11/17: No Country For Old Men

The signal moment in the Coen brothers' excellent No Country For Old Men comes about halfway through, and it's a seemingly minor scene with precious little to do with the main plotline. Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is recounting a story he's read in the newspaper, about a homicidal couple who had been torturing, robbing, and killing old people, and he laments how it took one of the victims running from the house screaming and wearing a dog collar before anyone took notice. "I guess digging graves in the yard wasn't enough," he says, and it inevitably elicits a wry chuckle. It also gets a laugh out of the deputy who Bell's telling the story too, and the Coens abruptly cut to the deputy's "hyuck," before cutting back just as quickly to a disapproving Bell. The effect is electrifying. The scene both provokes a reaction and then proceeds to explore the nature of that reaction, all in a few rapid cuts, forcing the audience to question its own assumptions and the implications of its jaded laughter at such images of violence and human ugliness.

This kind of moral questioning is at the heart of the Coens' film, as it was in the Cormac McCarthy novel which the film is adapted from. In adapting McCarthy's novel, the Coens have remained remarkably faithful both to the substance of the plot and to the feel of the material, the folksy rhythm of McCarthy's border town dialogue and the philosophical inquiry into violence and evil. But this scene indicates at least one way in which the Coens have gone beyond the book's scope, making its moral inquiry a kind of interactive experience in which the audience must follow along with Bell (the moral center in both film and novel) in tracing the ontology of evil. Many people, when they heard that the Coens would be tackling McCarthy's arch-moralist novel, feared that the brothers would inject the film with too much of their trademark ironic humor, dulling the impact of the story and its intentions. But quite to the contrary, in most cases the Coens have actually dulled the novel's humor, stifled it in favor of a deadpan realism that accentuates rather than lifts the horror. In one scene early on, there's another exchange between Bell and his deputy. "This is quite a mess," the deputy says. Bell's response ("If it ain't, it'll do until the mess gets here") was, in the novel, exactly the kind of ironical humor that one would most easily associate with the Coens, and this is the kind of moment that would seem to gel most easily with their own aesthetic. And yet the directors choose to deliberately defuse the humor by emphasizing the dead bodies strewn around the desert, and keeping the body of a dead dog pointedly in shot throughout the scene, glimpsed just to the right of Bell in the background, even framed between the legs of a horse at one point.

In addition to de-emphasizing McCarthy's morbid humor, the Coens have also played up the gore that always figures in McCarthy's work. Their images of violence have a quality of stasis, as though the camera is lingering in order to examine the gore in detail, an effect that admirably captures the extended nature of McCarthy's head-on descriptions of violence. The unstoppable hitman Chigurh (Javier Bardem, incredibly sinister) turns violence into a process, reducible to its steps and casual in its application. His offhand robbery of a drug store, achieved by setting fire to a car outside as a distraction, is followed by a lengthy scene in which he removes a bullet from his leg, shown in all its gory detail. Both scenes are presented as though Chigurh is simply going through the motions, following a set of instructions that he's memorized through repetition. Chigurh's mission is to locate Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who's stolen $2 million from a botched drug transaction he stumbled across in the desert one afternoon. The killer's path is strewn with corpses, as he stoically tracks his prey with little regard for anyone who winds up in his way. He is an incarnation of evil, an evil intimately associated with the modern age but, as the philosophical coda makes clear, not unique to it. Bell's mistake, throughout the film, is to take the (conservative) moral stance that the modern age is degraded and its evil more widespread than in the past. But McCarthy's novel has more historical sense than that, and the Coens bring over a précis of the moral examination that occurs in the final quarter of the book, following the abrupt death of its former protagonist Moss.

This moment, one of the most startling in the book because of its radical disposal, without ceremony, of the hero, has been beautifully preserved by the Coens, as has the sudden switch of perspectives from Moss to Bell. The final 20 minutes of the film are dedicated to Moss' struggle to come to grips with the evil represented by Chigurh. This is a struggle that the audience must engage in as well, and the Coens' film allows plenty of room for such moral questioning. In adapting McCarthy's novel, their faithfulness to the text, despite many necessary changes, involves above all a faithfulness to the book's moral character, its insistence on not just taking murder as a fact of life the way Chigurh does.

