The Death of Louis XIV (2016) A Film by Albert Serra

"In prior efforts, Serra has shown a penchant for degrading his iconic subjects and passing the result off as humanizing historical realism—dwelling on Casanova as he admires his own excrement or shovels heaps of animal meat in his face, for instance. That tendency isn't fully abolished in The Death of Louis XIV, but it's tamed. The emphasis is where it should be—which is to say, not on the Sun King's increasingly black, gangrenous left leg, but on the leader's face, and the faces of those around him, as he sluggishly succumbs to his undoing. The humanity of the situation, rather than the grotesquery, is Serra's focus here, which is already a promising recalibration of his sensibility."

Review continues at Slant.

The Human Surge (2016) A Film by Eduardo Williams

"Were it not for one showy transition of a camera burrowing through topsoil for a macro-photographic tour of an ant colony, The Human Surge might easily be mistaken for a particularly interminable YouTube video, unfolding as it does like the aimless time-killing of bored boys without much to do and a crummy camera to record whatever ends up happening. Facetious as such a characterization may seem for a film with the temerity to divide its action across Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines, it's not exactly unsuitable given director Eduardo Williams's subject matter, which concerns the lives of minimum-wage slackers from the aforementioned locales who fill their downtime forging tenuous human connections across Internet platforms. Using a pair of nifty cuts to connect these disparate milieus, the film develops in chapters as if to imply a fundamental interconnectedness between people across the world in similar dead-end situations, yet often the only quality holding the episodes together is the amateurishness of the staging."

Full review continues at Slant Magazine.

Gebo and the Shadow (2012) A Film by Manoel de Oliveira

105-year-old Portuguese filmmaker (sorry, it's tough not to cite in awe his age) Manoel de Oliveira's superb, haunting Gebo and the Shadow premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2012 and is only now getting a (severely limited) stateside release at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Talk about respect for your elders, eh? Anyway, I wrote about why you should go see it if you have a chance at In Review Online.

Screening Notes #23 (Year-End Catch-Up Blurbs)

Nebraska: The above image gets at the heart of Alexander Payne's latest. From the perspective of a television set beaming a Detroit vs. Chicago NFL game (is there a more classic, long-standing matchup?), we see pale, wrinkled, defeated men, eyes frozen by the familiar spectacle before them even as their investment seems less a product of genuine excitement than numbing routine. A common critique lobbed at Nebraska, and at Payne in general, is that the director creates grotesque caricatures only to belittle them. I feel Payne recognizes these Midwestern bumpkins waiting to die in their sunken sofas as tragic manifestations of accumulated repression and resignation to life's shortcomings and disappointments, and the resulting sense of dark humor comes, at least in this case, not from smug superiority but from a heavyhearted acknowledgment of the ways in which life wears on everyone. Seeking to replace lost pleasures, the film's characters resort to materialistic desires, illusory as they are; a father's (Bruce Dern) misguided pilgrimage to claim his transparently phony million dollar reward becomes the central narrative and thematic thrust, but the falseness of the promise only exacerbates the breakdown of trust and support within his estranged family. "I just want one," grumbles a perpetually hungover and out-of-it Dern of his desire for a new pickup truck, crystallizing the prevailing attitude of the ensemble: when life no longer seems to offer joy, wealth and belongings are assumed to be the corrective. Nebraska's resonant monochrome widescreen images are in the vein of the predominantly gray, sparsely populated Midwestern landscape photography of Stranger than Paradise (1984), another film which regards the stubborn commitment to a fading lifestyle with a tarnished romanticism. But Payne's film offers another level specific to today's America; in the deceptively schmaltzy denouement, we're not quite watching a man's triumphant re-discovery of himself, but rather the full emergence of a new, more dispiriting form of father-son bonding predicated on the temporary relegation of real problems to shiny distractions.


