There Will Be Blood (2007) A Film by Paul Thomas Anderson

It is difficult to pinpoint the variety of motivations that led me to kick this blog off last year. There have been a great number of films that I've seen in the past in which something occurred - a camera movement, a gesture, an utterly bizarre moment, a mood, a performance, a director, a style - that gradually created a desire inside me to write. Slacker, Damnation, Garden State, Paths of Glory, The Silence. These were all films that made me feel something that I knew needed to be expressed, but yet I remained quiet. Then Paul Thomas Anderson's magisterial There Will be Blood came to theaters. I saw it twice. That was the tipping point. I knew I needed to start writing. It was an especially crucial moment for me considering the film was the only thing I'd seen on the big screen up to that point that I could comfortably call "art". Sad, I know, but I knew it was a powerful sensation that called for action.

Ironically, I never ended up writing about There Will Be Blood for a number of reasons, most notably the fact that I sprung voraciously towards new films and wanted only to write about those. Anderson's work was simply an energizer, a celluloid strip that caused me to throw myself into the blogosphere rather than a film I was truly committed to engaging with in writing. I have now seen it for a third time, and it remains as eye-opening an experience as it was both times in the theater. The epic, Kubrickian scope of it translates decently well onto the television screen (after all, maybe I've trained myself to consume films that beg for theatrical treatment on a dinky home screen, having seen all of Kubrick's films in the comfort of my own basement). The scintillating uniqueness of Jonny Greenwood's score manages to resonate even without the luxury of surround sound. Robert Elswit's Oscar-winning cinematography loses some of its majestic impact on a digital television, but his compositions remain never less than striking. And most interestingly, Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning lead performance only becomes simultaneously more fascinating and more inscrutable through repeat viewings, his layers of mystery only deepening the more he ruthlessly snivels at his opponents.

It is necessary to point out that Day-Lewis, playing Daniel Plainview, the turn-of-the-century oil man who dominates the film physically, emotionally, and and spiritually, considers everyone an opponent. That makes for a lot of snarling. Plainview tells us, in the only scene of the film in which he comes close to speaking his mind, that he is a misanthrope, that he finds nothing to like in most people. He says this to a man named Henry (Kevin J. O'Conner) that falsely passes himself off as his brother to line himself up with success and money, and yet even as Plainview falls for his description, one can sense the distrust and dislike he feels towards him. This is because Plainview is a materialist in the strictest sense of the word, so much so that he devalues all human relationships in favor of personal accomplishment. Family does not matter, other than as a superficial image that will boost Plainview's own ethos. This may be the reason why in the stunningly wordless opening twenty minutes - reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey right down to shot compositions and musical cues - Plainview takes a fellow oil-man's baby son as his own when he injures himself at work. H.W. (Dillon Freasier), as he calls him, becomes his omnipresent right-hand-man, a vehicle that will allow others to apply qualities to Daniel such as family-oriented and loving even though they are noticeably lacking. That is, he is his sidekick until he goes deaf due to a massive explosion at the oil derrick one day, a defect that tarnishes Daniel's sense of self, bearing in mind he cannibalizes H.W. into a fragment of his own persona.



If H.W. - a character who is fittingly kept opaque throughout the film - becomes a fraction of Plainview, then Paul Sunday, the eccentric prophet in the small town of New Boston who turns Plainview's eye towards his land, becomes his mirror image. And yet at first glance, Sunday (a fitting name for a person who leads Sunday mass) appears to be everything Plainview is not: family-oriented, faithful in God, accommodating, gentle. Gradually, the film reveals him as a similarly greedy figure, devoted to turning religion into capitalism in the same way Plainview attempts to maintain his dominance of the oil business. Most aggravating is Paul's complete and utter phoniness when it comes to sermonizing; in order to rid his patrons of demons, he puts on exhibitionist spectacles involving screaming, writhing, and drooling. Paul Dano plays the determined false prophet as if on the same balance beam as Day-Lewis, risking ludicrousness one minute and putting on somber sincerity the next. Although both have the feel of eccentric and iconic figures, they manage to steer their performances towards believability.

