Empire of Passion (Ai no borei) A Film by Nagisa Oshima (1978)

Nagisa Oshima's Empire of Passion involves a plot that could work its way into any average mystery, thriller, or melodrama (and indeed does singlehandedly with Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)): Seki (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), a working-class mother, begins a doomed affair with the 26-year younger Toyoji (Tatsuya Fuji), behind the back of her humble, rickshaw-driving husband, Gisaburo (Takahiro Tamura). Themes such as guilt, passion, dishonesty, and fate almost inevitably bubble up. We expect the adulteress to be placed under suspicion by both her own husband and the people whom she is close with, and ultimately punished for her infidelity. Perhaps we anticipate some violence in one way or another. Oshima is without a doubt aware of the conventions he is working within, and though in several instances he embraces them with open arms, allowing them to guide his film instinctually, Empire of Passion is in many ways a deconstructive effort, a revisionist melodrama that takes its origins through interesting transmutations. The influence of Hollywood is coupled with an equally humble tribute to ancient Japanese folktale traditions, specifically the ghost story, or the Kwaidan. Oshima roots the film in these guidelines only to spin off of them into a stifling exploration of sexual politics, repressive social schemes, and the natural rhythms of small village life.

It is not long before the film dives into the meat of its situation. Without even spending much time on characterization (the narrow exception being a few short scenes in Seki and Gisaburo's small thatched hut, one in which Gisaburo asks her if she thinks Toyoji has eyes for her, the only instance of his suspicion shown by Oshima), we see Seki and Toyoji in the throes of a passionate affair clearly motivated by sex, with love only as an end result. Before we know it, Toyoji has cunningly convinced the gullible Seki that murdering her husband is the only way the two can truly achieve happiness and comfort together. The plan is clinically laid out by Toyoji: Seki will get Gisaburo maddeningly intoxicated on sake after his daily trip into town with the rickshaw, then, once passed out, the two will strangle him with a rope in the interest of expediency and silence. After that, he will be taken into the woods, thrown down one of the several wells that line the village's perimeter, and never be spoken of again. When asked, Seki will say Gisaburo has taken a trip to Tokyo. It's a highly specific plan that we are deliberately let in on, allowing the suspense to be heightened both in the act and in the aftermath, when the close-knit villagers whisper about the continued absence of Gisaburo. We begin to empathize with the murderous lovers without even taking into account right or wrong, because it is there viewpoint which Oshima observes.

A period of guilt and grief follows the murder for Seki, while Toyoji earnestly insists on her acceptance. She is now free from the reigns of what he perceives as an oppressive marriage, instead opened up to a new, more spontaneous manner of love. The unorthodox nature of their affair is mirrored by the extensive age gap which separates them, and also emphasized in an early scene which hints at the Oedipal slant of it; during his routine trip to present her with treats, Toyoji kneels down on the wood floor where Seki is breast-feeding her young boy and playfully ushers him aside, wondering when he gets a turn. It's an odd moment with traces of Freudian perplexity that spotlights the weird mother/son tension between the two and the inherent immaturity that accompanies Toyoji's younger age. Eventually, as years fly by and the collective chatter of the villagers regarding Gisaburo increases (the majority wonder whether he's alive or dead, while Seki indifferently brushes off these inquiries when questioned), the lovers must be extremely secretive about their meetings, even choosing to cease contact entirely at one point. This decision irks at Seki, for it was the promise of salvation and free love (however impermanent and momentary) which lead her to murder her husband. Adding to her disarray is the sudden presence of Gisaburo's sorrowful ghost, who doesn't so much actively haunt her as he does occupy the same space, quietly signaling for a comforting swig of sake in the middle of Seki's hut. However, this deeply disturbs her, so she believes that the two should meet at Toyoji's home, where he lives alone with his mentally disabled younger brother, despite the danger of being caught by one of the police officials patrolling the village, an interrogative bunch lead by the farcically portrayed Officer Hotta (Takuzo Kawatani). Therefore, contrary to the classical femme fatale, it is Toyoji who leads Seki down a troubling path towards murder based on the allure of sex.



