Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) A Film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

So far, 2011 for me has been very much the year of cinematic metempsychosis, which is certainly to say it's been a unique and eye-opening few months of film viewing to be sure. I guess I could say Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void somewhat blandly opened the floodgates at the end of last year with an old-fashioned human to human reincarnation, but ever since I've frequently witnessed the cycle of existence being broadened and redefined. Like The New World and Le Quattro Volte - the former only figuratively evoking these themes and the latter dealing directly with them - Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest Cannes winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is fixated on the idea that life vibrates in everything, as well as the suggestion that our conventional view of a lifetime full of experiences and memories need not apply only to humans. Furthermore, these films offer a perpetual shuffling of consciousnesses. Spontaneously and with reckless abandon, they will switch "protagonists" from human to animal to tree to wind to dust, caring nothing for the Hollywood paradigm that only a person can carry a story.

If Apichatpong's seems the most "Buddhist" of these films from the outset, it's largely because the Thai director has grown increasingly fashionable over the past year, forcing overzealous journalists to fit him inside an exotic box. Truth is, any given set of tenets likely didn't even enter Weerasethakul's purview during his making of the film. What he's after is more personal, a reflection of a highly specific constellation of concerns he has built into his artistic personality throughout his career and life. Uncle Boonmee is a tribute to memory and history, and what's so fascinating about it is that its many histories - personal, cinematic, political, as well as the history of Weerasethakul's own career and that of his titular character - are working in sync throughout the film on a rocky timeline that jolts from present to past to future as if the concept of time is merely of practical use. The particular sequence of events Weerasethakul is unfolding is nonlinear, but not in the sense that it is needlessly fragmented and could be refashioned in a way that makes linear causal sense. Weerasethakul unites his scenes through feeling and the progression that results is a purely metaphysical one.

The crux of the film, as the humorously blunt title makes clear enough, is Uncle Boonmee himself (Thanapat Saisaymar), an old farmer dying from kidney disease in the impoverished and climatically severe northeast portion of Thailand called Laos. This underrepresented region was the setting for Weerasethakul's short film A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (a prologue of sorts to the feature), and its devastating history of Communist oppression and immigrant exploitation weighs heavily on Boonmee, who regretfully was forced to join Communist forces in a handful of farmland massacres in the 1960s. Boonmee is haunted by these experiences as he steadily approaches his death, and the occasion musters up apparitions of his past lives in a variety of forms. But despite Boonmee's rather ugly past, Weerasethakul views his situation with compassion. After all, from his perspective of life, it would be disingenuous to judge a being based on one of its individual life spans when so many others are available to pull spiritual renewal from.



And that is ultimately what Weerasethakul is doing with the film's abstract form: seeking spiritual renewal in cinematic renewal. Uncle Boonmee is a very modular film made up of different vignettes, many of them episodes from what we can only guess are Boonmee's past lives. The film begins on one in which a bull breaks free from its rope and charges into the woods in the Laos countryside at dusk. The animal's liberation is quite moving, but shortly thereafter its owner appears in the scene to round him up, bringing him back to his farm. Whether Boonmee is in the shape of the animal or the human is left to the imagination, but given his present sense of guilt it is tempting to view him as the bull, especially since so many of the film's other vignettes deal with some form of liberation from social or domestic norms. The best of these is a mini narrative featuring a princess who takes a break from her fanciful ride through the jungle on the shoulders of male servants to admire a luminous waterfall (shades of The Last of the Mohicans). In the manner of a fairy tale, she sees a reflection of her younger self in the water and grows angry at the youthful beauty she believes she has now lost. One of the servants - with whom the princess makes amorous eye-contact a moment earlier - approaches and reassures her that she is beautiful, which has the reverse effect of augmenting her disappointment. The surprising arrival of a talking catfish manages to soothe her pain in an idiosyncratic episode of metaphysical underwater sex.