Some of the central themes that emerge out of There Will Be Blood, like greed, ambition, and fate, align the film with a greater tradition of mythic American films that tackle such subjects with epic scope and a brooding tone, such as John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Welles' Citizen Kane (a work that appears to be more and more of an influence to Anderson as the film progresses). However, subjects like the oil industry, capitalism, and evangelism seem more timely than they do timeless. Oil is now an atrocious global market heavily dependent on foreign affairs. Capitalism tends to hurt more than it helps. And religion has turned into a marketable, ever-shifting commodity, where conversion to certain beliefs is forced on the innocent passersby more than ever. Anderson's pejorative treatment of all three subjects begs for the film to be interpreted as an allegory on current affairs. Daniel Plainview, who is an overwhelming, suffocating presence onscreen, and in many ways a tangible weight, seems to have the force of an entire landscape. Could that landscape be the United States spiraling into abysmal depths as it equates wealth and achievement with importance?



It is not that Anderson has never grappled with such multi-layered subject matter before. In fact, his films all critique American ways of life to some extent, but it is the clarity and cohesion with which he pursues his key questions that distinguishes There Will Be Blood as his finest work. Magnolia (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love tend to put forth a broad smattering of ideas but lack overall focus, whereas There Will Be Blood maturely stays true to a distinct flow, even as its backstory is left cloaked and its pace may be described as deliberate. Anderson seems to have a firm grasp of the implications of his stirring images, such as the scene when Plainview literally rubs Paul's face in a pool of oil, or its supposed power shift later on when Paul conducts the salvation of Plainview, a blackly comic look at the facade of religious conversion. He also deftly incorporates Greenwood's tense string-based score, using it not just to supplement the drama but to embody the spirit of the film and its characters in a way that brings to mind, once again, Kubrick, who would frequently realize the full potential of dissonance between soundtrack and image.

All of this comes to us through one of the most cleverly self-referential titles I've ever heard. It's rare that I ever give a title too much credit, and I'm certainly not the kind of person that will watch a movie with the title in mind and go back and dissect it afterward. However, There Will Be Blood's is a standout; its blunt four words are an acknowledgment of the different permutations of blood that are spread across the film: the blood of the land (oil), the blood of the human body, and the blood of Christ. It is also a mouth-watering warning of the unsavory act that closes the film, which is really its only graphic outbreak, leading some to ask the question, "where is the blood?" I love the tension that Anderson creates by naming the film what he does, a claustrophobic tension that is only fully solved in the final minutes when Plainview lets out the multivalent last line, "I'm finished", in a symmetrical composition set to anachronistic string music. The sequence makes me want to jump for joy. It is great, fulfilling cinema.

World of Glory (Härlig är jorden) A Short Film by Roy Andersson (1991)

During an aggressively confrontational scene of mass genocide that inaugurates Roy Andersson's essential short film World of Glory, a lanky man, the figure who becomes the center of interest for the rest of the film, turns around in his fixed position to look directly into the lens. He does so amongst a larger group of stiffly dressed men and women who inactively loiter around a horrific scene: a truck full of naked people is taken on a trip around a parking lot while the diesel exhaust fumes of the truck empty into their space. He also does so vacuously, either unaware of the immorality of it or unwilling to express any feelings that would contradict those of his peers. It's safe to say that the man looks at us, the provoked viewers, but it is perhaps more accurate to declare that he turns to gaze at humanity, the cumulative force that positions itself in close proximity to such horrors but only impassively looks on. The camera also assumes the weight of history and the unfortunate tendency for deplorable events to repeat themselves in different forms and for different reasons over a large span of time. It is Andersson's prerogative to lament the fact that, much to our ignorance, these acts have become progressively less visible to society as a whole.