Dallas Buyers Club: On this one, I'm mostly in agreement with R. Kurt Osenlund, whose politically charged piece intones with a sense of fed-up finality: Why must we continue to not only accept but elevate this sort of myopic message-mongering? As a heterosexual, I can't speak with the same authority, but I nonetheless found the film's portrayal of LGBTQ culture to be staggeringly one-note and its bid for queer awareness to be almost pathetically flawed. Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodroof as a vitriolic homophobic redneck-turned-gay-hugging-survivalist has a definite exhibitionist force (the actor lost considerable weight for the role, and sinks into his despicable identity with great conviction), but it's squelched by what he represents: a hateful prick being implausibly sheohorned into the dominant Hollywood narrative of redemption. What results is a classic case of eggs-in-the-wrong-basket storytelling. Director Jean-Marc Vallée strains to render Woodroof a tragic hero at the expense of showing any logical demonstration of how he traverses the vast ideological ground that takes him from regarding "faggots" as the bane of the Earth to getting into fistfights over them in grocery stores. In the meantime, the struggles of an entire people – represented here as only the most radically marginalized personalities, the folks most likely to stir homophobic fire – becomes a mere footnote, the vehicle for Woodroof's character arc but rarely a palpable large-scale tragedy. A late-stage shift into hetero melodrama (Jennifer Garner's flimsy doctor never confronting Woodroof's greatest human failings even as she initially expresses disgust towards him) starts to feel in this context like an insult.


The Last Time I Saw Macao: Unclassifiable and unpredictable, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's utterly unique documentary-fiction hybrid (I realize that in today's festival landscape such a characterization might sound contradictory) begins as a fairly straightforward visual travelogue of Macao (a "Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China" that was once a longtime Portuguese colony), then lays over the top of it an entirely invisible narrative with campy shadings of noir and sci-fi before ultimately surrendering the film to some uncanny conspiratorial force that enshrouds the movie's final passage in a cryptic, wordless, vaguely apocalyptic fog. Prior to watching this, I had only seen Rodrigues' short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, which shares with Macao a cash-strapped inventiveness; the director and his screenwriting partner conjure up their enigmatic atmosphere via mostly static documentary images of contemporary Macao and the latter's paranoid narration alone. While Mata guides the viewer in his quest through his old hometown for a stripper in trouble named "Candy," the camera seems to adopt his perspective (one that's prone to Pedro Costa-like urban tableaux) but is equally likely to "construct" suggestive details through nifty compositional tactics. For instance, Candy's supposed murder at the hands of gangsters occurs at a shadowy dock where construction equipment and nautical structures obscure the line of sight, leaving us to speculate upon the source of bone-chilling screeches that could either be the menace that Mata speaks of or mere industrial clamor. The film is tantalizingly drawn to the disconnect between what we see and what we hear, a dissociative spell it seems to link to the post-colonialist mindset (Mata, after all, plays a Portuguese filmmaker returning as if by some magnetic pull to his old colony). Moreover, street animals – specifically cats – are omnipresent throughout as bizarre escorts, suggesting Rodrigues and Mata are consciously working in the lineage of Chris Marker.

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.

The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) A Film by Manoel de Oliveira

In the pivotal scene of Manoel de Oliveira's meditative, clear-eyed The Strange Case of Angelica, a curious detail emerges. A rural village's only photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), is hired to snap a posthumous photo of the recently deceased Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) in her family's posh, aristocratic hill-top hotel. Much of the photographic act is revealed in the same long shot. At first properly exposed (and indeed relatively dim), the image's highlights are blown out when Isaac requests a new, brighter bulb as a replacement in the overhead lamp hanging above Angelica's festooned corpse. The details in the lamp's cover are suddenly rendered indistinguishable, and parts of Isaac's face become a wash of white. Oliveira, the oldest working filmmaker at 103 years of age, surely possesses the chops to guard against such a "blemish," but he elects not to. In doing so, he problematizes the very nature of image production, calling attention to the materiality of the medium. It's only the first step in an elegant, compact metaphor for cinema itself, for what compels its making and what encourages our spectatorship.

Sure enough, this subtle manipulation of light is only of peripheral importance in the scene; rarely in The Strange Case of Angelica are there not multiple layers of meaning operating at once. More bluntly, the scene's purpose is to incite the conflict weighing on Isaac's psyche throughout the film. Upon peering in his camera's viewfinder, Angelica's eyes open and she bears a wide grin, shocking the already unsettled photographer. It's the beginning of a private pact between the ghostly Angelica and the weary, probing Isaac, which ultimately takes the two of them floating high above the village at night as Méliès-like specters, their bodies seemingly eternally embraced before Isaac is thrust abrasively out of the realm of dreams. Ayala, who enacted a familiar dance of unintentional playfulness and seduction in the similarly backward-and-forward-thinking In the City of Sylvia, taunts Isaac in both his waking and sleeping states, coming alive in his printed photographs and arriving as a glowing black-and-white phantom on his balcony. Often times it is to the unawares of Isaac, who, like a wide-eyed schoolboy, finds his lover disappearing every time he turns around sensing her presence. He is trying to capture that which is not there, that which is an illusion.

