Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) A Film by David Lynch

Following the widespread success of the television series Twin Peaks, the powers that be thought it necessary to tack on an obligatory prequel film, essentially a detailing of Laura Palmer's final weeks. Undoubtedly, Lynch's enthusiasm regarding the show was probably running close to empty given the amount he had to wrestle with television executives, which perhaps explains the indolent, free-for-all wackiness inherent in the film version. What many expected as an explanatory piece, Lynch does not provide, instead deepening the ambiguity of the series by piling on more and more symbols, Black Lodge enigmas, and non sequiturs. It's an oafish mess of a film, yet it is not without its pleasures, as it attains the sort of mystery that only Lynch could find in such a campy premise.

The film's first section is without question its most lackadaisical. Set somewhere around the region of Twin Peaks, it follows a previously unheard of FBI agent named Chester Desmond as he investigates the murder of a woman named Teresa Banks with a clumsy sidekick (Kiefer Sutherland). Lynch goes heavy on the lunacy here, offering up brief absurdist character sketches - like Harry Dean Stanton as a white trash murder witness - and unusual bits of secret agent insights: Desmond and his sidekick meticulously dissect an encounter with a zany woman dressed in red garbs introduced by Gordon Cole, the hearing impaired special agent played by Lynch himself. Once her body is found and returned to FBI headquarters, the two disappear without explanation. Then a portentous character played by David Bowie arrives in the offices, elicits a short burst of dream logic, and disappears as well, arousing suspicions that he was never there in the first place, although the security cameras tell otherwise. This is a confusing case of the eruption of mystery in everyday life, because Lynch never harps back on it, forgetting Bowie and the two investigators and even Special Agent Dale Cooper, the star of the television series who makes a brief appearance predicting Banks' murderer's next victim. That he predicts with such uncanniness the exact criteria of the next victim - a blond high school girl serving food at that very moment, to which Lynch cuts immediately to Laura working on "Meals on Wheels" - makes us wonder why Cooper could not have saved her, and by extension, why he drives into Twin Peaks with such newfound enthusiasm for the case when the television series begins.



In fact, one of the major flaws in Fire Walk With Me is its dissonance from the show, especially when it comes to characters. The most salient example of this is Laura Palmer's best friend, Donna Hayward. Lynch was unable to cast Lara Flynn Boyle, the firebrand who portrayed her in the series, so Moira Kelly takes over, but with this change comes a complete transformation of the character of Donna; in the show she is a strong individual, whereas in the film she is emotionally fragile, timid, and always looking for verbal confirmation that Laura is her "best friend". Laura - whose face permeates nearly every scene following the initial section - does not fit the esteemed sweetheart description that was so prominent in the show, for Lynch gets right down to business establishing her as a feral piece of work with sinister ties. Never do we see a hint of humanity in her eyes, even during the few times that she's seemingly speaking from the heart. Sheryl Lee's performance as Laura is spot on when dealing with cryptic erotica, but if there's ever a scene that calls for emotion, Lee muffs it and comes across awkwardly, ultimately leading to her inability to carry the film. Fortunately, Ray Wise as Leland Palmer, her self-feuding, antagonistic father, picks up the energy that she lacks.

Because the film only answers shaky questions that were already explained on the show, once can't help but think Fire Walk with Me is simply an excuse for Lynch to return to the mordant dreamworld of Twin Peaks, to revel in the perplexing imagery of the series once more. In tone, the film most closely resembles the final episode, with illusory interruptions left and right. The red room, or Black Lodge, is revisited frequently, although this time new characters arrive, such as a boy beneath a mask with an elongated nose, an old woman who constantly is pointing or offering pictures of empty rooms to Laura, and even a menacing primate. They are each curiously entrancing, but whether there is meaning to each individually is up in the air. Most disappointing though is the fact that their arrivals mean the omission of the giant and the butler from the series, and ultimately the abandonment of coherence. The film gains some life towards the end, once Lynch's (and Laura's) hysteria begins to take full force, but on the whole it never appears to have a raison d'être, making us long to get to the point in the story where we hear Jack Nance's character recite the famous words: "she's dead, wrapped in plastic".

Wild at Heart (1990) A Film by David Lynch

It has always been a mystery to me what was going through the minds of the jury at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival - an able one at that, with Sven Nykvist, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Fanny Ardant in the bunch - when they chose David Lynch's Wild at Heart as the Palme D'Or. As well as acting as another launching point in the flippant career of Nicolas Cage, the film toys with so many archetypes, references, and genres that it amounts to a scattered mess, loaded with shrill fragments and lacking any semblance of dramatic thrust. Lynch's love for cheesy, trailer-trash reworkings of vaguely 50's-esque milieus had hits its apogee when he made Wild at Heart, which is cushioned by the yokel-made The Cowboy and the Frenchman and his extensive Twin Peaks era. You can see some strands from these works laying loosely over the edges, but they are assembled in such a way that makes them uglier, soapier, and more clichéd.

Toothless hags, psychotic mothers pinned to their chairs, obese people wearing "Made in America" shirts, sausage venders who are pedophiles on the side: these are the types of people that you likely have no interest in meeting. These are also the kind of people that populate Sailor (Cage) and Lula's (Laura Dern) road trip in Wild at Heart. Out of desperation caused by Lula's mother's heated denial of her rebellious boyfriend Sailor, the fiery couple takes to the highway, constantly being swept away by their car radio, an endless repeat of deserted 50's bar rock. Sailor's interested in keeping his girl and his life, and Lula gives herself over completely to Sailor's gimmicky romance (Sailor frequently impresses her with his monklike devotion to his snakeskin jacket, his "symbol of individuality and personal freedom"). The central couple is the most tired attempt at symbolic archetype Lynch ever made; Sailor is a mix of James Dean and Elvis, and Lula straddles Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and "Like a Prayer"-era Madonna. Neither of them have that effervescent air of mythic American characters though, or perhaps they have too much, because their blunt overacting and lack of subdued physical expression only makes them laughable. Of course, this could be read as Lynch's intention, to push the parameters of histrionics to a point where the film would reach the terrain of intertextual meta-critique. Nonetheless, Sailor and Lula's inability to shut up and simply act natural for a moment aggravates on a level high above the storyline.

