The Holy Girl (La Niña Santa) A Film by Lucrecia Martel (2004)

In Lucrecia Martel's world, seedy scenarios are established only for them to taper off gradually while their psychological repercussions echo in the minds of her characters. In her 2008 film The Headless Woman, that axis point was a potential killing, and in her previous work, the heady and discreet The Holy Girl, it takes the form of a middle-aged doctor's public molestation of the adolescent of the title. Martel's interests lie not in observing the precise results of her central mysteries but in examining the confused psyches of her characters who are forced to make some sense of actions that appear senseless and integrate their repressed feelings of guilt and disorder into functioning everyday life. Fittingly, her films take place in unmistakably public places so that there is no escape from social situations, thus amplifying the clash between fleshy instincts and intellectual affectations. For Amalia (María Alche), a young catholic school girl who lives in a spacious, unwelcoming old Argentine hotel with her mother and hotel owner Helena (Mercedes Morán), an attempt is made to tie her victimization to her religious coursework while simultaneously hiding the particulars from her classmates and her family. For Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso), an Otolaryngologist at a medical convention in the hotel, his central act of indecency must be shielded from an entire legion of colleagues as well as Helena, whom he quickly threatens an adulterous relationship with much to the ignorance of her connection to Amalia.

Martel relishes the tricky task of balancing several narrative threads throughout the film: Amalia's evolving relationship with her best friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) with whom she shares typically girly pastimes but also a growing sexual curiosity, Dr. Jano's flirtation with Helena and casual treatment of her mild tinnitus, Amalia's persistent stalking of Dr. Jano (the true purpose of which is the film's intriguing perplexity), and several other minor subplots, from the vaguely incestuous relationship of Helena and her brother to Josefina's attempted, but ultimately unsuccessful, denial of pre-marital sex with her boyfriend. As in Antonioni, theme, rather than plot, dictates rhythm, and as such Martel hurdles unexpectedly between undercurrents of shame, sexual desire, gossip, guilt, and the supernatural. Further associating disparate elements is the idea of vocation, which is differentiated by its Catholic application ("God's call" as discussed in Amalia and Josefine's classes) and its practical, common application (a person's job or position in life). If Dr. Jano is a medical healer who betrays his best intentions by defiling Amalia, then Amalia sets out to be a spiritual healer when she chooses not to spill the information about Dr. Jano in favor of an intended religious salvation.

Or is this her intention? The word "mission" is uttered obliquely numerous times by Amalia to Josefina, which would suggest that Amalia has taken it upon herself to heed God's call in delivering Dr. Jano from sin, but it's easy to surmise that there's something else on her mind when she quietly lurks the hotel premises, deliberately placing herself in physical proximity to him seeking brief contact. Was she perversely attracted to Dr. Jano's understated rubbing of his crotch against her behind in a public gathering where a street performer was playing a theremin? Is she trying to tease out repeat encounters? Or is she merely taunting him, making him truly feel the gravity of his actions? Martel makes it clear elsewhere that these girls are capable of immaturity, gossiping disruptively in class about the teacher's (Mía Maestro) out-of-class romantic affairs, so the latter wouldn't seem far out of line.



But sexuality and violence are also at the forefront of their imaginations, and indeed menace emanates from the film like an animal looking to angrily burst from its cage. One mesmerizing, tension-filled sequence whips the camera around frantically in heated anticipation of danger as the girls frolic cheerfully through the woods (almost identical to the woods in The Headless Woman) trying to discover the source of gunshots. As if to cement their careless flirtation with death, a pair of hunters jog through the back of the frame at the very end of the scene. Later, a naked man falls from a window right outside the girls' classroom, barely surviving, after which Martel makes a brilliant cut to Helena's frozen, sleeping body. Amalia places her hand in the air over her back and wakes her up, momentarily borrowing the mysticism of the theremin player. These and other mysteriously troubling occurrences pile up throughout The Holy Girl, lending a premonition of an inevitable explosion. However, this explosion never comes, and the tension keeps elevating until it's unbearable in the final shot of Amalia and Josefina calmly doing backstrokes and whistling to themselves in the dilapidated hotel pool, a potent image of vulnerability. Martel's cinema radiates the sense of multiple things going on just outside our and the characters' consciousness(es), just beyond comprehension, which keeps her films at a near-constant level of anxiety, although it's never quite clear how much of this feeling stems from concrete reasons within the film and how much is just a psychological effect she is able to conjure in her characters in an attempt to accurately reflect their jostled and transient states.

Much of this uncertainty has to come from Martel's totalizing, exacting audiovisual approach, which combines decidedly fragmentary compositions, aggressively elliptical editing, and atmospheric sound design. Few directors today pay as much of obsessive attention to both every square inch of the frame as well as the entire space beyond it; when it comes down to it, Martel ultimately creates environments rather than a space for single scenes, choosing deliberately to visually fragment the space as if to set herself the challenge of expanding the world beyond the frame as much as possible. And yet, for all this pedantry, few directors are also able to suspend the kind of magnificent distrust of the cinematic image that Martel fosters. The surfaces of The Holy Girl seem self-contained, natural, diegetic, yet given microscopic inspection one uncovers sounds sneaking into the mix that seem to have no business being in the particular scenes they're in (or at least not at such a volume). Martel's distinctive manner of framing - filming entire scenes in close-ups, shooting from behind necks, cutting off essential body parts, choosing to let the speaker in a conversation be the character in the blurred background rather than the arbitrary figure in the foreground - is a way of throwing off the comfortable balance of a narrative, as is her radical cutting techniques, wherein an unshowy, seemingly in-scene cut can and often does signal a drastic leap in time and even place.