11/15: Ikiru

[This is a contribution to the Akira Kurosawa Blog-a-Thon hosted by Film Squish.]

Kurosawa's Ikiru is concerned with a seemingly counterintuitive idea: the poetics of bureaucracy. Its hero is a bureaucrat, and its central premise boils down to this man learning that he is going to die, and in response dedicating his remaining months to becoming a better bureaucrat. Veteran actor Takashi Shimura plays Watanabe, a career bureaucrat in a city Public Affairs department, who abruptly learns that he has stomach cancer and has only a few more months to live. His initial reaction is to sink into depression. He stops attending his job without even calling in, and drinks himself into oblivion in neighborhood bars — he seems intent on either forgetting about his plight or speeding it up to ease the burden on his self-absorbed son. A chance encounter with a writer at one of these bars proves to be the first step towards coming to terms with his illness, and this man takes Watanabe out for a wild night on the town, dancing, singing, gambling, and meeting young girls. This experience awakens Watanabe from his self-pity, making him realize that he should do something with his final months to redeem the wasted, routine life he'd been living since his wife died. However, he rightly rejects the hedonism of that one night as a long-term solution, recognizing it for the momentary pleasure it is.

As he casts around for a direction in his new life, a chance encounter again sets him onto a path, as he runs into his former employee Toyo (Miki Odagiri). Her youth and vitality enlivens her, but their initially carefree friendship quickly sours when Watanabe becomes clingy and desperate. She does, however, indirectly point him back towards yet another path: escape into his work, which is the path he decides on. He recommits himself to his job with a resolution to go above and beyond his duties to truly help people. It's at this point that Kurosawa makes the interesting decision to skip ahead five months, to Watanabe's wake. The remainder of the film is told in flashbacks by Watanabe's fellow employees, underlings, and bosses, revealing the misinterpretations and credit-stealing that go on even the night after his death. The bisected structure of the film allows Kurosawa to essentially create two films, one hopeful and one pessimistic. In the first half, Watanabe's realization of his own mortality initiates his examination of his life and what he's done with it. Even if his ultimate decision to turn back to his career is perhaps questionable as a means of fulfillment, it's still the first time in 30 years that he's made a positive decision for himself rather than just allowing his life to pass by. The first half ends with him actively taking on a new project that everyone else had dismissed, the creation of a children's park in a poor and neglected area of the city where a sewage pond was causing a health hazard.

After the first half of the film, the quiet optimism of Watanabe's mission isn't quite dissipated, but it is seriously dulled by the realization of just how little change Watanabe managed to effect in his surroundings. The second half of the film takes place entirely at Watanabe's wake, with his co-workers not so much mourning him as trying to figure out exactly what made him tick and what prompted the tremendous change in his personality in those final months. The first half of the film is defined by its transcendent quality: the sense, largely communicated by Kurosawa's sumptuous visuals, that we are observing more than just the external realities of a life in flux, but the internal qualities of the man himself. Shimura's amazing, wide-eyed performance goes a long ways towards establishing this spiritual closeness between the audience and Watanabe. His large, watery eyes practically bug out of his head on cue, and Kurosawa frequently allows his facial expressions to say it all in extreme close-ups. He emanates a sublime mix of melancholy, hopefulness, and quiet desperation, and his hunched, shuffling gait and murmured, halting speech only heightens the empathy for him.

