Drift (2017) A Film by Helena Wittmann

"The ocean has provided fertile territory for visual experimentation in recent years in a number of non-narrative art-house films, from Mauro Herce's hallucinatory Dead Slow Ahead to Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's frantic Leviathan. Helena Wittmann's Drift can now be added to this micro-genre, which isn't so much nascent as inextricably connected to an ancient tradition of storytelling based around the unknowable mystery of the sea. Two examples of this narrative legacy get cited early on in the film when its nameless female protagonists share thoughts at a beachfront café somewhere in wintry Germany prior to their parting from one another after a long weekend. One (Theresa George), who will soon embark on a solo expedition across the Atlantic, paraphrases a Papua New Guinea creation myth regarding a primeval crocodile and the warrior who slays it. The other (Josefina Gill), who plans to return to her native Argentina, responds by mentioning the legend of Nahuel Huapi, a Patagonian riff on the Loch Ness monster."

Full review of this New Directors/New Films entry continues at Slant.

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.

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016) A Film by Juho Kuosmanen

"With its 16mm black-and-white cinematography and lack of musical score, however, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki reaches further back into history for its primary cinematic touchstones, specifically to the grayscale neorealism of Ermanno Olmi and the Czech New Wave films, works which unhurriedly examined the plights of working-class everymen jostled around by forces of class and economics. It's noted often in the dialogue that Mäki's humble background is as a baker, and Elis repeatedly reminds him of the pitiful 'backwoods' to which he will return if he fails to live up to the hype. Alas, Kuosmanen places his sympathies squarely with the rube who's hopelessly out of place in a globalized market."

Review continues at Slant Magazine.

Zurich Film Festival

"It's generally agreed upon that one should allow themselves a few hours of decompression and acclimation when first landing in a faraway city, but as I drowsily touched down for the 12th annual Zurich Film Festival after an arduous 10-hour flight, time was not on my side, so I rushed instead to a film that captures something ineffable about the frazzled traveler's mindset. Gabe Klinger's Porto, my first taste of the festival at an evening showing, is about bemusedly roaming in half-light through a foreign city while periodically drifting in and out of recollections of a potent recent relationship gone sour."

I attended the Zurich Film Festival and covered it across two dispatches for the House Next Door.

Dispatch #1: On Porto, La Reconquista, Lady Macbeth, and Two Lottery Tickets
Dispatch #2: On Vanatoare, Europe, She Loves, Einfach Leben, Sketches of Lou, The Eremites, Misericorde, El Invierno

Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy

"Musical leitmotifs play a central role in Wim Wenders's 'Road Trilogy,' acting as both mood-setters and structural backbones. Nowhere is this more evident than in Alice in the Cities, which contains in one track, an arpeggiated acoustic guitar and synthesizer loop banged out in an afternoon by German krautrock group Can, the entire methodology and temperament of what would become a philosophically linked series of films. In musical-theory terms, the piece drones on an Aeolian modal chord and never settles on the root, creating a suspended sense of irresolution and uncertainty that aptly sets the stage for the 1974 film's meandering dramatic trajectory, as well as its ultimate view of life as a series of chance encounters without a clear end point." Full review of the new Criterion blu-ray here.

Spies (1928) A Film by Fritz Lang

"Horizon lines and vanishing points can sometimes be about as rare to come by in Fritz Lang's cinema as tracking shots are in Yasujirō Ozu's. In 1928's Spies, because of the geometric enclosures of the sets and the frequently downward-facing scan of Lang's camera, the background of the 4:3 frame is nearly always a wall, the ground, or a cluster of set elements that foreclose the margins of the characters' space. As in the opening shot, which shows a padlock up close before two ominous gloved hands enter the frame to pry at the lock. Lang first conceives of a restricting visual field and then confines human figures within it—all the better to hint at the invisible forces that govern individual lives." Continued at Slant.

