Mildred Pierce (episodes 1-2)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

Todd Haynes' new HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce is a fresh adaptation of the James M. Cain novel that had previously been adapted for Michael Curtiz's 1945 film of the same name. Haynes' expansive five-part miniseries, the first two parts of which aired on Sunday as a single two-hour block, takes its cues from the novel, rather than from Curtiz's noirish, overheated Joan Crawford melodrama. In the process, this new version expands into a potent, sprawling epic of the Depression era woman. Mildred (Kate Winslet) is placed in a difficult situation when she finally pushes her no-good husband Bert (Brian O'Byrne) out the door, sick of his laziness and his philandering with another woman. Mildred becomes a "grass widow," caring for her daughters Veda (Morgan Turner) and Ray (Quinn McColgan) on her own, making do at first with the meager proceeds from selling homemade pies, while she searches for a job in an economy with very few real prospects.

The signal virtue of Haynes' film is its meticulous attention to the economic realities of its era. In countless small details in the first episode of the series, Haynes emphasizes how every penny, every nickel, every dime must be carefully managed. On Mildred's first shopping trip after her husband leaves, she places items into her basket, weighing each one in her hand as she looks at the price, and Haynes pulls in for a tight closeup on the shopping basket as she mentally calculates the total cost, finally discarding an item that would push her over her budget. Later, when she gets a job as a waitress, her new employers make a point of telling her that the cost of her uniform will be deducted from her first check, and that any discrepancies at her tables will also be deducted, and that she'll have to buy her own shoes. The costs tally up quickly. As Mildred tells Veda in the second episode, everything in their lives, everything they own, has a cost, and Haynes makes sure that that cost is felt concretely, that every penny of it feels like it matters.

Haynes is similarly meticulous with every aspect of the film. The 1930s setting is believably tangible without any showy period touches; there's simply a constant sense of physicality in such details as Mildred's drab and obviously cheap undergarments, or the fruit vendors lined up along a cobbled street, or the tattoos on the arm of a blood donor, suggesting that only a lower-class man would be donating blood in this society, in this era. Haynes evokes the era with a direct but stylish aesthetic, using mostly pale, muted colors that add to the sense of reality. He's constantly shooting through glass, through windows that slightly distort and filter the view outside, as when Mildred is seen, contemplating her dim economic prospects, through the filthy front window of a diner, her face made indistinct by the gray grime layered on the glass. This is a film that is very much about the economic realities of the Depression for a single woman trying to provide for herself and her family, so the film's verisimilitude is vitally important. It also definitively sets Haynes' adaptation of the Cain novel apart from the famous 1945 Joan Crawford film, which not only shifted the story's era from the Depression to the then-current mid-1940s, but also offered an overheated vision very far removed from the physical and emotional realism of Haynes' version.


In that respect, Kate Winslet's performance as Mildred is a key component of the film's effect. Comparisons to Crawford are perhaps inevitable, but misplaced since Winslet's performance is in an entirely different register from her predecessor in this role. There's no melodrama in Winslet's performance, no excess. It's a warm, nuanced embodiment of a woman who, in the early scenes of the film, simply and abruptly decides that she's sick of the life she's been living, and over the course of the first two episodes begins to realize what she'd like to replace that life with. The first shot of the film is a closeup on Mildred's hands as she prepares pies for baking; Haynes immediately thrusts the audience into Mildred's world, a world of work and effort. In the subsequent scene, what starts as a routine conversation between Mildred and Bert — one immediately senses that they've had similar tense discussions many times — goes off-track when Mildred unexpectedly and casually drops the name of the woman that she knows Bert has been going to see. It's a remarkable moment, the truth suddenly bubbling up from out of this routine marital conversation, and afterward Mildred doesn't even quite seem to realize why she forced this confrontation, she just knows that she's reached a breaking point. Maybe it's the casual way that Bert says, "I don't see what else I can do around here," the careful phrasing of which Haynes utterly mocks because the audience can easily see the dirty pans and dishes stacked around the kitchen, while Mildred sits at the table working on yet another pie.

The film provides plenty of opportunities for Winslet to portray the complexities of this remarkable woman. In one scene from the second episode, when Mildred and Bert discuss finally getting a divorce and making their separation official and permanent, their conversation covers a wide range of emotions. The splitting couple is initially acrimonious and on edge, exchanging harsh words about one another's choices in romantic partners — Mildred has become involved with Bert's former business partner Wally (James LeGros) — but they soon begin gently joking about their situation, trying to laugh it off, and in their banter is visible a glimmer of the attraction they once must have felt for each other. The moment of warmth and humor segues seamlessly into tears, with Mildred breaking down, her face screwed up in anguish. It's a wonderful scene, a powerful acting showcase for Winslet especially, and it suggests the broad emotional palette that Haynes is working with here, tapping into the rich essence of Mildred's story and mining it for genuine, heartfelt drama rather than overwrought melodrama.

In the final act of the first episode, Winslet's Mildred conveys a sense of utter horror and desperation as she comes to grips with the prospect of having to lower herself in status in order to provide for her family. This class consciousness is most powerfully felt in a scene where Mildred goes for an interview to work as a maid in the house of a rich woman. Again and again throughout this sequence, Haynes holds one uncomfortable moment after another, allowing several beats to go by as Mildred attempts to swallow her pride, to choke down the bile rising up within her middle-class soul at being treated like a lowly servant. It starts when she knocks on the front door of the house, gets one look from the black servant who answers the door, and is immediately told to go around to the back. The door slams in Mildred's face, and Haynes holds the shot of her standing there, stunned into immobility. He holds the shot again after Mildred meets with the woman of the house and is told that she can't sit down without being told, causing Mildred to look startled again and stand up. When a second later the woman tells Mildred to sit down, the way Mildred holds her body, rail-straight and poised, suggests her pride struggling within her, resisting these demands for obedience and subservience.


Mildred is a very proud woman, and also a very tough one, a woman both of her time and astonishingly modern, even now. The film's portrait of Mildred constantly suggests the tension between the modern woman she's being forced to become and the conventional housewife she'd perhaps once been. Part of this is a growing sense of practicality, accepting that becoming a waitress to feed her family is nothing to be ashamed of — though she still can't bring herself to reveal her new job to her daughter Veda, who has very un-practical ideas about social standing and propriety, setting the stage for the conflicts that will drive the later chapters of this saga.

Mildred's modernity is refreshingly conveyed in the scenes from the series' second episode in which she first meets the wealthy but terminally lazy Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce) and impulsively decides to accept his flirtatious invitation to join him at his beach house. The sex scene between the two newly acquainted lovers is earthy and intense, emphasizing the straining muscles in Monty's forearms as his hand rests on the bed, holding up his body. Haynes' camera drifts sensually across the lovers' bodies, exploring the junction points between them, emphasizing the sweaty and surprisingly unglamorous contact between the toned Monty (with his dark brown tan, a product of empty days with nothing to do but lay on the beach) and the middle-aged but still sexy and curvy Mildred. Haynes purposefully contrasts this passionate scene, and the relaxed post-coital conversation of the lovers, against Mildred's comparatively awkward and passionless encounters with Wally, who she falls into bed with out of mere convenience and confusion. Haynes plays the sex with Wally for laughs: Wally gropes Mildred and they stumble around the room, nearly collapsing onto the bed, and as Mildred putters around her room afterward, Wally sits on the bed, balancing an ashtray on his rounded belly, an irredeemable comic figure.

Of course, Mildred's beachside interlude with Monty is followed by the tragic and heartrending conclusion to the second episode — culminating in a very lengthy final shot, a sustained look at Mildred's grief before a discrete pan around the corner to a dark wall — but even before this ending, the scenes at the beach with Monty resonate as a contrast against the rest of the film. It's a moment when Mildred is lifted out of her working class life, freed from the responsibilities of work even if only for a day. In a way, that's what attracts her to Monty, as suggested by the expression of mingled excitement and disgust that flashes across her face when she realizes that Monty doesn't actually do anything in his life, merely cashes the dividend checks he receives from his inherited family business. For Mildred, that's a glimpse of a whole other life, far removed from the bustling world of the restaurant, from the kneading of dough to make pies, from the necessity of counting every cent that buys her groceries. It all comes back to that grounding in the economic realities of the era in which the film is set, its emphasis on what money — and the lack of it, and the desire for it — really means.

Inception

Christopher Nolan's Inception is a purposefully twisty film, a film that prides itself on its elaborate structure — a structure that exists on the meta-level of the narrative as well as constantly asserting itself within the film itself. Mirroring the film's plot about sci-fi thieves who enter people's dreams to steal (or plant) crucial bits of information, Nolan weaves through one layer of dreams/narrative after another, constantly sending his characters leaping from one false reality to another, and thrusting the audience through similarly discombobulating shifts. And yet, for all these dreams and dreams within dreams, and maybe dreams within dreams within dreams, the film telegraphs its supposedly most important revelations well ahead of time, and in the end all of its intricate structures and flashy surfaces seem designed to disguise the rather conventional story being told at its center.

