11/30: The Key To Reserva; All That Heaven Allows; Vera Cruz

Martin Scorsese has made a commercial for the Spanish wine company Freixenet, which normally wouldn't be very notable to me, except that it's not so much a commercial as it is a 9-minute short film, called The Key To Reserva, Reserva of course being the wine in question. Scorsese took the opportunity and ran with it, clearly having a blast as he turns his commercial into a funny and detail-packed tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. It's a joy to watch, a witty tribute that any Hitchcock admirers should be sure to check out. The short, which is available online from Freixenet's website, begins with Scorsese explaining, in faux-documentary introduction, how he's discovered a three page excerpt from a Hitchcock film which was never made. And in a feat of film preservation that would be the first of its kind, he intends to preserve this unmade film, by of course making it himself. There follows the film itself, which makes a bottle of Reserva wine the MacGuffin for a series of hilarious and dead-on tributes to various Hitchcock films, from the Saul Bass-esque opening titles to the concert hall scene of The Man Who Knew Too Much to the gravity-defying denouement of Saboteur to the wine-cellar scene from Notorious. There's even a cameo appearance by the memorable R.O.T. monogram from North By Northwest, and the countless other Hitchcockian gags crammed into every second are guaranteed to make the film connoisseur smile. The final tribute to The Birds is the most impressive of all, using a crane shot pulling back from a building (the reverse of the one from the beginning of Psycho) to reveal a cityscape covered in threatening black birds. The fact that a Spanish company seems to be OK with such an expensive, elaborate, and in-jokey commercial just to sell a bottle of wine is pretty amazing, but then again it's already getting their name out there, so maybe they know best. In any case, it's a great, fun little diversion, definitely worth a look.

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By now, the plot of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows should be very familiar, considering it has been adapted for both Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven. It's the story of the lonely widow Cary (Jane Wyman), who falls in love with her younger gardener Ron (Rock Hudson), and plans to marry him despite the differences in age and social class which put external pressures on the relationship. As a satire of upper-middle-class pettiness and hypocrisy, it occasionally lays it on too thick, a hallmark of Sirk's work that nevertheless contributes to his satire's biting wit. As the gossip and snarky jokes and open disapproval of Cary's friends, neighbors, and even children begin to weigh on her, the relationship seems less and less stable or possible. Sirk's portrayal of these ungenerous souls is unremittingly caustic, with a devastatingly sharp satirical eye that never fails to capture the bitchiness and jealousy hidden beneath the ever-present phony smiles and friendly banter.

If Sirk's satirical touch can sometimes be heavy and unsubtle, his visual sense is unfailingly exactly the opposite. Here, his style is most effective in contrasting the harshness of his high society satire with the lush warmth of his visuals, especially in the scenes set at Ron's country retreat. Ron's lifestyle evokes the pastoral philosophy of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, which is quoted from in one scene. Ron's true-to-himself philosophy and rugged life, continually in touch with nature, is a stark contrast to the hermetically sealed spaces of Cary's old-money mansion, her dead husband's ancestral home and a constant reminder of her widowhood. Her daughter Kay (Gloria Talbott), a social worker who provides some of the film's funniest comic relief in her straight-faced presentations of Freudian psychobabble, tells her mother about the old, outdated Egyptian custom of entombing the wife with her dead husband so she might enter the afterlife with him. That custom is long gone, the daughter assures her, but Cary isn't so sure, and with good reason. What is her house but a brightly lit tomb, with her dead husband's possessions all around her? And the townspeople are only too glad to make sure she stays in this tomb, alone and unhappy, unless of course she decides to marry a socially acceptable man like the much older Harvey (Conrad Nagel), who lacks passion or emotion but offers her at least, in his dry way, "companionship."

The idea of the dead's possessions comes up again when she decides to marry Ron and begins packing away some of the more visible reminders of her status as a widow, including a trophy that had long sat on the living room mantle. When her son Ned (William Reynolds) discovers this, he's enraged, and he corners her later on for a late-night argument, in which he winds up next to the mantle, the trophy a conspicuous absence next to him, with two urn-like vases framing the empty space. Sirk does everything he can to draw attention to this absence, making the scene's focal point the disappearance of the trophy, while neither Ned nor Cary makes any mention of it during the course of the conversation. They're talking about Cary's impending marriage and Ned's feelings about it, but implicit underneath it all is the implication that Cary is trying to leave her husband's tomb, that she's putting away his possessions and forsaking her caretaker status.