Of course, such is the apparatus of filmmaking, wherein celluloid presents images of a lost moment, forever consigned only to the physical medium. (Fittingly, Oliveira lingers on "empty" frames for some time after narrative action within those frames has ceased, quietly combating pictorial transience, the dominant mode in the modern world.) The film invokes a clear sense of Isaac's lineage: a dreamer, a poet, a thinker, a romantic, an introvert, an outcast, a cultural connoisseur, a revolutionary - in effect, a surrogate of the early film director. As such, he is prone to the two fundamental cinematic impulses: that of George Méliès, the grasp for the fantastical and unobservable, and the Lumière brothers, the realist urge. Alongside his compulsion towards Angelica, Isaac is indescribably drawn to taking photos of laborers in the hills, obsessively depicting their pickaxes pummeling into the Earth. Later, he begins following the gyrating gears of a tractor sifting through dirt, snapping as many shots as possible. Glancing over these and other images draped across a string beside his balcony, the suggestion comes gently to the fore: he has created movement.



Oliveira, on the other hand, humbly rejects camera movement for the vast majority of the film, preferring to keep his camera - like the Lumière's - a stationary observer. There is supreme formal precision to the film, a fixed understanding of the behavioral patterns within a single rectangular room that is reflected in nearly symmetrical compositions that allow space for multiple planes of action to occur in one shot. The Strange Case of Angelica, however, is not exactly a "room film" in the same way that a Roy Andersson or an Akerman is a room film; Oliveira has constructed a fully realized, hermetically sealed fable world with a firm sense of built-in rhythms and patterns. The film's repetitive skyline cutaways have a storybook quality to them, containing the action within a single community and also reinforcing a temporal linearity. It's fitting that the film concludes on the shot of a woman closing up the boards on a window until the screen goes black, an image that is instantly reminiscent of Satantango. Like Tarr, Oliveira is interested in maintaining a communal narrative and entertaining the many digressions it brings, and when that narrative reaches a conclusion there's no more space for it to live beyond the cinema. Allowing it to exist would mean suggesting a continuity in the cinematic space Oliveira has built, which runs counter to his intentions. Instead, he finds this world, drops in on it in the middle of the night and leaves with it faded to black, preserving its memory.

The Strange Case of Angelica is an argument for the timelessness of images, for the fact that pictures, particularly moving ones, can reflect an immortality that causes the mortal to pine in hopelessness. There are gentle, multifaceted dichotomies at the center of the film - mortality and immortality, life and death, realism and surrealism, past and present - that Oliveira wisely navigates, finally coming to the conclusion that they are irresolvable, that there is no ideal course of action, only an endless tug-of-war between two respective poles. In an act of pure selfishness that is the sum of all those ruminative stares off camera and into the Great Beyond, Isaac eventually implodes with consuming desire for Angelica and commits some unfussy form of suicide, running to the hillside and collapsing before a procession of chanting children. Back in his room under the detached care of a village doctor, Isaac finally succumbs to death in one of Oliveira's most elaborately choreographed, yet entirely modest, long takes. His concerned landlady enters the room, sighing in quiet despair and acknowledging the inevitability. Her sigh is quite like that of the filmmaker, who at such an old age presents with utter clarity a simultaneous fear and embrace of the void, which of course is entangled (as with all great directors) with an awareness of the enduring power of love.

In Vanda's Room (No Quarto da Vanda) A Film by Pedro Costa (2000)

Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room is a remarkable, all-encompassing portrait of the Fontainhas ghetto of Lisbon and the people who live there, a stunningly intimate and compassionate panorama of a truly grim way of life. In its epic length and patient observation, the film accumulates an extraordinary power by its conclusion, a realization of the unmistakable humanity that can exist even as everything turns to devastation and degradation. At the center of this portrait is Vanda Duarte, an angular, slightly androgynous woman who spends her days selling lettuce and cabbage to the Fontainhas inhabitants and free-basing heroine with her sister Zita in the confines of her claustrophobic and filthy bedroom. Hers is a dour, self-destructive lifestyle, yet one not without its degree of perseverance, dedication, and dignity; Costa's impressive achievement here is to flip any pre-conceived notions of lowly drug addicts, to assert their essential humanity rather than belittle them for their reckless choices or suggest that they are disposable. In fact, through his persistent camera, Costa is able to uncover these same positive qualities in a variety of characters who cohabit the same concrete dungeon as Vanda while also discovering the vital concept of community that survives in this scenario.

