Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) A Film by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

It's quite a magical transfiguration how the smoke that fills the frame in the opening shot of Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte comes to be freighted with such expansive significance by the end of the film. The film's title, translated as either The Four Times or The Four Lives, has rather clear meaning in terms of its loose, suggestive narrative trajectory: in a small medieval Italian village perched atop steep mountains, Frammartino covers the four transformations of an object (human, animal, natural, material) that he posits to be the universal cycle of nature. An old, coughing goat herder (Giuseppe Fuda) dies and gives way to a baby goat, who then dies next to a tree, its decomposing corpse feeding life into the tree which ultimately is chopped down and used for the production of charcoal. This description nails down the entirety of the narrative, but it's beyond that the film achieves such an epic and unique meditation on life, death, and nature. The presence of the smoke at the beginning of the film is either an example of an "end is the beginning" storytelling maneuver or it's simply an excuse for Frammartino to prime the viewer for the eventual metaphysical discovery that the smoke is more than smoke, just as everything in his cosmically interconnected vision of nature has a multifaceted history behind its surface appearance.

An amusing oversight in the majority of synopses for the film place the elderly shepherd at the center of the "plot", as if he's the axis around which everything revolves, and as if the film can't be swallowed without a distinct point of human empathy. Frammartino, I imagine, would likely get a laugh out of this, because what his film is more precisely getting at is the relative inconsequentiality of the human in the vast order of nature. Le Quattro Volte merely begins with the human (or to be more exact, it begins with the smoke, the vessel in which only traces of a life form are returned back to the atmosphere) and ends somewhere far more permanent and intangible. This is not to say that the film is smug or reductive in its representation of humanity (quite the contrary as Frammartino's long attentiveness to the contours of the shepherd's face or the reliance upon spiritual folklore that marks his daily routine suggests a heightened sensitivity to the dignity of human beings in such an anti-modern, agrarian environment), just that it realizes and even celebrates the inevitable smallness of our place in the universe.

The film's elliptical progression is built around mini, self-contained action narratives (when I say action, I mean these scenes gather an enveloping power and story arch based purely on the physical behaviors within the frame). In the opening segment - the first of four separated by seconds of black leader that strongly suggest moments of reincarnation - the shepherd, a man clearly dying from some ailment, must trek down to the village church at night to retrieve a refill of his special medicine, which in adherence to a long-standing method of folk healing is the dust swept up from the floor of the church, presumably thought to be "holy". Normally, the shepherd trades his goat milk for a batch of the church dust but in this instance has no option when he discovers that the church is locked. Frammartino follows his odyssey of desperation in fixed takes, but he also keeps his distance. In such episodes, the film exhibits an omniscient foresight, asking us not to immerse ourselves in fear for the shepherd's life but to observe casually and prepare for what's next. This forward-thinking quality most closely resembles that of nature, which in Le Quattro Volte is seemingly always a step ahead, ready to produce newer life forms out of the rubbish of old.



The best of these vignettes, and exactly what the film neutrally advises us to prepare for, is a marvel of choreography that extends for several minutes. In it, a church procession marches down the street in one of Frammartino's recurring high-angle shots on the morning following the shepherd's search for the medicine. The composition is precisely structured: the fenced-in herd of goats appears on the left side of the frame, the street cuts across the middle, and an inconveniently-placed truck sits on a hill on the right side. Miraculously, Frammartino stages (or does he?) a dramatic series of events in which the shepherd's faithful dog tries desperately to alarm the passersby of the discrepancy in his owner's routine, barking and jumping around. The procession understandably doesn't heed the dog's unreadable warning, barging through to the other side of the street wherein Frammartino's camera position pans 270 degrees into another exquisite framing of a wooded street. The dog returns to terrorize a stray worshipper and then dislodge the truck from its position to crash directly into the goat fence, both actions occurring seemingly unintentionally. Despite the mammoth length of the scene and relative distance between pivotal points in the shot, there is a supreme sense of slapstick comic timing that raises the tantalizing question of directorial intrusion or natural absurdity. Given the difficulty of directing animals with this amount of shocking precision, I would feel inclined to agree with the latter, which only strengthens the film's revelatory view of nature as a force bearing a separate, universal consciousness.

