Drive (2011) A Film by Nicholas Winding Refn

It's pretty clear at this point where Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn's strengths and weaknesses lie: his eye for cinematic space and feel for primal (mostly aggressive) emotions has a way of obliterating nearly all nuance from character, theme, and story. Drive, his latest Ryan Gosling vehicle and Hollywood breakthrough, may be the film where that dichotomy is most evident. Like last year's The American (one wonders what might have caused this sudden urge to ape the contemplative action movies of old), Drive inserts a European flair for atmosphere and emotional restraint into a conventionally American conception of genre cinema. But Refn, unlike Corbjin, falls into thinking that stylistic affectations are enough to elevate trite material into something mythic and monumental, and ultimately Drive settles into a half-baked fever dream of flimsy homage - Mann, Wong Kar-Wai, Melville, and McQueen all join the party - to support a desperately Screenwriting 101 narrative of crime, film noir, and romance cliches. Regurgitated before a general American public, Drive's aesthetic signposts may look and feel novel (and I suppose they are when placed aside the majority of contemporary action movies), but they are for the most part merely rehashes of techniques and moods applied more convincingly and fittingly to the sources they sprang from.

The crux around which the film's ambitions can be measured is a montage sequence towards the end of the first act conveying a nameless Driver's (Gosling) infatuation with his doe-eyed neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan). Driver lusts after her apparent innocence, and it's made blindingly clear through Refn's many symmetrical compositions, where any human imbalance could throw off the pictorial and implied thematic unity, that he is the surrogate father of Irene's son, indeed even an ideal missing link to their family trio. (Considering Irene's jailed and "imperfect" husband is Hispanic, Refn seems unaware of the illicit racism inherent in the suggested betterment of this familial entity, but that's another line of thought entirely.) For Gosling, as with every existential anti-hero in the history of American cinema, getting the girl appears to be an instantaneous escape from the imprisoning drudgery of his repetitive role in life, which, in this case, consists of acting as the driver in big-budget movie stunts and manning the occasional getaway car for heists overseen by Driver's exploitative agent Shannon (Bryan Cranston). The montage in question covers Gosling's first leisurely endeavor with Irene and her son, when, given the task of driving her back to her apartment from the auto shop, he takes a diversion to a secret nature spot. Intending to crystallize Driver's single guiding desire and thus establish the backbone of the film's dramatic conflict, Refn instead reduces the scene to a brief, kitschy interlude where the gauzy blend of 80's synth pop and sunny visuals pillages the moment of any human tenderness that might have organically existed had Refn not indulged in the aesthetics of a television commercial. Disastrously, the entire justification for Refn's supposed character study feels tacked-on and superficial from the get-go.



Once Irene's husband does enter the narrative, of course he's tied up in some seedy shit left over from his pre-prison days. Taking it as his perverse strategy for acquiring Irene, Driver offers to assist the husband by providing his escape car in a heist that will help shake off his debts. In doing so, the tension between Driver's existentialist trap and his transcendent desires is erased, since pleasing Irene means doing what he already does. Henceforth, Drive spirals into an ultraviolent revenge yarn wherein Driver's life-or-death stakes rise, making his stoic put-on less and less convincing. Gosling, of course, has a role here that oozes cool, that is so indebted to historically badass representations of introspective action heroes (equal parts Delon, McQueen, and De Niro) that it demands a lot. And while Gosling is able to bring a formidable, enigmatic presence to the first half of the film, those same qualities of wordlessness and spare physicality are exposed later on as the self-conscious poses of a man disturbingly astray from functional morality. The issue is not that Gosling doesn't feel realistic, it's that he just doesn't feel like a human whatsoever and more like a pastiche of various tough-guy, anti-hero tropes (his resignation to a stuntman mask at the finale of the film suggests he has fully submerged his identity). Ironically, the same reasons Clooney was lambasted for The American are the grounds on which critics find ample praise here for Gosling, but the difference is that Clooney functions well as an interior actor, finding subtle ways to externalize his inner turmoil. Gosling, on the other hand, can only stare.

Refn, who has displayed a continued lack of imagination in his dealings with supporting role in the past, struggles to counteract Gosling's inertia with any vibrant, emotive characterizations for him to play off. The offhand glorification of Driver allows little screen time for characters like Irene, Shannon, and the movie producer-cum-mob boss Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks), to whom Driver becomes dangerously entangled following the film's central set piece. Mulligan, her suspected talents impoverished yet again by lack of screen time or one-dimensional writing (see also An Education), becomes little more than an abstract still frame of a Romantic Interest with no agency in the progression of the narrative. Sure, she's a symbol, a cipher more than anything meant to challenge Gosling's passivity, but her obliviousness makes her a moot point, not a tantalizing enigma. Brooks, meanwhile, injects artificial menace into the latter half of the film more by humorlessly cutting throats and slicing wrists than by actually telegraphing any convincing sense of doom in his facial expressions and body movements. His character, like Gosling, is a rudimentary idea of a genre archetype (the no-nonsense, antisocial mobster), and therefore is devoid of multiple layers.



