In this collection of 35 three-minute films on the subject of cinema by some of the world’s most impressive directors, the results are predictably varied. For each individual film, the filmmaker’s name is not given until after the film ends, which makes guessing who made them part of the fun. Many are immediately identifiable, either because of style (David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, Aki Kaurismaki, Tsai Ming-Liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien), or because the director is the star (Elia Suleiman, David Cronenberg). However, Wim Wenders and Raymond Depardeon throw effective curveballs and their respective shorts about cinema in Africa are welcome additions. Olivier Assayas serves up a fine suspense tale that plays like a serial episode, which is similar to the Dardennes’ Pickpocket-inspired shot of a thief in a theatre. Kiarostami gives the best take on crying at the movies (an image repeated less successfully throughout the film) in his simple montage of a theatre filled with Iranian women weeping at the end of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.
We see a recurrent fondness for Godard and Bresson, and also for these directors’ own films, albeit shown in different ways. Highlights include Takeshi Kitano as an incompetent projectionist who butchers his own Kids Return, Atom Egoyan linking The Adjuster with Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc via cell phones, and Lars Von Trier enacting a brutal fantasy while watching his own Manderlay. By contrast, Theo Angelopolous feels compelled to prominently display a poster of his own Suspended Step of the Stork beside a Fellini poster in his woefully pretentious “tribute” to Marcello Mastroianni; and Youssef Chahine presents a self-aggrandizing tale culminating with TV footage of a standing ovation in his own honour as he receives a prize at the Cannes festival! Even worse than these, several other shorts are downright embarrassing and should have been rejected – the entries from Gus Van Sant, Jane Campion, Michael Cimino, Amos Gitai and Alejandro González Iñárritu are awful.
Humour often works best. The Coen Brothers present Josh Brolin reprising his No Country for Old Men character Llewelyn Moss, trying to decide between Rules of the Game and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates. Nanni Moretti ruminates on incurring his family’s wrath for bringing them to Legends of the Fall, and explaining to his son that his own films are quite different from The Matrix. Walter Salles offers an endearing samba ode to Cannes that had me tapping my feet; Manoel de Oliveira gives a typically subdued, delightful retelling of a meeting between Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII. Hijinx in theatres is the subject of hilarious shorts, with string punchlines, by Andrei Konchalovsky (about a Russian theatre manager whose love for 8 ½ knows no bounds); Roman Polanski (about a couple encountering a groaning man while watching sex scenes from Emmanuel); and Billie August (a man’s date is spoiled by racists in a Swedish cinema).
The best-in-show honours probably go to Ken Loach’s entry about a man and his son standing in a multiplex queue trying to decide what to see and finding every title equally terrible. Like the most successful elements of this compilation, it was clever and left me beaming, confirming that even the poorest entries here do not mar the pleasures of the better ones, making the collection well worth seeing.
When the wonderful Cochochi was chosen winner for best film in this year’s Discovery section at TIFF, it must not have surprised anyone who had the pleasure to see it. The title refers to the valley of Okochochi in the Mexican Tarahumara Sierra, where the film is set. Evaristo and Tony have just graduated from boarding elementary school; Evaristo plans to continue his multilingual education, while Tony is relieved to be finished school. Even though he is clever and has won a coveted high school scholarship, Tony prefers to live on his family’s ranch.
The boys borrow their grandfather’s horse without permission and journey to a faraway community to deliver medicine to relatives. Along the way, they lose the horse and then each other. Separated, they try to find the horse, then their way home. Employing deceptive simplicity and a remarkable economy of words and images, young first-time directors Laura Amelia Guzman and Israel Cardenas demonstrate remarkable maturity and control of their craft in creating this beautiful, tender film. The duo captures effective performances from their non-professional cast; the note-perfect handling of numerous intricate, emotional scenes with their young actors reminds one of early Kiarostami. Amateur actors seldom perform with such aplomb in delicate scenes as when Tony confronts a bully whom he thinks has stolen the horse, or in the film’s conclusion, when he is confronted by his grandfather.
