Chicago Film Festival: Hallam Foe

David Mackenzie is back to some of his Young Adam tricks in Hallam Foe, and once again, the most riddlesome tricks of all are a) how he gets the movie to spring as excitingly as it does from a sketchy story with significant limitations, and b) why the movie fails to work a little better despite all the evident and encouraging talent involved. Hallam Foe orbits around the twin suns of Collision and Surveillance, as encapsulated in the opening sequence that starts with the title character (Jamie Bell) squatting in his treehouse to spy on his sister, who at that moment is taking an amorous roll in the glade with her boyfriend. After streaking himself up with some "barbarous" makeup and a makeshift headdress made of a badger hide, Hallam war-whoops his way down a pulley-and-cord contraption and crashes right into the humiliated lovers. The whole sequence, improbable in incident and choreography, serves primarily to acquaint us with Hallam Foe's bold and peculiar experiments in exaggerated reality. As befits a film about an incorrigible peeping tom, Hallam Foe is full of point-of-view shots and furtive, handheld pokes around corners and to the sides of various barriers. Just as markedly, however, but with much more distinctive formal panache, Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens (The Deep End) perpetually shuttle Hallam in and out of strong but strikingly different lighting schemes, soundscapes, and color patterns. Though these contrasts and effects occasionally spill into overstatement—trains that sound like entire artillery brigades, saturated colors and overexposed light to signal big emotional climaxes—Hallam Foe cannot be accused of concealing its investment in the dramatic heightening of sensation, the privileging of psychic logic and hormonal pulls over safer and more quotidian forms of "realistic" storytelling. Indeed, the film's evocation of Hallam's jumpy and inchoate overstimulation is its sustaining badge of craftsmanship and creative vivacity. Click here to read the rest...

Photo © 2007 Scottish Screen/Ingenious Film Partners

Chicago Film Festival: Scream of the Ants

I purchased a ticket to Scream of the Ants based solely on my affinity for Mohsen Makhmalbaf's past work, which has a nasty habit of receiving no commercial distribution in the United States despite the relative box-office potency of his Gabbeh and Kandahar and the critical adoration of those films and several others. Which is to say, I lacked any notion of Scream's theme or plotline and could not possibly have forecast the poetic, festival-style justice of wandering in the space of a single morning from Wes Anderson's Kool-aid vision of India to Makhmalbaf's assiduously bleak travelogue of subcontinental misery and his fulminating screed against the venal idealisms and disavowals that so often typify a foreigner's passage to India. As an Indian journalist advises a betrothed Iranian couple aboard an Indian train, "Most foreigners who come to India are stupid. They come chasing all the wrong things." Not coincidentally, this pronouncement follows the woman's admission that she and her fiancé have come in pursuit of a "Complete Man" or "Perfect Man" reputed by an acquaintance of theirs to "do great things in people's lives." This is a harebrained, romantically superficial agenda to rival Owen Wilson's—though Makhmalbaf, already savvy enough to set the West aside and show how one south Asian culture trivializes another, is also attuned to how India exploits and mystifies its own. Not only is the journalist riding the train to investigate a rumor about an old sage who can "stop trains with his eyes," and thus to earn a living by perpetuating the very kind of hooey he pretends to ridicule, but he kills time aboard the train espousing his own strain of unqualified utopianism ("Life is a miracle – everything is a miracle!") that is ubiquitously undermined by the status quo of a country where 99% of a billion citizens live below the global standard of poverty. In a brilliant and wickedly funny masterstroke, when the train finally haps upon the celebrated Baba sitting cross-legged on the rails, he privately confides to the Iranian couple that he sat on the tracks one day in hopes of ending his misery, but the train conductors all persist in slamming on their brakes—and now, the adulating crowds of pilgrims who have gathered around and behind him refuse to release him or to desist from holding him up as a spiritual icon.

This 20-minute opening of Makhmalbaf's movie is rendered with the political friskiness and absurdist humor for which Iranian films, much less Iran itself, is seldom given credit, largely because Western festivals and distributors decreed the flowering of Iranian cinema based on the evidence of children's stories like Children of Heaven and somber meditations like Taste of Cherry. The Makhmalbaf of A Moment of Innocence or Gabbeh, and even more certainly his Iranian contemporaries like Kamal Tabrizi and Massoud Dehnamaki, would have spun a teasing but illuminating feature out of this comic entrapment and the serious currents of ignorance, projection, and desperation that give rise to it. The Baba himself, with his weather-beaten body and his doubly-elbowed arm—a souvenir, no doubt, of a long-ago compound fracture—is a transfixing character who may or may not be "in" on the joke of which his fate is the center. Therefore, it's with considerable regret that we watch Makhmalbaf and his characters abandon this anecdote for a shape-shifting movie that never finds any comparably fertile or crystallized point of focus, however much justifiable anger and philosophical ambivalence Makhmalbaf allows himself to vent through the ensuing hour of arguments, monologues, vérité photography, and narrative cul-de-sacs. The husband, a former Communist long disabused of any form of hope or belief in his fellow man, reveals himself to be a colossal narcissist and a chauvinist of epic proportions—not least when he hires a prostitute for an entire night to get down on all fours and serve as a table on which to set his teacup. The wife, comparatively sympathetic but worryingly recessive, hungers for the kind of fulfillment this lover will never give her and hangs more desperately on the dream of finding a Complete Man whom she doesn't even recognize when she finds him.

Scream of the Ants grows nearly intolerable as the two trade bitter barbs over the course of a long night, so much so that we excuse the totally incongruous edit that finds them reunited for a taxi-ride into the desert. In an even more marked demonstration of the narrative listlessness that afflicted his script for his daughter Samira's most recent film, At Five in the Afternoon, Scream of the Ants lacks anything like the muscular, compressed montage that typified earlier Makhmalbaf projects. He resorts to fixing the camera on scenes and objects which are themselves prodigious or harrowing or beautiful rather than making them so through framing and metaphor, as he did so indelibly with the floating prostheses of Kandahar or the titular character of The Cyclist. Scream of the Ants, whose title refers to the unheard protests of people in a godless world, lapses inexcusably into talking-head aesthetics, with various characters spouting different strains of Makhmalbaf's own frustrated and contradictory world-critiques... but then, just as the picture precipitously lost its footing after the first act, it recovers its visual potency, at the very least, in an extended finale along the shores of the Ganges: filled with bathers, bobbing with corpses, strewn with blossoms, lapping against the concrete banks where even the wealthiest of the deceased are burned by their families for want of a proper gravesite. Again, the strange and bitter world yields itself up to Makhmalbaf's camera without his necessarily intervening or shaping our impressions at the level of his most rigorous artistry. And yet, these moments of mysterious and discomfiting realism make Scream of the Ants an urgent record of a denied world (and not an emblem of that very denial, like The Darjeeling Limited is, for all its cosmetic wonders). In its visual austerity, its withering speeches, its unusual tolerance for nudity and verbal vulgarity, and even in its aesthetic self-sabotage, Scream of the Ants maps a Godardian arc from artistic wit and sophistication into dogmatic ideology and ascetic self-loathing, directed if not against the director himself than at least against his medium and against his world. Whether this breakdown is ameliorated or extended by the riverside coda is up to each viewer to decide, just as the question remains open as to whether Makhmalbaf has really made a movie here or else just crudely illustrated an Op/Ed that's been thundering inside his head.

