What I'm Thankful For: Eleanor Powell

This Week in Rankings

A Day's Pleasure - 7, 1919
The Postman Always Rings Twice - 11, 1946

Hearts and Minds - 13, 1974
Eraserhead - 10, 1977

Lincoln - 2012
Wreck-It Ralph - 2012

On Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln begins with the President talking to a pair of black soldiers after a battle, one praising him for being such a swell President, the other insisting he do something about the inequality in pay between black and white servicemen.  The threesome is joined by a pair of white soldiers, one of whom compliments Lincoln on, and then begins to recite, his Gettysburg Address.  He trails off, forgetting the ending, but as the four soldiers turn to leave, the one who'd been berating him turns, looks Lincoln in the eye, and finishes the speech:

 It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Thus are the terms of the conflict we are about to watch set in motion.  Not a hagiographical biopic about a national saint, but a gritty, detailed look at the machinations required to turn rhetoric into action, and about the gulf that lies between the ideals we hold and express in words and the reality of what we are actually able to achieve in our debased, messy world.

The bulk of the film plays much like an extended, 19th Century-set episode of The West Wing (it's got the same highly entertaining mix of political seriousness and fast-talking humor, though instead of the TV series's famed "walk and talk" steadicam sequences, we get a lot of "sit and talks"), as Lincoln and his cabinet try, in January of 1865, to round up the necessary 20 Democratic votes to pass the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery) in the House of Representatives.  The first section of the film is an expositional wonder, as not only are the main characters (including Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), Republican poobah Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) and various members of the White House-hold, among others) introduced and motivated, but the political issues involved are explained with a detail, clarity and respect for the audience's intelligence that's extremely rare in a Hollywood film.  All credit should go to playwright Tony Kushner's screenplay, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's fascinating and engrossing book Team of Rivals.  It's as good if not better than anything I've seen from Kushner, and that's saying a lot for the author of Angels in America.  Lincoln's explanation of the complex tangle that is the suspect legality of the Emancipation Proclamation, and why it must be superseded by a Constitutional Amendment before the war ends is a wonder of relatable wonkery.  After this exposition, the film settles in as a classic race against time: the President's men must get the necessary votes before a peace expedition from the South arrives in Washington to surrender.  If the South is willing to surrender, then no one but the most radical Republicans will vote for Abolition and slavery will continue, conceivably forever.  A trio of fixers (James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson) is assigned to the task of persuading the Democrats (Walton Goggins and Michael Stuhlbarg, among others) without bribing them, while Lincoln stays on the sidelines, coping with his home life (manic depressive wife Mary (Sally Field) and his two sons, the oldest of whom, Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wants to enlist) while trying to keep the various factions within his own party and cabinet from undermining his efforts.

The heart of the film is Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Lincoln, which will very possibly win him a well-deserved third Academy Award.  Beyond the superficial elements (his resemblance to Lincoln, his remarkable voicework), Day-Lewis captures the heart of our most melancholy president, tall and gangly with a shuffling, stooped walk and the manner of someone who doesn't quite seem to occupy the same space as those around him and yet has such an easy, disaffecting way with story and anecdote that he's instantly relatable.  This Lincoln has a fascinating kind of tangentiality: his preferred mode of persuasion is telling a story, the meaning of which is often rather ambiguous.  When pressed to make his point more clearly, he manages to summon an anger and eloquence unseen by American audiences since Martin Sheen cursed God in Latin.  Day-Lewis captures the fire and the sadness in Lincoln, he presents him as a man almost destroyed by personal tragedy, an unrivaled national calamity and the unendurable burden of history, for he is fully aware that his is the most important job in the history of his nation, and that if he fails it will mean lifetimes of suffering for untold millions.  He is a man who is consciously prolonging a war for the sake of passing a piece of legislation, knowing as he tours the battlefields full of dead that they died because of his belief in the greater, future good.  The most remarkable thing about Lincoln is that he endured.

Which brings us back to words and actions.  The nature of politics is to lie in the gap between ideals and reality, and Lincoln dramatizes this like no film I know.  The plot of the film follows an attempt to actualize a part of the ideal enunciated at Gettysburg.  The film's most fully-realized subplot revolves around Thaddeus Stevens, a thunderous opponent of slavery noted for his fiery speeches on the floor of the house and his unwillingness to compromise.  But in order for the Amendment to pass, Stevens must moderate his rhetoric so as to blunt the argument that abolishing slavery is merely the first step on the road to full racial equality.  Everyone knows that's what Stevens believes, but if he says it in the debate, his side will lose necessary swing votes.  And so, in order to achieve his desired action, Stevens must stand mute and refuse to articulate his true beliefs.  How he threads this needle and outwits his interlocutor with an inspired burst of invective is one of the film's many joyful turns.  Other subplots revolve around rhetoric as well: Lincoln's attempt to persuade one representative culminating in said Congressman's joyous cry on the House floor when he finally makes up his mind (a nifty little performance from Stuhlbarg); a semantical error a Democrat makes on the nature of the peace expedition that nearly undoes the whole project but for Lincoln's lawyerly sophistry; even the final resolution between Lincoln and Mary, as she finally understands the enormity of the responsibility and grief he suffers under only because he had until then refused to articulate it in words, preferring to allow himself to be silently crushed under its weight for the good of the nation.

Ultimately, of course, the Amendment passes and the film might have ended there, ten weeks before the assassination.  But Spielberg isn't quite finished: instead we jump to Lincoln's last night where we see him leave the White House for the final time, receding into silhouette as his butler looks back at him like he's had one of those movie premonitions that cause double takes.  The sequence has a cloyingness that the film for the most part avoids: for much of the film Spielberg restrains his natural schmaltziness in favor of a pared-down visual style to match the film's dingy, drained, Eastwood-grey color palate.  When the assassination does come, we don't see the action at Ford's Theatre, rather we see Lincoln's youngest son hearing the news at a different theatre across town (thus Spielberg manages needlessly to drag a child into a film that is otherwise entirely about adults, as he's done in pretty much every one of his films for the last 30 years).  Why this should be is not entirely clear (surely there are far more interesting ways of dramatizing Lincoln's last night, with its triple assassination attempts, and so on; at least they made a call on Stanton's pronouncement after Lincoln's death: he belongs to the ages, not the angels) but it does lead to an interesting postscript.

