The Day He Arrives (Saturday, April 21, 2012) (41)

Hong Sang-Soo's film The Day He Arrives fits squarely in a category of "oblique movies," films that function as much as a pure art film as it does as storytelling. There is basically a beginning and end, but the middle gets rather murky -- on purpose -- and it is in this fog, and because of this fog, that the tale comes alive and turns something banal into something wonderful.

Concentrating again on the reflexive world of "film culture," as he did with his last film Woman on the Beach, the movie focuses on the day film professor and director Sangjoon arrives in Seoul to meets up with his friend Youngho. Sangjoon first visits an ex-girlfriend, and walks down the street meeting and talking to several strangers. He meets a trio of film students who recognize him and invite him to eat a meal with them. He later meets up with Youngho and a woman who works with him. The waitress at this restaurant is flirty and they all four begin to talk. At the end of the night they leave as normal.

The next thing we see, without any explanation is the same story beginning again (or, at least beginning after Sangjoon leaves the ex's apartment). Most of the specifics about the thread are different, conversations has some similarities although people meet in different places and go in different directions, but the important structural elements (such as Sangjoon eating at a restaurant and leaving with a woman) remain intact and recognizable. We see three full cycles of the same story, each a bit different.

Of course, the first thought in any film-goer's mind is that this seems like a twist on Rashomon-type story, where the reason for the variations is because different people remember the situation differently. However it doesn't seem to be that straightforward. This isn't so much about different points of view of the same story, but different possibilities of the same very small events. It also doesn't involve multiple narrators, but just a single third-person omniscient one.

It's never clear, nor does it matter, whether each of these scenarios actually plays out in Sangjoon's life, if he imagines the same situations happening differently (maybe he ends up with the waitress at the end of the night, maybe with Yongho's colleague), or if it's just Hong riffing on a small idea -- possibly a meta work on the nature of the medium with screenwriter/filmmaker playing god at the human chessboard. There is a sense that Hong is improvising on a theme the way a Jazz saxophonist might twist and expand a standard, so you know what you're hearing, though you never heard it this way before.

Hong really gives us no clear answers about what he's looking to achieve here (unlike with the Kurosawa, where it's pretty clear he's exploring the nature of subjectivity) and this is what makes the film interesting and fun. It has a playfulness and an alacrity that raises this essay from purely theoretical and alienating to familiar and warm. We get into the game of the film, waiting for the next story rhyme, enjoying how variations from past events will come back. At one point a highway sign flashed for less than a second in the first shot of the film comes back near the end -- not creating any great meaning, but highlighting that the act of film viewing is deep and should be engaging.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Keyhole (Tuesday, April 10, 2012) (35)

Guy Maddin is the most interesting and best Canadian filmmaker working today and easily one of the best filmmakers from any region. I have a never-ending respect for David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, two directors whose work in the past has been spectacular, but Maddin has eclipsed them and developed a new style and visual language along the way. His films fall somewhere between narrative and experimental works on a filmic spectrum, frequently using documentary elements and always dealing with nostalgia and subconscious through a Brechtian formalist language. He walks the line of being fun and funny, but also uncanny, sometimes uncomfortable and frequently difficult.

His latest work, Keyhole, is all of these things. It's not really a linear narrative film, not totally experimental (despite being commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State), but also totally weird and unsettling. All the while it's thrilling, exuberant and firmly sarcastic. It is a film told in a "fugue state" style, making elements disconnected, obscured and abstract. It is wonderful and fascinating.

The story of the film is really secondary to the formalism and thematic content, but deals with a noir-like plot involving a man named Ulysses (Jason Patric), who returns to his home after a botched job with his underworld lackeys. He brings with him a young beauty, Denny (Brooke Palsson), and a bound young man, Manners (David Wontner), who seems to be his son. In the house on the upper floor is his wife, Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), and an old man who claims to be her father, guardian of all memories in the house. This geezer walks around, out of shape, in his underwear, dragging with him a heavy chain that seems to keep him tied to the building itself. Ulysses must struggle to get to his wife, deal with Old Man Memory and figure out what to do with his two prisoners.

As a dream-essay, the film doesn't move along in an A-to-B fashion, but jumps from one thing to another in a sometimes bizarre or difficult way. Characters don't seem to be really alive or dead, but suspended in mid-flight between two places (waking and sleeping, still and dynamic, past and present). Just like a dream, there are small circular stories connected with other circular stories, making the film slightly more difficult to follow... though if you sit back and enjoy it, everything becomes clear. (Part of this structure is that there is a somewhat Marxist element of having no internal dynamism, making it hard to know what is next or when it will end. This is certainly a challenge, but a thrilling and, ultimately, a rewarding one.)