All of this being said, Drive is a sufficiently assured film in several departments aside from narrative and character. I can practically hear the proverbial chorus of supporters stomping their foot down to the chant: "it's a film about atmosphere, not story!" Indeed, on that level Drive is a luscious ode to the nighttime gridlock of LA as a place of pulsating beauty, and one needn't look further than the film's first and finest scene, a calmly paced, compositionally tight getaway sequence following a too-close-for-comfort heist. It is here, in Driver's special habitat, that Refn really locks in to his character, paying close attention to the squeeze of his leather gloves against the clutch and the rapidly shifting eyes from road to rear-view mirror as he waits for the robbers and navigates the dark labyrinth of streets. Refn will frequently fill three-quarters of the frame with blackness and amorphous clusters of streetlights towards which his characters will apprehensively peer, evoking the claustrophobia that accumulates when there are so few options on where to hide a hulking piece of metal. The film almost never missteps in its calculated approach to shooting action in a way that respects silence and space while also ensuring that bursts of violence and noise are especially earth-shaking.

Trouble is, it's already well known that Refn succeeds on this level. He's been an atmospherically adept filmmaker from the start, but he's yet to marry his uncompromising craft with material that it can do justice to. And beyond that, he's yet to find aesthetic heft from within. As much as Refn's hypnotic treatment of driving is well-intentioned and well-delivered, it's pulled from Mann (Collateral in particular), Two-Lane Blacktop, and Walter Hill's The Driver. As pained and passionate as Gosling and Mulligan contrive to look at each other, their gazes - and the souped-up visual treatment of those gazes - is excavated from late Wong Kar-Wai, especially when Refn resorts to operatic slow motion for good measure. And as much as Drive pushes to become the next seminal anti-hero saga, it's constantly drowned underneath the weight of its towering predecessors (Taxi Driver, The Conversation, To Live and Die In LA, etc.) and relegated to the level of pedestrian.

Nostalgia Without Memory in Glen Goei's "That's The Way I Like It"

Like Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Ôshima before him, Singaporean director Glen Goei’s concerns lie in the shifting face of Asian culture, in the clashing tides of tradition and modernity that express themselves precariously in the social consciousness. But his 1998 film That’s the Way I Like It is as distinct in its mutated resonance as it is in its unapologetically commercial approach, which strays wildly from historically novel expressions of this quintessential thematic conflict. Verging on indifference and even contempt towards traditional societal mores (so long as the film’s single caricature of tradition bears such disdain for social difference), the film instead giddily absorbs the anarchic collage of transnational stimuli. In it, a go-nowhere supermarket employee lusts after an expensive hot rod, ventriloquizes his idol Bruce Lee, and concretizes the onscreen illusion of a suave John Travolta in his pursuit of disco dancing mastery.

Quickly, the film becomes the Singaporean answer to the American hit Saturday Night Fever, if not an outright remake than at the very least a work that would not exist without its global countercultural impact. In itself, this is a tantalizing prospect: not only has American “exceptionalism” fueled the ubiquity of various corporate chains around the world, it has also become the primary source for inspiration, a necessity for artistic creation. But this is not blatant Americanization as is commonly claimed. Arjun Appadurai’s seminal essay “Cultural Dimensions of Globalization” delicately puts this misconception by the wayside in positing that “the crucial point, however, is that the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex system of imaginary landscapes”. Hock (Adrian Pang), That’s the Way I Like It’s teenage protagonist, has neither transmogrified his entire lifestyle to that of the national source of his material interests, nor has he actively weeded out all but American stimuli. The Chinese influence of Bruce Lee still weighs heavily on his public (the long, thick dark hair and shirt-popping pectorals) and private (the endless late-night exercise routines and fights with invisible enemies) persona, and his ritualistic nights with friends at the bowling alley (a recreational activity too diffuse to be traced back exclusively to the USA) still define his quotidian life.

The markers of American fetishism come disembodied from their original contexts, nearly becoming new fascinations entirely. Just as Appadurai discussed Filipino musicians covering American popular songs with superior skill and fidelity to the originals despite “the fact that the rest of their lives is not in complete synchrony with the referential world that first gave birth to these songs”, so too does Hock’s increasing prowess as a disco dancer gradually lose any tangible connection to American culture aside from the abstracted icon of John Travolta. Here, Hock displays “nostalgia without memory,” adopting the sociocultural mindsets and material desires (his sexualization of the commodity is a particularly Western tendency) of hopped-up Americans without a historical contextualization for such frameworks. Faux-Travolta’s (Dominic Pace) reemergence in the conclusion of the film, tying together the loose ends, is therefore less a symbol of a completed cycle of Americanization as it is a reminder of the remoteness of his values, especially because Hock has chosen the girl who contradicts his unsubtle and single-minded courting advice. These simple narrative cues, which may seem like obvious emblems of Americanization on the surface, are in actuality loaded images of what Appadurai called the “ironies and resistances” of our global system, a system that now churns multi-directionally and diffuses the modern world in contrast to tradition more than ever.