After Lincoln's death, we cut to a scene set a few days earlier, the end of his Second Inaugural Address.  Paralleling the film's open, we're given a profound rhetorical statement which does not (yet, 150 years later) match our nation's reality.  But now, we don't have a Lincoln to struggle to actualize these beliefs on our behalf.  The film thus ends with an exhortation, a challenge.  It doesn't have the volcanic fire of War Horse's final scene, a family reunion in the midst of a destroyed world.  Like in most of the rest of the film, Spielberg's aesthetic showmanship is subordinated to the words. It's just a man giving a speech to a crowd. . . unless it becomes something else.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

 

VIFF 2012: Memories Look at Me

After several days of festival movies filled with storytelling gimmicks and dazzling displays of artistic virtuosity, I was utterly unprepared late on my fifth day at VIFF for the hyper-mellowness of Song Fang's debut film about visiting her family as an unmarried adult.  It's a fuzzy blanket of a movie, a fuzzy blanket of death.  You'll recognize Song as the Chinese student in Paris in Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and she plays herself here beside her real-life parents as they discuss mundane family events and history in dialogue that is largely scripted but feels improvised.  The movie is thus a lot like a Liu Jiayin film, but where Liu foregrounds her formal playfulness Song seems to be trying to erase any sense of artificiality from her filmmaking.  Her takes are long but not ostentatiously so and in some scenes she even uses traditional analytical editing where the demands of minimalism would require a long take.  She cuts axially out of and into a frame and sometimes the camera moves, but never for its own sake.  Much of the film is confined to a single set, her parents' apartment, and Song uses different set-ups in the same locations to give a sense of variety to what could otherwise be a very static, boring space.

The plot is structured around a series of conversations between Song, her parents, her brother and an aunt and uncle.  The conversations invariably turn out to be roundabout ways of nagging Song to answer one simple question, finally posed halfway through the film: "How long will you go on living alone?"  There's a cautionary tale about a great uncle who remained single and ending up staying up all night and sleeping all day, a long talk about taking care of a family friend sick with cancer, long shots of family members cutting each other's finger nails and so on.  It's a question Song is clearly asking herself: the more she stays, the more nostalgic she gets for her youth, when she lived at home and had people to take care of and who would take care of her.  Family as a bulwark against the solitude of death.

The high point in the film is when Song's brother comes to visit and promptly falls asleep.  Soon, everyone else is napping too.  I love when people take naps in movies (see for example, Chungking Express) and this has got to be the purest depiction of the joys of the warm afternoon nap ever committed to film.  But as Song watches her parents sleeping, first her father, alone in closeup, then her mother bedside him, the film's melancholy heart breaks.

VIFF 2012: Moksha: the World or I, How Does That Work?

The longest, most unwieldy title of the festival belongs to this film by Korean director Koo Sungzoo.  It opens with a closeup of a man screaming, shouting for help as he finds himself chained to the ground in the middle of an empty, frozen playground.  How and why he got there is never really explained: he's a man trapped in a metaphor, and the only way for the film to end is for him to figure out what it all means.  Throughout the film various people walk by and talk to him.  A woman slaps him repeatedly, he chats with a passing drunk, a priest dances for him to achieve "supreme perfect wisdom" ("Don't dance, call the police!" the man desperately pleads).  He gets yelled at by a crazy bride on her way to a wedding, he shouts angrily at a phantom "crazy filmmaker", he has a conversation with Edgar Allen Poe (apparently, I missed this but Koo and Tony Rayns discussed it in the post-film Q & A), at some point comes the realization that "the afterlife is awful but you can't kill yourself because you're already dead."

This is all suitably weird, but the film is necessarily limited to its central metaphor.  There's not a lot of mystery about what it all means, and in a Dragons & Tigers series dominated by films about death (I saw five of the eight films in the competition, this one along with A Mere Life, Memories Look at Me, A Fish and the eventual winner, Emperor Visits the Hell and they are all more or less explicitly about death and/or the afterlife) this is probably the least subtle and the least resonant.  It plays as more of a thought experiment than a dramatization.  Still, it's pleasantly off-beat and the central performance by Jang Hyeokjin is impressive considering how central he is to nearly every frame of the film.  The fact that this was probably my least favorite of the films I saw at VIFF this year says less about its quality than it does the quality of the festival as a whole.

This Week in Rankings

Blind Husbands - 3, 1919
Ali: Fears Eats the Soul - 5, 1974

The Shining - 4, 1980
Skyfall - 2012

VIFF 2012: Something in the Air

The latest film from Olivier Assayas has apparently been retitled After May (a direct translation of its French title, Après mai) for its US release, but I do like this festival title better (though the classic Thunderclap Newman song does not appear in the film).  The original title's reference is most likely lost on the American audience, which isn't likely to be familiar with the protests and riots, both political and cinephilic, that rocked Paris in the spring of 1968, but the details aren't particularly relevant to the story, which fits neatly into the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age-in-the-70s category with films like Almost Famous or Dazed and Confused.  It also, somewhat unexpectedly, makes a neat companion piece to Assayas's last film, the epic Carlos.