It is hard to believe, but there is a literary source to Wild at Heart: Barry Gifford's novel of the same name. There is something to be said about Lynch's knack for stranding a work so distant from its novelistic origins, the result of which must have excited Gifford, for their collaboration continued on to Lost Highway. But Lynch's cinematic realization of Gifford's material here is uninspired; he seems to have less interest in the story than he does in taping on goofy metaphors and discomforting vignettes. Some of the bizarre characters, Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) specifically as a heinous, womanizing bandit that Sailor hooks up with, are right up there with the rest of Lynch's freaks, but their additions often feel meaningless and hollow, existing only to fulfill Lynch's desire for spastic narrative detours. The tacky allusions to Wizard of Oz are also fruitful, culminating in the grandly embarrassing finale of the film, but whether or not Sailor and Lula are journeying along the yellow brick road doesn't matter - the metaphor is totally arbitrary. Similarly, Lynch can't seem to let go of his characteristic fascination with fire as a dominant motif, but it too is stolid, incorporating itself as more of a fixation Lynch can't shake off rather than a fitting element. Admittedly, I have a hard time speaking this negatively about Lynch, but Wild at Heart struck me upon first viewing, and still to this day, as the nadir of his career.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (Lik Wong) A Film by Ngai Kai Lam (1991)

Today in mainstream, lowbrow action films, movement and viscera comes and goes at a fast pace, and blood and guts often follow in synchronicity. When a character reaches for his gun in a dark alley, he is bound to shoot. When a simmering femme fatale puts a knife to the throat of a fraudulent punk, she will most likely either slash his neck open or at least give it in a pinprick as a warning. But what often exists in these encounters is a dangerous sense that the actors don't have any dedication to their malign roles. Moreover, the construction of such scenes involve all the rigor and creativity of a chore. The directors behind the work have a predetermined idea of where they want to take their action aesthetically and narratively, so when fight scene after fight scene slips by on the screen, it seems as if they are merely getting on with it, creating the scenes for productivity's sake.

Such insistence upon proficiency and reliance upon tried-and-true technique is wholeheartedly absent from the Hong-Kong manga-inspired flick, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, a popcorn movie that is so gleeful in its bad taste and its joyous maximalism that it becomes viscerally draining in its own way. The film involves something about an excessively hostile prison, an imprisoned flutist named Ricky with superhuman strength, a "gang of four", which are the four outrageously subhuman masters of each prison sect, a romance between Ricky and his girlfriend, the vengeance of whom got him into jail in the first place, and oppressive authorities. Any attempt that the film makes at a statement on the abusive, corruptive nature of authority however, is ultimately undermined by the sheer absurdity on display. The story is so inconsequential, the characters so shred-thin, the scenarios so unbelievable, that any encapsulation of the plot remains entirely unnecessary. I still cannot, for the life of me, decide why a fat, greedy little boy shows up at the prison in the end with his domineering father to egg on all matters of violence and obsessive torture, and, echoing some ludicrous back-story that occurs offscreen, frighten the larger, more threatening inmates with his mere presence.

What makes Riki-Oh such a hoot to watch is the gung-ho attitude on the part of the filmmaker, Ngai Kai Lam, that permits him to obey this credo: "if it's shown fast enough, maybe people will believe it." Of course, this is never the case, and as a result we can identify the clearly discernible tin foil - meant to stand in for an iron door - that Ricky jumps through, the ridiculously doctored facial grotesqueries when someone's skin is slashed off, or the obtuse physical movements during fight scenes that don't, by any stretch of the imagination, seem practical. Every time Ricky punches an opponent, he tears clean through their bodies. In an act of desperation, one of his adversaries unravels his own large intestines to strangle Ricky. When all is said and done though, Ricky's outlandish physical strength is too much for his opponents. But simultaneously, via sporadic inner monologues and flashbacks that come so infrequently that they cease to be devices at all, we see that Ricky is really a gentle human being, resolute in his fight for justice. This is all narrative hogwash, but Ngai truly believes in it, and what he brings to the assembly line of blood and guts is not determined professionalism, but rather enthusiastic amateurism that delights in every second of fantastic cinematic realization.

The Double Life of Veronique (La double vie de Véronique) A Film by Krzysztof Kieslowski (1991)

The Double Life of Veronique is a film that hinges entirely on ineffable qualities: the interconnectedness of humanity, dual personalities, alternative realities, mysticism, sensation, attraction. That Krzysztof Kieslowski manages to meld what are perhaps some of the most difficult themes to convey through cinema into a light, tonally spectacular work of art is in itself an act of miracle. The film is best viewed as a phenomenological experience, an invitation to soak the senses in sight and sound purely, resist cognitive processes and the inevitable urge to deconstruct a linear narrative, and simply engage. It is, then, the fault of Kieslowski's that there does exist a smoke and mirrors act within the core of the film, a jumbled puzzle that requests putting together. At the same time, this puzzle is not so much convoluted as it is grounded in the very patterns of the film, solved best through resistance to the elliptical ebbs and flows.