Weerasethakul shoots these scenes with dreamlike immediacy and an old-fashioned day-for-night effect that bolsters the deep blues and greens in the color palette. In the princess sequence, the film's stylization jockeys unexpectedly between the mannered staging, framing, and visual effects of a 60's costume drama and something more termitic, with loose, documentary-like compositions (the close-up of the servant from the princess's point of view stands out) and a handheld camera that reacts spontaneously to Weerasethakul's odd catfish sex scenario. The princess, floating around in the whirlpool, gives herself up to the fish, at which point the camera ducks under the water between her legs to fill the frame with bubbles. It's the film's most abstract image, quickly turning away from the narrative for a purely formal investigation of the agitated water. That the bubbles gradually come to resemble sperm eggs only enhances the film's all-encompassing love of life, the fact that new lives seem to be crop up everywhere, even in the throes of bestiality. Weerasethakul holds on the bubbles for quite some time, letting a deep underwater rumble dominate the soundtrack, but still I had an itch for him to keep the shot on screen for even longer as it's one of the film's most memorable and entrancing images.



Human-animal sex is not a new subtext in Weerasethakul's work, but here it acquires added prominence and a uniquely comic effect. It's viewed as a passage from human to animal, a transformation from a domesticated entity to something more untamed, a creature without limitations and boundaries, and it's reflected most hilariously in the film's kookiest invention: the monkey ghost. This red-eyed ape, a hulking beast that looks curiously like some bad sci-fi monster from a B movie, first appears in the woods where the bull escapes to. The moment feels like the entrance of the monolith in 2001: all of a sudden a pair of red eyes just emerge in the darkness without context or explanation. Clarification is saved for a scene about 15 minutes later when Boonmee, his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), and Jen's son Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee, who plays a notable role in Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century) sit on the porch at night. After Boonmee's long-dead wife Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk) appears in ghost form at the table - eliciting not fear and uncertainty but a jovial family reunion complete with a photo album - a monkey ghost approaches from the darkness, its eyes at first the only visual indicator of its presence. When it does arrive at the table, it reveals itself as Boonmee's long-lost son Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong). Boonsong admits to wandering into the forest to "mate with a monkey ghost" many years ago, which turned him into one of them for good. Following the slight shock of this revelation, the conversation continues in the manner of a rather prosaic family reunion, with Boonmee asking the simple questions a father would normally ask a son he has not seen for years.

This casual acceptance of that which is unknown and extraordinary is omnipresent in the film, and it has the effect of aligning the more overtly mystical elements directly with Weerasethakul's dry country realism. There is a notion of counterbalance everywhere in the film: personal and political, past and present, archaic (Weerasethakul's conscious integration of older cinematic techniques and 16mm) and modern (the sanitary urban funeral mass at the end of the film, the credit song by Penguin Villa that sounds like Thailand's answer to the Jonas Brothers). Right after the porch sequence, Weerasethakul expels the mystical elements for the subsequent scene, a straightforward afternoon walk through the farm between Boonmee and Jen in which the two of them lick fresh honey from the roof of a bee hive. Moments like this one have the kind of lazy countryside patience typical of Weerasethakul's work. His long takes focusing on relaxation and healing (quite literally in one shot inside the house with Tong tending to Boonmee's kidney disease) allow for a gentle respite from the ghost story, which is not to say that the latter doesn't share the same willful restraint.



The film's political undertones simmer to the foreground in the final thirty minutes when Boonmee, Jen, and Tong enter a cave in the jungle at dusk, obeying an instinct Boonmee had during a recollection of a past life. Their journey through the thick jungle brush is riveting, as Weerasethakul's dense soundtrack communicates the idea that the woods are vibrating with life especially at this late hour (of course, an offhand shot of a pack of monkey ghosts confirms that they are). Once in the cave, as fireflies glimmer off the ceiling, Boonmee relates a troubling story of countryside warfare and oppression, to which the film provides a series of still photographs. The photographs, interestingly enough taken as documents of Weerasethakul's own brief filmmaking history in the region, particularly during the production of A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, feature soldiers inspecting the farmland and eventually men dressed in ape costumes communing with the soldiers. It's a radical hybrid of Boonmee and Weerasethakul's memories and an unexpected aesthetic choice for such a crucial moment in the film, but it pays off beautifully, suggesting that the unity of collective history can provide catharsis from oncoming death.