It's this kind of subtextual visual touch that sets Sirk apart. He's working, as always, with a somewhat over-obvious and melodramatic script, with Kay a perfect vehicle through which to explain the characters' psychological motivations. She's often lampooned within the film for her ready explanations, which she wields like a shield even in a romantic encounter, but the script also uses her as an all-purpose explainer to draw out emotions that Sirk rendered perfectly well through his mise en scène. Thankfully, the love between Cary and Ron is left unexplained, in a rare moment of restraint from the script. Their love requires no better explanation than the quiet moments they share in front of the frosty blue glass of the window in Ron's home, looking out on a glorious winter snowscape. These moments abound in this film, as Sirk clearly sides himself with Ron's closeness to nature and quiet romanticism. In the film's final scene, when Cary finally comes back to Ron after all the troubles they've endured, their reconnection is symbolized by a reindeer that walks right up to the glass window that earlier backgrounded their most intimate moments. This is another potent melodrama from the master of such films, possibly the only director in the classical Hollywood era able to elevate such lurid women's pictures above the level of their writing through the sheer force of his visual expression and sensitivity towards his characters.

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Vera Cruz is Robert Aldrich's rollicking adventure film set in the midst of the Mexican revolution against the emperor Maximilian. Among the American mercenaries heading south to get in on the fighting (and the monetary rewards) are Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster), a vicious bandit with a trust-no-one credo, and Ben Trane (Gary Cooper), a former Confederate officer and plantation owner who just wants money to rebuild his shattered life in the aftermath of the Civil War. These two unlikely compatriots team up, and even enter into an uneasy friendship, as they jockey for control of a massive cache of gold in the care of Maximilian's forces. It's a film of treachery and shifting loyalties, complicated by the addition of Denise Darcel as a shady countess not above using her considerable charms to blind men to her schemes, and Sara Montiel as the feisty Spanish girl whose sympathies lie with the rebels.

The film may locate the western genre south of the border (the better to stereotype its Mexican inhabitants), but otherwise it's a pretty typical example of the buddy western, with two diametrically opposed friends united by a common cause. Cooper's tough but moral Southern gentleman and Lancaster's sneering, dirty-dealing thief can't remain friends for long, and the film builds considerable suspense around the question of who's going to betray whom first. Aldrich's characteristic interest in the immorality and bluster puts the focus squarely on Lancaster, whose leering, over-the-top performance carries the film. Cooper plays the straight man in comparison, stolid and quiet as ever, letting Lancaster's gleeful amorality dominate the film until the inevitable final showdown necessarily pits the two opposing philosophies against one another. It's a predictable Hollywood western in so many ways, and Aldrich hardly does to the western what he did to the noir in Kiss Me Deadly. Lancaster and Cooper are the two competing visions of the American masculine archetype, the bad boy and the tough quiet one, but there's no deconstruction of these archetypes, just the celebration of their ultimate on-screen avatars. Still, it's a fun enough film in this vein.

More damning is the apparently slapdash quality of the editing, especially in the fight scenes, where awkward edits continually try to conceal the fact that the film's stunts and fight choreography were woefully inadequate. These obvious mid-action cuts have the effect of disrupting the space of the battle scenes, entirely breaking any illusion of continuity between the opposing sides and deflating the sense of excitement. If this was done with more rigor or intentionality, it could be seen as a deconstructionist gesture on par with the critique of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly, but in this film it just comes off as sloppy and shockingly amateurish in an otherwise polished and traditional production. Even with these failings, Vera Cruz isn't a total disappointment, and as a light 50s Hollywood entertainment it certainly does its job. Aldrich would go on to much better work only a year later, though, so in the context of his career this is a minor early entry, already showing evidence of his interests but still not as self-assured or distinctive as his best films.