Early on, after the dizzying, action-packed opening sequence, it becomes clear that Inception is at heart a heist picture. The ace dream "extractor" Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are hired to do a seemingly impossible job for the businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe): to plant an idea in the head of Saito's corporate rival, Fischer (Cillian Murphy). To do so, of course, Cobb and Arthur will need to gather a team, which triggers the obligatory extended sequence in which the pair goes around gathering together their fellow conspirators, including the "architect" Ariadne (Ellen Page), who will build the dreams, and the forger Eames (Tom Hardy), who will pose in other identities within the dreams. Once this team is assembled, the dream extractors enter the mind of Fischer, enacting an elaborate plan that involves putting the businessman to "sleep" multiple times, moving from one dream to another within his sleeping mind, constructing multiple layers of reality where the various characters are sleeping, dreaming within a dream, all while their "real" bodies are sleeping on a 747 bound for Los Angeles.

The bulk of the film is taken up by this complex web of dreams within dreams, and Nolan stages it all as an unrelenting action race against time. You see, Fischer had had training to protect against extraction, which means that his subconscious is "militarized," and that means that people are constantly shooting at the heroes. And if they die in the dream, they'll go into limbo, even though under normal circumstances they'd just wake up when "killed" in a dream. And... well, there's a lot more, but that's a big part of the problem. The film is awash in complex concepts and reversals, in intricate rules and exceptions to those rules. Mostly, though, it all just plays out as a big, thudding, deafening action extravaganza, like the wildest physics-defying action sequences from The Matrix stretched out to feature-length (kind of like The Matrix's sequels, come to think of it). When the extractors arrive in a dream layer that is, for some inexplicable reason, set in a snowy wilderness with a heavily defended fortress at the center, it seems less like a movie than a video game, maybe a level of a Call of Duty shoot-em-up. That's what the various dream layers start to feel like after a while, like levels in a game — and when you get right down to it, while it's lots of fun to play a video game, no one really likes watching someone else play a video game. Nolan is playing a very big, very expensive, very complicated video game here, and it's exhausting to watch him play it through to the last level.


All of Nolan's blaring action set pieces and dream levels would perhaps be more bearable if one sensed there was something of substance to be found by navigating this maze. But, much as in The Prestige, Nolan's last attempt at a "personal" interlude in between Batman films, all of the film's narrative shenanigans don't really add up to anything in the end. It seems like a superficial attempt to dazzle with complexity for its own sake, despite a conceit that's tailor-made for such narrative pyrotechnics. Comparing Inception or The Prestige to Nolan's breakthrough second film, Memento, it's obvious that what's really missing is a deeper emotional connection to the film's structural gimmicks. The reverse-time structure of Memento, so often wrongly derided as a shallow gimmick, was actually a clever and substantial way of reflecting not only the character's short-term memory loss, but the resulting disconnect between his morality, his actions, and his reasons for those actions. Cause and effect were reversed and disassociated for that film's protagonist, and the film's structure reflected that.

Inception is lacking in that kind of depth. Nolan's love of structural puzzles seems to have consumed him, to the extent that the gimmicks now drive the film, rather than allowing the narrative structure to be defined by the story's themes and characters. Cobb is driven by his relationship with his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), and their children, who he's been estranged from. His fixation on Mal and his desperation to get back to his children are his major motivating forces and, more or less, his only character traits. But there's no depth to these emotional foundations. The film slowly metes out pieces of information about Cobb's past with Mal, using this relationship as material for "twists" that are so broadly telegraphed they're never even the least bit surprising. What should be the film's emotional core winds up being used for shallow suspense, and it fails even at that. Mal is never fleshed out enough as a character to make her anything more than a plot device, despite Cotillard's best efforts to make the character interesting. That's typical of the film as a whole: the performances are fine and even effective, but the characters are largely non-entities, hurtling through the film's claptrap constructions without pausing to take a break. The characterization is so thin that it's refreshing when the actors do even something small to enliven their generally functional parts, like Ariadne's little satisfied smirk after Arthur uses a tired movie trick to steal a kiss. Any little scrap of emotion, anything that feels the least bit real, is to be cherished in a movie this empty.

Within this oft-dazzling but ultimately insubstantial film, there are powerful moments, most of them early on, when the film's grandiose dream imagery still feels relatively fresh. Too often, Nolan signifies the unlimited imaginative potential of dreams by, well, blowing lots of things up, but there's no denying that certain sequences are viscerally thrilling, like the scene where Ariadne first explores the dream world, changing its architecture around her, creating steps to walk up and using mirrors to craft whole new landscapes. Nolan doesn't move much beyond this visually, though. His film's vision of dreams is surprisingly staid and unimaginative, rooted more in other movies — the weightless kickboxing cribbed from The Matrix, the crumbling dystopian cities of countless sci-fi movies, the frenetic action movie chase scenes of James Bond or Jason Bourne — than in a real feel for dream logic or the surreal imagery of our minds. For a film about dreaming and reality, Nolan is dreaming surprisingly small, content to deliver predictable heist movie beats dressed up in a flashy surface that he presumably hopes will be mistaken for the substance missing from the film.

The Conversations #23: True Grit

The latest installment of The Conversations has now been posted at The House Next Door. This time around, Jason Bellamy and I discuss the Coen brothers' new adaptation of Charles Portis' True Grit, and compare their take on the material to Henry Hathaway's iconic John Wayne-starring version of the same story. We talk violence, revenge, Wayne, Westerns, the place of this film in the Coens' oeuvre, and much more. Join us at the House and be sure to comment to continue the conversation.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

The Town

Ben Affleck really likes Michael Mann's Heat. Like, really, really loves it. Like, it's his favorite movie ever. How do I know this? Because Affleck's second directorial feature, The Town, follows the template of Heat so closely, is so deeply indebted to its example in every way, that it might as well be a remake. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, the brains behind a gang of Boston bank robbers who run briskly paced jobs that could be mistaken for professional robberies if you ignore all the idiotic things that the script has these supposed crack thieves do over the course of the film. Heat was driven by the grudging professional respect and mutual intelligence of Robert De Niro's ace thief and Al Pacino's dogged police detective, so Affleck tries to develop a similar rivalry/bond between MacRay and the FBI agent trying to catch him, Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm). In some ways this is doomed to failure — Affleck and Hamm is simply not De Niro and Pacino, and there's nothing anyone can do about that — but the problems run deeper than that. Affleck can't develop the same epic but intimate scale that Mann so effortlessly infuses into his films, where the canvas might be sprawling but the characters within it are sharply defined. The characters of The Town lack that definition, and the relationships between them are consequently shallow. When Frawley half-admiringly calls his adversaries "the not-fucking-around crew" — after an armored car robbery that went so spectacularly, laughably wrong that the crooks ultimately escape only because the script says they must — it doesn't feel earned, it doesn't feel organic.

That's the case with a lot of things here. The Town isn't as deep or as smart as it clearly thinks it is, but it does have its charms. Affleck has a good feel for action, and his robbery scenes have energy and vigor to spare. Taken as a lightweight heist flick — its obvious cribbing from Heat aside — it's at least mildly enjoyable, and does a good job of conveying the hopeless cycle of these poor Boston guys who seem to have crime passed down to them in their blood from their equally lowlife fathers. As the Irish gangster Fergie (Pete Postlethwaite) tells MacRay's gang at one point, he looks at them and sees their fathers; he's an old guy who's been in this racket long enough to see gangs of sons replace their fathers. That's probably the film's most compelling subtext, this emphasis on the continuity of crime from one generation to the next within this cramped part of Boston that no one ever really gets out of.

Less compelling is the budding romance between MacRay and the bank manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall), who his gang had briefly taken hostage during the robbery that opens the film. Affleck seems to be going for the unlikely but surprisingly tender romance between De Niro and Amy Brenneman in Heat, but Mann developed those characters so that they were disarmingly right together. The romance in The Town just consistently feels unlikely and silly, despite a warm and nuanced performance from Hall as her character deals with the stress of the bank robbery's fallout. The drama is, in general, rather generic, just stock bits of childhood trauma that provide the characters an opportunity for ponderous soul-baring speeches. MacRay's mother left him when he was a kid, and Claire had a brother who died when she was young, though this bit of information then becomes merely a source for the clever catch phrase that Claire uses to alert MacRay to the feds' presence in her apartment when Affleck decides to rip off the farewell scene between Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd in, you guessed it, Heat.