The film tells an outwardly complex narrative, written by Kieslowski and his longtime script collaborator, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, of two young women who are existential copies of each other. Introduced first is Weronika, a Polish soprano. Weronika is a woman delighted by the simplistic textures of life; indeed, there a few better examples of female ecstasy in cinema as those of Weronika proudly finishing the final note during an outdoor choir practice while rain beats down on her face in close-up, or lifting her head joyfully as dust caroms off the ceiling wherein she deflected her favorite transparent bouncy ball. Furthermore, she has an unexplainable certainty that she is not alone in the world, that her pleasures and pains are being mirrored by someone else, and this notion is validated when she witnesses her doppelgänger boarding a bus in a market square amidst a public riot. Unfortunately, she is invariably discovering sharp pains in her chest, which eventually, when she persists at singing in a performance for a distinguished music school, claims her life.

As a result, Veronique, her French double, quits her singing career. She begins feeling a heavy grief for something which she cannot put a finger on. Her life as a music schoolteacher continues, but it becomes invested with routine because she is far too preoccupied by her otherworldly emotions. When a children's book writer comes to Veronique's school to put on a marionette show, she becomes infatuated by the glimpse she gets of the man via a reflection on the wall beside the stage. Once again, Veronique is able to see and feel that which is invisible to others, and her subsequent love for the puppeteer is a further inquiry into the enigmatic quality of Veronique's character, of her uncommon ability to harbor feelings for those things that she has no concrete certainty of, and of her omnipresent brushes against transcendence.



Both characters are played by Irene Jacob, a young actress who previously had only a minor part in Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants. Despite this lack of experience, Jacob shows an amazing ability to imbue her performance with multivalent gazes and quietly expressive physicality, sacred qualities that are most often only discussed when dealing with veteran actors. While she plays two sexually active characters, her true pleasure seems to always come from an outside source, a difficult complexity to convey. Late in the film, when she finally connects with the puppeteer through a nifty sound recording he sent her as a way of testing for a forthcoming novel the psychological likelihood of a complete stranger following a path to another stranger, the two have passionately emotional sex, but Jacob's intense expression seems to be out of the moment, as if she's really using the act as either a way of reciprocating her beliefs in coincidence or even connecting on a higher level with her deceased double (after all, the two make love in the same hotel room that Weronika's boyfriend said he was staying in earlier in the film). Rarely does a character emote so profoundly, and perhaps never have I felt so much love for a two-dimensional person as I do for Irene Jacob in The Double Life of Veronique.

Kieslowski and his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, the cameraman for his visually enticing A Short Film About Killing, are constantly finding innovative ways to emphasize both the mystical worlds of Weronika and Veronique and the inherent self-reflexivity of a film with such a title. Most discernibly, the film has a warm, soothing color palette of olive greens and deep reds. The colors rarely have specific physical beginning and ending points on screen, but rather flow together like liquids. The most telling example of this fluidity comes in an abstract shot that reimagines Weronika's death aside an amorphous red haze. In contrast, the exterior shots of Polish streets have a dullness in response to the green filter, as if the life has been sucked out of them. Such emptiness is not as extreme as it is in A Short Film About Killing, but it nonetheless provides a coldness to compliment Weronika's impending death. Also, glass becomes a central motif in the film, with the ponderous images of Weronika and Veronique frequently reflected against windows to suggest the more faint replica of themselves. Then there is the repetitious use of the aforementioned opaque bouncy ball, which reflects the world as in a silver globe. The camerawork has an impressive elasticity, jumping from eye-catching tableaux shots to abstract, dynamic micro images. Finally, the sound is designed to amplify minor details, completing the magnificent aesthetic which manages to achieve a sensually heightened world.

Kieslowski's film, though, when it comes down to it, does not need to be analyzed too thickly. It is determinedly metaphysical, and it curiously succeeds at transmitting the ineffable feelings of the unknown, of the indescribable attractions we all have towards others, and of an entirely separate reality existing on the opposite side of a thin piece of glass. Although it contains an occasionally contrived plot point (the ability of Veronique's friend to systematically remember that the puppeteer was a children's book writer and that she even owns one of his books), the overall rhythm it forges is too powerful to resist. Most importantly, it is a stunningly beautiful, palpably sensual piece of work, and one of the few masterpieces I dare to name.

The Ice Storm (1997) A Film by Ang Lee

Fate is the engine that drives The Ice Storm and its cast of characters - the members of two Connecticut upper middle-class suburban families - into a flurry of entanglement that proves devastating. The touch of magic realism that brews beneath the spot-on period piece naturalism should come as no surprise in an Ang Lee film (the director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and is all the more respectable for its subtle deployment, the opposite of which contributed to the bloat of a film like American Beauty, another examination of the effects of suburban blues.

The Ice Storm, an adaption of Rick Moody's acclaimed novel, is set in 1973, a few years after the massive cultural and sexual revolution that occurred in the late 1960's. The Hood's and the Carver's are still living within this jostled cultural landscape, either fostering adulterous or criminal habits or experimenting with sex, alcohol, and drugs. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is frequenting the Carver house for afternoon delights with the bored wife Janey (Sigourney Weaver), thus triggering simmering suspicion in Elena Hood (Joan Allen). All of their children have uncertain romantic or scandalous pursuits: the rebellious Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) speaks casually about sexual encounters with her friends at school and is secretly admired by Sandy Carver (Adam Hann-Byrd), to whom she makes the offer, "I'll show you mine if you show me yours.", Sandy's spacey brother Mikey (Elijah Wood) uses Wendy for strictly experimental purposes, and Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire) has "that feeling" for a fellow student with knowledge of Dostoevsky and existentialism but with a serious aptitude for heavy drug usage. They are all considerably unsure of their actions, a sentiment that is mirrored by their parents. Ben knows what he's doing is wrong but is too shallow and immersed in himself to properly inform his wife who stubbornly remains silent until the situation intensifies.

