Hunger (2008) A Film by Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen's brutal, transcendent prison drama Hunger has to be one of the most impressive films to not win a Palme D'Or in the Cannes Film Festival's long and vibrant history. Weaving its serpentine, minimalist narrative through the stories of prison officer Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), two cell partners named Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan) and Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon), and finally the desperate martyr who becomes the film's main focal point, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), McQueen essentially divides his film up into two stages in the extended revolt of Irish Republican Army prisoners: the initial dirty revolt, which entails the refusal to bathe and the spreading of human waste, and the tragic hunger strike of the film's title. More fundamentally though, it's pitched between atrocity and contemplation, as the visceral battle of the first half gradually gives way to morbid silence. This dissection of a historical event - the 1981 IRA strike - marks a sharp left turn in the career of director Steve McQueen, who has hitherto worked principally in the realm of structuralist installation art. His grasp of the cinematic medium in the feature-length format, however, is clearly significant. Though the film progresses rather like an abstract tone poem, failing, perhaps intentionally, to delve too deeply into character psychology, there is always - in spite of McQueen's startlingly disjunctive stylistic ideas - a coherent and otherworldly force guiding it along.

The weighty political implications of the film are more or less brushed under the rug by McQueen in favor of viscera and emotionality. This is, of course, really a monolithic conflict between a subversive clan of Irish Republicans and the cold, didactic Thatcher regime, which had at the time been ambivalent and discriminatory towards the Roman Catholic community of Northern Ireland, but it's treated more as a timeless battle between an oppressive authority and the seemingly powerless underdogs. The disembodied radio voice of Margaret Thatcher (or "vapor", as McQueen describes it) doesn't enter into the film until three-quarters of the way through, emphasizing the insignificance of political conflict when placed aside real, physical conflict. Political conflict, McQueen suggests, is what allows a government official to hide behind her curtain and coolly analyze a situation without actually understanding it. Hunger marks an attempt to shed light on the vicious human battle that went on inside the Maze Prison without any presuppositions about who's right or wrong. Neither the prisoners nor the often savage guards are cheaply antagonized; McQueen takes pains to reveal them in both moments of quiet introspection and erratic violence. Raymond Lohan, for instance, is first shown eating breakfast in the calm of his suburban home before heading to work, where, after checking for bombs planted underneath his car, he routinely terrorizes the prisoners. Later, he compassionately visits his comatose mother at a geriatric home. All in a day's work.

Raymond's story is mostly backgrounded though by those of the prisoners. Naked and surrounded by filth of the scatological and insect sort, the men waste away somberly in their cells, fiddling with secretly transported notes detailing some vague, unidentified scheme (an escape, or perhaps the eventual shocking murder of Raymond?). For all of the tactile sensations - the overwhelming reek, the ubiquitous slime - McQueen presents the cells as something of a spiritual abode, a place of relative tranquility in comparison to the violence and exploitation that is endured outside the excrement-caked walls. The lone source of light in the cell is a diminutive window that collides with the various contents of the room to produce a warm, golden glow, a sense of holiness juxtaposed against the decidedly unholy behaviors inside (clandestine masturbation, damming of the walls to spread urine into the halls). McQueen's painterly, Costa-like compositions discover the unexpected beauty in this paradoxical space: primitivized, desperate men silhouetted against the textured surfaces, reaching out to any hint of freedom and life, such as in a long, impressionistic shot of Davey fixating his fingers on a fly circling the bars on the window. McQueen even manages to create abstract art out of a cleaner spraying the feces off the wall, an image that reflects his backdrop in gallery installation.



Hunger is necessarily low on dialogue for its majority - better to luxuriate in the primal emotions at work in the struggle, an interplay of muscle and mind that leaves no room for words - but when screenwriter (and unsurprisingly, playwright) Enda Walsh steps forward for a bravura display of linguistic profusion in an incredibly protracted scene of dialogue between Bobby Sands and a priest in an empty mess hall towards the middle of the film, it's unexpectedly effective. The heavily discussed 17 1/2 minute static take follows the most physically and emotionally extreme stretch of the film, when the prisoners are subjected to cavity searches in the face of an unrelenting SWAT team whose shield-banging provides an intense percussiveness to the scene's clamoring mise-en-scene. It's fitting, then, that the film's gradually accumulated intellectual probing coalesces out of this violent action, which heightens the sensitivity of the audience to an alarming degree. The cautious and winding path of their conversation from harmless, blackly comic small talk to full-fledged debate about the ethical implications of a hunger strike - with the priest detecting a misanthropic, murderous bent to it and Sands defending his decision as the only remaining manner of revolt - highlights the divide between ideology and experience, detached viewpoint and first-person stance, even further. Having witnessed the brutal, wordless struggle that McQueen so skillfully portrays, which culminates less out of a political ideas than it does out of sheer firsthand savagery, it's only natural that we come to side with Sands as he delivers a personal anecdote of desperation and in-the-moment decision-making in a powerful, rhythm-altering close-up.

After this burst of verbiage, the film settles into the fatal, meditative tone that marks its slow conclusion. Sands initiates the hunger strike that expands to several prisoners in the Maze, but McQueen centers his attention strictly on his protagonist as his body rapidly emaciates and his flesh forms lesions from severe depletion of nutrients. There's a deeply Christian flair to Sands' martyrdom, his singular leadership of the revolt, and his gradual weakening in the face of his cause. Perpetually in bed denying the meals delivered regularly at his side, McQueen bathes him in white light, and he is given a final, touching moment of reminiscence in a brief memory of childhood, a last escape from the oppression that surrounds him. The young Bobby is embarking on what seems to be a boy scout trip to the woods, where he eventually finds himself jogging, all alone. He stop mid-path and stares at the tall, imposing trees around him, while an atmospheric string section bubbles up from the silence, the only instance of a musical score within the narrative of Hunger. It's an appropriately enigmatic finale to this humanistic, uncomfortably moving work of art, a stylish display of the simultaneous anguish and willpower of the human spirit that loudly proclaims the entrance of a distinctive filmmaker.

Be Kind Rewind (2008) A Film by Michel Gondry

Let it be known: Be Kind Rewind marks the first instance on this blog of me so thoroughly doubling back on an old post, deleting it, and rewriting my evaluation. Rarely have I found a first assessment so off base after a second viewing. My instincts usually land me somewhere in the ballpark, but what seemed like an uninspired trifle that was too cute and contrived in its dewy cultural critiques the first time around (and salvaged only sometimes by flashes of humor) stood out as an enormously heartfelt celebration of folk culture wrapped up in nearly flawless, well-paced entertainment the second time. Also, as pure comedy, Gondry's fifth feature is a gem, hysterically held together by the perfectly cast duo of Jack Black and Mos Def. Black, bumbling and discursive as ever, plays the self-congratulatory Jerry Gerber, the "star" of a series of abbreviated fan-produced blockbusters made at a modest little New Jersey video store, and Def is his dramatic foil Mike, a hesitant, proper employee at the store who is all too fearful of corrupting his reputation with Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), the store's veteran owner who is on a business trip in an attempt to pillage the airtight wisdom of a corporate video store. Jerry and Mike are forced to "remake" the numerous Hollywood movies in the store when a robbery-gone-wrong at the local power plant finds Jerry literally magnetized (a playful, absurdist touch), thus unintentionally erasing the VHS tapes that still comprise the entire catalog.

In terms of general narrative sweep, this is a relatively straightforward, by-the-numbers feel-good movie; that is, one in which the underdogs (Mr. Fletcher, Mike, and Jerry) combat a series of misadventures to stick it to the big guns of the media industry (Sigourney Weaver arrives as an uppity enforcer) that threaten to punish them for copyright infringement. It's ultimately only a humble, tentative triumph, nothing that would get their names in the news as cunning revolutionaries against corporate oppression, but a triumph nonetheless. All of their homemade movies, which gradually become the talk of the town, are instantly steamrolled by Weaver's comrades, forcing them to make their most audacious leap of faith. They devise the plan to produce - with the assistance of the various townies who have become regulars at the store - their own original short film based on the life and times of Fats Waller, a legend of the uptown Jazz movement of the roaring twenties who maintains nostalgic value for Mr. Fletcher. In doing so, they're making a small, if substantial, effort towards swimming upstream against the inexorable, often tyrannical flow of mass media, and making a case for the individual over the machine. What reeks of predictability and didacticism is more than redeemed by the tremendous amount of heart and tongue-in-cheek charm throughout. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and doesn't pin itself down to one all-encompassing, negative view of mass culture.