That's not all he rips off. The film frequently feels like a collection of scenes and scenarios from Mann's heist classic. The final robbery, at Boston's Fenway Park, degenerates into a street battle between cops and crooks, with assault rifles blaring. In the midst of this chaos, the final run of MacRay's best friend James (Jeremy Renner, giving an edgy, slightly sinister performance that deepens the character far more than the script does) feels more than a little like a recreation of the final moments of Tom Sizemore's character in Heat. In the film's final act, MacRay even develops a thirst for vengeance that drives him much as De Niro's Neil McCauley in Heat.

But this is precisely where the biggest difference between The Town and its source arises. It's obvious, from his film's denouement, that Affleck is more of a romantic than Mann. Virtually no one could watch the final act of Heat without desperately hoping that Neil makes it out alive, that's he's able to evade capture and find his private paradise with the woman he loves, away from the life of violence and crime he'd made for himself. And virtually no one could watch the final act of Heat without knowing that Neil is doomed anyway, that his mythical "one last gig" will not be his last because he's gone into hiding on some tropical island. Neil is such a compelling character, as defined by Mann and De Niro, that one always wants to see him make it, even knowing he won't, and even despite everything's he done in his life. Affleck obviously watches Heat with that same yearning for Neil's success, and this is doubtless why he decided to give his own film a kind of happy ending for his own character — as though he could vicariously live out the escape and rebirth denied to Neil. Neil's desire for vengeance undid him, but MacRay is able to get his vengeance, he's able to get his escape, he's able to get his redemption by using his stolen money for good, he's even implicitly able to get his girl, who may come join him in his exile someday. Affleck is ducking away from darkness and complexity, delivering a would-be heartwarming ending in which the longtime crook redeems himself and gets away clean. It's singularly unsatisfying, and not only because of the cheesy sunset shot of a bearded MacRay looking out over a lake from his remote cabin.

What's obvious is that Affleck wanted to remake Heat without dealing with the complicated morality or deep, contradictory characters of Mann's film. The Town still has its moments, like the way James takes a sip of soda from a discarded fast food drink before making his suicidal final run at the cops: the kind of small, surprising, humanizing detail that is sorely needed in this film. The performances are largely solid, particularly Renner's James, who has an at times creepy bond with his childhood friend, and Postlethwaite as the kind of sinister, subtly nasty hood who might have fit well in one of Guy Ritchie's first couple of films. The only real exception is Blake Lively, as James' sister Krista, delivering a mumbling, over-the-top performance of such spectacular awfulness that her big dramatic moments induce only giggles. The problem with the film is not the cast, however, but the generic unoriginality of its script and the lack of anything substantial or un-borrowed to flesh out these clichés.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is a ghost story told with the calm and patience of a prosaic tale of country living. The film concerns the final days of the titular protagonist, Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), an old farmer suffering from a kidney disease. He's visited by his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) and her son Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), and in his last days Boonmee's remote farm is haunted by ghosts of his own past, as well as visions of alternate lives both past and future. The film moves at the tranquil, languid pace of lazy afternoons with nothing to do, and this quiet grace allows the frequently outrageous and bizarre elements of the story to blend seamlessly into reality, to appear as natural as the background hum of insects or the gentle murmur of the wind.

The film is certainly awash in surreal elements, presented with that deadpan nonchalance that characterizes much of Weerasethakul's work. Boonmee is visited by both his dead wife, Jen's sister Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwong), and their son Boongsong (Jeerasak Kulhong), the latter of whom reappears as an apeman, having long ago wandered off into the jungle to commune with the mysterious "monkey ghosts" that inhabit the dense forests surrounding Boonmee's home. Huay appears without fanfare, simply fading into existence in an empty seat while the family is eating dinner. At first she's a kind of cinematic ghost within the frame, a hovering reflection where there is no mirror, a faint photographic afterimage layered within the film stock. But as she fades in, she becomes tactile and physical, as real-looking as the non-ghost people sitting around her, and the scene loses its subtle air of unreality to become simply a prosaic family dinner again, a group of people sitting around talking and reminiscing. It's a subtle point: within the cinema, everyone is a ghost, an image, and no figure is any more "real" than any other. Weerasethakul allows the film's ghosts to be as physical, as concrete, as the living people, just as he allows past, present and future to coexist without separation.


The same slow adjustment to strangeness occurs with Boonsong arrives. The "monkey ghosts," from a distance, are haunting and creepy figures, pure black shadows with glowing red eyes set into their faces. Weerasethakul periodically inserts a shot of these creatures in the jungle, these inscrutable figures with piercing eyes, eerie ghosts or demons who never reveal more of themselves than this shadowy outline. Boonsong appears the same way, walking up the stairs towards the family, his red eyes the only visible sign of him, the rest of his body blending so totally into the darkness that the twin red orbs appear to be floating in midair, disconnected from any concrete figure. Once he steps into the light, however, his creepiness is diffused, and he's revealed as simply a man in somewhat ungainly ape makeup. As he talks with his father, describing the circumstances of his long-ago disappearance, it is both poignant and silly and strangely ordinary: the emotions of the reunion, a son revisiting his father after many years of absence, cut through the goofiness of the ape outfit.

Weerasethakul has a wry sense of humor in moments like this. The first thing Jen says, upon realizing who the apeman is, is to ask, "why did you grow your hair out?" It's a singularly strange and funny thing to say to a guy who's somehow been transformed into a talking gorilla, and it reflects just how accepted the surreal and the supernatural are in this film. Later in the dinner, when Boonmee's worker Jaai (Samud Kugasang) arrives, he looks in wonderment at the monkey and the dead woman sitting at the table, but then he breathlessly murmurs, "I feel like the strange one here." In Weerasethakul's casual presentation of the supernatural and the mythical, it's prosaic reality that begins to feel strange. And after all, Jaai is the only outsider here, the only one who's not a member of the family. His distinction from the family is ultimately more important than the separation between the dead and the living, or between the human and the once-human.


Jaai is also an outsider as a Laotian immigrant, possibly an illegal who'd entered the country without authorization. The film is set in a border region between Thailand and Laos, and towards the beginning of the film Boonmee and Jen talk about illegal immigrants. Jen evinces prejudice against the Laotian workers, saying that they're "smelly" and that they sometimes rob and kill their employers. It's the same kind of dynamic that seems to develop anywhere that poor foreign laborers enter a more affluent neighboring region for work: they're needed for the work they do, but also mistrusted and feared, thought of as inferior and filthy, looked down upon by those who rely upon them. Politics drift gently through Weerasethakul's film, never quite becoming the focus but lightly tugging at the corners of consciousness. This examination of the nature of illegal immigration is later expanded when Jen has a conversation with Jaai, in which he reveals that he is soon leaving, heading back home to marry a girl who he'd been courting from afar. He's maintained his connection to his native country, and he knows that even if Boonmee is okay to him — though it's implied that the workers aren't paid especially well — that this isn't really his home.

Jaai's lower-class position is subtly mirrored in the later interpolation of the story of a princess and her servant. This dreamlike sequence feels like a folk tale or myth subtly grafted into the film, perhaps as a visualization of one of Boonmee's past lives. The servant and the princess fall in love, and Weerasethakul gracefully captures the forbidden tenderness between them in a scene where a group of servants bear the princess' carriage through the jungle on their shoulders. The princess, encased in gossamer layers of gauzy fabric, the lower half of her face hidden beneath a veil, reaches out of her carriage to touch the hair and bicep of the closest servant, who turns to her and folds her hand into his own free hand as he continues to haul her on his shoulder. This simple moment of physical contact, stolen secretly, feels as powerful as a kiss or an embrace. Later, the aging princess doesn't believe that the servant wants her anymore now that her youthful beauty has faded, and she sends him away by the side of a small lake where she sees her younger self reflected in the water. Then, in another of Weerasethakul's bizarre touches, she's confronted by a talking catfish who praises her beauty and eventually flaps between her legs as she wades into the water, the fish bringing her to orgasm as she drifts towards a waterfall.