Once the goats have escaped from their enclosure, they investigate the shepherd's grounds, finding him gasping lethargically for life in his bed. Upon the man's expected death the film launches into its second section, inaugurated by a startling shot of a white calf dropping from between its mother's hind legs. This is the film's most persuasive hint towards a theme of reincarnation; Frammartino certainly doesn't spell his ideas out, but he doesn't cloak them in deep obscurity either. The calf is slow to adjust to the world, and the film responds by casting a glow of freshness upon objects. In a barn lit only by cracks of beaming sunlight, the group of young goats experience the falling of a broom with mutual bemusement. A pack mentality and eventually a growing need for competition arises, until suddenly the white calf is stranded in a ditch during one of the daily herds through the countryside. Frammartino expertly manages his minimalist soundtrack, conveying as great a sensation of loss and isolation in the sudden absence of the hitherto omnipresent clatter of bells as in the melancholy image of the calf alone in the forest, "baah-ing" with a fear of the unfamiliar (a moment that is, I should add, nearly as moving as the final scene of Au Hasard Balthasar.)



Frammartino's evocation of the subsequent transformation is remarkably subtle and free of emotional manipulation (we are talking about the stranding and innocent death of an adorable young animal here). Instead, the expected strategy is reversed and the sequence is unusually uplifting, with a series of the same landscape shot in different seasons containing the tree the calf last laid down under, a slight aesthetic move that allows for a mere inference towards the animal's fate while acknowledging the idea of seasonal renewal. Adding a layer of absurdist comedy to the mix is the next narrative progression involving a gang of gung-ho civilians cutting down the tree to embark on some weird celebratory ritual back in the village. The shot of the treetop slowly rising with human force above the thatched roofing of the village, accompanied only by the faint sounds of camaraderie, is a particularly memorable one, humorously indicating man's ceaseless drive to claim and manipulate nature.

Le Quattro Volte doesn't stop there though, ensuring that although the tree (an amalgam of both the shepherd and the calf's life forms) was stolen from its place in the ground for arguably trivial human purposes, it will be returned to the Earth in a more diffuse manner, spreading through the smoke of the charcoal production across the many vast and misty mountains that Frammartino carefully photographs throughout the film. Rather than belittling to human experience, this is a graceful and humble nod to the ultimate possession of our souls to the Earth in which we reside and not simply in the domain of a personal lifespan. Lest I sound too abstract and poetic (such an opaque, wordless film will do that to you), it's important to mention that Frammartino has crafted an elegant visual essay that can really only be described in such terms. But rather than being intellectually exhausting, it's an inviting, rewarding work, a soft punch right to the frothy, ambiguous gut of emotions and feelings, and even as it elicits dense allusions to the cyclical theories of Pythagoras and the alarming illogicality of village folklore, it need not be reduced to linguistic justifications.

Summer Hours (2008) A Film by Olivier Assayas

Early on in Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours, a group of young kids, the grandchildren of an old and widowed art collector named Hélène (Edith Scob), spontaneously climb a small tree, their arms reaching up into the elongated branches with tireless determination. It's an offhand moment of rapture that actually proves to be a visual summation of the film's many disparate themes, a way of eloquently signaling that they are all bound to the same flow of nature, left to branch off in different directions. So, too, are the children who climb the tree, just as their parents - the estranged but loving trio of Frédéric (Charles Berling), Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), and Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) - have been pulled apart by the shifting currents of their respective lives. The image is part of a series of extensive steadicam shots capturing the hustle-bustle of a family get-together for Hélène's 75th birthday party at her lavishly old-fashioned country home, the family stomping ground for several generations and a storage unit for the rare artwork of Hélène's uncle Paul Berthier as well as a cornucopia of "bric-a-brac from another era." Assayas' fluidly cooperative camera makes the joyousness of the gathering readily apparent, but the film slowly reveals layers of melancholy in the withholding interactions of the family members, in the sense that the robust house is now underused, and especially in Hélène's acknowledgment of her impending mortality, which raises the question of what to do with her and Paul's legacy.

What follows is a knockout scene of Hélène speaking with her longtime friend and housemaid Éloïse (Isabelle Sadoyan) in the now-empty household presumably later in the day after the family has left. They speak calmly but mournfully about the state of the house, the party that day, and Hélène's lingering feelings of isolation and anxiety regarding her children and their willingness to pass down the relics of family history to their own offspring. But the key to this sad, powerful scene lies not in Assayas' casually revealing dialogue but in his restrained staging and mise-en-scene. If the ubiquitous movement of the party suggested a celebration of life, here Assayas' employs a two simple, static medium shots of Hélène and Éloïse. The whole room is awash in the cool blue of dusk offset by the vibrant oranges of indoor lamps in the background, Assayas being less interested in photographic realism than he is in telegraphing the mood through the lighting. It's the film's most tragic scene because we know death is around the corner, but Assayas doesn't belabor the point. Abruptly after, the film leaps ahead three months to a point when the family matriarch has passed away. So as to keep the melodrama to a minimum, Assayas exposes the aftermath in two succinct shots of Frédéric and Adrienne struggling to maintain their emotional control in private and public spaces. In a small gust of editorial wind, Summer Hours has launched into its second and most thematically dense chapter.