Additional heft is invited to the death scene in its allusions to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In Boonmee's story, he speaks of monkey ghosts inside caves being spotlighted obtrusively by xenophobic soldiers (obviously paralleling the exploitation of illegal immigrants in the area), an image that recalls Plato's discussion of a group of individuals finally seeing the light beyond the shadows on the cave's wall. Shortly thereafter, Jen wakes up on the cave floor in the morning with Boonmee's dead body beside her. She's positioned halfway in the dark of the cave and halfway in the morning light, and as she sits up her body becomes fully lit. In doing so, Weerasethakul discovers a way to make the death of his human protagonist an instance of uplifting enlightenment, because after all Boonmee has many more lives to live. It's this generosity, this ability to find renewal in the end of something, that makes Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives such a warmly transcendent film. In its lament of the death of Boonmee and even the death of an old way of cinema, Weerasethakul is also looking ahead to the mysteries that lay beyond.

Pulp Fiction and the Threat of Persuasion

(DISCLAIMER: This is my final paper for a course I took this past semester called Narrative Ethics. The class necessarily mandates a moral engagement with narratives, an attempt to investigate how moral theories are reflected through stories. As such, I had to take into account extreme points of view and analyze them, so it might come across as preachy or superior. However, I should stress that as much as it's fun to pick apart Tarantino, I think Pulp Fiction is his best work yet.)

The notion of media as an influencing factor on the lives of viewers in America is a topic that has been endlessly debated ever since the advent of motion pictures. The moment the Lumiere brothers pointed their camera at an oncoming train, it caused mass hysteria and fear, the idea that the visual illusion was actually an extension of real life. But it didn’t just start with film; stories, in general, have forever had a curious ability to shape the lives of the participant. Because deeming any narrative an effective one means evaluating a level of participation we have with the story, the very act of consuming narratives becomes one in which we are complicit in the acts of the characters. As a result, this can lead to a certain kind of passivity in the viewer that allows stories to have an almost subconscious authoritative sway.

Filmmaking in the late 1900’s and early 21st century has taken a particularly radical turn towards depicting violence and other matters of human debasement in an extremely graphic, unapologetic manner. As a result, there has been a rise in critical concern about the control narratives have over the morals and behaviors of viewers, particularly young and impressionable ones. The history of this discourse hit a fascinating point after the release of Quentin Tarrantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994, a film that picked up where other controversial American narratives like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Clockwork Orange (1971) left off, presenting drugs, violence, and urban crime in a hip and irreverent way that pushed several buttons in the sensitive psyche of America. Of course, there was also an entire counterculture that worshipped the film for its adventurous and fearless spirit, which is precisely where much of the anxiety arose. If so many films have a positive impact on audiences for their joyful and wholesome qualities, did Pulp Fiction represent an instance where the film’s ambiguous attitude towards the story’s depravity and the simple bravura with which it presented this depravity actually negatively impact the moral pulse of the audiences who loved it?

The answer is not so clear-cut, but the question certainly provides a great deal of room for contemplation. There’s no doubting that Pulp Fiction, in light of what a sheer provocation that it is, is destined to have some impact on the viewer. Whether this is a positive or negative one, or somewhere in between, is heavily dependent on several different things: the actual moral stance of the filmmaker and the ultimate trajectory of his narrative, the ability for the viewer to actively engage with the narrative to a point where they can decipher the moral stance at the heart of the film, and all the inevitable contradictions that can arise in the aesthetics and tone of the film. Essentially, the response that a film like this receives hinges massively upon how intelligent and sensitive both the filmmaker and the audience is.