This whole sequence has the feel of an erotic folk tale, unreal and ghostly. The princess and her servant are both caked in blue paint that makes them glow eerily in the moonlight. Weerasethakul, as is his habit, never explicitly connects this tale to the rest of the film, but its implications are obvious. If it's a past life of Boonmee, we're meant to wonder what part he plays in this drama: is he the princess or the servant? Or even the catfish, since the film's opening scene seems to imply that one of his past lives was as a cow escaping from its owners and wandering off into the jungle. The themes of aging and loss reverberate throughout the film, as Boonmee thinks back on his life, regretting what he's lost and what he's done, lamenting his illness and weakness as compared to his youthful vibrancy. The princess, looking into the lake, sees herself as a younger woman and wishes she still looked like that — but then she pushes her lover away, accusing him of fantasizing about her younger self. She speaks of the woman in the reflection as though she was another person altogether, as though she wasn't simply an earlier image of herself, frozen in time at a particular moment. It's as though she's disconnected from the past, disassociated from her own memories. Maybe that's why photographs, mementos of the past, are so important, why at Boonmee's familial reunion with his wife and son, he pulls out photo albums to look at with them, poring over these images of particular moments of time from the past. When we look at photos, we remember ourselves in earlier times as though catching glimpses of someone else's story, some younger person we only vaguely remember being. It's as though our "past lives" are just earlier moments, earlier ages, from the same long life.


There is a political component to memory here, as well. One of Boonmee's regrets is his time spent as a soldier, violently suppressing communists for the government. He says that he believes his illness is the payback of karma for all the men he's killed. Jen shrugs off such concerns, saying that he was only serving his nation, but she does seem proud of her father, who had apparently resisted the violence to some extent. He'd been sent into the woods to hunt people, she says, but instead he hunted animals, communing with nature and avoiding the horrors of killing. The film is subtly haunted by this violent, military past, a mostly unspoken past of bloodshed and repression.

Towards the end of the film, Boonmee describes a dream or a future vision, his words accompanied by strange still images of soldiers capturing and leashing the monkey ghosts, and citizens apparently rioting angrily, throwing rocks. (At the soldiers or the apes?) Boonmee's vision describes an authoritarian future in which the past can be erased by the government, in which those who maintain a connection to the past are hunted and captured, then made to disappear. It's an obvious metaphor for the governmental whitewashing of various tragedies and atrocities: whole cultures and groups, like the Laotians, like the monkey ghosts who may represent primitive ethnicities or cultures, can be made to disappear by the inevitable onslaught of progress and modernity. That's why the film is set in a tranquil, largely untouched rural area, surrounded by dense jungles, a last bastion of connections to the past, to rural living and agrarianism. In the film's final scenes, the characters return to the city and are surrounded on every side by signs of modernity: television sets and air conditioning, rock music karaoke, neon lights that brighten not only urban restaurants but sacred temples. Weerasethakul cleverly shoots a funeral scene from three angles: first head-on, looking at the mourners, then from behind them, looking at the altar with its banners and candles, and then, jarringly, in a wide shot from the side, revealing the previously unseen gaudy tower of neon lights that fills up the side of the temple, next to the rows of mourners. This shot disrupts the somber, spiritual tone of the funeral, introducing the disjunctions of modernity, in which the cheap and the superficial rest side by side with the serious.


Weerasethakul further examines the changes of modernization in the scenes of Tong as a monk towards the end of the film. Tong seems too restless for the monk's life, too in love with modern conveniences and appliances. But such things are infiltrating the supposed calm of the monastery as well: he describes how many of the monks have stereos and computers to send e-mails, and wishes that he had such things, too. He seems thoroughly disconnected from a life of spirituality and stoicism, and one wonders what ever made him think to be a monk. It feels like Weerasethakul's subtle lament for a culture that has perhaps lost touch with such otherworldly, mystical things. The film is partly about the increasing emphasis on the worldly and the material, and in this context Weerasethakul's emphasis on reincarnation, ghosts, rural legends and romantic folk tales is a radical assertion of the resistance of these traditions against encroaching modernity.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the culmination of Weerasethakul's "Primitive" project, which also included a pair of short films dealing with similar themes of memory, nostalgia, history and loss in this particular border region of Thailand. As the capping work of this project, this feature is one of Weerasethakul's richest films, weaving together the political, the spiritual, the fantastic and the deeply personal into a mysterious, moving, often funny account of facing mortality and confronting the sometimes uncomfortable truths of history. As such, the film looks both forward into the future and back into the past, and finds death in both directions, but even so it is not a bleak or dark work. It is instead warm and beautiful, evocative and sensual, flowing with the rhythms of daily life even as it examines the extraordinary and the shocking in both the real, violent history of the world and in the magical realms of myth, art and fantasy.

Film Socialisme (take 2)

Take 2, because take 1 was not enough. Because this latest film of Jean-Luc Godard defies interpretation at every step. Because Godard released Film Socialism with "Navajo English" subtitles in the English-speaking world, defying Americans to glean some meaning from the minimal, fragmented translations that reduce this film's at times complex texts to disconnected strings of verbs and nouns, at times run together into compound words. Not that seeing the film with more complete translations in the subtitles completes the picture: there are still gaps, still confusions, still whole sections where that signature Godard logic is fully comprehensible perhaps only to the filmmaker himself. The film, grandiosely titled as the document of (or monument to) an entire political philosophy, is a summation of Godard's relationship to commerce, quotation, politics and nationalism. As such, it can only be as gnomic and digressive as Godard's whole career has been. The document of a journey now lasting over 50 years, the journey of a filmmaker who's always been interested in questions of art, commerce, political action and inaction, history with its repetitions and echoes, and of course his own role as an artist in dealing with these subjects, and our role as the audience in watching him deal with them, trying to follow him. That's what the film is, a game of "follow me," with the implied dare being "if you can."

This intellectual gamesmanship is bracing and enthralling, even when the film remains baffling and unapproachable despite multiple viewings and multiple attempts to get closer to it. At one point, one of the characters, a young woman trying to trace the various losses of socialism like a detective of history, suggests that not everything is comparable (and thus comprehensible?), that sometimes "the incomparable can only be compared to the incomparable," a paradox that Godard applies to the machinations of history, the march from Hitler and Stalin to the current global capitalist status quo, where such flashy dictators have been replaced by the dominance of gold and money. That's why, perhaps, this woman is trying to discover the truth behind the various robberies that define the past: money stolen from Spain, from Palestine, by the West and by the supposed representatives of Communism alike. The gold funneled out of national banks by businessmen and capitalists: this, it is implied, is the foundation for the modern order, for the opulence of the cruise ship and the culture that revels in such luxuries.


Photographs are important in this film, as Godard examines the relationship between reality and the document of reality. A discourse about the imperialist history of the West's involvement in Palestine ends on the revelation of "the first photo of the Bay of Haifa," which segues into an image of the cruise ship photographer snapping pictures of partying tourists, then an image of an Arab woman looking at a photo, presumably the already mentioned imperialists' document of the West's arrival in the Middle East. The implication is that a photo is not just a document, not just a representation of what is seen. There is a story behind each photo. Just as a photo of a cruise ship passenger tells a story about luxury and privilege, a photo of a Middle Eastern location, from the vantage point of arriving imperialists, tells a story about a history of conquest and exploitation. That's why so many shots in this film show people using cameras, taking photos, documenting their surroundings and documenting, in the process and perhaps unconsciously, their relationship to those surroundings. The importance of the camera is asserted again in the film's second half with the presence of the TV journalists, whose cameras are never present during the intimate, private interior moments where the family discusses their ideas and their emotions. The TV cameras are only present outside the house, and mostly glimpse people rushing back and forth, trying to avoid the camera's gaze. Only Godard's camera, which exists outside the diegesis, can capture the more private moments that really count.

The second segment is Godard's return to the territory of his 1975 film Numéro deux, an examination of the political foundations of the family, dealing with the question of how ideas are passed from one generation to the next. The parents try to make a connection, to forge a mutual understanding, but they frequently falter, struggling to pass on their understanding of a world they don't really understand themselves. This is a near-constant undercurrent in Film Socialisme, this struggle to make sense of history and the present, which is the current endpoint of history, the situation that everything before had led towards and created. Politics and family life interweave, as the outside world unavoidably intrudes upon the domestic status quo, influencing the relationships that form between parents and their children, influencing business and daily life alike.


In the first scenes of this segment, first the family's father and then the mother are questioned from offscreen by their children, an interview technique that references Godard's frequent use of such dialogues dating back to Masculin féminin. In these unbalanced conversations, the children want to understand, while the parents just want to be loved and appreciated. Godard spaces out these dialogues amidst the quiet stasis of daily living. The pacing of these pastoral scenes of home life is exquisitely slow and meditative. Godard holds shots for a long time, watching as these people brush their teeth, or as the daughter rests her head on her father's shoulder in the dark, or the mother washes the dishes. There's a casual domesticity to such moments, and Godard purposefully infuses political dialogue and considerations of history and the image into this context. He's suggesting that such concerns are not — or should not be — separate from daily life or daily concerns. There is no disconnect between the home life and the political life, as the journalists hang around the family's home trying to create a political documentary, filming these domestic moments while shouting out questions that never get answered.


