Unknown Pleasures

Jia Zhangke's third feature, Unknown Pleasures, is a naturalistic, nearly documentary-like examination of the lives of a group of teens and twenty-somethings in a poor city in northern China. Jia's aesthetic is sparse and gentle. Shooting with digital video, which gives the film a rough, shot-on-the-fly quality, he documents the emptiness and stagnation that constitute life for this aimless generation, who seem to have few opportunities and little hope despite China's prodigious leaps into the modern international economy. These young people, like friends Bin Bin (Wei Wei Zhao) and Xiao Ji (Qiong Wu), have recently finished school but they have no jobs and no prospects, so they simply drift around shiftlessly, spend dreary afternoons in front of the TV, and pursue dull and passionless relationships with girls. Xiao Ji lazily chases after the dancer Qiao Qiao (Tao Zhao) but doesn't seem to know what to do with her once he's got her, while Bin Bin spends quietly boring afternoons with his studious girlfriend (Qing Feng Zhou), the only character in the film who seems to have some ambition and some potential.

For Bin Bin and other young men like him, "there's no fucking future."
Bin Bin calls the World Trade Organization a scam, and when his shy, smart girlfriend says she's going to be studying international trade, he can't even imagine what that means — selling rabbits to Ukraine, he guesses. China is modernizing and involving itself in the international economy, jumping into the future, but young people like Bin Bin and Xiao Ji are being left behind, with no hope of profiting from the country's modernization. Factories are laying people off and cutting wages — when they're not being blown up by domestic terrorists dissatisfied with limited economic opportunities — and at times it seems as though the only real money flowing through this city is in its vibrant, flourishing criminal underworld. The aimless lives of these youths, their imaginations fired by American crime movies and pop culture, occasionally intersect with the fringes of that underworld, as they cross paths with loan sharks, petty thugs, DVD bootleggers and massage therapists who are actually prostitutes.



TV and pop culture are omnipresent here, engulfing the lives of these aimless youths. American pop culture seeps into their lives in the form of tough-guy movies like Pulp Fiction and Fight Club — "hit me," Xiao Ji says to the gangster Qiao San (Zhubin Li), copping his attitude and his lines from the latter movie. Xiao Ji especially seems to have adopted his pose and his attitude from American crime movies, and he speaks gushingly of Pulp Fiction, saying he wants to be an American bank robber, a romantic criminal like the couple who stick up the diner in Tarantino's movie. This American culture is probably even more accessible to them than their own: when Bin Bin visits a DVD bootlegger towards the end of the film, he asks for copies of Jia's previous films Xiao Wu and Platform, but the guy only has Pulp Fiction.

In a diner with Qiao Qiao, Xiao Ji sticks his finger out like a gun, shouting "freeze," and Jia's camera swings wildly to follow his threateningly pointed finger, before cutting to Xiao Ji and Qiao Qiao dancing in a club, waving their hands in front of their faces like Uma Thurman and John Travolta in the famous dance sequence, an effect heightened by Qiao Qiao wearing a wig as a deliberate tribute to Thurman's black Anna Karina wig. (There's layers of homage here: a Chinese tribute to an American movie that was itself deeply indebted to the French New Wave.)

These sad, quiet young people are always sitting in front of the TV, its flickering glow casting blue light on their faces as they sit stoically and silently, watching in pairs in their living rooms or in crowds in public places. The TV is omnipresent, showing a mix of Chinese cartoons and music videos, and news stories about Chinese/American relations, the WTO, Falun Gong, and in one notable scene, the announcement that Beijing was chosen to host the 2008 Olympics. When the announcement is made, everyone clustered around the TV cheers and applauds — except for Bin Bin and Xiao Ji, standing stoically in the back of the crowd — as Jia's camera pans away from the revelers, arcing over to a nearby street where fireworks sizzle and spark on the pavement, a few kids watching, rapt, as the sparks fly.


For all the patriotic national pride expressed by the other people in that scene, all of this news, good and bad, seems so remote from the actual lives and experiences of these young people. Trade deals, prestigious international events, monks setting themselves on fire, terrorists amiably bragging about their guns on TV: it's all related by the glowing box that's perpetually tucked into a corner of the frame. Pop culture and commercialism define these youths, who escape their humdrum lives by singing Chinese pop tunes — like the one from which the film takes its name — and attending glitzy events sponsored by the Monkey King, which is both a cartoon and a brand of liquor. Qiao Qiao dances and sings in these corporate-sponsored events, shilling liquor that she can't even stomach when she tries to drink a few sips, while her agent/boyfriend Qiao San manages her career (and her affections) with an authoritarian hand.

At times, Xiao Ji seems to have stumbled into a gangster movie, pursuing his love of Qiao Qiao even though the possessive, gun-toting Qiao San tries to intimidate him with his gang of thugs. Though the film's mood is predominantly quiet and pensive, prone to languid tracking shots and long static sequences in which no one says a word, there's a constant aura of repressed violence just below the surface. The characters talk about guns and robberies in ways informed by the American movies they've seen — presumably the same way they learned to smoke with cigarettes dangling coolly from their lips — but life isn't as glamorous or as cool as the movies. The gangster ultimately dies, offscreen, in a thoroughly undramatic fashion, and the main characters' attempt to re-enact their fantasies of being movie bad guys is inept and doomed to failure. Meanwhile, the real violence percolates in the background, in the form of domestic terrorism committed by frustrated unemployed men and bursts of fanatical religious extremism.

This is a film about deep-seated frustration and attempts to escape that only make things worse. Poignant and quietly affecting, the film's low-key, documentary-like aesthetic is a rebuttal to the kind of noisy, kinetic culture that the teens in the film consume. While they imagine they're living in a Tarantino movie or a Hong Kong gangster flick, the movie of their lives is not explosive or exciting or violent but quietly sad, a movie not of violent tragedy but of a soft, slow decline.

The Son

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Son is a quietly moving, remarkably intense film that hides a great deal of churning emotions beneath a deceptively placid exterior. In that, the film mirrors its protagonist, the mild-mannered and reserved Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), who seldom betrays a hint of the doubtless complex emotions bouncing around inside of him. Olivier is a carpentry teacher at a trade school, where he prepares young boys, many of them poor and from troubled homes, for careers as carpenters, gently and patiently instructing them in every small detail of the profession. When the film opens, Olivier receives a new candidate, a boy named Francis (Morgan Marinne), who he initially resists adding to his class, though he takes an immediate interest in the boy, shadowing him around the building and even following him home after class lets out.

The Dardennes build up some mystery and ambiguity around the character of Olivier right from the beginning. With his impassive, doughy face and his eyes obscured by the lenses of his glasses, he's difficult to read, his intentions and thoughts uncertain. There's an ambiguous tension here, in that it's not clear why he's taking such an interest in this boy, pushing him away by refusing to enroll him, and yet unable to resist any opportunity to catch a glimpse of the boy. The Dardennes' camera, hovering over Olivier's shoulder like a restless insect, buzzing around him but seldom catching a full head-on view of him as he stalks the boy, contributes to the somewhat sinister vibe of these scenes, the sense that something strange is going on here. The Dardennes leave the audience to wonder just what kind of man this is, his face filling the screen but his eyes not betraying any hint of what he's up to.

The mystery is eventually resolved, with the Dardennes' typical lack of fanfare, in a conversation between Olivier and his ex-wife Magali (Isabella Soupart). Her few appearances here, evincing an awkward, strained intimacy with Olivier, represent the only times when the film expands its scope beyond Olivier and Francis. For the most part, they are the only characters here, their quiet, inexpressive presences placed squarely at the center of the film. Olivier accepts Francis into his class and begins mentoring the boy, always with a dark secret from the past hanging over their interactions: Olivier knows that Francis, at the age of 11, had killed Olivier and Magali's son.