From one scene to the next, Ulysses goes from hard-boiled B-movie noir star to a nervous everyman dealing with his memories and his demons. The house becomes his subconscious, his journey though it, like his classical namesake, becomes his psychoanalysis. The eponymous keyhole in the door to the upstairs bathroom (where Hyacinth and Old Man Memory seem to live) serves the purposes of being a small view into a distant recess of memory as well as a hole through which Ulysses can pull threads (literally). The reason the story feels choppy, difficult and strange is because it's Ulysses' therapeutic journey. My shrink father once said that psychoanalysis is the act of taking down a wall, brick by brick, and then rebuilding it slowly with better mortar... that seems pretty apt here in the case of this house.

Aside from all of this elegant presentation and plot, what makes Maddin's films so clever and enjoyable is how technically interesting they are. He's a master of juxtaposition, editing and pacing. Images are frequently on screen for seconds or only several frames, signaling something in our brains, but remaining distant enough that we feel we are just short of making a connection. Characters come and go through dark canals and obscured spaces, making the act of watching one of his films (this one in particular) a game, but one with no rules that are easy to win. It's a new kind of filmmaking, a doorway to more avante-garde material, reminiscent of the work of Bruce Connor, but shown through the prism of something almost familiar and narrative. It's difficult to define, but thrilling to behold.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Arbor (2011) (Thursday, February 8, 2012) (151)

I am always interested in films that make leaps in formal conventions and are daring about how they present their information. Such is the case with Clio Bernard's film The Arbor, a pseudo-documentary about English playwright Andrea Dunbar. Bernard presents Dunbar's story as a series of actual audio interviews of Dunbar and her family recorded in the 1980s that are dubbed over actors playing the parts of these people. Most of the time the syncing is so close that we lost track of the formal process, as if the actors were simply speaking the lines of these sad, poor Yorkshire characters.

Dunbar came to some prominence and notoriety in the late 1970s with a short play called "The Arbor", which autobiographically told of her life and background. At the time she was a poor girl living in counsel estates in West Yorkshire. She wrote the play for a school project at age 15, but it was entered into a national competition, which it won. It was produced by the Royal Court Theater, with whom she would develop a brief relationship with.

From there she wrote a screenplay for the Alan Clarke film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which was also autobiographical and dealt with many of the same characters and situations. All this time, she was generally on drugs and drunk and had three babies out of wedlock (the first was to a Pakistani man, which became the subject of her first play). She would go on to write a third play along similar lines before dying of a brain hemorrhage in 1990.

We then see how Dunbar's drug and alcohol abuse and the grinding poverty they lived in changed the lives of her kids. Her eldest daughter got hooked on drugs as well, worked as a prostitute and was convicted of killing her own baby with Methadone.

This is a very interesting, bleak look at the modern world, and one that we don't see all that often. It has the feeling of something that Andrea Arnold might have made (or Alan Clarke), and certainly feels as desperate and depressing as the story is. There is a helplessness to the whole thing that I find appealing and yet alienating. It's hard to identify with any characters because they're all so broken... and because the formalism of the piece gets in the way.

I'm not totally sure what I'm supposed to make of the this process and how I'm supposed to feel about the separation between the characters and myself that I feel. Is the point that I am as separated from them because of the dubbing as they are from one another? This is an interesting concept, an interesting Marxist technique in the midst of this anti-neo-liberal tale. I appreciate what Bernard is trying to do here more than I like the final product. I feel like it's a bit underdeveloped. Still, it's a very interesting and good film.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Future (Wednesday, July 13, 2011) (54)

As trite as it sounds to say, Miranda July doesn't see the world the way you and I see it; she sees it through the eyes of an unconventional artist. Time after time in her newest film, The Future, she shows us something totally original, something we never would have thought of, as a way of telling a rather standard story. It is a wonderful view of the world, an incredibly sad and anxious view. It's the post-post-Graduate view of the world (or post-post-post-) where thirtysomethings are looking ahead not knowing their direction, not knowing about marriage or kids, not knowing about What Comes Next. It's a story of the fear of the future, either known or unknown, and a the uncertainty that comes from not having memories of the future (shit - I just blew my own mind there).