I certainly haven't comprehensively figured out The Holy Girl on a subtextual level, but it's clear enough that Martel is a highly experiential filmmaker whose evocative works - perched somewhere between the cerebral alienation of Antonioni and the sensuousness of Denis - tend to fly in the face of rational interpretation. That there are moments here of startling truthfulness, however, in which the behaviors of characters seem silly from a logical standpoint but emotionally dead-on, appears to suggest that Martel has elevated her unique examination of human nature to a level of artistry divorced from language. The Holy Girl isn't uniformly breathtaking (a few scenes of casual interaction between Helena and various hotel workers feel middling in spite of their perfectly realized sociological tensions, drawing the attention away from the strongest dramatic areas) but when it manages to fulfill its destabilizing vision of burgeoning sexuality competing with religious and social conventions, it does so in striking and inexhaustible ways.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) A Film by Monte Hellman

If the American road movie has popularly been about the freedom and progress that the road offers, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop radically reverses that paradigm. Fixated on stagnation and loneliness in spite of the constant movement, the film introduces characters who drive to far-out corners of the United States merely for the hell of it, who spend their time searching aimlessly for new drag races and new car owners to whom they can assert their ride's superiority. There are no feel-good undertones here, just the hypnotizing solitude and endlessness of the highway. A driver (famous singer James Taylor) and a mechanic (Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson), both unnamed, drive the kind of beat-looking but powerful '55 Chevy that only a car freak could truly appreciate, and their time is consumed by driving to nothing in particular, racing a townie automobile aficionado, and then fixing the damage to do it all again. An end goal or purpose is never clear, and the Sisyphean ourobouros they have entered shows no signs of deteriorating.

Hellman displays the punchy gift of a minimalist in his establishing of this closed-off world of motors, tires, and cement, starting the film on an enigmatic nighttime race scene that turns quickly into a getaway from the police. The details of this sequence - who they are racing, the simple geometry of the raceway, where they are, where the cops come from - are thickly obscured by the atmospheric wordlessness of the scene, the way that the roar of the engines and uncertain expanse of the dark road overwhelms any sense of comprehension or stability. Hellman cuts the scene into a methodical dance between shadowy eyes darting around the road and the rear-view mirror, tires gripping pavement, and speedometers flickering upwards. It's a spare, visceral vision of car racing that attempts to capture the feeling of this lifestyle rather than render narrative logic, and indeed Hellman continues to portray it in this abstract manner throughout the film, so that the real experience these outcasts seem to live for is exclusively a feeling, a mode of being, like a brief drug trip. In fact, for a film so intimately tied to this pastime, the actual car racing remains a minor sidenote in the film, a ghostly presence on the fringes of the day-to-day lifestyle which proves to be taken up more by uneventful driving, laborious gas station stops to fill up the tank and tend to the engine, and quiet side-of-the-road cafe breaks.

The film is so dedicated to capturing these in-between stretches of boredom and stasis in as much detail as possible that it winds up completely stripping away any of the glamor that might be connected to the social universe of car racing. As if to further remove it from prestige and authenticity, Hellman enters G.T.O (Warren Oates) to the mix, a suave poser named after his shining yellow Pontiac G.T.O (a more eye-catching and consumer-friendly muscle car than the Chevy). G.T.O passive-aggressively wages competition between the two cars, revving up his engine to pass them on a country road while claiming to various hitchhikers that they are the ones acting up. Finally at a southwestern gas station they arrange a cross-country race to Washington D.C. for pink slips after a tense, prolonged exchange of adversarial glances. Hellman maintains a bizarre distance during conversational scenes such as these, shooting in long takes and letting action occur in the foreground, middle ground, and background all at once. For speaking to even be considered, aimless walking about and circling the cars must ensue to a point where each party has a firm sense of preconceived notions before opening his mouth. At one point, the driver and the mechanic roll through a crowded vehicle gathering late at night, Wilson robotically reciting the technical specs of each car before they stop to incite a race with the one they know will be most challenging. For them, life is a relentless compiling of practical knowledge and pursuit of competition.



Their well-groomed automobile savviness is countered by Oates' desperate desire to appear tough and sophisticated. When he forcefully regales his passengers with the particulars of his Pontiac as cited in the car manual, one gets the sense that he doesn't grasp any real working knowledge of these terms, only that he obtains pleasure from sounding esoteric and loaded. This artificiality extends to his personal life, which he mythologizes in many mutating shapes and sizes; at one point he's an ex-military officer, another time he's a man who abandoned his wife and daughter for life on the road, and later he's the guardian of Taylor and Wilson. Slowly this role-playing transforms from pestering to deeply tragic and deformed, the vague ramblings of a dreamer without any clearly defined personality for whom the route to self-actualization is as endless and ill-defined as the path of the road itself. Oates, in his chameleonic cashmere sweaters and black leather driving gloves, is brilliant in the performance, spewing a hideous stench of self-righteousness yet also managing to convey an emotional volatility on display most movingly in a scene with a nameless hitchhiking girl (Laurie Bird) who has been traveling with Taylor and Wilson throughout the film. As she dozes off in the passenger seat, he kicks into a classic monologue about "getting away" and "living the simple life", yet it's clear that all he's ever been doing is trying to get away from something internal that he is afraid to confront.

Speaking of the girl, she's one of the many fascinating thematic ciphers in Two-Lane Blacktop, a mysterious figure searching for connection just as urgently as Oates but with none of the smug self-consciousness. Beautiful, directionless, and infatuated with the romanticism of the road, it's as if she snuck out of the backdoor of a Godard film and wandered into Taylor and Wilson's car only to be simultaneously unsettled and entranced by their blankness and social indifference. They barely register her stealth entrance into the film in the background of a wide shot, failing to acknowledge her presence in the backseat when they return from a meal in a diner. Gradually however, they forge an unspoken interest in her, both battling quietly for her affections but never achieving anything close to a functional relationship. When she exits the film towards the end the same way she came in - her body vanishing into the background in another vehicle - the driver and the mechanic know it was bound to happen, that their endless silences broken up only by concise exchanges about technical matters would wear heavily on her and eventually bore her. Had she been willing to stick around forever without any change, they would have welcomed the idea, but like everything else in the world besides cars, she is ultimately disposable.