Where that film chronicled the eclipse of ideology by the sheer enjoyment its hero found in acts of destruction, in this one we see the idealism of the leftist political movements of the 1960s dissipate as its teenage protagonists grow up.  The story focuses on Gilles (played by Clément Métayer), an apparent Assayas stand-in, a bookish type who partakes in some (ineffectual) protests, argues the finer points of ideology but is increasingly more interested in girls and art (he's a painter).  After a bit of vandalism backfires, Gilles and his friends go into hiding, cleverly disguised as a rich kids' summer vacation in picturesque Italy.  He begins a romance with Lola Créton's character Christine, a more committed, and very cute, activist while Gilles's best friend Alain hooks up with a redheaded American (she "studies sacred dance. In the Orient, they still dance for the Gods").  Meeting up with a radical film crew provides some of the film's best lines: interested in filmmaking, Gilles asks if he can borrow their equipment sometime and is told "We only do agitprop, we don't lend for fiction."  Later, after the filmmaking collective shows one of their documentaries they lead an Q & A, which leads to a priceless encapsulation of the cul-de-sac that is radical politics as different factions of audience and filmmaker argue over whether a "revolutionary cinema requires a revolutionary syntax", or if revolutionary syntax is simply the "individualistic style of the petit bourgeoisie" and that what they need to do is "enlighten, not shock the proletariat".  Gilles sums them up later as "boring films with primitive politics".

The second half of the film, as the kids return home and go their separate ways, is a delicate balance of disillusion and hope for the future, as Gilles becomes less interested in politics and more in love with art and filmmaking in particular.  While Gilles gets a job working for his dad at a TV studio and watches and reads about movies in his free time, along with putting together trippy light show for rock bands, Christine remains a committed lefty while Alain and the redhead drift.  The requisite "decadent 70s" sequence is set at a house similar to the one in Assayas's Summer Hours.  But where the party that ends that film is all golden sunlight, cheery kids, innocence and beauty, this one is a druggy, fiery haze ending in chaos, death and Captain Beefheart.

In Carlos, Assayas chronicled the descent of 60s radicalism into the kind of nihilistic violence we call terrorism today.  With this film, he tackles the flip side of that same subject, as leftist idealism fragments both in the face of bourgeois temptation (drugs, money, art) and under the weight of its own radicalism.  All radical movements crumble for the same reason: purity becomes more important than reality and the radicals cannibalize themselves (see what's going on in the GOP right now).  That's why we're a little sad to see Christine still helping the collective schlep their boring films around to increasingly small audiences of like-minded radicals, though she alone has remained true to their youthful ideals.  She seems happy, and certainly admirable as a person, but somehow diminished.  Gilles on the other hand is open and expansive, absorbing politics as he absorbs everything else he encounters before eventually moving on to the next discovery, the next world.  We leave him working on a B movie set at Pinewood Studios surrounded by Nazis and dinosaurs, an artist on the ground floor, looking up.

VIFF 2012 Ranking and Links

Here's a preliminary ranking of the 31 movies I saw this year at the Vancouver International Film Festival, with links to the write-ups I've done for them so far.  I'll be writing about the rest of these over the next few weeks; the pace has slowed lately due to first a cold then parental responsibilities. Hopefully I'll be able to finish these by the end of the year.

1. In Another Country

2. Like Someone in Love

3. Mekong Hotel

4. Night Across the Street

5. Romance Joe

6. Walker

7. Something in the Air

8. Tabu

9. When Night Falls

10. The Last Time I Saw Macao

11. Memories Look at Me

12. Thursday Till Sunday

13. Neighboring Sounds

14. Three Sisters

15. Emperor Visits the Hell

16. Reconversão

17. Mystery
18. A Fish
19. The Unlikely Girl
20. East Meets West
21. People's Park
22. Amour
23. In Search of Haydn
24. 10 + 10
25. Mother
26. Antiviral
27. The Angels' Share
28. A Mere Life
29. Everybody in Our Family
30. Beautiful 2012
31. Moksha: the World, or I, How Does that Work?


Updated Feb. 1, 2013: Rankings updated. Obviously I didn't finish by the end of the year, but with only six movies left to write about, I hope to finish soon.

Updated July 18, 2015: Only one left. I will finish it someday.

This Month in Rankings

Flunky, Work Hard - 19, 1931
Murders in the Rue Morgue - 17, 1932

Swordsman 2 - 19, 1992
The Master - 2012
Looper - 2012
Cloud Atlas - 2012

VIFF 2012: Neighboring Sounds

Kleber Mendonça Filho directs the fourth film in what turned out to be a surprisingly strong showing for the Portuguese language at this year's festival, along with Reconversão, Tabu and The Last Time I Saw Macao.  Three of those focus on the remnants of the Portuguese colonial experience on other continents (Tabu in Mozambique, Macao in China and this one set in Recife, one of the largest cities in Brazil).  In many ways, this is the most conventional film of the bunch, a familiar-seeming network narrative of a few weeks in the lives of the residents of a particular street in a relatively affluent area of town.  As usual, there's a multitude of tensions bubbling under the placid surface, along class and racial lines as well as the requisite secrets from the past haunting certain folks.  For most of the film's running time, that tension remains constant but unrelieved, it's only in the final scenes that some actual violence bursts forth, unfortunately in a bit of an anti-climax.

The most interesting thing about the film is explicitly stated right there in the title: the sound design.  Though the film is set in a few houses and an apartment building on what appears to be a single street, we never get a clear layout of the neighborhood.  It's disorienting visually, but the sound design knits the space together.  Sounds from one area are constantly bleeding into another, kids playing, dogs parking, cars passing by, the on-screen space is always filled with off-screen sounds.  This is how the neighborhood is experienced: not as a community where everybody knows everybody (all the community gatherings end in disaster, first a hilariously petty condo board meeting, later a birthday party) but as an occupied space that is forever invaded by outsiders' noise (this is literalized in a zombie-invasion like dream sequence).  The two characters we spend the most time with, a handsome, charming rich guy named João who lives in the high rise and a housewife who buys pot from the water delivery guy, has an affair with her washing machine's spin cycle and is tormented by the barking dog next door never actually meet.  Their storylines merge somewhat at the end, but only aurally, never visually.