Commercial distributors will sprint in the opposite direction from a picture like this (check out the Variety review!), so I'm doubly grateful to the film festival. For better or worse, this side of Makhmalbaf is exhilarating at its best but still feels essential at its petulant and shapeless worst (embodied, for me, in a long speech by a German tourist who's repeating what a million college-campus T-shirts have contended for years). I wanted to scream several times during Scream of the Ants, sometimes for no better reason than the film's laziness and hectoring tone, but just as often for the same reasons that have pushed Makhmalbaf to this edge of his own outrage. C+

Photo © 2006 Makhmalbaf Film House/Wild Bunch

Chicago Film Festival: The Aerial

If Guy Maddin and Leo McCarey got together to remake Brazil, their efforts might yield something like Esteban Sapir's The Aerial, a jaunty errand into silent-era surrealism and anti-corporate allegory that should, by all rights, be too obvious in its points and too crammed with fancies to generate the level of charm and light-touch magic that it does. In The Aerial's universe—billed as "Once upon a time..." but inclined, too, toward the present and the prescient—a monolithic and mobster-defended television station has already committed a whole host of crimes against humanity: its leaders have literally revoked the voices of the world's citizens; they have eliminated rival media outlets; and they have saturated the grocery market with boxes of "TV Foods," basically sugar cookies topped with a lulling spiral of white frosting. Only one woman in the film's unnamed city has retained her own voice and the right to its exercise, but at the heavy prices of hooding her face, parading her body in sultry nightclub performances, and indenturing herself to the tyrannical and devil-tailed mastermind Mr. TV. This woman, simply named Voice, has a child, a boy born without eyes whose own vocal capacity is a desperately kept secret. Soon, the fate of this pair intertwines with that of an inventor, his young daughter, and his grandfather, who live and work in a TV repair shop. When the girl arrives to visit her blowzy, cigarette-smoking mother, she befriends the sightless son of Voice. When Voice herself is abducted by Mr. TV and his henchmen—on the way to an even grander, and weirder, scheme of world domination—the two children as well as the girl's reunited mom and pop trek into the snow-swept mountains to rehabilitate an old transmitter and basically culture-jam the villains to death and the slumbering, wordless population to life.

As you will already glean, the political line of The Aerial does not distinguish itself in nuance or depth, and Sapir is much softer on the question of whether silence is coerced or whether it is passively and hegemonically accepted. The almost-ending of the movie, which suspends and challenges the power dynamics and the prevailing apportionments of Good and Bad, would have offered a richer, more provocative conclusion than the one we actually get, however much The Aerial admits of its fairy-tale contours. Sapir also indulges in some appropriations of several sign systems—Communist, Nazi, Judaic, marital, domestic—that he cheekily but indubitably simplifies in pursuit of his homiletic agendas. But all of that said, The Aerial is patently an exercise in formal and stylistic brio, and in breathing witty, creative life into hard-leftist axioms. On these scores, the movie is a robust success. The antique, tungsten quality of the flickering light and the evocative, efficient editing achieve a splendid mixture of beauty and economy. The soundtrack is bright and unimpeachable—not just the warm, funny, inspired musical score but the ingenious instrumentation that also supplies all of the film's foley effects, including footsteps and gunshots. Sapir also has great fun throughout with the placement, phrasing, and materiality of his intertitles; characters are frequently spotted waving or shoving the text out of their way, or having the summary terms of entire emotional states scrawled right over their heads.

Best of all, the gusto with which Sapir reprises so many silent-era tropes while also flexing them for new expressive potentials rhymes perfectly with The Aerial's polemical support of creativity over convention, of under-exploited powers over institutionally regulated genres and boilerplates. Even as the movie assumes discordantly conservative notions of redemption through sentimentalized childhood and of the two-parent nuclear family as ethical building-block, the geometries and overlays and eccentricities of the film stoke the very imagination which Sapir's politics almost suppress. Compared to Maddin's frequently arch and esoteric approaches to the tropes of early cinema, Sapir shows a Pixar-ish loyalty to clear, clever, and spirited storytelling, over and above arcana and idiosyncracy for their own sakes. Thinner and less adventurous than first impressions imply, but a feast for the ear and the eye from start to finish. B

Photo © 2007 LadobleA

Chicago Film Festival: Men in the Nude

Number of nude men in Men in the Nude: Zero. Aside from some glimpses of backside and some female bosoms, the title of Károly Esztergályos' movie doesn't denote anything except some marketer's cynical attempt to hustle an audience looking for a thrill. Clearly, I was such an audience, but since I don't care about the baseball playoffs or the new fall season on TV, you can't be too hard on me. Plus, as Nathaniel has often observed, it's a fairly open secret that a gay moviegoer implicitly obligates himself (or, despite a perpetually malnourished market, herself) to see a steady stream of coming-out comedies and somber closet dramas that have big dreams of mediocrity, and next to no aspirations toward actual, enduring value.

Men in the Nude—about a middle-aged Hungarian novelist (Lászlo Gálffi) who surprises himself by taking home a young, blond, rabbit-faced hustler (Dávid Szabó) while the writer's wife (Éva Kerekes) is off performing a play in the provinces—treads a lot of safe, unilluminating water for its first hour. Chest-kissing, opera, poppers, petty crime, early-dawn homecomings, briberies, saucy wives, the heedlessness of youth, the laments of encroaching age. I will say that Esztergályos offers the first image I've ever seen of a character reading aloud from great hardcover literature (Death in Venice, as if you didn't assume) while simultaneously being fellated (and in the very same shot!). Had the movie hewed to the path of well-worn inanity and yielded another tacky-sexy chuckle or two like this one, Men in the Nude could have relied on its notoriously generous niche-market constituency for a passing grade: our version of the Gentleman's C. There but for the (dis)grace of compulsive jump cuts, truncated subplots, and what-were-they-thinking allusions to the film's own emptiness goes Esztergályos. "Wife comes home early—it's a banal story," the writer confides to his Mrs. and to the audience, with faster and fuller assent from the latter, and that's even before a stilted penultimate sequence in a police interrogation room or a desperately "surreal" finale that conjoins far-scattered spaces and swells the volume of the soundtrack for no reason but the most pitifully failed echoes of Lynchian unmooring or exquisite Beau travail-style crystallization. If the Men were emotionally or psychologically denuded, to whatever qualified degree, Esztergályos would have at least some reason to have made this movie, much less to have chosen this moniker. But even by the standards of visually undistinguished wait-for-the-DVD fare, this one's fully missable. D+

Photo © 2006 Centrál Filmstúdió

Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes

No one works as hard as Gary Tooze, the DVD Beaver, to let the world know about imminent DVD releases, and to help us sort between the wheat and the chaff, down to the finest little decibel of audio quality and the slenderest little margin of image cropping. I'm not as exacting a DVD shopper as Gary, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to be as comprehensive as he is, but so much pure gold has been dropping on the market lately, with even more looming on the horizon, that I felt I needed to say something.

For all of you Barbara Stanwyck fans, or for anyone who wanted to believe my raves about Executive Suite but had no way of verifying them for yourself, Warner Home Video is dropping The Barbara Stanwyck Collection at the end of October. That's a while away—ask any academic, or any student, and we'll scream at you that the beginning of fall is still an eon from now—but it's never too soon to gear up for Barbara. I haven't seen any of the other films in the collection, but Robert Wise's thrillingly tense and sensationally acted boardroom thriller (that's not an oxymoron, if it sounds like one) doesn't pull any punches. Barbara helps, Fredric March is efficiently insidious, June Allyson comes vividly if briefly to life, and Nina Foch actresses at every possible edge, without once making a show of herself. Exquisite.

Even though I dislike their new logo and redesigned packaging (who picked Rancid Mustard for the color on the spines?), I must admit that the Criterion Collection has been exceeding even their own high standards of late. They've honored my three favorite Japanese directors already this summer, with deluxe editions of Mizoguchi's Sanshô the Bailiff (my rhapsodic review here), Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine, and a box-set of Hiroshi Teshigara masterpieces, so I can finally stop cruising used DVD stores in pursuit of the out-of-print Milestone imprint of Woman in the Dunes, one of the greatest films of all time. (Am I supposed to insert a personal qualifier here?) As if this all weren't enough, coming soon from Criterion are Mala Noche, the highly elusive debut of Gus Van Sant, and a director-approved re-release of Days of Heaven (original review and quick tribute after seeing the restoration in 35mm).

