Be Kind Rewind (2008) A Film by Michel Gondry

Let it be known: Be Kind Rewind marks the first instance on this blog of me so thoroughly doubling back on an old post, deleting it, and rewriting my evaluation. Rarely have I found a first assessment so off base after a second viewing. My instincts usually land me somewhere in the ballpark, but what seemed like an uninspired trifle that was too cute and contrived in its dewy cultural critiques the first time around (and salvaged only sometimes by flashes of humor) stood out as an enormously heartfelt celebration of folk culture wrapped up in nearly flawless, well-paced entertainment the second time. Also, as pure comedy, Gondry's fifth feature is a gem, hysterically held together by the perfectly cast duo of Jack Black and Mos Def. Black, bumbling and discursive as ever, plays the self-congratulatory Jerry Gerber, the "star" of a series of abbreviated fan-produced blockbusters made at a modest little New Jersey video store, and Def is his dramatic foil Mike, a hesitant, proper employee at the store who is all too fearful of corrupting his reputation with Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), the store's veteran owner who is on a business trip in an attempt to pillage the airtight wisdom of a corporate video store. Jerry and Mike are forced to "remake" the numerous Hollywood movies in the store when a robbery-gone-wrong at the local power plant finds Jerry literally magnetized (a playful, absurdist touch), thus unintentionally erasing the VHS tapes that still comprise the entire catalog.

In terms of general narrative sweep, this is a relatively straightforward, by-the-numbers feel-good movie; that is, one in which the underdogs (Mr. Fletcher, Mike, and Jerry) combat a series of misadventures to stick it to the big guns of the media industry (Sigourney Weaver arrives as an uppity enforcer) that threaten to punish them for copyright infringement. It's ultimately only a humble, tentative triumph, nothing that would get their names in the news as cunning revolutionaries against corporate oppression, but a triumph nonetheless. All of their homemade movies, which gradually become the talk of the town, are instantly steamrolled by Weaver's comrades, forcing them to make their most audacious leap of faith. They devise the plan to produce - with the assistance of the various townies who have become regulars at the store - their own original short film based on the life and times of Fats Waller, a legend of the uptown Jazz movement of the roaring twenties who maintains nostalgic value for Mr. Fletcher. In doing so, they're making a small, if substantial, effort towards swimming upstream against the inexorable, often tyrannical flow of mass media, and making a case for the individual over the machine. What reeks of predictability and didacticism is more than redeemed by the tremendous amount of heart and tongue-in-cheek charm throughout. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and doesn't pin itself down to one all-encompassing, negative view of mass culture.



In fact, while on the one hand Gondry is lambasting the impersonal nature of mass media and the ways in which it often cultivates a passive audience, he is also celebrating the lasting spark that such films can and frequently do induce. Jerry and Mike know these movies so well that they can fire through a faithful, albeit superficially ridiculous, interpretation of them in under a day and with boundless enthusiasm. What's more, their customers can rent these movies, notice the boorish discrepancies from the original, and still come back for more, enraptured and unexpectedly impressed by the scrappy layman's versions, stirring up as they do fond memories of the source movies themselves. Beneath this is a reassuring statement from Gondry that whatever the box-office profits of a big-budget feature, whatever the high-falutin' intentions of a major production studio, that it is ultimately the audience who owns the movies in the long run, the vast majority who form potent mental imprints of their individualized experiences of the media. It's an uplifting view of culture, antithetical to the widespread pessimism regarding the "death of movies and art", and nowhere is it more evident than in Gondry's beautifully rendered climax. For all the film's silly, nonchalant humor, the final scene is pure pathos. As the destruction crew waits impatiently outside, the town gathers together in the video store to screen their finished Fats Waller film. The projector's flicker (partly produced by the machine itself and partly a result of Mike and Jerry's foolhardy aesthetic decision to place a household fan in front of the lens to conjure the look of an old-fashioned film) dances across the faces of the rapt audience, alternately laughing and crying at the various roles they played in the film. Gondry's utterly aware of how cheesily meta the scene is, but it's genuinely moving anyway.