Phoenix (2014) A Film by Christian Petzold

In Christian Petzold’s Holocaust drama Phoenix, dignity is a question of positioning within the expansive 2:35:1 cinema frame. Nelly (Nina Hoss), the film’s heroine, a concentration camp survivor requiring facial reconstruction surgery to reintegrate into the bombed-out wasteland of postwar Europe, is more or less kept in the center of Petzold’s compositions throughout, even when she’s on the move. When we meet her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), who may or may not have rat her out to the Nazis and who jumps at the opportunity for an inheritance when he finds this seeming doppelganger of his presumed-dead wife at a Berlin nightclub where he’s working, he’s charging left and right, the camera unable to neatly contain the movements of his brawny frame. This being a movie by Christian Petzold, who directs as if trying to curry all attention away from what the camera’s doing, such pictorial schemas don’t come right out and announce their presence. They’re ingrained in the thematics of the story to such a degree that there’s nothing to show off.

Nelly’s centrality in Petzold’s compositions is vital. Phoenix is set in a historical context in which consciousness of the death-shrouded past is paradoxically the key to progressing into the future. In her suicide letter, Nelly’s friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) puts this dynamic in existential terms, stating that her heart is with the dead and that she can’t go on with the living. Her point is that she’d rather die than live in a compromised world where her fellow Germans can’t acknowledge recent traumas, preferring instead to “live” in denial. Nelly lacks this firm stance, but her character arc is one of gradual realization, of a shifting of priorities from a longing to reclaim her pre-war comforts to an understanding that such recuperations can only be illusory after being subject to dehumanizing treatment.



Thus, Phoenix’s script is fundamentally didactic; at its core is a lecture on the dangers of historical repression. What’s remarkable about the film, though, is the ways in which it subsumes its point-making into visual drama, a subtly evolving interplay between appearances and motivations. After receiving her facial surgery, Nelly finds herself in a series of situations in which keeping up a stoic front is imperative—first as a matter of survival, then of submission, and finally of deception. It’s only in the bulldozer of a closing scene that she is able to emerge from beneath an artificial shell and outwardly express a personal objective.

And yet, because of Hoss’ totally psychologically invested performance, the ripples of internal transformation become apparent, if only through barely discernible fluctuations in her facial muscles. When Johnny, trying to mold this woman into the seamless image of his wife (which, of course, means Nelly herself), asks her to mimic her own penmanship, he’s taken aback by the exactitude. Nelly, sensing he might arrive at an acknowledgment of her identity, lets out a hint of smile, though it lasts less than a second before her face reverts back to its default blankness. The patient cutting of Petzold and his editor Bettina Böhler—everything’s boiled down to the Nelly’s reactive energy, not necessarily the patterns in the dialogue—is sensitive to these modest eruptions of feeling across largely fixed surfaces, and the sparseness of the compositions, with Hoss’ face looming large amongst nondescript negative space, encourages us to see them too.



The closest Phoenix gets to expository instructions on how to read its narrative is a scene when Nelly’s friend verbally chides her for attempting to reunite with her husband, who she knows betrayed her. A series of photographs she shows to Nelly corroborates this certainty, and from this point Nelly, who’s already advanced beyond the bandaged blank slate of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face, undergoes a shift from the Madeleine of Vertigo to Fassbinder’s Maria Braun, or from a woman complicit in her own distortion at the will of a man to a woman cleverly exploiting those masculine perversions to meet her own ends. Just before a key scene when Nelly interrogates Johnny on the disintegration of his relationship with his “wife”—a metaphysical moment staged on a fast-moving bicycle, with both characters facing forward as the world blurs behind them—Nelly is seen wearing a black sunhat and a netted veil, the iconic get-up of Fassbinder’s classic postwar heroine. Without calling obvious attention to the references (the emergence of the “new” Nelly out of darkness in Johnny’s apartment, suggesting Hitchcock’s sensational reveal, being the nearest to a direct quotation), Petzold has shuttled Hoss’ malleable figure through a series of feminine representations from the history of postwar art cinema, each one more human, more whole, and with more agency than the last.