The film is structured modularly; to an extent, the scenes that make up the middle portion of the film (all occurring during a Thanksgiving weekend) could be rearranged without risking a loss of clarity. Lee opens the film on the night of the ice storm, revealing small fragments, shifts backwards, and returns to the storm for the final act. Therefore, the motif of ice is omnipresent, with there being nicely detailed shots of freezer trays scattered throughout. Water can frequently stand in as a symbol for sex, in its inexorable renewals and flow, so what exists for the characters is a kind of sexual freeze, a reduction of the sexual act to something that is rigid, cold, devoid of feeling, and ultimately physical. Because sex and sexual anxiety is the source of immaturity and much of the unspoken distress that the characters (both young and old) feel, the ice storm is somewhat of a karma device. It inevitably causes a death that is part of one of nature's domino effects.

To visually convey this metaphorical depth, Lee wisely chooses to not do a tremendous amount with his camera; instead he only occasionally provides gentle shots of the ice frozen solid to tree branches, and more tellingly will shoot through windows at his characters, the precipitation on the windows shrouding a mosaic of the outdoors reflected against the glass and the scene inside to evoke the double lives of his confused souls. The rich cast, made up of established Hollywood actors (Joan Allen being the highlight) and promising newcomers who have only currently become stars (i.e. Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood), does a stellar job of bringing this ennui to life. Christina Ricci's performance is especially fantastic. With its simultaneous period relevance and timelessness (ancient Native American flute reverberates on the soundtrack), The Ice Storm is the most important film of Ang Lee's career.

Ulysses' Gaze (To vlemma tou Odyssea) A Film by Theodoros Angelopoulos (1995)

Becoming enraptured by the elegiac beauty that permeates Theodoros Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze is not a difficult task. Unraveling its dense symbology and digesting the barrage of thematic material that Angelopoulos fires at the audience however, is. Of course, there is a wealth of conceptual ideas that do hit home with ease, most notably the congruence of Harvey Keitel's search for primitive film footage shot by the Manakis brothers (the first ever reels of Balkan film) to the odyssey of Homer. Keitel, playing a Greek filmmaker coming back to his homeland after 35 years in America, wanders from Greece to Sarajevo while being consistently haunted by memories or ghostly relics of the past: his loves (or perhaps, singular), all played by Maia Morgenstern, his family, the colleagues of the Mannakis brothers themselves, and the primordial, undeveloped footage of observational cinema that the Mannakis brothers recorded - their first "gaze" at the world.

Angelopoulos sanctions the idea of time as a continuum, of the past always being relevant to social and cultural identity in the present and frequently being the source of irreparable damage. That damage is evident in Angelopoulos' subjective view of Greece and of the surrounding nations: cold, wintry, foggy, dilapidated, and ugly. Scattered refugees limp through the barren terrain, the "snow and silence", Keitel calls it, in one of the film's most mournful travel sequences. He frequently converses in the film with people who speak of the problematic, irresolvable nature of the Balkans, that although the country converted to nationalism, it cannot escape the communism of the Eastern bloc. A gargantuan statue of Lenin is carried downriver with Keitel seated beside it (reminiscent of the hand in Landscape in the Mist), standing in as figurative proof. This is the most ceaselessly nagging metaphor in Ulysses' Gaze. Angelopoulos hangs on it for so long that he undermines the inherent hands-off approach of his meditative style to begin with; in such instances, the technique becomes as manipulative as a frenetically edited action picture. There are several times when Angelopoulos' long-take mastery feels portentous and exhaustive, such as when Keitel's character surveys the passing years of his family's New Year's party; in one static shot, the family waltzes from 1945 to 1950, an interesting idea at its root but which comes off as tedious.

Despite these occasional bouts of self-indulgence though, the film, as an elegy on the dissolution of geographical identity (Keitel stomps over borders with little perceivable distinction), has a magnificently sorrowful, dreamlike beauty. Ruins hold mysteries undiscovered, such as the rundown cinema that holds the Mannakis reels which is located in the midst of the Yugoslavian war that the filmmaker travels through. In one transfixing shot, the camera moves from Keitel's somber glance past the dirty screen to reveal snow falling outside a hole in the wall above it. Two other memorable scenes stand out: early in the film, Keitel follows a woman he believes he once knew through the shadowy streets of Greece only to be sandwiched by a crowd of torch bearers and another of policeman and civilians holding umbrellas. Towards the end, following Keitel's direct exposure to wartime horror, which felt disjointed and lacked the emotional punch it intended for, a small orchestra and children's choir plays in a frost-bitten park to a frozen audience. Although it is never as emotionally devastating as his masterpiece, Landscape in the Mist, Ulysses' Gaze is worth experiencing for these kinds of transcendent pleasures.

La Lettre (1998) A Short Film by Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry is an artist who has created some of his finest work in short form or in collaboration with other directors. Like his segment for Tokyo! (2008), La Lettre comes from a collaborative program, in this case designed to center around the coming of the new millennium (2000). Gondry gave the new millennium the feel of an encroaching deadline destined to prove one boy either a man, with the approval of his been-there-done-that brother, or a teenage outcast.

The story details a typical childhood love and the difficulty to reconcile one's tacit desires with reality. Stéphane is a pouty-eyed boy on the brink of adolescence with an interest in photography that somewhat acts as a mask for his consuming affection for Aurélie, a girl he goes to school with who is leaving town for a few days. While Stéphane is enlarging a photo of Aurélie in the family's dark hallway at night (to add to his already extensive collection of photos of her), his brother advises that he "french her" before the year 2000 or else he'll regret it.