In the second half of the film, with Watanabe's disappearance from the narrative except in the form of a photograph hung in the center of the room, this transcendent quality also largely disappears. The employees' squabbles have the quality of the multiple perspectives that Kurosawa had used in Rashomon two years earlier, but in this case they disagree not on facts, but on matters of interpretation. The palpable absence of Watanabe is a black hole in the film, especially since the periodic flashbacks in which he appears briefly restore that feeling of transcendence and emotional connection. The arguing employees are no substitute for Shimura's powerhouse central performance, and it's as though Kurosawa ended a perfectly good narrative film early in order to stage a debate. The employees' arguments spell out all too clearly the ideas that Kurosawa wanted to communicate, a prime example of a great director not trusting his own visual storytelling. This is especially apparent since the second half also contains a handful of the film's best scenes.

In one scene, perhaps the film's most potent, some women from the neighborhood that Watanabe helped show up at his funeral, interrupting at a crucial moment when the ambitious deputy mayor had been busily rationalizing his failure to give Watanabe proper credit. These women kneel in front of the altar and pour out their grief, weeping and crying over the kind, helpful, driven man who helped them so much. Kurosawa barely shows the women, though, instead keeping their cries on the soundtrack while he cuts around the room to close-ups of the politicians and public officials who have gathered for the service. Their uncomfortable expressions when faced with this wordless remorse say it all, and Kurosawa handles this moment with economical grace, indicting every man in the room without a word. The remaining hour of bluster and blather only confirms what's already implicit in this scene: these men don't understand Watanabe, and they don't get that his exceptional commitment to his job in his last months was his way of living his life to its fullest.

The other great scenes in the film's second half are both flashbacks, one in which Watanabe wistfully stares out at the work in progress on "his" park, and another from the night he died, as he sits on a swing in the snow-covered park, singing quietly into the night. These brief scenes — moments, really — are imbued with Watanabe's grace and poignancy, and they are gently affecting, getting at the man's core in ways that no amount of words ever could. Ikiru is the story of this bureaucrat's realization that life should never be accepted passively, but lived with vibrancy and energy. Its other characters never come to this same realization, making this film simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. But if one broken and mummified man can learn to live his life actively, whatever that means for him, the same option must be open to everyone else too.

11/14: The Pornographers

Shohei Imamura's The Pornographers is a pitch-black absurdist comedy of outrageous sexuality and the role of sex in a modern world dominated by greed and manipulation. The titular pornographer is Subu Ogata (Shoichi Ozawa), who makes porn movies and sells a wide variety of sexual literature, photos, illicit audio recordings, and impotence medicines — all this while telling his widowed lover and landlady Haru (Sumiko Sakamoto) that he sells medical equipment. In a way, to Ogata, this seems to be a true statement. He increasingly views the world, and especially the men in it, as sick with sexuality, and views his "immoral" work as a kind of cure.

Ogata's profession starts out as just a way to make money, but as he encounters police raids, local mobsters, thieving partners, and his own complicated sexual impulses, he becomes more philosophical about his work. In any case, it seems like it's stopped making him money, and he begins pouring all his own money into buying equipment and supplies, while his personal life descends into a labyrinth of forbidden and twisted sexual desire. He wants Haru's 15-year-old daughter Keiko (Keiko Sagawa), and Haru, who is sick and on the verge of dying, encourages him to marry her, though the promiscuous Keiko herself has little interest. Meanwhile, Haru tries to remain pure due to a vow she made to her first husband, who she believes has been reincarnated as a carp and watches over her — when the carp jumps in his tank, that means that her dead husband disapproves of her actions. There's also a bizarre Oedipal subtext with Haru's son Koichi (Masaomi Kondo), who she spoils and takes care of, and who responds with a devotion bordering uncomfortably on the sexual.

With these warped and intricately intertwined sexual impulses wending through its narrative, The Pornographers is structured as though the id is periodically overwhelming the story. Imamura's narrative will often run in a more or less traditional manner for a while, only to be disrupted by the intrusion of an unsettlingly real dream sequence. These strange dreams pop up from time to time without warning, often emerging spontaneously from scenes that at first appeared to be entirely realistic. It's never even made clear quite whose dreams they are, although presumably they might be attributed to Ogata. Certainly the later ones, with their imagery of sexual impotence, are his, but several earlier ones seem to belong more plausibly to Haru or her daughter. In any case, these absurd interjections add to the film's stylized depiction of sexual desire. It all culminates when Ogata becomes impotent and is driven to entirely reject human sexuality in its ordinary forms, pursuing the construction of a perfect mechanical woman to satisfy his desires.