Screening Notes #7

Scarface (1932): Paul Muni's turn as the immoral, faux-Italian, pseudo-philosophizing titular character in Howard Hawks' Scarface is a classic bit of scenery-chewing, a performance so unhinged and ridiculous that it suffocates the film that surrounds it until there's hardly anything left. Hawks' film is so compromised, so unevenly paced and clunky, that it never gels as a complete work, reducible only to a smattering of scenes here and there with any cinematic qualifications, but Muni chugs on through like a bull in a china shop, seemingly unaware of the camera and all too aware of it at the same time. That might sound incomprehensible, but it merely takes a few scenes in Scarface - his philistine presence at a show on Broadway, the final meltdown with his sister - to be rendered passive by Muni's ludicrous excellence. Had Hawks brought the visual care and wit of the opening shot to bear on the entire film, Scarface might be a different story, but as is it's a fairly banal, if radical for its time, gangster yarn.

Apocalypse Now (1979): This is the piece that has both confirmed and complicated my feelings towards Coppola's legendary Vietnam War epic, which I just saw for the first time (I know, apparently it's sacrilege) and fell asleep to. I will need to revisit it with undivided attention before I can develop any concrete argument for/against it, but I must say that I was both livid and entranced by the parts I did catch. Interestingly enough, Jameson finds fault in the final act, which I found to be the most convincing portion of the film, the part where Coppola's woozy narrative progression and disjunctive images of madness and "horror" (vague, I know) felt most earned. It's true that Coppola's "motifs don't grow, they merely recur"; Apocalypse Now is nothing if not a more successful and morally respectable precursor to Michael Bay, an example of a camera simply recording explosive and hallucinatory shit happening in front of it. I found its ending to terrifically lay bare the sludge and slime of war, while Coppola's earlier attempts to do so was like diving straight into the deep end of a pool without any floaties, but its general dearth of specific significance becomes retrospectively annoying.

The Baxter (2005): In the end it's an optimist's comedy, or in other words, the kind of comedy I can't quite warm up to. Michael Showalter tames down the polite vulgarity most hilariously displayed in Stella to leave behind a performance that is so irritatingly even-tempered and smiley that it hardly registers any solid laughs. One can sense the sickly romantic sap early on, the Hallmark platitudes about finding the right one and searching for the heart rather than the looks, particularly in Showalter's preachy and inconsistent narration. But there are still some genuine outbursts of humor here and there, traceable mainly to Justin Theroux's suave and sensitive lady-killer. There's a moment in the first act when his high school sweetheart tells Showalter there's no chance she'd ever see Theroux again, and then he shows up on the spot. Sure, it's cheap and silly, but Theroux pulls it off with such conviction.

Rango (2011): The question is, is there any such thing as a children's film anymore or have children's films always been this subliminally heady and postmodern and I just didn't know it (because I don't watch many children's films these days)? Get this for attention-grabbing: Rango spends its first ten to fifteen minutes with an unapologetic and rather in-your-face discourse on the nature of narrative where its reptilian and amphibian characters bounce lofty questions off each other. It certainly wasn't exciting for children, and the failure to contextualize this straight-faced intellectualism didn't work for me either. Eventually the film settles into a conventional underdog tale, meanwhile flimsily attempting to connect its initial ideas to the progress of the story, but the intended balance is never achieved and the film reaches neither absorbing feel-good narrative qualities and character development nor rewarding subtexts. What it does have going for it is the textured, grotesque close-ups of seemingly limitless desert creatures.

Louie (2011): Forget what I said about how this show isn't consciously funny this season; the recent episode involving the anti-masturbation, puritan Christian girl is the funniest thirty minutes I've spent this year. In a season preoccupied by grave themes of life and death, war and xenophobia, and love and rejection, Louie suddenly embraces the fart joke, entangling it with sex in the most outrageous way imaginable. What's more, he follows it up in a back-to-back night with the scariest episode of the season, a descent into depression and suicide that resolves none of its frightening implications, and yet a week later, with an hour-long episode delving into the Iraq War in a manner refreshingly free of didacticism. It's further proof that Louie's still aggressively pushing the boundaries of cable television.

Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 7 and 8): Those who know me know that this is my favorite show on television without question, but I've been mildly let down by the latest season, which isn't partitioning its virtues as wisely as I'd like. No longer pursuing Cheryl, Larry's at his freest and most balanced state yet, and as a result his dissections of quotidian etiquette are at their most ludicrous. What's more, the funniest character on TV, Leon (J. B. Smoove), isn't getting enough screen time, and when he does, Larry's stakes are so low that the pleasure of watching Leon casually and unintentionally destroy Larry's life is nonexistent. That being said (a turn of phrase hilariously deconstructed at the end of the brilliant 7th season), I enjoy getting into Larry's mind more than any other performer in comedy television, Louie included.

State of Dogs (1998) A Film by Peter Brosens and Dorjkhandyn Turmunkh

The delicacy of human memory outweighs the unknowable depths of postmortem enlightenment in Belgian filmmaker Peter Brosens and Mongolian director Dorjkhandyn Turmunkh's State of Dogs, a mesmerizing documentary/fiction hybrid that raises countless questions about existence and faith, government regulation and community, reality and folklore, history and spirituality, and most of all, life and death. A co-production spanning almost half a dozen countries, the film nonetheless feels so organic to the Mongolian experience that it couldn't have been made by an outsider. Brosens made the film as the third entry in his Mongolia Trilogy (along with Poets of Mongolia and City of the Steppes), which launched a career marked by an immersion into foreign cultures as well as an engagement with a process that is increasingly rare in film production worldwide: co-direction. Here, Brosens works with Turmunkh, a Mongolian native who must have brought a level of familiarity with the various traditions and circumstances shown in the film that rubbed off on Brosens. It's difficult to say whose credit belongs where, but whatever the case their contributions have fused into a major statement, a simultaneously tactile and mystical experience that moves gracefully with the contours of the forbidding Mongolian desert.

Is is there, in this arid wasteland of sandy hills, snowy plains, and scattered ghettos, that Brosens and Turmunkh probe the wandering spirit of a stray dog named Basaar who is killed early on by a hunter hired by the government to extinguish diseased canines roaming the city of Ulan Bator. The atrocity of the dog murders is not shied away from by the filmmakers, who create a remarkably disturbing sequence set to foreboding Arabian music that is as much of a confrontational call to action as it is an inciting incident for the story of Basaar. Electing to not advance to human life right away, the dog prefers to let his soul venture from its rotting corpse on the side of a desert road to reminisce on the few charms of his past life via an unassuming narrator (Banzar Damchaa). The scenario itself, built from the Mongolian belief that the dog is the final life form before human reincarnation, is ripe for sentimentalization on paper, but Brosens and Turmunkh approach it with a loose, surreal touch, digressing from the central premise constantly to become absorbed in the life experiences, individuals, and Mongolian rituals Basaar remembers from his days of homelessness, desperation, and danger. Among these anecdotes include the life of a recently pregnant young woman from the city who once treated Basaar with kindness (and whose child, the film suggests, will be Basaar's reincarnated form), an old nomad who owned Basaar for a short period of time along with cattle, his experiences rummaging for food amongst indifferent passersby, and his observation of various rituals within the wandering Mongolian groups (music, wrestling, the spreading of myth).

Movement - of Basaar's spirit, of trains across endless panoramas, of traditional customs passing on to modernity - becomes the crux of the film. Brosens and Turmunkh reflect it in their fluid integration of visual motifs that recur throughout, such as shots from the window of a moving vehicle and static compositions of various herds (people, cattle, dogs) moving from one side of the frame to another. Within this framework, the lack of movement becomes equally substantial; a landscape, vast and unchanging, passes through the camera's lens as if to represent a static force amidst all the movement, and thousands of dead canines are scattered across the desert and the sides of village roads, acting both as mementos for an old way of life and shocking reminders of collective guilt. Without ever becoming preachy or melodramatic, State of Dogs possesses a mournful lament towards these markers of the past, tying intimately into its concern for the sociocultural effects of globalization. Basaar's eventual rebirth, depicted in a striking sequence of intercutting, is a byproduct of drastic shifts in social and political customs. He will be born into an entirely different milieu by a woman particularly young for child labor, and it's difficult not to acknowledge the unsettling parallels Brosens and Turmunkh lightly draw between the tumultuous life of a wandering dog like Basaar and the upbringing of the modern child, especially in a context as rough and unforgiving as that of Ulan Bator.




There is a vibrant mysticism running throughout the film, but it never overwhelms Brosens and Turmunkh's intimate visualization of the physical, observable world. While State of Dogs' associative arrangement may at times seem sporadic and unmotivated, the filmmakers have a deft way of evoking the coexistence of the mythic and the mundane. Seemingly non-diegetic audio bleeds into from one shot to its subsequent shot and proves to be springing from a tangible source, and myths spoken by real Mongols find faint echoes in the shot compositions and cutting patterns. Brosens and Turmunkh appear to be suspending disbelief cinematically, using the film medium as a way to entertain supernatural possibilities such as the obliteration of time and space and the presence of spirits and myths, while doing so in a way that doesn't lose grip of authentic, lived reality. Their deepest plunges into the supernatural come in the final act of the film, when townspeople rave about the narrative behind an upcoming solar eclipse: the dragon Rah will swallow the sun and leave Earth in a total freeze of darkness. After suspensefully documenting the existential panic of the citizens, the ensuing eclipse acquires great life-or-death tension. When it passes by without harm, the sense I get is not that there is no Rah, but that the hysterical drum-banging and chanting of the townsfolk scared him away.