After so many years of study and repeat viewings, it’s become somewhat clear that, at heart, Tarantino has no intentions of simplistically promoting the horrible actions of his characters, that he’s not just presenting a subversive narrative to ape people of their sense of moral grounding and position them in the minds of psychopathic criminals. In fact, if one watches reasonably closely, Pulp Fiction is quite obviously structured as a violent spiral towards ultimate salvation and a sense of existential renewal. If it’s not openly criticizing the acts of its characters – namely Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), Vincent Vega (John Travolta), Ringo (Tim Roth), Yolanda (Amanda Plummer), Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis), and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), among many others – then it’s at least suggesting that at the end of the film they have decided to seek a new and perhaps better path, one of righteousness and non-violence. If the startling violence, swearing, and racial slurring is what sticks in the mind of the viewer, it’s only because Tarantino allows the bulk of the film to center around such aspects before exorcising them in the final moments of grace, not because he necessarily prefers those elements and wants them to be the most influential.

Yet it’s also clear that they are the most influential ingredients of Pulp Fiction, and the comparatively meager portion of righteous renewal at the end of the film is but a small side note to the rest of the film’s hypnotic onslaught of depravity. After witnessing an hour and a half of action-packed killing, drugging, boozing, and disrespecting, a viewer is less likely to see the ideological undertones of the final scenes than they are to see them in a strictly narrative sense as a way to tidily and calmly “complete” the story. A young, impressionable viewer in particular – that is, a viewer without a nuanced understanding of filmmaking and simply without such a long history of experiencing narratives – is prone to being swept under the spell of Pulp Fiction’s admittedly gripping narrative momentum, happily lost in the maelstrom of action to the point where they are not actively thinking about the story’s implications as it flies by. As a result, the turnaround of Jules Winnfield, Vincent Vega, Ringo, and Yolanda in the concluding scene of the film is not going to register beyond the domain of a narrative maneuver. Put in other words, the viewer will not see it as anything with a carefully chosen meaning, a meaning that puts to shame all the actions these characters performed earlier in the story.

What they will see, potentially, is how cool and suave Vincent and Jules are when they murder someone for pay, how naturally Mia Wallace snorts cocaine, and how easily Ringo and Yolanda go about executing an intended robbery. This is because Tarantino’s stylistic palette has a way of perhaps unintentionally celebrating the same acts he goes on to subtly condemn later in the film. An enduring issue at the center of this kind of filmmaking is how one goes about cinematically representing behaviors that are not virtuous, and in this instance Tarantino has a hard time not making these scenes seem fun and exciting, if not always rewarding. His swift editing, bold camera movements, and big close-ups that allow the viewer to see the casual thrill in the character’s eyes as they execute another job manage to sometimes feel like the equivalent of a sporting event. In the first scene when Jules and Vincent murder a group of guys who betrayed their boss Marsellus Wallace, the anticipation builds with Jules’ impassioned recitation of a Biblical verse right before he fires repetitively at his human target, at which point Tarantino cuts dramatically between the bloody body and Jules’ seemingly guiltless mug. It’s very easy to see the sickness of the act if one is able to pry themselves out of the film’s immersive rhythms, but if not, the scene comes across as celebratory and justified, as if Jules’ target got the revenge he deserved.



There are other ways, however, that Tarantino attempts to quickly prove that the characters’ behaviors were not as easy and faultless as they might have seemed. In the subsequent scene, Vincent mistakenly pulls the trigger on one of their surviving hostages in the backseat of their car, forcing them to make a decision about what to do with the bloody corpse in broad daylight. It seems like a small effort on Tarantino’s part to provide some sort of punishment to the two hitmen, yet it’s still not too earth shattering a predicament for them. Also muddying up his cause is the generally casual tone with which he presents the scene. Vincent and Jules are so relaxed about their accidental killing – not to mention more concerned about the fact that they might be arrested than about the fact that they just killed an innocent due to a careless mistake – that it’s almost as if Tarantino doesn’t see it as a problem either. Here, in the context of media persuasion, Pulp Fiction verges ever closer to ethically questionable by treating human life as a mere inconvenience to these smug and self-satisfied characters. If Jules and Vincent’s dialogue wasn’t so hip and coolly conversational, the scene might play out as an instant condemnation of their cruelty. But because they are shown as relaxed and fun guys to be around, the intent of the scene is harder to pick out and the negative influence becomes that much more powerful.

