The Conversations #16: Easter Double Feature

Jason Bellamy and I have now posted the latest installment of our ongoing Conversations series, in which we discuss various films and filmmakers in back-and-forth debates and discussions. Our latest conversation revolves around two very different films that, in fact, tell more or less the same story: Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. It's a special double feature of movies about Jesus' life and death, just in time for Easter weekend. In addition to discussing both movies individually and in comparison to one another, we talk about cinematic representations of Jesus, and various matters pertaining to religion and faith in general. It's a pretty wide-ranging discussion of a pair of controversial films, so we hope our readers will be inspired to join in with additional thoughts and/or disagreements. As always, we view our conversation as just the start, and hope others will continue the talk.

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Irma Vep

Maggie Cheung is Irma Vep. Maggie Cheung is Irma Vep. Playing herself as an actress starring in an ill-fated remake of Georges Feuillade's classic silent serial Les Vampires, Cheung is synonymous with Olivier Assayas' clever, relentlessly meta film. Assayas' Irma Vep is a sly satire of the film industry, and an attempt to figure out the place of French cinema in a world in which the classic French cinema, from Feuillade to the New Wave and beyond, seems on the verge of being forgotten or rendered irrelevant. Assayas' film is very conscious of its cinematic lineage. Why else cast New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as struggling, aging director René Vidal? Vidal is himself a former icon, a legend even, who has become hopelessly out of touch, unsure of his art. He is remaking a very famous film, and knows it, and maybe isn't quite sure why he's doing it. He is the film's representative of a film industry that's growing old and growing young at the same time: while there is precious little room left for Vidal's arty kind of cinema, or for the old-school politically engaged work that once defined French art and cinema, a new generation has embraced a populist cinema of violence and action, and is frankly suspicious of any film that doesn't cater to mass audiences. A journalist, interviewing Cheung, tells her that Vidal is washed up, that Jean-Claude van Damme is where it's at, Schwarzenegger is where it's at: movies that audiences love, movies full of violence. And movies that this same journalist excitedly justifies as being full of poetry and "ballet" and choreography.

This is, not coincidentally, the same rationale that Vidal uses to explain to Maggie why he hired her. He saw her in a Chinese action movie, he says, and admired her "grace." She simply laughs, and quietly murmurs, almost embarrassed, that all the stunts were done by someone else; the clip that Assayas collages in at this point, looking cheap and tawdry from a blurry VHS, makes a mockery of Vidal's desperate search for "grace" in artistically bankrupt commercial ploys. Cheung fares much better. Because although Maggie Cheung is Irma Vep here, she's also Maggie Cheung, and always remains herself in the midst of all this movie-making chaos. It's very important to Assayas' film that Cheung is playing herself, is playing Maggie every bit as much as she is in the short film, Man Yuk, that Assayas made as a silent, expressionistic portrait of his actress and muse. Cheung is at the core of Irma Vep, looking bemused and somewhat non-plussed by all the pretensions, pettiness, and bitchiness that goes on during the making of a movie. She is in many ways Assayas' stand-in here, a quiet observer who's entirely foreign to this world: she speaks no French and is thus always standing to the side, watching these conversations without really understanding what's going on. Assayas keeps reminding us of this by having someone in the scene occasionally translate into English for Cheung, giving her fragments of information, always biased by the speaker's perspective and personal grudges. As an outsider, Maggie is free to observe from a distance, to stay above the fray, to simply accept her role — as fetish object in black rubber, as foreign exotic — in this weird production.

Indeed, Cheung — the character, not the actress, to the extent that there's a separation — begins to inhabit her role even when she's not filming. In one of the film's most stunning sequences, Maggie returns to her hotel room, jitters around to a massive fuzzy burst of Sonic Youth, then ventures out into the hotel in her skintight black rubber costume. She's become Irma, the vampire, the ghostly thief slinking through the corridors. She sneaks into another woman's room, spying on her as she lies in bed naked, yelling at her boyfriend over the phone, and then Maggie spies a pile of jewels and is seized by the desire to take them. It's all bathed in a glowing blue light, with the unreal sparkle of the jewels calling to Maggie/Irma, demanding her attention. Afterwards, she runs to the hotel's roof in the rain, the lights reflecting off the sleek curves of her suit, her hair getting all slick and wet, clinging in strands around her face, hovering like a vampire above the rain-shiny streets of Paris. It's gorgeous, the kind of sensual moment around which Assayas' film is built.