Auteur delights, or at least they delighted me: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which scared the bejesus out of me in cinemas all three times I paid to see it, arrives with even more scarifying footage on August 14th; and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (reviewed here) gets the 2-disc treatment it always deserved on October 23rd, as do several other Kubrick titles.

My two favorite films of 2007 so far, Ray Lawrence's unnerving and trenchant Jindabyne and Robinson Devor's courageously and compellingly cryptic Zoo, will both reach wider American audiences on DVD than they ever enjoyed in theaters; Zoo arrives on Sep. 16 and Jindabyne on Oct. 2.

On the other end of the historical spectrum, the archivists and the deep-pocketed among you will be ecstatic to hear that those unbeatable compilations of early-cinema rareties and esoterica, Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, shall be followed in October by the National Film Preservation Foundation's Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. The thematic rubric is new for this series (the other collections are purposefully and wonderfully eclectic), but there's still plenty of variety included in this new package, despite its pointed and fascinating emphasis on politics. I'll study up on How They Rob Men in Chicago, in case history ever repeats itself, but I'll be even more excited for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, the entire disc devoted to female suffrage and "The New Woman," and virtually every other snippet, sideshow, epic, and episode. Here are the full contents, and here's where you can pre-order at the greatest savings (though Amazon has a prettier page). The NFPF has already announced that they'll be hosting another theme party for next year's Treasures IV set, which will be devoted to the American Avant-Garde between 1945-85. (On that same page, you can watch selected clips from the first two anthologies; select Disc 1 to see a full minute of Watson & Webber's mindblowing The Fall of the House of Usher, and try to figure out how two amateurs made this in 1928!)

Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has never appeared in any home format anywhere in the world, is now available as part of a French-Belgian DVD package called The Chantal Akerman Collection. "A woman in trouble" if ever there were one, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel and Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) is a Belgian housewife like countless others, preparing breakfast and cleaning her kitchen, and devoting her morning to countless other errands around the apartment...except that Akerman makes us feel the scale of these semi-mindless occupations, their essential fusion of tedium and fascination, by capturing these household tasks in huge 35mm and with unrelenting attention for almost four hours. Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, in what would feel like three years in the life of the audience if Seyrig weren't so subtly and unpredictably entrancing, and if Akerman's political platform weren't so fully realized within clear, confident, brilliant aesthetics. And I haven't even said anything about the gentleman caller. Or the ———... because I don't want to spoil them.

See Jeanne Dielman... on a big screen if you ever get any opportunity in your whole life to do so; it makes sense, despite the intense frustration, that Akerman has withheld her legendary masterpiece for so long, because the hugeness of her images in relation to their subject is deeply essential to the project. Still, not everyone is going to have that big-screen opportunity, and those of us who have certainly want to revisit Jeanne Dielman... and figure out how Akerman, Seyrig, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and editor Patricia Canino pulled it off. If I know you love Todd Haynes' Safe, and by his own admission, that film, like so many others, is impossible without this one. I refer you again to my personal list of the greatest films ever made, and I insist (insist!) that, Treasures III and other anthologies aside, The Chantal Akerman Collection, which also includes the deliriously great Rendez-vous d'Anna and three other titles, is the DVD release of the year.

(Image from Jeanne Dielman c/o this Finnish-language bio of Chantal Akerman)

The Best Films of 2006

Why is Clean called Clean? The most obvious reason is that the narrative centers around the attempted detoxing of Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung), the volatile, irresponsible, casually abrasive Mrs. of a rock star named Lee Hauser. Lee lives to see the other side of his prime but dies before truly acute embarrassment sets in: Emily procures some heroin one night in Hamilton, Ontario, they quarrel, they both take hits while spending the night separately but alone, he dies, and she doesn't. She does, however, serve six months in prison, loses her home-base apartment in London, and bears the perfectly apt decision of a Canadian court to award custody of her young son to Lee's parents, the bashful but magnanimous Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and the dying but hard-willed Rosemary (Martha Henry). In story terms, Emily's renunciation of drugs is most obviously a prerequisite for securing at least some visiting rights, if not full custody, of her child—and yet, neither in plot nor in style does Clean ever take shape as the maternity melodrama that writer-director Olivier Assayas leads us to expect. Neither a Sirkian bath in rich colors and expressionist worldviews nor a visually ascetic character drama in the Cassavetes mold (such as this year's fleetingly similar Sherrybaby), Clean refuses either to fetishize or to undercut Emily's bond with her son, and it breaks profoundly with its generic templates by emphasizing narrative momentum without leading Emily toward a plane of maternal competence or demonstrating definitively that she isn't cut out for the job. Clean takes the drugs out of Emily's hands, at least kinda sorta—there are hints of back-sliding all over the dialogue, and occasionally in the images—but has the gumption to withhold any clear, compensatory object of transference, for her or for us. "Clean" Emily is a listless but not quite lost Emily: inspired to write and sing music that is neither good nor terrible, guaranteed neither success nor failure in the pursuit of her own recording career, both in love with her son and impatient with her mothering role, both humbly responsive to Albrecht's benevolence and unable to be fully straight with him, Emily doesn't come into focus—a testament not to disarray but to uncommon discipline in Assayas' film.

If the cinematography weren't so precisely choreographed and gorgeously detailed, and the editing weren't so polished and rhythmically sound, Clean might come across as a shamble instead of a film that insists on Emily's plausible existence, and the humane, unheroic poetry of her personal and professional dilettantism. Colors, angles, camera movements: they are all exerted with consummate control in Clean's diverse sequences, from the enervated hustle of a greasy waitressing job to the endorphin rush of an amped-up club gig to the fragile politeness of offering shelter to a catastrophic friend to Nolte's frightened, dignified, and subtly rebellious reactions to his wife's mortality (and, by extension, his own) to a bit of comic skullduggery surrounding a lipstick-lesbian record producer and her captive ex-lover (which teases more quickly and playfully at retrograde crazy-dyke stereotypes than do the turgid excesses of Notes on a Scandal). Few films in 2006 so comfortably wedded visual finesse and savvy editing to such a pronouncedly story-driven endeavor, and if Clean doesn't always have a strong sense of where it's going, and if the indie-rock idiom occasionally outs itself as a naïve outsider's projection, one shouldn't overlook how brave the movie is to buck the trends not just of bad-mommy morality plays but of standard drug-recovery dramas and of Maggie Cheung's high-glamour iconography and of Assayas' own recent filmography. Clean follows, incongruously, the baroque paranoias and Lynchian short-circuitries of the estimable demonlover, though in its quiet way, Clean shares with its predecessor (and with Irma Vep) an interest in the tribulations and machinations of complex women in creative industries, as well as a polyglot sensibility that presumes the smallness of the world. Clean moves in and out of Canada, England, France, and the United States with the same understated fluency of its swerves in and out of redemptive drama, tacit comedy, and voyeuristic showbiz-fantasy. A second viewing is, in my experience, a shaky proposition: the film's refusal to settle questions and the concerted affectlessness of Cheung's performance, occasionally flirting with blandness, are not as refreshing the second time around. Too, the nascent Americanization of Emily in the final scenes feels like a rhetorical move with too little warrant in emotional substance or dramatic satisfaction. Still, Clean deploys its humanistic style in the service of legitimately interesting humans, who relate to each other in plausible, demanding, and affecting ways when they aren't name-dropping Tricky. Its sense of space and of place are beyond reproach, and without a Babel-like bone in its body, it captures the essence of a contemporary life lived across the outmoded borders of nation, region, genre, or conventionally defined gender roles—a life riven with self-destructive impulses but beginning to sound the first, tentative notes of stability.