Three quarters of the film is spent on this tense back-and-forth after the crime is committed, with Toyoji and Seki almost always disagreeing on the best steps to take to account for their safety or well-being. This erratic character interplay is guided, and perhaps fundamentally shaped, by the equally unpredictable presence of weather in the film. Oshima hardly ever maintains a natural temporal evolution between the four seasons, lingering on some longer than others, and always acknowledging their impact on the everyday lives of the villagers. Not only does this add uneasiness to the atmosphere, lending it the sense that the villagers understand their life patterns and therefore know one of their own is hiding a secret, but it also requires that we see the lovers in a distinct context each time, forced to make different decisions in different situations.

Empire of Passion's primary visual motif, a circle, seen both in the recurrent shots of Gisaburo's rickshaw wheel and the trademark images from inside the well looking up at the outside, indicates the ourobouric flow of life, that the truth is inevitably encircling the two until it is fully revealed. Yet it also seems that Oshima wants to destabilize that supposed determinacy, hence the erratic progression of the story, as if keeping alive some hope that Toyoji and Seki will be able to find redemption from their crime and transcend the limits placed upon them by the rigid, authoritarian society. And to some extent, they do towards the end when they both argue that the other should survive and therefore free themselves from the suspicious eyes of their peers, while their apparent impending suicides only fuel sexual desires. These acts of selflessness and rebellion are curious hybrids of pleasure (sex and revitalization) and pain (death), echoing an earlier scene when Toyoji begins violating Seki sexually with her son crying in the neighboring room, an action that effortlessly transforms into one that Seki finds pleasure in.

Oshima's visual sensibility is superficially naturalistic, yet a sense of manufactured artifice belies the proceedings, further cementing the influence of Hollywood. For its majority, Oshima sticks to detached, humbly attractive compositions that capture a village that seems perfectly believable: a cluster of warm brown cottages nestled inside lush vegetation and intersected by dirt roads. Once the murder is committed however and the seasons unpredictably shift, a swirling mist begins to find its way into the village. Cinematic techniques are used to emphasize this agitation of naturalism: in a wonderfully eerie scene where the ghost of Gisaburo takes Seki for a ride home on his rickshaw through a densely fogged path, and in a shot when Gisaburo's body is first dumped the well during winter, Oshima utilizes slow motion to great effect. Further pitched away from reality is Toru Takemitsu's typically moody soundtrack, which infuses even the mundane with malign purpose. These elements overwhelm the film's oddly inconsistent narration, spoken with tell-tale objectivity by an old woman, and its sometimes overly histrionic acting. Empire of Passion's fateful conclusion is punctuated by bursts of the macabre, including an especially enigmatic blindness that overcomes Seki in what appears to be a dream state. When the inescapable punishment comes and Gisaburo's corpse is revealed, it is possible that Seki can see for just a moment, forced by the ineffable hand of nature to stare directly at her mistakes.

Synecdoche, New York (2008) A Film by Charlie Kaufman

The decade's most revealing, complicated, and self-lacerating filmmaker surrogate is Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), standing in for first-time director but seasoned screenwriter Charlie Kaufman in his sprawling Synecdoche, New York. Cotard is an artist grappling with the great question of how to depict life in all of its mundane, difficult, and sometimes inexplicable glory through arguably overdone methodology; Kaufman is the writer of such singular films as Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Human Nature (2001), and Spike Jonze's Adaption (2002) and Being John Malkovich (1999), works that have now and then elicited accusations of Kaufman as a convoluted hack exploring important themes in a way that spotlights only his own cleverness. Indeed, Synecdoche, New York is heavy on the convolution, and one can't possibly make it out of it without attesting to the fact that Kaufman's damn clever, but the film's exploration of its central figure - an upstate New York theater director - is intense and all-encompassing, rivaling There Will Be Blood (also from 2008) in its unflinching study of a man invested for better or worse in his vocation.

With the obvious finesse afforded to all of the film's ingredients, down to every last detail, it's clear Kaufman is one of these very figures. The film represents an amazing example of an artist working from the outside in, pining to explore his own inner-being and the relationship between his art and his life. Yet it is important not to see Synecdoche, New York as a work of insularity, telling us about its creator but nothing else, for it constantly strives to understand the lives around its protagonist as well as the links that connect them, and often times even condemns Cotard's irrational thoughts, showcasing the negative ways in which they manifest themselves on-screen. An early example of this is when Caden's artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) leaves with their daughter Olive to Germany due to a great deal of mounting anxieties regarding his increasingly paranoid and hypochondriachal tendencies (on a day-to-day basis, Caden believes he has extracted life-threatening diseases that make him more miserable by the minute) as well as a seemingly marriage-long tension between Adele's extroverted, art-chic personality and Caden's introverted, worrisome one. The first few scenes of the film show the family in cramped, rather ungainly quarters going about their own business, Olive inquiring nasally about her "green poop", Adele balancing her daughter's woes with her own busy morning routine, and Caden sitting at the table complaining, for all intents and purposes, to himself about his psychosomatic conditions. Adele and Olive ultimately never return from Germany, and their physical dismissal from the film sets in motion its slow, exacting departure from reality.