In fact, while on the one hand Gondry is lambasting the impersonal nature of mass media and the ways in which it often cultivates a passive audience, he is also celebrating the lasting spark that such films can and frequently do induce. Jerry and Mike know these movies so well that they can fire through a faithful, albeit superficially ridiculous, interpretation of them in under a day and with boundless enthusiasm. What's more, their customers can rent these movies, notice the boorish discrepancies from the original, and still come back for more, enraptured and unexpectedly impressed by the scrappy layman's versions, stirring up as they do fond memories of the source movies themselves. Beneath this is a reassuring statement from Gondry that whatever the box-office profits of a big-budget feature, whatever the high-falutin' intentions of a major production studio, that it is ultimately the audience who owns the movies in the long run, the vast majority who form potent mental imprints of their individualized experiences of the media. It's an uplifting view of culture, antithetical to the widespread pessimism regarding the "death of movies and art", and nowhere is it more evident than in Gondry's beautifully rendered climax. For all the film's silly, nonchalant humor, the final scene is pure pathos. As the destruction crew waits impatiently outside, the town gathers together in the video store to screen their finished Fats Waller film. The projector's flicker (partly produced by the machine itself and partly a result of Mike and Jerry's foolhardy aesthetic decision to place a household fan in front of the lens to conjure the look of an old-fashioned film) dances across the faces of the rapt audience, alternately laughing and crying at the various roles they played in the film. Gondry's utterly aware of how cheesily meta the scene is, but it's genuinely moving anyway.

Be Kind Rewind's films-within-a-film ultimately owe more to Gondry's faux-DIY visual style than the commonplace look of the film itself, but I can take this small compromise as a necessary move from an indie eccentric attempting to make a message movie about mass culture products from within Hollywood. That's not to say there's an unforgivable shortage of imagination at work here; the shoddy special effects that Jerry and Mike employ to their adaptions, like pizzas behind people's heads to suggest blood, night vision to appropriate evening fight scenes, or numerous cardboard miniatures, are priceless. And Jack Black's performance is one of his most memorable, as it usually is when he's this unhinged. Stumbling around the sets like there is serious cash at stake, his larger-than-life swagger and sense of stray filmmaking knowledge ("you know, you gotta wet the ground!") is hilariously measured. The film is further proof that Gondry is not entirely impotent when reduced to his own material, still capable of crafting charming, emotional works.

No Country For Old Men (2007) A Film by Joel and Ethan Coen

I didn't like No Country for Old Men much the first time I saw it. I admired the tension Joel and Ethan Coen created in the visceral "chase" scenes, but was left unsatisfied by the ultimate direction of the narrative, the way the Coens seemingly dropped their mounting themes in favor of smaller subtexts towards the end of the film. I did not like how they indulged their characteristic urge to have their characters straddle a line between concept and caricature, such as when they insist on getting a wry chuckle out of an otherwise fascinating figure. To me, that was Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in the film, the unstoppably methodical killer at the heart of No Country For Old Men whose intriguing, mysterious resonance is frequently diluted by silly, offbeat character tics. Most of all, I was put off by the Coens' typically unnecessary "comic relief", which has the effect of bringing the film to a meandering halt. For the most part, No Country For Old Men is lighter in this regard than most of the brothers' films, but the very fact that they did include such scenes was irritating. To me, it's evidence of the Coens' somewhat compromising nature, the way they feel compelled to include every emotional spectrum in a film that very well may not call for such variety, as if the audience would be instantly bored if they endured a stretch of austerity for too long. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much), the Coens' postmodern Western stood out to me as a massive misstep for Best Picture by the Oscar committee, and one of the most overrated films of the past decade.

But, thank God and the frequently remedial digital video disc for second chances, as it turns out No Country For Old Men is not nearly the trifle I suspected it upon first viewing. Actually, there is a deep vein of richness to it, much of which is surely inherited from Cormac McCarthy's source novel, but which is also expanded upon by the Coens' deft cinematic sensibilities, their distinct understanding of how a film works in cerebral, subliminal ways. Its narrative is simple, archetypal: a gruff Vietnam veteran, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), stumbles over a dope running gone wrong and discovers the inevitable suitcase filled with hundred dollar bills, only to then find himself the target of a maniacal killing machine (Bardem), all while an aging sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), pursues the criminal. Basically, it's the stuff of a classic Western, yet it's uncomfortably bereft of the traditional values and dichotomies that would safely tie everything together in the end. A nihilistic work without any reliable moral center, the Coens are constantly highlighting the subtle similarities between the three central characters, the supposed "good", "bad", and "average" guys, whether zeroing in on a congruent behavior, framing them in the same ways at different times, or literally associating them with a specific line of dialogue, as when early in the film Chigurh holds up his bizarre cattle gun to the head of an innocent man on the side of the road and mutters the phrase "hold still", which is followed by a crosscut to Llewelyn narrowing the aim of his gun barrel at a deer and repeating the same line.

Another series of shots early on have the same effect of unsettling equalization, and also illustrate the Coens' theme of the banality of evil. After finding the case of $2 million, Llewelyn returns to his small trailer-park home and evades his wife Carla Jean's (Kelly Macdonald) incessant questioning. The Coens reveal a chain of simplistic images of domesticity, the kind of by-the-numbers man-comes-home-to-wife shots that one might have seen in, say, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat. But Llewelyn is fidgety, squirming out of his chair and out of the frames faster than his wife wants him to. Something is not right. He ends up leaving the house late in the night just hours before the break of dawn to bring a jug of water to a struggling survivor of the crime scene in the desert, a move that ultimately signals the beginning of his end. Shortly after, Chigurh has secured important documents about his prey's identity from Llewelyn's car, whose tires were burst when the vengeful figures arrived. His first step is to go straight to Llewelyn's trailer and bust through the door lock with his cattle gun. The couple has left the premises, and after searching the rooms with clinical precision, the Coens repeat the earlier shots of Llewelyn and Carla Jean, this time occupied by the invasive Chigurh. He casually drinks milk from the fridge (substituting for Llewelyn's beer) and has a moment of repose on the couch. This sequence acquires the element of relaxation and comfort missing from the one prior. Chigurh has thoroughly invaded not only their space, but also their routines. Then there is an elegant grace note, an impressionistic shot of the television across the room with Chigurh's ghostly silhouette reflected on it. When the Sheriff inevitably goes through the same routine moments later (even sipping from the milk), the Coens repeat this image, likening these dichotomous figures through a seemingly offhand, ephemeral glimpse.



In the Coens' warped outlook, such is the nature of crime and justice, a procession of behaviors in which no one's quite in the right place at the right time. The closest any of the three main characters come from occupying the same frame at the same time is in a last-moment getaway when Llewelyn leaps out of a motel window just as Chigurh enters the room to fire a shotgun in his general direction, amounting to only a split-second of shared screen space which may very well be the film's most heart-racing snippet. Otherwise, this is a profoundly non-confrontational film that gathers all of its tension from suggestion and rising action. Though every character is ostensibly chasing something or being chased, whether it's an ideal or a person, there is never any resolution to this nifty cat-and-mouse act, no climactic outburst of violence. As for the violence that does exist, the Coens are most content showing either the repercussions or the physical traces of it as opposed to the entirety of the graphic encounters themselves. When Chigurh strangles a police station attendant early on with his handcuffs, the emphasis is less on the metal-to-flesh contact as it is on the scuff marks of flailing boots on the floor, the image of Man's abstract, fossilized aggression. In doing so, the recurring motif of boots becomes intimately associated with violence and Man's relationship to the Earth, enough so that by the time Chigurh has an encounter with Carla Jean towards the end of the film, his dust-off of his boots outside is enough to clarify the unseen murder. Similarly, the spilled milk inside the motel entrance after Chigurh has entered is enough - thanks to the random linking of milk to Chigurh from earlier - to imply that whoever is behind the kiosk has been killed.

These kinds of subtle visual gestures are littered throughout No Country For Old Men, providing unexpected insights into the characters and thematic concerns. What the Coens are getting at is that the very ground we live on has been progressively tainted by the actions of Man, and that what Man has ultimately constructed for himself is emptiness, lack of defined moral reasoning, and reliance upon fate alone. Like the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001, the Coens begin the film with a visualization of a barren, empty landscape, only this time, the position of humanity is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It has not just begun its fateful journey, but has instead found itself at a troubling crossroads where only violence emerges from the emptiness. Though Chigurh is clearly the "villain", he's also somewhat of a walking embodiment of the Reaper, dispassionately bringing death at random as a function of fate (he carries around a quarter and flips it for his victims before systematically taking their lives). Yet he's not entirely remote and devoid of motivation; the crazed money hunger that drives him towards his end goal is nothing if not reflective of a capitalist society at large. However, while the film is essentially lamenting an "old-timer" practice of thinking and acting that corresponds with Ed Tom's father's generation, it's also silently lauding the productivity and determination of the lawless world it's depicting. The frightening poise and intelligence of Chigurh is pitted against the somnambulant, voyeuristic role of Ed Tom, who is mournfully reading about violent crimes in the newspaper more than he is solving or stopping them; Chigurh is a man of action while Ed Tom is consistently falling up short, preferring to wallow in confusion at the anarchic evil in the world. So there's this abysmal strain of ambivalence in the film that cannot be sorted out easily.

