The Man From London

The films of Béla Tarr have always been haunted by film noir to one degree or another. Tarr's downtrodden characters plod miserably through gloomy, shadowy wastelands, getting tangled up in plots and intrigues that briefly distract them from the otherwise unchanging stasis of their lives. In The Man From London — an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel that was already adapted for noir films twice in the 1940s — the influence of noir is as overt as it's ever been in Tarr's work, but tellingly it is not a drastic departure from the rest of his oeuvre, only a slight shift in emphasis that brings these subcurrents to the surface. It is, typically of his work, slow-moving and stunningly beautiful, shot in a high contrast black-and-white where light sources generate hot, blinding whites that threaten to burn through the frame, while the blacks of shadowy nights are dense and inky, and the characters in the film are, at various times, swallowed up by both the darkness and the light, both representing equal threats. As with all his films since Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr's longtime editor Ágnes Hranitzky is credited as a co-director, but this too hasn't signalled much tangible change in his art; instead, it seems a way of affirming the paramount importance of editing to his films, presumably on the basis that in a film with so few cuts, each one must be vitally important.

This is a gorgeous, mysteriously moving film, its potent chiaroscuro images buttressed by the moaning organ drones of Tarr's frequent musical collaborator Mikhály Vig, as well as the expressive sound design in which every creaking, metallic, mechanical sound of the docks is amplified into a hypnotic percussive rhythm. The Man From London is often considered lesser Tarr, whatever that means, but this film finds the Hungarian master in as fine a form as ever despite its troubled production history. The one minor problem is the distractingly bad dubbing of the actors' voices into French and English, which seems to have been done with little care for syncronizing the audio to lip movements. Even this adds to the film's powerful sense of disconnection and alienation, as does the multilingual dialogue, which Tarr has said was his preferred audio for the film even though some early screenings aired with everyone dubbed into Hungarian.

In the gorgeous, atmospheric opening, the camera watches from the windows of a high tower at a dock where ships moor, letting off passengers who shuffle across to a railroad station nearby. A railroad worker, Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), sits in the tower all night, and the camera is aligned with his perspective, tracking in slow arcs around the interior of his tower room to take in the whole dock area. There's a voyeuristic thrill to this opening sequence, as Maloin, from his godlike perspective, sees things that he is obviously not meant to see. A man on a docked boat throws a suitcase into the darkness of a nearby pier, where it's picked up by a second man. The two men later fight, and in the struggle one of them falls into the water and never resurfaces, taking the suitcase with him. When the surviving man quickly leaves, Maloin climbs down from his tower with a hook and fishes the suitcase out of the water, discovering that it's full of money.


This opening sets the tone, patiently observing as these events unfold without fuss, the camera tracking past the windows to slowly sweep across the whole scene. Down below, pools of light and shadow are stretched out across the docks, with streetlamps casting bright ovals carved out of the darkness, figures melting in and out of the dark as they prowl around. Their furtive, secretive movements avoid detection, except of course for the near-omniscient viewpoint from which Maloin watches, a viewpoint that associates him with the voyeuristic audience, watching a typical noir tale of treachery and violence. It plays almost like a silent film; there's no dialogue in the entire first half-hour except for some distant, barely overheard murmuring. No words are needed, because these are familiar cinematic archetypes, carved in light and shadow, enacting a primal noir drama for an audience hiding up above.

The details of that pantomimed opening are later filled out, when the British private detective Morrison (István Lénárt) arrives, investigating the robbery of 60,000 pounds from his employer by a man named Brown (János Derzsi), one of the men Maloin had seen in the opening. It almost doesn't matter, though, because in typical fashion, Tarr is less interested in plot mechanics than he is in the mundane routines and boring lives that continue to trudge forward uneventfully even as this investigation circles inexorably around the events of that night. Maloin grimly watches as the inspector tries to figure out where Brown and the missing money have gone, while Brown himself begins stalking the dockworker, apparently suspicious that Maloin may have seen something or retrieved the suitcase.

The plot is extremely basic, stripped down to just the essentials, and in a way the only big events in the film are those that occur during that opening half hour; everything else is simply an elaboration of the consequences of that noirish template. In one scene, the opening sequence is virtually repeated, this time with the inspector moving around in the darkness below, trying to recreate the potential chain of events, cleverly working out how the two criminals had snuck the suitcase full of money past customs, and then discovering the corpse in the harbor. This reinforces the impression that the film's story is an archetypal template, a basic form — ordinary working man stumbles across illegally gotten cache of money — that can be repeated and restated infinitely. The story's familiarity and simplicity frees Tarr to confine the narrative to the background, focusing instead on atmosphere and on the protagonist's grim, lifeless existence. Tarr even has the violent climax play out offscreen, keeping his camera trained on a closed wooden door during Maloin's final confrontation with Brown, the camera shaking slightly as if in shivery anticipation of the outcome of whatever's happening, unseen, beyond that door. If the opening encouraged a voyeuristic perspective on distant events, this scene denies and frustrates that voyeurism, granting the characters the private intimacy to carry out the conclusion of their story without any prying eyes to observe.


What's interesting about the film's study of Maloin is that he hardly seems to want the money once he has it; even in the shot where he opens the briefcase for the first time, there's not even a flicker of emotion on his face as he stares down into the case, before the camera tracks around and then angles down to peer into the open case, revealing the money inside. He retrieves the money, then dries it out, with a mechanical lack of feeling, compelled to do so by the momentum of the plot and little more. Once he has the money, it hardly helps him escape his dull life, nor his clearly unhappy marriage to a woman (Tilda Swinton) with whom he does nothing but shrilly argue.

The only way in which he ever uses the money is to help his daughter Henriette (Erika Bók), who first appears in a fascinating scene in which Maloin, walking home with the money, stops to watch her sweep the floor in the butcher shop where she works. At first, the scene seems as voyeuristic as the opening, with Maloin watching as the girl in the shop bends over to sweep, her skirt riding up so that her ass is clearly visible to anyone on the street outside. When it's revealed that she's actually his daughter, the emotional tenor of the scene subtly changes, and he becomes angry at his daughter's careless flaunting of her body, angry with the work that makes her display herself like this. His reaction is almost as if he's discovered she's a prostitute, and later he protectively pulls her out of her job, then buys her a fur in a store where the pushy salesmen chatter in excited tandem at father and daughter until they decide on a purchase.


Notably, Maloin never tries to use his newfound money to escape his grim home life, nor does he deviate from his routine or begin spending wildly, the downfall of so many noir heroes in similar situations. Like many of Tarr's characters, he's trapped by a lack of imagination, an inability to see past the dull materiality of his circumstances, to grasp at something greater that occasionally seems to be lurking just beyond his senses. At one point, as he leaves a bar, he walks, without looking, past a surreal scene of several bar patrons playing an odd game, one of them balancing a pool ball on his forehead while the other lunges at him with a chair, both of them doing this strange dance to the wheezing sound of an accordion. The scene recalls the extended dance sequences in Damnation and Sátántangó or the living diagram of the solar system in Werckmeister Harmonies, scenes where the dullness of ordinary life is interrupted by outbursts of strange exuberance, moments of sensuality and celebration. Here, this dance is relegated to the background, a momentary diversion that the main character, locked into his private hell, barely notices.

This is one of several points at which Tarr hints at something stranger and grander just outside the border of the main character's circumscribed sense of reality. The way the high-contrast photography renders light as an incandescent and impenetrable whiteness similarly suggests something beyond, an almost spiritual dimension to this otherwise prosaically grounded story. In one rapturous shot, Maloin's wife opens the glass doors leading out to their balcony and steps out into the bright light that swallows her up, nearly erasing her black-clad form in a suffusion of light, pouring over her and flooding the center of the frame with this blinding nothingness. When she then closes the shutters, the room is smoothly plunged into darkness, the light chased away by shadows; it's a beautiful and mysterious shot that suggests the ways in which these characters are closed off from light, hope, spirituality, anything that might fend off the darkness and shadows. The light is also tinged with a sense of danger, though, as though these people might burn up if exposed to its brilliance for too long. In the film's mysterious final shot, Brown's silently suffering wife (Ági Szirtes) simply stares straight ahead until the white light absorbs her, the image fading to a plain white nothingness before the credits roll.

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

Eric Rohmer's final film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, is a charming, deeply felt ode to the follies and pleasures of devoted love, a fitting subject for this last statement from a director who always concerned himself with both the emotions and the philosophies of love. The film opens with some text that suggests Rohmer's unique approach to realism and fidelity to his sources. The film is adapted from a 17th Century romance set in 5th Century Gaul, so its sense of period realism is of course already at a remove: the denizens of one century imagining what the inhabitants of another thought and acted like, and then Rohmer enters the picture to imagine about those imaginings, at an even further remove. Even so, he acknowledges that unfortunately he had to change the setting of the story, since the Forez plain that served as the original story's setting is no longer as pastoral and serene as the story requires, having been overrun with "urban blight" in the intervening centuries. The text conveys Rohmer's regret at having to make these kinds of changes, necessary as they are in adapting a story that's so remote from the modern era. It's a sly introduction to a film that purposefully places itself in an alien time and place, with foreign customs and ways of thinking that seem absurd and goofy to modern sensibilities. The sense of distance allows Rohmer to remain true to the spirit of the old source while always maintaining his own modern perspective on the material.