So the film, a mostly wordless character study written large across the canvas of the American countryside, concludes the way it began: anti-social loners scraping by just to keep driving and dreamers involving themselves in new experiences to add to their ever-growing mental database of fictional constructs. There are neither psychological epiphanies nor narrative satisfactions. In fact, the alleged "race" that the two cars embark on was essentially over before it even started. Stopping and starting as casually as any driver might on a long trip, the journey becomes more about routine, labor, and killing time than anything else, with the three men forming an unlikely camaraderie by the end. If there's any hope to be found in this unnerving ode to meaninglessness and alienation, it's in the rare coming together of these two different kinds of outcasts, the sharing of mutual goallessness. Never has a film so potently conveyed the spiritual vacuity of life on the road.

Dazed and Confused (1993) A Film by Richard Linklater

It’s difficult to imagine a better film about the pent-up restlessness and aimless recreation of suburban teendom than Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Made during a time when Linklater was seemingly incapable of churning out anything less than effortless entertainments that doubled as poetic works of art, and set in a time (the 1970’s) that the baby boomer Linklater knows well, the film lovingly reflects the era without falling into nostalgia traps. Instead of romanticizing a sense of limitless possibilities and never-ending fun, Linklater seems determined to depict how little there was to do, how so much of the time spent any given day was spent thinking about what could be happening. Wisely, that's what the film posits about every decade; people are so often thinking about the could-have-been's, would-have-been's, and should-be's that they neglect the joys that the present can offer. But this seemingly didactic message is merely a delicate subtext flowing beneath the surface of a film whose modest goal is to simply capture the essence of a particular time and attitude and thus discover something essential about growing up in any place at any time.

Like many of Linklater's early films, Dazed and Confused occurs on an unobstructed linear timeline over the course of one day and is a marvel of economy and pacing. Plotwise, the film's connective tissue is varsity quarterback Randall "Pink" Floyd's (Jason London) mental wrestling with an authoritative document passed down from high school coaches mandating chastity from drugs and alcohol during both the upcoming offseason and season. For Pink and his best friends, scribbling a signature means not only sacrificing freedom but also what constitutes the entire lifeblood of high school and youth for them: drinking, smoking, and hanging out with nothing to do but pass the time blasting Aerosmith and Alice Cooper. This utter lack of productivity, the value of which is so impossible to explain in words but is so evocatively reproduced by Linklater, is the bread and butter of the high school years. It permeates not only the typically party-hardy jocks - Fred O'Bannion (Ben Affleck), Don Dawson (Sasha Jenson, Melvin Spivey (Jason O. Smith), and Benny O'Donnell (Cole Hauser) - but also the introspective wannabe intellectuals who over-analyze their every move (Mike Newhouse (Adam Goldberg), Tony Olson (Anthony Rapp), and Cynthia Dunn (Marissa Ribisi)), the potheads and music junkies who are willing to do anything as long as weed is present (Ron Slater (Rory Cochrane) and Kevin Pickford (Shawn Andrews)), and the naive incoming freshman who spend their time imagining what the high school experience might be like and mythologizing the various popular seniors (Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), Sabrina David (Christin Hinojosa), Carl Burnett (Esteban Powell), Tommy Houston (Mark Vandermeulen), and John Hirschfelder (Jeremy Fox)).

All these individuals and many more congregate on the final day of school in May of 1976 and the subsequent morning to celebrate their mutual hit-or-miss aimlessness, driving around their small Texas town looking for something to do until finally out of this nothingness a "beer bust" is created by the moontower on the outskirts of town. Before this point, everyone partitions their time between a burger joint and a pool hall, going back and forth with reckless abandon as mid-70's rock hits blaze from the speakers of cars and countless beers get swigged in backseats. There's something ritualistic about the way Linklater films the driving sequences from a head-on view (the same angle that would be employed as homage in That 70's Show), as if the passengers are in the aisles of church and the road is their religious rite of passage. Beyond that, Linklater's use of driving as a structural element in itself charges the film with relentless movement; if the activity in one car begins to grow tiresome (and it never does), cross-cut to another to see what else is going on. In its middle stage the film becomes a riotous collage of different characters, behaviors, and moods set against different moving backdrops. The unspoken punchline is that all this momentum is actually leading nowhere, only the same rounds of tomfoolery as usual.



Linklater is quick to establish the 70's as anything but idyllic and faultless. The entire first act revolves around the freshman "initiation procedures", a series of good-natured but mostly malicious lashings and tasks handed down by the overenthusiastic seniors. This would succinctly be deemed "hazing" nowadays, but in Dazed and Confused's world it's an orientation that is allowed or at the very least turned a blind eye towards by school authority figures and parents (the one exception being Tommy's mother, who pulls a rifle on O'Bannion as he's preparing his session of ass-whipping in her front yard). While the football players run off with their thick wooden bats, the head cheerleaders - Darla Marks (Parker Posey), Jodi Kramer (Michelle Burke), Simone Kerr (Joey Lauren Adams), and Shavonne Wright (Deena Martin) - round up the freshman girls to bark orders, dump assorted condiments on them, and force them to make marriage requests to the male seniors watching on the sidelines. Curiously, the freshman seem to feel they deserve it, and other times they embrace it as a door to popularity and maturity. Linklater never comes right out and denounces the characters for it, but there are certain moments when he deftly draws attention to the perverse cruelty of it all, such as when he cuts away to Mike and Tony discussing the ridiculousness of the proceedings from the parking lot, or when the disconcertingly overeager O'Bannion (who allegedly failed senior year on purpose to get another shot at the incoming freshman) swings at Mitch's behind repeatedly in slow motion, which manages to heighten the viciousness, not to mention the implicit sadism, of the act.

