Silent Light (Stellet Licht) A Film by Carlos Reygades (2008)

Silent Light starts and ends with a sunrise and sunset, a monumentally simple concept that surprisingly has never once, to my knowledge, been exercised in a film. The two shots are undeniably sublime, protracted glances at the beauty of our world, and create something akin to the curtains opening and closing in the theater, a mere blink of the world's eye that exposes an age-old tale underneath it in the Mennonite community the film is set in. Director Carlos Reygades is unafraid to allow something so ordinary to grace the screen for an extended period of time, and in this refusal, demands the hushed attention such a cosmic act of nature deserves. His camera begins pirouetting through the starry night sky, eventually spiraling towards the ground and finishing with a languorous dolly in between two silhouetted trees, revealing the expansive sky as a slowly evolving amalgam of vibrant red and yellow paint. Accompanying it is the amplified buzzing of cicada bugs and the soft purr of the dawn wind. The shot's coda is essentially a reversal of the first one, and it is one of the most satisfying, visually orgasmic finales a film can offer, an aurora-borealis-like sight that accounts for one of the finest moments in contemporary cinema. These two shots contain enough wonder for an entire film, and I would have called it a masterpiece had they been the only components of Silent Light. The bleak moral play that exists within the remainder is, in this line of sight, somewhat of an addendum, enough to make a strong piece of pure cinema to be sure, even improved by the confounding impression that the opening leaves over, but it can be tedious.

The film chronicles an austerely, but not explicitly, religious man named Johan who is juggling two women in his life, a rather surprising fact considering the rigidity of the community. The Mennonites are settled in the Northern tip of Mexico, speak a German dialect called Plautdietsch, and adhere to liturgical activities in their withdrawn village, a place where the sounds of spoons upon bowls seem to reverberate for miles. Following the opening sequence, we see a silent family in prayer before a table of food and only hear the loud ticking of a clock in the background, which is trailed by a shot of a shiny disc on the clock that reflects the whole family. Immediately, Reygades also presents the village as a place where the slog of time is far more relevant to life, a characteristic that it shared with its festival companion, Times and Winds; each second that clicks by, it seems that emotions are magnified. Representing Johan's past lover but established partner is his wife Esther, a somber woman who cares for the pair's children and is well aware of Johan's admitted adultery with Marianne, another woman in the community with some physical similarities who genuinely feels bad for Esther. Johan feels some grief over his crisis, evidenced by the number of times Reygades patiently observes his weeping, but also believes that God has chosen a path for him to be with Marianne. He clearly still harbors much love for Esther, but his physical and emotional desire for Marianne is overwhelming, a notion he makes perfectly clear to his preacher father. Johan's struggle is universal - the difficulty to resolve one's polarized romantic feelings - but his method of dealing with it is certainly unusual. Esther makes her despair known in the climactic scene (staged traditionally in accordance with climate), first accusing Marianne of being a "damn whore" and then lamenting the past when her relationship with Johan was functional. The love triangle is an extremely unconventional one, with Marianne in complete understanding of Esther's turmoil, Johan unfazed by his dishonorable acts, and Esther repressive with her disapproval.



Carlos Reygades is a director whose first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, were both stylistic originals but nonetheless did little to foreshadow the ascetic, contemplative tone of Silent Light. The film's visual palette is representative of both Tarkovsky and, more presently, Lisandro Alonso. Each time Reygades establishes a scene with a wide shot, that wide shot lasts much longer than one might expect, and eventually, after tracking into the scene creepily, it becomes the shot for the entire scene. This is most mysteriously displayed when Johan visits a friend at his garage and the interior is pitch black until the camera enters completely. Also, the camera will perform the equivalent of Ozu's "pillow shots", only for Reygades, they frequently come during the middle of a scene. For example, when Johan and Esther are driving through inundant rain, the camera cuts away from their conversation inside the car - which always includes only one of them in the frame at once to suggest their spiritual disconnection - to follow on the dirt road at a distance before returning. There are also observational pauses in the story when we just view the family bathing outdoors or Esther driving a tractor through the wheat fields. For the first thirty minutes or so, this rhythm is tiring, but once Johan's crisis is learned, the film accumulates herculean force. In many ways, Silent Light is a riff on Dreyer's Ordet, except without such a blatant fixation on the religious strain. This is most evident in an exactly congruent denouement that acts as somewhat of a resolution to Johan's crisis and a justification of Marianne's earlier, and likely true, statement: "Peace is stronger than love." Whether this is an "homage" to Dreyer or a ripoff is in question, because there is a sense that Reygades uses the scene in the same affirming manner. Despite this though, the scene's power within the film is unquestionable, as are the other 145 minutes of elemental, authentic filmmaking. Silent Light is an assured film that uses the beautiful perplexity of nature to compliment and bookend the fragile frameworks of love and faith.