Prior to their exit, Caden sees his reworking of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (staged with young actors, a prescient nod to Caden's fear of mortality and aging) open to glowing reviews, causing him to receive a hearty "Genius Grant" with which to create a bold theatrical work. He embarks on this project with little more than a loose feeling: wanting to create a play that expresses the sorrows of life and the difficulty of leading one's own life with the constant pressures of providing for those around him, he devises the concept of a lifelike replication of the city of Schenectady, New York that he lives in (the title then is a play on words, with the replacement word "synecdoche" actually a figure of speech meaning a part representing a whole). He casts familiar actors in the parts of his family, his friends, and his co-workers. This process becomes an attempt to recreate his entire life, his entire environment, and it inevitably grows increasingly complicated and multilayered as Caden's personal life steadily collapses. Romances come and go, tending to add only misery rather than joy, augmenting the grief he feels about his lost family. In fact, women are a constant struggle in Caden's life; although he is unromantic, it seems that a women is always grasping for his attention, and he uses them as a way to combat his loneliness rather than evolve a relationship - love as a vehicle for forgetting.



The character of Hazel (Samantha Morton) is one of the few figures who is consistent throughout the film, and she is also an important aspect of Caden's troubled self. At the theater where Caden works, she is the box office attendant, and displays her giddy affection for him early on when Adele is still living with him. Caden clearly reciprocates the feelings, but is too withdrawn to act upon them comfortably, but when Adele finally leaves, the two begin dating. It is not long though before Caden screws things up in a typically neurotic manner, whining about his confusion and deterring Hazel. Soon enough, she finds her own husband and starts a new life, but Caden's interest does not waver (in a distinctly Gondry-esque visual flourish, Hazel's house is constantly burning with flames of desire). During this time, Caden goes through the motions with his own new wife, the young, passionate, but phony actress Claire Keen (Michelle Williams), with whom he has a child that he basically dismisses as not his own. Things start out well but end bitterly. Meanwhile, Caden is haunted by the now ubiquitous art-world images of his wife, who has found success with her miniaturized impressionist paintings, so small in fact that they have to be viewed through microscopes, and the image of a flock of museum-goers crowding around the portraits like scientists studying amoebas is a hilarious critique of the increasingly absurd mannerisms of modern art. More stinging is Caden's anguish about his lost daughter, who he finds has transformed into a tattooed lesbian imprisoned by the pornographic industry and the misguided hand of her mother's eccentric friend Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Evidently, between the chaos of his present romantic situation, the torment of wondering whether or not his daughter remembers him, and the constant fear of sickness and death, Caden has the material to produce a far-reaching, searing portrait of existential blues. Yet it is this burning desire to create something "real" out of things that are painfully real, this meddling approach to art as a form of objective projection, that paradoxically sends him further away from emotional truth and deeper into his own obsessive competition with loneliness. Fittingly, he finds a massive abandoned warehouse to begin staging his play, and in it he builds a stroke-for-stroke replica of Schenectady, which naturally includes the same warehouse within it. This results in a life-size, urban version of a Matryoshka doll, the literal embodiment of escapism for Caden, who frets layer upon layer over every minor detail. The characters in his play mirror this layering effect, because those who represent real figures in Caden's life eventually get represented within the play by other actors, and so on and so forth. Adele's artwork gains an added dimension when we witness the grandiose scale of Caden's, proving that success and artistic merit needn't be proportionate to scale. Towards the end of the film, Caden shrinks within his cavernous surroundings, disappearing amongst the other "actors", and he loses a sense of coherence and control over his blooming production.

