35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums) A Film by Claire Denis (2008)

Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum - like Hirozaku Kore-Eda's recent Still Walking - uses a beloved Yasujiro Ozu film as a jumping off point but ultimately morphs to its own context and sensibility. The story of Lionel (Alex Descas) and Joséphine (Mati Diop), an intimate father/daughter duo living together in a Paris apartment building mirrors that of Shukichi (Chishû Ryû) and Noriko (Setsuko Hara), a similarly affectionate but physically closer relationship evolving in Tokyo; both tales contain their fair shares of trains and reveal the weight of passing time as it influences the lives of family members. I won't sing about the ways in which Denis deftly reintegrates the elements of Late Spring into 35 Shots of Rum, as if the film can only be seen as a particularly bright spot in a long shadow of greatness cast down by the monumental Japanese work, but instead take it as the rich, plaintive gesture that it is, a singular entity as much as it is an homage.

Much has been made of Claire Denis in recent years, especially on The Auteurs Notebook and in the BFI's Sight and Sound Magazine, where Nick James declares her the finest filmmaker in the world. 35 Shots of Rum comes directly before her most recent fest-film White Material and it potently evokes a mood of tranquility. It eases us ever-so-gradually into a not-so easy sentiment: that we must find peace in our own routines and submit to the fact that the lives that run beside ours do not run on parallel tracks, that they criss-cross, intervene, and sometimes lead to isolation, as we see in the opening frames which assume the rickety point-of-view of Lionel as he yields to his occupation as a train driver. Shortly thereafter, he reunites with his daughter Joséphine in their apartment for a quiet night of brief expressions of admiration and modest downtime. A pattern is established that the film effortlessly maintains of work in the day and home at night, a seemingly endless systemization of separation and reconvening.

It is only through the passing of time that this pattern is mildly obstructed, ushered along by two figures - Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and Noé (Grégoire Colin) - who tug lovingly and desirably at our respective main characters. Gabrielle is an ex-lover of Lionel and also acts as the quasi-mother figure for Joséphine, and Noé is a young man living alone on a floor above them. Together, the four presume the awkward stance of a real family, with the two not linked by blood filling in the holes that are left enigmatically gaping. Not until the final quarter of the film does Denis subtly reveal to us hints of the mother through dusty material remnants in the apartment, and the exact state of affairs that defines her absence is left unanswered, just as the tangible course of events that lead Lionel and Joséphine to tension remains flexibly open to interpetation. Those familiar with Denis' work will acknowledge these ambiguities as par for the course; she never once judges her characters but at the same time does not take this opacity to an extreme, providing us evocative evidence in the behaviors of characters that suggests potential inquiries.



35 Shots of Rum is formally splendid and has an admirable inclination not to ogle at pleasurable images. Instead, Denis' exquisite cutting rhythms create a precise flow that matches the interconnecting nature of the characters and constructs what is specifically a montage of abstractions. Time and space are delicately scattered when Denis promptly excises the the conceivable payoffs of a scene to pursue other plot lines, a move that approximates the abrupt veering of a train at a fork. Even when the four central characters occupy the same space, leaving nowhere for the film to exit to, Denis discovers a way to obscure the ontological surfaces of the scene. Most memorably illustrating this is the rainy night that is in some ways the crux of the film. The four characters are heading to a concert when their car breaks down en route, leaving them defenseless in the pouring rain. During the drive there, Denis resists all-encompassing views of the car, instead shifting rhythmically between tight close-ups of their lowly lit expressions as the droplets of water on the windows blur the outside world they are contained within. The "family" then makes a spontaneous decision to have a rendezvous in an African restaurant on the side of the street, and once again Denis limits her vision to the central figures in comfortable but indecisive motion as they sway to the music in what is surely one of the most sublime renderings of the wit's-end-waltz-scene I have ever witnessed.

Moments like these stand out beautifully in what is otherwise an extremely consistent film, absent of many significant tonal or narrative leaps (besides a particularly unexpected and chilling moment of gore when Lionel confronts a dead friend in a train tunnel). Denis has an elegant way of suffusing profundity into the elliptical gaps where more conventional directors would resort to an emotional apex, such as when Joséphine arrives at Noé's door after a tension between the two in a previous scene. We expect a flush of emotion culminating in a kiss but instead get a cut to a new scene, letting mysteries regarding what happened simmer over. Similarly, one could argue that the final scene is a more fundamental example of this restraint; the characters dress up and Joséphine dons her mother's necklace, but the true content of the sequence is mysterious. Is it a marriage, linking Joséphine to Ozu's Noriko? And if so, for whom? The answers are left within the viewer's own projection, and Denis supplies enough emotion to want to search for them.