This knowledge informs the entire rest of the film, although it is never explicitly brought up again until the very end. The Dardennes adopt a restrained observational perspective, their restless handheld camera darting around as Olivier and Francis hesitantly interact, the carpenter teaching the boy, and often just staring at the boy, as though trying to process what he even thinks about this situation, what he thinks of this boy who stole his own boy from him. While Magali, when she finds out that Olivier is teaching Francis, reacts with understandable outrage and confusion — "no one would do this," she tells him, so "why you?" — Olivier seems to react with interest more than anything. It's as though he wants to understand, to make sense of the fact that his son is dead and that this seemingly normal, slightly dim-witted young kid was the cause. At one point, Olivier even steals Francis' keys and visits the boy's empty apartment on a lunch break, walking around the place and lying down on the kid's bed.

The film is intentionally somewhat distanced, despite its constant intimate closeups of Olivier: neither Olivier nor Francis is especially talkative, so most of their scenes together are nearly silent, with the only words exchanged being banal bits of carpentry instruction. The film is surprisingly affecting in its restraint: because the directors resolutely refuse to get inside of either of the central characters, the audience is left to wonder what's going on behind all these wordless, somewhat awkward moments. The tension of the early scenes lingers even after the mystery is solved, the threat of violence always implicit in the film's reserve. Is Olivier's placidness masking a deeper rage that might explode at any moment? Or is his interest in Francis driven simply by a spirit of forgiveness and a desire to understand?

The film's remarkable final sequence, in which Olvier takes Francis to a rural lumber yard on a weekend morning, answers those questions as the pair finally confront, slowly and incrementally, the truth about the pivotal event that ties them together. Even this dramatic climax is treated by the Dardennes with a sense of mundane realism, emphasizing the clumsiness and sloppiness of the chase sequence in which Olivier, after finally revealing his identity to Francis, chases the fleeing boy through the stacks of lumber. Despite how mundane it all looks, the Dardennes build a nearly unbearable tension throughout this whole sequence, the threat of tragedy or violence looming over everything; there's a sense of how fragile things are, how easily the quiet dynamic that had developed between the boy and his mentor throughout the film could suddenly turn ugly. The film's finale is a moving but ambiguous consideration of the possibility of forgiveness, with a wordless understanding passing between a man whose life had been torn apart by senseless violence, and a boy who barely even seems to understand what he did.

Sex Is Comedy

In Sex Is Comedy, Catherine Breillat lays bare the essence of her cinema in an especially direct way, making a metafictional, quasi-autobiographical film about a director making a film. Jeanne (Anne Parillaud) is a director very much like Breillat, a director whose work deals candidly with the antagonistic, push/pull, love/hate nature of male/female dynamics. Her latest film builds up to a scene of a young girl losing her virginity, but to capture onscreen the complicated emotions of this moment, she must overcome the resistance of her unreliable actors, who are never named but only called, somewhat pompously, the Actor (Grégoire Colin) and the Actress (Roxane Mesquida). As with much of Breillat's work, it's all too obvious that she's laying out a thesis and singlemindedly setting out to prove it.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who's seen the director's other films precisely what that thesis is. For Breillat, sex is a power struggle, love is a power struggle, virtually any relationship between a man and a woman can be boiled down to a power struggle. It's all a vicious game, which is why sex is comedy, although "sex is tragedy" would be equally apt. Jeanne, standing in for Breillat, stages love scenes like a war, and the behind-the-scenes glimpses this film provides into Breillat's working methods — the film is supposedly based particularly on her experiences while making Fat Girl — are fascinating. She's constantly looking for tension, for anxiety, arranging the actors into uncomfortable postures, the girl's elbow digging into the guy's ribs, or the girl putting her arm around his neck in a pose that's more like a wrestling headlock than an embrace. Jeanne is alternately tyrannical and tender on the set, and she has almost intimate, sexually suggestive relationships with both the actor and her assistant Léo (Ashley Wanninger), mirroring the relationship in the film she's making.


Unsurprisingly, Breillat finds, on the set, a neat parallel for romantic relationships in the power struggle between actor and director, each of them pushing at and pulling on one another by turns, fighting for control and dominance, arguing over every petty detail, like whether the actor will take his socks off or not for one scene. She recreates, with him, precisely the uncertain, will-she-or-won't-she vibe that she's trying to capture onscreen, and it's unclear if this relationship with the actor is "real" or simply a game, a way of getting the performance she wants out of him by keeping him destabilized even between takes.

That's one constant thread running through the film, a suggestion that this film's portrayal of faked intimacy between actors can be seen as a parallel for the games and power struggles that also go on in real relationships. The film's title encourages the comparison: sex is comedy, not only on a film set, but in the real world as well, where these same struggles and masquerades and fakeries go on without being acknowledged as explicitly as they are here.

Much of the film is dedicated to constant introspective meta dialogues, with everyone debating the nature of acting, the struggles of translating one's vision into cinema, the difficulties of filmmaking. It often feels as though Breillat is giving an interview, speaking through her characters about her own filmmaking process and her own ideas. It's interminably interesting and frustrating, and it exists mainly as a commentary on Breillat's other films, to the point where it's difficult to separate it from the rest of her oeuvre. It's a film where a director employs sexual manipulation in order to convey sexual manipulation onscreen, a tricky paradox that might just signify Breillat addressing or acknowledging the critics who have accused her of making exploitation films.


It all builds up to the moment when the actors finally perform their big love scene, and after some false starts they infuse the scene with genuine, harrowing emotion, particularly Mesquida, who's shivering and spasming and crying as Colin coaxes her character into letting him take her from behind. The scene is intense and shattering, though it doesn't even remotely capture the conflicted, complex layers of desire and reluctance that Jeanne had claimed to want from the scene — instead, typically of Breillat, the sex just looks unpleasant, like a rape or a near-rape, forced upon the unwilling girl by the insistence of the guy. It's strange that Jeanne is so insistent that girls both desire sex and are scared of, but all that comes across, here as in many of Breillat's films, is the fear, the pain, the unpleasantness, and none of the supposed desire. (One of the reasons that Breillat's more recent fairy tale films have been her best work yet is that they do embody the contradictory dichotomy that's only given lip service here.)

When the scene is over, the actress is still sobbing, and Jeanne, her own eyes red and her face overcome with emotion, embraces her and comforts her. The extra level comes from the awareness that Mesquida is playing an actress overcome by her part, leaving one to wonder how much of this is genuine, how much acted, and how closely the film within a film mirrors the film that Breillat actually made. In any event, it's a complex ending to a film that is otherwise only intermittently engaging for much of its length, even if it does add some crucial context to an understanding of Breillat's work.

Demonlover

Olivier Assayas' Demonlover is a bleak, enthralling depiction of the soulless, corporatized world to come. It's a David Lynch nightmare for the Internet era, picking up on the paranoid, identity-warping vibe of Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., and blending that atmosphere with a culture that's being digitized, stripped of its humanity, made sleek and robotic to mirror video games, porn, entertainment, and the horrible intersections between them. It's a harrowing and widely misunderstood film that only gradually reveals the truly dark soul lurking within its examination of a high-stakes international business deal.

Indeed, the film opens as a conventional, if dreamily paced, corporate espionage thriller, involving a prospective French/Japanese/American deal to distribute Japanese-made animated porn on the Internet. Diane (Connie Nielsen) is a corporate spy, a double agent pretending to work for Volf (Jean-Baptiste Malarte) while actually working for his competitor, planning to sabotage the deal in any way she can. Diane eliminates a corporate rival by drugging her and setting her up to get attacked, then rises up to take her place, so that she can personally oversee the deal and be in the best position to execute her plan when the time comes. Assayas parallels this ruthless corporate culture with images of Japanese porn in which sleek women with balloon-like breasts and no pubic hair — which couldn't be shown at all in Japan at one time — fight using "sex magic" and are defiled by penis-shaped eels. This is a film about the increasing inhumanity of our global culture: the Japanese animators demo a new 3D style in which the women somehow look even more plastic and fake than in the traditional animation, eerily human-looking but sanitized, stripped of personality, their eyes empty. Later, at a club, a group of actual human singers are similar glossy and robotic, moving as though driven by internal gears, smiling robotically as they perform.


