Winter Brothers (2017) A Film by Hlynur Pálmason

"Shot on desaturated Super 16 mm film in a Danish limestone quarry, Winter Brothers is one of the more aesthetically idiosyncratic directorial debuts in recent memory. Icelandic visual artist turned filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason, who decamped with his crew to the film's inhospitable setting for the duration of the production, approaches his chosen location like Michelangelo Antonioni did with that of Red Desert, transforming a place of grim labor and scant sunshine into a punctiliously designed cinematic space. Where Antonioni painted trees and grass to achieve his pallid industrial dystopia, Pálmason creates his by coating the scenery in calcite, dressing his cast in filthy faded denim jumpers, and partitioning the world into a careful visual system, with each location treated to its own rigorous compositional scheme. If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship."

Full review of this incredibly striking directorial debut, part of the New Directors/New Films series, continues at Slant.

Nymphomaniac: Volume II (2014) A Film by Lars Von Trier

Writing about Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac has had that special effect of making me like it more, which explains why my new In Review Online piece hits the site’s “Gold” designation. In addition, I've posted some tangential thoughts that didn't make their way into my formal review over at Letterboxd.

Nymphomaniac: Volume I (2014) A Film by Lars Von Trier

In Volume 1 of Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac, a battered Charlotte Gainsbourg rattles off her personal history to a benevolent but slightly creepy Stellan Skarsgård in his drab apartment, her recollections staged by the director according his typical lack of shyness towards explicit and extreme behavior. The episode ends abruptly, leaving me curious about Volume II but puzzled as to the significance of the format. I try to explain why in a piece for In Review Online, but inevitably can only get so far, seeing as this is ultimately half a film.

An Evening With Vampyr (Dreyer/1932) and Steven Severin

From the vantage point of a semi-jaded soon-to-be graduate of film school, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr embodies a film-school surrealist's idea of plot: stick a character in a weird scenario, watch as things get progressively strange. But the basis of this (some might say Lynchian) approach is Vampyr, and it was a whole lot more powerful in 1932 with Dreyer's formal innovation than it is in 2012 with half-baked conception and quasi-ironic gimmickry. The film follows, circa intertitles, "young Allan Gray, who immersed himself in the study of evil worship and vampires" and "a dreamer for whom the line between the real and supernatural became blurred," as he enters a remote European village and checks in to a dark, dusty inn. From there, Allan gets involved in the macabre history of the inn, where ages of the undead still stalk the premises and all manners of paranormal happenings occur. The machinations of Vampyr's narrative would hardly meet a literal-minded screenwriter's approval – Allan's barely developed, the spatiotemporal logistics of the world are not accounted for, characters and subplots shapeshift – but Dreyer's real accomplishment here is imaginatively recreating Allan's feverish subjectivity at a time when few films attempted such levels of paranoia and disorientation.

Dreyer wastes no time establishing the off-kilter world, letting Allan be greeted immediately by bizarre occurrences. When approaching the inn, he sees a dark silhouette beside a lake bearing a scythe, but it's not quite a Death figure; it's something less overtly sinister and more down-to-earth, a man capable of enacting physical rather than abstract violence. On his first night, a crippled insomniac enters his bedroom, circling the space slowly before reaching him as if gathering up demonic forces. Leaning over, his eyes gleaming, he offers Allan a book on the vampiric history of the village and admits to his own need to be saved from the imprisoning loop of the undead. Not long after, Allan is scouring the book for secret information about the mysteries of the inn (information that Dreyer relays via shaky intertitles), and clues from the text start to materialize around him. As an audience surrogate, Allan manages to be both overeager and fundamentally detached, lending the film the feel of a waking nightmare in which nothing can be acted upon or stopped.

