Out of Sight

Out of Sight is the way sexy, charming, steamy star power movies are supposed to be. Steven Soderbergh's witty, beautifully filmed adaptation of an Elmore Leonard pulp novel is a throwback to classic Hollywood's casual stylishness and verbal sparkle, the kind of film that Hollywood isn't supposed to be capable of making anymore. The film is built around the mutual attraction between unrepentant bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and the US marshal, Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), who's trying to catch him. Or, more accurately, it's built on the charm, attractiveness and rapport of the two leads, who are at their most naturally charismatic here, radiating the self-assurance and sexiness that makes them irresistible both to each other and to audiences. Theirs is a mad love, a lunatic love built on seductive banter, utterly unbelievable in any conventional sense: why would a smart, capable woman dedicated to the law fall so deeply in love with the man who represents her complete opposite? But then again, why not? Clooney and Lopez are so attuned to one another, so comfortable in one another's presence onscreen, that the unbelievable is rendered not only plausible but unavoidable, fated, totally logical.

This romance arises from the time the pair spends in a trunk together after Jack kidnaps Karen during his escape from prison. This scene is the most iconic and oft-cited of the film, and justifiably so, as Soderbergh keeps his camera inside the trunk with the dirty, mud-smeared escapee and the elegant, reserved marshall, all dolled up and glamorous after a birthday dinner with her dad, ready for a date with her FBI agent boyfriend. A red light overlays the pair, and the cramped space of the trunk enforces their physical intimacy. Later, remembering the moment, Karen will tell Jack, "you kept touching me, feeling my thigh," and she sounds wistful, nostalgic, fondly recalling the time he kidnapped her. Soderbergh captures Jack's hand in closeup, tapping idly on Karen's hips, feigning casualness but obviously lingering a bit over the curved thigh beneath her skirt. Karen lays in the trunk with her back to her kidnapper, her curves pressed against him, seeming as relaxed as though she's just hanging out at home, although whenever she hears a police siren pass by her eyes grow alert. They chat amiably about crime and the law and the movies, their banter leading them towards a discussion of unlikely screen love stories, such as the one they're obviously about to enact.

Soderbergh's old-school stylishness is well-suited to this charming criminal love story. Nearly every frame pops with brilliant colors, and Soderbergh associates particular colors and images with certain moods and themes. The scenes of Jack and his partner Buddy (Ving Rhames) in prison are awash in the yellow jumpsuits of the prisoners, and the color-coding helps clarify the otherwise unannounced leaps into prison flashbacks. The present-tense scenes in Miami, on the other hand, are full of bright pastel hues: lurid orange walls, the red Hawaiian shirt Jack chooses as a disguise. A trip to Detroit for the film's second half is announced with a shot of a blue-tinged street scene, smoke drifting from a manhole cover, a grimly urban noir landscape that ushers in the outbursts of violence that punctuate the final act.

After Karen gets separated from Jack during his escape attempt, there's a sequence that turns out to be a dream in which she visits Jack's hotel, gun drawn, to find him lying naked in the bath, his eyes closed. Soderbergh emphasizes the orange walls, and shoots through the louvers of a nearby window as Karen creeps into her prey's hotel room. Then Jack grabs her, pulls her into the bath with him, and there's an indescribably sexy shot of her sitting on top of him, fully clothed, in the tub, kissing him and sinking into the water with him. It's a dream, but Soderbergh's style is so lurid and romantically overblown to begin with that it's as plausible as any of the things that actually do happen in the film. The film is itself a dream, a romantic fantasy, and he merely calls attention to that fact by throwing in an actual romantic dream like this.


Soderbergh's romanticism reaches its peak during the central love scene in which Jack finally catches up with Karen again, and they get to play out a real version of that dream, although the reality feels every bit as dreamlike. Jack finds Karen at a bar, just as he'd imagined during their first meeting, when he wondered aloud what would've happened if they'd met under different circumstances, like in a bar. He shows up like a vision after Karen has been hit on by a pair of determined advertising agents, the very opposite, in their professional respectability and conventionality, of bank robber Jack. Behind Karen, a huge glass window reveals snow falling, large fluffy flakes tumbling down in slow motion, and as Jack appears the bar around them becomes fuzzy, the city seen through the bar window as a blur of colored lights in the background. Jack's initial appearance is as a reflection in the window, and Karen turns towards him as though half-expecting that he won't be there, that she was just imagining his ghostly form superimposed over the nighttime city and the snow. Soderbergh's cutting cleverly draws out the moment, making the audience wonder, too, if Karen is just dreaming again; it takes a few more shots for the pair to appear together in the same frame.

They speak in hushed voices, as though they're hiding in plain sight, afraid of being caught, their desire aroused even more by the forbidden, furtive nature of their romance. Soderbergh captures their faces in beautifully lit closeups, their eyes shining, shy smiles constantly seeming to flutter at the edges of their lips. The actors have never looked better or seemed warmer or more natural; they are captured here at their best, flirting with one another, their characters flirting with one another, it hardly matters. It's delightful, and sexy as hell. It's some kind of glossy ideal of what love is supposed to be like, not the painfully banal notions of love advanced by so many other Hollywood romances but a real, deeply felt attraction that expresses itself in every least gesture, every word, every glance.

Their conversation is intercut with a scene in a hotel room afterward, as Jack and Karen eye each other from across a hotel room, taking turns stripping, Jack taking off his shirt to reveal a muscular chest, Karen slipping her dress over her head to reveal a shapely body in a bra and panties. Their bodies don't communicate as much as the looks they give each other, though, those intense stares from across the room. Then, and only then, does Soderbergh restore them to the intimacy they shared during that earlier trunk scene, as they come face to face in bed, their faces in profile and shadowed, a freeze frame holding them in place just inches apart. All the while, the snow continues to drift down in the background, and the light in the room is gorgeous and moody, enveloping the lovers in the romantically exaggerated hues that their mad love seems to require. Soderbergh will subtly evoke this scene again towards the end of the film, when the criminals' plans have gone awry and Karen, of course, comes face to face with Jack again, this time with a gun in her hand, facing him down as criminal and pursuer. Behind Jack, a large window frames a glimpse of the midnight blue night, with fluffy snow falling as it had on that other night.


The film has a lot to recommend it besides this stylish romanticism, of course. Soderbergh has assembled a cast of gifted comic actors who anxiously flit and dodge around the central couple. The colorful criminals and lawmen who provide the film's detail and its heist plotting include Dennis Farina as Karen's father, Steve Zahn as a stoned and hapless would-be robber, and Luis Guzman as an alternately sinister and silly criminal whose scene with Catherine Keener's Adele starts out threatening but abruptly becomes surprisingly comic. Michael Keaton shows up for another very funny cameo, reprising his role as federal lawman Ray Nicolette, the character he played in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, another Leonard adaptation. It's a nice nod, because while Soderbergh's film strikes a very different balance from Tarantino's — tilting more fully towards romance and away from tragicomic violence as compared with Tarantino's much darker vision — the two films have in common their moodiness and their commitment to slow-burn pacing and sharply defined characters.

In fact, Out of Sight is best summed up by a small, subtle moment that occurs between its two central characters without a word being spoken. At one point, Karen is tagging along on a raid meant to capture Jack and Buddy. She's staking out downstairs while the rest of the federal agents storm the robbers' room, but while she's waiting in the lobby she notices, across the room, Jack and Buddy standing in an elevator, its doors about to close and take them down to the parking garage. She raises her walkie-talkie to her lips but then pauses, and lets her hand drop away as she simply watches until the door close. Soderbergh cuts away from the closeup of her to show Jack, as the doors are closing, tentatively raising his hand as if to wave, not the cocky, show-off wave of a cheeky movie criminal, but the genuinely confused wave of a guy who's acting nervous around a girl he really likes. It's a funny moment, but not as broadly funny as it might have been if Soderbergh had exaggerated the gestures or played it a little differently. This way, it's not broadly comic but natural and genuine, an expression of the pleasant confusion that these two soon-to-be lovers feel when in each other's company. That repartee, visual and silent as well as verbal, is the essence of Out of Sight, and it's that warmth, that real spark of attraction and wit, that makes it such a special and delightful film.

Close-Up

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up is a marvelously compelling documentary that, in the process of following the trial of a poor man accused of fraud, winds up delving into the nature of art and the relationship between fiction and deceit. The film is built around a real incident, the case of Hossain Sabzian, who impersonated the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to ingratiate himself with the Ahankhah family, pretending that he was going to film a movie in their home with the family as actors. The family was initially trusting but came to suspect him more and more, finally exposing him by inviting over a friend of a friend, the journalist Hossain Farazmand, who knew the real director by sight and instantly recognized that Sabzian was a fraud. Kiarostami's film is partially a documentary of the resulting trial, and partially a reconstruction — using the real participants in the events as actors, including Sabzian himself and the family he conned — of the events preceding Sabzian's arrest.