For all this riveting nihilism (and I love this about the film, its willingness to tackle a rather pessimistic worldview in an exciting, almost formulaic manner), No Country For Old Men fizzles out into what seems like an off-kilter, uncharacteristically hopeful conclusion. In a daring move, the Coens substantially shift their focus from the chase game between Chigurh and Llewelyn to a philosophical examination of the soon-to-be retiree Ed Tom. Llewelyn, to some extent the absolute main character in the film up until this point, is even extinguished offscreen in a bloody massacre at a fleabag motel. The Coens only show his body from a distance, face-down. The separate fates of the money and Chigurh are left unanswered. Though this is clearly a bracingly unconventional decision, and one that interestingly lines up with the rest of the film from a thematic standpoint (death is unpredictable, permanence is unlikely), I'm not sure if it necessarily strengthens the film as a film. That is to say, it doesn't make the experience any more pleasurable. Quite the contrary, it sucks the momentum away. The tone of the final scenes - quiet, introspective, dialogue-heavy - contrasts jarringly with the otherwise muscular forward motion of the rest of the film, and the deliberate decrescendo reverts to a rather streamlined vision of hope, a suggestion that simple complacency and optimism can alleviate such horrors. Ed Tom's final pronunciation "and then I woke up", spoken after a pair of recalled dreams with his father, has the unfortunate effect of placing the entire film in the context of some sort of dream-reality where the events onscreen are malleable and correctable. But what the Coens have devised feels so grounded, so palpable. It's a real shot in the dark to think that the kind of banal ambiguity the film luxuriates in could be properly digested and consummated. I remain skeptical of where the brothers' film ultimately goes, even if for its duration I sat in awe at the meticulously crafted existential thriller it was. But only a film this complex, this multifaceted, could be this troubling.

The Wrestler (2008) A Film by Darren Aronofsky

In Darren Aronofsky's brief career arch, which is 75% full of highfalutin, far-reaching art films with variable sparks of genius, the relatively modest and level-headed The Wrestler is both a big refreshment and a stunning turnaround in style. It tells an ultra-straightforward rise-and-fall story about a washed-up pro wrestler going by the typically bombastic pseudonym of Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke) that would threaten to drown under the pressure of its own pastiche if not for Aronofsky's nondescript, stoic presentation, not necessarily any kind of deconstruction of the chosen genre but a purification of it, a method that gives this hackneyed form some room to breathe. Randy is going through what many has-been athletes of his age go through: deteriorating health, accumulated issues related to the performance-enhancing drugs piling up in his system for decades, potent nostalgia for the glory years, and a dwindling fan base, all of which raise the difficult prospect of retirement. On top of it all, Randy's funds are low, he has trouble obtaining enough hours at the local supermarket where he hauls heavy crates around, and he is entirely alone with a cynical college-age daughter named Stephanie (Evan Rachel-Wood) who has pent-up hatred towards her mostly disengaged, unloving father. It's a situation that is ripe for sappy sentimentalizing, but Aronofsky doesn't do what so many of the film's countless predecessors did. He doesn't simplify Randy's struggles, and doesn't blindly suggest an unlikely U-turn of fortune; this is an earthbound, working-class piece of approximate realism.

The uncanny congruence between the trajectory of Mickey Rourke's own life and celebrity and that of his onscreen counterpart was beaten over the head upon the film's release and remains unavoidably integral to The Wrestler now. Rourke was born to play Randy, a man who once luxuriated in the fruits of his fame and has since withered away, yet comes out of his dormancy with his limbs intact. Aronofsky wisely lets the film rest almost solely on Rourke's mammoth shoulders, and The Ram's overwhelming physical presence - a meticulously sculpted, constantly groomed frame, androgynous golden locks of hair - positively dominates the film. He's there in every scene, lumbering around his passion and his bad choices, and Aronofsky forces the audience to get to know and ultimately sympathize with someone who can so gleefully indulge in perverse behavior such as fudging bloody violence and exploiting women at the local strip club where his love interest, the bodacious Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) works. It is through this wrenching performance, a careful balancing of regret and perseverance, absent-mindedness and thoughtfulness, that The Wrestler lives and dies as a character study, not some lofty scheme in Aronofsky's hands.

This is not to suggest that Aronofsky is just bumbling around half-assed and uninspired, failing to provide any thoughtful directorial involvement in a film that is otherwise saved by Rourke. In fact, it's actually Aronofsky's most comparatively subtle, nuanced direction yet, containing only a handful of aesthetic hallmarks in its palette rather than an overload of ideas. He shoots for a Dardennes-style realism, a motivation he tinkered with before in Requiem for a Dream but got caught up in stylized tilted camera hijinks in the process. Here, he and cinematographer Maryse Alberti's delicate wobbly-cam dynamics don't get in the way of the story being told, and for the most part construct and maintain a sense of verisimilitude and (with the exception of a plethora of slight jump cuts) plausible time and space. This platform is supplemented by some relatively animated choices. An interesting touch is Aronofsky's drudging repetition of the intimate following shot, images whose allusions to those familiar sports arena back hallway shots are cleverly counteracted by the fact that Aronofsky is tirelessly committing not just to Randy's momentous walks to the ring but also to his monotonous routines, like trudging through his trailer park or the corridors of the supermarket. The implication is that Randy can only live comfortably in his triumphant world of wrestling, even as the images remind us of his increasing remoteness from glory and sustenance.



It is clear right off the bat that Randy has fallen from grace in terms of his actual wrestling career, left to perform in dinky rooms against wannabe amateurs before rowdy crowds of approximately 200. In a series of slyly humorous scenes that reveal the backroom machinations of pro wrestling and underline The Wrestler's double role as a satire, Aronofsky makes it evident that the camaraderie between the men and Randy is purely borne of humble respect for his past triumphs. His opponents do not gawk at his larger-than-life stature or form subliminal antagonism out of jealousy. There's an unspoken understanding that Randy is losing his spark, and that whatever can be done to keep it burning faintly should be done. Therefore, each match Randy partakes in is farcically premeditated to result in a victory that will keep the small crowd drooling and riled up. Yet despite all of the artificiality of these "competitions", Aronofsky shoots them with such a closeness and rigor (reminiscent of Scorsese's work on the boxing scenes in Raging Bull), and the actors perform them with such gutsy dedication, that they obtain a level of unexpected savagery and believability. As these often graphic matches progress (one scene in particular between Randy and a staple-gun specializing newbie thoroughly earns its self-referential Passion of the Christ comparison shortly thereafter), one wonders whether the wrestlers have for some reason mutually abandoned their prior pact and are actually out for blood. This tiny gulf between fakery and reality extends from Randy's deeply posed lifestyle and Cassidy's seemingly sincere rapport with her licentious clients right through to the very film itself, which frequently walks the line in the middle of heartfelt authenticity and Hollywood superficiality.

Given this particular thematic concern, it's perhaps inevitable that the film does drift into sentimentality at times. One specific subplot about Randy's attempt at reconnection with his estranged daughter (who he "thinks is a lesbian", and wonders whether this will effect his decision on a present for her in a scene of deadpan humor) is criminally underdeveloped, resulting in a series of unpersuasive emotional leaps from hatred to sudden acceptance to utter indifference. Furthermore, Randy's finicky, juvenile boss at the supermarket (Todd Barry) is such an absurdly caricatured figure that he's nearly unwatchable for the few short scenes he is involved in. Yet these dramatic blips seem to be consistently redeemed by the strength of another clump of narrative, such as the story of the romantically doomed Randy and Cassidy (Tomei giving a satisfactory performance that holds its own against Rourke's star profile). Most of all, claims of by-the-numbers dullness are undermined by the fact that Aronofsky thankfully provides no deterministic catharsis, realizing that Randy has really dug himself too deep to be spared a conventionally happy ending, even as the film faintly jabs at such tidy resolutions. As the final shot implies, Randy is doomed to discover comfort and transcendence only in the wrestling ring, even if it threatens his own life.

Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) A Film by Hou Hsiao-Hsein

The titular balloon from Albert Lamorisse's veritable French classic The Red Balloon has aged well. In the approximately fifty years since its initial appearance as a shy, impressionable, lonely orb of red plastic, it has grown to be as wise and observational as its new director, Hsiao-Hsein Hou. Hou's own spiritual reprise of the quiet coming-of-age tale, Flight of the Red Balloon, casts the balloon in an entirely separate role. In Lamorisse's film, the balloon was a humanized emblem of companionship and creativity. In Hou's, the object's precise meaning is elusive as it plays less of a narrative role than a metaphysical one, hovering haphazardly over the earthbound dramas that are the film's primary focus and only having seemingly tangential significance. Hou, who controls the film with Zen-like patience, prefers to let the balloon gather its import on a scene-to-scene basis, resonating in new, distinct ways as his loose narrative gently explores hectic adulthood, jostled childhood, nostalgia, and the very mechanics of filmmaking in the guise of a director surrogate who is making her own intentional remake of The Red Balloon. This is potentially overwhelming, convoluted material, but Hou's supreme lightness of touch makes it not a cerebral effort but a sensual one, ebbing and flowing in ways that don't require heavy-handed analysis.