Vampyr is full of indelible images, and the visions accumulate at a relentless rate: a view of the shadow of a man digging a hole displayed in reverse so that it appears as if he is forcefully burying something; a wide shot of a surface of water where the reflection of a man walking by has no above-ground counterpart; a close-up of the recently bitten innkeeper's daughter turning her head slowly on axis with a chilling grin stuck to her face; an image of Allan's soul casually leaving his body; an aerial shot of his blank face as he's carried away in a coffin as well as the point-of-view shot of the sky, trees, and imposing inn from inside the coffin. Dreyer's standout images are surrounded by unsettling blankness, a peculiar emphasis on walls and doors that suggest claustrophobic dead ends. Indeed, the film's horizontality and flatness is a bold gesture in a genre in which vast, shadowy spaces are the common route for implying dread lurking where it's least expected. Vampyr, however, still summons the atmosphere of the best horror films, a visceral effect that has to do with the indistinguishability between the real and the unreal, facilitated by Dreyer's skill in filming both tangible horror and the horror of the unseen as if there's no difference.



Technically, Vampyr was Dreyer's first sound film despite its scant use of sync sound, but for all intents and purposes, it remains an expression of silent cinema. The first time I saw the film on DVD, it was accompanied by its original monaural score, a rickety orchestral haze by Wolfgang Zeller that sounds as gloriously degraded as the image, but seeing the film again in a theater setting, I was able to witness longtime Siouxsie and the Banshees' bassist and English musician Steven Severin's intense, cathartic live ambient score, perhaps even more fascinating than the original music for the way it digests the impact of Dreyer's film and intensifies its moods from a retrospective angle. Incorporating repeating motifs and movements that emphasize the cyclical nature of the vampire history in the village and Allan's sightings, Severin's music is awash in thick synth-pad drones, reverby chimes, electronic string sections, floor-shaking bass rumbles, and amorphous melodies. Certain movements suggest the dreamy romanticism of a Badalamenti/Lynch composition with its sappy tunefulness emptied out and rendered distant and ghostly (if that sounds like I'm describing what Badalamenti and Lynch are already doing on a standard piece, it goes to show how radically this score recedes into murkiness that it outdoes even their most unconventional scores).

If pressed to choose between the original and Severin's sound, I would probably opt for the latter. Coupled with this eerie, disheveled print from the 1930's, the modern ambient music offers a compelling clash of generations and approaches to the same sense of moody atmospherics. But even beyond that, Severin's music offers a more innate understanding of Dreyer's intention, a more complex and fulfilling synergy with the moods of the film, even outlining some of its tonal and thematic progressions through musical shifts that were not as obvious in the original score. Its throbbing drone sits confidently atop the action, giving shape and depth of feeling to Dreyer's more aimless interludes, and in the rare instance that Severin makes an attempt to sync loosely to what's onscreen, it's startlingly effective, as in a creepy shot when Dreyer's camera pans along a wall of shadows of dancing patrons and Severin conjures up a bygone jitterbug reminiscent of The Shining's music. I seriously hope this soundtrack iteration becomes more widely available at some point in the future, but if it never ventures beyond infrequent appearances in live settings, it's an experience not to be missed.

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.

Melancholia (2011) A Film by Lars Von Trier

Twenty years from now and henceforth, Lars Von Trier will be a fixture in surveys of film history. It’s hard to even say that about some of the greatest directors working today (of which I would not include Von Trier). He perpetually has his finger on the pulse of his viewers and is so gleefully and powerfully able to exploit that. One cognitive approach to cinema is as a tool of manipulation, and, setting aside the problematic ethical implications of that course of thinking for now, Von Trier is a master of manipulation. No director provokes such a physical response (nausea, chills, ecstasy) out of me, and no director gets me so livid one moment and so impressed the next. (I realize that by now this response to Von Trier is a cliche.) Melancholia is certainly no exception. Its opening montage is the most superficial, plastic-looking pastiche of Tarkovsky, Bruegel, and Last Year in Marienbad I've seen, yet it's somehow fascinating. Comprised of shots so slow-mo'd that they might as well be still frames and set to the Wagner symphony that is repeated bombastically throughout the film ("Tristan and Isolde"), the sequence feels emotionless and contrived. When Von Trier cuts away to the cosmos first for an elegant planetary dance and then for a representation of the titular planet bulldozing Earth, I couldn't help but recall Tree of Life, and in doing so, I was struck by the contrast between Malick's graceful, unassertive skill and Von Trier's self-serious, in-your-face heckling.

