It is a surprise to this viewer that the director carries off these new challenges rather effortlessly. The decision to use black and white has a number of implications and visually connects the film to the pastorals of Ingmar Bergman. Going beyond mere facade, The White Ribbon owes a debt to the philosophical struggles of The Seventh Seal and the narrative construction of Wild Strawberries. One can easily imagine Haneke’s schoolteacher protagonist growing up to become Bergman’s backward-glancing Dr. Isak Borg, and the whole of The White Ribbon‘s mystery falling somewhere between remembrances of a young Bibi Andersson and the reception of an honorary degree. That Haneke’s film was actually shot in color and then desaturated to its present starkness befits the cloistered lives of the characters who populate his little German hamlet, who have had their vivacity chaffed from them by various powers that be. More likely, though, since this technical sleight of hand is only occasionally noticeable in the film itself, the choice of using black and white was made to emphasize the extreme polarity of the world in which the story unfolds. It is the black and white of the feudal system, of lord and land, the black and white of the Protestant church, as hammered down by the village pastor. It is the culmination of generations of rigid ideology that will lead a German people faithfully, thoughtlessly to this story’s ultimate conclusion, twenty-five years beyond the final frame.

Yet somehow within the stockades of this obdurate world, there is space for romance to grow, however furtively. The courtship between the schoolteacher, played by Christian Friedel, and the Baroness’s nanny, Eva, blushingly portrayed by Leonie Benesch, is one of the more touching and genuine relationships I’ve ever come across in a film. That this love, which blooms quietly amid a rash of barn burnings, suicides and ritualistic shamings, was written and directed by the same man responsible for The Piano Teacher is nearly unthinkable. It is only when taken alongside the tragedies composing the film’s central mystery that this relationship assumes the bittersweet tinge familiar to Haneke’s work. As with Juliette Binoche and Thierry Neuvic in the masterful Code Unknown, their embrace is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Still, when stripped of everything else, the swirling image of Eva and the schoolteacher waltzing clumsily at the harvest celebration—eins, zwei, drei, eins, zwei, drei—remains an indelible one, containing both the ballet of Ophuls and the charmed nostalgia of early Truffaut. For narrator and audience alike, it is one of only a handful of moments in The White Ribbon of whose truth we can be certain.

Technically speaking, the film is quite breathless, and might be the crown jewel of any other director’s career. The composition is precise, the period met head on. It is easily the most accessible and palatable of Haneke’s works (please, start here and not with something like Funny Games, lest you be completely put off). It won the Palm d’Or at Cannes last year and was nominated as best foreign-language film at the Academy Awards, and deservedly so. But Michael Haneke, more than most, does not make films to win awards; he would sooner twist a boutonniere through your heart. Michael Haneke makes films to challenge his audience. He has an inimitable knack for finding a raw nerve and latching hold of it for two hours at a time, and when he lets go, an ache you never knew was there before lingers on for days. This is not to say that The White Ribbon is devoid of challenge, that it is easy. Far from it. But I do feel that its crisp veneer, its exaction of time and place, are a detriment to its overall impact.

Since seeing the film in the theater this past winter I’ve wrestled with Haneke’s decision to present his story under such well-worn historical circumstances, and I’ve come to understand it as an attempt at the elemental. Whereas the majority of his films deal with the ways in which we have been alienated from others and ourselves by media (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), technology (Cache), and patterns of cowed repetition (The Seventh Continent), The White Ribbon tries to move beyond the symptoms to the sickness itself. What that sickness is exactly is difficult to say. In the present film it lies somewhere between idea and ideology, the point at which rationality gives way to fundamentalism. It is the tendency for people in meager moral, spiritual or financial situations to grasp hold of something absolutely as a means of righting themselves. “In the name of a beautiful idea,” Haneke said in a New Yorker article last fall, “you can become a murderer.” Where fortitude flags, ideology bolsters. Nowhere does this seem truer than with the small German community in The White Ribbon. Especially susceptible to this reasoning are the town’s children, whose wide watchful eyes are a common motif, and whose hands, it can be inferred, orchestrate the majority of the film’s violence.