The young Taiwanese woman, Song (Fang Song), who is making her own digital version of The Red Balloon has come to study film in Paris and has taken a job on the side as the daytime babysitter of Simon (Simon Iteanu), a content 7-year-old with a swamped mother. In the opening shot, the closest thing to a direct lift of a scene in Lamorisse's film, Simon is dangling on the railing of the Metro station, pleading for the floating red balloon to return home with him. As if to announce the film's fundamental distinction right off the bat, Hou has the balloon not follow Simon. Instead, it has a mellow, indifferent air, justified in the subsequent credit sequence set to elegiac piano music. The balloon has not an individual role linked to youth but an egalitarian one that supports the characters of Song, Simon, his mother, and the various explicit and implicit figures. A divorced mother of two and a passionate voice actress in a local marionette production, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) mounts the film's most accessible plot points (an anger towards a neighbor/friend who does not pay rent, various quotidian struggles such as scheduling piano lessons, explaining her plans to Song, and arguing with her absent husband who has relocated to Montreal to write a novel and shows no signs of returning) and ushers in the bulk of the film's ensemble (the irritating tenant Mark (Hippolyte Girardot), a visiting Chinese puppet master, a pair of hulking, modest piano-movers, and the (mostly) offscreen presences of both her secretive husband and her estranged daughter Louise (Louise Margolin), who is studying in Brussels and only appears in the film via a seamlessly materialized memory that Simon describes to Song).

By building up a patchwork of subtle tension and conflict, The Flight of the Red Balloon achieves the texture of everyday life. Hou's narrative concerns, which are slight to begin with, remain elegantly understated as a democratic weight is assigned to the various mini-stories. All of this is showcased exquisitely in the film's predominant image, a simple wide shot of the family's cluttered Paris flat that Hou keeps returning to. On the left is the door and a packed shelf of books extending outside of the frame that Suzanne ostensibly never would have enough time to delve into, in the middle is an all-purpose dining table, and on the right is the narrow kitchen illuminated by a gorgeous stream of natural light flooding in from the window. It feels as if half of the film is spent observing this segmented domestic sphere, divided up to visualize coming, going, resting, cooking, and zipping around with purpose. Meanwhile, Hou's camera just sits in one spot, occasionally floating from side to side at a pace far too leisurely to accommodate the circus of workaday chaos, which balances the hysterical restlessness of Suzanne, the youthful time-killing of Simon (playing gameboy, drawing), and the quiet introspection of Song, who is perpetually seated at the center table reviewing her daily footage or dreaming up new scenarios in which to place Simon, the balloon, and the man in the lime green suit (to be digitally erased later). It would be disingenuous to overlook how technically proficient these long, often busy sequences are though; in an orgiastic bit of restraint, Hou unfolds one of the lengthiest takes of the film that casually observes several dramas at different intervals (Suzanne's yelling at Mark, her subsequent calm chat with Song, the clatter of the piano tuner in the foreground, and Simon's omnipresent rustling). It's a tumultuous mise-en-scene that manages a distinct poetry thanks to Hou's characteristic economy, the way he willingly has these components butt heads yet is equally prepared to allow a potentially compelling subject to wander offscreen.



None of this is to suggest that The Flight of the Red Balloon is a relentlessly boisterous, hyperactive endeavor; in fact, some of its best moments lie in the relative silence, the pauses from the "action". Like one of his prominent filmmaking fathers, Yasujiro Ozu, Hou routinely resorts to variations on the proverbial "pillow shots". Many times this entails dreamy interludes studying the uncanny soaring of the red balloon, shown in both long shots and with a tight, moving camera. But it also refers to the numerous instances of urban minutiae that Hou likes to turn his camera towards. In one compelling cut, he moves from the interior of the apartment room to the galloping shadows on the ground below a carousel, then the small metal ring at the edge that the riders interact with on their way around. Given the fact that it's Hou's first feature outside of East Asia, it all gives off the impression of an ecstatic outsider's perspective, devoid of cliches (and Paris is certainly full of those) or oversimplifications, which mirrors Song's own cultural assimilation through her Red Balloon remake. Another scene of blissful peace and quiet involves Simon's memory of jaunting around Paris with his sister Louise, which gradually transforms from verbal recollection to literal re-staging. Here Hou makes generous use of visual reflections and layers, shooting the action diagonally through shiny windows to emphasize the coexistence of past and present.

So where does the balloon come into play in this gentle, stoic drama whose chief concern appears to be people and their relationships? It seems to underline, in one big swoop, each of the film's major themes: nostalgia (in its reference to an earlier iteration), the transience of life, the ongoing impact of the past on the present, and the simultaneous melancholy and beauty of the everyday. The balloon hovers alone, but its luminous red sheen remains charming, just as Simon is for the most part, due to forces outside his control, incapable of a perfect childhood, yet he maintains a mask of complacency. And the presence of the balloon also reminds the viewer of Hou's enlightening worldliness, his openness to all forms of cross-cultural artistic associations. As witnessed in Binoche's impassioned recitations of the ancient Chinese story, where the dramatic bombast onscreen is countered by Hou's extended, unadorned gaze, nothing - not even a flurry of conflicts and obligations - threatens to dilute the timeless immersion in art.

Valhalla Rising (2009) A Film by Nicholas WInding Refn

How many shots of scraggly Viking warriors sitting on a hill, staring out into nothingness, and occasionally muttering portentous pseudo-Biblical lingo can one fit in a film before it becomes absurd? Nicholas Winding Refn was up to this challenge with Valhalla Rising, his latest film about a cyclopic slave-warrior appropriately named One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) who slaughters and escapes his Pagan captors to incidentally find himself connected to a group of brooding Catholic Norsemen who are emphatically searching for the Holy Land in 1000 A.D. Unfortunately, Refn's redundant "tone poem" does tip over into the absurd at times, and it's more mind-numbing than it is hypnotic, but it's tough to fault him for trying; as the film laboriously plodded along with enough Tarkovsky intoxication to sink a ship yet still miraculously itself, I began to wonder if I'd ever seen anything quite like it. Of course, I've witnessed savage Vikings beating skulls before (though sadly it remains for the most part a scarcity onscreen), and the general narrative outline and geographical trajectory of the film is suspiciously congruent with Joseph Conrad's radical anti-imperialist novel "Heart of Darkness" (not to mention having an overall air of mythical timelessness about it that suggests the story has been told in various iterations at least a million times), but something about Refn's strange presentation - his indulgence in gloom and doom or his frequently numb efforts with staging - makes it distinctive. This is closer to Andrzej Zulawski's hallucinogenic, unsettling oddity On the Silver Globe than any of the more common comparisons that have sprang up like Stalker or Aguirre, Wrath of God.

The trouble begins early when Refn titles the first chapter of the film "Wrath", immediately lending it the heavy sense of self-importance that often plagued Lars Von Trier's similarly subdivided gorefest Antichrist last year. What's more, the simple narrative strategy of chaptering proves to be an unnecessary and curious move on Refn's part in the grand scheme of things provided how tonally repetitive each section is and how much imagery feels like it's literally spliced around in different spots. We begin with One-Eye as a caged prisoner to the Chieftain, where he is routinely used for brutal battle games in which he finds himself chained to a stake in the ground fighting for his life. Though there's a perverse thrill in it for the blank Pagan warriors sitting on the sidelines, Refn's roving camera makes it a certainty to highlight the sheer displeasure of this lifestyle, the way the violence is strictly an end rather than a means to anything. This idea extends to the remainder of the "battle" scenes in the film, which for all intents and purposes are bereft of drama. Only elemental motivations - honor, rage, personal safety - guide these brief snippets of bloody violence, and they're meant to simply exist as facts of life, inevitable repercussions of the milieu. Like in ancient Scandinavian prose, Refn's violence is swift, matter-of-fact, and all in a day's work.

If these Vikings are wonderfully adroit fighters, they remain concise and clumsy with their words, and Refn's ponderous dialogue doesn't help. Granted, Valhalla Rising embraces a laudable level of historical realism, a preference for not sensationalizing the bare-bones lifestyles of these straightforward men, so it's only natural and rather wise that Refn eschews a traditional narrative arch in favor of a series of elliptical sequences and dialogue. However, somewhere along the way he mistakes dangerous levels of humorlessness and stoicism for authenticity, and the result is a smattering of wooden line-readings like "it was never for him, but his time is coming" that just sit like dead ducks without any surrounding context. Also, whether it's just Refn's bizarre inclination towards awkwardly up-front voices or the result of a hack sound mixer, Valhalla Rising must be one of the most sonically ragged films I've seen in a while, with disjointed hissing piercing through the vocal threshold time and time again and pounding, suggestive prog-metal building tension with no suitable visual counterpart. This all generates a serious divorce between image and sound that can be both irritating (when Refn refuses to pay off the anxiety he so willfully builds aurally) and strangely compelling, the idea of these two fundamental ingredients of cinema being as remote from each other as the alienated characters in the film.