If the opening functioned as a way to loosely establish all of the nuances of character and modicums of family history the film parses out, the rest of the time Assayas spends taking these seeds and letting them grow, exploring their modulations over time and in the throes of familial tragedy. Long-winded legal dealings and household art auctions are not normally fodder for riveting film drama, but here Assayas is able to casually reveal all the emotional tensions among the siblings that lie silently beneath the mundane formalities. In one of their first scenes of reconnection after Hélène's death, conflicts of interest arise between Frédéric, Adrienne, and Jérémie, the former interested in maintaining the summer home as a bearer of charged memories, with the other two finding it more financially plausible to abandon the house to prevent it from becoming just an uninhabited money box. The struggle is between holding on to intimate personal history while also trying to remain reasonable in the face of a generation that cares less and less about such archaic indicators of value. For Frédéric, a Paris-based economist who is ironically the most sentimental of the three, the implicit meaning of the house is too strong to simply monetize, while Adrienne and Jérémie, both of whom have pursued careers in other countries (America and Japan, respectively), can't see the concrete value in what are, for them, merely abstract and disembodied markers of the past.



This also hints at another of the themes Assayas is targeting: the irresolvable paradox of globalization. While the world strains to "connect" and further "dissolve" boundaries of nations with business and industry, it actually only creates an increasing alienation, manifested in the distance clearly felt between the siblings. The geographical distance from the house itself indeed proves to be a crucial factor in the decision-making of the characters when it really shouldn't have much to do with the preservation of one's own personal history. Jérémie, a businessman for Puma, and Adrienne, a designer attracted to modern style, have made their personal disconnection cultural. In their clothing, their speech patterns, and their views on the world, they have unintentionally separated themselves from the life created by Hélène and her painter uncle to the point where the placement of a decades-old vase in a museum or in an old house has become an entirely arbitrary and negligible consideration. Frédéric, on the other hand, given his relative proximity to the objects and the immediate family he still intends to pass them down to sees the dissolution of evocative family artwork to the level of vain public voyeurism to be sad and lamentable.

In spite of all these seemingly easy areas for critical objectivity, Assayas remains neutral and sensitive to the individual concerns of his characters. He's not making any generalized judgments about the increasing blindness of a younger generation towards the sophistication of an older one, or something like that. In fact, the film's uplifting ending manages to strike conflicting chords without trying to resolve them: a raucous gathering of adolescents, lead by Frédéric's daughter Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing), storm Hélène's old home just before its entry on the market, throwing the kind of elaborate summer party most high school kids would dream of. The scene is light and airy, filled with joy as Assayas' camera once again swoops in and out of the opulent rooms (now barren) in extended takes. Although most of the kids are obviously quite oblivious to the nature of the house they're trampling through, Assayas seems to be celebrating the idea that it's now a blank slate where new memories can be formed. This doesn't need to mean that the past is neglected either - Sylvie, in a scene that feels like Assayas' tribute to Claire's Knee, is overcome by the fleeting sensation of one of the paintings in the house, for she is standing right in the grassy meadow where it was made.

Moments before the party in Summer Hours' chronology is a short sequence where Éloïse returns to the house for the last time, peering in the windows at the spaces once filled with furnishings and life. Assayas' shoots the scene from inside the house looking out as Éloïse drifts by the windows. Is it from the house's perspective or Hélène's? Either way, it suggests a separate consciousness that lasts beyond living humans, a consciousness of place and history. Not only does this signal Assayas' interest in structural mirroring (the film begins with a scene of joy and then one of sadness and ends with a scene of sadness and then one of joy), but it also makes the case that both these seemingly opposite emotions spring from the same source, exist side by side. That's the totality of human experience right there, working in tandem in two elegantly simple scenes.

Screening Notes #4

The best few weeks of filmgoing I’ve had in a while are also, due to a generally busy schedule and lack of time, the worst weeks for productivity on the writing end.

Summer Hours (2008): Assayas is an electrifying magician; that is, he can make a work of art while appearing totally artless. Summer Hours, about art and by an artist, feels so offhand and casual and, at first, like anyone could have made it. None of the camerawork is showy, yet every shot is orchestrated like a great symphony. I love how Assayas picks simple, universal themes - the lasting importance of family, the forced estrangement of globalization, the permanent meaning indebted to objects - and simply dances around the edges of them, proving that a director need not highlight with a magic marker his ideas in order for his audience to connect with them emotionally. Showing specifics, not generalizations, is the key to great drama, and Summer Hours is nothing if not a long string of very vivid, petty specifics.