The individual characters do have storylines of their own, but they aren't quite as conventional as in a network film like Magnolia or Short Cuts, which follow the series of short stories model.  João's story is my favorite: he falls in love with a woman, they hang out together, they take a trip out of town (the only time we leave the neighborhood) and wander around his grandfather's estate and its village, walking through the ruins and hearing the sounds of the past (people chattering, a movie-projector humming).  But Mendonça Filho even trips us up there, as the romance plot is resolved entirely off-screen, leaving João to briefly tell another character how it ended.  The film is full of these little bits of rug-pulling that keep the viewer perpetually off-balance.  If the film had left is in that state it would have been great.  Instead, the film wraps things up with a bang in a more or less neat bit of narrative balance.  I want it to end just slightly earlier, just before the crescendo peaks, leaving us forever on the edge of the crash.

VIFF 2012: Three Sisters

By nine o'clock on Tuesday, October 5th, my VIFF experience was four days and fifteen movies old.  I trepidatiously settled in for movie #16, a two and a half hour verite-style documentary about three poor kids in China by acclaimed director Wang Bing (his nine hour documentary West of the Tracks recently tied for 202nd place in the Sight & Sound poll with Manhattan, Cleo from 5 to 7, The Shop Around the Corner, WALL-E, Badlands and There Will Be Blood, among others), wondering if the onslaught of reality, old age and festival-induced sleep deprivation would knock me out.  I armed myself with a "litre" of Mountain Dew and a pack of gummi bears, and when Wang himself, there for a post-show Q & A that would push the night into the morning, wished us all luck in staying awake for his movie, I had a feeling things would work out alright.

The experience of watching the film is much the same as that of any other so-called "Asian minimalist" movie, like something by Tsai Ming-Liang or Jia Zhangke.  The pace is very slow, not a whole lot happens in the long, single-take scenes, and enjoyment of the film depends on one's interest in watching other people do normal boring things (basic tasks like making soup or cleaning shoes) and also in the willingness to let one's mind wander.  These types of films are meditative not because they make you think but because in their opiated snail's pace, they allow you to think.

Various more or less coherent things I thought of while watching this film: what this country needs is a rural electrification project like the one that lifted much of America out of exactly this kind of poverty in the mid-20th Century, Mao's mid-century reforms had exactly the opposite effect (later in the film, they do appear to have electricity and television, and I may be exaggerating the effects of the New Deal in the US, but still); How do you document the lives of the poor without being exploitative or dilettantish? Is that  just a First World Problem?; The best way to tell if a country is developing economically is if they start making documentaries about poor people; The village is situated high in the mountains near what appear to be run down and out-of-use terraces, I wonder if those terraces are ancient ones that were abandoned in misguided communist land reforms (that led to mass deforestation and erosion), or if they are themselves the misguided reforms.  Either way, they're being used as sheep food on a wind-scorched landscape now; If this film were sub-titled The Shit Collectors of Yunnan, would that increase its box office?; Can a film be beyond criticism? Does talking about a film like this as a film trivialize its very serious subject, or is the act of making a film about such a subject necessarily trivializing?; Does Truffaut's assertion that it's impossible to make an anti-war film apply to anti-poverty films?  Does filmmaking in some ways glamorize poverty?

Three Sisters is about three very poor girls who live in a remote mountain village in Yunnan province.  The environment is perpetually damp and foggy, but the kids don't seem to mind too much (when they're gathered around a fire drying one of their mud-encrusted shoes, one of them cheerfully exclaims "today we'll dry your shoes, tomorrow mine!"  Similarly, when checking each other for infestations in what appears to be a nightly ritual, we hear the joyous shout "I found more lice!").  Their father is away, looking for work in the nearest city, the kids are staying with their grandfather in the village (the mother appears to have run off? I don't really remember).  We follow them through their various rural tasks (one of them greets another working child in a pasture with a matter of fact "everyone's out collecting dung today").  They don't seem especially miserable, but neither do they seem particularly happy.  They live in a half-modernized world: they have TV and locks on their doors, but little of the labor-saving comforts of the 21st century.  Missing from most of the film are the communal aspects of village life: festivals, religious ceremonies, weddings, funerals, birthday parties, games, storytelling, all those things we lament as lost and celebrate in John Ford films.  Near the end there is an autumn feast at the girls' uncle's place in a neighboring village that packs dozens of people into a tiny house for tons of (delicious looking) food and an impromptu political meeting.  It's not especially cheerful, but at least it looks warm.  

The oldest sister, ten-year old Ying Ying, comes across as a truly heroic figure.  She appears to do most of the farm work (sheep and pig herding, milking, dung-gathering, potato-planting, etc) and takes care of her younger sisters (cooking, cleaning, etc).  She simply does what she has to do.  On the rare occasions she gets to attend school she leans far forward over her desk, straining to take in all she can from her teacher, unable to prevent her desperation to learn from taking physical form.  Wang encourages us not to look at the film as a political statement ("oh isn't poverty so awful") but as a story of Ying Ying's heroism (not that that will get his movie shown in China, but his point is a good one regardless).  She does it all but she doesn't suffer, she inspires.

VIFF 2012: In Search of Haydn

The third of director Phil Grabsky's biographical documentaries of famous composers is about as good a film about Joseph Haydn as you're likely to see.  Unlike the subjects of his first two films in the series, Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn doesn't have a particularly interesting biography, nor does his music have as ubiquitous a presence in modern life. In fact, his life can be downright dull at times: he seems like a basically decent guy, though not exceptionally so, who was well-employed for most of his life and achieved great success and renown for his work.  Basically the opposite of our ideal tortured artist.  Musically, he appears to be more respected by professionals than loved by the general populace; his name is probably more famous than any of his tunes.