The Pornographers is a unique and incredibly odd examination of sexuality in a world of greed and repression, where the human, personal aspect of sex is increasingly being subsumed by economics, legalities, and mechanical desire. As such, this 1966 film is a stunningly prescient work, predicting among other things the numbing of sexuality in the age of Internet porn and the continuing interaction between ordered sexual repression on the one hand and unfettered id on the other. The wild imagery is offset by the surprisingly philosophical commentary of Ogata's conversations with his fellow pornographers, in which they discuss the ethics of incest, the potential for the fantasies of porn to replace real-life violent sexuality, and the loss of one-on-one romantic and sexual connections in a world where sexuality has become a commonplace public spectacle and a commodity on the marketplace. Imamura's sensibility is perfectly suited to such a complex film, which treats its subject matter with both irreverence and depth.

11/12: A Canterbury Tale; Beware of a Holy Whore; Act of Violence

In A Canterbury Tale, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger crafted a magical and haunting film from the simplest of premises, spinning out a rather uncomplicated yarn into a magical fable of the English countryside and its way of life. The set-up is simple: two soldiers on furlough, one American and one British, arrive in a small country town at the same time as a young woman who's seeking employment on a local farm. The setting is World War II era Britain, but the war seems very distant indeed from this idyllic country setting. The only, rather mild, indication of the war's effect is the periodic rumbling of military jeeps through the otherwise undisturbed and tranquil countryside. But this small town, situated along the same Pilgrim's Road that once led the travelers of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to their destination, has a darker undercurrent which these new travelers encounter almost at once. While the two soldiers lead the girl, Alison (Sheila Sim), into town, she is suddenly attacked by a mysterious figure who pours glue in her hair and then runs away. For anyone giggling at that already, yes, the seminal subtext is patently obvious, and yes, she does yell out, "Oh, there's sticky stuff in my hair!" One can easily picture an audience of Freudians going into raptures.

Needless to say, the trio become embroiled in an investigation to solve this mystery and capture the "Glue Man," who has struck 10 times before and whose activities seem to be of curiously little interest to most people in the village. But while this is the film's nominal plot, it's kept almost completely to the background, the better for Powell and Pressburger to focus their attention on the beauty of country life. By fifteen minutes after it's happened, the glue incident has already been nearly forgotten, as the characters begin to explore the town in earnest, and the audience begins to meet these sweet, innocent characters. The American GI is Bob Johnson (real-life Sergeant John Sweet), a fresh-faced Oregon boy who's wondering why his sweetheart back home has stopped writing. His earnest, wide-eyed manner and gentle good manners are instantly endearing, and Sweet is the perfect choice as a representation of good-old American values abroad. If this is what the British thought of us during WW2, then it only makes our current world image even sadder. Along with the similarly appealing Alison, Bob explores the village and the duo tries to figure out if the kind but strangely sinister local magistrate, Colpeper (Eric Portman), is the Glue Man or not. The third member of their trio, the British sergeant Peter (Dennis Price), is stationed at a nearby camp, and he joins in on the mystery when he's off from his duties.

What's most interesting about this scenario is that the filmmakers themselves seem to be most clearly aligned with Colpeper, who is an avid historian of the area around Canterbury and its rich history. Colpeper, even in his most sinister moments — and there are many, since the film begins dropping hints about him early on — is oddly appealing in his enthusiasm for local lore. He seems to be in a deep spiritual communion with the land around him, a connection to its religious past that he wishes to spread to others through his lectures and teaching. He seems, by today's standards, to be a figure of conservative morality, expressing a desire for the younger generations to get in touch with their more spiritual and innocent pasts. And certainly the Glue Man is an instrument of this backward-looking morality, since his sexualized crimes are intended to punish and discourage the local girls from going out with the soldiers stationed nearby. Despite all this, Colpeper is hardly an irredeemable villain, and the filmmakers clearly have great respect for his motivations and ideas, even if they stop slightly short of endorsing his actions.

