Happy End (2017) A Film by Michael Haneke

"With Happy End, Michael Haneke takes circuitous routes to arrive at rather simplistic observations—namely, that modern technology is a plague and that the rich are soul-sick and insulated from real-world troubles. He’s concocted a plot just busy enough to distract from these worn cynicisms and a set of characters too enigmatic to dismiss as mere chess pieces off the bat, but by the end, Happy End reveals itself as something vacuous and cold, a bizarrely seductive pseudo-thriller lacking a thoroughly worked-out payoff."

Review continues at Slant.

Western (2017) A Film by Valeska Grisebach

"'War is war. Life is life. You can’t lump them together,' says a burly construction worker early on in Valeska Grisebach’s Western, immediately invoking the dichotomy between civility and savagery at the heart of the genre referenced by the film’s title. The seasoned audience member will recognize the hollowness in such a statement, as the most ageless westerns have proven time and again that violence—physical and otherwise—is the engine of civilizing progress. And though blood is scarcely spilled in Western, the film nevertheless teems with nervous tension as a German construction crew descends on a modest Bulgarian village to conduct work on a hydroelectric power plant in the hills nearby. In a supremely understated style, Grisebach sets this all-too-modern scenario in motion and charts the ways in which power and privilege unconsciously manifest themselves, turning a boilerplate engineering initiative into a loaded culture clash."

Full review of Valeska Grisebach's recent NYFF competition title, Western, continues at Slant Magazine.

Conversation on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death (2005)

It's been nearly three months since Kenji Fujishima and I published our last Passing Notes column at In Review Online—a feature in which we pick a cinematic subject (anything that strikes our fancy at a given point in time) and trade thoughts about it. Our last two happen to have been prompted by tragic losses in film culture, the March piece focusing on the Phillip Seymour Hoffman-co-starring The Master and our new discussion—all 4,293 words of it—looking at Workingman's Death, the audacious 2005 docu-essay by recently deceased Austrian globetrotter Michael Glawogger (whose Whore's Glory I mused on at this blog two years ago). I'm a strong supporter of Glawogger's work, Workingman's Death especially, and the loss of this artist is devastating. We're not only losing a vitally important voice in contemporary documentary cinema but also a genuinely curious human being whose thirst for knowledge and experience was an example to live by. The conversation can be found here.

Intensifying the Affect: Peter Tscherkassky’s Virtuosic Repurposing Acts

(Note: The following is the last paper I ever wrote at Emerson College, an essay for my History of Experimental and Avant-Garde seminar.)

Looking for a world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization.
                -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "What is Phenomenology?"

Substitute “world” with “film” and one has a fairly instructive credo for digesting the work of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky (1958 - present). Since his first short film in 1981, Tscherkassky has sought increasingly imaginative ways of transcending conventional pictorial representation in cinema, producing radical aesthetic experiences that intentionally gesture towards visual coherence before completely unsettling any sense of spectatorial stability. Provocatively touted as “the most important and most internationally celebrated contemporary avant-garde filmmaker,” (Möller) much of his work has been the subject of psychoanalytic and philosophical analysis, but the films explored in this essay – Motion Picture (1984), L'Arrivée (1997/98), Outer Space (1999), Dream Work (2001), and Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) – suggest a desire to move beyond constricting modes of thought towards a new iteration of what Germaine Dulac deemed Cinéma pur; that is, a cinema with expressive qualities divorced from those of the other art forms based on “the power of the image alone” (34). Even as these films toy with structural framing devices, historically and theoretically loaded found footage material, and broader trends in the history of Austrian avant-garde cinema, their continual focus on material vulnerability reflects a larger interest in the fragility of various frameworks of thinking.

For the greater part of Tscherkassky’s career, this pursuit of pure cinema, absolute film, or immersive abstraction – whichever you prefer – has been tied to the photographic dark room. Starting with Motion Picture, Tscherkassky has been devoutly tied to celluloid film stock (both 16mm and 35mm) and hand processing (developing his film using his own chemicals and his own special methods). Integrating dark room manipulation of found footage stock into each of his works, not to mention producing his films entirely in this way for over a decade, Tscherkassky scratches, smudges, distorts, reprints, rephotographs, and multiplies his source material, in the process often abandoning any trace of the traditional point-and-shoot recording process that marks the vast majority of film production. Much of this work is accomplished with an optical printer, a device that allows one to scrutinize and maneuver individual film frames. Other times, Tscherkassky’s manipulation is entirely hands-on, in which case the effects seen in the finished films are produced through direct physical contact (abrasive or controlled) with the celluloid.