It's telling that Assayas has made a film about movie-making in which he privileges a sense of reality, of the moments that happen when the camera isn't rolling. There's a great sequence where the costume designer Zoé (Nathalie Richard), who's infatuated with Maggie, takes the actress to a party hosted by Mireille (Bulle Ogier). Assayas' camera weaves through the apartment's rooms in endless handheld takes, following conversations that drift in and out, as the layered soundtrack captures the cacophony of multiple threads going on at once. It's fun and funny as hell, particularly Zoé's conversation with the gossipy, matchmaking Mireille about Maggie, or the dance sequence where a group of girls put on Luna's cover of the Serge Gainsbourg/Brigitte Bardot tune "Bonnie and Clyde," another nod to the history of French culture, and its habit of appropriating cultural tropes from elsewhere. Just as the New Wave and its aftermath appropriated America's obsession with gangsters and crime flicks, Vidal is appropriating Chinese kung fu pictures to provide a different perspective on a distinctively French forebear — and Assayas, too, is appropriating from his actress, who is used here like a sample, an icon of foreignness and exoticism.

There is magic in this film, cinematic magic of the kind that only shows up in films made for "intellectuals," the word that the film's journalist uses so derisively, as a marker of elitism and anti-populism. There's magic in the film's celebration of its lead actress, who is radiant and exciting and who drifts through the film with poise and strength, even adrift as she is in a strange culture. There is magic, especially, in the final sequence, in which Vidal's unfinished film is screened and it is revealed that he was apparently not making the boringly faithful remake that everyone assumed he was making. Instead, his fragmentary assemblage (and Assayas') is a dazzling, avant-garde collage in which Cheung slinks through a barrage of slashes, designs and white noise, scratches that trace her form or the directionality of her intense gaze, creating a cinema of bare essences in which shapes, impressions, movements are everything. It's a jaw-dropping sequence that respects the past, not absolutely, but as a foundation for the experiments and playful reconstructions of the present. That's the spirit in which Assayas' film is made, as well, riffing on the history of French cinema as he laments what's been lost and celebrates the enduring possibility of a cinema that really matters, that's really in touch with people, with emotions, with visual beauty.

Blissfully Yours

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Man Is Not a Bird

Man Is Not a Bird was the first feature film of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, who later achieved cult acclaim for the sexual surrealism of WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie. In this debut, the themes Makavejev would explore in those later films — the double-edged sword of sexual liberation, totalitarianism, Communism, the tense relations between men and women as caused by social structures — are expressed through much more conventional means. The film provides a hint of the origins of Makavejev's sensibility in social realism and pseudo-documentary observation. There are early traces here of the irreverent perspective on sex and politics that would appear in Makavejev's later films, though here his satire is understated and subtle, ingrained within the framework of a loose narrative centered around two different working men. One, Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec) is a famous foreman renowned for his expertise in finishing jobs ahead of schedule, while the other, Barbulovic (Stole Arandelovic), is a lowly menial laborer who quarrels with his wife (Eva Ras) and his mistress alike.

The gulf between these two men, both laborers under the Communist system, is the gulf between the boss and the mere worker, but even Rudinski, so well-respected and famed, is subject to orders from above. He is as much positioned within a rigid hierarchy as the less fortunate Barbulovic. The film is all about power and the structures that control and shape lives. To this end, Makavejev opens with a scene of a hypnotist delivering a speech about the power of his craft, his ability to overcome people's innate beliefs and superstitions with his own control. Then Makavejev displays a very different form of control by cutting to a Communist Party manager giving orders over the phone, and then still another form of control when he shows a voluptuous nightclub singer arousing a roomful of drunken man into a frenzy of violence and spontaneous clamor simply by grinding her hips, shaking her ample breasts and suggestively licking her full lips. These scenes, each one exploring a different way in which people lose control over their lives and actions, establish the film as a kind of treatise on control and power, on the loss of self that occurs in both sexuality and under oppressive governmental regimes.

One thread within the film is the domination of women by men. Barbulovic's cowed, subservient wife is constantly berated by her husband, who expects her to obey his every order, to prepare dinner for him, and above all to be silent, never to question him. What's unstated but very much present in this relationship is the idea that Barbulovic, who is on the bottom of the chain of command in every aspect of his life, needs this sense of superiority and dominance at home. At one point, a tour guide is leading a group of schoolchildren around the industrial site where Barbulovic works. The tour guide praises Barbulovic as one of the best laborers, but in the same breath implicitly puts him down for not being a "mental" worker with an office job; the unspoken subtext is that this worker doesn't have to use his brain, or perhaps that as a mere laborer he doesn't really have a brain worth using. It is in cruel but subtle ways like this that the state keeps its people in line, convincing them that they have their place and that they dare not try to rise above it.