It is with these children, however, that Haneke loses what he is working toward. By rooting his examination of why we do wrong in the generation that would grow into the Third Reich, the universality of what he discovers can be brushed off as a uniquely German problem. Audiences are able to step back from the events of the film, point an obvious finger at nascent Nazism, and walk out of the theater relatively unscathed. This disconnect is only amplified by the strong historical aesthetic. Whether a similar distillation of human nature could have been reached under more modern circumstances remains, like the film itself, a mystery. Perhaps our lives are simply too cluttered in the twenty-first century to exist in high-contrast black and white. But as it stands now, when subtext to an audience is ninety percent context, The White Ribbon exists as a finely chiseled headstone beneath a century of glass: curious, morbid, oddly familiar, but ultimately the designation of someone else’s bones. – [DVD]

Drama/Mystery

Unrated

DVD Release Date: 6/28/10

Werner Herzog has been here before. His 1979 remake of Nosferatu, while not superior to the original, was an artistic success. It grabbed hold of the classic Stoker tale, aped in occasional homage the framing of Murnau, but generally set off in its own creaking and shadowy direction, aided by the grainy authenticity of 1970s German cinema and the frightening performance of Herzog’s best fiend, Klaus Kinski. For Herzog to remake Murnau seems in retrospect perfectly logical. The breadth of Herzog’s work could fall under the umbrella of Man and His Impossible Endeavor. What greater challenge exists for a German filmmaker than to remake one of the most famous German films of all time?

Now we find Herzog, thirty years later and none the wiser (this is not a slight—the man popped out of the womb quoting Schopenhauer, I’m sure of it), remaking another classic, Bad Lieutenant (1992). The original film is a blistering Scorsese-esque portrayal of a drug-addled cop dangling far beyond the end of his rope. It took Harvey Keitel‘s career up several notches and is without question his best performance. Period. Haven’t seen it? Well, neither has Werner Herzog. In fact, he’d never even heard of it before production began for his Lieutenant. Nor had he heard of Abel Ferrara, the original film’s director. Still, this naivety didn’t stop Ferrara from remarking of Herzog and company: “I wish those people die in Hell. I hope they’re all in the same streetcar, and it blows up.” He should have been more specific in directing his Bronxian rage. While the film’s script—not written by Herzog—does borrow strongly from the original, and both films share the same producer, Herzog himself is a sort of innocent. Upon learning of Ferrara’s existence and fury, not only did Herzog petition (unsuccessfully) to have the Bad Lieutenant moniker dropped from his film, but he also invited Ferrara out for a bottle of whiskey. Abel has yet to accept.

So is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans a remake, or isn’t it? Yes and no. Re-envisioning is a more suitable term. Certain parties (see above) wanted to do a remake, only when the project passed through Werner’s own brand of madness what came out the other side was something absurdly original, essentially Herzogian.

The differences between the two films are myriad, the most glaring of these being the tone. Port of Call abandons the boilerplate tragedy of its predecessor for an asylum farce, and is in the director’s eyes a black comedy. Where Harvey Keitel’s lieutenant is a man you want to see redeem himself, Nicolas Cage‘s lieutenant is a man you would happily nudge over the edge of a cliff, if only to see how high he would bounce. And bounce he does. The manic energy spiking in Cage’s performance cannot be overstated. Arms flail, pills fly, accents change with the irregularity of Vampire’s Kiss (1988), acts of violence erupt with the intensity of Wild at Heart (1990). This is vintage, erratic Cage, certainly not his strongest work but easily his most entertaining role of the last decade. Yet chew as he may on various bits of scenery, paraphernalia and fellow cast members, his performance is never able to hijack Herzog’s vision. Under a saner man such a performance might trash a film, but with Herzog, who has made a career of working with the clinically unbalanced (Kinski, Bruno S., Brad Dourif), Cage’s hysteria takes the film to new heights. To borrow from Val Kilmer, who appears in full form as the titular lieutenant’s partner, it’s all a bit like watching a tempest in a teacup.

Things work best for Port of Call when Herzog follows his leading man down, when he shakes off the conventions of a cop procedural and does something disastrous. He goes so far as to pull the film apart at the seams when Cage’s character becomes unglued, at one point using a POV shot from an alligator that may or may not exist, at another point interrupting a key stakeout scene with a full minute of close-ups of imaginary iguanas to the tune of Johnny Adams’ “Release Me.” It’s disgusting. It’s brilliant. In such moments I see a distillation of Herzog’s oeuvre. But more than this, I find both that which makes true art a thing to admire and that which is most admirable in life itself: commitment. It is with the absolute commitment of a captain who goes down with his ship that Herzog punctuates his narrative so completely. It’s the same commitment that drives Aguirre into the Amazon, Stroszek to America, and Timothy Treadwell to Alaska. It is the solitary penguin in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) that, rather than return to its flock, chooses to flee from the ocean into a thousand miles of barren ice and almost certain death. It is Nic Cage pulling a gun on a pair of geriatrics. Whether right or wrong, remake or not, it is resolute.