But it is precisely that heckling that makes Von Trier's work so distinguished. His aesthetic has taken a turn towards the romantic and the sensational since Antichrist that is aggressively singular: all downtrodden faces, gnarled jump cuts, deep, dark earth tones, and oppressively mangy tableau presented in rich high-fidelity widescreen. It's a look that can be both striking and thuddingly overwrought, like a melodramatic prime-time network TV drama. (The rate at which Melancholia vacillates between the two extremes suggests Von Trier rushed through production, spending more time on scenes he felt were of greater importance.) Even sillier is the insistence upon narrative segmentation, with title screens rendered in scratchy, prehistoric text or (as in Melancholia) iconic, Biblical scroll. Here, Von Trier divides his narrative into "I: Justine" and "II: Claire," the names of two sisters played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively. There's the predictable trope of the sisters being psychological binaries, an arthouse fetish that is by now old as dirt and that used to hint at auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni feverishly dissecting the female psyche but now often resembles a cop-out for a director who doesn't feign to understand how a woman's mind operates in the modern world.

Fittingly, Melancholia works best in its second half when Von Trier has all but abandoned introspection and obliterated the sanity of his leads. That's when the film starts aiming for the jugular and stops pretending to isolate its characters in a context that resembles real life. The latter is reserved for the first half, a wedding-from-hell scenario that hearkens - likely deliberately - back to 1998's The Celebration by Von Trier's Dogme colleague Thomas Vinterburg, by all accounts a superior anarchic outburst of familial tensions. Emerging out of the grandiose prelude, Von Trier's wedding narrative is souped up with jittery cameras and radically compressed perspectives to intentionally jar the viewer out of swoony stupor, regardless of the emotional texture of the scenes themselves. Unfortunately, the first scene Von Trier shows is a rocky attempt at comedy wherein Justine and her newlywed Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) shout in vein at their limo driver who can't seem to parallel park. The wide gap between style and content is surely one of Von Trier's many ill-conceived Brechtian devices, but it serves more to discombobulate the viewer's stomach than to actively foreground the chaos to come. Michael will soon be derailed out of the picture as Justine's mental illness takes the fore, and in doing so the rudimentary shaky-cam approach starts to find its footing: Von Trier seeks out the petty smirks and backhanded maneuvers that form a foundation for Justine's depression, and it starts to make sense; the people surrounding her (Charlotte Rampling as mother, John Hurt as father, Stellan Skarsgård as boss, Udo Kier as wedding planner) are all so cartoonishly rude, immature, and clueless that no relatively sane individual could stay with them for long. It's for the better that Michael's gone, and Claire's husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) ought to find his way out too.



Not that it matters, because everyone in Melancholia will be exterminated on and offscreen by the destructive finale of the film. Von Trier has always been at his best when dealing with ugly, extreme emotions (fumbling, of course, with the subtleties of human behavior) and the sci-fi scenario looming heavily over the characters - planet Melancholia is on a collision course with Earth - provides what is perhaps the perfect route to this emotional spectrum. Claire's herculean anxiety in the face of this perceived apocalypse, despite her astronomer husband's unconvincing declarations that Melancholia will miss Earth, is the focus of the second half, while Justine approaches a catatonic bliss at the mere thought of nothingness. Meanwhile, Von Trier orchestrates the growing disparity between the sisters' mental states with giddy stylishness, suspending the four actors - Sutherland, Gainsbourg, Dunst, and Cameron Spurr, who plays Claire's son Leo - in a Strindbergian, Dreyer-esque, existential black comedy complete with crazed horses and roiling layers of fog. In spite of the fact that the relative complexity of Justine's psychology is effectively stomped out by a line of dialogue about how "she knows things," or something, the effect of all this is hypnotizing. Von Trier's reliance on a DIY astronomical gadget concocted by little Leo out of metal wiring brilliantly elevates the tension as the mysterious planet nearly misses and then returns to Earth.