To say that Jules and Vincent actually influence the morals of a viewer is to say that their charismatic personas are so desirable that their behaviors are equated with achieving such a persona. For the impressionable viewer, personality and action can merge into the same entity of attraction, such that racial insensitivity, murder, and drug use are perceived as OK because in many instances they are presented as such in the context of the film. Quickly, a behavior or viewpoint reflected through the characters in the film becomes a behavior or viewpoint that a viewer actively tries to incorporate in a real-world situation in an effort to achieve the same kind of fully realized sense of self that Jules and Vincent possessed. The extremity of this adaptation can certainly vary among viewers, in that one individual might only take with them some of the character’s mannerisms or slang words whereas in a much more severe case an individual could even end up murdering someone.



The latter is a situation that has never, to my knowledge, been explicitly documented, at least in the context of Pulp Fiction, but the possibility seems to not be beyond the scope of imagination. All of this depends, of course, on the pre-existing moral compass of the viewer before watching the film as well as their ability to discern the fundamental ethical questions a narrative attempts to engage with. Given the adequate circumstances of a viewer with a firm sense of moral opposition to the uglier behaviors endorsed by the characters, Pulp Fiction reveals itself more noticeably as a film that aims not to negatively influence viewers but to propose a situation where immoral characters find themselves choosing a more honorable route through life, a route that values self-actualization and the avoidance of harm to others. When Jules refrains from shooting Ringo in the final moments of the film and lets him go peacefully, likening the whole affair to the same Biblical verse he used in his earlier killing, Tarantino is framing the whole narrative as a healing device, a way to forgive those who have allowed themselves to behave wrongly.

Thus arises the elusive difficulty of a work like this: even as its narrative poses as a celebration of moral fortitude through the final choices of its characters, it can still contradict itself through the very progression of the narrative. As much as Jules’ refusal to kill Ringo is not represented as “uncool”, the actions that precede this big decision are demonstrated as “cool”. This puts the viewer in a tough situation, perhaps a situation that is itself concerned with ethics: passively let the narrative entertain you as it was designed to and at least consciously let go of the will to deconstruct, or maintain a critical detachment and observe the narrative’s ideological leaps as they occur. If moral footing exists to begin with, both options should result in an identical response whether positive or negative, but if a moral template for reacting to the world is not yet developed, a narrative like Pulp Fiction can run the risk of doing as much damage as a more wholesome narrative can do good.

Certified Copy (2010) A Film by Abbas Kiarostami

Why is it that when a bride quite noticeably puts an eye-drop in her eye in the background of a frame and then cries in the foreground only moments later we still feel for her? The question might as well be the fundamental mystery of movie-going: why do we invest ourselves in narratives that we know are artificial, "staged"? The aforementioned instance occurs late in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, right in the thick of yet another situation that begs the question of reality or fakery. Of all the modern directors who deliberately reference the apparatus of the cinema and storytelling, Kiarostami is the most genuinely probing, using this epistemological issue not just as a clever side-note but as the very backbone of his work. The easy answer, as Kiarostami knows, is that it doesn't matter, that if whatever we're watching, real or fake, can hold a mirror to our own lives, who cares? Yet at the same time, Kiarostami is not satisfied with this answer. In every new film, he aggressively pries at text and subtext, form and content, authenticity and illusion, until hopefully something insightful is revealed in the rubbish of the destruction.