A moving, unsentimental portrait of youth and a loving depiction of the rural landscapes and its inhabitants, Cochochi also has a great deal to say about Mexico, indigenous culture and the impact of foreigners on the region. This much was evident from a single screening and I suspect the film would prove even richer with multiple viewings.
Produced from a script co-written by director Wes Anderson, lead actor Jason Schwartzman and Schwartzman’s cousin (and CQ2 director) Roman Coppola, The Darjeeling Limited is further evidence that the precocious Anderson is trying to face up to criticisms that his realism by way of fantastical art direction is starting to ring hollow. The story of three brothers (Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson) reuniting to find spiritual salvation (and their mother) in India, DJL can’t escape the emptiness of Anderson’s play worlds, floating casually along between the now-standard comic bits, music montages and ineffectively rendered pathos. Like its travelogue cousin Lost in Translation (for which Roman Coppola was credited as ‘additional director’), DJL doesn’t provide much meat to chew on post-screening; yes, they’re both fun rides, with more good musical choices than bad, interesting visual designs and perspectives, great actors and truly funny moments, but ultimately, sadly devoid of meaningful questions, let alone answers.
Sure, DJL, like most Anderson pictures, can be fun: Wilson is always good at being a character in the truest sense, and Anderson’s complex visual strategy, now also including experiments with zooms, often inspire through a pairing of whimsy and excitement within the frame. But his claim that India was so inspiring he just used “what was already there” is misleading and telling of his narrative conceits. His dedication to meticulously re-creating the train as a set, not to mention exquisitely detailing every pan and camera movement to highlight this edifice, saps any inherent cinematic spirituality.
A particularly troubling plot point involves the rapid-fire insertion of a local Indian boy’s death by drowning after Adrian Brody’s character is unable to save him – a serious moment of reprieve for the characters. Situating the brothers as participants in the death of this boy leads to a bloody Brody carrying the child to his nearby village and father, while conveniently also allowing them the opportunity to experience an authentic, rural Indian village (as heavily art directed as the rest of the film – was there ANY dirt there?). During the sacrosanct funeral (ooh, look at the exotic art design of foreign death rituals!) the boys selfishly flashback to not the funeral of their father, but the events leading up to it, namely Brody’s attempt to re-acquire his father’s Porsche. As contrast, this could work to paint them as crass Americans with no soul, but because the rest of the movie plays to the same tone – and relies on similar comic interludes – the character’s indulgences and righteousness in these scenes is especially unsympathetic.
The only progressive story the film explores is the idea of a parent running away from their familial commitments in order to seek spiritual completion – the opposite of Generation X’s backpacking/teach English spiritual salvation cliché. But too many details are ignored – how did they power that iPod in the country? Why didn’t Brody pay for those drinks at the train station? What makes Schwartzman smoking cigs so worthwhile a visual? – and the music choices are off as often as on. Structure over substance is a simple way to put it, but ultimately Anderson’s bourgeois baggage, like that of his characters, is simply tossed away in a vain effort to avoid questions and catch the latest train.
Note: In this reviewer’s opinion Hotel Chevalier, the short film that accompanies The Darjeeling Limited, is a far more rewarding experience, namely because it achieves all the elements Anderson seeks to pull off, and in shorter form: it’s both more heartbreaking and funny than its longer cousin.
I am baffled by the glowing response to Cronenberg’s latest, while English Canada’s other international cinema star, Atom Egoyan, received almost universal derision for his equally flawed Where the Truth Lies. At times, Eastern Promises seems to exist for no better reason than to showcase the advancement of realistic throat slitting make-up effects.
Naomi Watts plays a nurse who delivers a baby, then discovers the late mother’s diary, in which the young woman reveals she was a Russian mafia prostitute as well as other dirty secrets. Enter criminal patriarch Armin Mueller-Stahl (steely and effective in his role), his son (Vincent Cassel) and his bodyguard/driver (Viggo Mortensen), who are enlisted to get the diary.
