FilmCANon is a new regular feature that explores significant films from Canada’s vaults, in an attempt to examine the notion of a canon in Canadian film, and to trace the leaps and hurdles in the story of our independent-minded national cinema. Our eventual goal is to create a comprehensive database of essays and reviews about Canadian films we believe helped to shape our current cinema and to influence the Canadian filmmakers of today.
On Willow Point, the waters roll, and raise within our raptured
soul a
faith transcendent as we view, the Old World past into the new.
– Frank
Olsen, “Willow Point”
“It all happened in a Gimli we no longer know.” The phrase, uttered in the prologue of Tales From the Gimli Hospital, could serve as an apt summary of Guy Maddin’s oeuvre, which takes place in the fevered peepholes of Maddin’s mind, places in which the hidden, the unknown or the perverse is always the prime mover. Yet, in a near-miraculous development, we do know Maddin’s Gimli – now that this most singular of filmmakers has amassed a significant body of work and enough international acclaim to be included alongside David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan on the list of filmmakers we name as our most esteemed.
Gimli Hospital is where he started, and what impresses upon revisiting it is the consistency of Maddin’s vision. From the first title screen, the director’s tone – a sinister perfume of satire, homage, goofy surrealism, classic horror and druggy Nut Cracker-infantilism – is readily evident:
O Mount Askja!
Your Eruptions have put us in Boats
and sent us to scar new lands.
But from across the celibate Ocean
you cast your nets and haul us back
to your smouldering bosom.
The tone is there; we can see how this, the title card in medieval lettering, speaking of ejaculations and burning bosoms and overlaid with quavering music, foreshadows the doll-faced neurosis of Careful (1992) or the fluttering grotesquerie of Brand Upon the Brain! (2002). But also in these three lines we can see the kernel of one of Maddin’s pervasive themes: the sadness of exile, the sense of being outside and Other. And it is perhaps in this that Gimli truly deserves recognition as an indispensable part of Canadian film history: it is still one of the few films to deal, in a way that is both appropriately serious and absurd, with our status as a nation of immigrants.
We meet the film’s outsiders at the outset: Einar the Lonely (Kyle McColloch); his friend Gunnar (Michael Gotti); and the beautiful Snjófridur (Angela Heck). Before we get to their story, however, Maddin gives us the film’s framing device: at Gimli hospital, the nunlike matron Amma (Margaret Anne MacLeod) prepares to tell two children a story, to distract them from the imminent death of their mother. Maddin plays with place and time from the beginning, mixing archaic costumes with conspicuous visual details (the Big Gulp cup clenched in the dying woman’s hands) and the sounds of cars and rock radio scumbled on the soundtrack. He gives us a lurching tape loop that seems strictly there to enhance the mood, then drags it into the realm of the diegetic (“just let her listen to her music,” Amma tells the children, as Maddin hones in on the grille of an old radio). This is real-but-not, in the present-but-not, in Manitoba-but-not, and so we are displaced in space, time and immersive disbelief, much as the characters of the story that follows are also displaced.
The star of Amma’s story is Einar, a fisherman who lives in a smokehouse by the sea, where he hangs his phallic harvest from the shabby boards. In this land, we are told, there is “a stirring at that hour stolen and kept by little girls.” Maddin gives us scenes of frolicking androgynes, painted boys and girls whom Einar eyes while repairing his nets. To gussy himself up for one group of sunbathers, he gels down his hair with the guts of a fish, only to find that his quarry has fled. Later that night, Einar becomes ill, affected with that stirring, “the epidemic” – a plague of scars that is ravaging the land, and that has filled up the nearby hospital with invalids, whose ranks Einar soon joins. There he meets Gunnar, and a strange relationship built on envy and tenderness develops between the two men – until, alas! a sordid secret is revealed and events careen out of control.