The film now exists as a memorial for this strangely self-contained slum, because throughout In Vanda's Room it is being steadily demolished, resulting in the eviction and subsequent displacement of these already displaced immigrant souls (an experience Costa would tackle directly in his next film, Colossal Youth). While the rest of the world becomes transient and individualized and the New Europe furthers its diffusion of geographical and cultural identity, the people in Fontainhas cling to an established code, perhaps the only sense of consistency and stability they've known in their lives. The first post-credit shot of the film watches as Vanda's lifelong friend, the recently evicted Nhurro, bathes in buckets of hot water in a dank and shadowy room. As he finishes, steam rolls off his entire body to create an image of spectral and otherworldly effervescence, and it's as if Costa is immediately establishing the ghostly quality of these people, the fact that they are so vividly on the brink of total extinction. Periodically the film will pull back from the human component of the film for a reminder of the mechanical demolition of the neighborhood. Long static shots reveal trucks crushing the cement foundations, and at one point, a couple of steel office buildings are glimpsed in the background of the debris, presumably the impetus for this drastic act of modernization. As a result, a sense of encroachment and time running out is always palpable in the film, always something that quite literally weighs heavily on the inhabitants as the sounds of destruction dominate the soundtrack.

Subtly, Costa is raising a correlation between this mindless form of destruction as political and economic "progress" and the more personal form of self-destructive drug abuse witnessed in the characters, in its own perverse way a route to satisfaction and fulfillment. Both are careless and reprehensible, but in Costa's sublimely sympathetic vision the addicts seem almost justifiable in comparison to such an abstract political affair that would blindly annihilate an entire community of human beings for the supposed betterment of the greater good. In Vanda's Room, then, is not as laissez-faire as its cinema vérité trappings might lead it to seem, but rather works as an understated indictment of these wrongheaded government attitudes. As such, its finest and most potent argument is its peerless investigation of the private spaces behind the concrete walls where individuals - aside from consuming copious quantities of hard drugs - are harboring their own loves, desires, suspicions, and ideas. In a word, being human. In one scene, Vanda shows a group of friends and family a decrepit, utterly unsellable antique wooden ship that she plans to exchange in town for a modest wage and is met with skepticism and mockery. In another scene, an addict named Pango perseveres in mustering up a wardrobe out of scattered pieces of wood from old appliances that are lying around his dismal two-room apartment. And later, in the film's most moving scene, an older man named Pedro offers a bouquet of roses to Vanda after she compulsively outlines the schedule for taking the respiratory treatment she just supplied him with (Vanda coughs incessantly in the film, and every time she does it's as if her lung is flipping inside out). Each instance offers a small glimmer of camaraderie, resourcefulness, or kindness that powerfully articulates the vitality of these people better than any artificial dramatization of such a moment could.



Arguably it's Costa's severe technological transition that allowed for such piercing moments of authenticity (although I'd contend that nearly the same level of verisimilitude was already omnipresent in his comparatively bombastic Ossos, a work which utilized the traditional modes of production: a crew, lights, film, even some actors). In Vanda's Room was born out of Costa, a single DV camera, and a sound recorder, and the results are surprisingly high-fidelity if not frequently evocative and distinctive expressions of the digital medium. Costa has a painterly eye for texture and light and the way the two interact that is not unlike that of Tarkovsky, evident in the film's many lowly lit interiors where the deadpan expressions of people are offset by the grimy, clay-like shine of the walls and tables. Visually, the film is at its most stunning at these moments, and when the illumination is reduced at several points to the glow of one or two candles - as it is during one grueling midnight session of heroine usage - the contrast between light and dark is accentuated even further, taking on a metaphorical dimension to suggest the increasing loss of light and hope from these people's lives. Working in a similar fashion is Costa's dense soundtrack, a never-ending chaotic drone of destruction, children playing, rats squeaking, and people, like Vanda, chattering away in their superficially short and irritable tones, which is always offscreen as if to represent both the unbreakable togetherness of this community as well as the constant distance of those inside to the outside world.