Without a doubt though, where Refn's film indisputably succeeds is in Morten Søborg's darkly beautiful cinematography. The dirt, the fog, the threatening black clouds, the robust wrinkles on the faces of these weathered men, are all rendered with a stunning palpability via a sickly desaturated color palette. It's no surprise that the film is at its best when it is plainly luxuriating in images, eschewing character development for grim panoramas of both landscapes and faces. However, with such a barrage of photographic ruthlessness, perhaps it was an inevitability that it would overstay its welcome, becoming rather tiresome and redundant after about an hour. As if anticipating this, Refn supplies One-Eye's journey with an unexpected arrival in a refreshingly greener North American nowhere after the ship he was sailing on falls drastically off course in the midst of a thick fog. There he witnesses firsthand the overbearing religious frenzy of the Christians, who find themselves torn apart, often literally, when a few members don't hold the carrying out of Christ's sacrifices as highly as others.

The finale of the film, when the icy, vacuous anti-hero sacrifices his life in the face of a vast tribe of armed Indians for the survival of the young Danish boy who feeds him and stays at his side throughout, might suggest One-Eye as a worn-out reincarnation of Christ, giving the film a closing note of religious ambiguity as his disembodied face sits ghostly over the hellish landscape. Not only does One-Eye harbor this rare feat of astonishing humility, he also possesses the ability to portend strings of future events, which play throughout the film cloaked in a tacky red filter. But Refn's main character is an even stronger parallel to Odin in Norse mythology, the one-eyed God of War who ascends through a brutal environment to the climactic capital of Valhalla, where creatures feast, fight, and engage in all other acts of instinctual slumber. Whatever the allegory though, it's tenuous and murky at best, and Refn never seems entirely convinced of its necessity to the story. He simply jabs in several directions, prioritizing the visceral impact of the imagery and the violence over any meaning it might all have. Ultimately, Valhalla Rising, albeit messy and fierce in an intriguing way, is such a farcically self-serious production that it gets in the way of any authentic, complex statement on the culture and lifestyle of ancient Scandinavian warriors.

Revanche (2008) A Film by Götz Spielmann

It's a shame that the work of a director like Götz Spielmann takes twenty years to get to the hyper-selective, censorship-prone Western Hemisphere. Here is a director who, by the looks of his fourth feature, the ravishing, Oscar-nominated Revanche, has been carefully honing his distinctive European style for an entire career, and who has serious thoughts about art undoubtedly indebted to his diverse experience in theater, television, and film. It's all immediately evident in Revanche, a tense, angsty slow-burner about violence, guilt, vengeance, and ultimately retribution, with a cautious accumulation of details that gradually encompasses an entire world. Because of a media landscape that only jumps at films when they have some festival clout, or in this case, have "thriller" written on their backs, Criterion's recent release of the film is only an entry point, meaning in order to witness earlier Spielmann and gain some perspective on his latest, one has to do some heavy lifting, as it appears that only Antares (2004) is available in Region 1.

Alas, this isn't to suggest that Revanche doesn't have a stand-alone power of its own. Right from its tantalizing pre-credit sequence, a series of crystalline, poetic images, two of which recall of the works of pointillist Georges Seurat, the film postures a superficial sense of calm that, like the unidentified flying object that disrupts the surface of a lake in the opening shot, feels perpetually on the edge of agitation. This very tension between order and chaos is reflected geographically (halfway through, the film shifts permanently from city to countryside) and narratively. Though the story hinges on interconnectedness and coincidence, any peripheral similarities to the globetrotting absurdity of Alejandro González Iñárritu are brushed under the rug when Spielmann proves time and time again that his concerns are strictly local, both in terms of the small section of Austria in and around Vienna that the events take place and in relation to his unraveling of the tale. He frequently spends large blocks of time immersing the viewer in monotonous routines that take the mind off of dramatic mechanics and focus it on the present tense. This helps to downplay the narrative trickery which bubbles away underneath, a banal device suffocating below a placid, contemplative surface.

Still, Spielmann's own crafty screenplay is remarkably attuned to reality, always rooted inextricably to the logical ebbs and flows of these characters' lives. Alex (Johannes Krisch) is an errand runner for a local pimp to whom he owes a hefty sum of money, and he is secretly dating the pimp's most prized stripper, the Ukrainian Tamara (Irina Potapenko). In the manner of a classic crime noir, Alex summons the idea of robbing the local bank and fleeing South, one ditch effort that he insists will run smoothly. Of course, it doesn't, and Alex returns from his robbery to find a policeman standing next to the getaway car in the middle of an inquiry with Tamara about the apparent parking violation. Alex assumes it's an effort to detain the robber's girl, that the police already caught on to his crime, so he threatens the officer with his unloaded gun and swiftly drives away. A bullet flies in the process, and though Alex believes he has exited the scene safely, moments later, when blazing down the open road, it becomes evident that Tamara was actually shot and killed. He enters the forest, where he is forced to abandon the car and his fallen love.



After this rather conventional first half, Revanche transforms into a sustained rumination on Alex's quiet grief, much like Bela Tarr's The Man from London cares less about its initial act of corruption than it does its effects on the protagonist. Alex stakes out for the remainder of the film at his frail grandfather Hausner's (Johannes Thanheiser) rural cottage, where he soon learns that the woman who regularly visits and takes his grandfather to church is actually the wife of the policeman who was involved in the toss-up in town. What's more, the married couple - Robert (Andreas Lust) and Susanne (Ursula Strauss) - are Hausner's neighbors (that is, as much of a "neighbor" as one can be in a vast countryside). This revelation unveils a whole new dimension in the story: Alex's simmering thought to kill out of vengeance. Spielmann's depiction of this laborious, hesitant process is nothing short of astounding, maintaining a high degree of tension by vacillating between Alex's daily assistance to his grandfather cutting wood and his bit-by-bit aggregation of details regarding Robert's life. He finds the couple's house, memorizes Robert's jogging routine, and eventually becomes sexually involved with Susanna during Robert's work hours, itself a stealth, indirect blow to his girlfriend's murderer. Though nearly mute in its forward movement, the second half of the film is miraculously unrelenting, stuffed with character complexity gained primarily via an objective, undiscerning static camera.

But it is only Krisch's physically overwhelming presence that would falsely suggest Alex gets the bulk of the screen time, for Spielmann assigns equal weight to the story of Robert, a cop who is struggling with his own collection of personal tragedies, namely the heavy guilt caused by his deadly misfire and the sexual impotence that prevents him from starting a family with Susanna. Both of these problems are the nucleus of a marital tension between the two, a likely factor in guiding Susanna's desire for Alex, but it is mainly within his own mind that Robert battles. Every time he reaches the lake on his daily jog, he turns the picture of Tamara over in his hand repeatedly, staring his colossal mistake in the face. Not only does this superficially recall Alex's own extensive scrutiny over his photo of Tamara but it also tips us off to the more fundamental kinship between Robert and Alex. Despite the several immediately recognizable gulfs between the two men - Robert is an upholder of the law while Alex is a breaker, Robert is financially stable while Alex is not, Robert is a thinker and Alex is a silent, brooding doer - Spielmann makes a point to highlight the profound similarities which link them, and thus, all humans. Likewise, since every central character in the film is suffering from a gaping absence in their lives (Hausner is still mourning the loss of his wife), it takes only a matter of time for them to realize this about each other.



This is a deeply humanistic outlook that Spielmann employs, even if much of Revanche wavers towards darkness and pessimism, but it's certainly not out of place for a film that nonetheless operates in nonjudgmental territory throughout. Spielmann is exceptionally democratic in his imagery, treating both city and country to the same scrupulous eye; from the money-hungry debauchery of the Vienna red-light district to the prosaic rhythms of rural living, the film ekes out the humanity in the overlooked corners of life. The underworld of prostitutes, long victim to sterotypes, is dealt with here in modest fixed takes, scrutinizing over the back-room routines of these burnt out, exploited women. Even Hausner, an elderly man living alone who runs the risk of fading into brittle obscurity, gets his time in the spotlight, rediscovering a long-lost passion for the accordion that takes him back to his formative years. Most impressive of all is the trajectory of Alex, which comes across as less a dramatic metamorphoses than a slow unfurling of the potential that is evident early on. Krisch, in a cinematic debut, expertly plays him as a rough, unwelcoming figure prone to impulsive fits of emotion spread out within a primarily blank, homogeneous facade. His inconspicuous decision to refrain from killing Alex is masterfully paced, and confirms a glimmer of good-nature that is faintly conspicuous through the cracks of a harsh exterior.