11/29: Night On Earth

Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth is a love song to the beauty of city streets at night. It's also a love song about conversation, and storytelling, and the collisions (fortuitous or ugly) of strangers that make up the fabric of the urban landscape. The film tells five stories, each set in a different city — Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki — and each set primarily in a taxi cab at night. The first story, in Los Angeles, opens on late afternoon verging into evening, and the last story, in Helsinki, ends with a very early morning scene as the sky begins to flood with light and the city wakes up. In between, Jarmusch focuses on the dead-of-night hours when even these urban centers are largely quiet and subdued, devoid of people but still flooded with artificial light. This is an urban space in which the usual characteristics of city life — the clutter, the noise, the crowds — have been peeled away, revealing a quiet poetic beauty in the empty neon-lit streets and a possibility for random connections between those few strange people wandering around at this late hour. Obviously, this is an idealized fantasy city, a hermetically sealed artificial world for Jarmusch to play around it.

As with Jarmusch's previous feature, Mystery Train — itself an urban tone poem, in that case to Memphis — Night On Earth is a series of unconnected vignettes following different characters in each locale. And also like Mystery Train, not every segment is entirely successful, though the film as a whole holds together quite well. The first segment takes place in Los Angeles, with Winona Ryder as the spunky young cab driver Corky (really?) and Gena Rowlands as Victoria, a successful but stressed out Hollywood talent agent. Jarmusch seems to be reaching for the collision of the Hollywood dream factory with gritty everyday reality. But between the innately overwrought nature of Corky, and the disparity in acting talent between the smoothly realistic Rowlands and the awkward, amateurish Ryder, the expected collision winds up being reversed: Rowlands is the sharply defined real character and Ryder is the fantasy caricature. This reversal, possibly unintended, muddies the meaning of the segment's final exchange, in which Corky rejects the offer of a movie role because she's happy with her life as a cab driver and future mechanic. Is she truly rejecting fantasy for reality? She's already something of a cartoon, barely believable, and one gets little sense from Ryder's gum-snapping performance that she means anything she says. The world-weary Rowlands, though, turns in a typically great and understated performance, quietly injecting realism into the proceedings even if she is standing in for the Dream Machine. This segment is interesting, and I can't help think that Ryder's performance prevents some of its ideas from being fully communicated.

Much better is the New York segment, in which YoYo (Giancarlo Esposito) is picked up on a lonely Manhattan street by newly arrived German immigrant Helmut (Armin Mueller-Stahl). This is one of the film's funniest segments, a pure blast of comic greatness that doesn't stretch as much thematically as the Los Angeles segment, and is consequently lighter and sizzling with sharp dialogue. The interaction between the fast-talking, showy YoYo and the halting, uncertain Helmut is hilarious, especially when Helmut's total incompetence behind the wheel forces YoYo to take over the job of driving to Brooklyn. The introduction of Rosie Perez as YoYo's philandering sister-in-law Angela only compounds the humor, with her shrill screaming and profanity-laden abuse for her controlling brother-in-law providing yet another counterpoint in terms of personality. The meeting between these three multi-ethnic characters — the black YoYo, Hispanic Angela, and German Helmut — provides an implicit commentary on New York's famous melting pot, suggesting the possibility of connections across boundaries. Obviously, this verges as close to fantasy as the Los Angeles story did, but the better acting and richer humor help to pull it off this time. This segment, like the film as a whole, is especially a study of language, of the rhythms of speech and the emotional character of words and their multiple meanings. When Angela is first dragged into the cab by YoYo, she looks at Helmut after a few moments of yelling and derisively asks, "who's this clown?" But Helmut is unperturbed, because he really is a clown, or was one back in his native land anyway, and he happily pulls out two flutes and demonstrates his trademark trick of playing them a jaunty melody on both of them simultaneously. Angela looks baffled, then cracks up. And so an insult becomes an occasion for joy, and the language barrier is broken with song.