Einar is a “settler,” one of those who crossed the sea to live, uncomfortably, in a new environment. In the hospital – a mix of barn, circus and charnel house – he shares his affliction with other outsiders. There is a “minstrel” (played by McColloch in blackface), a doctor who is himself ill, and Gunnar, a plump oddball who has won favour with the Siren-esque nurses by telling them tales from the Gimli sagas – including the story of “the winter of the warm snow, the settlers’ only season of joy since landing on the shores of Lake Winnipeg one long ago October 21.” Note the specific date, the actual day the first settlers from Iceland landed, to a reading of Frank Olsen’s poem “Willow Point,” in Manitoba and established New Iceland, an area reserved for them by the Canadian government. Maddin’s own tale is as fantastical as the warm snow, but it is rooted in a very real instance of cultural displacement in Canadian history.
The seeds of antagonism between Gunnar and Einar are found in Gunnar’s popularity. Einar craves the nurses’ attention, but they are drawn to Gunnar, whom they even erotically “tuck in” while Einar watches from behind a sheer curtain, with Maddin’s sick-dream editing splicing the encounter into a series of silhouetted whispers. “Envy is a terrible ogre, children,” we hear Amma say, and soon Einar is literally screaming for attention and warming up to Gunnar – taking up his habits of “bark-fish cutting and bark-fish appreciation” – to make himself more appealing, more acceptable. But all of it is to no avail. He feels invisible, the classic affliction of the outsider and the immigrant, and soon he is delirious, which Maddin conveys with a series of fades and a hilarious scene in which Einar eats a nurse’s hat.
The conflict between the two men concerns the maiden Snjófridur, and it would be a disservice to say anything more. The fallout from their tragic realization, however, leaves Gunnar blind and enraged – although not without considerable tracking skills – and Einar on the run from his murderous friend. Hiding in the woods, on the fringes of an assembly presided over by an Abraham Licoln-lookalike who seems to be discoursing on Icelandic nationalism, Einar falls into a vision: with Maddin switching to a hot magenta filter, giving us the only breath of colour in the film, a strange woman in a silver dress sings a song, a serenade similar to that given by Rebekah del Rio in the Club ¡Silencio! sequence of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Her tune is intercut with scenes of synchronized swimmers, visions of total conformity and assimilation with a smile, and is only broken when Gunnar, now a staggering ghoul, stumbles past, and the two men find themselves engaged in a homoerotic sumo match soundtracked by a mysterious gaggle of bagpipers.
The story ends back in present-but-not Gimli, where the children’s mother has died, leaving them adrift, alone, in their own exile. They begin to find comfort in another yarn (“I feel another story coming on,” says Amma), and it is in this detail that the true importance of Tales From the Gimli Hospital is locked. It is, after all, a story about tales, and specifically the tales we tell ourselves for solace in the face of a world that aggressively makes us feel Other. The Gimli Sagas give comfort to the dying, those who have come across the “celibate Ocean” to “scar new lands,” but who have ended up scarred themselves. Amma’s stories give comfort to the children, who have lost their mother, who is their country, their world.
Likewise, Maddin’s stories are the combination and reconciliation of his inner obsessions with the physical and cultural geography of his surroundings. His trademark personal obsessions – sexual neuroses, perversion, mothers, sorrow – are stirred into the environment of Winnipeg and environs, notorious Winnipeg, nightmare Winnipeg (as Maddin’s most recent film boldy proclaims, My Winnipeg), and the resulting cinematic potion is Maddin’s world of blurry focus, dream-logic editing and deep chiaroscuro, where nothing is distinct or linear and shadows hide innumerable threats, the monsters of loneliness and rejection.
As Joseph Campbell says to Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth:
“The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, ‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.’”
In Tales From the Gimli Hospital, at the juncture of past and present, Guy Maddin’s inner and outer worlds meet; the world of the personal with the world of the common Canadian experience of being from elsewhere. And so we can say that, in Gimli Hospital and his subsequent films, Maddin has located the seat of the Canadian soul. This is what it looks like: an angel, drifting up among silvery cloud fumes, wings stretched wide, its lips mouthing the words, “It all happened in a Gimli we no longer know…”Made when he was only 27, Phillip Borsos’ debut feature The Grey Fox is remarkable in that it avoids so many of the clichés and plot devices that were de rigueur in the revisionist westerns that became Hollywood staples in the 1970s.