Without any warning, decades have past when sometimes it feels like only months. In truth, we see Caden age from a middle-aged father to a brittle old man, and the gaps in time are hardly apparent. The only evidence we get to the contrary is in the slaps of reality that Caden receives: Hazel informs him that his family has been gone for several years when it feels like a few frames have past since their departure, and he hears news of his parents and daughter dying. Kaufman's tricky methods allow the film to sneak up on you. By focusing adamantly on Caden, the film purposefully neglects all other aspects of the story, emphasizing his own static mindset and self-absorption. Because of this, he becomes disconnected and uninvolved in anyone else's life, shown in a scene when Caden finally sits at the deathbed of the grownup Olive and the two literally speak in different languages (German and English). This is not simply sloppy narrative mechanics; Synecdoche, New York effectively captures the effects of passing time, the feeling that one gets about things moving forward at an unnaturally rapid rate. When nearly all of his loved ones pass away in the blink of an eye with no portents about their approaching fates, Caden's overwhelming paranoia and morbidity is that much more potent.



For much of Caden's production, a pressing question is who will play himself. At an interview for the part, a lanky old man with gray hair and glasses (Tom Noonan) boasts to have complete knowledge him, stating that he has followed him for years with utmost fascination. The audience may recall several scenes earlier in the film where the man lurked in the background impassively. For all its well-written, thoroughly explored elements, the film lacks clarity in this figure. He begins as what seems like a conceptual enigma, perhaps indicative of some fragment of Caden's psyche, perhaps a forewarning towards a more metaphysical role he will play later in the film, but instead he abruptly transitions into just another character with his own motivations, falling for Claire and Hazel and eventually committing suicide.

When he's out of the picture however, a new, more beguiling character comes into play. Ellen, the cleaning lady of Adele's high-rise apartment that Caden stalks for some time, believes she understands his essence despite her lack of acting experience. She revamps the production, even taking over Caden's role as director. A play (well, more of an installation) that has for decades been stagnate and ill-prepared for an audience suddenly seems to come alive, yet Caden shows clear signs of submission. Kaufman is probing at the utter necessity of creating art, but also the importance of finishing it the right way. Caden loses his creativity and perhaps a sense of grounding in reality as he grows old and retreats further into his creation. Soon after, his life, and his production - which begins to look like some of the post-apocalyptic vistas in this year's The Road - ends. But of course, "genius grants" do not sustain themselves for such a long period of time in the first place. There is no play, only a man and his troubles, as well as the lessons he learns. This is Kaufman's maniacal, twisted, brilliant idea of a character study.

Last Year at Marienbad (L'année dernière à Marienbad) A Film by Alain Resnais (1961)

"...The spectator will let himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him, by the actors' voices, by the soundtrack, by the music, by the rhythm of the cutting, by the passion of the characters...and to this spectator the film will seem the "easiest" he has ever seen: a film addressed exclusively to his sensibility, to his faculties of sight, hearing, feeling. The story will seem the most realistic, the truest, the one that best corresponds to his daily emotional life..."

These are the words of Nouveau Roman author Alain Robbe-Grillet, who penned the screenplay for Alain Resnais' famously unconventional Nouvelle Vague film Last Year at Marienbad. What he's saying though, that the film is likely to be the gentlest, most malleable viewing experience possible, would undoubtedly contradict with the overwhelming majority of the film's approximately fifty-year audience. The quote also comes from a preface to the screenplay that was published prior to the release of the film, in which Robbe-Grillet sung sweetly about the perfect osmosis between he and Resnais in working on the project, a sentiment that he gradually and bitterly altered in the years after. The discontinuity between his statement and reality however may be by design, posed as yet another unkempt stitch in an already ruffled patchwork, a film that literally (and many would say figuratively) takes game-playing as one of its subjects. For good reason, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet have been named the biggest fibbers and pranksters in the history of the cinema.

I'd like to think though, with its immensely satisfying visual and aural rhymes, its subtle mutations in tone, and the rigorous performances of its two unnamed leads, that Last Year at Marienbad is much more than just a game. Instead, there is some truth in Robbe-Grillet's assertions: the film, through its unusual alchemy of repetition and minor variation, approaches the mechanics of the mind, specifically the way memory and fantasy work within the human brain. Whether or not this results in the kind of viewing Robbe-Grillet predicts is a different question. It is no way an "easy" film, but rather one that constantly asks questions, or perhaps only appears to ask questions. It can be aggravating or hypnotic, off-putting or encouraging, daunting or lean. Why its effect varies so much from viewer to viewer (the film caused one of the most divisive critical responses in film history) is and always will be a massive mystery, but it says a great deal about Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's achievement, and in a way, is naturally symptomatic of a film dealing with the elusive nature of human thought.