Best of 2006: Non-English Language Films

To answer the obvious question, which only recently became a question, there are no American movies here... not just on principle, but because I think all five of these movies, as well as L'Enfant, the unnamed first runner-up, beat Letters from Iwo Jima on any day of the week, in any language.

Here, then, are my picks for the five best films I saw last year that weren't in the English language. Incidentally, there's no Almodóvar here, either, but if you were a fan of Law of Desire, I can highly recommend the fifth film on this list. Old Joy fans (oh, you zillions!) will groove on Syndromes, if it's ever actually released in the States, and Requiem is probably the great under-exploited import of the year. There's got to be a bigger American audience for this movie, and hopefully for all of these movies. I hope that audience is readying their Netflix queue even as we speak, but I also hope we'll all keep throwing money at these movies when they're actually in theaters, or soon enough our cinemas won't speak any more languages than our current president does. And we know how many that is.

Curse, Indeed, of the Golden Flower

My friend Bob on Curse of the Golden Flower: "It's a slog, man. Very beautiful colors, but if I wanted to see a bunch of people just walking through a palace, I'd watch The West Wing." Does anyone still need a review?

Oh, why not. I will add (and you thought I was being so nice yesterday!) that a corollary problem to the endless power-walks through the palace of Emperor Ping, which are already more repetitious than the arpeggios in a Philip Glass score, is that Zhang Yimou indulges the tacky, sticky Rainbow Brite explosion of his mise-en-scène but fails entirely to construct a coherent physical space. For a movie that did precious little beyond sinking me into a Day Glo fortress, I wish that Curse had allowed me to know a little something about that fortress. It certainly didn't help that Gong Li—who has given poor, predictable, inexpressive performances in six straight movies now (Zhou Yu's Train, the partial exception of 2046, her lurid segment of Eros, Memoirs of a Geisha, Miami Vice, and now this)—can't assemble or communicate Empress Phoenix's villainy in any but the most banally perverse and overstated ways. Maggie Cheung could swoop through a carnelian castle in Zhang's Hero and hold the screen because that gal is a full-throttle cinema actress, with an ideal face and a subtle but heat-seeking instinct for how to use it. Gong used to give off a comparable vibe, but I think her gifts have coarsened and frozen by now, and she's pushing her way onto the dread Danny Huston List of actors I hate to see cast in anything.

Curse of the Golden Flower raises a conundrum, both physical and philosophical, of whether matter and energy can go over the top if there's nothing there, no substance or idea, to go over the top of. Heidi, Nina, and Michael could search high and low for Zhang's "taste level" here without ever finding it, and the grim inadequacies of the performances, the script, and the montage aren't so much compensated as they are thrown into greater relief by the gaudy grandiloquence of the colors and the lighting. The images of violence that break through the glassy neon surface of Golden Flower are punishing and fetishistic in that Mel Gibson vein, and when Zhang ties up this whole tale of civil war, incest, royal alienation, and choreographed bloodsport with some mewling, ridiculous ballad about "traces of your smile on a yellowing scroll," the film has either reached the apex of its own absurdity or the nadir of its own expensive emptiness. Probably both. At least the sober and discomfiting nationalism of Hero has loosened up into a friskier, more iconoclastic take on Chinese imperial mythmaking, but Curse hardly reflects the perspective of a mature or self-disciplined filmmaker, and there are too many other movies to see without wasting time on this unseemly bauble. D+

(Image © 2006 Sony Pictures Classics)

This Is How It's Done

As 2006 continues its quest for a great, definitive movie well into the final month of the year, why not flip back a half-century to 1954 and remember how a real, thorough-going masterpiece is supposed to look, sound, feel, and resonate? The majestic Music Box Theatre of Chicago recently hosted a one-week retrospective of restored 35mm prints of Kenji Mizoguchi's movies, and though my end-of-quarter schedule only allowed me to attend one film, Sanshô the Bailiff turned out to be a pretty unimprovable choice. I have never seen a Mizoguchi movie, partly because I was waiting for a curated opportunity just like this one. The VHS transfers of his movies, almost none of which are available on Region1 DVDs, have a besmirched reputation; furthermore, after finally introducing myself to Mizoguchi's countryman Yasujiro Ozu via the pristine Criterion DVD of his exemplary, affecting Tokyo Story, a part of me nonetheless wished that I had held out for a theatrical screening. Cinema this good deserves to be experienced at its full, shimmering size and in its intended venue.

Then again, I question my own convictions, because Sanshô the Bailiff is so dazzling that I recommend it whole-heartedly, even if a middling VHS print is the only available medium. The story is an intense, dramatic, and unpredictable reward in itself, beginning with the exile of a local governor in medieval Japan. The imperial lords have deemed this governor too sympathetic to the roiling, intensifying protests of the impoverished farmers and laborers in his region. Several years after his banishment, the governor's wife Tamaki, son Zushio, and daughter Anju are traversing Japan from its northern tip to its southern extreme, in the hopes of reuniting their family. However, in a frightful episode of deception and betrayal, marked by a horrifying score and harsh, unforgiving edits, Tamaki is separated from her children and impressed into a harem, while Zushio and Anju are sold into slavery in a distant compound, governed with an iron hand by Sanshô the Bailiff. Though the film and the age-old legend that inspired it take the name of this brutal overseer, the story emphasizes the heavy tolls on the son and daughter, as they struggle to retain the high moral principles imparted by their father and to nurture the ever-receding hope of reunion with their mother.

Mizoguchi's worldview is bleak in this picture. Corporal punishments and ethical corruption are ubiquitous in the various timeframes and locales in which the narrative unfolds, and the stark delineations of Good and Evil that one might expect in such a folkloric tale are persistently challenged. The BFI Film Classics monograph by Dudley Andrew and Carole Cavanaugh reveals that for all the consummate grace and exquisitely rendered light and framing in his movie, Mizoguchi offers a notably harsher, more daring version of the story than the one he inherited from the canonized retelling by Mori Ôgai that was a bestseller in Japan in 1915. Despite their pitiable circumstances, the grown children, Zushio and Anju, make difficult and morally debatable choices as they seek to escape a terrible destiny of unrewarded work and filial separation. They are hardly immune to the pressures of complicity and cowardice, which Mizoguchi invokes in strong but unsensationalized images of torture, suicide, and communal despair. That the film's gorgeous, fluid aesthetic of carefully composed images and thoughtful, evocative camera movements remains so constant throughout this melodramatic tale implies a mature, generous worldview that is equally informed by serenity, exploitation, pessimism, and hopefulness, and the acting, photography, soundtrack, and story structure operate in total synchronicity to tease out the psychological, political, and spiritual subtleties embedded in every scene. I am sure the film opens itself to even more layered readings for viewers better versed than I in Japanese history and religious traditions, though one need not press far into the film to detect its angry response to Japan's WW2-era militarism, or its determined separation of proud Buddhist ideals from overweening cultural separatism, or its aggrieved commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The whole country's midcentury crisis of national identity and cultural destiny registers powerfully at every register of this film, and yet Sanshô the Bailiff at no point seems beholden to any simplified political rhetoric or unilateral symbolic equivalence, and its emotional transparency is never compromised.

