Alien (1979) A Film by Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott, at least in the period during which he made Alien (because God knows he has been unpredictable since), is a living embodiment of the director as designer, concerning himself first and foremost with the aesthetic means used to build a mood and only secondarily with the practices traditionally attached to a Hollywood director: working with actors, pacing a story from beginning to end, constructing a "logical" mise-en-scene. One can easily imagine Scott taking the script provided to him by Dan O'Bannon and dividing it into manageable chunks, attempting to visualize each section in the most dramatic fashion, squeezing the emotion out of every beat, every shot, every sequence through lighting, camera movement, and blocking. Or getting caught up in individual set pieces and forgetting he's making a feature-length film, only to find himself shunted back on course by a more big-picture thinker like a producer or a screenwriter. Not surprisingly, Alien feels as if it's made up of separate movements cross-faded into one another, much like its antecedent 2001: A Space Odyssey, though Alien's segments vary radically in length and tone and don't always glide elegantly along as in Kubrick's musical opus.

None of this is to suggest that Alien succeeds in parts and fails as a whole; in fact, the film is a stunning example of a mean B-movie conceit elevated to larger-than-life stature through the conviction and consistency of its execution. Alien sustains an unrelenting power largely because of one key feature: its tendency to cut the explosive final moments of each aforementioned movement prematurely, letting the tension bleed into each subsequent chapter. Once the crew of the Nostromo spaceship unintentionally invites an alien visitor into its habitat, the film becomes a remarkably taut string of scenes involving people walking through chillingly quiet and empty spaces searching for the strange creature that has gone astray in their spacecraft. The punch line of each encounter - usually the sudden vision of a titular Alien (aka xenomorph) and the implied violent death of the person - is truncated; this is not a film committed to expensive showdowns, but rather to atmospheric build-ups that accumulate into a nasty, looming cloud of dread. No scene, therefore, is free of residue from the last, all the loose threads and offscreen mayhem making its presence felt abstractly.

Scott's imagination is opened up considerably by the kind of schlocky material he worked with in Alien and, subsequently, Blade Runner. As a stylist he's very much reliant upon colored lights and smoke effects, and in few genres other than science-fiction and horror do these tactics make sense. Hard sources glowing from uncanny locations, slashes of foggy light, blinking and shuttering effects, and labyrinthine sets are all vital to Scott's evocation of intense, claustrophobic atmospheres, and here those elements get a robust workout. With Scott, the look and feeling of a set can shift on a moment's notice based on the emotional temperature in that space, regardless of the so-called diegetic logic. As such, the chaos of strobe lights and leaking smoke in the denouement of Alien functions less as a plausible result of Ripley's imposed detonation of the Nostromo than it does as a manifestation of her wild anxiety. Even more absurdly, when she shoots into space in her escape vessel shortly thereafter, she hits a button that turns on a flashing blue light seemingly only to give the impending sight of a surviving Alien perched in the corner of her spacecraft an expressive, kaleidoscopic dimension.

What I'm saying is this: Alien gets its blue-collar socioeconomic detail, its abundance of sexually charged motifs (labored over so pointlessly by critics for decades, as they're ultimately little more than shortcuts - albeit brilliant shortcuts - to squeamish scares), and its simple but effective overarching structure from O'Bannon, its androgynous and frighteningly inhuman monster from hyper-goth Swiss artist H.R. Giger, and the fluidity of its production design (from the slick, symmetrical, cold spaces of the ship's main floor to the dark, muggy, lived-in corridors in the basement) from Michael Seymour and Roger Christian, among many others. Only then does Scott take the reins and turn Alien into the sweat-soaked nightmare that it is. Cinema is always a collaborative effort, of course, but I get the sense that Alien is almost overtly so, that its various achievements come from separate moving parts and were synthesized and fully realized by Scott once placed in front of his camera. Why? Because with the exception of Blade Runner and the very recent Prometheus, Scott has not made another science-fiction/horror film (never mind one with supposed feminist slants), suggesting that he is not inherently drawn to this type of material despite the obvious aptitude he possesses working with it. Scott seems to have designed and constructed Alien more than he directed it, a small distinction but a significant one.

But, what a beautifully designed film it is! For starters, the first twenty or so dialogue-free minutes of the film are riveting in their quiet, gradual building of ambience. Taking cues from Solaris, Scott uses the time his ensemble cast spends in a deep sleep to glide through the tubes, valves, and belly of the Nostromo, capturing the eerie stillness of life in space, the detachment and alienation of these living quarters. Papers and dangling clothing swing softly to the cosmic breeze drifting through the ship, and Jerry Goldsmith's intoxicating synth-pad score floats uneasily over the images, always an aural omen of things to come. When the crew is woken up by their "Mother" - Alien's HAL, because every post-2001 sci-fi needs a HAL - Scott watches as their glass covers are mechanically lifted, and then utilizes what are notably the film's only slow dissolves as Kane (John Hurt), the first to die, rises to wakefulness. It's as if Scott's editing cue is suggesting that Kane's soul is detaching from his body, the first indicator that these people are bound for death.

The best scene of the film is that of Brett's (Harry Dean Stanton) demise, the second of six total crew member deaths in the film (though one may be defined more as a shutting down, but that's another discussion). Up until this point, Brett has been characterized as a bit of a village idiot, one of the lowly workers on the Nostromo brave and ignorant enough to argue for financial benefits when the ship runs off course due to its interception of strange signals from a nearby planet. Thus, it's no shock when he is ushered into the Queen Alien's chosen breeding ground on the ship by a mischievous cat. That much is pretty lazily scripted, but it's what Scott does with the scenario through image and sound that elevates it into something tense, sinuous, and strangely mystical. Scott's camera moves through the hazy boiler room slowly and with uncomfortable grace, much like the way it traverses the empty spaces of the main floor in the opening movement of the film. Meanwhile, the cat's cries, as well as dripping condensation and chains dangling from the ceiling, are heard reverberating through the cavernous architecture, beckoning Brett through the room. Just when the tension is at its peak, Scott deflects it temporarily by making Brett walk over to the liquid falling from above to point his face heavenward. Perhaps it's an attempt to cool himself in the pummeling heat of the room, but it works best as a kind of mysterious out-of-body moment, a calm before death. The image may pull from Tarkovsky's canon, most specifically Stalker, but it nonetheless holds a peculiar weight of its own in this suspended instance.

Of course, there are other things to admire about Alien. Weaver's performance is increasingly mesmerizing as the film progresses (though in some ways Alien inaugurated the slasher tradition of cardboard thin characterizations, she brings a vitality and perseverance to Ripley that cements her humanity). Also, with the exception of a few screenwriterly clichés that look transparently manipulative in retrospect and a distracting subtext about corporate corruption (or whatever), O'Bannon's script is elegantly propulsive, mostly dedicated to exposing the utter fragility of humans in the face of something unknowable and otherworldly. But I'm most fascinated with the way Scott absolutely controls the screen, how he displays an innate understanding of the behavior of images and how those images can be transformed by sound and by combination. Alien would be little more than a lavishly decorated hunk of metal suspended in front of a back-projection and a Nigerian man in a bulky monster suit without this pristine aesthetic command.