The great strength of Grabsky's Beethoven film (I haven't seen the Mozart film yet) was its emphasis as much on the music as on the biography: he has a knack for getting inside the music and showing what is really unique, interesting and powerful about it.  To that end, Haydn presents a bit of a dilemma in that he just wrote so much music: over 100 symphonies and string quartets each, along with operas and keyboard music and more.  Trying to cover it all in the film's less than two hour running time is next to impossible.  Still, Grabsky does get some fine commenters (Emmanuel Ax and Marc-Andre Hamelin in particular) to explain in lay terms just how experimental and unusual Haydn was, and why he was to be such a huge influence on every composer that followed him, Mozart and Beethoven first among them.

Words and phrases used in the film to describe Haydn's music: sparkle, spirit, burst of life, surprise, humor, overt, modest, entertaining, great intelligence and seriousness, eloquent, rhetorical, inspirational, spirit, spiritual, exploring, pleasant, music for everybody, democratic, repetitive with long long phrases, not very difficult - but difficult to make beautiful.

The best parts of the movie are the performances.  Not just for the music itself (by the Orchestra of the 18th Century and the Endillion String Quartet, among others) but for the way the film captures them.  There are the standard, Great Performances-style long shots, of course, but Grabsky also frequently intercuts extreme close-ups of the musicians at work: say, the fingerboard of a cello or the strings of a violin.  The performance is broken down to its most basic elements, made physical and tactile.  Music can be so ephemeral, so abstract that grounding it in this way reminds us of its tangible reality, that it is created and performed by people on instruments.  To often music, classical music in particular, is treated as if it were an emanation from on high, divinely inspired by "genius" as a gift to all humanity.  Grabsky's project is to fight that rarefying impulse, to root the music in the people who wrote it and, just as importantly, in the people who perform it.

VIFF 2012: The Last Time I Saw Macao

Directed by the Portuguese pair of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, The Last Time I Saw Macao is an enveloping blend of essay film and film noir, of the film maudit Macao by Josef von Sternberg (who was fired and replaced by Nicholas Ray during shooting) and Chris Marker's meditation on time and place Sans Soleil.  Guerra da Mata plays himself as the main character though we never actually see him, just a stray arm or hand.  It's not shot in the first person, he just exists somewhere off-screen telling us the story in narration.  In fact, no one on screen ever actually speaks: all the voices we hear are either off-screen or lip-syncs.  The film begins with just such a performance, a drag queen performing a lip-sync to Jane Russell's "You Kill Me" from Macao.  Later, we learn that this same performer is an old friend of Guerra da Mata's, and he's been summoned back to Macao, the former Portuguese colony in China where he was born and grew up and which he hasn't been back to for many years, in order to help her out of some kind of jam: lives are in danger.

Much of the first half of the film follows Guerra da Mata as he revisits locations he remembered from childhood: his old school, a colonial government building, etc while he muses on the history of the city and its unique place between two countries (though governed by Portugal for hundreds of years, the two cultures never mixed, he doesn't speak Chinese and can't find anyone who speaks Portuguese).  The images the two directors capture of the city evoke this alien, "singular and bizarre" world, a city where even the TV is upside down, where a casino employs a Chinese gondolier who sings Charlie Chaplin's "Smile" while he works.  Slowly, the mystery plot reveals itself, but Guerra da Mata tends to get sidetracked in digressions about the city, just as every time he is supposed to be at a certain place at a certain time to meet someone, he ends up getting lost.

Like Godard's Alphaville, this unsettling modern landscape forms an ideal backdrop for a noir tale, one involving an underworld gang, the Chinese Zodiac, and a birdcage recalling the Great Whats-it from Kiss Me Deadly that can turn people into animals that ends with a man running at night through the labyrinthine city while fireworks explode (a climax reminiscent of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, or the film it borrows from, The Bribe).  The next morning's epilogue finds the city enveloped in an apocalyptic smog.  This intersection between silly city symphony and Hollywood hodgepodge, between travelogue and film noir, between essay and pastiche forms a liberating kind of cinematic world: one where anything is possible because everything is constructed: reality is fiction and vice versa.

One way to take this is as a story of Chinese Macao descending into a primitive, animalistic hellscape once the Europeans abandon the city.  A better way is as the story of a European explorer who keeps getting lost, leaves a trail of dead bodies behind him, creates an environmental apocalypse and then disappears, allowing the original, enduring culture to return to prominence.  Beneath the ephemerality of modernity, its casinos and showtunes and movies, lies an ancient, foundational, unknowable humanity.

VIFF 2012: Tabu

"She had a farm in Africa.  She had a farm in Africa."  With that refrain echoing the opening lines of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, the second half of Miguel Gomes's festival favorite Tabu begins, shattering the realism of the first half in favor of the kind of romanticism best found in the movies.  We're not unprepared for this seismic stylistic shift, for the first section of the film is preceded by a brief prologue, shot and narrated like a late 20s-early 30s jungle adventure film, about a man who, in the wake of his wife's death, sentences himself to "wander desolately over inhospitable plains" of Africa, only to be hounded everywhere he goes by his wife's ghost.  In the end, after he dies throwing himself into croc-infested waters, the villagers will speak of a vision of the lady wandering the jungle accompanied by "a sad and melancholy crocodile."

We experience this as though it were a movie being watched by the main character of the first half of the film, Pilar, a bit of a sad sack middle-aged woman.  Pilar has a old lady neighbor, Aurora, who appears quite senile, if not downright insane: she goes on gambling jags, accuses her maid of practicing witchcraft on her and so on.  Pilar is one of those nice ordinary people that everyone seems to rely on, at least a little, but that no one ever notices.  Even the Polish nun she's agreed to host blows her off to hang out with cooler, more interesting people.  The only time she seems to feel a real emotional connection with anything is at the movies: we watch her as she watches, and cries, at an unnamed, unseen film that features a Portuguese cover of The Ronettes' "Be My Baby".  When Aurora falls ill, Pilar is sent to fetch the mysterious Gian Luca Ventura, who appears to be some kind of elderly Indiana Jones-type (leather jacket, anachronistic fedora).  It is Ventura who tells the tale of the second half of the film, about his life with Aurora in Africa.