There is a traditional narrative story and a less traditional one that coexist simultaneously here. The film opens with a squeaky, non-human voice-over of a cat, who serves as a sort of Greek chorus, but in a much more Brechtian sense. When we finally see the cat, it's just a puppet of the front two legs and paws as in a cage. (This is the first of those totally creative and outside-the-box things that July gives us that probably no other director would have imagined or considered.) There is something particularly jarring, but appealing, about this, setting up a D.I.Y. world, a janky, wonderful aesthetic.

It's instantly comforting and sweet without being anywhere close to banal. (I have no idea who July looks to for inspiration, but this film feels like what a Michael Gondry film would be if he was more talented and also is very reminiscent of the fantastic Belgian film L'Iceberg, by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy). It's a bit surrealist, a bit absurdist and much closer to experimental/art film than standard narrative fare.

Back in the human world, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) are a couple in their mid-thirties who have been dating for about four years and living together for much of that time. He works from home as a phone tech-support clerk and she works as a dance teacher for pre-kindergarten pre-ballet students. They're both obsessed with modern conveniences (she spends hours watching a co-workers YouTube video of a cringe-worthy dance routine).

Once they decide to adopt that cat, Paw-Paw, they find they have a month before they can take him home (once its medical procedures have healed), a month before their serious adult lives will begin. They decide to quit their respective jobs, turn off their Internet service and change their lives. He starts to volunteer selling trees for an environmental nonprofit, more of a fill-in thing to do than a real career switch, and she begins to flounder, attempting and failing to post "30 dances in 30 days" videos to the Web. But then things start to go wrong when Sophie experiments with cheating on Jason and then tells him about it.

The idea of "memories from the future" is very significant in the third act of the film, and is something that really connects the standard narrative world to the atypical, creative one. As we see Jason's imagination of Sophie's future and his future without her, it becomes unclear whose point of view we're witnessing, whether we're really inside a dream-state or if it's really just the standard narrative again and when exactly this passage ends. Within Jason's mind, Sophie herself has revelations that we later see her responding to in her waking life. This is not him wishing she would learn some lesson (as a spurned lover might think of his partner), but him actually seeing a future where she learns these lessons and then her learning these lessons in the real world. Perhaps they're sharing the dream/fear and they're both in some collective unconscious. It is an absolutely brilliant illustration of an abstract, non-linear timeline.

In the middle of the film, we see several things that fall much more in line with July's own performance/video art background than with this, or any other, narrative story line. She gives us two funny, bizarre dances (if you liked the dance scene in Dogtooth, buckle up for what you will see here), both of them amazing and neither one necessarily advancing the story, but totally perfect in their moments. This still from the film is a perfect example of how the normal becomes a bit less than that in July's world. She's a bit too far out that window for a standard filmmaker to conceive of, it's a dramatic, almost violent, certainly sexual movement that has much more in common with silent film than anything we've seen in years.

As a short-story writer, July has a fantastic grasp of language and natural dialogue. Most of it is very funny and never feels forced. At one point when she's getting ready to go out, Sophie, looking in a mirror, says to Jason, "I wish I was a notch better looking; I'm right on the fence. I constantly have to make my case to each new person I meet." (Oh, I feel you, sister.) In another scene with her paramour, Sophie asks him what they're doing that night, to which he responds, "Well, we're going to fuck, then you can eat ice cream, then watch TV and then I'll watch you." To which she answers, "Is there really ice cream?" It's refreshingly realistic and painfully familiar.

The acting in this is wonderful. July is fantastic, vulnerable, weird, shy, self-doubting, but capable of normal interactions when she gains confidence (at least in Jason's mind). Linklater is great (he really is a great actor on stage and screen), also frustrated, unsure, quiet, scared and angry.

This film mixes all sorts of styles and formats, similar to how a video artist would do with found footage, creative ideas and abstract concepts. There's a sequence in the middle of the film where Jason meets a man who is selling a hair dryer for $3 in the local penny-saver magazine. We see a few scenes of the two men talking about life and love and getting a tour of the man's house and his weird collections. Although it's scripted, there's a cinema-verite feel to this, as if Jason (and Linklater) were stepping off the performance stage and into this man's living room.(July met the man during a non-fiction writing project she did; he is a non-actor.) This is yet another anti-establishment, risky decision that July makes, and, like the rest of the film, it pays off beautifully.

There's an amazing feeling I get as a viewer when I see something totally original, fun and interesting. The Future is all of those things and Miranda July is a brilliant artist and wonderful storyteller and filmmaker.

