on. The Europeans are hurt, outraged and dismayed, and can only revert to their historic and histrionic bickering. The Europeans cannot find fulfillment among themselves; they can remember and recognize something they can no longer produce.

Meanwhile Judy, the Barcelona surrogate Mom/hostess is revealed to be having an affair, unhappy and somehow unfulfilled in her marriage to the older model of Vicky’s fiancé. Vicky confides her secret and feelings for Juan Antonio to Judy, who tries to warn the younger woman away from the fate she continues to embrace. Too late for me, she laments, but not for Vicky. The possible truth of this view is lost in the attractively deep cushion of very good upholstery.

Really, Vicky’s plans for an elaborate social wedding in the Fall and the house in Bedford Hills need not be perturbed by finding out not only that she may not love the man she’s marrying, but that she may not even know what love is.

Cristina returns from a successful quick side trip to France intended to shake off the last effects of her multi-valent/partnered romance with the handsome European Art couple. Vicky finally tells Cristina of her single night of fallen love. Cristina reveals just how little affected she is from her great experience with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena by professing that, had she only known, she would gladly have stood aside for her best friend, as if her entire experience were little more in substance and meaning than another azure cashmere cardigan on sale at Bergdorf’s.

In the almost cluelessly unhappy world of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” the narrator never shuts up; unrelenting good cheer wears away the fragile remnants of love and courage, like a cruel partner who giggles at the exact moment that wordlessly indicates you are, at best, having sex, not making love. Nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo and style; no encounter or revelation need interfere with habit, one’s preferred self-image or any long-booked social calendar.

This nightmare of McLuhanesque socially appropriate “traffic flow” cannot rightly be called tragic, for no one is awake or responsive to life; no one actually exercises choice; no one admits to a power greater than their own convenience, will or illusion; no touch leaves an impression; no call makes them stop and turn, irrevocably, into a life uncharted.

Exactly on schedule, as planned, the Americans go home.

The Edge of Heaven

2008-08-11T15:14:00.013-04:00

Written and directed by Fatih Akin, “The Edge of Heaven” is a shimmering mosaic of exquisitely delicate counterpoint that nonetheless questions the modern inflation of applauding or expecting the orderly development of destiny. Above all it is a film about listening and liminal space. The messages these voices would bring are equally drowned out in the staid complacency of the university and by the deafening refrain of political radicals. Inner liberation as well as survival, growth and the possibilities of joy and fulfillment require being tuned in to what moment to moment events may be communicating.

Six characters, like the voices of a fugue, comprise three couples of parent and child, though their energic affinities lie along different lines of sympathy.

Ali, a Turkish national and pensioner who has worked his adult life in Germany and was widowed early, still has the vitality and desire in his senior years to seek out a prostitute. She, Yeter, turns out to be Turkish as well. Ali offers her a home with him, matching her current earnings, if she will sleep only with him. A better life for each, he reckons. After being threatened by Islamic vigilantes, Yeter accepts the offer, denying to herself that Ali will make sexual demands.

When he does, she hears neither the context of his demand nor the echo of her agreement. Shouting a false and belligerent declaration of her independence, Yeter punctuates her fury by pushing him violently away. In a rage at her refusal Ali slaps her; Yeter falls, hitting her head on a sharp edge and dies. He is sent to jail. Release for Ali comes only after his sentence is completed and he is deported back to Turkey, to the small town from which his journey began.

Ali’s son Nejat is a professor of German Literature at a university in Hamburg. Where his father is fiery and active, he is reflective and demure. He rejects the father he sees as a lecherous murderer. In an attempt to compensate for his father’s crime, Nejat goes to Istanbul to seek out Ayten, the daughter of his father’s accidental victim. She is nowhere to be found. What Nejat does find is a German language bookstore for sale whose owner wants to return to his homeland. Surprisingly more at home in Istanbul than the German university classroom, Nejat hears in this chance encounter an inner voice that harmonizes the divergent sonorities of his love of German and his awakened awareness of heritage.

Ayten, the missing daughter of the now dead mother, sees herself as a revolutionary and does take life-threatening risks. At a political rally, a plainclothes policeman is overpowered by the mob; his revolver falls and lands at Ayten’s feet. Quick and volatile, she grabs the gun, manages to escape the police and hides the weapon on the roof of a nondescript residential apartment building.

Ayten comes to Germany under an alias and tries to follow the clues that she hopes will lead to her mother, but Yeter has also been living under a kind of alias, disguising her real career from her daughter. Instead Ayten meets Charlotte, a university student her own age, who quickly grows infatuated with Ayten and brings the beautiful dark foreigner home to her bourgeois mother’s house. An unexpected romance develops between the two young women.

Charlotte’s mother, Susanna, does not wholly approve of or agree with her daughter’s desires and actions but she supports her. In a confrontation with Ayten, Susanna sees through the younger woman's political posturing and demands only that in her house Ayten not use vulgar language. In Susanna's simple delineating stand, Ayten is reminded of the mother she does not have.

In the search to find Yeter, Ayten is discovered by the authorities and must go through the lengthy and expensive process of seeking political asylum, paid for by Susanna. Ayten’s petition is denied on the grounds that her country is close to achieving a full western identity as an EU member. Like Ali, the illegal Ayten is returned to Turkey, though she now goes to jail for her former political activities.

As Nejat went in search of the to him unknown Ayten, Charlotte’s quest is to help her imprisoned lover. Susanna pleads with Charlotte to leave Istanbul and return home to her studies, to her own life. When Charlotte refuses, claiming that now she has found her life, Susanna withdraws her financial support. Through the bulletin board at the German bookstore now owned and run by Nejat, Charlotte comes to rent a room in his apartment.

In prison, Ayten is threatened by her former radical associates to turn over the gun she hid so long before. She enlists Charlotte’s help in recouping the hidden object, not revealing what it is.

Charlotte makes the parallel error to that of Ayten’s mother, Yeter. She focuses on what she wants out of life at the moment and forgets the reality of her outer environment. After retrieving the revolver, her bag is stolen by a gang of street urchins when she tries to brush off their entreaties for the blond foreigner to buy gum and tissues.

She brazenly chases after them and later, suddenly and unexpectedly, comes across the boys in an empty lot off a narrow side street as they wonder and marvel at the huge silver weapon. As she angrily screams her demand for the return of the gun, one of the boys pointlessly and unintentionally kills her.

In an attempt to understand her sorrowful loss, Susanna comes to Istanbul, to Nejat’s apartment, to collect the few belongings that are all that remain of her beloved daughter. She asks to spend the night in her daughter’s old room and falls asleep reading Charlotte’s diary. Susanna is awakened at dawn with the brilliant vision of her smiling daughter.

Though Charlotte could not listen to the world around her, she had listened to the inner voice that led her where it could. The vision attests to the complex fulfillment of a short life that it is difficult not to see as tragic. Susanna takes on her daughter’s wish and determination to help Ayten, who finds the parent she deeply needs in Charlotte’s anguished and willing mother.

Susanna happens to ask Nejat about his own father. She and Nejat share the ability to reflect on their experience, to patiently listen to the voices that would speak against habit and reflex, even against their former ideas of themselves. Nejat has a kind of epiphany, not unlike Susanna’s, through which he glimpses how the power of accident can re-route a life and is led toward the inevitable understanding of who his father is: a man he must forgive and embrace.

In this era the edge of heaven can only be approached through the personal encounter. Ali is freed from a meaningless, lonely and repetitious existence as a mere consumer in an inhospitable though highly developed world; Nejat enters into a life he previously could not have imagined or valued and comes to see his father’s essence; Ayten and Susanna encounter their shared ability to feel and act with courage. Without the two deaths, none of these revelations would occur. Redemption is only for those with the inner freedom to step outside their own trajectory and direct their voyage home.

Silent Light (Stellet licht)

2008-08-03T19:13:00.005-04:00

Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ third feature, “Silent Light”, takes place nominally in a Mennonite community in northern Mexico. The film’s combination of universal fable and magical realism is apparent from the first scene- a long shot of deep outer space. A galaxy slowly coalesces into the center of the image and continues its crystalline condensation toward earth as the spiraling Milky Way yields to preternaturally glimmering stars scattered along the lacy silhouette of a day-glow dawn emerging through a thicket of foliage and trees, propelled by the disembodied cries and calls of roaming wild animals.

The ominous sounds give way to the ticking clock in a brightly lit farmhouse kitchen where a farmer, his wife and family sit in silent meditation before their morning meal. The story that unfolds is of Johan’s struggle to honor his love for his wife, Esther and his attraction to Marianne, the woman with whom he is having an affair. He has kept no secrets from his wife, who patiently, supportively and lovingly awaits his decision. Johan wants to believe his liaison with Marianne could be spiritually ordained. His anguish and vacillation are evidence of his uncertainty as to which commitment is his true fate.

Long scenes of rugged landscape in wide-angle inclusiveness or pinpoint detail are punctuated with architectural vignettes that carry a deep relevance and resonance for the unfolding narrative. All of the architecture depicted is straightforward and ordinary; nothing is even slightly unusual. Through placement and direction, shape, size, color and lighting, these simple rectangles and boxes take on narrative associations far more complex than their modest purity would imply.

The first structure depicted is the farmhouse itself. Matter of fact in the extreme, its capacious interior is entirely unsurprising. Outside is another story: the large L-shaped main house nestles a small separate cottage set off to one side, seemingly uninhabited. Already we understand that there is something that the main house cannot contain.

Johan goes to pick up a repaired engine part from his friend Zacarias’ auto shop. The huge cavern of the shop’s work area is just a large box with one side that opens entirely, as with a roll-down garage door. Under the blazing morning sun the interior is as black as the underworld; undecipherable overlays of music and talk radio pour out of the mechanics’ workspace, though they are nowhere to be seen. Zacarias and his helpers are working down in a grave-like opening, which on second thought is not in the least unusual at a shop that repairs engines, trucks and cars.

The building that adjoins the dark workshop is a smaller plain white clapboard façade, as shallow in appearance as the workshop is deep. The wall is punctuated with a brown door and two small windows like closed eyes; their plain plastic shades are drawn down tight. Zacarias knows of Johan’s affair and that the two lovers are about to meet; he encourages Johan’s wish to believe that Marianne might be his “natural” woman.

Low to the ground the camera traces Johan’s steps as he climbs a hillock to join Marianne. A flat stone wall brings all movement to a halt. Three dark upright rectangular openings, possibly three doors in a game of chance or a reference to Calvary, speak irredeemably of fate. Johan is barely visible in the central opening, showering, trying to cleanse himself.

Seeking advice from his father, Johan goes to his parents’ farm. As the two converse in a snow covered field, we see a huge solid gray barn- old but implacable- it is set with a pair of enormous closed red doors. Like the united parents themselves, the barn and doors stand firm and present, their responsibility and gift are only to witness.

The seasons progress. Huge, indifferent and unrelenting, the metal teeth of a tractor shears the harvested field clean to the ground. Esther not only drives the tractor, but has made and serves the lunch that is interrupted when a messenger arrives and Johan reveals that it is a request from Marianne. Esther’s only comment is that he should take along the children for an overdue visit to the dentist.

Marianne’s world is a spacious gleaming-white truckstop diner so spotless it is impossible to imagine even the possibility of customers or food. She leads Johan to the simple motel bedroom, for what she tells him will be the last time. Afterwards they stand in front of two narrow green buildings; each has a separate external staircase leading to a single room on its second story. A drawn pink curtain marks the room from which they have come. The two buildings are so close it seems impossible that they do not and cannot connect, but they do not.

Johan tries and fails to resist his attraction to Marianne. Marianne’s sincerity and depth are above question. She, too, struggles with the truth of her relationship with Johan and her responsibility to Esther.

In a raging storm that matches her frustration, exhaustion and bottomless sorrow, Esther runs through an open field toward a copse of trees and collapses; she has nothing more to give. Like a discarded cardboard box lying in an empty field, the long low building of the rural hospital tells us the outcome of her ordeal.

Returned to the farm for the rituals and gathering of departure, the family prepares the body and makes their goodbyes. . Marianne arrives and asks to see Esther once before she is buried. The body lies in a white room so empty it appears as if in a ray of light, the companion/opposite to Marianne’s cool yet equally brilliant realm. Unlike the rest of the house that feels to be hermetically sealed, the window of this room is left ajar and the open, empty space becomes a prism connecting the two women’s essential spirits. Marianne leans down and kisses Esther tenderly on the lips, acknowledging fate and forgiveness.