The implication is that this worldwide culture is being subsumed by entertainment that removes the humanity from performance, business, and especially sex. Everything is fetishistic, remote from human experience, and often degrading, focused on mechanical repetition and a violent, misogynistic attitude towards women, who are treated as submissive vessels for unwilling penetration. There's something Pavlovian about it all, as though this digital, inhuman culture is teaching us how to act in the real world: Diane watches a porn in which a red, veined dildo mechanically thrusts in and out of a woman's mouth, and she reflexively wipes her own mouth with the back of the hand, as though salivating in response to these images.

The plot soon comes to involve the sadomasochistic, illegal website Hellfire Club, which depicts women — dressed up as icons of feminine power and strength — being defiled and tortured, while club members can type in requests for specific scenarios. The site shows women dressed as Wonder Woman, Lara Croft, Storm from the X-Men, and Emma Peel of British TV series The Avengers, all of them tied and chained to beds, electrocuted, tormented, staring accusingly up at the camera, and at the viewer. Assayas' Irma Vep dealt with the fetishization of the female action hero and the female form, but Demonlover takes it a step further, exploring the male desire to see these supposedly empowering embodiments of female power stripped and destroyed, to see them malleably twisted to whatever sick fantasy can be bought with a credit card and Internet access.

Gender is a big part of what Assayas is exploring here. Diane, for being efficient and businesslike at work, is routinely called a "cold bitch" by nearly everyone she meets — the only one who likes her is her American counterpart, Elaine (Gina Gershon), another ruthless businesswoman. Diane's coworker, Hervé (Charles Berling) wants her, turned on by precisely her chilly manner at work, her precision and ability to do her work without letting feelings get in the way. Of course, as the second half increasingly shows, this is only a facade for Diane, who is not nearly as soulless or as professional as she would like everyone to believe. She's a double agent, but it's as though her real secret is that she's still human in a world that's being repopulated by robots who only fake humanity, and often not very convincingly. Assayas pulls the rug out from under the viewer in the film's second half, after a pivotal sequence in which Diane is caught spying by Elaine, a scene that recalls Maggie Cheung's action hero roleplaying in Irma Vep. The two women get into a vicious fight that ends with them both bloody and passing out. The screen fades to black, and this proves to be a real Mulholland Dr. zoom-into-the-blue-box moment, because when Diane (yes, one wonders if that Lynchian name is significant) wakes up, everything seems to have shifted around her. The blood in the halls has been cleaned up, not that any of the hotel's guests, obliviously enjoying their vacations, seemed to notice the mess in the first place. Elaine has been cleaned up too, and she utterly disappears from the film, never to be mentioned or seen again, reflecting the total disposability and insignificance of any individual to the corporate mass media machine.


Everything shifts at work, too, as Diane slowly loses her power and everyone around her is revealed, one by one, as a double agent of one kind of another, including her former punching bag assistant Elise (Chloë Sevigny), who now takes control and has Diane reporting to her. The film becomes more and more destabilizing after this point, with the ground continually shifting below the feet of both Diane and the viewer. No one can be trusted, no one is loyal to anyone or anything, and everyone is only out for themselves. Diane thus transitions seamlessly from being a player within this system to being its docile, acquiescent victim, allowing herself to be led to her ruin. She was already sublimated to the system, complicit in its dehumanization, so she's very slow to resist when the system finally turns on her.

Assayas reflects his theme with the cool, glossy beauty of the cinematography, and with a soundtrack that vacillates between the dreamy lyricism of Sonic Youth's score and the grating, grinding noise of the industrial/metal selections that are dotted throughout the film. Every city looks the same, because they're primarily glimpsed as blurry lights from the back of a corporate car or from sleek, modern hotels and conference rooms. This plays into why these people are so unrooted, so disconnected from normal human relations. They don't even have countries or languages, really, and throughout the dialogue they're continually slipping between French, English and Japanese as though they forget what language they're speaking at any given moment.

The film is gorgeous and strangely haunting, playing out with the surreal logic and graceful imagery of a dream, which it increasingly becomes as Diane loses control. The apex of this theme of slipping control comes during a sex scene between Hervé and Diane that starts as a consensual seduction but abruptly turns into a rape, as though the scene had suddenly gone off track and become something totally different from what it started as. The next morning, Hervé wakes the sleeping Diane with tender caresses, very different from the brutal way he'd treated her before. These inconsistencies and disjunctions introduce ambiguity and uncertainty into the scene — encompassing even its startling, bloody resolution — to blur the line between sex as a romantic connection between individuals and sex as just another tool of control and domination.


Nearly the whole world is colonized in that way in Assayas' film, which offers precious little respite. There are momentary cracks in the strenuous inhumanity — Elise and Elaine going shoe-shopping and gossiping like stereotypical girls; Diane playing racquetball with a friend, disrupting her carefully maintained stoicism by actually getting sweaty — but such breaks are rare. Another is the very funny, strangely sexy shot of Elise in her downtime, lying naked in bed playing video games, intently driving her avatar to slaughter and happily kicking her legs in the air like a kid, contentedly playing. It's both a tossed-off non-sequitur and a key to the film, because in many ways Assayas is exploring a world where everything has been turned into one big video game, where the human cost of actions is not really considered any more than anyone thinks about hacking apart pixels to get to the end of a level.

That shot of Elise playing games is connected to the film's final scene, in which an unnamed suburban boy steals his dad's credit card to log onto the Hellfire Club, typing in a violent fantasy that he wants to see happen to a favorite female comic book character. He makes the request, but then barely pays attention as it is carried out on his computer monitor, doing his homework and paying no more attention to it than he would to any other ephemeral, disposable piece of entertainment. As he does his work, barely glancing at the screen, the woman whose torture he's paid for stares out at him, implicating him — and by extension, all consumers of the voyeuristic, exploitative modern culture — in her destruction.

This is a frightening film, a work of unsettling sci-fi that barely feels like sci-fi because the future world it depicts is maybe just a few steps ahead of our own. At times, it doesn't even seem exaggerated at all, as in the scene where Diane, Elaine and their peers meet to discuss a monopolistic deal that has been purposefully constructed to drive a competitor out of business. Assayas is suggesting that this ruthless corporate ethic is at the root of the dehumanizing culture on display in this film. And the participants treat it like a game, destroying one another to get to the top, where really they've only been set up as the next target for those below them. The film is an unforgettable satire of a globalist corporate culture that seems determined to turn people into video game characters or doll-like mannequins, just more grist for the pop culture machine.

Ten (2002)

Abbas Kiarostami's Ten is a very simple film on its surface, but its thematic and emotional depths are far more complex than its elegant formal minimalism would suggest. The film features ten conversations of varying lengths between a woman (Mania Akbari) and the various passengers she picks up while driving around Tehran, including her seven-year-old son, her sister, some friends, and a few strangers who she gives rides to. Kiarostami sets up a digital camera in the center of the car's dashboard, and alternates between shots angled at the driver and shots angled at her passenger. With only one exception — after she drops off a prostitute she'd picked up, the camera watches out the front windshield as the prostitute walks away and picks up a client — there are only these two camera set-ups in the entire film, sometimes remaining trained on one face for extended period, sometimes switching back and forth between the two partipants in these discussions. It is an utterly basic formal structure, and yet the film is never less than enthralling, because its wide-ranging dialogues are so interesting, and the portrait it builds of an Iranian woman's life is so compelling.

As with many of Kiarostami's films, the division between reality and fiction is interrogated, here in an especially subtle fashion. Everything about the film gives the appearance of a documentary, from its minimal camera set-ups and the rough, anti-glossy digital image quality to the casual, conversational way in which all the dialogue is delivered. And yet the dialogues certainly don't feel unscripted, even though most of the actors are non-professionals and even though the performances often feel loose and improvisatory. The dialogue in the film is too probing, too on-the-nose, to feel like unscripted reality; it's very often obvious that the dialogues have been constructed specifically to deal with one aspect or another of a woman's experience within Iranian culture, from religion and dress codes to divorce and motherhood. At times, the driver takes on the role, almost, of an interviewer, prodding her passengers with questions about their feelings and their experiences, trying to get them to talk about their lives and their problems. Akbari is a photographer and painter, and she would go on to become a director as well, and she falls naturally into the role of interviewer.