The film is, like many of Godard's films, about culture, though not in the obvious way of Passion, where he posed his characters like figures from classic paintings, nor of King Lear, where the search for Shakespeare provided the foundation for all manner of ruminations on culture and art and meaning. The young blonde son of the film's second segment is an avatar of culture, recreating the paintings of Renoir, moving with the rhythms of classical music and dreaming jazz. Godard's relationship to art has always been complex; he both loves beauty and is suspicious of it. He seems to be suggesting that art, rather than providing a commentary on reality and a way of expressing ideas about the world, has become an escape, a refuge from reality. A voiceover says, "We have only books to put into books. But what if we have to put reality into books?" Art feeds into art, creating a cultural conversation that is abstracted from the real world, from the experience of life as it is lived. That is why Godard subtly shifts the emphasis onto domestic routine, onto the peripheral tasks of the cruise ship's maids and waitresses as they do their work, onto brief scenes of Arab women talking and doing daily work.

In the final section of the film, culture becomes both a document and a warning, as Godard tries to develop an alternate understanding of art as essential, as intimately connected to life as it is lived. As Godard visits several European and Middle Eastern locales in turn, he finds the lessons of history in culture, and particularly the cycle of war and violence that has defined both world history and the depictions of it in art. The constant warring of Greek mythology and Greek tragedy, the emphasis on mortality in Egyptian art, the endurance of the Odessa Steps as a site of dramatized bloodshed: all of these markers are for Godard signs of the continuity between current situations and the grand tragedies of the past.

Film Socialisme (take 1)

Take 1, because Film Socialisme is not a film that offers up its ideas easily, because Jean-Luc Godard, in his latest film and first feature since 2004's Notre musique, is typically opaque and elusive. Take 1, also, because Godard, trickster that he is, released this latest opus to the English-speaking world in a way deliberately designed to make it even more difficult for those who don't speak the film's many languages. The film's dialogue and monologues are in French, Russian, German, Arabic, and other languages, but only an occasional isolated phrase of English. And Godard's chosen subtitles are in what the director has playfully dubbed "Navajo English," minimalist strings of disconnected words, not so much translating the dialogue as providing snippets of meaning, hints at the full meaning of what's being said. The subtitles are less translations than messages to the audience, enigmatic epitaphs that translate not speech but the deeper subtexts of Godard's cinema. The subtitles are a kind of passive-aggressive joke on American audiences, because America and its influence is the film's subtext — for the most part, Godard avoids explicitly mentioning America so assiduously that it becomes the unspoken ghost within the film, the driving force for everything that happens, the hidden target of so many of the film's satirical jabs.

And what is this but a satire? A satire of America, of capitalism, and also of the whole idea of cinematic storytelling. The film is divided into three segments. The first is set on a cruise ship, visiting various locales that have resonance to Godard — Barcelona, Naples, Odessa, Hellas ("Hell As," and also hélas, as in "alas," as in Godard's Hélas pour moi), Egypt, Palestine ("Access Denied," the onscreen text simply reads at this last port of call) — and never venturing beyond the superficial surfaces of anything. The images are glossy and pristine, bright and beautiful, parodies of cinematic splendor that are both jaw-droppingly sublime and yet somehow empty, suggesting how little beauty counts for amidst all this silly opulence. The film is obsessed with gold, with money. The cruise passengers play slots, their mechanically pumping arms highlighted against a gorgeous seascape. A Christian mass is held in a dining room with a bar nearby and a crystal ball rotating overhead, projecting fragmented mirror images of the ceremony. Snatches of conversation, partially translated or not, are concerned with business deals, with history (Hitler, Stalin, Communism, wars civil or otherwise), with seeming plots and spy maneuvers.

This baffling, elliptical verbal chatter is juxtaposed against the images of the cruise ship's conspicuous consumption: dance clubs where the music is distorted into a noisy clamor, passengers watching workout videos and cinematic images of Arabs interchangeably, people lounging around, eating, staring out at the sea. What better place than a cruise ship for Godard to document the victory of capitalism and the death of socialism: it is a place where capitalism's virtue is assumed, where every image, every setting demonstrates the capitalist's ascendancy. To the extent that there are distinguishable characters in this section of the film, they are symbols and metaphors rather than actual individuals. So Godard pays special attention to the glowing glamor of this setting, but does so in ways that call attention to power relations and the subtexts of the capitalist system as it's incarnated here. One shot from early in the film shows a couple of passengers posing for a photo on a typically glitzy staircase, surrounded by bright lights. But the image is out-of-focus; only the photographer in the foreground, presumably a cruise ship employee, is in focus, while the rest of the image is deliberately blurred and indistinct, an abstract image of privilege and success rather than a concrete portrait of two particular people. The composition calls attention to the worker taking the picture rather than the photo's ostensible subjects.


The film's second section shifts to a rural setting and focuses more concretely on a single family. The fragmentary pacing and flashy aesthetics of the cruise ship segment give way to a slower, more patient pace and an emphasis on domesticity and routine. This family, the Martins, owns a gas station and is apparently involved in an important election. They are dogged by a pair of journalists with a movie camera, who hover around the gas station accosting anyone who walks by, trying to get interviews and images. The fragmentary dialogue of the film's first part is replaced by lengthier dialogues, which makes the incomplete "Navajo" translation more of an issue: during the cruise ship passage, the Navajo subtitles mirrored the jumpy editing and the collaging of hi-definition digital images with grainy video footage. Here, the subtitles really do feel like out-of-context fragments ripped out of a larger whole, and it becomes even more apparent that Godard intends for language-deficient Americans to understand only incompletely, to be denied the full meaning of the dialogues.

But this confrontational pose is balanced by moments of humor and playfulness, particularly in the form of the Martins' young blonde son, a sprite who incarnates Godard's still-youthful sense of humor. This boy, dressed in a red CCCP shirt decorated with the Soviet hammer and sickle, conducts the classical music of the soundtrack, wildly swinging a lead pipe through the air in response to the music. Later, in his sleep, the movements of his mouth and the twitch of his fingers respond to — or perhaps produce — the plucking bass of a jazz tune. This boy chases off the TV reporters with his pipe, swinging it like a sword, playing pirate. He feigns blindness and runs his hands along his mother's body, creating an image of her in his mind with his fingers. He paints a Renoir masterpiece, and Godard's camera looks over his shoulder, distorting the image with digital color manipulation, as the boy looks at the young black camerawoman in her bikini top but paints a Renoir scene of pastoral beauty. The manipulated, blown-out colors make the whole image look like a painting, artificial and distancing.


Godard seems to be suggesting that art distorts, art lies, art dodges reality: the disconnect between what the boy is looking at and what he's painting suggests that the art of the past, like Renoir's landscapes, is a way of avoiding engagement with the present, with what's directly in front of us. What we need is an art of the present, an art that engages with reality as it really is. Earlier, on the cruise ship, one of the wealthy passengers wound through a gallery crowded with paintings, all of them for sale, all of them representing a classical style from the past, and images from the past. The glorification of the past, the obsession with masterpieces and masters, is interwoven with commerce, with the value of art in terms of money. Godard's more interested in the present, in images that are aware of history but point towards people and things that are happening now. Thus the second section, with its emphasis on the slow rhythms of daily life — brushing one's teeth, reading a book, children playing, halting conversations between members of the family — locates Godard's ideas within the context of the family, the context of prosaic reality rather than the stylized confines of art.

In the film's final section, Godard adopts an essayistic style to return to the locales of the cruise ship's journey: Egypt, Palestine, Hellas, Naples, Barcelona. For the cruise ship, these were simply destinations, brief stopovers, their rich histories obscured by the tourist's gloss. Godard returns to them here by pulling images from newsreels and films, images of art and photographs of history mashed up alongside cinematic excerpts. He's examining the disjunctions between past and present, nowhere so obviously as when he cuts between the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein and the modern-day Odessa Steps, a tourist attraction where groups of schoolchildren gather on the steps that were once the site of both a real massacre and its cinematic representation. It's during this section, especially, that Godard's insistence on denying meaning and translation render any understanding of the film conditional and ephemeral.


But, one suspects, that is the nature of the film in general, even for those rare individuals who "understand" all its many languages perfectly, who don't require any translation. Film Socialisme is dense and challenging, beautiful and provocative, allusive and elusive, bursting with so many ideas and suggestions that it defies the possibility of the kind of complete reading that one generally expects from a movie. In its very structure, the film is making a statement, more even than any Godard film before it, that the idea of complete understanding is an absurd joke.

Take 2, of perhaps many more, follows here. Understanding will come, if at all, much later.