Whores' Glory (2011) A Film by Michael Glawogger

"Griffith saw that the cinema could show things that everybody knows, that everybody wants to recognise, and at the same time, not show certain things which are very violent, which must be hidden. Griffith was the first to understand and experiment with the idea that cinema is an art which can make its strongest effect with the idea of absence, with the idea of cinema as an art of absence...

...I think what Mizoguchi wanted to say in the final shot (of Street of Shame (1956)) was: ‘Starting from here, it's going to be so unbearable that there's not even a film.’ After this closed door, a film is no longer possible. It's terrible, so don't come in."

-Pedro Costa, "A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing"

When watching Michael Glawogger's Whores' Glory, the concluding film in the globetrotting Austrian filmmaker's trilogy of transcontinental labor, I was intermittently reminded of a transcript of an inspiring lecture given by Pedro Costa to a school of Japanese film students. In it, Costa spoke of the philosophical and ethical divide between commercial cinema and cinema of truth, analogizing the whole argument to the idea of a door left open or selectively shut. Costa's language is curiously vague for the most part (or at least the translation is), perhaps intentionally so, but what I sense him dancing around is the notion of an ethical line - in no matter what kind of film is being made - that simply cannot be crossed. A film should only show so many details, and in fact it becomes more truthful, and more significant, when it eschews certain aspects of the lives of those onscreen that would in some ways be too intensely private to show, that would inevitably steal a part of the soul of the subject. Enter a film like Whores' Glory, which seems to thrive on tiptoeing across this line, for the most part keeping the door shut but occasionally dipping its feet in the other room. And, given my profound agreement with many portions of Costa's sublime speech, I find myself troubled by the speculation as to what extent Glawogger's few crossings of the line so dutifully established by the structure of his own work actually damn the film as a whole.

For clarification, Whores' Glory is an insanely comprehensive, thematically focused, brilliantly framed, tonally consistent, and refreshingly non-judgmental three-part look at prostitution in separate milieus: Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico. Glawogger somehow managed to gain extremely intimate access to a casual urban brothel in Bangkok, a grungy and claustrophobic red-light district in Faridpur, and finally a ghostly drive-in motel expanse just beyond the border of Texas known mysteriously as The Zone, and he codes each section with its own subtle variation on the same aesthetic of vibrant, compulsively composed cinéma vérité. The film's lack of an explanatory voice-over or a clear editorial point-of-view, as well as its ambivalence regarding the definitions of documentary and fiction (unafraid to pit reenactments and stagings alongside more "authentic" fly-on-the-wall footage), all situate it firmly within the same kind of postmodern Direct Cinema practiced by Costa as well as Glawogger's Austrian contemporary Ulrich Seidl, yet there's also an uncommon expressive streak running through Whores' Glory, a desire to use the editorial tools at the disposal to the filmmaker (a soundtrack consisting of mostly P.J. Harvey and CocoRosie tunes, dynamic color and compositional arrangement) to heighten atmosphere.

In most cases, that's precisely what Glawogger's stylistic tics do: heighten atmosphere. They don't reduce the lives of the destitute, dispossessed, or less fortunate to graphic displays. Glawogger's particular kind of keen compositional sense - basically an ability to stumble upon striking framings without appearing to set out with that intention when a take begins (his camera is almost always moving, whether handheld or on track, quickly or slowly) - is more about discovering something pre-existing that is beautiful than it is about arranging a subject and its surroundings in a flattering manner. Whether or not Glawogger actually does rearrange elements in the frame, and to what extent, is beside the point, because one gets the feeling that the prostitutes in Whores' Glory are not trivialized or overtly glamorized by the cinematography that contains them. Nor are they by the music that often accompanies the images and gives the film such elegant momentum, but the music does translate a melancholy perspective to the audience and sometimes threatens to derail the otherwise undemonstrative approach. For instance, it's hard to hear P.J. Harvey sing the words "all around me people bleed" or "the city's ripped right to the core" (both from "The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore" off of her 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea) and not attribute them to Glawogger's own stance on the matter, which, sympathetic as it may be, suggests an exotic imposition of perspective, a kind of generalized reading of a community.