The kiss unites the spheres of death and life in unspoken dialog. Marianne surrenders to her fate of taking Esther’s place. Esther grants her permission and comes to life to speak her gratitude to Marianne. The two youngest daughters enter the room and witness the exchange between their mother and Marianne, understanding that one is passing her earthly mantle to the other, that from now on Marianne is the mother of the children she could not have brought into the world. The girls are still young enough to be amenable to the mixture of the real and spirit worlds and accept this altered reality as they excitedly discuss the unusual proceedings of the day. They do not know what death is, or how long it should last, or how the journey begun in one place or person should find its way to another. The ghost of Marianne leaves the house as Johan’s father resets the clock that was stopped at the story’s start. The girls tell their father that their mother wants to talk to him.

The wide horizon darkens as the sun sets and dissolves into the enormity of the night sky, back to the twinkling stars that began this tale.

WALL-E and PRESTO

2008-07-31T20:18:00.004-04:00

The creations that come out of Pixar Animation Studios are a puzzling assortment. Invariably, the feature length presentations are technically spectacular collage pastiches composed of every conventional, sentimental and banal plot twist and character type imaginable assembled into a gleaming and self-canceling entity that attempts to exhaust critical observation into slave-like obedience and acquiescence laced with good humor. Cartoon logic is not employed but rather exploited.

Character A takes out a “loaded” gun and shoots character B between the eyes; a neat circle marks the bullet’s point of entry. Brain and skull are colorfully splattered on the wall behind or, perhaps, bolt out the back of the victim’s head like a speeding car. No matter; character B scoops it all up and pats it back into place, moving on to the next round of visual merriment.

In other words there is no such thing as consequence or non sequitur. Meaning is impossible in a world without consequence or limitation, for what could differentiate one act or state from another if the results are always interchangeable?

If only this were true and could tell us something about real life, arms and warfare would have no meaning or occasion and hospitals and doctors would be unnecessary. "WALL-E" trivializes the very buzzword topics it purports to engage and makes a parody of the very notion of the miracle of life in its “pizza-plant” finale.

The cute little rolling box with the blinking binoculars eclipses any real concern that the Earth has been devastated. That this is a love story can only be the case because WALL-E and EVE neither eat nor drink nor breathe and, therefore, can afford romance. They are not engaged in any struggle or even desire for survival, let alone franchise purchasing power. Their “lives” are mechanical operations.

The idea that the roly-poly illiterate Captain, barely able to lift his cup of morning coffee, could physically wrestle into submission a state-of-the-art technological computerized device is not an image of man overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, but rather a drowsy bed-time story for somnambulant adults who cannot face the world they have helped to create, wittingly or not, and cannot begin to imagine, let alone effect, any way out of this nightmare.

In absolute contrast to "WALL-E", the preceding short, “Presto”, is a work of cunning observation in which cartoon logic is employed to illustrate and illuminate a dark vision of reality and human resourcefulness.

Presto is a turn of the last century magician preparing for his evening performance in a grand old vaudeville theater. In the Dressing Room backstage a plump carrot rests on a mirrored vanity just out of reach of a famished white rabbit locked in a gilt cage. The rabbit furiously lunges for the carrot but to no avail. Presto enters and quickly locks the Dressing Room door. Ignoring the rabbit’s pleas for food he removes a gleaming key from his pocket and unlocks a drawer with a secret compartment containing two sparkling magical hats: a black satin top hat and a purple pointed Sorcerer’s cap emblazoned with silvery stars and the moon. Suddenly the bell rings for Curtain Time and Presto grabs the rabbit, plunking the Sorcerer’s cap on its head, and rushes off to the stage.

The hats are a magical device: the magician reaches into the top hat and his hand comes out of the sorcerer’s cap- no matter where it is, inches, feet, or perhaps, a universe away.

On stage Presto removes the top hat and reaches in to pull out the white rabbit sitting out of view in the wings. But the hungry and wily rabbit has taken the cap off his head and holds it just far enough away that the magician’s disembodied hand cannot reach him, and therefore cannot pull him out of the top hat. A series of vignettes ensues in which the rabbit continually foils the magician’s attempts to perform banal and predictable gags. As a result the performance actually becomes an inspired, unscripted dialog between the two dueling partners. The rabbit refuses to tamely cooperate because he has not been fed; Presto continues, unsuccessfully but to stunning effect, to attempt to assert his dominance.

Finally a show-stopping near-death finale elicits a spontaneous moment of awestruck silence from the theater audience before a round of rapt applause and, at last, the rabbit is fed the measly carrot. Presto takes a bow for a performance he did not intend, comprehend or appreciate and cannot repeat. In fact it was not a performance but life itself, a struggle within a context of actual consequences. Sated, the rabbit is content to be tricked back into the cage.

As the cartoon version of Nature, the rabbit wants only what nature always wants: to be fed. Man, the magician Presto, has no special talent except through his creative determination to persist. He happens to possess a device, which he can use but cannot control, the pair of enchanted hats. These hats allow him, as it were, to be in two places at once.

The hats are a metaphor of technology as opposed to the mechanical. They operate like a telephone- which is a machine and also the simplest form of technology. The salient feature of a machine is that it and its operation are limited to a specific place and time.

A visual depiction of a machine or mechanical operation is a cohesive image, commonly referred to as a “view”, whether representational or abstract. The visual depiction of technology is collage, which unites disparate elements to create an entity or understanding different from either part and that must be “read” to be comprehended, mixing speeds as well as types of perception. A collage is a visual depiction of the eradication of space and time.

For the “human” population of the orbiting spaceship in "WALL-E" the bumps on the road of life must be obliterated or smoothed out for them to roll into the future. Presto is a fully alive representation of the artist, or any person who responds creatively to the challenges of life.

Presto’s limitations and human frailty are plainly evident in his pride and the low conception of his intended performance. His true artistry and vitality are revealed in his spontaneous improvisation with the ups and downs provided by the abundantly resourceful rabbit. The creativity that springs from engagement within limitation and resistance is the true miracle of life.

Breath (Soom)

2008-06-11T00:25:00.004-04:00

“Breath” (2007), the most recent film by the Korean director Kim Ki-Duk, is a mesmerizing universe of creation and destruction entwining the literal and the symbolic with a vitality at once organically whole and serenely shattered. It is the tale of the fated meeting of a man and a woman.

He is a prisoner on death row for having murdered his wife and two young daughters, motive unknown, though it may be suspected that the brutality of his action is meant to spare them something about the horror of existence as he has come to glimpse it. For this condemned man his creative, impulsive and agonizingly repeated suicide attempts are, contextually, his only way of delaying the day of his execution: he must first recover sufficiently for the authorities to feel satisfied that full payment for his horrible crime can be exacted. Indeed, he cannot be allowed to usurp the state’s sovereign power and authority.

Unbeknownst to him there is someone he needs to meet who needs, equally, to meet him. She is a young housewife, sculptor and mother. With the discovery of her husband’s infidelity her world, or rather the tenuous illusion of life created by the rhythms and patterns of diligent hard work and devotion to her art and family, has shattered, awakening her from the dream of repeated gesture. Her husband’s affair is never more than a side issue; through the sensational televised accounts of the prisoner’s suicide attempts she has found the man she needs to encounter and is compelled by an inner necessity to seek him out .

Without knowing why, she follows the path that leads to the prison gate where she spontaneously claims to be the prisoner’s ex-girlfriend, thereby hoping to gain entry. Refused, she turns but cannot leave- she knows she must meet this man.

The surveillance camera hones in on her puzzled expression. The unseen Seer, presumably the prison Warden, phones the gatekeeper with the surprising counter-command of her permission to enter.

Kim exquisitely portrays the idiosyncratic complexity of even the most regimented authority: in absolute single-mindedness it can afford to be peripherally promiscuous. Clearly, she will not and cannot hinder the bureaucratic agenda and, perhaps, her influence, whoever she is, will help the prisoner to recover and desist in his suicide attempts. In so doing she will abet the authority’s desire, intention and duty; whatever else may or may not be accomplished is of no consequence, being outside the purview of official interest.

In the small stark visiting room she is inspired to tell of a childhood experience shared with two girlfriends; a dare to see who could hold their breath the longest under water without panicking, i.e. who could best tolerate the pull into unconsciousness without succumbing to fear and returning to ordinary breathing, to ordinary consciousness. What lived on in her from this early memory was the vague yet potent awareness of how it feels to be fully alive. Awakened from her transfixed state, she reconnects at a depth level to being alive, an impossibility without the specter of death and loss being present.

Though she has never forgotten this powerful moment only now does she come to understand that she has been living out the same long breathless moment in her upstairs apartment. Unconnected to the realities of her husband, child and work, she is not successful in any of these realms; her attitude and inclination are academic and perfunctory, if prodigious and sincere. The prisoner is all passionate action without the ability to listen, to let life take its own course; she is all endurance, discernment and dedication, without access to urgency.

Their meeting results in the magnificent creation of a series of performances that she enacts on subsequent visits, symbolic embodiments of the seasons- one full year- in costume, song and mise-en-scene. The small visiting room’s confining walls are visually pried open, figuratively eclipsed, with a wallpaper collage of bright flowers and green fields as she sings and dances a jubilant traditional ode to springtime that is both forthright and modest. As the prisoner is taken away, she gives him a photograph of herself as a young girl. Summer is brash and brassy with walls of brilliant blue sky and a coquettish rendering of teenage desire punctuated with a darting kiss.

Autumn is wistful and reflective, crowded with the burnt golds and deep reds of experience, memory and change. The accompanying photograph is a nude self-portrait, her body delicately coiled like the wrapping of a gift, her face entirely open and revealing. Finally, in winter, without scenery or song and barely sheathed in a black dress of mourning, there is a full erotic coming together at the end of which she seeks via an unbroken “taking the breath away” kiss to discover whether he is now ready to let go of life, no longer fighting for the next breath.

What is the underlying nature of their exchange? It is nothing less than a mutual initiatory experience. As a girl she did not permit her father’s beatings to destroy her need to draw, yet, as an adult- despite a fidelity to hard work at her art- could not resist the lure to buffer herself from darkness with the trappings of a normal life. She grasps that without a guiding passion commitment is merely the repetition of forms of existence. He, through the magic of her feminine heroism, which insists its way into his overly masculine, action-addicted psyche, apprehends why he has not been able to let go of life and surrender to his sentence. Before his encounter with her, his life would end incomplete.

Unlike her husband, who is genuinely able to find solace – though not passionate connection- through playing the “Moonlight Sonata”, and daughter who, at least for now, finds sufficient room to resonate within popular culture, the woman and the prisoner have not been able to find complete expression within the boundaries of collective existence. Theirs is a call to discover an aspect of existence and self that has been walled off- unwelcomed, unintegrated- and instinctively each fights in his and her own way to stay alive while there still remains a moment of hope for release from one-sidedness.

The psyche seeks the experience of wholeness; in this sense life is the preparatory journey towards the right death, as, incrementally, fulfilled experience is the path into greater living. Lucky are those who have heard the voice of life and fellow travelers in time to take up the right challenge. For most, like the prisoner, word comes too late for here and now remedy, another chance, but the symbolic realm allows the geometry of completion even after life has laid down its seemingly inexorable account.

He who has now been subjected to the power of feminine will calling the masculine out of its isolation is prepared for the release into death. She who has witnessed her potency in action can return to husband and daughter with the free gift of herself. No one will ever again circumscribe her need to live fully. She has had the revelation that living is her art, that her sculpture expressed a modest talent, not a calling. Whatever life next asks of her she will hear. The sounds of her shattered sculpture hammered into bits are her commitment to faith in herself.

Paraguayan Hammock (Hamaca Paraguaya)

2008-05-28T00:18:00.003-04:00

In “Paraguayan Hammock” the lives of Ramon and Candida, the only two characters in this fully-realized short feature directed by Paz Encina, are framed by two questions: will their son return from the neighboring 1930s border war and will it rain? A third unknown also interposes itself- is there a way to get the dog that Maximo left behind when he journeyed to the front to stop barking?

The action plays out primarily in three conversational scenes between the parents sitting in a hammock tied to two trees (rehung each day and removed each night) in a somewhat shady spot beneath the jungle canopy. Already autumn, the relentless summer heat keeps on burning down; drought is the other active character, constant as the barking dog. Rumbling thunder hints at a prospective downpour, but they note familiarly the absence of wind without which there is never any precipitation in this hillside hide-away clearing. With water, the dog might drink and they might know a moment’s quiet, but the minuscule quantity remaining to them is not enough to share.