The single infelicity in the movie, for me, is a pivotal scene where a recovered memory of childhood and the echoing call of the longlost mother jostle the adult Zushio out of his hard-bitten attitude of selfishness and cynicism; having rewritten the Sanshô fable to emphasize naturalism over sentiment and guilty repressions over mythological contrivance, both the staging and content of this story-point struck me as overwrought and out of step with the rest of the picture. Still, the movie hardly loses its footing even at this uncertain juncture, and the depth, power, and heavily qualified optimism of the latter chapters strike me as beyond dispute. The culminating episode weds a generous indulgence of the audience's desires with a contextualizing cloud-bank of uncertainty and loss. For that reason, among others, it's almost impossible to reach the end of the tale without wanting to immerse yourself again from the beginning, in order to measure its final ramifications against its opening movements, and to trace how Mizoguchi has derived such powerful, intricate feelings and thematic assertions from what seem like such modest techniques. I haven't seen a more elegant, more fully realized movie in 2006, and I expect in 2007 to make my way even further into the Mizoguchi portfolio. The Criterion disc of Ugetsu is a logical place to start, but I know that The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums and The Life of Oharu are just as highly regarded. Recommendations are welcome. Enthusiasm is total.

(Images © 1954 Daiei Studios, reproduced from the Osaka European Film Festival webpage and this Geocities page in Japanese.)

The Midwestern Croisette

The 42nd annual Chicago International Film Festival reaches its halfway point today, and glory be, I finally got to participate. I must say, I'm impressed at the range of films and countries represented. Even though a few high-visibility English-language tentpoles like Shortbus, Babel, and The Fountain are holding the festival together, the menu offers generous fictional and non-fictional courses from Latin America, East Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific (read: nearly everywhere except Africa, though I'd also have loved a shot at Inuit breakout Zacharias Kunuk's Journals of Knut Rasmussen). I've actually never attended a film festival before, so yesterday marked my introduction to more than the films themselves: for example, to the way a city's immigrant or second-generation population will turn out in droves for a national export, which will barely cause a blip on the eventual commercial market; or to the exquisite pride that derives from finally deciphering the processes of ticket-buying, schedule coordination, and navigation between theaters. Had I been a little more on top of things, I would have bought a ticket to last night's 11:00pm showing of The Host before it sold out, but now that I've secured my merit badge in demystifying festival bureaucracy, I'll do better next year.

As for the two films I saw—actually one-and-a-half films—I urge you to keep an eye peeled for Syndromes and a Century. Thai sensation Apichatpong Weerasethakul once again weaves an intricate, entrancing enigma out of rhythms, scenes, and techniques so quotidian that many filmmakers would find nothing to observe in them. The opening shot is of tall, thin trees swaying in the wind while the soundtrack hums with the distant echoes of electronic apparatus and media emissions. Gradually these sounds—analogous to Cliff Martinez's minimalist score for Soderbergh's Solaris but even more muffled—give way to a soundtrack of breezes, chirping birds, and buzzing insects, but just as the image finds this more "natural" sonic referent, Syndromes cuts to a close-up of a downcast man, head tilted forward before an antiseptically white background, which instantly undermines the lingering pastoral soundscape. These sorts of editing tricks, subtle discontinuities, and creative mixing and matching with noises, images, subplots, and characters is exactly what Apichatpong excels at, especially because he bends them so deftly in service of character and narrative. The movie, following a typically playful Apichatpong structure, goes on to trace two different stories that begin with the same incident (reprised in slightly altered form halfway through Syndromes' runtime). The first iteration privileges a self-possessed female doctor in a rural hospital, managing a forlorn suitor and a memory of near-love while efficiently dispatching her medical duties to a cantankerous clutch of Buddhist monks and a crop of newly hired doctors. The second iteration aligns itself with one of those new hires, though the hospital is now an austere military facility in a modern city, and hospital business plays out largely in subterranean corridors, supply closets, and blinding white enclosures. Though Syndromes is Apichatpong's most stylistically subdued film to date, it's still an unusually patient and good-natured portrait of rural/urban crossover, of spatial and musical dislocations, of clinical, spiritual, and popular perspectives, of romance and absurdity and barely voiced grief. B+

By contrast, the Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan seems impervious to the pleasures of understatement or quiet implication. I thought that Distant, Ceylan's big festival hit of a few years ago, was an elegantly framed rumination on awfully familiar ideas (estrangement as worldview, familial imposition), enlivened only by rare bursts of humor that the palette, mise-en-scène, and self-serious direction nonetheless worked hard to oppress. Climates, Ceylan's latest effort, which nabbed the FIPRESCI laurel at this year's Cannes festival, struck me as an even more laborious mounting of dismally old saws. The obvious, meticulous deliberation with which Ceylan has framed his images and timed his edits does not conceal the banality of what he produces—marked foreground/background gulfs between alienated lovers, ostentatious and tinny sound elements, protracted close-ups that climax with inexpressive tears. Particularly hard to take was a psychologically complicated scene in which a distraught Bahar (played by Ceylan's own wife, Ebru) seems to attempt a spontaneous murder-suicide while riding a motorbike with her atrabilious lover Isa (Ceylan himself). As the two of them crash on the roadside, the camera captures every untrained, agitated whinge of these non-professional actors, relegating the whole incident into a turgid bout of queasy, inarticulate exhibitionism and eroding every glint of potential in the script. Soon to follow is an endless shot of erotic/violent aggression between Isa and an old flame; again, the performers and the film surely want to be lauded for their "courage" and rigor in realizing such a tempestuous, illegible encounter, but again, the physical vocabulary of both actors radiates a nervous, under-rehearsed improvisation, and the formal presentation offers no needed assist. The unsettling narcissism with which Ceylan films himself and his intimates working hard to render themselves unlikeable and impenetrable feels as pointless and arid as the affective fallacies of heat, chill, snow, shade, and rain imparted by the title and dully realized in the photographic and location choices. About an hour into this thing, sensing no prospect of Ceylan's Climates growing any more hospitable or sustainable, I decided to check the weather outside. Walked out

(Images © 2006 Chicago International Film Festival; © 2006 Kick the Machine/Fortissimo Films; and © 2006 Pyramide Films/Zeitgeist Films)

Picked Flick #44: Shame

Across all of the arts, I think that the most urgent and sophisticated depiction of war is the one Bertolt Brecht constructs in his play Mother Courage and Her Children, in which the rumbling of military convoys and the cracks of artillery are mostly offstage echoes. The focalizing character is Anna Fierling, dubbed "Mother Courage" for both laudatory and facetious reasons, who strains to make a living for herself and her three bastard children while trudging through the muddy, scabbed grounds of the battlefields and surrounding towns, selling her second-hand wares to whomever, on whatever side, of whatever nationality or political persuasion, is willing to part with a buck, or a mark, or a krona, or a pair of boots, or whatever. Brecht helps us to understand war as a series of dark negotiations with one's own ethics, with one's own being, and with the competing ways of construing oneself as a communal figure: as a partner, a parent, a patriot, a pragmatist, a profiteer, a bystander, an objector. No one now living—at least no one paying any attention—can doubt the continuing relevance of this viewpoint, and the need for its proclamation: war, when it is happening, and it is almost always happening, is never "over there," it is always here, in its reverberations, its roots, its dollars and cents, even in the most isolationist refusals of war's reality.

Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film Shame presents itself in as un-Brechtian a style as it possibly could, but the intelligence and the inclusiveness with which it examines war as a social and human condition are very nearly on a par with Brecht's. In Bergman's Persona, made two years previously, Liv Ullmann reacts with mute shock and terror to televised images of martial atrocities in Southeast Asia, and to the horrifying conviction of a Buddhist monk setting fire to himself in protest of man's inhumanity. War provides a crucial context for the vicious psychological retrenchment that Persona subsequently explores, particularly via the Ullmann character, but Shame confronts the issue in a much more direct and thorough-going way. Eva and Jan Rosenberg (Ullmann and Max von Sydow) are married concert musicians who live out a rustic existence on a Scandinavian island—farming and raising chickens, struggling to get the radio and the truck engine to work, ferrying to the mainland for necessities and the occasional luxury indulgence. In Shame's first scene, Ullmann and von Sydow wake in their beds (not, crucially, the same bed), and as she rather brusquely dresses and washes her face, he forlornly recounts a dream of the previous evening. An undeniable chill, if not quite a hostility, exists between these people, though its relative severity will rise and fall through the first half of the film, sometimes warming to an optimistic intimacy, sometimes tumbling into a scary antagonism. Meanwhile, we learn quickly that whatever unnamed country of which the Rosenbergs are citizens, albeit quite secluded ones, has been rent for several years by civil war, whose armies might invade their own environs at any moment. In many films, even ones by Bergman, these dual narratives would serve as metaphors or reflections of each other: the on-and-off combat within the Rosenbergs' marriage and the literal war that, for now, is only visible in the processions of military trucks and the low-flying jets that occasionally pass overhead. The genius of Shame, though, rendered with stomach-turning immediacy and realism, is that we experience all of this as one narrative. The gnawing discontent between Eva and Jan is directly conditioned by the war; it is one of the thousands of tongues through which the war speaks. She expresses contempt for his tearful, paralyzed anxieties; he doesn't understand how she can listen to so much more of the radio coverage than he and yet reflect so much less sensitivity and fear in response; she wishes he would fix the fucking truck, partially so they will have a means of escape if marauding armies do appear, and partially because he's such a goddamned procrastinator in general. About a half-hour into Shame, with a speed, a potency, and a plausibility that are equally hard to bear, the martial conflict explodes at the Rosenbergs' very own door, frightening them to their cores, annihilating their privacy, and serving to draw them back together but also to make them scowl even more deeply at each others' shortcomings. Again, these personal clashes are not sidebars or collateral effects of the war: they are part of what war is. As circumstances deteriorate even further in Shame, so too do the relations between the Rosenbergs.

Along with how it pervades our personalities, slips under our very skins, the other vile and best-kept secret of war is its shapeshifting ability. Like a flammable liquid, it pours itself into any space or vessel, and is prone to ignite anywhere. The second half of Shame, now that the Rosenbergs realize how immersed they are in the crisis, shows how arbitrarily they are pawned between the opposing factions, how their friendships and their enmities become hopelessly confused, how in a very Brechtian fashion—if not, again, in a Brechtian idiom—war becomes a marketplace for terrible barters, including sexual ones, which give onto their own cycles of self-defeating revenge. If I'm making Shame sound like harrowing viewing, then I'm doing it justice; few films are so excoriating in their images or their trajectories. But there is nothing abstruse or reductive or inaccessible about it: it doesn't need manichean figures of good and evil like Platoon, or peekaboo movements in and out of the maelstrom like Saving Private Ryan, or even the ornate and remote meditative koans of The Thin Red Line. Ambitious and indispensable as Malick's movie is, its motivating quarry is the philosophical knot of war, whereas Shame draws the rutted map of war's psychology, in bold and grievous strokes recognizable to any audience, and liable to frighten and humble them all. Ullmann, exquisitely forceful and believable in her role, has exactly one Bergmanesque soliloquy about the states and layers of being and suffering, but even this builds to a ringing, legible, and haunting conclusion. Imagining the war-torn world as the collective nightmare of humanity, of a global conscience in a restive, inattentive sleep, she asks herself, "What happens when the person dreaming all of this and all of us awakes, and is ashamed?" (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1968 Svensk Filmindustri/Janus Films.

Picked Flick #48: Irma Vep

Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep crouches and teases from a funny, sexy, slinky space halfway between the chapbook and the manifesto. There is no doubt that Assayas, however offhanded his technique, means to shake up the French cinema. His characters can't stop bitching about the safe and stolid pictures that keep plodding around on Gallic screens, even as they join together to make a film of their own. Their shifty, shaky leader in this enterprise is René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a once-fêted director about whom everyone now seems especially dubious. René has somehow succeeded in wheedling Maggie Cheung into flying halfway around the world to France in order to star in his remake of Les Vampires, Louis Feuillade's six-hour film serial of 1915-16. Unfortunately, René flummoxes himself and everyone else each time he tries to articulate why he is making this movie and what indeed he means for it to be. He has fiercely specific ideas about individual shots and scenes, and he forces his cast and crew through an intensely mannered, deliberately antiquarian project that none of them quite understands—and yet, when he watches the rushes at the end of a full day's work, he is apoplectic with disgust. More and more, Irma Vep insinuates that René isn't just a stern, eccentric taskmaster but a genuinely ill person. He vanishes from the set in the middle of the shoot, the victim of a rumored breakdown, at which point the studio recruits another director to steward the project.

That's about it for story in Irma Vep, but what bewitches about the movie are its crafty, on-the-fly methods of capturing the stop-and-go rhythms of filmmaking, to such an extent that the nascent film-within-a-film is itself almost an afterthought, albeit a beguilingly odd one. Reviews routinely called Irma Vep a satire, but it's never perfectly clear that René's remake of Les Vampires is such a folly after all, and nor is it obvious that Assayas is exaggerating all that much the swirling tumult in and around a set. Ironically, the more heatedly René disavows his labor, the more the cameraman, costumer, and cast members devise their own excited inklings about the film's artistic potential. Then again, most of these characters are so quicksanded in their own private neuroses that it's a minor miracle that any film is coming together at all. Markus (Bernard Nissile), René's cinematographer of 15 years, is infuriated by the director's wordless dismissals of each day's work. The producers seethe with bureaucratic stresses and with petty suspicions of their colleagues. Laure (Nathalie Boutefeu), the second-billed actress, is diplomatically supportive of René's ambitions, at least until she learns that she'll inherit the lead role if the new director, José Mirano (Lou Castel), succeeds in appropriating the film. Most memorably, Zoé (Nathalie Richard), the perpetually frazzled and temperamental wardrobe supervisor, keeps trying to suture the flimsy latex of Maggie Cheung's principal costume—a zippered catsuit modeled less on Feuillade's original character than on Michelle Pfeiffer's Batman Returns get-up—while simultaneously nursing a potent but anxious crush on Maggie herself. While all of these characters repeatedly explode at each other, Maggie Cheung is almost supernaturally gracious and flexible: a refreshing detour from actress-as-diva clichés, not to mention an extremely able performance in the always difficult role of oneself. In a sense, Irma Vep takes shape as a series of challenges to Maggie's equanimity, but she keeps her cool not just around this retinue of barking headcases but in the face, too, of Eric Gautier's restive handheld camera. Then again, Maggie may be harboring her own secrets: in the one sequence where she separates from the group, she appears to sneak into a nearby hotel room and burgle an expensive necklace, while the naked owner gabs on her telephone mere steps away. Given its uncertain placement within Irma Vep's montage, Maggie may simply be dreaming this trespass, but something about the sheer, risky gratuitousness of her theft resonates with René's artistic vision and, indeed, with Assayas' own: all three artists play elaborate, improvisatory games with exotic objects. For both René and Assayas, Maggie herself is this object—and if anything, she understands René better as his psyche further unravels and his fetishistic fascination with her becomes more overt. "That's desire," she says, with kind, even-keeled understanding at the end of his confessional rant, "and I think it's okay, because that's what we make movies with."