Revanche is precisely arranged around a cluster of internal rhymes, beckoning the viewer forward. Spielmann doesn't regularly exercise a moving camera, usually letting cinematographer Martin Gschlacht set the camera down to frame the confines of a room for minutes on end, so when he does, it usually signals a crucial moment, or a moment that will be returned to later with a subtle difference, such as the repeated tracking shot following motor vehicles down a forest road, stopping to incidentally glimpse a dilapidated cross on the side of the road. There are also other satisfying measures taken, such as the way in which Spielmann downplays the bulk of climactic moments, like in the tremendously subtle death of Tamara, which first suggests relief and love but suddenly reveals itself as rapid physical decline, or the strictly verbal meeting of Alex and Robert on the lakefront towards the end of the film. It's all cleverly exacting filmmaking, the kind that creeps up on you and makes something extraordinary of a relatively ordinary scenario. By the time we learn what hit the water in the opening shot, it's not a startling epiphany or a momentous climax, as it might have been in a less accomplished work. Instead, Spielmann fascinatingly provides Revanche's pleasures elsewhere, in the monotonous chopping of wood or the gentle wheeze of an accordion.

Moon (2009) A Film by Duncan Jones

It's rather fitting - and almost parodic - that the debut feature of young English director Duncan Jones, the son of famously intergalactic rock star David Bowie, is set in space. Much less groovy than Bowie's sinuous pop music but equally out there is Moon, a film intoxicated under the influence of classic Sci-Fi, namely Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky's Solaris. Though the film takes place as far as possible from any inkling of society and human interaction, it's more fundamentally about a man remote from himself, using the moon mainly as an elaborate metaphor through which to investigate loneliness, ephemerality, and the burden of time. But this is not all the film takes on; it's also about corporate exploitation, technological progression, and the frailty of human life. Presumably, it's even about a bunch more that doesn't quite seep through the cracks by the end, as Jones overflows his debut with more ideas than some directors manage in a whole career, all communicated through a slick, self-described "mainstream" gloss. As ambitious as Moon is, it could have used some serious thematic editorializing, for it often drowns under the dense pressure of its semi-coherent inquiries, which fire on all cylinders but never quite connect in a satisfying manner.

The film cannot really be sufficiently boiled down to an all-encompassing premise, for its central mystery is so inexplicable to begin with, and what shaky base of logic it has is only constantly abstracted as it chugs along. The only facts that I can pronounce without wavering skepticism is that an individual astronaut named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is involved in a lengthy business trip on the moon with the transnational corporation Lunar Industries, mining for Helium-3 in an ambiguously distant future where the precious isotope is crucial to Earth's energy supply, and thus, its continuing survival. Sam's alone with the exception of his hulking supercomputer companion Gerty, who is essentially HAL 9000 replaced with a straightforward emoticon and the familiar ghost of Kevin Spacey, and his excruciating desire for human companionship is augmented by the fact that the lunar base's satellite is damaged, leaving only the potential for sending recorded video messages to his wife and baby daughter. Yet even these supposed building blocks of the story are uncertain as Jones begins to layer on the mystery. Furthermore, Moon's almost aggressively deliberate lack of contextualizing - other than the internationally and environmentally conscious Lunar commercial that opens the film, the only glimpse of the film's relative Earth is in the form of a neighborhood miniature set Sam has been constructing - seems to suggest this is a film resting squarely within the confines of one man's harried psyche.

Early on, Jones makes sure to establish Sam as a man whose mind is playing tricks on him as a result of alienation and monotony. He's getting headaches, vaguely Lynchian psychosexual nightmares, and invariable hallucinations of an enigmatic dark-haired girl who looks approximately 16 years young and might have hobbled in from Solaris. In fact, the latter seems to be the film's most casual head-scratcher, two quietly foreboding images whose mysterious power quickly subsides when Jones decides to never give the girl her cue again, as if she was forgotten as the script progressed. The second time she appears as a spectral silhouette behind layers of raining rock and lunar residue during one of Sam's missions, it has a disastrous and curiously metaphysical effect. Sam crashes his roving device, which subsequently is poured on by dust and rock while he sits unconscious. Next thing he knows he's back at the infirmary being nurtured by the questionably malign Gerty, who minutes later is witnessed having potentially sinister discussions with corporate officials back at the naval base on Earth about their plans for Sam. Against Gerty's droning insistence not to go outside after his accident, Sam explores the scene of his crash only to find that the incident set off an inexplicable procreation of selves, a rabbit hole involving his own body as it was before being salvaged.



This first act disruption of logic, the beginning of the film's many twists, is as nakedly speculative as any of the great paranormal predicaments in science fiction history. Jones' treatment of it, however, is actually nonchalant, even tinged with an ounce of humor, rather than stoic and eerie so as to elicit fear and enveloping mystery. Paradoxically, this method develops its own unique strain of discomfort, a feeling of tension between the expected strategy and the strategy Jones really applies, showing the two Sam's - who are soon after cohabiting the same base with the same story - interacting on oddly dysfunctional terms. They even play a game of ping pong, shot from a horizontal perspective and involving two Sam Rockwell's in one frame (to achieve this, Jones and his effects crew had to do some painstaking synchronization work), that humorously crystallizes the split psyche of the lonely astronaut. But where Jones gains originality and style points, his film also loses a great deal of dramatic momentum, signaling its first doppelganger too early and taking too long to move on into new territory. Is this a clone like Gerty says, suggesting a greedy, insensitive company playing tricks on the individual, or is it simply a visualization of an angrier, more pensive Sam and a restless, chatty one?

Questions like these are not normally answered in Moon, only obscured by more mysteries. In this sense, the film rightly continues a long lineage of probing science fiction works that do less to illuminate universal truths than to place things in bewildering contexts and prompt questions, seek new and unexplored inquiries when all boundaries have been stretched. It's difficult to go further into Moon without utterly laying bare its central enigmas and disconcerting questions, which are certainly more interesting in the film than they could possibly be in writing. Yet even for all its suspenseful red herrings and psychological complexity, Moon is peculiarly uninspiring, perhaps too subtly fraudulent to be entirely sincere and too sure of its own ideas to really put them on screen in an effective way. Its admirable old-fashioned effects, Clint Mansell's typically majestic score, and Sam Rockwell's sprawling one-man show all suggest a film of epic achievement, yet they really belie a work that, promising as it may be, fails to fully connect as intellectually stimulating science fiction or escapist entertainment.

An Education (2009) A Film by Lone Scherfig

It should have been clear from the title that Danish director Lone Scherfig's An Education would be something akin to getting lectured in school. Jumping ludicrously from "school sucks" ethos to nose-in-the-books classicism, it's as if Scherfig felt her audience needed a blunt reminder of what it means to really be "educated" in life. And so the youthful, wide-eyed, and fervent 16-year-old Londoner Jenny (newcomer Carey Mulligan) becomes her instrument, the doppelganger for Lynn Barber in the memoir off of which the film is based. Scherfig and screenwriter Nick Hornby begin her as a private school whiz kid cum promising cellist yearning for greater things outside her contained, self-proclaimed dreary London existence, send her through a year-long fling with a much older, seemingly more cultivated man named David (Peter Sarsgaard), and then bring her full circle to discover she was fine where she started and where she was headed. This all occurs in a still relatively conservative post-war London that is just starting to rock back and forth, not quite swinging yet, but nearly hip enough to harbor fancy forward-thinkers like David who are above the law because it's just "who (they) are".

I write so prominently in terms of what is being done to these characters because An Education is really that manipulative, too wholeheartedly dedicated to its end result that it fails to let any air into the proceedings, some faint acknowledgment that there is more than meets the eye. The film, once it settles into its central scenario, hinges on two potential courses of action for the eager Jenny: keep studying to guarantee a prized spot "reading English" at Oxford, which has been her goal as far as she and her family can remember, or ditch school and experience life uninhibited with the freewheeling David, whose early admission that he went to school at the "University of Life and failed" should probably have been enough to jolt Jenny out of her childish wonderment. As charming and supposedly connected as David is though, he's transparently off-kilter from the first time we witness him lamely plucking Jenny out of the rain with her cello and into his car to drive her home, a drab come-on that he attributes to his love of music more than anything. From there, the hands of fate keep working their unlikely magic, guiding Jenny back into David one day when window shopping with her snickering cardboard girlfriends, at which point he makes his first offer to take her out and see a classical concert uptown. Jenny - whose laundry list of sophisticated aspirations (listening to Jazz, eating great food, smoking cigarettes) center around the oasis of Paris - is of course smitten, seeing David as her knight in shining armor who can show her everything.

It's stomach-turning to watch the machinations of their developing romance. Jenny's one-dimensional parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), such cartoonish products of English traditionalism, are unbelievably welcoming to David despite the fact that he skirts pedophile status, sending her off with little skepticism and even extending her bed time in the face of his kind demeanor. As the meetings increase, the parents grow more and more blind to his games, falling for a flimsily staged prank about his upcoming once-in-a-blue-moon visit with C.S (aka "Clive") Lewis in Paris that attracts Jenny's future-minded father. Ultimately, they allow her to spend a few days with him in Paris on the strength of the potential career connections she could make, but Scherfig settles for a stylishly abbreviated montage, failing to truly capitalize on the first-time bedazzlement of the exotic city. Instead, the emphasis is continually on the peripheral magnetism of David and Jenny's relationship, which has its own share of contrivances. As functional as Mulligan and Sarsgaard are individually, they never quite develop enough salient chemistry to warrant Jenny's full-fledged indulgence in the new lifestyle. David is actually hopelessly unromantic when it comes to intimacy, wooing her with an utterly uncomfortable but somehow passing off as tender peep at her naked bosom, and later shocking her with an even more awkward episode with a banana, and one senses that Jenny should be smart enough to see through his skin-deep charm.