Brosens and Turmunkh's final montage, set to a typically haunting musical score by Charo Calvo, contains a poetic power that would be embarrassed by words. Suffice to say, the inclusion of an otherworldly contortionist suggests that they have succeeded in taking a full and justified leap into the unexplainable abstractions of life, coming full circle on a complete rejection of established rules of rationality, space, and even physics (seriously, this woman bends). What at first sounded like nihilistic verbal mush out of the mouth of an impassioned poet in the opening shot of the film now resembles principles to live by. The 180 degree turnaround from skepticism to belief that the filmmakers' inspire brings to mind L'Eclisse, in which Antonioni used a similarly jarring stylistic effect to communicate the irrelevance of the supposed story (Vitti and Delon's relationship, in this case Basaar's memories) and what was ultimately the central purpose (the spiritual void of modern romantic pursuits, the necessity of faith in the modern world). Incidentally, Brosens and Turmunkh's predilection for dwarfing individuals against vast expanses of dusty desert and dilapidated modern architecture through the use of the wide shot mirrors Antonioni's similar technique. They're in good company, and they've earned it. State of Dogs is a sad and eye-opening work that, in celebrating the tenacity of one dog's memory, is able to allegorize the passing traditions and practices of an entire nation.

Edvard Munch (1974) A Film by Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch so thoroughly intermingles the tenets of drama, documentary, and experimental cinema that it ultimately obliterates all three, becoming an undefinable artifact of artist autobiography, social critique, and visual poem. The film springs from the consciousness of the titular Expressionist painter with the same kind of all-encompassing grandeur of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (or more recently, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life), yet its own fragmented, vérité style is distinctly different from those works. What it does share is the sense of an interior life being sprawled out in cinematic images despite the scant and enigmatic presence of that person in the film itself. Geir Westby, a Norwegian non-actor like everyone else in Watkins' epic, plays Edvard Munch, a tortured artist born at the wrong time and in the wrong milieu, fighting to maintain his artistic license and his sanity. He brings an off-kilter, ghostly quality to the painter, barely speaking and frequently staring directly at the camera with his dark, sad eyes, much like the distorted and spiritually distressed figures in his paintings. When he's not attempting to imbue the same artistic pedantry of his subject into the very form of the film, Watkins is probing Westby from the outside in, peering into his soul like a member of Munch's bemused and hesitant audience.

More so than any other artist biography I've seen in the film medium, Edvard Munch demonstrates how the political and social upheavals of one's life inform the ultimate trajectory of one's artistic output. Watkins, a left-wing filmmaker dedicated to proving that all cinema, all stories, and all reproductions of life are inherently politically engaged, has such an intelligent grasp of the codependency of the political and the personal that not a single scene passes without a level of involvement in both. Munch grew up in the Norwegian towns of Oslo and Kristiania in the heart of a puritanical bourgeois society in the late nineteenth century, a passage of his life that comprises the first third of a nearly three-hour film that roughly, but never strictly and often sporadically, follows a linear chronology. The repressive regimes of these towns have circumvented all but the middle class, leaving the poor with no child labor laws and a decriminalized but maligned attitude towards prostitution. In concise journalistic sequences, Watkins details these social inequities and then abruptly turns his attention to Munch and his sizable family, perched uneasily in this milieu as a group of both staunch Christians and questioning souls. Munch's sympathies are pretty much finalized when his mother and sister die prematurely of tuberculosis, with his moralizing father turning only to prayer for medical treatment.



The increasingly unconventional worldviews of Munch (at least in the context of his own family) are given space to gestate at the Kristiania Bohème, a circle of rebellious artists echoed later by Munch's cooperation in a Berlin collective pioneered by August Strindberg (Alf Kare Strindberg). Lead by the outspoken Hans Jæger (Kåre Stormark), members of the Bohème dissect the moral absolutism of the Norwegian society, concepts of free love and anarchism, and the crucial role of art and expression in a functional world. For the most part, Munch is a silent onlooker at these raucous gatherings of tobacco smoke and verbal warfare, but through his artwork - the maturation of which Watkins is attentive to at every stage of the film - one can sense his growing disillusionment with strict codes of behavior and expression. A tipping point is Jæger's imprisonment following an immediately banned work of emotionally direct and politically inflammatory literature, at once a premonition of Munch's own struggles with censors and the Scandinavian intelligentsia and a catalyst for his drastic evolution from commonly accepted modes of objective naturalism in painting.