Bigger Than Life (1956) A Film by Nicholas Ray

Over the course of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, everything that glows with joyousness, complacency, and success at the beginning of the film is called into question: the leadership of a father, the safety net of a social class, the effectiveness of a public school, the moral guidance of the Bible, even the structural integrity of a suburban home. This is a film sandwiched between competing representations of comfortable family life in the 1950's that reflects upon the fragility of our lives in the face of ubiquitous darkness, fear, and encroaching mortality and challenges the notion of American freedom and individuality. Structured as a gradual transition from ostensible balance to exaggerated chaos, it showcases James Mason as the curiously suave, subtly arrogant schoolteacher and suburban father Ed Avery, who succumbs to an inexplicable artery affliction and is prescribed the still-experimental drug cortisone at the end of the film's first act. From there, he becomes a patriarch on steroids, his gestures of kindess hastier, his declarations of opinion more explicit, his assertions of power more extreme, and his emotional spectrum more definitive and outlandish. The script gradually weeds out the positive effects of the drug to focus with garish intensity on the negative outcomes of Ed's increasingly moody persona.

Bigger Than Life operates within the framework of a generic American suburb in the 1950's, complete with newfangled televisions, P.T.O meetings (those special pow-wows of community vision), and young boys with fantasies of football prowess, but Ray introduces ripples in the fabric of this illusory infrastructure, particularly in and around the Avery home. Several of these clues come before Ed's illness strikes: Ed's secret side job (maintained in need of extra cash) as a cabbie that causes him to return home later than usual three nights a week and arouses quiet suspicion in his housewife Lou (Barbara Rush); the cool slickness of the Avery house, where the presence of a deflated football on the mantle, posters of foreign cities and geographical maps on the walls, and scattered financial forms in the private sectors contribute to the sense of a domestic space seething with dissatisfaction and discomfort; and Ed's insistence upon turning out lights at night before Lou's chores are finished, as if desiring to live in a place that materializes the family's interior messiness. These hanging hints are especially conspicuous at the beginning of the film when the cheerfulness of the family offers such a striking contrast to the looming air of disappointment around them. Later, they begin to make sense, as Ray adds even more markers of fractured normalcy, like a backyard (always a site of joyful memories for the American family) troubled by an overgrown lawn, or the fact that the house becomes progressively segmented by closed doors, no longer an open environment.

That these hints are present throughout the film suggests that the use of cortisone for Ed is not merely something that nudges him towards patriarchal megalomania but that the drug was a way of exposing what was already lurking beneath his family man façade. "You've always been ten feet tall to me," says Lou to her husband in response to Ed's comment about the instant improvement cortisone has provided him. It's the kind of hokey, aw-shucks line expected of the Avery couple in the midst of marital satisfaction in this buttoned-up milieu, but because it comes after Ed has begun his bender it is graced with subtle, unsettling meaning. The values quietly honored by Ed pre-breakdown - his firm belief in maintaining a "sense of duty," his desire to make his son Richie (Christopher Olsen) a "man," his views on the softness of the educational system - are precisely those values emphatically proclaimed by Ed mid-psychosis; the only difference is that they have been exploded open, revealed for all their ugliness and Communist authoritarianism, for how intellectually righteous, unfair, and contradictory they really are. And they are especially damning in this small town society, seeing as they are an affront to the ideas of individualism erected by the American Dream. Yet the film also makes gestures to imply that Ed's symptoms are shared and similarly hidden by some members of his community. When he unleashes verbal fire at the P.T.O meeting on a horde of unsuspecting parents, calling the students at the school "moral midgets," amidst the jeers and gasps there are also notable sounds of enthusiastic agreement.

The film clues the viewer in to the flimsy fiction of small town life by paying close attention to surfaces and surface illusions as well. When Ed is first diagnosed with his affliction and he is being tested by doctors, there is a scene involving an X-ray scan of the inside of Ed's torso. At first, when the fluorescent lights of the hospital room are on, he unassumingly approaches the device, his head peaking up from behind it. Suddenly, the room turns dark, with only a neon red glow illuminating Ed's face, and his ribcage becomes the predominant element of the shot. It's a shocking shift, one that demonstrates how quickly and easily things can turn from an impression of comfort and safety to utter vulnerability, to a point where human flesh is made malleable and death seems so near. A thematic echo of this scene comes shortly thereafter when the cortisone has begun to inflate Ed's ego. Believing himself richer than he is, he takes his wife and son out to a ritzy clothing store and auditions various dresses for Lou, boasting that he can buy all of them. It's clear from the previous hints of financial issues - Ed's side job, the taxes laying dormant - that the family cannot afford these items, and the confusion and trepidation in Lou and Richie's faces is palpable. The mere act of transcending one's class boundaries, which is as easy as driving five minutes into town, can stir this family to the core.

Ray, exuding a sense of being both fluid in genre material and yet unwilling to play entirely by its rules, telegraphs the disintegration of the Avery family as if building to a macabre horror climax (indeed, The Shining would go on to expand upon the same familial scenario). The film's grotesquely hard and even key lighting, a sign of the Golden Age's "light-the-money" ethos, reveals the sweat perpetually beading down Mason's face, and one gets the feeling that Ray deliberately avoiding wiping him down before rolling the camera. Mason resembles a man whose external skin is dripping away, slowly unveiling a monster within. Practical tungsten units in the house all seem to be placed in the most impractical locations and at the most uneven angles, causing constant vampiric shadows on the walls that invite a layer of menace to casual domestic circumstances. In essence, this is an unlivable space, so clearly a movie set and so frighteningly a manifestation of Ed's consciousness; in two delightfully surreal touches, Ed unintentionally grabs hold of the doorbell when he has his second fainting episode and the ensuing ring sounds like his internal scream, and later, when he goes mad and wrestles his good friend Wally (Walter Matthau) through the railing of the stairs, the television blares frenetic carnival music.