The plot for this section follows the general contours of many a romance film, Out of Africa among them.  Aurora is the beautiful, intelligent, spirited heroine trapped in a marriage to a man she likes but doesn't really love who falls for the dashing young adventurer whose only fear is commitment.  The young Ventura is played by Carlotta Cotta, he kind of looks like what you'd imagine Johnny Depp playing Matthew McConaughey would look like, and when he's not romancing Aurora, he's playing in a rock band with her husband and a couple other friends: they prove to be quite popular in their little Portuguese community in Mozambique, they have a hit playing another Ronettes song "Baby, I Love You" (this time lip-synched to the version by The Ramones).  This half of the film, shot in 16mm unlike the first half's standard 35 (both sections are black-and-white), is entirely narrated: there is no on-screen dialogue, though there are sound effects (if I remember correctly).  It is entirely an imagining of the story told by Ventura, presumably through the mind of cinephile Phil Spector fan Pilar.  Where the first half of the film is told in the kind of deadpan realist minimalism that's become the standard form of contemporary art cinema, the second half is wildly emotional and florid (Ventura at one point finds himself with "a feral despair beneath a cloak of amiability"), where even the maps the explorers make of their previously uncharted colony are "very beautiful but, it turn(s) out, hardly scientific."

It's tempting to read the movie as a political metaphor, set as the second half of the film is in the last stages of the Portuguese Empire, with the natives eyeing hungrily the decadent parties and love affairs of their colonizers, colonizers destined to end up lonely old women in tiny apartments thousands of miles away.  But more so the film is about memories and stories, and the ways in which our love of cinema alters them, making them less real and yet connecting us to them more powerfully.  Perhaps that's where the decadence lies: when fiction becomes more meaningful to us than reality.

VIFF 2012: In Another Country

It wouldn't be a trip to VIFF without a Hong Sangsoo movie, though it'd be tough for him to top the double he pulled at VIFF '10 with Oki's Movie and Hahaha, two of his very best movies.  This one though is right up there, as Hong just keeps refining his quirky style, making it funnier, more elegant, and more subtly weird.  Like Yasujiro Ozu or Eric Rohmer, Hong seems content to spend years creating endless variations of the same central subjects (in his case, vacations, infidelity, drinking, and lazy filmmakers) within the same self-mirroring narrative style (where is first films tended to have a dual structure, with the first half of the film varying the second, his later films have expanded that to threes, fours and more). And like Ozu and Rohmer, I never fail to find his films delightful.  This might be Hong's gentlest film, warm and hilarious.  If there's any justice, the Huppert name will finally get him the wider American art house audience he deserves.

A short prologue sets up the frame story for the film: a young woman and her mother are hiding out from creditors in a small seaside hotel.  The girl decides to pass the time by working on a screenplay, the main character of which she's basing on a French woman she met at the Jeonju Film Festival.  (This woman appears to be the only Hong writer who actually goes to a hotel and works, perhaps because that's not why she went there in the first place).  Through the film she'll give us three stories about the French woman, all played by Isabelle Huppert and all set in the same small hotel.  In the first, Huppert is a director visiting a director friend, a Korean man with a very pregnant (and jealous) wife.  In the second, Huppert is the wife of a car executive meeting her Korean lover in the hotel, except he turns up very late and she keeps falling asleep.  In the third, Huppert is a divorcée who comes to the hotel with a professor friend to relax and see the sights.  In each story, Huppert is given a different color outfit (blue, red green, if I remember correctly) and certain story elements are repeated (she always looks for a lighthouse, interacts with a boisterous and somewhat dim lifeguard (played by Yoo Jun-sang, who damn near steals the picture) and always borrows an umbrella from and walks into town with the girl who works at the hotel) as well as certain shot setups and dialogue (Huppert and the girl with the umbrella leaving the hotel are an exact match in everything but their clothes in each story).

A more manic filmmaker would, given this scenario, try to up the ante by intercutting between stories, creating a kind of meta-meta fictional world.  Lee Kwangkuk (Hong's former assistant making his first feature) did something similar with Romance Joe, an audacious film that I also greatly enjoyed here at VIFF.  But Hong is much more relaxed, at least not at this point in his career.  He's content to tell his stories on their own, one after the other, rather than mix them up, counting on us to remember the rhymes ourselves rather than underline them for us.  To be sure, there is some bleeding between stories, but it's of a very minor variety.  More like the screenwriter in the framing story simply forgetting where she left the umbrella in which version of the story than a postmodern wink and a nudge.

It's that frame story that's nags at me most about this film, that sticks out like an absent note in a familiar tune.  Only in Oki's Movie has a Hong shown his film to be so explicitly constructed, with its four variations on a romance (or multiple romance) told in different perspectives under the auspices of a short film project.  But in In Another Country, we never return to the frame story.  The last Huppert Tale ends and so does the movie.  What happens with the girl and her mother?  What about their debts?  Is the screenplay she's working on three ideas about a film, or a film made up of three short stories loosely connected by a frame, in other words, the film we just watched?  And if the film she wrote has that same unresolved frame, then that irresolution proceeds into infinity: the film she's writing about a girl writing a film about a girl writing a film about a girl. . . story within story delicately threaded and never finished, never finishable.

VIFF 2012: A Fish

The second film I saw in the the Dragons & Tigers competition comes from South Korean director Park Hongmin, who used some homemade digital wizardry to make it in 3D, though unfortunately we were unable to see that version here (though we are assured it looks great).  It's an off-beat story about a professor who tracks down his wife with the help of a disreputable detective.  Seems the wife has run off to Jindo, an island that is home to an ancient religious order: the wife is going to become a shaman.  The film opens with a nice long shot that sets the disorienting tone for what is to follow: first we see a quiet pastoral landscape that is shattered when a hand knocks on the frame revealing the scene to be a reflection in a car window.  As the window rolls down, a street scene is revealed, not only are the reflection and reality opposed, but so are nature and civilization.  Park will keep us on our toes for the course of the film, as reality will always be shifting under our feet.