The film is a love story between the two title characters, the shepherdess Astrea (Stéphanie Crayencour) and her lover Celadon (Andy Gillet). Theirs is a Romeo and Juliet-style forbidden love, since their families have long quarreled over a trivial slight from the past. In order to disguise their affair, Astrea tells Celadon to pretend to be in love with another girl, but, due to his strong sense of duty and obedience, he pretends too well and causes Astrea to reject him in a fit of jealousy. He tries to kill himself, apparently succeeds, and is washed up in a land down the river, ruled over by nymphs and druids. This basic scenario prompts a convoluted series of misunderstandings and ruses that keep the lovers separated for the remainder of the film, with Astrea believing her beloved to be dead and Celadon refusing to return to her due to his strict adherence to his code of love. She told him never to come near her again, and though she now desperately wishes he were back with her, alive, he remains true to her final words to him.

Rohmer portrays love as a folly and a madness, a delirious devotion to a pure and impossible ideal. Much of the film is devoted to philosophical debates about love and religion. Celadon's brother Lycidas (Jocelyn Quivrin) represents the side of love and devotion in rhetorical battles with the lascivious singer Hylas (Rodolphe Pauly), who represents promiscuity and lust. In these discussions, Lycidas comes across as cool and collected, a rational proponent of love with his wife smiling sweetly by his side in mute agreement. Hylas, for his part, seems half-mad and wild-eyed, a Dionysian figure of lust and pleasure, his mouth constantly twisted into a sneer and his eyes popping with exaggerated desire. At the same time, Hylas' skepticism seems founded when Lycidas says that one who's in love literally becomes his beloved. Even the most cool-headed love, like the seemingly ideal relationship between Lycidas and his wife, contains an element of irrationality, a gap over which one must make a leap of faith without questioning or trying to understand the ineffable. The romance between Astrea and Celadon combines the stolid devotion of Lycidas with the mad lust of Hylas, and Rohmer suggests that perhaps this madness, which seems so absurd and even silly, is true love.


Indeed, the film's plot grows increasingly wild with each new wrinkle. In the final act, Celadon impersonates a girl, the daughter of a druid (Serge Renko), in order to remain close to his beloved without revealing his identity to her. The premise is fundamentally absurd, and must have seemed so even on the page, but when it's actually enacted and visualized it becomes a hysterical farce. Celadon, for all the talk of how pretty he is and how girlish he looks, is thoroughly unconvincing when disguised as a girl. The druid even explicitly says that he has a herb that will hide Celadon's beard — but then, in the subsequent scenes where he appears as a girl, he has a prominent five o'clock shadow that can't be missed. It's yet another example of the sly wit of Rohmer's literary adaptations: he remains fanatically true to the letter of his source even when the result onscreen is silly and hilarious, even when his images directly contradict the text. Perhaps this is a metaphor for love itself. Rohmer's devotion to his text risks absurdity even as the lover does in professing his adoration for his beloved, remaining true to strict codes of behavior that have meaning, if at all, only for him and his love. True love, in this film, creates its own world and its own rules, as remote from ordinary reality as this film seems from the present world.

Rohmer explicitly links this mad devotion to religion and spirituality, which abut romance throughout the film. The gods of the film are Roman gods, but the conversations between Celadon and the druid, which center around whether there are many gods or a single god with many aspects, obviously refer to Christianity without naming it as such. At one point, the druid, having tried to explain some of the "mysteries" of his faith, such as the division of a single god into several secondary aspects and the birth of one aspect of god from a human virgin, finally looks to heaven and declares that he can say no more, lest he taint the mystery. In a nice, subtle touch, Celadon's eyes follow the druid's towards the top of the frame, as though trying to see what the holy man sees above them. Love and religion are the twin "mysteries" of the film, the twin madnesses that possess human beings and make them behave in ways that may seem absurd or illogical or out-of-touch with the world. Thus, though the film's final act — in which a comical, "lesbian" desire develops between Astrea and Celadon, apparently without the former realizing that the latter is actually her lost (male) lover — can only be described as a farce, it's a farce with real feeling animating these unbelievable actions and contrivances.

Rohmer was always concerned with characters who stuck to rigid codes, embodied in the conflicted Catholic moralism of My Night At Maud's or the idealistic search for an abstractly "perfect" love in films like The Green Ray or A Winter's Tale. It's fitting that Rohmer ended his career with The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, since this film presents a vision of that kind of philosophical purity taken to its (il)logical extreme. Its pastoral beauty provides a languid setting for these musings on love, especially in an interlude where Celadon wanders through the forest, singing about his love as images of natural splendor fade into idealized images of Astrea smiling sweetly, flirting with the camera. This is a film that pays tribute to youth and beauty, to those who madly pursue ideals rather than settling for the more accessible pleasures that the world has to offer. It is a sublimely goofy film, and it's not the least bit ashamed of it.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

John Gianvito's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind is a simple but evocative documentary, a film that chronicles the history of American rebellion, resistance and progressivism, using monuments, gravesites, plaques and other commemorative relics to chart the various social, political and economic struggles of American history. The memorials that Gianvito captures in his sumptuous images — invariably backed by bright blue skies, fluffy clouds and lush green vegetation — are mostly public, with many familiar names and events highlighted, but the way he presents these finds has the feel of gathering evidence, silently making an argument through the accumulation of details. The film progresses roughly chronologically through American history, beginning with monuments to battles against Native Americans and moving on to chronicle slave rebellions, women's rights reformers, and especially the often violent struggles of the labor movement. Gianvito makes his perspective clear early on, when he films a sign about how colonial forces "defeated" the Indians in a battle: after an abrupt cut, the word "defeated" has been crudely papered over with a cardboard cutout replacing the word with "massacred." It's an acknowledgment that, within these nominally objective markers of history, there is a distinct slant, one that Gianvito is endeavoring to replace with his own slant and his own perspective.

For most of the film, though, the filmmaker simply observes and edits together these memorials and graves into a kind of alternative history of America. There are familiar names here, names inscribed in any high school history textbook, but their graves, their grand monuments, are scattered in with the more modest memorials to other martyrs and thinkers, names not so familiar, names and events that don't get taught in American classrooms. Gianvito, building on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, is paying tribute to the people, both famous and forgotten, who contributed to this country's history of struggle and reform. The sheer proliferation of small civic plaques commemorating the various massacres and tragedies of the labor movement itself makes a statement: so many plaques stoically recounting 19 dead here, 38 wounded there, a list of names with ages, some of them as young as six years or even six months old, another monument that documents how each of the men was killed (bullet through the heart or head) and who they left behind when they died. All the facts and figures, the years and dates, the cold hard recitation of facts about people who lived, fought and died for something they believed in. All the graves, all the forgotten heroes who died to get an eight-hour work day, to protest unfair business practices, to earn benefits that they would never enjoy themselves, but which would be passed on to future generations. One man was, his grave tells us, killed "by capitalist interests for organizing and inspiring his fellow man," a worn inscription that Gianvito finds important enough to emphasize by, for a moment, digitally enhancing the letters on the grave so they stand out clearly enough to be read.

These still, quiet images of graves and monuments are alternated with equally languid images of the wind whispering, whistling and murmuring through trees, fields of flowers, and undulating meadows of tall grass. The film quickly falls into a slow, steady rhythm: an image of untouched natural splendor, then a gravesite, surrounded by tranquil fields, buried in grass or shaded by trees, sometimes with lichens and mold wearing away the stone, sometimes with insects creeping along the cool surface of the tombstone. These images, mostly filmed in the American Northeast on bright, nearly cloudless summer days, are gorgeous and peaceful. There is rarely any direct sign of human presence — only in one shot does Gianvito capture, almost incidentally, some tourists walking along a path, distant from the grave he's shooting. The absence of any visitors to these monuments suggests a forgotten history, even if Gianvito is freezing these sites in place at moments of stasis. Many of these graves are marked with flowers and other signs of recent visitation, so the film's stillness and lack of population feels artificial, stylized, a bit of poetic license to make a political point: how easy it is to forget, to ignore the past, to walk by the lessons of history without pausing to consider them.


Some of these monuments are clearly marked and public, others are shrouded in trees, hidden away in private corners, decaying with age and rot. Gianvito introduces an image of an empty field with a paragraph of text citing a labor martyr and his unmarked grave, hidden beneath the field with no sign or monument to announce his presence or his role in history. A monument to one of many labor massacres is mounted at the base of a lamppost in a shopping mall by a major thoroughfare, a perfect example of capitalist practicality co-opting a memorial to its enemies. The film, by juxtaposing monuments placed in prominent, public view with those that are more obscured, calls attention to the vagaries of history. Gianvito, without saying a word, is asking us to question why and how we remember, and what we remember: who gets enshrined in history books, who gets a big tourist site memorial, and who gets shuffled off into a corner, buried in an out-of-the-way cemetery with only a small marker to commemorate their lives and actions.