In fact, the film is so much in sympathy with Colpeper that in many ways it seems to be his vision of the countryside that we're seeing on screen throughout the film. It's a strange and mystical place, where the past is sometimes so close that Alison, standing on a windy hilltop in an eerie stillness, can hear the music of the old Canterbury pilgrims from 600 years earlier. This connection to the past is established in the film's unforgettable first sequence, which begins in the time of Chaucer's tales. The pilgrims make their way along the road, and one of them, astride a horse, releases a falcon, which goes soaring off into the sky. In a stunning edit, the filmmakers then cut to an image of a modern fighter plane, similarly diving and swooping through the sky; the pilgrim has been replaced, down on the ground, by a wistfully smiling soldier. The whole film is subtly influenced by the texture of this non-diegetic introduction, which links all the film's modern events to the long-ago pilgrims who once passed through this region. These images have such a haunting and quietly beautiful quality that one can't help but believe Colpeper when he waxes ecstatic about the region's qualities. His words are bolstered by the weight of Powell and Pressburger's imagery, an odd situation in which the filmmakers seem to be conspiring with their villain.

All of this comes to a head in the film's ambiguous, elegiac denouement, in which the characters fulfill their connection to the past by themselves becoming pilgrims to Canterbury. All go for their own mundane reasons, but they all find something much different and greater than they expected — something mystical, spiritual, even miraculous flows through this final part of the film. By now, the mystery plot has drifted away and nearly been forgotten, nominally solved but not really resolved, its threads left hanging and ambiguous at the ending. It's a wonderful, entrancing end to a film that truly defies description, the kind of film whose charm and beauty are nearly impossible to resist.

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore is, essentially, one big in-joke, a feature-length parody of his own filmmaking process, in which he casts almost his entire stock company. It's a very nasty, acerbically funny film, with Fassbinder fearlessly turning his sharp tongue on his own image and the sexual complications that constantly surrounded him. Fassbinder steps back from himself in one respect, giving the part of the dictatorial director Jeff to Lou Castel, while he plays Jeff's assistant Sascha. Jeff is an angry, diva-ish tyrant, and a sexual manipulator who seems to constantly crave some attention of any kind. He's most infatuated by the boyish Ricky (Marquad Bohm), but he willfully sleeps his way through most of the cast and crew, male and female, and is frustrated when he fails to consummate things with the actress Hanna (Hanna Schygulla, vamping in an indescribably sexy channeling of Marilyn Monroe). She's more interested in the film's star, the craggy-faced Eddie Constantine, who's there because Jeff is making a new Lemmy Caution picture. Meanwhile, Ricky competes with assistant director David (Hannes Fuchs) for Jeff's attentions, while simultaneously seducing some of the women on the set. And the chronically depressive set designer, Fred (a typically histrionic Kurt Raab), breaks down and cries over seemingly anything.

This exaggerated cast of characters fight, sleep around, exchange partners, scream and yell, and consume massive quantities of alcohol — and all this before having completed even a single frame of film. Fassbinder's satire of his own emotionally draining filming process, made right after Whity and directly inspired by its torturous shoot, pulls no punches, either for himself or anyone else. These are a bunch of neurotic, hopeless, desperate people, and none of them more so than the Fassbinder stand-in Jeff, who even wears Fassbinder's trademark black leather jacket just in case there's any confusion about the connection. And yet the film is subtly hilarious, in its own bitchy way, for those who are open to its black charms. The histrionics and rage are played totally straight, even deadpan, but at the same time it's all so ridiculous that the film's straight face becomes difficult to uphold.