Badlands (1973) A Film by Terrence Malick

Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) is one of the most enigmatic Western rebels in the history of American cinema. The same can be said about his naive partner Holly (Sissy Spacek). Terrence Malick's debut is a strange, impressive film that, despite focusing all of its screen time on a young couple on a killing spree in the Midwest, is something of an anti-character study. Malick does not plumb the psychology of his characters by providing back stories, details of their experiences, or their relation to others and their society. Kit and Holly are opaque characters in the strictest sense of the word; their physical existence is all we are treated to, leaving us to make attempts at applying their physical surroundings (the extensive South Dakota and Montana frontier) as hints towards their erratic behaviors. Simultaneously though, Kit and Holly are likable, down-to-earth figures. Malick seems to have been on a mission to assert that there are pressures and justifications, possibly bigger than the world and our perception of it, that lead people to acts that are seen as evil to the majority.

Badlands sets itself up against understandable ideals; Spacek's pragmatic, drawly narration (which sounds on and off throughout the entire film) introduces Holly as a simple person bearing a vaguely troublesome road to where she's at (a 15 year old, mature-for-her-age redhead). Her father is a domineering, brutal cowboy who of course disapproves of his daughter's evolving companionship with Kit, a 25 year-old, denim-flaunting garbage boy with a poker faced cordiality, and her mother is out of the picture. Holly is understandably attracted to Kit; he commands her attention with his seeming ambivalence and she gushes (or at least I suspect she does, for nothing in her flat inflection suggests it) about his uncanny resemblance to James Dean. When Kit murders her father shortly after he denies a grant for sharing company with his daughter, Holly responds only with a hollow slap in the face and a suggestion of calling the police, to which Kit replies modestly something to the tune of, "You could, but it wouldn't be so hot for me". The two, about as unconventional a couple as any (most would say Holly is too young for Kit), subsequently flee the scene and drive headlong into the empty American West, with Kit shooting anyone who threatens their anonymity.

This, at its core, is the definition of a "road movie". Malick has no interest in such formalities though. Badlands is deliberately nondescript and visually dominant, a quite plain display of affinity with the classic mythic landscape of America. Malick uses Kit and Holly's transit as a reason to explore the rhythm of the West, a notion he was so taken by that he continued with his next film, the equally singular Days of Heaven. Malick's aesthetic here is just about the same: a devoted attention to a natural look (most often achieved with the lack of artificial light), grandiose bisections of land and sky, and warm, pleasant tones that contrast the lives of the characters on screen, which are the opposite of homely and appear to be headed towards a bleak fate. He also made it known with Badlands that he was one of the clearest descendants of Bresson, a practitioner of an economic flow and an ultimately cumulative poeticism that can be achieved by the subtraction of elements rather than the addition of them. Kit and Holly's sparse, distanced dialogue is absolutely immaculate; more often than not, it does not have to do with the film on any higher level, instead simply acting as tightly written, inconsequential fractions in an oblong whole. Undeniably, Badlands is a stellar debut, perhaps even lighter and more transfixing than any other Malick film.

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.

After Hours (1985) A Film by Martin Scorsese

After Hours is one of Martin Scorsese's most unnerving studies of urban paranoia, but unfortunately is a film that is frequently forgotten amidst more mammoth works such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or Mean Streets. Filmed in the mid-80's, it was a decidedly smaller production than most of his films, and as a result has slipped into near anonymity aside what preceded it (The King of Comedy (1982)) and what followed (The Color of Money (1986)). It does not lack the energy that such a fact would suggest however; by contrast, the film is always on the move, its camera an imaginative manifestation of its main character's shifty thoughts.