Be Kind Rewind's films-within-a-film ultimately owe more to Gondry's faux-DIY visual style than the commonplace look of the film itself, but I can take this small compromise as a necessary move from an indie eccentric attempting to make a message movie about mass culture products from within Hollywood. That's not to say there's an unforgivable shortage of imagination at work here; the shoddy special effects that Jerry and Mike employ to their adaptions, like pizzas behind people's heads to suggest blood, night vision to appropriate evening fight scenes, or numerous cardboard miniatures, are priceless. And Jack Black's performance is one of his most memorable, as it usually is when he's this unhinged. Stumbling around the sets like there is serious cash at stake, his larger-than-life swagger and sense of stray filmmaking knowledge ("you know, you gotta wet the ground!") is hilariously measured. The film is further proof that Gondry is not entirely impotent when reduced to his own material, still capable of crafting charming, emotional works.

Repulsion (1965) A Film by Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski's Repulsion begins and ends on an image of its main character Carol's eye, unblinking and nearly abstracted by the chiaroscuro lighting. In the first instance it's Catherine Deneuve as she sits in a trance at her job as a London manicurist, and the second time it's the worn photographic version of Carol as a young girl, standing with a haunted look in the background of a family portrait. But physical proximity, the film reveals, is no measure for emotional understanding, and as a result both shots remain singularly unsettling, the camera's extreme intimacy doing nothing to illuminate the complicated inner workings of the pathological Carol, who dwells in every scene of the film without ever communicating a graspable level of psychological continuity. She's blank, inexpressive, and aloof, but, like a troubled Hitchockian heroine, she's also physically angelic, clad in a white dress and regularly seen brushing her expertly balanced blond hair. For what reason, we don't know, because she harbors an extreme aversion to the male race, silently interpreting often earnest attempts at communication as vaguely aggressive, hormonal attacks. Like in Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel (whom Deneuve would later work with on Belle du Jour, a film with thematic parallels to Repulsion), Polanski makes the eye a key image only to subvert its familiarity with startling psychosexual ambiguities elsewhere.

It takes approximately 35 minutes for Polanski's film to really click, but when it does, and the horrific madness sets in, one understands the film's sometimes ponderous, disengaging set-up as a basis of normalcy on which to shatter expectations. Polanski saves his most inventive visual and aural motifs for when Carol's sister and husband finally leave the London apartment they're sharing for a vacation in Paris, stranding Carol, much to her dismay, in the quiet, claustrophobic domestic space. Before this, the film nurtures a relative sense of realism, systematically establishing Carol's relationship, or lack thereof, with those around her. She is deeply dependent on her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), even insisting she not go to Paris, while shunning Helen's methodically macho husband Michael (Ian Hendry), who writes Carol's eccentricities off as mere social clumsiness. The persevering Colin (John Fraser) is less apathetic, as he fruitlessly tries time and time again to woo Carol with his cool charm. At work, she is emotionally absent to all but her lovely female co-worker, who elicits rare amusement out of her through the recounting of a famous scene in Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush. This unexpected moment of laughing and communion (and comparative aesthetic convention, as Polanski shoots it in a casual two-shot) throws the film off balance and posits Carol as a potential repressed homosexual.

Any psychological suspicion such as this though tends to find a paradox a scene or two down the road, collapsing into the wash of ambiguity that makes up Carol's enigma. And it is this ambivalence towards pat character explanation, this sidestepping of easily identifiable pathology (a pitfall of its frequent critical bedfellow Psycho), that allows Repulsion to remain the uncannily terrifying film it was 45 years ago. It's after greater, more universal mysteries, like that which aligns it obliquely with Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman: the speculation as to whether Carol's feeling of male sexual oppression and antagonism points to a larger truth about femininity. As Carol spends her first few nights alone, her entire world transforms rapidly into the domain of her itchiest nightmares, such as men invading her privacy and virginity in the wee hours, the barriers around her (walls, cement ground) cracking, and the nagging intrusion of the outside world, constantly attempting to make contact with her through telephones and doorbells. Polanski shoots these surrealistic sequences with claustrophobic dread, alternating between intense close-ups of Carol's distressed facial orientation and wider shots that dwarf her, usually from an oblique angle like the floor or the ceiling. He also will pan into total darkness, filling the screen with black before emerging again to another episode. This particular tactic, as well as the inclusion of a skinned rabbit carcass that Carol leaves out for fear of cooking it, seem like peculiar augurs for the macabre techniques David Lynch would use to elicit disorientation and discomfort in his Eraserhead.