Dogville (2003) A Film by Lars Von Trier

Lars Von Trier's Dogville is a remarkably dense film unafraid to put forth a discursive string of unsettling questions about the baseness of human nature. This sentence could quite comfortably form the one-line review to any of the Danish director's films, and it's not necessarily always a clear-cut indicator of success. Von Trier's films are hardly prone to elicit black or white opinions, but of what I have seen, Dogville is the one that most closely approaches perfection. The film, three hours long with plenty of intellectual chutzpah, is one whopper of an experience. It is a rock-in-the-shoe of a film, the kind of significant work of art that defies you not to react, to the point where very few next-day reviews will really come across with utmost sincerity. As a disclaimer, it has been three days since I saw Dogville and it has taken me this long to wrestle with my thoughts; the same occurred with his latest provocation Antichrist. Point being, his films have a way of detecting some universal safe zone that exists inside viewers, entering through the back door, and hiding behind the walls when chased.

Magically, Von Trier manages to do this even when he crafts a world with no walls. That world is Dogville, and it consists of a rectangular soundstage smack dab in the middle of a colorless, intangible ether. Dogville represents a minuscule town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado during the Great Depression, but with its Monopoly-like etchings of houses and pathways, we understand it as being far more universal, an emblem of the blueprint by which all American (and perhaps international) small towns abide. It has a spot for the town dog that is reminiscent of silhouetted dead bodies from slapstick comedy films, a central road donned the common name "Elm St." despite the lack of elm trees, and a bench at the edge of the town designated with pedantic specificity as "the old man's bench". It doesn't matter if these things seem implausible given their assigned context (never does a certain old man even sit on "the old man's bench"); rather, they are meant to evoke a folksiness that might remind us of the small communities we have visited in our lives. Dogville is just an archaic slab of concrete onto which Von Trier has placed a group of living, breathing humans whose oblique naturalism contrasts starkly with their deliberately artificial surroundings.

It is not long though before the initial novelty of the unique setting dissolves and becomes invisible in the face of the film's plausible drama. That is not to say that one may mistake a real door for what was really just an actor pantomiming the opening of a door to a dubbed sound effect, but there is some heightened sense of conviction that these characters are actually living a customary life on a game board. This stems from the ability of an electric cast (including Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Philip Baker Hall, Chloë Sevigny, and Stellan Skarsgård) to bring to life a believable community, fraught with their own idiosyncrasies, prejudices, and routines. For all this though, Tom Edison (Paul Bettany), the soft-spoken writer in the town, feels the community needs a moral readjustment. He sees a certain coldness in the attitudes of those around him that may be a cause of the absence of a church in Dogville.



Then, as if struck down from God, the conveniently-named Grace (Nicole Kidman) arrives in town one night to the tune of gunshots. She is a radiant blond fugitive whose seedy ties with gangsters suggests she has stumbled out of a noir film from Hollywood in the 1940's. Tom, always willing to lend a helping hand, offers to have Grace hide out in Dogville, and he sees her presence as an immediate opportunity to put the townspeople's tolerance to the test. He holds a vote on keeping her and Grace just barely survives it. Although she understands she has placed a burden on the town and is more than willing to leave without bothering anyone, she is extremely enthusiastic about assisting wherever she is needed to reverse the skepticism of those around her. Not only that, but Grace also sees Dogville as a minuscule land of opportunities, a cozy place where "hopes and dreams are pursued". Her wide-eyed eagerness in the town is similar to that of Naomi Watts' character in Mulholland Drive, albeit in a less cartoonish manner. Consequently, both actresses deliver fearless performances that require their spirits to be up one moment and down in the dirt the next, laying bare not just flesh but dignity as well.