In one scene, staged at an almost excruciating length, most of the cast is gathered in the central room at the villa they're shooting in. Some are drinking at the bar, while others are paired off making out or dancing, and over the course of the scene these pairs constantly shift and rotate as the characters all play off each other's feelings, manipulating and jilting each other with only casual interest in what's going on. While all this is happening, those at the bar sink deeper and deeper into drink and begin heaving their glasses behind them over their shoulders, or throwing them at the far wall, prompting the dutiful bartender to appear with his broom and dustpan. Meanwhile, Jeff's fiancée Irm (Magdalena Montezuma) throws a fit at his disinterest and is promptly ejected from the set, following a harrowing speech which Fassbinder allows her to deliver in close-up. The scene as a whole is sustained for incredibly long, with most of it held at arm's length in long shots except for periodic close-ups like this one, which draw us closer to particular moments of emotional collapse. The distance which Fassbinder mostly keeps from the action allows him to ratchet up the tension without ever losing its comic edge. He wants us to feel the emotional anguish of these characters while simultaneously recognizing the ludicrous nature of the situation. The scene is both intense drama and absurd slapstick, with one feeding off the other and leading into the other. The screaming, the breaking glass, the Leonard Cohen music with couples slow-dancing and fornicating in the background, it all accumulates into a fever pitch of ridiculous tension.

Fassbinder presents many scenes in this way towards the beginning of the film, keeping the characters locked into a single space together and letting the sparks fly as their complex relationships and ever-shifting objects of "love" collide. The individual scenes feel disconnected from each other, having little to do with each other besides the same basic cast of characters and the same theme of searching for love and affection. Each scene is a new take on the film's central theme, a new set piece in which Fassbinder sets his characters free to hurt and play off one another. This feeling becomes even more pronounced as the film goes along, and towards the end, Fassbinder drastically shortens the scene length, increasing the tempo of his editing so that many different scenes breeze by. Whether the scenes are held at great length or last barely a minute, the idea is the same: they are "takes," different perspectives on the same set of emotional dilemmas. Fassbinder's coldly critical and blackly humorous look at his own filmmaking persona stands as yet another dark-hued masterpiece in his fertile career.

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In Act of Violence, Robert Ryan does an excellent job playing the initially threatening crippled GI Joe Parkson, who is an unrelenting mission to murder his former commanding officer, Frank Enley (Van Heflin). But of course all is not as it seems in this masterfully crafted film noir from director Fred Zinnemann. For the first half of the film, Parkson is a terror stalking Enley's pleasant, succesful suburban life. Enley is married, to the innocent and cheery Edith (Janet Leigh), and a well-respected local businessman, but the sudden appearance of Parkson clearly terrifies him, and Zinnemann keeps the audience squarely on Enley's side. The gun-toting Parkson is initially kept at a distance, a single-minded killer who can hardly wait to kill his prey; he stalks him mercilessly and with great haste, as though he's eager to kill him as soon as possible. Even Parkson's limp is turned into an instrument of fear. In one memorable scene, Frank and Edith are locked up in their house, hiding from Parkson, as the killer stalks around outside, trying all the doors. The scared couple can track his progress by following the dragging shuffle of his limping gait, the only sound in the otherwise eerily quiet scene.

That the film is then able to transform this jaded killer into a much more complex and morally ambiguous character is one of the film's central conceits. The second half of the film, when Parkson's motivations become known, reveals the complicated morality at the heart of the film, which encompasses war crimes and the question of whether some deeds are so heinous they just can't be forgotten. While Enley flees from Parkson and stumbles around for a way out, the film humanizes both men, making it clear that the violent link between them is only being continued in the current events. In the finale, both men have a chance to redeem themselves, with a resolution that of course allows Parkson to retain his humanity (Robert Ryan could never really play a cold-blooded killer), and for Enley to atone for his own violent past.

Act of Violence is a solid, well-made noir with a complex moral core to back up its gorgeous high contrast blacks and whites. As with many of the best noirs, the imagery may trade in one or the other, but the script recognizes that morality more often exists in shades of gray.