The rabbit, in particular, is one of the film's most interesting perversities. There's something especially penetrating about the way Polanski scrutinizes its slimy, rotting flesh, as if he's anticipating it to all of a sudden come alive like in a monster movie. Furthermore, why Carol does not make an effort to remove it from her kitchen and living room is an even greater curiosity, because it comes to almost signify her grotesque visions, bearing the weight of her traumas. She can't seem to escape them, no matter how simple it might be to do so. This is clarified by a scene when the decapitated head of it is found, shockingly, in her purse at work. But what adds another layer of mystery to it all is how Carol in some instances almost seems to invite her hallucinations. The most unsettling moment in Repulsion reminds me of the sole occurrence of movement in La Jetee, and it comes when Carol applies lipstick before going to bed. In a close-up from above, Deneuve meets eyes with the lens, appearing to grin for just a second. It's as if she's asking Polanski to insert another one of his harrowing rape sequences, and of course, he does. Carol is simultaneously desperate from sexual repression and frightened of sexual contact, which insures she will involve herself in an ourobouric loop of horror.

Sonically, this is just as much of a teasing, dense work. One could say Polanski luxuriates in a tension between "indoor" and "outdoor" sounds, emphasizing how they are infiltrating one another as if through the cracks Carol fantasizes about. On her trance-like strolls through London, jaunty street jazz and eventually a mildly comical banjo-percussion trio permeate the soundtrack. (Later, the same trio is seen out of Carol's window.) Brash, discordant drum solos accompany her in moments of severe panic, like when Colin makes a move on her in the car and she runs inside to wash her mouth of impurity. In its quieter moments the sound of a piano player practicing scales haunts her dreams, and then, the repetition of church bells nearby becomes the only sound during the nightmarish defilement. In fact, the linking of religion and sex is a constant, if superbly understated, motif; Carol herself, in her white nightgown, resembles the group of nuns in the churchyard seen from her window, and her relentless drive for ascetic sexual purity is the exaggerated practice of a devout Christian. This makes her eventual murders all the more chilling, the notion of a woman rising to a heinous act for fear of violating her own code of purity. In the final shot, we see the younger Carol arguably staring uncomfortably at her father, perhaps suggesting a backstory of incestuous abuse that would inspire her abysmal fear of men, but frankly this inquiry suffocates the tensions the film expertly creates, lumping it all into a blunt case study. Carol's tale acquires an iconic weight even as it elides easy interpretation, making Repulsion a disquieting odyssey of a mind out of sync with itself.

My Summer in Movies

Though I haven't quite lived up to my desired count, summer is the time when I try to watch more films than any other part of the year. This has been a particularly busy season for me, so I haven't nearly written as much as last year, or even as much as I'd like to. Regardless, I've seen some great stuff, and, for the most part, I've been able to relax and digest all of it slowly. So here's the ten best films I've seen this summer (only first-time viewings apply), with links to their respective reviews.

1. Cria Cuervos... A Film by Carlos Saura



2. Paris, Texas A Film by Wim Wenders



3. Ossos (Bones) A Film by Pedro Costa



4. Claire's Knee A Film by Eric Rohmer



5. Revanche A Film by Gotz Spielmann



6. Last of the Mohicans A Film by Michael Mann



7. The Vanishing (Spoorloos) A Film by George Sluizer



8. Flight of the Red Balloon A Film by Hou Hsiao-Hsein



9. The Insider A Film by Michael Mann



10. The Wrestler A Film by Darren Aronofsky



For now, it's back to class for another semester, back to cramming films into tight schedules.

Red Desert (Deserto Rosso) A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni (1964)

When Monica Vitti first appears in frame in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, her figure looks surreal against the pale, corroded industrial landscape she traverses. She's beautiful, as usual, with a green wool coat and voluminous red locks of hair. On the same waterside dock as her is a mass of striking workers in homogeneous gray and brown uniforms, their appropriately herd-like behavior set against Vitti's cautious mother figure, navigating the acres of factories and steamships with her little boy to meet up with her husband Udo (Carlo Chionetti), the manager of this misty compound in Ravenna, Italy. It's a world of vapid technological progress, of muscle and science, and Vitti's elegant, delicate Guiliana instantly feels out of place. For all of the surface similarities between Red Desert and Antonioni's previous three films (his "alienation trilogy" made up of L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse), the outsider quality of Vitti's main character, her casual exoticism in her own habitat, vastly separates Antonioni's project. We now have a woman who is not isolated from her familiar, though somewhat evolving bourgeois dwellings, but rather a bourgeois woman permanently housed within an alien environment, the pressure point of modern materialism. The film is the slow-burning dramatization of her misplacement.