This stance is decidedly more precise and polemical than those taken in Andersson's other films, ones that usually lean towards the existential, the unknown, and the unsolvable. Songs from the Second Floor was a somber and at times absurd riff on the meaning of life, and the more levelheaded You, the Living focused on the trials and tribulations of quotidian existence. World of Glory, an accomplished precursor to these two films, adopts the same histrionic, punctilious static-take style but fixes its attention on one character rather than shifting extemporaneously between vaguely related stories. The lanky man, camouflaged within his grayish surroundings by a thick coat of white makeup, stands in the middle of a series of perfectly composed frames to take us on a tour of his day-to-day life. He shows us his unremarkable possessions, like a small car, a bed, and a plain kitchen, and his similarly struggling family, with a mother on her deathbed, a dead father in a graveyard, a silent brother stuck in the throes of a mechanical job, and a young son getting the word Volvo carved into his forehead. The line between morbidity and black comedy is always played with in Andersson's films, but here it most closely leans towards the former. There is a frequent tension between whether it is right or wrong to laugh, but at times Andersson can't help but stage scenes with such caustic wit that his comedic side comes to the fore, such as when the man guzzles from a wine glass at mass for several seconds too long as a way to drink away his repressed sins.

The dire life of the central character, and the presumably miserable lives of the static figures that surround him, hint at the collective guilt of humanity. Andersson physically manifests this notion in the exaggerated mise-en-scene, one where characters hardly move an inch or crack a smile and stand with their shoulders hunched like zombies in foggy graveyards. World of Glory also introduces Andersson's concern for the force of consumerism, emphasizing the way materials dominate the lives of his characters, specifically in the shot of his little boy with the forehead imprint. The film's eerie classical soundtrack - which periodically rises in volume over the entirety of the film - weaves in and out of the scenes and the long black leader that separates them, creating a persistent mystery. It's a film that is absolutely brilliant in its deadpan simplicity, and positions itself as one of the medium's finest short works.

The Road (2009) A Film by John Hillcoat

I'll come right out and admit that I have not read Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, the basis of John Hillcoat's new film adaption. Yet I hope that this will help to provide a new perspective, considering nearly every review out there unfairly places every aspect of the film version beside those same aspects in the book and compares them. In most instances, it turns into this petty game where it seems as if the critic is trying to prove that the bigger brother will always be stronger, smarter, and more unique. Yes, Hillcoat is certainly a devotee of McCarthy's literature considering he has chosen to follow it so closely. But no matter how reverent he is, his film is a separate object altogether composed of images rather than words; it warrants its own judgment as a singular piece of cinema. Otherwise, reviews become biased and tell more about the critic's preoccupations than the film's. If there's ever going to be intelligent debate about the cross-section between literature and film, both need to be digested on their own first instead of immediately becoming such a comparative match.

Now that I have that out of the way, I'll go forth with my discussion of the film that has garnered knee-jerk descriptors such as "depressing" and "bleak". While The Road does take place in a post-apocalyptic Earth where evil cannibals massively overshadow the good guys and no solution is in sight, its ostensible core qualities - hope, love, and perseverance - fall several notches short of misanthropic. To give an idea of how diminutive the moral population is, the central father/son relationship (between Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) appears to be its lone presence for a great deal of the film, whereas snarling, toothless figures tend to peruse the devastated landscape in wild packs. There is no indication as to what caused the environmental disaster, but whatever the case, it was muscular enough to cast a lifeless gray over the entirety of the land, which is scattered with rusty cars, tipped powerlines, and fallen tree branches. Curiously, many houses remain structurally intact, and instead of containing measly scraps of food, they have turned into torture chambers where cannibals keep ravaged humans they plan to devour. At times, this imagery veers dangerously close to the overdone vistas of I Am Legend (2007), but in its more subdued moments, boasts dazzling, almost painterly visual invention.