For all its skepticism thrown at conventionality, the film, in the end, clings precariously to a notion of conservatism as the Averies embrace each other in a hospital bed. Though it may seem like a strange contradiction of Ray's previous destruction of middle-class ideals, his insistence upon the rejuvenation of the family unit as a vitally necessary weapon against chaos is not without its whopper of ambiguity. Not only is the scene of the embrace riddled by the same expressionistic kinks that are employed by Ray throughout the film - giving it the feel of a torture chamber more so than a room of rest and healing - it's also emphasized as a self-contained bubble outside the pressures of societal complacency, divorced from the context the family will soon re-enter. Medical treatment was exposed merely as a temporary prop for the reintegration of normalcy earlier in the film; once distanced from its grip, as Ed quickly became when his self-medication progressed, delusions and hypocrisies begin to seep back into domestic life. Apparently Ray later remarked that in retrospect he would have pinned the blame of Ed's escalating addiction more aggressively on medical malpractice were it not for backlash from the American Medical Association, but in fact this very ambivalence in the film towards the impetus for Ed's increased dosage leaves the tension between internal and external motivators of psychotic behavior thrillingly intact. As is, Bigger Than Life poses destabilizing questions about the very foundations of American family life that are routinely answered with the swift realization that problems have always been there. Society, caught between a longing for individuality and a need for organization, encourages them.

The Freethinker (Fritänkaren) A Film by Peter Watkins (1994)

If cinema is to survive as a democratic art form, one of its most crucial figures is the English filmmaker Peter Watkins, not because of any particular aesthetic approach to the medium but because of a distinct philosophical agenda that has inflected all of his work since he began making films in the late 50's. Watkins' outspoken critique of the mass media due to its stranglehold on widespread thought and suffocation of minority voices has inevitably pushed him to the fringes of the image-making world, where his challenging, provocative, and formally inventive works are forced to struggle for their infinitesimal audiences. The Freethinker, Watkins' belated companion piece to his 1974 stroke of genius Edvard Munch, represents perhaps the utopian ideal of his worldview, even as it often abandons Watkins' own voice and loses cinematic focus because of it. After failing to acquire funding for the project in the 80's when he first intended to make it, Watkins was able to produce the film with resources provided by a small Swedish high school, where he was to collaborate with the students for a semester-long training course out of which The Freethinker would emerge.

Watkins has always been interested in the idea of rationing out authorship and ownership in his own work, which extends to his inclusion of non-professional actors and crew members, his openness to improvisation, his penchant for giving performers the ability to comment upon the film within its diegesis, and much more, but The Freethinker goes further than many of his films in this distribution of voices. Previously untrained students acted in the film, devised scenarios for the script, and in some instances even directed scenes, heavily influencing a film that for more than four hours dances around fiction and documentary, political and personal, past and present, text and meta-text, and historical fact and poetic recreation without ever fully separating the respective threads. Watkins employs these methods to shrink the gap between both the film and the audience and the film and the conditions of its own making (i.e. life), ultimately insisting upon an active participation with the film. Keeping a film's narrative space enclosed and the process of its production secret, Watkins seems to be suggesting, is to guard against the entrance of the viewer's own consciousness, and with it, his personality, thoughts, and experiences. The Freethinker, on the other hand, as well as all of Watkins' work, lives and dies based on the extra-diegetic context (personal memories, political and social conditions) brought to the experience by the viewer.

As an extension of themes raised in Edvard Munch, The Freethinker places playwright August Strindberg (another fictionalized version of whom made his way into the previous biopic) at its center, focusing on the ways in which the pursuit of his controversial personal expression was consistently thwarted - like Munch's - by his country's manipulative political pressures. Strindberg is embodied here by Anders Mattsson, a young man whose angular features and cavernous eyes make him an ideal candidate for Watkins' probing close-ups, and who resembles, surprisingly so, the man himself, as the film's frequent cutaways to archival photographs of Strindberg demonstrate. But it's not merely a surface similarity that aligns the performer and his character; Mattsson, working for the first time as a motion-picture actor, is able to convey during the period piece sequences the tenderness and wrath competing within Strindberg, the latter of which took the fore as his career continued and his work became increasingly marginalized. The effects of Strindberg's feral nature are dumped largely on his first wife Siri Von Essen, played by Swedish biology student Lena Settervall, who also brings an unexpected depth of feeling to her role. Both actors are seen throughout the film against black backgrounds commenting with grave seriousness about their respective characters, and in Setterval's close-up, the round facial structure and melancholy default expression recalls Liv Ullman.

The Freethinker shifts between several different formal modes throughout: loose recreations of moments from Strindberg's life, re-stagings of scenes from Strindberg's plays, bizarre poetic interludes that materialize psychological states, composed interviews of the cast members, naturalistic behind-the-scenes footage featuring contemporary journalists questioning Mattsson while he's in character, roundtable conversations between Watkins, journalists, and current Swedish citizens on the state of contemporary politics and culture, and relatively straightforward episodes of documentary information-transfer (on-screen text, archival footage and stills). Watkins sequences these distinct strategies with anarchic disregard for linearity, conventionality, or much discernible structure whatsoever aside from the mostly chronological presentation of Strindberg's artistic life. Therefore, he's free to clash up footage however he sees fit, resulting in a wealth of associational effects (some subtle, some didactic) whose ultimate goal is to demonstrate the cyclical nature of historical "progress," the ways in which the failures of the past unceasingly show up in varying forms in the present. Where The Freethinker surpasses standard message-making is that it's never expressly, or exclusively, about delivering this idea but rather about the many ways this root concept can provoke a plethora of tangential ideas about media, politics, social codes, artistic license, artistic truth, etc.

While Edvard Munch derived firmly from Watkins' own directorial consciousness and thus provided powerful juxtapositions of images and sound, here the amateur and multi-disciplined production means that a great portion of the source material is bland and cinematically inert. At least half of the video footage was shot in an unglamorous sound stage that was at least three times larger than what the logistical qualifications of the shoot called for, and the remaining location material is flat and uninspired, with the actors usually reciting their lines back and forth from a locked position and the camera taking no advantage of the space it's in. Therefore the strength of the film falls largely on the shoulders of Watkins' provocative editing, his ability to assemble the material in striking and unexpected ways. It's telling of Watkins' talent, then, that The Freethinker still emerges as a challenging, intellectually restless, and often invigorating work in spite of these drawbacks.

Screening Notes #12

The Conformist (1970): I'm not one to obsessively justify the psychological, thematic, or narrative roles of images in a film, but if The Conformist is going to be the requisite love affair movie for cinematography students, it ought to have more purpose behind its visual choices. Sure, one can say that Storaro's noirish slashes of light play into the emotional turbulence of Jean-Louis Trintignant's character, just like the proliferation of sharp compositional lines or the one strange episode of dutch angles all do, but these semantics are too vague to have real visceral power. More often Bertolucci seems to just be toying with the image's expressive qualities, having a field day with camera movement, fog, filters, and vibrant gels even when these elements are noticeably gratuitous. I'm aware that it sounds ridiculous to gripe about filmmakers taking full advantage of a visual medium, but cinema is more than just visual fluff. It's about the way images are combined and sometimes connected with sound, the way this relationship also has a dialogue with the objects or subjects being photographed, etc., all of which contributes to the soul of a work. The Conformist feels damn near soulless to me.