The restless flight of birds overhead animates Ramon’s wishful divination- the wind is stirring: a hopeful sign; Candida dismisses the omen as another one of her husband’s imaginings. She can no more bear his scripted remarks than her own. Between them lies a great divide of his unbending certainty that soon enough Maximo will again appear before them and her insistence that joining the army was his needless path to certain death.

Flashback to the morning in the relatively recent past on which the young man was leaving for the front: the father cleaves sugarcane as the son reflects on the potential finality heralded by his departure. Nonsense, says the father; doing your duty is what will protect you. The mother, by contrast, tells her son to become one in camouflage with an orange tree in the forest, to take refuge away from the battlefield. In a way that was not yet apparent during the opening hammock scene, a fundamental masculine-feminine dichotomy is here depicted. To Ramon, duty faithfully done is the best guarantor of survival. For Candida, finding a way to escape the world’s arbitrary call is the only proof of caring enough about survival, let alone its possible achievement.

This difference in perspective gives another level to their dialogue when they reunite in the hammock. Now it is fully clear that their words and thoughts are not interchangeable. Though they live within the circular reality of repeated verbal ritual, his arc retains a linear stamp; each duty fulfilled in bright rising to occasion achieves the potential prolongation of life. For her, each external challenge refused is the way to keep life going in its same-ness. The aim of life is never to let yourself be seen, to sink into the protective obscurity of primordial mass, to so identify with the ordinary diurnal that you won’t be singled out, itself the first step toward death.

Ramon has summoned the village doctor, superstitious that the suddenly quiet dog may be dying. If the dog perishes, will it mean that Maximo never returns? The dog needs water, the doctor says; there is no water to spare, says Ramon. Besides, the doctor adds that he has had news from the front: the war is over and life will go back to normal. Of course, there is no way of knowing whether the combatants have been informed of the truce.

The idea that the dangers of continuing combat and the official end of hostilities may not be contradictory makes perfect sense in that the machinations of the political rulers are barely tangentially related to the struggles of regular life. In their own way these sovereign operations are equivalent to the parents’ back and forth dialogue- neither will bring on the rain or their son back home. Each is more like the elemental portions of existence: the negative/positive polarity of electrical impulse, or day and night.

Candida meanwhile gathers some fallen fruit, perhaps as their evening meal. A messenger has come to this nowhere place with news of a young man’s death; he wants to know if the name is recognizable to her. All males in this nameless anti-Eden carry the same name, she says, as if proposing that it hardly matters who may have died. Indeed, the notion that the world would pay even a moment’s attention to the supposed individual identity of the dead is so ludicrous to her that she cannot conceal her contempt for the carrier of the tidings.

It is twilight. The couple comes together once more to prepare for the end of the day. What the viewer has sensed throughout now becomes explicit. Yes, they always bicker, verbalizing their unchanging lines. Nothing can enter their closed world; no effects are possible. Known only to themselves, they live lives neither of desperation nor of potential transformation. There is nothing to await nor is waiting what they have been about. They merely occupy a space filled by the hammock until whenever its stitching wears out. Tonight warrants some morsels of food or not.

Night nears. Candida peels some fruit. Ramon lights the lamp. It is time for the return to their shack. But, wait- Ramon is about to walk off without the lamp and they are both on the verge of forgetting to take down the hammock. Candida gives voice to a glimpse of a future, when they will no longer remember that they have forgotten the markers of the end of day. Then their journey will be finished, if not entirely over. It is the ritual marking of the signifiers of process that stand for the action of life, giving it shape.

In a story which unfolds through the rhythms of waiting, with the intoned words of no greater moment than the silences, “Paraguayan Hammock” proves neither melancholy nor uplifting. Its emotional depth is miraculously carried by the total absence of any emotional charge. Waiting and waiting for are simply sundered, time itself is all that remains.

Flight of the Red Balloon

2008-04-12T20:48:00.012-04:00

With “Flight of the Red Balloon” Hou Hsiao-Hsien has created a jewel of lighter-than-air deception and quiet revelation that is both homage to and update of Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 French classic, “The Red Balloon.” The childhood loneliness at the core of the earlier film here permeates all the characters’ lives. Despite love, desire and caring good will the characters do not connect but merely overlap. Machines and technology mediate their interactions with themselves and with each other.

In the sparkling light of a summer afternoon, a young boy, Simon, scrambles up the railing of the Place de la Bastille Metro stop. Pleading with the eponymous red balloon- off screen, above the trees- to come to him, offering a king’s ransom of 100 candies, upping the ante to 2,000 caramels, but the balloon does not respond. Accepting his loss, Simon descends into the subway.

The camera drifts upwards and a glimpse of transparent red gives the impression that the balloon is nestled or trapped in the elaborate art nouveau sculpture of the Metro entrance. But this is a false start: only the crimson-tinted globe of a period lamplight. The camera proceeds upwards and we see the too-perfect opaque orb of the red balloon that caught Simon’s eye and attention.

The balloon lingers over the requisite attractive Parisian rooftops until it comes to rest on a Metro platform, patiently awaiting Simon’s train. The train arrives, the doors open; the adults come and go, pushing the unwanted obstacle of the balloon out of their way. Simon sees the balloon hovering just inches from his grasp, but this time it is he that does not respond. The train doors close and Simon goes on his appointed way. The recurrence of the balloon is not seen as magical or surprising or meaningful. Though Simon sees the balloon, its appearance does not connect to anything inside him or to the moment just a few minutes before when the balloon was the object of desire and promised sacrifice. The balloon appears many times throughout the film, though it will never again elicit a response.

In another telling of this tale one imagines that Simon would step off the train, grab hold of the balloon and be led into a journey of the unknown, or, at least, that he might try to bring the balloon into the train, activating the metaphor of merging the “other” life into the quotidian life, with all its tandem trials and lessons. But neither happens.

Song is a Chinese film student studying in Paris. She floats down a sidewalk with the same vaguely random directionality as the balloon, momentarily fluttering in a swirl at the streets' intersection, finally coming to the address she seeks. Entering a small dark theater, she encounters the rehearsal of a Chinese-inspired puppet performance that tells of a young couple, separated by the fierce Dragon king who holds the beloved prisoner at the bottom of the sea. The lover vows to boil away the ocean into a mist of oblivion to regain his true love.

Suzanne is the magnificently nuanced and varied voices of the puppets. She is a blonde rapture of vibrant talent and too much décolletage, an incarnation of frazzled beauty and distraction. Suzanne has hired Song as sitter/nanny for her son, Simon. Together they go to pick up the boy from school and Suzanne sends them home as she returns to the theater. We come to understand the sprawling nature of Suzanne’s life; a whirl of objects and emotions without order or scale, her precision is focused only in her work. On their walk home Song tells Simon of the Red Balloon film and at that moment points out a red balloon drawn onto the side of an adjacent shop. Simon does not know of the old movie and isn't interested in the image across the street; he wants to play a game of pinball.

Lovely and imperturbable, Song floats just above engagement with Simon and Suzanne, acting often as a buffer and never at a distance too great for observation. Simon is gentle, bright and related, never withholding or fearful. Song and Simon video their daily walks and errands. Song engages the boy, fleshing out his story, neither avoiding nor pursuing any of the difficult discoveries such as Simon’s parents divorce, his father’s absence or the absence of his “sort of” sister, Louise, who lives with their grandfather in Brussels.

Later, Simon and Song enter the apartment and find the usual clutter overwhelmed by a cascade of files and papers, boxes and bags. Tearful and angry, Suzanne is on the phone, saying that she cannot find the Lease Agreement, that since her husband left she cannot find where he put it or remember if she might have moved it. Suddenly the impermanence expressed in Song’s foreignness and Simon’s absent family is transferred to Suzanne herself; domestic security, apparently, is another thing of the past.

The puppet rehearsal continues and we see the undaunted young lover ladling cup after cup of seawater into a boiling pot. 2,500- 4,652 ladles of water, he counts as he goes, his ardor undiminished. A magical Genie appears, all hair and arms. To reward the young man’s effort and dedication the genie offers a magical golden coin that will help drain the ocean, forcing the Dragon king to release the beloved. In this second view there is an ominous discordance. Of course we want the young man to regain his true love, but we live in a world where technology has made actual and possible that which before was merely metaphor. Is the young man now a sociopath intent on achieving his goal at the cost to the world of the very ocean of life?

We learn that Song is making a film of a red balloon for her school project and Simon, dressed all in green, is helping by carrying the balloon. Song explains that green is a very easy color to erase digitally, so that she can make it appear that the balloon is traveling of its own volition. Suddenly the magic of the red balloon is entirely gone.

The problem of the Lease Agreement concerns the downstairs neighbor who doesn’t pay his rent; Suzanne owns that apartment as well. It had been her mother’s, and she will need it when Louise returns to Paris for school, deftly indicating that Suzanne herself is the product of a broken home. She finds the Lease Agreement and must now begin the process to force the errant downstairs neighbor to release her apartment; true love is replaced with property. It turns out that Louise does not want to come back to Paris for school, and one can see why. Her mother’s world is messy, complex and costly in many ways to herself and everyone around her. Though Suzanne is generous in emotion and substance, hers is an outmoded style, not technologically clean, not so easy to erase.

Set into the filigree of this family story is a scene of a Chinese puppet master giving a demonstration, organized by Suzanne, for a small group of students. The master's movements are so few and so slight it appears that the cloth and carved-wood doll really is a living being for whom the puppeteer has merely been so kind as to cup his hands, creating a tiny stage for the little performer to enact his scene. The puppet master appears to be doing nothing more than assisting the puppet to do what it wants, a humble gesture of loving helpfulness.

On a school trip to the Musee d’Orsay Simon’s class looks at a painting of a scene from the turn of the last century- a child chases a red ball in a dark and verdant park. In the distance, across a silent pond, a young adult couple can be seen. Who might these people be- the watching parents? More importantly, where is the artist standing, from where is the scene depicted, high above? Is the painting happy or sad? A little of both, one student replies, as Simon gazes up through the gallery’s skylight at the red balloon that flutters just above the glass. It has followed him throughout the film and, as before, he has no response to seeing it again, nor to the co-incidence- synchronicity- of seeing it represented in the painting even as it hovers above, embodying the artist's point of view.

The endless variety and sophistication of technology has robbed the world of its voice for magic and the extraordinary. In one scene Simon is “drawing” Louise through a projector device that allows him to trace her outline on an affixed sheet of paper; he looks into the machine, not at her. Suzanne peers through the viewfinder of her camera to record this fleeting moment of quiet childhood togetherness; like the scattered family it will not last.

One imagines, if one doesn’t know the effect first-hand, that to Simon, brought up with technology and totally conversant with its varied modalities, seeing the red balloon now here, now there, can carry no meaning because he cannot differentiate these occurrences from the sequential and random representations on a screen while web or channel surfing or gaming. His range of expression is limited to pressing buttons and moving “mice”; all of which breaks down barriers of conventional vision while subtly directing and coercing as it robs vision of its capacity to see anew, differently, or to persist on a path of one's own making. Since anything can always appear anywhere at any time, no particular appearance is significant.

Contempt (Le Mepris)

2008-04-06T19:54:00.006-04:00

Forty-five years later Godard’s masterpiece, “Contempt”, remains a startling visual stylization, majestically interweaving cool piercing intellect with surprising emotional breadth and depth.

Ostensibly a film within a film, the opening scene credits Godard’s film about the making of Fritz Lang’s film of “The Odyssey”. Lang, playing himself, is glorious as actor, director, Greek chorus and Tiresias all rolled into one man of heart and vision.

Piccoli and Bardot, the young married couple Paul and Camille, are to some extent merely stand-ins for the characters they play. They are not required to render real performances any more than the actors in Lang’s “Odyssey” are required to do more than place their bodies within the frame of the camera’s gaze. These actors represent pawns in a game played by the gods. So, too, forces beyond their control and understanding buffet about the actors, directors and the young couple in the “real life” of Godard’s epic journey. To be discordant is in keeping with the modern fractured world.

Bardot is never more sublimely empty than in the scene showing her smoldering nude body stretched out across a bed glowing in voluptuous semi-darkness. It is the first of many different versions of contempt. In the mumbled tones of intimate after-love, Camille inventories her own formidable physical assets, asking Paul if he loves each body part she enumerates. With her laundry list of skin and bones, she is plainly telling him that this transient envelope of existence is all of her that there is to be known.

She suspects him, even now, of not being entirely fulfilled in the thrall of the perfect specimen of the machine of her body. Her contempt is also for becoming a real woman beyond the perversely conventional dichotomy of wife/femme fatale. All she can do is try on a black wig; in her world, a different look is the closest she can get to a different dimension.