It is across this terrain that The Man and The Boy travel, headed - in suggestively mystical manner - towards the sea. The crux of the film takes place on "the road", interrupted on occasion by decidedly idyllic flashbacks of life before the disaster, where images of flowers, sunlight, and The Man's beautiful wife (Charlize Theron) often times come across too mannered to be taken as convincing recollections. To be sure however, this dreamt up perfection is supposed to be in the context of a lovesick husband who is damned to spend the rest of his existence warding off enemies with his remaining two bullets in a loveless setting; the unexpectedly quick excisions of these visions only accentuates their ephemerality. It is also through these flashbacks that we get an ambiguous lesson about why the wife is not with the two of them in their journey. Apparently, Mortensen knew only how to give (evidenced by a scene from the past where he slips his hand between his wife's thighs at an upscale theater), and Theron was done with taking, so their relationship went south. Theron is seen somberly leaving the film into pitch darkness during what seems to be the immediate aftermath of the disaster.



The Man's ceaseless attachment to his wife may help explain any believable lack of this with his son. Instead, his protection of his son feels entirely animalistic, the kind of instinctual urge that causes him to cover his son in his coat and rope him into his bosom when predators are near. Their discussions are limited to the here-and-now (The Boy regularly asks questions like "are we gonna die?") rather than rooted in any sort of tenderly shared experiences. Therefore, it appears that Mortensen protects his son for his wife, knowing that she brought him into the world, and has only the utmost dedication to act as his personal security guard. Unfortunately, Hillcoat doesn't handle this tricky dynamic too well, and before one realizes this may be the case, Mortensen and Smit-McPhee have already delivered a string of tepid scenes lacking much chemistry, stitched together by Mortensen's inconsistent narration. On individual terms, especially in a scene when The Man speaks timidly with an old blind man looking for food (Robert Duvall as a product of an expert makeup department), Mortensen is typically magnetic, yet one gets the sense that he can only deliver so many performances involving a dirty face and crying before it becomes a comfortable formality. As for Smit-McPhee, there were multiple pouty scenes that encouraged me to laugh.

For all its minor mistakes though, The Road is a compelling, if at times repelling, portrait of post-apocalyptic survivalism. Its tone is admirably consistent and unflinchingly bleak (to give in and use the oft-quoted adjective). The remarkable high-contrast, dimly lit cinematography is its standout feature. Yet for all its riveting, brutal suspense, Hillcoat can't manage to completely sidestep the melodramatic influence of Hollywood. After a series of tear-jerking close-ups set to Nick Cave's slightly manipulative score (which can supplement the visuals perfectly one moment and intrude jarringly the next), The Boy is left alone beside the sea. He believes he is the only human left who "carries the fire", his metaphor for possessing goodness, but conveniently, the Great American family arrives on the scene in the nick of time to take The Boy under their wing. If Hillcoat had resisted the desire for a tidy resolution, The Road could have concluded as the relentlessly dark parable it was for its majority.

Pickpocket (1959) A Film by Robert Bresson

It's easy to miss narrative details of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. So much becomes of so little. The story, that of a compulsive thief named Michel (Martin LaSalle) and his repetitious existence, is constantly expanding outward and the claustrophobic frames which contain it seem to be choking for breath, looking for a way to accommodate for any plot threads that are left unexplored. Yet this effect is all carefully devised by Bresson to approximate the perspective through which the loner Michel sees the world, and also the one-sided state of mind he has backed himself into. It is with rigidly uncompromising minimalism, eerie silences, and austere performances that Bresson is able to achieve this unique atmosphere. With Pickpocket, he manages to effectively render the damaged subconscious of a criminal by supporting the film throughout with his lead character's narrated diary entries, a technique that acquires the confessional immediacy of Claude Laydu's musings in the aptly named Diary of a Country Priest.

Not only does Pickpocket reach back towards Bresson's own oeuvre, but it also is heavily influenced by one of his favorite writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The film is often said to be the cinematic equivalent of the Russian author's Crime and Punishment, although it makes no attempt to adapt it note-for-note. Both films ponder about the nature of the common man and morality in society and deal with pro(anta?)gonists who commit illegal acts based on a justification of some sort, although the precise one in Michel's case is in question. His character is solemn and blank for the film's entirety despite the several options he has before him that could improve both his spiritual and financial well-being. There is Jeanne (Marika Green), an unassumingly gorgeous woman who lives in the same apartment complex as him and occupies a space directly next to his dying mother. Even when she suspects him of crime, she offers her guidance. There is also Jacques, a teasing friend who nonetheless is willing to help Michel find a job. With all of this help, one assumes he should not feel so alone in the world. Why then, does he resort to pickpocketing?