Of course, we can, and that speaks to the unflattering sense the film exudes that we are always four steps ahead of the characters, and the plot. With its scarcely placed but saccharine use of musical score, An Education bludgeons the viewer with dramatic innuendo, but Scherfig doesn't seem to realize that it's always doing a much greater job of foreshadowing than she likely intends. Therefore, the film sits uneasily in between functioning as a moralistic, told-you-so dissertation (which it unsatisfyingly proves to be in the tone-deaf final act) and an experiential first-person piece. The latter may have unearthed a more poignant film, especially given the fact that it could have rested on the shoulders of the able Carey Mulligan. If the story is insipid and by-the-numbers, Mulligan's expressive performance hints at bigger things. In the end though, her impressive spectrum of facial nuance - beginning at childish vulnerability and ending at Hepburn-like adulthood - becomes stranded within a stuffy scenario, so that her inevitable duping at the foot of David (turns out he's got a family!) is all the more devastating.

None of this is to suggest An Education is not a handsome and entirely satisfactory movie. But its problem lies right there, at its core: it does not risk anything and thus does not go anywhere particularly interesting. A few times, the doors are open to something unexpected and more emotionally complicated - David inexplicably starts using baby talk with Jenny on the eve of stealing her virginity, or Jenny confronts David's wife and son in their front yard - but Scherfig promptly closes them, afraid to investigate something outside of the confines of her pedestrian coming-of-age trajectory. Further proof in my mind that there's little worse than a small, independent work lacking the sense of spirit and singular energy such a description would suggest, instead in search of being the next "underdog" at the year-end Oscars. To translate, a superficially lively, colorful production with whiffs of cultural or historical significance and melodramatic shades of emotional urgency.

Daddy Longlegs (Go Get Some Rosemary) A Film by Josh and Benny Safdie (2009)

Like Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, Josh and Benny Safdie's microbudget tale of fatherhood-gone-wrong (or right, depending on whether or not you're prone to nostalgia), Daddy Longlegs, is a film that feels frozen in time. Its scrappy, no-frills presentation of New York City - a kind of distilled anytown, USA where catching a cab is as likely as getting mugged by a gun-wielding bum - is a fittingly universal backdrop for the unpredictable exploits of Lenny (Ronald Bronstein), a divorced father of two whose behavior is really as human as it is initially off-putting. Situated during the only two weeks per year that Lenny is allowed by custody to see his children, the film is a frantic, moody evocation of a man who desperately wants to make his prized two weeks count, but who is plagued by an itchy tendency to lose sight of maturity and responsibility. It opens to Lenny ordering and subsequently scoffing down half of a foot-long hot dog, then proceeding to unsuccessfully leap over a fence and mutilate his second half. Unlike the majority of busy workaday adults living in a big city however, Lenny does not trudge off like a curmudgeon mourning the loss of both cholesterol and green. Rather, he soaks up the absurdity of the moment, remaining fixed in his post-wipeout position, laughing off any residual disappointment. This is a man who seeks uninhibited pleasure in life and finds it in the immature flaunting of adolescent behavior, who feigns to swim upstream against the current of middle-aged mediocrity.

None of this is to suggest that Lenny is an instantly likable character for his "charm" or "perseverance" though. The feat of Daddy Longlegs (subtitled Go Get Some Rosemary), actually, is in its gradual transition from pity to empathy, from bemoaning the feral emotional spectrum of Lenny to understanding it and perhaps even identifying with it. As it happens, recent Boston College graduates Josh and Benny Safdie have based the character largely on memories of the disorderly father figure of their own childhood. The two grew up in Manhattan with a European father who bestowed his love of film on his children through restlessly filming home videos. In Daddy Longlegs, Lenny adopts a similar status as a film projectionist at the local theater, a job that obstructs his life with all its scheduling vagaries even as it provides his only financial and structural support. In one thrilling scene, Lenny is forced to take a shift he previously tried, without luck, to remove, at the same time as he needs to pick up his two little boys - Sage and Frey (the real life sons of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo) - at school. He hastily kickstarts the first reel, sprints to retrieve his children, and runs back to allow them a chance to operate the next reel (a tricky, time-sensitive maneuver that is not suitable for the wandering mind of a seven-year-old.)

A similar balancing act - between responsibility and enjoyment, seriousness and a desire to be a jovial father - is at play throughout the film. The problem is that Lenny tends to suppress the former until it's too late, when he has either argued vehemently with a school principle, found himself on a banal vacation upstate, left his kids with one of his several wayward friends, or almost lost them permanently to his ex-wife. In one of the few smacks of frightening reality in the otherwise relatively tame and comical film, Lenny force-feeds Sage and Frey a quarter of a sedative each ("a whole one can put a grown man out for days!" he insists) to keep them sleeping while he works an unexpected overnight shift, only to find them in a near coma for an indeterminate amount of time when he returns. He seems incapable of harnessing any logical foresight about whether a behavior is safe or not, and he can't seem to grasp both the fragility of childhood (later, he sends them out alone to retrieve the contents of a grocery list) or - given the fact that he is more of an extended play date than a wise father, the importance of maintaining a healthy balance of freedom and discipline. As much of an abrasive can of worms as he is though, it's clear where the Safdie's sympathies lie. They'd rather the contradictory jumble of Lenny to the stern, by-the-numbers conservatism of Sage and Frey's mother, whose presence is more often that not felt only implicitly in the muffled diegetic yammer on the other end of the telephone line provoking Lenny and grilling him for his mistakes. When she does reclaim the children later in the film, the one brief sequence inside her organized, hyper-controlled domestic environment has the formula of an army routine, with the daily customs like dinner and bedtime boiled down to an airless science.



In this sense, with the Safdie's tender acceptance of Lenny's complications, Daddy Longlegs comes across with a deeply regressive, nostalgic heart at its center, a potent yearning for the pleasures of the past and a coming to terms with the confusions of the present. Ronald Bronstein, an accomplished filmmaker himself, delivers a performance of immense skill and grace, somehow expressing a buried, troubled soul beneath an otherwise madcap exterior. His Lenny may not nearly be able to handle the labyrinth of the modern world, totally and pathetically, but his triumphs and charms - like pretending to catch fish for dinner off the side of a speeding motorboat, playing old tapes in the car in the midst of a late-night traffic jam, and running through public parks with Sage and Frey - are pure products of youthful energy. The signs of wearing out are there - smoking cigarettes in a panic, getting arrested for spray painting "Dad" on a street side wall, the disorderly sprawl of graying hair - but he refuses to let them suffocate his passion. This retro warmth is reflected in the distinctive visual style of the film, an energetic stream of home-video-like images shot on grainy 16 mm, bookended by illustrated brown and yellow credit sequences reminiscent of the Charles Schulz' Peanuts cartoons.

Intermingled with the nostalgic comfort however is also suffocating camera staging that never veers away from the center of the action, suggesting there is no physical escape from the present, no retreat to the days that required less responsibility. The Sadfie's shoot everything in claustrophobic, shaky close-up, hardly ever cutting away to reveal an establishing shot. And their employment of this cinematographic tactic is not shoddy or nausea-inducing, but rather a sensitive way of heightening the immediacy of the physical world, capturing details upon details at the rate that Lenny is forced to process stimuli. Consequently, Daddy Longlegs is both a pleasant and bleak trip, a juggling of good and bad vibes. Quite refreshing, it is, to see young filmmakers with full careers ahead of them operating in such multifaceted, knowing territory with limited means and an understated visual style so appropriately unpolished.

Sensitive Poetry or Amateur Strokes of Luck? The Films of Aaron Katz

Critical polarization has struck me again in the face of the films of Aaron Katz. I tend to approve and disapprove of his work at the same rate that it vacillates between irritating self-consciousness and poignant stretches of pure visuals. Of course, with the immediate stamps of "microbudget", "handheld", and "personal", his is an infantile oeuvre cultivated singlehandedly by the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, which has been so endlessly giving to the crop of films deemed part of the mumblecore movement. (Katz's latest, Cold Weather, which I have yet to see, recently premiered there.) As much as Katz's two debut films, Dance Party, USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007) - which only elapse a cumulative 143 minutes - revel in and even glamorize the repetitive quirks of the genre, they seem to periodically reach for something more pointedly cinematic and ambitious. There are times when the films try to prove that the man behind the camera is not a cash-strapped college graduate but rather an experienced filmmaker looking back critically at the unusual periods of his life between adolescence and serious adulthood, when all the potential was there without any understanding of how to achieve it. And then there are other times when they scream of amateurism, with Katz getting carried away figuring out how to properly stage a scene so that it strikes the accurate levels of cuteness, awkwardness, and naturalism. Granted, Katz's subject is the stuff of real life, and that's not always a breeze to convey. Fortunately, he handles it better than most - say, Andrew Bujalski for instance.