That reading becomes increasingly problematized by the nature of the film's emotional structure, which begins with the brothel that is easiest to swallow in terms of the level of shocking images on display, and moves gradually into thornier terrain from there. Bangkok's "The Fish Tank" is a business that operates in a very male-centric fashion, dividing its architecture quite firmly by separating the male and females by a pane of glass behind which women are advertised. In Faridpur, the women have more agency, and the entire environment is much more open, encouraging males and females to co-exist in a free market. Mexico differs from both the previous scenarios; its women work entirely on their own, divided into different motel rooms, and they do their "marketing" free of any "pimps" or "mothers." Glanced at quickly, it seems that the relative levels of dehumanization and squalor intersect with one another across the timeline of the film, which starts in a comfortable environment where women are literally numbered and transitions to a grungy, bleak place where individualism reigns. Really, each location - as well as any similarity and difference between them - is just too complex and multi-faceted to be summarized by a pop song, even one by an artist as complex and multi-faceted as PJ Harvey, CocoRosie, or Antony Hegarty.

Costa might call this use of music an instance of a film trying to "open the door," to allow the spectator to see himself/herself in the work rather than the truth of what's onscreen. I might agree. There are scenes in Whores' Glory that are wrenching and painful (a Faridpur mother's blunt, honest prediction of the rest of her very young daughter's life, a working girl in the same district asking the camera candidly why this is the path required of women) as well as scenes that are joyous and charismatic (a retired Mexican hooker's over-explicit and hilarious recollection of old jobs (which she recites entirely with her breasts indifferently exposed)), and Glawogger does not need to rely on music to convey the enormity of the human behavior in such instances. The film works well as a loving portrait of these women as people capable of their own personalities, desires, and problems irrespective of their profession, especially when it devotes the same kind of fascination to the actual labor in their lives. Indeed, one feature of Glawogger's film that is so unheard of in films coming even remotely close to the topic of prostitution is an earnest consideration of the job as a job, which is every bit as taxing and devotional as any other career.

Returning to Costa's idea of absence, then, it seems adequate that given Glawogger's unlikely interest in the politics and lifestyle of prostitution that he might benefit from skipping over the actual act itself, both as a sign of respect to the women and as a matter of augmenting the impact of his own film. That's exactly the case for three-quarters of Whores' Glory, but, in a build-up that is almost pornographic in nature, the film finally reveals sex in one of the final scenes in Mexico. The scene is not exploitative in its camerawork by any means, but the very presence of it seems to cheapen the integrity of the work, at the very least dulling its power. This is not some moralist statement arguing for chastity in cinema. Not at all. Quite simply, it's an aesthetic belief. Whores' Glory loses something by revealing that which is so protectively omitted throughout the film. One women in Faridpur seems to comprehend this idea even more so than Glawogger. Followed by the filmmaker to her room earlier in the film, she suddenly turns and remarks: "I'm going to close the door now."

Cannes 2012 Round-Up

Below is a complete ranking of the films I saw at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Enjoy!

1. Holy Motors (Carax, France, In Competition)

When I saw Leos Carax's first feature in thirteen years, Holy Motors, on the final day of rescreenings, it was by no small margin the most mysteriously beautiful, inventive film I'd seen at Cannes. Starting with the simple setup of a man working as a professional chameleon, riding a limousine stuffed to the brim with suitcases full of disguises around a serenely dreamy Paris and fulfilling different "appointments" around the city, Carax builds a multilayered meditation on performance, identity, virtual reality, and cinematic artifice. Much of the film's power comes from Denis Lavant, most deserving of the festival's "Best Actor" award, who lives each episode of the film's chronological but strangely timeless structure with the candidness and thoroughness necessary to breathe life into the film's motif of dual identities and the elusive "self". What at first seems to smell of redundancy and half-assed improvisation proves to be executed with such remarkable subtlety, grace, and precision by Carax that not a single delirious chapter - even as the director pushes Lavant to vaudevillian feats such as playing a repugnant sewer-dweller carrying an angelic Eva Mendes into his shit-stained lair, concluding with a sight-gag of Lavant's erection - feels out of place. This is a film with a fearless sense of movement and visual invention, not to mention a constant self-awareness and absurdist humor. I can't wait to see it again.