The film opens with a re-enactment of the reporter taking a taxi to the Ahankhah house to arrest Sabzian. Farazmand and the taxi driver sit in the front, while two soldiers sit in the back, and during this lengthy opening sequence the men chat casually, talking about the case they're going to deal with, about film, about journalism, and about incidents from Iranian history that happened in the areas they pass through. The conversation is casual and seems unrehearsed, though this is a re-enactment of the real events that led up to Sabzian's arrest. Once the cab arrives at the house, Farazmand goes inside, but Kiarostami's camera remains in the cab, observing as the driver chats amiably with the two soldiers in the back seat, asking them about their families and their homes. Then the soldiers go inside too, and again Kiarostami remains outside with the driver, as the man gets out of the car, picks up some flowers from a pile of trash, sniffs the flowers, and kicks an aerosol can so it rolls noisily down the street. The can rolls along the concrete, and Kiarostami's camera pans after it, eventually following it as the can starts to drag sideways across the ground in an unnatural movement, presumably pulled along by an unseen string from off-camera.

In this way, the subtle naturalism and observational aesthetic of the opening scenes gives way to a sense that things are being tweaked by the filmmakers, that not everything is necessarily as it seems. It's a reminder that the film's re-enactments are only playing at realism; they are in fact carefully arranged and scripted, based on real events but not in themselves "real" or unmediated. The naturalism of the opening is further deconstructed when, after Sabzian's arrest, the reporter remains behind, frantically running from door to door in the neighborhood to ask to borrow a tape recorder. The scene is farcical and surreal, as Farazmand rings doorbells at random, introduces himself, and asks for a tape recorder. One starts to wonder what kind of reporter shows up for a big story like this, planning to do an interview, and then has to beg for a tape recorder from complete strangers. It's comical and strange, especially when Farazmand finally gets his tape recorder and goes scurrying off down the street, pausing just once to give the aerosol can lying in the road a savage kick that sends it flying into the air, coming down and once again rolling along as the reporter disappears down a side street. As the credits finally roll, ushering in the meat of the subsequent film, concerning Sabzian's trial, Kiarostami leaves the audience to wonder about this strangely unprepared reporter, about con men, about reportage, about lies and fictions.


The images of the trial itself, captured in grainy footage that contrasts against the crisp, clean images of the re-enactments, are focused on Sabzian and his explanations for what he did. Kiarostami had remarkable access in the surprisingly relaxed courtroom where the trial takes place — or else not all of the trial footage is genuine, which only further blurs the film's interesting perspective on reality versus fiction, truth versus lies. Kiarostami seems too involved, too active in the trial's progress, for all of this footage to be real, unless Iranian courts are significantly less controlled than Western courts. The judge sits across the room, asking questions of Sabzian and the Ahankhah family, but for the most part Kiarostami's camera remains focused on Sabzian's face. At the beginning of the trial, Kiarostami explains to the defendant that this camera has a close-up lens and will remain trained on Sabzian, to capture his reactions and to provide him with a way to speak his mind and make his ideas clear. Kiarostami is making explicit what this film is about: he wants to give Sabzian an opportunity to express himself, to help others understand why he did what he did. During the trial, Kiarostami frequently even intervenes (or seems to intervene) in the proceedings himself, asking Sabzian direct questions and prompting the defendant to speak at length about the feelings and ideas that were behind his actions.

These close-ups of Sabzian are astonishingly moving, especially since the defendant's words reveal that he was no simple con man, that he was not trying to bilk the family out of money or otherwise exploit them. He did what he did, he says, because it made him feel respected. He is a poor man, divorced from his wife because of his inability to provide for his family very well, and he still struggles, constantly in and out of work, living a very poor and simple life with few real pleasures. His only pleasure, it seems, is the stimulation provided by the cinema, by art: he goes to the movies, especially the movies of Makhmalbaf, and finds a voice dealing with the kind of "suffering" that he himself feels in his own life. He is especially moved by the director's film The Cyclist, about which he says, "It says the things I wish I could express." With Kiarostami's prodding, the trial becomes a discourse on the purpose of art, the ways in which art can reach into people's lives in surprising ways. It becomes obvious that Sabzian impersonated Makhmalbaf because he wanted to feel as though he could reach people in that way, that he could express the things he feels with such clarity and beauty. As he struggles to express himself, to explain his actions, the subtext is the idea that art communicates. Sabzian's halting but often poetic descriptions of his "suffering," his poverty and feelings of uselessness and desperation, are a form of art, shaped and crafted by Kiarostami in turn.

The film is not only a commentary on the purpose of art but a subtle piece of social commentary as well, suggesting the hopelessness of poverty and unemployment that affects so many people. Even the Ahankhah family, who seem reasonably well-off in their large house, are not unaffected, as they have two sons who went to school for engineering, only to find that neither of them could get a job in the field after graduation. Instead, one son works in a bakery and the other is still unemployed. Sabzian's inconsistent work and constant struggles with money are even more extreme, and in court one of the Ahankhah sons, forgiving the defendant at the end of the trial, says that he blames "social malaise and unemployment" for Sabzian's actions. Kiarostami doesn't draw quite that straight a line between cause and effect, but it's obvious that he too thinks that this odd story is at least partially about class and economic hardship. Sabzian didn't commit his crime for money, even though he did borrow some money from the family at one point. He wanted to be Makhmalbaf not to get money, but in order to escape from his pathetic real life. He was playing a part and relishing the attention and respect he earned from the family who believed him to be a famous artist.

As he says himself at the end of the trial, at Kiarostami's prompting, he was more of an actor than a director, though. He was playing a part, he says repeatedly, and the structure of Kiarostami's film reinforces the connection between lying and acting, between the art of fiction and the art of the con man. The re-enactments in Close-Up, bringing together the real participants in these events to play out their scenes again, insert a further layer of fiction and artifice. In the reconstructions, Sabzian is playing at playing, pretending to pretend, while the rest of the actors are engaged in the same deceit. They play at reality, staging seemingly casual conversations that in fact are anything but unmediated. It is the flipside of the film's idea that art can reveal truths and speak to people about their own lives: art is also lying and pretending, and in that sense Kiarostami's film makes a very moving, strangely beautiful artist of Hossain Sabzian.

Saving Private Ryan

It has been said that all war movies are ultimately anti-war. The implication is that it is impossible to show the reality of war — the death and destruction, the dismemberment, the endless struggle over just one more patch of land like any other — without showing its horror, brutality and pointlessness. It has also been said, however, that no war movie can ever truly or completely be anti-war. By the nature of the war movie genre, it is inevitable that these films will be exciting and visceral, that they will show the bravery and honor of the soldiers, who are always at their bravest precisely when they are delivering grand, solemn speeches about how they're not brave. If Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan proves the truth of one of these axioms, it is the latter rather than the former. Spielberg's film is all about the honor of war, the bravery of the soldiers. Saving Private Ryan has often been praised for its realism, for its truthfulness to the experience of war, but Spielberg's idea of realism is hiring real amputees to play soldiers who get their limbs blown off. It's shallow realism, a thin coating of the real over a foundation of Hollywood contrivances and rote recitations of familiar ideas.

The script (by Robert Rodat) makes repeated use of the words of Abraham Lincoln's letter to the widow Bixby, who lost five sons in battle during the Civil War, the key words of which refer to those who offer their lives as a "sacrifice upon the altar of freedom." (There's a metaphor for Spielberg's "realism" here, since history has shown that the letter was mistaken, and at least three of those sons didn't die in combat.) This letter is read early on in the film by a general upon learning that three brothers have died within a week of one another during the invasion of Normandy, during World War II. A fourth brother, James Ryan (Matt Damon), has air-dropped into a chaotic region, his location and status unknown. The film bears the name of this Private Ryan, and it's this man, who remains offscreen for much of the film, who serves as the focus of the subsequent action. Later, the words of the Bixby letter are repeated in voiceover, and again they seem like brazen manipulation, an unthinking regurgitation of grand words with a grand name to somehow legitimize them.