Barbara and Beats Being Dead, Petzold’s last two films, withheld expression—performative as well as aesthetic—to the point of flatlining-sine-wave blankness. For me at least (though I do intend to rewatch them), they felt locked within their character’s environmentally motivated restraint, unwilling to open a door for the viewer while willingly cultivating a stuffy room. Phoenix is more seductive than either film, beginning with a ludicrous pulp plot and only then tunneling into behavioral nuance. Stefan Will’s uncluttered upright bass and piano score establishes the ambiance of a detective film, while Hans Fromm’s voluptuous cinematography—juxtaposing the shadowy alleyways of dilapidated Berlin against the garish neon of the night clubs in the American sector, then introducing the olive greens and morning dew of the German countryside—extends this aura. To watch Phoenix is to be put in the position of an investigator analyzing the psychological import of the most microscopic of gestures. Historical insight and cinematic sophistication, coexisting in a tight bind that puts neither on a platform, rarely synchronize with such tremendous grace.

It's All So Quiet (2014) A Film by Nanouk Leopold

"Obviously striving for 'elemental,' It's All So Quiet winds up torpid and vacuous, yet another willfully emptied-out exercise in festival-friendly austere naturalism. Director Nanouk Leopold inherits a rigid aesthetic schema and sticks to it wholesale: hard, jarring cuts from silence to noise and stasis to action; a dependence on overcast natural light; long handheld takes of physical labor; prolonged studies of blank expressions; the occasional jump cut. All these tics belong to an affected style forever in thrall to grave 'realism,' but which in fact only betray here a failure to interrogate the inner logic of the drama." More here.

Diplomacy (2014) A Film by Volker Schlöndorff

"Most of Diplomacy is a two-handed chamber drama restricted to a pressurized hotel suite leased by the German occupation, a half-lit royal office that plays host to hours of zigzagging polemics between Nazi commander Dietrich von Cholitz (Niels Arestrup) and Swedish pacifist Raoul Nordling (Andre Dussollier)...Relying on newsreels to ground its liberally fictionalized back and forth in historical record, even at one point draining its staged footage of color for a brief moment of trickery to further visually meld the reality and its recreation, Diplomacy isn't really fooling anyone into feeling doom-laden suspense (Paris, after all, is still standing), but the principal performers sell the momentousness of the drama." Full review of Schlöndorff's Spielbergian history lesson up now at Slant.

Passion (2013) A Film by Brian De Palma

I loved Brian De Palma's new film Passion with, well, a passion. Trafficking in the deliberately labyrinthine plot mechanics and metatextual layers of films like Mulholland Drive and Keyhole, with an additional jolt of De Palma's own absurdist humor, the movie's right up my alley, or at least one of my alleys. I tried to unravel some of its complexity for In Review Online here.

The Deathmaker

I've written a piece for Mubi.com on the 1995 German film The Deathmaker, which dives into the extensive single-room interrogation of Fritz Haarmann, the serial killer first dramatized in 1931 by Fritz Lang with M. The film's directed by Romuald Karmakar, a filmmaker that too few cinephiles are familiar with. Head on over to The Notebook to hear about why I find this spatially limited film so damn compelling.

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.

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.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) A Film by Tomas Alfredson

Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy provides visual evidence of the significant distance between the impulses of literature and cinema. The tension between the two mediums tugs at every frame. There is Alfredson's conflicted relationship with the source material, John le Carré's original novel, the sense of the film paying lip service to the vertiginous strands of plot. Meanwhile, there is an intuitive feel for mood, atmosphere, mise-en-scene, and the various other elements that construct the cinematic world, elements that are somewhat jeopardized, or at least made secondary, when the film indulges a necessary urge to unspool plot. Alfredson has shown a curious propensity for downplaying exposition, for making narrative details and back-stories feel democratically unimportant. In Let the Right One In, this resulted in an intriguingly incomplete sense of the foundation for the characters' histories that effectively complimented the film's spare plot. In a story with such thickness of exposition as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, however this low-key approach to dramatic detail is quickly distancing, deliberately failing to provide a base of comprehension as the enveloping mood overwhelms the specific words, behaviors, and conflicts marking the larger narrative design.