Because of this, Dogville gradually becomes an emotionally unpredictable parable of the xenophobic tendencies inherent in a group mentality and the evil that ensues when an outsider invades the group's space, among a confluence of other issues. While Tom continues to support Grace, if not publicly then privately, the rest of the town is progressively less accommodating. Despite Grace's unerring work ethic, her schedule is pushed to extremes in order to maintain acceptance in a community that runs stolidly on the ideal of utilitarianism. Her jobs, delegated to menial tasks such as making daily conversation with the repudiating town blind-man (Gazzara) who speaks of lavish sights out his window, do little to boost her integrity as a citizen in the community. Instead, they eventually afford her rape (by an old-world farmer named Chuck, in an ascetic portrayal by Stellan Skarsgård) and a mix of glaring eyes by women who disapprove of her actions. To complicate things, Grace and Tom develop an intimate but opaque love, and by film's end, Tom is about the only male in the community who has not had the sexual privilege of Grace's body, although none of these instances are voluntary. One of Dogville's most stirring images involves the town going about its business while in the corner of the frame, through the invisible walls, Grace is being taken advantage of violently, an eloquent statement on the prevalence of violence in the most unsuspecting of places.



As well as being heavily self-referential - the film contains chapter markers that explicitly state what is about to happen - Dogville pulls abundantly from other art forms such as literature and theater and also runs through a gamut of religious allusions. Grace's predicaments align themselves well with the martyrdom experienced innocently by Christ, only here the crucifix is replaced by a heavy wheel that gets chained to Grace's body via her neck, and the people around her further echo mythological significance with some of their strategic names: Pandora, Athena, Olympia. Von Trier's penchant to mix up different reference points (Christianity and Ancient Greece) within one film is nothing new, and why exactly he does it here is open to various interpretations, but its presence undoubtedly gives the story a feel of timeless universality. More coherent is the continued use of John Hurt's ebullient narration, which offers up storybook witticisms that contrast the harshness onscreen. In this way, Dogville almost functions as a critique of the "Great American Novel", questioning the reliance on conventional storytelling as a mode of sorting out the complexities of human nature, because in the end, Hurt's narration does little to actually punctuate the intangible qualities working beneath Dogville, a film that - in all its conscious artificiality - boils down to thematic and emotional levels beneath the surface.

It is precisely this ability on Von Trier's part to convey things subtly that distinguishes Dogville from the rest of his oeuvre. So many of his films are dirtied from beginning to end by his fingerprints, and it is not often that we get that sense of unnecessary intrusion in this film. Of course, a Von Trier film is always a Von Trier film - Dogville contains handheld camerawork that is a clear descendant of his filmmaking manifesto Dogme 95 and it also boasts the director's characteristic cynicism towards humanity - but he is more often than not sitting back and letting his actors carry the film from its slow build to its shockingly apocalyptic finale, obtaining exquisite performances from Nicole Kidman and several others as a result. It's rare that I can say this so confidently about a Von Trier film, but Dogville is indeed a deeply thought-provoking, mature work of art.

Liverpool (2008) A Film by Lisandro Alonso

It is a curious thing to be so thoroughly moved by a film that is less an authorial work of art than it is a fact of life, a spontaneous creation devised out of instinct as if a necessary tool for survival. Such seems to be the case with the work of Argentinian Lisandro Alonso, a filmmaker who is resolute in his insistence on a laissez-faire approach, yet deeply impassioned in his curiosity for observing life. The central figure in his latest film Liverpool is not an actor; Alonso found him working as a caterpillar operator, spoke with him briefly while pretending to be a magazine photographer, asked him to be in a movie, which was met with disbelief, and so Alonso returned a while later and persisted in asking him to be in a movie. That Juan Fernandez is a real person stripped from a real environment and not a performer tells a lot about Alonso's desire to approximate nature. Incidentally, Fernandez, playing a silent seaman named Farrel traveling to the southernmost portion of the world, delivers one of the most fascinating performances in recent memory without ever saying or doing anything significant.

Early on in the film, Farrel leaves the cargo ship he is stationed in to travel to Tierra del Fuego, the diminutive farming village he grew up in but has not returned to for many years. This introduces a pattern the film gradually creates of leaving spaces empty and moving on to a new setting. The entirety of Liverpool involves movement from one place to another yet it feels perpetually on the brink of greater movement, indicated by Farrel's nervous fidgeting when positioned alone in a space. He is constantly on a path, but the destination of this path becomes more and more ambiguous once we observe Farrel leave Tierra del Fuego as soon as he arrives. His estranged mother is bedridden and forgetful, shrugging off Farrel's attempts to jog her memory of his identity. He only exchanges a few words with his father and otherwise discovers his disabled daughter that he had never met. The snow-covered village is nestled between foggy hills so as to insulate it entirely from the outside world. The few people who exist there, blank and beset by everyday chores, are mirrors to their extreme landscape.