Melancholia is Von Trier's second quasi-autobiographical study of depression in a row, and with its final annihilation of the planet we live on, it stands to be miraculously bleaker than the pitch-dark Antichrist. The only perverse hope to be found is the supposed ecstasy that Justine achieves in putting a period on all things. Perhaps no director could entirely pull off making this small celebration convincingly triumphant, so it's remarkable that Von Trier manages to convey the ounce of euphoric grandiloquence that he does in the final back-and-forth of stirring close-ups, easily the film's best and most emotionally rich scene before it settles for an aggravatingly CG-laden money-shot of the Earth exploding around Justine, Claire, and Leo's triangular final dwelling. This is the most direct and unflinching capitalization on the climate of fear mounting around the allegedly incoming 2012 apocalypse that we've yet seen, and though I'm not ready to clasp hands with the devil the way that Justine does, Melancholia certainly evokes the soul-shattering intensity that such a cosmic event would inspire.

Drive (2011) A Film by Nicholas Winding Refn

It's pretty clear at this point where Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn's strengths and weaknesses lie: his eye for cinematic space and feel for primal (mostly aggressive) emotions has a way of obliterating nearly all nuance from character, theme, and story. Drive, his latest Ryan Gosling vehicle and Hollywood breakthrough, may be the film where that dichotomy is most evident. Like last year's The American (one wonders what might have caused this sudden urge to ape the contemplative action movies of old), Drive inserts a European flair for atmosphere and emotional restraint into a conventionally American conception of genre cinema. But Refn, unlike Corbjin, falls into thinking that stylistic affectations are enough to elevate trite material into something mythic and monumental, and ultimately Drive settles into a half-baked fever dream of flimsy homage - Mann, Wong Kar-Wai, Melville, and McQueen all join the party - to support a desperately Screenwriting 101 narrative of crime, film noir, and romance cliches. Regurgitated before a general American public, Drive's aesthetic signposts may look and feel novel (and I suppose they are when placed aside the majority of contemporary action movies), but they are for the most part merely rehashes of techniques and moods applied more convincingly and fittingly to the sources they sprang from.

The crux around which the film's ambitions can be measured is a montage sequence towards the end of the first act conveying a nameless Driver's (Gosling) infatuation with his doe-eyed neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan). Driver lusts after her apparent innocence, and it's made blindingly clear through Refn's many symmetrical compositions, where any human imbalance could throw off the pictorial and implied thematic unity, that he is the surrogate father of Irene's son, indeed even an ideal missing link to their family trio. (Considering Irene's jailed and "imperfect" husband is Hispanic, Refn seems unaware of the illicit racism inherent in the suggested betterment of this familial entity, but that's another line of thought entirely.) For Gosling, as with every existential anti-hero in the history of American cinema, getting the girl appears to be an instantaneous escape from the imprisoning drudgery of his repetitive role in life, which, in this case, consists of acting as the driver in big-budget movie stunts and manning the occasional getaway car for heists overseen by Driver's exploitative agent Shannon (Bryan Cranston). The montage in question covers Gosling's first leisurely endeavor with Irene and her son, when, given the task of driving her back to her apartment from the auto shop, he takes a diversion to a secret nature spot. Intending to crystallize Driver's single guiding desire and thus establish the backbone of the film's dramatic conflict, Refn instead reduces the scene to a brief, kitschy interlude where the gauzy blend of 80's synth pop and sunny visuals pillages the moment of any human tenderness that might have organically existed had Refn not indulged in the aesthetics of a television commercial. Disastrously, the entire justification for Refn's supposed character study feels tacked-on and superficial from the get-go.