Ashes (2012): Commissioned by Mubi.com and Lomography to make a short film utilizing the new LomoKino camera (a relatively inexpensive 35mm camcorder), Apichatpong Weerasethakul churned out one of the most unconventional advertisements for a product ever made with Ashes, a work that pushes his already intensely personal cinema to a more intimate place than before. The film is shot mostly around the filmmaker's country home, capturing casual episodes from the flow of daily life. As usual with Weerasethakul, the film's sound design is dense and rich, a tapestry of field recordings and low-key folk music juxtaposed with sequences of total silence. With the added haze of the LomoKino's images, as well as the stutter of the camera's low frame-rate, daily life is rendered ethereal and abstract, yet it also possesses the nature of a photo album flipped through frenetically in time, like a revved-up La Jetee. Unexpectedly, Ashes shifts into lo-fi digital footage towards its conclusion in a mesmerizing sequence of fire, sparks, and camera-phone-ready onlookers. (What it is exactly that we're looking at never became clear to me, but its mystery opens up precisely the zone of dreaming, contemplating, and recollecting that Weerasethakul encourages.) Nudging celluloid and digital up against each other is an extension of Weerasethakul's recent curiosity over the future of cinema, and further viewing of this ambient autobiographical sketch may yield the kind of multilayered rewards offered up by his prior two shorts, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua. Watch it here.

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (2012): I went into Ben Shapiro's documentary on renowned photographer Gregory Crewdson hoping to get some kind of hint of a future film from the master chronicler of American suburbia, but to no avail. In fact, I got quite the opposite. I've come away convinced that Crewdson's fascination with revealing narratives of immense emotional depth through single images is humbling, inspiring, and essential. If you're unfamiliar with Crewdson's work, the dude distills elements of working-class realism, Hollywood melodrama, and sci-fi into evocative large-scale portraits of small-town life that are equal parts David Lynch, Douglas Sirk, Jacques Tati, and Roy Andersson (though the mysterious beauty of his photographs is uniquely his...yada yada yada). Most interestingly, one would be hard-pressed to discern the difference between a Hollywood movie set and the set for one of Crewdson's single stills, as both involve elaborate logistical planning, a director of photography, high-powered lights, a large crew, and the whole nine yards. Shapiro shot the film over the ten years or so it took Crewdson to shoot his consummate photography series "Beneath the Roses," and the results, mostly on handheld digital camera, are remarkably intimate. The film's finest achievement is the way it captures every precise step in the artistic process, as well as how it makes all the madness and obsession that goes into production seem utterly ordinary.

Street of Crocodiles (1987): Twenty minutes of extraordinarily tantalizing science-fiction/horror atmosphere from the Quay Brothers. Seen on 16mm, this stop-motion animation has an incredible richness to its dusty imagery of a deserted, industrialized city as foreboding as that of Eraserhead. In this world of cobwebs, machines, and shadows, a slender man with sharp, exaggerated features bears witness to the enigmatic puzzles of a gang of puppet figures. It's all a pitch-dark vision of the collapse of a civilization, where no image is bereft of metaphorical import: unhinging nails as indicators of eroding societal foundations, puppets as surrogates for a dehumanized community). This is a murky, unsettling trip, a compact genre film that is unsurpassed in its total commitment to a mood of darkness and filth.

Jabberwocky (1971): Stemming from the same world of inventive pre-digital animation but on the other end of the emotional spectrum, Jan Svankmajer's Jabberwocky is a work exuding buoyancy, irreverence, and absurd humor. Freely inspired by Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, the film taps into eternal toddlerhood, with Svankmajer finding a toy-box of trinkets to incorporate in complex animated maneuvers around a static bedroom tableau. Army figurines march in formation then get swallowed up by a sliding baby doll, sharp knives pirouette around a table, shell-filled jars spontaneously materialize, a tongue protrudes from the picture in the wall, and, over and over, a live action shot of a black kitten knocking things over and licking its chops intersperses the tightly ordered mayhem. Svankmajer's logic is at its most outlandish (intentions of Freudian psychology are too opaque to register at first glance), but his involvement of a gorgeously batty score by Zdenek Liska lends the chaos a precise musicality, a sense of virtuosic orchestration. A domestic dream exploded into the furthest reaches of the childhood imagination. Watch it here.

Cannes 2012 Round-Up

Below is a complete ranking of the films I saw at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Enjoy!

1. Holy Motors (Carax, France, In Competition)

When I saw Leos Carax's first feature in thirteen years, Holy Motors, on the final day of rescreenings, it was by no small margin the most mysteriously beautiful, inventive film I'd seen at Cannes. Starting with the simple setup of a man working as a professional chameleon, riding a limousine stuffed to the brim with suitcases full of disguises around a serenely dreamy Paris and fulfilling different "appointments" around the city, Carax builds a multilayered meditation on performance, identity, virtual reality, and cinematic artifice. Much of the film's power comes from Denis Lavant, most deserving of the festival's "Best Actor" award, who lives each episode of the film's chronological but strangely timeless structure with the candidness and thoroughness necessary to breathe life into the film's motif of dual identities and the elusive "self". What at first seems to smell of redundancy and half-assed improvisation proves to be executed with such remarkable subtlety, grace, and precision by Carax that not a single delirious chapter - even as the director pushes Lavant to vaudevillian feats such as playing a repugnant sewer-dweller carrying an angelic Eva Mendes into his shit-stained lair, concluding with a sight-gag of Lavant's erection - feels out of place. This is a film with a fearless sense of movement and visual invention, not to mention a constant self-awareness and absurdist humor. I can't wait to see it again.

2. Journal De France (Depardon and Nougaret, France, Out of Competition/Special Screenings)

A basement full of unreleased newsreel celluloid from legendary French documentarian Raymond Depardon covering a vast range of small and large scale historical events circa the middle of the 20th century yielded the festival's most moving and poetic images. Uncovered by Depardon's wife and usual sound recordist Claudine Nougaret and positioned alongside contemporary footage of Depardon taking a photographic tour of France alone in his car, the resulting cut of Journal De France becomes a mesmerizing essay (set to killer musical cues!) on photographic truth and how images become a mirror of one's thoughts and feelings throughout the course of one's life. Yet as much as the film is a loving portrait of Depardon the artist and man, it's also, as the title suggests, a kaleidoscopic journey through France's history, its social and cultural charms, its regrettable involvement in wars, its strange political missteps (the scene of finance minister Giscard D’Estaing describing his public marketing campaign is a particular gem), and most of all, its ordinary civilians. The film's eye, like that of its primary subject, is humble, compassionate, and patient.