The film's artifice is perhaps most obvious in the first of the ten conversations, in which the driver picks up her precocious, angry son Amin (Amin Maher), who berates her for getting divorced and for not being a more dedicated mother. Throughout this remarkable conversation, the camera remains trained on Amin, privileging his perspective — it's not until this conversation is over, 15 minutes into the film, that Akbari herself finally appears. Much of the conversation is captured in unbroken single takes, with occasional cuts that are easily disguised by the jostling of the car; it gives the impression of a single long shot, focused on this boy's face as he argues vehemently with his mother. The content of the conversation is unusually direct and adult for a fight between a mother and her young son, with Amin telling her that she's selfish, that she shouldn't have divorced his father, that she only thinks of herself.

It's obvious that Amin is parroting back things that his father has said, but the dialogue, despite its casual delivery — and Amin gives a great, relaxed, naturalistic performance — also feels very much written, putting into this boy's mouth the kinds of things that are said about independent, thinking women in this culture. The rest of the film will further explore various attitudes about women in Iran, but right here at the start Kiarostami is establishing the dominant male perspective that women should be subservient and domestically oriented, a perspective that's apparently passed on from fathers to sons.

This is a woman who just wants to be able to resist that controlling male domination, to assert her own rights and her own individuality. An important thread that winds through several of these conversations is the concept of owning one's self. The driver does not want to "belong" to a man or anyone else, and she doesn't want to feel like she belongs to her son either, like she has to foresake everything she wants to do in order to care for her family. The woman is based on Akbari's own character, and like the actress playing her, she's a creative person, a photographer and painter who travels and works a lot and thus can't always spend time with her family. Her son obviously resents her for this, and despite her attempts to explain her decisions, he remains convinced that she is simply selfish for wanting something for herself, for wanting a life beyond the home, beyond childcare and domestic chores. There are several conversations with Amin spaced out throughout the film, and in the later ones, after he has moved in with his father, he seems slightly more relaxed, less prone to anger, but sadly no more accepting of his mother's life and desire for self-definition.


The idea of self-definition also comes up in a conversation with a prostitute who the driver gives a lift to one night. Throughout this conversation, the camera remains trained on the driver, never showing the prostitute's face, focusing on the driver's reactions to this other woman's thoughts about her profession. The prostitute seems to think in a way that's surprisingly similar to the driver, advocating independence and freedom from the constricting routines of marriage and monogamy. She's jaded, because she's seen men take phone calls from their wives, sign off with "I love you," and then go to bed with her. As a result, she sees women who tie themselves to a man as foolish, echoing the driver's own advice to a friend who defined herself exclusively in terms of a man, and was devastated when he left her for someone else.

That scene is contrasted against a conversation with a different friend who takes a breakup much more in stride, ending with an amazing, mysterious moment in which this woman pulls off her headscarf to reveal a close-cropped, shaved head, simultaneously laughing and crying as the driver asks her why she did this. She can't articulate it, but there's a real element of catharsis in this scene, a sense that the woman just wanted to do something to define herself, to express her independence in some way. Even the sight of her taking the veil off is electrifying, in a culture where virtually all the women wear these scarves, never showing their heads or their hair in public.

Ten is an exceptional movie, its formal rigor and simplicity providing a perfect framework for Kiarostami's probing study of the lives of Iranian women. These layered, rewarding dialogues subtly deal with issues of religion, domesticity, relationships between men and women, motherhood, and sex. But though there's an obvious current of social criticism running through the film, it's all couched in daily routines, friendships and relationships, with a deceptively casual dialogue style in which the subtext of social inquiry is deftly interwoven with warm humor and some intense emotional content.

Catch Me If You Can

Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can is a breezy but smart thriller, a briskly paced film whose playful title captures the charm and ease of this story, but barely hints at the surprising emotional nuances that Spielberg finds in this 1960s con man who skipped across America inventing occupations and identities for himself. It's based on the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), who runs away from home at the age of seventeen and immediately begins concocting grand schemes that are as much about creating a glamorous identity for himself as about all the money he makes through counterfeit check schemes. For Spielberg, Abagnale is still a kid when he runs away, trying to recapture an idealized image of happiness and family and security that he lost in his teenage years. The film opens with some unnecessary framing material set after Abagnale's eventual capture, but it doesn't really start until the scenes of the Abagnale family's 1960s suburban bliss.

Frank's father (Christopher Walken) is an honored man in their community, a local businessman who's recognized by his peers and respected by all. Frank Sr. is, above all, proud of his wife, Paula (Nathalie Baye), who he met during World War II in France. Frank Sr. tells the story of how he met her over and over again, how he saw this gorgeous blonde dancing in a small village and vowed that he "wouldn't leave France without her." As he tells the story over Christmas, dancing with his wife as Frank looks on, Frank knows all the words by heart, can fill in the blanks with ease. It's a story he cherishes, because it contains the essence of Frank Sr.'s philosophy, an ideology of entitlement that he passes on to his son: if you want something badly enough, if you fight hard enough for it, you will get it. Of course, the Abagnales' happy life eventually falls apart as Frank's father gets in trouble with the IRS and spirals into ruin and disgrace. His wife begins bringing other men around, and Frank knows that trouble is coming, but he still isn't prepared for the announcement that his parents are getting divorced. Unable to deal with it, he simply runs away.


Those early scenes, bright and idyllic as they are, are like TV sitcom visions of domestic contentment: the glamorous mother and suave father, an icon of paternal serenity even as his life collapses around him. Frank carries these visions off into the world, memories of the paradise he's lost and is now trying to recover. He is an intuitive mimic, and he is seeking alternate realizations of the glossy glamor of his childhood. He sees a pilot, in his crisp black uniform, surrounded by beautiful, cheery stewardesses in pale blue, and he immediately seizes upon this image as his own goal. Other kids would want to learn how to fly, to go through the work, to achieve that ambition, but not Frank. He doesn't want to fly, he just wants to be a pilot, and to him the two are almost unconnected. It's not the job he wants, it's the image of himself in that handsome uniform, surrounded by pretty, giggling girls. It's the sensation of walking down the street, turning heads wherever he goes. The film is set in an era when flight still seemed a little magical, and certainly very adventurous: the pilot is a kind of globetrotting hero, in control of these giant metal birds that only he really understands how to handle, living a life of adventure all around the world. When Frank occasionally reports in to his father with his adventures, his father is impressed by how "exotic" his son's life is. He says the word repeatedly, with a kind of reverent awe: where are you going tonight, Frank, he asks, somewhere exotic? Frank is able to continue and even improve upon the life of glamor and respect that his father lost when his finances fell apart.

Frank's opposite number is the FBI agent Hanratty (Tom Hanks), who makes it his mission to catch Frank as the con man's tricks grow bolder and bolder. Frank and Hanratty share a Christmas tradition, a telephone call from the lonely man on the road to the lonely man in the office. Both have nothing better to do on a family holiday. Both have shattered families. Hanratty still wears his wedding ring, as Frank points out, but he's not lying when he says he doesn't have a family; the air of sadness of a man with nothing waiting for him outside the office is unmistakable. The film is nakedly about the desire for family; it's not even a subtext, it's what drives everything Frank does, everything he wants. He doesn't even care about the money, not really. At one point, he pulls out a pair of suitcases that are stuffed with loose bills, carelessly tossed inside and crumpled up. Frank projects such a calm, self-assured demeanor most of the time that it's easy to forget, even for the audience, what an insecure child he still really is, but moments like that make it clear. He's got suitcases full of money that he doesn't know what to do with, and still he keeps going, keeps writing bad checks, keeps making up new identities: a doctor, a lawyer, a Harvard graduate, a Berkeley graduate. It's not about wealth for him, but what the wealth stands for: respect, security, acceptance, being able to impress people. He's after the vibe of that Rotary Club dinner — the first scene of the film after the framing material — where his father is honored by his town's most respected men, even the mayor himself.