And who can argue with that? – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Crime/Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 4/6/10

Steven Soderbergh

Godard anticipated Mr. Soderbergh’s present aim as early as the mid-60s (earlier, probably) in a scene from Two or Three Things I Know About Her, where Marina Vlady and a fellow prostitute pace around in their underwear with TWA duffle bags over their heads, to the delight of an especially wealthy John. It was around this time that Godard’s cinema became disenchanted with American consumer culture, and the Children of Marx and Coca-Cola smashed their pop bottles in the street and fled to the East. Capitalism and the American hegemony will, in time, make dancing shapes of us all.

Unlike in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, however, Mr. Soderbergh is not speculating at some distant point along the horizon, a point where human lives are reduced to corporate emblems for the sake of streamline capitalism. That point has already been passed. He is merely putting his camera to the ground to catch a glimpse of Godard’s nightmare, manifest, as it is today, in the torpid shape of porn star Sasha Grey (her face, one of the most marketable commodities in the adult entertainment industry) and the present machinations of global commerce. The film’s narrative, about an upwardly striving, fiscally irresponsible call girl in the personal branding age, is the logical end of Vlady’s TWA scene in Two or Three Things. Grey’s character, escort Chelsea/Christine, spends her time between clients worrying about SEO (search-engine optimization), finding the perfect photograph with which to advertise her services online, and constructing the persona of a “high class” call girl. She measures out her days in brand-name lingerie and 5-star restaurants. She is affectless, wooden, a porcelain sex doll trading hands across Manhattan. Her interior life is almost entirely ignored; with the exception of her fondness for Personology books, we know nothing about her. This is exactly how Mr. Soderbergh would have it, how Chelsea/Christine would have it, how personal branding has it—an almost glib impersonality.

Where The Girlfriend Experience fails is in its casual approach to this criticism. We live in a time so overly commodified and humanly cold that it is difficult to differentiate between an attempt at social realism and one of deriding social commentary. Certainly they coexist (a McDonalds advertisement is practically a satire of itself), but the line Mr. Soderbergh draws between the two is so consistently thin that I wonder if most people won’t miss the point. Primarily, that when we jeer at Chelsea/Christine’s lifestyle, her naivety and petty preoccupations, we are jeering at a reflection of ourselves.

Sadly, the art of reading subtext is a dying one, poorly tended in this age of signs and symbols. And because of this, Mr. Soderbergh’s film falls victim to the very system it is rebelling against. Just as Chelsea/Christine fails to become anything more than the symbol of her sex trade, to her clients, to the audience of The Girlfriend Experience, so too is the film itself absorbed at face value. The cluttered shot of a sporting goods store or boutique is processed solely as an establishing shot, which is its immediate function, yet that which it signifies, the wolfish culmination of overproduction and capitalist greed, is elided in our minds because of a widening perceptual disconnect between the signifier and the signified, between the image of a thing and the thing itself. An entire lifetime of exposure to flickering adverts and disembodied symbology has rendered us fundamentally incapable of realigning the two. We see the shapes of the film dancing but we fail to ask why they dance. Might it have been better for Mr. Soderbergh to blanket The Girlfriend Experience in expository voiceover, as Godard was so fond of doing? Possibly. But there is an equal danger in forced ideologies as there is in latent ideological tendencies. In the latter scenario the message is missed completely, in the former it is heard but not questioned. Which is worse?

All of this is to say that perhaps I misspoke earlier. Perhaps it is not a case of The Girlfriend Experience failing the audience, but of the audience failing The Girlfriend Experience. Or, more apropos, like a man trying to tell a rock that it’s a rock, of each failing the other in turn. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 9/29/09

As the title sequence of Roman Polanski‘s Repulsion suggests, with its violation of the human eye in closeup by thin striations of text, the film we are about to watch is one concerned with altered perceptions. Like the infamous razoring scene from Luis Buñuel‘s surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1929) to which it harkens, where a woman’s eye is bisected with a blade, a visceral call to arms by the director that we abandon old habits of viewing, this opening credit roll acts as an immediate declamation of Polanski’s concurrent aim at a new type of filmic experience. Although his departure will not be as radical as that of the surrealists, whose preoccupation with the disinterested play of thought leads to an often plotless scattering of associations, Polanski does share with the likes of Buñuel, Cocteau and Dali, a sense of the omnipotence of dream, but with a key difference: where surrealism considers the marriage of waking-reality and dream-reality to be the road to truth, Polanski treats this union as the road to madness (though André Breton does pine for the freedom of the insane in his seminal text, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), however facetiously).