Watts is wasted as a nurse who chiefly serves to advance the plot; her character is hollow, as are the scenes with her cartoonish parents. Conveniently, Watts’ character once miscarried, so somehow that means she is drawn to the orphaned baby with her shared Russian roots. Sure, I guess it could happen. Meanwhile, the film mostly belongs to Cassel and Mortensen, both effective in their scenery-chewing roles, and to the film’s credit the characters realistically speak in Russian at the appropriate times.
Yet the film progresses, at times listlessly, towards a conclusion that there’s no reason to care about. Cronenberg and his capable cast are unable to overcome Steve Knight’s script, which is hampered by passages of flat dialogue and a series of plot contrivances. Apparently a person can simply walk out of a maternity ward with any baby they want. Why didn’t Watts just take a baby years ago? It would have saved her a lot of grief. The burgeoning romance between her and Mortensen is equally implausible. Knight seems to presume he has been socially progressive by having Watts ride a motorcycle, although feminists had better overlook her needing Mortensen to repair the bike when it stalls. Suddenly she has fallen for him despite seeing him only a handful of times and knowing almost nothing about him (oh, right, he’s a bad boy). No, she’s a strong independent woman, thanks to being raised by an ex-KGB agent (that always helps).
Those who are rallying behind Eastern Promises have yet to adequately defend its many clichés. The film’s showpiece, a semi-nude fight scene in a Turkish bathhouse, is more outrageous than impressive, and like the rest of the film’s violence it borders on self-parody for Cronenberg. It is a credit to Cronenberg’s status and his body of work that he could make this film and have it be widely praised, especially with a horrendous cop-out ending that, ironically, seems to represent much of what A History of Violence, and specifically Mortensen’s character in that film, appeared to be reacting against.
The latest film from Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days) sees him collaborating with co-cinematographer Ed Lachman, which proves a fruitful pairing for both notorious provocateurs. Here they present two stories, connected only by theme, in which characters move from the Ukraine to Austria and vice versa. In one, young Olga (Ekateryna Rak) quits working as an underpaid nurse to try her hand at internet pornography, then moves to Austria to work as a live-in maid, and ends up as a nursing home caretaker. In the other story, young Pauli (Paul Hofman) fails at becoming a security guard, and after mounting debt forces him to live with his parents, he agrees to accompany his boorish stepfather (brilliantly portrayed by Michael Thomas) to install gumball machines in the Ukraine.
This was my first encounter with Seidl’s work, but will not be my last. He elicits remarkable performances from his mostly amateur cast, and his command of tone and style is excellent. At nearly 2.5 hours, Import/Export moves briskly for a film of its kind and builds resonance from startling imagery and realistic characters.
The film exasperates at times since many of the scenes could be interchanged at random without affecting the plot. One suspects that this is of relatively little importance to Seidl, who presents the film as a kind of essay about his repulsion towards aspects of European society. Import/Export expresses a dark and angry outlook; several scenes are clearly designed to shock (and succeed in doing so), but unlike certain films by Seidl’s compatriot, Michael Haneke, the characters and situations appear to concern real people as opposed to rigid pieces of an argument, making Import/Export both more accomplished and more affecting.
Winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, Jellyfish feels more like an amalgamation of short stories than a cohesive film. Set in Tel-Aviv, the three principal scenarios are mostly connected thematically, each containing characters feeling trapped by their surroundings, wanting to escape. One story concerns a couple’s disastrous honeymoon after the bride breaks her ankle at their wedding; in the second, a waitress at the same wedding breaks up with her boyfriend, then finds a young mute girl alone on the beach and attempts to take care of her. A third story concerns a woman from the Philippines who cares for a bitter elderly woman.