The central metaphor of the film is a shamanic ritual wherein stuck souls are fished out of the sea so they can continue their way on through the afterlife.  There's a series of funny interludes in the film focusing on two fishermen on a fog-enshrouded boat.  At first their conversation revolves around typical fishing topics: how to fish and the meaning of life ("Why do the fish take the bait?" "Some of them think the bait will take them to a new world." Fish cultists believing in the Hook as the Rapture, apparently).  Eventually, after an encounter with a talking fish, they begin to question, like the main characters of Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, how exactly they got on the boat in the first place.  Unlike in Tom Stoppard's play, however, the question isn't a meta-fictional one but a spiritual allegory, enmeshed in Korean Buddhist and shamanistic traditions.

Eventually, as twists and realities pile onto one another, it becomes hard to follow the thread of causality.  Exactly who is dead and who is alive and how they got that way doesn't exactly come together in a particularly explicit way (or if it did, I didn't quite catch it).  But that's not to say the film isn't coherent.  On the contrary, it makes absolute emotional sense. The tragedy of death and the weird and wonderful ways we cope with it.

VIFF 2012: Reconversão

This is the third documentary I've seen by Thom Andersen, and the first not about the architecture of his hometown Los Angeles.  The last one I saw was here at VIFF a couple years ago, a shortish look at billboards around town with a spinning radio dial soundtrack called Get Out of the Car, the first was the magisterial Los Angeles Plays Itself, about the depictions of the city through the years in Hollywood films, a slyly witty examination of how film transforms, misrepresents, ignores, violates and masks the city he loves.  But this year, Andersen has traveled halfway around the world to examine the work of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto Moura, who mainly works in the north of the country, in and around the city of Porto.

Unlike Andersen's other films, this is structured more like a traditional documentary, as he looks at various buildings, one after the other and describes what he thinks is interesting about them, the theory behind them and the artistry that went into their construction or conception.  More than once the project never manages to get built as planned: architectural art, though it is necessarily the largest, most monumental art form, may be more ephemeral than any other: more difficult to make than a movie, easier to compromise and harder to maintain in its original state.  It's this last sense that interests Souto Moura and Andersen most: Souto Moura's most distinctive trait as an architect has to do with his attitude toward ruins: he likes to "reconvert" them into functional spaces (walls especially, Andersen and Souto Moura both lavishly praise the granite walls of Northern Portugal).  The film is full of their ruminations on the meaning of ruins, I noted a few quotes, forgive me if the wordings aren't exact:

"The ruin ceases to be architecture and becomes nature."

"The city is functional when its objects survive to take on functions beyond that which they were designed for."

"Ruins are like animals: they move, they resist."

This is explicitly a rejection of the Romantic idealization of ruins: it's not about reveling in the glory of the past, or the beautiful decay of all things, Souto Moura finds this attitude itself decadent.  His art is about making the past a fundamental, functional part of the present.  It's not hard to see why an Angeleno, a man from a city the most notorious trait of which is that it is almost utterly without a visible past, would be fascinated by the idea.

The most unusual element of the film is its photographic technique, frequently using a series of still frames, shot once or twice per second and then animated, looking like film projected at a single frame per second (or two seconds) rather than the normal film speed of 24 frames per second.  According to the VIFF program notes, this results in a higher resolution image.  I don't really know how that's supposed to work, I mostly just found the technique distracting.

VIFF 2012: Beautiful 2012

This terribly-titled omnibus film collects four shorts from directors from four East Asian countries commissioned by the Hong Kong Film Festival.  The films are much longer than the ones in the other collection I've seen here, 10 + 10, running about 20-30 minutes each.  Also unlike that film, there doesn't seem to be a real unifying theme behind the works ("Beautiful" is not a theme, and even if it was, it's a stretch to apply it to a couple of these). The first film, You are More than Beautiful comes from South Korean director Kim Tae-Young.  A variation on the plot of Buffalo 66, it's about a guy who picks up a girl (a hooker?) to pass off to his father as his fiancée.  Unlike Vincent Gallo's film, however, the father is dying and when the couple arrive at his hospital he's in a coma.  The guy pays the manic pixie girl off, but she sneaks back into the father's hospital room, packed to the gills with similarly dying old men, and starts talking to him.  Then she bursts into an impromptu aria from a Korean opera.  It's silly, but it totally worked for me.  I'm a sucker for these kooky girls that break into song.  Kim's direction is crisp and unassuming.  I'm curious to see one of his features.

The second short in the film is easily the highest profile, Walker by Tsai Ming-liang, his first film since Visage, which I saw back at VIFF 2009 (and which my wife almost walked out of).  It's been awhile since then and I don't quite remember how it ends, but apparently Lee Kang-sheng, the star and main character of all Tsai's films, is now a monk, and this film is the chronicle of his walking, very, very, verrrrrry slowly through the city.  It starts with him exiting, one minute movement at a time from a stone staircase, out of the past, into the bustling sidewalk.  There follows a series of still shots (Tsai of course doesn't move the camera) with Lee seemingly in slow motion while the city moves on around him.  It's like the shot in Chungking Express where Tony Leung and Faye Wong are in slow motion at the lunch counter while the passersby move in blurs around them.  At first, people don't seem to be paying much attention to the monk, there's a scene in a square with a woman pounding something and chanting while passersby take her photograph and ignore the monk in their midst.  Later though, there's a long shot of the monk moving down the street while crowds gather and watch him and, more interestingly to them apparently, photograph Tsai's camera crew.  The space around the monk is open, the crowds keeping their distance as he forms an oasis of stillness in the middle of the city.  Later an ice cream truck plays a tinkly version of a Strauss waltz as the monk walks by, decidedly out of time with the tune.  One overhead shot includes an apartment window filled with an aquarium, much like the one in Lee's parents' apartment in Tsai's other movies.  He's glimpsed in the space between buses; he moves out of focus past a giant crystal clear advertisement.  Occasionally it can be hard to pick him out of a long shot until you realize that he's the thing that's not moving.  It is, perversely enough, Tsai's fastest-paced film, the editing more rapid than anything I've seen from him before (though the shots are still much longer than the typical film).  Eventually, Lee comes to a stop, his path has lead him to a door that prominently declares "No Entry".  Finally he slowly raises his head and slowly takes a bite of the egg mcmuffin he's been slowly carrying for a day a night and another day.  Looks like it tasted great.