Once Irene's husband does enter the narrative, of course he's tied up in some seedy shit left over from his pre-prison days. Taking it as his perverse strategy for acquiring Irene, Driver offers to assist the husband by providing his escape car in a heist that will help shake off his debts. In doing so, the tension between Driver's existentialist trap and his transcendent desires is erased, since pleasing Irene means doing what he already does. Henceforth, Drive spirals into an ultraviolent revenge yarn wherein Driver's life-or-death stakes rise, making his stoic put-on less and less convincing. Gosling, of course, has a role here that oozes cool, that is so indebted to historically badass representations of introspective action heroes (equal parts Delon, McQueen, and De Niro) that it demands a lot. And while Gosling is able to bring a formidable, enigmatic presence to the first half of the film, those same qualities of wordlessness and spare physicality are exposed later on as the self-conscious poses of a man disturbingly astray from functional morality. The issue is not that Gosling doesn't feel realistic, it's that he just doesn't feel like a human whatsoever and more like a pastiche of various tough-guy, anti-hero tropes (his resignation to a stuntman mask at the finale of the film suggests he has fully submerged his identity). Ironically, the same reasons Clooney was lambasted for The American are the grounds on which critics find ample praise here for Gosling, but the difference is that Clooney functions well as an interior actor, finding subtle ways to externalize his inner turmoil. Gosling, on the other hand, can only stare.

Refn, who has displayed a continued lack of imagination in his dealings with supporting role in the past, struggles to counteract Gosling's inertia with any vibrant, emotive characterizations for him to play off. The offhand glorification of Driver allows little screen time for characters like Irene, Shannon, and the movie producer-cum-mob boss Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks), to whom Driver becomes dangerously entangled following the film's central set piece. Mulligan, her suspected talents impoverished yet again by lack of screen time or one-dimensional writing (see also An Education), becomes little more than an abstract still frame of a Romantic Interest with no agency in the progression of the narrative. Sure, she's a symbol, a cipher more than anything meant to challenge Gosling's passivity, but her obliviousness makes her a moot point, not a tantalizing enigma. Brooks, meanwhile, injects artificial menace into the latter half of the film more by humorlessly cutting throats and slicing wrists than by actually telegraphing any convincing sense of doom in his facial expressions and body movements. His character, like Gosling, is a rudimentary idea of a genre archetype (the no-nonsense, antisocial mobster), and therefore is devoid of multiple layers.



All of this being said, Drive is a sufficiently assured film in several departments aside from narrative and character. I can practically hear the proverbial chorus of supporters stomping their foot down to the chant: "it's a film about atmosphere, not story!" Indeed, on that level Drive is a luscious ode to the nighttime gridlock of LA as a place of pulsating beauty, and one needn't look further than the film's first and finest scene, a calmly paced, compositionally tight getaway sequence following a too-close-for-comfort heist. It is here, in Driver's special habitat, that Refn really locks in to his character, paying close attention to the squeeze of his leather gloves against the clutch and the rapidly shifting eyes from road to rear-view mirror as he waits for the robbers and navigates the dark labyrinth of streets. Refn will frequently fill three-quarters of the frame with blackness and amorphous clusters of streetlights towards which his characters will apprehensively peer, evoking the claustrophobia that accumulates when there are so few options on where to hide a hulking piece of metal. The film almost never missteps in its calculated approach to shooting action in a way that respects silence and space while also ensuring that bursts of violence and noise are especially earth-shaking.