Nicely shot and very well acted, Jellyfish is most successful at surface level. The ensemble cast is uniformly good at creating rich, empathetic characters in a relatively short time span. Directing team Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen (also the screenwriter) deserve credit for the film’s effectively tight structure and for sustaining a tone which veers between quirky, comic, dramatic and ambiguous (at times reminiscent of Miranda July’s superior Me and You and Everyone We Know).
However, Jellyfish is less successful at its core and its ending fails to deliver on the promise of early scenes. Although the Tel-Aviv setting is assigned great relevance and characters mention involvement in the Holocaust and Syrian war, these stories could happen just about anywhere. Each character learns something about themselves, leaving an aspect of their perspective altered – satisfying enough, but search for deeper meaning and prepare to be under-whelmed. The characters are meant to resemble jellyfish because of their inability to control their destinies, the source of all their conflicts. Yet in the conclusion, the ocean is presented as an oasis, free of troubles; therefore, should they envy their coelenterate namesake? Ultimately, the film is at times as intricately arranged as its allusive title, but both are also transparent, without much at their centre.
If you’re expecting The Man From London to be of the same calibre as Tarr’s previous films, you’ll probably be disappointed. For those who have never seen a Bela Tarr film, stay away from this one and watch Werckmeister Harmonies or Satantango instead. In contrast with those masterpieces, Tarr’s latest more closely resembles his script for Passion, loosely based on The Postman Always Rings Twice. The very simple story concerns Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), who observes a fight between two thieves then ends up with their cash-filled suitcase while contemplating what to do with the money and his own life.
Fred Kelleman does unsurprisingly excellent work behind the camera, particularly with his play of light and shadow in the lovely black and white images. Yet while the opening shot is typical, virtuoso Tarr, The Man from London never achieves the daring, awe-inspiring impact of his last two films. Whether the reasons for this are fidelity to his source material, the notoriously troubled shoot or otherwise, the film proves to be a simplistic exploration of very familiar themes and story (the recent No Country for Old Men, for example, covers similar terrain and is superior in every way). Tilda Swinton, while believable in her role, employs an outwardly expressive acting style that clashes awkwardly with the rest of the cast’s uniformly restrained, interior performances, accentuating her already odd (dubbed) placing in this film. Worse, a scene in which Maloin drags his daughter away from her demeaning job inspired unintentional laughter when a butcher entered to chop slabs of meat; here, Tarr’s characteristically dreary vision descends into a clumsy stereotype of Eastern European art-house misery.
Despite its disappointments, the film still contains many nice scenes, including a vintage Tarr tableau of an accordion player and a man balancing pool balls on his head. Overall, Tarr’s direction is assured, but one can’t help but wish his script would rise above its many tropes. Maloin may be a sympathetic character, but Tarr is unable to deliver the spirituality or complexity he appears to be seeking within his mundane images.
Thanks to his offbeat dream cinema, Guy Maddin is now firmly entrenched as an impressive name on the international cinematic scene. Domestically, over the past 5 years Maddin may even have become the most accessible Canadian filmmaker, reaching a high level of cultural acceptance wherein many hipsters (see Toronto musicians) gleefully reference Maddin films and his signature style. Nor is it because said style is repetitive; rather, Maddin is fascinating for the tweaks and new directions he achieves with each new project. His consistent use of old-world Hollywood and silent film forms, placed within a contemporary kinetic structure of symbols and comic interludes, has almost, in spite of itself, become extremely accessible. That his films have never made serious theatrical waves in his homeland is one of the true travesties of modern English Canadian cinema exhibition.
Maddin’s ceaseless experimentation now brings him to a cinematic rumination on lifelong hometown, Winnipeg – to many Canadians, a simple bastion of Winter cold, Summer flies and the Blue Bombers football team. Culturally, however, it’s long been fervent ground for quiet contemplations: witness Clive Holden’s 12-vignette portrait of stasis in movement, Trains of Winnipeg; the poetic rock of the Guess Who or the Weakerthans, the aborted creature dreams of Marcel Dzama, and finally, the fantastical films of Maddin.