Carlos

Olivier Assayas' Carlos is a probing, fascinating epic, a sprawling, admittedly fictionalized biography of the Venezuelan-born socialist terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, who went by the nom de guerre of Carlos (Édgar Ramírez). The film's scope and breadth encompasses, in sharply drawn detail over a five-and-a-half-hour running time, nearly 20 years in the life of this self-described revolutionary fighter, who briefly became an internationally infamous face of terrorism for his violent actions and bold plots. The film is a profile of one man and his actions, but more than that, it is a sweeping portrayal of terrorism, diplomacy, the shifting alliances of convenience and ideology that define global relations, the back-door dealings and maneuvers in which state action and anti-state terrorism exist as part of a single, densely connected network. It is an epic in the true sense of the word, a film that attempts to present a coherent portrait of this single terrorist's actions and, in the process, to examine the struggles of the Cold War and the struggles that continue to define the world today.

Carlos is an idealist for a cause, at least at the beginning of this three-part saga. Assayas opens the film with Carlos as an eager young fighter, already with some background in insurrectionary struggle behind him, but still relatively inexperienced. He nevertheless becomes an important figure in the European arm of a Palestinian terrorist organization, based in London, carrying out actions against prominent Jewish leaders. His first, clumsy attack on a businessman to some extent establishes the pattern for what's to come: Carlos is fast and violent and effective, but his gun jams and he only wounds the man, forced to escape frantically. His second attack, a bombing of a café, goes smoother, and soon afterward Carlos, naked and solid — he will grow fat in his later years, and is already boxy — admires himself in a mirror, caressing between his legs. It is as though this success is a sexual conquest for him, a validation of his manhood and his valor. He finds glory in the slaughter of random innocents.

Sexuality, masculinity and glory are very important to this film. Carlos is a compulsive womanizer, a man who loves women as much as he loves weapons, as much as he loves his cause — or the idea of a cause, since an actual ideological commitment seems increasingly remote in relation to him throughout the course of the film. In one of the film's most telling scenes, early on, with one of his many lover/conspirators, he shows her a trunk full of weapons, reveling in her fearful reaction. He caresses her with the weapons in his hands, placing a grenade first between her legs, then rubbing it up her body to place the arming ring between her bared teeth. Sex and war and revolution are all tangled up for Carlos. His lover tells him that his love of women and his love of weapons are the same, and Carlos seems to agree: "my weapons are extensions of me, like my arms." One can't help but think of that earlier scene, where Carlos held his penis in the aftermath of a bombing, celebrating these "extensions" of himself.


Carlos celebrates because, more than an ideological revolution, it's personal glory and personal success that he seems to thirst for. He chafes against orders, declaring that he's working for the revolution, not for any leader or single government. But later, when he's independent, with control over his own cell, he demands absolute obedience; he only wants to be the one giving the orders. At one point, he tells a Saudi Arabian diplomat that he cherishes democracy, that he will discuss a crucial matter with his comrades — but when his comrades disagree with him, he explodes, making the decision unilaterally on his own. It's not democracy he wants, it's not revolution, and more and more what he seems to want is money.

The brilliance of the film's three-part structure is that it documents the increasing distance of Carlos from any kind of idealism or, towards the end, any kind of action at all. Throughout the film's first part, Carlos is, at least ostensibly, striking out in the name of a cause, though even then his cause seems poorly defined, a so-called "internationalist" movement that aims to fight imperialism everywhere. He rejects peaceful means, rejects strikes and protests and political channels, and one suspects, even this early, that he does so not so much because he doubts their effectiveness as because these methods lack opportunities for glory and grand gestures, for headlines and action. When he's first asked to join the Palestinian group, he's told to think of a code name, but he already has: he's obviously put a lot of thought into this, come up with a cool name to make famous before he had done anything to require such an alias.

The first part ends with a shot of Carlos and his cell on a train, headed towards what will turn out to be their most decisive and grandiose action, an assault on an OPEC meeting, aimed at both making a big statement and, in the process, killing the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers to advance the agenda of Iraq. The film breaks here because if the first part documents Carlos' introduction to terrorist action, the second part is about his acclimation to infamy, about his willingness to allow himself the illusion that he's an important actor on a global stage. The OPEC assault becomes a protracted and increasingly bizarre hostage negotiation, as Carlos' initial plans fall apart due to machinations within various foreign governments. He had been relying on Libyan support, but during the initial attack he killed a member of the Libyan delegation, burning that bridge almost immediately.

As a result, the terrorists wind up flying back and forth between Libya and Algeria with a DC-9 full of OPEC delegates. It would be almost comical if the stakes weren't so high, and Assayas emphasizes how ridiculous and petty it all is — the plane lands in Libya despite official refusal, but isn't allowed to leave the edge of a runway, and while they're bickering with flight control, an Austrian diplomat steps in to demand that the terrorists return the borrowed DC-9. All this while lives hang in the balance, and the terrorists begin to realize that they're facing a choice between carrying out their mission — slaughtering the Iranian and Saudi ministers — and getting killed, or letting everyone free in exchange for a large sum of money and political protection. Carlos' militant associates are in favor of killing the ministers, sacrificing themselves to complete the mission, but Carlos disagrees. He's "a soldier, not a martyr," he says, and tries to convince the others — and possibly himself — that the revolution needs the money, but it's hard to ignore the sense of a man coming to terms with political realities.


The political reality, for Carlos and his allies, is that they are simply pawns in a complex global game. Carlos began his struggle with grand goals. But what is he fighting against? Imperialism, capitalism, Zionism. He offers up abstract enemies, ideologies to combat, but there's seldom any evidence that his missions — carried out, as often as not, in service of shadowy political motivations in Baghdad or Moscow — do anything to advance his abstract revolutionary program. He fights for money, for ransoms, to gain support of one possibly sympathetic government or another.

Within the film, the German revolutionary Angie (Christoph Bach) provides the voice to these doubts, expressing his desire to fight capitalism, to make a difference, not simply to "spread terror." Angie, disillusioned with the struggle, is particularly appalled by the actions of some of his German comrades who, during a siege on an airplane, separate the Jewish passengers from the non-Jews, threatening to kill the Jews first. Angie sees it as a continuation of the horrors of Auschwitz, perpetrated in the name of a cause that is supposed to oppose tyranny and brutality but winds up simply duplicating it or worse. Angie sees a clear difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and he also sees clearly that the actions he's taken part in have done little to advance the kind of cause he is interested in. Carlos sees the world in black and white, in terms of revolutionaries and anti-revolutionaries, but Angie understands that not all revolutions are equal, and that much of what is done in the name of revolution has little to do with advancing the fight against capitalism or opposing oppression.

To underscore this point, the film's second part, which encompasses the OPEC raid and its aftermath, ends with Carlos striking a deal with the Syrian government — formerly his enemies, who had once tried to killed him, but who now want his services in a changed world — to set up a new organization and work for them. In the film's third part, the bulk of the terrorists' time is spent shuttling from one place to another, establishing tenuous relationships with various socialist governments, getting an offer from the KGB to kill Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (Carlos dithers until someone beats him to the hit), forging alliances with Iraq, Syria and East Germany, even flirting with helping out Romanian dictator Ceausescu. Carlos' ideals, whatever they were, seem to have vanished, and when one German diplomat calls him a mercenary, it's essentially accurate. He plots mission after mission, most of which never happen, but which in any case all have as their only goal money, or weapons, or political support. The film's third act is a long decline into irrelevance, as Carlos gets old and fat, settles down with his wife Magdalena (Nora von Waldstätten) and their daughter, drinks, plays at the beach, poses as a businessman. It's an aging terrorist's idyll, and Assayas presents it as such, as a surreal interlude of domestic calm — at least relatively, since Carlos' philandering ways continue throughout — in a life of violence. Carlos' story doesn't end with a bang, it just peters out, until after the Cold War, after a montage shows the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the East Berlin Stasi offices where Carlos once cut so many deals, Carlos is simply a liability, welcome nowhere, kicked out of Syria and Libya, abandoned by the mistreated Magdalena, out of contact with his daughter. Even his vaunted penis fails him, throbbing with pain and requiring medical attention, while his vanity compels him to seek liposuction — "for his love handles," as an observing spy mocks him to a superior.


Carlos is forced to confront, then, the knowledge that he was not nearly as important as he had thought. With the Cold War over, there are no longer any friendly government embassies or spy headquarters where he is welcome, no longer any allies, no longer anyone who needs his services. He even tries to flatter himself by believing that someone is going to come after him and kill him, that the French or the Israelis or the CIA would want him dead, but the fact is that he's a small concern by this point, incidental, and he's finally only taken to France and tried for the long-ago murders of two policemen. He was a useful nuisance, an agitator in the long war between East and West, a gun-runner and a pawn. But despite his briefly famous name and his grandiose rhetoric, he accomplished nothing. He was never more than a tool passed around in the hands of various warring governments.