Adaptation (2002): Charlie's one tricky bastard. Upon finishing this film, I thought that Kaufman had self-consciously laid his life on the line and then somehow suffered a crushing blow to his intelligence, ultimately forgetting the point of his movie. For all of the film's structure vs. art musings, it seemed that he had settled for conformity in the denouement (a word which Kaufman's made-up brother in the film pronounces hilariously wrong) rather than meeting somewhere in the middle. But when one places the film's title into the mix, it becomes clear that Kaufman's up to something awfully clever and scathing here. His hero, a representation of his most finnicky, holed-up artist qualities played by Nicolas Cage, is forced to "adapt" to his surroundings, whereby his life becomes an absurd genre movie and is swallowed up by Hollywood conventions. Even so, one wonders if the witty commentary is swallowed up as well by the questionable construction, rendered with perhaps a bit too much conviction by Spike Jonze.

Arrested Development (Season 1 9-22, Season 2 1-5): This is getting really funny. I never wanted to like it, but as Gob keeps saying "Come on!"

Certified Copy (2010): The best film I missed in 2010, Certified Copy is a masterstroke that reminds me I need to see a lot more by Kiarostami. I always end up saying this, but this might be Binoche's very best performance. The way she so deftly handles Kiarostami's thematic ideas and formal shifts while making it all feel so natural is a thrill to watch. What separates this from, say, her tremendous work in Flight of the Red Balloon or Blue is the vast range of emotions, traversed between with such spontaneity. Kiarostami's directorial finesse is omnipresent but light enough not to overshadow what is centrally a film about conversation. As such, he keeps it simple, using primarily close-ups but creating a psychologized Tuscany outside the frame with sound and background movement. The film's ending, in which the flight of a bird is timed to uncanny perfection, is sublime.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010): Like everyone else, I was put into a trance by Apichatpong's latest, but I don't know if it speaks more to the excessive hype surrounding the film or to its actual inferiority that I still find the film's prequel, the short Letters to Uncle Boonmee, to be a more evocative and visually appealing piece of filmmaking. I mean, there are some shots and lighting setups in this feature version that I seriously object to, not because they're too much, but because they're just plain pedestrian. Yet these are very small distractions; other times the film so looks so beautiful I don't want it to end, which brings up another miniscule gripe. Apichatpong, for all his over-indulgence in the long take in the past, seems to have lost faith in it during some of his strongest shots here. It's hard to argue with a film that had me swooning in its strange power, but I think with some fine adjustments this could have been a real goldmine. As it is, it's certainly a film to get lost in, to live with, and to lounge around in, but it's a bit sad to have to settle for the treasure that it is rather than the film of the decade that it could have been.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976): This is the ideal situation of a film I once considered a trash heap of lackluster cinema vérité suddenly revealing itself as a deeply fascinating work by a director in utter command of his decidedly rough filmmaking. Cassavetes flirts with noir conventions without ever fully embracing them, always keeping his commanding sleazeball Cosmo Vitelli front and center, unafraid to let such a dedicated loser dominate the frame. The compassion towards the grotesque here is amazing, and the grimy, low-key atmosphere of disembodied, barely visible heads and off-screen voices never ceases. It's a dream, really.

Hadewijch (2009): One hell of an engrossing experience even with its baffling and ideologically questionable third act. Dumont makes stellar symmetry of two musical performances at the film’s center: an outdoor Franco punk act playing a rendition of a Bach tune and a church quartet, both of which the film’s protagonist (first-timer Julie Sokolowski, with a greasy mop of hair) watches in their entirety. Still, I can’t help but think Dumont could have found so many other ways to end the film in a more satisfying (and I don’t mean tidy) manner, and especially without using Islamic terrorism as a mere plot device.

Minority Report (2002) A Film by Steven Spielberg

The more I think about Steven Spielberg, the more I feel he is, at heart, a sci-fi director. As hinted at by his statement that he "dream(s) for a living", his ability to conjure up futuristic worlds from scratch and move freely within them, rendering reality somewhere in the middle ground between distracting sensationalism and grounded present-tense filth, is high among the ranks of cinema's great world-builders, and his grasp of how supernatural, extraterrestrial, and hyper-technological fictionalizations provide some kind of symbolic mirror to modernity is worth analyzing. With Minority Report, a bona fide Tom Cruise vehicle that's as much about glorifying the man's almost parodically insistent action sprint and ultra-cool self-assurance as it is about anything else, Spielberg creates a vividly urban futuristic environment where today's practices of airtight security, individualized consumerism, and extreme democracy have run amock, morphing into a kind of oppressive totalitarianism this very system blindly set out to avoid. The governmental infrastructure in the film is faceless, although the questionable merits of its corporate justice system - a preventative police force that hinges on the fantastic mental abilities of three captive "precogs" who predict murders - are shouted at passersby throughout the city on a regular basis.