Such sentimentality is at odds with the battle scenes, in which Spielberg tries to be unstinting in his depiction of the horrors of war. The celebrated opening (which kicks in after a lame and thoroughly Spielbergian framing device) is a nearly half-hour re-enactment of the invasion of Normandy, a bloody and relentless sequence. The opening minutes of this sequence are especially striking: as the troop boats drift towards the shore, Spielberg shows the men inside the boats, praying and muttering to themselves, throwing up, shaking with fear. And then the boats arrive at the beach, and the gangway at the front lowers to allow the soldiers to charge off... and the enemy machine guns open fire, cutting down whole ranks of soldiers where they stand, before they have a chance to take so much as a step forward. Within seconds, a whole boat's worth of men has fallen, each line collapsing riddled with bullets, clearing the path for the next men behind them to be shot as well. It's horrifying, this devastating slaughter, and the rest of the sequence only intensifies the sensation of being surrounded by death. It's loud and visceral. Limbs fly, the bottom half of a man's body disappears into an impact crater, blood spurts, bullets ping off metal, medics struggle to staunch the flow of blood from men who are soon dead, either from existing wounds or new ones, as bullets continue to fly. In one shot, Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), dazed from an explosion, watches as a soldier with his arm blown off wanders aimlessly in a circle, stoops down, and stands back up holding his own detached arm before strolling away like a zombie.

This is powerful stuff. But the film's visceral feel for combat and death doesn't really carry over into the scenes after the battle of Normandy, when Miller's unit is tasked with the mission of locating the missing Private Ryan and bringing him back safely, so that his mother will not have to hear that her fourth and final son has also died in combat. Miller's men resent the mission, resent being asked to risk eight lives for the sake of one, and though Miller mostly tries to keep his reservations to himself, he too is unhappy with the job. He loves and cares for his own men and feels the pain of losing each one, but Ryan, as he says himself, means nothing to him. The bulk of the film consists of this small group's trek across a battle-fraught stretch of France where German and American troops square off in various ruined small towns.


When the soldiers aren't engaged in battle, Spielberg and the script mostly resort to war movie clichés, like one man's never-sent letter to his parents, taken after his death by another man in the unit and then passed from one man to the next as those carrying it are killed in action. Another man regrets a childhood unkindness to his mother. Another man is Jewish and never gets tired of shouting his religion at German soldiers. The home and pre-war occupation of the guarded, private Miller are the subject of a pool in his company, and of course at a key moment he must deliver a big (and unbearably maudlin) speech about what he did before the war. The action is realistic and visceral, but when the soldiers put down their guns there's nothing but obvious scriptwriters' devices and Hollywood speechifying, a reminder that for all the blood and missing limbs Spielberg displays onscreen, this is still just another in a long line of Hollywood war movies, and a rather traditional one at heart.

There is one cliché that Spielberg and Rodat go to great lengths to subvert, and that's the cliché of the cowardly or incompetent soldier who redeems himself at the last moment in a grand act of bravery. Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) is a translator and map-maker who has never seen combat, but who joins the unit because Miller needs someone who speaks both French and German. Upham cowers at the fringes of each battle, watching from the sidelines, but in the film's final battle, a desperate struggle to hold a bridge against German tanks and infantry, he's tasked with running back and forth among the American positions, carrying ammo where it's needed. At some point, his already modest courage utterly falls apart, and he can barely do more than whimper and cower in a corner, trying to hide from the Germans. There is a certain moment that seems to be building towards Upham's redemption, but that redemption never comes. The tension of the scene arises almost entirely from the way Spielberg cleverly sets up expectations for a very conventional resolution: one expects Upham to finally man up and come to the rescue, but it never happens. It's a bracing defiance of convention from a filmmaker who is usually conventional, and purposefully so, even at his finest moments. So it's worth noting that Spielberg defies the convention in order to reinforce another, solidifying Upham's status as the cowardly and ineffectual intellectual figure. He also ties this cowardice to one of the film's most laughable contrivances, the German soldier who Upham had earlier defended from summary execution, only for him to return at the climax, once again killing American soldiers. It's outrageous, especially since it winds up suggesting that Upham was wrong, earlier in the film, to oppose the summary execution of a surrendering enemy soldier. The film seems to be singularly lacking in the perspective that enemy soldiers are, like Miller and his men, mostly just ordinary men doing their duty for their country. Instead, Spielberg, with his blockbuster instincts, has to make this random German soldier the villain of the piece, and everything surrounding Upham and the German soldier is so irredeemably muddled that it's not really clear what, if anything, the film is trying to say about this situation.

Sometimes a movie that isn't very good can still be interesting. A movie that fails in a thousand ways can still capture the imagination, provoke thought, deliver startling insights. Spielberg's movie is the opposite. Saving Private Ryan is a "good movie" that's not that interesting, a well-made war picture with no particularly fresh or interesting insights, only confused messages and silly regurgitations of clichés and leftovers from countless other war movies. In isolated scenes it sometimes seems like a fine film, and at its best it's undoubtedly a great action movie. There are scenes here, moments of awful beauty, that must surely rank among the most powerful cinematic encapsulations of the wartime experience. The red waves washing up over the bodies of men and beached fish at the end of the battle of Normandy, bloody waves gently rolling into the shore, are haunting and unforgettable (though borrowed from Sam Fuller, a towering influence on this film). The film's non-battle scenes don't often rise to this level, though, and the film is torn between two modes, between stark realism and Hollywood artificiality, without ever quite settling on one or the other.

Cold Water

The key sequence of Olivier Assayas' Cold Water is a lengthy party thrown by a large group of teenagers at an abandoned house (a scene that would recur in different form in Assayas' later Summer Hours). Assayas' camera winds through the party, democratically encompassing all of the action in long tracking shots that show the teens dancing, smoking drugs after meticulously arranging the materials to fill a pipe, setting a massive bonfire in front of the house and dancing in front of it. As the soundtrack collages together Janice Joplin, Alice Cooper, Creedence, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Nico — appropriate to the setting of 1970s Parisian suburbs — Assyas' camera weaves around, capturing seemingly off-the-cuff compositions in which no one ever stands still, in which everyone is perpetually in motion. Outside, he frames the teens dancing to Creedence in front of the bonfire, flailing their limbs as others pile on more twigs and branches from around the spacious grounds of the country home, and the record periodically skips, starting over with the rollicking opening riff of "Up Around the Bend" after a nasty scratching noise. Every so often, the camera captures the leads, the disaffected teens Christine (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet), dancing or kissing in the midst of this frantic, beautiful teenage paradise.

Only Assayas could make this anarchic scene so beautiful, so graceful. He obviously appreciates the lyricism and poetry in this teenage wasteland, the sense of alienation that's palpable and unavoidable for these kids. The flames, bright and yellow in the background, cast a golden glow on the faces of the partying teens, and their party is equal parts celebratory and destructive. They take apart the house, throwing chairs and pieces of window frames into the flames, shattering windows, and they dance around the flames as though celebrating a pagan ritual. But their faces are mostly smiling; they're free and happy, if only for the immediate now, and the hints of danger and rage that periodically threaten to boil over mostly center around Christine, the disturbed young girl who's desperately acting out as a defense against a father who's uncaring and disciplinarian and a mother who's too busy trying to sort out her own troubled life to do much good for her daughter. Christine is always running away, always in trouble, and anytime her father catches her he simply sends her to a clinic where they drug her and confine her, trying to wear down her rebellious impulses.

Early on, after Christine is caught while shoplifting with Gilles (who, leading a more charmed life than his girlfriend, manages to escape), she faces a police counselor who clearly wants to help her, who looks at her with frustration in response to her insolent stare and refusal to answer his questions seriously. Assayas is always framing Christine in tight closeups that emphasize her young, beautiful face and the utter inscrutability of her expression. She's often seen through some kind of filter, with a blurry windowframe partially obstructing the view of her face, making it difficult to get close to her. When she's sent to the clinic by her father, she sits patiently waiting with her suitcase in her lap, arranging her hair in front of her face, closing herself off from what's around her as though constructing a defense. (Later, when she chops off some of her hair, her new shorter haircut makes her look more open, more vulnerable, as though she's lost some of the shields that had protected her.)

She is a mystery, locked up inside herself, unable to express what she wants or what's bothering her — when asked a question about herself, by well-meaning authority figures like this one, she responds with mischievous pranks or impenetrable silence, simply fixing him with that inexpressive stare. She's unable to articulate what she wants, or she knows it won't do any good. Her experience with authority figures like her parents or the clinic nurses who want only mute obedience has not suggested that anyone's listening to her when she expresses her own opinions and her own desires. She's a totally lost girl.


Gilles, on the other hand, has advantages that Christine does not: he's a middle class boy with a well-off family, and when he gets in trouble, as he inevitably does, his family bails him out and smooths things over. His situation is coming to a head as well — his parents, divorced like Christine's but without the same sense of instability, have decided to send him to boarding school — but his home life is not nearly as dire as Christine's. His father, at least, tries to understand him, to communicate with his son, and when Gilles is upset at the threat of boarding school his father comforts him. It's obvious that while Gilles' acting out could be merely a phase of teenage rebellion, the destabilization of Christine's life is much more enduring.