In documenting this harsh reality, Assayas' filmmaking crackles and vibrates with raw energy. The soundtrack buzzes with punk and post-punk songs by bands like Wire, New Order and the Dead Boys, music with a raw-nerve vitality that is perfectly suited to Assayas' globetrotting saga. His characteristic probing camera is equally well-suited to nuanced negotiations, fast-paced action, and the many slow, sensual scenes that establish the rhythms of Carlos' global lifestyle: his routine seductions of women, his constant traveling back and forth. The film leaps from place to place around the world, constantly introducing new cities and new power brokers with onscreen titles, conveying the sense of constant momentum that, in the early stretches of the film, establishes Carlos' rise to power, and is then used in similar ways later in the film to suggest that he is no longer welcome anywhere, that he's being forced from place to place.

The film's scope also allows Assayas to establish subtle rhymes and patterns, like the way that, during the OPEC hostage incident, the plane is turned away from Libya, and later, when Carlos is trying to find a safe asylum to settle in after being kicked out of Syria, his plane is again sent back from Libya, for very different reasons, but both times because of politics, alliances, appearances, diplomacy, all the things that Carlos likes to think he's involved in but that he really doesn't understand. There is a pattern, too, to Carlos' seductions of women, to the ways in which he draws women to him and uses them, always continuing to take other lovers, to see prostitutes, and to demand absolute obedience in matters both personal and political. He is a chauvinist who has little patience for feminism, who despite his supposed championing of the oppressed can see no role for women as equal partners.

This is just one of Carlos' limitations as limned here. Assayas, by necessity, invented much of this story, reading between the lines of his meticulous research, and he shapes the material into an examination of the ways in which ostensibly revolutionary programs again and again serve the interests of various states and governments, never doing anything to help the oppressed anywhere. Even when Carlos undertakes a campaign of bombing and terror with the intention of freeing Magdalena from prison, he only accomplishes the opposite, stiffening the sentence handed down against her in response to the attacks. In this respect, Assayas goes somewhat beyond Gillo Pontecorvo's famous The Battle of Algiers, to which he obliquely nods with his café bombing sequence. (Though Carlos, notably, never looks at the faces of his victims the way the terrorist in Pontecorvo's film so memorably did.) Pontecorvo's film was sensitive to the devastation wrought by terrorism while suggesting that sometimes such violent resistance was necessary in the face of oppression. Assayas suggests, instead, that if that were ever true, it's not anymore, in a constantly shifting world order where oppressive and unstable governments aim terrorism as a weapon at one another, using the terrorists themselves, and their ideals and ideologies, as pawns in this global game of high-stakes chess.

The Conversations #22 (part 2): Black Swan

Jason Bellamy and I have now posted part II of our conversation about Darren Aronofsky. In part I, from a couple of weeks ago, we talked about Aronofsky's first four films, and now we've turned our attention to his fifth and latest, Black Swan. We talk about the film's psychosexual underpinnings, its lurid aesthetics, its genre references, its links to the films of Powell and Pressburger and others, and its ideas about female sexuality and identity. We hope you'll join us in discussing this very provocative film. We have a feeling that lots of people have strong opinions about Aronofsky in general and this film in particular, so please let us know what you think in the comments section at the House Next Door.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog's latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is about the Chauvet Caves, the site in France where the earliest examples of human painting have been discovered. It's a 3D film, of all things, Herzog's first experiment with that technology, and it's going to be screening at the beginning of November as part of the DOC NYC festival. I've reviewed the film for the House Next Door, so follow the link below for my thoughts about Herzog's approach to this material, the way he uses 3D for good and ill, and the characteristically Herzogian themes that he brings to the documentary.

Continue reading at the House Next Door

The Social Network

The Social Network details the development of social networking hub Facebook, as the site developed from the drunken game of Harvard computer whiz Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) into a worldwide phenomenon. Facebook has arguably had a tremendous impact on Internet communication, but this film, directed by David Fincher from a script by Aaron Sorkin, doesn't have much to say about the ways in which the site has or has not changed the Internet. Instead, it's more of a psychological and legal drama about the desire for acceptance, the bizarre anti-logic of business in the dot-com era, and of course the American passion for betrayals and lawsuits. The film is, among other things, a scathing portrait of Facebook founder Zuckerberg, who is here portrayed as a disconnected, selfish jerk who betrayed his friends and built his ideas upon the foundation laid by others. The film is a profile of Zuckerberg, but more than that it's a profile of a time (the early-to-mid 2000s) and a place (mostly the inner workings of Harvard University) from a director whose best work has often made geography and time central concerns.

Like Fincher's Zodiac before it, The Social Network is a historical film, but a historical film that is set a mere seven years in the past. It is, nevertheless, history, and Fincher is as deliberate and detail-oriented in recreating the feel of an early 2000s college campus as he was in capturing the feel of 70s San Francisco. The campus at night, bathed in eerie yellow lights and accompanied by the moody music of Trent Reznor (whose effective score, in collaboration with Atticus Ross, alternates between low-key background buzz and bursts of dancey pop-industrial), becomes as powerful a presence in the film as the dangerous nighttime vistas of Zodiac. And the film's detours into college parties — from the glitzy, privately catered affairs of the elite frats to cheesy theme nights and rowdy, drug-fueled house parties — resonate with telling details. The era that Fincher is evoking so concretely here is precisely the era before Facebook changed youth culture by, as Zuckerberg says, putting college social life online. To some extent, in this era where a few years can bring and have brought massive changes in technology, nostalgia cycles have shortened to the point where this film can be nostalgic for the pre-Facebook technology and web culture of a few years ago, when blogs still seemed somewhat novel and websites like MySpace and LiveJournal were at the cutting edge.

Fincher loves dealing with process, methodically following the steps, treating every story like a case to be solved; one suspects that he identified very strongly with Jake Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith in Zodiac. Sorkin's script for The Social Network allows Fincher to indulge that fascination with process, as the narrative carefully traces the development of Facebook from the coding right up to the business dealings to the inevitable lawsuits that followed. It's a multi-leveled examination of this story that recalls Zodiac in many ways: of all Fincher's films, there is clearly the strongest connection between his serial killer process piece and his dissection of a website's birth. Both films are backward-looking, and The Social Network makes its retrospective nature explicit by continually cutting back and forth from the dual lawsuits against Zuckerberg to the events that led up to that point. Where the earlier film delved into the gathering of evidence and the obsessive analysis of clues, The Social Network revels in the minutiae of coding and algorithms and innovations.


Although The Social Network is never quite as affecting or as evocative as Zodiac, which is still Fincher's best film, this is a sharp, witty film, packed with great characters and scenes that reveal the mix of careful research and keen observation that Sorkin and Fincher bring to this film. Sorkin famously got tips from Harvard alum Natalie Portman on the secrets of the school's exclusive "final clubs," and this knowledge shows through in the periodic inserts of fraternity hazing and private parties where these privileged elites unwind. The idea of privilege is a key subtext here, as the original germ of an idea for Facebook was to create a social networking site that sets itself apart through exclusivity — specifically, the exclusivity of Harvard prestige. Twin rowing champions Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer), who eventually wind up suing Zuckerberg for stealing their ideas, embody that privilege, the inherited elitism of being born into money and feeling entitled to the benefits of that lineage. At one point, outraged by what they see as Zuckerberg's thievery, they use their connections to wrangle a meeting with the president of Harvard, but they're non-plussed when he responds to their complaints with contemptuous jokes and berates them for expecting special treatment because of who their father is. It's a great scene, and a scene that one suspects Zuckerberg himself would appreciate, as it deflates those who just naturally have all the money, charisma, success and athleticism that Zuckerberg seems so desperately to want.

Zuckerberg's complicated attitudes about privilege and elitism — resentment and contempt mingled with his own air of entitlement — also wind through the film. Eisenberg perfectly captures the snobby, snotty, clipped tone of an insecure young geek who's convinced that he should get whatever he believes he deserves — who's convinced, simultaneously, both that he's better than everyone around him, and that everyone else thinks he's insignificant. It's that mix of profound insecurity and outrageous self-confidence, projected in every twitch and mutter of Eisenberg's pitch-perfect performance, that really sells this character, and to some extent the film as a whole. It's a totally satisfying performance of an absolutely aggravating and unlikeable character. Fincher earns equally great performances from everyone in this film, and Justin Timberlake, as Napster co-founder Sean Parker, is especially potent, projecting the hyperactive enthusiasm and radical pose of a new generation of Internet entrepeneurs who ride waves of grassroots guerilla programming to international prominence. But despite Timberlake's flashy and fun performance — witness the obvious pleasure he gets from telling a recent conquest that he's a kind of Internet celebrity — it's the quieter, more restrained Eisenberg who remains at the film's core.