For the most part, however, the film chugs along in an upbeat manner, its anthemic soundtrack and Linklater's popping color scheme contributing a patina of stylishness and energy. And of course the guilty pay for their actions (O'Bannion finds himself dripping with white paint after being set up by the freshman boys and is never again seen in the film after a ferocious outburst) and the innocent get rewarded (Mitch and Sabrina both find love interests by the end of a long, eye-opening and booze-swilling night), a system whose determinism is undercut by the sheer hilarity and spontaneousness of the night. Other characters straddle the line between reprehensible and benevolent, such as Pink and Jodi, who both participate in the procedures but later become active supporters of the freshman, inviting them out for the night as if drinking beer, breaking mailboxes, and driving aimlessly is some noble and substantial route to self-actualization. So often Linklater uses the pumped-up soundtrack - a smorgasbord of critically maligned and supposedly "trashy" rock-and-roll smash hits - to raise an emotional tension amongst the elements: the hopeful "School's Out For Summer" scores the frantic escape of the freshman from the seniors, the anticipatory "Low Rider" bellows as the characters ride around in dejection after Pickford's big party is canceled, and in the final shot, "Slow Ride" urges the characters to "take it easy!" when really they should be doing anything but.



That the Criterion booklet provides a Linklater-penned "yearbook" section with in-depth descriptions of each characters' personal quirks and aspirations suggests that Linklater so fastidiously thought out his characters that any hour-and-a-half attempt to fully flesh them all out was bound to fail on some level. Yet what's so surprising about Dazed and Confused is that so few individuals in its massive ensemble feel exclusively like high school types (one of the few exceptions being Slater, a quintessential stoner so hysterically exaggerated that his spaced-out asides manage to move beyond the stereotypical and into the mythic.) There's a generous attempt here to not only imbue each character with multiple and seemingly clashing sensibilities (Pink's simultaneous jock-isms and stoner-isms, Mike's longing for "visceral experience" in spite of his talky persona) but also to prove that the various cliques of public schooling can coexist harmoniously. Hell, there's even two vagabond townies - the creepily suave David Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) and the tough greaser Clint Bruno (Nicky Katt) - who blend right in with their younger high school acquaintances, and McConaughey's so good in what is his first and best role that it seems as if the part, an organic mixture of feel-good ethos and indiscriminate philandering, was written expressly for him. Such is the case with most of the film's best performers, who sink right into their roles likely with firsthand experience and contrast sharply against the lesser abilities of some of the younger actors (Wiggins, Hinojosa, and Powell especially).

The beer bust is the orgiastic meeting place of all these superficially disparate individuals who are really in search of the same things (beer, weed, and companionship), and it provides the fittingly explosive backdrop for the film's final act. Linklater sticks to the same method of balancing several mini-narratives at once by intercutting among the various gatherings at the party just as he did between cars earlier in the film. The social subtext is ever-present: the appearance of activity and momentum disguises the basic purposelessness of the endeavor. But what's so fascinating about Dazed and Confused is that it argues for the lack of purpose as a purpose in itself, the vessel through which Pink eventually rebels against the stuffy "Neo-McCarthyism" of the school's leaders and the guise under which Mitch is able to enter high school with a veneer of hipness. Linklater does not arrive at this juncture through directorial insistence but rather by discovering it spontaneously in mid-air. Dazed and Confused's ultimate achievement is crystallizing the feeling of throwing caution to the wind and indulging in all luxuries, caring little for the inevitable explosion of future repercussions.

Screening Notes #6

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and 2 (2010, 2011): I can't comment on the narrative content, because having seen these films far apart and in questionable order, all the story's complexities (needless complications of wizardry?) still baffle me. But I must admit that these final two films by director David Yates, the franchise's Jonathon Papelbon, pack a distinctively ominous and dreary wallop when compared to the rest of the series. There are moments, fleeting as ever, but still moments, in which Yates' terrific ability to dredge up a palpable atmosphere of doom just overwhelms any concerns of plot and character, particularly during the epic intercutting in Part 2 between Voldemort's army's approach and Harry's search for the second-to-last horcrux (?), one of several elements to pull from the Lord of the Rings playbook (a confused brunette protagonist perversely lured to the darkness through the magnetism of various jewelry, a villain's evil, disembodied whisper flung through an unstable delay effect, and ugly, amoral, boulder-swinging behemoths). One animated episode in Part 1, for further proof, might be the franchise's shining moment. Yet a sense of the momentousness of this cultural occasion, the wrapping-up of a ten-year-old cinematic saga based on the most commercially relevant work of popular literature of our time, is curiously missing from these films. So awkwardly handled is the final twenty minutes - energy here, hefty exposition there, thin character drama somewhere - that a tacked-on epilogue can only elicit embarrassed chuckles, the final straw in an oddly insubstantial realization.

Louie: Season 2 (2011): While Louie gets progressively unfunny (Louie's friend Pamela puts it aptly when she says "you're like, the most boring comedian ever", and I don't think she means it entirely as an insult), which is mostly a way of saying its punchlines spread out significantly and most of its time is spent not trying to be a comedy, it also gets far more direct and unsentimental about the way we live our lives, the way we hold insecurities, possess dreams, take things for granted, and lose our grip on reality. Already this new season boasts several snippets of scrappy, blue-collar profundity: Louie waxes depressively about the insignificance of life to a girl he takes on a date, explains to his daughter that every second she spends on Earth should be cherished, and spews his deepest romantic impulses to Pamela, a take-no-bullshit single mom with no interest in Louie beyond buddy-buddy friendship. Fortunately, Louie's stoic, drawn-out manner of articulation is quite funny in a dry, even arid way, and he makes what might be the most fearlessly confessional show on television also a modest entertainment.