Guiliana's problem goes deeper than a simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time however. The industrial habitat is a nucleus, a predictor of how the outside world will evolve, and not just a rare exception. It is clear that the unpredictable, enigmatic neurosis that Antonioni superbly conveys in Guiliana cannot be cured in any systematic manner. Instead, it is the result of a woman being out of step with the movement of society around her, unprepared to adapt psychologically and physiologically to her surroundings. Udo stubbornly attributes her emotional turmoil to a vaguely defined "accident" some half a year before that put her in a hospital for months, but from the first time Antonioni reveals one of her chilling midnight haunts, the implication is that something far more all-encompassing, more undefinable, is at the root of her world-weary exhaustion. She twitches, forgets things, caresses her body in a panic fit as if to make sure it's still there, and shies away from all physical contact. Yet when she's not having such convulsions, she's acting comparatively normal, maintaining an air of adult complacence and even engaging in a bit of horseplay in the film's drawn-out centerpiece, an impromptu gathering between a group of industrialists and their wives at an abandoned fishing hut. This sequence, a languid choreography of laughing and sometimes writhing adults chatting circuitously about aphrodisiacs and other insignificant topics, illuminates the seeming calmness and comfort level of the majority of the group, and cements Guiliana's status as a fundamental outcast, prone to certain behavioral changes that come across as hasty and unmotivated.

Only a mild and arbitrary interjection of the external world - say, the presence of a color (intentionally calculated by Antonioni) or a particular spoken word that doesn't sit right - can disturb Guiliana back to her angst. In the case of this particular sequence, a quarantine flag raised by a neighboring ship sends her into a panic. This occurs after an aphrodisiac compels her to make an offhand, celebratory comment about her desire to make love. She then reiterates privately to her husband, "I meant it, I do want to make love." His response is at once practical and backhanded: "How can we?" Though he's referring to the social incorrectness of indulging in desire before the group of people around the two of them, he might as well be speaking broadly. How are two people to make love in Antonioni's grim world, a place where "it's never still", as Vitti pronounces, where thick fog and industrial horns perpetually interrupt the stasis. A sensual pleasure such as that which Guiliana requests, which is potentially enough to remind her of a reason to live, seems impossible and unthinkable. As with many of Antonioni's films, Red Desert's general narrative action can be brusquely reduced to "people talk and talk and never quite connect", and one gets the sense that it's a fatal misfortune, that the searing emotional divide between people is partly what's preventing Guiliana from properly engaging with the world.



One character, Richard Harris' Corrado Zeller, a friend and coworker of Udo, gestures towards personal, enlightening connection with Guilana. He arrives with both a calculated sense of lust towards her and his own particular breed of sorrow. Listening and ogling more than he does engage in conversation, he nonetheless represents a somewhat continuous source of support and empathy for Guiliana, who reveals to him a story of her past suicide attempt. But when he proves to be equally out of sync with the world, affirmed by his eventual taking advantage of Guiliana in her climactic moment of distress, Antonioni's point becomes clear as ever: that there's no easy escape, no shoulder to cry on in regards to this kind of moral discomfort, that only approximate adaptions made over time can approach anything near alleviation. This is the undertow of the quiet, poetic final scene, in which Guiliana once again walks through the industrial maze, answering an innocent question from her son about a bird's ability to evolve in such a way that it knows to avoid the gushing poisonous smog from the silos. Guiliana's small feat of acknowledging this instinctual maturation, of becoming the authority on it, implies that she is prepared to at least tolerate the world, if not cope with it.

All of this is, for the most part, more alienation from Antonioni, a thematic concern that was in danger of becoming simplistic shtick at this point in his career. But too much of Red Desert hints towards newer ideas and points towards the refreshing experiments of Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point. One sequence in particular stands out, and it comes at roughly the beginning of the final act. Guiliana is comforting her son with a story, but at his request it's not a preexisting story, something pre-fabricated to elicit a streamlined response. Therefore, she is forced to pull from within, from her ideals, experiences, and memories. As she narrates an iconic tale of a curious little girl and her secret private beach, Antonioni provides luminous, nostalgic images that feel like estimations of Guiliana's own thought process. The girl is confronted three times with unsettling mysteries - a floating empty boat, an unidentified operatic voice, the startlingly human-like rock formations - and is forced to overcome them with both excitement and fear. It's touching that Antonioni engages with and allows for this kind of emotional crutch, the ability to conjure up the past in an attempt to understand the present. Rather than being stranded totally in her confusion, there is this sudden moment of catharsis that is uplifting and transfixing.

