Lady Blue Shanghai (2010) A Short Film by David Lynch

Remember David Lynch's vehement disapproval of all things product placement in the past? Well, given that apparent sense of outrage at the notion of whoring one's art to the advertising industries, there is more than a strong whiff of hypocrisy at the crux of his latest short film endeavor, Lady Blue Shanghai, a project designated as a vehicle for Dior's new accessory line. In it, Marion Cotillard does her best Laura Dern "woman in trouble" impression by staring uncomfortably at a fogging, radiating purse in the middle of a Shanghai hotel room (blatant allusions to Mulholland Drive's blue box in its transportive, otherworldly power), inexplicably recalling past traumas (or are they peaceful memories?), and trudging through fantastical spaces in hysterical fits of emotion. Her spacey character eventually recites poetry (written by Lynch) in front of a pair of Chinese bellboys about the Oriental Pearl Tower, leading her to an epiphany involving a blue rose. If it sounds like a cheap entry-level tour through the wonderfully surreal sights and sounds of Lynch's oeuvre, that's because it really is. And with its jittery, unpolished, intimate digital video stamp, it comes closer to a 16-minute abbreviation of INLAND EMPIRE.

At first glance, the film appears to be fixated on a typically Lynchian universe of dark hallways, glowing patches of light, and stilted dialogue, as if this was really a passion project for Lynch to begin with that got tagged with a Dior purse late in the game. Yet there's also an overwhelming impression by the end that this is a mere novelty item whose lone motivating force is the appearance of an ominous Dior product in a few incarnations, the most prickly being an utterly gratuitous shot overlooking the Shanghai cityscape where a video billboard plays a bit that feels lifted straight from a more television-ready commercial. I can admire Lynch's ability to suffuse the mass market with his trademark sensibility (unsettling, dead-end dialogue, low-frequency drones, opaque narrative), but I wonder if it's worth it if it means downgrading it at the same time, sugarcoating his fine-tuned tics to fit into a nice "weird" envelope while simultaneously maintaining a degree of allure and trendiness, because, after all, this product has to sell. It's likely that Lynch had to update his bank account after a few years of inaccessible experimental work, which seems fair enough, but I would hate to see Lynch get stuck in a creative impasse. Of course, be sure to check out the film yourself over at Lady Dior's official website, and weigh in with your own thoughts.

Sensitive Poetry or Amateur Strokes of Luck? The Films of Aaron Katz

Critical polarization has struck me again in the face of the films of Aaron Katz. I tend to approve and disapprove of his work at the same rate that it vacillates between irritating self-consciousness and poignant stretches of pure visuals. Of course, with the immediate stamps of "microbudget", "handheld", and "personal", his is an infantile oeuvre cultivated singlehandedly by the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, which has been so endlessly giving to the crop of films deemed part of the mumblecore movement. (Katz's latest, Cold Weather, which I have yet to see, recently premiered there.) As much as Katz's two debut films, Dance Party, USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007) - which only elapse a cumulative 143 minutes - revel in and even glamorize the repetitive quirks of the genre, they seem to periodically reach for something more pointedly cinematic and ambitious. There are times when the films try to prove that the man behind the camera is not a cash-strapped college graduate but rather an experienced filmmaker looking back critically at the unusual periods of his life between adolescence and serious adulthood, when all the potential was there without any understanding of how to achieve it. And then there are other times when they scream of amateurism, with Katz getting carried away figuring out how to properly stage a scene so that it strikes the accurate levels of cuteness, awkwardness, and naturalism. Granted, Katz's subject is the stuff of real life, and that's not always a breeze to convey. Fortunately, he handles it better than most - say, Andrew Bujalski for instance.

Dance Party, USA is his first feature, and everything about it is bite-sized: the running time (65 minutes, which puts into question its very existence as a feature), the spare plot, the range of emotions. But this is not to say that its achievements are microscopic. Centering around a group of high school students wallowing in the age of partying and perversion, it speaks of an era whose external displays of emotion may be flimsy or veiled, but whose motivations behind such emotions are vast and elusive. This is the terrain through which Katz unassumingly navigates. The point of inspection is chiefly Gus (Cole Pensinger), a soon-to-be eighteen-year-old with a hyper-masculine swagger and a social and verbal incapacity to rival Alex in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (the film is also set in Portland, Oregon, another similarity between the two works). He has proudly amassed an outsized reputation as an arrogant debauchee who is willing to do the craziest things at parties and forget about it the next morning. It is the Fourth of July, and high school bashes appear to be on cruise control, with kids gathering in houses with cheap beer and sexualized rap music to dance around nothing but their own inchoate small talk, the objective of which is always physical reward. If this description, comprising a bulk of the film's opening half hour, sounds improbable, spend a year in a modern high school and witness how meaningless the social interactions in some circles have become. Katz's depiction of this growing high-school subculture is actually impressively spot-on, capturing with painful honesty the salient misogyny and anti-intellectualism that plagues much of today's young students.

Underneath a night sky bursting with fireworks, which Katz takes advantage of in one long, observant take, Gus sits and sparks up (pun intended) a conversation with Jessica (Anna Kavan), the mysteriously unassertive best-friend of his ex-girlfriend Christie (Sarah Bing). Jessica, who has already been introduced in both the protracted opening shot of the movie in a messy morning-after-the-party trudge and a series of stillborn communications thereafter, has already made up her mind about Gus before he opens his mouth. She is not interested in getting in bed with him and will not listen to any pathetic denials of his stature. Much to her surprise, Gus is genuinely open about his behavior, and stunningly does not profess any premeditated desire to get in her pants. Instead, after a few moments of stunted interaction rife with verbal dead-ends, he inexplicably decides to come clean to her about a past wrongdoing utterly unrelated to her. He admits to an instance at a party that technically qualifies as rape, but which was followed immediately by remorse and comforting. Moments later, Jessica is asking him to ditch the party with her. This gives way to an achingly tender sequence set to touching piano music where the two of them drive through town and eventually stop and sit silently in the middle of what looks like a parking lot lit only by dim streetlights. Neither of them have a clue what to say to each other, so they resort to a simple mutual exchange of "are you cold?", but their mere physical proximity is enough to qualify it as nervous attraction.



Though maddeningly opaque and nearly invisible, Gus' clumsy admission is actually an undaunted leap of faith and a faint sign of maturation presumably brought on by actual romantic interest rather than raging hormones. Dance Party, USA abandons narrative impetus after this premature climax, and instead drifts for its remainder as Gus and Jessica contemplate their encounter amidst mundane distractions: hanging out with friends, smoking cigarettes, discussing nothing tactlessly, and for Gus, attempting to right his wrongs by confronting the girl of his past indiscretion, who understandably doesn't remember him. It unfolds in a free-floating, directionless manner, as Katz's restless camera hovers over the blank faces of his unassured protagonists, eventually seeking poise and quietude in the occasional pillow shots of the surrounding streets. Much of this plods on incessantly - a few too many "ums" and "likes", a hysterically sustained air of discomfort and awkwardness such as in the scene when Gus watches TV with the oblivious girl, that suggests an overstatement of adolescent clumsiness. In such instances, Katz seems more concerned with getting a laugh at the expense of the characters than he does with accurately reflecting the ebb and flow of high school culture.

Taking place across the country in Brooklyn, and thus mirroring mumblecore's nation-spanning nature, is Katz's second feature, Quiet City. Here his aspirations prove not altogether distinct from those in Dance Party, USA, focusing in on another precarious intimacy, only this time in the context of hapless post-collegiate slackers. Jamie (Erin Fisher) has arrived in Brooklyn by subway to meet her friend Samantha at a cafe. Problem is, she's not familiar with the city and has no idea where to find her destination. She asks a young man (Cris Lankenau) in a parking garage where to find it, and after trying several different variations of the same explanation, he ends up just walking with her. Katz starts making sly cuts that affirm the subtle spark between them, when every time it seems as if they are going to go their separate ways, we see them together a frame later in the space they were supposedly departing from. She winds up not finding her friend in the cafe, and after waiting for a while to no avail, the young man offers to let her hang out at his place, an unadorned apartment, for as long as she needs. They talk, drink some wine together without any hint of connoisseurship, and tinker with a toy keyboard (how could this be a mumblecore film without at least one instance of cloying amateur musicianship?) The beginnings of a delicate connection are afoot, but each of them maintain a degree of caution; their interactions remain purely friendly, as if hampered by a constant awareness of the other's romantic situation (Jamie has an ambiguous attachment to a jealous boy back home and the guy, whose name we eventually learn is Charlie, is still getting over a break-up).

Despite this hesitance, the seeds of attraction are thoroughly and saliently planted. The iron walls that blocked verbal communication in Dance Party, USA have been broken down, so Charlie and Jamie interact with effortless comfort, even humor and charm. They are also substantially normal, under-the-radar people without flaws as obvious as those of the characters in Katz's debut. One night spent at Charlie's turns into the entire subsequent day for Jamie, which involves more aimless hanging around (indeed, Charlie is out of a job with literally nothing to do). They infiltrate Samantha's apartment, once again finding no one, stop by the apartment of Charlie's newly engaged friend Adam (fellow director Joe Swanberg) to reclaim a long-lost hat in the funniest scene of the film, and eventually find themselves at an art gallery showing curated by Jamie's friend Robin (Sarah Hellman), leading to a late-night party filled with more jobless slacker types. Quiet City unfolds in an all-too-familiar realm of financial hardship, estranged friendships, uncertain romances, and dispassionate gatherings that gain their pessimism from the fact that everyone there is worrying about their unpaid rent rather than enjoying the company of others. Katz evokes this mood with grace, still remaining conscious of the transient pleasures that exist, such as the charmingly inelegant boogie shared by Charlie, Jamie, Robin, and Charlie's witless old pal Kyle (Tucker Stone), or the first small gesture of outward physical contact between Charlie and Jamie, a tradeoff of high-fives.



Both of these films have a sense of effortlessness and economy in their progression, a refreshing lack of formula guiding their apathetic movement. I'd even venture to say that, in keeping with their clear absence of narrative promises, they value the spontaneity of the present over the vast anxiety of the future. This is a notion justified by Katz's enduring propensity to pause the narrative after long scenes of dialogue to ponder the tranquil stillness of the surroundings, shots that achieve their consummate power as punctuation marks in Quiet City due largely to a significant cinematographic leap between the two films, with director of photography Andrew Reed realizing the visual potential of autumnal skies and urban silhouettes. Yet with this equilibrium comes an astonishing lack of directorial intrusion, which can be both a blessing, in the film's best moments, and a curse, threatening to reduce the characters to caricatures. This negative aspect can be witnessed in both films, in Gus' frustratingly one-note friend Bill (Ryan White) and Kyle in Quiet City, a figure used only for comic relief. With that said, the rewards of Katz's work are not always to be found in character psychology, but rather in subtle shifts in tone. In this regard, Quiet City is his more tonally spectacular work, with an utterly refined interplay of tenderness, uncertainty, and nonchalance conquered with supreme visual and aural instinct. At the same time, it's the more straightforward of the two films; Dance Party, USA contains richer emotional undercurrents that bubble up beneath the surface, and do so in a lot fewer coherent words.

Yet all this time I wonder if I'm giving Katz too much credit, reading too far into films that are really just half-baked screenplay ideas stretched to just barely feature lengths with the liberties of non-actor friends and unimposing production schedules. After all, it's a whole lot easier to assemble a collection of rather lifelike moments if an overbearing producer is not breathing down your neck wondering when serious progress has been made. In fact, as a filmmaker myself, I know that it's not that hard. But I am still willing to accept these conditions if Katz's films continue to feel so serene and poignant. Dance Party, USA marks one of those rare instances when I actually felt a film was too short, and Quiet City stands as an even rarer instance of a film being just the right length. Because of this, Katz seems very sure of his own scope, aware of how his films are making an impact and when they are. And if the final offhand kiss between Gus and Jessica in a photo booth after a slow simmer of unrelated, anxiety-filled scenes isn't making an impact, I don't know what is.

Before Sunset (2004) A Film by Richard Linklater

Sequels, those intolerable addendums that Hollywood regularly churns out in the sole interest of hearty financial returns, have never seen a finer day than Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, a film that rightfully completes and enriches its predecessor in ways that required the span of nine years between the two productions. Before Sunrise concluded with its two short-term lovers making a last second agreement to meet back in Vienna in six months in the same spot, still ignorant of each other's last names, phone numbers, or any means of communication but dead-set on carrying out the plan anyway, because their intimate connection was seemingly too unshakable to fail them. Though one would expect that this is where Linklater would begin the sequel, he opts to leap ahead nine years instead, equaling both the elapsed time since the release of the original and the years ticked away from the lives of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Right from the opening sequence, it is evident that the time passed has made its inevitable mark on the two as well as on the production stamp, a discernment made concrete when Linklater splices antique images of the lovers from the first film amidst the tranquil cinematography of Before Sunset. If Before Sunrise looked lived-in, durable, and immutable, the sequel's wispy patina is like that of a postcard slowly fading away into obscurity, mirroring the weathered state of Jesse and Celine's relationship.

On the coda of his European book tour, Jesse is answering questions in an elegant Parisian bookstore about the ambiguous ending of his successful novel - which, to no one's surprise, is based on the events of Before Sunrise - when he spots Celine peering at him from a nondescript aisle. Her full, curvy features from years before, witnessed in the momentary archival glimpses, have given way to a coarser, thinner bone structure, indicative of not only aging physically but hardening her worldview from a handful of dispassionate experiences and missed opportunities. Indeed, soon enough we learn that this is actually the pair's first meeting since their romantic evening in Vienna (which Celine calls a "one-night-stand" in her waltz in the closing scene, an ostensibly self-effacing jab at herself for all her preoccupations with sex). Life - or more specifically, Celine's grandmother's death - got in the way of her fulfilling her promise to meet Jesse at the specified time and place. A potentially crucial opportunity was muffed, and the two of them have to deal with that through cordial niceties that only serve to mask what is clearly lamentation and heartache underneath, especially for the always amiable and understanding Jesse, who actually did show up in Vienna and was forced to pay the dividends.



All regrets and gentle grudges are tossed aside though, at least at first, while Jesse and Celine agree to catch up before his flight back to the United States. It would take a vegetable not to realize the immediate similarities between this and their previous rendezvous through French streets and cafes, for after the initial small-talk is exchanged, Jesse and Celine get right back to effortless, rambling discussion as if they had never ceased in the first place. They speak about Jesse's notion that people do not change, his experience in a Trappist retreat, Celine's work as a student in New York City during the same time that Jesse lived there, and the nature of aging and responsibility. But what gradually leads to the most personal admissions is when they summarize their current scenarios: Celine has a blasé relationship with a war photographer whose work causes him to be away half the time, and she now affiliates herself with environmental agencies in a half-hearted attempt to cure a hobbled world; Jesse, an established author, has a wife and a son but feels like he's "running a small nursery with someone [he] used to date". As adults invested in routine, they are more guarded and closed-off than before, and are thus less willing to release their emotions, so the conversation at first plods when it finally gets to this seemingly commonplace realm. But once the two hop aboard a tour boat on the Seine in a scene of masterful staging and careful pacing, the river breeze seems to stir up the hitherto concealed layers and the past lovers begin positioning their mundane existence in relation to their idyllic night in Vienna and the liberties it produced. Jesse asks, "Oh, God, why weren't you there, in Vienna?" He knows precisely why, but his real question has more to do with a lifetime of wondering how things would have turned out if she was.

These private revelations continue to crescendo until they reach their peak in an escort car driving back to Celine's apartment. It's a scene that curiously echoes the last moment at the train in Before Sunrise, because it is perceived that this is the final chance for communication before separation once again (the film's rigidly maintained real-time structure allows for no wasted minutes in the face of Jesse's fast-approaching airport deadline). Yet the potent sense of hopefulness in the original has been replaced by confessional hysteria, with Jesse and Celine voicing their feelings in an anarchic display of regret, sadness, anger, and pity. Hawke and Delpy handle the situation beautifully, exploding and regrouping in a matter of seconds, filling the gaps with tentative acts of subtlety - one fleeting moment has Celine reaching her hand out to comfort Jesse as he looks out the window only to pull it back submissively when he turns around. All of the repressed dissatisfaction about the formulaic lives these two spontaneous characters lead comes to the forefront. Perhaps realizing the importance of not letting her out of his grasp once again, Jesse offers to take her to her door, which leads to a tour of the inside of her apartment. Miraculously, Jesse and Celine manage a quaint reversal of their previous emotional outpouring. There seems to be a mutual acknowledgment of their success in overcoming the hurdle that spelled failure last time. They do not leave each other, and one gets the sense that Jesse isn't planning to, as he indifferently delays his escort. Maybe they exchange numbers this time. Maybe they realize they really should be together. Regardless of the end result, Linklater has provided an utterly complete and stirring portrait of two harmonious souls in discordant stride.

A New Outlet

I have recently been accepted as a freelance writer for Examiner.com, a national news website that caters to all sorts of special interests with a local focus. I will be writing for the Boston outlet as a Film Examiner, which ultimately means maintaining a firm grasp on all things cinematic occurring in Boston, Massachusetts, whether they be festivals, rare releases at local art house theaters, or bigger multiplex offerings. (If you check out my page so far though, you'll see that I have been largely neglecting the latter, which I guess comes as no surprise.) Several of my essays here will be cross-posted on Examiner in abbreviated versions assuming they were films I saw on screen in Boston, and anything else will be previews of what's up and coming. If you live in the city, I hope this can be a beneficial tool, and if not, feel free to take a peek at the articles anyway, because compensation is based wholly on readership and page views. (I have added a button on the sidebar for quick access to my page if you're interested.) Of course, this blog will remain my most prized center for writing, but Examiner may prove a nice supplemental project with a slightly different tone.

Before Sunrise (1995) A Film by Richard Linklater

After sensitively probing the scattered fabric of Generation X with his seminal features Slacker (1991) and Dazed and Confused (1993), Richard Linklater moved towards a palette that was at once decidedly broader and more specific with Before Sunrise, one of the defining films of the 1990's American independent cinema. Meeting two disparate souls - a personable young American male named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) who wants to just "be a ghost for a while" and an intellectually curious French woman named Celine (Julie Delpy) - on a train in the anonymity of the European countryside, Linklater's film, while at first hearkening back to his unreleased debut It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988) due to its emphasis on public transit, seemed instantly an attempt to transcend any of his familiar measures of place and community. Jesse and Celine are characters who are out of their element, standing out as clear central figures in opposition to the homogeneous ensemble pieces Linklater has perfected throughout his career. They begin conversing over coffee, and soon enough he is asking her to get off and kill time with him in Vienna for the day before he has to catch a flight in the morning. It's a setup that prefigures a situation of almost Greek-like levels of fate and free-will, contrasting the rambling, directionless non-structure of his earlier works.

What becomes especially interesting in Before Sunrise though is not that Linklater abandons any of his former methods, but rather how effortlessly he is able to adopt a more rigid three-act structure while still maintaining his signature air of casual spontaneity. Celine eventually does get off of the train with Jesse, but unlike Linklater's own cameo performance in Slacker, she does not have any stoic skepticism about it. On account of Jesse's prophetically logical dissertation about how she would regret not getting off the train with him in a distant, romantically confused future (the first of the script's devilishly clever speeches), she feels completely at ease with his laid-back, unassuming demeanor. For the rest of the day and into the night, the two wander around Vienna discussing various topics related to life, love, death, and the innumerable gray areas in between, all captured by Linklater and cinematographer Lee Daniels' modestly roving camera, which remains as straightforward as possible so as to not interrupt their delicate interaction. Knowing that the two must separate in the morning though lends a constant mood of melancholy to the proceedings, a feeling of transience and frailty that grows deeper and deeper, devastatingly, as Jesse and Celine's relationship grows stronger.

It's a premise that is simultaneously sad and inspiring throughout, but Linklater and his two leads have an uncanny way of diverting the negative aspects of the situation until the final twenty minutes, so that what remains is entertaining, thought-provoking talk interspersed with humorous non-sequiturs that often times lead to the intellectual core of Linklater's work. For instance, at one point the two are dining at a patio cafe when Celine mistakenly makes prolonged eye contact with an elderly mystic, who takes this as an invitation for business. Receptive as always, Celine agrees to have her palm read. The mystic makes a vague enough summary of her current and future self - enough to have gathered simply from the scene of course - and concludes by making a brief statement to Jesse, which he later deems "condescending", as well as labeling the whole encounter a hokey act of opportunism. Celine, on the other hand, is taken by this small spiritual communion between two souls, moved by how such a lowly street entertainer could inspire so much mystery and seeming understanding. A scene as minute as this works to cement the fundamental differences between Celine and Jesse's worldviews: he is the rationalist, and she is the lofty, spiritual romantic (roles that would, to some extent, be reversed in the tantalizing sequel, Before Sunset (2004)). Later, an encounter with a street-side poet affirms these statuses. Yet Linklater, ever attentive to the multivalence of human beings, throws in personality ripples that complicate their ostensible roles. Celine, betraying her idealistic nature, is constantly worrying about the omnipresent possibility of death (witness her possession of the George Bataille anthology The Dead Man in the opening sequence), and Jesse at one point waxes about how he feels like a child dreaming up his future life in his mind, a seemingly more reassuring, optimistic outlook.



And so Jesse and Celine continue to talk, talk, and talk, and after all of this heart-to-heart, as well as the equally vital gaps of silence, a charismatic relationship forms that feels as carefully constructed as any of the best in cinema, yet it maintains a wholly authentic sense of two people living beside one another as opposed to performing. It's almost as if the script was abandoned after a while and the film simply became a documentary of Hawke and Delpy's chemistry on set, assuming such conversations very well could have occurred when a camera was not rolling. Because of this, one feels a strong artistic kinship with the films of Eric Rohmer, who was always able to capture similarly holy moments of human interaction on screen with a casual formalism that Linklater shares. Like in Slacker, Linklater appears resolute on assigning the camera an ethical dimension, using the static long take in an utterly nongratuitous manner for reasons that have less to do with aesthetic editorializing and more to do with respecting the length and fragility of his character's exchanges. Moreover, the dependency on fixed visual patterns is yet another sign of permanence, along with the classical music heard on the soundtrack and the ancient sights of Vienna that Linklater occasionally - but not superficially - revels in, that counteracts the ephemerality that ultimately drives Jesse and Celine apart in the end.

Before Sunrise is sneakily calling attention to these themes throughout, without ever overshadowing the dialogue that is its central purpose. The images of trains, tracks, and blurring landscapes in the beginning and end of the film come to signify the race of time and the fleeting tragedies it creates. The sound of the tracks can be heard, implicitly, in the whole film, to be sure, but most presciently during the final moments of Jesse and Celine's time together, as they contemplate what the best possible solution is to their spiritual dilemma. Should they stay in Vienna and forget their lives at home temporarily? For just one more night, or for months? Or is it worth strengthening the relationship only to lose it later in a cruel, loveless world? Can they even go home and forget it ever happened? As the trains load their passengers, Jesse and Celine reach a consensus that is in some way a middle ground, but still it is stuffed with impracticality and snap judgments. Then Linklater makes a curiously poignant move not unlike the one made by Antonioni in L'Eclisse, yet infused with a remarkable Ozu-like tenderness, cutting back to the several locations the two spent time at over the course of their stay in Vienna. It is clear here, in this fond farewell (but not quite goodbye), that this is a precious film about places and people, about permanence and impermanence.

Greenberg (2010) A Film by Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach's latest film Greenberg is a witty, dawdling work that manages to illuminate both the best and worst features of the director's abilities. Unsurprisingly, it's rife with deadpan one-liners lodged within long strokes of naturalistic dialogue, and has a modest visual style that works accordingly. Conversely, it's also desperately one-note, cynical, and hopeless in its tone, taking the rather petulant, ungrateful titular character (Ben Stiller) and placing him within a context from which there is no upward escape (he verbally commits to "doing nothing for a while"). Adding to Baumbach's repertoire of distinct location shooting, Roger Greenberg has drifted into Los Angeles for an indeterminate amount of time to house-sit for his brother (Chris Messina), who is on vacation in Vietnam. There is a running, though never officially verified narrative detail about Greenberg having just been let out of a mental institution. His reason for entering is, perhaps intentionally, never clarified in the script. He's a terminal crab, and it becomes clear that any logical root of his anxiety is negligible; this is a man who will grow bitter even when there's nothing to grow bitter at, who will look sullen when all around him is sunny and pleasant.

Baumbach does not begin the film on Greenberg though. Instead, in a sweeping pan of the Los Angeles horizon line, his camera spots a woman walking the Greenberg family's dog in the hills, and she becomes the focal point for the first 15 minutes. Her name is Florence Marr, and she works as a personal assistant to the Greenberg family, thus naturally being granted the privilege of taxiing Roger around Los Angeles when he needs (having lived in New York City for years, he has lost all courage to get behind the wheel, though he does wisely assert the ability late in the film after snorting a line of coke). Greta Gerwig - of Hannah Takes the Stairs recognition - plays Florence, and herein lies Baumbach's unique attempt to meld mumblecore stylistics with a dedramatized Hollywood heavyweight in Ben Stiller. One could say that Baumbach's been towing this line throughout his career, but in Greenberg it seems a particularly conscious decision, especially given Mark Duplass' invariable appearance as a jerky old band-mate. This works to further isolate the film's prosaic qualities from any sense of formulaic gloss, a testament to how little interest it has in delivering anything close to rousing emotional epiphanies. The closest the film gets to such a maneuver is when the camera tilts above the distraught Greenberg to reveal a massive human blow-up waving erratically in the wind in the parking lot of a car dealership, a revelation that is, ironically, more humorous than it is inspirational.

When the film eventually does introduce Roger Greenberg, only the back of his head is seen looking out the window at the backyard pool in his brother's LA crash pad while on the phone with Florence. A couple of beats later he is in another room peering out the window again. Subtly the film establishes this motif to suggest that Greenberg is internally trapped, capable of only passively staring at the external. He's a man who has remained locked within himself even as the years have passed and others have changed, and has a severe inability to self-correct. This is witnessed in the variety of old friends he encounters over the course of his stay in Los Angeles. After college, Greenberg was in a successful hair band that turned down a promising record deal, and years later he reunites with both Duplass' character and a kinder, more charming deadbeat, Ivan Schrank (Rhys Ifans). Ivan inertly goes along with Greenberg's annoying neuroses in the name of friendly reconciliation, but continually winds up empty in return. All Greenberg does is complain when Ivan takes him to a backyard party filled with children and parents, where Baumbach intercuts between several different instances of his pathetic small talk to heighten the embarrassment. Their discord reaches its apex in the film's prolonged centerpiece, when Ivan finally takes a rather timid stand for himself at a drugged-out twentysomething party in the Greenberg home. No less awkward are Greenberg's meetings with his old girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who uncomfortably tries to deflect his halfhearted stabs at romantic revival.



Greenberg's overarching thrust though is the precarious relationship of Roger and Florence, which springs into being haphazardly when he goes down on her after five minutes of shared beer drinking. The scene instantly earns its place in the canon of bad cinematic sex, attributable as it is to Baumbach's own enduring breed of clumsily de-eroticized sexploitation. Florence reactively apologizes for her ugly bra, then thinks out loud when she questions whether or not the sound she heard was a train. The moment ends with the same lack of emphasis it started with, but it nonetheless effectively frames the two as instantly connected in their own idiosyncrasies. Although there exists a significant age gap (Greenberg is in his forties and Florence is in her mid twenties), it is practically set in stone that these two will be indebted to one another in some way for the remainder of the film, no matter how wavering that connection is. And indeed it continues in flux, he being resolute in his confusion, she being casually impressed by his skill of modestly doing nothing. Like the filmmaking traditions Stiller and Gerwig originate from, it seems perilously unlikely that Roger and Florence will ever achieve a harmonious connection, instead occupying a hazy middle ground that is as nuanced in its awkwardness as the cinema of Noah Baumbach. Their one area of mutuality is in the family dog, Mahler, for whom they regularly convene at the veterinarian hospital, himself being a kind of distillation of the direction of Roger and Florence's relationship (when his health is relieved towards the end, a faint hint of improvement comes for them too).

The difficulty with writing about a film like Greenberg is that it is in some way a betrayal of my own instincts. As a casual viewer, this is actually a film I very much enjoy, yet as a critic, the film's flaws present themselves more clearly. There is no doubting that Baumbach is an extremely adept chronicler of the everyday lives of upper-middle class white people, and that he extracts the absolute best performances out of his actors. Stiller is a devastatingly believable Roger Greenberg, abandoning any outward displays of comic bravado to focus his attention more on droll antagonism, the humor of which only sneaks pathetically through the cracks, and Gerwig gives the finest performance yet of her young career, finding for once an actual cohesiveness in her weird tics. But at some point it would be interesting and indeed a sign of maturation if Baumbach could transcend his own niche, which currently displays a rather narrow worldview. It can be grating to see him concentrate so microscopically on ungrateful people who shouldn't really have the fussy abnormalities that they do, while in the process appearing invisible to the plight of others such as the under-the-radar foreign minions who work around the clock at the Greenberg house and are simply relegated to the background. Yes, Greenberg is a well-crafted, acutely observed film, but it can also come across like the sound of Baumbach walking into a wall one too many times.

Differing Visions of the Geisha in Marshall and Naruse

(Like my review of The Sheltering Sky, this is a piece that was written for a class of mine. Had I been given critical freedom, this may have read a bit differently.)

Ever since its inception, the geisha has begged to be exotified. One artful, elegant Japanese woman is designed both to delight the senses and summarize the sophisticated charms of her culture. Such an illustrious figure presents a challenge to the art-makers of the world who wish to depict the life of a geisha: how does one pay respect to the beauty of her art without exploiting or overlooking the person behind it? This is a fundamental question that was surely on the minds of Rob Marshall and Mikio Naruse before they directed Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and Late Chrysanthemums (1954), two notable films about geishas. Though the two films were produced in distinct circumstances – Hollywood of the 21st century and Japan of the postwar era – they both present fascinating, if often considerably separate, visions of the geisha. Experiencing the two films provides immeasurable insights into the public perception of geishas as it varies across hemispheres and throughout history. Late Chrysanthemums views the geisha life as one that is lost and forgotten, leaving real ordinary women behind the faded makeup, whereas Memoirs of a Geisha treats the culture as one made up of larger-than-life icons whose surface appeal is worthy of endless flattery and exaltation.

In order to begin to understand these two works alongside each other, it’s important to frame them within their respective historical and cultural contexts. Memoirs of a Geisha is a big-budget modern drama prepared by the Hollywood movie industry, and as such, is instantly a product designed for maximal entertainment value to be consumed on a vast scale. Considering its exotic subject matter, the film is necessarily a vision of the East as seen through a Western gaze, and thus is highly susceptible to claims of Americanized reductionism and Orientalism, as is frequently the case with big Hollywood films that attempt to capitalize on the allure of an unfamiliar culture but end up exploiting it instead. Mikio Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums is on the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, a film produced in Japan for Japanese people. It’s a film that does not attempt to exotify its own culture, indeed often presenting it in all its intimate bleakness. Inevitably, these two exclusive filmmaking scenarios bear some very dissimilar results, but the congruencies are also quite interesting.

Memoirs of a Geisha is the creation of Rob Marshall, an A-list Hollywood director with large-scale credentials, including the commercial successes Chicago (2002) and Nine (2009). He has become well known for his sweeping musicals, and although Memoirs of a Geisha takes the form of an epic melodrama, the lavish spectacle that is his forte clearly carries over. He applies this grandiose visual style to the tale of Chiyo (Ziyi Zhang), a peasant girl from a fishing village who is sold at an early age with her sister Satsu to a geisha house in the Gion district of Kyoto, Japan. Once Satsu is exiled from the house and delivered to a brothel instead, Chiyo finds herself a victim of the cruel hypocrisies and haughty authoritarianism of the older geishas, all while the antagonistic Hatsumoto (Li Gong) forms a deep jealousy towards her undeniable beauty. Chiyo is immediately a lonely soul for the first third of the film, but the broader narrative follows the entire trajectory of her young life, culminating in her widespread approval as one of Japan’s most prized, sought-after geishas. Towards the end however, Marshall documents the unexpected shattering of this lifestyle due to the onslaught of World War II, showing how it deeply affects both her personal growth and her legitimacy as an artist and entertainer.



Late Chrysanthemums essentially picks up where Memoirs of a Geisha left off chronologically, despite being made fifty years before. Mikio Naruse was a near antithesis of Rob Marshall due to what was really an unfortunate case of cultural invisibility, having been regularly overshadowed by cinematic giants like Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. Regardless, his films were always sensitive treatises on the difficulties of ordinary life in the modern world, and this awareness was what made Late Chrysanthemums such an apt chronicle of the drastic societal transformations wrought by the war, with the use of geishas being an effective foil through which to evoke lamentation and nostalgia. His film investigates the everyday lives of four workaday women in Tokyo, all of whom were once fellow geishas. Central in this quartet is Kin (Haruko Sugimura), a well-off moneylender who has a financial connection with each of the supporting women: she was a lead investor in the small bar co-run by Nobu (Sadako Sawamura) and waits impatiently for long overdue payments from Tomi (Yûko Mochizuki) and Tamae (Chikako Hosokawa), who occupy the same house together. None of these women are entirely stable, either financially, emotionally, or both.

Being a Tokyo-based production, the film is quick not to gloss over any of the devastating realities of the postwar landscape, remaining aware of their dissonance from the geisha era. The troubling effects of the weak economy and job market can be felt obliquely in the personal lives of the four protagonists. Tomi and Tamae both incessantly bemoan the paths of their ungrateful children, who have married and moved away and left their mothers to sustain themselves solely on menial jobs. Kin too witnesses a severe lack of human connection despite her steady source of income, which she seems to be unable to find a purpose for. Instead, she is consumed by the fond memory of her past lover Tabe (Ken Uehara), who arrives late in the film only to prove equally miserable in the face of the hard times. This sorrowful emotional register provides a sharp contrast to the heyday of the geisha witnessed in Marshall’s film and only reminisced upon periodically by the women in Naruse’s. In one melancholy scene when Tomi is fixing up Tamae’s hair and praising her for her past beauty, the poignancy of the moment is deflated by the fact that both of them are stubbornly drunk and otherwise rambling about their estranged children. The uncertain present regularly interrupts any mentions of the idyllic past.

Memoirs of a Geisha shares the overall gloomy mood of Late Chrysanthemums, yet does so in broader, more overtly melodramatic strokes. For the entirety of the film leading up to Chiyo’s recognition as an outstanding geisha, the Gion district is literally flooded by melancholy, with nearly constant torrential rain accenting - in a rather traditional dramatic move - her troublesome encounters. The lead geishas treat her with hostility as a meager servant, and the older Hatsumoto takes every opportunity to make Chiyo look traitorous, at one point falsely exposing her as a runaway when it was really her who was causing mischief outside of the geisha house. It is not until Chiyo is discovered by Mameha (Michelle Yeoh) - Hatsumoto’s enduring rival - that she manages to transcend her rough upbringing and aim for a more significant identification as a geisha, landing her romantic sights on the upper-class Chairman in the process.

What is ultimately occurring here is a traditional dramatic format in Hollywood, a way of clearly identifying each character in accordance with one particular trait. Chiyo is the saintly protagonist rising from rags to riches, The Chairman is the object of romantic interest associated with sophistication and wealth, Mameha is the clear-cut mentor incapable of guiding Chiyo in the wrong direction, and Hatsumoto is the feverish villain responsible for much of her misery. These characters rarely make a move that would jeopardize their fully formed persona; instead, every one of their actions seems a device layered with dramatic import to help guide Chiyo’s personal journey. This kind of narrative mechanism is very writer-friendly, for it allows the assumption that each individual in the film is a pawn to be played with in order to reach an overarching significance. In the case of Memoirs of a Geisha, this significance is that everyone, like Chiyo, is in control of their own fate, that personal feelings are more reliable than the allure of external pressures, just as Rob Marshall and screenwriter Robin Swicord are the sole dictators of the path that their film will take despite being based off of an existing novel by Arthur Golden.



Late Chrysanthemums also takes literature as its source material (Fumiko Hayashi’s “Bangiku”, translated as “Late Chrysanthemums”), but it is not nearly handled as manipulatively. If Kin had existed in Memoirs of a Geisha, Marshall would likely have interpreted her money lust as an inherently negative trait, thus positioning her as the antagonist. For Naruse, this is no area for judgment. He sees it as a natural reflection of the distressing economic times, acknowledging money as something that has to be at the root of every conversation for the general welfare of society even if it means endangering human relationships in the process. Kin can be greedy and brash one moment and warm and tender the next, such as when she repeatedly turns a cherished letter from Tabe over in her hands in longing. Amidst the turmoil and loneliness, Naruse admires any act that suggests human camaraderie, explaining why even during moments of deep melancholy there is an underlying sense of earthbound comedy. The film allows for these simultaneous contradictions in character personalities and dramatic presentation to more closely approximate the flow of everyday life, in which actions are not as black and white as they are in the operatic Memoirs of a Geisha.

In this way, Naruse emerges as a social realist whereas Marshall works in more idealistic territory. His film is interested in documenting and combating the social inadequacy as it happens, literally reflecting what he sees around him in the most truthful manner possible. In a way, it works as a social critique. It matters less that these women were once geishas than it does that their realities were once grander and more luxurious. They are artifacts from a bygone era when elegance and art could be focused on because money was not an issue. While Naruse values the vitality of these women’s memories, he also suggests that in order for them to survive they must maintain a sharper focus on the present. Because Memoirs of a Geisha’s characters exist within the time of Japanese cultural prosperity, the stakes - while more lavish and dramatic - are not as high as those in Late Chrysanthemums. It is only when World War II arrives that the characters must reevaluate their means of endurance, as their previous ways of life are thoroughly shattered. One can imagine Chiyo proceeding to become Kin in Late Chrysanthemums; the final time we see her she is still wistfully connected to the Chairman, and the first time we see Kin she is still pining about her old flame with Tabe. It’s as if the war completely stripped the romanticism right away from the geisha.

This notion is reflected in the distinct visual styles of both of the films. A winner for Best Cinematography at the 78th Academy Awards, Dion Beebe’s work in Memoirs of a Geisha is undoubtedly sumptuous and elaborate, with each frame displaying careful precision by way of lighting, mise-en-scene and composition. Marshall positions each shot so that it is a visual treat unto itself. Rarely does an individual frame seem a particular point of emphasis because of the steady stream of pictorial grace. This democratic stylishness underlines the fact that this is the exotic East as seen through a Western lens. Nothing appears mundane, and everything, even the wicked women who scorn Chiyo, is fair game for beautifying. Naruse’s visual style is similarly democratic and without inflection, but in an utterly different way and for a separate purpose. The images in Late Chrysanthemums are uniformly prosaic and meant to elicit the mundane rhythms of daily life. It is a traditional formalism that does not call attention to itself, instead directing the concentration on the quietly powerful performances and the casual events of the story.



The two film’s respective modes of stylization also extend to their costume and set designs. The women’s wardrobes in Memoirs of a Geisha are remarkably ornamented, with generously embroidered kimonos, delicately applied makeup to add an aura of mystery, and wildly showy hairdos. They are walking embodiments of overstatement, and because of this their attire often cloaks their personalities, lending the film the texture of a prolonged fashion show. How much of this is an authentic replication of the kind of embellishment exercised by real-life geishas and how much is a subtle stretching of the truth remains unclear, but given Marshall’s utter lack of experience with pre-1940’s era Japan, it can be assumed that he took liberties to hyperbolize them to an extent. Everything in their proximity is equally extravagant and caressed with soft, low light, often in warm shades of red and green (a highly exotic color scheme ever since Eugene Delacroix’s Algerian paintings verified it). Even the more overtly tragic scenes remain gorgeous in both color and set design, such as in the final act when the war has ravaged the country.

The women’s clothing in Late Chrysanthemums, on the other hand, indicates something far removed from the eccentricity of the geishas that they once were. Now garbed in neutral, more commonplace kimonos, their external appearances still manage to be as telling as they were in the geisha era, only this time they hint at the repose and sorrow of their current lives. Fittingly, their homes are drab and unfurnished, which implies both emotional emptiness and a financial inability to decorate. Outside, Tokyo has become an impersonal metropolitan center filled with a new generation of women dressed in tight sweaters and trousers, a modern way that allows little room for the four old-fashioned women at the center of the story. Such a generational discord is potently felt in one of the closing scenes of the film when Tamae tries an imitation of the Marilyn Monroe gait in front of Tomi, only to immediately mock her own foolishness. Beauty in the modern world, they sadly realize, is no longer associated as closely with the geisha, but rather with the international celebrity.

All of the prominent emotion that this subtly poignant scene withholds is on display in the grim but finally sentimental resolution of Memoirs of a Geisha, when Chiyo is left largely to her own devices, with no use for the skill she has so patiently honed. Regardless of the differing levels of restraint in the two films though, they do share the same sense of lamentation and loss of the ephemeral golden age of the geisha, as well as a genuine sadness about the war that drove it out. And they both view the geisha custom as one that has a substantial impact on the individuals adhering to it, either guiding their lives unsteadily, as in the case of Chiyo, or providing unshakably fond memories for the four late chrysanthemums in Naruse’s film. Of course, Memoirs of a Geisha may continue to ring hollow as a superficial Hollywood melodrama, but the evidence it provides towards the enduring exotic impact of the geisha culture is as compelling as any of the carefully crafted scenes in the moving Late Chrysanthemums.