Mars Attacks! (1996): It's inspiring to me that piles of studio money was spent on this garbled, deliberately shoddy expansion of a defunct line of sensationalist trading cards from the 60's. That Tim Burton, one of the most happily grotesque big-business directors working today, was able to muster up a fruitful career after this politically inflammatory, misanthropic vision of alien apocalypse is startling and reassuring, proving that Hollywood has a flicker of sensitivity for brash, anti-corporate sensibilities and campy, D-grade aesthetics. Granted, Burton has not made anything as personal or memorable as this schlocky piece of trash since (nor has he worked with as killer a cast), and the images of radioactive chaos and destruction he created were more than enough to make up for the lopsided pacing and haphazard logic.

500 Days of Summer (2009): I watched it for Zooey, but even she can't temper 500 Days of Summer's extraordinary annoyances. Every time an emotional undercurrent or a thematic shift is registered organically in conversation (and the actors do quite a handsome job of maintaining chemistry and expressing longing and frustration), director Marc Webb feels the need to address it through some stylistic shift, some quirky device that underlines his characters' emotional subtexts. What he doesn't realize is that instead of highlighting and immortalizing the tricky sensations of romance, these handsy moves simplify his characters' actions and feelings, making them redundant and generic. I've rarely seen a film so unsure of itself as 500 Days of Summer, but that has nothing to do with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's confusions and insecurities and everything to do with Webb's inability to express anything complex or subtle about human interaction outside the domain of Hallmark signs and symbols. Also, it's impossible to ignore the breathtakingly sappy ending wherein Gordon-Levitt meets a new broad named Autumn to symbolize his new beginning.

Midnight in Paris (2011) A Film by Woody Allen

I've been disappointingly slow in catching up with the latter half of Woody Allen's oversaturated directorial career, which seems to be defined by countless riffs on the same themes, stories, and characters. What Midnight in Paris appears to suggest is that in his old age Allen has grown both wiser in his worldview and more juvenile and obvious in his delivery methods. The film's hokey premise – an insecure Hollywood screenwriter and wannabe novelist Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) strays from his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) on their Paris vacation to find himself moonlighting in the 1920's nightlife among his various artistic idols – feels ready-made for a high-school-level improv skit, or perhaps a young Allen-influenced filmmaker trying his hand at self-referential comedy. (If this is the so-called late career "comeback" Woody needed, I have even less anticipation for his other recent films.) But while the scenario compulsively heightens in absurdity, with Gil speaking dreamy gibberish about his new friends in the 1920's and Inez writing him off as some drugged-out lunatic, or his eventual romantic pursuit of a Picasso mistress named Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Allen's firm grasp of it rises in conviction, sincerity, and sheer craftsmanship. In a nutshell, Midnight in Paris is the grand, eccentric realization of an utterly stupid idea.

The film's treatment of Paris as a lively receptacle of history and culture, where ghosts of the past slide with ease into the present (a metaphor made concrete through the scenario), hearkens back to Allen's Manhattan, where the American city was treated as similarly fertile ground for artistic influence. But there's something different going on here; Allen's latest film is not so much a love letter to a city as it is the deconstruction of a mind so smitten with a city that it sees that which is not there, or put in other words, finds creation in reality. Midnight in Paris, then, could have been set anywhere with as vivid a cultural lineage as the French capital, allowing that the main character was as doe-eyed about it as Gil is about Paris. Arriving there at the beginning of the film, Gil lectures Inez about the allure of the city like a schoolboy recounting his playground adventures to his mother. Problem is, it's not only Gil lecturing but also Allen unsubtly dishing out character exposition through explicit address rather than a casual compiling of conversational details, something that he can't seem to stop doing in Midnight in Paris. At one point, when the couple meets Inez's parents for dinner, Gil quickly launches into an anti-Tea Party rant, seemingly for the express purpose of establishing that Inez comes from a Republican family.

Allen continues to layer the unlikeable qualities of Inez and her family – Inez is taken by the pseudo-intellectual filibustering of her old professor Paul (Michael Sheen) and she eventually hits the sack with him, her mother is a materialistic snob who thinks that an $18,000 wicker chair is affordable, and her nosy father goes out of his way to hire a private eye to follow Gil on his nightly prances around the city – until it's only natural that the film finds an escape route to the 1920's, some breathing room from the stuffy social atmosphere of the present. The film presents the past through Gil's glorified lens, a fantasyland where nightlife is always raging and everyone he runs into is a legend in the history of Western literature, artwork, or cinema. Wilson plays off this spectacle with wonderfully slapsticky immediacy; his initial reaction to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) is a precarious mixture of disbelief and amusement, and as the big names pile up over the course of his first night in ancient Paris (Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) it's not unlike the sight of watching a first-time drunk happily accepting his thorough displacement (one reaction shot as the legends all dance together at a cabaret is particularly priceless). Gil's experiences in this bygone era are so ludicrously idealized – he becomes acquaintances, if not friends, with nearly every historical figure he bumps into – that it's tough not to see it as an elaborate mental construction, a perfect dream. To return to this dream, Gil has created a simple escape mechanism: all he has to do is sit on a specific set of steps just as the midnight gong rings in the new day for the entire look and feel of the film (the production design, cinematography, and costumes) to be suddenly and magically ruptured.