Spielberg is adept at quickly immersing the viewer in the particulars of this scientifically and technologically dependent society, pulling out all the stops in a muscular opening sequence depicting John Anderton (Cruise), the head sheriff in this futuristic context, navigating a dense network of visual cues provided to him by the precogs and subsequently stopping a domestic murder at the last second. The scene functions as a killer race against time, but it also communicates through its mise-en-scene and production design the way the general public has become desensitized to this weird, confrontational form of justice, a process that leads a herd of heavily suited officers trampling across a suburban playground, the children and parents around them stopping to look not in destabilized shock but in comfort and fascination. Similar responses are elicited by the equally jarring billboard advertisements around the city, which actively name-call people by scanning their retinas and try to specifically target products to them. While superficially very glossy and radiant, it's also an environment where personal unrest and economic hardship abound, points Spielberg highlights later in a moving aerial shot through an urban ghetto (a sequence that looks like an early demo for Enter the Void). The look and feel of this world are deftly conveyed within minutes of the film's opening, lending the firm social and political background that supports all of Minority Report's cerebral drama and clever plot turns.

When Anderton suddenly discovers himself as the guilty party in a future murder (a ludicrous notion on the surface that could only fly in this hermetic scenario), it sets the narrative in suspenseful motion, pitting Anderton against the entire company for whom he was hitherto the leader. Now the justice force is rallied up by Anderton's nemesis, the precrime skeptic and more conventional cop Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), whose involvement in the pursuit is largely derived from his desire to prove to Anderton the ethical dilemma of the whole precrime framework, the idea that a person can be arrested for a crime that they haven't yet physically committed. (The police force's wholehearted dedication to the capture of Anderton at the neglect of all other crimes that could feasibly be taking place is one of the forgivably silly sleights of hand that Spielberg always assumes suspension of disbelief will fully account for.) Anderton and Witwer's philosophical debates about fate, science, and not to mention the ethics of imprisoning three shaved savants who are still unmistakably human for judicial purposes are key inquiries only outwardly expressed in one early scene that nonetheless give the film a speculative weight not normally encountered in a work of such breakneck speed and crowd-pleasing effect. Spielberg - with the exception of A.I. - is generally not one to confidently dive into these heady subtexts, but their existence here serves to give multiple layers of resonance to the film's arguably fatalistic sprawl, which positions Anderton in a situation where he can, according to the most gifted precog Agatha (Samantha Morton), change the future given his knowledge of it.



The film vacillates throughout between bleak, moody blacks and blues and Spielberg's characteristically angelic overexposure. Especially as the narrative approaches its climax (Anderton's murder), and thus at the peak of the protagonist's fate-altering authority, it becomes progressively more tantalizing to assign the latter with cosmic or holy significance. As Agatha guides Anderton through a packed shopping mall while he's hotly pursued by the police, tipping him off to every muscle movement that will keep him out of the team's field of vision, the setting is bathed in a glow of spiritual light, as if Anderton is walking through heaven in his sudden opportunity to "play God." Spielberg seems to be momentarily entertaining this possibility of divine intervention if only to quickly dismiss it, nodding moments after to Anderton's - and perhaps humanity's - consuming desire to know and understand his (its) future. In the kind of telling composition Spielberg so casually and expertly integrates into his action staging, Agatha tries to hold Anderton back in a tight two-shot, a Persona-like image that underscores Anderton's shallow idea of progress and Agatha's more knowing one. Of course, in spite of his insistence on refusing to murder his victim, Anderton does, finding that the precrime forces are, conveniently enough for the narrative, delayed in their timing of the crime.

This explosive payoff leads organically to a larger mystery centering around the unlikely interconnectedness of two minor narrative threads: the stray and seemingly random snippet of visual information Agatha urges Anderton to see early on in the film as well as the disappearance, several years before, of Anderton's young son. At the other end of this late-stage mystery is the kind of "gotcha" twist expected of a film with so many red-herrings and hunches proved wrong, but it's admittedly a very surprising and thrilling one that subtly reveals itself, and the whole film, to be about the essentially irreparable flaw in such a limited democracy that values absolutes in its calculated and scientific engagement with justice rather than accounting for all the gray areas between non-criminal behavior and murders. Some Spielberg enthusiasts have noted the unlikelihood that Spielberg would be so harshly critiquing a system that he supposedly believes is theoretically workable (although that's a depressing thought that I frankly can't get behind), but to me it seems quite clear; for a film that handles its tonal shifts from dark, serious drama to witty sight gags (quite literally) with such careful precision, it seems improbable for it to not be aware of or confident in its own political and philosophical implications. As expected, Spielberg ties it up in a wholly unsatisfying and unconvincing bow that is plain ridiculous in context of the film's chilly grasp, but Minority Report's cautionary worldviews on technology, security, and justice certainly overpower this alienating entertainer shtick, making it a film that balances on a fine line between sheer spectacle and serious statements and, I believe, comes out on the right side.