There's a gap between them, the gap of class, exacerbated by Christine's mother (Dominique Faysse), who has an Arab boyfriend named Mourad (Smaïl Mekki), which Christine knows very well is viewed as an additional mark against her by the custody courts. But Christine's mother and Mourad are the ones who actually care about the girl, who want to help her even though they're unable to; her father (Jackie Berroyer) barely even listens to her, and the first chance he gets he simply sends her off to a clinic. Assayas films her father at the clinic talking to a doctor, seen through a window, the words they exchange inaudible — it's far more than he ever says to Christine, anyway. Virtually his only audible dialogue in the film is in a scene where he scolds and implicitly insults one of his employees while giving the man an assignment; one can see quite easily the nature of this cold, petty man and what his relationship with his daughter must be like.

The heart of Cold Water is this gap between generations, as well as the gap of class. The film opens with Gilles' Hungarian grandmother telling stories, in Hungarian, about World War II, stories that can't possibly mean anything to the kids she's speaking to. They're barely listening, and when they finish their breakfasts they rush off; they've got their own problems, and the past of their parents and grandparents couldn't seem more remote. Later, Assayas inserts a shot of the grandmother silhouetted in the dark, quietly praying under her breath, ending with a hushed "amen" — it could be a prayer for her lost grandchildren, for the aimless younger generation she doesn't understand, for her own burdens that they could never understand. It's a sign that, though this is a film that is totally on the side of the kids, a film that intimately understands teenage suffering, Assayas is also sympathetic to older value systems, including a spirituality that's as foreign to Christine and Gilles' generation as World War II stories.

The option of prayer isn't available to Christine and Gilles. With no parents, no stable value system, no idea what they want or what's expected of them, they're wandering aimlessly through the fog, sometimes literally as in a haunting sequence in which Gilles sneaks out of his house into a foggy evening, walking through a multicolored autumn forest and then riding his bike into a gray cloud that soon swallows him, erasing him in the dense smoke curling around him. This image of erasure and nothingness is echoed in the film's unforgettable final image, a blank piece of paper that reflects the inability of these teens to communicate, to make themselves heard. They're not even sure what they could say, what they could write, how they could capture what they're feeling and thinking in mere words. The film's title refers to that final scene, set by the side of a cold river in the middle of winter; the world is cold, and these teens huddle together to keep warm, but even with each other they can't quite communicate. They don't want to be alone, that's all they know — anything else is mysterious, inexpressible, and a blank page might be the only thing they leave behind in the world.

Happy Together

The films of Wong Kar Wai are often about people who feel very intensely, who love and hate with a fiery passion that bursts out in the garish, expressive aesthetics of the films. In Happy Together, Wong examines this kind of passion especially intimately, through the gay relationship of Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung), who visit Argentina together as a way to reinvigorate their on-again-off-again relationship, but wind up instead merely replaying the same troubles they always have. The film is a powerfully focused examination of this disintegrating, up-and-down relationship, capturing the violent emotions, the heartbreak, the longing and desire, and the fleeting moments of happiness that are like the glue holding this fractured romance together, momentarily bridging the gulf that's widening between these two men.

That gulf is represented, in many ways, by the waterfall at Iguaza, which they promise to visit together during one of their happier moments. The falls, seen on a lamp that Yiu-fai bought — a bright and gaudy representation of the falls, lit from within by a rotating cylinder that makes it seem as if the water is glistening in the sunlight — come to represent for Yiu-fai the potential for happiness and togetherness. This trip is something they planned to do together, a goal for their relationship, a sight they could share. Wong visually suggests that it's also an abyss that might swallow them whole. An image of the actual falls is inserted early on, as a response to the hopefulness that Yiu-fai has for the trip, but the image of the reality is very different from the lamp's sunny depiction of natural splendor. It's a sensuous color image of the waterfall, all dark blues and jungle greens, inserted into the mostly black-and-white opening section of the film. The camera slowly turns around the falls, capturing the slow churning of the water and, increasingly, the drifting white smoke that begins to fill the frame as Wong's graceful camera move pushes the tumbling water itself off to the sides. In stark contrast to Yiu-fai's optimistic desire to see this place with his lover, the image is dark and sinister, an image of destruction and apocalyptic grandeur: it is a seemingly bottomless pit, filled with smoke from the violent churning of the water as it crashes into the reservoir deep below. It's a gorgeous but foreboding image, a suggestion that what waits at the end of the trip is not reconciliation but erasure, heartlessness, brutality, the cold and cataclysmic violence of nature.


That image, so frightening and intense, lingers over the rest of the film. When that tracking shot of the falls predictably recurs at the end of the film, it provides a kind of melancholy closure, as one lover sees the falls in person, the water rushing down towards him, its spray drenching his face, while the other is left with the lamp, a gaudy and false facsimile of the real place. That's the essence of the film, the moment it's journeying towards, as Yiu-fai struggles against the confining boundaries of his unhappy relationship with Po-wing, a relationship where it's not clear who needs the other more, who's keeping who prisoner.

That dynamic plays out within some of Wong's most potent and beautiful images, as captured by his usual cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Though set mostly in Buenos Aires, Wong finds in this city a Southern hemisphere counterpart to his home base of Hong Kong, which perhaps explains the sequence where Yiu-fai, realizing that he is in the other half of the world from his home, imagines what Hong Kong would look like upside-down. The answer, as envisioned by Wong, is indeed turned upside-down but not otherwise that different, as he finds in Buenos Aires a similar late-night neon vibe, all hazy lights and poetically empty street scenes, occasionally interrupted by a bright, summery daytime scene where the sun fades the images to a white glare. That impression is introduced slowly into the film, as most of the early scenes play out in a crisp, high-contrast black-and-white, with only selected moments rendered in the characteristic warm, brilliant colors of the Wong/Doyle collaborations. When, after Yiu-fai and Po-wing are reunited following some time apart, the film explodes into full, sumptuous color during their cab ride back to Yiu-fai's apartment, it's as though the fullness of the couple's conflicted emotions have finally exploded to the surface of the film.

Despite these strong emotions, Happy Together is more relaxed and languid than previous Wong Kar Wai films, in which unpredictable violence could erupt at any moment, and this film looks forward to the slow, sensuous rhythms of In the Mood for Love rather than the the frantic tempi of most of the preceding films. The body of the film focuses on the lovers' uneasy reunion, as Yiu-fai tries to hold onto the unstable Po-wing, who obviously needs and cares for Yiu-fai but still can't help straining against the bounds of their relationship, going out, sleeping with other men, prostituting himself with American tourists. The relationship settles down slightly when Po-wing is beaten up by some of his clients for stealing a watch, and Yiu-fai tends to his lover during his recovery. The scenes of tension and arguing are offset by scenes of surprising tenderness and affection, like a sequence where Po-wing teaches Yiu-fai to dance, and the dance slowly becomes a gently swaying embrace. This scene, like the opening's disarmingly explicit and erotic sex scene between the men, establishes the stakes of their troubled love, the real depths of feeling upon which their often fractious relationship is built.


There's also tenderness in the depiction of Yiu-fai's friendship with his restaurant coworker Chang (Chen Chang), which is contrasted against the doomed love affair at the center of the film. As Yiu-fai's relationship with Po-wing collapses, his connection — platonic and hesitant, though not without suggestions of attraction and intimacy — with Chang deepens. Chang is a typically eccentric Wong character, a young man who had been nearly blind as a child and who had, as a result, developed extremely sensitive hearing and an ability to detect the smallest nuances of emotion in people's voices. He also, despite his displacement in South America, has the stability of home and family that the rootless Yiu-fai, wandering in a foreign land and disconnected from a family that's all but disowned him, only wishes he could someday return to. Those longings, the heartache and sadness of these aimless men, are expressed in typical Wong fashion. Chang carries a tape recording of Yiu-fai's tears to the "end of the world," a lighthouse in the far south of Argentina, where, it is said, his worries can be dissipated; it's a moment that looks forward to the similar scene at the end of In the Mood for Love. Po-wing also enacts the ritual of visiting his lover's apartment while Yiu-fai is not there, cleaning the place and rearranging things, a form of intimacy without direct contact that weaves through Wong's films.

Happy Together, like nearly all of Wong's films, is a deeply moving and rich work, a film about dislocation and the longing for stability. These characters have drifted far from home, isolated from their families and their homes, and they unsteadily try to make their way in an unfamiliar land even as their emotions overwhelm and unbalance them. Turned upside-down from their homes, they rush towards the churning abyss, towards the end of the world, and then pull back towards redemption and rebirth at the very last moment.

Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels is a moving, hilarious, poppy, absurd, moody film about urban disconnection and loneliness, alternately contemplative and hyperactive, filmed with the characteristic punchy stylization of director Wong Kar Wai. The city (Wong's Hong Kong home) is a peppy, colorful place, neon and bright, its colors brilliant, shining bright in the seemingly perpetual night: beautiful and dangerous. The film concerns itself with the people who live their lives almost wholly at night, shunning the daily nine-to-five grind in favor of nights packed with activity, with crime and romance and desperate attempts to connect with other wanderers of the night. In this city, it's often raining, the streets are slick and shiny, and time moves unpredictably, sometimes racing by in the blur of time-lapse traffic scenes, sometimes slowed to a crawl. The city's night is populated by a professional killer (Leon Lai) who wants to quit his job, his agent (Michelle Reis) who arranges his kills without ever meeting him in person, the mute He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who spends his nights in closed stores, reopening them without their owners' knowledge and forcing passersby to partake of his wares, the emotional young woman Charlie (Charlie Yeung) who's obsessed with a guy who's left her, and the punky Blondie (Karen Mok) who just wants somebody to think she's special, to remember her.

These various drifters and loners collide off one another in the night, careening around on their oddball errands, their violent missions, their melancholy unkept dates in various smoky bars. As Zhiwu says, he's always looking to find "friends and confidants," so he "rubs elbows" with anyone he meets, which in his case usually means dragging his unwitting victims, kicking and screaming, into bizarre transactions. Running a laundromat, he forces a bum to get his clothes washed. Taking over a grocery store, he tries to convince a lady to buy eggplants — hilariously, she thinks it's improper since she's single, and what would people think? — and then saddles her with a tremendous watermelon. He keeps running into the same unfortunate guy (Fai-hung Chan) over and over again, first giving the guy a hair washing and shave under duress, then riding him and his extended family around the city in an ice cream truck, gorging them with cones and tremendous sundaes with candles flaring on top like it's a big birthday celebration. These surreal crimes are a weird way of getting attention, connecting with people — Zhiwu sees it as a kind of service, a way of making people happy in unexpected ways.

It's also a way to break through the barriers preventing communication. Zhiwu can't talk because there was an accident with expired pineapple, an in-joke based on the character with the same name and played by the same actor in Chungking Express, who was also obsessed with pineapple, and who says, as this Zhiwu does later in the film, that everything has an expiration date. The other characters in the film don't have Zhiwu's extreme communication problems, but they're similarly disconnected, isolated from one another in various ways. The killer and his partner communicate with one another primarily through technology. She faxes him maps of the locations for his missions, hand-drawn with marker, her little personal touch added to an impersonal business. Otherwise, they communicate through numbers: through the numbers of answering machine services, a common device in Wong's films, or the number of a particular song on a jukebox that the killer leaves as a message to his partner when he wants to quit. Unable to tell her his feelings face to face, he leaves a number that leads to a song about breaking up.

In the same way, he leaves behind clues for her in the apartment where he stays while on his missions. She's in the apartment before the killer, cleaning it and setting it up for him, much like Faye Wong's character in Chungking Express, rearranging the apartment of the man she loves to help him forget his ex-girlfriend. Wong films these scenes to emphasize the parallels and the disjunctions: the killer and his partner inhabit the same space in subsequent scenes, separated by time but not by space. Later, after the missions, she goes through the killer's trash, because it helps her learn about him, to feel close to someone she never actually meets face to face. And, as the killer reveals later, he knows she does this and deliberately leaves behind evidence of his actions and his personality, knowing that she'll be able to piece together information about him through what he throws away. In this way, they become closer while remaining at a physical remove; it is as close as they get to connection, as close as they get to really knowing another person intimately.


For the killer and his partner, this distance is something they try to maintain, even if they don't really want to; they pose, keeping their cool, playing their roles, even if they secretly yearn for something deeper, something more real. Towards the beginning of the film, the killer's partner says that she's not interested in any of the "friends" she visits, that it's all anonymous and impersonal for her, that these targets don't mean any more to her than the man she sics on them. She tries to live up to that image, projecting an aura of untouchable cool: her bangs combed over her forehead and hanging down into her face, nearly covering her eyes completely most of the time, as though if she hides her eyes, she can't see or, more importantly, be seen. She is, like so many of Wong's characters, an icon of cool with her rubbery fetish dresses and her bright red lips, her garters and her cigarettes, sexy and cool, remote, simmering and chilly at once. It's only in private that she betrays her reserves of feeling, masturbating violently and passionately in the empty apartment whenever the killer isn't there; in public she appears as the cold professional that her job requires her to be.

The killer is similarly haunted by emotions that don't suit his profession. He yearns, like so many other killers and criminals in the history of genre fiction, for an ordinary life, for this one last job to be his true last one; he wants to find a girl he can love, he wants to settle down. He occasionally runs into people who recognize him from a more innocent time; he wryly notes, in voiceover, that "even if you're a killer, you still have classmates from grade school around." When he meets a cheery old school friend who's about to get married, the guy tries to sell him an insurance policy, but he won't get one because it only reminds him that he wouldn't have anyone to name as a beneficiary. He's living an entirely solitary existence, with no friends, no family, no real life other than traveling from place to place, living for a day at a time in apartments scrubbed clean by his partner, killing people in a burst of gunfire and then moving on to the next mission.

The yearning for connection in this film is intense, as every character wants someone or something they can't have, while somehow remaining isolated from the people who do cross their paths. Zhiwu tries to connect with the chatterbox Charlie, a romance that seems counterintuitive but somehow perfect — a man who can't talk and a woman who can't stop pouring out her every feeling in a torrent of talk and tears — but she's still hung up on her ex and barely registers Zhiwu's presence. Blondie wants the killer, and is in fact convinced, whether rightly or wrongly, that they'd once dated and he'd simply forgotten her, but he only wants company for the short term.

Wong situates these gloomily romantic stories and characters within a glitzy, hyper city that seems to be losing its collective mind, unleashing bursts of unpredictable violence that recall the abrupt transitions from calm to bloodshed in his directorial debut As Tears Go By, or the climactic gunfight in Days of Being Wild. The overall atmosphere of slowly simmering heartache — all those shots of lonely people in lonely bars, bathed in neon glow — is thus constantly threatened by outbursts of absurdity or over-the-top violence. The most notable is a surreal but gory fight that suddenly breaks out in a restaurant around Charlie and Zhiwu, with a man named Blondie — the name of the girl who Charlie believes stole her man, though she seems to have a very different story from the Blondie who hangs around with the killer — at the center of the brawl. The sequence is frantic and motion-blurry, a frenetic outpouring of kinetic knife-fighting and screaming, streams of blood and people running desperately through the chaos.

These outbursts add to the sense of emotions flaring out of control; the city seems to reflect the turbulent confusion and desperate longings of these people, or perhaps it's the other way around. Either way, the landscape of Fallen Angels is emotionally explosive, with Wong's bold aesthetics creating the impression that the characters' feelings are being written onto the surface of the film, inscribed in every shaky pan and every over-saturated color.

The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque

Eric Rohmer's The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque is a charming country film, a kind of political romance centering on a rural mayor's plans to build a comprehensive cultural center in a small rural town with a declining agricultural tradition. The mayor, Julien (Pascal Greggory), is a socialist who believes that his bold plan for a big center combining a theater, a cinema, a sports complex and a library will revitalize the countryside. Not everyone agrees, from his novelist girlfriend Bérénice (Arielle Dombasle), who's skeptical of the project's ambition to be modern while blending into the country, to the local schoolteacher Rossignol (Fabrice Luchini), who's mortified by the project's prospective erasure of a whole tract of beautiful green land. The film consists largely of a series of conversations, between these characters and others, that become debates on the oppositions of right and left, city and country, progress and conservation, tradition and modernity.

Julien's project, his grand ambition to reshape the country, is posed as a leftist idea, as a way to invigorate a countryside that's been decimated by the changes of industrial agriculture — the few small farms left are struggling and it's obvious that many more will have disappeared within a few more years. Thus Julien can position the ecologists, the nature-lovers and conservationists, as "reactionaries" in his political vocabulary: the left wants to develop the country, to institute progress, while the right gets hung up on a few trees that would be uprooted, a few picturesque views that might be tarnished. It's a neat reversal, one that illustrates just how fluid the definitions of right and left can be, and how inadequate such dialectics can be for encompassing the complexity of real politics. The magazine editor Régis (François-Marie Banier) and his reporter Blandine (Clémentine Amouroux) also identify as leftists, but they have very different visions of this leftism from one another and from Julien. Régis is a political dogmatist who seems to think in terms of taking sides, and thus looks on Julien's local politics as a distraction from the broader theoretical dialectics that define political philosophy on a national scale. Blandine, on the other hand, keeps her own opinions largely to herself, arguing first one way then another, a true journalist who seeks to clarify and identify the views of others.