The Grey Fox is the story of Bill Miner (Richard Farnsworth), a real life stagecoach robber who, after a 33-year stretch in the joint, is released completely ill prepared into the 20th century. To say that things changed while Bill was in prison is putting it mildly. Despite having a place to stay (his sister’s house) and a job lined up, Bill feels ill at ease in his suddenly strange surroundings. His sister’s husband doesn’t like him, his potential employment is grim, and he can’t even go for a whisky without being recognized and hassled.
One night Bill goes to see Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, and the movie has the same effect on Bill as James Bond does on most 10-year-old boys. Bill decides to rob trains just like they do in the movies. The first robbery doesn’t go so well, but the next one is a bit of an improvement. Bill leaves his sister’s place, settles in British Columbia under an assumed name, and begins a courtship with a photographer and feminist named Kate Flynn (Jackie Burroughs).
The scene of the initial courtship between Bill and Kate always reminds me of a more believable version of Jack Nicholson’s courtship of Kathleen Lloyd in Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks. Both scenes, set in similar locales, involve loner criminals who are “cooling off” under false identities and striking up a relationship with the local female black sheep. In both scenes, the dialogue between the couples is playfully aggressive – none of the potential lovers gives an inch. But while, in Penn’s film, Lloyd’s character winds up being a mouthpiece for a 1970s mentality (the sort of see-how-much-smarter-we-are-now mentality that also runs through Penn’s Little Big Man), Burroughs thankfully escapes such a fate. The distinction may seem trivial, but it’s at the heart of what makes this film work: authenticity. The characters are true to themselves and not to the filmmaker’s modern sensibility.
I doubt that anyone could agree exactly when the revisionist western was born. Some say that John Ford’s 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, was the first, while others go back a decade earlier to Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon. Along the way, filmmakers like Sergio Leone, Monte Hellman and Sam Peckinpah helped dismantle the archetypical western so that after The Wild Bunch in 1969, the classic John Wayne western was, for all intents and purposes, dead.
Regardless of exactly when it began, what can be called the revisionist western period was notable for using the classic western template as a springboard for allegory. Much like the revived detective film, these new westerns used the past as a way to reflect upon contemporary problems – namely Vietnam, Watergate and America’s changing economic landscape.
What makes The Grey Fox so refreshing is that it uses the revisionist western as a launching pad in much the same way that the revisionist westerns used the traditional western decades earlier. Everything in the story seems ripe for metaphor and symbolism and perhaps, had the film been made in the United States, it would have wound up carrying the heavy baggage of allegory; the characters would be symbolic stand-ins and the past would come to represent the present. However, in Borsos’ film, the “Us vs. Them” attitude that tends to punctuate the majority of revisionist westerns is absent. In fact, even the Pinkerton detective (Gary Reineke), whose pursuit of Bill provides the closest thing to a plot, is not a villainous cardboard cutout. In The Grey Fox, the “good guys” and “bad guys” are missing. Instead we’re left with characters that are just characters, warts and all. There’s an understated depth and complexity to these people, especially Bill, who is probably not nearly as folksy as he pretends to be. For a guy who seems so affable, he doesn’t show any qualms about lying and stealing (two things he does a great deal of), and Borsos never goes the Hollywood route by trying make his protagonist into some sort of folk hero. Unlike the countless portrayals of Billy the Kid and Jesse James, Bill is not Robin Hood, nor does he seem to be up against a particularly corrupt system.
Also separating The Grey Fox from the revisionist westerns of the ’70s is its complete lack of fatalism. The ethos that it was all for not and that you couldn’t win no matter how hard you tried was an essential factor in westerns as diverse as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, and also in contemporaneous stories that have what you might call a western mentality, such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider and Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. In those films, and the many imitators they spawned, life was all predetermined. Defeat (frequently in the form of death) of not only the main character(s), but the ideals of the main character (usually meaning Freedom), was a forgone conclusion – it was like things couldn’t end any other way. That this deterministic ethos seems to surround a great many important films from this decade doesn’t make it any less facile; it’s the sort of fashionable nihilism that Daisy Buchanan probably would have embraced. That The Grey Fox manages to eschew all this, despite having a premise that seems ripe for lots of heavy metaphors, is one of the things that make it such a treasure. Bill Miner is just a guy – not a stand in for a political or ethical position on life. He’s not Everyman, and neither Bill himself nor the filmmakers show any pity for Bill’s situation.