Bresson's cinema is famously a cinema of questions, questions that permeate through every aspect of the film, be it related to mise-en-scene, narrative, or theme. Where is this scene taking place? Who was he just talking to? What leads him to behave the way he does? These often lead to dead ends when considered logically. But it's also necessary to point out that Bresson wants you to feel before you comprehend, and also wants you to acknowledge that the journey you take to reach supposed answers is just as important if not more important than the answers themselves. It is significant, then, that the title of the film is as succinct and pragmatic as it is; Bresson wants us to first and foremost get inside the head of a pickpocket. Consider the life of a pickpocket: isolated, focused, sneaky, drifting. We experience these traits through Bresson's exquisite cinematography, which creates an endlessly self-contained world of hands, doors, mechanically moving crowds, wallets, and blank glances. Bresson does not show us any exteriors in their entirety, nor does he ever reveal Michel's whole room at once. When on a subway or on the street, the camera stays fixed on Michel, following him as he scouts victims who are diminished to black blurs across the screen. The film's quietly elaborate centerpiece, in which Michel and his new accomplices devise a ballet of theft in the train station, is the towering technical achievement of the film, yet it is never ostentatious. Instead, the form perfectly reflects the action.



The film also makes mindful use of sound as well as image. Reminiscent of Bela Tarr's application of post-synchronized sound, Pickpocket exists in a Paris where the clatter of footsteps is cumulatively louder than the sound of human voices and even motor vehicles. It all works to deindividualize the masses; after all, Michel prefers not to see them as separate people with individual strengths and weaknesses, but rather as a collective whole which he has elevated himself above by reading books. Nearly everyone wears black suits and is ripe for the picking, or pickpocketing, rather. It also should not be noted that hands, which take greatest precedence visually, create not the faintest of sounds. To Bresson, hands tell as much about a person as anything else on a physical body, and here, their silence helps to emphasize their deft movement and underscores the fact that Michel speaks only through action. The whole of his existence is defined by the choices he makes with his hands, as they are both the vehicles of his downfall and the sources of his pleasures.

If pleasure sounds like a impossibility in the life of Michel, take into account the different meanings of the word. When he commits theft, he gets a perverse and - as some critics have argued - sexual thrill out of it, no matter how briefly that thrill lasts. It is the danger of the encounters that excites him, the rush of being inches away from someone breathing on your neck while still slipping a hand into their coat pocket. Pickpocket is indeed a thoughtful inquiry into the way we live our lives, the meaning of our existences, and the shaky divide between right and wrong, but it is also a film that speaks strongly about compulsion and the intangible force that drives people to continue harmful behaviors. Michel gets his due in the end when he foolishly, and perhaps deliberately, steals from an undercover policeman, but his imprisonment is not a judgment on Bresson's part as much as it is another question. When he finally embraces Jeanne between metal bars and the emotion breaks through, reaching a level of transcendence, as Paul Schrader suggests, we wonder whether or not Michel's crimes were worth it.

Ponyo (2008) A Film by Hayao Miyazaki

All of Hayao Miyazaki's animated films are ostensibly "for children", but never has that element been as pronounced as it is in Ponyo, an earnestly minor effort about a fish who longs to become human to be with a young boy named Sosuke. In several instances, the film straddles a thin line between genuinely poignant simplicity and twee juvenilia; for proof, notice the film's laughable closing credits, which smash down the barrier in a blaze of Comic Sans type and bouncy pop music that I haven't heard outside of birthday parties for three year-old's. But I know Miyazaki has these tendencies - certainly traces of them litter the sublime Spirited Away (2001) and even the surprisingly heady Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind (1984) - and I've learned to look past them to discover the more furtive merits underneath. After all, were it not for my ardent belief in Miyazaki's artistry, I probably would never bash an eyelid at Japanese anime.