Last Year at Marienbad features three central figures identified only as X, A, and M in the production notes. X (Giorgio Albertazzi), encounters A (Delphine Seyrig) at an opulent hotel getaway somewhere in a void in Europe (possibly Marienbad, but there is no certainty, as the exteriors change conspicuously), and attempts to convince her of their meeting a year back in the same place, where they agreed to reconvene in exactly one year and run away together. Like Resnais' previous fiction debut, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (scripted by Robbe-Grillet's contemporary, Marguerite Duras), the male/female dynamic here takes on an aggressor/resistor stance, with X relentlessly insisting and A guilelessly denying any knowledge of such a meeting. As the film progresses, there are ever-so-slight variations in A's reaction to the stubborn perseverance; most of the time she staidly and somewhat playfully brushes off X, but then her tone grows serious, until in the end the two reach some sort of consensus, though a shaky one at that. X's recollections of specific moments that marked their meeting seem convincing enough to warrant A's continued attention, but he appears to be in pursuit not of a tangible romantic relationship but of something deeper, something essential to his being, something metaphysical perhaps. The enigmatic M, a lanky, stone-faced man who appears to have a significant connection to A, stalks the film in near silence most of the time, strolling down the corridors of the hotel and frequently playing a Chinese strategy game called Nim with X, mirroring the supposed battle between the two over A, and on a larger level emblematic of the film as a whole.



This meeting constitutes the primary conceit of the film, which is more a situation than a plot. Nothing more happens, and it also might be accurate to say that the same thing happens again and again, played out with minor discrepancies. No one scene can be said to have occurred in reality or in the minds of the characters, and with so many fragmented moments to choose from, the film only obscures itself more and more as time passes. We see contradictions arise once again when X's narrated recollections don't match up exactly with the images onscreen, colliding with them in a way that disorients the viewer. Such a mystery yields several potential explanations: X has been lying all along, and his stories are no more certain in his mind than they are in ours; like an instance of déjà vu, X's memories only arise in glimpses, so what he has to work with cognitively is then rearranged as scenes with slight changes; or there is the possibility that the whole film is from the trajectory of A, who is trying with some difficulty to piece together the images created by X's consistent, obstinate words.

An atmosphere of static, free-floating menace permeates through this drama, which Resnais capitalizes on with stunning visualizations of the numerous planes that Last Year at Marienbad inhabits; that is, past, present, future, fantasy, memory, dreams. Sacha Vierny, one of the gifted cinematographers on Hiroshima, lets the camera slide through the hotel and around its premises with both effortless grace and physical detachment, echoing the fluid yet cold forms in the magnificent marble architecture. It is no more likely to focus on its ostensible human subjects than it is to pause and marvel at the icy beauty of its surroundings, tracking across the gilded ceilings, expansive hallways, or palatial spiral staircases as X's voice-over describes the alienating quality of these elements. Yet the human presence in the film tends to be just as lifeless; immobile, unemotional figures dressed in fancy nightwear occupy the spaces in schematic orientations, lending a ghostly peculiarity that certainly, among many other things, influenced Stanley Kubrick in The Shining (1980). Some of the most confounding shots in Marienbad though are the simplest technically, such as the repetitious use of static mirror compositions, which uncomfortably plunge us directly out of the present and into the very embodiment of the temporal refractions that are the film's bread and butter. It is in these moments where Robbe-Grillet's manifesto seems truest, where space and time are obliterated in the name of unique cinematic expression.

Amarcord (1973) A Film by Federico Fellini

To watch Federico Fellini's Amarcord is to step inside someone else's mind as they flip through old photo albums from their youth. The film exists in that ineffable place where the brain constructs its own memories of the past, regardless of whether or not they play out as they did in the photographic scenes. Or at least, that's what Amarcord feels like. In truth, Fellini did not have to resurrect any ancient photographs or memorabilia from his past in order to build the world of the film; he did not need any objective indicators to use as springboards for ideas. That the atmosphere of the film seems so polished, so intimate, and so paradoxically accurate, despite its deliberately fabricated surfaces, speaks volumes about the feverish imagination of Fellini. The subject of the film is Fellini's hometown of Rimini, yet it's a place that he visited only sporadically and for brief periods of time since his youth. Fellini made a conscious decision not to shoot Amarcord in Rimini in order to preserve the poignancy and essential constructive nature of his memory, an intentional sidestep of representational autobiography.