Borsos sustains the film’s distinctive tone not just with his characters, but also through his aesthetic – the look of the film is different from pretty much every other western. Although the British Columbian terrain links it to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Grey Fox has neither the composed beauty of Vilmos Zsigmond’s widescreen compositions nor Altman’s schematic use of Leonard Cohen’s music. That’s not to say Borsos’ film is completely devoid of formalism; there’s a great sequence near the end that implicitly and explicitly links The Grey Fox and Bill Miner’s plight to the aforementioned The Great Train Robbery. The plot unfolds in episodic little bursts not unlike a Terrence Malick film. There’s a beautiful scene in the snow between Miner and his associate played by Ken Pogue that feels like in could be a lost scene from Days of Heaven. But Borsos is never as stylistically rigid as Malick. This is not an auteurist film – Borsos knows he’s not the star of the show.
It is impossible to discuss The Grey Fox without mentioning the presence of Richard Farnsworth, who anchors the film in much the same way he did David Lynch’s The Straight Story. It’s interesting that both films deal with an anachronistic figure maintaining a sense of dignity while travelling across a landscape that seems unfamiliar. It’s perhaps also worth pointing out that both films are inspired by true stories.
As The Grey Fox’s plot begins to gather steam in the final third of the movie, a sense of inevitability grows, but the film still has a few tricks left up its sleeve. We feel safe in knowing how the movie will end – or do we? Because even in these somewhat predictable final scenes, there is a sense that there is something greater going on. Even when it starts to go wrong, Bill never loses his cool. He seems calm, collected, but never resigned: you make your own way, and fate’s got nothing to do with it.
“Cinema is the most ephemeral of all
the arts; the Greeks had an entire film industry.”
– Jean-Luc
Godard, 1968, in Avignon, on the eve of the premiere of La Chinoise,
in response to a group of journalists (and Paul Thompson)
who asked him if he was
jealous of theatre’s ephemeral nature.
As a critic of cinema, sometimes I wonder, especially of late, why I bother. Sure, part of the fun of alternative art often lies in the search, but the satisfying finds – the album or screening that completely alters your mood for the day, planting roots inside your mind for the next few weeks, even years – are increasingly few and far between. Luckily, one of my first assignments set the bar high – although, if I hadn’t become a reviewer, I’m sure I’d be forgiven for never coming across Mongrel Media’s 2003 DVD release of a collection of films by celebrated Toronto author Michael Ondaatje. This first home video release from one of Canada’s most accomplished and internationally celebrated writers, simply called Films by Michael Ondaatje, includes three insightful and entertaining films released between 1970 and ’74, including the feature film The Clinton Special: A Film About The Farm Show. Feted on the DVD cover by none other than Allan King as “quite simply my favourite Canadian feature film – funny, touching, and deeply moving… a national poem of breath-taking originality”, The Clinton Special is a revelation as much for its relevance as a document of a key moment in Canadian theatre culture as it is for the gloriously fragmented freedom of its filmmaking style.
The Farm Show, one of the one of the pioneering works of the theatrical movement known as collective creation, caught Ondaatje’s eye during its breakout 1973 run at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. The previous summer, Passe Muraille director Paul Thompson, in response to what he claims was the dominant Canadian theatre scene’s saturation with established plays from “over there” (meaning Britain), designed a workshop project for minimal investment that he had no idea would work. In theory it was to be a simple yet unique theatrical experience: a small troupe creates a play out of material culled from two months’ living and talking with farmers in small-town Southern Ontario. In an attempt to connect with everyday people – something Thompson has always sought in his work, from his nascent days as a stageur in France to his continued work with the Blyth festival, and recent collective creation forays to the Republic of Georgia and Brazil – the director staged the original performances of The Farm Show’s collaborative narrative inside rural auction barns, specifically for the local townsfolk whose workdays the troupe participated in, whose conversations they eavesdropped upon, and whom they had come to know as friends.