2. Journal De France (Depardon and Nougaret, France, Out of Competition/Special Screenings)

A basement full of unreleased newsreel celluloid from legendary French documentarian Raymond Depardon covering a vast range of small and large scale historical events circa the middle of the 20th century yielded the festival's most moving and poetic images. Uncovered by Depardon's wife and usual sound recordist Claudine Nougaret and positioned alongside contemporary footage of Depardon taking a photographic tour of France alone in his car, the resulting cut of Journal De France becomes a mesmerizing essay (set to killer musical cues!) on photographic truth and how images become a mirror of one's thoughts and feelings throughout the course of one's life. Yet as much as the film is a loving portrait of Depardon the artist and man, it's also, as the title suggests, a kaleidoscopic journey through France's history, its social and cultural charms, its regrettable involvement in wars, its strange political missteps (the scene of finance minister Giscard D’Estaing describing his public marketing campaign is a particular gem), and most of all, its ordinary civilians. The film's eye, like that of its primary subject, is humble, compassionate, and patient.

3. In Another Country (Hong, South Korea, In Competition)

The first time Hong Sang-soo's static camera compulsively snap-zoomed in on the action in In Another Country's extended opening shot, it's as if the entire audience experienced a collective lurch towards the actors. Perhaps this impression is just to due to my unfamiliarity with Hong's aesthetic, but in any case In Another Country provides a heightened intimacy with the filmed material, a direct relationship between director/audience and subject, and a sense of the film being conceived as it's being shot. A work so casual, spontaneous, and grounded rarely makes an appearance In Competition at Cannes, and Hong's glorious hangout of a film is all the more powerful for it. One of several films at the festival (along with Cosmopolis, Like Someone in Love, Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, In the Fog, and Moonrise Kingdom) that seemed to exist in a deserted bubble of a world comprised only of characters in the story, Hong follows Isabelle Huppert as she materializes the incomplete scenario ideas of an aspiring screenwriter (seen in the opening shot) on vacation in a South Korean beach town. The film's effortless narrative symmetry allows one to contemplate the subtle variations in the ways Huppert's three different characters are treated by a rotating cast of locals, thus providing insights into love, life, and otherness so off-the-cuff and fluid it puts shame to more heavy-handed treatments of these motifs.

4. Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas, Mexico, In Competition)

The obligatory pillar of provocation this year was held up by Carlos Reygadas with his new film Post Tenebras Lux, an ambitious collage-like expression of Mexican country life that unsurprisingly garnered equal parts applause and booing. (One wonders when Cannes crowds will grow up and learn to embrace artistic license and individualistic work without resorting to knee-jerk skepticism.) Post Tenebras Lux digresses rather significantly from the comparatively sobering and linear Silent Light, but what it does share with Reygadas' previous work is its insistence upon making its audience feel something, and it put me in an unusually discomfiting space that I've rarely experienced from cinema. Despite some of its age-old arthouse ingredients (nature, animals, mechanical sex, an unforgivably extraneous scene of animal cruelty), the film is quite unlike anything ever made, and truly unique to Reygadas' sensibilities. A dark energy pulses through the film as the Mexican filmmaker never shies away from presenting conflicting emotions (family bliss and marital tension, tenderness and unexplained violence, religious devotion and paralyzing fear of the Devil) alongside each other with fervent unpredictability, giving its mystical and quasi-autobiographical musings a distinctly different tone than the otherwise structurally similar Tree of Life from last year. Though Reygadas employed the suddenly in vogue but previously extinct Academy aspect ratio (the boxy, claustrophobic 4:3), no film at Cannes felt bigger or more expansive, as its loud, immersive sound design and ghostly visuals exploded from the screen.

5. Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, Iran/Japan/France, In Competition)

I'll join the chorus of critics intrigued but somewhat baffled by Abbas Kiarostami's new Tokyo-set feature Like Someone in Love. The film is startlingly open-ended, seeming to merely capture a few episodes in the middle of a much longer narrative, and in the thick of Cannes craziness, the mental space required to mine Kiarostami's complexity is simply non-existent. Here, the director charts a similar paradigm shift roughly at the midway point as that of Certified Copy when the relationship between a young girl (Rin Takanashi) and an old man (Tadashi Okuno) shifts from prostitute/client to grandfather/granddaughter based on the innocuous misunderstanding of the girl's psychologically abusive boyfriend (Ryo Kase). The side-effect is an opaque investigation into the nature of social roles and perception, limited to a few interiors in Tokyo and several of the director's trademark car conversations. It's amazing how economical this film is, using such a small number of tense, protracted dialogue scenes to open up a vast ocean of mystery around these three characters, each of whom appear to be hiding something authentic and unfettered beneath their social façades.

6. Walker (Tsai, Taiwan/Japan, Critic's Week) A new 30-minute short by Tsai Ming-Liang entitled Walker was one of the best surprises of the festival. I'm still eagerly awaiting a new feature from the Taiwanese master, but this new work is precisely the length it needs to be. The film is decidedly, unapologetically simple, though certainly not simplistic. In it, a Buddhist monk (Tsai apostle Lee Kang-Sheng) dressed in a bright red robe walks through the hustle-bustle of Tokyo at a snail's pace to fetch a snack (this narrative detail is only revealed later in the film in an unexpected sight gag), his head perpetually facing the ground and his eyes in a meditative squint. He lifts each foot as if lifting the weight of his spirit before returning it to the ground with patience and grace. Were it not for the real-time passersby - many of whom take note of the camera's presence (adding gravitas to the performative spectacle) - one might be tempted to assume Tsai shot at a high frame-rate for slow motion. Lee's persevering slowness, his utter commitment to the act, is astonishing. Tsai shot the film himself on a digital camera with his usual frozen takes and distinctive urban framing, and the result is a remarkably pure evocation of the ghettoized pursuit of faith in the modern consumerist environment.

7. In the Fog (Loznitsa, Russia, In Competition) An extreme seriousness towards death characterizes a great deal of the best Russian cinema, and Sergei Loznitsa's In the Fog joins that lineage. This 2-hour opus unwaveringly explores the rocky psychological landscape of men crawling inevitably towards a not-too-distant death, meanwhile caught between the absurd pressures of patriotism and a simple respect for human existence. On the frontiers of the German occupation, Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy) is wrongly accused of treason by his fellow men, and escorted out of his forest home by two Russian soldiers - Burov (Vladislav Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) - to be killed. Happenstance has it that Nazi soldiers interrupt the scene of the punishment, and Burov becomes the wounded, setting the stage for an extended inquiry into the ethical dilemmas of war under a misguided regime. Loznitsa's dialogue-heavy script - set entirely within the confines of the grey and foreboding woods - often stumbles and crawls, and, in its lack of variety, clearly shows the effects of working with limited funds (this is a film that could have benefited greatly from a more palpable sense of surrounding context), but In the Fog is nonetheless the most stirringly spiritual feature of the festival.

8. Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day (Rodrigues, Portugal, Critic's Week) There's not a single horizon line visible in João Pedro Rodrigues' 30-minute short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, and it creates a powerfully destabilizing effect. Paired in a Critic's Week program with Walker, the films share a quiet observation of people walking through an urban space, but here there is an enigmatic undertone - teased out directly late in the film when one girl's Twilight Zone-esque ringtone sounds - of science-fiction and campy genre cinema that allows the images of a swarm of young adults emerging to level ground from within subway stations to suggest a kind of post-apocalyptic zombie invasion. Rodrigues covers all of the action - teenagers throwing up, keeling over inexplicably, walking into city ponds while holding up their cellphones seemingly in search of service, etc. - from vaguely aerial perspectives, bolstering the uncanny effect of the happenings. Is this a metaphor for the somnambulistic state of contemporary techno-youth, or is it just an unconventional vision of the undead traversing a posthuman landscape? The film's only press blurb is of little help: "Tradition says that on June 13th, Saint Anthony’s Day – Lisbon’s patron - lovers must offer small vases of basil with paper carnations and flags with popular quatrains as a token of their love." Morning of Saint Anthony's Day is an inspired oddity.