Watkins pays so much attention to forces beyond Munch's control and personal sphere that the film can hardly be limited to the straightforward biography it purports to be (and which it is wrongly held up to by art historians befuddled by the omission of the later half of Munch's career). The act of painting itself - for Munch, crude, aggressive expressions of emotional volatility and spiritual turmoil - is detailed with great precision and persistence, with Watkins' largely nervous, zooming and focus-adjusting camera taking momentary pauses to scan the textured surfaces of Munch's canvasses. The images savor the tactility of the work, recognizing (as the majority of the backward-looking Norwegian public and critical community fail to do) the pain and joy that goes into every brush stroke, every scrape. Munch's painting are mostly of his family ridden by illness and devastation, an aspect of his life Watkins is sure to stress in his repetitive inserts of traumatic moments in their household, including Munch's own near-death experience coughing up blood in his bed. These terrifying fragments of tragedy and turmoil might come across as sensationalist window-dressing had Watkins not focused on patiently establishing Munch's domestic environment early on, and ultimately their continued employment manages to express the fidgety mental sickness that sparks much of Munch's artistic inspiration.



Perhaps even more instructive in understanding Munch's angst is his brief but impassioned affair with a married woman identified as Mrs. Heiberg (Gro Fraas, channeling her inner Liv Ullmann), the failure of which is the crux of the artist's social, romantic, and existential frustration. The film's most discernible narrative thrust is the rise and fall of this short-lived relationship captured by Watkins with supreme intimacy. When it does inevitably collapse, its repercussions are felt throughout the remainder of the film in Munch's paintings and in his mind, wherein fragmented moments of sexual passion, soulful staring, and subsequent jealousy replay over and over. As if to cement the fact that Mrs. Heiberg was Munch's true missed opportunity, his fullest and most transient pleasure, Watkins concludes the film on a painterly image of the two framed against a blood red sky, a simultaneously romantic and foreboding crystallization of the affair's impact on Munch. Fittingly, most of the film's loveliest, most unforgettable images - shot, like the rest of the film, in mysteriously grainy 35 mm - comprise the two of them in various natural landscapes, dreamlike evocations of bliss that seem to rest outside time.

These moments, however, are never as cathartic as the painter hopes for them to be. Edvard Munch has the tendency to cut short its brightest pleasures, splice them into otherwise bleak passages, or overlay a disparate element (sound, image) of darkness. The film thrives off the interplay of contradictory emotions and techniques (dramatic exposition, journalistic documentation, Tarkovskian meditation), unafraid to pit them against each other within a single scene. The ongoing narration itself, largely readings from Munch's third-person-ridden diary entries provided by Watkins himself, is a constant counterpoint to the action, undercutting the traditional documentary etiquette of always informing with clarity and "truth". Much of the narration seems to eschew crucial details evident in the frame, missing the entire story, or suggest an emotion not entirely accurate to what we see of Munch onscreen. It's a perfect representation of the confused and frantic psyche of this profoundly influential artist, and also one of Watkins' subtlest applications of dialectical editing maneuvers in a body of work ravaged by critical complaints about unconventionality. Fascinatingly, given the many superficial similarities in the careers of these two artists, it's probably natural that their strengths should interact in such a way.

In the City of Sylvia (2009) A Film by Jose Luis Guerin

Consisting of a man, an audience surrogate, sifting through beautiful French passersby on a lazy summer afternoon in Strasbourg, Jose Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia is a heterosexual male fantasy executed with the patience and precision of a private investigator's video tapes. I'm being tongue-in-cheek, of course, because the film doesn't possess the kind of perversion of the male gaze that such a description would suggest. What is does do is accurately convey the loneliness and romantic desire of an adrift artist seeking companionship in a foreign city, an act of voyeurism that gently comes to mirror the filmmaker's search for a subject, as well as the viewer's search for meaning within an onslaught of daily visual and sonic stimuli. It's about an unnamed man (Xavier Lafitte) silently probing the female public for a so-called Sylvia, a woman from 6 years prior that he had a memorable night with at a bar called Les Aviateurs, but the tip-off to this plot detail - ultimately the entirety of the film's narrative content - is not revealed until more than halfway through. So until this realization, the man's pursuit is shapeless and abstract, the only proof that he's looking for anything at all being the numerous sketches of slightly varying women that he keeps referring to in his notepad.