My somewhat clouded response to Ponyo has to do with the fact that it manages to juggle, often times within the same scene, everything I adore about Miyazaki's work and everything I despise about it all in one 103-minute film. For starters, the story: little Sosuke lives with his nurse mother and sailor father in a small village beside an ocean with a vibrant ecosystem filled with unidentifiable blob fish and fantastical reefs. He's a boy who longs for all the excitement and variety of the underwater world and Ponyo - the fish who arrives at Sosuke's shore stuck in a bottle - is a creature who pines for the sobriety and innocence of a human life. Their mutual needs are met when Ponyo licks a wound on Sosuke's finger and unknowingly sets off a mutation that will allow her the ability to vacillate between human and fish, but will also disrupt the balance of nature. Ponyo's potion-making father Fujimoto is the figure who for a moment comes closest to being a traditional antagonist in the film in his relentless search for his daughter, but soon enough we realize his intentions are reasonable. He wants his daughter to be happy in one state or another without destroying the natural order, and the potions he concocts are made in order to combat the omnipresent dumping of human waste into the waters.

The absence of the normal mechanisms employed to further narrative is one of Ponyo's virtues. There is no snarling enemy in the film as usual; instead, all of Miyazaki's characters wind up being multi-faceted in one way or another. (Recall No Face from Spirited Away, who sparked xenophobic shrills in the members of a bathhouse at first but proved to be an honest soul with some common needs.) I admire this magical ability to dredge up a full-blown story out of limited means, and it immediately makes Miyazaki's films distinct from the Pixar and Disney fare, where the trials and tribulations of the main characters are never in question. Ponyo does not always adhere to its plot either, wandering off on tangents meant to revel in imagery or illustrate transient, on-the-fly moments that most children's films leave out. Take, for instance, the quiet moment we share with Fujitsu in his private dwelling as he sifts through potions without doing anything significant, or the prolonged opening montage detailing the kaleidoscopic movement of underwater creatures. As always, Miyazaki's spectacular technical ability astounds us throughout, and in some ways the tranquil setting of Ponyo suits his adeptness with color and liquid marvelously; the sequence where the ocean becomes a writhing animal and Ponyo runs atop the violent waves is particularly a stunner.

If simple charm and visual bravura were enough, Ponyo would be an indisputable success. However, we've come to expect both of these things with Miyazaki's work. The recurring themes are what is especially interesting about his career, but they should warrant a consistent heft from film to film. Here we only get a brief acknowledgment of the dangers of human pollution (a subject that usually becomes, in one way or another, the hefty subtext of his films) and a treatment of parents that is too infuriatingly unconvincing to be taken as a serious critique of Japanese parenting. Also, Miyazaki's trademark tick - having characters directly state their actions and emotions in an annoyingly over-expressive manner - starts to become too necessary to the film's meaning, whereas in the past it could be dismissed as a minor blip shrouding more understated messages. It's as if Miyazaki opted only to delight rather than to challenge, and the hammy wrapped-in-a-bow conclusion further underlines this fact. Hell, the presence of Disney B-listers Nick Jonas and Noah Cyrus as the voices of Sosuke and Ponyo, respectively, is enough of an indication of Miyazaki's tender embrace of whimsical entertainment over environmental polemic.

Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) A Film by Wim Wenders (1987)

If you have ever wished you could fly, see Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire on the big screen. This may mean suspending your disbelief however and accepting that you have become an angel to Wenders, because in our secular world, Wings of Desire is an unabashedly spiritual film. That may take some getting used to for some people, but if you can warm up to the idea that the protagonists we sympathize with are indeed immortal spirits lovingly observing life in holy black trench coats, you are in for a gloriously elegant visual symphony. In it, Wenders does not just want you to watch the angels go about their business; he wants you to be an angel too. His camera hardly ceases its weightless movement throughout the film, hovering flawlessly over the mundane moments that make up the lives of Berlin citizens. Wenders has a way of making the mundane seem extraordinary though, and this is very much the purpose of the film, which ultimately surfaces an unusual irony: to grow accustomed to an empyreal perspective is to gather a paradoxical longing for the concrete, sensual pleasures of real life.