These conversations circle around the same issues again and again, using this small local issue as a focal point for discussions that are often very dense and theoretical but never dry. There's something charming, even playful, in the film's endless dialogues. In the early scenes, Julien walks around his garden estate with Bérénice, explaining his project to her as they examine the plants, flowers and vegetables growing on his expansive grounds. The two are talking about abstract and political issues, debating the importance of the proposed cultural center and quibbling over the authenticity of a modern building that would be styled to blend in with the aged local architecture, even appropriating stones from disused local buildings. Their conversation is thus impersonal and political, at least on the surface, but the way they talk to one another is flirtatious and charming, as though they're courting one another through talk that seemingly has nothing to do with romance or love. The quick-witted repartee is fluid and spontaneous, establishing the comfort of these lovers with one another and their intense interest in one another: they're talking about rural development and local electoral politics, but the subtext is much more personal.


Just how personal is revealed in Bérénice's references to the beach: "I don't do anything at the beach either, but I don't get bored there." Sure, because for Rohmer the beach is the site of sexual intrigues, of dalliances, of fleeting loves and summer romances — the territory of Pauline at the Beach or the sensual opening of A Winter's Tale. Of course, Dombasle herself was a star of Pauline at the Beach, and Greggory was in the film too, so the reference seems especially self-conscious, an acknowledgment that, as in many of Rohmer's films, these particular actors have been chosen for the continuity they provide with the director's previous work. The rural paradise of this film is thus connected to the seaside retreats of past films, and these characters who charmingly chat about politics are associated with other Rohmer heroes and heroines who were more overtly concerned with love and sex.

Rohmer also uses the landscape itself as a counterpoint to all these words. Julien can be very eloquent about the appeal of his project, very convincing, but his vision of reinvigorating the countryside is continually belied by the vigor all around him. The beauty of the country, its peace and warmth, seems to be mocking his belief that anything further is needed. The early scenes when Julien walks around the garden with Bérénice are especially bucolic and lovely, but the whole film is an ode to greenery and lushness, as the bright hues of the countryside provide an evocative backdrop to the characters' perambulations. It's as though the landscape is conspiring to subtly support the perspective of Rossignol, with his passionate, verbose defenses of unspoiled natural beauty. (Luchini, another Rohmer veteran, delivers a lively performance as the schoolteacher with an activist's angry conviction and a defeatist's pessimism.)

By the end of the film, it's obvious that Rohmer is having a bit of fun at the expense of political conviction itself, suggesting that "the people" about whom everyone purports to care so much will just continue to make their own way through life while grand political ambitions thrive or fail with little concrete impact. Julien is pompous and loves to hear himself talk, and a big part of his project is certainly the feeding of his own ego. Rohmer absolutely demolishes the character in a scene where he stomps back and forth, delivering a grandstanding political oratory to a ten-year-old girl who has just thoroughly out-argued the politician. But Rohmer doesn't eliminate the character's appeal; Julien is at least refreshingly unconcerned with being the "right" kind of socialist or politician, an issue that concerns the much more dogmatic Régis a great deal.


That dogmatism is a leftover of the sectarian squabbling of '60s leftists, even though Régis himself castigates that very mentality. At one point, Régis makes reference to the "totalitarianism" and Maoism of 1968, which seems to be a bit of a jab at Godard and the other New Wave filmmakers and youths who fully embraced the radicalism of that era. It's also an acknowledgment that all extremism — all idealism, perhaps — is ultimately totalitarian to the extent that one wants to impress one's own vision of the world onto others. Everyone in the film keeps arguing for their own way of thinking, their own perspective, based on their relative weightings of the values they hold dearest, without pausing for a moment to consider other ways of thinking, other possibilities.

That's why it's so refreshing when Blandine, gathering material for a story on Julien's project, doesn't just talk to Julien and Rossignol, but wanders around the rest of the village, talking to farmers and local residents, asking them questions that are more theoretical than directly about the project itself. It turns out that people have their little dissatisfactions and their big problems, that they have some small ways they could imagine improving things, that they're as stumped as the politicians about the big issues, and that none of these people align neatly with the clichés imposed upon them from outside. After all the circular debate and philosophical blather of Julien and Rossignol and Régis, it's great to hear real people talk about their real lives, and these sequences have the quality of a documentary interlude spliced into the fictional film. The locals provide an alternate perspective to the more dogmatic competing ideologies of "progress" and "ecology" represented by Julien and Rossignol, respectively. The women, too, provide a counterpoint to the men, as both Bérénice and Blandine play the role of "devil's advocate," the latter quite literally in her role as a reporter asking questions, and the former more subtly as she deflates Julien's ambitions with deliberate provocations while playing the part of the unapologetic urban woman of the world.

The film ends with what's basically a shrug, as the project falls through and country life returns to normal. The finale takes place at a park where the locals are holding a community fair, everyone picnicking and having fun, children running around, playing games, the beauty of nature surrounding them all. In the midst of this idyll, all that's left for the principal characters to do is to sing, to face the camera in some of the film's very first closeups, brazenly breaking the fourth wall as they narrate this saga's disappointments and lessons in song. It's a wonderfully unexpected finale, playful and flippant, but also so very wise. Sometimes, it's far better to cast all the politics aside, to play in the meadows and sing. At the end of the film, these characters put aside their debates and their rhetoric and allow themselves to be seduced by the sensual pleasures that had been wrapped around them, verdant and ripe, throughout the film.

The Mirror (1997)

[This is a contribution to the Iranian Film Blogathon hosted by The Sheila Variations. The blogathon is inspired by imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi, and focuses on both his own films and those of other important Iranian directors. The blogathon will run from February 21-27, so check out all the related posts at Sheila's blog during this week.]

The Mirror uses a clever conceptual device as a way to observe, in pseudo-documentary fashion, the day-to-day rhythms of life in the city of Tehran. For the first half of the film, a young girl (Mina Mohammad Khani) tries to find her way home after her mother fails to pick her up after school. The girl gets a ride from a friendly stranger who calls himself the General, until his motorcycle gets smashed in an accident. Then she gets rides in various buses, seemingly picking them at random, hoping that they'll get her home. As she rides, she listens in on various conversations going on around her, and the film provides a glimpse into the lives of the ordinary people of the city, capturing attitudes in flux and the small complaints and pleasures of everyday life. Then, halfway through the film, the girl suddenly turns to the camera and says, "I'm not acting anymore," rips off her fake cast and the coat she'd been wearing, and storms off the bus, refusing to take part in the film anymore. After a hesitant interlude in which the film crew, including director Jafar Panahi, try to decide how to deal with their young star's sudden bout of anger, Panahi decides to continue following Mina anyway. As a result, the second half of the film mirrors the first, as the film crew follows Mina as she continues to try to find her way home — supposedly to the actress' real home now.

The film's structure calls attention to the continuity between fiction and reality, as the staged scenes of the early part of the film are mirrored by the supposedly "real" scenes of the latter half (even though it's doubtful that anything in the film is actually unscripted). Both halves of the film concern a girl trying to get home, lost in the city, and Mina's character — stubborn, independent, wise in her childish way — hardly changes when she says she's going to stop acting. At one point, in the second half of the film, Mina meets an old woman who had been on a bus with her earlier, talking about her uncaring children and her feeling that her life is miserable. Mina sits with the woman and finds out that she hadn't been acting earlier, that though she'd been paid to be in the film, everything she'd said had been a description of her actual life and her actual feelings. Later in the film, someone who'd been watching the filming compliments Mina on her acting but especially singles out for a praise a scene where, supposedly, she hadn't been acting, a scene after she broke character and quit the film. The line between fiction and reality is blurry here, and it seems to be Panahi's assertion that, in both fiction and documentary, artists are attempting to capture the essence of reality, and in that sense it hardly matters if something is factual as long as it's true to the emotional and social reality that the camera captures. And in spite of the metafictional gimmick at the heart of the film, it's obvious that The Mirror is true to reality, that Panahi is trying to present a portrait of life in the city with all its complexity.

One interesting aspect of this portrait is the emphasis on the role of women. During a cab ride towards the end of the film, the driver and some passengers debate the roles of men and women in a society where tradition remains ingrained even as a few changes are beginning to shake things up. A woman in the cab passionately argues that women shouldn't be slaves to their husbands, that it's not the woman's duty to be a maid or a housekeeper, and that men should help out their wives. The driver and another man argue against her, trying to maintain that men earn the money while women should stay at home and keep the house in order. But as the woman points out, this strict division of labor is no longer always true, as women begin to work outside of the home, too — a situation that calls into question the codification of the man as the worker and the woman as the child-rearer and housekeeper. This exchange suggests a society in flux, a society where new situations and new values are threatening the traditional understanding of men and women. This open, honest exchange is juxtaposed against the buses, where men and women are segregated from one another in separate sections, with one of the film's most charming moments being Mina's observation of the shy, sweet smiles exchanged between a young man and a young woman, separated from one another across the bus but connecting anyway with their glances.