And yet, there's so much conviction in the film's construction - its acting, cinematography, blocking, production design, costumes, etc. - that the film remains entirely riveting. Alfredson has so thoroughly sunken into the gritty, unforgiving, desaturated Cold War milieu that his film exudes a sense of being lived in, as if it's a pre-existing artifact rather than something that was built from scratch to approximate a bygone time. Smoke and dust fill the air, splashes of light poke through windows, seemingly important papers and other bric-a-brac cover nearly every square inch of table-top, and faded, garish patterned wallpapers peel slowly off walls. Through these decrepit spaces weathered men in similarly discolored sports jackets brood silently or merely pass by, their perpetual exasperation leaving a bitter taste in the air. Someone in a tight knit circle of British intelligence officials has revealed vital information to a Soviet spy who's now likely running amok with it. Not one man will budge with any revealing news, so semi-retired espionage expert George Smiley (Gary Oldman, who paradoxically never smiles throughout the film) is elected to take the place of the recently resigned Control (John Hurt), who clearly felt significant pressure from all of his somber right-hand men (Toby Jones, Mark Strong, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch).



Tinker, Tailor becomes centered on Oldman, a ruthless, uncompromising, and melancholy spy master whose hardened exterior Alfredson refuses to penetrate. Thus, the film's design - insistently paced, nearly inscrutable, and never stopping to check for audience comprehension - mirrors the rate at which and precision with which Smiley ponders his next move. A great deal of the film's major plot progressions are telegraphed not with dialogue but only with Smiley's gestures and sneaking eye movements (for the most part drooped in shadows). When the men do speak, often in long shot or peeped through telephoto lenses, they do so in espionage jargon (Operation Witchcraft comes up frequently), meaning that their political sleights of hand are obscured thickly by code words. As clues accumulate and suspicious men start to behave less and less suspiciously, one suspects the cool disorientation to be precisely Alfredson's point. It is so often in such ambiguous political affairs that the comparatively morally pure outsiders cannot pass judgment on the events because of sheer lack of insider knowledge. As a result, cruel, unfaithful, and insular men are the movers and shakers of a cycle of events that leave innocent people dead.

Alfredson tracks this cycle of events with clinical rigor; if the characters he's portraying are caught in an existential black hole with no escape (Tom Hardy's character is the best example, not known to the audience at first but quickly yanked from reclusion into the narrative), the director himself presents his material with the straightforward duty of an existential anti-hero. Rarely is his camera devoid of modest acrobatics, tracking around rooms slowly and unassumingly, gracefully shifting focus, giving visual attention to every member in a room, equally unsure of who to trust. With the help of the brilliant interior lighting by DP Hoyte Van Hoytema (definitely the cinematographer's finest moment since Let the Right One In) wherein light falls with seemingly malign intent and every lamp and overhead appears to cover only a one-foot radius (the inability to see clearly - what with the smoke and darkness - is often played into the narrative), the film's backhanded maneuvers are utterly enthralling to behold. It is quite simply the best looking film of the year, lovingly designed to recreate its setting and shot with an Ozu's eye for symmetry and indoor details. The film only grows more confusing as it presses on, but the mood of enveloping doom and sadness surrounding Oldman's compulsive workman expands. Rarely has being out of the loop felt so engaging.

Fitzcarraldo (1982) A Film by Werner Herzog

By virtue of its tumultuous production, Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo has managed to give credence to the outlandish critical notion that the logistical aspects of a film's making should be weighed into a final judgment on the actual quality of the work. In other words, if blood was spilled to produce a series of images on celluloid then that has a bearing on the integrity of the finished product. I don't hesitate to call this absurd, unfair, and utterly wrong. Declaring Herzog's lumbering creation one of the greatest in the medium on that grounds that it took years to film, survived several episodes of recasting and reshooting, incorporated the muscle power of real Amazonian jungle natives, and featured the literal hauling of a massive steamship over a mountain does a major disservice to the actual work. There's a reason these tales of behind-the-scenes tomfoolery are normally shielded from the general public; they shouldn't cloud the end result, what's actually onscreen. It speaks of a culture more infatuated with hype, sensationalism, and myth than it is concerned with art. No matter how stunning and revelatory Les Blank's documentary on the film's production (Burden of Dreams, 1982) might be, I can't help but think it does nothing but continue to feed the wild legend of Herzog and suffocate the oeuvre of Herzog.