Protruding from this set-up is a plot involving Gil's idyllic love object (Cotillard's Adriana), allowing Allen to chart the hilarious disconnect between past and present. This is most skillfully rendered in a great bit of physical comedy when Gil steals Inez's favorite diamond earrings to give them to Adriana based on her written yearnings in an old French memoir that is translated for Gil by a present-day museum tour guide. Of course Inez returns to the hotel room with her parents partially to grab the earrings and Gil is forced to pluck them out of their gift box nearly in front of her eyes to fake them being scattered in the bathroom. Other times, Allen uses the drastic separation in time to plant clever in-jokes about artist's careers: Gil, in an attempt to surprise Adriana with his creative genius, drops the seed for The Exterminating Angel to Luis Bunuel, Ernest Hemingway speaks in a stoic, poetic manner typical of his prose, and Gil must prove to a suicide-prone Zelda with little evidence that's not creepy or mind-boggling that her husband's only love is for her. Towards the end of the film when Adriana reveals her glorification of the Belle Époque in a way that instantly recalls Gil's blind love for the 1920's, it's easy to see where Allen's taking us, but the general predictability of the whole affair is never overwhelming or self-defeating. In fact, unusually for a film about the awkward leaping between time periods, Midnight in Paris's greatest asset is its remarkable pacing and flow, the care and precision with which Allen has arranged his images (the honeyed gas-lamp glow courtesy of cinematographer Darius Khondji is one of the finest visual accomplishments in Allen's career).

In spite of the pitch-perfect cast however, there's often a noticeable stiffness to the line deliveries, a lack of the natural chemistry existing in Allen's best work, and this shortcoming becomes even more pronounced when Allen makes Wilson spell out the film's heavy-handed lesson about the fallacy of romanticizing the past in neglect of the present during a scene in the Belle Époque with Cotillard, a thematic thrust gradually hinted at by various characters throughout the film. Funny thing is, Allen seems to contradict his own message by presenting the past exclusively as a place of historical caricatures and endless intrigue and the present as (mostly) a place of uppity, snotty Americans who take for granted the simple things in life, including female representations that border on the sexist (all that's missing is the sickly blue tint that so many unimaginative directors incorporate when trying to evoke the despair of our modern world). A belated first try at romance between Gil and a Parisian record-store employee (Léa Seydoux) with whom he seems to share everything is a flimsy stab at surrounding the present with an equal sense of mysteries and opportunities on the horizon, not to mention the fact that it provides the film's eye-rolling final scene. But major flaws aside, it's hard to get past the feeling that Allen's saying something essential and timeless here about the threat of succumbing entirely to nostalgia, and that he's saying it inside a taut and assured package.

Record Club: Sam Amidon "All is Well" (2007)

It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to.
- Jean-Luc Godard

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
- Jim Jarmusch

There’s a misnomer is modern music – in fact, in all modern art – that originality and authenticity of vision is of utmost importance, that an artist must write a song or a filmmaker must produce a novel concept in order to be worthy of consideration on the high altar of art. So widely accepted is this belief in individuality that the once-prevalent traditions of community art and the popular domain have mostly dwindled and become unfashionable. Over the course of his career, Vermont musician Sam Amidon has been gently deconstructing this myth by rearranging, reharmonizing, and recontextualizing ancient Appalachian folk songs. Managing a miraculous balancing act by paying gloriously self-conscious homage to public domain music and maintaining a vivid stamp of independence simultaneously, his work is living proof that originality and mimicry are not so mutually exclusive. The feelings I get listening to Amidon’s eclectic folk music are quite a unique privilege in contemporary music; I am privy to what feels like the private musings of a single consciousness and also the countless emotional undercurrents of a more universal consciousness. By the time the sentiments inherent in the songs Amidon lovingly covers reach his distinctively affectless croon, they’ve been filtered through an abundance of voices before him, yet they are somehow singular with each new utterance.

His 2007 album All is Well, his fourth effort in a body of work consisting of four proper solo LP's and a couple of EP's and team efforts for which Amidon regularly takes a massive artistic leap, is perhaps the best example of this balance between respect for the original and fearless pursuit of the new, a concise sampling of ten moody tracks from the displaced pages of American musical history. For the most part, Amidon luxuriates in the domain of traditional folk instrumentation (acoustic guitar, fiddle, banjo, piano), yet it's both the strange places he takes those instruments as well as the unexpected additions to the palette that make All is Well such a quietly enthralling work. His two pivotal collaborators - young American composer Nico Muhly and Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurosson, both of whom have formed their own impressive bodies of work - push Amidon out of his comfort zone of sparse folk exhibited on his prior album But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted, using their own backgrounds in electronic and orchestral experimentation to provide nuanced and fanciful additions to Amidon's evocative, bare-bones covers.

The oddities creep in slowly though, allowing time for the equally impressive moments of pure restraint to take hold. This is evident right from the album's opening track, a cover of a tune called "Sugar Baby" popularized by banjo troubadour Dock Boggs in the 1920's, one of the record's highest peaks and a fitting introduction to the melancholy, introspective atmosphere Amidon likes to conjure. Boggs' gorgeously expressive version was a frantic assualt of messy banjo plucking and nearly unintelligible lyrics pleading desperately through thick static for his "sugar baby" to return to him. Amidon reverses the formula altogether. His is a slow, meditative rendition, one that so thoroughly stretches out the repetitive refrains ("I got no sugar baby now", " Who'll rock the cradle when you're gone?") that they acquire an aching emotional urgency more serious and convincing than that of Boggs. All of a sudden the story of a man pining for his true love to come back home to him and their child possesses a contemporary relevance, a plea for the many marriages on the rocks in today's scatterbrained society. Here Amidon's simple acoustic picking is supplemented by the muted electric guitar melodies of Pakistani musician Shahzad Ismaily and a single bass clarinet. At just over five minutes, the song's desolate sound-scape is hypnotizing in its repetitiousness and emotional sincerity.