Proving that a lower budget is only a hindrance to those lacking in imagination, Maddin uses a recent discovery of his – personal narration (also seen in last year’s Brand Upon the Brain!) – to turn a Documentary Channel (Canada) commission into an exercise in innovation. Using both public and personal history as jumping off points for ruminations on the sleepy nature of the cold city, Maddin employs actors in smartly designed sets and costumes, amidst constructed re-creations that allow him to examine his family (especially during his youth), hockey (the Jets), the mystery of The Forks, and secret sects that – according to Maddin’s sexually overdosed mind – involved intertwined rituals bridging spiritual and business interests. His most contentious and reverberating theme is the notion that ghosts – of dreams past, homes lived in, experiences acquired – can be the instigating factor toward staying in a familiar place. Rather than escape these apparitions, which many may feel hold them back, Maddin suggests ghosts provide the necessary context to explore the particular issue of home – or where an individual is ‘from’ – by providing an echo for lives lived in the present. In short, this film (about Maddin as much as Winnipeg) reveals that such ghosts are the catalyst for crazed visions of a parallel sleepwalker’s universe inhabited – depending on the person – by hockey players, voiceless acts of sexual depravity and physical desperation, guided by the voice of an omnipotent narrator who observes them all in ultra-kinetic black and white.
No working filmmaker more effectively captures the quality of dreams than Gus Van Sant. His last three pictures – Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005) and now, Paranoid Park – are masterpieces of tone, employing startling perspectives to make us reconsider the seams of perception; walking out of them, one feels lightheaded, unable to rub the sleeplike film of the director’s images from the plane of consciousness. Most impressive is Van Sant’s ability to reproduce the moral neutrality of dreams. In a dream state, the rules and standards of waking life do not apply; our subconscious casually sprouts images we might find repugnant or blasphemous if dropped into the strict code of acceptable social conduct at work in the waking world of adulthood. Van Sant’s films float in a similar space, where judgment does not apply. It is the fever dream of adolescence, before morals have set in the manner of concrete, and we can still see possibilities for other shapes to be made from the stuff solidifying in the standard mold.
Paranoid Park is a coming-of-age story told through the eyes of its young protagonist, Alex (Gabe Nevins – like most of the film’s cast, an actor with little to no prior experience). Alex is an average teenage skateboard rat, living a life where boredom and intensity often blur together indiscriminately. His parents’ broken marriage has shaped his life, but he is predictably blasé about it. He does not drink or misbehave much, but yearns to be immersed in the world of Paranoid Park, a skateboard park in Portland, Oregon’s East Side built illegally by a group of misfit street kids.
When we meet Alex, he has just begun writing his story down, so we don’t yet know the major details. His tale unfolds in a narrative that doubles back on itself, repeats episodes, shifts points of view and overlaps interior monologues with conversational dialogue. Van Sant, having used Harris Savides as cinematographer on his last four features, enlists the eye of Christopher Doyle (with whom he previously worked with on the ill-fated 1998 remake of Psycho) to convey the confusion and disjointedness of the teenage experience. Shots of Alex writing in his notebook are interspersed with grainy, first-person point-of-view sequences of skaters riding the ramps; scenes from the high school hallway, which pointedly reference similar shots from Elephant; and various other scattered images, filmed using an array of visual techniques. While many of the tricks are recognizable from past films – for example, the long, slow zoom, also used to great effect in Last Days – the overall effect is a shift away from the visual consistency of Elephant and Last Days to a much more scattershot palette, designed to define the borders and mimic the rhythms of Alex’s mind. Music is used in the same way, with Van Sant veering from melancholy Elliott Smith songs played in full to snippets of Nino Rota and ambient soundscapes.
As the narrative crinkles outward, unfolding like a balled-up piece of note paper, we get hints that something may not be right in Alex’s world. The cops show up at his school, looking to interview skateboarders. Disturbing items appear on the news. Alex, having just lost his virginity to his cheerleader girlfriend, abruptly breaks off their relationship. The extent of Alex’s trouble is not revealed until deep in the film, but when Van Sant lays it out, he does so in a way that is jarring, shocking and surprisingly sad.