Trouble is, it's already well known that Refn succeeds on this level. He's been an atmospherically adept filmmaker from the start, but he's yet to marry his uncompromising craft with material that it can do justice to. And beyond that, he's yet to find aesthetic heft from within. As much as Refn's hypnotic treatment of driving is well-intentioned and well-delivered, it's pulled from Mann (Collateral in particular), Two-Lane Blacktop, and Walter Hill's The Driver. As pained and passionate as Gosling and Mulligan contrive to look at each other, their gazes - and the souped-up visual treatment of those gazes - is excavated from late Wong Kar-Wai, especially when Refn resorts to operatic slow motion for good measure. And as much as Drive pushes to become the next seminal anti-hero saga, it's constantly drowned underneath the weight of its towering predecessors (Taxi Driver, The Conversation, To Live and Die In LA, etc.) and relegated to the level of pedestrian.

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.

Europa (Zentropa) A Film by Lars Von Trier (1991)

How does a filmmaker induce a state of hypnosis in his audience, partial or otherwise? Ask Lars Von Trier, master of subtlety, and he'll tell you the easiest way is to literally attempt hypnosis via a blurred, repetitious image and a lulling narration. Such is the case with Europa, whose first five minutes are spent in this very manner, with Max Von Sydow's almighty basso advising us within a hesitated countdown to sink deeper into our own bodies, over a rapid traveling shot pointed straight down at a pair of train tracks. The intention is clear: Von Trier wants his audience to watch the fast approaching film (if we're going with the train analogy) under a spell. He does not want the film to be viewed under the consciousness that marks one's waking life, but rather a notch or two in the direction of the subconscious. This move is designed to approximate the somnambulistic quality of his lead character, Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), an American pacifist who comes to postwar Germany in 1945 to take a job with his uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) as a sleeping-car conductor. Kessler tries with all his might to remain neutral to the simmer of political activity in the film, yet he is unknowingly pulled in several directions. He has come to Germany blindly, a stubborn American with scant knowledge regarding the state of the war-torn country he is entering.

Europa is the first film to introduce Von Trier's seemingly unfounded anti-Americanism, and his ploy of hypnosis comes off as a clumsy attempt to let the audience sympathize with Kessler. Given Kessler's intended lack of involvement, it is very likely that Von Trier is indicting Americans for not taking action against the Germans early enough, for allowing the continuation of the Holocaust. The biggest crime, then, is not taking a stance. This neutrality is put to the test however when Kessler finds himself romantically involved with the stone-cold, impersonal Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa), the daughter of Lawrence Hartmann (Udo Kier), the owner of the Zentropa train line which Kessler now works for. With the purpose of verifying his honest and non-judgmental nature, Katharina reveals her connection to the Werewolves, a subversive terrorist group who murders members of the allied forces. Kessler accepts her dissidence, if hesitantly, and marries her. Obviously, as the film progresses and Kessler becomes further entangled in the political plotting of those around him, he is forced into making a decision.

This is the general framework that the film follows, but it's nearly impossible to keep up with the minute-by-minute interactions of characters and new scenarios. Looking at the list of characters in the film, I find myself having trouble remembering half of them. I'd like to think that this is a natural byproduct of Von Trier's intentionally choppy, hazy narrative progression rather than my own viewing deficiency. Since we are experiencing the film through the eyes of Kessler, it is as much of a blur for us as it is for him. Von Trier blatantly intends for this confusion to occur, but whether that enhances the experience of the film is questionable. The only film to spectator relationship that occurs is a manipulator to manipulated one, guided along by Von Sydow's omnipresent narration, hinting at the construed artifice of the story (his voice exists on its own plane, frequently mocking the action or summarizing it objectively and only occasionally breaking through the barrier to speak directly to Kessler) and lending the story a sense of inevitability and fate. Since Von Trier's aspirations clearly amount to inducing a dream-state, a fantasia of a re-envisioned historical moment, this screen relationship is detrimental, for we are not manipulated in our dreams.