The overwhelming sadness of In Vanda's Room is that these tiny shreds of human connection and satisfaction - even if they are centered around drugs - are soon to be extinguished and complicated by the eventual erasure of the neighborhood. In a conversation between Vanda and Nhurro in which the two of them discuss the prospect of whether their lives are predestined or chosen (Vanda is admirably always the source of assurance and nourishment in such scenes), it becomes clear that they have known each other since they were young, that they have struggled with the same issues for quite some time. The same is certainly the case for most of the people in the film, and the identical situation out of which they are forced to suck it up and start a new life is one that would be unspeakable in a less impoverished area of society. This shortsighted tendency to overlook the lower class is the real tragedy of In Vanda's Room, and it's one that Costa delicately and persuasively implicates the audience in through his calmly riveting filmmaking.

Ne Change Rien (2009) A Film by Pedro Costa

(This review is referring to a screening at the Harvard Film Archive after which Costa himself spoke.)

"I don't like documentaries. No one likes documentaries."
Pedro Costa

They say great artists don't know how to talk about their work. Or so the cliché goes. Pedro Costa reinvigorates this understanding; not only does he ponderously ramble on about matters somewhat tangential to those inquired about (which must partially be attributed to the language barrier), but in many instances he seems to present notions that contradict or complicate the ostensible motivations and ideologies present onscreen. When Costa half-jokes about a universal distaste for documentaries, one gets the sense that he's referring to a didactic, dry form that he does not concern himself with. That much is clear. However, this offhand comment comes moments before an extended monologue about what he perceives to be a widespread disillusionment with the pleasures of fictional world-building, a lack of ability for contemporary audiences to invest in narratives with the same sense of wonderment and awe that cinema-goers did in the early 1900's. All of this is curious when placed in context of the film in question, his latest venture into the vast gray area between narrative and documentary, Ne Change Rien. Nine out of ten viewers unaware of the exacting cinematic practice of Pedro Costa would call this a documentary, perhaps even an insipid, perplexing one at that, and that same sample would likely agree that Costa had no intentions of creating a skewed kind of "vampire story". This pro-fiction babble is destabilizing coming from a director whose very films seem disillusioned by narratives, fixated as they are on worlds where all stories seem to have evaporated and there is little more to do than tirelessly investigate the strange tendencies of surfaces and people.

But to temporarily decipher Costa's charming hypocrisies, it's at least important to realize that he transforms what is superficially a music documentary into something else entirely, an utterly distinct piece of pure cinema that has a tendency to oppose everything a standard film about music would do. Its central aim is Parisian actress Jeanne Balibar - whose secondary musical career Costa turns his camera towards here - as she alternates between rehearsals with her eponymous trance/lounge/pop group in their preparation for an LP and her work as a singer for a theater production of Jacques Offenbach’s La Périchole. The particulars of this documentation (song titles, names of fellow performers, even the name of the stage production she's involved in) are left unclear in the film, meaning it's certainly not fulfilling as a traditional documentary whose primary goal is to enlighten and inform viewers. It's closer to a film like Ossos, seemingly his most fictionalized Lisbon portrait, where details are scattered and obscured in an attempt to facilitate an enigmatic story delivery. Because Costa creates a longing for details within the viewer through his deliberately incomplete or unexplored segments, a tension is established not entirely unlike that in a narrative film.

Usually this tension is made explicit in the fragmented presentation of individual scenes, where Costa lets his camera linger on a static frame of one performer, or in some extreme cases, just the neck of a guitar in the shadows, while the rest of the music occurs offscreen in an imagined space. If one of the chief concerns of a music doc is to capture the collaborative magic of music-making, Costa subverts it by refusing to show the band in mutual engagement. Yet at the same time, his employment of a mono soundtrack (he only used one microphone, usually beside the camera) is an attempt to harness a greater sense of togetherness. Here the tension between the visual separation and the sonic singularity makes for an odd and disconcerting hybrid, confusing the viewer but also encouraging imagination. What's more, it approximates the phenomenon of multitrack recording, where performers are literally disconnected in a studio but joined in the headphone output. In one revealing scene, Costa shows a sound-blocked booth where Balibar is singing, and it is only when he cuts away to the musicians in the adjacent room that we realize an entire song is being played, as Balibar's intimate, mellow singing gives way to a fuller, more manufactured group sound. Moments like these potently convey the manipulation of the studio recording craft and feel like uncomfortable invasions of privacy.