The Conversation (1974) A Film by Francis Ford Coppola

For a medium that is so universally hailed as a “visual art”, the resource of sound that is employed in cinema can be routinely neglected. With a film like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, the coin has been flipped, and cinema is almost anything but a primarily visual art. It’s not that Coppola’s compositional instincts are not intact (they are), or that his visuals do not effectively communicate the emotions of the story (they do), or that his nearly abstracted aerial zoom of Union Square to open the film is not a dynamite teaser (it is); it’s just that in a film like The Conversation, hinged on the notions of surveillance and wiretapping, sound becomes the most powerful tool in broadcasting the complicated psychology of the central character, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). Caul (the pun relating to telephones here is delicious, yet curiously never called out in reviews) is a strictly secretive professional, a man whose life, as one character puts it in Taxi Driver, "has become his job." He's hired by top-shelf employers to listen in on others' conversations, extracting important private information that he relays to them.

Thus the film itself becomes akin to an extended audio tape, a dense and often times sonically harsh private recording. Harry's investigation involves a complex system of wires, mics, and recording tape, and his subjects - a young, upscale couple, Mark and Ann (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams), from a nearby business aware of their being watched - have deliberately chosen to have their conversation while strolling in the middle of a crowded Union Square in hopes of not being easily heard. Throughout the film Coppola returns to Harry in his intense scrutiny of the recording, laboring over specific bits by slowing it down, speeding it up, rewinding, and changing frequencies. The detritus of all this calculated dissection is bizarre processed noises that sound like something from Star Wars (must be the influence of Harrison Ford as the stern businessman watching Caul's every move), which at first act as a logical result of Harry's work before entering into the soundtrack as a seemingly non-diegetic, unmotivated force to torment him in his private life (though sometimes it's hard to tell given the amount of sound bridging the film engages with).

Representing Harry's psychological state is something the soundtrack does more and more as the film progresses and more information is accumulated about the titular conversation. In the ensemble scenes when Harry is among his colleagues at a dingy late-night office party, the soundtrack plays like a lo-fi remote recording, with the various voices fading in and out of comprehension. Little attempt is made on Coppola's part to make the dialogue that occurs have any satisfying coherence or completeness, mirroring Harry distanced, dispassionate experience of the scene, the way he's always wandering away from the central action, thinking to himself in brooding silence. As he lies in bed later with the lovely femme fatale Amy (Teri Garr), his mind is anywhere but on the present moment, as snatches of the conversation come back to him in fully memorized form, leading fluidly to an ominous dream sequence where Harry - in a clever bit of staging - shouts his uncertainties to an obscured Ann at the top of a hill. Harry's suspicions regarding the potential violence surrounding the conversation are unclear (evidenced by the thick fog) and his attempts to attain freedom and clarity in the face of this predicament are ill-advised, for he is too withdrawn and self-absorbed to feasibly find an answer. The ourobouric loop suggested by this self-defeating psychology is mimicked by the melancholy jazz piano that is a constant motif throughout, a piece of music whose constantly ascending and descending melody implies a never-ending aversion to climax or catharsis.



Coppola's just as deft at visually communicating his character's surfacing feelings of guilt and the idea that the strictly professional can't help but invade the decidedly personal. Quite organically, he and DP Bill Butler find geometrical elements in the architecture of a scene that effectively heighten the escalating tension in the story, like the onslaught of diagonal lines that appear in the background of many shots, most memorably in one that gradually dollies into a payphone, proportionally catching more and more harsh reflections on the glass as Harry grows increasingly impatient with his call. In a separate and equally natural compositional method, Harry is frequently positioned behind gates, window panes, and other patterned frames, making sure to announce his entrapment from his job, his social life, and himself. At one point the subject of this technique is a priest on the opposite side of confession booth, and here it works to show how ill-suited the priest is to simplistically intervene in Harry's life, thus dismissing the possibility of any quick and easy religious solution.