9. Amour (Haneke, France/Germany/Austria, In Competition)

Michael Haneke's Amour is an unapologetically traditional, by-the-numbers European arthouse film centering on the big themes of mortality, love, grief, family, and humiliation. Which is not to say it's fraudulent or insincere, just that it's precisely the unflinching film one would expect Haneke to make on the topic of an aging couple slowly coming to terms with death. Every formal strategy (detached wide shots, measured cutting, muted colors), narrative jolt (sudden violence, a metaphorical bird entering a French apartment), and casting decision (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert as the central family) is justified and expected, but as a Bergmanesque chamber drama it lacks the magic and complex humane treatment of Bergman. In Amour, death divides a family, and Haneke, amazingly precise as he is, can't put forth an image of postmortal hope that is very convincing, instead preferring to unceasingly pick apart the physical and psychological strain of aging and death. There's an abysmal fear in this film that's disguised as cruel realism.

10. Lawless (Hillcoat, USA, In Competition)

John Hillcoat's Lawless, previously known as The Wettest County in the World and based off the book of the same name, received some undue critical hounding after its premiere, which is strange given that it's a pretty bareknuckled and well-made Western, nothing more and nothing less. Sure, Hillcoat waters down any moral ambiguity that might have existed in the film's awkwardly schmaltzy epilogue, and the sexual landscape leans towards vaguely misogynistic, but I'll take some of these missteps over The Road's simple-minded affectations of importance and superficially "contemplative" mise-en-scène. What's more, Lawless is chock full of thrilling performances by Tom Hardy as a daftly philosophizing brute, Gary Oldman as an indifferent mobster, Guy Pearce as the slimy villain, and Shia LaBoeuf (!) in his best role as a wannabe tough guy. Still, the greatest source of my enthusiasm for the film was the immaculately dusty and contrasty cinematography of Benoît Delhomme, who shoots these Prohibition-Era ghost towns - always wafting with the smoke of whisky and brandy production - in an undeniably conventional yet painterly manner. It's a ruthlessly brutal genre movie that for quite some time maintains an air of Peckinpah-like stoicism.

11. Lawrence Anyways (Dolan, France, Un Certain Regard) Another year of inclusion in Un Certain Regard for Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan represents yet another example of the mainstream hesitance to embrace youthfulness in auteur cinema. Surely, Lawrence Anyways has more personality, and is more expressive and heartfelt, than a number of the Competition entries, and it could have added further diversity to the lineup, especially in light of its focus on social minorities (specifically a transsexual intending to remain in a heterosexual relationship). Dolan's films clearly emerge from a passionate and genuine place, and their energy and messiness is entirely the product of a spontaneous excitement for cinema. Needless to say, Lawrence Anyways is sloppy, overlong, and digressive, but the strange allure of Dolan's work is that he manages to absorb these flaws into the texture of his character's lives, discovering ways to transform self-indulgent slow-motion shots (this one has even more than Heartbeats) into gaudy expressions of a character's veiled insecurity or overblown self-importance. Like Dolan's main character, Lawrence Anyways is split between two urges: that of individuality and personal fetishism (the film's often radical compositional style and its Felliniesque eccentricities, to name two), and that of conformity (its fiery scenes of romantic turmoil featuring a revelatory Suzanne Clément and its eye-rollingly sappy denouement, both of which achieve Hollywood rom-com stature). Upon close inspection of the film's insanity, it's not too difficult to see the structural design on display.