Stars: 4 of 4

Film Socialisme (Saturday, June 11, 2011) (42)

I must begin to say that when i started writing this blog two years ago, I never thought i would be able to review and write about a film by Jean-Luc Godard. This is a real treat for me.. Too bad the film is such a dog. Woof.

Watching Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme is not an enjoyable experience. It's a lot of frenetic cutting, there is footage from all sorts of cameras, including old-style analogue video, digital, celluloid and camera phones. Most of the film is in French, though we also hear English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic and Greek... and almost none of it is subtitled. In fact the subtitling seems to be specifically directed by Godard as well and he really only translates the gist of what is being said, so that long dialogues are reduced to several key nouns and adjectives, sometimes compounded into a linguistic gumbo gobbledygook.

It seems that Godard is making a comment on the nature of film to mislead and control and the bourgeois nature of contemporary cinema. This is so banal it's offensive (to say nothing about the bourgeois irony of making a movie that costs money and saying that people with money are out of touch).

There are three distinct parts to the film that have specific themes and styles. The first, takes place on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean where you see a bunch of Euros going around on holiday from port to port (North Africa, Spain, Egypt, Greece, Ukraine). There is a mix of documentary stuff and a weird narrative story about a rich business owner and people who don't like him. There is very little here that makes sense other than the general idea of "industrial capitalism is bad". Feh.

The second story, the most traditional in structure, is about a family who owns a gas station in France where there is a documentary crew filming them and they are being compelled to close the pumps. They discuss their lives and feelings. The final part is the most abstract where we go from city to city around the Mediterranean and see how they have changed over the years and the relative highs and lows (and revolutions) in each.

I imagine there are some Big Themes throughout the three parts here, but without a crib sheet it was almost totally opaque. Ever since about 1968 (when the student protests in France affected him politically and aesthetically) Godard has made movies that are more and more non-narrative, abstract and difficult to understand. I guess there's some merit to sitting down and trying to understand the meaning here, but it doesn't really interest me. (This is me saying about contemporary art, "so what? I don't get it.") And I guess that is really what this is. It's an art film, and experimental movie. It's not a narrative story. It has more in common with late Makavajev films like Sweet Movie (a boat that has some revolutionary significance) and Gorilla Bathes at Noon, than Breathless. The symbolism is important. The subtitles are important. The frenetic style is important. It's just that none of it is interesting or easy to watch and enjoy.

Stars: 1 of 4

Le Quattro Volte (Tuesday, May 3, 2011) (27)

Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is a beautiful and challenging film. It has a light narrative structure, but feels more like an experimental art piece than anything particularly plot-driven. It relies entirely on the beautiful cinematography of Andrea Locatelli, employing no score and no dialogue. The sound we hear is created by the natural situations we witness: a truck driving up a hill, the bells of a herd of goats as well as their collective bleating, a crowd of people getting together in a village square for a celebration. This is a very slow-moving film, but is quite lyrical and interesting.

It opens with an old goat herder walking with his sheep in the hills in rural Italy. He has a terrible cough and stops his work to hack away for awhile. When he gets home, he mixes an unknown substance into a glass of water. The next day as he makes his rounds in the village delivering milk he picks up a pack of dust from the church after a nun has blessed it (this dust is what he drank in the water the night before). Later we follow a goat kid from its birth to its first trip out with the flock into the hills, where it gets separated from the group because it can't keep up. Finally we see the villagers cut a tall tree and put it up in the square for a celebration. The tree is taken down and burned to make charcoal.

These little episodes all deal with the cycle of life and relative life-spans for each kind of being (a man, an animal and a tree). It seems the title (The Four Times, in English) refers to a theory of Pythagoras that life has four stages from beginning to end: human, animal, plant and mineral. I have to admit, I caught the four parts, but it's still rather cryptic (and had to look up the meaning after I saw the film... I'm a cheater).

I was struck a few times over the course of the picture about how much it reminded me of some of the more exotic fare of Tarkovsky, notably his Solaris from 1972. Clearly that is a story mostly set in space, but it deals with ontology in an interesting, abstract way. This connection was particularly clear to me with the way Frammartino uses shots of natural textures to fill the screen expressively between more narrative moments. Even though it is stylistically very different from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi (there's no music, the shots don't have much movement in them at all), they both share a similar poetic quality.

This is not an easy film, but it is interesting and beautiful. It's not often a film can capture your attention for 88 minutes without nearly any sound. This one does.

Stars: 3 of 4