In the third segment of the film, the bitter Parisian cab driver and African immigrant played by Isaach de Bankolé picks up the sexy blind woman played by Béatrice Dalle. The driver has just unceremoniously kicked out two African diplomats who had been harassing him, and he picks up this blind woman consciously thinking that he'll finally have an easy fare. As it turns out, he takes the occasion to be the insulting one, asking insensitive and callous questions about her blindness and her inability to do certain things, even asking her what it's like to make love while blind. But Dalle's character is comfortable in her skin, unlike her driver, who freaked out over similarly probing questions about his nationality and class from his previous fares. She is unperturbed, annoyed but secure enough in her own life that she can shrug off the insults and spit them back at him. This segment ultimately has something to say about race, but I'm not sure I know what it is, and Jarmusch seemingly makes every effort to complicate matters and prevent the presentation of race from being in the least bit straightforward. This is especially true of the decision to make the initial abusive passengers also black, so that their prejudice and abuse seems to be more a result of class than of race; they make fun of him for the kind of black he is, not just because he's black. As for the scenes with Dalle, the combination of a blind white woman with a black man naturally lends itself to certain sappy clichés, and Jarmusch skirts frighteningly close to triteness when he has Dalle say that she doesn't know what color means. But this segment ultimately pulls back from any serious treatment of race, and its primary appeal is the gorgeous imagery of Paris at night-time and the impressively weird performance from the always engaging Dalle.

Jarmusch may be the only director who can effectively handle Roberto Benigni, as he already amply demonstrated in Down By Law, and again in the Roman segment of this film. The usually aggravating Benigni is at his comic peak here, seemingly unrestrained and wild without veering off into annoying as he too often does. His performance is a masterwork of ever-escalating loony-ness, as he plays a cab driver who picks up an ailing priest (Paolo Bonacelli) and feels the need to abruptly make his confession right there in the cab. I'm reluctant to even discuss this segment, because it really should just be experienced rather than described, and I couldn't do justice to Benigni's frantic cadences, or the way he describes his ludicrous sins with joy and fond nostalgia rather than regret. It's in this segment that Jarmusch makes the best use of the film's recurring structural two-shot, showing the cab driver in the right foreground of the frame and the passenger in the left background. Here, the interplay between Benigni's foreground gesticulating and ranting and the priest's horrified reaction and struggles with his heart medicine form the very foundation of the humor. Jarmusch sticks with this two-shot for the vast majority of the segment, once Bonacelli enters the car, and it perfectly underscores the scene's humor by creating a constant tension between the foreground and background, with essentially two different mini-narratives occurring simultaneously. Benigni has never been better, or funnier, than he is here.

The last segment of the film, in contrast, is the most melancholy of the lot, concerning the depressive Mika (Matti Pellonpää), who picks up a trio of drunken revelers on a deserted, snowy street. Two of the men are carrying their passed-out friend, who they say has just had the worst day of his life. What follows is a kind of competition of misery between the men and the cab driver. The men first describe what's happened to their passed-out friend, and Mika then tells his own even sadder story, telling them that it could always be worse — and even within Mika's tale, about the loss of his prematurely delivered first child, there is always the hope of the future. In this segment, despite the depressing subject matter of the conversations, there's a real sense of pleasure in the depiction of the conversations themselves. Jarmusch is a big fan of telling stories, as his episodic diner chat film Coffee and Cigarettes certainly demonstrated, and here his love of talk is clear even if the talk is mostly maudlin. This patter of voices is juxtaposed against the utter quiet of Helsinki's deserted night, the streets covered in snow at places and slicked wet with melted ice at others, the light reflecting off all these gleaming surfaces and giving everything an icy winter glow. This is possibly the film's most beautiful section, ending in a gray pre-dawn haze as the unfortunate passenger sits alone in the snow waiting for a new day to begin.

Despite the subtle strength of this final segment, which pulls everything together in some inexpressible way, Night On Earth is at its most successful when it aims for broad comedy, as it does in the New York and Rome sequences. These are the film's comic heart, its riotous vision of laughter and humor as the connective tissue between disparate souls in an emptied urban space. When Jarmusch stretches for understated social commentary in his urban vignettes, as he does in the Paris and Los Angeles segments, he's less successful, straining the limits of his caricatures and the fantasy cities they inhabit. The city as a fantasized venue for humorous interactions and social commentary is hardly a new idea, stretching back at least to Chaplin and Tati, especially in the latter's masterpiece Playtime. But Jarmusch's vision of the city is much different, much less physical for one thing: his characters never interact with the urban space but simply pass through it. The city is merely decoration, a poetically lit set in which these characters can talk and think and interact. Their connections, or failures to connect, are the film's real subject, and the city becomes ancillary, the passive object which allows these people to meet. Their meetings are depressing, hilarious, thought-provoking, puzzling, or provocative, but above all they're always entertaining and engaging.