The third film is by Chinese director Gu Changwei and I can't say I liked it much at all. Seemed to me like a compendium of the worst art house clichés.  There's even a slow motion shot of a cat meowing, like something out of an SNL parody video.  Maybe it just had too much going on after Tsai's sublime minimalism.  But the fourth film, My Way, by Hong Kong director Ann Hui, is very sweet.  Francis Ng plays a transgender man about to go in for his sex change operation.  We see him going out to the movies, hanging out with his friends and arguing with his ex-wife.  There's a brief flashback to their fight after she figures out his situation, and so a very real sense of relief and joy when she shows up after his operation to wish him well.  The subject is an under-discussed one in the Chinese-speaking world, even more so than it is here.  But Hui manages to tell this simple, humane story with warmth and, well, beauty.

VIFF 2012: Mother & Mekong Hotel

These two shortish films (about an hour long each) from Thailand were paired together here at VIFF, though they don't have a whole lot in common other than a sensibility that mixes fiction and documentary, reality and mythology into a more or less seamlessly whole vision of the world as a place where anything is possible at any time.

Mother is an experimental film directed by Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul (Billy) and is part documentary about his own mother's various health problems (mental and physical), part dramatization of some events that happened, part fiction and part fantasy.  The most striking bit is a long dream sequence, shot in black and white and scored with a harshly droning kind of minimalist music mixed with a chorus chanting by Thai composer Phil_WC, it sounded to me like some of the György Ligeti music Kubrick used in 2001.  Another sequence finds the mother in a grocery store grabbing things off the shelves apparently at random, the camera mounted on the shopping cart looking back at her, in the style of Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee.  Throughout the film there are hyper-extreme closeups of a person's face, so close that they cease to be recognizable as human but instead become alien landscapes.  The documentary sequences are less successful, though certainly emotionally wrenching, they're shot in a first-person shaky cam that mostly just made me dizzy.  Perhaps I'm just getting old.

Mekong Hotel was one of my most anticipated films coming into the festival, the first feature by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Joe) since his Cannes-winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (which I saw here at VIFF 2010).  It's partly bits of a story Weerasethakul had written years ago about a young couple who are haunted by a pob ghost throughout their lives (pob ghosts are spirits that eat the entrails of animals and humans, like a Thai chupacabra I guess), but most of the film is simply Joe and his actors and composer hanging out at the titular hotel overlooking the Mekong River, the border between Thailand and Laos, chatting about politics and how high the water will rise in this year's floods.  The composer, Chai Dhatana, noodles his score on a guitar throughout the movie, an ambling, aimless tune with hints of Southern blues that evokes not only the endless flow of the Mekong, but the Mississippi as well, both rivers oft-flooded borderlands conducive to lazy afternoon conversations and where the line between myth and reality is a little more porous than it probably should be.  I have written down in my notes the line "device to allow your spirit to wander".  I don't remember the context, who said it or what the device is, but it seems to me that that describes Joe's movies pretty perfectly.

VIFF 2012: A Mere Life

The Vancouver International Film Festival's annual Dragons & Tigers competition has an impressive pedigree, honoring young filmmakers over the years such as Jia Zhangke, Hong Sangsoo, Koreeda Hirokazu, Lee Changdong, Wisit Sasanatieng and Liu Jiayin.  I think I'm going to make it to about half the competition films this year, and this film by Park Sanghun is the first.  It's an unrelentingly grim movie that I'm surprised to find I actually liked quite a bit, given that I don't normally warm to dark or depressing movies.

It starts off with a family visiting a Buddhist shrine.  The mother encourages her son to help her place a stone on top of a rock pile (the act has a religious significance of which I'm wholly ignorant).  When the precariously balanced pile collapses, the mother does a comical double take and runs away, leaving her exasperated husband (named Park Il-rae) to rebuild the pile (or face karmic wrath?, again, I'm ignorant).  That's about the last bit of light comedy the film has to offer.  From there, it becomes a grunge-realist story of poverty and the husband's drunken incompetence that comes to a head when he is scammed out of their savings and brings some poison home.

It's here that the film takes an unexpected turn.  It certainly is a bold choice to have your main character murder his wife and child halfway through your movie, and Park doesn't shy away from the horror or detestability of that act.  But that's not the end of the story either.  Instead of making a film about how simply awful it is to be poor and married to a drunk, Park gives us something I haven't quite seen before, a story about an irredeemable man that asks us not only to understand but to try to forgive him.  It asks the rare question, what do you do after you've committed an unforgivable act?  Park Il-rae sentences himself to walking the earth as a destitute wretch, while he keeps trying and failing to kill himself.  His father tracks him down (a striking fire-lit scene as the father burns all of Park's meager possessions in his troll-like under-the-bridge home) and tries to kill him but dies of a heart attack instead.  He tries to hang himself, but the rope breaks.  We leave him wandering aimlessly alone in a desolate grey mudflat, shot with a nauseatingly unstable shaky cam.  Death would be too good for him, so karma (or whatever) simply won't let him die.  It's not simply that life is his punishment, I get the feeling he'll be left to wander until he finds forgiveness, from the people he's killed, from himself, and from us.