Left fulfilled but ultimately unsatisfied, Farrel leaves the village abruptly. But, in a move that takes Alonso's cinema in a new direction, the camera remains static as he trudges away. Once he's about as far from the camera as any of Alonso's protagonists, the film cuts back into the home of his family. Alonso abandons Farrel and completes the final twenty minutes of the film in Tierra del Fuego; "he's always leaving, so then he leaves the film," Alonso says plainly. This is not the only difference between Liverpool and his previous features though. Los Muertos followed its similarly unreadable protagonist unceasingly through a homogeneous environment, hardly ever letting him out of the frame, whereas Liverpool seems interested in more than just its enigmatic central figure. It is also consumed by the physicality of spaces, both interior and exterior, on ocean or on land, at night or during day. There is overwhelming authenticity in the objects positioned in the frame, the aged paint on the wall, the off-kilter positioning of a window shade, and the startlingly beautiful natural light. One gets the sense that these are real spaces that are lived in and are not tampered with, and of course this is the truth. Alonso wants his film to smack with the pang of reality so that you can feel the physical as well as emotional weight of it.

These types of formal pleasures in Liverpool are countless. Every composition is mesmerizing yet never overly planned out; there is instead a sense of fragmentation and improvisation in the shots. Several of the opening scenes conceal views of seemingly crucial objects, such as Farrel's inscription on the side of one of the boat's pillars. Similarly, Farrel stares out of the frame at emptiness which we do not see, directing our attention at a world outside of the cinema, at worlds which have yet to be explored. Alonso illuminates as many of those neglected locations as he does mysteries about Farrel and his family. The film's thought-provoking final shot operates as a vehicle through which to piece together the events that take place over the course of the film. Great melancholy washes over the screen in the image of a red "Liverpool" keychain.

The Brood (1979) A Film by David Cronenberg

A conversation between a father and a son begins casually. The two figures wear robes are engulfed in black space. Before any verbal indications tell us so, we can infer what kind of father/son relationship is being studied: it is one where the father is a calculating authority and the son is a nervous, fidgety outcast. Slowly, these characteristics become pronounced and a gentle chat turns into a father's unflinching condemnation of his son's lack of masculinity. The son, actually a young adult with a full-grown beard, whimpers and fails to find a way to deflect his father's stern blows. When his emotional state is at its nadir, he lifts his shirt to reveal grotesque sores dotting his torso and back. The two lugubriously embrace in an air of tension and seemingly unrequited intentions.

And so begins David Cronenberg's deeply unpleasant but invigorating film The Brood. The scene is deliberately unexpected and disorienting, arriving on screen without any sort of warning or rundown as to what is going on. In fact, it is not until mid-scene, when Cronenberg cuts away to a crowd in a dark lecture hall watching this discussion that we have any sense of place. Cronenberg is teasing us in several ways; not only geographically and temporally, but also in terms of our perceptions of the characters. It turns out it is not a father/son dynamic that we are observing but instead an abstract role-playing game where the "father" is actually psychiatrist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) and the "son" his disturbed patient (Gary McKeehan). The scene effectively sets the tone for the rest of The Brood, positing the connection between psychiatrist and patient as an ambiguous one with unusual consequences, and establishing the film's tendency for moody guesswork.

Of course, then, Dr. Raglan is no ordinary psychiatrist. He actually specializes in an experimental technique called Psychoplasmics at the Somafree Institute, a method which aims to rid patients of painful emotions from damaging past memories by manifesting them physically in the form of epidermical deformities. (Such a bizarre premise is common ground for Cronenberg, who has made a long career out of presenting hideously tangible body horror as a way of channeling his lofty ideas about "the new flesh".) Dr. Raglan receives a patient named Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) who recently divorced her husband Frank Carveth (Art Hindle). Under only her father's care, the pair's young daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds) begins witnessing terrible murders of both her grandmother and babysitter. Frank investigates these freak killings because Candice represses all memory of them in an eerie silence reminiscent of little Danny in The Shining. The intricacy of the cases and the spots Frank finds on his daughter's arms leads him to begin speculating about the nature of Psychoplasmics, finding himself conversing with one of Raglan's past patients, Jan Hartog (Robert A. Silverman), a man who wears a thick white scarf to cover the worm-like entrails that protrude from his neck. Frank discovers that Raglan has actually discarded all of his current patients as a way to better centralize his attention on Nola, who receives daily checkups in a log cabin in the woods. At this point, he becomes thoroughly suspicious of Raglan's motives and increasingly protective of his own daughter.