11/27: Sawdust and Tinsel

When Ingmar Bergman died earlier this year, there was a certain strain of criticism — most (in)famously presented by Jonathan Rosenbaum in the New York Times — that took the occasion to re-evaluate the famed director's art and importance. At the time, I found the timing unfortunate and the arguments unconvincing; Bergman has always been a director who has meant a great deal to me, and at least several of his films have to be counted among my personal canon. Looking back now, having just watched Sawdust and Tinsel, a key developmental work for Bergman and yet probably the weakest of the many films I've seen by him, I nevertheless remain more convinced than ever that Bergman is a cinematic great.

Let me explain. I have yet to explore much of Bergman's early career, and it's mainly some later milestones that have endeared him to me: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, The Silence, and even a few flawed but powerful works like Shame and Hour of the Wolf. Sawdust, the story of the bitter circus owner Albert (Åke Grönberg) and his unfaithful mistress Anne (Harriet Andersson), shares some similarities with these later works, and it's easy to see how Bergman got from here to the more fully realized films he'd be making just a few years later. The film's story is told in a blend of expressionism and neorealism, with the latter pointing back to Bergman's earliest dramas and the former pointing ahead to the direction his films would take from then on. The expressionistic sequences are often compelling, displaying the kind of visual sense and eye for composition within cinematic space that detractors like Rosenbaum are continually insisting is missing from Bergman's cinema.

In the film's most compelling image, when Anne goes to visit the local theater troupe after a fight with Albert, she's left on the abandoned stage after a rehearsal. As the theater goes dark, she's framed within a circle of light, all alone in a sea of black. Critics often point to Bergman's theatrical fascination as an inherent negative — something you'd never hear about, say, Fassbinder — but this scene makes it clear that even early on Bergman understood the difference between cinematic and theatrical space, and was able to combine them in interesting ways. In this sequence he creates an interplay between the theater and the cinema, framing Andersson first in what might be called theatrical space, with the camera at a distance showing the whole stage with her in its center (though even here he tweaks the theater by placing the camera backstage rather than in an audience's position). Then he cuts to a medium shot, with Andersson approaching the camera, slowly filling the frame, the close-up allowing her cold and determined expression to complicate the scene's emotions, in a sense contradicting the lost, confused sense communicated by the earlier distancing long shot. Both emotional sensations remain in the shot; just as the theatrical space is being contained and reshaped by the cinematic frame, the loneliness and isolation of the long shot is being subsumed by Anne's determination to control her life.

There's also a wonderful scene early on in the film in which one character relates the story of the clown Frost (Anders Ek), whose wife betrayed him by swimming nude with some soldiers from the local garrison. Frost's very public humiliation as he's forced to retrieve his wife in front of a laughing mob and carry her naked body away prefigures the story of Albert's problems with his mistress. Bergman presents the flashback in a washed-out, overexposed white that obliterates detail and gives the scene a haunting, mesmerizing quality. There is quite possibly no greater director of embarrassment than Bergman, and he perfectly captures the humiliation of Frost, cutting between tortured close-ups and wildly exaggerated crowd shots of the observers. The soundtrack is similarly suggestive, veering between an eerie stillness and the roar of cackling laughter. The scene becomes sheer torture as it goes along, as much a purely symbolic representation of primal emasculation as a recounting of a specific incident.

Unfortunately, such scenes are the exception rather than the rule in this film. Bergman's engagement with neorealist aesthetics is much less interesting than his more expressionistic mode of storytelling. And though Bergman is frequently accused of theatricality because of the overwrought performances he wrings out of his actors in his wildest scenes, it's in the more realistic segments of his work that theatricality more often has free rein. For me, Sawdust is dragged down by the prosaic quality of its story and the overly theatrical emphasis on lengthy dialogue scenes with little visual or intellectual interest. Everything that the film might have to say in Grönberg's blustering speeches was already said far better in that self-contained early scene depicting Frost's humiliation, and doing so primarily in visual terms rather than verbally. The narrative never progresses far beyond there, because Bergman has structured things so that Frost's story is meant to foreshadow Albert's. What it actually does is render the rest of the film redundant. There's some pleasure in Harriet Andersson's effortless sensuality, and in Anders Ek's drunken, spiteful performance as the broken clown Frost, but the emphasis on such theatrical, actorly elements is exactly what Bergman's critics latch onto in the first place. In this early film, at least, there's some justice to the complaints.