Therefore the film is a work of self-mythology, and is all the more universal for it. Released in 1973 and thus considered one of the initial works in Fellini's much-overlooked "later career", Amarcord is the Italian director's warmest, most nostalgic, and most continually surprising film. Aside from the coherent time span of a year that the film takes place within, signaled by the yellow puffballs of spring that delicately breeze through the air and act as bookends, any semblance of narrative structure is nonexistent. Fellini instead just strings together a series of scenarios, mostly centering around a boisterous family with their pre-teen son Titta, but also expanding to accommodate for other members of the town, such as the impassioned prostitute Volpina, Titta's lovesick friends, and the object of all male desire, the refined Gradisca. Interspersed within the vignettes are brief scenes of meta-documentary, where a lawyer and historian muses about the town's culture directly to the camera, a trope that Fellini would return to in And the Ship Sails On. Emerging from this cacophony of seemingly disjointed scenes is a loving portrait of a community connected by its collective quirkiness.

Amarcord is an ensemble piece in the purest sense of the term, in that no individual character stands out as more important than another. Instead, it is their presence onscreen together, along with their surroundings, which work to form one large character, and it is this character, a spirit more than a physical shape, which proves of interest to Fellini. Fittingly, none of the individuals in the town would seem entirely plausible in this world; they occupy an adjacent universe as faint distortions of recognizable "types" seen through Fellini's mad imagination. He spent the bulk of his pre-production time going on day-trips to search for faces that could occupy his film, figures whom he believed could undergo his warping process from individuals to caricatures to the embodiments of his own crude sketches. The result is a cast of characters who may or may not be based off of real people from Fellini's past, yet each is so fully vested in that it's hard to doubt their existence. From Titta's father's enraged dinnertime fits to Gradisca's endearing poses for a Fascist officer to the priest's odd fascination with when and why the young boys touched themselves, Fellini depicts a town full of spirited oddballs who are grounded less in movie stereotypes as they are in one man's bubbling imagination.



The film's communitarian spirit is accompanied by an equally unwavering loyalty that the characters have towards God, their country, and their families, three values that are stated in this order throughout the film. Although Fellini's foremost interests are personal and anecdotal rather than political or religious, his examination of the inherent patriotism and faith in his characters proves to be quite crucial to the film. It is through these lenses which we view some of its most significant events. For instance, Titta and his friends' sexual fantasies - this being one of the most omnipresent themes in the film - are triggered mainly by the priest in confessionals. He adamantly inquires about their experiences in vulgarity, launching a hilarious montage of Titta and his friends satisfying themselves in inopportune places due to the smallest of erotic gestures. Later on, in a blazing release of sensual desire, the voluptuous tobacconist exposes herself to Titta and lets his face be consumed by her bosom. Similarly, Titta's plump friend imagines a marriage to his crush Aldina staged in front of a Fascist rally replete with an oversized flower-sculpture of Mussolini, the figure behind the force that puts Titta's Communist father through a scene in which he is coerced into drinking castor oil. Fellini, famously indifferent towards Fascism (a notion which is evident in the largely comic portrayal of the officers in the film), may not see politics or religious institutions as his film's meat, but it is an inevitability that they play a large role in the proceedings, figuring prominently into even the most personal of moments because of how sewn into the fabric of Italy they are.

For its majority, Amarcord is a boisterous film, punctuated almost constantly by joking spurts of foul-mouthed familial anger (a distinctly Italian trait if there ever was one) and Nina Rota's typically wistful, circus-like score. Even when we think we're silently viewing the town center in the middle of the night, with its dog seated territorially as always, a blaring motorcycle zooms by the frame and circles the square only to return and vanish off into the distance with another crackling roar. This continuous clatter emphasizes the liveliness of Rimini, the fact that even when it's ostensibly sleeping, it never quite tips over entirely into stasis. Yet there are a few scattered scenes where the magic of the visuals requires little to no aural accompaniment, and it is during these quiet moments that Amarcord is most sublime and memorable. The calm after the family's zany uncle stops screaming "I want a woman!" from high stop a tree, the thick fog covering the morning route to school where a cow is seen enigmatically sipping from a puddle, the first snow of the winter which, famously, marks the inexplicable arrival of a peacock; such scenes sprinkle mystery and beauty into this otherwise hilarious, irreverent, and charming artistic creation.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) A Film by Wes Anderson