12. The Hunt (Vinterberg, Denmark, In Competition) Thomas Vinterberg's a director with a clear interest in the secrets lurking beneath the complacent surfaces of Danish communities and families, and he's exercised that concern yet again in The Hunt, a finely wrought but quickly forgettable drama about a Kindergarten teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) who is angrily cast off from his circle of friends and colleagues following the random lie of his female student (Annika Wedderkopp). There's a palpable socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure in the film's small town, as well as a solid sense of verisimilitude that must come from Vinterberg's years as a Dogme ascetic, but at the same time there's a sluggishness, a beating-around-the-bush quality to the film's narrative progression, as if Vinterberg has merely set up a troubling scenario to relish in his formidable knack for depicting societal disintegration. Furthermore, The Hunt feels too much like just a good story that was put to film, rather than a story that was expanded upon and expressed vitally through cinematic means. It's a small distinction, but it's the one that prevents Vinterberg from being as distinctive a director as he could be.

13. Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, USA, In Competition/Opening Night)

The Darjeeling Limited suggested a director trying to engage with issues broader than his own tiny universe and Fantastic Mr. Fox showcased an artist's desire to work with a new approach, but Moonrise Kingdom represents a firm step back into the confines of Wes Anderson's own headspace, and at this point the refusal to make artistic evolutions more drastic than the simple changing of a typeface and the move away from anamorphic widescreen is somewhat damning. The film feels decidedly small and inconsequential, failing to achieve the surprise emotional punch or sprawling canvas of films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Furthermore, Anderson puts the burden of the film's momentum in the hands of two unknown child actors (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) who just cannot carry a scene or portray pre-pubescent love in a convincing manner. As usual for Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom is aesthetically irreproachable, shot with an oppressively diorama-like sensitivity and production designed to fantastical perfection, but it puts its eggs in the wrong basket narratively, all while wasting the naturally Andersonian flair of Anderson newcomers Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton. My love for Anderson aside, and despite a hilariously overblown climax that utilizes some throwback color toning, Moonrise Kingdom is a frustratingly flimsy act of regression from this important American filmmaker.

14. Cosmopolis (Cronenberg, USA, In Competition)

The humid theater it screened in was of no help to David Cronenberg's already-stuffy Cosmopolis, the experience of which was akin to being suffocated by the director as he whispered his esoteric contemporary philosophies in your ear. Well, more precisely, Robert Pattinson, who has become the inert mouthpiece for Cronenberg's meandering and impenetrable dialogues on the current state of economics and politics. It's clear enough that this is the story of the 1%, but I'll admit total confusion and ignorance towards the remainder of Cronenberg's intentions, and I'm certainly not prepared or interested in trying to shuffle through the needlessly coded meanings in this never-ending string of talk. Intellectual detachment is all well and good though if Cronenberg were at least able to present his ideas in compelling cinematic fashion (hence the success of Like Someone in Love) rather than resorting to what feels like characters reading manuscripts to each other in a black box theater. The outside world is so closed-off and pared-down in Cosmopolis that it's as if any of Cronenberg's decisions apart from the dialogue (the NYC location, Pattinson's plot-churning desire for a crosstown haircut, the rat as a symbol of the deteriorating dollar) were arrived at arbitrarily. Add to this the flat digital cinematography and Cosmopolis is just a dull, unimaginative slog of a film.

15. The Paperboy (Daniels, USA, In Competition)

Ok, at least Lee Daniels dropped the wacked-out racial hierarchy of the abominable Precious, but in its wake he's yielded a frankly incompetent, meaningless, and misguided tribute to the low-budget homespun camp cinema of the film's 1960's era, and he's traded the revolting view of inner-city blacks in the previous film for stereotypes of southern white trash in this one. Surely, The Paperboy aims for ickiness, but to what end? In a climactic sex scene between recently-released criminal Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) and blonde bombshell Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), Daniels cuts to images of livestock as a punctuation mark, as if deriding his characters' baseless behavior. As much as the film tries to approach a sympathetic note for its depraved characters in the end, for the most part it rides this reprehensive wave throughout, and it presents it all in a psychosexual storm of bad editing and crummy lighting. Zac Efron stumbles away with some surprisingly nuanced acting as a detective's (Matthew McConaughey) younger brother and a man struggling with overwhelming physical desire for an Kidman's older character, but otherwise the cast appears confused, seemingly lost in Daniels' inexact mise-en-scène, unaware of whether or not the cameras are rolling. This is a profoundly awful film.

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.