His brother's rather imposing warning sets off for Stéphane a swirl of uncertainty and self-doubt, visualized in one of Gondry's characteristically evocative dream sequences. At a cramped party high atop the city with the omnipresent clock tower placed nervously outside the window - the scene looking purposely, as usual, like it was constructed directly in a set - Stéphane trudges around the room with a physically impeding camera on his head, eyeballing the barrage of couples nuzzling each other as they dance. Eventually he makes a move on Aurélie only to clunk her in the face with his lens-face, causing the entire room to quake and the clock tower to inevitably come crashing down on them. The symbols are all quite pronounced: the clock tower acting as the outside forces threatening Stéphane, the camera as the hobby that he veils himself behind.

Gondry's tale is a simple one, but it's unlikely that another director could manage to realize it so imaginatively. Stéphane snaps out of his dream and heads to Aurélie's house at her request, for she has a letter for him. Obviously, as any child in his situation would, he believes that it will be her pronouncement of her love for him. Life however, unfortunate as it is, does not come so satisfyingly. Upon reading the letter he is startled, bombarded by the complexity of life, and, through a series of tactful old-fashioned camera techniques, retreats back into the subjective "reality" of his photographs. This procession would stand as another time Gondry has explored the different realms of reality one utilizes to escape the truth, often in a romantic situation.

La Lettre is brilliant short film with the intimate look of Truffaut's 50's work and a straightforward score that matches Stéphane's minor predicament. It is also one of Gondry's most personal films because he has admitted to his childhood unfolding congruently with Stéphane's; he too was a child enthused by the art of photography and withheld the unattainable romantic desires that are inherent in the era.

The River (He liu) A Film by Tsai Ming-Liang (1997)

A small selection of obsessive filmmakers say that they make one film in their career, simply rehashing the same themes with imperceptibly slight changes. If there is a current director to whom this idea can be most aptly attributed to, it is Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Liang. His third feature, The River, is his first spot-on representation of his career-long concerns: existential solitude within the modern, urban consumerist environment, difficulty of communication, meaningless, merely physical sexual consumption, objective struggles as spiritual struggles. In 1997, when the film was released, it was Tsai's deepest, most complex, and most ambitious film to date. Today, a wealth of critics still consider to be his finest work, however I have trouble applying favoritism to any particular film of his considering they do contain such a string of similarities.

Tsai has cast Lee Kang-Sheng as the lead in every one of his films, and he also resorts to several other regulars including Miao Tien, Chen Shiang-chyi, and Lu Yi-Ching (save Tien, these figures are non-professional). For the most part, Kang-Sheng plays drifters either jobless or with a minor job, and usually develops some physical or emotional ailment. The two always inevitably overlap, as in The River, when he develops a severe neck pain following his spontaneous involvement in a film shoot, appearing as a corpse floating in the polluted Tanshui River in the film's opening scenes. Just as he is the source of contrived tragedy in the film that is being shot on the water by Ann Hui (in a special appearance as herself), Tsai plants his camera nearby the film within a film, asserting Kang-Sheng's character (Xiao-Kang) as the narrative catalyst as well. There is a taste of Kiarostami in this scene, a need to make the audience aware of the fact that it is indeed a film. Although Xiao-Kang was initially against the idea of appearing in Hui's film due to the dirtiness of the water, he takes up the offer and pays for it.

Shortly thereafter, Tsai casually begins observing the lives of a man (Tien), who spends ample time bumming around Taipei's gay saunas, and a woman (Yi-Ching), a bored elevator attendant. It is not until about thirty minutes into the film that we see the two and Xiao-Kang living in the same apartment, a triumvirate of lonely souls that hearkens back to Tsai's previous film, Vive L'Amour (1994). This time however, the focus is on a family which is not so much dysfunctional as they are nonfunctional. They barely speak, and if they try to it is in vain, such as when the father calls the mother (the only time he tries to communicate with her in the film) and only receives an answering machine. Nonetheless, the parents feel obligated to do what they can to cure Xiao-Kang; they try acupuncture, medicine, an herbal doctor, folk rituals, and a faith healer, none of which show promise. Meanwhile, there is incessant rain that is leaking into the father's bedroom, an issue he attempts to fix by capturing the water with a plastic sheet and channeling it into the apartment's drain system. When he and Xiao-Kang are out of town to visit the faith healer, Master Lui, this flooding problem becomes extreme, leaving the mother alone in the apartment with little means of solution.

The only escape for these characters comes unsatisfactorily through sex; the mother maintains a silent affair with a pornographic video dealer, the father shimmies through the dark hallways of the saunas, one in a mob of shirtless zombies peering into rooms in hopes of finding another pleading male, and Xiao-Kang encounters several affairs throughout the film made useless by his uncertain sexual identity, one of which involves his father, quite uncomfortably, in the lowly lit sauna. Feelings of confusion and dehumanization run throughout the film, and it is most stirring in the aforementioned scene, which is all the more nerve wracking because the dank lighting of the sauna obscures body parts, most adversely the head.

Tsai's visual style foreshadows his late works, which have reached the extremes of modernist minimalism. In the most complex scenes, the camera will remain fixed in its objective, detached position for minutes on end, acquiring an eerie realistic quality that builds tension until it is almost unbearable to watch. The River does however also contain a surprising amount of camera movement, an element that is entirely done away with in Goodbye Dragon Inn. The symbol of uncontrollable water appears here as the link between the family's several troubling agendas, and one can't help but see that, on a broader scale, it helps Tsai flow smoothly from one film to the next, carrying the same themes and images down the river.