It's curious, then, how Herzog has to some extent built his career around myth and labor and offscreen sportsmanship, so much so that these seemingly trivial aspects feel consciously intertwined with the work itself. In Fitzcarraldo, for instance, it's impossible not to liken its central premise of a German opera-loving entrepreneur, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), devising the scheme to exploit a deserted area of the jungle for its rubber in hopes of bringing an opera house to an otherwise remote, impractical landscape with the similarly far-reaching scheme of Herzog, to painstakingly document this man and join him in his mission in the process. He's taking the incentive to support, finance, and realize this lofty dream, completing and even exaggerating the story of the real Irish entrepreneur the film is based on. Thus, the physical process of the plan often seems the point. It's a challenging scenario in which the film's existence depends entirely on Herzog's own capacity to finish what he's started, to defeat every real live obstacle that comes in his way. When the steamship is finally tugged over the mountain in the film's signature sequence - a feat of manpower only necessary to shortcut the path to the crew's destination and avoid a treacherous stretch of rapids - the emphasis is squarely on the physicality of it all: the heavy turning of the makeshift wooden levers, the slow crawl of the steamship, the sweat brimming off Fitzgerald's (aka Herzog's) forehead in anticipation, and the exhausted moaning of the army of natives.

As a result, this is an extremely bizarre adventure movie, less a delicate refinement of cinematic craft than it is a messy, manly sprawl towards the end result. Or, to put it simply, an experience more like hiking than movie-going. Herzog's direction is at its most scattershot and unrefined, at times displaying little to no evidence of storytelling efficiency, staging skill, or spatial awareness. And I don't necessarily mean this as a criticism, for the film's unabashed "wildness" - one of its greatest virtues - is, intentional or not, a suitable counterpart for its increasingly out-of-control protagonist, a pompous, insensitive hack clearly not cut out for unregulated exploration and leadership. Furthermore, exposition and narrative-building prove to be the film's poison in the nearly hour-long introduction to Fitzcarraldo, a meandering chunk of scenes detailing Fitzgerald's (known to the Peruvian natives as Fitzcarraldo) passionate attempts to acquire funding for his journey. The slew of legal hands he encounters do little more than chuckle at him, what with his unkempt blond coiffure and resume of dashed hopes (a trans-Andes train line already failed), so eventually he turns to his devoted wife Molly (Claudia Cardinale) for the money. The best scene amidst all of this endless, ponderous narrative padding is a moment when Fitzgerald and his wife flirt and makeout on a hammock and Herzog chooses to turn his camera towards a baby leopard in the room instead, admiring its wide-eyed, naive awe at the display.



This is a significant moment because it points towards Herzog's fundamental forte as a filmmaker, his spark in the face of all that is wild, natural, and largely undirectable. That the film distinctly picks up steam (pun intended) as it distances itself farther from the comfort of civilization and closer to the savagery of the jungle natives is a ramification of Herzog's own trailblazing persona, the positive relationship between his determination and creativity and new, unfamiliar surroundings. Fitzcarraldo's most moving sentiments deal with the futile grasping onto familiarity and routine even as things grow increasingly alien, witnessed in Fitzgerald's defensive blasting of a Caruso opera from his phonograph in hopes of hushing the invisible tribe enveloping the river, or his regular attempts to interpret the inexplicable actions of the natives through lousy, imprecise translations. In several scenes, Herzog emphasizes the uneasy exoticism of the jungle tribe by eschewing subtitles. They simply swarm the crew, bickering in a distinctive native tongue, their bow and arrows slung as always on their backs, and the uncertainty and tension is palpable.

As expected, Fitzgerald's grand scheme blows up in his face in the end as the natives fulfill their secret plan to steer the ship into the heart of the rapids, which will supposedly rid them of evil spirits. The unpredictability and externality of this force is both emblematic of the lawlessness of nature and is a byproduct of Fitzgerald's flawed ambition. Herzog is quick to point out how nature dwarfs Man, exposing such petty obsessions as a lucrative jungle opera house as the huge absurdity that it is. If he had had the gall to kill off his foolishly idealistic crew right in the climactic moment, as the ship goes careening off the rocks in one of the film's most riveting sequences, a sudden thud of hammer-to-the-head determinism, then the savagery of his satire may have hit even harder. But maybe the dumb celebratory final sequence - in which Kinski smokes the biggest cigar ever made - is a more fitting conclusion, a potent sign that Herzog realizes his own hypocrisies. Killing Fitzgerald would have meant killing himself, cutting short a career that would continue to explore more provocatively than any other filmmaker the links between ambition, art, and failure.