At one point, Gianvito films a sign whose text briefly describes a 1759 slave rebellion (failed, naturally). He holds an angled shot of the sign for long enough for its text to be read, and then cuts to a different angle, revealing the very different sign in the background: an Exxon gas station sign, with cars speeding by on a highway between the rebellion memorial and the list of gas prices. The revelation recontextualizes this monument, revealing its awkward positioning by a road where it could hardly be read by all the cars speeding by, and revealing its proximity to the signifiers of modern American prosperity and commerce. By and large, these signs of progressive history are positioned within a society that is rushing ahead, not pausing to read the epitaphs on these obscure graves, not caring to be educated about the revolts and struggles described by roadside plaques. Even when modernity isn't so intrusive within the frame, it's often in the background, as Gianvito's meticulous sound design lets in the roar of passing trucks, the hum of a lawnmower, the distant buzz of what might be the titular wind, or else the traffic on a nearby motorway.

It's only at the end of the film that this timeless, methodical examination of history's uneasy position in the present gives way to a full-on embrace of the now. After filming several high-profile capitalist brands — McDonald's, Walmart — through the film's signature waving leaves and branches, Gianvito introduces a briskly edited sequence of present-day protests against the Bush administration and the Iraq war. It's an attempt — perhaps a strained one — to link the film's history of struggle to modern resistance and protest. Gianvito's evocation of different flash points in American history — the oppression of Native Americans, the slave rebellions, the fight for women's suffrage, the violence against labor unions — suggests that oppression is a constant, and so too is the resistance against it. In this context, the ineffectual Bush-era protests clearly lack the gravity or the air of importance of the other historical touchstones of Gianvito's film, but his point with this coda remains powerful: the need to struggle, to fight for the next advance, the next small victory for the under-represented. This poetic, evocative film beautifully captures the urgency of such struggles while paying tribute to those who struggled, won, lost, lived and died, and were feted or forgotten by history.

The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's fifth film, is built around a metaphor so blunt and on-the-nose, so obvious, that it's either ridiculous or brilliant. A trio of brothers — Francis (Owen Wilson), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Peter (Adrien Brody) — have been feeling lost and aimless following the death of their father. They meet up a year later in India, taking a trip around the country while lugging around the huge collection of luggage left behind by their father after his death and divided amongst the three brothers. Yes, they're carrying around the baggage of the past, the baggage that represents their relationship with their father, with their distant, flighty mother (Anjelica Huston), and with each other. It's fairly naked symbolism, handled with Anderson's characteristic wit and attention to detail. The luggage — all matching pieces in orangish brown with fanciful designs and their father's initials embossed on the cover — stands for everything that's preventing these brothers from functioning properly, as people or as brothers.

Jack is plagued by a troubled relationship with his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman), whose continuing hold on his mind and emotions is demonstrated in the short film, Hotel Chevalier, that serves as "part one" of The Darjeeling Limited. Peter is running away from his pregnant wife, afraid to face the responsibility of fatherhood even though he says he loves his wife; it's obvious that he's been scarred by his experience of family life and doesn't think he can handle a new family of his own. Francis, for his part, got in a car accident and spends the entire film in bandages; he lets slip only late in the film, in that typically offhand Anderson way, that he crashed on purpose, meaning to kill himself. Before that, he takes his bandages off and observes his still scarred face, dryly noting, "I guess I still have some healing to do." It's the kind of dual-meaning line that is perhaps a little too pat, a little too direct in its resonances. Like the use of the dead father's baggage as a metaphor for, well, baggage, lines like this make the film's themes — recovering from the past, the wounds caused by family, the struggle to come to terms with one's self — seem like Hallmark sentiments, too cute and clever to really cut deeply the way Anderson no doubt intends.

That's an accusation lobbed at Anderson's cinema in general, of course, but The Darjeeling Limited seems to take this particular aspect of his work to an extreme that's a bit hard to take. When the three brothers try and fail to save an Indian boy from drowning in a river, it's a turning point in their relationship and in their vision of themselves, a moment when they finally experience something beyond themselves, beyond their egocentric fascination with their own small problems. It should feel monumental and sad; instead, at the funeral for the boy, Anderson shoots the three brothers walking in slo-mo through a scenic panorama, while a jaunty Kinks tune plays on the soundtrack. It's a favored device for Anderson, whose use of music is generally impeccable, but here the tone is all off. He doesn't seem to have the gravitas to handle a moment like this, which is odd from the director who treated the attempted suicide of Luke Wilson's character in The Royal Tenenbaums — set to Elliott Smith, a perfect choice — with a raw energy and intensity that is much missed here. None of this film's characters or situations have that same weight or impact, perhaps because they too easily descend into the kitschy, finicky excesses that mark Anderson's worst moments as a director.


None of this is to say that The Darjeeling Limited is a complete failure, because it's far from it. It's simply the first Wes Anderson movie where the long-held complaints of his detractors seem appropriate. The movie is never less than enjoyable, but it's also a bit hollow, a bit superficial, especially in its treatment of the entire country of India and all its people as a symbolic background onto which these troubled white men can write their own problems and insecurities. To some extent, the film mocks this kind of outlook, particularly in the way the obsessive, detail-oriented Francis plans out an entire step-by-step itinerary for their supposedly spiritual journey. It's like they see the route to enlightenment and self-fulfillment as a process that comes with written instructions, that they can simply follow the steps and they'll be reborn. India is thus just a background for them, a symbol of purity and spirituality, a whole country that they can use to help them become better people. It would be a potent critique if Anderson wasn't often guilty of the same thing, using the scenery and the people as props, especially in the funeral scene, in which the death of this boy merely serves as a way of forcing these brothers, finally, to deal with the death of their father, whose funeral is intercut as a flashback into the funeral of the Indian boy.

Still, The Darjeeling Limited does have many of the charms and pleasures of Anderson's better work, as his usual eye for detail results in many subtle interconnections. He uses objects to probe character and set up events better than anyone, as in the scene where the three brothers begin buying things at an outdoor market, and these objects (Peter's shoes and snake, Jack's mace) resonate throughout the rest of the film, triggering various incidents and adding to the richness of the film's texture. The film is centered around objects, and some of the best scenes involve the brothers bickering over the things their father left behind. Peter, in his grief, has been gathering up various small reminders of their father and using them for himself: sunglasses, a razor, a lighter. This doesn't sit well with Francis, who keeps making a gift of and then demanding back a ridiculously expensive belt which Peter finally throws at his brother's already-wounded face. The scene culminates in a hilarious, out-of-control, nearly slapstick chase/fight when Jack gets some use out of the pepper spray gun he'd bought in the market.

Anderson also gets a lot of comic mileage out of Jack's writing, which Jack insists is fictional even though his brothers read it and recognize direct autobiographical accounts of their own lives. This pays off at the end when Jack reads aloud from a story that, in fact, is a direct translation of some dialogue from Hotel Chevalier, and he finally admits that his stories are factual. Like most of Anderson's best moments, it's both funny and poignant, a reflection of this character's continuing obsession with the past. It's also one of several callbacks that more or less validates the function of the slick Hotel Chevalier, which doesn't stand alone from its companion film very well at all. There's definitely an undeniable kick, though, when Jack in Darjeeling Limited turns on his iPod to a certain Peter Sarstedt tune that is, apparently, his seduction music of choice.

This film suggests how thin the line is in Anderson's cinema between deeply felt emotionalism and a mere accumulation of mannered tics. The Darjeeling Limited crosses back and forth across that line several times, occasionally mining the same moody, complicated depths as Anderson's other features, but more often coming across as a shallow imitation of his best work.

You, the Living

You, the Living is Roy Andersson's follow-up to his remarkable 2000 film Songs From the Second Floor. Like its predecessor, You, the Living is a loose collection of absurdist vignettes set in a dull, gray city full of odd, depressive, quirky people. The film has no central narrative, it's simply a set of scenes, with characters whose lives occasionally overlap but still never really add up to a larger story. Instead, the stories are linked thematically, by Andersson's concern for the condition of people's lives in the modern era. His characters are beaten down, often terminally unhappy, trapped in dull routines and useless jobs. Andersson's vision is unsettling — dreary, absurd, shot through with dark, satirical humor — and yet not entirely bleak nor entirely hopeless. What this film is about, more than anything, is the possibility of finding some happiness in this life, some joy amidst all the ugliness, some pleasure to go with the pain. The film's central idea is the importance of living for the present, of enjoying oneself when death lingers unseen just around the bend, ready to strike at any moment. Andersson's characters are acutely aware of death and misery, and perhaps this primes them to also recognize the little moments of pleasure they are able to find at intervals.

Andersson has retained the signature style of Songs From the Second Floor: the camera is almost always static and maintains a respectful distance from the characters, who are staged in self-conscious medium-shot tableaux. These people sporadically address the camera, conversationally relating their dreams to an unseen audience. Sometimes these dreams are Kafkaesque nightmares, as when a truck driver dreams that he was tried and sent to the electric chair after breaking some antique dishes during a failed magic trick. Other dreams are more ecstatic and joyful, even if they're tinged with the melancholy knowledge that they're just dreams. Anna (Jessika Lundberg) is obsessed with local rock band guitarist Micke (Eric Bäckman), and one night she dreams that they get married and live in a moving house. She's still in her wedding dress, puttering around, while he plays guitar and smiles at her, and outside throngs of eager admirers gather to wish the happy couple their best. It's a dream, not only of romantic fulfillment, but of a world in which everyone is cheerful and kind and goes out of their way to be nice to other people. It's not the world Anna lives in, but the one she wishes she lives in.