3. In Another Country (Hong, South Korea, In Competition)

The first time Hong Sang-soo's static camera compulsively snap-zoomed in on the action in In Another Country's extended opening shot, it's as if the entire audience experienced a collective lurch towards the actors. Perhaps this impression is just to due to my unfamiliarity with Hong's aesthetic, but in any case In Another Country provides a heightened intimacy with the filmed material, a direct relationship between director/audience and subject, and a sense of the film being conceived as it's being shot. A work so casual, spontaneous, and grounded rarely makes an appearance In Competition at Cannes, and Hong's glorious hangout of a film is all the more powerful for it. One of several films at the festival (along with Cosmopolis, Like Someone in Love, Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, In the Fog, and Moonrise Kingdom) that seemed to exist in a deserted bubble of a world comprised only of characters in the story, Hong follows Isabelle Huppert as she materializes the incomplete scenario ideas of an aspiring screenwriter (seen in the opening shot) on vacation in a South Korean beach town. The film's effortless narrative symmetry allows one to contemplate the subtle variations in the ways Huppert's three different characters are treated by a rotating cast of locals, thus providing insights into love, life, and otherness so off-the-cuff and fluid it puts shame to more heavy-handed treatments of these motifs.

4. Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas, Mexico, In Competition)

The obligatory pillar of provocation this year was held up by Carlos Reygadas with his new film Post Tenebras Lux, an ambitious collage-like expression of Mexican country life that unsurprisingly garnered equal parts applause and booing. (One wonders when Cannes crowds will grow up and learn to embrace artistic license and individualistic work without resorting to knee-jerk skepticism.) Post Tenebras Lux digresses rather significantly from the comparatively sobering and linear Silent Light, but what it does share with Reygadas' previous work is its insistence upon making its audience feel something, and it put me in an unusually discomfiting space that I've rarely experienced from cinema. Despite some of its age-old arthouse ingredients (nature, animals, mechanical sex, an unforgivably extraneous scene of animal cruelty), the film is quite unlike anything ever made, and truly unique to Reygadas' sensibilities. A dark energy pulses through the film as the Mexican filmmaker never shies away from presenting conflicting emotions (family bliss and marital tension, tenderness and unexplained violence, religious devotion and paralyzing fear of the Devil) alongside each other with fervent unpredictability, giving its mystical and quasi-autobiographical musings a distinctly different tone than the otherwise structurally similar Tree of Life from last year. Though Reygadas employed the suddenly in vogue but previously extinct Academy aspect ratio (the boxy, claustrophobic 4:3), no film at Cannes felt bigger or more expansive, as its loud, immersive sound design and ghostly visuals exploded from the screen.

5. Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, Iran/Japan/France, In Competition)

I'll join the chorus of critics intrigued but somewhat baffled by Abbas Kiarostami's new Tokyo-set feature Like Someone in Love. The film is startlingly open-ended, seeming to merely capture a few episodes in the middle of a much longer narrative, and in the thick of Cannes craziness, the mental space required to mine Kiarostami's complexity is simply non-existent. Here, the director charts a similar paradigm shift roughly at the midway point as that of Certified Copy when the relationship between a young girl (Rin Takanashi) and an old man (Tadashi Okuno) shifts from prostitute/client to grandfather/granddaughter based on the innocuous misunderstanding of the girl's psychologically abusive boyfriend (Ryo Kase). The side-effect is an opaque investigation into the nature of social roles and perception, limited to a few interiors in Tokyo and several of the director's trademark car conversations. It's amazing how economical this film is, using such a small number of tense, protracted dialogue scenes to open up a vast ocean of mystery around these three characters, each of whom appear to be hiding something authentic and unfettered beneath their social façades.

6. Walker (Tsai, Taiwan/Japan, Critic's Week) A new 30-minute short by Tsai Ming-Liang entitled Walker was one of the best surprises of the festival. I'm still eagerly awaiting a new feature from the Taiwanese master, but this new work is precisely the length it needs to be. The film is decidedly, unapologetically simple, though certainly not simplistic. In it, a Buddhist monk (Tsai apostle Lee Kang-Sheng) dressed in a bright red robe walks through the hustle-bustle of Tokyo at a snail's pace to fetch a snack (this narrative detail is only revealed later in the film in an unexpected sight gag), his head perpetually facing the ground and his eyes in a meditative squint. He lifts each foot as if lifting the weight of his spirit before returning it to the ground with patience and grace. Were it not for the real-time passersby - many of whom take note of the camera's presence (adding gravitas to the performative spectacle) - one might be tempted to assume Tsai shot at a high frame-rate for slow motion. Lee's persevering slowness, his utter commitment to the act, is astonishing. Tsai shot the film himself on a digital camera with his usual frozen takes and distinctive urban framing, and the result is a remarkably pure evocation of the ghettoized pursuit of faith in the modern consumerist environment.

7. In the Fog (Loznitsa, Russia, In Competition) An extreme seriousness towards death characterizes a great deal of the best Russian cinema, and Sergei Loznitsa's In the Fog joins that lineage. This 2-hour opus unwaveringly explores the rocky psychological landscape of men crawling inevitably towards a not-too-distant death, meanwhile caught between the absurd pressures of patriotism and a simple respect for human existence. On the frontiers of the German occupation, Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy) is wrongly accused of treason by his fellow men, and escorted out of his forest home by two Russian soldiers - Burov (Vladislav Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) - to be killed. Happenstance has it that Nazi soldiers interrupt the scene of the punishment, and Burov becomes the wounded, setting the stage for an extended inquiry into the ethical dilemmas of war under a misguided regime. Loznitsa's dialogue-heavy script - set entirely within the confines of the grey and foreboding woods - often stumbles and crawls, and, in its lack of variety, clearly shows the effects of working with limited funds (this is a film that could have benefited greatly from a more palpable sense of surrounding context), but In the Fog is nonetheless the most stirringly spiritual feature of the festival.

8. Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day (Rodrigues, Portugal, Critic's Week) There's not a single horizon line visible in João Pedro Rodrigues' 30-minute short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, and it creates a powerfully destabilizing effect. Paired in a Critic's Week program with Walker, the films share a quiet observation of people walking through an urban space, but here there is an enigmatic undertone - teased out directly late in the film when one girl's Twilight Zone-esque ringtone sounds - of science-fiction and campy genre cinema that allows the images of a swarm of young adults emerging to level ground from within subway stations to suggest a kind of post-apocalyptic zombie invasion. Rodrigues covers all of the action - teenagers throwing up, keeling over inexplicably, walking into city ponds while holding up their cellphones seemingly in search of service, etc. - from vaguely aerial perspectives, bolstering the uncanny effect of the happenings. Is this a metaphor for the somnambulistic state of contemporary techno-youth, or is it just an unconventional vision of the undead traversing a posthuman landscape? The film's only press blurb is of little help: "Tradition says that on June 13th, Saint Anthony’s Day – Lisbon’s patron - lovers must offer small vases of basil with paper carnations and flags with popular quatrains as a token of their love." Morning of Saint Anthony's Day is an inspired oddity.