Cronenberg had recently gone through a difficult divorce himself at the time, and the film's themes attest to that. There is a great deal of reticence and fear in The Brood, and I don't mean on the surface. Somewhat of a pessimistic, uncertain view is directed towards the concepts of birth and the sacred mother/daughter relationship. Ultimately, the bursts of violence enacted against central characters in the film are an indirect product of Nola, for we find out that the results of her psychotherapy are far more extreme than most. When Nola's father becomes another spontaneous victim of murder, Frank finally discovers the guilty party and, with the help of a scientist, discounts it as completely human. The murderer - or murderers it turns it out - are small unorthodox "children" absent of belly buttons, suggesting they were not born in the first place, yet they possess oddly human traits such as their bright blue snowsuits which closely resemble those of Candice. The film's doozie of a climax has Frank pretending to have rekindled feelings for Nola in an attempt to settle her down so as to give Dr. Raglan the ability to save Candice in the attic of the cabin where she is surrounded by scheming killers, the vehicles of Nola's rage.

Not all of the film is so pulse-poundingly tense however, and it is precisely this restraint that classifies Cronenberg as a filmmaker of great maturity rather than simply a purveyor of cheap exploitation, as his first two features may have suggested. The Brood's closing minutes certainly contain intensely graphic imagery, but it is elevated by its metaphysics, which are carefully implanted in the largely gore-less first 75 minutes. There is a great deal of probing dialogue on display, foreshadowing music courtesy of Howard Shore, and melancholic observations of the Canadian setting. Stylistically, the film's sober build-up would have you believe that nothing nearly as shocking and provocative could ensue in the final minutes. Cronenberg excels when snapping expectations and genres however, and in doing so manages to reveal the complex dynamics that exist within a family, specifically how the mistakes of parents can do irreparable damage to children.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) A Film by Spike Jonze

Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, a succinct, poetic tale of a young boy's imaginative escape from reality, is one of the literary pinnacles of my youth. It is the kind of perfect little book that succeeds on all fronts; its eloquent tableau illustrations please the eye and tell as much if not more of the story than the words do, and its brevity only enhances the potency of its ambiguous but acute childhood themes. Understandably, Spike Jonze's recent film adaption of it has elicited great bursts of nostalgia from a 16-21 year-old target audience. Just take a trip down to Urban Outfitters, where Wild Things merchandise has infiltrated, and you'll know what I mean. In a nutshell, there's a lot riding on the shoulders of Jonze's film. Thankfully, Jonze appears to have lovingly adapted his source, packing a great deal of sentimentality into his own elongation of it, suggesting that he's clearly as reverent as we are. Jonze's own radically different quirkiness comes to the fore however, eventually suffocating most of the genuine emotion he was shooting for.

The film kicks off promisingly though. An abrasive cut jars us out of an opening musical cue (the first in a soundtrack written entirely by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and into Max's (Max Records) aggressive sprawl down the stairs to chase his dog. The frenetic bound of the camera introduces the film's dynamic sense of physicality and hyperactive movement to compliment Max's shifty thoughts. Then there is a scene that manages to delicately balance the cuteness of childhood and the harshness that breaches it in a way that is believable. Max is playing out by the street in his snowy neighborhood, fiddling with snowballs in a primitive fort. He then sees his older sister leave the house with some friends and slyly decides to attack them from behind a fence. The bigger boys with her fight back and overstep their boundaries by body-slamming Max who is hiding within his fort. The boys awkwardly and insincerely apologize. All is fun and games until someone gets hurt.

In this instance, Jonze effectively brings to life this cliche. Otherwise, it is not very often that Where the Wild Things Are achieves this universal poignancy. The impulse of self-conscious cuteness progressively impedes on the action; Jonze and screenwriting partner Dave Eggers sugar coat an especially heartstring-tugging scene following the snowball episode when Max tells his mother a story from his dreams about vampires. The film then overplays the book's admirably restrained advance into Max's fantasies, substituting a melodramatic sprint to a nearby boat on the water for the transformation of room to jungle. Once Max does reach the island where the wild things are, he witnesses a group of bizarre creatures burning sticks in the woods for fun. Immediately there is a disunity between the book and the film that is somewhat grating: the wild things are voiced as if in a petty conniption fit with each other by James Gandolfini, Paul Dano, Catherine O'Hara, and Forest Whitaker, among others. Their mystery in the book is replaced by doleful ranting about loneliness.