In fact, the real world of the film is much colder, and is filled with puzzling incidents of degradation and anger. An Arab barber, fed up with his customer's subtle racism, shaves a stripe across the top of the man's frizzy red hair and then storms out of the shop. A teacher breaks down in tears in front of her class because her husband called her a "hag" during a fight. Andersson then cuts away to a rug shop, where a salesman is upset because he got mad and called his wife a hag, though he tries to poll his customers about whether it was worse that he called her that, or that she called him an "old fart." A woman named Mia (Elisabeth Helander) laments her loneliness and misery, completely ignoring the proffered comfort of her boyfriend, even as she ends every fight with an ultimatum and then a promise that she'll see him soon. Andersson's characters often don't recognize the opportunities for pleasure and happiness in their lives: Mia has a devoted boyfriend, while the bickering husband and wife obviously love one another, or else their words wouldn't have had such power to wound. In another scene, a man lies in bed naked, mechanically recounting the way his pension fund was drained of money by a poor banking decision, while on top of him his wife makes love to him, ignoring his words even as he ignores her. She seems to be enjoying herself, grinding away at him, moaning and exclaiming how good she feels, but the man is too wrapped up in monetary problems to join in, to have some fun himself.


Often, there is a subtle socio-political underpinning to Andersson's tableaux. He's presenting a world in which people are routinely dehumanized, in which their opportunities for pleasure and genuine human connection are scarce. Their office jobs are unsatisfying — one man, seemingly useless at his job, rather pathetically asks if any of his coworkers called for him, even though he knows they didn't — and their lives are draining and boring. Meanwhile, a wealthy businessman gloats over a successful deal over lunch, loudly talking into a phone about buying a boat, while behind him a pickpocket steals his wallet, immediately paying for his own meal with the other man's money, then going out and buying a suit. The pickpocket does all this with a noncommittal expression on his face, but he can't hide a small note of satisfaction when he tells the tailors that a certain material is too prickly on his skin; he's enjoying playing at upper class for a change. He's thus one of Andersson's characters who actually finds a bit of happiness in this life.

Among the film's happiest characters are undoubtedly its musicians, who find satisfaction in their creative pursuits. The film is driven by the bouncy, bopping pulse of its music, a makeshift fusion of Dixieland jazz, New Orleans funeral music and the martial rhythms of a marching band. These musicians practice, oblivious to the discontent of those who have to hear them, who shout and bang on the ceiling for them to stop. But nothing stops them, and Andersson scores the film to the lugubrious bloop-bloop-bloop of the tuba and the leaden thump of the bass dream. He loves these ungainly instruments, which dwarf the men who play them. They are awkward instruments, silly even, but Andersson presents these men playing in isolated scenes as soloists — just tuba or just bass drum, each of them blasting away on their limited instruments. The music these men create is loose and spontaneous, as is the torchy song Mia invents about her own problems early on in the film, singing it on a park bench. The spontaneity of this music is contrasted against the ritualized music of funerals, the martial rigor of military parades, and the formal singalong that a group of wealthy partygoers engage in, enacting a set of prearranged moves to accompany the song. This song is an empty charade of drunken revelry, sung by people who lack the passion and deep emotional wellsprings that run through the film's other characters. Mia drinks because it's the only way she's able to cope with her depression; her partying is real life, not a ritual imitation of it.

You, the Living is ultimately a film about going on with life in an era when so much seems futile and impossible to fix. At one point, a woman in church rattles off a litany of the horrible evils requiring forgiveness from the Lord: lying governments, distracting media outlets, corporations growing wealthy by screwing over others, the greedy, the corrupt, the warmongers. This is explicitly a film about living in the post-9/11 era, the Iraq War era, surrounded by hatred of all kinds, by corruption and a global economy that makes a few rich at the expense of everyone else. Andersson, needless to say, is interested in the "everyone else." These people live their lives, and have fun if they can, under the shadow of death, the shadow of the terrors unleashed on the world by forces no one can seem to control. In the film's final image, the town is beset by a sinister squadron of planes, possibly coming to drop their bombs and put an end to it all. Andersson seems to be asking, if the bombs drop tomorrow, what will you have done today to make life better for yourself and those around you?

Paranoid Park

Paranoid Park opens with an oddly unsettling credit sequence, a gorgeous static shot of a bridge on a dark, overcast day, threatening dark blue clouds hanging in the background over a pastoral scene. The landscape looks like it was cut-and-pasted from Hitchcock's chipper rural fantasia The Trouble With Harry, while the clouds and the air of foreboding might've come from the heavily painted backdrops of The Birds. There's something eerily artificial about this view that is reminiscent of Hitchcock's fondness for matte-painting backgrounds, even though here the scene is entirely natural. It's not surprising that director Gus Van Sant's images would subliminally hark back to Hitchcock in this way — after all, he has already paid homage to the master by remaking and deconstructing Psycho — but the film this shot introduces actually owes very little debt to Van Sant's acknowledged influence. As though driving this home, immediately after the proper credits there is in effect a second credit sequence, a close-up on a sheet of looseleaf paper as a pencil writes the film's title in juvenile handwriting sloppily across the page.

This second "credits sequence," in which the film's central character Alex (Gabe Nevins) starts writing a lengthy letter, is much more in keeping with the spirit of the film as a whole: it is rough, homemade, amateurish, perfectly attuned to the high school mentality that Van Sant aims to explore. In many ways, the film is a summation of Van Sant's career so far, from the rugged semi-documentary Mala Noche to the rigorous Bela Tarr-influenced "death trilogy" that immediately preceded this film. In fact, given the basic premise here — a skater kid accidentally kills a railroad security guard and is haunted by this tragedy — it's tempting to lump this film in with Van Sant's recent loose trilogy, but it doesn't quite fit. There are moments and techniques in Paranoid Park that seem to have developed naturally from the films that preceded it, like the endless tracking shots of Alex and his skater friends walking through the halls of the high school (cf. Elephant) or through the grassy hills in the area (Gerry). But in other ways the film moves beyond its predecessors, incorporating a rich pastiche of different types of material. Alex's narrative, shot with Van Sant's typical fluid, visually pristine cinematography, is subsumed within a patchwork structure that jumps unpredictably through time and includes frequent detours into abstract interludes or sequences that might have come from a skateboarding documentary, shot on grainy low-quality film stock with artfully off-center compositions capturing the quickly moving skaters.


The film is further marked by Van Sant's use of amateur actors, a practice he's often turned to but rarely with such commitment: not since his first film Mala Noche has he placed such an obviously untrained and technically unskilled cast in front of the camera at such length, with so much dialogue to work through. It's a choice that could have easily backfired, but the actors, mostly real high schoolers and skaters who had never acted before, wind up infusing the film with verisimilitude. This is especially true of Alex's narration, as he reads from the letter that he's writing throughout the film. His subjective perspective dictates the film's structure, his story jumping randomly through time as he simply pours his impressions onto the page, forgetting details, jumping back to fill them in later, continually skipping ahead and doubling back. Some scenes play out twice, once in broad outlines with Alex supplying the gist of the scene in voiceover, and then again in full, with the dialogue filled in completely.

His reading of this material is perfect, hesitant and constantly interrupted by awkward pauses or passages where he simply runs the words together without inflection. He sounds like a kid reading his book report aloud to a class, which is of course exactly what he should sound like. Van Sant is brave enough to really commit to this awkwardness, riding it out even when the results are as painful to watch as remembering your own embarrassing teenage moments. A conversation between Alex and his friend Macy (Lauren McKinney) is almost unbearable, its rhythms completely off-kilter in the way that only terminally shy adolescents can manage. You can feel the affection between these two as well as the insecurity and self-consciousness, the way they can sometimes barely get out their thoughts without endless pauses, and other times run everything together in a nervous jumble. It's oddly endearing only because it feels so shockingly real.


This awkwardness and nervousness extends throughout the film, and it's hardly limited to the traumatic event that Alex experiences when he witnesses the railroad guard's gory accidental death. Indeed, one of the ways in which Paranoid Park distinguishes itself from the so-called "death trilogy" is in its treatment of this death and its placement within the narrative structure. Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days can all be thought of as journeys towards death, documents of the time spent leading up to death, and ruminations on the sensationalist treatment of death in the media. They are truly films about death, about mortality, about violence, in a way that Paranoid Park is not. The film's one act of violence is harrowing and narratively important, but it does not have the same thematic central place that violence and death hold in the other films. Moreover, Alex reacts to this death in much the same way as he reacts to a lot of the other confusing, scary, unfathomable things he encounters on a daily basis: schoolwork, his parents' impending divorce, the prospect of losing his virginity with a girl he barely even likes, the uncomfortableness he obviously feels around other people. He is especially awkward around grown-ups, and it's not hard to understand why considering the condescending way they talk to him. In one scene, his father tries to connect with him but his language is so stiff and formal it sounds like he's making a business proposal rather than having a chat with his son. It's apparent that the adults around Alex are no more sure of themselves or in control than the teens they're supposed to be raising.