Twin Peaks (1990 TV Series) By David Lynch and Mark Frost

Every episode of Twin Peaks commences with the same sappy, tacky credit sequence, one that manages to act as the kind of cozy pleasure that is so often established only to implode upon itself in David Lynch's work. Angelo Badamalenti's sentimental keyboard anthem rings over featherlight shots of the woods, a gentle stream, a classic town welcome sign, and the giant waterfall that rages beside the town's inviting hotel, "The Great Northern". There are also tight images of the gears pumping away in the local lumber mill, which gently asserts itself as the backbone of the entire series, aesthetically and narratively. Twin Peaks has a very mechanical, strained quality to it, as clearly a product of human creation as the gears and saws that spin inexorably in close-up. This is nothing new in Lynch's work, as his films often extend laughably "over-directed" scenarios, but his work on this early 90's television show is some of his most deconstructive in terms of the creation of his own cinema and cinema in general; the bulk of the show is set up like a nauseatingly melodramatic small-town murder mystery, but in Lynch's unceasingly creative world there is biting parody, and, to disrupt the comfortable flow, the cryptic surrealism he is most loved for.

Over its 30-episode run, Twin Peaks tells two different stories, interchanged midway through the show's run. The two directions the show takes are loosely linked and are best looked at separately. In its first few episodes, the show presents Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan, who is the knight in shining armor throughout, a quintessentially "good" character and a moral prototype for the rest of the town), who arrives in the northwestern town of Twin Peaks to investigate the shocking, incomprehensible murder of the well-respected high school homecoming queen, Laura Palmer. The initial season depicts Cooper gradually unlocking the cumbersome, elusive mystery, which is finally solved a few episodes into the second season. After this, the plot line branches out into a yarn dealing with the mystical powers of the Twin Peaks' woods and a battle of wits between the corporate king of the town, Ben Horn (Richard Beymer), and the sly owner of the lumber mill, Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie). A legion of fanzines would avidly discuss theories on who killed Laura Palmer, so when the momentum that the show carried for so long disintegrated into a new act, Twin Peaks undeniably lost critical and commercial steam. To add to this, Lynch himself became disgruntled by the network airing the show (ABC) and therefore ceased to direct many of the episodes that followed the revelation of Laura Palmer's murderer.

In the pre-revelation stages of the show, Lynch molds the plot around rather conventional soap drama/mystery tactics. As well as advancing the expanding mystery, half of the time is spent simply finding a firm footing in the kind of sanitary small-town environment Lynch is known for being attracted to, evidenced most tellingly by Blue Velvet. A laundry list of characters is introduced (far too many to mention here) that all seem to know each other personally. People act in an uncommonly cordial way, and their motivations and interests rarely extend further than their tightly knit community. For instance, there is Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), who is devoted solely to running the town smoothly and loving his mysterious Asian girlfriend with sinister ties, Josie Packard (Joan Chen); the town's angelic diner manager, Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton), who never fails to speak in a soft, reassuring manner to her customers; and Donna Hayword (Lara Flynn Boyle), the loyal best friend of Laura Palmer who transforms from sincere investigator to femme fatale and back again without ever losing her interest in understanding the town's myriad of secrets. The bulk of Lynch and co-producer Mark Frost's characters have a hilarious quirk or two, Cooper's being his boundless enthusiasm for simple pleasures such as black coffee and cherry pie. Elsewhere, Jack Nance, whose sullen face permeates Lynch's macabre debut, Eraserhead, plays Catherine Martell's down-to-earth husband Pete but still manages to project surreal, awkward character traits that rub off on those around him. Perhaps the oddest of them all is the "Log Lady", an uptight woman with thick-framed glasses who shows up everywhere with a log slung across her bosom and provides before the start of every show kitschy musings or nonsensical anecdotes that outline in some way the theme of the coming episode.



From very early on, Twin Peaks declares its intentions: Lynch does not want it to be an average television show. In the second episode, Agent Cooper has an outlandish dream that provides clues that assist him in his investigation. Of course the clues are vague and nearly unworkable (as they are in all of his hallucinations), but Cooper is whispered to by a somnambulistic Laura some sort of divine knowledge that allows him to pursue the case intuitively. Within this dream, some of the most memorable images of the show and indeed of Lynch's oeuvre are introduced. A seemingly never-ending labyrinth of red curtains and alternating, jagged black and white floor tiles are home to the spirits of many of the characters involved in the case, only they are bereft of any life and speak in a jumbled, disconcerting manner (which is achieved by the actors learning their lines in reverse and the sound being manipulated later). A well-primped midget dances smoothly around the rooms to Badalamenti's dreamy jazz tunes, speaking in a coded language to a now elderly Cooper who just stares intently in hopes of picking up any semblance of cogency. The first time we enter this dream world, titled "The Black Lodge", it is as unexpected as it is thrilling. Unfortunately, it does not return until the final episode, which certainly contains the most brilliant moments that the show has to offer. Granted, it was Lynch's return to direction after a disappointingly prolonged leave of absence.

Periodically, yet only when Lynch is at the wheel, Twin Peaks does drift back into dream logic. The no-name directors who attempt to insert Lynchian surreality into the plot only end up achieving lukewarm thrills, incapable of harnessing the unabashed originality of Lynch's vision. Several times Cooper is also greeted enigmatically by a giant wearing suspenders who moans inexplicable clues like "without chemicals, he points". The entire set that Cooper is inhabiting tends to darken and the soundtrack shifts to a deep synthesizer hum to signal the arrival of the giant, who fades in a la superimposition and stands toweringly above Cooper via baroque camera angles. His two most stunning appearances come during the performance of a jazz singer in deep red lipstick (think Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet) at a midnight show and in Cooper's hotel room after being shot and greeted in a cheery yet oddly insincere manner by an old room service attendant (a hilarious example of Lynch's use of deadpan comedy). Unsettling as these scenes are, they don't show up often enough to balance out the amount of otiose melodrama that is present in the episodes.