Paul asserts that he loves each part of her equally, from which she concludes in dead earnest that he therefore loves her completely. He agrees, adding, “tragically.” Matching her black wig, he has adopted the look of a black hat in the hopes of inheriting some of Dean Martin’s charisma and success. It is his effort to acquire a desired aspect rather than discover his own character.

Paul pretends that he is a serious writer rather than a hack journeyman for hire. Though he knows how to secure a reasonably hefty paycheck and to play hard to get, what he has to offer is a list of decaying literary attributes as lifeless as Camille’s body parts. If he at an earlier time aspired to even a modicum of artistic achievement, he turned out to be no more than an avenue for someone else’s prosaic imagination to travel on. The longevity of his market value will not exceed Camille’s. Neither has the substance without which personal destiny has no core.

Camille and Paul’s story mimics in pathetic dis-similarity the story of Ulysses and Penelope. Paul has been asked by a famous American producer, Jerry Prokosch- played with over-sized vulgarity and ceaseless narcissistic zeal by Jack Palance- to rewrite the script for Lang’s film to make it sexier and “new.” Prokosch invites the couple to his villa for a drink, taking the beautiful young wife in his little red sports car while vaguely suggesting that Paul come along in a cab. Camille is hesitant; Paul insists she go, that he will follow. She exudes the uncertainty and anger of being even temporarily unclaimed by the designated other. The spell of her and Paul’s magical interlude is broken; she cannot forgive.

Paul’s cab ride, like Ulysses' journey, doesn’t go as planned. The taxi gets into an accident. To find another cab he has to walk for 20 minutes from the Castello Sant’Angelo to the Piazza Venezia. He is half an hour late. With the heartless brevity redolent of contemporary attention deficit disorder, Ulysses’ decade of meaningful wandering and development has been reduced to thirty pointless minutes. These few minutes of unexpected waiting have stretched Camille beyond her resources. Paul makes matters worse by flirting with the producer’s attractive assistant/interpreter. Each knows that this day has revealed something neither of them wanted to discover.

Paul quotes Dante’s lines about Ulysses' last voyage: “We rejoiced, but soon our joy turned to grief…and the sea closed in on us.” Perhaps the most concise poetic description of the journey of life and a virtual blueprint description of Paul and Camille's fate, this oracle is followed by the spectacularly oppositional imagery of the harsh and dry opaque verticality of the rocky cliffs of the island of Capri partly encircling and overshadowing a tiny cove of brilliant, glistening deep turquoise water.

For Lang, Ulysses’ character cannot be changed without changing the entire nature and substance of the story- it would no longer be the Odyssey. That Ulysses could not restrain his desire to gain experience of the world despite his love for his family and known world was the instantiation of his desire to know himself; he and his world are inseparable. Lang’s interpretation and understanding of the Odyssey and of Ulysses is of no interest to the American producer. Prokosch wants to re-envision the context of the Odyssey with Ulysses restyled as a modern man, an everyday neurotic. Secretly unhappy with Penelope and suspecting her fidelity, in this version Ulysses goes off to war, not bothering to hurry home after the victory and only killing all his wife’s suitors in order to save face. Prokosch’s Ulysses is a clever, defensive ambler, irrelevant in an uncaring world, responding as best he can to gain advantage or evade the unwanted.

Paul resonates with this convenient view of Ulysses’ fate for it will explain why Camille no longer loves him. Paul’s boredom, thoughtless over-confidence, carelessness, and meaningless flirting have produced her disdain. That this idea makes no sense doesn’t matter. It fits the modern concept of mechanistic cause and effect, lacks entirely any sense of responsible volition and obviates any deeper understanding of or inquiries about the nature of love and desire. Camille responds by flirting with Prokosch partly to punish Paul, but more because she has no other persona to enact or call upon.

Camille recalls idyllic images of their earlier happiness: a simple, uncomplicated and unconscious love of unboundaried bliss and pleasant delirium. Paul envisions a time when Camille would no longer love him, but the corresponding image is of her perfect unchanged nude body, suppliant as always. She dreams of the past; he begins to imagine a different future.

The young couple argues. Paul asks Camille why she no longer loves him and her reply is that she would rather die than tell. However, barely a few minutes pass before she does tell: she hates him because he is incapable of moving her. Camille’s contempt is akin to hating god for not being more god-like. As if denouncing a false god for his impotence, she does not see that the error and responsibility are her own. She no longer loves Paul because he is just a man. Previously she placed him in the position of a god, or, at least, co-conspirator in their undifferentiated and repetitive unconscious instinctual vitality. Now she finds he cannot make her love him any more than a god can make someone believe or worship sincerely. She feels abandoned and is incapable of moving in any direction on her own. She needs the other to move her, even as she resists. Prokosch’s large gestures may be empty and false, but they are unambiguous and predictable. It is no surprise when she goes off with the American; their fates are sealed in their separate yet equal inabilities to find another dimension or view of themselves. Endless repetition requires no next scene and the handsome runaway couple meet a sudden and unglamorous end in a highway accident: the little red sports car crushed like crumpled paper in the gigantic rig of a tractor-trailer, the two bodies slumped like discarded dolls.

Lang’s deeply human and humane character reminds us that man can only be human. Dante echoes again; man is not made to live like a brute, but to follow virtue and knowledge: to aspire to them, to keep them ever in our sight.

In the final scene of Godard’s film Paul has found the letter from Camille and he, too, prepares to depart. On the rooftop terrace of the Capri villa, Lang is shooting the end of his film; he describes it to Paul as that moment when Ulysses first sees his homeland. The actor playing Ulysses, barely more than a prop himself, moves sideways across the edge of the terrace. The camera sweeps along with him and then finally past him, out to a pure uninterrupted view of the horizon of sky and sea. Nothing and everything is there. The film has come full circle back to its own beginning as Ulysses eventually comes back to Ithaca. It is no mere return, the place and man are no longer the same, each is new and more. To find his way home Ulysses must first see his home in his mind’s eye, exactly as the artist must first see the vision of his work.

The Witnesses

2008-03-21T19:59:00.003-04:00

Andre Techine’s new film, “The Witnesses”, is a difficult and courageous vision wrapped in a gay romance and sophisticated contemporary folklore. Set in Paris, 1984, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic, it weaves together the fates of five characters whose lives passively bear witness to their era, location and personal histories. For each one of them there is a moment of experience in which the observer becomes the act-or, awakening momentarily to witness in a deeper, evidential way the truth of his/her singular existence and struggle and is permitted, through the convergence of freedom and necessity, to make some mark in the world.

That these moments of transformation do not eventuate in transformed characters is one of the more shocking aspects of this bristling story. The changes that occur are not meaningless, but the film questions the model we use to view the development of character and of life itself. The neat progression of stacking, cumulative perceptions is replaced by the random non-linear hyper-action of the molecular images of the replicating virus and the ceaseless up/down, in/out of the flow of waves along the shore.

The film opens with a furiously-paced score that matches the intensity of a young woman, Sarah, stabbing at the keys of a red typewriter, her gaze darting everywhere in a desperate attempt to pull an elusive oracle out of thin air. She circles and crosses out the freshly typed lines until almost nothing remains. We feel her tension, urgency and dissatisfaction.

In a hospital corridor a handsome dark man, Mehdi- a police detective and father of a new-born- bickers with Adrien, a middle-aged doctor. Sarah, the new mother and Mehdi’s wife, looks trapped and cautious in the hospital bed, leery of the baby lying nearby.

Sarah’s friend Adrien is a gay man who cruises for sex at night in the park where he meets Manu, newly arrived in Paris with little more than youth, good looks and two years of culinary schooling. Manu is fiercely independent and clear in rejecting Adrien as a sex partner but welcomes him as a friend. Manu lives with his sister Julie, an aspiring young singer, in a small room in a seedy hotel occupied mostly by amiable prostitutes.

Early in the film, a dramatic example of the sudden call from observer to actor presents itself. Sarah invites Adrien and Manu for a seaside weekend. After lunch on the beach, Mehdi swims far out into the cove. Manu follows, swimming out past his ability and would certainly drown if not for Mehdi’s determination to pull the dead weight back to shore. The two go on to become lovers; their trysts are simultaneously full of passion and lifeless. Manu cannot give himself to anyone, while Mehdi feels physical longing, nothing more. Because their liaison is not the basis for renewal, they return to being observers of their lives, even at a carnal peak.

Adrien likes beautiful boys and can afford to treat himself. He comes to think of Manu as his great love, not least because they are not sexually involved. During a narcissistic outburst of well-practiced wounded love-pride, the doctor’s initiatory moment reveals itself in the sores and lesions on Manu’s chest that he rightly intuits as the presence of a new killer disease.

The shock of recognition allows Adrien to step out of his petty habituation, giving him a larger sphere in which to focus and utilize his estimable resources and expertise. Manu’s decline is steady and ineluctable. Whereas Mehdi could just pull Manu out of the deep water, Adrien is essentially helpless. Adrien’s commitment to starting a war against this disease while shepherding Manu through his decline and death lends his own life meaning and purpose. Once Manu dies and he picks up the next handsome boy, he is back to the mechanics of living, pattern without recognition.

Sarah learns of her husband’s affair with Manu but harbors no ill-will toward either man. What Sarah rejects is motherhood; it is not a child but a book that she wants to bring into the world. She is keenly aware of the unsympathetic response this provokes. She is honest and determined, struggling with a novel that does not come together and ultimately must be thrown out. She cannot find her story.

At Adrien’s for a Christmas dinner with Manu and Julie, Sarah asks Julie about the magic of her art. Julie is quick to disabuse Sarah of so romantic a notion. It is hard, muscular work- more like athletics- finding the right place in the throat from which to produce the correct sound. Momentarily alone with the diseased and disfigured boy that was her husband’s lover, Sarah gives Manu the kiss he asks for. Like a medieval princess encountering a leprous beggar in a wondrous legend, she willingly offers her lips; in that touch with death, chance and transcendence, Sarah understands that she has found the subject for what will undoubtedly be her one completed piece of adult fiction.

Manu’s moment comes in the humble guise of a store-bought stew provencal, casually and improperly prepared. He rejects it and along with the stew everything that is fractional and wrong, including his own life, which he ends with an overdose of pills provided by Adrien.

The day that Julie and Adrien bury her beloved brother, Julie admits that all her feeling and attention have gone to safe-guarding her voice for that night’s performance. Julie’s is a minor operatic talent at which she has slaved away to the point of becoming a viable performer in a small Mozart role. She has found the place in her throat and her place in career, but it does not correspond to any particular location in the world.

Mehdi returns to his detective work and family life; Sarah returns to her husband and child. Adrien continues his work and finds the next boy, relieved of having to rename convenience and habit as love; Julie is free to accept an offer to sing with a company in Munich; there is no reason not to go.

Thus it can be said that the witness element in Techine’s film is not about the distinction between action and observation. A character may be engaged with his or her life’s routine while not birthing new life within or without. A moment of engagement is just that: an experience of lived life. Only when a calling surfaces- saving the swimmer, fighting AIDS, perfecting vocal expression, discovering a narrative- is there a shift out of witnessing and into some completion, a hiatus from routine and the perpetual cycles of life.

The Duchess of Langeais

2008-03-03T20:01:00.004-05:00

“The Duchess of Langeais”, Jacques Rivette’s new film, opens with images leading the viewer across an ancient church floor patterned with symbols redolent of mysterious power, patched and faded beyond legibility if not resonance. A filigreed iron grille of prison-like bars separates absolutely the luminous space of an elaborately carved high altar, glistening with gilding and color and embellished with narrative images that we cannot see, from the darkened nave where seated congregants dutifully listen to a vocal concert Mass by the convent nuns, now used to celebrate the latest regime change: post-Napoleonic royal restoration. The church and convent is the crowning and orienting complex on an isolated rock of island jutting up into the sky from the pure blue line of the sea.

The film demarcates spheres of possibility and action and requires that the viewer abandon a premise normally taken as axiomatic: that the storyline will unfold in a fashion where the narrative elements build so as to reveal an underlying depth dimension.

Whatever vertical dimension exists in this work lives outside the story proper. It is referred to in the tale told by Armand, a French general; equally it shows up in the imagery of the up and above convent to which Antoinette, the duchess, repairs after her unconsummated affair seems to render daily life in society intolerable to her. Each of the two main characters encounters a life moment which offers the potential for a transformative experience. Neither, however, is prepared to receive an unanticipated shift in understanding, so that no defining moment can occur.

Antoinette and Armand meet at one of the elegant nightly soirees that constitute the socially acceptable round of amusements for upper class Parisians. She is intrigued by the damaged and illustrious soldier; he determines to make the beautiful duchess his mistress; more deeply each intuits in the other a trustworthy reflection of a substanceless stance.