9. Amour (Haneke, France/Germany/Austria, In Competition)

Michael Haneke's Amour is an unapologetically traditional, by-the-numbers European arthouse film centering on the big themes of mortality, love, grief, family, and humiliation. Which is not to say it's fraudulent or insincere, just that it's precisely the unflinching film one would expect Haneke to make on the topic of an aging couple slowly coming to terms with death. Every formal strategy (detached wide shots, measured cutting, muted colors), narrative jolt (sudden violence, a metaphorical bird entering a French apartment), and casting decision (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert as the central family) is justified and expected, but as a Bergmanesque chamber drama it lacks the magic and complex humane treatment of Bergman. In Amour, death divides a family, and Haneke, amazingly precise as he is, can't put forth an image of postmortal hope that is very convincing, instead preferring to unceasingly pick apart the physical and psychological strain of aging and death. There's an abysmal fear in this film that's disguised as cruel realism.

10. Lawless (Hillcoat, USA, In Competition)

John Hillcoat's Lawless, previously known as The Wettest County in the World and based off the book of the same name, received some undue critical hounding after its premiere, which is strange given that it's a pretty bareknuckled and well-made Western, nothing more and nothing less. Sure, Hillcoat waters down any moral ambiguity that might have existed in the film's awkwardly schmaltzy epilogue, and the sexual landscape leans towards vaguely misogynistic, but I'll take some of these missteps over The Road's simple-minded affectations of importance and superficially "contemplative" mise-en-scène. What's more, Lawless is chock full of thrilling performances by Tom Hardy as a daftly philosophizing brute, Gary Oldman as an indifferent mobster, Guy Pearce as the slimy villain, and Shia LaBoeuf (!) in his best role as a wannabe tough guy. Still, the greatest source of my enthusiasm for the film was the immaculately dusty and contrasty cinematography of Benoît Delhomme, who shoots these Prohibition-Era ghost towns - always wafting with the smoke of whisky and brandy production - in an undeniably conventional yet painterly manner. It's a ruthlessly brutal genre movie that for quite some time maintains an air of Peckinpah-like stoicism.

11. Lawrence Anyways (Dolan, France, Un Certain Regard) Another year of inclusion in Un Certain Regard for Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan represents yet another example of the mainstream hesitance to embrace youthfulness in auteur cinema. Surely, Lawrence Anyways has more personality, and is more expressive and heartfelt, than a number of the Competition entries, and it could have added further diversity to the lineup, especially in light of its focus on social minorities (specifically a transsexual intending to remain in a heterosexual relationship). Dolan's films clearly emerge from a passionate and genuine place, and their energy and messiness is entirely the product of a spontaneous excitement for cinema. Needless to say, Lawrence Anyways is sloppy, overlong, and digressive, but the strange allure of Dolan's work is that he manages to absorb these flaws into the texture of his character's lives, discovering ways to transform self-indulgent slow-motion shots (this one has even more than Heartbeats) into gaudy expressions of a character's veiled insecurity or overblown self-importance. Like Dolan's main character, Lawrence Anyways is split between two urges: that of individuality and personal fetishism (the film's often radical compositional style and its Felliniesque eccentricities, to name two), and that of conformity (its fiery scenes of romantic turmoil featuring a revelatory Suzanne Clément and its eye-rollingly sappy denouement, both of which achieve Hollywood rom-com stature). Upon close inspection of the film's insanity, it's not too difficult to see the structural design on display.

12. The Hunt (Vinterberg, Denmark, In Competition) Thomas Vinterberg's a director with a clear interest in the secrets lurking beneath the complacent surfaces of Danish communities and families, and he's exercised that concern yet again in The Hunt, a finely wrought but quickly forgettable drama about a Kindergarten teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) who is angrily cast off from his circle of friends and colleagues following the random lie of his female student (Annika Wedderkopp). There's a palpable socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure in the film's small town, as well as a solid sense of verisimilitude that must come from Vinterberg's years as a Dogme ascetic, but at the same time there's a sluggishness, a beating-around-the-bush quality to the film's narrative progression, as if Vinterberg has merely set up a troubling scenario to relish in his formidable knack for depicting societal disintegration. Furthermore, The Hunt feels too much like just a good story that was put to film, rather than a story that was expanded upon and expressed vitally through cinematic means. It's a small distinction, but it's the one that prevents Vinterberg from being as distinctive a director as he could be.

13. Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, USA, In Competition/Opening Night)

The Darjeeling Limited suggested a director trying to engage with issues broader than his own tiny universe and Fantastic Mr. Fox showcased an artist's desire to work with a new approach, but Moonrise Kingdom represents a firm step back into the confines of Wes Anderson's own headspace, and at this point the refusal to make artistic evolutions more drastic than the simple changing of a typeface and the move away from anamorphic widescreen is somewhat damning. The film feels decidedly small and inconsequential, failing to achieve the surprise emotional punch or sprawling canvas of films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Furthermore, Anderson puts the burden of the film's momentum in the hands of two unknown child actors (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) who just cannot carry a scene or portray pre-pubescent love in a convincing manner. As usual for Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom is aesthetically irreproachable, shot with an oppressively diorama-like sensitivity and production designed to fantastical perfection, but it puts its eggs in the wrong basket narratively, all while wasting the naturally Andersonian flair of Anderson newcomers Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton. My love for Anderson aside, and despite a hilariously overblown climax that utilizes some throwback color toning, Moonrise Kingdom is a frustratingly flimsy act of regression from this important American filmmaker.

14. Cosmopolis (Cronenberg, USA, In Competition)

The humid theater it screened in was of no help to David Cronenberg's already-stuffy Cosmopolis, the experience of which was akin to being suffocated by the director as he whispered his esoteric contemporary philosophies in your ear. Well, more precisely, Robert Pattinson, who has become the inert mouthpiece for Cronenberg's meandering and impenetrable dialogues on the current state of economics and politics. It's clear enough that this is the story of the 1%, but I'll admit total confusion and ignorance towards the remainder of Cronenberg's intentions, and I'm certainly not prepared or interested in trying to shuffle through the needlessly coded meanings in this never-ending string of talk. Intellectual detachment is all well and good though if Cronenberg were at least able to present his ideas in compelling cinematic fashion (hence the success of Like Someone in Love) rather than resorting to what feels like characters reading manuscripts to each other in a black box theater. The outside world is so closed-off and pared-down in Cosmopolis that it's as if any of Cronenberg's decisions apart from the dialogue (the NYC location, Pattinson's plot-churning desire for a crosstown haircut, the rat as a symbol of the deteriorating dollar) were arrived at arbitrarily. Add to this the flat digital cinematography and Cosmopolis is just a dull, unimaginative slog of a film.