The eye Polanski draws his name and title across belongs to the very beautiful and quietly disturbed Carol Ledoux (played here with startling vacuity by a twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve), and the cleaving text acts as much as a departure point from the audience’s traditional modes of filmic experience as it does an entry point into Carol’s troubled world. It does not serve, however, as an invitation into Carol’s mind, for she is very much, despite her sexually aggressive hallucinations, an impenetrable character. This resistant quality can be partially attributed to Deneuve’s playing Carol as a blank slate, someone whose past circumstances and present thoughts are almost entirely vacant, left bare to be furnished by the audience’s own needs and inclinations—our imaginations make monstrous the smallest sound in the night, and by this principle Polanski lets us create our own undoing. More than by Deneuve’s acting, though, this impenetrability exists as a limitation of the medium itself. When it comes to achieving interiority, film, compared to literature, is decidedly lacking. One cannot simply present stream-of-consciousness in narrative film without it assuming the clunky form of voiceover (Janet Leigh‘s character in Psycho (1960), for example) or, conversely, presenting itself as a disjointed montage of fleeting images, á la the surrealists. This conventional wisdom does not affect Polanski’s ambition, however, and he does everything within his technical ability to rebel against it, achieving an ultimate proximity to his subject’s interiority that is closer than the cinema has ever come before.

Of the five senses that account for human experience, film is bound, and privileged, to convey only sight and sound, and contrary to the implication of the film’s credit sequence, that it is the eye which will carry us through, Repulsion actually achieves a mimesis of Carol’s reality by way of the viewer’s ear. Take for example the auditory clues during the scene in which Carol murders her would-be suitor, Colin (John Fraser). The film as a whole is frighteningly silent, with the exception of a small handful of recurring sound bites. Some of these are presented rather frankly, the funereal march of a tympani drum that opens the film and accompanies Carol on her aimless walks, or Carol’s Theme, a dulcet though melancholy flute refrain that seems to announce Carol’s solitude as though it was a character in Sergei Prokofiev‘s classic composition Peter and the Wolf (a broken bird, perhaps). Others of these sounds are given greater subtlety, existing at muted levels, both arriving and departing without direction. In the murder scene two such recurrent sounds conspire to give the audience an auditory impression of Carol’s imbalance. These are the sound of a child’s fingers clumsily inching up and down the C-scale on a piano, and that of an airplane passing far overhead. Both appear independently at other points within the film, yet they arrive together here at the moment after Colin barges through Carol’s front door and before he closes it for the last time. The aural montage created between the two is one of immense space, the very local, personal sound of fumbling through basic scales on a piano contrasted against the distant and anonymous noise of jet traffic. The source of these sounds, though potentially belonging simply to the ambience of a London flat, seems too specific and aligned to have arisen from anywhere else but Carol’s own memory, which leaves her and the audience, in a moment where rationality could right the situation with Colin, reeling instead in the telescopic distance between the local and the remote. The murder itself then becomes a silent byproduct of her auditory wandering, as Carol’s blank face while blunting Colin with the candlestick similarly reflects her nonpresence in the act.

Despite Polanski’s directorial eye and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor‘s deft manipulation of the apparatus, producing some dizzying, confounding distortions of space, these acoustic pings are somehow more amenable to our experience of Carol’s psychosis. It is through auditory hallucination that we first suspect Carol’s madness. “We must get this crack mended,” she says early in the film, looking fixedly out of frame. The sound of broken concrete crumbles into and out of existence, and then the camera cuts to the shot of a crack in the kitchen wall, preformed and unmoving. Even when the theme of cracked walls returns later, with the visual hallucination of the walls physically cracking catching up to her auditory hallucination, it is the sound of their destruction, like the crash of a thunderbolt, which has the more potent effect.