One of the almost painfully dull attributes of the show is the numerous romances that are glazed over. Donna Hayword has what seems like an eternal pact with the gleaming, virile, hopelessly grave and contemplative James Hurley (James Marshall), formed out of their mutual lament for the death of their close friend (and in James' case, lover) Laura. The two of them share a love song that James sings 50's style, utilizing only a guitar and a microphone drenched in reverb. Their relationship comes across as schmaltzy and unrealistic, two high-school students with an unbelievable amount of insight into the metaphysical aspects of friendship and community, and the mawkish music that accompanies their scenes together does not help. Another waitress at the town diner, Shelly Johnson (played by the beautiful Mädchen Amick), leaves her malicious trucker husband Leo (Eric DaRe, who is involved in much of the sinister underworld of Twin Peaks) to be cheaply wooed by the typically rebellious high school football captain Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook). While these cheeky romances are usually overtly hammed up in the interest of parody when Lynch directs, they feel as if they are common ground for the other directors that grace the show, and therefore do more to degrade than to provoke laughter.

The problem with aiming for art on television is that television is available to such a wide range of viewers that networks do not want to risk airing a program that could be considered daring or provocative. The open-ended finale of Twin Peaks is just that, although it's rather bittersweet considering the span of episodes Lynch seemed not to be heavily involved with. Upon realizing that the program was dipping itself into ever deeper mysteries that seemed unnecessary to package up, Lynch took it upon himself to finalize the show's run in a boisterous fashion. Unfortunately, this results in several ambiguities regarding expedited relationship quarrels that were introduced in the concluding three episodes; Donna's confusion over her real parents, the stress of James Hurley's father's wife Nadine- who'd been in a nostalgic trance for a lengthy amount of time after an attempted suicide - after springing back to life only to realize her husband is with another woman, Bobby and Shelly's relationship future, Sheriff Harry S. Truman's jumbled state following the death of Josie, and Pete and Catherine's uncertain marriage are all left dangling to be ruminated on by the audience. However, it is difficult to say what impact these unanswered questions have on the meaning of the story as a whole, if any at all. It feels like a "get-out-of-jail-free" card played by Lynch out of desperation to finish the work he started but was getting fed up with. The undeniably interesting ambiguity is the complete and utter reversal of Dale Cooper due to being hosted by the menacing enigma "Bob" (the snickering evil, manifested by ominous owls, indirectly responsible for the deaths of both Laura Palmer and Josie Packard, and the threatening injuries inflicted upon Cooper's newly developed love, Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham)) following his trip to the eerie woods of Twin Peaks.



On the whole, Twin Peaks is thoroughly engaging, comedic, and frightening if only sporadically shameful and sentimental. The cult status it achieved feels wholly reciprocated given its unusual credo of television as art. In its finest moments, the show does come the closest I've experienced to American television, even major network television, as art. The contributions across the board are inspired and unique; of course Lynch's direction is wholesome and visionary, Badalamenti's score is terrifically coherent (if at times annoyingly intrusive), MacLachlan's acting is top notch, Nance's character is hilariously histrionic, and the screenplay work (divided up between Mark Frost, Lynch, Barry Pullman, Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, and a few others) is invigoratingly complex and takes a number of ambitious turns. Although you'll spend half the time scratching your head trying to figure out who killed Laura Palmer and subsequently becoming bothered by the story's new direction, you'll eventually become swept up by a whole new string of mysteries inside the seemingly perfect world of Twin Peaks.

The Limey (1999) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

If Steven Soderbergh divies up his career into commercial filmmaking (the Ocean's trilogy) and more artful projects (Bubble or the Tarkovsky remake, Solaris) 1999's The Limey occupies a space neatly in the middle. It's somewhat of an expected thriller plot, but his revival of two 60's countercultural actors, Peter Fonda and Terrence Stamp, and by extension his archival use of footage of a free-spirited Stamp in a Ken Loach picture - not ironically also named "Wilson" - adds a dimension of the personal to Soderbergh's project. As well as attempting to paint a discombobulated portrait of loss and revenge, Soderbergh appears to be hinting at the pliancy of the physical careers of Stamp and Fonda themselves. Their characters in The Limey feel like aged extensions of those they played in films like Easy Rider and Billy Budd, after enduring years of near hyatis.

Terrence Stamp delivers an impressively subtle performance as Wilson, a grey-haired Brit who is released from prison for armed robbery after receiving a letter from his friend (Luis Guzman) about his daughter Jenny's death. He is certain of it being a murder, and is suspicious of Fonda's character Terry Valentine, a rock record producer involved in a heroine gig with a group of trucking business gangsters. Wilson knows Valentine's ability to rake in beautiful woman given his numerous mouth-watering homes, so he pursues him at all costs once learning loosely of a relationship he had with Jenny from her voice coach, who becomes one of Wilson's helping hands throughout the film. Savage revenge looks like an act of duty for Wilson, as he makes expedient work of nearly everyone who gets in his way, but this may give the impression that he is a ruthless headcase. In truth, his tender side incessantly comes to the fore a la quiet moments of introspection; soundless bits of imagery, treated to appear as if rapidly disintegrating, flash on screen nearly every time Stamp is alone peering pensively into nothingness.