It's hard to write about Irma Vep and capture what is so special, playful, and exploratory about the movie. One major reason is that Assayas operates from such a jazzy visual sensibility that words are poor communicants for his signature fixations—for example, recurring shots of Maggie in her leather facemask, or the subtly sustained sequence shots in which Zoé's unrequited crush graduates from a subplot to a major assertion of the film. There's also the fact that, shaved of its last five minutes, Irma Vep would amount to a reasonably smart and enjoyably frisky sketch about art, recycling, and paranoia. Instead, Irma Vep unleashes a whopper of an open-ended finale: proof positive that you don't need a plot-twist, nor even much of a plot, to send your audience reeling out of the theater. As the crew of Les Vampires 2.0 gather to watch a rough assembly of footage by their hospitalized auteur, Assayas does more than call the bluff of René's skeptics. What he has crafted is so fearlessly, unspeakably strange that this modest, desultory movie suddenly quakes with the distilled force of aesthetic mystery. Forget Guy Maddin, or plastic bags blowing in the wind, or those blinding cityscapes at the ends of Happy Together and Adaptation. Though Assayas would reach further and score higher in demonlover (many of whose central motifs are already active here), Irma Vep bears the signature of a filmmaker who can stand far enough outside himself and his medium to see what is truly remarkable and also unsettling about both. He concocts, via a story about resurrecting old images, a tantalizing foretaste of the weird, hypnotic, possible futures of movies. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1996 Dacia Films/Canal+/Zeitgeist Films.

Cover Boy

Debuting on newsstands right about now is the new issue of Stop Smiling, the magazine where you'll find my cover-story interview with the phenomenal Scottish film director Lynne Ramsay. Some of my favorite tidbits from the conversation are missing from this transcript—not least the discovery that we love many of the same films, including Safe and A Woman Under the Influence—but I still hope that you'll enjoy the conversation and follow up on her films, including the three dazzling shorts (Gasman, in particular) available on the Ratcatcher DVD. After a week of very high spirits for British cinema, Ramsay's a great rental choice!

Image © 2006 Stop Smiling Magazine, and reproduced from their website.

Cannes Lineup

It's in. How come I'm not excited? (Lynch's absence doesn't help.)

Picked Flick #58: In the Mood for Love

Pardon me for a moment as I swan off to buy some noodles. From a street vendor. Dappled by a sudden spray of rain. In my cheongsam. Hair piled high. Accessorizing perfectly with my natty enamel noodle-pail. [Sighhhhh]

You know, as many times as I have defied the old homily and, indeed, tried this at home, it never quite works out. I rocked a lot of ramen noodles in my years of graduate-student penury, but even with Michael Galasso's indelible theme surging through the kitchen and all the lights turned down low, trying to keep my elbow straight and my neck proud and my hips in a perfect pendulum, wouldn't you know that the elusive spark of sad, swollen Romanticism, of rue dans la rue, never came close to igniting. The only part I successfully conjured was "sad," and not even in the way I intended. Oh, but don't be laughing. Y'all know you tried, too.

As with The Crying Game, but working in an opposite direction, I have experienced a pretty notable swerve in my repsonse to In the Mood for Love. In this case, I have grown almost habituated, if such a thing is possible, to Love's rapturous mise-en-scène and its intricately woven sound elements, hypnotized and transported as I am by the miracle that is Maggie Cheung. I love the word "equipoise," but I wonder if it describes any single thing in the universe so well as it does Cheung's absolute and yet sensationally un-fussy control over the line of her body, the most minute calibrations of every feature, every lash. Sitting in a chair, casting her eyes over a newspaper, her posture is not an I or an S or an L, but some kind of sublime, pristine character missing from our alphabet. Her playing of scenes like Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow's evening out at a restaurant is suffused with an emotional urgency that is almost chemical, nowhere manifest and yet everywhere felt; by comparison, even such an accomplished telepath as Julianne Moore seems like she's doing handstands and flagging out semaphores in the somewhat analogous scenes in The End of the Affair. Other actors have dazzled in Wong's movies, though usually by sculpting themselves into ravishing emblems of cool like Brigitte Lin in Chungking Express or Carina Lau in Days of Being Wild, or black holes of devouring need like Leslie Cheung in Happy Together, or plaintive alter egos like Tony Leung in almost everything. But Cheung in In the Mood for Love exhibits an utter, respectful reverence for the art-object that Wong is creating around her, without ever seeming merely ornamental or rooting herself into any one attitude or affect. She is sad, resigned, perceptive, aroused, a good neighbor, a rattled wife, a creature of new and sudden impulse, a pilgrim returned to former haunts, and in every one of these guises, she has the clarity and soft color of blown glass, but also the veins and arteries of a human person.

As for the film, I must admit to wishing that the coda at Angkor Wat didn't feel quite so monumentalizing of what is, at heart, a gorgeous empherality. In general, I sometimes feel about Wong that, if this makes any sense, he makes movies for people who read magazines that I wouldn't like—the shimmering sheen, the insistent motifs (both visual and sonic), the lingering sense of a fold-out centerfold spread are all, at times, a little much. In short, I do love Wong, but I do have to be in the mood. Happy Together is my favorite of his films, partially because it's the most willing to rip itself open and trace some real edges in the material, without losing the power to stun us with unexpected elegance, artful caesuras. Still, even more than that film, In the Mood for Love concocts such a potent aura of feeling, deepening and darkening its flavors with each re-viewing, that my lingering disputes with Wong's aesthetic all but float away while I'm watching. It's cinema as absinthe. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

The Buzz

Probably not a great idea to rush myself to judgment on such a ruminative and atmospheric film, but who said reviewing films was a good idea? Short notes here about my successful (read: awake and alert) return to The Spirit of the Beehive.

I'll be back at the same revival house shortly for a new print of Blue Velvet and—O, heavenly thought!—another new print of Days of Heaven. All in the next two weeks. That is, if the next two weeks don't kill me; those of you who teach know what I am talking about.

Cinema Interruptus

Really, I blame the government, since I was up so late doing my taxes—why does the Connecticut Part-Year Resident form have to be so byzantine? But, my anger also lies with myself: tonight I lucked into an on-campus screening of a restored 35mm print of Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, the very day that one of Nathaniel's readers named it as having one of the best child performances ever, and in perfect synchronicity with my own embarrassingly sluggish New Year's Resolution project, and with a free ticket to boot... and then I promptly fell asleep less than a minute in. I woke up about 50 minutes later, to find little girls hanging little wooden organs on a life-size anatomical model in a schoolroom, and then wandering out to a shack in a field (see photo). Beehive is only playing one more time, tomorrow, so I'm going to sleep early and staying in bed late.

Andrei Tarkovsky and Heidi Klum

I'm so excited for my public speaking gig tomorrow at the Real Art Ways cinema and gallery space in Hartford, where I will be giving one of two post-film lectures after a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Andrei Rublev. Literally one of the greatest and most inspiring films I have ever seen, Andrei Rublev is a breathtaking spiritual epic orbiting around the life of Russia's most famous painter of orthodox icons. Before you get nervous, a lot of the magic inheres in how thoroughly Tarkovsky sidesteps biopic conventions—we never once see Rublev paint, and he is a witness to more scenes than he is a participant. Instead, we are treated to some of the most rapturous crane and aerial shots in cinema history, starting with the prologue's curious episode of a man attempting to fly off the top of a church tower with a homemade balloon as support, and climaxing with the spectacle of a naked woman fleeing the village where 14th-century Christian soldiers are violently interrupting a "pagan" ritual. She runs into the river to avoid capture, and the camera's whirling and yet poignantly static tracing of her escape is the very essence of visual poetry. All through the film, imposing architecture resonates against the fluid movements of water and bodies, and the palpable grittiness of earth, iron, and fire is shot and edited into transcendental, almost conceptual purity. It's truly awesome. In fact, this will be my third time seeing Andrei Rublev on a big 35mm screen, and I've been boning up for two days on the religious history of Russia, the revival of Rublev's personal mythology under Stalin and Khrushchev (of all people), the always strained relations between Tarkovsky and Mosfilm, and the philosophical and aesthetic undercurrents linking Andrei Rublev to other Tarkovsky films like Stalker and Solaris.

Or at least, this is what I am TRYING to do. Because in a cruel twist of fate, which I blame ENTIRELY on Gabriel and Nathaniel, my entire consciousness has been flooded in a giant tsunami of Project Runway.