Armand in successive segments tells the duchess of his time on campaign in the desert of Africa when he had to march barefoot under a punishing sun over a brutal terrain that never seemed to get closer to its goal. The native guide had lied about the distance, for there was no way back. Armand’s bitter denunciation produces no response from the guide except an indifferently offered dagger with which he may end his suffering, if he so chooses. Marching on, pushing himself beyond his physical limits and carried for the final distance on the native’s shoulders, he ultimately reaches that place which offers him a clear vision of the equal presence of opposites: desert on one side, oasis on the other. Life, he is invited to see, challenges him to choose a direction that calls to him.

To Armand, however, the experience he describes has no impact. The journey, far from being an entry into awareness, becomes reduced to a harried remembrance of when physical survival hung in the balance. The ordeal opens no new understanding because Armand does not have the capacity to encounter himself in a new form. Rather, he continues on the same road he will follow when he begins to woo the duchess- a determination to successfully complete a quest with which he is not actually engaged.

Suitably married to a husband of the right rank, Antoinette is only required to fulfill her mundane social duties. She is more than welcome to a love affair if she so desires, provided discretion is exercised as to the where and when. It would seem from very early in the film that we are witnessing the unfolding and inevitable consummation of a passionate liaison.

Something, alas, is missing. The lover, though often ardent in his words of pursuit, is barely lukewarm in his actions. Similarly, the woman for whom he is supposedly pining away speaks as though her whole life between their meetings is just dead routine. Antoinette is a flurry of energetic anticipation in preparing for Armand’s visits, yet, as soon as they are together, she is as distant in the present as ambiguous about a future between them.

The duchess takes the poses of a woman falling in love, even as we witness her infatuation with the style, not with the man. Armand brusquely makes a demand he cannot effect and Antoinette trumps his bluff by simply asking “how?” He arranges for the duchess’ abduction, but in parallel fashion loses the spark once it could catch flame. Armand has all the trappings of a man of action, but we recognize them as circumstantial, not characterological.

Once it is unmistakable that the two will never become lovers, Rivette teases us with the cleverness of the unraveling. They who cannot but be appearances to each other must remain hot in pursuit of what neither would know how to want. How can the frustration of this failed attraction be rendered meaningful?

Miraculously, the film provides an unexpected, though forceful, answer. The surrounding characters function as mouthpieces of the idea that adherence to social form and subordination of any feeling to the necessity of weighing how it is to function in the world is precisely what gives life meaning. Forget transformative experiences, grand passions, religious conversions, liftings of the veil- no one wants them. If some misfit is seduced by a moment of inner revelation into imagining a different life, it is everyone’s task, by way of censure or complicity, to unite towards supporting that person in keeping the personal private until it can be conveniently forgotten.

Each of these characters is in harmony with his/her station in life; they are survivors. The aging and practical Princess, like the convent’s Mother Superior later, understands that form is the only unconditional reality of any given collective; the worldly and veteran Monsieur de Pamier understands that life can only be lived at the juncture of appearance and sentiment. The duchess’ maid, Lisette, can easily resist the luxurious cream-filled pastries that do not agree with her and Julien, the Majordomo, knows that his lot is to obey command and bell alike. Like the Princess and Pamier, these two know how to negotiate advantage from the small, yet immensely variable, slice of latitude that social form and the necessities of life allow.

Antoinette and Armand have found in each other the needed foil for their own reflections. Seemingly the misfits, they are, in fact, utterly conventional. Their security lies in being told that there can be no life outside the rules. Neither wants the substance of contact, for each knows of his/her incapacity to fully surrender to experience. Their gamesmanship ratchets up into high gear until the duchess ruins herself socially, eventually finding her way to the inspired depravations of the religious refuge.

Armand plans to abduct the duchess a second time. With his band of accomplices, the weary and sickly general breaks in to the convent, too late: the duchess is dead. Again, he can think of nothing better than to follow through on his original plan and steals Antoinette’s lifeless body, carrying the corpse back to his waiting ship. Armand is now as adrift as the directionless vessel that suddenly no longer has purpose. His cohort suggests tying weights to the meaningless body and dumping it into the sea, henceforth thinking of the entire experience like a childhood story, or a poem.

The Letter Never Sent

2008-02-12T17:06:00.001-05:00

“The Letter Never Sent” directed by Mikhail Kolatozov is, above all, a film of and about passion, the manifold forms in which fire courses within, rages across and deeply defines the human struggle to find, create, experience and share a life of meaning and value on a personal level and within the collective.

“Letter” is an updated Tale of the Round Table. Medieval, that is to say “timeless”, characters in modern guise- three geologists: Konstantin, the young couple Tatyana and Andrei, and the group’s guide, Sergei- are dropped off by helicopter into the silent vastness of the Siberian tundra. Their arduous mission is to locate the much hoped-for treasure of diamonds that scientific understanding strongly suggests must be present, though no previous expedition has succeeded in finding any hint of the precious stones. This form of nature’s unceasing wealth will provide profitable and productive livelihood and pay for a futurity of further discovery- the exploration of outer space.

What makes this 1959 Soviet-era film remarkable is that- within a setting in which the grand and ruthless power of nature dominates and dwarfs the human figures- four distinct and fully realized character portraits are achieved.

Sergei’s life is akin to that of the huntsman/adventurer. Battling the elements is his home territory; sensation and action are his defining characteristics. He demands his right to distance from the others even as he grows aware that he has fallen in love with Tatyana. He is moved and transformed by the emergence of a passion and need for the other he never dreamed possible; in his inmost soul he recognizes that this love will never be consummated.

Andrei is the inverse figure to Sergei. Earnest and dedicated to his career, he has found a biding and requited love with Tatyana. Open-hearted, his energy is primarily mental; he is the husbandman who nurtures and cares for the fulfilling passion that life has brought to him.

Tatyana, herself a committed scientist, is also the instinctive feminine, passionately in love with life, utterly able to sense and deliver what the moment requires. She understands and values the unique qualities of each of the men. Her love for Andrei is deep and genuine; it must be seen as an aspect of her hunger for life.

Konstantin- the film’s narrator- is the group’s leader, a sage and irrepressible knight errant. He is the explorer who is compelled by the vision of finding and bringing new riches to mankind. His is the essential understanding that saving/securing the priceless material is his only purpose; for the seeker, this alone can complete human incarnation.

Konstantin’s mode of centering himself on the expedition (from whence the film derives its title) is to write to his beloved wife, Vera. Vera, whom we only see as a shimmering presence of memory or projection, is unmistakably an inner figure on Konstantin’s journey, like Beatrice to Dante.

Over the entire summer and well into the autumn the band struggles in the grueling and unrewarded labors of trying to locate the diamonds and with the unfolding and deepening of their individual stories. Konstantin cannot believe that both his deep, experienced intuition and the scientific data could be wrong, and regretfully acknowledges that without positive results there will be no more expeditions.

Frustrated in discovery of diamonds and of love, Sergei doubles his efforts digging relentlessly into the open wounds of the earth. Charged and pushed to the limit, his physical pull toward Tatyana is at its most overpowering. She averts the moment absolutely, yet with a keen emotional understanding that respects Sergei’s sincerity and tenderly affirms his feelings for her at exactly the right note of intimacy. Thus, though unrequited, Sergei’s love for Tatyana enables him to experience the miracle of his need for the other, thereby touching a place of inner completion.

Tatyana’s expansive and deeply human gesture seems as if to usher in the discovery of the diamonds. The group’s dedication and efforts are rewarded; it seems now that their journey has meaning. They prepare to return to Moscow with the confirming samples and maps to the treasure lode. It seems that all has ended well.

During the night the entire forest bursts into a great fire, surging in every direction. Sergei fearlessly races to secure the provisions already loaded into the small boats, as Konstantin, Andrei and Tatyana are barely able to collect their equipment and follow. Caught behind a raging stand of flames, Sergei throws the bags of supplies to the others, knowing that he will be consumed in this final quest. With his death comes a downpour of rain, diminishing- though not extinguishing- the fire, giving the survivors a slim chance to track a path to rescue.

They can only move as the fire permits, zigzagging over the treacherous terrain. Andrei injures his leg; radio contact for revealing their whereabouts to the base camp is lost. Andrei’s precipitous physical decline requires Tatyana and Konstantin to carry him as more and more of everything extra is discarded. His awareness that he has become extra baggage eventuates in his reasoned and loving plea that they leave him behind and try to save themselves. They refuse; he slips away, disappearing into the icy waters as the other two sleep. His is the second and complementary sacrifice to the needs of the now group of two.

Frantic and unable to find him, Tatyana is pierced to the core by Andrei’s suicide, her inability to save him. Yet she must stay present to what is needed next. As the Siberian winter begins to take hold she and Konstantin face the most elemental survival odds: can they, without supplies and food, make it to a clearing or the large river before the ice petrifies them? Finally there is nothing more for her to do; the moment has become frozen in time. Now she can only affirm her own death. Konstantin is left on his own.

Miraculously, he makes his way to the ice-crusted river, glistening in the dim afternoon light like the diamonds they have all sacrificed so much to achieve. He cobbles a raft from a fallen tree and loose brush. He knows that he cannot survive to deliver his message. Because he understands that personal survival is without meaning, whereas the sacred stone holds the complete meaning of both symbol and substance, he recognizes with almost his last strength that he can drift down the river and out to sea on an iceflow; there he will be visible and found after his death with the treasure and map in his pocket.

Interweaving four characters with this level of complexity so that the viewer can see each destiny fulfilled and can grasp that securing the treasure for the use of the community is the ultimate human purpose allows the director to convey a vision of futurity of far greater significance than the specific politics of the state. Only the unconditionally embraced journey can lead to the new.

Cassandra's Dream

2008-02-04T14:53:00.001-05:00

Woody Allen’s provocative new film “Cassandra’s Dream” might aptly be titled ‘All in the Family’. It opens with two young men, brothers Ian and Terry, caught -like everyone- in the maelstrom of modern consumer capitalism, feverishly scheming to buy a beautiful sailboat they cannot afford. The men reinforce each other’s desires in exactly the wrong ways and hoped-for rescue from their uncle Howard, the mother’s brother and a self-made tycoon, turns out to be the sealing of their terrible fate.

They want the boat. Already it is a symbol of a futurity of freedom based on a shared childhood memory of an idyllic afternoon sailing. That they are too young to be looking back so desperately and so longingly is only one of several sirens screeching from the wings. Terry, a mechanic at a local auto shop is a gambler. Recent winnings at the dog track secure the boat and the dog’s name, Cassandra’s Dream, is not heard as warning but used to christen the new purchase.

Ian and Terry are not unsuccessful, per se, but going nowhere and hopelessly adrift on the raging tide of modern life that is predicated on buying what one cannot afford. Installment plans, credit and subsidies are the smoke and mirrors that soften the hard edges of unrelenting routine and shrinking futures.

The young men and their parents live a comfortable life well beyond their means, subsidized by uncle Howard. Long ago their ultra-practical mother accepted that- without the largess from her brother- the earnings from her husband’s barely sustainable restaurant would have left them an impoverished family and made untenable her agreeable days of television and cigarettes. She shares her brother’s vision, minus the ambition.

The more substantial sibling, Terry, has an innate desire to live within his means; he serves an inherent moral sense. It is his voice that speaks the weightless Cassandra-like prophecies so easily and reflexively deflected by his brother Ian. But Terry can neither afford nor maintain conviction; he is drowning in alcohol, pills and gambling debt. Ian, on the other hand, lacks character and conviction equally. Time after time in their conversations, his vacuous amorality trumps Terry’s decency. Terry simply must have money for booze and the gaming table, thus, must defer to Ian even as he inwardly wrestles with the wrongness of Ian’s point of view.

Ian is willing to believe and do whatever it takes to keep alive his fantasy of future potency as a hotel mogul while he marks time working in the family restaurant. On the sly he borrows flashy Jaguars from his brother’s auto shop and pretends he already has the life to match the cars. His eye is always roving for the ‘upgrade’; he dumps a waitress from the restaurant for Angela, an attractive but talentless actress whose image, and costliness, is more fitting to his imagined life.

One scene alone stands in contrast to the rest of the film. Angela’s parents come into London, presumably to meet the new financier-beau. In a brief moment the father takes Ian aside, conceding that he knows his daughter is high-maintenance merchandise. He reveals that he, too, once had a chance for a life at the high stakes table, but recognized he hadn’t the nerves or stomach for it and became, instead, a driver for the men he was destined not to emulate. Here is one small man who can take his own measure and face what he sees. But times have changed.