Paris, Texas (1984) A Film by Wim Wenders

With Paris, Texas, German-born director Wim Wenders shows a knack for capturing the essence of America's heartland with more grit, honesty, and grace than most Americans can. The film, whose initial inspiration was Sam Shepard's collection of literary tidbits, Motel Chronicles, was developed in the midst of a three-month long trip to the West that Wenders took alone, photographically documenting his travels, and it distills a career-long fascination that the director has had with America. Right from its first images of a solitary figure in a baseball cap and black suit plastered against a cartoonishly vibrant desert landscape, it becomes evident that Wenders' rendering is separate from a mere pastiche of the previous practitioners of the Western - Ford, Leone, Peckinpah, Mann, Hawks. In fact, Wenders' sensibility seems to come out of left field, cultivated in an environment removed from such cultural benchmarks, the vision of an outsider looking in and ecstatically committing his sensations to the screen. The shots are moving, but they might as well be continuations of the photographic diary he kept prior to the filming. This sheer visual rapture partly accounts for the seemingly directionless, ambling mood of the opening thirty minutes, which delight in the aesthetic pleasures of the Western landscape and its archetypal qualities more than they advance any narrative.

The other reason for this dramatic stasis comes from the fact that the central character Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), the figure seen somnambulistically marching through the terrain, is about as blank and inexpressive as Wenders' narrative. He walks and walks and stares off into the distance with majestic, mournful eyes, but his reason for doing so is left unclear. Even when his middle-class, billboard-constructing brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) hears of his whereabouts and jumps at the opportunity to scoop him up, for it seems Travis has been MIA for four years, no words, no explanations, no expressions, are delivered. For whatever reason, Travis has made the decision to stop speaking, and given his near amnesiac state, it seems it was a decision made long ago. Details concerning Travis' past life and human acquaintances are collected gradually through context and incident: his brother is a well-to-do Los Angeles local with a French wife named Anne (Aurore Clément) and the couple takes care of Travis' only son Hunter (Hunter Carson, real son of L.M Kit Carson, who adapted the screenplay); he once had a lovely wife named Jane (Natassja Kinski), but unexplained symptoms procured their splitting apart; at an unexpected point in time, he escaped the reality he carved out for himself, leaving his family to believe him dead. But there's no guaranteeing Travis' presence in America is indicative of any kind of desire to reacquaint himself. Indeed, it is possible he wandered over the Mexican border unknowingly, and any suspected desire is negated when he first stoically escapes his brother's hospitality, bursting headlong back into the vast, empty desert.

Wenders niftily builds a rhythm and tone around blocks of silence, communication sent one way only for the receiving end to discredit or ignore, much like the dilapidated milieu he portrays is littered with weathered signs pointing vainly out into the great nothingness of the West. Walt speaks, Travis stares. Eventually, Travis is brought back with Walt to his home in Los Angeles, where Anne speaks and Travis stares. At one point, he finally begins speaking, muttering the words "Paris, Texas" and following it by showing Walt a photo of a vacant lot where he explains his parents likely planted the seed that began his life. When Travis' finally uses words, his communication is stunted and driven by his own internal logic; he's kind and tender, but not the best listener. Stanton's intense, iconic portrayal though makes it well known that something is eating away at Travis, a dogged determination to right his wrongs, to stitch together the family that lost its way. A deeply nostalgic scene when Travis, Walt, Anne, and Hunter sit down to view an assemblage of old Super-8 home footage confirms a retrospective warmth and comfort at the heart of Travis' life that no longer exists, but which shows a possibility of rejuvenating when the estranged father and son meet eyes longingly for an extended period of time, and soon after when they waltz down the street after Hunter's school day, imitating mannerisms from either side (one of those singular moments of cutesy compromise that often manifests itself once or twice in a Wenders movie).