Bringing to the screen a quick-witted, savvy screenplay by Joseph Minion, Scorsese turns a night for Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a pragmatic guy working in a cubicle, into an insanely unlucky fever dream. When the night is young, Paul meets a charismatic blond lady named Marcy in a cafe through a mutual fondness for the book he's reading. They exchange numbers and soon enough he's being driven by a raucous taxi driver to her friend's Soho apartment, during which his only 20 dollar bill blows out the window. The apartment is the habitat of a classic lower Manhattan art-freak, Kiki, who works tiresomely on obscurely contorted body sculptures and exercises a life of sadomasochism and claustrophobic punk clubs. Paul gradually becomes creeped out by Marcy, tells her off, and later that night discovers her dead body. Following this, he bounces randomly from apartment to diner and back again in search of someone who will either lend him some money to ride the subway - whose prices increased at midnight - or offer him a bed to sleep in. To add to his troubles, the neighborhood's fed-up denizens are forming a clan in response to a spontaneous series of robberies, asserting the frantic Paul as the primary suspect.

Scorsese imbues this harrowing outing with a surreal, fable-like quality and a Kafkaesque sense of perpetually accumulating doom. His vivacious shooting style incorporates subtle, subconscious messages that manage to make the audience feel the same aggravated, discombobulated feelings that Paul has. Continuity will break, such as when the sound and image do not exactly match up during a scene when Paul sneaks into Marcy's pocket book and discovers a cream designed to soothe burns only to quickly slip it back in upon her return, and the camera will exaggeratedly glide towards objects that either propound Paul's terror or provide hope of salvation, on display when a phone rings in an apartment and Paul lunges towards it with rhythm-snapping immediacy. Scorsese also tracks along the seedy Soho streets in a voyeuristic manner behind or beside Paul, sliding across the ground like a snake bushwhacking through the immense amounts of incessant rain and manhole fog.

In a way, the camera embodies the very movement of mischievousness, as if it's involved in an endlessly hostile practical joke played on Paul. Each time he leaves Kiki's discomforting apartment to the sound of Howard Shore's haunting, minimalist synthesizer jingle, the camera wheels by the sculptures in a POV shot, looking as if they're pushing him away while warning him of eternal damnation. However, eternal damnation is eventually what he evades by some unlikely stroke of luck in the slick, devilishly clever finale. With this, Scorsese hyperbolizes the ourobouric flow of urban life: one can always make it back to work in the morning only to begin another seemingly menacing day in the city.

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) A Film by Tomas Alfredson (2008)

Vampire films of merit come few and far between, which is why Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In - a work that fuses horror and social realism to engrossing extent - comes as such a surprise. Moreover, in an age where horror cinema has dwindled into empty, gratuitous offerings of torture porn and shock-for-shock's sake ghost stories (no less, the lame cult phenomenon of Twilight), its intelligence should rightfully be highly praised. The film is not a vehicle to explore the spectacle of vampirism; instead, the inclusion of vampire elements helps to add a morally complex dimension to the young relationship between the film's two main characters: Oskar, an inferior, fantasizing 12-year old outcast, and Eli, the mysterious vampire Oskar falls for, unknowing - at least at first - of her bizarre background.

Eli is an enigmatic character throughout, both due to the fact that she is constantly verging on uncontrollable violence and because Alfredson implicitly hints towards her androgynous nature. She repeatedly tells Oskar she is not a girl, which at once can be taken in light of her inhumanity, but following the brief insertion of a shot of her castrated genital region, a gender context is implanted in her statement as well. As displayed in the opening scene, Oskar is a boy who channels the anger he feels from being bullied into vicarious acts - a Travis Bickle of sorts. "Squeal like a pig," he proclaims over a black screen in the beginning before we see him thrusting a knife through the air maliciously. In this light, Eli is the mirror of Oskar: violent, brave, and intimidating. She stirs up courage in Oskar, encouraging him to be proactive when dealing with the bullies at school and henceforth brings about his maturation, which is as much of a negative one as it is positive. The film culminates with Oskar traveling to freedom with Eli; in his mind he is a victim of love but is just as much a product of the seduction of a vampire, destined to become the kind of ruthless supplier of blood that Eli's father was in the film.