Pushed along by the onslaught of sophisticated computer technology, animation as an artistic medium has lost some of its charm in recent years. Pixar's films look increasingly unbelievable and more approximated to reality, making us marvel at how close the images come to being completely lifelike. More and more, it seems that it is only in the "experimental" quarters where one can witness something truly unique being done with the primitive techniques of animation: line-drawing, stop-motion puppetry, etc. In the mainstream, it has become an anomaly to see a work like this that exploits the self-reflexive potential of the medium or draws attention to its own fundamental artifice. Wes Anderson's latest film Fantastic Mr. Fox is unsurprisingly - given the fact that Anderson has always been a director to only skate on the very fringes of the mainstream - one of those rarities. With its deliberate imperfections and unreal sense of movement, it stands as a welcome critical and commercial success that breaks free from the contemporary trends in digital animation.

When the initial furor over Fantastic Mr. Fox diminishes, I think that it will be remembered first and foremost for these formal characteristics, the way Anderson's fox and opossum characters leap and bound across the frame in a way that seems anatomically impossible, and the way he infuses every whisker with manufactured emotion when in close-up. Often times it seems like frames may have been mistakenly dropped as figures jerk purposefully through Anderson's dioramic tableaux, a result that is at first jarring but ultimately delightful. Every panoramic view is carefully constructed from left to right and top to bottom, with not a pixel of wasted space in a compositional sense. Many have pointed out how this self-conscious manipulation is only a natural progression for Anderson because of how cartoonish and astray from reality his characters have been in the past, but I think it is essentially working to emphasize the reality of these foxes, that they're always pulsing with energy, ready to unleash their animal instincts at a seconds notice.

Anderson's move to animation is also content-conscious. Fantastic Mr. Fox is adapted from Roald Dahl's judiciously illustrated children's book of the same name, a story about a vibrant community of foxes. Its primary focus is on one individual family, the father of which has grown stir crazy from occupying the same underground home for a great deal of time. Once a budding thief, proficient at harassing hens and sneaking into the prized alcoholic cider house, Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) has decided, at the insistence of his practical, soothing wife (Meryl Streep), to lay low for a while. In the manner of classic crime movie archetypes however, Mr. Fox chooses to team up with Badger the opossum (Bill Murray) for one last job in hopes of sticking it to the three cruel farmers, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, once and for all. This whopping plan eventually goes haywire when the farmers trap the foxes underground, forcing the entire community to work together to solve the problem.


It is through this predicament that the film mines timeless truths about family, community, and natural instinct. For the majority of the film, Mrs. Fox rolls her eyes at Mr. Fox's go-get-em attitude, preferring for him to settle down and sort out his responsibilities as opposed to complaining about his living situation and the supposed pains it causes him. In the end, Mr. Fox overcomes the farmers because of this overwhelming desire to embrace his own wild tendencies, to flee from captivity. Likewise, Mr. Fox's neglected son Ash - played by Jason Schwartzman in a role not unlike his other semi to fully fatherless characters in Anderson's previous work (Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited) - spends most of the film disappearing beneath the shadow of his athletic cousin Kristofferson (Wes' brother Eric Anderson), but learns to accept his weaknesses and embrace his cousin as a friend. As always in Anderson's work, these somewhat uplifting metamorphoses are treated with a droll and forgiving eye rather than a sentimental one. And it is the acknowledgment of the necessity of compromise - between wildness and domesticity, responsibility and personal enjoyment, self-efficacy and complacency - that makes it a multifaceted children's film as well as an extension of Anderson's characteristic concerns.

Did I say children's film? It's tough not to, but besides the fact that half of its targeted demographic is likely children, and that a children's book is its source material, the bulk of the comedy in the film and the pedantry of its formal treats would seemingly go right over the head of a child. Anderson's "jokes" remain purely situational as opposed to punch-line-oriented, and the closest the film comes to one-liners is in the form of running in-jokes that are usually slipped between the cracks of fluffy, expedient dialogue. The visual world the film creates, now constructed from scratch instead of plowing through the limitations of real world sets, is impressively in step with all of Anderson's work, right down to the two-dimensional look reliant on tracking shots, the ubiquity of the Futura typeface, a clever pop soundtrack, and the presence of an overarching color scheme (in this case a beautiful honey golden). Never before has this aesthetic reached further than its strictly cultish following, but Fantastic Mr. Fox is lighter on the dark undertones that Anderson so frequently likes to entertain and heavier on the fun. It's a remarkably lean, easily watchable endeavor that is hilarious and punchy from its first moment to its last.