Enter uncle Howard! Despite humble beginnings, he established himself as the head of an international enterprise with vague medical associations; over the years his financial success has kept his sister’s family afloat. His nephews hope he will rescue them, again, as usual. Howard is readily willing to foot the bill for the boys’ new futures, but has a favor of his own that is the price of their second chance. As in all higher-level financial dealings, Howard’s gains have been at the expense of others; he is actively immoral. Irregularities in his business affairs have not so much been found out as that there is now a witness, a former colleague, willing to testify. Howard faces exposure, jail and ruin, while his nephews need his economic support- Terry to erase his outsize debt, Ian to sign on to his dream investment.

Howard contracts his nephews to remove the threatening witness by whatever means they choose. Beyond economics this is their opportunity to internalize the truth that the world’s morality is whatever you can get away with and that the spoils belong to the victor. Whoever accepts those rules has a fighting chance to make a mark in life; everyone else (like the boys’ father) is merely washed in and out by the waves.

The neat small core of the film is the planning for the crime and the after effects of its execution. Terry, predictably, cannot live with himself in the secret knowledge of his participation. For Ian, this has just been one more disagreeable task on the road to imagined power and prestige.

As the witness’ plan to tell all against Howard set the central plot in motion, the threat that Terry, burdened by conscience, will expose what occurred repeats the same idea. He must be gotten rid of for Howard and Ian to feel safe. Now it is brother versus brother in a battle for survival. The plan Ian contrives to make Terry’s death appear a suicide looks foolproof; however, at the last moment Ian’s will is not strong enough and it is he that cannot survive. Herewith comes the repetition of the theme that immorality can only succeed when it has no boundary.

The film ends with the police speculating about the double-death: lots of booze and drugs; one kills the other, by accident or on purpose, the survivor kills himself.

In Woody Allen’s pitch-dark vision, there are neither wins nor partial triumphs; death and destruction claim their daily victims, preparing the way for the story’s next version. The Cassandra of myth (she whose prophecy was fated not to be believed) lingers on in some new story with the same characters. Corrupt CEOs and those in their debt continue to play out the inertial life of money.

Last Year at Marienbad

2008-02-01T21:50:00.001-05:00

“Last Year at Marienbad” (or was it Fredericksbad?) explores the phenomenon of memory and the idea of possibility in the context of the spa-going European rich between the wars. More precisely, its concern with memory- which on the surface is about identifying and proving what happened when, where and to whom- describes an obsession with naming literal events that had no outcome last year anymore than they can in the present.

Alain Resnais’ film moves through repetitive ritual to a depiction of the stagnation which results when forms and patterns of behavior become surrogates for action. The environment of Marienbad is an active element of the film barricading and confounding any possibility that even chance could enter the equation to counter inertia.

The film begins with long, elaborate and repetitive scenes of the setting of the luxurious spa. Its gilt encrusted ceilings and walls; the endless enfilade of dimly glittering hallways and heavily paneled doors that lead to more hallways and other doors, an ineluctable Piranesian loop.

The colorless trompe l’oeil murals of the walls and the occasional framed period etching depict formal gardens almost identical to the flat geometric park surrounding the villa. These images are less works of imagination than random game board instructions. They are relentless reminders for the characters parading from room to room, that this world operates in single-point perspective, where depth is merely alluded to by way of elaborate adjustments and calculations. It isn’t actually achievable, let alone desirable, by the rules of their game.

On stage an actress and actor- dressed, coiffed and bejeweled exactly as the audience members at the spa’s little theater- deliver their lines as if automatons. All of the characters, only three of whom emerge as actual identities, share a lifelessness which is inescapable.

The narrative voice belongs to one of them, the suitor. His pervasive role is to establish, particularly with the woman he pursues, what happened when they met the year before and fell in love. His fractured argument moves to define what has to have happened at that time for him to know all that he does about her. Almost convincing in its specifics, the case he makes nonetheless lacks any embodied reality.

That this is so continually leads the viewer back to the film’s central paradox: the very urgency of unveiling the truth about last year is trumped by the certainty of inertia. The suitor cannot differentiate between persistence and will, which he entirely lacks and fears. The unrelenting quality of his quest is entirely betrayed by his willingness to postpone action.

The object of his love, the exquisite, young Delphine Seyrig, is a parody of restless passive beauty. Neither can she give herself to anyone or anything, nor can she maintain a position or point of view (- she never stays anywhere more than a few weeks and, repeatedly, we see her break the heel of her shoe.) She represents fear in its overt form. Her modus operandi is escape; whether sitting, standing, lying or walking her internal focus is on knowing where the exit from the moment lies. For her, fear is not a negative emotion, but a comfortable milieu and an actual safeguard enabling an exploration which cannot eventuate in any conclusion. Even if unwillingly, she can endure small doses of her pursuer’s portrayal of what transpired when last they met. Her decisive place of confidence rests in her ability to counter any certainty about what happened with the parry that decision can await a future time. Such time, of course, could never actually present itself, since only the fear has life.

The third figure, her husband, is an agent of death who inspires fear. Little more capable of action than the others (who represent feelings of fear and sentiment), he represents will, though meaningless and without effect.

The symbol of his might is a game/trick that he displays early in the film to establish his dominance among the residents at Marienbad. Sixteen objects- matches, cards- are placed in four rows: 7. 5. 3. 1. The rule: each of the two players may, in a given turn, take away one or more pieces, but only from one row. Whoever must take the last piece loses. The husband calmly asserts that though he could lose, he never does.

Everyone wants to figure out a strategy or gimmick to explain the winner’s luck: who goes first; take away even numbers only; etc. But the game can only be won by paying attention as you go. The husband neither needs to confuse nor cheat; he only has to concentrate- an impossibility for the other characters who are either unconscious or dead in their faithful observance of meaningless forms. The husband lives only through the will to win, however pointless. Obviously the winnings mean nothing to him, only the power.

That power also describes his hold on his wife. Given that his very presence inspires fear, he is her perfect mate. She gets to hold onto the freedom of being afraid without respite, while he gets to experience total control with the absence of desire. Each of these characters remains impervious to any external stimulus; each also achieves constancy of occupation because their own feeling states never bore them. They are ghosts in an airless world. Like the images on the walls, the characters live a 2-dimensional existence, lacking depth in every sense of the word. Their world is like a blueprint or a map, where a journey can be conceived, plotted and traced, even confirmed, but never taken.

When finally the wife does go off with the suitor, they are each fulfilling a role like young children in a school play, or markers on a game board. The suitor does not want, nor can he, change his role to become a man, the lover. He is terrified of will and force- potency, and of the loneliness of even momentary non-consensuality. The wife cannot live in an environment free from fear and the need to escape. Having nothing but surface and form, she has nothing to give to a man who would want her as a woman. Equally powerless where real action is concerned, the husband cannot stop them, but knows they can go nowhere.

As the fatelessly mismatched couple flees into the night, the narrator puzzles over how it is possible, in this plain, flat garden- devoid of all vegetation or any obfuscating element, where everything is straight paths and right angles- that, even now, they are losing their way.

The Education of Fairies (La educacion de hadas)

2008-02-01T21:48:00.001-05:00

The Education of Fairies by director Jose Luis Cuerda pretends to take place in the present; it is really a wondrous fairy tale. Like all such stories, it offers a warning of the dangers of living in a partial world with a partial view, however beautiful.

Nicolas, a middle-aged toy designer with mercurial sparkle in his eyes, lives in a beautiful and rambling stone casita in the Catalan countryside with his childhood nanny-cum-housekeeper. On a flight to Barcelona he sees Ingrid and her precocious young son, Raul, and instantly falls madly in love with both.

Ingrid, an ornithologist, is conveniently divorced from her son’s now dead father who was a pilot and a Viscount, which makes her the modern equivalent of a princess. She and Nicolas marry and for two years happiness reigns in the secluded domain. Nicolas and Ingrid enjoy a passionate love life and Raul receives a fanciful education on the lives and powers of fairies in his nightly bedtime stories from Nicolas. The stepfather and young boy bond deeply in walks in their own enchanted forest complete with magical trees and a secret hideaway.

Then the magic seems to come undone, the spell broken. Raul will not agree to being adopted by a man with such a common last name. Ingrid wants separate bedrooms, complaining of Nicolas’ snoring, and then threatens a more complete break. But why? He loves her; she loves him; there is no one else. All we know is that Ingrid is a beautiful woman who is about to turn 40 and breaks into tears whenever she looks into the mirror. While waiting for Ingrid to decide, act or explain her withdrawal Nicolas makes too many nervous trips to the local supermarket, where he meets Sezar, the abused checkout clerk.

Sezar, the grandchild of martyred Spanish Republicans, has come to Barcelona from her native Algeria en route to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She is waiting for her final letter of acceptance. Meanwhile she meets a charming street performer who turns out to be a drug dealer. Molested by her ogre boss at the market, beaten up by two thuggish co-horts of her now-jailed ex-boyfriend, she crosses paths with Nicolas who sweeps her into his vintage white Jaguar Roadster and out of this mess.

He takes Sezar to the secret hideaway in the enchanted forest where he tells her his story- more than he has revealed to Ingrid. The lonely child of an unmarried mother, his only romantic attachment prior to Ingrid was with Beatrice, the discarded last girlfriend of his bankrupted and suicided father. Beatrice died pregnant with Nicolas’ unborn child. Even Nicolas’ glamorous car is second-hand from his father; he and Ingrid and Raul live in the house inherited from his dead grandparents. He lives entirely in the imagination trying to obviate and compensate for a lineage of sorrow and neglect. He has made nothing in life but games.

Raul has received another education, more practical and worldly, from interaction with his classmates and their parents. Moreover, like Sezar, he has a fiery past and a sense of the future. The image of his aviator father disintegrating in mid-air for a noble cause feeds his heroic nature and his practical side knows that he will grow up to be the next Viscount Rocca di Castelgrande. He despairs of the unhappiness in his house but will not succumb in sorrow and dreams. He goes to the magic tree in the enchanted forest and discovers Sezar. He mistakes her for one of the fairies he has been trying to contact to fix the obvious and inexplicable problems between his mother and much-loved stepfather.

Raul has been told that fairies have a kind of amnesia and must be re-educated into their prodigious powers. He leaps to the task with gusto and faith, constantly checking Sezar’s mathematical abilities to verify his progress. Raul and Sezar are kindred spirits, alive to the action of life. Sezar is literally physically scarred by an endless litany of life’s cruel tragedies but she has transformed them into stepping-stones out of the past and toward a new future.

She receives the letter of acceptance to the Sorbonne. Before leaving for Paris Sezar confronts Ingrid, who reveals what she has kept from the others. Ingrid has been told, and tests have proven, that she has an incurable, though not cancerous, lesion in her brain- that she could die at any moment, though she appears radiantly healthy. She has decided, alone and unilaterally, that it will be best for Nicolas and her son if she leaves them now, before the envisioned ugliness and pain arrive. Trapped within the powers of her negative imagination, Ingrid is haunted by the vivid specter of that which is not there and blind to the reality and challenge in front of her.

Sezar is not so romantic and points out that any of them could die at any moment and offers Ingrid her philosophy of active determination and joy, suggesting that Ingrid tell Nicolas her buried secret. Sezar has done what she can and rides out of the story and into her destiny on a modest motorbike. The film ends with Ingrid, alone, pacing back and forth on the balcony, undecided about what to do and unknowing of how to decide.

One wishes for a simple, happy ending for all, but it cannot be so. Nicolas and Ingrid cannot confide in each other and with outer lives of independent ease and comfort they lack a means of connection to a larger world and remain characters in an entirely personal, storybook dimension. In that partial sphere even the blessings of love and kindness are not enough to satisfy and set free real people. Sezar has passed many tests in the world and knows she has the strength to desire and choose life. Raul has met his first challenge on the road to adulthood with courage, ingenuity and humility. She and Raul live outside the spell of romantic, beautiful sadness in which Ingrid and Nicolas are still caught.

Irene Jacob as Ingrid and Ricardo Darin as Nicolas are both superb in capturing the haunted anguish of their character’s inability to mature. Victor Valdivia as Raul and Bebe as Sezar give engaging performances filled with life, hope and joy.