Antonioni's typically impeccable mise-en-scene stretches here to a new degree of artistry. Interestingly, shots of the back of Vitti's head, with her vantage point out of focus, the kind of images that might be brief insert shots in another film, become the punctuation points to focus on here. They communicate a murkiness and unfamiliarity of vision that Lucrecia Martel certainly must have lifted as inspiration for her film The Headless Woman. His decision to convert to color was the boldest and most advantageous choice of his career, and Red Desert, his inaugural experiment with it, renders one astounding image after another. It's been argued that his integration of specific primary colors warrants a scene-to-scene symbolic or psychological value, but I take them as being an incessantly oppressive and taunting force, a reminder of the colorful allure of Guiliana's wardrobe, and hence her preferred mode of living. They seem like the last potent indicators of life and creativity in a milieu mostly dominated by unflattering grays and browns and exacting progress. It's a beautiful plea indeed, the kind of thing that conveys an even greater pain and isolation than almost anything Antonioni had done prior.

The Insider (1999) A Film by Michael Mann

For a film about a fired corporate scientist who leaks information about his former tobacco company to the CBS show 60 Minutes, Michael Mann's The Insider has no shortage of suspense. It's a premise that looks bone-dry on paper, that would likely be squandered in the hands of a lesser director, but Mann turns it into a compelling psychological almost-thriller, a work that is perpetually nearing a fever pitch in tension but never quite gets there, yet remains exciting in an edge-of-your-seat kind of way regardless. Russell Crowe, in a rare role of interest, plays the eponymous protagonist Jeffrey Wigand, a brilliant but emotionally volatile Louisville-based chemist whose continuing support for his family is put in jeopardy once he loses his distinguishable career with Brown & Williamson Tobacco for cloudy reasons. The vigilant 60 Minutes journalist/producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) excavates the story and contacts Wigand, understanding of his personal predicament but lightly persuading him to unveil his potentially shattering secrets to the nation. Though Wigand is deeply skeptical at first, unwilling to let anyone into his now damaged sphere of personal stability, Bergman eventually becomes his trusted defender, guiding him wearily through towering litigations from his stern, cryptic ex-company and ominous threats to his family's safety from an unknown source.

We never know whether the source is ultimately real or imagined, and the ambivalence is what drives Wigand's drama. The film is loosely divided into two disparate sections, the first of which amounts to a fairly straightforward thriller capitalizing on Wigand's consuming grief and growing sense of paranoia. His precarious feeling that he is being watched and his time is running out has an eruptive impact on those around him, and it manifests itself in all he does. In one instance, a characteristic bit of Mann introspection, Wigand is alone at a driving range late at night. While hitting golf balls to displace the crisis (a Brown & Williamson document he signed has a privacy agreement that could jeopardize his family's health insurance should he choose to advance his relationship with Bergman), he notices another solitary figure several stations away in a black suit. The entire sequence is reducible to a simple progression of exchanged glances, but Mann ratchets up the tension with his moody dark green palette, his generous employment of suffocating close-ups, and his occasional focus on the minute details of golfing, like a ball swooping into a back net. One begins to wonder if these are just ghostly manifestations of his own paranoia, men in professional attire appearing only to taunt Wigand, to convince him to take the easier route. Later, when a security team hired by Bergman arrives at his house as he drives down the street, Mann provides a brief traveling point-of-view shot of a black-clad guard, which immediately elicits hysterical anxiety. But, a moment after when the man is revealed as a security guard, the joke is on Wigand, and the audience.