"Sugar Baby" is probably the album's most musically straightforward tune; from here Amidon & Co. complicate the rhythms, melodies, countermelodies, and song structures, taking them further and further away from their origins. The contrast between a song like "Sugar Baby" and the subsequent track, the enigmatic and darkly propulsive "Little Johnny Brown", is much like the gaping contrast between past renditions of these songs and Amidon's. More often than not, the ancient folk songs Amidon is covering have rarely before even been paired with instruments, a notable example being "O Death", a morbid acapella poem famously sung by Ralph Stanley on the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Therefore Amidon's compositions, which feel natural and lived-in, are all the more breathtaking for their having been ignited from either nothing or from something radically different. "Little Johnny Brown" is as stunning a testament as any, a series of words originally taken from a children's singing game by Ella Jenkins in the 1960's that become unsettling and almost demonic as they are looped and overlapped by Amidon towards the end of the track like a perverse equivalent of "Ring Around the Rosy", all while piano cadences and bizarrely percussive snaps and clicks circulate around Amidon's central guitar part.



In fact, what is happening on a subtextual level in "Little Johnny Brown" is happening throughout the album in different ways: the sense of Muhly and Valgeir's fluffy additions teasing out the underlying emotions from Amidon's droning, inexpressive voice (interestingly enough I don't mean that as an insult), similar to the way Robert Bresson's nifty cinematographic moves suggest otherwise hidden tensions in the blank facades of his characters. As a result, the songs are open to a seemingly limitless number of interpretations as the multitude of impressions in Amidon's wry inflections pile up. Every song on All is Well consists of a narrator relaying a story: an immigrant's gleeful account of his lover back home in "Saro", a prideful and eventually violent encounter with the boyfriend of a girl he's flirting with in "Wild Bill Jones", a boy excitedly reminding his date to prepare her outfit in "Wedding Dress", a religious devotee's self-assured leaving of a woman in "Fall On My Knees", a guileless young romance in "Little Satchel", a fearful confrontation with premature death in "O Death", a boy's realization that his love for his family is bigger than his pride in the escape from home parable of "Prodigal Son", and a stoic acceptance of impending mortality in the closing title track. Yet each of these cursory summaries does little to suggest the sublime layers of emotional complexity buried within Amidon's takes. Among many other surprises, the pensive air of "Wild Bill Jones" suggests skepticism to battle the narrator's misguided sense of pride, the serpentine disconnection of sub-bass and fingerpicked banjo on "Fall On My Knees" and the distant cackle and dissonant strings the song concludes with all challenge the narrator's feelings and actions, and the deeply sad sprawl of the strings in "All is Well" demonstrate that all is indeed not well.

All is Well is arranged in such a way to offer shifting relationships on its core themes of guilt, naivete vs. wisdom, death, love, and faith. There are three strands running through the album: the guilt theme cutting across "Wild Bill Jones", "Fall On My Knees", and "Prodigal Son", the romance theme stretching through "Sugar Baby", "Saro", "Wedding Dress", and "Little Satchel", and the inquiry into mortality at first abstractly marking "Little Johnny Brown" and then directly approached in "O Death" and "All is Well". It's as if with the progression of the record Amidon's narrators grow increasingly world-weary and knowing, or in other instances, such as in the approach to love, more juvenile. One can witness the palpable release of fear from the protagonist of "O Death" by the time he gets to "All is Well", in which the greeting of death, at least lyrically, suggests an awakening. Similarly, the knee-jerk gun-slinging of "Wild Bill Jones" in the event of heavy jealousy gives way obliquely to the devastating weight of guilt in "Prodigal Son", wherein Amidon again works with repetitious refrains ("I believe I'll go back home / acknowledge I done wrong") against a bouncy and plaintive fanfare of upright bass, french horn, clarinet, and strings.

Throughout the album, there are moments of musical bliss that supersede any of the narrative or thematic content, such as the violins swelling up ecstatically at the 2:05 marker of "Saro", the many extended rings of piano and banjo in "Wild Bill Jones", the crack of Amidon's voice as he stretches for the high notes in "O Death", or the growing sense of anticipation expressed by the growing number of instruments in "All is Well". Nico Muhly, whose 2008 watermark of modern classical Mothertongue was among the many albums I considered for this Record Club pick, has an instinctive feel for orchestration that seems to be heightened when paired with other artists, so much so that as much as Muhly's sensibilities challenge Amidon, Amidon's spare folk forces Muhly to temper his sometimes madcap and unrestricted tendencies. Combining the legato string arrangements of Arvo Pärt, the fluttery bells and whistles of Sufjan Stevens, and the forceful repetitions of Phillip Glass yet maintaining a distinctive oddness of his own, Muhly brings surprising beauty to these songs, a measure of pastoral charm and fairy-tale whimsy that is able to dance around Amidon's voice in unpredictable but never overbearing ways. Furthemore, Valgeir's touches, less noticeable but no less affecting, offer subliminal hints of modern electronica and electro-acoustic improvisation, not to mention his high-fidelity engineering of the record gives great room for the instruments to reverberate in space.

If hard-pressed to pick a low point on All is Well, I'd have to settle on the jubilant "Little Satchel", if only for the fact that its romantic emotional spectrum sounds less open to various interpretations as the rest of the songs (and the octave synth churning underneath the acoustic guitar is probably my least favorite flourish on the album). But even this song is memorable in its own right, a sudden explosion of pure giddiness surrounded by darkness and instability. Truth is, I'm thoroughly smitten with the record, certainly Amidon's most coherent and consistently evocative effort yet (though his subsequent I See the Sign - which pushes his urge for experimentation further - comes close). It's such an eclectic, emotionally complex, and intimate listen, the kind of album that absolutely necessitates and rewards total immersion. I'm very curious what everyone else thinks of the record. Maybe someone will challenge my unending enthusiasm. What are the high points? What are the low points? To return to my opening credo, does the public domain nature of these songs hinder your appreciation of them, heighten it, or does it not matter at all?

(Also worth noting: if you like the album at all, I highly recommend catching Amidon live, as he's one of the most distinctive personalities you'll ever witness on stage. For a taste, see this video of "Little Johnny Brown" and then proceed further to his YouTube channel for wackier tidbits.)