15. The Paperboy (Daniels, USA, In Competition)

Ok, at least Lee Daniels dropped the wacked-out racial hierarchy of the abominable Precious, but in its wake he's yielded a frankly incompetent, meaningless, and misguided tribute to the low-budget homespun camp cinema of the film's 1960's era, and he's traded the revolting view of inner-city blacks in the previous film for stereotypes of southern white trash in this one. Surely, The Paperboy aims for ickiness, but to what end? In a climactic sex scene between recently-released criminal Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) and blonde bombshell Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), Daniels cuts to images of livestock as a punctuation mark, as if deriding his characters' baseless behavior. As much as the film tries to approach a sympathetic note for its depraved characters in the end, for the most part it rides this reprehensive wave throughout, and it presents it all in a psychosexual storm of bad editing and crummy lighting. Zac Efron stumbles away with some surprisingly nuanced acting as a detective's (Matthew McConaughey) younger brother and a man struggling with overwhelming physical desire for an Kidman's older character, but otherwise the cast appears confused, seemingly lost in Daniels' inexact mise-en-scène, unaware of whether or not the cameras are rolling. This is a profoundly awful film.

Cannes 2012: A Virginal Diary

(I attended the Cannes Film Festival for the first time this year, resulting in my low output on this blog for the past two weeks. I will soon post a round-up and ranking of the films I saw.)

The international cinephile is at a great deficit when entering the grounds of the Cannes Film Festival. Navigating between filmmakers, press, agents, buyers, distributors, programmers, and the French, all of whom sit atop a higher rung in the mysterious hierarchy of power at this strangely clandestine event, he must obsessively organize his time, maintain a stoic façade, communicate quickly and definitively with those in charge, and suppress his own feelings of ecstasy upon being granted access to any number of the festival’s events. All of this, of course, while being severely jet-lagged, poorly rested, malnourished on baguettes, ham, and Red Bulls, and vaguely loopy from the wine, champagne, or Stella Artois presented freely and eagerly at so many of the festival-sponsored social gatherings. What’s more, this is all assuming the international cinephile was able to acquire one of the nifty identification cards known as the accreditation badge that is required to make one’s way through any gate, queue, or building. And not even those solve much.

I won’t go into the many ways one can get his hands on said badge, but in my case, as I attended my first ever Cannes Film Festival, I was granted a Short Film Corner accreditation due to the festival’s acceptance of my now three-year-old medium-length dramatic film Wind Through the Cradle. Sounding quite prestigious at first, the limits of the badge – which is adorned with a red circle in the top right corner and a yellow circle in the bottom right so as to prevent confusion - swiftly made themselves known to me: no access to market screenings (an unfortunate setback after I missed the premiere screening of Apichatpong's new film Mekong Hotel), only a limited 150 points to use for in-competition film premiere tickets (some of the bigger entries risked obliterating my total entirely), and apparently no access to the festival-ending Short Film Corner party on the beach. The badge seemed like bullshit. Others told me I was lucky. A market badge actually costs money, and restricts the festival-goer from reserving any premiere tickets. At the same time, it allows for one to boost his/her credentials over the course of subsequent festivals, to gain respectability and clout in the eyes of the business. The Short Film badge is less beneficial in the long run.

What these limitations mean is that going to see arthouse films in the cinema, hitherto a simple, unfussy process, is now riddled with obstacles, governed by a faceless and enigmatic force known as Securitas that is made up of tan-suit-clad Frenchmen whispering to each other, arbitrarily ticking away at their audience counts, scanning badges, and either letting you by their iron post or sternly professing the words “It’s not possible,” a phrase I found to be in abundance in Cannes. It’s the death knell that tolls the long walk back past the rest of the soon-to-be dejected queue, all of whom have stood waiting in hot sun (or in the case of this year’s oddly turbulent two weeks, cold and relentless rain) like you for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. As an example of the perplexing nature of linguistic translations, it has to be one of the most spine-tinglingly impersonal in history. Imagine it lining the billboards of the Croisette in 2013 as the newfangled motto: Festival De Cannes – It’s Not Possible.

When one does manage to slip through this hurdle and ascend the steps to one of the festival’s many official theaters (and this is a much more frequent phenomenon than I’m making it seem, as I stood in line 23 times and only missed the mark 8 times, resulting in my grand total of 15 films viewed), he is greeted to jovial female guards who check bags and usher to open seats. In fact, everything about the internal spaces of Cannes is luxurious, quite a contrast to the militant exclusivity of the external zones. Theaters are clean, often massive, well air-conditioned, and filled with cozy red chairs that encourage dozing as much as they enhance the film-viewing experience. Screens normally stretch beyond the proportions of the respective rooms they’re in, and the surround sound collaborates magically with the acoustical architecture of the theaters. (Given the generally amazing sound design on display in the selected films this year, this was quite a treat.) After scrambling to find a seat (because one can never be sure if security properly gauged the available seating in the building), there’s something sacred about sitting in the cinema successfully with moments to spare before the start of a film. Surrounded by film lovers and finally shielded from whatever chaos reigned outside, the achievement allows for the rare instance of repose, of remembering what you’re really there for.

There's really a special sensation that occurs when watching the types of films I have hitherto watched alone or in half-empty theaters in the presence of hundreds and thousands. A rapt silence, punctuated by an unusual frequency of coughs (perhaps the cumulative result of a country so famously known for smoking), washes over the theaters and centers all attention of the screen. This is especially uncanny in the 2,300-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière, where quieter films produce the sense of a mass holy communion. With the exception of the routine walk-outs in anything mildly provocative (Reygadas, Carax, Haneke, Kiarostami), rarely did I witness patent disregard for films. At one point what I thought was outright hostility from a snickering couple next to me turned out to be uncontainable enthusiasm, as the culprit of the noises giddily remarked in the urinal next to me after the film through language barriers: "I'm sorry, this director just interests me!", speaking of Hong Sang-Soo. Open, honest, democratic cinema enthusiasm prevails at Cannes, so much so that the awkward conversations when you realize you're communicating with an entirely incompatible perspective (usually when someone (often an American) brushes aside a film for being "slow," "boring," or "pretentious") stick out like sore thumbs.

The most bizarre aspect of the festival experience is the way that the kinds of contemplative, challenging films that Cannes has prominently featured in the past decade exist alongside such a raucous atmosphere of partying. Everything is in excess on the Croisette: films, drinks, people, noise, prices. There is simply no time - other than perhaps a measly window between 5 am and 8 am - when the activity settles down, so organizing one's schedule becomes vital and extraordinarily difficult. Accepting the invite to a late-night party where great directors, actors, critics, etc. are present is tempting and exciting, but it frequently means sacrificing quality sleep, which in turn launches a spiral of sluggishness that infects the experience of films the next day, deteriorating the active, thinking mind. One drink at the cheap-minded hotspot Le Petit Majestic (outside of which flocks a massive nightly crowd of networkers) can quickly turn into a long conversation with a peer about a film in competition, which almost surely will lead to another party in the wee hours. Just when I thought I was finishing up a conversation with an LA-based sound designer around 3 AM, circumstances somehow led me into the apartment of three Italian cooks - one of whom spoke more languages and dipped his feet into more industries than I could count - who fixed up a lavish meal of pasta and wine. This was merely one of the experiences I had in Cannes that was impossible to predict and which, in hindsight, is impossible to plot out.