While such scenes border on the sentimental or perhaps familiar, the rest of the narrative is engineered with temporal disassociation. During conversational scenes, the dialogue will often kickstart before the subject begins cuing up, almost as if some of the words were simply preemptive thoughts before speaking. There are also scenes that are damning in regard to the film's style; when Wilson and the voice coach meet up and sift through their thoughts, their fluid conversation is intercut line by line in three incongruent settings. All of this leans towards gratuitous stylistic flourishes, which if any is the key problem in The Limey. Soderbergh's obscure editing style, which even replays the same events multiple times with minor changes, often points towards a film with a more jack-in-the-box denouement, in the vein of Memento for instance. However the climax, which has Fonda held at gunpoint, is strainingly impermanent, and it becomes clear that Soderbergh's apparent primary interest in a meditative character study is shrouded in its own emphasized narrative treatment. Notwithstanding these occasional fumbles, the film is intriguing if entirely for Stamp and Fonda's comeback performances and the superb score that underplays them.

Bottle Rocket (1996) A Film by Wes Anderson

While at the University of Texas, roommates Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson did not necessarily have plans of making several films together. However, when they co-wrote the short Bottle Rocket in 1994 and received accolades at Sundance, their plans changed. This gave them the possibility to make the feature-length Bottle Rocket, which was the first burst of energy out of the collaboration.

Owen Wilson plays Dignan, a twentysomething who escapes from the nuthouse he's stationed in to jump impromptu into an ill-prepared life of crime with his friends Anthony, played by Owen's brother Luke Wilson, and Bob. When the gang's first attempted robbery succeeds, albeit clumsily, they hide out at a motel on the side of a vast strip of land where Anthony woos the Spanish maid Inez. Communication between the two is nearly impossible, allowing Anderson to find drollery in Anthony's earnest attempts at cheering her despite the fact. He follows her closely around the symmetrical corridors of the complex (ones that, with their peachy red color scheme, are characteristic of Anderson's milieu), even slipping into the rooms with her to fluff a pillow or two, much to the patron's confusion. Anthony assumes Dignan's jealousy, and when Dignan hears through a translator "tell Anthony I love him", one can imagine something else at work in Dignan's decision to keep hush about it until later in the film.

These minor moral predicaments - Anthony's subtle lovesickness after he leaves the motel, Dignan's uncertain thirst for criminal success, Bob's brother difficulties and troubles with the law for sustaining marijuana in his backyard - are ironically underplayed by Mark Mothersbaugh's carefree ditties, assuring the film never dips into weighty themes. The Devo frontman has brought zest to each of Anderson's films, although in Bottle Rocket it is probably the lesser performance; the songs sound as if they've been extracted from a company learning video. Anderson's visuals were not yet refined in his debut either. Stage-like compositions are not as abound, and the informational overhead shots are few and far between. Often times close-ups feel amateur; for example, the characters are frequently placed on the wrong side of the frame looking out with no lead room. Nevertheless, one can sense his style beginning to take form, and if anything, Rushmore was a great leap.

Whereas the camerawork may be primeval, the themes and sets are noticeably Andersonian. The yellow jumpsuits that are worn in the film's semi-climactic (and most hilarious) heist are reminiscent of the uniform orange hats worn by Team Zissou in The Life Aquatic, and the bromance that ensues between Dignan and Anthony shares the same foundation of that of the three brothers in The Darjeeling Limited. Male bonding - forged through hilarity and absurdity - is common in Anderson's work. Bottle Rocket never feels fully inspired, but in its successful dryly comic moments, it can be seen as a strong primer for the wonderful films that followed from this great young American auteur.

Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik) A Film by Abbas Kiarostami (1990)

There is nothing sensational that can be found on the surface of an Abbas Kiarostami film. For the excitable viewer, his films can be frustratingly dry, but for the patient viewer, they are profoundly rewarding. It is in the fact that his films don't beg for attention that one can provide reasoning for deeming his work as "high art". Fittingly, Kiarostami is also an extremely humble individual. In his interviews, he views his films with an open mind, accepting of all outside interpretations and even questioning his own. Close-Up, he said, was the first film that he actually sat down in the cinema for, viewed unabated, and liked. And, well, he should like it, because aside from its considerable technical flaws, it is an ingenious character study. There is absolutely no shortage of imagination.

It tells the story of a struggling lower class Iranian man who, in a desperate attempt to liberate himself from his suffering both financially and personally, acts for a day as the famous Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. His behaviors, which include sharing a bus ride with an Iranian mother and a copy of Makhmalbaf's novel/film The Cyclist and visiting her home to speak to her sons about his work as an artist, are intercut with the court case that follows. Hossain Sabzian is the man's name, and he was arrested for attempted fraud. Sabzian sheds light on his intentions in the claustrophobic court room, which works to localize a wide variety of demographically distinct Iranian people. He admires Makhmalbaf greatly for his willingness to "portray the sufferings of ordinary people".

He is filmed almost completely in close up in these scenes, as there is a film crew recording his unusual case in the interest of cinema. These scenes acquire a harsh documentary feel with dismal 16mm footage. Sabzian's concerns are self-liberation through the arts and the need to care for his family during difficult times. His reasons for acting as Mahkmalbaf are baffling, compelling, and relatable. The story's power lies entirely on the shoulders of Sabzian: his downfalls are tragic and his emancipations are uplifting. A character so powerful contains the ability to pierce through technical blemishes such as poor audio and obtuse lighting. A viewer cannot watch Close-Up with the expectation of seeing stunning cinematic bravado; rather, the virtue of the film is its lyrical humanism.