Max, out of self-defense against being eaten, optimistically claims himself to be their King. With it comes not just great fun with the wild things but also great responsibility. One of Jonze's mistakes here is providing Max with the ability to constantly sort out problems, albeit with some hesitance, and deliver a verbalized solution that hammers in a particular lesson of the film. He also frequently resorts to a pouty face when placed in a predicament, with O's music layering on thick the bathos. Moreover, Jonze's ideas for expanding the simplistic storyline are hit-or-miss. For a moment, the attempt to create a huge stick fortress to fulfill the head wild thing's dream boasts some terrific potential, a deviation that will end the sadness once and for all, but ultimately it turns into more quarreling. Not even the joy of creation can tame these wild things.

The building of the fortress also points towards something else that is partially lacking in the film; fantastical settings. If we are supposed to believe that the entire film stems from Max's creative mind, it is not only unconvincing that the wild things bicker like adults but also that the landscape they inhabit is decidedly bland. In Sendak's book, each image has a faintly distorted sense of scale, color, and texture. Nature is gentle but mystically stylized. Jonze's relentless use of Cassavetes-style camerawork only reinforces the disconnect between book and film. Sure, Jonze should be able to mold the story creatively to his own instincts, but not to the extent that he loses the exaggerated distinction between reality and fantasy. Where the Wild Things Are stumbles upon a striking image once in a while - a snowy night in the woods, Max and Carol trudging across the desert, Max lumbering underneath the empty teepee, the animatronics-made wild things in general - but Jonze does not let them hold the power. His direction does not match the enigmatic nature of his content, and it constitutes a fairly lackluster adaption stripped of emotional complexity.

Antichrist (2009) A Film by Lars Von Trier

Uncharacteristically for an "arthouse" film, Antichrist has inspired an intense and widespread public brouhaha. Even for Lars Von Trier, the long-protested cinematic deviant of such extreme films as Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves, and Europa, the work is somewhat of an anomaly. Who would have ever thought that a film with content reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman and a dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky would have ever received such an exaggerated response from the public at large? The entire lot of filmmakers Von Trier appears to be influenced by are too subdued and modest to have provoked it. Regardless, the director has presented a symbolically loaded tale of psychotherapeutic chaos and tickled the mass conscience in a way that reaffirms the overwhelming social power of cinema.

From its initial impulsive critical feedback at Cannes, Antichrist certainly succeeded in getting me excited. As is rarely the case, I was responding fervently to the (mostly) silly hype. Rumors of Von Trier "losing his mind" were especially enthralling; my question is, didn't Von Trier lose his mind the moment he picked up a film camera? Never have his films persuaded me for their great maturity or sophistication, but rather for their genuine uniqueness and insanity. Often times they are a mess, but Von Trier is one of those interesting enigmas whose next project can never be predicted, having moved around aesthetically and thematically almost on a film-to-film basis since his career began in the mid-1980's. So, with only a handful of press images and a slew of bombastic adjectives to work with, I could only wonder: following an unusually out of place comedy (The Boss of it All (2006)), where would Von Trier take us this time?

The mysterious but true answer is into his own head. Indeed, Antichrist may well be one of Von Trier's most personal, sincere films to date, which compels us to label him an absolute nut. In order to combat his own depression, he focuses in on an immensely depressing subject with parallels to his own life. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play with utter conviction and bravura a grieving couple whose son dies in the film's elegant opening sequence, a hyper-slow motion monochromatic account of the married couple engaged in passionate sex while their son guilelessly slips out his bedroom window. The film's "plot" really begins after this episode, when Dafoe - portentously dubbed "He" to Gainsbourg's "She" - insists on curing his wife's irregular grief pattern by himself, being the domineering therapist he is. The course of action he takes is irregular itself though: he forces his wife to confront her fears in the couple's reclusive retreat in the woods, once again suggestively called "Eden". Gainsbourg's psychological trauma intensifies as she is aroused by memories of her son's life and the malignant presence of nature that surrounds her. At one point, she insists that the ground is burning, to which Dafoe counters with characteristic detachment, "the ground is not burning".