In this context, the death Alex causes is an extension of his general teenage insecurity, just one more thing to worry about. In an inversion of the usual priorities, death has become a metaphor for the trials of puberty, a distortion of scale that is wholly in keeping with the high schooler's outsized sense of his personal troubles. Van Sant privileges this perspective by infusing the film with Alex's own personal sense of things: his blurry view of the world, the expansion of individual moments into endless periods of contemplation. Van Sant makes liberal use of slow motion and extended static shots, drawing out these contemplative interludes into lengthy studies of Alex's internality and disconnection. In one of the film's finest shots, Alex takes a shower immediately after the accident, and the camera focuses steadily on his bowed head, his shaggy hair hanging down over his face. The individual spikes of hair let off long rivulets of water, flowing in slow motion like rivers of shifting light growing from Alex's head. The light in the scene subtly shifts from shadowy to luminescent, and the composition almost verges into abstraction even as it maintains its roots in Alex's expression of misery.

The sound design in this scene is also stunning, as it is throughout the film. Playing off of the rainforest wallpaper in the shower behind Alex, the soundtrack consists of electronically modified bird chirps and rain, slowly warping into a shrill, intensifying sine hum, morphing from tranquil natural sounds into an overpowering mirror of Alex's internal strife. Van Sant's use of sound is always remarkably sensitive, whether he's layering and subtly tweaking natural sounds like this, subtly referencing Fellini by bringing in chunks of Nino Rota's scores for Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord, or tastefully incorporating pop songs, as he does with two sad, yearning Elliot Smith tracks. Many of the skateboarding scenes are accompanied by glitchy, languid electronic music that brings to mind Robert Ashley's seminal minimalist composition "Automatic Writing," with processed traces of whispery voices skittering across a surface of droning electronic tones. This haunting, ghost-like music is surprisingly appropriate for the documentary-like skateboarding scenes, bringing a sense of wistfulness and nostalgia to the kind of footage that is usually accompanied with high-voltage jock rock. This collage of music and sounds drawn from many different sources contributes greatly to the film's tonal ambiguity, as the bouncy whimsy of the Rota music grates up against the more downbeat selections. There's a sense that, just as Alex doesn't quite know what to feel or what to say, Van Sant wants to leave his audience with similar sensations, a similar incompleteness and lack of resolution. His film captures the awkwardness and insecurity of adolescence but doesn't attempt to explain it; his characters always maintain their mysterious surfaces, their slow motion smiles and stares giving away little of their interior lives.

Knocked Up

Judd Apatow's Knocked Up seems to have solidified the comedy writer, director, and super-producer's reputation as a purveyor of "dude" comedy. It's a rep I'll admit I've had mixed feelings about. I've steered clear of a lot of the sillier-looking Apatow-produced product, but I loved Greg Mottola's Superbad for its warmth, raucous humor, and the way it captured a certain kind of foul-mouthed male bonding. I had less enthusiasm for Apatow's first feature as a director, the Steve Carell vehicle The 40 Year Old Virgin, which was funny in patches but undercut its mostly frank treatment of sexuality with a surprisingly conservative ending that confirmed religiously motivated ideas about virginity, sex, and marriage. Knocked Up is Apatow's second directorial feature, and the good news is that it's much funnier than his first attempt in the director's chair. It's also more consistent, and though it could still use some trimming (a light slacker comedy weighing in at over two hours?), most of its jokes do hit home.

It also shares its predecessor's genuine interest in looking at gender relations from an unabashedly masculine point of view. Even if these films basically delight in their protagonists' juvenile sensibilities and bantering dialogue, there's also something to the way Apatow considers romance and dating from a guy's angle. These films are fantasies, blatant wish fulfillment in which grubby slacker guys (Seth Rogan's Ben in this case) can land beautiful, successful women like Alison (Katherine Heigl). But they're also dead-serious in that they try to get at the things that guys want and think, and can't necessarily communicate even to women they love. The best moments in Knocked Up are the ones that capture this fundamental miscommunication, like the scene where Ben attempts to explain himself to Alison at a dinner party and instead winds up connecting with Pete (Paul Rudd), the equally slacker husband of Alison's sister Debbie (Apatow's wife Leslie Mann). The two men wind up communicating in a hybrid language of movie quotes, fragments of thoughts, and phrases that seem to suggest everything to each other and nothing to the women, who look on blankly, somewhat annoyed. It's funny, yes, but it also gets at something beyond the humor, the differences in priorities, expectations, and even language between the genders. In scenes like this, Apatow is at his best, using crisp 180-degree editing to convey the sense of people talking to each other from entirely different spaces. There are several scenes like this throughout the film, scenes where one character's anger and annoyance encounters another's blank incomprehension, breakdowns of communication that are enhanced by Apatow's breaking down of the conversation into strictly divided spaces once the fighting begins.

This kind of head-on confrontation with gender differences is welcome in a film dealing with unexpected pregnancy, a topic that garnered Knocked Up seemingly endless comparisons to Juno last year. The films couldn't be more different, though. Where Juno focused its attentions squarely on its teenage protagonist, with Michael Cera's confused boyfriend in the background, Knocked Up is a relationship film right from the beginning. Even before the main characters ever meet, Apatow follows them in parallel narratives, tracing their convergence at the bar where they'll meet and have the night of drunken sex that will ultimately bring them together in a shared situation. Even after this point, whenever the characters are apart the film keeps track of each of them, essentially halving the narrative to keep both the prospective mother and father central to the film. This division of structure drives home the film's central point about sharing responsibility in relationships.

Despite all of these efforts, though, the film isn't equal in its treatment of the genders, and it can't quite get over Apatow's essential "dudes" mentality. There's a real affection here for the milieu of Ben and his stoner friends, who lounge around the dump of a house they share, smoking pot and playing whatever silly games they can think up while high. The opening credits show them jousting by the side of a pool, smoking up, and riding roller coasters, a lifestyle that's contrasted against Alison's staid morning routine as she wakes up for work. The film makes some attempts to understand Alison, to get at what makes women tick, but ultimately Apatow resorts to clichés. Whereas the worries of the guys have real poignancy, and even have the feel of fresh insights at times, the film's female characters are given stock concerns: growing old, getting fat, being alone. It's obvious that Apatow means well — even his cursory treatment of the way pregnancy can affect women's career prospects is refreshing, and not something one sees often in a Hollywood film — but it's equally obvious that he's mostly as lost as Ben when it comes to understanding his women characters.


The film also suffers from its essential unreality. Making a fantasy is fine, and it's certainly easy enough to get past the fact that Alison hooks up with the slovenly Ben. There's no accounting for attraction, a truism that counts doubly when alcohol is involved. It's also easy to accept that she's willing to give him more of a shot once she learns that she's having his baby. But when, time and time again, he acts like a jerk to her or otherwise reveals his total lack of thought or tact, it's impossible to do more than wince and look away. Ben is a nice, sensitive guy about half the time and a total dirtbag the other half, and the two tendencies seem to be competing within him at all times. Alison's Herculean ability to overlook and forgive his flaws and missteps strains credulity way more than the much remarked-upon discrepancy in looks between the two of them. The film's unreality becomes even more obvious in the denouement, which hinges upon an economic fantasy — relegated to one of those handy time-lapse montages that cover a large amount of time and effort — in addition to the central romantic fantasy. That the film resorts to rather worn comedy tropes and several deus ex machina in the end is, to some extent, only disappointing because Apatow obviously aspires to, and may even be capable of, so much more. His films contain the germs of something greater than they turn out to be. There's emotional warmth in his characterizations and complexity in the themes he chooses to address, but this only shows through sporadically in the actual films, which inevitably compromise the characterization for the sake of plot when they need to, and treat the more nuanced aspects of his subjects only in fits and starts.

Still, Knocked Up is a very funny movie, which is certainly one kind of success. The interactions of Ben and his friends are frequently hilarious, and perhaps even better is Alison's reaction to these motley dudes. But by far the film's funniest scene, the one that nearly knocked me out of my seat and still makes me smile now, has nothing to do with the central romantic relationship. In a scene late in the film, Alison and Debbie are trying to get into a club with a bouncer (Craig Robinson) who's standing in their way, and things look like they're going to get ugly. As the scene builds tension, escalating into a shouting match between Debbie and the bouncer, Apatow abruptly defuses things, subverting expectations by having the bouncer gently pull Debbie aside. In a quiet voice, with great dignity and sincerity, he delivers a wonderful speech that gives this entirely minor character a suddenly complicated and inwardly torn persona. The scene touches on questions of prejudice and societal expectations that Apatow, as usual, seems content to hint at rather than address directly. Even so, it's a perfectly pitched moment, warm and funny and genuinely unexpected without seeming contrived.

The fact that Apatow is capable of moments like this, that his films in fact are frequently stuffed with such moments, is probably the main reason that he's garnered such stratospheric acclaim in his relatively brief career. His comedies are raucously funny and raunchy in all the right ways to get broad laughs from an equally broad audience, and yet they're not empty the way so many pandering modern comedies are. Knocked Up has warmth and genuine emotion, and even a hesitant but very much beating moral heart at its core. When the film is at its best, it's very easy to overlook its flaws and simply enjoy what it does well.