As good as Eisenberg is in this role, the script occasionally does him a disservice, most notably with the conceit of hinging so much of Zuckerberg's motivation and psychology on his rejection by girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), who he insults on his blog after their nasty breakup at the start of the film. It's a simplistic thread of pop psychology that even provides the predictable emotional punchline before the end text describes the outcomes of the lawsuits, another all-too-typical legal drama touch. These kinds of pat movie devices don't serve the film well: the all-too-easy intimation that Zuckerberg started Facebook to get revenge on a girl, that his obsession with her continued to drive him for years afterward, conflicts against the subtlety and complexity evinced by the film elsewhere. The film is at its best when it's patiently setting the scene, building up the atmosphere of a college campus and establishing the character of Zuckerberg as an impatient genius whose lack of social niceties make him an unlikely choice for the founder of the world's most successful social website. Sorkin's eloquent, frequently funny script makes the film a lot of fun, whether its gently mocking the pretensions of the Harvard elite (although the Winklevii, as Zuckerberg memorably dubs them, do ironically emerge not as stock villains but as more sympathetic characters than their rival in some respects) or nailing the strange twists of college life (like a great subplot involving a chicken and "forced cannibalism"). This is a smart, entertaining, and often incisive film that merges the in some ways quite distinct aesthetics of Fincher and Sorkin to create a very compelling hybrid.

Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese's latest film, Shutter Island, is a stylish, artfully made work that establishes a powerful atmosphere of dread and despair right from its opening minutes, as a ship emerges from a thick gray fog and U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) sweats and shakes while staring into the mirror. Together with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), they're heading to the foreboding, forbidding Shutter Island, a combination prison and mental hospital designed to hold only the most violent and dangerous mentally ill patients. One of these patients has escaped, and Daniels' investigation of this mysterious place will be a challenge to his own sanity. Scorsese's film is an odd, unsettling, potent concoction, at least for most of its length, even if it's painfully obvious just where it's heading long before it ever gets there — and even if its inevitable final act is disappointing in its predictability.

There is a nicely suggestive idea contained in this final act, nonetheless — and if it's not obvious by now, it's impossible to talk about this film without talking about its ending — and Scorsese does manage to make this resolution heart-wrenching and affecting even as it's also trite and formulaic. There have been countless films that revolved around the kind of pat reversal that Scorsese (working from a source novel by Dennis Lehane) tries to pull off here: see, the marshal was really a patient all along, and the film's whole convoluted plot, with all its conspiracies and weird details, was an elaborate attempt by the hospital's staff to shock Teddy out of his delusions. Of course, this could only fail to be obvious to those who have never seen a movie like this before, to those unfamiliar with the generic conventions that control this kind of movie. The thing is, no matter how familiar this territory is, Scorsese makes it a thrilling ride to traverse it once again. Right from the very first scene, it's obvious that something's up: something seems subtly off about the initial interactions between Chuck and Teddy, and it's not just the way Scorsese's camera gently directs attention to mundane acts like the sharing of cigarettes. We feel that these small gestures, these details, will be important later; Scorsese's visual cues suggest a mystery that revolves around the very basic precepts of this situation. It's possible that some may even guess, already, where this is all heading; it occurred to me, at least.

It almost doesn't even matter, though, as Scorsese makes the film's introductory scenes so compelling that any explanation seems unnecessary. There's an air of unreality to these opening scenes that never quite goes away. The sky behind Teddy and Chuck is somehow too dramatic, too beautiful with its thick gray clouds and the roiling water. Few commentators have failed to note the influence of British filmmakers Powell and Pressburger on this film, but it goes beyond the post-World War II setting or the handful of dizzying overhead shots looking down a cliff, directly referencing Black Narcissus. The stylization, the studio-bound aesthetic of Powell and Pressburger's lurid fantasies, lingers over this film even though Scorsese's shooting on location. Shutter Island, as a place, is a fusion of movie archetypes, a perfect genre location, all dark corridors dripping with water, flickering lights everywhere, barbed wire, a decrepit old cemetery, a lighthouse strangely guarded at all hours, where terrible experiments are rumored to take place. This is a movie-movie, a movie that's constantly reminding one of other movies, that revels in its genre conventions and self-consciously keeps pointing them out. That's certainly apparent in Teddy's troubling visions of Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas), who he believes is a patient here. Laeddis was the man who Teddy blames for the fire that killed his wife Dolores (Michelle Williams), but Laeddis is such a sinister, over-the-top movie monster — with a scar across his face, a milky white eye and a melodramatic leer — that it's impossible to believe he's a real person. It's obvious from the start that he's a mental projection, a way for Teddy to avoid the real truth, whatever it is, about his wife and his past. Koteas plays this monstrous character with clear delight, relishing the melodramatics, playing him like Scorsese's Travis Bickle a few years older and even further gone, twitching and grinning with his deformed face.


This is the kind of pleasure Shutter Island offers, and it's not an incidental pleasure by any means. Scorsese fully adapts to the conventions of the horror genre here, offering up some rather startling jump scares, like the half-naked inmate who leaps out of a dark passageway to scream "tag, you're it" and then races back off into the darkness. The fun here isn't necessarily in the content but in the execution, the way Scorsese continually does exactly what one expects but puts his own idiosyncratic twist on it. The atmosphere of the island, almost constantly overcast, with stormy weather always looming overhead, is one of slowly creeping dread. Scorsese further enhances this mood by inserting Teddy's internality into the film, a mix of visions, dreams and memories: of his wife, of the woman he's supposed to be finding on the island (played at various times by Patricia Clarkson or Emily Mortimer), and especially of his past as one of the soldiers who first walked into Dachau at the close of World War II. The film is located at this particular historical moment, in 1954, with the nightmare of the Holocaust not so distant, and Scorsese does a good job of capturing the paranoia and the terror generated by this travesty: most particularly, the fear of science as a monstrous corrupter, responsible for both the hydrogen bomb and the devilish human experiments of Dachau and Auschwitz. This fear informs Teddy's own paranoia, his solid belief that terrible experiments are being performed on the patients on Shutter Island. His rantings, increasingly unhinged throughout the film, draw from the fear of Nazism's anti-human sensibility spreading domestically, and from the kind of distrust of human decency that things like the Milgram experiments tended to confirm.

Some of that aura of dread comes, too, from Scorsese's soundtrack selections. He's assembled a compelling, complex soundtrack in which the music, frequently grating and eerie, seems to emanate from the harsh terrain of the island itself. Challenging classical and modernist music by John Cage, Gustav Mahler, Morton Feldman, György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki and John Adams is omnipresent here, solitary notes and clusters of notes hovering in the still, damp air, occasionally interrupted by the piercing screams of the inmates. Scorsese's use of sound here is as compelling, as sensitive, as his more familiar pop music soundtracks in Mean Streets or Goodfellas. The music is so dense, so intense in its effect, that the moments of silence, the moments where the music cuts away to reveal a profound and empty quiet, hit as though all the air had been suddenly sucked away, leaving behind this awful vacuum. The complexity and eerie beauty of this soundtrack is often matched by the quality of Scorsese's images, which have a kind of processed grandeur that one associates with the Technicolor era, another reason the Powell/Pressburger comparisons are so salient. At one point, flickering flames slash up across the screen like fragments of Brakhagian light and color, as though Scorsese were superimposing this kind of experimental light study atop his images, playing across the faces of the actors. Even Scorsese's judicious application of CGI is affecting, and eerie: a shot where Teddy embraces Dolores in a vision, only to have her turn to ash and burn away, is devastating. The ash, often raining down around Teddy in the nightmare visions that haunt him, represents both the fire that killed his wife, and the human ashes that often rained from the smokestacks of the death camps when the ovens were running.

As powerful as the film often is, its final act is clumsy and uneven, delivering exactly the expected payoff and relegating way too much time to the hospital psychiatrist Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) laboriously explaining the whole thing. If the rest of the film is affecting and off-kilter, packed with compelling imagery, the finale switches gears for a succession of talking heads spelling out the entire plot. The film is a mood piece where the mood is abruptly disrupted in the last act. Nevertheless, even here Scorsese crafts some stunning sequences, particularly an absolutely horrifying flashback in which Teddy finally remembers, or understands, what actually happened to his wife. Still, there's an unavoidable aura of disappointment throughout the final scenes, a sense that Scorsese had abandoned the film's visual richness and imagination for a rote series of psychological explanations and diagrams, a nod to Psycho with Kingsley in the role as the psychologist profiler, diagramming and lecturing about the film's plot. If the rest of the film provides evidence of Scorsese's visual and emotional deftness, this ending perhaps suggests the limits of his imagination.