Paris, Texas eventually levels out to become an exceptionally straightforward story, that of a father and son searching for a mother, so simple and pure in its impact that it takes pictorial and geographical eyes as sharp as Wenders and cinematographer Robby Müller to capture in such an arresting manner. Travis and little Hunter travel from the hills of LA to the scrambling metropolis of San Bernadino on the strength of Anne's knowledge that Jane takes a monthly trip to the bank to add funds to an account under Hunter's name. Each locale has a specific visual stamp: the organic, luminous panoramas in the open desert, the neon and black juxtaposition of Walt and Anne's LA-overlook, and the crisp, almost hygienic compositions in the heart of San Bernadino, some of which recall Godard's treatment of the urban metropolis in Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

Wenders' potent visual intuition transforms a laconic story with sentimental undertones into a dense, prolonged (a mammoth running time of two and a half hours that goes by in a jiffy), mythic statement on the essence of the American family, a loving and optimistic but ultimately misshapen ideal. To emphasize this, Wenders has the family periodically speaking through barriers, like the walkie talkies and tape recorders that Travis and Hunter communicate with, first as playful detective devices and then as electronic mediators to deliver sad, intimate monologues, or the one-way mirror that separates Travis and Jane once he finally tracks her down working at a phone chat sex club. The latter, a probing session of long-winded dialogue courtesy of Sam Shepard, beautifully illuminates the film's gentle postmodernist undertow, with Travis' rectangular, cinematic view of Jane in the adjacent room recalling Hunter's earlier comment that the image of Jane in the home video is not his mother, but rather his mother in a movie. With Wenders calling attention to both the artifice of cinema and the fundamentally alienated nature of the central family, it's remarkable that it all manages to be so heart-wrenching anyway, and much of it is owed to Wenders nuanced visual presentation, which in one instance naturally superimposes through the one-way window the faces of Travis and Jane, hammering home their physical proximity while reminding us that it doesn't change their inability to connect.

In the end, Paris, Texas is really a film whose power derives from much more than just its director. It is a genuinely collaborative effort that features effective showings all across the board: the pristine lensing of Robby Müller (who later did similarly sumptuous landscape work with Jim Jarmusch), Sam Shepard's poetic, refined dialogue, which would stand on its own wonderfully, and Ry Cooder's inseparable slide guitar score, jangling its way through the drama like a desert wind. Of course, at the center of it all is Harry Dean Stanton's deeply expressive mug, generating emotion out of every wrinkle. His character is an unbelievably moving evocation of a self in peril, beckoned by the sensual pleasures of life but determined to remedy the people around him at his own expense, a notion constantly visualized through the breathtaking barrenness of the Western landscape, beautiful and limitless but always foreboding, teasing, and powerful enough to swallow up a man. Travis' metamorphoses is both complete and incomplete when in the final shot we see him retreating back into the darkness of the open road, connecting an ourobouric loop of dissolution and reconciliation.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009) A Film by Werner Herzog

Of the two loosely connected films that comprise an unintentional diptych of the American law system, Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is unquestionably the proverbial head-scratcher, a bizarre, inchoate collection of non-sequiturs resembling the more erratic projects of David Lynch, who serves as executive producer. The film was decades in the making for Herzog and fellow screenwriter Herbert Golder, who first concocted the script in the 1970's but were unable to find sufficient funding for the production until recently when Lynch showed an interest with his Absurda Productions. Based loosely on the true story of a grad student who killed his mother with a sword after become maniacally invested in his production of the Greek tragedy Electra, by Sophocles, in which he played the lead character Orestes whose actions he imitated, it is indicative of the kind of meta-textual tale Lynch would be sympathetic toward. I asked Herb Golder about the type of creative relationship that Herzog and Lynch shared during the making of the film, and although he insists that Lynch never once set foot on the set, I take his statement that the finished product is completely of Herzog's sensibility alone with a grain of salt. With distinctly Lynchian line delivery, a story whose blurring of reality and fiction is largely INLAND EMPIRE-esque, and the inscrutably random appearance of a midget (Verne Troyer), My Son often times feels like Herzog's sloppy thank you note to Lynch.