Still, the film refuses to claim moral superiority over its characters. The ethical ambiguity has the potential to be maddening, but Van Sant, who has in the past occasionally demonstrated his disdain for subtlety, gives us plenty of clues as to the film’s thematic concerns. One of Alex’s friends asks him repeatedly about the war in Iraq, placing the story firmly in a contemporary adult world where violence is used cynically and wantonly as a source of power. There are references to the mightiest of brand names, which both enrich the authenticity of the storytelling and act as reminders of the world of global commerce operating just beyond Alex’s consciousness. Most telling, however, is this quote, a casual quip spoken by one of Alex’s skateboarding peers: “Grownups do stuff for money. There is no other reason. [sic]”
What Paranoid Park finally asks us about is blame. It presents us with a situation that urgently calls for blame, then questions the value and the validity of that blame in a world that – knowingly – abandons its children to the streets, wages war and worships money above all else. It does so through a portrait of adolescence as both purgatory and state of grace, where the minutiae of emotional experience – weighing whether to hold hands on a bus with a girl who could be your girlfriend, maybe, if you wanted – carry the same heft as matters of life and death. Since most of us can probably remember those moments as clearly as Van Sant renders them here, Paranoid Park counts as that most valuable artwork: one that tries to transcend the loneliness of human experience to find, in the universal, the possibility of redemption. What a beautiful dream, indeed.
Upon seeing a scorpion swarmed by ants near the beginning of DePalma’s new film, I thought, here we go again: a signature image from The Wild Bunch can now be counted among his famous, ever-present hommages. Instead of drawing straight from Hitchcock, Eisenstein, or Jules Dassin, now it’s Peckinpah. After winning Best Director honours at Venice with this politically charged, low-budget film, I both expected and hoped for a departure from the trends of his more recent work. Although aesthetically a far cry from the likes of Mission to Mars, the film is ultimately a remake of Casualties of War with far better intentions than execution.
At first we see a Rashomon-like examination of the different points of view that contribute to obscuring the truth about an incident that takes place amidst the tableau of the war in Iraq. These include a marine film-student wannabe’s video diary of his barracks; a French documentary film crew following the same unit; an Al-Jazeera type broadcast about the American occupation; an Iraqi insurgent’s web-circulated footage. As the American unit is forced to stay for a prolonged tour of duty, the soldiers begin to show signs of psychological fraying until several go berserk and commit a brutal crime.
Loosely based on real events, Redacted’s similarity to Casualties of War evokes the parallels between the current occupation and Vietnam, arguing that history has tragically repeated itself. However, similarities to Casualties and countless other war films also hurt Redacted, when the issues of media representation and government “redacting” are overtaken by focus on the soldier’s psychologies before and after the crime. DePalma correctly asserts that a lack of critical or gruesome images, readily available during Vietnam, has contributed to the comparatively slow public reaction against the Iraq war. However, Redacted offers precious little insight about soldiers or warfare that most people don’t already assume, which is not assisted by the recycling of stereotypes such as the villainous, racist, fat, profane Southerner. Although shot and structured quite distinctly, stock characters and dialogue mar the film after its opening half hour.
In spite of its frustrating parts, Redacted looks great, assisted by Toronto producers Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss, and the film is improved considerably by several memorable set pieces that provide palpable tension. Scenes explaining how Iraqis pass through American-guarded checkpoints are enlightening as well as dramatic and achieve the kind of resonance to which the whole film aspires. However, DePalma reaches his peak form during two particular scenes, first during a harrowing and suspenseful search for IED’s, then, in a very effective narrative twist, the surprising departure of a main character. Flaws aside, Redacted is enough to make one hopes that DePalma will continue to make films with a political conscience and perhaps inspire a few other Hollywood directors to follow suit.