Inspired by the play’s rustic origins and subsequent success with more urban audiences at Passe Muraille, Ondaatje – who, at 30, had published several collections of poetry but had yet to write his first novel – proceeded to document the play’s summer tour of Southern Ontario rural communities.
At the time, the cinematic climate in Canada was no more robust than it is now. Despite the broad cultural impact of Goin’ Down The Road (1970), notably for its realistic portrayal of modern life in Toronto at the time, the cinema distribution system in Canada was hobbled, at best. There was never a question of The Clinton Special being a box office hit – this was that romantic analog time of an underground movement of cinema captured on 16mm, when filmmakers were still sorting through the hazy aftermath of the ’60s French new wave challenges, both here and in an increasingly experimental, auteur driven Hollywood. This was also before the Toronto Film Festival, and long before the current climate of relative box office demand for earth-docs (Manufactured Landscapes) or bloated 3D concert film bonanzas (U23D, barf). But from small expectations are often borne extravagant designs (see Guy Maddin’s recent My Winnipeg), and with the increasing buffer of his status as emerging author and only a minimal arts council grant, Ondaatje crammed his first film with loads of imagination. A flash of a feature at 71 minutes, TCS reflects both the acutely fragmented, non-linear narrative approach of Ondaatje’s then-recently successful book The Collected Works of Billy The Kid (1970), while simultaneously establishing a lifelong fascination with motion-picture editing – a fascination that no doubt impacts the non-linear arcs of his later literary work, most pedagogically in The Conversations (2002), a series of discussions with legendary editor Walter Murch.
To capture the project on camera, not just as a live show, but also as a showcase for its collaborative creation method and the inspiration for its bang-on reflections of the rural everyday, Ondaatje employs three key narrative devices. The first actually includes performance footage, though this doesn’t appear until 15 minutes into the film. Culled from shows in rural settings, often with the audience sitting all around the stage or on barn rafters above, the camera feels like a literal member of the surrounding rural audience. The film opens, though, with four minutes of credits and a brief setup of the geographical context of the show, then two quick interviews with troupe members David Fox and Miles Potter that establish director Thompson’s lack of concrete knowledge about the show’s narrative. Ondaatje’s most daringly successful conceit is then introduced via a stunning performance by Fox: with his back turned to camera, standing beside a busted up blue car, he barks like a dog as if someone is approaching, then turns and, with the words, “Don’t you worry about him, he won’t bite – he’s gentle as a lamb,” introduces himself as farmer Harry Thopmson. Thus begins a series of monologues delivered by the actors, throughout the rest of the film, directly to camera. This re-creation of townsfolk mannerisms and dialogue by the actors – outside of the play’s performance – specifically for/to the camera, adds a significant level of viewer participation to the original narrative conceived by Paul Thompson and the company. The self-reflexive design involves the viewer in the theatre performance in a completely new manner, offering a private film performance outside the documentation of the event itself. And because the actors have by this point grown so comfortable in their roles, they ooze natural character, and it’s these presentations that anchor the film in a fictional realism that the viewer is both in on, but also a privileged observer of.
Additional footage includes traditional documentary interviews with actors and townsfolk in rural locales, often their own home/farm, and details of the countryside around Clinton and area, where the play toured. Ondaatje’s camera repeatedly finds unique frames – and elements within the frame – to focus upon, and he’s confident enough in his visuals, as an editor, to allow long takes (Potter’s now infamous hay bailing scene plays out for 10 minutes straight) and playful self-reflexivity to balance out the more serious narratives.
Interviews with the actors and Thompson about their process and expectations also allow the viewer to compare initial responses to the actors’ direct-to-camera interpretation to that of the actual subject of the narrative. In fact, by interviewing the farmers and introducing the camera’s presence in much the same way the actors had introduced themselves the year previous, Ondaatje reveals touching portraits of the natural desire of rural folks – like anyone else – to show and tell. Thus juxtaposing interviews with the initial source of the play (the townsfolk) and the re-interpreters of the non-fiction material (the actors) with the reactions of these townsfolk in the audience, the actors in the play, and the actors performing asides directly to camera, Ondaatje presents multiple elements of the profoundly positive self-discovery experience this was for both the actors and their subjects.