Mann is gently manipulating the audience in such a way throughout the film, but he's doing so less to augment the thrills and more to place us in the cognitive positions of the characters. In another sequence, one of the film's most expertly crafted and viscerally effective, Wigand wakes up in the middle of the night to his young daughter telling him she heard a sound in the backyard. He frantically escorts her to the basement, advising she stay put while he secretively retrieves a gun and heads outside. His subsequent search of the yard - a tense, funereal march loaded with chilling red-herrings - is intercut with shots of his daughter downstairs. The sudden automatic firing up of the hearth is a heart-jumping cut that frighteningly gives the impression, at least at first, that the supposed intruder is in the basement. Moments later, Wigand's daughter steps outside - the way that any curious young girl would - while her father spies a conspicuous footprint in the dirt. There's no doubt in my mind that Mann is aware of the disquieting possibility that Wigand would shoot if he heard a sudden noise behind him, killing his daughter unintentionally. So he lets the moment simmer until finally she speaks up and he responds accordingly, a touching father-to-daughter fib that temporarily diffuses the pressure. Crowe's performance reaches its high point during scenes like these, when he's forced to make a startling emotional turn that highlights his duties as a masculine protector and a nurturing family man, and the overbearing difficulty of balancing both.



Dante Spinotti's long telephoto images and ultra-shallow depth of field create a visual equivalent to this constant apprehension, a feeling that danger is closer than expected and the blurry outsiders are not to be trusted. Often times Mann is framing his characters in an oddly incomplete manner, cutting off one half of their face or leaving just an ear in the frame, taking it further by fiddling erratically with the focus. The result is a collection of Hollywood abstractions, denaturalized images that deny the conventions of how a star's facial features are normally processed. It's fitting for a film that is primarily about distortion of truth in our country, through media, through deceitful corporate enterprises, and through the filter of others. When Wigand does agree to the interview and the final 60 Minutes program is completed, CBS does not show it in its entirety for fear of being sued by Big Tobacco, and a later, seemingly more revealing public version has Wigand reduced to a censored, pixelated blob with a monotone drone - in other words, a whistle blower sucked of his life. Mann seems to ask, how can we trust information that is so manipulated? Does the news network's refusal to reveal the story in its complete, actual form signal a fabrication of intent as dishonest as that of the corporation it attempts to expose?

Pacino's character, who is the spotlight of the second, more behind-the-scenes, journalistic portion of the film, seems to be aware of these questions, and he assumes The Insider's moral center. In the final thirty minutes, he is doing an existential juggling act, pondering the true worth of a profession that can destroy a subject's life (Wigand's wife divorces him, one of the primary reasons being his perpetual endangerment) and produce results that are only skimmed over by the American public. One of the important things Mann's film does is it forces the audience to live the treacherous vulnerability that comes with working a job involving the bringing to light of such under-the-radar topics. He questions the ethical dimension of it, mirroring the ways in which Wigand's own personal life is infiltrated by the political mongering. It becomes clear that Pacino's Bergman is the film's real main character, the most salient bearer of the film's themes and sentiments, and his performance is consistently stunning. Though Mann's forte is the crime genre, I'm always impressed by his level of sincerity and engagement with more diverse topics. The Insider is proof. A trigger is never once pulled, but the hard-boiled tension and psychological rumination remain intact.

Claire's Knee (1970) A Film by Eric Rohmer

If a filmmaker ever created more tranquil evocations of the languid, luxurious pace of summertime than Eric Rohmer, I'm not aware of it. The fifth entry in Rohmer's six Moral Tales, and what is likely his most beloved and best-known work, Claire's Knee, is as formidable an example as any, a peaceful meditation on the inertial state of emotions during the summer, the way that love and desire become sluggish and speculative when divorced from obligation and routine. Organized in chronological order around sleek handwritten title cards reflecting the date, the kind of diary-like jots that one might see in a Bresson film, Claire's Knee concerns the final arrival of a wealthy, bearded 36-year-old diplomat named Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy) to his idyllic Lake Annecy estate before his impending marriage, where he incidentally runs into his old friend Aurora (Aurora Cornu), an Italian novelist. The two converse jovially and reflect on the state of their lives beside the shimmering lake, and eventually Aurora introduces Jerome to her landlady Madame Walter (Michèle Montel), who has a sprightly, frizzy-haired 16-year-old daughter named Laura (Béatrice Romand). In mildly self-referential manner, Aurora engages Jerome in a playful experiment in which he flirts with Laura and tests his fidelity to his fiancée, a scenario that she hopes will inspire her writing and that also mirrors Rohmer's own method of creation through investigative analysis.