In Vanda's Room (No Quarto da Vanda) A Film by Pedro Costa (2000)

Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room is a remarkable, all-encompassing portrait of the Fontainhas ghetto of Lisbon and the people who live there, a stunningly intimate and compassionate panorama of a truly grim way of life. In its epic length and patient observation, the film accumulates an extraordinary power by its conclusion, a realization of the unmistakable humanity that can exist even as everything turns to devastation and degradation. At the center of this portrait is Vanda Duarte, an angular, slightly androgynous woman who spends her days selling lettuce and cabbage to the Fontainhas inhabitants and free-basing heroine with her sister Zita in the confines of her claustrophobic and filthy bedroom. Hers is a dour, self-destructive lifestyle, yet one not without its degree of perseverance, dedication, and dignity; Costa's impressive achievement here is to flip any pre-conceived notions of lowly drug addicts, to assert their essential humanity rather than belittle them for their reckless choices or suggest that they are disposable. In fact, through his persistent camera, Costa is able to uncover these same positive qualities in a variety of characters who cohabit the same concrete dungeon as Vanda while also discovering the vital concept of community that survives in this scenario.

The film now exists as a memorial for this strangely self-contained slum, because throughout In Vanda's Room it is being steadily demolished, resulting in the eviction and subsequent displacement of these already displaced immigrant souls (an experience Costa would tackle directly in his next film, Colossal Youth). While the rest of the world becomes transient and individualized and the New Europe furthers its diffusion of geographical and cultural identity, the people in Fontainhas cling to an established code, perhaps the only sense of consistency and stability they've known in their lives. The first post-credit shot of the film watches as Vanda's lifelong friend, the recently evicted Nhurro, bathes in buckets of hot water in a dank and shadowy room. As he finishes, steam rolls off his entire body to create an image of spectral and otherworldly effervescence, and it's as if Costa is immediately establishing the ghostly quality of these people, the fact that they are so vividly on the brink of total extinction. Periodically the film will pull back from the human component of the film for a reminder of the mechanical demolition of the neighborhood. Long static shots reveal trucks crushing the cement foundations, and at one point, a couple of steel office buildings are glimpsed in the background of the debris, presumably the impetus for this drastic act of modernization. As a result, a sense of encroachment and time running out is always palpable in the film, always something that quite literally weighs heavily on the inhabitants as the sounds of destruction dominate the soundtrack.

Subtly, Costa is raising a correlation between this mindless form of destruction as political and economic "progress" and the more personal form of self-destructive drug abuse witnessed in the characters, in its own perverse way a route to satisfaction and fulfillment. Both are careless and reprehensible, but in Costa's sublimely sympathetic vision the addicts seem almost justifiable in comparison to such an abstract political affair that would blindly annihilate an entire community of human beings for the supposed betterment of the greater good. In Vanda's Room, then, is not as laissez-faire as its cinema vérité trappings might lead it to seem, but rather works as an understated indictment of these wrongheaded government attitudes. As such, its finest and most potent argument is its peerless investigation of the private spaces behind the concrete walls where individuals - aside from consuming copious quantities of hard drugs - are harboring their own loves, desires, suspicions, and ideas. In a word, being human. In one scene, Vanda shows a group of friends and family a decrepit, utterly unsellable antique wooden ship that she plans to exchange in town for a modest wage and is met with skepticism and mockery. In another scene, an addict named Pango perseveres in mustering up a wardrobe out of scattered pieces of wood from old appliances that are lying around his dismal two-room apartment. And later, in the film's most moving scene, an older man named Pedro offers a bouquet of roses to Vanda after she compulsively outlines the schedule for taking the respiratory treatment she just supplied him with (Vanda coughs incessantly in the film, and every time she does it's as if her lung is flipping inside out). Each instance offers a small glimmer of camaraderie, resourcefulness, or kindness that powerfully articulates the vitality of these people better than any artificial dramatization of such a moment could.



Arguably it's Costa's severe technological transition that allowed for such piercing moments of authenticity (although I'd contend that nearly the same level of verisimilitude was already omnipresent in his comparatively bombastic Ossos, a work which utilized the traditional modes of production: a crew, lights, film, even some actors). In Vanda's Room was born out of Costa, a single DV camera, and a sound recorder, and the results are surprisingly high-fidelity if not frequently evocative and distinctive expressions of the digital medium. Costa has a painterly eye for texture and light and the way the two interact that is not unlike that of Tarkovsky, evident in the film's many lowly lit interiors where the deadpan expressions of people are offset by the grimy, clay-like shine of the walls and tables. Visually, the film is at its most stunning at these moments, and when the illumination is reduced at several points to the glow of one or two candles - as it is during one grueling midnight session of heroine usage - the contrast between light and dark is accentuated even further, taking on a metaphorical dimension to suggest the increasing loss of light and hope from these people's lives. Working in a similar fashion is Costa's dense soundtrack, a never-ending chaotic drone of destruction, children playing, rats squeaking, and people, like Vanda, chattering away in their superficially short and irritable tones, which is always offscreen as if to represent both the unbreakable togetherness of this community as well as the constant distance of those inside to the outside world.

The overwhelming sadness of In Vanda's Room is that these tiny shreds of human connection and satisfaction - even if they are centered around drugs - are soon to be extinguished and complicated by the eventual erasure of the neighborhood. In a conversation between Vanda and Nhurro in which the two of them discuss the prospect of whether their lives are predestined or chosen (Vanda is admirably always the source of assurance and nourishment in such scenes), it becomes clear that they have known each other since they were young, that they have struggled with the same issues for quite some time. The same is certainly the case for most of the people in the film, and the identical situation out of which they are forced to suck it up and start a new life is one that would be unspeakable in a less impoverished area of society. This shortsighted tendency to overlook the lower class is the real tragedy of In Vanda's Room, and it's one that Costa delicately and persuasively implicates the audience in through his calmly riveting filmmaking.