It may seem odd that I've chosen a Bergman film I don't really like that much to mount a defense of this great director. But what struck me, on watching Sawdust and Tinsel, was not only the number of things that didn't work, but just how much did work in spite of the many weaknesses. Even in this minor transitional film, Bergman was already displaying the foundations of a powerfully expressive visual style and a tendency to intertwine cinema and theater in ways that comment on and develop both. He will certainly be missed.

11/26: I'm Not There

I've seen a lot of people asking what exactly Todd Haynes' I'm Not There has to tell us about Bob Dylan, its ostensible subject. This is, of course, the wrong question. Moreover, it's the question that Haynes' film is specifically intended to short-circuit, to avoid, and it's likewise the question that Dylan has structured his career around hiding from. He's not there, not in this film, and not in his music either, not the way anyone ever wants or expects him to be. I'm Not There has a lot to say, but not necessarily about Dylan, and not necessarily in the easily digested bites that seem to be desired by those doing the asking. The question implies that the film should dissect Dylan, explain him, relate key incidents in his life without artifice and show how the music is related to the life. That's what biopics do, right? It's a damn good thing this isn't a biopic.

What it is, is something much more complicated and beautiful. Haynes has taken Dylan and fragmented him, thrown bits and pieces of his persona, music, and chameleonic life into six different characters, all playing various ghosts of a living Dylan who's shed or absorbed all these aspects of himself to create whatever he is now. There's Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody Guthrie, an eleven-year-old black boy who's still anachronistically riding the rails in 1959, seemingly living in an earlier era in the time of burgeoning civil rights protests. There's Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, the protest-era Dylan, pushed onto stage by Joan Baez stand-in Alice (Julianne Moore) to belt out his heartfelt socially conscious songs. And Bale returns later in the film for a second turn as Pastor John, Jack transformed into a deeply religious minister in a reflection of Dylan's 80s turn to God. In between these two poles, there's Cate Blanchett in a shockingly powerful portrayal of Jude, essentially the mid-60s, gnomic burn-out Dylan as depicted in Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. And Ben Whishaw as Arthur (Rimbaud, naturally), the sensitive poet Dylan, whose role consists entirely of cryptic non-sequiturs delivered to a panel of interviewers who inevitably bring to mind the McCarthy Senate hearings. There's also Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor who once played the younger Dylan in a movie before heading into an increasingly bitter and disenchanted life. Finally, in the film's weirdest diversion, Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, a nod to Dylan's scoring of (and cameo in) Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

This diverse cast comprises a series of Dylan echoes, referencing and riffing on the musician but never quite forming any composite portrait. Haynes has blended these different elements together, not chronologically in terms of their place in Dylan's career, but in a dense free-associative montage that's constantly switching between stories, musical numbers, and meditative abstractions anchored by Kris Kristofferson's narration. As a fan of Dylan's music with a casual knowledge of his life, I was able to follow the web of associations pretty easily, as the film skips nimbly around from image to image. I'd imagine that non-Dylan fans would be missing out on a lot here, since Haynes doesn't make it easy to parse the complex accumulations of Dylan doppelgängers and coded references that are packed into almost every scene.

I myself was initially puzzled by the Billy the Kid sequence, wondering why Dylan's Pat Garrett soundtrack (musically a minor work) was being given such prominent treatment, until I realized that these scenes occupied a space within the film akin to Dylan's motorcycle crash and subsequent retreat to record his Basement Tapes with the Band. This sequence's retreat to the past mirrors Dylan's own retreat to America's musical past following his accident, drawing on both his own early folk and blues songs, along with a healthy dose of country. Furthermore, Gere's Old-West ramble through the carnivalesque town of Riddle (what better name?) recalls the circus imagery of any number of Dylan songs, as well as the assemblage of downtrodden and outrageous characters from "Desolation Row." These kinds of associations, references, and evocations of lyrics make up the very fabric of this film. Still, I think the film has plenty to offer even complete Dylan neophytes, in terms of the sheer beauty of its imagery, the wonderful tapestry of Dylan's music (mostly originals with a few new performances) that weaves through the film, and the idea of artistic rejuvenation that's embodied in Haynes' treatment of Dylan's many faces.