Gradually however, the threatening force in the woods makes itself known to Dafoe's character as well. Not only do the woods embody a dangerous place to settle, but they are also rife with foreboding animals, and even nonliving objects (acorns and trees) enact an angry violence towards the two. Gainsbourg's sanity becomes an element directly related to nature's outrage; as more problems occur, she becomes increasingly out of touch with reality. At one point she hears the wail of her son reverberate around the cabin, eventually discovering nothing. Her psychological and spiritual transformation turns for the worst, culminating in the bizarrely unsettling and shockingly graphic final thirty minutes, where the bulk of the film's most talked-about scenes ensue. Dafoe and Gainsbourg undergo a significant transfer of power, signaled by the literal desexualization of the two of them. I won't divulge what actually happens because it has been endlessly ranted about on every other blog, but on a metaphorical level, She destroys His masculinity and removes the indicator of His power over Her.

The film equates femininity with nature, and nature's depiction here is relentlessly evil. Such a concept appears undeniably misogynistic, but in an interview, Von Trier stated that he has been consciously tackling issues in his recent films that he is opposed to. Whether he's sincere or not, he puts Gainsbourg through such startling effronteries that the end result could only be one of two things: career devastation or herculean praise, the latter of which came true when she won Best Actress at Cannes. At the same time, there's something perversely empowering about her character, as if Von Trier sees something admirable in her scowling persistence and unpredictability, traits that lift her to a more mythological level. She also has a haunting clairvoyance about her, constantly predicting non-verbally what will happen next, eventually explaining to her husband that once the "Three Beggars" arrive, one of them will have to die.

This idea of the "Three Beggars" - which turns out to be the deer, fox, and crow that show up individually throughout the film - points toward the more spastic allegorical levels of the film. Whenever these animals appear, they supply otherworldly tension. Each is a reminder of the supposed terror of reproduction; the deer turns around to reveal a grotesquely limp infant hanging near its hind legs, the fox bites open its own lower stomach, and a hideous baby bird inexplicably falls from a tree with flies nibbling from its corpse. Are these unavoidable reminders to Dafoe of the inherent sin of reproduction, suggesting that He is subconsciously punishing his wife for bringing their son into the world? Maybe, but Von Trier bubbles up any possible answers in obscurity by layering on other symbolic cues over it. The likeness of the central characters and setting to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the further religious presence of the three distinct animals, the notion of witchcraft informing Gainsbourg's actions (the subject of her thesis whose remnants lie across the cabin), the extreme sadomasochistic and animalistic sexual content - all work to heighten the ambiguity. Sometimes Von Trier goes in over his head and becomes overly self-conscious (I'm pointing at you, talking fox), making us question the aim of his symbolism in the first place.



No matter how frustratingly confused Antichrist's themes become, there's no denying that the film has an astounding vision. Special mention is due to Anthony Dod Mantle, Von Trier's longtime cinematographer, who took the reigns on the set in several instances when the director's depression left him considerably weak. Visually, credit should be split down the middle, with Von Trier being the mad genius to have devised such luminous imagery and Mantle the brilliant technician to execute it, using a fusion of current digital technology with the Red and the Phantom cameras. In doing so, Antichrist joins a short list of the finest cinematic statements made using digital. The scene on the train to Eden when Dafoe elicits visions from Gainsbourg is a particular standout; as She trudges in hyper-slow motion around the foggy, ominous woods, the camera observes from detached perspectives, mirroring the dreaminess of Her husband's coaxing words. The immense detail in these images, as well as in the two black and white sequences that bookend the film (scenes that take place out of the "reality" of the story), is startlingly palpable and the palette tremendously rich.

In such instances, Antichrist reaches a level of transcendence. One is not simply watching the film but experiencing it in all its vivid, sometimes hideous glory. As expected, it's a remarkably uneven and unsubtle film, from the jarring contrast between grandiose stylization and documentary-like jump cutting to the similarly opposite emotions triggered by the unpredictable clamor of the story, first marked by grim Bergmanesque chamber drama and punctuated by bursts of genre horror and exploitation. After seeing the film, I couldn't be certain as to whether I was reacting to what it did viscerally or to what it ultimately achieved on a cerebral level. I still can't be sure, but when I think about how deeply the film's denouement shook me, I am once again lost for words. That's about as close to a verdict as I can get.