The subtext of the film is rebellion against what's expected. Mina rebels against the film crew, against the instructions of her male director — and Panahi continually inserts little jokes at his own expense, to undermine his authority as director. Mina is a fiercely independent young girl, in both incarnations of her character. She is occasionally helped along in her long odyssey home, but more often she resists the condescending help of the adults around her. She wants to find her own way, even though she's hopelessly lost and doesn't know the names of any streets, only being able to navigate by her memory of certain landmarks. Though dwarfed by her surroundings — she has to clamber up the wall of a phone booth to put her coin into the phone's slot before making a call — and obviously overwhelmed by the rushing traffic and chaotic crowds that surround her everywhere in the city, she tries to contain her fear. She asks many people for help, but she wants only limited assistance. She doesn't want to be delivered anywhere, she just wants directions and then she can go running off, her head down, her little feet pumping rapidly as she runs with a sense of purpose even when she has no real idea where she's going. The patter of her feet on pavement, captured by the microphone that the film crew leaves on her when they follow the rebelling young actress, is a recurring sound on the soundtrack, even when Mina herself dodges out of view behind traffic or gets lost in the crowds on the sidewalk.

More than anything else, the film is about the frenetic energy of Tehran, packed with cars and bikes and pedestrians, a dangerous and active city where frequent accidents — at one point a smashed car is lifted out of the center of a traffic jam with a crane — only add to the confusion. The people Mina meets on her journey home are often interesting in their own right, with their own stories and their own concerns, from the General's anxiety about his relatives' fashion choices at his son's wedding (he seems to think that their old-fashioned style will embarrass him) to the musician who used to earn his living by dubbing the voice of John Wayne in imported American films. Although overt commentary is impossible, Panahi seems to be implicitly examining the state of modern Iran, suggesting submerged clashes between modernity and tradition, between homegrown and outside influences.

Panahi, who was recently arrested by the Iranian government and effectively banned from making films, uses his unassuming pseudo-documentary style to consider the changing roles of women in this traditionalist country. The film is utterly apolitical on its surface, and yet at the same time it is unquestionably a film with a real social consciousness, an alertness to the ways in which ordinary people live their lives, the pressures they face from the intersections of religion, tradition and more modern influences. Mina, though she wears the head-scarf and clothes of a traditional woman or girl, seems like a thoroughly modern woman in terms of attitude: self-sufficient, bold, reluctant to bow to the demands of her elders. Panahi, from behind the camera, displays the same traits, the same determination, and if he is truly prevented from making any more films by the Iranian government, it will be a great loss, not only to the Iranian people — who need an artist this sensitive, this perceptive, this creative — but to the entire world.

Rendezvous In Paris

Rendezvous In Paris is one of Eric Rohmer's episodic films, like his sadly unknown 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. This is a triptych of three stories set in Paris, with the concept of the rendezvous as the driving force and structural foundation of all three. The three stories concern two-timers and cheaters, and revolve around O. Henryesque ironies and coincidences, the stories marked by cute twists and wry reversals that mask the more quietly emotional subcurrents running through all three tales. These are simple, even stereotypical stories — one girl discovers her boyfriend is cheating, another cheats on her boyfriend with an older man, and a painter clumsily juggles two women who aren't interested in him — told with the directness and playfulness that Rohmer typically brings to his work. It is a light film, even minor, in the context of Rohmer's career as a whole, but its simplicity is also a virtue. The dialogue, as usual in Rohmer, is refreshingly open and eloquent: Rohmer's characters don't always say what they mean, or even know what they mean, but they always speak in ways that reveal their souls, whether intentionally or not. Rohmer seems to have a profound belief in the power of talk, even when it's idle banter or lies.

In the first of the film's three stories, Esther (Clara Bellar) becomes obsessed with the idea, mentioned in passing by an admirer, that her boyfriend Horace (Antoine Basler) is seeing another girl on the side. The rendezvous here is an idée fixe for Esther: she's told that Horace meets another girl at a certain café at 7:00 on the evenings when he's not with Esther. After introducing this structuring idea, Rohmer allows the plot to meander along, with Esther's obsession with this supposed meeting always percolating subtly in the background. She tries to study for a test, confesses her worries to a friend, and then indulges a playful flirtation with a man (Mathias Mégard) she meets in an outdoor market, and all the while she's thinking about Horace's supposed meeting with another girl.

The scene where Esther flirts in the marketplace is a masterful piece of staging. As Esther walks along in the foreground of the shot, turning her head this way and that to look at the various stalls in the market, the man trails along behind her, telling her that he has a dentist's appointment and wants to pass some pleasurable time with her beforehand. Rohmer's camera drifts along with the pair as they walk, capturing the delicate struggle between them as the man flirts and tries to charm her, while she maintains a pose of faux-aloofness, pretending to be absorbed by the sights of the market around her, hardly ever even looking directly at the man who's strolling just behind her. It's a game, and a fun game to watch, this jockeying for position within the frame, this struggle to get the upper hand in a game of romance and flirtation. Rohmer captures the little details — Esther's studied air of casualness offset by a charmingly genuine smile, the way she keeps subtly cutting off her would-be suitor, preventing him from walking exactly next to her — that characterize these games between men and women, the games that are the subject of so many of Rohmer's films.

The games continue as Esther sets a fake date for the same café that Horace is rumored to frequent, a date she really has no intention of keeping. But when her wallet is stolen and then returned by a stranger named Aricie (Judith Chancel), who also has a date at that same café, it becomes obvious that Esther is meant to be at that meeting at 7:00, just as it becomes obvious to the audience what the ironic twist is going to be. The denouement is no less delightful for its obviousness and contrivance, though. It's a cutesy twist, a pat irony, but Rohmer uses it as a way of probing how the seemingly light games that men and women play with each other in love disguise deeper reservoirs of feeling. Esther plays off her confrontation with Horace as a game at first, acting as though she doesn't know him, letting herself be introduced as an old friend by Aricie, hiding bits of coded malice in her superficially playful patter. But it's obvious how much she's hurt, how shaken she is by this betrayal, and finally she can't hide behind the games anymore, and storms away. It's fitting that the final irony is also hurtful: she leaves without fulfilling her date with the man from the market, who shows up just after the drama has played out, looking around expectantly and hesitantly, already fearing the disappointment of the girl not showing up. These games of love, Rohmer suggests, are not the laughing matter that we sometimes pretend they are.


The middle story of this triptych also deals with unfaithful lovers, although from the opposite perspective: a woman (Aurore Rauscher) meets with a somewhat older man (Serge Renko) in parks around Paris, cheating on a longtime boyfriend who she almost thinks of as her husband. Rohmer's sense of geography, his attention to the nuances of place, is on full display here, as the two lovers meet in one park after another, always searching for novelty and "poetry" as they get to know one another and try to negotiate their clandestine relationship. They always meet in public, because the woman doesn't want to risk going too far by visiting his apartment, and as a result their relationship exists only in public, in parks where they walk with arms wrapped around each other, or kiss on benches in secluded areas, or playfully trot from place to place. Their conversation is at times banal, just idle chit-chat, at times touching on the deeper issues of love and intimacy that concern their relationship and the woman's continuing but increasingly loveless relationship with her other boyfriend.

The two lovers are unnamed, credited only as "elle" and "lui," suggesting that they are archetypes, paradigms of the dueling negotiations between men and women as they try to form relationships. They lie to one another, in small ways, telling each other conflicting stories about their desires and their feelings, never quite forming a solid bond: she's leading him on, keeping him at a distance, while he wants more but seems disappointed when she finally offers it. It's as though their relationship is perfect within the limited confines they set for it, and outside of that narrow purview it will inevitably collapse. As they slowly work towards discovering this truth, Rohmer revels in the beauty of the Parisian parks they visit, surrounding these hesitant lovers in rich, vibrant green hues that seem to enfold them at first, and which are increasingly replaced by bare trees and paths strewn with browning leaves as fall leads into the winter chill. Rohmer has always had a great feel for the seasons, around which he built a four-film series late in his career, and here he manages to film the chilly air, the coldness that makes these lovers want to cuddle closer on damp benches.