In a collection of inferences and telling snippets, the film slowly and expertly reveals itself to be about the elusiveness of truth, the way that such detailed examination of physical evidence can still lead one down a false path. In this way, it's not unlike Antonioni's exquisite Blow-Up, a film which similarly fetishizes a technical process in order to immerse the viewer in the main character's misguided subjectivity. Most of the superb tension present in The Conversation's final act derives from the ambiguity in whether or not the actions onscreen are Harry's visions or if they're hard facts. A toilet overflows with blood, a women is thrust into a glass wall viciously (her tortured scream quickly becoming a shrill, synthesized pulsation in the musical drone of the scene), a frenetic burst of violence ensues. If The Conversation is a film invested in the idea of being in several different places at once through surveillance - sonic and physical, private and professional - then the ending proves that this discontinuity has become not only spatial but also cerebral. Harry believes he has cracked the mystery of the conversation, but the physical evidence tells otherwise, or is it his fractured mind telling him otherwise? Coppola's dense, multi-faceted collage of a film has a way of bringing about the same profound disorientation in its viewer as it does in its protagonist.

Screening Notes #3

The Others (2001): Spiritually and structurally, Alejandro Amenábar takes pains to emulate The Shining (the displaced mansion, the final act involving kids taking the initiative to climb out the window, the unsettling shock cuts, the fixation on circles and patterns), but more often than not it's so transparent that it comes off as little more than genre pastiche. It would all be rather irritating if The Shining wasn't already such a masterful benchmark in macabre cinema, and if I wasn't perfectly fine with revisiting anything that shares with it artistic similarities. Aside from that, it's interesting how it continues modern Hollywood's fetishistic desire to dissect the very private star persona of Nicole Kidman, the way it aggressively dislodges her from her comfort zone in a sneaky attack on over-anxious and oppressive parenting.

Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave (1995): I've always been fond of Nick Park's particular animation style, whose slippery homemade textures possess an inherent playfulness. Much of the charm I respond to in these episodic short films is quite directly in how things look, how the surfaces are clearly so labored over. But it's also about how detailed Park is in his direction. His emphasis on all the tiny behaviors (albeit of narrative motivation rather than atmospheric) makes him a unique descendant of Jan Svankmajer.

Arrested Development (Season 1, Episodes 1-9, 2003): A show I've been harassed to watch for quite a while, and also one I semi-consciously avoided in light of the few episodes I did see. Recently I started up on it formally, and I remain bugged (or perhaps that's too harsh a word) by the same qualities that casually directed me away from it: its nearly oppressive level of design and self-referentiality, its offhand insensitivity, its "wink-wink-ness", and the forcefulness with which it intends for you to laugh. My own taste for comedy lies more in improvisational directness than it does in the domain of clever intellectual montage and the omniscient guiding narration of Ron Howard (hence why I prefer romps like Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Curb Your Enthusiasm in their nearly abstract vaudevillian qualities), which is why I think the best parts of this show rest on the shoulders of David Cross and Will Arnett, who have classically showboating characters with real room for natural absurdity.

The Conversation (1974): A film of sound first and visuals second, which fails to acknowledge that Coppola is really at his best in both departments. There's not a huge amount of complexity at work here in the story, ensuring it fits within the bulk of 70's paranoid thrillers, but Coppola's presentation of that story, and the emotional predicaments that come with it, is immensely rich and nuanced. It's a tantalizing slow burn of a film, a fever dream that accumulates layers upon layers of menace and uncertainty with such ease.

Minority Report (2002): Very glad I got around to revisiting this one, which is easily one of Spielberg's most fluid and assured entertainments of the past decade. It doesn't have the same levels of termitic ideas as A.I., but it telegraphs its own lines of inquiry - the future of national security, the scary issues of corporate consumerism, the struggle against personal and political fate, the injustices that fall through the cracks in a system of absolutes - with greater slickness and visual acuity. All of this, I think, without jeopardizing the pure mass appeal, as Spielberg's fluctuation between dark sight gags and dead seriousness is well-tempered. Backlash against the film's twisty ending abounds, but I took it as not only loaded with thrilling scriptwriting maneuvers but also thematically and emotionally in line with the rest of the film. More on this one to come.

Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires) A Film by Xavier Dolan (2010)

Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats - the Canadian wunderkind's second feature at an astonishing 21 years of age - exists in a milieu where looking a part and acting a part is boiled down to a precise science. Style is the raw material with which characters wage war on each other. When they can't speak their thoughts, they express themselves through their clothing, their hairdos, and the rapidity with which they renew both. The generalized ennui marking their default expressions is a code designed to indicate their lack of interest in communication and their perceived self-assurance, but it really just illuminates how desperately they desire attention. Dolan's signature theme in the film is how the superficial becomes a parasitic growth on the meaningful, an obsession that disguises deeper feeling until it's too late. It would be too easy to lob the same theory at Heartbeats itself, a film so self-consciously concerned with style for its own sake that it neglects great waves of narrative detail and momentum, but it contains too much conviction in its mood shifts and its emotionality to be easily dismissed as "style over substance", or whatever that platitude has come to mean. Dolan's not guilty of creating a prolonged fashion show if only for the sense that he's aware of how style inflects his character's behaviors and motivations, how it plays such an integral role in their psychological metamorphoses.

In the case of the menage-a-trois he has created to express his themes, Dolan has devised a scenario where uncontrollable lust leads directly to angst and madness. Good friends Francis (Dolan himself in the lead role) and Maria (Monia Chokri) both develop an unspoken desire for Nicolas (Niels Schneider), an outgoing, confidently stylish newcomer in their circle of friends with the kind of shaggy dog haircut and laid-back persona that makes him instantly lovable to the shy and disaffected. Such is the situation with Francis and Maria, who are both, in spite of their loud, flashy external presentations, quite troubled internally, choosing to hide their social ineptitude beneath the veil of exorbitantly priced sweaters and countless cigarettes. The film's loose, stripped-down narrative traces the passive-aggressive mongering of Francis and Maria as they vie for the attention of a boy who remains a mysterious surface pleasure throughout, a vexing personality who seems to communicate everything and nothing simultaneously in the courage of his tossed-off vernacular.

Dolan proves to have little interest in fleshing out the particulars of his narrative. Instead, he's content to focus hyper-attentively on the present moment, using (and sometimes overusing) ravishing slow-motion sequences to pick up on every microscopic shift in the emotions of a scene. There are plenty of times when this fetishistic slowing of time suggests Dolan has yet to digest In the Mood for Love, particularly when his compositions - such as that of Maria swaying her birthday present for Nicolas by her side as she struts down the street - are such transparent thefts of Kar-Wai. But in other instances, Dolan is able to capture an enormous amount of emotional clarity in the elongated fleeting moments when Francis and Maria first meet Nicolas for lunch (wherein Francis ducks his head down temporarily in obvious attraction) or when they watch, hypnotized, as Nicolas dances under a strobe at his crowded party. The rejection of traditional characterization here (no back-stories, no casually revealing expository dialogue) makes perfect sense given the decidedly noncommittal qualities of the characters themselves, who'd rather stand like a mannequin in the corner of a party than openly tell you about their lives.



Comparisons to the French New Wave and the souped-up melodramas of Pedro Almodovar are inevitable with a film so spontaneous and free in its dealings with youthful love, so littered with varied musical offerings, and so awash in primary colors, but they're especially apt for Dolan, who hasn't so much invisibly integrated his influences into his cinematic vocabulary yet as he has rehashed them in all their dazzling glory. Heartbeats is almost never less than fraudulent - albeit a kind of acceptable fraudulence given how beautifully and comfortably Dolan seems to adopt the mannerisms - which means that when it manages to possess its own singular vision it's particularly special. Dolan has the finicky (some may say masturbatory, and they'd be primed for support when his character indeed masturbates in the film) eye to sensationalize anything he finds visually compelling - the kiss of a breast in extreme close-up, Maria's voluptuous behind in a hot pink dress, the pirouette of cigarette smoke up nostrils, the drip of rain across an umbrella, the scrape of a red high heel shoe across a forest road covered in leaves - and it offers a painterly inspection of detail rarely seen in narrative films with an agenda. Moreover, Dolan has a talent for rendering key moments abstract in his juicy shallow focus cinematography, such as the climactic hissy fit thrown between Francis and Maria in the woods, in which his camera thrusts into the frantic movement of their entangled bodies, creating a swirl of colors and blurry action.

My initial reaction was to scoff at Heartbeats for its deeply self-conscious gimmicks and its glaring hipness, but I was pulled under its spell rather quickly, sympathetic to its experiential approach to the rhythms of unrequited love. Dolan would have a fairly solid and consistent sophomore feature if only he was smart enough to trust his narrative alone and do away with the insufferable faux-documentary questionnaire segments with 21st Century Romantics that periodically interrupt the plot and severely weaken the growing mood with irritating snap zooms and stuffy dialogue. As it is, Heartbeats, aside from occasionally being a fantastically sensual experience, merely reveals the fertile ground on which Dolan will hopefully refine his style in years to come. In other words, it's a tantalizing if flawed work, and if Dolan can take a lesson from his characters and learn to better direct and shape his stylistic assaults, he can probably wind up with something equal to his vivid influences.