Pasolini- A Proposed Trilogy

2008-02-01T21:46:00.001-05:00

Pier Paolo Pasolini made one trilogy- The Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) and intended to make a Trilogy of Death. Salo’ is the only completed film from this intended trilogy. For me, an unintended trilogy shaped itself while viewing Teorema, Porcile and Salo’ at a Pasolini retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

Each film is a masterwork on its own, yet combines with the others in surprising and, perhaps, unexpectedly obvious ways, to create a full and complex vision saturated with Pasolini’s exploration of the nature, boundaries and interpenetrations between the religious and the human. The films also describe an arc of stylistic progression: Teorema is a mythic tale, as pure and stark as an early renaissance mural cycle by Bellini or Carpaccio; Porcile is a time- and world-traveling double story juxtaposing mercantile contemporary sophistication with a 16th century fantastic fable; Salo’ is an anti-tale 3-ring circus from Hell, its cinematic artistry conspicuously inept and fragmented, entirely stylized and utterly without stylishness.

Part One, Teorema

Teorema begins with a desolate and otherworldly rock-strewn landscape seen from high above through a thin scrim of rapidly shifting clouds that look and feel scratchy, harsh and dry. Dividing this wasteland is a jagged line that could be a road; if so, it is a forlorn path toward and from nothing imaginable. Perhaps it expresses division, boundary, a marking of this from that.

Cut to a contemporary documentary-style Interview in which a journalist questions the workers at an Italian factory that has just been “given” to them by the owner: Will it, by default, make them all into bourgeois capitalists? No Comment, the reply. The recollection of this prologue echoes at the end of the film creating a non-existent Epilogue that entirely repositions the premise of the journalist’s question.

Three is a charm: Flash back, now, to the beginning of the mythic tale in its 1960’s setting. The “king” is the factory owner and father. His royal family (the mother, son and daughter) is augmented by the faithful housekeeper, Angelina. Their realm is an exquisite and fully modernized Palladianesque villa with a vast walled garden outside Milan. Though beautifully appointed, it is a sleek and desolate home of icy precision. Even the kitchen is untroubled by any signs of food or use. The sumptuousness is entirely contained in the endless and expensive proportions of smooth polished surfaces.

An unappreciated and imperfectly cherubic messenger of the gods brings a telegram to the gated domain: Arriving Tomorrow, it states. An unexplained and somewhat mysterious attractive, blue-eyed young man arrives the next day and all the pent-up or unacknowledged energies of Eros begin to stir in this household. First Angelina and then the entire family, including the father, succumb to this Adonis’ physical charms. Then, just as suddenly, the messenger arrives with another telegram commanding the mysterious young man to depart the next day.

The royal house is collectively and individually shattered. The divine itself is brought into question: the young man is barely more than a handsome cipher, but one that can intuit and actively respond to the deepest needs of the others.

After the young man’s departure it is again Angelina who is first to respond. She sneaks away from the villa, going home to the countryside. Silently she sits on a bench, eating nothing but nettles, becoming a quasi-pagan proto-saint spectacle for the local peasants who can only understand her gestures in the imagery of the church. She fulfills the faith they invest in her by healing a leprous child and floating in the air.

Eventually she comes down from the sky and beckons an old woman to follow her to an empty excavation site for a new apartment house complex where she buries herself in the soft dark earth. I will not die, she says, signaling for the old woman to shovel more dirt on top of her. Angelina folds herself back into the earth from which she has come and of which she is still a vital part; her separate and temporary individual journey has come to its fulfillment and she reunites with her own earthly essence like a drop of rain falling into the ocean. Streams of tears flow from her eyes not from grief but as the much-needed sustenance for what is yet to come.

The daughter falls into a coma, her right hand clenched as if on the memory of her encounter with the young man, literally trying to hold time still. By refusing to awaken and acknowledge the movement of time, of life, she exists only in the past, trying to make even the future into the past.

The son imagines himself an artist and propels himself out into the world, alone, though obviously generously funded. His stance is a false obsession with futurity and a prideful compensation for what he sees as his shameful recognition of being different, needy and incomplete. He attempts to create a new and perfect world that is little more than attractive formal obfuscation. The illusion of sui-generis expressionistic art cannot hide the reality that all his efforts are guided by the literalized image of the beloved and are an attempt to regain something lost and irrevocably outside himself, not an exploration of anything new. He has not taken in the gift of the divine and therefore cannot create anything from it. Though he convinces himself he is moving fearlessly forward, his gestures are empty and angry.

The mother tries to keep the fire of the divine eternally alive in the present by re-living the act of corporeal love with other young men, picked up randomly on street corners. Her conscious and voluntary degradation ultimately leads her to a decaying and nearly abandoned old church. She understands her dilemma to be religious- a search for meaning that, for her, previously did not exist. She has no illusions about the absence of dimension in her life or the limits of her own capabilities. The encounter with the young man and her subsequent attempts to recreate it simply made her aware of these truths. In honoring that awareness and her own limitation, she at least finds the humility her children lack.

The film’s ultimate scenes with the father are perhaps the most startling, complex and original cinematic evocation of a complete shift in consciousness. The father searches to comprehend the significance and ramifications of his encounter with the young man. He is the only one not entirely enthralled by the idea of revitalization through the erotic aspect, knowing that it alone cannot be the portal to a new dimension. Like Angelina in her very different way, he knows that sacrifice, giving away all that he has gained and achieved- the factory to the workers, his very self to the cosmos- is the only means to achieve an essential freedom from the trappings of persona that limit not only what he sees but how he is seen.

The father enters the train station; where is he going? He sees a beautiful young man, who imagines, as we might, that the older man is looking for sex and cautiously acquiesces to the unspoken request by going into the Men’s Room. But that is not what the father is looking for. He turns away; a young child with its mother wanders by and he kneels down and lovingly smoothes its blond hair and, rising, slowly begins to take off his clothes in the middle of the station.

His action makes him invisible to the outside world. It makes him, for the onlookers, into a “crazy person”. Either way, the result is that he is no longer recognizable, even to himself. The scene shifts abruptly to the wide empty desert terrain where the father, nude as a new-born and equally as defenseless, stumbles across the dusty plain under the searing glare of a harsh noon light, trying to determine a course, a direction, some meaning, anything. He falls into the parched bleached earth and, lifting himself up, screams.

It is significant that no one in the film is evil. The preconceptions and limitations of persona show, except for the father and Angelina, a missing of the message transmitted by the erotic.

Part Two, Porcile

Porcile (Pigpen), the second feature of this proposed trilogy, begins with a view of the same dry, colorless vista that opens and closes Teorema, except that now the rocky landscape is alive, heaving with smoky volcanic activity. A butterfly appears suddenly- a surprising vision of life: colorful, beautiful, and fragile. Equally unexpectedly, a hand darts out trapping the delicate insect and stuffs it into the mouth of a ravenous disheveled young wanderer dressed in the tattered rags of a 16th century European peasant.

Is he the new incarnation of the father from Teorema, reborn in that vast wasteland as a scavenging savage? He hurls boulders at the ground, stalking and killing a gyrating snake, tearing into the warm scaly half-alive flesh with his bare teeth.

Woven into this soon to be far more outlandish fable is the contemporary story of an enigmatic young man, Julian, his crippled father and Julian’s bourgeois fiancée, who coolly and intellectually considers the appropriateness of their intended coupling from a mercantile perspective of increasing profit and multiplying shares.

Porcile is a complex double parable on the theme of blind ruthlessness, seen in two very different environments. The contemporary story is, perhaps, the continuation of what might have happened after the factory of Teorema has been given to the workers. A battle of greed narrows the field to two operators- Julian’s father, a cold buffoon of calculating avarice and entitlement who represents the ostensibly more rarified and retreating modality of bourgeois pretension, and his rival, a jaunty plastic-surgeryed shape-shifter who does whatever is necessary to get what he wants and is aligned with the future, powered by the expedients of science and technology and ornamented with the heartless prejudice of easily distorted data.

These characters are each one side of the same coin and their world is a cold, dead parody of life predicated on the ceaseless flow of product and consumption which is mirrored in the lingering scenes of the huge, bored omnivorous pigs cramped into their compartmented pens, ultimate consumers waiting to be fed until they, in turn, are slaughtered and fed to others.

The 16th century fable centers around the young wanderer who is not just a ravenous scavenger killing and consuming the few living things he encounters, but, it turns out, a cannibal as well. A strange logic and precise rituals, however, guide his actions. When he kills the first of his human victims, a foot soldier straggling behind his troop, he cuts off the dead man’s head and throws it into a smoking orifice in the rocky hillside.

Next we see the cannibal eating the dead man’s roasted flesh, but- miraculously? - at his side, also consuming what would be his own body, is the soldier-victim himself, now regenerated (-from the severed head tossed back into the smoky mouth of Mother Earth?)

The cannibal and his resurrected soldier-victim go on to attack and consume others, always first enacting the ritual of cutting off the head and offering it back into the earth, thus mysteriously increasing the size of their band in direct proportion to the number they kill and consume.

Eventually one would-be victim escapes and makes his way back to the city where troops are marshaled and a trap set to capture the cannibal and his band. In chains and under heavy guard the outlaws are brought to the city to await the word of the court.

In the contemporary story the rival forces Julian’s father to acquiesce to a business partnership leveraged in his favor using the threat of exposure of a questionable but accepted rumor implying perverted bestial sexuality to Julian. The titillating rumor is obviously false yet easier to accept than Julian’s un-bourgeois ways and his maddeningly quixotic impartiality. He could be a figure of redemption, of relief for the others who are trapped in stultifying literal materiality, except that they do not experience their limited reality as suffering. Julian’s fiancée leaves him for a more predictably profitable alliance.

The fable continues as the judges emerge from deep inside the medieval citadel while church bells clang riotously, drowning out the actual words of the sentence they read aloud. The condemnation is the accusation of evil; the punishment: to be taken back into the desolate wilds and tied, each limb attached to a stake driven deep into the earth, their bodies exposed, to be ripped apart and devoured by roaming animals.

The cannibal is unrepentant, accepts his lot and declares his crime: that he killed his father; that he ate human flesh; that he trembles with joy. His followers, though already dead and resurrected, cry tearfully and struggle against their death-sentences in a magical moment of cinematic confusion.

In the film’s ultimate scenes Julian quietly leaves his father’s pristine palatial house, crosses the vast manicured lawn and disappears into the pigpen.

A crowd of peasants arrives at the villa as the party celebrating the business merger of the father and rival is about to begin. They ask to speak not to Julian’s father, the estate’s padrone, but to whomever of the two, father or rival, is strongest. Julian’s father readily and happily concedes his inferiority, declaring himself suddenly overwhelmed by a consuming desire for a cream-puff and lurches out of the room on his crutches, leaving the rival, now partner, to negotiate this unwanted and unseemly interruption.

The peasants, cautious and respectful, barely know how to begin their incomprehensible account. The rival taunts them to be quick and not waste his time. One of them explains that had they not seen “it”, they would never have known: Julian abandoned himself into the pigpen and was consumed entirely, even his clothes, by the huge gluttonous animals. They arrived too late to save him, not even a scrap of clothing could be salvaged to attest to the tragedy.

Not a sole of a shoe, the rival demands? No. Not even a single button, he asks? No, not even a single button, they lament. Then don’t say a word to anyone, the rival commands, happy with the good fortune that yet another inconvenient obstacle has removed itself from his path to success.

Part Three, Salo

Though all three films hold a line of continuity through detail, ideas and form, Salo’ provides the retrospective arc of trilogy for Teorema and Porcile.

In hindsight Teorema becomes a classic and simple legend of small scale and deep resonance. The earthly horizontal plane of existence and the vertical dimension of psychic depth are united and activated in the characters’ encounter with the divine in its aspect of Eros. Theirs is a world and world-view in which the erotic and the divine are still inextricably linked and alive. The nature of each character’s submission to or rebellion from his/her new awareness is fundamentally a religious experience.

In Porcile the depth dimension has been subverted into the service of the earthly plane of profit and technology. The crippled father and his rival still enjoy the benefit of energies greater than themselves and each retains and maintains a sphere in which to act out that power: the father in culture and history, the rival in commerce and futurity. For both, money underpins it all. In a parody of fevered comedia dell’arte bravura, their interactions are fueled by a sublimated and redirected Eros no longer connected to the divine but banished to the Board Room. Julian has the power derived from depth and interiority but in this thin and brilliant world can find no place where and no one for whom these qualities are credited with value or given room to operate. Being neither for nor against the bourgeois principle he becomes irrelevant and disappears without a trace or sense of loss on the part of the others. They are too consumed with success to take notice or care.

Set in the winter of 1944-45 in a Nazi-occupied northern Italian town of otherwise idyllic beauty, Salo’ is the precinct of unbridled power and corruption of four high government officials. They are called the Masters and derive from Porcile by way of the condemning judges and from the unthinking omnivorous pigs that consume everything (including Julian)- either literally manifested in the animals of the pigpen or metaphorically as the father and rival.