I love the simplicity of the conceit: an ensemble of characters in a beautiful landscape, rarely more than two of them - a male and a female - in a scene at one time, talking in front of gorgeous backdrops. This is Rohmer's bread and butter, the fundamental substance of his work. What the film comes down to is a series of these verbal happenings one after the other, with just the necessary parts excised from individual days. Rohmer cuts to a new title card only seconds after the last line in the script is spoken, yet it never feels like the ultimate finality of a conversation. The result is lucid, elliptical storytelling, cultivating the notion that these days are amorphous and interconnected, that everything remains the same despite the brief repose in between. Extraordinarily, in spite of the linguistic themes that are central the film (Aurora's novelistic aspirations, the profusion of language), Claire's Knee retains an energy that is wholly cinematic. Remove the sound from the film (yes, deceptively its most vital ingredient) and an elemental visual power would remain, a carefully calculated mood piece in which Rohmer's crisp, evocative images convey a story as potently as that of the naturalistic dialogue.

Indeed, Rohmer's distinctive visual prowess is frequently neglected in favor of discussions about the director's startling wit and intelligence, manifested most tellingly - as the critical consensus goes - in the characters, their interactions, and the gentle narratives they inhabit. Claire's Knee is of course typically enthralling in this regard, an exploration of desire, possession, and fidelity so subtly machinated that it's difficult to pinpoint the exact moments the film has its particular effects. When the titular Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) - the half-sister of Laura - enters the narrative 45 minutes into the film, the atomic shift in Jerome's exterior from cool, composed affability to awestruck, boyish lust is almost unnoticeable, and the key image that compels it is offhand and matter-of-fact. It is not until Jerome spells out his infatuation with Claire to Aurora, which is microscopically focused to her knockout knee, that it really registers, and even then it's a tentative half-truth, as Rohmer is always aware of the slight incongruities between a character's internal state and their actions and words. But I'm still influenced to say that the film's real pleasure, its sensual rather than cerebral rewards, are to be found solely in the wondrous pictorial and structural minimalism. Witness, for instance, the democratic delineation of primary colors in the images below, the organic quality of the film itself, the refreshing lack of rococo lighting techniques (courtesy of none other than Nestor Almendros of Days of Heaven acclaim), and most notably the liberating compositions themselves, which effortlessly capture the lazy vibe of summer.

Under the Volcano (1984) A Film by John Huston

(This is a tardy contribution to Adam Zanzie's John Huston Blogathon over at Icebox Movies. The celebration ran from August 5th to August 12th but Adam is still accepting submissions.)

Faced with the towering question of where to begin in the prolific 40-year career of John Huston, I resorted to the relatively safe assumption that a director's later films often display the very heights of their respective skill sets. Just as Stanley Kubrick, Luis Bunuel, and Alfred Hitchcock all have arguably stronger outputs throughout the second halves of their careers, I wondered if the same might apply to Huston, the old English studio hand with such classics to his name as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon. Even though his first 20 or so films are often the most star-studded, epic, and canonized, I hoped to discover a late career gem out of comparative obscurity, a film with less clout but maybe no less gusto. The resulting choice was Under the Volcano, a surreal, fatalistic character study that might make you feel as drunk by the end of it as its perpetually inebriated central character, a recently resigned British consul named Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney) who is in nary a scene without a jug of hard liquor clutched at his side. Living in a recondite Mexican town with perhaps no plans of leaving the place he no longer has obligations in, Geoffrey's a drifting man, complacent with just stumbling around town day in and day out, meeting new people haphazardly but forming no lasting connections.

In drunken trances, Geoffrey mumbles about desperately wanting his ex-wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset) back, yet it is because of his immaturity and reckless behavior that he refuses to step back and realize that she has been sending him letters all along. It turns out she has been prepping for a return to Mexico in hopes of rejuvenating her relationship with the unstable Geoffrey, fresh off an ultimately unsuccessful marriage fling with his younger, suaver half-brother Hugh (Anthony Andrews). When Yvonne does arrive, appearing angelically in the entryway of a street-side cafe that Geoffrey is drinking and heckling surrounding customers in, it's as if he fails to recognize her as a living, breathing human, taking brief glances and turning away systematically to prove to himself that she's not just a hallucination. Finney's showstopping performance - though at times a histrionic overestimation of an alcoholic - is at its most nuanced during these initial scenes of reconnection, conveying the simultaneous shock, awe, and hesitance of the encounter without losing a palpable sense of hysterical disorientation. Most of all, the film acquires a much-needed element of humanity when Yvonne enters the picture. As evidenced by the first fifteen minutes of mostly unintelligible, insignificant verbal exchanges, Geoffrey is so off his rocker that he needs a foil like Yvonne who can breathe life into him, illuminate the emotions that are so deeply buried beneath his scrambled exterior.