Four days ago, I not only didn't have cable, but I hadn't had it for six years, except for the fact that in three of those years, I subscribed for 4-6 weeks apiece stretching from the Golden Globes to the Oscars, promptly cancelling the service on the morning after. Time Warner of Ithaca was straight irritated at my not-even-seasonal subscribing, but they'd still schlepp to the house and hook up the box, knowing that I'd walk it back to headquarters in a month's time. Now, on why I just don't care about TV: it has less to do with derision for the form (though, I admit, there is some of that) than with personal appetites and desires. I do. not. want. to experience characters once a week at some appointed time, in open-ended storylines. My life and my job satisfy those roles just fine. My art is supposed to come in discrete packages that have been shaped and concerted and filigreed with infinite nuance so that I have single, intense experiences of stories or people, which I can turn over and over like crystals in the light, rather than stringing them along like tinsel on a tree. Unless it's Once and Again, it just doesn't turn me on.

But as someone I know would say, f*** me running, because I love Project Runway. I am its newest convert. I accidentally saw the last two-thirds of this week's episode on Thursday night, when I was connecting my VCR to my cable box and activating a timer-record on the next channel down, until I got com-pleet-lee absorbed in Nick's crisis of conviction, in Daniel V.'s friendly and adorably unpushy counsel, and in Zulema's right to switch her models (which I wholly defend, even though it came at the expense of by far the best model-designer pairing on the show). I watched that funk till the end, and though I personally would have given a slight edge to Andrae's stunningly creative translation of brackish gutter water into flowing fashion (I wish there were a picture or, better, a video of that fabulous back in motion), I wholly applaud Daniel V.'s inspired sartorial take on the beauty of the orchid. I marveled at the stunning, Aristotelian completeness of this episode—the ironic reversal of fortune (Zulema's), the qualified healing of the wounded (Nick), the cosmic blessing of the most loyal comrade (Daniel V.)—an exquisite hour-long drama which all came together in perfect synchronicity with the just desserts of the garments in question. That was some Euripides-style jelly, people.

So you know my timer-record just went Physical all day on the eight-hour marathon of the season thus far. While I sit here reading my little treatises on Tarkovsky, I am gobbling Runway like it's cheesecake, till I'm caught up like Usher. The banishments have been so utterly just (shades now of Sophocles!), and the victories so deserving. Even in weeks where something amiss took place—I think Kirsten's outfits were worse in the series opener than either of that week's booted victims—justice soon takes its course in a following episode. It is hilarious how the carry-over contestants always look like they want to coo over Heidi's growing bump at the beginning of each episode. Santino's hubris feels utterly believable, not just amped up for insta-celeb effect, and I do think that dude is talented, so I really don't hate him, and I think it makes sense that he's still around, even after some close brushes. The judges, with the occasional exception of Michael Kors, reply tartly to the outfits without being gratuitously mean, and without trying to go for the big water-cooler catchphrase. I love how Nina Garcia is a dead ringer for Dominique, the imperious senior editor in High Art, a movie that is not unlike the dark underbelly of Project Runway for boho photographers. I loved when Alabaman Heidi got the axe, and when the Heidi breathed out her customary "Auf Wiedersehen," tragic Heidi blurted with perfect sincerity, "I don't know what that means, but Bye!" Best of all, I have never understood or cared about fashion AT ALL, and even less about reality television, but this show really is training my eye about what to look for and think about with regard to runway ensembles, and it's such a pleasure to see contestants judged on their ideas and creativity instead of some canned, parodic version of personality.

L-O-V-E.

(Only gripe: now that I know the show, I am even more incensed by the non-inclusion of Shannon Maddox, whose sensuously detailed theatrical costumes have amazed me in two productions, and whose quick but non-bitchy wit would have been purrr-fect for this show. Really, why'd we have Emmett all that time when we coulda had this?)

(One more gripe: I'm not getting much work done. Gabriel and Nathaniel, you are the Hekyll and Jekyll of my life. I do not even want to know Galactica's time slot. Seriously, y'all need to keep that shit to yourself. To punish you for colonizing my precious work time, I am going to hit Reload one less time on each of your blogs tomorrow than I usually do. Seriously, I'm limiting myself to 8 or 10 clicks a day, and that is final.)

Picked Flick #66: Dream of Light (El Sol del Membrillo)

My friend and comrade in cinephilia Tim Robey treasures the film Vanya on 42nd Street, naming it as a personal favorite though he has only seen it once—in part, it seems, because he has only seen it once, or even more specifically, because it imbues its viewers with an impulse to see it only once, to savor it as a memory rather than as a living-place or a possession. I can easily see how the empyrean theatricality of Vanya, ranked at #74 on this very list, could engender this kind of self-imposed and almost sacralizing distance, which I take to be a kind of loyalty, and a recognition of those precious instants when cinema shines its light on the magic essence of some other art form. A different film, Victor Erice's Dream of Light, is my own touchstone for this kind of closely harbored adoration. Like Vanya it offers an awe-inspiring marriage between two arts, and does so with such absolute humility and such expert, inviting simplicity that you trust and absorb it immediately. The corroboration of further viewings feels unnecessary, perhaps even undesirable.

Dream of Light is a Spanish film. Its original title, El Sol del Membrillo, translates more directly as "The Sun of the Quince Tree," and several prints name the film as The Quince Tree Sun. Only in America, as far as I know, was the film released as Dream of Light, and this confusion over titles both augments and reflects how elusive and ephemeral the movie is. Tracking it down, looking it up, even invoking it in conversation is a serpentine process, a series of choices that circle the film instead of leading right to it. The subject of the film, also deceptively simple, is the languid, patient process by which the painter Antonio López Garcia commits the image of a quince tree to his canvas. The process of painting, the interplay it requires between eye and mind, its status as a dynamic rather than a static art, was never really clear to me before I saw this movie. That López Garcia labors over a still-life of a tree, not a Pollock eruption or a Bacon abjection or a series of Van Gogh swirls, only enhances the revelation. His eye measures the tree and its bounty of leaves and fruit each hour of each day, so attentively that the viewer gradually shares in this observant acuity, if only for 135 minutes, and with greater and greater admiration for how López Garcia, aided by mundane tools and scrupulous geometrics, translates such seeing into a new, existing object. At least cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, who achieved international fame a decade later with The Others and Talk to Her, has got the jump on us here, judging and rendering López Garcia's world with a comparable grace and luminescence.

Happily, and credibly, López Garcia's painstaking devotions to both his subject and his art are not conveyed as something that excludes him from the group. His days percolate with dialogues—with his wife, with visiting friends, with fellow artists, with workers helping to renovate the house behind which he paints. Dream of Light explodes the romantic myth of the solitary artist with zero fuss or fireworks, even as it makes transparent how inward, idiosyncratic, and unlinguistic the work of the painter is. Positioned as one among many kinds of laborer, as one amid a slightly ragtag but genial and hospitable community of talkers, watchers, and creators, López Garcia emerges more fully as a character than do the protagonists of almost any fiction films or documentaries. The fact that Dream of Light blurs that distinction, too, evaporating its relevance almost from the first scene, is another of the major coups of this peerlessly modest but truly singular movie. When I reminisce about Dream of Light, I get so enamored of what I remember (perhaps even wrongly so!) that I feel briefly compelled to seek it out, to watch it immediately and regularly, and to learn how much more it surely contains and reveals. But something keeps me from doing this, and for now, I'll keep listening to that something. But I hope you won't. At least once. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #68: Chronicle of the Smoldering Years

I write this capsule, so many of 2005's movies have attempted to delve into the ongoing crises and entrenched corruptions of the developing world, with especially strong epicenters in the Middle East (Paradise Now, Syriana) and central Africa (The Constant Gardener, Darwin's Nightmare). To recognize that Syriana was written and directed by an American, Darwin's Nightmare by an Austrian, a