Therefore, divorced from defined narrative purpose, In the City of Sylvia returns the cinema to its earliest practice of unmitigated observation, in the process drawing attention to how much our quotidian lives are spent merely watching life unfold around us. The film is broken up into two major set pieces bookended by shorter scenes of the protagonist's untethered contemplation, the first of which is a prolonged, deceptively simple episode of the man's perusal of various women at an outdoor cafe we later learn is associated with the Drama Conservatory, where Sylvia was allegedly studying. Guerin resists the urge to impose much action upon the nearly thirty minute sequence, instead simply watching the wordless ping-pong of glances between cafe patrons. Lafitte, with his notepad and his beer, is patiently perusing the crowd, staring at the unself-conscious expressions of women without the faintest hint of sexual predation. Rather, with the help of his sketches, he's trying to put form to an amorphous memory. Guerin compensates for the film's bland technical craftmanship (it's as if a bounce card was the only tool for illumination, resulting in a lot of flatly lit faces) with placid and subtly tricky compositions that play with ghostly juxtapositions of foreground and background, placing heads in compositional relationship to one another despite their differing depths in the frame. The effect is a fragmented facial collage, suitable to the uncertain recollections of Latiffe's hopeless romantic.

Finally, after changing seats to get a new angle, he sets his sights on a slender brunette (Pilar López de Ayala) and takes it upon himself to follow her throughout the city, attempting to decide with some certainty whether or not she's Sylvia. The ensuing chase sequence plays like what Before Sunset would have become had Ethan Hawke been too afraid to approach Julie Delpy, and other times, particularly when Guerin indulges a delicate undertow of physical comedy (the man's compulsive spilling of drinks, his bumping into various objects), like the time-stretching of a Jacque Tati gag about the confusion and isolation of the contemporary urban labyrinth. (Guerin finds enjoyment in the multilayered wide shot made possible by the cobblestone back alleys of Strasbourg, transforming Latiffe into a curious lab rat with a perpetually shifting end goal.) But of even greater interest is the fact that the whole sequence - and much of the film, for that matter - is without dialogue and told in the primal visual language of silent cinema, which makes it tempting to view it as the modern update to F.W. Murnau's similar boy-chasing-girl work, Sunrise. Both films include a bittersweet scene on a moving tram (here, it's Latiffe's eventual meeting and hesitant exchange with Ayala), and both use their visual repertoire to evoke both the subjectivity of their central characters and the occasional omniscient perspective, a mysterious third person that can naturally be linked to the audience.



Guerin seems to have deliberately fashioned his film in such an open-ended manner so as to invite these decade-spanning cinematic associations. Because after all, In the City of Sylvia proves to be in its own quietly self-referential way about the experience of watching and making movies. Latiffe, suggesting an androgynous Renaissance painter with his flowing long hair, skinny mustache, and loose, unbuttoned long-sleeve shirt, compiles the various physical features of the women around him into his notepad, hoping to concretize the vague impressions in his mind, much like the slow process of mental images into scripts and ultimately cinematic images. Moreover, it gradually becomes clear that what he's searching for is not necessarily The Sylvia (although it does begin that way), but rather The One; this is a sneaky stand-in for our own goal-aspiration processes, which often start specific and wind up broad and redefined. Latiffe approaches Ayala and discovers not only that she is not Sylvia, but also that she has been aware of his following her for quite some time. He instinctively feels awful and lets his feelings of shame and regret overshadow any attempt to get to know this women who he has clearly been infatuated with regardless of her identity.

Ayala's character slips out of the back of the frame when she exits the tram in a wide shot that Guerin returns to two more times and uses as his final image, converting it now into a metaphor for missed opportunities. But it remains ambiguous as to whether or not Ayala makes a presence in the film again. In one of Guerin's several compositions to make stunning use of reflections and multiple planes, Ayala shows up unexpectedly as a specter laid across the reflective glass of a moving tram seen from Latiffe's perspective, coexisting with the (real or imagined) bodies of various other women boarding the tram or in the nearby area. Is she really there waiting to get onto the tram, or has the romantic metropolis shattered itself into a space of both facts and illusions? Latiffe's object of desire has expanded, fragmented, and reshaped itself, and the city that was once a habitat for one Sylvia has become a place bearing countless Sylvia's, countless opportunities for romantic involvement. He doesn't realize this instantly, or else his enigmatic hookup with a random girl from the bar - shot by Guerin in the tantalizing low light of his hotel room - wouldn't have been so unfulfilling, but perhaps by the end of the film he has come to terms with the absurdity of his quest. If not, he can only get as far as his notepad, nowhere near the heights reached by Guerin's seemingly slight film.

La Collectionneuse (1967) A Film by Eric Rohmer

Wise and aloof, contemplative and so discreet that its nuances fly by without the most careful of observation, Eric Rohmer's La Collectioneuse defies all of the fashionable signposts of the French New Wave. It seeks to put a microscope to the affected machinations of young people, exposing the falseness beneath the facade rather than celebrating the art of role-playing. The film was the third entry and first feature-length work in Rohmer's Moral Tales, a series built around the trope of a male character involved in a relationship being tempted by an auxiliary love interest/sex object, all the while self-consciously testing his own moral code, making an elaborate psychological game out of the potential for infidelity. Here, that figure is Adrien (Patrick Bauchau), a dangerously suave and judgmental art dealer who skirts to his friend Rodolphe's countryside villa with the straight-faced hipster Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) in an attempt to reach a state of total nonintervention in life. He finds his courageous act of stasis to be a "better contribution to mankind than working", so he trudges around the picturesque French estate passively reading books, walking aimlessly around the grounds, taking early morning dips in the ocean nearby, and lounging in the blank bedroom that has been appointed to him by Rodolphe.