The Masters have assembled a collection of Victims, 18 beautiful adolescent boys and girls, imprisoned, naked, in a rural villa that is a gross and deformed extension of the pleasure palaces of the 18th century. Upon these adolescents the Masters act out their sexualized fantasies of rage, domination and filth. A small band of armed young ruffians, accomplices, supports and enforces the Masters’ authority. Four aging Madams are the Storytellers who take turns in nightly performances meant to ignite the lust of the Masters. The sexual perversions are all predictable and banal and include scatology, humiliation and every form of physical torture and mental anguish.

The actor-Victims seem halfhearted, not really “playing” their parts well, or, as the doomed adolescents, not really taking in their situation as the objects of hatred of the Masters, but how could they, after all? When the Victims start casually turning on one another the viewer’s despair sinks another level. Intermittently scored, the sound of aircraft overhead remind us that theirs is a rapidly shrinking world coming to some kind of apocalyptic end.

The final scenes of Salo’ capture the entire story. Each Master, in turn, watches from a throne placed in a second story window as the others torture the remaining victims to death. It looks like a documentary of the Inquisition, madness and lust disguised and channeled with religious zeal, death and destruction eroticized.

Protecting, or merely “attending” the Master-voyeur are two of the armed guards, themselves just boys. They have the means- their weapons- to overthrow the Masters and put an end to this outrageous tragedy, but they do not see the horror around them, their role is, in a sense, just a job. They don’t share the Master’s tastes but won’t bite the hand that feeds them.

They are bored. One turns the radio dial abruptly changing from the liturgical chant that underscored the last scenes of torture. He finds a smooth, slow dinner dance tune. He asks the other boy-guard, who is slumped in an easy chair, his machine gun splayed across his lap, Do you know how to dance? Not really, he shrugs in reply. Well, let’s try, a little. They carefully set down their weapons and start to dance, awkwardly but not unlike a random couple at a county fair killing time until something better comes along. What’s your girlfriend’s name, one asks? Margherita, the other replies- his mind elsewhere, though nowhere in particular, as death rages in the courtyard below.

The depth dimension in Salo’ is not subverted but gone. The world of Salo’ is a chaotic, capricious nightmare of real tragedy in which there is no possibility of meaning, nor is there the ability, or desire, even, to sustain the search for meaning. Eros is shackled to death; there is no sphere of operation apart from destruction. It is an apocalyptic vision almost entirely devoid of hope for it describes a level of pointlessness, stupidity and cruelty that is impervious to awareness or action. This vision bypasses any position in which the notion of transformation as development could take place. It describes a blackness darker even than the alchemist’s nigredo. That is an abstract principle, not a compromised world in which living beings must try to get by, let alone attempt to fulfill some notion of destiny, character or meaning. It is impossible to imagine that anything could re-generate from this level of corruption without first annihilating itself entirely.

There Will Be Blood

2008-01-18T11:55:00.001-05:00

“There Will Be Blood” is Paul Thomas Anderson’s plangent parable of modern capitalism and the end of an era- whether of innocence, opportunity or sheer rapaciousness. Daniel Day-Lewis’ spectacular portrayal of the oilman Daniel Plainview is a masterful skein of biblical monumentality and subtle deeply nuanced feeling.

Daniel Plainview is always at odds with the world around him- either deep in the earth clawing out whatever thing of value will yield to his unrelenting assault or towering above the people and circumstances he must endure and negotiate. Both Anderson’s and Day-Lewis’ brilliant use of the spatial dimension- visually and metaphorically- is the magical key to this dark hymn of the fate and suffering of a man without peer, a character without antagonist or opposite.

Midway through the film Plainview asserts his hatred for the world and everyone in it. His is a life entirely aligned with Will in which, not surprisingly, he cannot find resonance or common ground with people looking for the greatest ease and gain at the least effort. His forays into the horizontal plane of everyday life only support his hatred of mankind because he never encounters anyone capable of being a true counter-force.

Plainview lives the moment-to-moment of life looking for the task at hand to which he applies himself unreservedly with preternatural energy, insight and cunning. In 1898 he digs for silver, his leg shattered in an accident when he falls to the bottom of the mine. He pulls himself up the damaged ladder one rung at a time and crawls miles into town under the glaring desert sun to cash in three dollars worth of ore. He drills for oil and makes a strike; he accepts responsibility for an orphaned baby and raises the boy, called HW, as his own.

By 1911 Plainview is patching together his conquests of land; brushing off the local false prophet, Eli Sunday; protecting his emerging empire from the oil cartel; building roads and a community to support his drilling sites and laying pipeline to free himself and other single operators from the railroad’s stranglehold.

When the first well erupts suddenly his son is hurled onto the roof of the derrick shed. From the office hut at the base of the hill it takes only seconds for Plainview to scan the chaos and spot the injured boy. Instantly, without regard for his own safety, he rushes to HW and carries him away to their cabin. Just as lightning-like Plainview leaves HW as soon as he realizes no more can be done for the boy and that the gushing well must be brought under control. Deaf and mute from his injuries, HW is sent away to a special school and doctor’s care.

A stranger shows up at the camp one day claiming to be Plainview’s younger brother, Frank, by a different mother. He has letters from their sister, a diary and other tokens of proof as well as news of their father’s death. Worn out by the struggle of life and a string of losses, Frank claims to want nothing more than a chance to work and Plainview takes him on. In the company of his newly found brother, Plainview thinks for a moment that he is not alone. To Frank, imagined blood-kin of like mind and heart, he delivers his sermon of hatred for the world. Soon enough Frank is revealed as an impostor, a cowardly false-brother. Plainview kills him and buries the drifter’s body in a nameless grove of trees.

For those who live only on the horizontal plane, the moment-to-moment of life is spent trying to gauge which identity to adopt to achieve a desired advantage.

Eli Sunday is a smarmy hick charismatic preacher so enamored of his own performance that he cannot see just how forgiving or inattentive his congregation must be to bear his childish posturing. He mistakenly imagines himself to be Plainview’s equal and tries to insinuate himself into the greater man’s plans. Humiliated by Plainview, slapped and smeared with mud, he can only run home to take out his rage on his aged father. The damning fault Eli finds in the old man is that he sold out to Plainview too cheap- he should have gotten more money. Eli is false and greedy, as is the leader of the oil cartel who offers to buy out Plainview’s interests at a handsome-enough price.

Plainview, however, wants something to do; he already has money. Later he publicly and ostentatiously insults the oilman who doesn’t even bother to defend himself and humors Plainview patronizingly. The future belongs to the nameless cartels that also own the routes of distribution and, like the old-world Rhineland Prince-Bishops, control everything and its value via access. For Plainview acquisition is always in the service of action; for everyone else, action is always in the service of acquisition.

Plainview meets his only match in the old settler who would not sell-out to him. He needs access across that land for his pipeline to the sea and submits to the older man’s condition: baptism in the Redeemer’s church. Eli makes his second mistake in thinking that it is he and not the pipeline that has brought Plainview to kneel. The scene is the only comical moment in the film, directed as a Mack Sennett Kabuki farce.

The legend of Daniel Plainview is not an Everyman’s story. By 1927, the film’s end, a mere 29 years later- the span of one generation, Plainview is the master of a vast empire of oil which neither needs nor has a place for him. Business cartels and a new era have cornered him into the preposterous oubliette of a ridiculously luxurious Tudor-bethan McMansion.

He transforms the long enfilade of formal rooms brocaded and studded with smoldering sconces into an overgrown Country Fair shooting gallery heaped with sacrificial mounds of meaningless lucre, now the object of his aim. Plainview drunkenly fires off down the marble-floored hall, his bull’s-eye hit unable to kill the dumb stuff that stalks him, for it is only furniture and already dead. Oceans of liquor cannot shrink him to fit the oversize dollhouse.

HW shows up with his teacher/sign-language interpreter. He wants to leave Plainview, go off on his own, find something for himself. Plainview insists hearing it from the boy’s own mouth and we are shocked to realize that even HW, who owes his very life to Plainview, has been false. Not for being the false son, that he only now discovers. HW has been false by pretending to be more or differently damaged than he was- he is perfectly able to speak- and using that pretense to calculated advantage. Like the false brother, HW is a coward in facing life’s challenges, adopting a false identity for the gain of substance and sentiment.

One last insult swaggers up from the past in the form of the fraudulent preacher-boy Eli. Sunday tries to extort money from Plainview to cover his low life and investment losses, not knowing that his trump card is less than a joker. Plainview first makes him admit that he is a false prophet, that there is no god- which Eli readily confirms- before revealing the zero-value of his bid. Eli dissolves into pathetic whining when his desperate illusions run dry.

In the cheerlessly nonchalant and over-lit glare of the mansion’s palatial basement bowling alley- a merciless parody of depth and life as game on the horizontal plane- the pitiful poseur’s ploy is the last straw, too puny to deserve life. Once again Plainview has been shown the worthlessness of his fellow man. As if fulfilling an obstinate duty, Plainview pummels Eli Sunday into a bloody pulp smeared across the gleaming oak floor. Blood oozes out of Eli’s body just as the oil once oozed out of the ground on his father’s ranch. In disgust, Plainview calls out, “I’m finished.”

The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2008-01-16T19:26:00.001-05:00

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, a solemn and plangent requiem for an era, opens on a closing note: the last pitiful and nearly profitless train robbery by the James Gang, reduced to little more than a rabble of unreliable petty criminals half-heartedly commanded by the famous brothers, Frank and Jesse. Soon after the gang will disband, the brothers going their separate ways.

Frank is an Old Testament thief, patriarchal and practical, yet humble in a way. He sees the world in front of him and opts for retirement when the gold watches and extra cash of bourgeois travelers no longer outweigh the rustling posse always at heel. It is really a business decision; maybe, he says, he’ll try his hand at selling shoes.

Jesse is not free to make such a sensible decision. Outside the law in entirely different ways, ruthless, fearless and driven by more than profit alone, he is keenly aware of and tortured by his dual nature as animal and man. Brad Pitt majestically portrays Jesse James as an increasingly haggard lion, roaming a shrinking plain, worn down yet ever bristling with intuitive insight, animal ferocity and deep understanding.

After the breakup of the gang and Frank’s departure, Jesse’s isolation allows for the entry of Robert Ford- Bob, 19 years old and devoid of any compelling characteristics beside a narcissistic need to be noticed and a blind willingness to believe in traits he obviously does not possess. In an enclosed garden the wannabe gangster flinches uncontrollably at the sudden appearance of two snakes which are already caught in Jesse’s absolute grip and decapitated with casual mastery, prey to be sautéed in garlic.

Casey Affleck has an uncanny feel for these empty and unknowing characters, blind to their own neediness and supposedly ignorant of the destruction they flawlessly execute. With a small arsenal of tics and evasions Affleck draws a brittle portrait of fussy and superficial exactitude that can only barely cover the Black Hole at its core, a compellingly contemporary image in contrast to Pitt’s timeless majesty, cornered and doomed.

The famous bandit is the hero of Bob’s worship and he cleaves to Jesse like a blood-sucking slug. Feeling spurned by Jesse and unable or unwilling to accept his human and subordinate status or the loss of Jesse’s solar radiance, Bob turns in vengeance to the only other authority he knows: the Police. He betrays his former comrades and makes a deal to bring in the Big Man. As an empty coward, his only possibility of heroic stature is a supreme act of cowardice.

Bob raises his gun to the occasion, not considering that it is Jesse who has given him the weapon and offered his unarmed back. Bob pulls the trigger. He denies his action as he runs to telegraph the Governor, delirious with ideas of reward and applause. His notoriety is short and loveless- Jesse is still the object of everyone’s affections and, even in death, it is Jesse’s image that carries imagination and hope.

Bob and his brother Charley- accomplice to the murder- take to the stage profiteering in artifice, re-enacting nightly, the fateful moment. Jesse had once asked a terrified Charley if he ever thought of suicide. No, always something else he wanted to do, was his honest and cautious reply. But it is not too long before these theatrical replays of shame lead him to take his own life. Bob moves on, opening a saloon in Colorado where he will eventually be gunned down by an old acquaintance who is unable to rest with the injustice done a decade before.

Andrew Dominik’s beautiful and stylized film unfolds in post-apocalyptic monochrome, a gothic Book of Hours, all quirky medieval illumination in prairie Sampler simplicity. Heavy blankets of dark clouds bear down on inky black horizons squeezing out the thinnest possibility of escape.