In this atmosphere, Barbulovic needs to feel as though he has someone to order around the way he is ordered around at work. It is in this way, perhaps, that the dynamics of power and control corrupt and infiltrate the realm of sexuality and relationships between men and women. Within a society where people are rarely able to feel much sense of self-determination in anything they do, they enact dramas of sexual domination and exploitation instead. So Barbulovic insists on his wife's acquiescence to his philandering, his naked betrayal of her: he even gives away her dresses to his mistress. As it turns out, his wife is not so meek, and she assaults his mistress on the streets and decides that she is no longer going to give in to the "hypnotism" by which men keep women under their thumbs. By the end of the film, this mousy, shy woman is seen with a new man, laughing and drinking with him, having realized that men need not be the only ones to cheat or abandon their spouses.


The other story running through the film is the romance developing between the older Rudinski and the young barber Rajka (Milena Dravic). Rudinski, like Barbulovic, is trapped by circumstances and powers beyond his control. He is famed as a great employee and a great manager, and as a result he travels everywhere, never staying in one place for very long, always laboring under pressure to get things done as quickly as possible and move on to the next place, the next job. His is a life dedicated to work, with little room for developing meaningful relationships. Thus his romance with Rajka, as passionate as it is, seems doomed from the start: he knows that he'll have to move on sooner or later, leaving her behind as, no doubt, he's left many others behind in the past. And even though he reassures her with various promises — even telling her he'll take her with him when he goes — she seems to know as well as him that this is a temporary arrangement, a temporary love. And so she never quite convincingly fends off the advances of local boy Bosko (Boris Dvornik), a lecherous ladies' man who counts off his amorous conquests with notches on the steering wheel of his truck. She knows, perhaps, that when Rudinski is gone she'll have to settle for a different kind of romance with a more geographically convenient object of affection.

Makavejev is exploring, in many different contexts, how little control these people (like all people, in some ways) have over their lives, how much they are at the mercy of outside forces. Throughout the film, he inserts digressions with a Communist party official who never seems to leave his office, but whose edicts over the telephone have wide-ranging consequences. At one point, he is able to tell a group how to vote on an upcoming decision; "we decided how the Communists would vote, and thank God you're all Communists," he exclaims. The people at the bottom get whatever the ones at the top decide to hand down. For his dedication and skill, Rudinski gets an elaborate party at the climax of the film, a lavish celebration where he gets a medal and a handshake, small compensation for his total commitment to his work, while an orchestra plays Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. (In a hilarious scene, the orchestra accidentally wanders into a working area, where they're beset by showers of sparks, the dress of one instrumentalist catches on fire, and the site foreman responds to the orchestra's alarmed chatter about the Ninth Symphony by saying, "we don't produce such things here.")

The film's finale escalates towards a complete breakdown in the relationships that had developed throughout the film. The orchestra's bombast is set off against Rudinski's post-celebration depression, as he throws a bottle of liquor and shatters a mirror; Makavejev freezes the image of the shattered glass, capturing the moment of destruction in a still frame. This freeze frame is matched by another that caps a love scene between Rajka and Bosko. The pair have sex in Bosko's truck and then follow it with a joyous sequence in which Bosko playfully sprays a hose at the truck's window while Rajka presses herself up against the glass, making faces and splaying her fingers as the water cascades across the windshield. Makavejev freezes the image of Rajka's hand on the glass, a moment of sexual and sensual fulfillment that he treats with as much import as the moments of desperation within the film. One could argue that, while the men in the film remain trapped by work and responsibility, the women achieve some measure of independence by striving for sensual pleasure rather than romance or stability; just as the pain of Rudinski's depression lingers in a frozen image, so too does the freeze frame of Rajka's hand aginst a sheet of water allow this ephemeral moment to linger, to endure beyond its brief duration.

This is an early indication of Makavejev's later, more fully developed dichotomy of sex as containing the potential for both destruction and for radicalism and self-fulfillment. This film lacks the freewheeling spirit and sense of play that runs through Makavejev's later works, but its near-documentary commitment to prosaic reality, to the drab exteriors of industrial communities, makes it a promising, satisfying debut nonetheless.