Indeed, the troupe of actors, many of whom were on the verge of quitting once the circumstances of the play’s writing process sunk in – Thompson’s initial daily direction was “Go out and meet people!” – were in the end its secret weapon. Adept at observation and imitation, in the play they clearly relish the opportunity to convey the amount of thought invested in harvesting the minute mannerisms of this particular community. Performing a wide age of characters from the surrounding area, even background chickens or combines, their collective effort exhibits the desire to express the knowledge of deep fundamental truths about the community and its character(s).
Ondaatje’s two short films from 1970 are also included in the DVD release, and both are similarly layered, wondrous portraits of outsiders playing on the rules of the game. In Sons of Captain Poetry, ostensibly a film about Ondaatje’s language-challenging contemporary Canadian poet bpNichol (and his wacky volleyball-playing commune), Ondaatje collaborates with cameraman/editor Bob Fresco to creatively frame the outside-the-frame poet, gorgeously experimenting with a racking zoom lens that shifts depth of field while traveling down rural roads. The sound collage, a mixture of location sound and nichol’s verses delivered live, sustains a strong backbeat for the film’s constant searching movement. And in Carry on Crime and Punishment, Ondaatje re-creates a silent-era slapstick comedy, following the abduction of a dog, with accompanying vaudeville piano. The key theme throughout the works, and what manages to keep them fresh and invigorating today, is Ondaatje’s inherent acknowledgement of the role of art as pivotal personal ambition as well as an instigator of self-awareness; the simple fun he himself has making and talking about art seems to be both a personal catalyst and sustainable by-product.
Overall, The Clinton Special’s more-or-less invisible status in Canadian film culture presents an interesting dilemma for casual viewers, critics, and programmers alike. Like Zale Dalen’s fabulously entertaining Skip Tracer (1977), or even the repeatedly acknowledged masterpiece The Grey Fox, important films from this era – at least those of a certain calibre – are perhaps available at a one-off Cinematheque screening, but otherwise impossible to find for personal review and reflection. Given this lack of access outside of academic-related promotion, it’s no surprise that the current crop of filmmakers who annually vie for a prime slot at TIFF and the other Canadian Fall festivals routinely produce films with a lack of cultural coherence, or cinematic advances. It’s tough to build upon a legitimate canon when it’s so difficult to find films that light the fuse.
Since the ’70s Ondaatje has gone on to produce a critically, culturally, and commercially significant collection of books (and movies adapted from his books) far beyond what I’m sure he could have imagined in his emerging years, riding down rural roads, shooting 16mm footage of the landscape’s undulations, and actors pretending to be machines, animals, and regular country folk. His consistent portraits of outsiders, people taking on the role of someone else in order to subvert societal expectations, have attracted a unique following. And there’s always a potential adaptation of In The Skin of the Lion to keep afloat hopes of a self-story-sufficient Canadian film culture. Based on the innovations of The Clinton Special, which seem fresher than most Canadian films made since its time, the country could do much worse than hoping Ondaatje himself is offered the chance to direct.
“The Farm Show” was also filmed for CBC broadcast, but Thompson claims the taping was poorly handled, including abandoning the live rural setting for an in-house studio production with an audience of random rural folks the corporation had bussed in. Thompson followed up “The Farm Show” with a similar smash stage success, “1837.” With this theatrical hit in hand, he managed to convince CBC producers to allow him to direct the accompanying television version.
Youth Without Youth is the film you might expect from a 68-year-old producer-writer-director who, while still in his 30s, made The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and the first two Godfathers – four of the most important films of the 1970s, by most people’s reckoning. That statement might seem inconsequential, were it not for Coppola’s infamous output during those intervening years, which ranges from the underappreciated beauty of Rumble Fish (1983), to the “He directed that?” of the1996 Robin Williams vehicle Jack, to The Godfather Part III, which, for all its finer qualities, ultimately drove home the notion that the Coppola of the ’80s and ’90s was not the same Coppola who stood at the forefront of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” generation of American filmmaking.