Frank thinks he's found this restoration of family life in Brenda Strong (Amy Adams), a young nurse who he meets in a hospital, and who spontaneously inspires in him yet another lie, yet another identity: as a doctor. This, more than anything else Frank does, makes it clear that it's not money he wants. There's no money in this ploy, not really, but there's the respect of being in a noble profession, and there's the obvious adoration of Brenda, who's the same age as Frank, more or less, but seems like a giggly teen in comparison to his assured maturity, which makes him believable when he says he's a decade older than he actually is. (The casting of DiCaprio is ingenious in this respect: he looks awkward and ungainly as a teen in the early scenes, then seems to naturally grow into Frank's cocky-kid projections of maturity and confidence.)


Frank rediscovers, with Brenda and her family, the happy home life he'd lost as a child. They are almost surreal, this cheery, tight-knit family, and it's easy to forget the darkness lurking just around the corner: Brenda's Irish Catholic parents had kicked her out after she'd slept with a boy and gotten an abortion. Frank's seeming respectability wins them back over, not only to him, but to their own daughter. They're living a different kind of lie from Frank, lying to themselves about their own goodness, rejecting their daughter as a slut until she returns with a handsome doctor who wants to marry her. Spielberg kind of glosses over this subtext, but it's there nonetheless, lurking beneath the unreal cheeriness and familial closeness of this household. In a David Lynch film, the Strongs would be a parody of suburban nicety and inner hypocrisy, but one senses that Spielberg sees them in more of a rosy light. They're funny, this stern but sentimental couple who do the dishes together, their butts swaying in time to the music, dancing together as they do domestic chores, totally in sync and totally contented. Frank watches them and sees in them his own parents, dancing together in the living room on Christmas, totally happy and totally into each other.

It's a dream of family, an ideal, and Spielberg's cinema is perfectly suited to capturing ideals. This is such a rich film because Spielberg seems to identify so completely with Frank the innocent trickster, always in search of family, always in search of a childhood innocence that's gone forever. Everything in the film is seen through this lens. Everything is 1960s glossy, bright and airy, clean and pure. Only occasionally does Frank touch up against the grimier underpinnings of the fantasy life he's building for himself: a glimpse of a bloody leg during his doctor ruse, a negotiation with a prostitute that's a letdown after he thought he was having just another romantic encounter, the tears of Brenda when she tells him about her abortion and again when he has to leave her, to go on the run again. These are reminders that the fantasy is just a fantasy, that the glossy world Frank is erecting around him can only remain intact so long as he keeps his blinders on to everything he's running from, everything that's poised to destroy his dreams. Spielberg brilliantly constructs that glossy fantasy world, a con boy's dream of love and family, and he brilliantly explores the emotions of the man running through the fantasy, breathlessly exclaiming "catch me if you can" as though it's all a game, even if it's really anything but.

Minority Report

[This is a contribution to the Steven Spielberg Blogathon, hosted by Icebox Movies and Medfly Quarantine, running from December 18-28.]

It is fitting, and much remarked-upon, that for a film about seeing the future, eyes and vision are incredibly important to Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. The film literalizes the idea of seeing the future, removes the concept from the realm of the metaphysical and places it into the context of a gritty forensic police thriller. The future world it imagines, by way of Philip K. Dick, is one in which a trio of powerful precogs — savants with awesome mental abilities — are harnessed by the police department to prevent violent crimes before they happen. The precogs see — literally see — murders that are going to happen in the future, and their visions are harnessed through computers into video records that can then be played back, manipulated, and enhanced, their details thoroughly dissected by the precrime investigator John Anderton (Tom Cruise).

The business of cop shows, the sifting through of evidence and unearthing of clues, is translated into this futuristic milieu as Anderton analyzes these videos in order to discover the soon-to-occur murder's location and actors. Spielberg stages the introductory scene of Anderton leading an investigation as though the detective was conducting a symphony, using a complex computer system that responds to his every movement. He waves his hands and video fragments dash across the screen. Segments are looped and repeated, details are zoomed in on and snatches of sound are amplified, and every nuance of the video becomes a potential clue pointing towards the scene of the future crime. Detective work becomes a process of looking deeply and intently, examining the image — in other words, the detective becomes a figure analogous to a film editor, or perhaps a film critic, an analyzer of images, fitting together the bits and pieces of a scene in a way that makes sense and reveals the meaning of the scene.

The film's literalization of seeing the future is so potent because it's a metaphor or a model for the cinema, but even more poignantly it's compared to home movies. Anderton spends his days looking into the future, but his nights are spent immersed in the past, in home movie recordings of his young son, who disappeared and is presumed dead. We never say that we are seeing the past in the same way as we talk about seeing the future, but when we look at home movies or a photo album, we are in fact seeing the past, visually engaging with memories. When Anderton pulls up the footage of his son playing on the beach, selecting it from a larger collection like a connoisseur, he engages with it in much the same way as he does with the precogs' visions of the future: looping and rewinding, revisiting key passages as though hoping to extract some meaning, some tangible clue, from these images of his laughing, energetic son. It places Anderton's work in heartrending relief, as an effort to find the truth in these video images of the future, the truth that eludes and mystifies him when trying to make sense of the loss of his son through video records of the past.


The directive to look, to see deeply, is also central to the character of Agatha (Samantha Morton), the most powerful of the precogs. Agatha wants a witness, wants someone to look closely at a particular vision of hers, a vision of a crime that has long been thought "solved," the murder prevented before it happened. Agatha's quest becomes linked to Anderton's when Anderton sees himself in one of the precogs' visions, and sees his own name come up as the next would-be murderer for the police to apprehend. Anderton is forced to go on the run, eventually joined by Agatha, who he liberates from her weird imprisonment in the tanks that house the precogs and make them look like exhibits at an aquarium, an aspect of the whole precog system that everyone seems, curiously, morally blind to until Anderton rips Agatha out of this housing and is forced to confront her humanity.

That moral blindness is another form of seeing and not seeing, the motif that Spielberg seems fascinated with here. Is it really possible that this future society is so indifferent to the humanity of the precogs that a system where these people are permanantly chained, physically and mentally, to a computer system that channels their visions, is not only accepted but is soon to be unveiled on a larger scale? Before Anderton goes on the run, he and his fellow cops make some nods to the moral and philosophical dilemmas at the root of precrime — how do you arrest someone for a crime that hasn't actually occurred? — but they easily shake off the deeper doubts of FBI agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), dismissing his concerns as inconsequential whining. In (broad) contemporary political terms, Witwer is the bleeding-heart liberal concerned with rights and morality, while the rest of society seems poised to side with the law-and-order conservatives who view the sacrifice of these abstract values and ideals as secondary to the gains of preventing murders. Spielberg never taps too deeply into this subcurrent of the story, but it's there nevertheless, teasing just below the surface.

Instead, there's a lot more fun with eyes and seeing. Anderton, grieving for his son, buys his drugs from an eyeless man whose hollow, empty sockets unseeingly bore into the center of the suffering Anderton. Later, he goes on the run but his eyes identify him wherever he goes. In this future society, eyescans are so routine that even advertisements scattered around on billboards scan the eyes of passersby in order to target spoken ads at individuals. As a result, wherever Anderton goes, his name is being shouted out amidst cheery slogans; Big Brother sees him everywhere because big companies see him everywhere. There's something to be said here, probably, about the reversal of the usual couch potato dynamic of consumers staring at ads. Now the ads stare back, and get personal, the logical outgrowths of online ad targeting and spyware. Spielberg, again, doesn't really go there, just leaves it as intriguing loose thread. For him, the eyescans are a plot device, necessary to give Anderton an obstacle to overcome.


This problem results in the ingenious sequence where Anderton goes to a disreputable doctor who gives him an eye transplant, which in this society where eyes are the windows not only to the soul but to one's entire person, is the equivalent of a new name and a new identity. Spielberg stages a brilliant sequence where the blind and blindfolded Anderton, who has to shield his eyes for some time after the surgery, is forced to hide from an army of spider-like miniature police robots. Spielberg's camera follows the robots on their skittering journey through the dilapidated building where Anderton is hiding, the camera seeming to creep through walls, finally arriving at the room where Anderton tries to slow his pulse and hide his breathing by submerging himself in cold water, before being forced to reveal his new eyes for the robots to scan.

All of this is set-up and preparation for the film's best gag, the slapstick chase sequence between Anderton and his own eye, a slippery connection to his past identity that he finally holds onto by the barest thread. Literally. This sense of humor — black, grisly, sometimes positively naughty as in Anderton and Agatha's visit to a virtual reality sin palace — enlivens the film, as does Spielberg's predictably fluid action staging. Minority Report is tense and visceral, balancing man-on-the-run suspense with bursts of action and those moments of piquant humor that give this dark film a surprisingly playful sensibility.

The finale drives home the film's multiple takes on seeing — to see the future, to see the truth, and not always at the same time or in the same sense — while first imprisoning Anderton in a way that mirrors the fates of the precogs at the beginning of the film, then unleashing him for the climax. Spielberg, as always, can't resist tying things up for the finale, resolving the darker undercurrents of the film in a tidy denouement where the bad guy is caught, the precog program ended, and everything set right. The rest of the film raises unsettling propositions about justice and morality: that justice could miscarry; that the illusion of moral certitude is just that, an illusion; that predicting the future can be the same as creating it, as Anderton is, paradoxically, set on the path to murder by the prediction that he would commit a murder. The film's ending tiredly suggests a more benign justice that will, eventually, win out in the end, but the torturous, unlikely machinations required to reach this happy ending only wind up enforcing the limitations of justice and law. Spielberg, no matter how hard he tries, can't erase the disquieting implications of his own film, and Minority Report is all the richer for this final lingering tension.

Blissfully Yours

For his second feature, Blissfully Yours, Apichatpong Weerasethakul crafted a delicate, impressionistic depiction of a lazy summer afternoon shared between Min (Min Oo), a Burmese who has illegally crossed the border into Thailand looking for work, his girlfriend Roong (Kanokporn Tongaram), and Orn (Jenjira Jansuda), an older woman who Roong has hired to help Min. The film is decompressed to an extreme degree: virtually nothing actually happens in its two hour duration, as routine tasks and long moments of stasis are captured and mined for their emotional and sensual nuances. In the lengthy opening scene, which starts the film without any credits or lead-in, Roong and Orn have taken Min to a doctor to treat his skin condition, and they simply argue in a low-key way with the doctor about what's wrong with him and what he needs. Min stays silent; much later, it will become apparent that Min is pretending to be mute so he won't reveal his foreign dialect, while Orn is trying to trick the doctor into giving Min the health certificate he needs to find work. But Weerashethakul doesn't dwell on any of this. He simply allows the conversation to play out, as puzzling and elliptical as it is, capturing the absurd way in which Orn and Roong are forced to keep talking in circles, confronted by the doctor's obstinate refusal to do anything outside of regulations.

It is a frustrating, mysterious scene, but also a strangely funny one; Weerashethakul has a streak of dark but playful humor that often shows up in moments like this. Here, it becomes apparent when the conversation with the doctor goes on for several minutes as though it's about a new condition, and then when the doctor asks how long this has been going on, they answer that he's had it since he was a child. It's the kind of absurd reversal of expectations that Weerashethakul subtly integrates into his otherwise hyper-realistic, observational aesthetic. Even better is the brief few moments when the director lingers to watch the doctor's next patient, a hard-of-hearing old man who's grumpily bickering with his daughter. Upset over his broken hearing aid, he advises the doctor that if she should have children, she should have a son because "boys are much better with electronics than girls."

In this way, Blissfully Yours simply drifts along, from moment to moment and place to place, patiently watching these people's daily routines. In one scene, Orn mixes together chopped-up fruits with a table full of creams and skin lotions, creating her own concoction, halfway between a fruit salad and a skin treatment. Weerashethakul loves to watch procedures like this, just as later his camera admires the careful, methodical way in which Roong prepares a snack for Min, wrapping up a piece of meat with a cluster of rice grains, then tearing off a piece of bread to engulf it all, and dipping the small bunched ball into the juices from some fruit. She repeats the procedure twice, making one for Min and then one for herself, and Weerashethakul captures the hypnotic quality of her careful motions as she assembles these snacks. She does it, perhaps, with the same mechanical care with which she paints Disney figurines at the factory where she works, where she's so overworked that, as Min laments in voiceover, her hands are sore after a particularly hard day. The film's extreme patience becomes especially clear when, nearly 45 minutes into the film, the credits suddenly appear as Min and Roong are driving towards a picnic in a remote woodsy area. It's as though Weerashethakul is saying, now the movie is starting, everything that came before was simply a long prelude, an introduction, presenting the necessary context for what's to come.


Indeed, the earlier scenes have a groundedness, a quotidian quality, that wafts away once the characters leave behind the city for their rural getaway. The early scenes establish that these characters are trying to escape, that they're bored, fenced in by routine. One of Min's periodic voiceovers even explicitly calls their picnic in the woods an "escape," and at this point Weerashethakul's sensuality, his pictorial sensibility, takes over. As the young couple winds through the woods together, the branches brush up against their skin and the sun sporadically breaks through the dense foliage above to flare white-hot in their eyes. They finally arrive at a beautiful rock cliff above a lush, deep green valley, and they picnic there, picking berries together in the woods, kissing, sleeping in the sun, eating, fending off the alarmingly large ants that scramble across their blanket. The ants are harbingers of the ruin to come, tangible suggestions that this afternoon is ephemeral, that whatever happiness they might find here is fragile and easily upturned, but initially they're just a nuisance to be laughed off.

These scenes are all about the play of light dappled on bare skin, the casual sensuality, and sexuality, of the characters as they drift together and apart over the course of the afternoon, sometimes joined in intimacy and at other times separated by silence and disconnection. Weerashethakul intercuts the scenes between the two young lovers with scenes of Orn and her husband, engaged in a similar indulgent afternoon in the woods not far from the younger couple. Weerashethakul is all about suggesting emotional and thematic depths without directly confronting them. Through subtle gestures, the sex scene between Orn and her husband becomes, without a word being spoken, about her desire to have a child and his reluctance to go along with her. The way she watches as he takes off his condom and throws it away after sex, the way she caresses her own belly as she lies next to him: these simple gestures say everything about these characters, their urges and needs. Later, Orn joins up with Roong and Min, following a strange and elliptical series of events in which her husband runs off, chasing a motorcycle thief, possibly to die or merely to confront some more mundane fate, but either way disappearing from the film without ceremony. Afterward, Orn wanders through the forest, donning an antiseptic mask she finds on the forest floor. Even in such a direct and seemingly realistic film, Weerashethakul displays a weird kind of beneath-the-surface surrealism in small, unexplained details like this. These seeming non-sequiturs simply add to the film's richness, its texture, its ineffable sense of mystery.

This mystery is intact, certainly, throughout the final stretches, in which hardly a word is spoken. Roong and Min lie down next to a river together, and nearby Orn lies down by herself in her underwear, her full middle-aged body looking Rubenesque, straining against the constrictions of her garments. Roong, in contrast, is childlike and skinny, and the older woman gently mocks her for it, even as Roong playfully pinches the older woman's large butt. Weerashethakul pulls back for a long shot, showing the couple and the woman lying on opposite sides of the frame, implicitly establishing a comparison between generations, between maturity and youth. In fact, though, both women seem equally troubled, linked by their concern for the helpless, drifting Roong, who they together are helping to shepherd through life as though he was a child. In the final minutes of the film, Weerashethakul maintains a steady gaze on Roong's face as she lies next to Min, lost in thought, absentmindedly stroking his penis. Then he cuts away for a couplet of moody sunset landscape shots, before returning to find Roong turning slightly towards the camera, an unreadable expression on her face for the few frames before the cut to black.

It is a fittingly mysterious ending, and that's even before the strange textual coda that scrolls across the screen a few seconds later, describing Min going to Bangkok for a job, Roong getting another boyfriend and selling noodles, while "like before, Orn continues to work as an extra in Thai movies." It's a suggestion, perhaps, that life goes on in its own strange and often disappointing way, that afternoons like this, extended moments of contemplation and sensuality, are fleeting and momentary, and also tinged with sadness. Implicit even in joy is the inevitability of decay, of loss, of death, like the ants who skitter gleefully across the food during the final scenes, ruining everything, devouring whatever they find.

In the Mirror of Maya Deren

Maya Deren is a legendary figure in avant-garde cinema, a true visionary who completed just six short films in her brief life, but whose reputation has endured on the strength of this small but utterly original oeuvre. Martina Kudlácek's documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren is an attempt to grapple with this tremendous legacy, to trace Deren's eventful, complicated life, to explore the ideas and preoccupations at the heart of her cinema, to gather the testimonies of those who knew her, who were affected by her incandescent passion and energy. All of this comes across beautifully in Kudlácek's film, which is a true ode to its subject, a poetic assemblage of reminiscences, fragments of film, excerpts from Deren's finished works, and audio recordings of her voice, delivering lectures on filmmaking, voodoo, art and philosophy.

Deren's work as a filmmaker began with Meshes of the Afternoon, made in 1943 with the help of her then-husband, the experimental filmmaker Alexander Hammid. This epochal film, nearly on its own, is responsible for Deren's legacy: it is a trancelike psychodrama, steeped in the logic of dreams and nightmares, populated with doubles and mirrors and an eerie sense of danger and sensuality intertwined. Kudlácek's film touches on the making of this short, but her focus is not necessarily on the details and intricacies of the filmmaking process — this documentary gives little sense of Deren at work, only momentary glimpses of her process behind the camera. It is not a behind-the-scenes documentary, nor is it a comprehensive biography, though it veers closer to the latter. Kudlácek seems chiefly concerned with getting as close as possible to a vision of who Deren was, what her creative philosophy was like, what she thought about and imagined when she was creating her visionary works. The film follows the arc of Deren's life, tracing her biography, often filling in details with onscreen texts that describe pivotal events — childhood background, marriages, divorces, moves, publications. But these are facts, only, and the interviewees who Kudlácek includes in the film, all of whom knew Deren very well, rarely talk about the facts of her life. Instead, they discourse on her personality, on what made her special and what made her films special, on her ideas, on her mystical and spiritual qualities.

It is fitting that a poetic, evasive figure like Deren should be treated to such a poetic, evasive biography, one that establishes certain basic facts but is much more concerned with the ephemeral and the sublime. Kudlácek's own voice never enters the film; she never offers her own commentary but allows everyone else to speak, to offer their own individual commentaries on who Deren was and what she represented. The voices here range from Hammid to future IMAX filmmaker and personal friend Graeme Ferguson to fellow avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas to Film as a Subversive Art author Amos Vogel to the performers who appeared in Deren's dance films to the Haitian friends she made on her many visits to that country, working on a film she never completed. These people offer many contrasting visions of Deren: personal reminiscences, admiration for her commitment and craft as a filmmaker, and in many cases expressions of her supposed mystical and even magical power. Brakhage tells a story about the diminutive Deren, possessed by a Haitian god during a ritual, actually throwing a refrigerator across a room, and the Haitian painter André Pierre tells about a time when Deren disappeared from a boat only to reappear floating way out in the ocean, singing.

All of this, like everything else in the film, is presented without comment, as one more indication of the legends and stories that have accumulated around this extraordinary figure. There is a certain amount of pretension in Deren, in her mysticism and her speeches about filmmaking. Sometimes in her filmmaking as well: Brakhage laments that her final film, The Very Eye of Night, was misunderstood by practically everyone, but the film itself is tiresome and inscrutable, consisting entirely of negative-image dancers superimposed upon a field of stars. As with most of Deren's work, there's an elaborate intellectual justification for everything here — something about myth and the movement of "celestial bodies" — but unlike in her earlier work the film itself is largely inaccessible without the benefit of this context. Whatever meaning Deren intended for the dreamlike Meshes and At Land, or the rigidly choreographed earlier dance films like Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence, the films themselves have a sensual and visceral quality that goes beyond mere conceptual games.


Thus, when Deren's voiceover is heard describing her films in lectures, speaking over images from her own films, it is undeniable that the images possess a power and beauty that cannot be captured in words, not even the words of the filmmaker herself, whose explanations for her every choice fall short of the ineffable quality that made her films truly great. Kudlácek's film is fascinating for providing a glimpse into Deren's thinking, into her creative process, but ultimately all these words can only be a glimpse, dwarfed by the mysterious power of the films themselves. In the Mirror of Maya Deren also proves valuable for its insight into Deren's collaborative process, for the way she would draw in multi-talented people to work with her. Although she worked entirely outside of the conventional Hollywood system of her time, she was also distinct from most of her contemporaries in the avant-garde, including Brakhage and Mekas, who tended to be solitary figures making personal films on their own, with just a single camera and their own two hands. At one point, Brakhage himself is shown at work on the film Water for Maya, his tribute to Deren, and it's a very different working method from Deren's expansive, collaborative ventures: Brakhage sits alone, holding a filmstrip up to the light, carefully dabbing paint onto the strip.

In contrast, Deren worked with crews; never traditional crews, in the usual sense, but free-floating ensembles where people would come and go, doing whatever needed to be done on the set. Her first film was made in collaboration with Hammid as co-director and co-star, and on subsequent films she would often include choreographers and musicians as key collaborators, their contributions as integral to the finished work as her own. It's telling that she viewed her dance films, especially, as interactions between the dancer's body and the camera, two equal partners creating a unified motion together. This is especially apparent in the way these films frequently play fluidly with a sense of space and time, cutting together shots so that a dancer may start a motion in one place and complete it somewhere altogether different, bridging space and time with the arc of a leg.

Kudlácek's film is especially good when dealing like this with the formal qualities of Deren's cinema, the way she would use her editing to transcend a limiting, realistic view of the world. That's perhaps why, as Mekas describes it, she was contemptuous of his improvisational, naturalistic method of shooting, preferring art that is planned out, that has a definitive form and meaning. Kudlácek herself subtly undermines her subject here, though. Right as Mekas is talking about the value of improvisation and random footage, and Deren's dim view of such spontaneity, Kudlácek inserts some of her own footage, of an Anthology Film Archives employee accidentally stepping into a shot and then ducking back out abruptly. It's as though the documentarian is silently making her own position known, gently underlining Mekas' point with this quirky little moment.

Perhaps it's also because of Kudlácek's sympathies for improvisation and accident that the film's best moments consist of archival footage that Deren never assembled into a finished work. Kudlácek samples generously from Deren's hours of Haitian footage, and there's a joyous energy and unpredictability to this material that belies Deren's own ethos — who knows what the Haitian film would have been like had she actually ever made it, but her footage from her trips there has a spontaneity and raw beauty unlike anything in her more lyrical established oeuvre. The same is true of a phenomenal outtake from Ritual in Transfigured Time, in which Deren herself throatily sings a folk ballad while dancers twirl about, their bodies thrusting together in openly sexual ways, smiling and laughing with the same unselfconscious openness seen on the faces of the voodoo dancers. In the Mirror of Maya Deren is a valuable, fascinating documentary, cutting to the heart of one of avant-garde cinema's most beguiling and interesting figures.

The Conversations #3 (part 2): Overlooked - Solaris

Part two of the third installment of the monthly feature The Conversations has now been posted at the great multi-author film blog The House Next Door. As I said yesterday, this month Jason Bellamy and I each selected a film from the last few years that we deemed to be "overlooked." I picked David Gordon Green's Undertow, and Jason opted for Steven Soderbergh's Solaris. The first part of this two-part conversation, on Undertow, can be found here. Now the second part, on Solaris, has been posted as well. Click the link below to read it.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Hollywood Ending

When people say that Woody Allen's career has gone downhill in recent years, I suspect many of them are especially thinking of Hollywood Ending. It's ironic, for a film about vision and filmmaking, that this is one of Woody's most indifferently shot and conceived films, a film of such staggering incompetence and awkwardness that one can hardly believe it when sporadic moments here and there actually work: it's downright bizarre to see flashes of Woody's comic brilliance shining through in the midst of such a train wreck. It's impossible to watch the film without wondering if Woody intended it to be this bad, if we're meant to be watching the film made by Woody's character within the film, a struggling director whose comeback chance is sabotaged when he develops a psychosomatic case of blindness. It's otherwise hard to account for the bland television aesthetic of so many scenes, the horribly stilted acting and torturous dialogue, the bursts of lively comedy alternating with long stretches of dead time.

Watching the film as someone who's enjoyed even most of Woody's supposed "lesser" works, it's as though all the popular criticisms of the director have suddenly come true. His dialogue has always been wordy and contrived, but in the past he's managed to make it sound, if not quite natural, then at least fluid and stylish and, most importantly, funny. In this film, as in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Woody's dialogue is flat, dead on the page, its artificiality and silliness all too apparent. As the director Val Waxman, Woody fares best, probably because he's basically playing himself — and that too is a problem, because the schtick, the flailing neurotic hypochondriac thing, is wearing dangerously thin. But it's worse when he puts his lines in someone else's mouth. As his ditzy girlfriend Lori, Debra Messing is oddly off-key and empty, maybe even emptier than the part seems to call for. As the Chinese translator who helps Val hide his blindness on the set, Barney Cheng is more like a robot, unfamiliar with humanity's strange habit of conversation, than a foreigner, so exaggerated is his stilted accent and mannered tone. Woody's never exactly been subtle in his treatment of non-white characters but this is egregious. And the introduction of Val's green-haired, rodent-eating, heavy metal-loving son Scumbag X (Mark Webber) is simply embarrassing: it's meant to show how out of touch Val is and only ends up proving how out of touch Woody is.

To continue recounting the absurd scenes in this mess of a film would only be painful — why prolong the misery? — though special mention should probably be made of Woody's utterly inept attempts at shilling for 7-Up and Pepsi through some hilariously obvious product placement. What's really perverse about Hollywood Ending is that a lot of it, surprisingly, actually works in spite of the tremendous odds against it. There are stretches of comedy that Woody handles with his usual light touch and supple wit, like a great scene featuring Tiffani Thiessen in a cameo turn as a seductive actress whose feminine wiles are wasted on the blind Val. And Woody's sputtering delivery often stumbles into some typically clever lines, much of it admittedly variations on familiar material ("For me, the nicest thing about masturbation is afterward, the cuddling time.") but no less funny for its familiarity.


It's as disconcerting as ever to see the aging Woody cast himself in romantic comedies opposite much younger women, but Téa Leoni is nevertheless a welcome presence here. Woody's rapport with Leoni, as his ex-wife Ellie, is certainly nowhere close to his best comic pairings (Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow), but it's also not nearly as flat and affectless as his doomed attempt at sparking some humor out of Helen Hunt in Jade Scorpion. Leoni's an effective comic actress, and she invests her scenes with a subtlety and attentiveness that the often lackluster script hardly demands of her. In one of her best scenes, as Val waxes nostalgic about their past together, Ellie sits on the edge of his bed in the foreground, wearily rolling her head around, half paying attention and half simply trying to work out the kinks in her neck. It could have been broadly overplayed for comic effect, for a cheap punchline, but the way Leoni plays it it's not even a joke: it's just a woman tired after a long day and in no mood for reminiscences.

Other scenes go on so long that they have time to shift from annoying and off-putting to outrageously funny, like the early scene, before Val's hysterical blindness, where Val and Ellie meet for a drink to discuss the plans for the upcoming movie. Val keeps shifting fluidly from casual shop talk about who he wants to hire and what he wants to do, to outraged ramblings about the way Ellie had cheated on him with the producer Hal (Treat Williams) and destroyed their marriage. Woody's neurotic schtick is initially just aggravating, but he keeps it up so long, and handles the transitions from businesslike to ranting so smoothly, that it's soon hard to resist the scene's hysterical flow, and the material becomes funny almost in spite of itself. The capper is Val's list of very specific gripes about the ways in which he was tipped off to the affair, like getting a bill for a room and escargot from the Plaza Hotel: "sex and snails with that roast beef from Beverly Hills!"

Hollywood Ending can, in spurts, be as funny as any of Woody's best material — but then, the film throws out so many one-liners and sketches that some of them were bound to stick. Many others don't, and much of the film is a pile-up of bad ideas, half-realized scenes and dead-on-arrival jokes. It's like a Woody Allen sketchbook committed to film with no self-editing or polishing up, an accumulation of discarded routines in which the good moments are swallowed up by deep abysses of bad acting and careless staging. This film has more ups and downs than its relentlessly dull and mediocre predecessor Jade Scorpion. The funny bits are funnier, but when the film is bad — as it too often is — it's worse than Woody has ever been before in his entire long career.

Films I Love #23: Balance Beams (Jonas Leddington, 2002)

Balance Beams is a documentary about the 2002 AMPLIFY music festival in Tokyo, Japan, curated by experimental music label Erstwhile Records, who later released the film as part of a box set commemorating the fest. This will probably seem like an obscure choice to anyone not already well-versed in the kind of music favored by Erstwhile, and it's not a film that got much notice outside of the insular community of electroacoustic improvisation. It certainly deserved more attention, though: there is no film that does a better job of capturing the unique philosophy and approach to music that characterizes the group of musicians documented here, who represent the best that this community has to offer. It is difficult to encapsulate this diverse body of musicians under a single rubric, but they are all improvising in a post-jazz context, often using either customized electronic devices or traditional instruments which are played in non-traditional ways. There is a strong emphasis on communication between collaborators, and throughout the course of this festival, all the players rotated through various ad-hoc groupings to allow them to respond to a number of different contexts. It is resolutely abstract and difficult music, free from melody, rhythm, and any other traditional markers of musical vocabulary.

In contrast to the difficulty of this music, the film is relatively straightforward in its aesthetics, and is at its best whenever it focuses exclusively on the musicians. It is not always the most artfully made film, though its aesthetic merits become clear during the long, very welcome stretches where Leddington's camera probes into the working methods of the musicians as they play. This is a very process-oriented film, fittingly for a genre of music where the process of creating sounds is of central importance. All of these musicians think carefully before making a sound, a fact that Leddington establishes early by opening the film with a snippet of Taku Sugimoto's infamously silent Guitar Quartet, which mostly consists of four guitarists sitting quietly on stage, hands poised above their guitars, waiting for someone to touch a string.

The rest of these musicians are not nearly as extreme as Sugimoto, but they do share his thoughtfulness and deliberation. It is therefore a rare pleasure to see guitarist Keith Rowe at work in revealing closeups that put the emphasis squarely on the techniques he uses to produce his sounds. Rowe places his instrument flat on a tabletop, surrounded by effect pedals, springs, handheld fans, radios, and assorted metal objects, all of which are used to excite the guitar's strings in interesting ways, creating textured sound fields. Throughout the film, Leddington explores the various means of sound production these musicians deploy: the alien squeaks and cries of vocalist Ami Yoshida, the sine wave samples of Sachiko M, the relatively traditional guitar of Burkhard Stangl, the eccentric percussive array of Günter Müller, the bare turntables and gadgets of Otomo Yoshihide. Balance Beams provides a perspective better even than the average audience member at one of these shows, creating an experience that is not just a document of a particular festival, but a summary of this movement's philosophy of sound and music.