With both Japon (2002) and Battle in Heaven (2005), Carlos Reygadas established himself as an aggressive but cagey international film auteur. His stark pacing and spacing in Japon wowed viewers, if only thanks to its sheer patience – and of course its sex scene between two older, dignified characters. Where Japon was measured and arguably a tad dry, Battle in Heaven was much more abrupt, dripping with guilt and sexuality, both in its blaring depiction of Catholic symbols and frank sexual acts.
As a member of a minor movement in Mexican cinema alongside more famous recent mainstream directors Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men), Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams, Amores Perros), Reygadas became a mentor to fellow Mexican Amat Escalante (Sangre, 2005). Like Reygadas, Escalante explored his narrative mostly in a realistic vein, with the occasional fantastic or magical flourish, and his vision also attracted viewers on the global festival circuit (winning Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2005). Theatrically, domestically or around the world, it’s significant to note that compared to their blockbuster brothers, Reygadas and Escalante’s films are frequently limited to festival screenings and cult DVD distribution.
Though the Reygadas’ cinema often appears designed to disrupt expectations through blatant images or lingering visuals, its realist foundation is ultimately quite humane. Silent Light, which received a special Jury prize in Cannes this past year, is a unique examination of the relationship between husband Johan (Cornelio Wall) and his wife Esther (Miriam Toews), a devout Mennonite family. When Johan falls for Madre (Elizabeth Fehr), a local widow, he turns to his neighbours and father for advice on how to reconcile his faith in god, and his dedication to his family and lifestyle. So overpowering is his desire for this other woman – seemingly born of honest-to-goodness love, not merely sexual lust – that it renders Esther not only heartbroken, but devoid of life.
Setting the film within an insular village near Chihuahua, Mexico, and having his lead actors speak Plautdietsch (a German dialect never before spoken in cinema), was a daring move, easily justified because ultimately, a subtitle is still a subtitle, and a moving cinematic experience is largely visual. Indeed, Reygadas’ developing ability to paint cinematic portraits irrelevant of dialogue, mixing different class and popular representations amidst his portraits, is perhaps his greatest asset. An observer rather than a moralist, Reygadas has a strong faith in the human heart to commit to one true passion and then see it through by any means – however misguided the dream may be, or however his culture may conspire against accomplishing that dream. For Johan, it’s not about his commitment to his family and current wife; it’s more important whether he should finally be selfish enough to choose for himself, regardless of consequences for others. This prioritization of a singular passion for the good of the self instead of the good of the public, the religious sect or the family unit definitely poses heavy questions, and Reygadas here offers the chooser both a nearly unbelievable consequence, and a reprieve: bookending the film is a gorgeous, dollying time-lapse extreme wide shot of a field, respectively fading up on dawn and down on sunset, simultaneously dismissing and reaffirming the daily struggle to commit to the evanescence of life.
The question with any ghost story is always whether to mine scares from the familiar DNA of the genre, or to seek out new ways to make people frightened, uncomfortable and horrified. Both methods can yield machete-sharp filmmaking; despite its familiar twist, Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others (2001) is one of the creepiest ghost stories put to screen in the last decade, while a film like Higuchinsky’s’s Uzumaki (2000) – essentially a film about evil shapes – is all the more disturbing for its unique agents of fear.
Thai director Wisit Sasanatieng has made a couple films – the psychedelic Western melodrama, Tears of the Black Tiger (2000) and the even stranger Citizen Dog (2004) – that revel in skewed imagination and subverting genre conventions. Maybe he got bored of being unique (Wikipedia suggests he also faced large budgetary restraints) because The Unseeable is a traditional story that relies heavily on tricks well-tested by Amenabar and the increasingly tiresome M. Night Shyalaman, as well as the recent spate of Asian horror films clustered under the “J-horror” banner.