It was finally the success of another Coppola – his daughter, Sofia – that inspired Francis to shed the work-for-hire trappings of Hollywood, abandon a long-gestating mega-project that was going nowhere, and invest his own cash (mostly profits from wine-making, his true passion of the last quarter-century) into this low-budget, HD adaptation of a little known novella by Romanian philosopher and historian Mircea Eliade. In his own words, Coppola “wanted to make personal films, art films, experimental films – all those kinds of films no one would want to finance.” So he went and made one.
The statement that begins this review might confuse anyone who’s become familiar with Youth Without Youth through the critical community’s tepid response to the film. (A few notable critics – J. Hoberman, Manohla Dargis and Andrew Sarris – have praised it.) You’d think Coppola’s artistic rejuvenation would have cinephiles flocking to theatres, but I saw the movie on the first Saturday night of an exclusive engagement at Toronto’s Carlton theatre, and the room was nearly empty. After a couple weeks in release, the film has disappeared from theatres.
As I watched Youth Without Youth, the reasons for its poor reception became readily apparent, if somewhat sad. On its surface, the story – beginning in 1938 Romania and traveling through Switzerland, Malta, India, and into the 1960s – concerns Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), a 70-year-old professor of linguistics who’s struck by lightning and awakes to find his body restored to that of a man in his mid-thirties. Aided by Professor Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz), Dominic discovers that he possesses superhuman powers of memory and comprehension, and soon finds himself on the run from Nazis scientists. Along the way he encounters Laura (Alexandra Maria Lara, fresh off her great performance as Annik Honoré in Control), who resembles his lost love Veronica and seems to possess bizarre powers of her own.
Frankly, I’m surprised I was able to describe the film’s plot in that much detail. Youth Without Youth is surreal, unusual, inaccessible, and dense with ideas. It shifts without warning in time and between several distinct genres, and seems to deal primarily in metaphysics, with Coppola taking his cues from Eliade’s prose to find new and innovative ways of representing interior consciousness on screen.
Technically, there’s a lot to be excited about. It’s a really confident piece of work, beautifully lit by 32-year-old Mihai Malamaire Jr., and lushly edited by Coppola’s long-time collaborator, Walter Murch. The legendary editor’s guidance can be felt right from the picture’s opening frames, and I’m not quite sure why Murch’s involvement didn’t at least get a few film students into theatres. From the old-fashioned opening title cards, to the striking visual motif of the red rose (which the filmmaker lifts directly from Eliade), to the film’s closing without credits of any kind (much like Coppola’s 70mm roadshow screenings of Apocalypse Now), there’s a sense that the audience is being treated to something special.
I’d be lying if I said that a significant portion of Youth Without Youth didn’t fly completely over my head. Thematically, however, this is territory Coppola’s been flirting with throughout his entire career: in the temporal shifts and generational themes of The Godfather Part II and his re-workings of the series’ chronology for TV and home video; in the time-traveling Kathleen Turner of Peggy Sue Got Married; and even (get ready to laugh) in the aging disorder suffered by Robin Williams in Jack. No doubt such ideas attracted the director to these work-for-hire projects of varying quality; here, Coppola goes at the material on his own terms and without restraint. When we call films “smart” and “adult”, we usually mean they contain a few ideas we were taught in high school and have since forgotten. It’s nice to be reminded of all that stuff from time to time. Youth Without Youth, however, is the kind of “smart” that gets filmmakers into trouble. We have no trouble accepting it from great literature, but it’s difficult to sell millions of dollars worth of theatre tickets and DVDs to audiences who won’t understand the movie. Coppola’s latest is pretentious and self-indulgent in the best senses of the words.
I’m not sure I like Youth Without Youth – or that I even know how to like it right now – but I’m excited that Coppola made it. I think it’s a shame that critics and cinephile audiences say they want sophisticated, adult, and unconventional work, then stomp all over (or completely disregard) one of the greats when he follows through on his promise.