Dance Party, USA is his first feature, and everything about it is bite-sized: the running time (65 minutes, which puts into question its very existence as a feature), the spare plot, the range of emotions. But this is not to say that its achievements are microscopic. Centering around a group of high school students wallowing in the age of partying and perversion, it speaks of an era whose external displays of emotion may be flimsy or veiled, but whose motivations behind such emotions are vast and elusive. This is the terrain through which Katz unassumingly navigates. The point of inspection is chiefly Gus (Cole Pensinger), a soon-to-be eighteen-year-old with a hyper-masculine swagger and a social and verbal incapacity to rival Alex in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (the film is also set in Portland, Oregon, another similarity between the two works). He has proudly amassed an outsized reputation as an arrogant debauchee who is willing to do the craziest things at parties and forget about it the next morning. It is the Fourth of July, and high school bashes appear to be on cruise control, with kids gathering in houses with cheap beer and sexualized rap music to dance around nothing but their own inchoate small talk, the objective of which is always physical reward. If this description, comprising a bulk of the film's opening half hour, sounds improbable, spend a year in a modern high school and witness how meaningless the social interactions in some circles have become. Katz's depiction of this growing high-school subculture is actually impressively spot-on, capturing with painful honesty the salient misogyny and anti-intellectualism that plagues much of today's young students.

Underneath a night sky bursting with fireworks, which Katz takes advantage of in one long, observant take, Gus sits and sparks up (pun intended) a conversation with Jessica (Anna Kavan), the mysteriously unassertive best-friend of his ex-girlfriend Christie (Sarah Bing). Jessica, who has already been introduced in both the protracted opening shot of the movie in a messy morning-after-the-party trudge and a series of stillborn communications thereafter, has already made up her mind about Gus before he opens his mouth. She is not interested in getting in bed with him and will not listen to any pathetic denials of his stature. Much to her surprise, Gus is genuinely open about his behavior, and stunningly does not profess any premeditated desire to get in her pants. Instead, after a few moments of stunted interaction rife with verbal dead-ends, he inexplicably decides to come clean to her about a past wrongdoing utterly unrelated to her. He admits to an instance at a party that technically qualifies as rape, but which was followed immediately by remorse and comforting. Moments later, Jessica is asking him to ditch the party with her. This gives way to an achingly tender sequence set to touching piano music where the two of them drive through town and eventually stop and sit silently in the middle of what looks like a parking lot lit only by dim streetlights. Neither of them have a clue what to say to each other, so they resort to a simple mutual exchange of "are you cold?", but their mere physical proximity is enough to qualify it as nervous attraction.



Though maddeningly opaque and nearly invisible, Gus' clumsy admission is actually an undaunted leap of faith and a faint sign of maturation presumably brought on by actual romantic interest rather than raging hormones. Dance Party, USA abandons narrative impetus after this premature climax, and instead drifts for its remainder as Gus and Jessica contemplate their encounter amidst mundane distractions: hanging out with friends, smoking cigarettes, discussing nothing tactlessly, and for Gus, attempting to right his wrongs by confronting the girl of his past indiscretion, who understandably doesn't remember him. It unfolds in a free-floating, directionless manner, as Katz's restless camera hovers over the blank faces of his unassured protagonists, eventually seeking poise and quietude in the occasional pillow shots of the surrounding streets. Much of this plods on incessantly - a few too many "ums" and "likes", a hysterically sustained air of discomfort and awkwardness such as in the scene when Gus watches TV with the oblivious girl, that suggests an overstatement of adolescent clumsiness. In such instances, Katz seems more concerned with getting a laugh at the expense of the characters than he does with accurately reflecting the ebb and flow of high school culture.

Taking place across the country in Brooklyn, and thus mirroring mumblecore's nation-spanning nature, is Katz's second feature, Quiet City. Here his aspirations prove not altogether distinct from those in Dance Party, USA, focusing in on another precarious intimacy, only this time in the context of hapless post-collegiate slackers. Jamie (Erin Fisher) has arrived in Brooklyn by subway to meet her friend Samantha at a cafe. Problem is, she's not familiar with the city and has no idea where to find her destination. She asks a young man (Cris Lankenau) in a parking garage where to find it, and after trying several different variations of the same explanation, he ends up just walking with her. Katz starts making sly cuts that affirm the subtle spark between them, when every time it seems as if they are going to go their separate ways, we see them together a frame later in the space they were supposedly departing from. She winds up not finding her friend in the cafe, and after waiting for a while to no avail, the young man offers to let her hang out at his place, an unadorned apartment, for as long as she needs. They talk, drink some wine together without any hint of connoisseurship, and tinker with a toy keyboard (how could this be a mumblecore film without at least one instance of cloying amateur musicianship?) The beginnings of a delicate connection are afoot, but each of them maintain a degree of caution; their interactions remain purely friendly, as if hampered by a constant awareness of the other's romantic situation (Jamie has an ambiguous attachment to a jealous boy back home and the guy, whose name we eventually learn is Charlie, is still getting over a break-up).

Despite this hesitance, the seeds of attraction are thoroughly and saliently planted. The iron walls that blocked verbal communication in Dance Party, USA have been broken down, so Charlie and Jamie interact with effortless comfort, even humor and charm. They are also substantially normal, under-the-radar people without flaws as obvious as those of the characters in Katz's debut. One night spent at Charlie's turns into the entire subsequent day for Jamie, which involves more aimless hanging around (indeed, Charlie is out of a job with literally nothing to do). They infiltrate Samantha's apartment, once again finding no one, stop by the apartment of Charlie's newly engaged friend Adam (fellow director Joe Swanberg) to reclaim a long-lost hat in the funniest scene of the film, and eventually find themselves at an art gallery showing curated by Jamie's friend Robin (Sarah Hellman), leading to a late-night party filled with more jobless slacker types. Quiet City unfolds in an all-too-familiar realm of financial hardship, estranged friendships, uncertain romances, and dispassionate gatherings that gain their pessimism from the fact that everyone there is worrying about their unpaid rent rather than enjoying the company of others. Katz evokes this mood with grace, still remaining conscious of the transient pleasures that exist, such as the charmingly inelegant boogie shared by Charlie, Jamie, Robin, and Charlie's witless old pal Kyle (Tucker Stone), or the first small gesture of outward physical contact between Charlie and Jamie, a tradeoff of high-fives.



Both of these films have a sense of effortlessness and economy in their progression, a refreshing lack of formula guiding their apathetic movement. I'd even venture to say that, in keeping with their clear absence of narrative promises, they value the spontaneity of the present over the vast anxiety of the future. This is a notion justified by Katz's enduring propensity to pause the narrative after long scenes of dialogue to ponder the tranquil stillness of the surroundings, shots that achieve their consummate power as punctuation marks in Quiet City due largely to a significant cinematographic leap between the two films, with director of photography Andrew Reed realizing the visual potential of autumnal skies and urban silhouettes. Yet with this equilibrium comes an astonishing lack of directorial intrusion, which can be both a blessing, in the film's best moments, and a curse, threatening to reduce the characters to caricatures. This negative aspect can be witnessed in both films, in Gus' frustratingly one-note friend Bill (Ryan White) and Kyle in Quiet City, a figure used only for comic relief. With that said, the rewards of Katz's work are not always to be found in character psychology, but rather in subtle shifts in tone. In this regard, Quiet City is his more tonally spectacular work, with an utterly refined interplay of tenderness, uncertainty, and nonchalance conquered with supreme visual and aural instinct. At the same time, it's the more straightforward of the two films; Dance Party, USA contains richer emotional undercurrents that bubble up beneath the surface, and do so in a lot fewer coherent words.

Yet all this time I wonder if I'm giving Katz too much credit, reading too far into films that are really just half-baked screenplay ideas stretched to just barely feature lengths with the liberties of non-actor friends and unimposing production schedules. After all, it's a whole lot easier to assemble a collection of rather lifelike moments if an overbearing producer is not breathing down your neck wondering when serious progress has been made. In fact, as a filmmaker myself, I know that it's not that hard. But I am still willing to accept these conditions if Katz's films continue to feel so serene and poignant. Dance Party, USA marks one of those rare instances when I actually felt a film was too short, and Quiet City stands as an even rarer instance of a film being just the right length. Because of this, Katz seems very sure of his own scope, aware of how his films are making an impact and when they are. And if the final offhand kiss between Gus and Jessica in a photo booth after a slow simmer of unrelated, anxiety-filled scenes isn't making an impact, I don't know what is.