The logic behind this sonic preeminence can be found in the way that we relate to sight versus sound in Repulsion. When we watch the film, the visual component has set dimensions that are informed by the size and shape the screen. The image occupies a certain small percentage of our field of vision and, more importantly, though the film itself is of a three-dimensional space, its projected visual exists in only two dimensions; the image is framed by the edges of the screen and exists separately from the non-cinematic world from which we view it. We see Carol as her dementia mounts pacing circles through an Expressionist iteration of her apartment, but with a clear ability to mark the distinction between her space and our own. This sense of delineation between the cinematic and non-cinematic is considerably blurred by the film’s sound, where even though the source of cinematic auditory stimuli is apparent, its separation from non-cinematic auditory stimuli often is not, as both types of sound occupy the same liminal space. This phenomenon is most quickly demonstrated by a telephone ringing in a film (as they so regularly do in Repulsion) and the viewer turning to see if his own phone has rung. Of course a full-fledged confusion of the cinematic and non-cinematic is rare, and thus a kind of added bonus to the sound department’s exquisite design, but the fact remains that because acoustics extend beyond the flatness of the screen and penetrate us, percuss us, actively violate our sense of hearing, where image, grotesque or beautiful (with Deneuve beneath Taylor’s lens, sometimes both), lies docile in two-dimensional space on the screen, the film’s audio component elicits an exponentially greater degree of empathy for Carol than does its visual counterpart.

Certainly this is not the case with most films. It is a rarity necessitated by Polanski’s aim to show us a woman who is insane but whose insanity is not recognized by those around her; we are the ones who must recognize it. He forces the audience into Carol’s ear, and we are synchronously attacked by the same stringent doorbells and phones, haunted by the same distant shuffling of feet, the same auditory echoes of memory that occupy such a large portion of Carol’s perceptions. Polanski strangles our acoustic space because he cannot constrict the physical walls around us, and the hearing of Repulsion thereby becomes something experiential. This technique is mimicked to similar effect in more modern films such as Darren Aronofsky‘s Pi (1998) and Lodge Kerrigan‘s phenomenal Clean, Shaven (1993), both of which, like Repulsion, attempt to approach the interiority of a schizophrenic main character.

Ultimately, though, we cannot breach the internal workings of Carol Ledoux, as no method exists, filmic or otherwise, to fully immerse one person into the sensorial reality of another, but the film does come startlingly close at times. What we come away from Repulsion with then is a lingering openness of perception, not exactly paranoid but not accepting either. Sounds are intensified, their origins dubious. As with the other two films in his Apartment Trilogy (Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976)), Polanski excels at presenting us with the banal only then to turn it over in his directorial hand and show us its rotting underbelly. He finds corruption in the seemingly uncorrupt, repulsion in the beautiful, and his surgical eye and ear brings the analytical scalpel down across the cornea of our own world, leaving us humming quietly to ourselves and searching the walls for cracks. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Thriller/Horror/Drama

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 7/28/09

The greatest wonder and compliment, I feel, to the brilliance of Resnais’ second feature-length narrative—and here we must use the term “narrative” loosely—is that nearly half a century after the above interview with Cinepanorama was conducted, we can still do nothing better than throw our hands into the air and chuckle when asked about its meaning. Many people find this elusiveness frustrating, and the refusal of the film’s director, now bitten with the frost of his winter years, to submit any clues of authorial intent (not surprising, the film was penned by Alain Robbe-Grillet) only adds to its mystique. However, I submit that this mystery is not a thing to be glowered at, a bad thing. Quite the opposite: this uncertainty is a thing to be reveled in, a good thing. For you see, reader, all joy is lost in explanation.

Last Year at Marienbad, like Resnais’ first feature-length film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), an existential love affair set against post-atomic angst, has as one of its primary concerns the intersubjective experience of reality: how objective reality is created, or not, by a triangulation of many individuals’ subjective perceptions. For events occurring on a massive scale, such as the bombing of Hiroshima, this reality is created quite easily and its features are, by so many points of reference, undeniable. However, events on a smaller scale, for instance in Hiroshima, Mon Amour the female protagonist’s recalling that her first love died in her arms on a deserted riverwalk, or the trist that informs the narrative of Last Year at Marienbad, suffer from a lack of intersubjective credibility. For these events, there is no consensus. There is only the wandering of a single mind, which has nothing to use but its own refracted image as a point of cross-reference. The result is a corruption of intersubjective certainty, and the individual memory begins to run away with itself. In both films, these personal recollections, though dubious, are presented to the viewer as genuine to the films’ cinematic reality. There is no visual cue, no change in tone or presentation for the audience to differentiate between what is factual and what is not. In the same way, it is not possible for the character whose memory we enter to differentiate between the emotional impacts of a true recollection versus a false one; both are felt with the same degree of intensity and conviction. Objective and subjective realities are here impossibly confused, and the audience is in no small way to blame. By the logic of intersubjective construction, Resnais has made the viewer, simply through the act of viewing his film, the second point of reference by which these faulty memories gain validity and burst into objective reality! We are, in Last Year at Marienbad, all parties to the murder.