Such is the case with Damiel (Bruno Ganz), an angel who has grown bored of his task to spend eternity without human sensation. Instead, he mournfully watches both public and private moments unfold, periodically resting a hand on a woeful victim's shoulder without being seen or felt. He has the uncanny ability to tune in to the inner monologues of random pedestrians, catching snippets of their thoughts before moving on to new subjects, a tactic which sometimes results in a whispered aural collage. For instance, he'll track down a line of subway passengers or peruse around a spacious public library witnessing testaments that range from the humorously momentary to the abysmally philosophical. His partner in voyeurism, Cassiel (Otto Sander), goes about the same routine, although his pursuit is far more ascetic; he treats it like the deeply compassionate activity that it is rather than an unfortunate inevitability. In Wenders' Berlin, the immortals are very much in coexistence with the mortals, even when neither realizes it. Both seem equally relevant to the flow of everyday life.

Evidence towards this is present in the starry-eyed gazes that children cast in the direction of the angels once in a while, and also in the character of Peter Falk (playing himself) who admits to having made the "transition" long before the film begins. Falk is the good-natured, gruff film actor starring in the film-within-a-film, which appears to be some sort of concentration camp thriller. In the middle of Wings of Desire, while ordering coffee at a concession stand on the side of a drab street, he begins addressing Damiel directly, claiming he senses his presence. He starts explaining how the blissful combination of coffee and cigarettes is what swayed him towards switching to a mortal life. Despite the odd impression Falk makes on the confused passersby, Damiel is touched by the unfettered joy he gets from the simplest of human excitements. At this point, he has made up his mind: he wants to become mortal.



Falk is not the only factor in this persuasion however. The other - a beautiful trapeze artist Damiel is enamored with - ultimately thrusts the film in a wayward direction. Throughout the film, he sits in at circus rehearsals in which the woman, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), contorts in phenomenal directions high above the rest of the performers while the camera downplays its graceful movement to be replaced by her astonishing displays. Damiel even observes her privately in her trailer home swooning to records and relaxing in her bed, a privilege that thousands of peeping toms spend their lives yearning for. Wings of Desire's final chapter, in which Damiel makes the transition to mortality and guilelessly searches Berlin for Marion, essentially feels tacked on and insipid, as if Wenders could not resist an urge to endorse the film with conventional appeal. The contemplative tone of the long black-and-white preface is dropped in favor a color-drenched romantic fable that is burdened by the melodramatic nature of Damiel's cloying naiveté. Although we sense that Damiel's lust for sensation is finally met, the overlong ending makes Wings of Desire needlessly bifurcated.

Yet the meditative perfection of the majority of the film overshadows its near spoiler of a conclusion. Working with exemplary cinematographer Henri Alekan and assistant director Claire Denis in her early stages, the film is a recipe for beauty. The soaring but cautious crane and dolly shots that capture elaborately choreographed scenes adopt the first-person perspective of the angels and emphasize their affectionate scrutiny. To accompany the magnificent visuals, Jürgen Knieper's minimalist cello score pairs with the inner monologues of Berlin citizens to create intricately layered sound design. All of this works to exhibit a Berlin that is stung with an acute sense of melancholy that is similar to that of Angelopoulos' Greece, yet it is not without its celebration of life's pleasures as well.

35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums) A Film by Claire Denis (2008)

Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum - like Hirozaku Kore-Eda's recent Still Walking - uses a beloved Yasujiro Ozu film as a jumping off point but ultimately morphs to its own context and sensibility. The story of Lionel (Alex Descas) and Joséphine (Mati Diop), an intimate father/daughter duo living together in a Paris apartment building mirrors that of Shukichi (Chishû Ryû) and Noriko (Setsuko Hara), a similarly affectionate but physically closer relationship evolving in Tokyo; both tales contain their fair shares of trains and reveal the weight of passing time as it influences the lives of family members. I won't sing about the ways in which Denis deftly reintegrates the elements of Late Spring into 35 Shots of Rum, as if the film can only be seen as a particularly bright spot in a long shadow of greatness cast down by the monumental Japanese work, but instead take it as the rich, plaintive gesture that it is, a singular entity as much as it is an homage.