Don't Touch the Axe (The Duchess of Langeais)

Jacques Rivette's newest film, Don't Touch the Axe (I prefer the original French to the American retitling The Duchess of Langeais) is a sublime game by an old master at the top of his form. Games are the film's central conceit, in fact, whether they be word games, mind games, literary games, games played between appearance and feeling. The game being played at the narrative level takes place between a General (Guillaume Depardieu) and a Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) whose circumspect courtship, constricted by the rules of polite society and the oppressive etiquette that goes along with them, turns into an increasingly barbed battle of wits and stubbornness. This perennially unconsummated couple veers between flirtatiousness and withdrawal, culminating eventually in the Duchess' retreat into a convent and the General's vain attempts to rescue/kidnap her from its cloistered, heavily barred confines. In one of his earliest films, the short Le coup du berger, Rivette already viewed love as a game of chess, and this wry perspective on human relationships has apparently survived intact from then all the way into his latest feature.

But this is only one game that Rivette is toying with, and he plays an entirely different one with the audience, a game of subtle winks and sly nods that continually disrupts the placid surface of the narrative — which on its most apparent level resembles any number of more typical period pieces — with a clever humorous slant on the material, a sense that the director is looking slightly askance at these people and their bizarre rituals of love. This narrative disruption is mirrored in the way the General's story to the Duchess, about his time lost in the desert after escaping from the enemy's imprisonment, is continually interrupted, usually by the listener's short attention span and her tendency to divert the flow of the conversation just as the story is reaching a critical juncture. This results in the General's story being doled out across three successive evenings that they spend together early in their relationship. On the third night, as they settle in to continue the story, Rivette frames the Duchess in a tight closeup as she asks her would-be lover to finish the tale. At this moment, she turns a sly sidelong glance directly into the camera, maintaining eye contact with the audience, as though to include them in the game.

This game of narrative interruptus is also carried through in the way Rivette uses the text of the film's original source, a novella by Honoré de Balzac. This is a rigidly faithful adaptation, in a manner similar to Fassbinder's interpretation of Fontane's Effi Briest, with texts from the novel periodically included as intertitles to highlight certain moments or get at the characters' internal states. The titles are also used to convey the passage of time, which is parceled out in scrupulously precise measures: "one hour later," "twenty-two minutes passed," "she waited twenty-four hours." These titles often seem to abruptly cut off the action, sometimes flashing up on screen when, after a long scene of near-stasis, a character is right in the middle of completing the scene's first real movement or action (most often: leaving the room). The passage of time, like everything else in the film, is subject to Rivette's subtle humor. After the Duchess kicks her friend out of her house, a title informs us that one hour passes (a very common interlude), and surprisingly in the very next scene there's the General again, still standing in her parlor, walking around it aimlessly, looking like only five minutes has passed since she ordered him to leave. Rivette's use of these titles is obviously very sardonic and mannered, as when he uses a long series of images of the Duchess at a party as though it constituted a clause in between two dashes in a sentence: "the Duchess searched for him —" followed by the visuals and then, when the dangling phrase had almost been forgotten, "— in vain."

This idiosyncratic approach to literary adaptation dominates the film, as Rivette remains literally true to the source material while slowly worming his way underneath it in order to get at the basic absurdity of this situation. This is a period piece where all the characters look distinctly uncomfortable in their clothes, especially Balibar, who never looks glamorous in the succession of ludicrous dresses she squeezes into; she's a rather frumpy and unappealing duchess. This discomfort is part of Rivette's agenda of deconstruction, and he accentuates the ridiculousness of this all in a way that should make it impossible to look at any straight-faced period piece quite the same again. The sound design is also a crucial element. The film's characteristic onomatopoeia are the "thud" and the "clank," heavy, awkward sounds that correspond especially to the loping gait of the General, who walks with a stiff-legged limp. His heavy footsteps are only one noise in the film's orchestration of incidental sounds, in which footsteps play an especially important part — the General's thumping walk is contrasted, in one scene, against the quiet shuffling of the Duchess' maid, who walks around in socks. Rivette also calls attention to the popping of logs in a fireplace, the rapping of canes, and the creaking of wooden floors loaded with people. One scene, at a grand ball, becomes a comedy in sound as the elegant dancing and string music is accompanied by the constant squeaking of the floor whenever someone moves.

It's odd, but Don't Touch the Axe definitely functions as a comedy, despite the often melodramatic thrust of its narrative. Rivette's whimsical touch is evident everywhere, perhaps most memorably in the scene where two of the General's friends engage in some drunken and utterly inscrutable language games as the Duchess waits impatiently for him outside. These two seem to be making jokes on their own personal level, cracking each other up over variations on the usage of words like "drama" and "stunning." The repetition of these jokes, and the tension built up by Rivette's cross-cutting from this scene to the Duchess waiting outside, culminates until the duo starts to actually seem funny to the audience, rather than just themselves. This same duo provides another of the film's funniest scenes, this time a purely pantomimed one with no dialogue, in which they draw straws to figure out which of the General's friends will have to be disguised as a nun for the convent raid at the end of the film. This is not to say that Rivette disregards the seriousness of his story, and there are moments of surprising pathos, well-played by the two leads, who throughout the second half of the film practically seethe with barely suppressed emotions. Rivette understands the sturm und drang inherent in this story, but this doesn't prevent him from also seeing the humor. In a way, this humor arises because Rivette, unlike other directors of period romances, looks at the conventions and surfaces of this type of film from a distinctly modern perspective, rather than simply accepting the social mores of the time in which the story is set.

Don't Touch the Axe is a delight in every way, a film that functions on its surface level as a straightforward melodramatic romance, even as Rivette plays gleefully with the form of his storytelling in order to infuse the film with his love of gamesmanship and multi-layered constructions. He employs his actors as pieces in this game, and Balibar and Depardieu do an excellent job of delineating the rigid boundaries of their characters, both of whom oscillate between stubborn refusal and open yearning. Balibar especially gives an interesting performance, breathless and flighty, her flute-like voice bringing an otherworldly vibe to her unattainable Duchess. Depardieu is more stoic as the unflappable General, who possesses shadowy connections and nearly unlimited resources but is no less flummoxed by love. Ultimately, though, both characters are simply pawns on Rivette's meticulously arranged chessboard, playing games that have little to do with the story they're ostensibly involved in, and everything to do with the pleasures of narrative deconstruction and the director's sly sense of humor.

Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton is a crisp, smart, economical legal thriller that is perhaps more than a little predictable in the machinations of its plot, but it makes up for its small bows to genre conventions in other areas. Most notably, the film is first and foremost a study of its title character, with George Clooney giving a great performance as a high-powered lawyer whose specialty is "fixing" delicate and difficult problems for his company's wealthy business clients. He's growing weary of his job, though, and the constant pressure — not to mention the realization that he's on the wrong "side" morally — are beginning to take a toll on him. He's also a compulsive gambler, he's divorced and has a young son who he obviously loves and admires, and he's got an accumulation of debts after a failed business deal with his alcoholic brother. Clooney truly inhabits this downtrodden role, playing a man worn out by his life but not necessarily devoid of energy yet.

This is the directorial debut for screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who wrote the scripts for the Jason Bourne trilogy as well as The Devil's Advocate and Dolores Claiborne. But Michael Clayton is certainly his strongest script so far; the dialogue is sharp and always believable, benefiting tremendously from a uniformly great cast, and the twists and turns of the plot keep the suspense elevated. The film is constructed as a loop, opening with a scene where Clayton leaves a card game to fix a problem with a client who committed a hit-and-run accident. He deals with it, then drives away, noticeably exhausted and aggravated, and stops by the side of the road to stretch his legs and admire three horses standing on a hill. While Clayton stands in front of the horses, Gilroy composes a shot from behind the animals, facing Clayton, with his car parked by the side of the road over his shoulder, conspicuously framed into the shot — a moment later, it becomes apparent why when the vehicle erupts into a fireball. The film then jumps back to four days earlier in a fade-to-white, and the remainder of the narrative catches things back up to this point.

It's easy to dismiss this kind of non-chronological structuring as pure gimmickry, a cheap trick with no purpose, but Gilroy actually handles it beautifully. On one level, yes, the structure serves to enhance suspense, to create a sense of mystery so that the film is essentially answering the question of who tried to kill Clayton and why. But the second time this sequence is replayed, towards the end of the film when the chronology has led back up to it, it has acquired a new significance and new meanings to its details and to the psychology of Clayton. The first time we see these things happening, we're watching for plot, for events, trying to understand what's happening; the second time, it's Clayton we're trying to understand, and the events here are important not in themselves but in relation to his character and persona. The experience of reviewing the opening events towards the end of the film is a process of fitting together Clayton's personality, contemplating the changes he's undergone in the course of the film and what these events might mean to him. What had seemed mere surface, basic plotting, at the beginning of the film, becomes laden with psychological meanings. This slow process of boring into Clayton's character is even reflected structurally in the film's opening and closing shots. The first shots of the film are all empty, nearly devoid of life — the first few minutes of the film consist of a montage of images from within the law firm, late at night, while Wilkinson rants in voiceover. The meaning of his monologue, his disgust with his profession and the way he's wasted his life, is not yet clear, but the empty rooms and corridors speak volumes about the loneliness and distance of these characters. The final shot of the film is a sustained closeup on Clooney's face, after he's definitively redeemed himself, stepped back over to the "right" side of the moral boundary. The film's trajectory is thus from an empty room with no people in it to a closeup on a human face — it's a movement from corporate distance to individualistic humanism.