The men's inertia is threatened by the presence of Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a young, unflappable free-spirit that catches Daniel and Adrien's unawares when they discover that she is also spending vacation time at Rodolphe's place. Haydée abides by a schedule opposite to that of Daniel, whose pursuit of an ascetic lifestyle allows for no nightlife. At first, she's but a fleeting phantom, leaving only traces of her uninhibited but not unusual flights of twentysomething recreation, but eventually, in their disengaged voyeurism, the men start to take note of her allegedly worthless and hollow male visitors. Desperate to put an end to their feelings of inferiority, yet always concealing any wiff of jealousy or desire, Adrien and Daniel begin to make offhand stabs at communication with Haydée, eventually forcing complacence upon her. They start to incorporate her into their activities, never failing to suppress their brutally specific criticisms of her, calling her a "miserable specimen", a "slut", and a "collector" of lovers with the kind of casual delivery that would suggest they really think their judgments are the final say. Despite their linguistic prowess and lofty existential concerns, these men are deeply malformed. Their immaturity is revealed in great swathes of behavioral idiosyncrasies, which Rohmer, attentive as ever even in this primitive stage of his career, holds an unblinking eye to: note Adrien's awkward picking up and putting down of the telephone after Haydée uses it, or his neurotic biting of a rock to displace the conversational tension with her during one scene on the beach.

Adrien's hyper-articulate, context-heavy narration guides the dramatic action and offers an additional layer through which to scrutinize the discontinuities between thought and behavior, principle and impulse. Rohmer's leading males are so self-assured, so certain that they are following the proper path, that it's easy to fall into a trap in which they appear righteous and sympathetic. Yet as much as Adrien frames Haydée's day-to-day behavior as manipulative, as if she's playing a game with his emotions by sleeping around with Daniel and others, it's really Adrien who's the weasel, feigning affection and then slipping away with the exacting care of a great dictator. Late in the film, he practically whores Haydée out to an American art dealer (a menacing, Sean Connery-esque Eugène Archer) by dropping her off at his house for two days, effortlessly making it a perverse part of his master plan of directing Haydée's attraction to him (and somehow it works, if only temporarily). While Adrien speaks internally of his dominance of the social situation, the onscreen action tells a different story. The American picks apart Adrien's pretensions of passivity, making him look like nothing more than the lazy narcissist he is (any shades of virtue in Archer, however, are stomped out like a cigarette when he childishly slaps Haydée for breaking a valuable vase).



La Collectionneuse marks Rohmer's first collaboration with cinematographer Nestor Almendros, whose exquisite eye instantly became an inseparable element of Rohmer's work. The sparsely gorgeous, summery color compositions which reached their fullest force in Claire's Knee are already in evidence here, contributing a mood of languid relaxation. In keeping with a reductive principle borrowed from the minimalism of Bresson, Rohmer strips most of his images of any extraneous objects, ultimately discovering a common pictorial rhythm with a burst of each primary color in almost every shot. Shooting in wide shots that feel both composed and tossed-off, Rohmer and Almendros capture with the gift of natural light images that possess the warm hues and palpable textures of a great painting; often times the soupy early evening skies seem like painted backdrops, a la Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus, yet somehow they maintain a weighty realism. Rohmer suspends his characters in such wondrous environments that it's an even greater tragedy that they're so preoccupied by petty concerns.

In fact, this constant, overwhelming presence of natural beauty is a humbling reminder to the viewer that there are larger, purer forces than the characters' pseudo-romantic ploys. If the people in La Collectionneuse are evasive, complex, and impenetrable - the sudden tonal shifts in many of the conversations are beguiling - the landscape that they occupy is uniform and majestic, a tension that levels the film with a mesmerizing consistency. Crucially, Rohmer never dips into judgment himself, instead letting the moral dimension of the film rest somewhere in between his own stance, that of the characters, and that of the viewer. To cement the open-endedness, Rohmer has Adrien return to a state of zero by the end of the film. After renouncing his infatuation with Haydée once and for all, he considers himself to be at last capable of utter freedom, finally stripped of any unwanted temptations. But quickly he realizes that he's plagued by anxiety, that the illusory rewards of his self-confirming victory were only temporary. Perhaps he has solved his own predicament by realizing that aspirations to nothingness are simply illogical and that there's no joy to be obtained from a life of social and existential apathy. In doing so, he has allowed Rohmer to emerge from a perplexing and revealing dive into the male psyche.