That unexpected object of value, that treasure, is Certified Copy. Playing - perhaps consciously, perhaps not - as a Tuscan version of Richard Linklater's Before Sunset (which gets it off on the right foot right away), the film details a day's encounter between an uppity art dealer named Elle (Juliette Binoche) and an Italian writer named James Miller (William Shimell) who comes into town to lecture about his recent book, the central thesis of which states that the distinction between original artworks and copies is a negligible one as long as it retains the same emotional value. The two of them may or may not have met before, a Marienbad-like mystery that hangs over the entire film. Kiarostami excels at doing the same thing with a mystery that Resnais did: suggest a possible solution only to complicate it moments later, ultimately building up such a heaping pile of these red-herrings that the very basis of reality is obscured. In the opening sequence, it seems clear enough at first that Elle is simply attending Miller's lecture out of scholarly interest, but as her presence grows progressively disruptive (thanks to her bratty kid who whines about hunger in the corner of the hall) and Kiarostami's unadorned mise-en-scene isolates individual expressions at just the right time (first revealing Elle and Miller in the same frame at an equally opportune moment), the question becomes how a woman with merely leisurely reasons for attending the lecture would cause such a quiet stir and leave before the end, not to mention bring her kid in the first place.

Only a few minutes after Elle's son mentions "that man" in lunch conversation and she brushes it off like any mother would when asked an uncomfortable question about her romantic life, Miller is seen in Elle's basement art store circling the shadowy paintings and sculptures before calling halfheartedly to her. Their exchange stays strictly cordial, like two strangers ready to share thoughtful conversation about a subject they share an interest in, but when that conversation does come in a long and revealing car ride (leave it to Kiarostami to dispel his film's thematic keys in the utterly singular social context that is the two front seats), ideological tensions arise that just nearly transcend the domain of detached argumentative discourse, as Elle begins to gradually expose more and more personal quibbles with Miller's cerebral artistic inquiries. Driving past a series of geometrically placed tall trees, the two discuss the theories of Miller's book, referencing the trees in a way that simultaneously reveals their originality and also their essential nature as copies of other trees, especially in such a landscape where humans have sculpted nature to their own aesthetic liking.



So, is it possible that the distinction between originality and replication is actually an inextricable rather than mutually exclusive one? That issue receives a major workout when Elle suddenly goes along with a cafe owner's reference to Miller as bearing the appearance of a great husband, playfully rebutting with his imagined domestic shortcomings and treating Miller as her husband the moment he returns to the room. From there, she's doing one of two things, or perhaps both given the film's philosophical engagement with behavioral dualities: enacting a prolonged role-play as Miller's wife or simply quitting the facade and finally unleashing the buried emotional distress of years of romantic estrangement. Both would put Miller's theories to the test assuming that one of the behavioral modes is not genuine, that one of them is a false construct. Quickly enough, this opens up Kiarostami's confrontational interaction with the audience, challenging the viewer to contemplate which of the various iterations of self that we project on a day-to-day basis is an original, which ones are copies, and which ones, if not all, are both.

This is a richly thought-provoking experiment, as I'm sure is obvious by now, and one that Binoche and Shimmell handle with remarkable grace and dexterity. The entire film hinges on the subtle discrepancies in their performances, Binoche's coming more naturally in her full command of the role and Shimmell's ultimately a bundle of restrained reactions to Binoche's charismatic and embittered matriarch (he being primarily an opera singer and this being his first film role). Their shifting personae are reflected in Kiarostami's staging and framing, with his complicated and spontaneous use of mirrors and his isolation of shot and reverse shot as two images in which the characters look directly into the camera, as if speaking directly to the viewer and to Kiarostami rather than their onscreen counterpart. It's all, seemingly, hyper-controlled, so much so that when a bird flies by a window in the blurred background of a shot in the final scene and provides a perfectly atmospheric touch, it calls to question how much of Kiarostami's cinema really is a total exploitation of artificial staging and how much of it is simply a product of being in the right place at the right time, a collection of truly original moments. Make no mistake about it, despite the film's conscious integration of classic European art cinema tropes and its outspoken skepticism about the very notion of originality in art, Certified Copy is one-of-a-kind.

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.