In fact, even with Yvonne prying for his sober attention slowly and carefully so as not to ruin the second chance too disastrously, Geoffrey is a monumental prick, and it's both a wonder that Yvonne has any desire to be with him and a testament to the emotional complexity of the film that it remains compelling even with Geoffrey hogging nearly every frame. He's such a pain that we almost wish death upon him if he can't clean up his act, and it becomes clear that that's the very structure Huston embraces, adopted from Malcolm Lowry's literary source, a book long considered "unfilmable" for its principal focus on the internal mayhem of Geoffrey, described in long-winded, flowery prose. Lowry's novel touches on the last 24 hours in Geoffrey's life, and so too does Huston's film, which begins with an abstract credit sequence of slowly swinging stuffed skeletons in a foggy black abyss, an immediate, straightforward portent of the impending death. What's more, the film (and the book for that matter) are set within the timeline of the Day of Death in November of 1938, an annual Mexican commemoration of the deceased. If not for this intriguing milieu, Under the Volcano might just be a standard character study. It is precisely this dreamlike world Huston and esteemed production designer Gunther Gerszo recreate - in which gaudy devils and grim reapers coexist merrily with the passersby on a bustling sunny day - that infuses the story of the self-destructive Geoffrey with such foreboding resonance. The grotesque figures seem to be constantly ushering the path to the end of his life with eerie contentment.



Under the Volcano is ultimately a film about performances, the kind of work that is talked about almost exclusively in terms of its characters. It's no surprise given the extreme literary inclination of its director, for whom solid material nearly always meant a pre-existing novel. In this case, Huston takes a Lowry novel that is slippery, impressionistic, and often plain abstract, qualities that one might deem "cinematic", and morphs them into an arguably more "literary" form, a linear, prosaic documentation of Geoffrey's final hours. Even Huston's sedate direction - the drama primarily unfolds in medium shots, everything is in deep focus, presumably the polar opposite of Geoffrey's actual intoxicated vision - approximates theater rather than film, and it seems an attempt to give the performances an egalitarian scrutiny, to not stifle the drama with overbearing cinematic techniques. It is not until the first outward display of emotional turmoil that Huston allows the characters the luxury of the close-up with a blurred background, when Geoffrey begins by passionately advocating for a new beginning in a small Northern village ("where the year is divided into seasons") and almost immediately doubles back on his enthusiasm to humiliate Yvonne for her temporary re-marrying. After this punishing scene, the film takes its rather sudden leap towards the bulk of its emotional epiphanies, culminating in a lengthy sequence at a sleazy, off-the-beaten-path tavern where Geoffrey, in a fit of anger, confusion, and of course, severe drunkenness, incidentally sleeps with a prostitute and finds himself at gunpoint with a gang of Mexicans suspicious that he is a Russian spy.

Save from a frankly absurd climax involving an ethereal white horse that unexpectedly tramples Yvonne as she triumphantly sprints to save Geoffrey, this final showdown at the tavern is the film's most skillfully orchestrated sequence, a gradual crescendo of the grotesque that amplifies the negative effects of Geoffrey's disastrous obsession. The film's not entirely devoid of interesting visual tactics, and here it's most evident; Huston creates a sense of euphoric disorder through his repeated employment of gnarly close-ups on the bizarre regulars at the bar, like the dwarfish owner or the expressive fiddle player in the corner. It's also where Under the Volcano reveals itself as a film that is first and foremost about the grotesque and the way it infiltrates both life and death. Geoffrey has reduced himself to one of the measly skeletons seen reflected in his black sunglasses at the beginning of the film, a figure without a soul, a purpose, or a fighting chance. He's burrowed himself too deep into his own drunken abyss, to the point where he can't communicate coherently with those around him. Even worse, his own fate entails the fate of his doomed lover as well. Though not an entirely rewarding or multi-layered experience, Under the Volcano succeeds in conveying the earth-shattering effects of an alcoholic on himself and those around him, a fatal flaw that can strand a man in obscurity and leave him to die confused and aimless.