Best Films of The First Decade of the 21st Century

(UPDATED 8/15/12)

I'm not one for assigning much meaning to end-of-the-year lists and other games, but I do think they're always a fun exercise. Obviously it's nearly impossible to rank quality, and it's especially silly to assume that one's thoughts couldn't change sporadically, but what I do think these lists do is provide a place for cinephiles to spot a film they have not seen and seek it out. It is a nice way to get some idea of what to bother with and what not to. Of course, I haven't seen every film that has been released this decade, so there are certainly some omissions that many would complain about, but here's what I've come up with for the films I found most fascinating, most gorgeous, most perplexing, and most hilarious.
 

1. Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 2000, Hungary)
 
2. Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001, USA)
 
3. Songs from the Second Floor (Andersson, 2000, Sweden)
 
4. The New World (Malick, 2004, USA)
 
5. There Will be Blood (Anderson, 2007, USA)
 
6. In Vanda's Room (Costa, 2000, Portugal)
 
7. Secret History of the Dividing Line / The Great Art of Knowing (Gatten, 2002/2004, USA)
 
8. What Time is it There? (Ming-Liang, 2001, Taiwan)
 
9. Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004, USA)
 
10. Hunger (McQueen, 2008, UK/Ireland)
 
11. Zodiac (Fincher, 2007, USA)
 
12. Revanche (Spielmann, 2008, Austria)
 
13. In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000, Hong Kong/France)
 
14. Still Walking (Kore-Eda, 2008, Japan)
 
15. Saddest Music in the World (Maddin, 2003, Canada)
 
16. Three Times (Hou, 2005, Taiwan)
 
17. Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001, Japan)
 
18. In the City of Sylvia (Guerin, 2009, France/Spain)
 
19. INLAND EMPIRE (Lynch, 2006, USA)
 
20. Public Enemies (Mann, 2009, USA)
 
21. No Country for Old Men (Coens, 2007, USA)
 
22. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004, USA)
 

23. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou, 2007, Taiwan/France)
 
24. The Holy Girl (Martel, 2004, Argentina)
 
25. The Life Aquatic (Anderson, 2004, USA)
 
26. Elephant (Van Sant, 2003, USA)
 
27. The Intruder (Denis, 2004, France/Switzerland)
 
28. Cache (Haneke, 2005, Austria/France)
 
29. Distant (Bilge Ceylan, 2002, Turkey)
 
30. Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Ming-Liang, 2003, Taiwan)
 
31. Silent Light (Reygades, 2007, Mexico)
 
32. Summer Hours (Assayas, 2008, France)
 
33. Birth (Glazer, 2004, USA)
 

 
34. Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman, 2008, USA)
 
35. Gerry (Van Sant, 2002, USA)
 
36. Dogville (Von Trier, 2003, Denmark)
 
37. 35 Shots of Rum (Denis, 2008, France)
 
38. Liverpool (Alonso, 2009, Argentina)
 
39. Waking Life (Linklater, 2001, USA)
 
40. White Material (Denis, 2009, France/Cameroon)
 
41. The Last Mistress (Breillat, 2007, France)
 
42. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Ming-Liang, 2006, Taiwan)
 
43. The Man From London (Tarr, 2007, Hungary)
 
44. The Girlfriend Experience (Soderbergh, 2009, USA)
 
45. AI: Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001, USA)
 
46. Alexandra (Sokurov, 2007, Russia)
 
47. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Puiu, 2005, Romania)
 
48. The Squid and the Whale (Baumbach, 2005, USA)
 
49. The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson, 2001, USA)
 
50. Collateral (Mann, 2004, USA)
 

 
Once in the list, now bumped out: Millenium Mambo (Hou, 2001, Taiwan), City of God (Mierelles, 2002, Brazil), Three Monkeys (Bilge Ceylan, 2008, Turkey), Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002, USA), Enter the Void (Noe, 2009, France/Japan), Science of Sleep (Gondry, 2006, France), Old Joy (Reichardt, 2006, USA), Heima (DeBlois, 2007, USA/Iceland), Eastern Promises (Cronenberg, 2007, USA/Russia), Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009, USA), Los Muertos (Alonso, 2004, Argentina), Garden State (Braff, 2004, USA)

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.