If the film tails off about halfway through and never fully recovers, it's because its main subject is essentially uninteresting. I realize that this may be a minority viewpoint and that several people have expressed great enthusiasm for Balibar's artistry. I also realize that her unflinching stoicism is deeply in line with the rest of Costa's work, in which figures exists like shadows in an otherwise concrete world. But her enormous ambivalence and, quite frankly, lack of sufficient musical talent became rather off-putting at a certain point. It's as if the music doesn't grow organically from her, like she's endlessly going through the motions, existing in this space and only happening to toss off some utterances under her breath so as to not look like a complete maverick of indifference. This seeming vacancy of mind is evident in one of the film's most trying scenes, when Costa sets his camera down in one never-ending two shot of Balibar and Rodolphe Burger (the guitarist) as they dissect a pulsing bass sample from Curtis Mayfield’s “Super Fly”. Balibar is mechanically repeating the same vocal melody and her lethargic knee-tapping periodically falls out of time. Surely, it doesn't take much to simply follow a beat or search for some variation in phrasing, and I think Balibar's inability to convincingly do so in this scene suggests a fundamental remoteness, a lack of connection with her music. If it's any measure of credibility, I should make it clear that I have had extensive experience as a musician, rehearsing and recording, and it's something I find consistently exhilarating, making Balibar's indifference that much more irritating.

Unfortunately, this is to the detriment of Costa's own rigorous approach. His unrelenting static compositions provide ample time for Balibar to reveal her inner spark, but she remains remote even as her face, made gigantic with Costa's claustrophobic framing, looms over the theater for several minutes. As a study of a person, it's transfixing stuff, but as a study of a performer and performance, only variably does it offer excitement, immediacy, or insight. Balibar aside, the atmosphere in Ne Change Rien is unprecedented; a feeling of late-night melancholy and introspection pervades the film even during its daytime studio performances, when ethereal light sprays in from the few windows, teaming with domestic lamps as the only sources of illumination in the otherwise black, cavernous space. This moody setting is likely what contributes to Costa's vague description of his film as a "vampire movie where the characters play instruments", and it perhaps speaks to the kind of world-building he advocates for. It's a place you get lost in for however long the film runs, and you lose your conception of time. I wasn't watching Ne Change Rien as much as I was living it.

Ossos (Bones) A Film by Pedro Costa (1997)

Pedro Costa's first look at the lives of Cape Verdean immigrants in the Fontainhas slum is also his first pronounced gesture towards a kind of fiction/documentary hybrid, a representation of real lives in real settings with the logistics of a narrative production. In short, a breathtaking work poised peculiarly in between authenticity and artifice, reality and hyperreality, logic and illogic. Assembled in a deeply elliptical fashion out of extensive blocks of self-contained moments, Ossos chronicles the routine struggles of a battered community over the course of what appears to be a few weeks. Within its first 15 minutes, a young woman named Tina (Mariya Lipkina) has threatened to gas herself and her newborn child in the confines of her own decrepit living room, and the inscrutable father has subsequently taken the baby away to the city for bartering. And Costa reveals these occurrences with such an economy and forthrightness that they fly by without being fully comprehended. A lack of storytelling aptitude is not what's at play here (Costa has no interest in the conventional workings of plot) but rather an early instance of such extreme immersion in the concrete that it surpasses easy encapsulation. The two individual shots that detail these events - the first a low static shot and the second a brisk horizontal tracking shot invariably interrupted by roaring traffic heading upstream - are utterly devoid of traditional exposition, leaving the viewer to connect the dots as to what occurred before the frame and what extended beyond it, both temporally and spatially. In each instance Costa eschews the explanatory essence entirely. One may be tempted to ask questions like "does she follow through with her grim setup?" or "where is he taking the baby in the bag?", but perhaps the more fundamental, unsettling question is "why is there gas or a bag in the first place?"