Of course none of this play between reality and unreality would be possible without Resnais’ shattering treatment of time, which can be attributed to the collision between the director’s own documentarian background and Marienbad co-creator Alain Robbe-Grillet’s position within the Nouveau Roman literary movement. From his fifteen years working as a documentarian, Resnais gained a sense of the mechanics of history and developed an eye for the patterns that compose its seemingly linear progression. What he saw, and he certainly was not the first, was that history moves in cycles. But more than this he came to evince a sense of the omnipresence of history, that in the human mind all of history is condensed within the present moment, like an infinite series of transparencies (or strips of celluloid) stacked atop one another. This theory presents itself most startlingly in Resnais’ award-winning documentary Night and Fog (1955), where black-and-white footage of Holocaust concentration camps is cut with modern color footage of the bucolic Polish countryside, the effect being a potent sense of dread and an obliteration of the comfortable distance we place between the past and ourselves. This method of condensing time functions in Last Year at Marienbad in similar fashion, where though we experience the disjointed narrative across a runtime of 94 minutes, for the protagonist immersed in the double exposure of past and present, the story might take only a few seconds to tell, or a few minutes, a few hours, a few months, an eternity. We cannot know, and the film refuses to provide an answer. It only gives us the sensation of time rising slowly above our heads like an uncontrollable flood.

This flood, however, would merely be standing water if deprived of novel movement and direction, and Resnais’ sense of the immense depth of history in the present moment might otherwise be subjugated by a linear narrative. Such is the case with Hiroshima, Mon Amour, where the past is waded through along a straight path of narrative progression, however open-ended. This is not to fault that film, but merely to recognize it as an intermediate step between traditional treatments of cinematic time and the afocal fugue of time achieved in Last Year at Marienbad, where neither the past nor the present is favored as the viewer’s jumping off point.

The temporal volleying in Marienbad is, by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s design, endlessly beguiling. His aim, like that of all Nouveau Roman authors, is to disrupt the A to B of traditional narrative and create a story whose meaning is pointed not in a single direction but in every direction. As Resnais remarks in the aforementioned Cinepanorama interview, no answer to this type of story is correct, and no answer is incorrect. If the effect of Robbe-Gillet’s narrative technique could translate to the art of painting it would most likely resemble a work by Jackson Pollock, whose lines constantly evolve, swooping and doubling across one another, running in every direction off the canvas and into eternity.  And yet, though both men seek to arrest a glimpse of chaos, Robbe-Gillet’s design is more precise, his lines more straightly drawn. What he achieves, and what Resnais accentuates with his direction, is a deceptive unbalance, one where the viewer does everything he can to assert traditional ideas of space and time onto the vacillating narrative only to have the plush rug pulled out from underneath him, again and again, just as he is about to gain perspective. Costume and location shift, dialogue stutters, repeats, memory and action deform one another, both with and against the protagonist’s will, and the audience is kept afloat, never knowing if the next step taken will be made of marble or paper-mâche.

If there is only one element of Last Year at Marienbad by which the audience can gain a sense of stability, one constant, it is the infinite geometry of the Marienbad chateaux. Before we achieve character, those loose allegorical molds, X, A and M, we are introduced to the space in which their shadows will be cast. Both the grounds of the chateaux and the halls of the building itself are composed of soberingly clean lines. In these hallways Resnais’ camera wanders constantly, using breathtakingly long tracking shots that examine both the baroque details of the architecture, like memories intricately crafted and instantly forgotten, and the great voids of space that lie between them. In the French garden he favors a stationary shot, one that allows the viewer’s eye to make its own progression down the main approach, wandering the hedgerows and sharply cut promenade, as both design and vision are drawn into the horizon and beyond. Such shots are frequent throughout Marienbad, in fact they bookend the film. Their immediate result is a calming effect on the viewer: a single, fluidly observed tracking shot through a hallway serves as temperance to the volatile and elusive narrative, where meaning is forcefully skewed. In their simplicity there is room for reflection, in their regularity and uniformity, a meditative pause. It is here perhaps that meaning can be found, or lack of meaning reconciled with.