This is not to say however that Herzog's footprint is invisible, because after all, we're talking about a director who, above all others, can't help but kick around in the mud of his own work. The central character is a testament to this fact, another peg in a long line of "mad men" that Herzog likes to capture on screen, people who push themselves radically outside of society. Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) is presumably in his late twenties or early thirties but still lives with his eccentric mother (Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie) in a San Diego suburb, much to the dismay of his curiously complicit fiancé (Chloë Sevigny). His life is superficially hygienic, with a ready-made dinner available for him every night and a home that is garnished by phony implications of the happy, good life - a bright pink exterior, waltzing flamingos, and an ostentatious garden. Yet this showiness is also slightly off-kilter and disturbing, hinting at the unsteady waters of Brad's own schizophrenic persona. The film's first scene is a crude variation on the Twin Peaks opening, with two happy-go-lucky detectives (Willem Dafoe and Michael Peña) cruising through town right before receiving a call about an unwieldy murder, and from here the film excavates the enigma that is Brad via flashbacks that are elicited by Detective Hank Havenhurst's interviews with Brad's theater director (Udo Kier) and Sevigny's character.

Beneath the guise of bizarreness, there is a standard police procedural, and Herzog seems to want this conventionality only to tweak it with the hypnotic quality of his performers. Despite the fact that Brad is the film's singular oddball, Shannon is very much the actor who seems to embrace the freest manner of performance with wacked-out lines that come entirely out of the blue ("Some people act a role, others play a part!"; "God is here! But I don't need him anymore!"). The seemingly sane citizens are by contrast purely artificial, stilted creations, incapable of focusing on anything outside the crime scene filling up the picturesque street. It is fitting then that the majority of the film's laughs are evoked by Brad, the strange figure who holes himself up in his home with two "hostages" and shouts outlandish orders at the police officials barricading the exterior. In a one-off comment on the somnambulance of the task force, Brad wanders right by Dafoe's investigator when the case is first cracked open, muttering something about his "Razzle Dazzle" coffee cup while Dafoe apathetically ignores him. This comic absurdism does not weigh into the story as much as it should though, for Herzog's exploration of the crazed mind at the center of My Son is for the most part sincere, and with its pseudo-mystical underpinnings, it is hugely unconvincing and leads nowhere.



One element that makes the film uniquely Herzogian is its impulsive globetrotting. For a while My Son appears to be locked in to one locale, but as flashbacks grow increasingly tenuous and inexplicable, we see Brad in the misty mountains and tumbling rivers of Peru and the destitute streets of China. In Peru, he is with a disparate pack of marijuana-smoking free-spirits previously unidentified within the present-day of the story who lounge around on tall rocks and stare at the passionate waters, as alive with elemental energy as the rapid fog in Heart of Glass. Here he is a lone rider, supposedly unaware of the presence of others around him as he speaks nonsensical spiritual babble. One of the film's best images occurs in Peru, which I sense is a lift from somewhere else in his oeuvre, with the camera tracking around Brad in the middle of imposing mountains as he stares into the lens, his voice repeating on the soundtrack: "why is the whole world staring at me?". The brief China segment shows up almost incidentally, giving rise to a documentary quality. Herzog's crude digital footage captures underprivileged men and women as Brad becomes one of them, perusing the crowd conspicuously. These episodes are basically inconsequential in the context of Brad's mental disillusionment, but they have something to do with his increasing interest in an ill-defined New Age Spiritualism that leads him to call himself Farouk and the Greek tragedy he is acting in.

Herzog is mostly screwing around in My Son, letting his thoughts manifest themselves on screen with no inhibition. It's problematic, because the story of Brad McCullum - a matricidal wack-job succumbing to the customs of an ordinary life yet also repelling against them wildly - is potentially intriguing. As it is, the film is awkward and unfocused, drifting around at such a rate that it tends to forget elements that should be essential to its core, such as the Greek tragedy propelling Brad's insanity, or the indifferent, corrupt police force that could have been put to great use. At Herzog's best, he can conjure up transcendent escapism, but his worst work (in which I think My Son must be included, although this is only from my peripheral perspective, having seen it once in a screening environment that was less than ideal) tends to feature a director who is under the impression that he can get by simply with the clout of his own spontaneous genius.