It is also troubling that Europa calls attention to itself so often. This has long been one of Von Trier's great weaknesses, his aggravating propensity to add unpleasant, distasteful elements to an otherwise interesting, well-constructed aesthetic. The maladroit attempts at hypnosis aside, Europa - which is shot in black-and-white for its majority - luxuriates in mindless switches to grainy color. Von Trier's application of color never achieves a rhyme or reason aside from his own giddy desire to mix things up. It would be inaccurate to say that black-and-white resembles nightmare while color resembles reality, or vice versa, because neither possibilities are backed up on screen; color is used so infrequently and in such unusual circumstances (one brief close-up, the middle of a scene which was previously in monochrome, not to mention individual frames which include both black-and-white faces and color faces) that it defies logic. The film also wears an influence in German Expressionism, Film Noir, and early silent cinema on its sleeve. A brief, superimposed image of Kessler sprinting across a back-projected clock embodies the classic Film Noir theme of racing against time, the luscious (and rather Hitchcockian) black-and-white imagery and use of looming close-ups recalls Murnau, and Sukowa's icy performance as the quasi-femme fatale seems to resurrect Marlene Dietrich (although, to be sure, it wasn't until 1992 that Dietrich passed).

For all of these cannibalistic elements, I couldn't help but imagine how well Europa would play alongside Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) in a double feature. Both films utilize diverse tactics from film history to ostensibly strengthen their central conceits, both are revisionist, somewhat absurd World War II stories, both deal with a group of radical political activists (the Werewolves and the Basterds), and both involve an explosive finale resulting in the death of a mass of people (in Europa's case, this means the explosion of the train on a bridge, leading to an admittedly breathtaking scene of slow, painful drowning set to Von Sydow's God-like voice). Each work has its own merits as well as its own frustrations. In the end though, Inglourious Basterds would have to screen second, to emphasize how comprehensible, measured, and exciting it is by comparison.

Dogville (2003) A Film by Lars Von Trier

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

Antichrist (2009) A Film by Lars Von Trier

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

Ordet (1955) A Film by Carl Th. Dreyer

After viewing two Dreyer films, I'm starting to understand the necessity of his plain and formalized cinematic language. It's certainly not a style that grabs your attention or demands praise. This puts the Scandinavian director's body of work close to two other understated masters who are thought of as the ultimate examples of truth and humanity in film: Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu. With Vampyr and now Ordet under my belt, I just haven't been able to find an affinity with the director's films, something that I achieved instantly upon viewing only one Bresson and Ozu film respectively.

Ordet is the most blatant study of religious faith ever recorded on film. It tells the story of the Borgen's, a Danish family living on a farm who inevitably build towards a spiritual crisis. Each character undergoes a significant transformation in the film: the granddad Morten Borgen begins as a skeptic of prayer and ends as an embracer of the "warmth of life"; the son Johannes believes for a great part of the film that he is the reincarnated Christ and ends freed from his nearly insane behaviors; the son Mikkel begins as an agnostic and ends with perhaps the strongest faith; Anders Borgen clings to the wish of obtaining the tailor's daughter and eventually is fulfilled, and the tailor has an organized fundamentalist belief which he reverses considerably, finally allowing his daughter to marry Anders. These metamorphoses are the foundations of the truly miraculous climax that ensues when the daughter Inger, wife of Mikkel, is rebounding from intense labor.

Although Ordet's ending is magnanimous in its optimistic, faith-supporting religious appeal, I found it to be unrealistic. It was rewarding and moving from a plot standpoint, but it is seen better as a allegory on the excesses of faith than as a palpable occurrence. Nonetheless the film is a complex, sophisticated work of art in light of its incredibly dry but focused vision. Dreyer strips his locations down to the bare minimum, revealing mainly white walls and mundane portraits on the walls (which curiously always seem to mirror the people who own them). He avoids music and manipulative cutting, resulting in hopelessly austere camerawork that usually involves one shot per scene. The visual style that I find has existed in both Vampyr and Ordet is mainly mid-level compositions that continually pan around the room to observe the action. I find myself wishing Dreyer would frame more delicately. I also believe that Bergman's The Seventh Seal was a far more interesting religious exploration, with the use of a pessimistic mood and beautiful cinematography. However, one can't deny Dreyer's place in the maturation of film as an art.