NHFF: The Burning Plain (2009) A Film by Guillermo Arriaga

Predictions of what a filmmaker's next project will be like are hardly ever more accurate than when dealing with the work of writer Guillermo Arriaga. His last three screenwriting endeavors, each a collaboration with fellow Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, have been downbeat emotional collages that link three seemingly disparate stories into one powerful, if contrived, comment on the interconnectedness of the modern world. With The Burning Plain, Arriaga has for the first time taken his shot at the director's chair, and little has changed. He is still working in the same territory, and for that alone he should not be criticized; it's not so much a "safe zone" as it is a unique way of seeing the world, just as Bela Tarr should not be hammered for making a seven hour epic in slow-take black and white and then moving on to three more similar films, or Ingmar Bergman for making different variations of the same themes throughout his prolific career. At the same time, something tells me Arriaga's conjunctive narrative style is getting particularly old, that the mode he has chosen gives him considerably less flexibility, perhaps even that he is consciously forcing stories together to fit this mold.

While this may be true in general, I do not suspect this to be the case with The Burning Plain. Something about it speaks of greater personality; Arriaga seems closer to the work, and understandably so, considering he wouldn't have taken the initiative to direct had he not felt he could bring something more inspired to the film than what another individual (Iñárritu?) could. The film takes us back to Arriaga's favorite landscape dichotomy: that of the untamed, expansive desert and the bleak modern suburban life, in this case the difference between New Mexico and Oregon. Also, he has predictably fallen back on his same tick of triangular storytelling, spontaneously shuffling between the three points of interest. There is the story of Sylvia (Charlize Theron), an exhausted, guilt-ridden waitress in Oregon who engages in meaningless sex with various men as a way of coping with her troubles. Similarly ashamed is Gina (Kim Basinger), a married woman who maintains a secretive affair with a Mexican man whom she meets in a dilapidated trailer in the middle of nowhere behind the back of her unknowing family, although her coming-of-age daughter Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) is suspicious and proactive. We also meet Maria (Tessa La), a young girl whose father becomes severely impaired in a plane accident, causing her to search with her father's friend for the mother she never knew, who happens to be Sylvia.

Because Arriaga's mechanics are so refined at this point, his editing so invisible when shifting stories, one perceives the story as all taking place during the same time. However, temporal dissonance is one new element that Arriaga embraces with The Burning Plain. Revealing how it occurs would spoil the film, as it is meant to provide a startling revelation towards the end, but credit is due to Arriaga for refraining from providing too many clues to make the unveiling predictable. Still, this is not to say that it is some surprise twist that gives the film integrity. Arriaga significantly downplays this moment, and the film continues for approximately thirty minutes after, steering it away from an impermanent entertainment and more towards an emotional character study that feels fully vested in. And when I say fully vested in, an important distinction must be noted; that does not mean the drama is overemotional and bloated, as is often the case in Iñárritu's Babel, but rather that it is carefully observed. Only once does Arriaga resort to the "crying montage", and it is considerably less painful and prolonged than in the past.



The drama only gets tiresome for its continuous gloominess, not for any lack of realism. Arriaga clearly lost his funny bone a long time before he had the opportunity to write his first script, and it often times results in an awfully one-sided view of the world. Sylvia's life is deliberately depressing in every nook and cranny, from her relentless job - where most of her ostensible "friends" work - and even to her own bedroom, both settings stripped entirely of warm colors resulting in a dingy palette loaded with cold blues and grays. You would also be hard-pressed to find an instance of Theron smiling during her gripping and unrelenting portrayal, one that requires her to lay bare the conventions of the movie star in the same way she did for Monster (2003). Basinger plays her mirror image, a woman who has more structure to her life but who suffers from the same inner anxiety, physically manifested in the constant glaze of sweat that covers her skin. The New Mexico desert she frequently inhabits becomes a barren nothing, grim for its muted colors, detached compositions (courtesy of There Will be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) and the double-crossing, eventually horrific events that take place there.

Instead of providing comic relief, Arriaga takes pauses between dramatic longeurs with streams of nondescript imagery. Ultimately, this is what separates Arriaga and Iñárritu directorially, and what gives The Burning Plain more of a calmer, contemplative tone. Arriaga's camera will settle on a pack of black birds lifting off from the ground, or an empty plain situated between two mountains. Yet its atmosphere is stifling, tinged with the feeling of inevitable tragedy caused by a lava flow of troubling choices that the character's make. The film has so far received horrid critical reviews, but they seem to be missing this calculated mood. While Arriaga may be having a fun time jostling the audience around narratively, the effect is actually quite appropriate for a film dealing with regrets and claustrophobic lifestyles, of actions being the result of selfishness rather than compassion for others.