That any film critic can produce thoughtful commentary on this mess of cinema during the festival is mind-boggling to me, and a testament to how much I have to learn before I am fully on the right mental wavelength for this frenetic environment. Granted, I had no access to WiFi or a Press Room (an actual Zen-like space in Cannes where writers crowd into a quiet, potentially sound-proofed room to escape the hubbub of the festival and earn piece of mind), but the thought of containing my varied and overlapping reactions to the films I saw still seems radical, maybe even insane. However, the result of this mental anarchy is a quite unique sensation that was previously unknown to me: the feeling of gathering an omniscient understanding of festival programming, of noticing interesting patterns and trends (aesthetic, thematic, narrative, and otherwise) across the collection of films. In acknowledgment of this, I ended up staying largely within the In Competition films and not venturing too far into the Un Certain Regard, Director's Fortnight, Out of Competition, and Critic's Week categories, preferring to zero in on the formal rhymes within the festival's main event. Regardless of the limitations and difficulties of this, or any of my approaches for that matter, the Cannes Film Festival was an eye-opening experience, an invigorating, frustrating, magical two-week daze in which I was never, ever fully awake.

Wuthering Heights (2011) A Film by Andrea Arnold

If there was any doubt of the emotional infantilism and redundancy of Andrea Arnold's new and fiercely independent update to the classic novel Wuthering Heights, a tune by English pop-folk act Mumford and Suns portentously titled "The Enemy" springs up on the soundtrack, interrupting the soundscape of this otherwise insistently diegetic work. The song cries, "How could you lean on a man who was falling?" a pithy summarization of the central doomed romance of Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw, two young lovers in a windswept farmhouse in a harsh 19th Century Yorkshire landscape. Arnold pulled a similarly heavy-handed move in her previous Fish Tank with Nas' "Life's a Bitch," a rap that not only cemented the film's incessant miserabilism but also undermined the progress hitherto made by the impoverished characters. Musical accompaniment this overt and unwarranted can't help but give the impression of a director timid about the impact of her source material and the methods used to convey the emotions and themes within. In Fish Tank, that timidness severely distracted from the strengths of the film; here, it's just a safety net, another sign that the audience should be feeling the kind of unease and desperation that they've been feeling throughout.

Fortunately, the musical coda is not the nail in the coffin of Arnold's work. This is a film loaded with too many striking aesthetic ideas and brooding atmospheres (all of which descend from Tarr, Malick, and French director Philippe Grandrieux, who uses similarly abstracted handheld shots) to be entirely hampered by its intermittent juvenilia. With its opening scene of an adult Heathcliff (James Howson) slamming himself into a concrete wall repeatedly in a drab, featureless room filmed in queasy handheld shots that translate the brutality of the act to the screen, the film announces itself as a proudly extreme diversion from the long line of previous cinematic adaptations of Emily Brontë's text. Arnold replaces dialogue, character development, and lavish attention to period decor with mud, wind, rain, and rotting animal carcasses, all of which impress upon the film a tactile relationship with nature. The weather (usually grey and threatening) and the open landscape dictates the lives of the characters in the novel, and Arnold, recognizing that as the most cinematically expressive aspect of the work, fills the film with shots of flora and fauna and painterly montages which seem to accomplish little narratively. It's tough to say whether Arnold is making any kind of statement about man's minuscule part in the natural world; instead, this fascination with the details of the setting functions to ground Heathcliff and Cathy's youthful emotional reticence in a very specific place in nature.

Arnold is so committed in her portrayal of the Yorkshire setting that nature is often called upon to fill the void left by the primitive character development. Part of the goal here is to strip the novel down to its narrative essentials, compressing the book's epic romance and its themes of obsession, outsidership, class warfare, and religious hypocrisy to an implicitly felt brew of glances and gestures. When young Heathcliff (played by 14-year-old Solomon Glave) - a wandering black kid of questionable origins (Arnold's decision to do away with Brontë's more ambiguous explanation of Heathcliff's outsider identity and go straight for a black-white dichotomy is both a brave and simplistic decision) - is taken in by the lowly Earnshaw family because Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton) believes it to be "the Christee-yan thing to do," Arnold immediately conveys the family's knee-jerk intolerance of their new black brethren through the menacing stares of Mr. Earnshaw's hateful son Hindley (Lee Shaw), the family's servant Joseph (Steve Evets), the housemaid Ellen (Simone Jackson), and even young Cathy (Shannon Beer). Little is spoken, but Arnold's choice to stage the meeting of Heathcliff and the Earnshaws on a rainy night by inky, flickering firelight, as foreboding a set as any in a film of fog, dim natural light, and dark interiors, directly introduces racism as a central theme.

The second aim of Wuthering Heights is to capture the feeling of hesitantly falling in love for the first time and of hormonal charges bursting to the surface at unexpected times and in unusual ways. Fish Tank's best scene featured a dangerously seductive Michael Fassbender fondling the daughter of his character's girlfriend, and by shooting the scene through the girl's perspective, Arnold was able to catch the vivid moments of fear and excitement that characterize sexual awakenings. Here, she rigorously adopts Heathcliff's perspective for the entirety of the film, and his first intimate encounters with Cathy pop like sunshine against the murky landscapes. One scene involves the two of them riding a horse, and for an extended moment Heathcliff luxuriates in the closeness, slyly smelling her hair and glimpsing her bouncing figure. Later they wrestle around in mud, an act that's fueled by both sensuality and subtle vengeance for Cathy's earlier intolerance, especially noticeable when Heathcliff pins her wrists to the ground in a charged embrace. Arnold deftly handles these moments of emotional ambiguity with claustrophobic, intuitive camerawork (aided further by the film's unconventional 1:33:1 aspect ratio).

Trouble is, Wuthering Heights is a two-hour-plus feature film, and it never expands these thematic roots any further. Racial tensions balloon outward into obligatory n-words, and the burgeoning sexual urges between Heathcliff and Cathy fizzle over into their adult selves (Howson and a questionably cast Kaya Scodelario), who are still kowtowing around one another and making indecisive advances. Instead of exploring the contours of these difficult emotions, how they morph and stagnate over time, Arnold prefers to reduce them to symbolic gestures. Thus, the relentless images of mangled and defenseless animals are able to stand in for both Heathcliff's animalistic image to the white folk and the inevitably decaying loss of innocence in the central romance. After not one but two puppy hangings, the film becomes metaphorically burdensome and, frankly, cruel. At a certain point around a third of the way through, Wuthering Heights bottoms out, adding nothing new to its portentous cycle of anticipation and failure. When a teary-eyed Heathcliff smothers Cathy's recently deceased body with kisses in the final act, it's a punchy metaphor for the film's own belated explosion of emotion.