The story, set in Siam in 1934, concerns Nualjan (Siraphan Wattanajinda), a pregnant country girl who has arrived in the city looking for her missing husband. Without money or much of a clue how to begin, she finds lodging in a dilapidated manor home inhabited by the reclusive Madame Ranjuan (Suporntip Chuangransri), and soon gets stuck in a kind of timid stasis, harangued by her friend Choy (Sombatsara Teerasaroch) and bossed around by the house’s domineering caretaker (Tassawan Seneewongse). Weird happenings compel her to leave, but when she has the baby, she’s forced to stay and confront the house’s grim truth.
Abandoning the hypercolour palettes of his previous films, Sasanatieng here uses a muted scheme of sepia-tinted greens and browns to render the eerie atmosphere of the manor, which he contrasts with the fervid, suffocating cocoon of a room inhabited by Madame Ranjuan (who, with her bloody lipstick and busty slips, is a nod to the glamourous film stars of the ’30s and ’40s). The subdued art direction is effective and impressive in its consistency – not a trait many Thai films can be commended for – although you can’t help but wonder how it would’ve played if the director had stuck to his eye-popping colours, giving us a ghost story in paisley or electric violet.
The story’s great secret is not so great, and seasoned horror fans are likely to guess the reveal early on. Assessing the film’s quality, then, becomes a matter of judging how well Sasanatieng deploys his arsenal of sinister trimmings – shrieking musical punctuations, carefully placed visual grotesqueries, foreshadowings and flashbacks – to sustain the tension. The details are augmented by the performances, which range from subtle to scenery-shredding, and which give the film its one streak of originality: situating the tale in a cloistered world shaped almost entirely by female dynamics, wherein class status, maternity and jealousy all play potent roles.
As an experiment in genre proficiency, The Unseeable is a welcome addition to Sasanatieng’s filmography. However, genre can also be a dangerous trap for filmmakers that start out with a singular vision. If Sasanatieng loses his appetite for visual adventure, he’ll have squandered a lot of talent. If he continues his tour of genre film, evolving into a kind of Thai Takashi Miike – and his forthcoming martial arts revenge picture, Armful, suggests that’s the case – his will be a career to follow closely.
Fans of Swedish director Roy Andersson will not be disappointed in his latest film. His follow-up to the brilliant Songs from the Second Floor (2000) is by turns rollicking, noisy, somber and utterly hilarious. If it takes seven years to create a film this rich and unique, Andersson proves it is well worth the wait, and he rewards the patience of his followers.
Taking its title from Goethe – “Be pleased then, you the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot” –Andersson presents a series of loosely connected characters and scenes that seem to be united by a bartender’s refrain at last call, “Tomorrow’s another day”. Andersson is concerned with nothing less than the human experience, but his unmistakable vision and style make such weighty themes utterly engrossing. As with Songs, he presents a series of vignettes, often tableaus, intricately designed with painterly precision; the film did not take three years to complete by accident, and each shot could justifiably be hung in a gallery. Andersson also retains the tone of Songs and his celebrated shorts: an ironic, Kaurismaki-esque deadpan look at suffering and buffoonery, perhaps best encapsulated with the line, “With all the misery in the world, how can we not get drunk?”
A livelier film than Andersson’s previous efforts, You, the Living has music infused into many scenes; a character spontaneously breaks into song on a park bench (and is joined by her secret admirer, hiding behind a tree). The members of a Louisiana Brass Band feature prominently, as we see them practicing in their homes (at their neighbour’s expense), then playing various gigs (the drummer gets carried away at a funeral and starts a swinging beat).
The film’s many gut-busting set pieces include a man’s dream of landing in the electric chair after a failed magic trick, an irate hairdresser shaving a road through a businessman’s bushy hair (he explains, “I was having a bad day”), and a teacher breaking down in front of her grade school class because her husband called her a hag. Andersson’s greatest maestro moments come in the remarkable final shot, and an outrageous fantasy sequence in which a moving house pulls into a crowded train station. Like the rest of the film, it must be seen to be believed.