In the end, for their last tryst, the lovers play at being tourists in Paris, pretending that they've arrived for a sightseeing trip, and the metaphor of tourism in a subtle way comments on their own relationship. There's a sense of the temporary, of the scenic and superficial, in this relationship that exists only in parks. The ending is another ironic twist worthy of O. Henry, but as in the first segment, it's also an opportunity for the playfulness and games to give way to stark honesty. The woman, dropping her tourist act and dropping, too, the flirty charm with which she'd strung along her lover, finally tells him her true feelings, in blunt and painfully honest terms. It's yet another reminder that the charm and surface lightness of much of Rohmer's work can be deceptive, that the emotions at stake in these seemingly trifling stories can in fact be quite profound.


The third and final segment of Rendezvous In Paris, though, concerns much more frivolous and transient relationships than the more enduring ones in the first two stories. A painter (Michael Kraft) gets a visit from a friend of a friend, a Swedish woman (Veronika Johansson) who's visiting Paris and needs someone to show her around. He's not too interested in her, and she seems indifferent to him, and he takes her to a museum where he becomes fascinated by another woman (Bénédicte Loyen), who turns out to be married. There's a more subtle irony at work in this story than in the first two, with their broadly telegraphed twist endings. Throughout this story, the painter uses his work as an excuse, as a pretext, as a prop for conversation: when he doesn't want to do something, he says he's engaged in painting, and when he wants to impress a girl he talks about painting, pompously lecturing on form and color and history to seem intelligent. He's kind of a fraud and an arrogant jerk, like so many of Rohmer's male protagonists, absorbed in himself and so insecure as an artist that his art hardly seems as important to him as meeting girls. The irony arises because, at the end of the film, having passed an afternoon with the married girl who makes it clear that she's not interested, and having been stood up by the Swedish girl who he'd earlier intended to stand up himself, he's finally left alone with his painting, and the events of the day send him off in a new and potentially fruitful direction, injecting some life and vigor into his previously dull work.

This is, perhaps, another not-so-complex ironic twist, if a more subtly communicated one than in the first two segments. But it's Rohmer's sensitivity and wit that allows this point to resonate, as he patiently observes this cad at work and play. "I thought you were an artist, not a pick-up artist," the newly married girl observes wryly as he trots along behind her, much as the stranger in the market had behind Esther in the film's first segment. Like Esther, she seems playfully receptive, committed to her new husband but not so much that she won't indulge in a little harmless banter with this stranger, and even visit his apartment to see his paintings. And as in the first segment, Rohmer's fluency with body language is compelling to watch: the conversation in the painter's studio is a study in distance and intimacy, as the two slowly drift together only for her to abruptly break away, shattering the intimacy that occasionally threatens to develop between them. Their conversation, about art and the importance of searching for one's aesthetic, is a kind of mask for their innocent flirtation, but it's also the first time in the film, one senses, that when the painter talks about his art, he's doing so genuinely, rather than using his painting as an excuse or a tool or a symbol for his identity.

This kind of multi-leveled conversation, where surface meanings and subtexts intertwine and words are both revealing and deceptive, is typical of Rohmer. Even in such a simple, essentially light-hearted film, with its jaunty illustrated titles and interludes of street singers to introduce each tale, Rohmer is dealing with complicated emotions, with the question of how we discover what's important to us and what we want from our lives and relationships. This is, as with so many of the films Rohmer made in his later career, a youthful film made by an older man, with its cute young actresses and handsome leading men, their vibrancy and vitality bringing Rohmer's agile dialogue to exciting life. It's a fun film where even its humor and its playfulness contribute to its deeper themes.

Late August, Early September

In Late August, Early September, Olivier Assayas delicately probes the loosely intersecting lives of the friends and family surrounding ailing writer Adrien Willer (François Cluzet). The film's episodic structure, divided into segments like chapters in a novel, emphasizes the effect of time and the way people tend to drift in and out of each other's lives. Weeks or months pass between episodes, and when the film returns to a character, things have changed or just shifted slightly, much has happened to be summed up in a few suggestive words or a telling glance. The film revolves around the way these people are, as the title suggests, on the cusp of a change, poised in between seasons in their lives: they are all at an age where they're settling down, becoming respectable or willfully refusing to, learning what they want out of life and love. Gabriel (Mathieu Almaric) is shaken up by the realization that his friend Adrien might be dying, and he's disturbed by the usually reticent Adrien's sudden bursts of forthrightness and warmth, but more than that he's reflecting on his own life. Adrien is a dissatisfied writer, self-critical to a fault, pretending that he's not bothered by what people think but, inside, really seething that his books haven't been more successful on a mass scale, angry over what he sees as his commercial failure. The dissatisfaction and frustration of this man as he faces death drives the drifting, aimless Gabriel to really look intensely at his own life for the first time, and to rethink what he wants to do with the time in front of him.

This theme, never stated explicitly but always bubbling just beneath the surface, drives every character in the film to one extent or another. Assayas builds the relationships between these characters patiently, with small, writerly details that give the film a kind of novelistic attention to subtleties. Many of the characters in the film are writers or creative people of one sort or another, and what they do with words Assayas molds with his images, with the performances he shapes from his great cast. The relationship between Gabriel and his ex Jenny (Jeanne Balibar) is strained and charged through with the last remnants of the sexual chemistry that must have once defined their love. In the opening scenes of the film, Gabriel and Jenny attempt to sell the apartment they once had together, and Assayas frames Jenny in the foreground, occasionally mumbling something under her breath, even as Gabriel dominates the conversation with the prospective buyers. It's immediately apparent how unhealthy their relationship was, how Gabriel steamrolls over his former lover's words, ignoring her even as Assayas ensures that she remains in a prominent position within the frame, creating a tense dynamic of domination and submission between the pair. Throughout the film, though, this relationship, now ended, ironically becomes stronger as the lovers grow apart, realizing that despite the occasional temptation to reunite, they are no good for each other. There's a moment, late in the film, where it seems like Jenny is going to get a ride home with Gabriel, but instead takes an offer from another friend; it's casual and offhand, but when they say goodbye there's something final in it, like they've finally realized they're both moving on.

Assayas has a real feel for such beneath-the-surface realizations and symbolic moments. The film flows with the pacing and naturalness of ordinary life, but his camera seems to guide the viewer towards the moments and the images that suggest deeper currents. Gabriel's tumultuous relationship with his new lover, Anne (Virginie Ledoyen) reaches a pivotal moment when the unstable Anne visits him for a weekend. Their conversation at an outdoor café touches on trivialities and routine banter, only gradually working towards more serious matters, but there's something almost magical about the cups of hot drinks sitting in front of them, streaming pennants of steam out into the cold wind throughout the sequence. It's the delicacy and the ambiguity of this detail that makes the scene so special: it's not an obvious symbol for anything, merely a beautiful aesthetic touch that helps to enforce the scene's sense of two people who love each other finally connecting in a solid way.


This subtlety goes a long way, also, towards defining the troubles between Anne and Gabriel in the first place. Assayas' gliding, flitting camera has a way of guiding the attention to just the right moment, just the right image. At one point, Anne and Gabriel go to see Gabriel's brother (Eric Elmosino) and his wife (Nathalie Richard) at their house in the country. There, surrounded by Gabriel's friends and family, all of whom are still very close friends with his ex Jenny, Anne feels out of place and lost, an outsider looking in at her lover's life. Nowhere is this more clear than when Gabriel seriously discusses Adrien's condition with a few close friends, and they all try to come to terms with their grief and their anxiety about what's going to happen. These are intense emotions, but Assayas is too subtle a filmmaker to forget about Anne, who he locates sitting off to the side, smoking, drawn into herself, feeling as though she's excluded from these strong feelings, feeling that there are parts of her boyfriend's life that are utterly inaccessible to her. It's all accomplished without words, just the simple gesture of including her in the scene, not letting her get completely shuffled off to the side by the camera as she is by the characters within the scene.

Assayas shows a similar generosity and understanding towards Véra (Mia Hansen-Løve), the young teenage girl who was the much older Adrien's girlfriend in his final months. She largely appears at the fringes of the narrative, saying little, her existence mostly unknown to Adrien's friends. But Assayas periodically returns to her, silently observing her reactions to the film's events from her slightly distanced perspective, and in the final stretch of the film she becomes a kind of icon for the ways in which lives can connect in unexpected ways, the ways in which our experiences eventually form the mature people we'll later become. Assayas, who would brilliantly return to this kind of multi-character narrative with his more recent Summer Hours, is rejecting the convention of the linear narrative, instead focusing on the ways in which people's individual stories intersect and split apart to form new stories. The naturalism of this film arises from the fact that the characters seem to be living individual lives independently of the junctions and encounters required by the plot; the ellipses of the narrative create a sense of getting reacquainted with these characters after some time apart, catching up on what's changed and what's stayed the same. That's why, in addition to being a film about maturity, Late August, Early September is itself a mature film, a film that's clear-eyed about people's failings and virtues, about the limits and joys of creativity, about how much a person can change and how much we're all slaves to our natures.