I hear that nagging voice again, though: so what does all this tell us about Dylan? Again, the wrong question, and one that's ironically a variation on the probing questions asked of Blanchett's Jude by a British journalist, who keeps trying to pin down Jude to a sound-bite-friendly cliché. This is probably the finest scene in the film, and Haynes allows it to morph slowly from a tense Q-and-A session into a nightmarish, noir-inspired music video of Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," with the journalist as Mr. Jones, who just knows that something is happening but doesn't understand what it is. Eventually, disturbed by Jude/Dylan's refusal to provide pat answers or give the TV-ready stock phrases that these leading questions demand, the journalist airs a program in which he "exposes" Jude's roots as an ordinary, suburban Jew from an affluent family. Does this reductionism to the question of roots, of background, explain anything about Jude or Dylan?

Of course not, and though such explanations and questions aren't Haynes' interest, he doesn't shy away from the core of Dylan's art, the shape-shifting nature of Dylan's persona, always inaccessible but otherwise quite different from one incarnation to the next. In fact, Haynes embodies this eclectic sense of personality not only in his multiple Dylans, but in the stylistic melange with which he surrounds them, drawing on his obviously rich filmic knowledge for a web of cinematic references every bit as dense as his musical ones. The Jude sequences draw most obviously on Don't Look Back — it would be impossible for Blanchett's sneering, mumbling, leather-clad impersonation not to recall the Dylan of that era — but more subtly these scenes reference Fellini's 8 1/2 with its warped visages of hangers-on, and in turn Woody Allen's own Fellini homage in Stardust Memories, with murals on the walls reflecting the character's inner states.

Even more than Fellini, though, this is Haynes' channeling of Godard. I've always thought that Godard, possibly my favorite director, has had a purely superficial impact in terms of the impact he's passed on to other directors. Only Fassbinder ever really seemed to "get" Godard and take his influence in a truly interesting direction, while countless other directors latched onto jump cuts and other surface aesthetic features. With I'm Not There, Haynes has arrived as another truly Godardian filmmaker, in the best possible sense. Yes, there are some of those kinds of surface aesthetic references, right down to the way the introduction of the film's title text, letter by letter, plays off of different combinations to alter meanings: I, I'm here, I'm her, I'm there, I'm not her. Likewise, the scene where Jude and his/her electric band literally machine-guns an audience of folk fans, before symbolically machine-gunning them with the force of their radically rule-breaking music. Haynes also plays with machine-gun rhythms in the periodic repetition of the portraits of his six Dylan stand-ins, and certain scenes specifically recall One Plus One or Masculin feminin. But Haynes has also absorbed Godard's influence in more subtle ways. Indeed, the film's essay-film structure, seamlessly blending narrative fragments with more ruminative interludes and purely abstract montage with poetic/philosophical voiceover, would be impossible without Godard's example.

Haynes has also taken Godard's example as to the importance of the soundtrack and its relation to the imagery, though there's nothing specifically Godardian about the way that Haynes uses sound here. The only similarity is the denseness of the sound, the complex layering, not just for the interplay of different sounds, but the meanings contained within them. Dylan's music is of course ubiquitous, his lyrics frequently commenting on scenes. Sometimes, ingeniously, Haynes allows the lyrics to comment even if they're not being sung yet. The noirish dream sequence I already mentioned was initially a bit mystifying, until I realized that the music from "Ballad of a Thin Man" was looping underneath it, and as I mentally filled in the lyrics they began to mirror and comment on what was happening on screen — and moments later, when the vocals actually begin, there's an echo effect, as well as, probably, a moment of realization for those not already familiar with the song.

I have absolutely no trouble calling I'm Not There a masterpiece. Haynes has crafted a film that, in saying nothing about Dylan, says everything about the nature of artistic experimentation and adaptation, the many ways in which art can be political, and the attempts of the cultural elites to impose their own neatly ordered narratives on the messy, shifty, angry artist. Haynes rejects such narratives out of hand. His narratives here are more like Dylan's own "narratives," in his story-songs like "Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," in which the semblance and structure of a story being told is belied by the poetical nonsense that comprises it. Haynes embraces that nonsensical spirit, and the result is one of the finest, sweetest, warmest evocations of artistic expression imaginable.