Ultimately, there is no arrival in Marienbad‘s geometry. No point exists where the eye may come to rest along its lines; there is only constant departure. In this perpetual motion we see reflected an endless searching, one that perfectly compliments the mechanics of the film. “Perspective,” Resnais later says in his Cinepanorama interview, “is only gained from the next point.” But it is a point that we never reach in Last Year at Marienbad. Without it, the film eschews concrete meaning, and the audience is reduced to the position of the confused, heartsick protagonist, whose simple task of remembering proves to be anything but simple.

At first glance this all seems impossible, the viewer lost in the film, caught in the progression of its straight lines, between its immutable statues and granite slabs. But this is precisely where we find ourselves. And some forty-eight years into the life of Last Year at Marienbad, no audience has been able to escape its impeccable design. Watching the film for the first time is no different than watching it for the tenth time, or, if I may extrapolate, the hundredth time. We are all still left simply wandering, tracing its lines, listening to its echoes, and losing ourselves in its night. Alone and suspended with Alain Resnais. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama/Romance

Not Rated

DVD Release Date (Criterion Collection) – 6/23/09

The memory to which Ramsinski recoils, top billing at a Wrestlemania-like event, April 6, 1989, burns with a more consistent intensity for all the ways he encounters that moment in his daily routine. News clippings collage the walls of his van. A twenty-year-old action figure of him rides on the dashboard. He dusts off an old Nintendo to virtually relive, again and again, the match that was his high-water mark. Even his hearing aide is anachronistic. His hair, a long, fleetingly Herculean mess of peroxide blonde, looks much as it did in the photographs we see of his rise to fame. And it is through this hair that we first encounter Randy. During the opening sequences we follow him at his back, the camera never moving from beyond his shoulders and up, and the darkness of the rooms and people he passes through makes his bright hair the dominant visual by contrast. In these early scenes, and throughout much of the movie, Randy is constantly stereotyped and self-stereotyped, reduced to this costumed exterior, and it becomes apparent that his self and his persona are hugely divided. When this persona is removed, and Randy is sidelined from the ring, a crisis of identity sets the drama of The Wrestler into motion.

Aronofsky’s three previous films have all considered obsession and addiction in one form or another: knowledge (Pi), drugs (Requiem for a Dream), and love (The Fountain). And whether it is an elusive formula or a tight red dress, Aronofsky has been ceaselessly bleak in his belief in the weakness of the human spirit to turn away from the golden carrot that it dangles just beyond its own reach. The Wrestler is no less concerned with addiction, Randy’s obsession with that moment in 1989, but the film does more than just present an image of self-destruction. When the object sought after is fame, the audience is necessarily drawn into the film as the antagonist to Randy’s desire. Contrary to our half-hearted investment in his life outside the ring, his stabs at romance and compassion, it is squarely within the cult of celebrity that we find ourselves on the screen while watching The Wrestler. We are the savages at the coliseum, the maddening crowd. We are the amputee who offers up his prosthetic leg as a weapon in one of Ramsinski’s bouts. We are the family that both embraces and cannibalizes Randy. Aronofsky implicates us in his destruction, and the confluence of emotions is fascinating. An opponent staples a five-dollar bill to his own forehead. We laugh out one side of our mouths because the act is absurd, but we cringe out the other side because the thought of rent flesh is disturbing, and at the same time we are struck with the realization that were we not here to witness it, this spectacle would not be taking place at all.

These contradictions make viewing The Wrestler a muddled affair for the heart. We empathize with Randy’s situation, his confusion and desperation, and yet we cheer him toward the edge knowing that it may well kill him. We push him to that place on the top rope twenty years ago where his heart is not yet broken, and his daughter is not yet abandoned, and his future lies somewhere beyond the mat. We see the scar on his chest and the joy in his face, and we smile because we share that too. “Ram Jam!” the crowd demands his signature move. “Ram Jam! Ram Jam!” We join in. “Ram Jam! Ram Jam!” At what cost, fame? The old warrior rises. The coliseum erupts.

And then he jumps. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R

LABYRINTH (1986)

Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times: “The magnetism between newcomer Jennifer Connolly and David Bowie’s ornate codpiece is monumental!”

Hear hear, Mr. Ebert.

Dance, magic dance.