But the film keeps marching forward without any interest in tying these loose ends, only fractionally resolving the uneasy question marks scenes later when we see Tina still submitting to her daily grind and the father restlessly pacing around town looking for someone to either feed his child or buy it. Costa presents nothing beyond the physical presence of the characters onscreen, refusing to analyze their often contradictory behaviors, like swapping from hasty selfishness to tenderness or suicidal impulses to a calm moment of mutual laughter in a matter of moments. And his non-actors are certainly fascinating enigmas in their own right, with their mere corporeality superseding our understanding of them as living, breathing humans. In this regard, the figure who stimulates most frequently is more or less the central character Clotilde, the cleaning lady and close friend of Tina played by Costa regular Vanda Duarte. Clotilde's first appearance onscreen in the second shot of the film is utterly hypnotizing as she trudges down a set of stairs in the morning to haphazardly turn on a pot to boil then smoke a cigarette in front of the stove. Costa confidently sets her up in a long posed close-up, drawing attention to both her profoundly vacant stare and her peculiar, rather androgynous physical features: a pointy, angular bone structure, a faint mustache, and a long, greasy head of hair like that of a Native American tribe leader. She also moves with icy deliberation, completing each stone-serious gesture like the strictest of Bressonian archetypes.

Duarte's apathetic death stare introduces one of Ossos' central motifs of extended painterly close-ups that border on static portraiture. It even proves to be the chief leisure activity of the Fontainhas inhabitants, who have literally come to a standstill in their private moments. When no longer working, these people stop motionless and simply stare blankly, for there is nothing else to do. They cannot focus their eyes on an object, for there is nothing to look at. They do not look forward or backward, because their lives appear to have little progressive or regressive movement. They are locked in the oppressive present, perpetually sucking on cigarette butts, which look more damaging here than ever. Costa's unblinking camera frames them from a respectful medium distance in their evocative silence, a pictorial space gently composed with the look of a muted pastel painting, serviced tremendously by Emmanuel Machuel's stark rendering of deep shadow and neutral hues (after all, he worked harmoniously with Bresson too). These long closeups will often exist as scenes unto themselves, devoid of any surrounding context, a curiosity that is augmented when seemingly irrelevant peripheral players are the subjects. For instance, Zita Duarte (Vanda's sister, who actually dominates the first shot of the film) and Clotilde Montron both play haunting onlookers with no impact on the proceedings, particularly providing impassive stares from adjacent rooms in an arbitrary community dance scene somewhat reminiscent of the bar dance in Bela Tarr's Satantango. More interestingly, with the former's haggard slenderness and the latter's robust softness, they suggest doppelgangers of Clotilde and Tina, ghosts of meta import perhaps.



It would be disingenuous to say that nothing is going on during the many moments of seeming emptiness though, because Costa's aural representation of offscreen space is as dense as it is prescient, foreshadowing with equal potency the spaces that are later visually documented. Families are heard bickering in the alleyways near and far, doors are shutting, children are moving to and fro, and dogs are barking in the distance, a stunningly layered sound design that puts into question the level of artificiality. Are the diegetic sounds heard beyond the frame the quotidian reverberations of an unknowing slum populace, or have they been carefully manipulated? Costa preserves this tension between documentary and fiction as compellingly as he vacillates between the broader strokes of a faint narrative and the micro snippets of inconsequential routines. In the city, the father is taken in for temporary care by a compassionate nurse named Eduarda (Isabel Ruth) from the hospital that the ill baby is given to, and Clotilde also begins cleaning for her. Later, Eduarda visits Fontainhas and sleeps with Clotilde's husband (Miguel Sermão) while the two are intoxicated, completing a breaking down of the walls between the poverty-stricken lower class and the equally drifting middle class. Though Eduarda's behaviors tend to come across rather impulsive, she is ultimately redeemed when she nurses Tina back to complacency after another misguided suicide attempt, just as the father continues to comfort and feed his baby after abandoning it. In spite of their weaknesses, these are characters with a concrete sense of dignity and a residual tenderness even in the midst of all their struggles.

Ossos is one of the shining achievements in recent world cinema, so sure of its own scope while remaining decidedly mysterious, a pure force of nature that does little to illuminate in distinct terms yet stuns in ineffable ways regardless. Costa's visual and sonic instincts are remarkable; as a pictorialist with paramount emphasis on drawn-out, fixed takes, he stands among the finest in cinema, capturing the gritty erosion of the slum with a sensuous poise that turns the ugly into the evocative. Though Ossos is the most "cinematic" of the Fontainhas films, no less alarming is the emotional authenticity, no cheaper are the rhythms of life. Operating under its own inexplicable internal logic with a formal dedication to match Robert Bresson, the film is presumably Costa's final foray into film before his further attempts at intimacy in the digital works In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth.