Moon (2009) A Film by Duncan Jones

It's rather fitting - and almost parodic - that the debut feature of young English director Duncan Jones, the son of famously intergalactic rock star David Bowie, is set in space. Much less groovy than Bowie's sinuous pop music but equally out there is Moon, a film intoxicated under the influence of classic Sci-Fi, namely Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky's Solaris. Though the film takes place as far as possible from any inkling of society and human interaction, it's more fundamentally about a man remote from himself, using the moon mainly as an elaborate metaphor through which to investigate loneliness, ephemerality, and the burden of time. But this is not all the film takes on; it's also about corporate exploitation, technological progression, and the frailty of human life. Presumably, it's even about a bunch more that doesn't quite seep through the cracks by the end, as Jones overflows his debut with more ideas than some directors manage in a whole career, all communicated through a slick, self-described "mainstream" gloss. As ambitious as Moon is, it could have used some serious thematic editorializing, for it often drowns under the dense pressure of its semi-coherent inquiries, which fire on all cylinders but never quite connect in a satisfying manner.

The film cannot really be sufficiently boiled down to an all-encompassing premise, for its central mystery is so inexplicable to begin with, and what shaky base of logic it has is only constantly abstracted as it chugs along. The only facts that I can pronounce without wavering skepticism is that an individual astronaut named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is involved in a lengthy business trip on the moon with the transnational corporation Lunar Industries, mining for Helium-3 in an ambiguously distant future where the precious isotope is crucial to Earth's energy supply, and thus, its continuing survival. Sam's alone with the exception of his hulking supercomputer companion Gerty, who is essentially HAL 9000 replaced with a straightforward emoticon and the familiar ghost of Kevin Spacey, and his excruciating desire for human companionship is augmented by the fact that the lunar base's satellite is damaged, leaving only the potential for sending recorded video messages to his wife and baby daughter. Yet even these supposed building blocks of the story are uncertain as Jones begins to layer on the mystery. Furthermore, Moon's almost aggressively deliberate lack of contextualizing - other than the internationally and environmentally conscious Lunar commercial that opens the film, the only glimpse of the film's relative Earth is in the form of a neighborhood miniature set Sam has been constructing - seems to suggest this is a film resting squarely within the confines of one man's harried psyche.

Early on, Jones makes sure to establish Sam as a man whose mind is playing tricks on him as a result of alienation and monotony. He's getting headaches, vaguely Lynchian psychosexual nightmares, and invariable hallucinations of an enigmatic dark-haired girl who looks approximately 16 years young and might have hobbled in from Solaris. In fact, the latter seems to be the film's most casual head-scratcher, two quietly foreboding images whose mysterious power quickly subsides when Jones decides to never give the girl her cue again, as if she was forgotten as the script progressed. The second time she appears as a spectral silhouette behind layers of raining rock and lunar residue during one of Sam's missions, it has a disastrous and curiously metaphysical effect. Sam crashes his roving device, which subsequently is poured on by dust and rock while he sits unconscious. Next thing he knows he's back at the infirmary being nurtured by the questionably malign Gerty, who minutes later is witnessed having potentially sinister discussions with corporate officials back at the naval base on Earth about their plans for Sam. Against Gerty's droning insistence not to go outside after his accident, Sam explores the scene of his crash only to find that the incident set off an inexplicable procreation of selves, a rabbit hole involving his own body as it was before being salvaged.



This first act disruption of logic, the beginning of the film's many twists, is as nakedly speculative as any of the great paranormal predicaments in science fiction history. Jones' treatment of it, however, is actually nonchalant, even tinged with an ounce of humor, rather than stoic and eerie so as to elicit fear and enveloping mystery. Paradoxically, this method develops its own unique strain of discomfort, a feeling of tension between the expected strategy and the strategy Jones really applies, showing the two Sam's - who are soon after cohabiting the same base with the same story - interacting on oddly dysfunctional terms. They even play a game of ping pong, shot from a horizontal perspective and involving two Sam Rockwell's in one frame (to achieve this, Jones and his effects crew had to do some painstaking synchronization work), that humorously crystallizes the split psyche of the lonely astronaut. But where Jones gains originality and style points, his film also loses a great deal of dramatic momentum, signaling its first doppelganger too early and taking too long to move on into new territory. Is this a clone like Gerty says, suggesting a greedy, insensitive company playing tricks on the individual, or is it simply a visualization of an angrier, more pensive Sam and a restless, chatty one?

Questions like these are not normally answered in Moon, only obscured by more mysteries. In this sense, the film rightly continues a long lineage of probing science fiction works that do less to illuminate universal truths than to place things in bewildering contexts and prompt questions, seek new and unexplored inquiries when all boundaries have been stretched. It's difficult to go further into Moon without utterly laying bare its central enigmas and disconcerting questions, which are certainly more interesting in the film than they could possibly be in writing. Yet even for all its suspenseful red herrings and psychological complexity, Moon is peculiarly uninspiring, perhaps too subtly fraudulent to be entirely sincere and too sure of its own ideas to really put them on screen in an effective way. Its admirable old-fashioned effects, Clint Mansell's typically majestic score, and Sam Rockwell's sprawling one-man show all suggest a film of epic achievement, yet they really belie a work that, promising as it may be, fails to fully connect as intellectually stimulating science fiction or escapist entertainment.

An Education (2009) A Film by Lone Scherfig

It should have been clear from the title that Danish director Lone Scherfig's An Education would be something akin to getting lectured in school. Jumping ludicrously from "school sucks" ethos to nose-in-the-books classicism, it's as if Scherfig felt her audience needed a blunt reminder of what it means to really be "educated" in life. And so the youthful, wide-eyed, and fervent 16-year-old Londoner Jenny (newcomer Carey Mulligan) becomes her instrument, the doppelganger for Lynn Barber in the memoir off of which the film is based. Scherfig and screenwriter Nick Hornby begin her as a private school whiz kid cum promising cellist yearning for greater things outside her contained, self-proclaimed dreary London existence, send her through a year-long fling with a much older, seemingly more cultivated man named David (Peter Sarsgaard), and then bring her full circle to discover she was fine where she started and where she was headed. This all occurs in a still relatively conservative post-war London that is just starting to rock back and forth, not quite swinging yet, but nearly hip enough to harbor fancy forward-thinkers like David who are above the law because it's just "who (they) are".

I write so prominently in terms of what is being done to these characters because An Education is really that manipulative, too wholeheartedly dedicated to its end result that it fails to let any air into the proceedings, some faint acknowledgment that there is more than meets the eye. The film, once it settles into its central scenario, hinges on two potential courses of action for the eager Jenny: keep studying to guarantee a prized spot "reading English" at Oxford, which has been her goal as far as she and her family can remember, or ditch school and experience life uninhibited with the freewheeling David, whose early admission that he went to school at the "University of Life and failed" should probably have been enough to jolt Jenny out of her childish wonderment. As charming and supposedly connected as David is though, he's transparently off-kilter from the first time we witness him lamely plucking Jenny out of the rain with her cello and into his car to drive her home, a drab come-on that he attributes to his love of music more than anything. From there, the hands of fate keep working their unlikely magic, guiding Jenny back into David one day when window shopping with her snickering cardboard girlfriends, at which point he makes his first offer to take her out and see a classical concert uptown. Jenny - whose laundry list of sophisticated aspirations (listening to Jazz, eating great food, smoking cigarettes) center around the oasis of Paris - is of course smitten, seeing David as her knight in shining armor who can show her everything.

It's stomach-turning to watch the machinations of their developing romance. Jenny's one-dimensional parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), such cartoonish products of English traditionalism, are unbelievably welcoming to David despite the fact that he skirts pedophile status, sending her off with little skepticism and even extending her bed time in the face of his kind demeanor. As the meetings increase, the parents grow more and more blind to his games, falling for a flimsily staged prank about his upcoming once-in-a-blue-moon visit with C.S (aka "Clive") Lewis in Paris that attracts Jenny's future-minded father. Ultimately, they allow her to spend a few days with him in Paris on the strength of the potential career connections she could make, but Scherfig settles for a stylishly abbreviated montage, failing to truly capitalize on the first-time bedazzlement of the exotic city. Instead, the emphasis is continually on the peripheral magnetism of David and Jenny's relationship, which has its own share of contrivances. As functional as Mulligan and Sarsgaard are individually, they never quite develop enough salient chemistry to warrant Jenny's full-fledged indulgence in the new lifestyle. David is actually hopelessly unromantic when it comes to intimacy, wooing her with an utterly uncomfortable but somehow passing off as tender peep at her naked bosom, and later shocking her with an even more awkward episode with a banana, and one senses that Jenny should be smart enough to see through his skin-deep charm.



Of course, we can, and that speaks to the unflattering sense the film exudes that we are always four steps ahead of the characters, and the plot. With its scarcely placed but saccharine use of musical score, An Education bludgeons the viewer with dramatic innuendo, but Scherfig doesn't seem to realize that it's always doing a much greater job of foreshadowing than she likely intends. Therefore, the film sits uneasily in between functioning as a moralistic, told-you-so dissertation (which it unsatisfyingly proves to be in the tone-deaf final act) and an experiential first-person piece. The latter may have unearthed a more poignant film, especially given the fact that it could have rested on the shoulders of the able Carey Mulligan. If the story is insipid and by-the-numbers, Mulligan's expressive performance hints at bigger things. In the end though, her impressive spectrum of facial nuance - beginning at childish vulnerability and ending at Hepburn-like adulthood - becomes stranded within a stuffy scenario, so that her inevitable duping at the foot of David (turns out he's got a family!) is all the more devastating.

None of this is to suggest An Education is not a handsome and entirely satisfactory movie. But its problem lies right there, at its core: it does not risk anything and thus does not go anywhere particularly interesting. A few times, the doors are open to something unexpected and more emotionally complicated - David inexplicably starts using baby talk with Jenny on the eve of stealing her virginity, or Jenny confronts David's wife and son in their front yard - but Scherfig promptly closes them, afraid to investigate something outside of the confines of her pedestrian coming-of-age trajectory. Further proof in my mind that there's little worse than a small, independent work lacking the sense of spirit and singular energy such a description would suggest, instead in search of being the next "underdog" at the year-end Oscars. To translate, a superficially lively, colorful production with whiffs of cultural or historical significance and melodramatic shades of emotional urgency.

An Autumn Afternoon (1962) A Film by Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu's final cinematic testament was the tragicomic An Autumn Afternoon, a film that in some ways distills his signature concerns in a neat, summative manner and in other ways presents them as stiff and straitjacketed as ever. Its subject is one that comprises a large portion of Ozu's oeuvre, enough even to create its own microgenre: the lonely widower marrying off his aging daughter. Like in Late Spring, its closest companion, Ozu regular Chishû Ryû plays the father Shuhei Hirayama and Shima Iwashita replaces Setsuko Hara as the daughter, Michiko. This is Ozu reprising a common situation that is clearly of utmost importance to him for the impressions of family bonds, aging, generational dissonance, and loneliness it raises. It's as if he was determined to portray the scenario in as many subtly altered iterations as possible to mine the attitudes and behaviors as they transform and mature over time. Unsurprisingly, the preliminary notes for another film he was planning before his death from cancer in 1963 dealt with the same subject matter.

If Ozu's intention was clearly studied and compassionate though, it's only a shame that the execution sometimes comes across like repetition. Ozu wasn't a tremendously varied or risk-taking artist; he did what he did consistently and with the care and tact of a great architect. But in Autumn Afternoon, the scenario is stifled by its banality, too devoid of nuances that would set it apart from the other masterworks in this category of storytelling. As with all of his films, narrative punctuation is eschewed, leaving only a series of domestic snapshots, dedramatized glimpses from the lives of the central characters. Here Ozu rests his gaze most stringently on Shuhei, a father with a decent office job and consistently reliable friends. His days are ritualistically spent working and then catching up with Kazuo (Shinichirô Mikami) and Shuzo (Nobuo Nakamura) over Saki. Home life feels less intimate and united than in some of the director's previous works, with dinner usually occurring individually and an emphasis on cordial pleasantries rather than thorough family-to-family bonding. Though unclear at first, it becomes evident that Shuhei even has a son who is relegated largely to the background.



With his bold color palette that highlights neons and reds and his precise pictorial attention to household consumer objects, Ozu suggests that it is the force of modernity that is gradually distorting the traditional values of the Japanese family. One narrative strand has Shuhei's elder, married son returning home from work with extraneous purchases - first a brand new set of shimmering golf clubs, then an upgraded refrigerator - only to find himself in prickly quarrels with his wife about spending restraint. Fed up with arguing, he lies on the floor smoking a cigarette unresponsively, half hypnotized by the wealth of purchasing possibilities and half understanding of his wife's irritation. The 1960's were a time when Western values of consumerism and idealism were slowly settling into Eastern cultures, and their mark can be witnessed in the deliberately artificialized night life scene, glowing with bright bar signs, the practice of following the baseball game on television seen early on in the film, and the Sapporo and Canada Dry beverage boxes perpetually in the crystal clear background of one of Ozu's long, poised hallway shots. But Ozu does not greet this cultural osmosis with resentment and defensiveness; rather, like all of his characters, he is open-minded and welcoming about the opportunities now afforded. His is not a critical cinema but a sensitive, forgiving one, forever pitched in the present tense for better or worse, and this is done justice to by his graceful pictorial balance and his stoic dramatic economy.

Yet by the end of An Autumn Afternoon, the pervasive sense crept up that I was moved in the same exact way - and for the same reasons - as I was with Late Spring. The formulas of the two films are frustratingly congruent: both meander in a seemingly directionless state before acquiring unexpected pathos towards the end when Ryu's characters finally decide - after a slow ping-pong of skepticism and receptiveness in the face of a slew of persuasive friends and acquaintances - that they should swallow their pride (and their undying love) and marry off their daughters, and the climactic image of both films (the daughter inevitably garbed in an elegant, suggestively decorated wedding dress after little anticipation) is cushioned by the same scenes of acceptance and subsequent loneliness. One slight ripple in An Autumn Afternoon has to do with Ozu's seeming reluctance to let melancholy get the lion's share of the emotional spectrum, ducking away from potentially tear-jerking scenes with a bouncy score that helps recall the film's more comic touches. But even the lighter elements of the film are laced with a somber air that is in this case a tad too deterministic: Shuhei's old teacher, nicknamed "The Gourd" (Eijirô Tôno), who has been reduced to somewhat of a village idiot living as a widow with his embittered daughter in an unsuccessful bar, stands as a too-perfect indicator of Shuhei's potential future if he doesn't allow his daughter to marry. While An Autumn Afternoon manages to encompass every thematic concern Ozu was delicately riffing on his entire career, it also tends to feel like a safe, lifeless reprise of them.

Cria Cuervos... (1976) A Film by Carlos Saura

Ana Torrent and landscapes. These seem like two surefire ingredients for majestic pictorial beauty. I remember being instantly drawn to Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) on the strength of its eerie DVD cover image alone: the haunted young actress frozen in the middle of a train track extending into the horizon line, challenging the camera with her probing, thousand-mile stare. An elegiac, unusual film in its own right to be sure, but what I remember most vividly from it are the expressive panoramas of Torrent in the vast landscapes of Spain, simply existing in that inherently intense, hypnotizing way of hers. My fascination led me to Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos..., one of the most alarmingly exquisite films I've seen a long time (on the basis of how little I knew about it going in and how much I was moved coming out), one in which Torrent thoroughly ups the ante. Released three years after Spirit of the Beehive and only marking her second feature role, the film, thin on narrative details and thick on symbolism and metaphysics, is an elegy to a missed childhood, a deep-focus snapshot of a frail family tree, an angry critique of a Fascist-controlled nation, and a hopeful search for new beginnings. Its nucleus is an opulent Victorian mansion in Madrid crammed within layers of boisterous traffic and cluttered modernization, home to three young sisters living with their strict aunt and mute grandmother, a succinct juxtaposition of the old and the new, the past and the uncertain future.

The girls are on vacation, a time to play, to let thoughts wander, to get lost in fantasies, memories, and dreams, and the film itself follows suit. After a touching montage of family pictures set to a gorgeous Federico Mompou piano piece that opens the film, Saura gets right into his deft interplay of past, present, illusion, and projection. Tiptoeing down the stairs in a composition reminiscent of German Expressionism, the middle child Ana (Torrent) wanders over towards a lurid bit of middle-class melodrama where mysterious dialogue snippets protrude from behind closed doors. One gets the sense that Ana has a hunch about what they are discussing, who "they" are, and why they are making a racket in the middle of the night, but Saura leaves the audience in the dark. A light turns on in the room, emanating from the crack in the door, and a woman subsequently flees from the room in a hurry, her bra conspicuous from behind rumpled clothing. Ana and the woman make fleeting eye contact. After she leaves the house, Ana enters the room and removes an empty glass of milk from the bedside table, proceeding to wash it in the kitchen. Out of the back corner of the frame, Ana's mother (Geraldine Chaplin) casually approaches her, inquiring about why she is awake so late and then sending her off to bed. In this calmly dreamy opening sequence, Saura has subtly embedded three motifs that will be repeated throughout the film, and the most enticing part is how he leaves the notion of actuality dangling in the air. His images hit with such a visceral impact that their logical dividends can only be sorted out gradually as the film progresses.

Indeed, in a manner even more forward and direct than in Tarkovsky's Mirror, a film which shares much with Cria Cuervos, Saura lets family history dissolve along with the vagaries of time and space. Though his editing appears to induce linearity, albeit with a somewhat suggestive and uncanny chronology, the sequences in Cria Cuervos - the aforementioned included - often seamlessly blend reality with distortions of it as filtered through the distressed mind of the dark-eyed protagonist. For instance, Chaplin's offhand entrance into the kitchen belies the fact, learned only minutes later, that she is actually a ghost. The tomfoolery occurring in the closed room was actually the scene of Ana's father's death, which Ana is convinced was a product of her poisoning his milk. He, Anselmo (Héctor Alterio), was a military officer and a traitorous husband responsible for the figurative "sickness" that indirectly claimed his wife's life. This tension is explored most evocatively in a marvelous sequence late in the film that begins with the mother playing piano to Ana to put her to sleep (that Mompou again), and culminates with her sobbing in front of her husband in the entryway of their home about his insincerity and its psychological effects. Curiously, Saura shatters the perception of temporal fluidity when Ana transitions from being the flesh and bones of the scene to being the omniscient, ghostly observer, watching her deceased parents bickering across a rigid wall of time just as her mother intruded gracefully on the present moments before.



What makes Cria Cuervos so endlessly fascinating and dreamy is the fact that Saura never once makes an attempt to maintain any sort of prolonged plane of reality. The world is ever susceptible to ghosts of the past and ghosts of the present, anything warped by young Ana's morbid, heartbroken perspective. In her dreams, we witness a tender, almost erotic relationship between her and her mother, conjured as a delicate and affectionate woman whose pointy bone structure and frail features suggest years of problematic living. In one of the film's more Bergmanesque touches, Chaplin addresses the camera directly as Ana's adult incarnation, waxing about the false promise of a wondrous childhood and the many psychological wars she battled. Saura introduces this with an elegant camera move from Ana's closeup to Chaplin's embodiment, something which is instantly perceived as mother and daughter, but which soon proves to be yet another instance of various realities coexisting. Even more so, it forwardly proposes that the pains of one generation are transmitted to the next, creating perhaps an ourobouric loop of trauma. Incidentally, this deeply personal notion is inseparably linked to the political undertones nestled into the film. Cria Cuervos was produced and released at the time of General Franco's passing, marking an end to a sustained period of political oppression in Spain and the inauguration of democracy. But just as the tortured memory of her conniving military father haunts Ana and is the source of her desire to bring death upon those she dislikes (late in the film, she tries to poison her Aunt Paulina (Mónica Randall)), there is no promise of the dictatorial, fascistic impulses of the past not spilling over into the new Spain.

The film makes something of an ambiguous leap of faith in its closing minutes though. Ana wakes up to find that her attempted murder of Aunt Paulina was unsuccessful. Her sister wakes up in the throes of a violent, sadistic dream involving her parents right before she was killed. And vitally, vacation has ended, and school is back in session. The subsequent images of hordes of children hurrying into the school buildings is indicative of both restless energy and will to learn and a profound ambivalence. Is their mass education promising for the future of Spain or is it ill-fated, destined to exist under the influence of an older generation with older values? If the other events in the family household suggest averted violence and second chances, can the nation be spared the same opportunity? All of this is underlined further by the presence of the chirpy pop song by Jeanette that is repeated throughout the film, the song that Ana and her sisters improvisationally waltz to earlier on. While the jaunty rhythm and up-to-date instrumentation are typical of a modern sensibility, Jeanette's wistful lyrics about missed opportunities and a lost past do not sound so optimistic. This tantalizing irresoluteness is central to the success of Cria Cuervos, a magical film that tries desperately to celebrate the small pleasures of life but continually mines the troubling truths in the shadowy past.

Daddy Longlegs (Go Get Some Rosemary) A Film by Josh and Benny Safdie (2009)

Like Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, Josh and Benny Safdie's microbudget tale of fatherhood-gone-wrong (or right, depending on whether or not you're prone to nostalgia), Daddy Longlegs, is a film that feels frozen in time. Its scrappy, no-frills presentation of New York City - a kind of distilled anytown, USA where catching a cab is as likely as getting mugged by a gun-wielding bum - is a fittingly universal backdrop for the unpredictable exploits of Lenny (Ronald Bronstein), a divorced father of two whose behavior is really as human as it is initially off-putting. Situated during the only two weeks per year that Lenny is allowed by custody to see his children, the film is a frantic, moody evocation of a man who desperately wants to make his prized two weeks count, but who is plagued by an itchy tendency to lose sight of maturity and responsibility. It opens to Lenny ordering and subsequently scoffing down half of a foot-long hot dog, then proceeding to unsuccessfully leap over a fence and mutilate his second half. Unlike the majority of busy workaday adults living in a big city however, Lenny does not trudge off like a curmudgeon mourning the loss of both cholesterol and green. Rather, he soaks up the absurdity of the moment, remaining fixed in his post-wipeout position, laughing off any residual disappointment. This is a man who seeks uninhibited pleasure in life and finds it in the immature flaunting of adolescent behavior, who feigns to swim upstream against the current of middle-aged mediocrity.

None of this is to suggest that Lenny is an instantly likable character for his "charm" or "perseverance" though. The feat of Daddy Longlegs (subtitled Go Get Some Rosemary), actually, is in its gradual transition from pity to empathy, from bemoaning the feral emotional spectrum of Lenny to understanding it and perhaps even identifying with it. As it happens, recent Boston College graduates Josh and Benny Safdie have based the character largely on memories of the disorderly father figure of their own childhood. The two grew up in Manhattan with a European father who bestowed his love of film on his children through restlessly filming home videos. In Daddy Longlegs, Lenny adopts a similar status as a film projectionist at the local theater, a job that obstructs his life with all its scheduling vagaries even as it provides his only financial and structural support. In one thrilling scene, Lenny is forced to take a shift he previously tried, without luck, to remove, at the same time as he needs to pick up his two little boys - Sage and Frey (the real life sons of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo) - at school. He hastily kickstarts the first reel, sprints to retrieve his children, and runs back to allow them a chance to operate the next reel (a tricky, time-sensitive maneuver that is not suitable for the wandering mind of a seven-year-old.)

A similar balancing act - between responsibility and enjoyment, seriousness and a desire to be a jovial father - is at play throughout the film. The problem is that Lenny tends to suppress the former until it's too late, when he has either argued vehemently with a school principle, found himself on a banal vacation upstate, left his kids with one of his several wayward friends, or almost lost them permanently to his ex-wife. In one of the few smacks of frightening reality in the otherwise relatively tame and comical film, Lenny force-feeds Sage and Frey a quarter of a sedative each ("a whole one can put a grown man out for days!" he insists) to keep them sleeping while he works an unexpected overnight shift, only to find them in a near coma for an indeterminate amount of time when he returns. He seems incapable of harnessing any logical foresight about whether a behavior is safe or not, and he can't seem to grasp both the fragility of childhood (later, he sends them out alone to retrieve the contents of a grocery list) or - given the fact that he is more of an extended play date than a wise father, the importance of maintaining a healthy balance of freedom and discipline. As much of an abrasive can of worms as he is though, it's clear where the Safdie's sympathies lie. They'd rather the contradictory jumble of Lenny to the stern, by-the-numbers conservatism of Sage and Frey's mother, whose presence is more often that not felt only implicitly in the muffled diegetic yammer on the other end of the telephone line provoking Lenny and grilling him for his mistakes. When she does reclaim the children later in the film, the one brief sequence inside her organized, hyper-controlled domestic environment has the formula of an army routine, with the daily customs like dinner and bedtime boiled down to an airless science.



In this sense, with the Safdie's tender acceptance of Lenny's complications, Daddy Longlegs comes across with a deeply regressive, nostalgic heart at its center, a potent yearning for the pleasures of the past and a coming to terms with the confusions of the present. Ronald Bronstein, an accomplished filmmaker himself, delivers a performance of immense skill and grace, somehow expressing a buried, troubled soul beneath an otherwise madcap exterior. His Lenny may not nearly be able to handle the labyrinth of the modern world, totally and pathetically, but his triumphs and charms - like pretending to catch fish for dinner off the side of a speeding motorboat, playing old tapes in the car in the midst of a late-night traffic jam, and running through public parks with Sage and Frey - are pure products of youthful energy. The signs of wearing out are there - smoking cigarettes in a panic, getting arrested for spray painting "Dad" on a street side wall, the disorderly sprawl of graying hair - but he refuses to let them suffocate his passion. This retro warmth is reflected in the distinctive visual style of the film, an energetic stream of home-video-like images shot on grainy 16 mm, bookended by illustrated brown and yellow credit sequences reminiscent of the Charles Schulz' Peanuts cartoons.

Intermingled with the nostalgic comfort however is also suffocating camera staging that never veers away from the center of the action, suggesting there is no physical escape from the present, no retreat to the days that required less responsibility. The Sadfie's shoot everything in claustrophobic, shaky close-up, hardly ever cutting away to reveal an establishing shot. And their employment of this cinematographic tactic is not shoddy or nausea-inducing, but rather a sensitive way of heightening the immediacy of the physical world, capturing details upon details at the rate that Lenny is forced to process stimuli. Consequently, Daddy Longlegs is both a pleasant and bleak trip, a juggling of good and bad vibes. Quite refreshing, it is, to see young filmmakers with full careers ahead of them operating in such multifaceted, knowing territory with limited means and an understated visual style so appropriately unpolished.

Attack on "Slow Cinema"!

In the past few weeks, a handful of critics (Steven Shaviro, Dan Fox, Glenn Kenny, Danny Leigh, Vadim Rizov) have begun passive-aggressively attacking Harry Tuttle, founder of the blog Unspoken Cinema, for a thesis he himself did not materialize. Unspoken Cinema is singlehandedly devoted to the presence of a trend in today’s film culture deemed Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, or CCC. He did not insist that CCC was an exclusive genre acknowledged by the filmmakers themselves, nor did he state that it was necessarily an oppositional form to Hollywood. His is a study of a particular inclination towards silence and plotlessness that has undeniably manifested itself most saliently in recent years (check out his thorough timeline), and has existed in the works of many directors – Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa, Lisandro Alonso, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz, Chantal Akerman, Tsai Ming-Liang, Carlos Reygades, James Benning, Jia Zhang-ke, Sharunas Bartas, among others - regardless of cultural background. Of course the filmmakers are after different effects (just watch Liverpool and Silent Light and experience a vast gap in motives), but there is often a deep symmetry in their approaches that suggests a more universal artistic kinship, a desire to revitalize cinema’s fundamental ability for pure visual and aural immersion.

His methodical and multi-layered definition of CCC – so sensitively sorted out that it has taken a long-running series of posts – is careful to recognize the tendency as distinct from the otherwise superficially similar facades of Modern Cinema or Structural Cinema, movements that either contained an intellectual analysis behind their aesthetic efforts (witness the deeply expressive films of Antonioni or Angelopoulos) or a concrete statement on the limits and capabilities of the medium in question (evidenced by Andy Warhol and Michael Snow’s groundbreaking experiments). Neither concern, Tuttle explains, appears to be at the heart of CCC’s aesthetic interests – extensive visual scrutiny, suppression of outwardly emotional expression and dramatic trajectory – but rather a heightened involvement in the physical and sensory world, removed from any analytical editorializing. Such films encourage a sense of contemplation in the audience, a willingness to abandon conventional modes of movie-watching, of digesting and interpreting films, to instead revel in the seeming emptiness of the natural or synthetic world, which, as verified by the greatest films of the bunch, can uncover an unexpected wealth of rewards that are difficult to put into words.

Tuttle’s exploring and open-ended defining of CCC is not something that should be frowned upon or painstakingly mined for faults, for it is one of the few, if perhaps only, substantial efforts towards contextualizing this cinematic trend that is as worthy of examination as any of the other arguably nebulous trends in film history (Experimental/Avant-Garde Cinema, Cinema Verite, Neorealism). Sure, it’s not something that can be quantified or completely rationalized, but Tuttle will be the first to acknowledge that: “The study of aesthetic movements (productively or in vain) is what Film Theory is all about. You never know beforehand if it was worth your time... Or else past critics would have never discounted in their times the great masterpieces that we acknowledge now.” He can occasionally get rather hostile and reactionary in his impassioned defenses, blithely proclaiming CCC as “the greatest today!” or reducing a storm of opposing viewpoints to “anti-intellectual banter”, but what comes across most potently is a serious apprehension about CCC becoming so marginalized among cinephiles that it would cease to be taken seriously as a formal preoccupation. There’s also a very coherent and very true warning regarding the now-pejorative use of the term “slow”, as well as the uncritical, subjective term “boring”, and how they have polluted a large portion of the film criticism that aims to discuss this current trend. The unregulated backlash against Tuttle’s enthusiasm, spawned by a Nick James editorial in Sight and Sound that denounced CCC for the fact that “sometimes it’s worth it, and sometimes not”, as if variability in quality is something new and unacceptable in cinematic tradition, is surely needlessly combative, proof of a competitiveness and antagonism that should not exist in scholarly discussion of movies. As far as I’m concerned, I will remain a passionate defender of great films, regardless of trend associations, and will not blindly gang up against well-informed critical theories.

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

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

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

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



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

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