Much has been made of Claire Denis in recent years, especially on The Auteurs Notebook and in the BFI's Sight and Sound Magazine, where Nick James declares her the finest filmmaker in the world. 35 Shots of Rum comes directly before her most recent fest-film White Material and it potently evokes a mood of tranquility. It eases us ever-so-gradually into a not-so easy sentiment: that we must find peace in our own routines and submit to the fact that the lives that run beside ours do not run on parallel tracks, that they criss-cross, intervene, and sometimes lead to isolation, as we see in the opening frames which assume the rickety point-of-view of Lionel as he yields to his occupation as a train driver. Shortly thereafter, he reunites with his daughter Joséphine in their apartment for a quiet night of brief expressions of admiration and modest downtime. A pattern is established that the film effortlessly maintains of work in the day and home at night, a seemingly endless systemization of separation and reconvening.

It is only through the passing of time that this pattern is mildly obstructed, ushered along by two figures - Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and Noé (Grégoire Colin) - who tug lovingly and desirably at our respective main characters. Gabrielle is an ex-lover of Lionel and also acts as the quasi-mother figure for Joséphine, and Noé is a young man living alone on a floor above them. Together, the four presume the awkward stance of a real family, with the two not linked by blood filling in the holes that are left enigmatically gaping. Not until the final quarter of the film does Denis subtly reveal to us hints of the mother through dusty material remnants in the apartment, and the exact state of affairs that defines her absence is left unanswered, just as the tangible course of events that lead Lionel and Joséphine to tension remains flexibly open to interpetation. Those familiar with Denis' work will acknowledge these ambiguities as par for the course; she never once judges her characters but at the same time does not take this opacity to an extreme, providing us evocative evidence in the behaviors of characters that suggests potential inquiries.



35 Shots of Rum is formally splendid and has an admirable inclination not to ogle at pleasurable images. Instead, Denis' exquisite cutting rhythms create a precise flow that matches the interconnecting nature of the characters and constructs what is specifically a montage of abstractions. Time and space are delicately scattered when Denis promptly excises the the conceivable payoffs of a scene to pursue other plot lines, a move that approximates the abrupt veering of a train at a fork. Even when the four central characters occupy the same space, leaving nowhere for the film to exit to, Denis discovers a way to obscure the ontological surfaces of the scene. Most memorably illustrating this is the rainy night that is in some ways the crux of the film. The four characters are heading to a concert when their car breaks down en route, leaving them defenseless in the pouring rain. During the drive there, Denis resists all-encompassing views of the car, instead shifting rhythmically between tight close-ups of their lowly lit expressions as the droplets of water on the windows blur the outside world they are contained within. The "family" then makes a spontaneous decision to have a rendezvous in an African restaurant on the side of the street, and once again Denis limits her vision to the central figures in comfortable but indecisive motion as they sway to the music in what is surely one of the most sublime renderings of the wit's-end-waltz-scene I have ever witnessed.

Moments like these stand out beautifully in what is otherwise an extremely consistent film, absent of many significant tonal or narrative leaps (besides a particularly unexpected and chilling moment of gore when Lionel confronts a dead friend in a train tunnel). Denis has an elegant way of suffusing profundity into the elliptical gaps where more conventional directors would resort to an emotional apex, such as when Joséphine arrives at Noé's door after a tension between the two in a previous scene. We expect a flush of emotion culminating in a kiss but instead get a cut to a new scene, letting mysteries regarding what happened simmer over. Similarly, one could argue that the final scene is a more fundamental example of this restraint; the characters dress up and Joséphine dons her mother's necklace, but the true content of the sequence is mysterious. Is it a marriage, linking Joséphine to Ozu's Noriko? And if so, for whom? The answers are left within the viewer's own projection, and Denis supplies enough emotion to want to search for them.