Let the Right One In's "love story" however, is by turns complex (as illustrated above) and banal. The two forge their first emotional connection through the ultimate outcast staple: the Rubik's cube. Oskar plays with the device in his free time but cannot solve it, but when he offers it to Eli, she has a curious ability to finish it overnight. This exchange felt familiar and somewhat grounded in the romance and coming-of-age genres, detracting from the relationship that otherwise felt like it was evolving supernaturally. Interestingly, Alfredson keeps most of the violence offscreen or at a distance so that when Eli does make an attack or her father collects the blood of a victim, it is genuinely terrifying. He refuses to romanticize the violence, reflecting how it is a necessary burden for Eli rather than a footloose pleasure.

For the most part, CGI is used tastefully, a method of adding a subtly alien quality to Eli's movements. The film is most frustrating when it is not, such as during a scene when a newly cursed survivor victim of Eli's attack is bombarded by digitized cats and subsequently engulfed in flames as a response to daylight. One of the finest achievements of the film is its pacing and visual focus. The art direction is stellar, an exacting milieu of snow and blood, whereas the camerawork reflects the slow pace of life in the Swedish village the film is set in. Rarely does a vampire film extract so much fear out of calculated ambiance instead of viscera, and it is one of the best films of 2008 as a result.

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.

Three Monkeys (Üç maymun) A Film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2008)

The trailer for Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest film, Three Monkeys, left me hoping the talented Turkish auteur had not lost the restrained genius that has made him so distinctive. It includes a host of thriller trailer clichés: ominous flashes of negative, text that detaches from itself frenetically, distasteful solarization effects - in a word, it does not come close to doing justice to the subtle brooding atmosphere of Ceylan's third straight Cannes contribution.

At this point, Ceylan, hotly contagious among fans of high art, has established himself as the contemporary master of domestic tension, almost a Turkish Bergman when taking into account the amount of time he spends silently scrutinizing the emotional complexities of his alienated characters. While Three Monkeys does maintain this thematic bent, the film also introduces some elements that are new to Ceylan, for instance poetic hallucinations (the eerie sight of a deceased child in broad daylight) and cinematographic flexibility (the camera in Three Monkeys frequently spends time scanning faces in close-up or changing shots within scenes, whereas Distant's focus was on wide, prolonged static shots). Also, the film's characters are all well aware of each other's grief but refuse to vocalize their feelings, resulting in a more intense psychodrama than Distant, in which negative feelings were repressed and (just nearly) completely unexpressed.

The film's tension can be attributed to Ceylan's nifty, schematic approach; just about every scene contains only two characters reflecting on unseen wrongdoings, glancing morosely at each other, arguing severely, or lying about a day's events. We only see three people in the same frame in the film's most climactic scene, and those are the three stubborn monkeys that make up the shattered family at the film's center: Eyüp (Yavuz Bingol), the foreboding father who had done time in jail to assist his greedy politician acquaintance and receive a large sum of money in return, Hacer (Hatice Aslan), the deceitful mother caught up in an affair with the politician, and Ismail (Rifat Sungar), the suspicious son forced by the weight of the crisis into committing dreadful acts. Ceylan forges a discomforting quietude within the family, a product of his refusal to show the acts that trigger the dissolution, instead lingering for lengthy amounts of time on the nuances in expression in the solemn faces, the drawn out resonances of Hacer's adultery, Ismail's eventual violence, and Eyüp's shallowness.



Three Monkeys is at the same time a commentary on the greedy nature of politics, the placing of public regard atop the need to take blame for one's faults. This is evident in the character of Servet (Ercan Kesal), the politician whose legal issues are dumped conveniently on Eyüp with money as the saving grace. Servet does not need to worry about his problems with Eyüp available as bait, just as Eyüp does not need to worry about his son's crime when he can simply offer up the punishment to his friend Bayram (Cafer Köse). The mostly minor actors do an outstanding job of manifesting the deep ocean of gargantuan emotions - love, hate, grief, confusion - into a largely wordless spectrum of shadow-eyed facials and tense body movements.

Perhaps the finest achievement of the film however is its technical beauty and tonal singularity. The inherent menace in the script is supplemented chillingly by atmospheric sound design; rolling thunder, rustling winds, crickets, diffused barking dogs, clanking train tracks, and amplified drips create a palpable mood that far surpasses anything a score could have brought to the film. And of course there is the cinematography, which, as is expected from the highly skilled photographer/filmmaker, is absolutely immaculate. Ceylan has crafted a world of shiny, somber faces against huge black clouds, windy terraces overlooking the sea, and wet winding roads containing careless individuals, all adding up to his most riveting piece of cinema to date.