Although Clooney is the film's center, he's counterbalanced by equally strong performances from Tom Wilkinson as Arthur Edens, a lawyer defending a chemical giant for the harm caused by one of their insecticides, and Tilda Swinton as the chemical company's chief lawyer. Edens precipitates the film's plot when he has a psychotic incident in a deposition room, stripping off his clothes and ranting incomprehensibly. His degenerating mental state, ironically, helps him to see things more clearly, and he realizes that he is definitively on the wrong side in this case, that by defending the chemical company he is helping them get away with murder for the deaths and cancers they've caused. His quixotic efforts to build a case against the company instead of for them lead to the violence and high-level cover-ups that make up the film's thriller plot. Swinton is his opposite number, in some ways equally pressured and weighed down by her job, but nevertheless committed to keeping things under control at any cost. Her performance is stellar, perfectly capturing her character's uncertainty and the in-over-her-head feeling she suffers at nearly every moment. Gilroy nails her character in several scenes in which he juxtaposes her interviews and speeches to the press and investors with her earlier preparations for these public appearances. What seems relaxed and spontaneous in public is revealed as carefully rehearsed, with each word carefully chosen, right down to the seeming hesitations and fumbling for a word that inject some humanity into the proceedings. Her character is a true corporate drone, and even her human touches are faked, that is until she is forced to confront the taking of a human life — then, Gilroy shows her sweating, the armpits of her blouse stained, one human touch that even she can't fake.

It's this attention to detail, this intelligent characterization and visual storytelling, that elevates Michael Clayton above its genre origins and makes it such a worthwhile film. As the plot weaves its predictable way towards an inevitable but highly satisfying conclusion, the only conclusion possible without resorting to nihilism, the script slowly digs its way into these characters, not only Clooney's, but also Wilkinson and Swinton. The result is a briskly paced thriller that never sacrifices character for plot.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The opening of Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of the most viscerally affecting and powerful acts of sustained empathy I can remember encountering in the cinema in quite a while. For what seems like an eternity — but was probably only about a half hour out of this nearly two-hour film — Schnabel's camera steadfastly maintains the first-person perspective of a man who has suffered a debilitating nerve disorder, paralyzing his entire body except for his left eye. The camera maintains the man's perspective without fail. What he sees appears on the screen. When he blinks, the screen goes momentarily dark. When his vision blurs or part of his eye clouds over, the image responds in kind. The effect is claustrophobic, almost suffocating, like the diving bell of the title, which becomes the man's metaphorical image for his condition, returning to it again and again over the course of the film, a frightening image of a man trapped underwater in a heavy diving helmet, screaming unheard. Schnabel's decision to submerge the viewer along with the film's protagonist is perhaps the only way to communicate the sensations attached to this plight, to provide a new way of looking at the world through another's eyes.

It's a stunningly empathetic vision, executed with a visual flair that's nearly as breathtaking as the story's content is bracing. Schnabel's roaming, insistent, blurring and refocusing camera inevitably calls to mind Stan Brakhage in this section, and especially Brakhage's hallucinatory Deus Ex, also a chronicle of a hospital stay. Beyond the thematic similarities, in both films the hospital-bound protagonist, unseen and embodied in the camera eye, lets his gaze wander over flowers, disembodied limbs of visitors, and near-abstracted surfaces blurred by hazy vision. Of course, the film doesn't maintain this stringent first-person perspective. Even in the opening half-hour, there are periodic cuts to scenes from memory or fragmentary dream-like images, and then the film switches to a more conventional third-person perspective, returning periodically to the protagonist's point of view for isolated scenes. The film remains extraordinarily close to this man and his altered experience of the world, even after it abandons seeing through his eye, but the rest of the film definitely approaches the material from a slightly more exterior perspective. This switch is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it might've been nearly impossible for Schnabel to sustain the first-person perspective at feature length, at least not without completely wearing out the audience. And yet, as claustrophobic and constricting as this section is, its formal rigor is somewhat missed in the rest of the film, which is still excellent, but not quite the towering achievement that is promised by this introduction. I can't help but wonder what the film might've been if Schnabel had chosen to extend this formal conceit to the entire narrative.

In any case, the man is Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a notorious playboy and ambitious writer, whose true account of this experience is the basis for Schnabel's film. Amalric, once he's visible in the second part of the film, gives a remarkable performance, conveying all through a single expressive eye, held wide open in stark contrast to the flaccid rest of his face. Schnabel, to his great credit, never allows the film to degenerate into the kind of weepy Oscar-bait that such extreme physical performances usually entail. The film is anchored by the introspective, wide-ranging, and even mordantly funny voiceover of Bauby, much of it taken directly from his book. This narration gives the film a cerebral gloss that in some ways leavens the film's tremendous emotional force, rendering it bearable and allowing the film to touch the head as well as the heart. Bauby's condition is a natural heartstring-tugger, so the pensive voiceover ensures that the film never descends into mere emotional schlock, instead carefully considering the repercussions of such physical limitations for perception, identity, the concept of life, and the human mind. Bauby's commentary considers how his condition has affected the way he sees, and even the way he thinks, as well as covering the expected reminiscences and recriminations from a lifetime of vigorous living and loving.

The paralyzed editor also provides surprising moments of wry humor, particularly in his dealings with the trio of beautiful young women who care for and accompany him in the hospital. There's Olatz López Garmendia, Schnabel's stunning real-life wife, as the physical therapist (and self-appointed religious counselor) Marie, who is introduced in a scene where she leans over Bauby's bed, and his eye is drawn to both her tantalizingly just-hidden breasts and the glittering cross dangling between them. She also tempts the immobilized patient by trying to teach him how to move his tongue, demonstrating it for him several times, prompting Bauby to mutter in his head, "not fair, not fair." There's also Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), his speech therapist, and Claude (Anne Consigny), the translator who helps Bauby to actually "write" a book by translating his eye-blinks into letters, painstakingly getting down his thoughts in this time-consuming manner. This trio of beautiful, inspiring women are Bauby's main contact points, but in many ways he seems inundated with women: there's also his former lover and the mother of his three children (Emmanuelle Seigner), the ex-girlfriend he remembers breaking up with after she made him purchase a glowing and blinking statue of the Madonna (Marina Hands), and the largely unseen Inès (Agathe de La Fontaine), his one true love who won't visit him because she doesn't want to see him this way. On one level, the film is about Bauby's relationships and enduring fascination with the women in his life, as well as Schnabel's equally powerful affinity for gorgeous women. Images of women, of their expressive faces and smiles and the casually exposed skin of dresses riding up, have an ethereal beauty in this film, as Bauby and Schnabel unite in a voyeuristic appreciation of the female face and form, even as these same women drive Bauby forward in much deeper and more meaningful ways than their physical surfaces.

In exploring the mindset and inner life of Bauby, Schnabel has constructed a film of awe-inspiring beauty and depth, a dazzling patchwork of images, ideas, and dreams stitched together from Bauby's writings. The one fault is the metaphor of the butterfly, a positive counterpoint to the diving helmet image that described Bauby's isolation in his own body. The butterfly represents, for Bauby, his ability to escape from his entrapment by means of imagination and memory, the twin capabilities of the human mind that are glorified here. The butterfly is a very tired metaphor for human freedom, although here it's presented in narration over a lovely abstract collage of superimposed imagery, and is mostly not returned to afterwards, as though Schnabel also understood that this uncharacteristic moment of triteness was a weak link in the writing's clear-eyed thinking about sensation and the mind. Otherwise, the film remains remarkably balanced in exploring the emotional and intellectual ramifications of Bauby's sensory state without manipulation or overt sentimentalizing. This is an incredibly powerful film, in which the union of aesthetics and subject is nearly perfect. Having seen Bauby's words visualized by the fragmentary beauty of Schnabel's hyper-stylized imagery, it's hard to imagine it being done any other way — certainly, any more traditional cinematic language could never do justice to the intrinsically internal nature of this story, which is primarily located in the brain of its protagonist rather than a physical world. This is a truly original and exciting film, one that maybe falls (just) short of a masterpiece, but nevertheless indicates a true master in the making.

Juno

Like director Jason Reitman's last film, Thank You For Smoking, his teen pregnancy comedy Juno is smart, witty, unsentimental, and could probably be accused of being merely "quirky" by those less charmed by the film's carefully constructed edifices. The title character (Ellen Page) is a high schooler who gets pregnant after a night of fun with her best friend Pauly (Michael Cera). She's initially tempted by abortion, seemingly because it's the obvious option, but decides she can't go through with it and will put the baby up for adoption, settling on a childless couple (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) who seem promising. It's a story rife with potential for weepy melodrama and pious moralizing from either the left or the right. Reitman, with the help of screenwriter Diablo Cody (best known previously for her stripper memoir Candy Girl), deftly sidesteps both possibilities, drowning out both sentiment and preaching with a barrage of wisecracks and non-sequitur jokes. The dialogue is a mishmash of pop culture references, a la Tarantino, and it seems stitched together from a series of deadpan one-liners, a la Chuck Palahniuk, but there's still something about the rhythms of Cody's writing that's distinctively hers, a wry sarcasm that looks at the world from just slightly askew.

It's easy to see why this style would grate on some, especially since every character in the film speaks in the same voice, but I found it mostly charming and funny, aside from a handful of cringe-worthy exchanges that are mostly confined to the opening few scenes. It helps that the proliferation of wisecracking humor doesn't serve as a replacement for heart and emotion, which are sometimes hidden or submerged, but never eliminated. In one early scene, when Juno goes to tell Pauly that she's pregnant, she puts on the usual facade of sarcasm and affected posturing, even setting up a living room tableau on his front lawn as a prank, but it's obvious that she's nervous. And when Reitman inserts a closeup on her eyes, they're just slightly wet and soulful, while her mouth maintains the same wry smirk as she fakes smoking a pipe — the contrast tells us all we need to know about Juno and her barely controlled feelings without resorting to anything too sappy or showy. The film's more emotional moments are mostly quiet, and often risk silliness in order to achieve genuine pathos, like the scene where Garner, as the prospective adoptive mom, happens upon Juno at the mall and feels her stomach. She kneels down, talking to the teen's belly, trying to get the baby to kick, and the scene is played entirely straight, stepping back from the obvious laughs in order to allow a sweet and moving moment to emerge from the awkward situation. It would be very easy for the film to mock Garner's needy, somewhat desperate character, but for the most part it doesn't, only poking gentle fun at her idiosyncrasies while treating her emotional state with respect.

In fact, that respect is a hallmark of Cody's script. Her characters may all talk the same way, but their personalities are individuated at a deeper level, in their behaviors and their emotions, the things they want and think about. She's equally generous towards Bateman's character, even though in some respects he's the film's "villain" — he laments the relative loss of freedom that's accompanied his marriage, and doesn't feel ready for the added responsibilities of a kid. But his exchanges with Juno, though sometimes laced with a tangibly creepy undercurrent of attraction, are warm and funny, and draw him out him as a complicated individual rather than the irredeemable jerk he might've been. It also helps that the film is loaded with great acting, especially from the two leads. Page turns in a great performance, all bluster and sharp wit with a strong basis of vulnerability and emotional upheaval brewing underneath. Michael Cera seems to have settled into playing one character over and over, the same nervous, perpetually confused nerd he was in both Arrested Development and Superbad, but it's a great character and he unfailingly brings heart and awkward energy to the role.

Juno is a lot of fun, a smart comedy that treats a serious subject with irreverent wit while never losing track of the deeper emotions and ideas linked to it. I'm a bit afraid that Juno's longevity may ultimately be about the same as Reitman's Thank You For Smoking, which was also sharp and witty and fun, and which quickly faded into memory not too long after I saw it. Both films share a concern with surfaces, with sarcastic repartee covering up deeper subtexts and feelings. In the earlier film, it was the double-talking swagger of cigarette spokesman Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), which served to obscure the realities of cigarettes' effects. The cover-ups are more benign in Juno, where the heroine's hardened surface deflects the disapproving stares of her peers at school (who mocked her for her differences even before her pregnancy). What Juno may have going for it, over Reitman's earlier effort, is its deeper involvement with its characters, the knowledge that heavily stylized banter and dialogue constructed almost entirely from one-liners can coexist with implied characterization and the subtlety of actors' gestures and expressions. This makes Juno a much more fulfilling experience than Reitman's last film, and by the end, it's even moving in spite of its nonstop wisecracking.

12/29: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Tim Burton's version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd is a devilishly clever, funny, and creepy ode to misanthropy and vengeance. The title role is the barber Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), who renames himself Sweeney Todd after a lengthy enforced absence from London. He was exiled from his home by the powerful Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who coveted Barker's beautiful wife, and upon Barker's return over a decade later, he finds that his wife has killed herself and their daughter has been adopted and virtually imprisoned by the judge. He swears vengeance on the judge, and sets up a new barber shop above the decrepit pie shop run by the widow Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter). In the course of this vengeful quest, though, his hatred of the judge gradually spreads to the entire human race, and he unleashes a killing drive to rival the most vicious screen serial killers.

It's an unlikely subject for a musical, and though I haven't seen the original staging, Burton's adaptation does a fairly good job of balancing the macabre with the ludicrous, deftly positioning his film between horror and comedy. At the start, though, the production is a bit shaky, and the treatment of the musical numbers initially uncertain and awkward. The opening titles, with their video-game CGI effects, aren't the most promising introduction, but thankfully Burton tones down the CGI throughout most of the film. A few more wide shots of period London are equally distracting, and in an early scene he attempts a rapidly paced tour through the streets of this CGI town, which is badly mangled and so chintzy that it nearly derails the whole opening. Thankfully, once the film settles into interiors, Burton is able to create the atmosphere much more organically, with subtle elements of design and lighting, rather than resorting to entirely computer-created environments.

The opening also falters a bit in the translation of the Sondheim song book from stage to screen. The first musical number takes place in the very first scene after the credits, as Sweeney Todd arrives back in London on a ship. Todd is initially off-camera, and the focus is on the youthful sailor Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower), who sings an impassioned ode to London's joys. He's interrupted when Todd suddenly steps forward, taking over the foreground of the shot, and presents a much darker vision of London: "There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and the vermin of the world inhabit it." This is a perfect translation of the stage dynamic into cinematic visuals, allowing Todd's face to enter the frame and physically blot out Anthony just as his darker worldview pervades the narrative. But the rest of this number is handled much more clumsily, with the editing chopping up the song and switching in between lines to slightly different angles on Todd's face. Whereas the first entrance of Todd is deftly handled with a real awareness of space and framing, the rest of the scene disrupts this spatial care by pointlessly switching angles and cutting around the central figure as he sings. Musical numbers inevitably work best when there's a sense of space and movement built into them, and Burton's unmotivated cutting only calls attention to the lack of spatial definition in this scene. His edits here seem intended only to get "cool" angles on Depp's perpetually photogenic face, not to preserve the flow of the scene or the song.

Fortunately, once Todd arrives at Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, things get much better, and much smoother. It's even easy to forget about Depp's substandard singing voice when the musical numbers are so much fun, and the diabolical wit of the lyrics stings with practically every line. The introduction of Helena Bonham Carter, looking her frizzed-out, voluptuous, raccoon-eyed Marla Singer best, is also very welcome. She infuses her role with world-weary pathos and casually pragmatic cruelty, and does a much better job than Depp with the vocal duties, to boot. From her very first number, "The Worst Pies in London," it's clear that she adds a much-needed sardonic edge to the film's brutality, a sense that the violence and ugliness of this film reflects a world of poverty, rigidly defined class structures, and common people sadly resigned to their fates. Only Sweeney Todd is truly discontented enough with his rotten lot in life to do anything about it, and he strikes out in the most hideous ways, his every horrifying act a reflection of the horrors inflicted upon him and his class by society.

Once Mrs. Lovett enters the narrative as Todd's foil and partner, the film soars, and the clumsiness of the opening few scenes is quickly forgotten. These two engage in wittily arranged numbers, like the scene where Todd sings a love song to his razors, while in the background the pitiful Lovett is pining for Todd, their lyrics occasionally joining in identical expressions of love for different objects. Even better are the deliriously naughty pas de deux numbers, like the one where Lovett concocts her fiendish plan for disposing of the bodies Todd leaves behind, and the duo twirl around the shop in a mad dance, bursting with excitement and energy. Their every appearance together is a real joy to watch, even in the potentially silly scene where Mrs. Lovett imagines an idyllic life with Todd by the sea — her hopeful pragmatism and his stoic gloominess provide a perfect counterpoint to the sunny skies and warm colors that are absent everywhere else in the film's grey and brown palette. There's not a scene between these two that doesn't sparkle with weird charm and vivacity, even when the subject of the songs is murder and cannibalism.

The film is less successful when it diverts from this central duo, which it thankfully doesn't do too often. Anthony has a perfunctory role as the wide-eyed innocent who falls for Johanna (Jayne Wisener), Todd's captive daughter, at first sight. His narrative of naïve young love is obviously the exact opposite of Todd's disillusionment with the world, and the film suggests that the only reason for Anthony's optimism is that he hasn't experienced enough yet. Give him time, and he'll head down that path as well. Even the young and beautiful Johanna is tainted by her captivity at the judge's home, and she holds out little hope by the end of the film that anything will ever be better, even once she escapes her tormentor's clutches. This love story is given short shrift in the film, though, and its brief diversions from the central Todd/Lovett plot are mostly unwelcome. Anthony's songs to Johanna may well be a parody of young love's excesses — and lines like "I'll steal you, Johnna" have more than a little tinge of creepiness — but the fact remains that they're saccharine and grating in comparison to the more vibrant Todd and Lovett numbers. It's therefore a good thing that this less interesting couple gets much less screentime, though the result is that their story winds up so under-developed that one wonders why they're here at all — presumably the original play fleshes out their story more fully.

Quibbles aside, Sweeney Todd is an excellent film, a nasty piece of work that fully submerges the audience into the vengeful rage of its protagonist. It's hilarious, disturbing, and blood-drenched, with a razor-sharp gallows humor that slices through nearly every scene, even the goriest ones. Burton has possibly the perfect sensibility for such a delicate balancing act, and as a result the film is witty and vibrant while never flinching away from the bloody physical realities of the violence, which is shown with an at-times nauseating physicality. This emphasis on the brutality of Todd's violence helps to ground the film's fantasy, to keep the flights of song and music rooted in a concrete reality of suffering and sorrow. The result is that the musical numbers are like fantastic dreams, attempts at escape from the morbid reality of a world in which murder does double duty as revenge and good business practices.