THE WHOLE SHOOTIN’ MATCH (1979)

Before Smith or Soderbergh, before Linklater or Sayles, a crook-nosed lad from Austin, Texas named Eagle was inadvertently inventing modern American independent cinema. Shot over a number of weekends on a zero budget with borrowed equipment, The Whole Shootin’ Match very casually made the statement that great film exists in places other than just NY and LA. Its story of the two Faulknerian schemers feels like a modern, ruralized iteration of the Jackie Gleason and Art Carney dynamic. Their gaffes and triumphs have an equally unaffecting quality on their friendship. The charm is undeniable. Though the film is cited by Robert Redford as the inspiration for the Sundance Institute, his endorsement was unable to buoy Eagle to sustained success and the director later died of alcoholism, undistinguished and penniless. Eagle’s story is included in the documentary The King of Texas. – [imdb]

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. It does not arrive silently nor is it met with acquiescence. It is a process of punctuation and repercussion. It is a fight. The man Harvey Milk understood this, and with a warm, genial temperament that palliated but never quenched the urgency of his agenda he assumed the fight for Gay Rights as his own, which it was. For the better part of a decade he galvanized the gay community in San Francisco, conducting its ragged antagonism into diplomatic reason. In 1977 the community’s buoyant outcries carried him to a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as the first openly gay elected official in the United States. It was an achievement whose triumph is overshadowed by its necessity, a requisite step by a people toward the Declaration of Independence, but whose importance cannot be understated. The cost of the step gained, redeemed upon the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, was no mystery to the man himself. It was a sacrifice he marched toward knowingly. Fearful yet undissuaded by threats against his life, he never lost hope.

The idea for a film on Milk’s political career had been around for nearly two decades, probably since the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk took down the Academy Award in 1984. Over the years a number of directors and actors have been attached to various scripts, but it wasn’t until a recent flat race between Gus Van Sant and Bryan Singer, approaching the 30-year anniversary of Milk’s death, that the film finally went. Let us all be thankful that Van Sant’s project won out by a nose because his talent as a storyteller and an artist wins by eight or ten lengths, easily.

Throughout his career Van Sant has concerned himself with the unreality of the American dream, the discordance between the way things are and the way we are told they should be, and his films have focused on an intimate number of alienated outliers to the status quo. Homelessness, figurative and occasionally literal, has been his motif. His style, flowing and balletic, and his affinity for slow-motion sequences, having reached their poetic but absurd apex in his last film, Paranoid Park, are tempered in Milk for the sake of accessibility, as is his use of the hiccuping storyline. He maintains, however, an eye for grace in his direction and a belief in the power of an immobile or irregular shot to engage the viewers’ imagination more dynamically than leading them around by the nose. I was stunned by the simple, unusual beauty of a conversation between Milk and a San Francisco police officer after the beating of a gay man unfolding in the blood-flecked reflection of the victim’s discarded safety whistle. Touches like these for the unobserved make viewing Milk, or any Van Sant film, a process of discovery.

The great difficulty of realizing Milk, a biopic with a predetermined outcome, was making the film more than a procession toward the grave, allowing the vitality of a man and a movement to shine in the shadow of impending tragedy. Much of the film’s ability to do so can be attributed to its high degree of intimacy. The nakedness of the performances coupled with the bare gaze of the camera reveal an irrepressible hope. Even though we are confronted with Milk’s assassination almost immediately, the body bag being dollied away in a blip of archival news footage during the first minutes of the film, the following scene, which introduces the character Milk, is so arresting in its portrayal of the man’s vulnerability and optimism that we cannot help but be carried off by it. The fatalism that ultimately tugs at the story’s coattail is dissolved by the truth in that moment. It is held at a distance by hope, and by the magnetic and impossibly compassionate performance Milk‘s star, Sean Penn. In my mind, the Academy Award was his by the conclusion of his first scene on the subway stairwell. Penn creates a man transparent of ill will yet charismatic and of tenacious purpose, and over the course of the film he reasserts himself as an actor of the highest caliber, belonging to the fraternity of Daniel Day-Lewis and Philip Seymour Hoffman as one of the greatest working actors today.

The timing of Milk‘s theatrical release, little more than a week before the November election that saw Proposition 8 strip same-sex couples in California of the right to marry, was no coincidence. It was film as political activism, and it showed that some people still believe in the power of art to affect, and not simply comment on, the world in which it is created. That the film failed to sway public opinion is regrettable and underscores both a continued strain of human ignorance and the impotent role of art in the modern world. Milk‘s release to DVD, however, coming little less than a week after the California Supreme Court began hearing arguments for a repeal on Proposition 8, represents a chance for one or both of those things to change. It is a chance for a film, a movement, the memory of a man, to push back with their collective will against repression and regain the step that was lost, a chance for hope. Without it, Harvey Milk rightfully said, life is not worth living. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Biography/Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 3/10/09